[…] that military spending; and in the end US capitalism is first and foremost interested in its own health, regardless of the niceties of ideology. Somewhere inside the Reagan administration the US business world has been ringing alarm bells about US military spending, just as it did in the late 1960s over expenditure on the […]
Nexus: postmodernism or what? I wonder what posterity will make of Nexus magazine. It continues to be just about the most fascinating and the most infuriating thing which plops through my letter-box. Take the April-May 2000 issue. On the positive side there is a very interesting and maybe very important piece on the soya bean, […]
In and out of focus In the springtime weeks when senior Cabinet members Charles Clarke and Patricia Hewitt found themselves in difficulties, it was reported that Philip (now Lord) Gould, the focus group guru with whom the pair worked very closely in Neil (now Lord) Kinnock’s kitchen cabinet 20 years earlier, was moving into a […]
[…] When Lobster began in 1983 there seemed every point in collecting and publishing every available scrap of information on the British security and intelligence services: we had Reagan and Thatcher, a resurgent British imperialism on the coat-tails of America, and a repressive, authoritarian regime at home. Publicising what the British state most wanted kept […]
[…] Warren Commission. Old Nazis, New Nazis One of the most impressive pamphlets to come my way in recent years is Old Nazis, the New Right and the Reagan Administration: the role of domestic fascist networks in the Republican Party and their effect on U.S. cold war policies, by Russ Bellant. This is 96 A4 […]
[…] ambitions for JFK and RFK. A detailed comparison of how the Kennedys generally wished to balance US domestic and international priorities, versus the balance sought by Nixon, Reagan and others, might well have provided readers of the Matthew Smith book with some material to flesh out his otherwise over simple conclusions. It is remarkable […]
Kees van der Pijl Routledge, 1998, £15.95 From the late 1970s a group of Dutch academic Marxists – including Henk Overbeek, Meindert Fennema, Frans Stokman, Robert J. Mokken and Kees van der Pijl – began studying networks of capitalist power, setting up their own international scholarly network in the process (involving, among others, Beth […]
On 8 July the Foreign Minister, Robin Cook, announced that the Libyan Government accepted ‘general responsibility’ for the death of WPC Yvonne Fletcher and normal diplomatic relations with Libya were being restored. The media reporting of this accepted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) spin that it meant the Libyans have admitted killing Fletcher. The […]
[…] all went to Princeton. George Rentchler was in my class there and was a friend. James Rentchler worked in the White House for both Presidents Carter and Reagan in the National Security Council on European affairs and served as Ambassador to both Guinea and Malta. His flat, as Gallagher described it, was filled with […]
[…] to the shooting of the Pope. The US embassy says they’re fakes. It certainly sounds implausible that anything so sensitive would be transmitted by telegram. But then Reagan has appointed a lot of dummies as ambassadors. See the list – and comments – in IHT 31st March 1983. 18. William Pfaff in IHT (14th […]
