Given a WTO-driven free trade regime in a world without enforceable international law and with large accumulations of capital emerging from the supply of consumer wants (including guns, sex, labour, drugs, untaxed goods and unregulated financial services), the lifting of capital controls by the Reagan-Thatcher generation also meant the globalisation of criminality in all its […]
[…] September 1, was riveting. His voice occasionally breaking with emotion, Shultz declared, ‘The Soviets tracked the commercial airliner for some two and a half hours.’ President Ronald Reagan soon appeared to add, ‘This was the Soviet Union against the world and the moral precepts that guide human relations among people everywhere. It was an […]
[…] then as head of the CIA during the post Watergate period, notably the Team B episode which paved the way for the Second Cold War of the Reagan years. The October Surprise of 1980 and the media’s false ‘debunking’ of the story. The politicisation of the CIA under Reagan and Casey and the fabrication […]
[…] the negative aspects of satellite systems – their role in the US war-fighting infrastructure; their use in distorting defence estimates; the abuse of their data by the Reagan administration hawks to justify Cold War expenditure and rhetoric to the American public; and the severe difficulties the programme has run into after the detonation of […]
[…] trafficker and Contra supporter, had been released in the 1980s instead of now. Critics alleging a Contra-drug link would have been proven right, and the CIA’s and Reagan Administration’s routine denials exposed. The Contras might not have received another nickel. Thus the Administration, instead of arresting Meneses and Blandon, protected them. Later, Blandon became […]
[…] which are already pro-Western” and should, therefore, be supported. It’s the dream of ‘roll-back’ in the Third World. The British state and to a lesser extent the Reagan Administration – certainly the State Department – are wilfully backing the wrong horses. But there is slightly more to it than this, for Becker is creeping […]
[…] limit was reached.) Congressional bans on aid to the death squads of the contras in the mid-1980s were secretly and illegally subverted by Oliver North in the Reagan White House with Pentagon and CIA support, provoking the Iran-Contra confrontation. Indonesia’s acute crisis today recalls in its details the political uncertainty at the end of […]
[…] were again welcome in Fiji. Later that year he became the first South Pacific head of state to get a full-scale red-carpet welcome at the White House. Reagan praised his “political courage” in allowing nuclear warships into Fiji. Secretary of State Shultz told him: “Your decision to restore access to United States naval vessels […]
Blair Anthony Seldon London: Free Press (Simon & Shuster), 2004, h/b, £20 What a tome! At 755 pages, with 40 chapters and 3000 plus footnotes, the book is neatly divided into chapters on either specific historical periods or significant individuals. The picture that emerges of Blair is striking in its variance from much of […]
[…] democratic governments’ such as Libya, or Burma for example. (19) In 1986, having launched from a British airfield his bomber raid on Colonel Gadhafi’s family, President Reagan described the Libyan despot as a ‘unique threat to free peoples’, a ‘rogue regime that advances its goals through the murder and maiming of innocent civilians’. […]
