Introduction I began writing this in the early 1980s. If you were then reading the Guardian or the Observer, and knew a little, simple economics, it didn’t take genius to notice that while the UK’s manufacturing economy was being decimated by Conservative Party economic policy, the City of London was booming. More interestingly, and less […]
[…] that this was a very remarkable book was correct. It was. This is centrally an account of some of the bureaucratic struggles inside the CIA during the Reagan years when the in-coming Know-nothing administration decided they would impose their childish notions about the world onto the Agency and get it to produce ‘intelligence’ to […]
[…] of much of the American Right. But that’s been done already. How often do we need to be told of the idiocies of Jerry Falwell and Ronald Reagan, the cynicism of Karl Rove, or the horrors of consumerism as a way of life? Reading this I kept thinking, OK, but we know all this. […]
[…] August 28, 1991). In fact, arms merchant Ari Ben-Menasche identified Cardoen as the person who brokered the deal between Iraq and Earl Brian, corrupt functionary of the Reagan administration, for an illegal sale of the PROMIS software. Moyle no doubt imagined himself to be a super secret agent; Casolaro wanted fodder for a novel. […]
Covert Action CAIB trundles on. I haven’t always agreed with CAIB’s line. With others on the U.S. left, it used to seem reluctant to deal with the real nature of the Soviet Union. Having got to he point where America has become Amerika, many American radicals have been unable to acknowledge that the other Superpower […]
[…] explore and support his thesis about LIC clutters up with a lot of repetitive discussion of LIC and its predecessors an interesting and detailed account of the Reagan administrations’ attempts to ‘roll back revolution’. Molloy would justify by this by claiming that LIC really was something substantially new, not just ‘counter-insurgency under a new […]
One of many reasons why the lobbying industry attracts opprobrium is because Britain’s political system offers only limited public sector facility to those who wish to influence it but lack the funding and/or patronage to do so. ‘The lobbyists’ did not cause the injustice. It is up to government to come up with the solutions. … Read more
[…] no-one who had read, say, Alfred McKoy’s The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia, exactly the same thing happened, for exactly the same reasons, when the Reagan administration set about destroying the Sandinista regime. It was simplicity itself: planes flew from America carrying supplies for the CIA’s contra army camped along the Nicaraguan […]
[…] into power in much of Europe, America and Australasia. It is arguable that without the oil price hike in 1974 we would not have had Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and their subsequent effects on the world. An e-mail to the Observer journalist who conducted the interview with Yamani went unanswered but I had an idea: […]
[…] far from being ‘Finlandized’ or GDR-ized, far from drifting slowly into the Soviet orbit, saw the beginning of the right-wing moves which now see Thatcher, Kohl and Reagan in power. To this mere book-reading outsider one of the odder features of the great ‘mole hunt’ has been the contrast between the wilder stories told […]
