The Sultan of (Emergency) Swing Amidst an astonishing, relentless, wide-ranging purge that shows no signs of abating, with 60,000 – and counting – civil servants, academics, judges, prosecutors, policemen, soldiers jailed, fired, suspended or stripped…
Category: Pepe Escobar
Pepe Escobar (born 1954) is a Brazilian journalist. He writes a column – The Roving Eye – for Asia Times Online, and works as an analyst for RT, Sputnik News, and Press TV as well as formerly for Al Jazeera.
Behind all the noise and theater of the Trump campaign is the banal logic of a businessman Imagine hordes of American theocrats, white supremacists, nativists, NRA worshippers, all in an ‘open carry’ orgy, descending on…
When Turkish President/aspiring Sultan Recep Tayyip Erdogan landed at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport early Saturday morning, he declared the attempted coup against his government a failure, and a “gift from God.” God apparently uses Face Time….
Let’s cut to the chase; as much as the Pentagon may have finally concluded that Russia holds undisputed conventional superiority in the European theater, the only possible rationale for NATO’s existence is unchanged; the US…
The Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, backed by the UN, essentially ruled that there is no legal basis for China to claim historic rights to vast sections of the South China Sea included…
… In a nutshell; the option to a united Eurasia is chaos. And there’s no question the Empire of Chaos will stop trying to sow chaos. … President Vladimir Putin stresses Russia’s «all-embracing and strategic partnership» with China, one can hear the proverbial howls of anger emanating from the neocon/neoliberalcon axis in the Beltway. As he met Chinese president Xi Jinping in Beijng this past Saturday, Putin even allowed himself an understatement; «To say we have a strategic cooperation is not enough anymore. This is why we have started talking about a comprehensive partnership and strategic collaboration. Comprehensive means that we work virtually on all major avenues; strategic means that we attach enormous inter-government importance to this work». Why understatement? Because this really ventures way beyond a stream of business deals.
So what started as a gamble by David Cameron on an outlet for domestic British discontent, to be used as a lever to bargain with Brussels for a few more favors, has metastasized into an…
So the annual Bilderberg meeting placidly came and went behind heavily secured doors (and fence) at the Hotel Taschenbergpalais Kempinski in Dresden – conveniently upstaged by the murky story of a US-born Muslim and registered…
Not a day goes by without some sort of turmoil in the South China Sea. Let’s cut to the chase: war is not about to break out. In a nutshell, the non-stop drama, as ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) diplomats told me, is all about “escalation-management protocols.” Translation: how to prevent any unilateral outburst that could be interpreted as warlike. Compounding the problem is that ASEAN can’t seem to manage its own internal protocols. This past Tuesday offered a graphic illustration, after a special ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Yuxi. First ASEAN issued a communiqué. Then it retracted it. As much as that reflects internal dissent among the 10 nation group, it also happens to puncture the Pentagon myth of China’s “isolation”.
The stakes could not be higher. Not only the future of the BRICS, but the future of a new multipolar world is in the balance. And it all hinges on what happens in Brazil in the next few months. Let’s start with the Kafkaesque internal turmoil. The coup against President Dilma Rousseff remains an unrivalled media theatre/political tragicomedy gift that keeps on giving. It also doubles as a case of information war converted into a strategic tool of political control. A succession of appalling audio leaks has revealed that key sectors of the Brazilian military as well as selected Supreme Court justices have legitimized the coup against a President that has always protected the two-year-old Car Wash corruption investigation.