In 2018, the Pentagon announced a shift away from their failing policy of counterterrorism in the Middle East and North Africa toward a new National Defense Strategy of so called “Great Power Competition,” with Russia and China. Instead of turning toward peace, free trade, and diplomacy, this policy change will come at enormous opportunity costs such as further distorting our economy, practically guaranteeing boom-bust cycles of ever intensifying severity, as well as reducing the average American’s standard of living. It would impoverish the very people who desire genuine populism.
Comic relief of the week: what’s happening in Hong Kong continues ‘to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy and economy of the United States’
July 21, 2021 (Joseph Thomas – NEO) – A South China Morning Post (SCMP) article citing US corporate and government institution “associates” inadvertently gave away the entire game unfolding in Southeast Asia’s Myanmar.
In this episode of The Source, we interview Alejandra Mejía, who is Chief Editor of Migrant Roots Media. We talk about the ‘Policy Report: An Analysis of the Biden-Harris Administration Plan for Central America’ by Migrant Roots Media. We examine in what way the $4 billion strategy for Central America of the Biden administration “bolsters a neoliberal development plan”. We also discuss whether this approach is different from the one of the previous administrations – both Democrats and Republicans. Finally, we also talk about Kamala Harris’ first international trip as Vice President to Guatemala and Mexico and what came out of that visit.
Alejandra Mejía is Chief Editor of Migrant Roots Media, an independent media platform which seeks to unearth the root causes of global migration. She received her BA in Comparative Literature and Latinx Studies from Williams College in 2017 and is currently an Assistant Editor at Duke University Press where she acquires books in Latinx History. Her politics and devotion to migrant justice are largely informed by her lived experiences as a working-class Central American immigrant in the United States.
The MEK was originally an armed group opposed to the Iranian monarchy before the revolution, and during that period it was also responsible for killing several Americans.
The MEK has not changed. They remain at their core the same militant and extremist organization they have been for decades. Cheering on the MEK is as crazy and irresponsible as endorsing the Lord’s Resistance Army or defending the Khmer Rouge, and it is not an accident that the group has sometimes been likened to the latter. Unfortunately, because they hate the Iranian government and make the right noises about democracy, they are given a free pass and Iran hawks embrace them as allies. In the past, participants in MEK summits have ranged from Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, and Rudy Giuliani to Joe Lieberman, Tom Ridge, and John McCain. This year it included former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Michele Flournoy, the current Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bob Menendez, his fellow New Jerseyan Sen. Cory Booker, and many other members of Congress. The speakers routinely declare that the MEK and its allies are the “real” opposition working towards “secular democracy,” they denounce the Iranian government, and they call for some form of regime change.
It did strike me as ironic that there has been quite a bit of outcry that the mainstream media allegedly censored the lab leak theory when my article pushing back on the lab leak theory was apparently censored.
