Free Republic

Tokyo: Japan has ditched the United States to purchase Russian crude oil above the $60-a-barrel cap, saying it needed it to ensure access to energy from Moscow. The oil purchases by Japan represent a break in the US-led efforts to impose a global $60 per barrel cap on purchases of Russian oil. However, a report by The Wall Street Journal said Tokyo, which is Washington’s closest allies in Asia, got the US agree to the exception. Most European nations stopped purchasing Russian oil in response to the invasion of Ukraine in February last year. The G7 nations which include Japan...

During a three-day state visit, Chinese President Xi Jinping held friendly talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a show of unity, as both countries increasingly seek to position themselves as leaders of what they call a “multipolar world order,” one that challenges U.S.-centric alliances and agreements. Among those agreements is the petrodollar, which has been in place for over 50 years. In case you’re wondering, “petrodollars” are not a real currency. They’re simply dollars being used to trade oil. Early in the 1970s, the U.S. government provided economic aid to Saudi Arabia, its chief oil-producing rival, in exchange for...

Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered one of his most unhinged performances on September 30 in a speech announcing the annexation of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions. Addressing hundreds of Russian officials during a ceremony in the Kremlin, Putin had relatively little to say about the war in Ukraine. Instead, his address was dominated by some of the fiercest anti-Western rhetoric of his 22-year reign. Putin branded Western leaders as “racist” and claimed they were guilty of “spreading Russophobia all around the globe.” However, his main focus was the allegedly imperialistic policies of the West. The Russian leader supported...

The Biden administration is expected to announce in the coming days another package of military assistance for Ukraine, which will follow an $800 million package announced last week. CNN and NBC News reported that the administration was putting together another $800 million weapons package for Ukraine. A congressional source told The Hill that a weapons package was being considered, but that there were no further details.

Globalists Cheer Pope’s Role in ‘Great Reset’World Economic Forum explains Francis' contribution to new oligarchy VATICAN CITY (ChurchMilitant.com) - A premier globalist organization is praising Pope Francis for "put[ting] his stamp on efforts to shape what's been termed a Great Reset of the global economy in response to the devastation of COVID-19."TIME magazine features the "Great Reset" in its cover story The World Economic Forum (WEF), which claims to be masterminding the "Great Reset," calls Francis an "agenda contributor" to the project in which "global stakeholders" will determine "the future state of global relations, the direction of national economies, the...

Boris Johnson has thanked the first-time Tory voters who have handed him an “overwhelming mandate” to get Brexit done, and offered an olive branch to those who opposed him. Speaking on the steps of Number 10 Downing Street, the modest official residence of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Johnson related that he had been formally invited to form a new government by Queen Elizabeth II, and pledged that he would lead a “people’s government”. “I’m proud to say that members of our new One Nation government, a people’s government, will set out from constituencies which have never returned...

As pollsters collectively changed their predictions and news pundits started to resemble confused and dejected children, the fight-or-flight response kicked in for countless viewers. Hearts pounded, stomachs turned and some of the more privileged liberals started seriously considering whether to flee the country in the face of a national nightmare that had just become a reality (privileged, because the average American doesn’t have the resources to just pack up and run at will).

'Terror and Consent': brilliant, contrarian By James E. McWilliams SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN Sunday, March 30, 2008 During the course of a long, intellectually demanding narrative, "Terror and Consent" pivots on several paradigm-shifting claims. One of them, which appears in the introduction, stands out for its humanitarian implications: "During the era of twentieth century industrial nation states ... 80 percent of the dead and wounded in warfare were civilians." For Philip Bobbitt, a distinguished lecturer and senior fellow at the University of Texas and a law professor at Columbia University, this is more than a gee-whiz factoid. It's the basis...

<p>PARIS -- French libraries are said to file their nation's constitutions -- there have been more than a dozen since 1789; the current one is a relatively ancient 49 years old -- under periodicals. Now Nicolas Sarkozy, France's peripatetic new president, has created a commission on constitutional reform. The commission includes Jack Lang who, as minister of culture in 1983 under President Francois Mitterrand, staged a sublimely unserious conference on the (supposed) world economic crisis, featuring the likes of Sophia Loren, Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer.</p>

Neoliberalism and the Demise of Democracy: Resurrecting Hope in Dark Times by Henry A. Giroux www.dissidentvoice.org August 7, 2004 Neoliberalism has become one of the most pervasive, if not, dangerous ideologies of the 21st century. Its pervasiveness is evident not only by its unparalleled influence on the global economy, but also by its power to redefine the very nature of politics itself. Free market fundamentalism rather than democratic idealism is now the driving force of economics and politics in most of the world, and it is a market ideology driven not just by profits but by an ability to reproduce...

neo-neoliberalism Mia T, 2.24.04 ne•o•ne•o•lib•er•al•ism n. neocommunist political movement, a tipsy-topsy, infantile perversion of the Marxist-Leninist model, global in scope, beginning in the post-cold-war, unipolar 1990s, led by the '60s neoliberal baby-boomer "intelligentsia," that seeks power without responsibility, i.e., that seeks to dilute American power by concentrating power in said '60s neoliberals while yielding America's sovereignty to the United Nations, i.e., while surrendering to the terrorists, as it continues the traditional '60s neoliberal feint: (1) concern for social justice, (2) distain for bureaucracy, and (3) the championing of entrepreneurship for the great unwashed.       If Act I...

January 26, 2004, 9:35 a.m. Kill Yuppie Scum The backlash against neoliberalism. For a few months in the early 1990s I lived on the Isle of Dogs. This is a district of London, three miles east of the Tower and the old City of London (which is now a financial hub). For a long time the Isle of Dogs was a working-class district, a region of docks and wharfs backed by miles of grimy, cramped rowhouses. The Luftwaffe flattened a fair portion of the docklands in WW2, and the Isle of Dogs suffered along with the rest. After the war...

No-one wants to talk about Japan these days. The conventional wisdom is that the bloom went off Japan’s economic rose around 1990 and that the utter superiority of neoliberal capitalism was vindicated by the strong performance of the American economy during the 1990s. Furthermore, everyone is now convinced that China – whose economy is 1/8 the size of Japan’s – is the rising economic power and therefore the appropriate object of attention. But Japan is, despite everything, still one of the master keys to understanding the future of the world economy, because Japan is the clearest case study of why...

A Presentation on the 33rd conference of Union of Radical Political Economics Free trade means free war ----A discussion on China's accession to WTO Han Deqiang, Economics and Management School, Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, ....Almost all Chinese media told readers that the accession to WTO will do favor to consumers, and therefore to common people. They described that we could buy cheaper cars, oranges, perfumes, even wheat, in high quality, so it's a good opportunity for us to wait until the door of custom house be removed. Yes, I argued, we could buy...