Month: January 2020

Background Briefing: January 27, 2020

 

The Leak from the White House of Bolton’s Bombshell Book

We begin with the lead article in The New York Times revealing some of the incriminating contents of former National Security Advisor John Bolton’s forthcoming book “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir” which is due out next month. Just as Trump’s lawyers are defending him before the senate impeachment proceedings underway, the passages revealed from Bolton’s book demolish the president’s defense that there was no quid pro quo and are likely to offer cover for a few Republican senators to join the Democrats in voting to have Bolton testify to the senate or at least have the passages from his book entered into the record. Jacob Heilbrunn, a Senior Editor at The National Interest and the author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, joins us to discuss his article at The New Republic “The Neocons Strike Back: How a discredited foreign policy ideology continues to wreak havoc in Washington and around the world”. And while Bolton is not a neocon in the mold of those who brought us the disastrous Iraq War but is rather an anti-globalist neocon, unlike his former boss who has no scruples and only cares about himself, Bolton does have principles and cares about the country’s national security even though many feel his policies endanger it. Furthermore, since the fact that the leak of Bolton’s manuscript which was at the White House for pre-publication review, comes from the White House itself, Heilbrunn reports that there is a lockdown and panic inside the White House where the leaker known as “Anonymous” continues to operate undetected.

 

 A New American Neo-Nazi Terror Group Whose Leader Lives in Russia

Then we speak with Jason Wilson, a reporter for The Guardian based in Portland, Oregon where he covers the growing neo-Nazi and white supremacist movements in the Pacific Northwest and has an article at The Guardian “Revealed: the true identity of the leader of an American neo-Nazi terror group”. He joins us to discuss how the leader of a new terror group “The Base”, which is an English translation of Al Qaeda, who goes by the aliases of “Norman Spear” and “Roman Wolf”, is actually a 46 year- old American from New Jersey, Rinaldo Nazzero, who lives in Russia and is likely to have ties to the Russian Security Services.

 

The Need to Expose the Global Wealth Defense Industry

Then finally, we look into this year’s gathering of the global elite at Davos with Chuck Collins, a member of the Patriotic Millionaires whose latest book is, Is Inequality in America Irreversible?  He has an article at The Guardian “Millionaires like me should pay more taxes. Giving to charity is a fig leaf”, and we discuss the need to challenge and expose the global wealth defense industry which protects people like Africa’s richest woman, the daughter of Angola’s leader who has amassed billions extracted from a country where the majority of the population live in dire poverty.