by Donald A. Smith, PhD This is an extended version of my essay published in Common Dreams as Who is to Blame for the War in Ukraine?. Here are four views about the war in Ukraine, listed in order of increasing cynicism about U.S. culpability for the crisis: The Russian invasion of Ukraine was totally…
In Bellingham on Jan 28, 2024 the Washington State Democratic Central Committee passed a resolution written by me, Donald A. Smith, PhD, along with Sharon Abreu and Linda Boyd, calling for a less militarized foreign policy and for a “just transition” to a peace economy. Resolution on the Urgency of Transitioning to an Economy Based…
CIA Manipulation of Public Opinion Here’s my summary: The security state (CIA and Pentagon) run the government more than the White House does, especially when the president is old and weak, as is Biden. Congress mostly follows what the White House wants (on foreign policy) [and funds the security state extravagantly]. The peoples’ voices barely…
Chat GPT, write me a poem about the bipartisan incompetence, corruption and hubris of Congress, where the only things Democrats and Republicans can agree upon is huge military budgets and endless disastrous wars. (I edited Chat GPT’s output in about a dozen lines.) In the once hallowed halls where power resides, Bipartisan folly and corruption…
Kennedy speaks very well, seemingly off the cuff, in this 2.5 hour interview with Lex Fridman: Transcript for Robert F. Kennedy Jr: CIA, Power, Corruption, War, Freedom, and Meaning | Lex Fridman Podcast #388 I like Kennedy’s antiwar positions. His antivax activism is concerning (though a lot less concerning than the hawkishness of President Biden…
In Scott Ritter Investigation: Agent Zelensky – Part 1 former United States Marine Corps intelligence officer and United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) weapons inspector Scott Ritter accuses Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky of corruption and of being an agent for British Intelligence. I don’t know what to make of the video. The soundtrack (music with drumbeat)…
RESOLUTION TO 40th LD DEMOCRATS REGARDING SITUATION IN UKRAINE: WHEREAS the conflict in the Ukraine is heating up into a potential major war between nuclear superpowers, and WHEREAS in February of this year, the U.S. government, led by neo-con Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, and Ukraine ambassador Geoffrey Piatt, supported the…
In The New Yorker’s How Russia went from Ally to Adversary, (published in the June 19, 2023 print edition as “Eastern Promises”), author Keith Gessen tells some of the history of post-Soviet Russia. Unusual for mainstream journalism, the article indicates that U.S. policy contributed to the rise of Putin and other authoritarian leaders in Russia…
The New Yorker article Biden’s Dilemma at the Border (June 19, 2023), by Dexter Filkins, describes the havoc and suffering caused by the large number of migrants fleeing South America towards the United States. The article says “Some of the biggest groups [of immigrants] were coming from four countries—Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti—with which the…
In the video RFK, Jr. Interviews Jeffrey Sachs on Ukraine and China, Jeffrey Sachs recalls his fruitless efforts to publish an opinion piece about Ukraine in the New York Times. He says that he had spoken with the editors and they had finalized a version of his piece that incorporated some edits that he was…