Beyond the rather obvious corruption risk that gives foreign potentates the opportunity to buy Trump’s favor, the Board of Peace is also a bid by Trump and his cronies to usurp or circumvent the functions of existing international bodies and institutions like the United Nations. Flawed as they may be in many respects, these institutions do possess widespread legitimacy: virtually every nation on Earth belongs to the UN. We don’t need to romanticize these institutions or pretend that they’re better and more effective than they really are — in far too many cases, they even wind up prolonging conflicts and issues they intend to resolve — to recognize they often have practical value as forums for discussions among nations and, in some cases, mechanisms for action on pressing international problems.

As a pay-to-play scheme with its membership determined by Trump himself, the Board of Peace will lack even a patina of legitimacy — and it may find it impossible to achieve anything aside from its primary function of enriching Trump himself or its original purpose of supervising the Gaza ceasefire plan.

Indeed, the board’s membership remains far too narrow to command anything resembling widespread and lasting legitimacy. Right now, the board consists of a handful of governments already politically aligned with Trump or seeking to curry his favor in one way or another: countries like Argentina and Hungary run by Trump allies Javier Milei and Viktor Orban, as well as Middle Eastern states like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey that combine ties to Trump with their own national interests in Gaza’s stability. All told, around thirty-five countries out of the fifty or so Trump invited to join the Board of Peace have said they’ll sign up, with only Vladimir Putin promising to pony up the $1 billion payment required for a permanent board seat — funds the Kremlin says will be drawn from Moscow’s frozen assets. If Trump were to accept Putin’s offer, he would effectively be comping the Kremlin for its membership.

~ Full article…

Transition of officials from the UK Ministry of Defence to spyware firm Palantir raises alarms over national security dependency and eroding accountability.

Investigation reveals that Palantir, a US surveillance and AI firm with close ties to the Trump administration, hired its fourth former UK Ministry of Defence official in 2025, just months before winning a no-bid £240 million contract. The pattern of recruiting senior civil servants and ministers, coupled with high-level government access, illustrates a deep integration that critics warn undermines sovereign control, democratic oversight, and public trust in critical systems from the NHS to national security.

Palantir hired four ex-Ministry of Defence officials last year, with its latest recruit joining months before the US spyware giant won its biggest ever contract with the department, openDemocracy can reveal.

On 31 August 2025, Barnaby Kistruck left his role as the Ministry of Defence’s director of industrial strategy, prosperity and exports – marking the end of a career in the civil service spanning almost two decades, in which he’d worked primarily on national security and defence.

Nine days later, he took up his new position as senior counsellor at Palantir, a US tech firm with close ties to the Trump administration that specialises in providing AI-powered military and surveillance systems and data analytics.

openDemocracy understands Kistruck played a key role in writing the UK’s Strategic Defence Review and accompanying Defence Industrial Strategy, which were published last summer and recommended AI play an increased role in defence policy.

In December 2025, three months after Kistruck’s appointment, Palantir won a three-year Ministry of Defence contract worth £240m to ‘modernise defence’ by providing “data analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic, tactical and live operational decision making across classifications” in the armed forces.

The contract, which is more than three times larger than any Palantir has previously won with the MoD, was awarded without tender.

~ Full article…

In a viral interview last week, US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee declared that “it would be fine” if Israel “took” all the land from the Nile river in Egypt to the Euphrates in Iraq.
[…]
This is the devastating backdrop against which Donald Trump convened the first meeting of his so-called “Board of Peace” in Washington.

Behind the language of reconstruction lies a familiar formula: security control without sovereignty; billions pledged without rights restored; governance structures designed in foreign capitals; economic management tied to compliance. Gaza’s devastated coastline is recast as an investment corridor. Reconstruction is framed as an opportunity for “modernisation”: digital identification systems, tightly monitored financial flows, the promise of a cashless economy administered under external oversight. A liaison office is established to coordinate with a Palestinian Authority stripped of territorial control. Self-determination is deferred yet again.

In this model, occupation is rebranded as redevelopment. Annexation advances on the ground while a new supervisory regime is assembled above it.

Cardinal Pierbattista Pizzaballa, the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, declined the invitation and called the initiative what it is: a “colonialist operation — others deciding for the Palestinians.”

The description is precise.

What is consolidating is a colonial architecture: territorial absorption normalised; siege maintained through financial and logistical systems; reconstruction conditioned; international law invoked when convenient and ignored when it obstructs expansion. The language may oscillate between messianic fervour and technocratic management; the result converges.

Yet this is not the only architecture taking shape.

Next week, states will convene in The Hague, in an meeting co-chaired by South Africa and Colombia, to advance a different logic: that international law imposes obligations on third states; that arms transfers can be halted; that ports can refuse docking; that vessels can be de-flagged; that public contracts can be reviewed; that universal jurisdiction can be activated. The Hague Group was formed to break paralysis — to translate condemnation into coordinated state action.

Concrete action, not rhetoric, is precisely the world’s demand. That is why days later in Amsterdam, social movements, trade unions, parliamentarians, jurists, dockworkers, journalists, and political leaders from across the world will march to Amsterdam for the People’s Congress for The Hague Group. There, they will map the global supply chains that sustain Israel’s war machine; coordinate organising at ports and transport hubs; plan campaigns to cut contracts and financial ties; pursue accountability through courts; target shipping giants and energy flows; and align strategy across borders.

~ Full article…

In America, nothing — and I mean nothing! — seems capable of reversing massive military spending and incessant warfare. President Ronald Reagan, readers of a certain (advanced) age may recall, was nicknamed the “Teflon president” because scandals just didn’t seem to stick to him (at least until the Iran-Contra affair proved tough to shed). Yet history’s best candidate for Teflon “no-stick” status was never Reagan or any other president. It was and remains the U.S. warfare state, headquartered on the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. And give the sclerotic bureaucracy of that warfare state full credit. Even as the Pentagon has moved from failure to failure in warfighting, its war budgets have continued to soar and then soar some more.

Forgive the repetition, but what gives? When is our long, national nightmare of embracing war and (wildly overpriced) weaponry going to end? Obviously, not anytime soon. Even the Democrats, supposedly the “resistance” to President Trump, boast openly of their support for what passes for military lethality (or at least overpriced weaponry), while Democratic members of Congress line up for their share of war-driven pork. To cite a cri de coeur from the 1950s, have they no sense of decency?

~ Full article…

The money disappeared while Epstein’s international child-trafficking operation remained highly active. This was the same period Epstein was making repeated visits to the White House during Bill Clinton’s presidency. Shortly afterward, Treasury funds began disappearing, while Epstein’s net worth surged to all time highs. Is this just a coincidence?

~ Video…

Fitts explains why the global monetary system is no longer functioning as a currency system – but as a control grid, with the end-goal being programmable money, digital surveillance, and centralized power. She lays out how bankers quietly gained control over both fiscal and monetary policy, why she believes political factions in Washington are unified on this agenda, and what it means for individual freedom.

The discussion also turns to gold and silver, with Fitts arguing that the surge in physical delivery reflects collapsing trust in the financial system’s “plumbing” and growing concern over paper leverage.

In this episode of Little by Little:

• A financial coup explained
• Programmable money and the control grid
• Why Washington factions are unified
• Physical gold and silver as a response to systemic risk
• How people prepare without feeding tyranny

~ Full video…

Catherine Austin Fitts: ‘We don’t have a financial problem – we have a bank robbery” … “The Uniparty criminals have stolen $55 trillion since 1998”

What few seem to understand is 1) the last “real recession” that cleared excesses of debt, leverage and speculation was 1980-82, 45 years ago and 2) the buffers that enabled the eventual recovery back then are gone. Where total debt was low in 1980–about 50% more than GDP–now it’s triple GDP. That means “borrowing our way to expansion” isn’t possible: borrowers are already unable to service existing debt, never mind more debt.

As for the Fed rescuing the debt bubble by dropping interest rates to zero: recall that the Fed isn’t buying more than a sliver of the $106 trillion debt; it’s only generating a false signal that risk is low. In the real world, risk is rising inexorably due to excessive debt, interest payments, leverage and speculation.

As for bailing the system out as in 2008, that is no longer possible, either. The system was “saved” by recapitalizing the financial sector–the source of new debt and speculation. But this time around, the economy is saturated with debt, income has stagnated and cannot support more borrowing, and the credit-asset bubbles in housing and financial assets has reached unprecedented heights of risk, i.e. fragility.

This is why a recession that clears the system of excessive debt, leverage and speculation leaves a devastated economy incapable of expansion: the system is now totally dependent on excesses of debt, leverage and speculation for its survival, never mind expansion, and once that collapses (as all bubbles do), the signaling, confidence and wealth that enabled the bubble will no longer exist.

~ Full article…

In the week when President Donald Trump vowed to implement a wave of increasing tariffs on European allies until the United States is allowed to buy Greenland, Yanis Varoufakis and Wolfgang Munchau dissect the terminal decline of European sovereignty and the shifting pillars of the global economy. Is Europe unable to confront Trump due to its total reliance on American technology and defence? And while the U.S. and China embrace disruptive economic models to maintain their dominance, why does the EU choose to preserve a failing status quo rather than pursuing the radical political union necessary for survival?

~ Video…

Venezuela’s oil in three dimensions

If all of Venezuela’s oil were stored in a single cylindrical tank, the structure would rise 1.6km (1 mile) into the sky and have a diameter of 6.2km (nearly 4 miles).

One mile is roughly equal to the height of three One World Trade Centers stacked on top of each other. It is the tallest building in New York City at 541m (1,776ft)

To place that scale in context, the tank would cover roughly half of Manhattan.

Global proven oil reserves, which measure the quantities of crude oil that are economically recoverable with current technology, total about 1.73 trillion barrels, which means Venezuela has roughly one-fifth of these reserves.

~ Full article…

Convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein told a Qatari businessman that Doha needed to “sing and dance” for Israel to get on US President Donald Trump’s good side during a blockade of the small Gulf state.

The email, part of the US Justice Department’s tranche of documents released over the weekend, shows Epstein inserting himself into a rift that erupted in the Gulf between Qatar on one side and the UAE and Saudi Arabia on the other.

Epstein told a man identified as “Jabor Y” that Qatar could apparently come in from the cold if it was able to normalise ties with Israel.

“If the people would allow your country to recognize israel. ,could be interesting to discuss. If not maybe consider putting 1 billion into a fund to benefit the victims of terrorist acts. asking the other gcc memebers to match it,” Epstein wrote on 9 July 2017.

In other emails, Jabor Y appears under the name Jabor Yousef Jassim Al Thani. He is a Qatari businessman and member of the royal family. In a 2016 document, he appears to ask for permission for Epstein’s plane to land in Doha.

The UAE and Saudi Arabia led Arab states in severing diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed a land, air and sea blockade on the gas-rich monarchy in June 2017. Trump backed the blockade.

Epstein suggested that Qatar’s problems could go away if it stopped “kicking and arguing” and forged closer ties to Israel. He said Qatar needed to follow India’s example, which has emerged as a close Israeli partner.

“The Indian Prime minisiter modi took advice. and danced and sang in israel for the benefit of the US president. they had met a few weeks ago.. IT WORKED.!” Epstein wrote to Jabar.

~ Full article…