Also known simply as a coup (koo), it is the illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the …
Coup d’état
Also known simply as a coup (koo), it is the illegal and overt seizure of a state by the military or other elites within the state apparatus. A coup d’état is considered successful when the usurpers seize and hold power for at least seven days. Although the coup d’état has featured in politics since antiquity, the phrase is of relatively recent coinage; the Oxford English Dictionary identifies it as a French expression meaning a “stroke of state”. The phrase did not appear within an English text before the nineteenth century except when used in translation of a French source, there being no simple phrase in English to convey the contextualized idea of a “knockout blow to the existing administration within a state”.
Typically, a coup d’état uses the extant government’s power to assume political control of the country. In Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook, military historian Edward Luttwak says: ‘A coup consists of the infiltration of a small, but critical, segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder’, thus, armed force (either military or paramilitary) is not a defining feature of a coup d’état ”
According to Clayton Thyne and Jonathan Powell’s coup dataset, there were 457 coup attempts from 1950 to 2010, of which 227 (49.7%) were successful and 230 (50.3%) were unsuccessful. They find that coups have “been most common in Africa and the Americas (36.5% and 31.9%, respectively). Read More…
The New York Times reported "Goldman is trying to enter 2016 with a clean slate and put much of its outstanding regulatory issues behind it." The Times quoted Lloyd Blankfein, CEO of Goldman Sachs as saying, "We are pleased to have reached an agreement in principle to resolve these matters." Not a single Goldman Sachs executive has been fired or prosecuted; they have received bonuses instead ...
Article by: Borislaw Bilash II In November 2013, President Viktor Yanukovych announced that Ukraine was suspending pursuit of the Ukraine-European Union Association Agreement for which the country had been preparing for since 2008. The announcement led to the largest peaceful protests seen at the Maidan in Kyiv since the Orange Revolution of 2004. On November 30, 2013, at 4:00 a.m., as the protests dwindled, the Berkut ...
Israel was behind the 2013 coup in Egypt that toppled Mohamed Morsi, the African country’s first ever democratically-elected president, an Israeli general has revealed. Morsi, a member of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood party, entered office after the 2011 Egyptian uprising against the regime of former dictator Hosni Mubarak. Brigadier General Aryeh Eldad wrote in an article in Maariv newspaper that Israeli intelligence officials had reason to ...
Clever security researchers have uncovered the biggest security Coup d'état on the planet. Microsoft, the NSA, the CIA have all been colluding to create the most bloated covert piece of malware known to exist for 5 years [1] undetected. Microsoft decided somewhere along 2006 and 2007, that it was willing to throw away half of their market share (128 billion) in allowing this to occur [2] ...
As American bombs rain down upon Libya on the premise that Qaddafi was brutalizing indigenous pro-democratic demonstrators, the accusing fingers of Libya, Iran, China, Syria, Belarus, and a growing number of other nations are pointing at Washington for funding and plotting regime change against their respective governments. Either in an act of absolute hubris or to spin emerging evidence that the US indeed has been funding and ...
The Emergency Economic Stabilization Act and Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), commonly referred to as a “bank bailout,” authorized the US Secretary of the Treasury to spend $700 billion (actually spent more than double that) of taxpayer dollars to purchase distressed assets, especially mortgage-backed securities (MBS). Instead, the funds were given to foreign and domestic banks to offset their risky MBS, OTC derivatives and other losses. The bank ...
The mother of all insider trades was pulled off in 1815, when London financier Nathan Rothschild led British investors to believe that the Duke of Wellington had lost to Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo. In a matter of hours, British government bond prices plummeted. Rothschild, who had advance information, then swiftly bought up the entire market in government bonds, acquiring a dominant holding in England’s ...
New Century Financial, one of the largest sub-prime lenders in the US, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April 2nd of 2007, beginning the collapse of the financial market in 2007 and 2008. "The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has ...
US Sponsored Coup d'Etat in Haiti: An armed insurrection which contributed to unseating President Aristide as a result of a carefully staged military-intelligence operation, involving the US, France and Canada. The 2004 coup had set the stage for the installation of a US puppet government in Port au Prince, which takes orders directly from Washington. Following the destabilization and replacement of the President, the US kept ...
The April 2002 coup attempt against President Chavez represented the perhaps most important turning point of the Chavez Presidency. First, it showed just how far the opposition was willing to go to get rid of the country’s democratically elected president. Up until that point the opposition could claim that it was merely fighting Chavez with the political tools provided by liberal democracy. Afterwards, the mask was ...
