Global Research

Image: author Stephen Lendman

Longstanding US/Israeli plans call for redrawing the Middle East map – including balkanizing Iraq and Syria along with installing regional puppets serving Western/Zionist interests.

The ugly scheme involves endless wars – killing millions through violence and deprivation. Imperialism works this way – causing unspeakable human misery for power, resource control and profit.

America, key NATO allies, Israel and rogue Arab states like Saudi Arabia are allied in potentially embroiling the entire region and beyond in endless conflicts – wanting regime change in Iran, Syria and elsewhere.

Washington wants all independent governments replaced by pro-Western puppet regimes. Israel wants all its regional rivals eliminated – Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Assad in Syria.

Former US Political Advisor for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, current Consul General to Jerusalem Michael Ratney was just appointed US Special Envoy for Syria.

It comes when Turkey joined America’s war on the Syrian Arab Republic directly – by attacking Syrian Kurds on the pretext of fighting Islamic State terrorists it actively supports – providing them safe haven in its territory, training them and funneling them cross-border to wage war on Syria as US proxy foot soldiers.

Last week, Obama and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan agreed on letting US warplanes use Ankara’s Incirlik and Diyarbakir air bases to bomb Syrian targets – along with the first step toward balkanizing its territory by establishing a buffer and no-fly zone in northern Syria bordering Southeastern Turkey.

At Monday’s daily State Department press briefing, AP’s Matt Lee asked spokesman Admiral John Kirby “what’s going on with the Turks? (I)t seems like a really bizarre situation has unfolded over the course of the past week with them (claiming to join) the air strikes against ISIS, but at the same time bombing PKK positions” in Syria and Iraq.

“So what exactly is going on here, and doesn’t this just make an even bigger mess out of the situation than” earlier?

Kirby ducked the question saying “(w)e are grateful for Turkey’s cooperation against ISIL (America’s ally, not enemy) to include now use of some of their bases for coalition (US/Britain/Israel and now Turkey) aircraft to go against targets – ISIL targets, particularly in Syria.”

Fact: Washington provides air support for IS proxy foot soldiers. Syrian infrastructure is targeted. Easily visible columns of IS elements (via satellite imagery) move free of US attacks.

They could easily be destroyed if Washington wanted them eliminated. Just the opposite. Kirby and other US officials claiming America is at war with IS is polar opposite truth.

Matt Lee pressed Kirby on attacking PKK fighters in Iraq and YPG Kurds in Syria – “perhaps the most effective (ones) on the ground against ISIS/ISIL,” he said. “You don’t have a problem with that,” he asked?

Kirby disagreed on Kurdish effectiveness, called the PKK “a foreign terrorist organization” because Washington say so, and added “Turkey has a right to self-defense” – the same rationale as Israel’s phony claim about a Palestinian threat.

Lee pressed further asking “(i)s the US telling Turkey not to go after the PKK if the PKK in Syria are going after ISIL – yes or no?”

Kirby seemed nonplussed – interrupted by another reporter asking “(s)o you don’t know (about Kurdish elements) fighting inside Syria?”

Kirby lied saying “I have no specific information.”

Question: “Who is shooting at whom at this point?”

Kirby ducked the question – without explaining sophisticated US satellite imagery he understands well as a retired navy admiral, able to follow ground activity wherever the Pentagon wishes.

An unnamed US official said Washington and Ankara are cooperating to create “an ISIL-free zone and ensure greater security and stability along Turkey’s border with Syria.”

Fact: The last thing Washington wants is stability anywhere in Syria or other targeted countries – regionally or elsewhere. It defeats US imperial aims. Endless wars serve them.

On Tuesday, all 28 NATO ambassadors are meeting in Brussels (at Turkey’s request) to discuss Ankara’s intervention in Syria and Iraq along with US/Turkish plans for Syrian buffer and no-fly zones – escalating Obama’s war to oust Assad and perhaps enlisting greater NATO involvement even if not announced.

An Alliance statement said member states “follow developments very closely and stand in solidarity with Turkey.” Whether it suggests direct NATO involvement in Syria and/or Iraq (including ground forces) remains to be seen.

On Monday, Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Ankara will press ahead with military action against PKK forces – claiming it’s part of its “war on terror” even though the secular PKK is bitterly opposed to IS extremists, engaged in combat against them.

A Syrian Kurdish People’s Defense Units (YPG) spokesman accused Turkey of attacking its positions. Ankara claimed unidentified elements fired cross-border from Syrian territory.

US officials said they’re unaware of any such attack but support Ankara’s right to self-defense – even if its forces committed naked aggression.

Meanwhile, US/Turkish plans call for a 60-mile-long buffer and no-fly zone around 30 miles into Syrian territory, according to various reports.

If established, it’ll constitute a blatant violation of international law without Security Council authorization, besides breaching Syrian sovereignty – along with a first step toward balkanizing the country, destroying it by dismemberment.

At the same time, a shaky 2013 established Turkish/PKK truce was breached. A group spokesman said “(i)t seems Erdogan wants to drag us back into war.”

“When things reach this level and when all of our areas are bombed, I think by then the ceasefire has no meaning anymore.”

White House deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes expressed support for Turkey’s “right to take action related to terrorist targets.”

So did EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini and Germany’s Angela Merkel – “expressing solidarity and support in the fight against terrorism.”

The region already is boiling. Turkey’s intervention ups the stakes.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. 

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. 

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The Kabul government is preparing for a big advance in northern Afghanistan.

National Security Forces have been involved in intense clashes with the Taliban in 7 provinces.

At the moment security forces have gained round only in Faryab province. The Taliban has now started a new offensive in the Badakhshan province by taking control of the “Kala” military base, seizing several checkpoints and capturing 100 pro-government fighters. Islamic State has also participated in clashes at the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border.

1. July 20-27, The operations of Afghan National Security Forces against the Taliban are underway in 7 provinces of Afghanistan. The attacks on the positions of militants were performed in Takhar, Kunduz, Faryab, Nangarhar, Sar-e Pul, Uruzgan and Logar. The Afghan Ministry of Internal Affairs reported government forces killed 20 and detained 2 militants. Also, a serviceman of the Afghan National Security Forces was killed. The most intense clashes were observed in Kunduz, Nangarhar and Faryab (on July 13, Taliban forces captured 22 checkpoints and over 40 settlements there). At the moment, Afghan National Security Forces have liberated a part of the Faryab province and destroyed 2 Taliban bases in the Almar district.
2. July 24-25, Taliban militants along with the “Unity of Islamic Jihad” took control of the “Kala” military base in the Wurduj district of the Badakhshan province. 25 Afghan servicemen were either killed or wounded, 100 were taken prisoner. Militants captured 10 Kalashnikov LMG, 90 assault rifles, 2 mortars and some other equipment. The Taliban stated it had taken control of 6 check points and 12 settlements around the military base. However, this information wasn’t confirmed by Kabul. Earlier, the acting governor of Badakhshan Shah Wali Adib was alarmed by the situation and asked the central government to send reinforcements.
3. July 26, The chief of the Badakhshan police General Abdul Wahid Baba Jan accused captured “Kala” servicemen of making a secret deal with the Taliban. According to him Kala servicemen had enough arms and equipment to defend the military base, but they preferred to make a deal with militants.
4. July 27, The Taliban released the 100 servicemen captured after taking control of “Kala”. The event confirms that General Abdul Wahid Baba Jan’s allegation that they didn’t try their best in clashes against the militants. At the very least, it indicates low morale among the Afghan forces.
5. July 27, The Ministry of Defense of Afghanistan has been preparing a military operation in the northern part of the country: Badakhshan, Takhar, Kunduz, Balkh and Baghlan. The operation is a result of numerous reports from localized pro-government forces about the lack of support from Kabul.
6. July 1-27, Islamic State has been advancing at the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border since early July. 3000 to 4000 of IS militants are concentrated in the region. According to official reports, at least 12 border guard servicemen were killed there. Different reports state a number over 80 Turkmenistan servicemen killed. It’s possible that Islamic State is there is to capture gas fields of Turkmenistan.

Despite Afghan government’s official reports that clashes are underway in 7 provinces, there are many more zones of military activity in the country. The Taliban has party taken control of other Afghan provinces too. Attacks on military servicemen and policemen constantly come around the south, east and central regions. 4100 Afghan National Security Forces servicemen were killed and 7800 wounded since the start of 2015. Kabul’s big advance in the north is a reaction to numerous requests of local authorities and an overdue attempt to get the situation under the control. However, the events in the Badakhshan province on July 24-25 indicate that government forces have most likely been losing the will to fight against the Taliban.

Islamic State militants have increased activity at the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border. From 12 to 70 Turkmenistan bodyguards have been already killed since early July. The terrorists aim to capture gas fields of Turkmenistan. There are two opportunities for IS there:

• To create an attack corridor through the border
• To “infiltrate” the border under the cover of local fights and attack the border guard from two sides (IS uses this strategy regularly)

The increase in IS activity is synchronized with signing of The Iran Nuclear Deal and is clearly pushing the USA’s interests: to prevent the supply of Turkmen gas to China (through TAPI or Uzbekistan) and redirect the flows to the Europe. Iran will replace Russia in energy supplies, enforcing the USA for further anti-Russian actions in the central Europe.

Image: Three girls at a juvenile facility in Racine, Wisconsin. Richard Ross

How did we end up with millions behind bars and police armed like soldiers?

How did we get here? The numbers are chilling: 2.2 million people behind bars, another 4.7 million on parole or probation. Even small-town cops are armed like soldiers, with a thoroughly militarized southern border.

The common leftist explanation for this is “the prison-industrial complex,” suggesting that the buildup is largely privatized and has been driven by parasitic corporate lobbying. But the facts don’t support an economistic explanation. Private prisons only control 8 percent of prison beds. Nor do for-profit corporations use much prison labor. Nor even are guards’ unions, though strong in a few important states, driving the buildup.

The vast majority of the American police state remains firmly within the public sector. But this does not mean the criminal justice buildup has nothing to do with capitalism. At its heart, the new American repression is very much about the restoration and maintenance of ruling class power.

American society and economy have from the start evolved through forms of racialized violence, but criminal justice was not always so politically central. For the better part of a century after the end ofReconstruction in the 1870s, the national incarceration rate hovered at around 100 to 110 per 100,000. But then, in the early 1970s, the incarceration rate began a precipitous and continual climb upward.

The great criminal justice expansion began as a federal government reaction to the society-wide rebellion of the late 1960s. It was a crucible in which white supremacy, corporate power, capitalism, and the legitimacy of the US government, at home and abroad, all faced profound crisis. The Civil Rights Movement had transmogrified into the Black Power movement.

“Third World” Marxist and nationalist groups like the Black Panthers and the Young Lords began arming. During riots in Newark, Watts, and Chicago, black people shot back at cops and the National Guard; in Detroit, urban “hillbillies” — poor white Southerners who had also been displaced by the mechanization of agriculture — fought alongside their black neighbors. Transwomen, drag queens, and gay men fought the cops who came to raid the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. Women organized, filed successful lawsuits, and staged large protests against discrimination.

Even the US Army was in rebellion. In Vietnam draftee insubordination took the form of increasing drug use, combat refusals, and even “fragging” — the murder of overly gung-ho officers.

Added to all this was the increasingly regular rioting that gripped America’s inner cities. Every summer from 1964 through the mid-1970s saw a riot season, in which multiple major American cities were wracked by massive, violent, fiery, spontaneous uprisings of mostly, but not exclusively, unemployed and underemployed African-American youth. Cops were shot, whole commercial districts were looted and burnt, and all of it was captured on TV.

Importantly, these domestic social explosions hurt US imperialism abroad. In the context of the Cold War, burning cities put the lie to official American mythologies. If capitalism and liberal democracy were so much better than socialism, why were black people in America so furious?

In 1967 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, known as the Kerner Commission, found that in every single case the precipitating cause of the riots was police brutality. Furthermore, the commission found that police tactical incompetence usually made things worse.

It was in response to this panorama of formal and informal rebellion — and law enforcement’s apparent inability to stop it — that the massive criminal justice crackdown began. The opening move was President Johnson’s Omnibus Crime and Safe Streets Act of 1968.

Congress passed the bill literally in the shadow of smoke from yet another riot — this one in outrage at the murder of Dr Martin Luther King. From the passage of the Omnibus Crime and Safe Streets Act of 1968 emerged a new super agency, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), which over the next ten years spent a billion dollars annually rationalizing and retooling state and local law enforcement.

It was thanks to the LEAA that American police forces first obtained computers, helicopters, body armor, military-grade weapons, SWAT teams, shoulder radios, and paramilitary training, and started new militaristic forms of interagency cooperation. The LEAA also pushed literacy requirements and basic competency tests for police officers. In other words, the LEAA was simultaneously an attempt to modernize American policing and to intensify and expand it.

If Johnson laid the groundwork for the crackdown, Sunbelt Republicans perfected the rhetoric. Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona linked the redistributive efforts of the New Deal and War on Poverty to criminal violence: “If it is entirely proper for the government to take away from some to give to others, then won’t some be led to believe that they can rightfully take from anyone who has more than they? No wonder law and order has broken down, mob violence has engulfed great American cities, and our wives feel unsafe in the streets.”

Here were the old demonizing tropes of white racism. Black people were cast as dangerous, ignorant, unworthy of full citizenship, and thus in need of state repression. As Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, put it in his diary: “[The President] emphasized that you have to face that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” A federal war on heroin followed and with it came new laws like the RICO Actthat empowered prosecutors. At the same time Nixon began his appeal to “the silent majority,” a group not named as white but understood as such.

Meanwhile, as part of police modernization, counterinsurgency became the framework. One law enforcement journal, describing what would become the locked-down ghetto of the near future, advised: “Techniques to control the people include individual and family identification, curfews, travel permits, static and mobile checkpoint operations, and the prevention of assemblies or rallies.”

The article went on to describe rising crime rates as a precursor to revolution, and lauded the “value of an effective police organization — both civil and military — in maintaining law and order, whether in California, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, or the rice paddies and jungles of Viet-Nam.”

Upward Redistribution

Eventually this first phase of the criminal justice buildup began to plateau. By the late seventies, a series of major scandals had revealed the nasty side of policing and government spying. First among these was the Nixon administration’s burglary of Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. Then the Knapp Commission hearings exposed the New York Police Department’s appalling corruption, while the Senate’s Church Committee revealed rampant domestic spying and began reining in the CIA.

From other quarters came revelations about the brutality in Southern prisons. Many lockups in the US South relied on armed trustees, prisoners who acted as guards and were given free rein to abuse fellow inmates. Texas was the last state to abolish the armed trustee system in the early 1980s. All of this caused a momentary pause in the otherwise forward momentum of the repressive buildup.

That pause was short-lived. The Reagan Administration soon relaunched the federally subsidized drug war and the larger project of domestic repression it helped produce.

However, this second stage of the buildup was not about suppressing rebellion; that job was largely done. There were no more riots; the Panthers had been crushed; and many once-radical community organizations had been domesticated, their rank-and-file members demobilized, their leaders reduced to begging for foundation grants.

The Reagan Revolution’s radical economic restructuring had, however, created new problems to which criminal justice offered solutions. Reagan’s massive upward redistribution of wealth had created vast swaths of impoverishment and dramatic new levels of inequality. In this context the reinvigorated war on crime served to physically contain and ideologically explain away, via racist victim-blaming, the massive social dislocations of neoliberal, free-market economic restructuring.

So then, why and how did economic policy move radically rightward in the early 1980s?

Sabotage, at Home and Abroad

This transformation, the beginning of neoliberalism, begins with the crucially important collapse of profit rates in the early 1970s. After twenty years of continual expansion during the long postwar recovery, profits began to sag in 1966 and continued to decline steadily until 1974, when they reached an average of around 4.5 percent. The same pattern of a 20 to 30 percent plunge in profits was true across all advanced capitalist countries.

This was, ultimately, a crisis of over-accumulation rooted in the end of the postwar boom. By the late sixties, the long wave of post–World War II growth had created a global glut. There was finally too much capital, too much stuff, and not enough profitable outlets for investment, not enough consumption to keep the colossus moving.

For the first time in American history the Phillips curve, which plotted an inverse relationship between rising wages and rising unemployment, was out of whack. Historically, when unemployment increased wages tended to go down. But in the early 1970s, both unemployment and wages were increasing. This was the infamous and anomalous “stagflation” — stagnant growth plus inflation.

While the cause of the crisis was overproduction at a global scale, the solution, in the eyes of the ruling class, was cost-cutting in the form of deregulation, tax cuts, and reduced wages.

From the New Deal, through the War on Poverty, and into the Nixon era, the state had played an increasingly prominent role in the economy. Between 1964 and 1979 the federal government enacted sixty-two health and safety laws, plus thirty-two laws protecting the environment and regulating energy use. Between 1970 and 1973, Nixon presided over the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Safety Administration, and the Mine Enforcement and Safety Administration.

All this translated into higher costs and thus lower profits for business. High taxes and restrictive regulation, once seen as merely the modern cost of business, where now seen as profit killers.

To make matters worse, the 1970s saw a truly massive offensive by organized labor. Truckers, farmworkers, longshore workers, gravediggers, postal clerks and letter carriers, autoworkers, and assembly line workers of all sorts struck during the 1970s.

And they usually won. The ratio of quits to layoffs reached two to one, almost twice what it was in the late fifties. The share of the workforce involved in some strike activity between 1967 and 1973 reached 40 percent — even though in the same period the unemployment rate crept from 4 to 8 percent.

Restive workers also resorted to informal rebellion on the shop floor. Ford claimed that absenteeism in its plants doubled and sometimes even tripled during the sixties and early seventies. In one factory workers wrote messages to management on their machinery, such as, “Treat me with respect and I will give you top quality with less effort.” Sabotage, slowdowns, and wildcat strikes became the industrial equivalents of “fragging” officers in Vietnam.

One account relays the plight of a Ford manager in a plant plagued with absenteeism and sabotage. Among the plant’s employees was a young man who consistently skipped work on Friday or Monday. When the manager finally demanded to know why the man worked a four-day week, the young worker replied, “Because I can’t make a living working three days a week.”

He spoke for a generation; working-class power translated into an informal, economy-wide slowdown, which meant a measured decline in productivity.

Even more disturbing from the point of view of the capitalists was that government, or at least its recently expanded social safety net, was actually subsidizing the working-class rebellion.

A nationwide strike against GE in 1969 helped crystallize the issue. Strikers were not only receiving strike funds from their union — tens of thousands of them were also drawing welfare checks.

“It’s a mind-boggling situation,” declared Thomas Litwiler, a GE executive in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “The strikers are living reasonably well on welfare, and nobody knows what to do or what it really means any more.”

Working-class power was being institutionalized within the state, and the state in turn was being transformed. But from the point of view of employers, welfare for strikers meant government-subsidized class war.

The Cold Bath Recession

The solution, for business, arrived in the form of what Francis Fox Piven called The New Class War. Restoring the Phillips curve and getting the price of labor to respond to rising unemployment meant stripping away the supports of the safety net produced by America’s New Deal and Great Society.

The counterattack began in 1979, when President Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Volcker dramatically boosted interest rates, thus cutting off borrowing and buying power. Reagan accelerated this “monetarist” squeeze, and interest rates reached 16.4 percent in 1981. The United States (and thus much of the world) was plunged into what was then the most severe recession since the thirties.

Referred to as a “cold bath” recession, it was designed to punish the uppity working class. As Volcker told the New York Times: “The standard of living of the average American has to decline . . . I don’t think you can escape that.”

At the same time Reagan cut taxes for the rich and began gutting welfare, he pushed forward on deregulating health, safety, and environmental standards. In 1982 alone Reagan cut the real value of welfare by 24 percent, slashed the budget for child nutrition by 34 percent, reduced funding for school milk programs by 78 percent, trimmed urban development action grants by 35 percent, and cut educational block grants by 38 percent.

The medicine worked. Poverty increased and with that labor militancy and the cost of wages decreased. From World War II on, wages had been rising more or less consistently.

In 1980 not a single new union contract included a pay cut, or even a freeze. But in 1982, only one year into the Reagan Revolution, 44 percent of new contracts included wage cuts or freezes. As the official unemployment rate, always an under-estimate, reached 10 percent, working-class living standards began to collapse.

Alan Budd, chief economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher, described the new economic dynamic as follows: “Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes . . . What was engineered — in Marxist terms — was a crisis in capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labor, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”

How was this new social landscape of deindustrialization and increased poverty next to new extremes of wealth to be managed and explained away? Reengaging the criminal justice buildup provided the answer.

Launching the Drug War

Reagan’s criminal justice offensive began quietly at first. His administration doubled FBI funding, loosened wiretap laws, gave more money to the US Bureau of Prisons, appointed a generation of new right-wing federal judges, and urged changes in the criminal code that increased the power of prosecutors. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court handed down decisions that rolled back defendant rights. Gates v. Illinois made it easier for police to obtain search warrants based on anonymous tips; United States v. Leon allowed police to use defective and partially false warrants.

Then came the Federal Crime Bill of 1984, which created the assets forfeiture laws enabling police to keep as much as 90 percent of any “drug-tainted” property seized. This massively incentivized state and local officials to get on board with the drug war.

Next came the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which imposed twenty-nine new mandatory minimum sentences, among them the notoriously racist disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing.

The escalating repression hit poor people of color hardest, and black people hardest of all. In 1980, African Americans made up 12 percent of the nation’s population and over 23 percent of all those arrested on drug charges. Ten years later, African Americans were still 12 percent of the population, but made up more than 40 percent of all those arrested on narcotics charges. Still more remarkable, over 60 percent of all narcotics convictions were of African Americans.

Overall, drug arrests almost doubled in the late eighties: 1985 saw roughly 800,000 people taken down on drug charges; by 1989 that number had shot up to almost 1.4 million.

By the late eighties, politicians and the media were locked in a symbiotic hysteria, a classic mutually reinforcing “moral panic.” The zenith of this was the Hill & Knowlton–produced TV ads featuring the scowling mug shot of a black convict named Willie Horton, imprisoned for rape and murder. Horton escaped prison while Michael Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts.

During this time the 1988 crime bill was introduced, which created a “drug czar” — cheerleader-in-chief for the drug war — and pumped yet more federal money down to local police and state prison construction. The bill also created a “one-strike” policy for public housing tenants.

The Clinton presidency brought more of the same. After the Los Angeles riots came the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. Local cops got another $30.2 billion in federal cash. (It is worth recalling that no matter how much the Clinton’s play up their supposed solidarity with African Americans, Bill Clinton’s actual presidency was tyrannical in the extreme for millions of poor and working-class black people caught up in his law-and-order agenda.)

Two years later, with another election on the way, Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, massively expanding the use of the death penalty and eviscerating federal habeas corpus. Right behind that came the Prison Litigation Reform Act, which barred many prisoners from access to the civil courts, helped eliminate prison law libraries, kept judges from imposing meaningful penalties on abusive prison administrators, and stripped lawyers of their ability to receive legal fees when handling prison civil rights suits.

In election year 1996 Clinton, on a roll of utter brutality and right-wing pandering, delivered the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which among other things eliminated an undocumented person’s right to due process while lavishing cash on the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Throughout the eighties and nineties, state legislatures imitated and matched cues coming from the federal government. California alone made over a thousand changes to its criminal code during these years.

Regulate, Absorb, Terrorize, Disorganize

Looking back we can see clearly the effects of this generalized project of repression: mask the real causes of poverty with racist fearmongering and victim-blaming. Keep once-rebellious communities in America’s cities fragmented and tied up in the criminal justice system. Secure central cities for gentrification and redevelopment. Keep labor cheap by hounding immigrants. And, in a pork-barrel strategy, build new local support via publicly funded prison construction, service contracts, and employment as guards.

In other words, among the important things criminal justice does is regulate, absorb, terrorize, and disorganize the poor. At the same time it promulgates politically useful racism. Criminal justice discourse is the racism circus; from courts to reality TV it is the primary ideological site for producing the false consciousness that is American racism.

Why is racism false consciousness? Because it divides the working class and causes people of all races to misunderstand their real material conditions. It creates, via racialized scapegoats, pseudo-explanations for poverty and exploitation, deluding and frightening downwardly mobile voters.

Most important, the criminal justice crackdown and overuse of incarceration allows capitalism to have the positive effects of mass unemployment (lower wages due to an economically frightened workforce) without the political destabilization that mass poverty can bring. Unlike a robust social safety net, incarceration and militarized policing absorb the poor and working class without empowering them or subsidizing their rebellion, as was the case during the sixties and seventies.

Unlike the soft forms of social control — meaning the ameliorative and redistributive welfare programs of the Great Society — the new model of social control does not come with dangerous notions of “equality” and “social inclusion.”

Today, the poor are thoroughly locked down, as is our political imagination about what poverty means. Law enforcement has moved to the center of domestic politics; state violence is perhaps more than ever a constant, regular, and normal feature of poor people’s lives.

Simply stated, capitalism needs poverty and creates poverty, but is simultaneously always threatened by poverty. The poor keep wages down, but they also create trouble in three ways.

First, their presence calls into question capitalism’s moral claims (the system can’t work for “everyone” when beggars are in the street). Second, the poor threaten and menace the moneyed classes aesthetically and personally simply by being in the wrong spaces. Gourmet dining isn’t quite the same when done in the presence of mendicant paupers. And finally, the poor threaten to rebel in organized and unorganized ways as they did in the sixties and seventies.

Capitalism will never escape these contradictions. The best it can do is manage them with criminal justice, the ideological racialization of poverty, and the geographic segregation of the poor.

One more point. When viewing this history and the present, it is important to think in terms of concomitant and overlapping agendas. Police on the street are not usually consciously pursuing the violent reproduction of neoliberal capitalism. More often local cops in Staten Island; Albuquerque; Ferguson; Waller, Texas; etc. are pursuing their own personal power trips, which very often take on racist angles.

But regardless of what cops think they are doing, their work usually also fits into local political agendas of segregation and real-estate development. And both of those smaller projects fit into the larger national project of social control in an increasingly unequal class society. In other words, the macro, mezzo, and micro levels all line up but also all remain somewhat autonomous.

Finally some good news. Incarceration rates have begun to plateau again, and there are growing divisions among economic and policy elites about the nation’s grotesquely overgrown justice system. California, under court order, has released more than forty thousand prisoners in recent years. This indicates an opening that movements like Black Lives Matter can exploit to force through meaningful policy changes.

And what is our side’s policy prescription? Less. Not better, just less. Fewer prisons, fewer SWAT teams, less surveillance. Not better-trained cops with body cameras, but rather less gear, less money, and fewer cops.

This article draws on Christian Parenti’s book Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis.

by Holly G. Prigerson, PhD; Yuhua Bao, PhD; Manish A. Shah, MD; M. Elizabeth Paulk, MD; Thomas W. LeBlanc, MD, MA; Bryan J. Schneider, MD; Melissa M. Garrido, PhD; M. Carrington Reid, MD, PhD; David A. Berlin, MD; Kerin B. Adelson, MD; Alfred I. Neugut, MD, PhD; Paul K. Maciejewski, PhD1,14

ABSTRACT

A court controlled by an Islamist militia in the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Tuesday sentenced the son of Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s assassinated head of state, and eight others to death by firing squad.

Among the others condemned to die were Abdullah Senussi, Gaddafi’s former intelligence chief, and two former prime ministers, Baghdadi Mahmudi and Abuzed Dorda.

Eight other former officials were condemned to life in prison in the mass show trial, while seven were sentenced to 12-year prison terms. Four were acquitted.

Saif Gaddafi, who was widely viewed as the second most powerful figure in the old regime, was taken prisoner while trying to flee Libya in November 2011 after a six-month US-NATO war had succeeded in toppling his father, who was captured, tortured and murdered by Islamist militiamen the previous month.

At the time, then-Secretary of State and present front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination Hillary Clinton gloated over the gruesome killing, declaring amid laughter, “We came, we saw, he died.”

Saif Gaddafi was tried in absentia, as he is being held by a militia in the northwestern Libyan city of Zintan, which rejects the authority of the regime in Tripoli. The latter regime was set up by the Islamist Libya Dawn militia a year ago after driving out a Council of Deputies, which was elected in June of 2014 with barely 18 percent of the electorate participating. The council fled to Tobruk and, while controlling little of the country, is recognized internationally as the government of Libya.

United Nations officials, human rights groups and even the rump regime exiled to Tobruk joined in condemning the trial and verdict as illegitimate.

While presented as a settling of accounts between the US-orchestrated “revolution” and the old regime, the trial has been merely one more indication of the disintegration of Libya as a result of the war of aggression launched against the North African country four years ago. Civil war conditions that have killed thousands and turned millions into refugees have far overshadowed the rigged courtroom drama, which has been met with popular indifference in Libya.

Those placed on trial were accused of killings and repression carried out in the immediate run-up to the US-NATO intervention, which was promoted as a “human rights” intervention designed to stave off a supposedly imminent massacre in the eastern city of Benghazi, which had been overrun by US-backed Islamist rebels.

In reality, there was no evidence that such a mass killing was being prepared, and in the end, ten times as many people were killed by the US-NATO bombing campaign and the attacks of the Islamist militias than died at the hands of government forces in the clashes preceding the intervention.

To call the proceedings in which Saif Gaddafi and the other former regime officials were convicted a kangaroo court is an understatement. Gaddafi himself was not in the courtroom and had been able to follow the proceedings via video only three times at the trial’s outset over a year ago.

No evidence implicating individual defendants in specific criminal acts was presented and there were no witnesses presented in open court for defense attorneys to cross-examine. The only evidence consisted of confessions extracted under torture.

Some of the defendants, including Senussi, did not even have lawyers. Those that did were denied access to their attorneys. Defense lawyers themselves were denied basic documents, while facing threats and even physical assaults.

Indicating the conditions under which the trial was held, a UN trial monitor was taken prisoner by militia members in the courtroom and accused of practicing black magic.

John Jones, Saif Gaddafi’s lawyer, appointed by the International Criminal Court, denounced the proceedings as “a complete show trial, a farce.”

“This trial is effectively being run by Libya Dawn militias,” Jones said. The prosecutors, he added, “are relying on confessions from defendants extracted by torture. It was condemned by Libya’s own ministry of justice as illegal.”

Senussi’s London-based lawyer, Ben Emmerson QC, who like Jones was denied access to his client, issued a statement charging that “extreme fear, insecurity and intimidation” had dominated the trial.

“The death sentence just handed down against Abdullah al-Senussi is the most deplorable decision in a case in which every one of his basic rights to a fair trial and due process have been completely ignored,”

he added.

This travesty of a trial only serves as further evidence of the real crimes against Libya that have yet to be prosecuted, those committed by US President Barack Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron in launching an unprovoked war of aggression aimed at toppling the country’s government and seizing control of its oil wealth, the greatest proven reserves on the African continent.

This seminal crime has produced an unending series of atrocities, from the vast increase in the number of migrants losing their lives fleeing Libya across the Mediterranean for Europe, to the sectarian murders and beheadings carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), which has established a growing presence in a country where Islamist militias previously had no significant influence.

One of the worst recent terrorist attacks, the massacre of 39 tourists in Tunisia, was carried out by a Tunisian national who was trained in Libya and then sent to his own country to carry out killings.

An indication of the criminality of Western imperialist policy toward Libya came this week with the revelation in newly released documents in London that the British government spent 13 times as much money bombing Libya to bring about “regime change” than it has since contributed to rebuilding the shattered country in the wake of the 2011 US-NATO war.

House of Commons library files have put the total cost of the 2011 British military intervention at £320 million, while in the four years since the military attack, the UK has given only £25 million for reconstruction and stabilization projects.

Previously the Cameron government had attempted to maintain a veil of secrecy over the cost of the intervention, with government ministers speaking in terms “tens of millions” spent on the war.

No doubt similar, if not worse, ratios exist for the US, France and all of the belligerent NATO powers.

The revelations have been joined with the announcement that the House of Commons is to launch an inquiry into Britain’s role in toppling Gaddafi and its responsibility for the chaos that has engulfed Libya since.

Crispin Blunt, the Tory party chairman of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee, told the daily Guardian:

“It has turned out to be a catastrophe for the people of Libya. And now it is a growing problem for us, with our undoubted enemy ISIS beginning to establish control of areas of Libya. Plus the migration crisis–any area where state authority collapses obviously poses problems for us all over the world.”

Undaunted, Cameron, speaking during a state visit to Indonesia, indicated his willingness to renew British military attacks on Libya.

“If there is a threat to Britain or to our people or our streets and we can stop it by taking immediate action against that threat, then I as prime minister will always want to try to take that action and that’s the case whether that problem is emanating from Libya, from Syria, or anywhere else,”

he said.

The Obama administration, meanwhile, is reportedly seeking an agreement with one or another of the surrounding North African countries to set up a base for US drones in order to carry out renewed strikes against Libya.

Prime Minister Abe Shinzō’s stunning return to power in the December 2012 landslide election victory, and the consolidation of his leadership in a repeat victory in December 2014, has heralded the resurgence for Japan of a more assertive, high-profile, and high-risk, foreign and security policy.[i] However, as Japan’s Foreign and Security Policy Under the ‘Abe Doctrine’ suggests, Abe’s status as an arch-‘revisionist’ ideologue, combined with the track record of his first administration in 2006-2007, made clear that he would move aggressively to shift Japan towards a more radical external agenda—characterized by a defense posture less fettered by past anti-militaristic constraints, a more fully integrated US-Japan alliance, and an emphasis on ‘value-oriented’ diplomacy with East Asian states and beyond.[ii]Indeed,

Abe’s diplomatic agenda has been so distinctive and forcefully articulated in past years that it might be labeled as a doctrine capable of rivaling, and even of displacing, the doctrine of Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru that has famously charted Japan’s entire post-war international trajectory. In contrast to Abe’s more muscular international agenda, the so-called ‘Yoshida Doctrine’, forged in the aftermath of total defeat in the Pacific War, has long emphasized for Japan the need for a pragmatic and low-profile foreign policy, a highly constrained defense posture, reliance but not over-dependence on the US-Japan security treaty, and the expedient rebuilding of economic and diplomatic ties with East Asian neighbors.[iii]

Three faulty foreign policy arrows

Abe has begun to shunt Japan in new radical directions in terms of its security posture. The list of Abe’s ‘reforms’ thus far includes the establishment of the National Security Council; National Security Strategy; State Secrecy Law; Three Principles of Defense Equipment Transfers; revised ODA Charter; revised National Defense Program Guidelines; and currently legislation to enable the exercise of collective self-defense, US-Japan relations (revision of the Defense Guidelines, pushing ahead with the Futenma Replacement Facility; attempts to complete the Trans-Pacific Partnership), and Japan-East Asia relations (historical revisionism in regard to musing on the legitimacy of the Kōno and Murayama statements, and the 2013 visit to Yasukuni Shrine; the pursuit of values-oriented and hyper-active diplomacy; and the ‘encirclement’ of China). Indeed, for much of Abe’s second period in office, this agenda has seemed irresistible as the prime minister has looked to challenge domestic and international taboo after taboo, and thus to finally bring to an end the ‘post-war regime’ and usher in Japan’s return as an autonomous great power, supposedly an equal partner of the US, and a state capable of exercising leadership in East Asia (or a code word for countervailing leadership against China’s rising influence).

Nevertheless, questions and signs continue to emerge as to whether Abe’s foreign policy really has the ideological and material staying power to achieve its high ambitions, and whether it can shift Japan away from its post-war track and onto a new trajectory. The first agenda of security policy has progressed rapidly for Abe, culminating thus far in the ramming of collective self-defense legislation through the National Diet’s Lower House in July 2015. But there are signs of resistance kicking in domestically from the LDP’s New Kōmeitō partner and a number of the opposition parties, and public opinion over collective self-defense. The second agenda of strengthening US-Japan relations has proved harder, with security ties moving ahead but signs of repeated gridlock on Okinawa, and slower progress on the TPP, and US watchfulness on Abe’s revisionism and the impact on its ‘rebalance’ and East Asian stability. The third agenda of Japan-East Asia relations has progressed the least. Despite Abe’s grandiose plans for reasserting regional leadership and the implicit ‘encirclement’ of China, the ASEAN states have only been enlisted to a limited degree in this effort, perceiving the real intent to be to contain China; South Korea has drifted away from Japan strategically, at times towards China; and China itself has simply refused to engage in depth with Japan, continuing to bolster its position in the region and in some ways encircling and challenging Japan. The Abe-Xi Jinping summit in November seems to have resulted more from Sino-Japanese stalemate than any inspired moves by Japan to gain strategic advantage. Abe’s three arrows of his foreign and security policy, hence, risk becoming as mixed in their accuracy and effect as the three arrows of ‘Abenomics’.[iv]

Abe has only served two and half years as prime minister in this stint and may enjoy several more years following his victory in the December 2014 elections to continue to pursue his radical agenda. But the probability is that the Abe Doctrine, whilst making substantive differences to Japan’s foreign and security policy, will continue to fall short of its ambitions, and perhaps ultimately run into the sand. This is because of three fundamental inherent and irreconcilable contradictions. Essentially, these result from the fixation of the Abe Doctrine on attempting to escape the post-war order and the humiliations to national pride and sovereignty imposed during that period, and the fact that this in many ways only leads to Japan becoming further entrapped in the past with resultant tensions for the implementation of current policies and relations.

Three great contradictions of the ‘Abe Doctrine’

The first great contradiction is the assertion of the Abe Doctrine that it is founded upon the promotion of universal liberal values in order to uphold the status quo of the international order. The facts of Abe’s foreign and security policy are that it is, of course, essentially revisionist in tone: the focus on overturning the reforms imposed by the Occupation, the judgments of Tokyo War Tribunals, and Japan’s previous statements on history oriented toward the region, are a challenge to existing international law and norms. Hence, while Japan may argue that it is China that is determined to upset the international status quo, the Abe Doctrine means that Japan also at times has to be bracketed in that category. The result is not just that Japan’s assertions of leadership based on universal values lack credibility and efficacy in East Asia, but that its approach also conflicts with the outlook of many states, and not least that of the US which founded the existing international order of the postwar period upon those very liberal values.

If the Abe Doctrine’s claims to uphold the liberal order can be said to be often fundamentally illiberal and conflictual, then its second great contradiction is the belief that the post-war regime can be brought to an end by constantly revisiting, and in certain instances unilaterally reinterpreting, past history. For again, this generates regional tensions and leads to the prolongation of Japan’s predicament of being caught in the constraints of the past.[v] The apparent belief of Abe and the revisionists, as they prepare next month for a new statement on the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Pacific War, is that Japan by openly challenging historical interpretations of the colonial past, or more often slyly marginalizing the Kōno and Murayama statements, will eventually achieve a watershed moment of domestic and international acceptance or acquiescence in the abandonment of these taboos and the consequent constraints on Japanese foreign policy. However, all the evidence points to the reality that the Abe Doctrine’s emphasis on revisiting the colonial past and Occupation period only serves to deepen regional animosities over history and territory, and to isolate Japan diplomatically. In this way, the Abe Doctrine’s plans for regional leadership are thwarted, and the postwar period of national resentment and constraints is in actuality perpetuated for Japan.

The third and perhaps greatest contradiction of the Abe Doctrine is the belief that Japan can finally recover true autonomy and independence in the post-war period through increased dependence on the US. Abe views Japan as reasserting its position as a first rank power alongside the US through deepening bilateral cooperation. But this conception is deeply flawed, not only because Japan under Abe is already finding it difficult to follow through on key policy cooperation promises, but just as importantly because the doctrine’s revisionism actually presents the bilateral relationship with fundamental incompatibilities of ideology and values that undercut the potential for cooperation from the start.

The first problem for the bilateral relationship within this contradiction is that Abe’s hopes for more equal ties with the US cannot by definition materalize as long as Japan continues to lock itself into dependency on the US in a range of political, economic and security affairs. Abe’s attempts to strengthen Japan’s great power profile through deepening integration into the military alliance can only really spell dependency. Japan’s gearing of its security doctrines and capabilities in the proclamation of collective self-defense and the revised Defense Guidelines in the service of US-Japan alliance curtails rather than builds genuine security autonomy. The Abe administration’s determination to construct the Futenma Replacement Facility in Okinawa and the long-term presence of US foreign troops on Japanese soil again indicates a relationship of dependency, as does the constant seeking of security reassurances from the US in regard to Japanese control of the Senkaku islands in its dispute with China. Hence, the reality is that the Abe Doctrine is in many ways reducing Japan’s autonomy in international affairs, and this will only be compounded as its revisionism leaves it more isolated in East Asia with a limited range of other feasible regional partners even when taking into account the burgeoning relationship with Australia. Japan will thus only become more susceptible to US pressure, so breeding concerns over alliance dilemmas of abandonment and entrapment, and potential resentment against the US rather than correcting that tendency.

The second problem wrapped up within this third great contradiction, is that whilst the Abe Doctrine may actually be continuing to cede Japanese autonomy to the US and even if Japan might acquiesce in the vulnerabilities and to an extent the resentment that this relationship creates for the security benefits it generally provides, nevertheless this relationship is still likely to be fraught with other difficulties borne of ideological incompatibilities and tensions. Japan’s illiberalism under the Abe Doctrine and fascination with revisionism, as seen in dealings with past statements on colonial history, Yasukuni, and revisiting Occupation reforms, has the potential to place Japan and the US at genuine loggerheads. This type of dynamic has already been witnessed over the US dissatisfaction with Abe’s questioning of the Kōno Statement on the ‘comfort women’ issue and the necessity felt by the US to push Japan back into line on the issue. The consequence of the Abe Doctrine’s seeking autonomy and status through the bilateral alliance—in fact a process of a failed logic leading to enhanced dependence on the US, coupled with enhanced ideological incompatibilities between the US and Japan—is to lock Japan more into the US alliance, and again thus more into the post-war system, and to again generate probable resentment at Japan’s essential subjugation to the US.

Resentful Realism redux?

In conclusion, therefore, the Abe Doctrine, although a bold attempt by the prime minister to break out of a pattern of a perceived decline in Japan’s international presence and generate a new path for grand strategy, has a strong probability of ultimate failure due to problems in execution and conception. The policy is clearly wrongheaded in attempting to tackle Japan’s international security problems by predicating its approach on an ideological revisionism that contains the potential to undercut cooperation with East Asia and the US. Instead, a truly liberal approach that conversely emphasizes more genuinely Japan’s successes of the post-war period and is borne from the reforms of the Occupation, a desire to remove history from the agenda of ties with East Asia and the US, and conceives of a more autonomous security policy less fettered to that of the US, might actually function as a more effective alternative to Abe’s brand of foreign policy

Until Japan corrects the radical revisionism of the Abe Doctrine, the likely outcome for Japan’s foreign and security policy is not a strong and cooperative Japan but one that may be characterized by ‘Resentful Realism’.[vi] In contrast to ‘Reluctant Realism’ that sees a comfortable alliance with the US, careful calibration of ties with East Asia and China, and contribution to a stable balance of power, ‘Resentful Realism’ might see a Japan driven by fear of China, lack of trust in the US, and a continuing desire for the reassertion of national pride and autonomy.[vii] The fact that Japan will be unable to achieve confidence and security given the structures and doctrine promoted by Abe will only aggravate tensions and mean that Japan will be a more unpredictable ally and player in general in the East Asia region, so posing risks for regional ties and security, and Japanese security—the very opposite of what an ‘Abe Doctrine’ originally promised to deliver for Japan’s grand strategy.

Christopher W. Hughes is Professor of International Politics and Japanese Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He is also Chair of the Department of Politics and International Studies, Chair of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Co-Editor of The Pacific Review.

August 6, 2015, is the 70^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, a civilian city that had minimal military value, despite the claims of President Truman when he announced the event to the American people.

The whole truth of what the Nuremburg tribunal would later help define as an international war crime and a crime against humanity has been heavily censored and mythologized ever since war-weary Americans in 1945 accepted the propaganda that the bombings were necessary to shorten the war and prevent the loss of a million US soldiers during the allegedly planned November 1945 invasion.

Of course, the reason that the United States wasn’t sanctioned like Germany was for the Jewish holocaust was that America was the victor and the occupier and thus it was in charge of making and enforcing the rules in the New World Order.

The United States military ambushed the equally defenseless Nagasaki City three days later with the second atomic bomb to ever be used against a civilian population (that no longer had any military value to Japan). “Fat Man”, the plutonium bomb named after Winston Churchill, was detonated before the Japanese leadership fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima.

Lies my History Teachers Told Me

My high school history teachers all seemed to be ex-jocks who weren’t athletically talented enough to make it to the majors. The main chance for them to continue playing games for pay was to join the teaching profession and coach high school athletics. American history was of secondary importance in many small town high schools but it hardly made the list of interests for coaches, who reluctantly accepted the job; and so my classmates and I “learned” our lessons from some very uninspired, very bored and/or very uninformed teachers who would rather have been on the playing field.

In my coach’s defense, the history books that they had to teach from had been highly censored in order to promote patriotism; and so we “learned” that most everything that the “noble” British colonizers and “honorable” US empire builders ever did in the history of warfare was self-sacrificing, democracy-promoting and Christianizing – and that everything their freedom-seeking, revolutionary colonial victims did was barbaric, atheistic and evil. Anybody who resisted colonial oppressors was treated as a terrorist.

It was from these history books that we learned about the “glorious” end of the war against Japan via nuclear incineration. Everybody in my high school, including myself, swallowed the post-war propaganda hook, line and sinker.

50,000 American soldiers deserted or went AWOL during WWII

Of course, I now realize that my classmates and I, just like most other Americans (including the volunteer or conscripted members of the military), have been naïve victims of “lies our history teachers taught us”. In their defense, those teachers had been misled in their own schooling by equally mis-informed teachers who got their information from a variety of dis-informers who wrote the books: and those authors were the war- and empire-justifying militarists and assorted uber-patriotic pseudo-historians who had been duped into believing the myth of American exceptionalism.

Not included in that group of true believers were the 50,000 WWII American soldier-members of the “Greatest Generation” who, in many cases, logically and understandably deserted or went AWOL during their war service, a reality that has been conveniently censored out of our consciousness.

The First Casualty of War is Truth

One of General Douglas MacArthur’s first acts after taking over as Viceroy of Japan was to confiscate or otherwise destroy all the photographic evidence documenting the horrors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He imposed total censorship over journalists who wanted to report to the world about what had really happened at Ground Zero, again proving the old adage that “the first casualty of war is truth”. Embedding journalists in the US military so that only America-friendly reportage happened wasn’t the original idea of General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf in Gulf War I.

Back in 1995, the Smithsonian Institution was preparing to correct some of the 50-year-old pseudo-patriotic myths about the Pacific War by staging an honest, historically-accurate display dealing with the atomic bombings from the Japanese civilian perspective.

Swift, vehement and well-orchestrated condemnations directed at the Smithsonian historian’s plans to tell unwelcome truths about war came from right-wing pro-war veterans organizations,  the GOP-dominated Congress at the time, and other militarist groups (such as Newt Gingrich’s paymaster Lockheed Martin, one of many war-profiteering merchants-of-death multinationals whose profits and products depend on Congressional and Pentagon largesse). Gingrich actually threatened to stop federal funding of the Smithsonian, thus forcing it to censor-out all of the contextually important parts of the real story. And so the pseudo-patriotic myths about Hiroshima and Nagasaki continue to be preserved to this very day.

Historical Illiteracy in America is Endemic

We historically-illiterate Americans are blocked, again and again, from learning historical truths about the American Empire – and the control that the military and multinational corporations have over it. Anything that might shake voter confidence in – or incite grassroots revolution against – the unelected ruling elites, the Pentagon or the conscienceless transnational corporations (that control our two major party politicians, the mainstream media and the “invisible hand of the market”) is verboten.

The Smithsonian historians did have a gun to their heads, of course, but in the melee, we voters failed to learn an important historical point, and that is this: the war in the Pacific could have ended in the spring of 1945 without the need for the August atomic bombings, and therefore there might have been no Okinawa bloodbath that senselessly doomed thousands of American Marines.

And there would have been no need for an American land invasion of Japan in November. Indeed, in the 1980s, released top secret records revealed that the contingency plans for a large-scale US invasion (planned for no sooner than November 1, 1945) would have been unnecessary.

To the victors go the spoils, and the American victors were the ones running the war crimes tribunals and thus also determined the content of my history text books.

America’s Leaders Knew that Japan was Searching for ways to Honorably Surrender Months before Hiroshima

American intelligence agencies, with the full knowledge of President Roosevelt’s and President Truman’s administrations, were fully aware of Japan’s search for ways to honorably surrender months before Truman gave the fateful order to incinerate Hiroshima.

Japan was working on peace negotiations through its ambassador in Moscow as early as April of 1945, with surrender feelers from Japan occurring as far back as 1944. Truman knew of these developments because the US had broken the Japanese code even before Pearl Harbor, and all of Japan’s military and diplomatic messages were being intercepted. On July 13, 1945, Foreign Minister Togo wrote: “Unconditional surrender (giving up all sovereignty, including the deposing of Emperor Hirohito) is the only obstacle to peace.”

Truman’s advisors knew about these efforts, and the war could have ended through diplomacy by simply conceding a post-war figurehead position for the emperor (who was regarded as a deity in Japan). That reasonable concession was – seemingly illogically – refused by the US in their demands for unconditional surrender, which was first demanded at the 1943 Casablanca Conference between Roosevelt and Churchill and then reiterated at the Potsdam Conference between Truman, Churchill and Stalin. Still, the Japanese continued searching for an honorable peace through negotiations.

Even Secretary of War Henry Stimson said: “the true question was not whether surrender could have been achieved without the use of the bomb but whether a different diplomatic and military course would have led to an earlier surrender. A large segment of the Japanese cabinet was ready in the spring of 1945 to accept substantially the same terms as those finally agreed on.” In other words, Stimson knew that the US could have ended the war before Hiroshima.

The Unreasonable Demand for Japan’s Unconditional Surrender Prolonged the War

After Japan officially surrendered on August 15, 1945, MacArthur allowed the emperor to remain in place as spiritual head of Japan, the very condition that forced the Japanese leadership to refuse to accept the earlier, humiliating, “unconditional surrender” terms.

So the two essential questions that need answering in order to comprehend what was going on behind the scenes are these:  1) Why did the US refuse to accept Japan’s only demand concerning its surrender (the retention of the emperor) and 2) why were the atomic bombs used when victory in the Pacific was assured?

The Factors Leading up to the Decision to use the Most Barbaric Weapons of Mass Destruction in the History of Warfare

There are a number of factors that contributed to the Truman administration’s fateful decision to use the atomic bombs.

1) Investment. The US had made a huge investment in time, mind and money (a massive 2 billion in 1940 dollars) to produce three bombs, and there was no inclination – and no guts – to stop the momentum.

2) Revenge. The US military and political leadership – as did many ordinary Americans – had a tremendous appetite for revenge because of the Pearl Harbor “surprise” attack. Mercy wasn’t in the mindset of the US military, the war-weary populace or even of average American Christians and their churches. The missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were accepted as necessary, with no questions asked, by most of those folks who only knew the sanitized, national security state version of events. Most Americans wanted to believe the cunningly-orchestrated propaganda.

3) A “use it or lose it” mentality and scientific curiosity. The fissionable material in Hiroshima’s bomb was uranium. The Trinity test bomb (exploded on July 16, 1945) and the Nagasaki bomb were plutonium bombs. Scientific curiosity was a significant factor that pushed the project to its deadly completion. The Manhattan Project leaders were curious. “What would happen if a city was leveled by a single uranium bomb?” “What would happen if plutonium was used?” Now that the war against Nazi Germany (the original intended target) was over, the most conscientious scientists felt that the bombs should not be used against civilian targets.

4) “Orders are orders”. Actually, the military decision to drop both bombs had been made well in advance of August 1945. Accepting the surrender of Japan prior to their use was not an option if the experiment was to go ahead. It should be obvious to anybody that the three-day interval between the two bombs was unconscionably short if the purpose of the first bomb was to force immediate surrender. Japan’s communications and transportation capabilities were in shambles, and no one, neither the US military nor the Japanese high command, fully understood what had happened at Hiroshima. (It is a fascinating fact that the Manhattan Project had been so top secret that even MacArthur, commanding general of the entire Pacific theatre, had been kept out of the loop – until July 1)

5) The Russians. Stalin had proclaimed his intent to enter the war with Japan 90 days after V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945), which would have been two days after Hiroshima was bombed. Indeed, Russia did declare war on Japan on August 8 and was advancing eastward across Manchuria when Nagasaki City, the center of Japanese Christianity, was incinerated.

Certainly Russia was still feeling the sting of humiliating defeat and the loss of territory from the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1905 when they were beaten by upstart Japan. Elephants and ego-bloated nation-states have long memories, especially when they lose an argument, lose a fight or are embarrassed in public. Witness the 150 year old enduring promise from segregationist devotees of the Confederate flag like Dylan Roof, the KKK, and the White Citizen’s Councils that “The South Will Rise Again”; or consider the rabid right-wing, sociopathic NeoNazis all around the world in their devotion to Adolf Hitler and their symbol of fascism, the Swastika.

The US didn’t want Japan surrendering to Russia and thus sharing the spoils of war. Russia was soon to be one of only two world superpowers – and therefore a future enemy of the United States. So the first “messages” of the Cold War were sent by the US to the USSR on August 6 and 9, 1945: “Stalin, stay away from Japan’s carcass. We own it. And besides, we have the bomb.”

Russia didn’t receive the spoils of the Pacific War that they had anticipated, and the two superpowers were instantly mired in the multi-trillion dollar stalemated nuclear arms race and the multitude of proxy wars that regularly risked the total extinction of humanity. What also happened along the way was the moral bankruptcy of both of the paranoid super-power nations that insisted on fighting the stupid cold war, a war that was fueled by war-profiteering corporations and borrow and spend economics.

The Reality for the Innocent Casualties of War

An estimated 80,000 innocent civilians, plus 20,000 weaponless young Japanese conscripts died instantly in the Hiroshima bombing raid. Hundreds of thousands more suffered slow deaths and disabilities from agonizing burns, radiation sickness, leukemia, anemia, thrombocytopenia and untreatable infections. The Japanese survivors and their progeny suffered a fate similar to the survivors and progeny of America’s “Atomic Soldiers”. (Atomic Soldiers were those soldiers who were exposed, in the line of duty, to the hundreds of nuclear tests in the 50s and 60s or to the depleted uranium that the US military used in the two Gulf Wars.) Each of those groups were afflicted with horrible radiation-induced illnesses, congenital anomalies, genetic mutations, immune deficiencies, cancers and premature deaths, still going on to this very minute.

(Another shameful reality that has been covered up is the fact that 12 American Navy pilots, their existence well known to the US command prior to the bombing, were instantly incinerated in the Hiroshima jail on that fateful day.)

Military Myths That our Teachers Taught us

So the official War Department-approved, highly censored version of the end of the war in the Pacific was added to an ever-lengthening list of myths that we Americans have been continuously fed by our corporate-controlled military, political and media opinion leaders. In the process, the gruesomeness and cruelty of war has been cunningly propagandized so that we consumers of information see only the glorification of American militarism.

Among the other censored out realities include what really happened in the US military’s participation in the destabilize-and-conquer campaigns and coups d’etat in Ukraine, Honduras, Venezuela, Libya, and bloody invasions and/or occupations of Korea, Iran, Viet Nam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Granada, Panama, the Philippines, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Haiti, Colombia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc, etc. This list doesn’t necessarily cover the uncountable secret Pentagon/CIA covert operations and assassination plots in the rest of the world, where some 150 “sovereign” nations have been coerced into allowing the building of American military bases (permission lavishly paid for by bribes or threats of economic or military sanctions).

But somehow most of us still hang on to our shaky “my country right or wrong” patriotism, desperately wanting to believe the cunningly-orchestrated myths that say that the war-profiteering corporate elite (and the politicians, military leaders and media talking heads who are in their employ) only work for peace, justice, equality, liberty and “making the world safe”, not for democracy, but for predatory capitalism.

While it is true that the US military has faced down the occasional despot, with necessary sacrifice from dead and incurably-wounded (in body, mind and spirit) American soldiers and veterans, more often than not the rationalizations for going to war are the same as those of the “godless communists”, the anti-American “insurgents” and “freedom fighters” who just want us Yankees to go home where we belong.

August 6 and 9, 1945 are just two more examples of the brain-washing that goes on in all “total war” political agendas, which are consistently accompanied by the inevitable human death and destruction that is euphemistically labeled “splendid slaughter”, “collateral damage” or “friendly fire”.

What Happened to the Humanitarian, Peace-loving America That We Used to Know and Love?

It might already be too late to rescue and resuscitate the (mythical?) moribund humanitarian, peacemaking America that we used to know and love. It might be too late to effectively confront the corporate hijacking of liberal democracy in America. It might be too late to successfully bring down the arrogant and greedy ruling elites who are selfishly dragging our planet down the road to destruction. The rolling coups d’etat orchestrated by the  profiteers of what I call Friendly American Fascism may have already accomplished its goals.

But I suppose there is always hope. Rather than being silent about the destabilizing conflicts that the war-mongers are provoking all over the planet (with the very willing assistance of Wall Street, the Pentagon, the weapons industries and their lapdogs in Congress), people of conscience need to start learning the whole truth of history, despite the psychological discomfort that they may feel (cognitive dissonance) when the lies that they had been led to believe can’t be believed any more. We need to start owning up to America’s uncountable war crimes that have been orchestrated in our names.

And so the whistle-blowers among us need to rise up in dissent, go to the streets in protest and courageously refuse to cooperate with those sociopathic personalities that have gradually transformed America into a criminal rogue state. Like Nazi Germany or Fascist Japan, rogue nations throughout history have been eventually targeted for downfall by its billions of angry, fed-up, suffering victims who live both inside and outside its borders. That fate awaits America unless its leaders confesses their sins, honestly ask for forgiveness and truly promise to join the peace-loving human race.

Doing what is right for the whole of humanity for a change, rather than just doing what is profitable or advantageous for our over-privileged, over-consumptive, toxic and unsustainable American way of life, would be real honor, real patriotism and an essential start toward real peace.

The BBC’s claim of 90% success for Bt brinjal in Bangladesh has been challenged by a journalist. Claire Robinson reports

BBC Panorama’s programme, “GM Food: Cultivating Fear”, has come under attack from a Bangladeshi journalist for falsely portraying Bt brinjal (eggplant/aubergine) cultivation in Bangladesh as a success. The programme, which aired on 8 June, featured pro-GMO campaigner Mark Lynas visiting a Bt insecticidal brinjal field and enthusing about the performance of the crop, which was claimed to reduce insecticide sprays and help farmers avoid the effects of pesticide poisoning.

Faisal Rahman, staff correspondent for the United News of Bangladesh (UNB), contacted GMWatch after watching the programme, which he felt “denied the reality of losses the farmers of Bangladesh incurred by cultivating Bt brinjal”. Out of concern for the farmers, Rahman wanted to set the record straight. His evidence, together with subsequent investigations by GMWatch, casts serious doubt on the credibility of the BBC Panorama programme.

Faisal Rahman is the author of a report for UNB on the second year of Bt brinjal cultivation in Bangladesh, titled “Bt brinjal turns out to be ‘upset case’ for famers”. The report, published in March this year, was based on field visits and telephone interviews with farmers growing Bt brinjal. The report concluded, “The cultivation of genetically engineered Bt brinjal in the country’s several districts has cost the farmers their fortunes again this year as the plants have either died out prematurely or fruited very insignificantly compared to the locally available varieties.”

Faisal Rahman’s findings

As part of his research for the story, Faisal Rahman interviewed 40 farmers out of a total of 108 growing Bt brinjal this year. He obtained the list of farmers growing Bt brinjal from the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), which is supervising the Bt brinjal project, and had no prior information about the farmers’ experiences with the crop. He visited 12 fields himself and talked to the other farmers over the phone. According to his research, 32 out of the 40 farmers found serious problems with Bt brinjal. For example, farmers Mohammad Haminur Rahman and Mohammad Mobarak Hossain of Sherpur Sadar upazila (sub-district) said they harvested 8-10 maunds (1 maund is around 80 lb) of Bt brinjal three months after the planting, less than half the amount that could be harvested from a local brinjal field of the same size in the same time scale. Ramzan Ali of Jhikargachha upazila in Jessore said most of the Bt brinjal plants in his field had died.

Faisal Rahman says he did not publish the 32 out of 40 figure because he suspected that the real number of farmers facing loss could have been far higher.

Some of the farmers told Rahman that BARI had strictly forbidden them to talk to journalists. In one case he felt that this influenced the story he was told. “I called a farmer in Jessore. He was in town but one of his brothers was looking after the Bt brinjal field. He said some plants in their field had died but his brother could tell me more. He gave me his brother’s number and I called him instantly. His brother said the Bt brinjal was performing well.”

Call from BBC Panorama

On 16 April, a few weeks after his UNB report was published, Faisal Rahman was called by the BBC Panorama producer and researcher Joseph McAuley. McAuley introduced himself as a BBC journalist interested in investigating the debate on Bt brinjal’s performance at farmer level.

According to Rahman, McAuley asked for his help in visiting some of the Bt brinjal fields mentioned in the UNB report.

Rahman says, “I welcomed him, but with caution.” He hoped that a BBC investigation would cross-check and verify the claims he had made in his own reports, lending them the added credibility of a BBC investigation. Rahman was confident that a truly independent investigation would do just that.

However, Rahman’s note of caution arose from his concerns that McAuley’s independence might already be in jeopardy. “He said he visited some fields in two districts, Tangail and Kushtia. I asked him whether he visited the fields independently or whether there was someone else with him. He said he visited the fields with BARI officials. I asked him whether he thought the presence of BARI officials could produce an independent outlook on the reality.

“I asked this because I had Mark Lynas at the back of my mind, as he posed as independent journalist in 2013. He later produced an absurd piece on Youtube where he was shown interviewing farmers in presence of BARI officials.”

Rahman says the presence of officials during the interviews and filming could influence how the farmers behave: “The colonial legacy here means that officials enjoy a lot of fearful respect from the farmers.”

According to Rahman, McAuley admitted that he had no other contacts to reach the Bt brinjal fields and that was the reason he had visited them with BARI officials. Rahman agreed to send him the phone contacts of some Bt brinjal farmers he had mentioned in his UNB report. He also advised McAuley to visit the farmers on his own, without officials being present.

After Rahman had put the phone down, a thought hit him. “I sent McAuley a text message saying, ‘Can I ask you whether or not your current work on Bt brinjal cultivation is an initiative solely taken by BBC? Is there any other party involved?’

Rahman says, “I felt McAuley’s pride as a BBC journalist was affected by this question as he called me at once and asked me, ‘Do you want me to answer that?’

“I said yes, I wanted to know that. I explained that I was cautious even about helping someone from the BBC, because I had read a shoddy report on Bt brinjal in The Guardian last year. Besides raising false claims, The Guardian report quoted Lynas at length and made allegations against the professionalism of Bangladeshi journalists over their visits to Bt brinjal fields in the first season of cultivation, without giving them a chance to reply.”

Rahman asked McAuley whether he knew Lynas: “He remained silent. After some discussion, he said he wanted my help ‘as a journalist to a journalist’. I assured him again I would give him the phone numbers of Bt brinjal farmers.

“After some time, he called me again and said something that I could not understand, maybe because he was travelling. After some failed attempts, his assistant, a fluent Bangla speaker, called me and told me what McAuley wanted to say was that I should not mention or publish anything of the conversation between me and him anywhere. I said did not feel bound to abide by that request as farmers in Bangladesh are in great danger, particularly from people from outside the country. Pardon me if I sound a bit xenophobic.”

Rahman gave McAuley the addresses of 11 farmers in three districts – Narsingdi, Comilla, and Manikganj – who cultivated Bt brinjal this season, as well as the phone numbers of some of the farmers. In addition, Rahman gave him the phone numbers of two farmers who cultivated the Bt brinjal last season.

When Rahman watched the Panorama episode, he was surprised to find that did not feature any of these farmers. Instead it featured Hafizur Rahman, a farmer from Tangail Sadar upazila, enthusing about the success of Bt brinjal and saying he didn’t have to spray insecticides to kill the fruit and shoot borer pest (though he still had to spray for other pests).

Rahman says, “I felt deceived.” It was then that he decided to make public the details of his email and telephone conversations with McAuley “for the greater common good – to know whether McAuley visited the farmers or had any conversations over the phone, and what he found. And second, the way Panorama featured Lynas raised doubts in my mind about McAuley’s intentions.”

GMWatch challenges McAuley

GMWatch emailed McAuley and asked him whether he had contacted any of the farmers whose contact details Rahman had give him. We said we were concerned that the breadth of Bangladeshi farmers’ experiences with the crop were not accurately reflected by the programme and that the available testimony about the problems farmers had experienced may have been ignored.

McAuley replied:

“We spoke to a wide range of people to understand more about Bt brinjal; Mr Rahman and the farmers he suggested were a few of the many people we contacted.

“We did meet some of the farmers. They had complaints about the Bt brinjal crops, but those did not concern the effectiveness of the crops in resisting fruit and shoot borers. One farmer said his crops had been affected by bacterial wilt, something which we have been told has affected a small number of farms. Other farmers we met said that locals around their town had a long-standing preference for brinjal varieties with particular colours and textures, and this meant they were finding it harder to convince local wholesalers to give them a high price. One of those farmers also felt the recent hot weather had impacted on later yields of his crop, which had initially been strong.

“One farmer did not wish to speak to us, and two of the farmers Mr Rahman suggested were not growing Bt brinjal this season… The programme contained interviewees in the UK and Bangladesh who were opposed to Bt brinjal, and other contributors who were opposed to GMOs more generally. We are confident that we reflected facts and a range of opinions about Bt brinjal with due fairness and accuracy, and that we made the programme in accordance with the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines.”

McAuley clearly received complaints from the farmers about the Bt brinjal’s performance but these were not reflected in the BBC Panorama programme.

What’s more, McAuley’s response is suggestive of the blinkered mindset that has grown up in some parts of the media regarding GM crops. According to this view, as long as the deliberately inserted GM trait (in this case, a Bt toxin that kills the fruit and shoot borer pest) performs as intended, all other aspects of the crop’s performance and marketability can be ignored. In the strange parallel universe of GMO hype, a crop can fall victim to bacterial infections and fail in the marketplace but still be hailed as a success.

We showed McAuley’s response to Faisal Rahman, who replied:

“Bacterial wilt was endemic to Bt plants in most of the fields. Even according to BARI, bacterial wilt was the reason for the death of 15-100% of the plants in some of the fields I visited. So the problem of bacterial wilt with Bt brinjals should not be taken lightly.

“In most of the fields, Bt brinjal appeared to be more vulnerable to whitefly, another common pest of brinjal. Almost all the farmers used pesticide for whitefly. However, whitefly has not yet appeared as a major threat to non-GM brinjal in Bangladesh.

“Whatever the reason – in almost all cases the official reason is bacterial wilt – Bt brinjal plants started dying from as early as one month to as late as 4 months after planting. In many fields, some plants were alive but the fruits they bore were rotten.

“Even though some farmers – of those I talked to over the phone, it was no more than one-third – claim to have an average or satisfactory yield, most said that the Bt brinjal fruits were not selling well because of the colour and size, and in some cases the fruit being harder than the local varieties.

“The people of Bangladesh are great connoisseurs of brinjals and it sounds a little unnatural to me when someone says a particular brinjal is not sold in a particular area because it is unconventional. People like to pinch the fruit to feel its flesh and they are attracted by the brightness of the brinjal before buying it. I think buyers might have been put off the Bt brinjal fruits by the first touch or sight – the unnaturally hard fruits, the extra weight compared to size, the faded colour compared with the local non-GM varieties. Some of the Bt brinjal farmers agreed with me.”

BARI defends GM technology

In judging Bt brinjal solely on the performance of the Bt trait and ignoring other problems with the crop, McAuley seems to have taken his lead directly from BARI. After Rahman’s UNB article on the failure of Bt brinjal was published, Dr Rafiqul Islam Mondal, the director general of BARI, sent him a rejoinder in which he attacked the article as “totally partial and worthless”. Mondal said BARI had developed the Bt brinjal “only as a resistant [sic.] to shoot and fruit borer” and “the technology was successfully demonstrated among 108 farmers plot. Bt technology is not responsible at all for dieing [sic.] of plants due to bacterial wilt and other insects and pests.”

Dr Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist trained in molecular biology and director of sustainable agriculture at the Center for Food Safety, commented on Mondal’s statement:

“Dr Mondal’s assertion that susceptibility to bacterial wilt has nothing to do with the Bt gene or its expression is not supported by any cited research or science. It may or may not be true, but can only be determined by appropriate research or data. His statement does not recognize that genes generally affect the function (expression) of other genes, and most often in unpredictable and unintended ways. When a gene affects the function of other genes, geneticists call this pleiotropy. There are many examples for genes that have been engineered into plants. That does not mean that possible pleiotropic effects of the Bt gene or its expression will necessarily affect the plant’s defence against disease. But the possibility can’t be ruled out without doing the experiments.

“In fact several GM traits have been associated with possible negative pleiotropy with known plant disease defence genes, or in at least one case, increased susceptibility to a plant disease (none of these engineered genes were Bt genes, but they support the concept).[1]  A well-known incidence of unexpected pleiotropy involving conventional breeding occurred in 1970, when a trait for male sterility in corn, which facilitates the making of hybrids, unexpectedly also conferred susceptibility to a previously minor plant disease called Southern Corn Leaf Blight. The result was the loss of a substantial part of the US corn crop. So dismissal of the possibility of pleiotropy in the case of Bt brinjal and disease resistance without providing any data to support it is not scientifically sound.

“Alternatively, the brinjal variety that the Bt gene was inserted into may be more susceptible to bacterial wilt, and may have other problems too. Defenders of GM might say that this is not the fault of GM. But it may be related to the GM process. For example, it is often easier to transform some varieties of crops than others, and these varieties may be more susceptible to some diseases, or have other undesirable properties. It would take considerable time to transfer the Bt gene to the many Bt brinjal varieties grown by local farmers that may already have resistance to the wilt disease, as well as other desirable properties. And farmers may not want these genes placed into those varieties.

“Either way, connections with GM should not be dismissed offhand. Technologies always have a social context. It is as real as any gene. We need to understand how that context is a weakness or strength of GM, not dismiss it. The common refrain that society should consider only narrowly-based risk assessments ignores the reality of the inevitable social contexts of technologies.”

BARI rejoinder confirms the UNB report

In spite of Mondal’s indignant response to the UNB report and attempt to defend GM technology, the BARI rejoinder does not contradict and in fact confirms the main allegations raised by the UNB report against the performance of Bt brinjal.

For example, the UNB report said, “Harun Mirza, Dilip Kumar Das and Mohammad Ali of Burichong upazila in Comilla planted BARI Bt brinjal 1 (Bt-Uttara) and BARI Bt brinjal 4 (Bt-ISD 006) on about 18-20 decimal plots. All the three claimed that around 150-200 of the 500-700 saplings that were provided to them died earlier within one month’s of the planting. The fresh plants that replaced the dead plants also could not survive, while the most of the rest are also dying out, they added.”

The BARI rejoinder confirmed, “At Comilla, Bt brinjal plots of [Mohammad] Ali and Dilip Kumar was [sic.] affected and all the seedlings died due to heavy shower during November.”

BARI also provides more detailed figures for the failed Bt brinjal crops of some of the farmers quoted in the UNB report. For example, one farmer is quoted in the UNB report as saying, “Most of the saplings (of Bt brinjal) have died. The plants are prone to diseases.” BARI confirmed the experience of this farmer and gave a figure of 45% crop failure due to bacterial wilt.

On issues of fact, BARI’s rejoinder disagrees with the UNB report in one respect. BARI claimed, “No shoot and fruit borer is seen in the BARI Bt brinjal varieties”. In contrast, the UNB report claimed fruit and shoot borer infestation in at least one Bt brinjal field. Faisal Rahman says, “UNB has strong evidence in support of the claim.” Photographs of the affected farmer (Mohammad Ali, of Nimsar, Comilla) are shown below.

Missing data for 90% success claim

In the BBC Panorama programme, the narrator and frontman Tom Heap said, “After a false start last year, this season more than 90% of the GM trial plots have been successful.”

This remarkable claim is at odds with the finding of Faisal Rahman that 32 out of 40 farmers interviewed by the end of March this year complained of Bt brinjal crop failure. That’s 80% of the sample interviewed and 30% of the total of 108 farmers growing Bt brinjal. As Rahman points out, the real figure could be much higher, as he did not interview the remaining 68 farmers.

So where did Panorama’s 90% success claim come from? The source was briefly flashed up on the screen as “Cornell University”. Cornell and the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) are “partner” organisations of the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII), which is promoting the Bt brinjal project in Bangladesh and the rest of South Asia.

Cornell University is home to the controversial Cornell Alliance for Science, which is publicizing the Bangladesh Bt brinjal project. The Alliance was launched last year with a $5.6 million grant from the Gates Foundation to “depolarize the charged debate around agricultural biotechnology and genetically modified organisms (GMOs).” Its partners includethe GMO industry group ISAAA, which is funded by Monsanto, CropLife, and Bayer. Cornell gave Mark Lynas a Visiting Fellowship and a platform to voice his pro-GMO views. Lynas now promotes GMOs “to the exclusion of almost everything else”. Cornell paid his travel expenses to the Philippines to write a pro-GMO article.

GMWatch wrote to Cornell’s Alliance for Science, asking them to provide the study or documentation that was the source of the 90% claim. The Alliance’s Sarah Evanega replied but failed to provide any documentation. Instead she told us, “The original source was BARI – the national Institute leading the project”. We replied: “When we cite data at GMWatch, we ensure we have the study or documentation that is the source of the data. So I am sure you have the document on which this claim is based, even if it comes originally from BARI? Please can you send it to me?” Evanega replied, “Please get in touch with BARI. As I did not produce the [Panorama] piece, nor write it, I do not have the source. Best you get it straight from the source.”

GMWatch put the same question to Cornell’s International Programs of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences but thus far has not received a response (we will update this article if we do receive one).

GMWatch also put the question to BARI and to Joseph McAuley, the producer and researcher for the BBC Panorama programme. BARI did not initially respond. McAuley did respond, but avoided answering the question and failed to provide any data. He wrote:

“As I mentioned in my email of 28th June, if you have any further comments to make or concerns about the programme, the BBC has an official complaints process. The website is www.bbc.co.uk/complaints. That is the best way to ensure your concerns are dealt with properly and formally. I am happy, however, that the programme was accurate with the information we were given.”

After receiving no reply from BARI for 10 days, we wrote again. This time we received a reply from Dr Rafiqul Islam Mondal, the director general of BARI. He wrote:

“Performance of Bt brinjal during 2015 at 108 farmers fields of 17 districts are quite good and satisfactory. Farmers got a good yield and also a handsome profit by selling their product. Some slides in this regard are attached herewith for your kind information. We have a short video on the performance of Bt brinjal, but it could not be attached due to its large size. We are also planning to arrange a press conference on the performance of Bt brinjal in the last week of this month.”

This statement provided no evidence for the 90% success claim. The powerpoint presentation attached by Dr Mondal also provided no evidence, and mostly consisted of pictures of brinjals in the field.

One possible source for the 90% claim is the BARI rejoinder to UNB. This claimed that only 12 farmers out of 108 were affected by bacterial wilt and insect pests and that the remaining 96 (90%) had “success” with Bt brinjal. But this is just an assertion. No documentation was provided in support.

Doug Gurian-Sherman explained:

“Meaningful data would ideally include side-by-side comparisons of Bt and non-Bt brinjals, grown with the same inputs and managed appropriately by unbiased researchers. Additional comparisons with brinjals typically grown in the areas where the trials were conducted, again with the same inputs and management, would also be valuable. The trials in Bangladesh were apparently farmer trials, not experimental field trials. But that is no excuse for not having some reasonable comparative data.”

The unavoidable conclusion is that BBC Panorama claimed a 90% success rate for Bt brinjal with no sound evidence to back it up. It is especially ironic, then, that the programme allowed the former EU chief scientific advisor and biotech entrepreneur Anne Glover to claim, without challenge, that anti-GMO campaigners just “make things up”.

After Panorama left, farmer’s showcase Bt brinjal crop failed

On 20 June Faisal Rahman visited some Bt brinjal fields in Tangail with fellow journalist Delowar Jahan, staff correspondent of the daily newspaper Sokaler Khobor. BBC Panorama’s visit to Tangail had made them curious about the performance of Bt brinjal there. They called in on Hafizur Rahman, the farmer who was featured in the Panorama programme to show Bt brinjal was a success.

Tellingly, Hafizur Rahman said he had “stopped taking care of his Bt brinjal field about one and a half to two months ago” because the plants had been slowly dying out, from just three months after planting.

His brother Alhaj had also cultivated Bt brinjal on another plot nearby, and the condition of his crop was worse. The two journalists found a significant number of the plants dead in both the fields. Many plants were bearing fruits that were unnaturally hard and some of the fruits had rotted before being fully ripe.

In two other fields in the neighbouring sub-district of Elenga upazila, the condition of the crop was far worse. Abul Hossain, the farmer the journalists interviewed there, had to sell his Bt brinjals at an extremely low price – Tk 5 a kg (the normal price was Tk 15 and above). His uncle was the owner of another Bt brinjal plot and had the same experience. Both fields were mostly planted with the BARI variety Bt Begun 2 (Nayantara), which rotted prematurely. The other variety, BARI Bt Begun 3 (Kajla), bore excessively hard fruits and the colour was faded.

Hafizur Rahman told the journalists that the BBC team had visited his field along with others from BTV, the national Bangladeshi TV channel which is strictly controlled by the government, Channel i, a private TV channel that supported Bt brinjal from the beginning, and BARI.

The fact that BBC Panorama claimed this new GM crop as a success without following the farmers for at least one complete growing season is an extraordinary lapse of journalistic standards. In effect, they treated an experimental trial as a proven agricultural success – without even waiting to see how the experiment ended.

BBC Panorama following Lynas’s lead?

BBC Panorama was not the first to feature the supposed success story of the farmer Hafizur Rahman. Mark Lynas got there first. In April 2015, Lynas had published an article in the New York Times about Bt brinjal in Bangladesh self-interestedly titled, “How I got converted to GMO food”, which also featured Hafizur Rahman. Lynas claimed that the Bt brinjal had “nearly doubled” productivity and that Hafizur Rahman had been able to sell the crop labelled “insecticide free”. Lynas concluded, “Now, with increased profits, he looked forward to being able to lift his family further out of poverty.”

But Farida Akhter, from a Bangladeshi NGO that has been monitoring the Bt brinjal field trials, tracked down Hafizur Rahman and said almost every element of the Lynas narrative was misleading or false.

According to Akhter, far from being a poor farmer that the GM crop is helping to lift out of poverty, as Lynas claimed, Hafizur Rahman is actually “a Polytechnic graduate” and “well off commercial vegetable farmer”. And the story about the GM crop enabling him to dispense with agrochemicals was also, it seems, far from the truth – multiple chemicals, including pesticides, were used on the crop. The farmer also complained that the Bt brinjal had a “rough surface and gets soft very quickly”, unlike the traditional variety which is “shiny and remains fresh for a longer time”.

None of this appeared in Lynas’s account, though the BBC did at least admit that some pesticides were used on the crop.

Did McAuley of BBC Panorama merely follow Lynas and the GMO promoters at BARI and Cornell in choosing to put Hafizur Rahman at the centre of its report? It seems likely. This approach is an odd choice for a journalist who was offered the opportunity to take an independent approach by following up the stories of farmers whose experience differed so radically from Lynas’s version. It only makes sense if the aim of the programme from the start was to make a GMO promotional.

Who’s behind Bt brinjal in Bangladesh?

Faisal Rahman finds it hard to believe that Lynas’s version of what happened with Bt brinjal in Bangladesh is preferred by much of the world’s media over the version presented in reports from independent journalists based in Bangladesh. He said, “I welcome any other independent journalist or researcher to investigate the debate, but the way the Western world is bending its head to listen to what Lynas has to say about Bt brinjal is surprising to me.”

Perhaps the only way to explain it is by looking at the power structures that are promoting Bt brinjal in Bangladesh.

This issue was skated over in the BBC Panorama programme. The presenter Tom Heap paid it lip service by asking Matia Chowdhury, Bangladesh’s agriculture minister: “Are you truly free and independent of the big agritech companies or are you in the pocket of Monsanto?” She replied that the Bt brinjal gene was given by Cornell University, “not an agritech company”. Monsanto told the programme it does not receive any benefit from the Bt brinjal project in Bangladesh.

Heap took these claims at face value, allowing the impression to stand that the Bt brinjal project is a humanitarian public initiative.

But the reality, as is generally the case with “humanitarian” GMO projects, is more complicated.

Bt brinjal is promoted in Bangladesh and the rest of South Asia by the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project II (ABSPII), which lists the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI) and Cornell University among its partners.

As we’ve seen above (“Missing data for 90% success claim”), Cornell has given Mark Lynas a position from which to promote GMOs.

As for ABSPII, it is funded by USAID and counts Monsanto as a partner. USAID has long been known as a tool that the US government uses to actively promote GM seeds and agriculture. A report by GRAIN stated:

“USAID programmes are part of a multi-pronged strategy to advance US interests with GM crops. Increasingly the US government uses multilateral and bilateral free trade agreements and high-level diplomatic pressure to push countries towards the adoption of many key bits of corporate-friendly regulations related to GM crops. And this external pressure has been effectively complimented by lobbying and funding from national and regional USAID biotech networks.”

Finally, in presenting the Bt brinjal project as a public initiative, agriculture minister Matia Chowdhury failed to mention that the private seed company East West Seed Ltd, now renamed Lal Teer, is a partner in the project. According to an agreement between the company and Monsanto subsidiary Mahyco, Lal Teer (East West Seed) is a sub-licensee for some other Bt brinjal varieties. Environmental campaigners in Bangladesh have accused USAID’s ABSPII project of encouraging Mahyco to provide open-pollinated Bt brinjal seed varieties to BARI free from royalty and the hybrid varieties to Lal Teer against payment of royalties to pursue its “ultimate goal” of the commercialisation of patented GM crops in Bangladesh. Lal Teer chairman Abdul Awal Mintoo admitted that Monsanto and Mahyco owned the GM technology in the Lal Teer Bt brinjals.

Ecology and biodiversity conservation researcher Pavel Partha commented that Bt brinjal cultivation would rob the farmers of their right to produce their own seeds.

Integrated Pest Management a more effective approach than GM

Bangladesh is the home of highly successful Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programmes to manage pests, including the fruit and shoot borer, in brinjal crops. A report by Dr David Andow found that brinjal IPM in India and Bangladesh has been about three times more profitable than Bt brinjal is projected to be, and has directly improved the profitability of small-scale resource-poor farmers.

The estimated economic surplus for brinjal IPM is significantly larger than for hybrid Bt brinjal. Farmers are expected to receive 63% of the surplus from brinjal IPM but only 10% of the surplus from hybrid Bt brinjal. The report concluded, “Increased public investment, greater promotion, and strengthened public policy for brinjal IPM relative to those for hybrid Bt brinjal will result in greater social benefits in India and a major increase in profitability for small-scale resource-poor farmers.”

Conclusion: How BBC Panorama misled the public

BBC Panorama’s claim of a 90% success rate for Bt brinjal this year in Bangladesh is contradicted by the findings of the independent journalist Faisal Rahman, who conducted extensive interviews with farmers and found that 80% of the farmers he interviewed, 30% of the total growing Bt brinjal this year, had problems with the crop.

Joseph McAuley, the producer and researcher of the BBC Panorama programme, failed to provide evidence for the 90% claim when asked and said the source was Cornell University. Cornell also failed to provide evidence and referred GMWatch to the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), which is supervising the Bt brinjal project. Dr Rafiqul Islam Mondal, the director general of BARI, also failed to provide evidence. We conclude that there is no evidence for the 90% success rate claimed by BBC Panorama.

The main problem affecting the GM Bt brinjal was bacterial wilt. This was admitted by McAuley and MondaI. However, both McAuley and Mondal implied that because the intended trait of the GM Bt brinjal – resistance to the fruit and shoot borer – appeared to work, this justified presenting the crop as a success. Dr Mondol said, “Bt technology is not responsible” for bacterial wilt. But Dr Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist and director of sustainable agriculture at the Center for Food Safety, said there is no evidence to support this claim. The wilt problem could be related to the Bt trait, but no one has done the experiments to find out.

BARI issued a “rejoinder”, which aimed to rebut Faisal Rahman’s report for United News of Bangladesh (UNB) detailing the widespread failure of Bt brinjal in its second year of cultivation. However, the BARI rejoinder confirmed the UNB report in the major points of fact. It differed in one point: BARI claimed 100% success for the Bt brinjal crop in resisting the fruit and shoot borer pest, while the UNB report claimed fruit and shoot borer infestation in at least one Bt brinjal field, a claim for which Faisal Rahman says there is strong evidence.

Even the showcase Bt brinjal crop featured by BBC Panorama failed soon after the cameras left, according to Faisal Rahman and fellow journalist Delowar Jahan, who conducted a followup interview with the farmer concerned.

BBC Panorama also failed to investigate the many commercial links with the Bt brinjal project and the implications for Bangladeshi farmers of losing control over their own brinjal seeds.

Finally, BBC Panorama ignored research showing that existing Integrated Pest Management (IPM) non-GM brinjal programmes are three times more profitable than Bt brinjal is projected to be and have directly improved the profitability of small-scale resource-poor farmers.

In conclusion, for its programme, “GM Food: Cultivating Fear”, BBC Panorama appears to have abandoned facts for propaganda.

Notes

1. See Doug Gurian Sherman’s reports for the Union of Concerned Scientists, Failure to Yield, High and Dry, and No Sure Fix (available from http://www.ucsusa.org/); also Zeller SL et al (2010) Transgene × Environment Interactions in Genetically Modified Wheat. PLoS ONE 5(7): e11405. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0011405

For 14 years the US has waged a global war on terror with a stated goal of denying al Qaeda a safe haven anywhere in the world. Now several of our regional partners in the Middle East, hell-bent on removing Assad from power, are backing a coalition of Syrian rebel groups that include the local al Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al Nusra as a prominent member – and at least one high ranking former US military official thinks working with al Qaeda is justified. The rebel coalition, backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, is calling itself the Army of Conquest, and has recently made gains against Assad consolidating territory in Idlib province.

Reporting on al Nusra’s recent victories in Idlib, Charles Lister at Brookings reported:

Several commanders involved in leading recent Idlib operations confirmed to this author that the U.S.-led operations room in southern Turkey, which coordinates the provision of lethal and non-lethal support to vetted opposition groups, was instrumental in facilitating their involvement in the operation from early April onwards. That operations room — along with another in Jordan, which covers Syria’s south — also appears to have dramatically increased its level of assistance and provision of intelligence to vetted groups in recent weeks.

Whereas these multinational operations rooms have previously demanded that recipients of military assistance cease direct coordination with groups like Jabhat al-Nusra, recent dynamics in Idlib appear to have demonstrated something different. Not only were weapons shipments increased to the so-called “vetted groups,” but the operations room specifically encouraged a closer cooperation with Islamists commanding frontline operations. [emphasis added]

As news of the coalition victories spread, the Wall Street Journal published a piece entitled “To US Allies, Al Qaeda Affiliate in Syria Becomes the Lesser Evil” that reinforces the possibility some U.S. military leaders also see such collaboration with al Qaeda as a legitimate option. The author of the article spoke with retired US Admiral James Stavridis, a recent Supreme Allied Commander of NATO who oversaw the 2011 Libya campaign. Discussing the new role of key US allies backing a coalition that includes the al Qaeda affiliate, the Admiral compared the relationship to partnering with Stalin in World War II:

It is unlikely we are going to operate side by side with cadres from Nusra, but if our allies are working with them, that is acceptable. If you look back to World War II, we had coalitions with people that we had extreme disagreements with, including Stalin’s Russia,” said Mr. Stavridis, now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in Boston.

I don’t think that is a showstopper for the U.S. in terms of engaging with that coalition. [emphasis added]

It is important to note that the head of al Nusra though indicating an unwillingness to attack the West for now, still pledges allegiance to Ayman Zawahiri, the long time deputy to Osama Bin Laden, and currently the official head of Al Qaeda. In addition, human rights groups have pointed to al Nusra’s “systematic and widespread violations including targeting civilians, kidnappings, and executions.” Al Nusra has engaged in lethal car bombing attacks targeting civilians and they have actively recruited child soldiers. Like ISIS, al Nusra has treated women and girls in areas they control particularly harshly. In addition to strict and discriminatory rules on dress, employment and freedom of movement there have been abductions of women and even executions of at least one woman accused of adultery.

Despite all this, retired Adm. Stavridis isn’t the only commentator who finds our allies’ involvement with al Nusra ‘acceptable’. The prominent foreign policy journal, Foreign Affairs published a piece this year entitled “Accepting Al Qaeda: The Enemy of the United States’ Enemy.” The author, Barak Mendelsohn, makes the case that al Qaeda staying “afloat” is better for US interests, citing threats to US allies from Iran and the Islamic State. A couple weeks later Lina Khatib, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Center, wrote in a piece that “Nusra’s pragmatism and ongoing evolution mean that it could become an ally in the fight against the Islamic State”.

Even some Israeli leaders have publicly proclaimed the Sunni militants as the lesser evil in the ‘long war’ against Iran and its allies. In 2013, the Israeli Ambassador to the US and a close advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu, Michael Oren, said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post,

“We always wanted Bashar Assad to go, we always preferred the bad guys who weren’t backed by Iran to the bad guys who were backed by Iran.”

He specifically added, that this was the case, even if the “bad guys” were affiliated with al-Qaeda. Multiple media reports have recently detailed an Israeli policy of giving medical care to wounded Syrian rebels belonging to al Nusra.

The Obama administration has for the most part signaled a reluctance to arm Syrian rebels affiliated with al Qaeda, but has not publicly opposed the new coalition backed by regional partners such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey. Indeed as the Saudi monarchy has expressed much angst over the historic Iran nuclear deal, the administration may not have the leverage to oppose the kingdom’s Syria policy, which could risk antagonizing them even further.

When you step back these developments are truly breathtaking. What does it say about the clarity of the strategic thinking behind the current “war on terror” that the perpetrators of 9-11 may morph from enemies into allies? One would think that after decades of blowback from supporting the Mujahidin forefathers of al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the eighties, that our allies and the U.S. foreign policy elite would learn their lesson.

Unfortunately, the willingness to advance goals through a short-sighted military support of unsavory characters still holds firm in Washington. Coupled with a desire to mollify Saudi Arabia’s suspicion of the recent diplomatic initiatives in the region, US officials may be acquiescing to the Kingdom’s plan to see a Sunni state replace the Alawite regime of Bashar Assad. Considering the disastrous results of a similar strategy in Libya against Gaddafi in 2011, policy makers should sound the alarm immediately and push back against this obvious recipe for disaster, before it spins out of control. Again.

Via – Peace Action West – Groundswell Blog

There is much that is revolting about the current world and Andre Vltchek, Christopher Black and Peter Koenig are well placed to document it, which they have done in their new book ‘The World Order and Revolution! Essays from the Resistance’. http://badak-merah.weebly.com/the-world-order-and-revolution.html

Using a combination of political, legal and economic analyses, Vltchek, Black and Koenig carefully strip away the façade that the corporate media presents to us, and which the imperial elite wants us to believe, so that we can see some of the ugly, underlying truth about our world.

Investigative journalist, philosopher and film-maker Andre Vltchek, international criminal lawyer Christopher Black and geopolitical analyst and former World Bank economist Peter Koenig each bring many years of deep engagement resisting the US-European empire to provide unusual insight into the depth of its depravity. But if you still believe that politics involves principles, the law is about justice, economics is concerned with the equitable distribution of resources and the military is about defence, then I recommend you avoid reading this book. Having delusions exposed is invariably painful and these three authors show no interest in sparing you this pain. Because, I can assure you, the truth they reveal is painful indeed.

The first section of the book is a series of articles written by Vltchek. He travels from one country to another looking beneath the surface, to tell us how ordinary people are doing. His reports invariably contradict what we have been told to believe by the six corporate media conglomerates that control and disseminate propaganda as ‘news’ in the West.

He describes Cuba in which ‘music and dance are synonymous with life’ and where, despite decades of being under economic and sometimes military siege (instigated and policed by the US government), Cuba continued to send its teachers and doctors to help poor countries all over the world.

Vltchek draws our attention to the genocide committed by Germany in South West Africa a century ago and mentions the interesting detail that the first German governor of the former colony was the father of Hitler’s deputy Hermann Goering. Germany, of course, has never apologised or paid reparations for its genocide, let alone the ongoing segregation that divides the now ‘independent’ Namibia ideologically, racially and socially which even today leaves much of the African population living in wretched poverty.

Vltchek also casts his perceptive eye on ‘cowardly’ France, the collaborationist Czech Republic, Iraqi Kurdistan, Hong Kong and elsewhere, invariably providing a perspective you won’t read elsewhere.

In the second section of the book, Black – that rarest of entities: a lawyer with a conscience and great courage – describes his attempts in ‘international criminal tribunals’ to defend heads of state and other prominent individuals whose primary crime was that they tried to do the right thing by their own people and, in doing so, resisted imperial objectives.

While I have observed the legal system trashing justice on a routine basis and both experienced and witnessed the suffering this can cause, even I was nauseated by Black’s lengthy descriptions of the blatant disregard of the most rudimentary principles of ‘legal process’ that we have been told we can expect since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

Black spares us no detail in describing one corrupt practice after another, which judges, prosecutors, UN officials and others accepted without question, obviously because they had been carefully chosen for their roles and for which they were very adequately rewarded; for example, Louise Arbour, the chief prosecutor in one case, was later appointed a judge of the Supreme Court of Canada.

Black describes court proceedings against Serb President Slobodan Milosevic who was killed in a NATO prison on 11 March 2006 when it was clear that ‘there had been no crimes, except those of the NATO alliance, and the attempt to fabricate a case against him collapsed into farce’. Since the conviction of President Milosevic ‘was clearly not possible after all the evidence was heard, his death became the only way out for the NATO powers. His acquittal would have brought down the entire structure of the propaganda framework of the NATO war machine and the Western interests that use it as their armed fist’.

Another grotesque legal injustice was perpetrated against General Augustin Ndindiliyimana, the most senior ranking military officer in Rwanda in 1994. ‘General Ndindiliyimana was considered a political “moderate” during the Rwandan War of 1990-1994, a Hutu respected by Tutsis and Hutus alike.’ Moreover, as even witnesses for the prosecution testified, his gendarmes did not commit crimes against civilians and tried to protect them where they could. So why was he arrested?

As Black informs us: Ndindiliyimana was a potential leader of his country, he refused to cooperate with the Rwandan Patriotic Front regime installed by the United States after the war, he knew too much about what really happened in Rwanda and who was really responsible for the violence, he knew that UN and American forces (despite Bill Clinton’s denials) were directly involved in the final RPF offensive of 1994 and the murder of President Habyarimana. Most importantly, perhaps, the prosecutor used his arrest to pressure him to give false evidence against former deputy minister of defence in Rwanda, Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, the prosecution’s ‘big fish’. Ndindiliyimana refused.

If you can stand to read Black’s careful account of corrupt legal proceedings that seem to have no end, you will discover that this eminently decent man, imprisoned in 2000, was at least acquitted but not until 2014!

While Black wrote with equally compelling testimony on other subjects – including drawing our attention to the methane disaster now imminent in the Arctic, with a sudden methane release equal to ten times the existing atmospheric content of this gas now possible at any time according to the Arctic Methane Emergency Group http://ameg.me/ which cites the work of Dr Natalia Shakhova and Igor Semelitov: see ‘Methane Hydrates: interview with Dr Natalia Shakhova (& Igor Semelitov)’  – his conclusion in relation to the use of these international tribunals is what stands out for me: ‘The international criminal justice machine has become a weapon of total war, used not to prosecute the criminals who conduct these wars, but to persecute the leaders of the countries who resist.’

So what of Peter Koenig in this volume? Well Koenig’s background working for the World Bank gives him particular insight into neoliberal capitalism – a ‘euphemism of the empire for the complete and ruthless exploitation of every living thing and every resource on the planet for private profit’ – and the damage it has done.

So how does it work? Well, as I learned from the board game ‘Monopoly’ which I played as a child, in capitalism the aim is to own everything by wiping out the other players. Unlike the board game, however, in the real world the major players – that is, the largest multinational corporations and their compliant governments – use a variety of tools, only some of which are economic, such as ‘austerity programs’ and privatization (justified, as Koenig explains, ‘under the pretext of “structural reforms” to “salvage” poor but often resources-rich countries from bankruptcy’). Other tools for wiping out other players, not included in the board game, include various legal avenues for perpetrating injustice, such as those referred to above, and military violence (in one or more of its various forms).

Among the issues to which Koenig draws our attention are the imperial financial organisations, based in Washington, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and the so-called ‘troika’ (the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission) which exercise disproportionate power over most national governments (as recently illustrated by events in various European countries, including Greece). He also highlights economic tools, such as ‘free trade’ agreements like the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), which are designed to abolish national sovereignty completely and formally enshrine corporate governance of our world.

And what is the outcome for ordinary people of these ongoing economic incursions? Devastated lives: unemployment (or employment on poverty wages), poverty, homelessness, deficient health services, pension and social security cuts. In short, a life devoid of opportunity and security as increasing numbers of people in industrialised nations start to experience life as many know it in other parts of the world.

Koenig, of course, has suggestions. For example, in the case of Greece: it should voluntarily exit the Eurozone. It could look east to the possibilities offered by the Russia-China alliance. He sees significant hope in BRICS.

But Koenig has much more to offer than I have mentioned here and his discussion of false flag operations, such as 9/11 and Charlie Hebdo, will interest many who do not normally look as deeply as they might. I also enjoyed the chapter which mentioned Argentina’s courageous President Cristina Fernandez who has resisted the Empire’s financial terrorism and publicly labelled its military terrorism too.

In essence, what this book demonstrates is that the Empire is coming to get you too. The only question worth asking is what weapons it will use against you? Will it suffocate you politically by destroying your civil rights, will it destroy you economically by taking away your chance to find meaningful work (or just bankrupt your country), will it attack you through the legal system, bury you in propaganda until the truth is impossible to find, kill you militarily or, one I would add, drug you into psychological insensibility? See ‘Defeating the Violence of Psychiatry’

http://warisacrime.org/content/defeating-violence-psychiatry

But the world is in revolt too and the invitation for you to join the resistance is always open. In fits and starts, more people are asking questions, looking behind the façade and perceiving the ugly truth. And there are enough people around who are willing to suggest ways to resist. Here’s a couple of suggestions of my own. Consider participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ http://tinyurl.com/flametree and signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’

http://thepeoplesnonviolencecharter.wordpress.com

The Empire has already taken over our streets and invaded our homes (where even those of us who feel least affected are still bombarded by its propaganda to infest and befuddle our minds). Will you join these three authors and me in resisting the destructive forces of Empire?

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is [email protected] and his website is at http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

It is a breathtaking, truly beautiful battle, and those of us who are at the front line of it, by making films, writing for or speaking on the airwaves of the anti-imperialist networks, are thoroughly determined to give our very best, and if necessary, even to risk our lives!

Mighty new television networks based in South America, Russia, China and Iran are locked in what could only be described as an epic battle against the omnipresent Western propaganda and indoctrination networks.

Some of us went very close to death, in the toughest slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America, or at the battlefields, at the corners of the world where almost no one really dares to go. We confronted the Empire. Some made that one extra step, crossed the invisible line, and fell; never came back. Others managed to return, just to be spat at by those who never left the couch, for not going “all the way”, for surviving, for somehow managing not to die.

Why am I writing this?

Because much was already done, plenty was sacrificed! I just left South America, departed from my beloved continent, a continent I am fighting for, whose revolutions are also mine. And while, this time, I worked really feverishly in Ecuador, Brazil, and Paraguay and briefly in Argentina and Mexico, I realized that here, of all the places, we – our media – are not yet managing to influence the people as much we hoped to.

How little of RT, PressTV, CCTV, even teleSUR reaches ordinary people!

Almost entire cable and satellite distribution is in the hands of the right-wing ‘opposition’.

Even in Correa’s Ecuador, I hardly stumbled over those channels! English language news coverage has been fully abandoned to the CNN and FOX! And this was the case in all hotels where I had stayed. Not surprisingly, I encountered identical situation in Paraguay, and also, shockingly, in Brazil, which is one of the leading BRICS countries.

Right-wing O Globo is literally everywhere, and the left-wing television and radio stations are far in between. The English language coverage is reduced to CNN and FOX, wherever I stayed: Sao Paulo, Manaus, Belem, Recife, Fortaleza and Salvador Bahia. No teleSUR in the major hotels where I stayed, and no RT!

To make it worse, hotel managers that I summoned, had no idea what I was talking about. RT? CCTV? PressTV? I had to spell, write it down and explain what they are.

Their programs can be seen all over the globe, and they have been dramatically changing the lives of millions in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, even in some hubs of the Empire itself, like New York and London. Lies of colonialist and imperialist demagoguery are painstakingly challenged. Those who used to be voiceless are now being clearly heard.

When I was transiting at Lima’s Jorge Chavez airport, CNN en Español was beaming support coverage for some of Venezuela’s ‘opposition’ hunger strikers.

I went all the way – I summoned the airport’s top managers and accused them of committing a hostile act against Venezuela, by promoting right-wing US sponsored attempts to overthrow a democratically elected government in South American country. I managed to scare them. They apologized (although I felt that they were totally confused; no idea what I was talking about). They changed the channel immediately – to FOX Sport!

We had brief conversation about RT (they had no clue what it is either), about the CCTV (close circuit cameras?) and the PressTV (“press” sounded familiar to them). I demanded that they beam teleSUR from all screens placed in public areas. They replied that they would like to, but it is not part of their basic cable package! One of them asked whether it comes from Patagonia?

*

Of course we all know what is going on. We heard it thousands of times, and we wrote about it again and again: the Latin American revolutions are being undermined by the ‘elites’ and by their toxic pro-Western, right wing media. It has been happening in Venezuela since the beginning, and in Ecuador and Bolivia, but also in Brazil, Chile and Argentina.

The result is that the people in our revolutionary countries know close to nothing about our own allies, including Russia, China, the rest of South America and Iran. And what they know is exactly that propaganda, which is being spread by the Western media, all over the world. Almost all local newspapers are relying on EFE, Reuters, AFP, AP and other manufacturers of Western “exceptionalist” narrative.

The voice of BRICS is almost not heard at all, all over Latin America. It is extremely alarming!

And even when the information gets through, on the Internet, through blogs of the RT and teleSUR, the sites are not coordinated effectively, and as a result; well-organized and well-paid troll commenters are heavily infesting them.

*

We need our people to hear about China from the Chinese people, not from the Western propaganda media. We need Russians to explain themselves, now that they are battling ha eavy onslaught of Western imperialism. We need Iran to speak to our viewers about the Middle East and Islam, and we need South Africans to tell us about tremendous bloodshed that is taking place all over the African continent, under appalling boots of the Western neo-colonialists!

Instead, it is again the West, telling us what to think about the world! And even from the left: Latin American intellectuals still trust much more some defunct pseudo left wing personalities in Spain or the United States, then their Chinese, Russian, Iranian or African comrades! Cuba is most likely an exception.

We need our allies to speak! Not those who want to divide and rule, not those who were colonizing and ravishing entire planet for many centuries. Not those who abandoned battles without real fight.

teleSUR is doing enormous work, explaining Latin America to the world, and broadcasting wherever it can, for the people all over Latin America.

But much more has to be done! Big fraternal media should be promoted. It is huge; it is fun, and high quality. RT is lately eclipsing some Western propaganda channels like BBC and CNN even from major the cities of the Empire. PressTV is competing successfully with the big-Gulf-buck al-Jazeera. CCTV has more viewers than Japanese NHK.

I can watch teleSUR in Lebanon, so why not in Brazil!

El Mercurio had formed its alliance with Comercio and others like them. So if El Mercurio can do it, why not teleSUR, RT, PressTV and others?

*

Let us all protest, let us demand! If one person a day asks at Quito airport for teleSUR, they will not listen. If ten were demanding, they would have to comply.

The same with the hotels! Everyone who reads this essay: people, whenever you stay in any hotel in Latin America, which does not carry teleSUR on its “menu”, which does not “play” with RT, PressTV, CCTV, be a pest; demand! Nag, nag, and nag!

Otherwise, we will never win this battle, this ideological combat.

Otherwise, nothing will really change! We will have progressive governments, sure (at least for some time) but people will continue to be brainwashed by the Western imperialist propaganda (and so called “education”)! Latin Americans will be told how to perceive their own continent. Westerners will continue telling Chinese people how to judge their own country. The world will be told lies about Russia, and even some Russian people will begin believing them.

Help our media to compete! Let us tell our own stories. We don’t need someone in London or New York to define who we are!

Our television channels are now much better than those produced in the West. Those who see them; those who have opportunity to see them, love them! The only obstacle is that ridiculous ‘deficit’ created by the ‘elites’, through the distribution.

Demand! “Either you carry teleSUR or to hell with your cable company!” Or: “Give us RT or no more paying for your satellite, Compadres!”

And we will continue risking our lives, working day and night, in order to give you our best, dear viewers. But please, please watch us! Insist that our voices, not just those of the Empire, are truly heard heart, “at home” and all over the world!

Image: Photo by Fabio Rodrigues Pozzebom / ABr

Below are excerpts from a July 26, 2015 speech Syrian president Bashar al-Assad delivered in Damascus.

On the West’s double standards on terrorism

[Western powers] call it terrorism when it hits them, and call it revolution, freedom, democracy, and human rights when it hits us. There, its perpetrators are terrorists, and here, they are rebels and moderate opposition. They scream at the top of their voices whenever they are touched by a spark of fire while they fall deathly silent when we are burned by it.

On humanitarian intervention

Let them permit the opposition in their countries to bear arms and kill and destroy and keep calling them opposition, or permit them to become proxies or let other states decide what is the ruling system for them should be, then we will believe and accept their old recipes that have always been used to justify an aggression or interference in states’ affairs under humanitarian slogans like human rights, freedom, democracy, and so on.

On the West’s relationship with militant Islamists

What they want is to keep this monster in check and not eliminate it. All their military, political and media campaigns are in fact smoke screens, and what the West has done so far has led to a growth of terrorism instead of eliminating it, and this is confirmed by reality, not personal analysis, as terrorism has spread geographically, its material resources have increased, and its manpower has doubled.

An observation a propos of Assad’s comments: Western newspapers talk of the Egyptian army’s fight in the Sinai against militant Islamists, but of the Syrian army’s fight against militant Islamists in Syria as “regime forces” waging a “brutal” war to crush a “rebellion”.

A woman holds an image of Cevdet Kiliçlar, one of the 10 people killed by Israel’s attack on the Mavi Marmara, Istanbul, 6 November 2012. (Ozan Köse/Flickr)

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) is appealing a ruling ordering her to reconsider her decision not to investigate Israel’s lethal attack on an aid flotilla to Gaza five years ago.

But Geoffrey Nice, lead counsel for victims and families of those killed in the Israeli attack on the Mavi Marmara, told The Electronic Intifada that the arguments Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda has put forward are “complete hogwash.”

Nice, who worked for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia from 1998 to 2006, led the prosecution of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević.

Nice and his law firm Stoke and White also represent the government of Comoros, the Indian Ocean archipelago state where the Mavi Marmara is registered.

Instead of doing her job and properly investigating the case, Nice said, Bensouda’s appeal is “a last ditch attempt to do what would be expected of her by the US and supporters of Israel.”

A professor of law at London’s Gresham College who has previously represented victims before the ICC, Nice said he doubted that Bensouda even had a right to go to the appeal judges at this stage. He said his first legal response would be to ask them to throw her appeal out on procedural grounds.

Serious errors

Earlier this month, a panel of ICC judges found in a scathing 2-1 ruling that Bensouda had made serious errors of fact and law in her decision not to pursue the case.

They said that the chief prosecutor had underestimated the seriousness and international significance of the crimes and ordered her to review her decision not to proceed with an investigation into the attack.

In the early hours of 31 May 2010, Israeli commandos boarded and seized the flotilla boats in international waters in the eastern Mediterranean.

Israeli forces carried out a particularly violent armed attack on the largest vessel, Mavi Marmara, killing nine persons. A tenth victim died of his injuries in June 2014.

The victims were all Turkish citizens. One of them, 18-year-old Furkan Doğan, was also a US citizen.

The initial request for the ICC to investigate the killings was submitted in 2013 by Comoros. Bensouda decided not to proceed with a full investigation in November 2014.

Ignoring evidence

In a notice of appeal filed Monday, Chief Prosecutor Bensouda says that the judges overstepped their mandate and trampled on her prosecutorial discretion by ordering her to review the case.

She also claims that the ruling gives her no clear explanation of how to review her decision.

But Nice said that her claims are “absolute rubbish” and the judges’ ruling is very clear about what matters and evidence should be looked at again.

The judges’ 16 July ruling lists a long litany of errors by the prosecutor.

These include that Bensouda “wilfully ignored” evidence submitted by Comoros that Israeli forces “fired live ammunition from the boats and the helicopters before the [Israeli forces] forces boarded the Mavi Marmara.”

This information was supplemented by the UN Human Rights Council fact-finding mission and autopsy reports, which, according to the evidence submitted by Comoros, “indicate that persons were shot from above.”

Intent to kill

“For the purpose of her decision” whether or not to investigate, the judges conclude, “the prosecutor should have accepted that live fire may have been used prior to the boarding of the Mavi Marmara, and drawn the appropriate inferences.”

“This fact is extremely serious and particularly relevant to the matter under consideration,” the ruling continues, “as it may reasonably suggest that there was, on the part of the [Israeli] forces who carried out the identified crimes, a prior intention to attack and possibly kill passengers on board the Mavi Marmara.”

The judges also fault Bensouda for failing to properly consider the impact of the crimes beyond the immediate victims.

Israel’s violent actions against the Mavi Marmara would, the judges write, “have sent a clear and strong message to the people in Gaza (and beyond) that the blockade of Gaza was in full force and that even the delivery of humanitarian aid would be controlled and supervised by the Israeli authorities.”

Rule of law

Nice says the stakes are high – not just for this case but for other Palestine-related matters that might come before the ICC.

In January, the court began a preliminary probe, at the request of the Palestinian Authority, that will include Israel’s attack on Gaza last summer that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians.

Will such cases be handled according to the “rule of law,” Nice asks, or will victims witness “officials of the highest rank seeming yet again to bend the knee to the interests of Israel and the US?”

Janine Jackson interviewed investigative reporter Lee Fang about Washington’s revolving door for the July 24 CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: When Eric Holder first joined law firm Covington & Burling in 2001, he was coming from a stint as deputy attorney general under Bill Clinton. So it’s no wonder that when Holder went to the Obama administration as attorney general, the folks at Covington kept his seat warm.

And indeed, for many, Holder’s seamless slide from theoretically prosecuting big banks to defending big banks from prosecution is a common-sense phenomenon only the hopelessly naïve would bother to decry. He’s a lawyer, what do you expect? was the substance of many a comment –of what comment there was, because, again, this latest glimpse of the porous tissue between regulator and regulated went down as no news at all for most of the press.

Our next guest does find that revolving door newsworthy. Investigative journalist Lee Fang has been talking about money and politics for years; he’s a co-founder of RepublicReport.org and writes at The Nation as well as The Intercept. He joins us by phone from the Bay Area.

Welcome back to CounterSpin, Lee Fang.

Lee Fang (image: David Feldman Show)

Lee Fang: Hey, Janine. Thank you so much for having me.

JJ: Well, tell us first, if you would, a little bit about Covington & Burling. Who are they and who are some of their clients?

LF: Covington & Burling is a Washington, DC, law firm that also engages in lobbying; it’s got an extensive practice that hires former members of Congress, their staff, former federal officials—including of course, Eric Holder—and it represents major corporations. So the firm has helped negotiate settlements for corporations that have been accused of wrongdoing, they’ve also helped secure legislation for their corporate clients and they’ve done a number of regulatory and lobbying acts that help provide their clients with special access to politicians.

JJ: And some of those clients have included some of the largest banks.

LF: Yeah, that’s right. You know, a few years ago, Reuters had a great investigation that showed that Covington & Burling has not only represented the big banks—Bank of America, CitiGroup, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo—but they played a really special role in the foreclosure crisis, helping these banks set up a mortgage company that helped create a document trail. When banks have attempted to foreclose on companies and they have to produce these documents showing that they have a chain of title, then this third party company, known as MERS, produced these documents, in many cases falsified these documents, and Covington’s role, actually, in the late ’90s—they provided the legal documentation to create MERS on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The New York Times depicts Eric Holder’s departure from the Justice Department. (photo: Zach Gibson/NYT)

JJ: Well, in thumbnailing Holder’s tenure as attorney general, folks like the New York Times said, “His Justice Department wrested huge fines from banks, including JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and CitiGroup,” but seen another way, Holder by some lights didn’t so much try and fail to prosecute big banks as succeed in protecting them.

LF: That’s right. As the inspector general of the Justice Department found, under Holder the Justice Department actually deprioritized mortgage fraud in their US attorney offices in New York, California and elsewhere. So there was a systemic attempt to shift the blame for the mortgage and financial crisis in 2008. Instead of the big banks, there were only criminal prosecutions of some small-time lenders and mortgage professionals, but the big banks that really had the responsibility behind the financial crisis, there was no effort to make any criminal referrals that we know of publicly and, of course, there were no prosecutions of any of the large banks responsible for the crisis.

JJ: Well, when you talk about Eric Holder going from Covington & Burling to the White House back to Covington & Burling back to the White House back to Covington & Burling, the response from many could be summed up, I think, as “duh.” I mean, some of us don’t forget 1992 Hillary Clinton saying, “For goodness sakes, you can’t be a lawyer if you don’t represent banks.”

And the idea is kind of: This is just how the game is played, what’s your problem?

For me, it’s not as if we’re asking reporters to feign surprise or feign ingenuousness, but you can’t present just kind of winking at the cynicism of it all as though that meant the same as interrogating it, or explaining who is hurt and who is helped. Obviously, real people are involved here.

LF: That right. I think this is not just a scandal for the Justice Department in that so many of the officials, not just Holder, but his top deputy Lanny Breuer also returned to Covington & Burling after serving for a few years in the Obama administration—this is a scandal for the media.

One of the perhaps most cynical and and most prevalent ways that you can legally bribe a government official or an elected official is to wait to give them a multi-million dollar check, not while they’re in office, but as soon as they retire. So if a politician helps a bank or an oil company, that oil company can’t directly buy them a boat or give them a million-dollar check. But if they wait until that official retires from office, as soon as they step out the door of Congress and find an employment contract with a lobbying firm or a big bank, then they can accept a multi-million-dollar payday; and so it’s simply delayed bribery, in my perspective.

But because this has become so routine, that this happens every day, whether it’s a member of Congress or a high level regulator, or in this case, the head of the Justice Department, this has become such a function of life in Washington, DC, it’s no longer a scandal in the eyes of many reporters. In a sense they condone this behavior, because in some of the exit interviews that Holder gave, reporters who had that special access to Eric Holder, they didn’t ask him about this dynamic, they didn’t ask him how much he’s being paid, they didn’t ask him about the ethics issues of going back to work for a big bank lobbying firm given his role in refusing to criminally prosecute these banks. You know the onus lies on the reporters and the media outlets that fail to ask these questions.

JJ:  I almost feel as though it’s a sign of savvy to show that you’re not outraged, that you’re not disturbed at this sort of shenanigan, you know? That’s kinda what makes you a “serious” reporter in some ways. Which is disheartening.

LF: Sure, it’s part of the dynamic of being a beat reporter that if you ask these kind of unflattering questions, you lose access, you get shuffled around. So to be a successful beat reporter, you have to ask only tangential questions, or questions that make the interviewee—cast them in a positive light, I suppose.

A lobbyist for Pepsi is now chief of staff of the Senate Agricultural Committee, which oversees school lunch programs and nutritional guidelines.

JJ: And just so folks know that we’re not using Holder as an example because he’s so rare, this kind of porousness happens at all levels. For example, before you were writing about Holder, you were writing about this guy Stephen Sayle from Chevron and his new job.

LF: That’s right. A top lobbyist for Chevron, Stephen Sayle is now a senior staff member for the House Committee on Science, which oversees science policy for the federal government. This is a lobbyist, Mr. Sayle, who has helped Chevron beat back regulatory efforts that rest on federal science, whether it’s on the ozone or on climate change.

And now that he is overseeing the Science Committee, he has a unique opportunity to shift not only policy that governs the way that federal science is used to implement pollution regulations, he also has an opportunity to help with the Science Committee’s kind of investigation of climate scientists: Over the years, the House Science Committee has brought in various scientists to quiz them on climate science and other issues that are very controversial now given the EPA’s pursuit of regulations that affect the fossil fuel industry.

But that isn’t a unique dynamic. In the last two Congresses, we’ve seen an unprecedented wholesale change in the senior staff positions in Congress, and I’m referring to the chief of staff, which reports directly to a member of Congress or senator, or the staff director position, and that’s the position that oversees either a committee or a subcommittee. In almost every single position for staff director, we’ve seen lobbyists for the relevant industry take those spots.

So for the Agricultural Committee, which oversees school lunches and nutrition guidelines, we now have a Pepsi lobbyist who is overseeing that committee. In the Senate Armed Services Committee, which oversees military spending, we have a lobbyist for the trade group that represents Lockheed Martin and Boeing now leading that committee. So from committee to committee, whether it’s on chemical safety, whether it’s on pollution or on school lunches, we have lobbyists for the industries affected now running the show from the inside.

JJ:  It certainly sounds like a story to me, but it’s not if you think it’s just business as usual.

LF: Certainly, and this gets back to the culture of Washington, DC. If you work in the public interest, if you kind of sacrifice your career to helping the public good, working at a small think tank or at an academic research position or in a public interest organization, you’re kind of seen as a loser. You’re not invited to the big parties, you’re not featured in the glossy magazines. But if you’re a political player, the big media outlets celebrate you; you’re kind of seen as a winner in the big social circles in Washington, DC. And as a kind of side effect of this entire dynamic, when you take these positions, whether it’s with Chevron or with another company, and then move into positions of power, your friends in the media do not consider this a scandal.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with journalist Lee Fang; his recent article on Eric Holder appeared on The Intercept. You can find them online atFirstLook.org. Lee Fang, thank you very much for joining us this week onCounterSpin

LF: Janine, it was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

President Obama’s supporters are quick to tout his record as one of tremendous success, especially his “reform” of health care, but that is largely because they like him personally – not because Obamacare has been a rousing success.

By any measure the law, which has routinely been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court as constitutional despite the use of dubious legal justifications, remains largely unpopular among a majority of Americans. In addition to that, almost nothing of what the president and acceding Democrats promised the law would do has come to fruition. Indeed, on a number of fronts, the law has created the exact opposite effects.

Take the promise of a reduction in health insurance premiums. When the president was pushing the Affordable Care Act during his first presidential campaign and after he was elected to his first term, he claimed his legislation would reduce the annual premiums for the average family by $2,500. In fact, as documented in this video montage, Obama made the promise repeatedly.

Rates are only going to go up

But in reality health insurance premiums for most Americans have skyrocketed, along with deductibles. According to one report, premiums in some states are rising as much as 51 percent this year.

As Breitbart News reported:

According to states that have released rate requests, New Mexico’s market leader Health Care Service Corp. is asking for an average premium spike of 51.6 percent; Tennessee’s top insurer BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee wants an average spike of 36.3 percent; Maryland’s market leader CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield is requesting an average spike of 30.4 percent; and Oregon’s top insurer, Moda Health, is seeking a 25 percent spike.

Tens of millions of Americans have also seen their insurance deductibles skyrocket as well – many have become so high that customers have to delay care. Deductibles as high as $6,000 a year per family member are not uncommon.

But as bad as all of this sounds, it is about to get worse – much worse.

Under provisions of federal law, insurance companies are required to file rate increase requests a full year before they can implement them. Even then, state regulatory agencies must approve the increases.

Because new enrollees under Obamacare have been much sicker than insurance companies anticipated, they are requesting even higher rate increases for 2016. As reported by The New York Times, this year’s requests range between 20 and 40 percent:

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans – market leaders in many states – are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

Other companies in other states, including Oregon, are also proposing increases.

“Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here,” Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, told the Times. “Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.”

The president won’t admit his reforms have failed

Because of the higher costs of coverage – and because they are not sick nearly as often – millions of young people have opted not to get coverage, thus skewing the numbers of healthy versus sicker consumers, thereby raising the costs for everyone.

None of this matters to the president, however, who arrogantly refuses to acknowledge the unworkable nature of his failed legislation.

Though he is responsible for these increases, and not the insurance companies (because he signed the Affordable Care Act into law and they must comply with its coverage mandates), Obama doesn’t think insurance companies should get them. He was on the stump in Tennessee recently arguing that state insurance regulators ought to refuse or scale back the requests.

If they don’t get them, a few things will happen. One, companies will go out of business, leaving even fewer coverage choices for consumers than they have now. Two, more Americans will be thrown into the federal system, which is already broke, inefficient and compensates doctors so poorly more that more of them refuse to accept federal insurance of any kind. And three, overall health of the American populace will decline because Obama’s “affordable” health reform will have become completely unaffordable.

The alternative – higher rates for all – isn’t a much better option.

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.realclearpolitics.com

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o65vMUk5so

http://www.breitbart.com

http://blogs.wsj.com

In a meeting with government officials on July 18^th, four days after the conclusion of the nuclear agreement, President Rouhani of Iran praised the work of his negotiating team and called the deal a triumph. Is the President right? Does the deal really signify a victory for Iran, as he claims, or an elusive surrender, as a number of critics have pointed out? To answer these questions, a brief review of the contents of the agreement is in order.

The Nuclear Deal in Brief

A close reading of the contents of the deal reveals that the agreement places severe restrictions on, and extensive monitoring of, all aspects of Iran’s nuclear technology in return for a promise of gradual removal of sanctions. It would effectively establish U.S. control (through IAEA) over the entire production chain of Iran’s nuclear and related industries—from uranium mining, to centrifuge manufacturing, to enrichment processing. As President Obama put it (on the day of the conclusion of the agreement): “Inspectors will have access to Iran’s entire nuclear supply chain—its uranium mines and mills, its conversion facility and its centrifuge manufacturing and storage facilities. . . . Some of these transparency measures will be in place for 25 years. Because of this deal inspectors will also be able to access any suspicious location.”

These restrictions include the following: downgrading Iran’s enrichment capabilities from 20% of purity to 3.67%, freezing this minimal level of 3.67% enrichment for 15 years, reducing its current capacity of 19000 gas centrifuges to 6104 (a reduction of 68%), reducing its stockpile of low grade enriched uranium from the current level of 7500 kg to 300kg (a reduction of 96%), and imposing strict limits on its research and development activities. While some restrictions on research and development are promised to be relaxed after 10 years, others will remain for up to 25 years.

In addition, Iran would have to accept an extensive monitoring and inspection regime not only of declared nuclear sites but also of military and other non-declared sites where the monitors may presume or imagine the incidence of “suspicious” activity —the monitoring will be 24/7. The elaborate system of monitoring and inspection was succinctly described by President Obama on the day of the conclusion of the agreement in Vienna (July 14, 2015): “Put simply, the organization responsible for the inspections, the IAEA, will have access where necessary, when necessary. That arrangement is permanent.”

It is true that in theory, or on paper, Iran could object to inspectors’ excessive or unreasonable access requests. In practice, however, its hands are tied because an arbitration commission that would be set up to judge whether the inspectors’ access requests are justified is not independent of the powers or authorities that are behind the inspection requests. In other words, the plaintiff, the prosecutor and the judge would be the same: the U.S. and its allies that heavily influence the IAEA decisions and operations. So, the projected arbitration process seems to be merely a formality, designed largely to pacify Iranian voices critical of the deal.

Sanctions relief is promised in return for Iran’s commitments listed above. However, the deal attaches a number of potentially problematic principles to the relief program.

To begin with, while Iran has accepted to put into effect all its commitments in the first six months of the deal, sanctions relief would be phased in over a period of 10 years. Second, the relief will not begin until Iran has verifiably put all its commitments into effect. In other words, the so-called “implementation phase” of the agreement has diametrically opposed meanings for the two sides of the deal: while for Iran it means the end of the implementation of its commitments, for the U.S. side it means the beginning of the implementation of their promises. Third, a “snap-back” clause, enabling rapid re-imposition of sanctions if Iran is deemed in non-compliance, effectively gives the U.S. and its allies the whip-hand over the deal’s implementation.

It is obvious from these stipulations that while the “snap-back” clause and other binding conditions of the deal guarantee Iran’s compliance with the agreement, it leaves the U.S. side free from similar guarantees or obligations of carrying out their end of the bargain. Thus, for example, if at the end of the first six months, or at any time during the following 10 years of gradual sanctions relief, the U.S. reneges on implementing its promises, Iran would not be able to do anything about it. It could certainly say “the deal is off.” But that won’t be helpful either because it would simply take the nuclear issue back to square one, so to speak, except that Iran would now find itself in a much weaker position, since it would have already given away, or rendered ineffectual, all its earlier trump cards: its 20% enriched uranium, its 19000 centrifuges, its 7500 kg stockpile of enriched uranium, its robust research and development facilities and scientists, as well as its advanced ballistic missiles. Furthermore, by then the U.S. and its allies would have gained access to, and therefore acquired information on, many of Iran’s vital nuclear, military, intelligence, and national security sites and documents.

Prior to the conclusion of the deal, President Rouhani and his negotiation team had repeatedly told the Iranian people that their country’s “red lines,” as laid down by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and passed into law by the Iranian parliament, would not be violated. Top among those red lines were: (a) simultaneous implementation of the agreement by both sides; (b) no access to military sites; (c) no access to nuclear scientist; (d) no restrictions on research and development; and (e) preservation of industrial-level enrichment as the minimum level of enrichment.

The brief sketch of the nuclear deal provided above clearly shows that, contrary to repeated claims of Iran’s negotiators, all the so-called Iranian red lines are breached.

This is perhaps why for the 20-month long duration of negotiations Iran’s negotiators did not reveal to the Iranian people all the asymmetrical compromises they had made; ostensibly out of a fear that that the people’s knowledge of what was being given away behind their back might have derailed the negotiations.

This is also perhaps why once the lopsided or unfair nature of the agreement was exposed at the conclusion of negotiations (14 July 2015), it was quickly voted on and ratified by UN Security Council (20 July 2015), thereby depriving Iran’s parliament, its Supreme National Security Council, its defense and security apparatuses—in short, the Iranian people— from having a say in the adoption of the unfair deal by the UN Security Council.

Formally, the text of the deal is currently under review by Iran’s parliament and Supreme National Security Council for modification, adoption or rejection. In practice, however, this is an exercise in self-deceit as the outcome of this review would have no bearing on the obligations created for Iran by the UN Security Council’s adoption of the agreement, codified as Resolution 2231. This means that the entire process of the nuclear talks (from its formal inception in Geneva in November 2013, through its 20-month long secret negotiations, all the way up its hasty adoption by the Security Council on 20 July 2015) was carried out essentially behind the back of the Iranian people—a highly undemocratic method.

Geopolitical Implications

There are clear indications that proponents of the nuclear deal on both the Iranian and the U.S. sides are aiming at broader economic and geopolitical collaborations than just the nuclear agreement. Characterizing the deal as a diplomatic success, Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, recently declared, for example, “The atmosphere is now quite ripe for broadening of regional and international cooperation.” Earlier he had pointed out that the deal would “open new horizons” for cooperating in “the fight against extremism”—a hint at the prospects of Iran formally joining forces with the U.S. in the fight against groupings such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

According to Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), President Rouhani of Iran also made a similar suggestion in a recent (July 18^th) phone conversation with the British Prime Minister David Cameron, indicating that concerted efforts in the fight against extremist groups in the region was vital for their defeat. Cameron’s office stated that the prime minister had expressed the hope that the nuclear agreement would mark a fresh start to relations between Britain and Iran and indicated that the nuclear negotiations had touched on such issues as civil wars in places like Iraq and Yemen.

These and many similar statements, as well as the very acceptance of the not-so-honorable nuclear deal, indicate that powerful voices in and out of the Rouhani administration are gradually but systematically abandoning the revolutionary-era resistance to domineering imperialistic plans—even when such plans entail compromising on fundamental issues of sovereignty and national security.

The Obama administration too has indicated that the nuclear deal would or could be the beginning of wider collaboration with Iran; and that it intends to use the nuclear deal to coerce Iran to assist the U.S. in pursuing its geopolitical goals in the region. Reversing previous policy of excluding Iran from geopolitical discussions in the area, President Obama recently announced that Iran should “be part of the conversation” in resolving the Syrian conflict.

By adopting this new tactic to enlist Iran’s cooperation, the Obama administration pursues a number of objectives.

The first objective is that by moderating, neutralizing and/or enlisting Iran’s cooperation, it would automatically break up or undermine the challenge to its policies posed by the so-called “axis of resistance”—consisting of Iran, Hezbollah, Assad’s Syria, and Shi’a forces/government in Iraq, Yemen and Bahrain. By the same token, it would also win Iran away from getting too close to Russia and China.

The second objective is that, by thus making its interventions and military adventures in the region less challenged, or better managed, it can then act more aggressively toward Russia and China, which are increasingly perceived as more “menacing to worldwide U.S. interests” than any other country.

The third objective is that the new tactic could help Europe to substitute imports of oil and gas from Iran for those from Russia, thereby undermining Russia’s influence over Europe.

These and similar signs of potentially broad partnerships between Iran and Western powers have created a widespread impression that for Israel, Saudi Arabia and other allies of the United States the agreement signals a loss of influence while, by the same token, it indicates a gain of power and prestige by Iran and, by proxy, its allies in the region.

These perceptions and projections seem to be based on the presumption that the nuclear deal represents a voluntary agreement between equal or near-equal sides. In reality, however, the dealt is far from a voluntary agreement between two equally-positioned traders or dealers. Iran negotiated under duress. Largely shut out of normal international trade, and constantly threatened by economic strangulation, it essentially negotiated at gun point. As an astute observer of the negotiations has pointed out, “Iran voluntarily agreed to the deal the same way that a robbery victim voluntarily agrees to give up valuable possessions.” Not surprisingly, the deal is tantamount to an elaborate document outlining (in subtle ways) the terms of Iran’s surrender.

Also not surprisingly, a number of observers have characterized it as the “nuclear Turkmenchay”, a reference to the infamous 1828 Turkmenchay Treaty as a result of which Iran lost vast territories in the Caucasus (including Baku, Shirvan, Ganja, Nakhichevan, and Yerevan) to Tsarist Russia.

The question is why did the Iranian ruling circles, represented by the Rouhani administration, accept such an unsavory deal?

In the face of the brutal economic sanctions, threatening an economic collapse and potentially a popular uprising that would threaten the power and property of the ruling elites, these elites faced (and, indeed, extensively debated) two alternatives to solve Iran’s economic problems and preserve their rule: “resistance” economics vs. austerity economics.

According to resistance economics, suggested by Ayatollah Khamenei and supported by radical segments of opposition voices to neoliberal policies of the Rouhani administration, Iran should view economic sanctions as an opportunity to become self-reliant: to utilize domestic talents and resources in order to become self-sufficient by producing as many of the consumer goods and other industrial products as possible. Indeed, by following, more or less, this philosophy of resistance economics prior to the rise of Mr. Rouhani to presidency, Iran made considerable progress in scientific research, technological know-how and manufacturing industries. Proponents of this alternative also advocate relatively strong social safety net programs to protect the financially disadvantaged segments of citizens.

The other alternative, advocated by the Rouhani administration and its allies, calls for the adoption of supply-side, neoliberal or austerity economics. According to this doctrine, solutions to economic stagnation, poverty and under-development lie in unhindered market mechanism and unreserved integration into world capitalist system. Recessions, joblessness and economic hardship in many less-developed countries are not so much due to economic mismanagement or the nature of global capitalism as they are because of government intervention and/or exclusion from world capitalist markets.

As most of the former leaders of the 1979 revolution have aged, their earlier revolutionary appetite for radical economic alternatives also seems to have faded. By the same token, they seem to have acquired an avid appetite for the accumulation of power and property. Accordingly, the revolutionaries-turned-oligarchs, both in and outside the Rouhani administration, have shunned “resistance” economics in favor of the U.S.-style austerity economics as remedy to Iran’s economic ills and, therefore, to the salvation of their rule.

This helps explains why the nuclear deal is so lopsided against Iran: since President Rouhani and his negotiating team did not restrain their belief that the solution to Iran’s economic problems lay with its joining global financial markets, or contain their enthusiasm to be accepted to the pantheon of Western capitalism, they inadvertently weakened their bargaining position. By the same token, they led the United States and its allies to play hardball.

It also helps explain why the deal, if ratified by the U.S. congress, may do more damage to Iran than stinting its scientific research and development, or holding back its technological progress. Perhaps more importantly, it would undermine Iran’s sovereignty as it would find it difficult to resist or oppose to U.S. (and its allies’) geopolitical designs in the region lest that should trigger a “snap-back” of economic sanctions.

Indeed, in the event of any future geopolitical disagreement or dispute with the U.S. and its allies Iran would be facing a situation akin to a plea bargaining scenario: take what it is offered, or face “crippling” economic sanctions.

Viewed in this light, the post-nuclear deal Iran would not be in a position to resist, let alone influence, the U.S. (and its allies’) geopolitical designs in the region. And this is why, contrary to popular perceptions, the deal represents a victory not for Iran (and its allies) but for U.S. allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia—Benjamin Netanyahu’s screaming and breast-beating notwithstanding.

Ismael Hossein-zadeh is Professor Emeritus of Economics (Drake University). He is the author of Beyond Mainstream Explanations of the Financial Crisis (Routledge 2014), The Political Economy of U.S. Militarism (Palgrave–Macmillan 2007), and the Soviet Non-capitalist Development: The Case of Nasser’s Egypt (Praeger Publishers 1989). He is also a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.

London — Metropolitan Police claim an investigation into the possibility of prosecuting journalists for their role in publishing secrets leaked by Edward Snowden will be kept secret.  The revelation thatinformation won’t be disclosed due to a “possibility of increased threat ofterrorist activity” follows the relentless demands for information from journalists at The Intercept.

In 2013, Brazilian student David Miranda—partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who was then at the centre of the Guardian’s disclosures about the National Security Agency—was detained for 9-hours at Heathrow Airport while transporting a batch of encrypted Snowden documents to assist Greenwald’s reporting on the files.

Miranda was returning from Germany where he had met filmmaker Glenn Greenwald, who was involved in breaking revelations leaked by Edward Snowden. The leaks exposed the extent of mass online surveillance carried out by the U.S. National Security Agency and the U.K.’s monitoring operation, GCHQ.

After the airport seizure of digital material including a laptop, cell-phone, and memory sticks, the London Metropolitan Police opened a criminal investigation and posted a statement on its website, describing the confiscated material as “highly sensitive” and claiming the disclosure of it“could put lives at risk.”

At the time, in London’s High Court, lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw said, “The disclosure of (the material) would be gravely injurious to public safety and thus the police have now initiated a criminal investigation.” He added, “…there is an absolutely compelling reason to permit this investigation to continue.”

Cressida Dick, previous assistant commissioner at Scotland Yard, alsoconfirmed at the time that detectives were examining whether journalists had committed offences. She said officers were looking at potential breaches of a specific anti-terrorism law that makes it unlawful to communicate information about British intelligence agents.

And then…silence.

According to journalist Ryan Gallagher, the London Metropolitan Police Force has repeatedly refused to release information on the investigation. Gallagher’s persistent pursuit of information on the status of the investigation, using the Freedom Of Information Act, including data on the costs and number of officers involved, fell on deaf ears—until he received a partial response on July 21.

In its response to his request, the Metropolitan Police finally put its cards on the table “…to confirm or deny whether we hold any information concerning any current or previous investigations into the alleged actions of Edward Snowden could potentially be misused proving detrimental to national security.”

The response then lists a series of national security exemptions to the Freedom of Information Act and justifies why details on the investigation will not be released.

“In this current environment, where there is a possibility of increased threat of terrorist activity, providing any details even to confirm or deny that any information exists could assist any group or persons who wish to cause harm to the people of the nation which would undermine the safeguarding of national security.”

Despite a remarkable lack of interest from the press on the issue and claims from the Metropolitan Police that it“would not be in the public interest” to reveal information on the investigation, The Intercept is not giving up without a fight. Believing it is definitely in the interests of those spied upon to know the details of the spying, the news organization has filed a complaint with the body that enforces Freedom Of Information laws and is challenging the Metropolitan Police’s ongoing refusal to release information.

This article (UK Police Want to Secretly Arrest Journalists Who Report on Snowden’s NSA Leaks) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Michaela Whittonand theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. If you spot a typo, email[email protected].

Michaela Whitton joined Anti-Media as its first journalist abroad in May of 2015. Her topics of interest include human rights, conflict, the Middle East, Palestine, and Israel. Born and residing in the United Kingdom, she is also a photographer. Learn more about Whitton here!

Hezbollah is a legitimate part of Lebanon’s government. It’s not a terrorist organization as Washington and Israel claim.

It was born out of the IDF’s 1982 Lebanon invasion – devastating naked aggression, slaughtering around 18,000 people (mostly civilians – including Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres).

Journalist Robert Fisk called what happened “one of the most shocking war crimes of the 20th century.”

Hezbollah is more than a political entity. It has a military wing for self-defense. It provides vital social, charitable, educational, and healthcare services. It established dozens of hospitals and scores of schools. It enjoys widespread support, especially among Shias, comprising over a third of Lebanon’s population.

On Tuesday,  and other noted figures spoke at the Conference of International Union of Resistance Scholars in Beirut. Muslim clerics and Palestinian activists came to address longstanding Israeli occupation, persecution and aggression.

Lebanese imam Sheikh Maher Hamoud expressed support for Palestinians’ liberating struggle. “We are proud of being individuals confronting a cancerous tumor in the Muslim world,” he said – leaving no doubt what he meant.

“Should we wait for our sons in Palestine to suffer harm more than what they experience nowadays, for al-Aqsa Mosque to be restricted more or for Syrians and Yemenis to be killed more? When will the time come for us to raise our voices in unison against oppression?”

Nasrallah urged “activat(ing) and boost(ing) all forms of the resistance against the Israeli normalization…We won’t abandon Palestine and its people,” he stressed. “Israel, the cancerous tumor, is to be wiped out” – meaning one day Palestinians and regional countries will be freed from its oppression.

On Tuesday, Muslim MKs addressed Israeli soldiers attacking Muslim Al-Aqsa Mosque worshipers on Sunday – to make way for settlers led by notorious racist Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel commemorating Tisha B’Av – marking the destruction of Jerusalem, two holy temples and other ancient tragedies.

MK Ayman Odeh called his visit “provocative,” saying “(h)e’s a minister, not just a settler. He’s a government representative, and the government isn’t condemning” his offensive act.

“This means that the government wants to turn the political issue in Jerusalem into a religious conflict between Muslims and Jews. We reject that approach, which will lead to a bloody war.”

Israeli high crimes take many forms. Muslims are targets for praying to the wrong God. Thousands are wrongfully imprisoned for political reasons.

On Tuesday, Israeli prison guards assaulted wrongfully incarcerated for life Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine leader Ahmed Saadat in Nafha prison.

Palestinian Minister of Prisoners Affairs, Issa Qaraqe, said he and others were attacked. Torture, beatings and humiliation are standard Israeli practice. Qaraqe demanded this “craziness” stop – or things will “explode.”

On Monday, Israeli soldiers murdered another Palestinian in cold blood – the 18th this year. Muhammad Abu Latifa was “executed” during one of Israel’s multiple daily community raids – bursting lawlessly into Palestinian homes pre-dawn, terrorizing family members, making arrests without just cause, and at times committing cold-blooded murder.

An Israeli spokesperson lied saying Muhammad fell off a roof fleeing from Israeli soldiers – ludicrously claiming he and another Palestinian youth planned a terror attack in Israel, never presenting evidence when these type accusations are made.

Muhammad’s uncle, Jamal Abu Latifa, refuted the official story, saying “(h)e was chased at 5:30AM, shot in the feet, then arrested.”

“Surprisingly, the Israeli soldiers shot him in the chest, then tied him with electricity wires, and we have evidence that some of his body parts were fractured as a result of the assault by soldiers.”

He didn’t fall off a roof. He committed no crimes. “The occupation army executed Muhammad after they detained him,” his uncle said.

Israeli forces attack Palestinians daily. Most incidents don’t get reported. Too many occur regularly. On Monday, 15-year-old Abd al-Karim Azis al-Haddad was assaulted without just cause.

He suffered multiple bruises and internal bleeding. He was beaten on his waist and genitals inside a police station rest room. Two other Palestinian youths were assaulted the same way on the same day in the same place.

In early July, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of making “abusive arrests” – targeting Palestinian children, forcing them to sign confessions in Hebrew they don’t understand for alleged crimes they didn’t commit.

Israel mistreats Palestinian children like adults. It policy reflects police state viciousness.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Are they expecting something to happen?  As you will read about below, the European Union says that any nation within the EU that does not enact “bail-in” legislation within the next two months will face legal action.  The countries that are being threatened in this manner include Italy and France.  If you fast forward two months from this moment, that puts us in early August.  So clearly the European Union wants everything to be squared away by the end of the summer.  Is there a reason for this?  Are they anticipating that something really bad will happen in September or thereafter?  Why such a rush?

We all remember what happened when major banks were “bailed out” during the last financial crisis.  A tremendous amount of taxpayer money was given to the big banks to help prop them up so they wouldn’t fail.  This greatly upset a lot of people.

Well, when the next great financial crisis hits Europe, banks are not going to get “bailed out” this time.  Instead, we are going to see “bail-ins”.

So precisely what is a “bail-in”?  Essentially, what happens is that wealth is transferred from the “stakeholders” in the bank to the bank itself in order to keep it solvent.  That means that creditors and shareholders could potentially loseeverything if a major bank in Europe fails.  And if their “contributions” are not enough to save the bank, those holding private bank accounts will have to take “haircuts” just like we saw in Cyprus.  In fact, the travesty that we witnessed in Cyprus is being used as a “template” for much of the new legislation that is being enacted all over Europe.

The bottom line is that not a single bank account in the European Union will ever be truly safe again.

By this time, everyone in the EU was already supposed to have enacted “bail-in” legislation, but some countries in Europe have been dragging their feet.  So now the European Commission (the executive body of the European Union) is giving them a hard deadline.  According to Reuters, any nation that has not passed “bail-in” legislation within two months will be subject to legal action…

The European Commission on Thursday gave France, Italy and nine other EU countries two months to adopt new EU rules on propping up failed banks or face legal action.

The rules, known as the bank recovery and resolution directive (BRRD), seek to shield taxpayers from having to bail out troubled lenders, forcing creditors and shareholders to contribute to the rescue in a process known as “bail-in”.

So which countries are being threatened?

It turns out that there are 11 of them.  The following comes from Mark O’Byrne…

The article “EU regulators tell 11 countries to adopt bank bail-in rules” reported how 11 countries are under pressure from the EC and had yet “to fall in line”. The countries wereBulgaria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, France and Italy.

France and Italy are two countries who are regarded as having particularly fragile banking systems.

But why only two months to get this done?

When I was in law school, I took an entire course on European Union law.  Normally, things in Europe take a very long time to get done.  It is out of character for the European Commission to rush to get something like this done so quickly.

Could they be anticipating that this legislation will need to be put into use very soon?

What we do know is that bonds in Europe have already been crashing, and it appears that the European Central Bank is starting to lose control over European financial markets.

And we also know that there has been a sustained bank run in Greece.  In fact, it is being reported that 700 million euros were pulled out of Greek banks on Friday alone.  Personally, I think that anyone that still has any money in Greek banks is absolutely insane.  Some day in the not too distant future, Greek bank account holders are going to be in for a “haircut” just like we saw in Cyprus.  The following comes from Zero Hedge…

While the Greek government believes it may have won the battle, if not the war with Europe, the reality is that every additional day in which Athens does not have a funding backstop, be it the ECB (or the BRIC bank), is a day which brings the local banking system to total collapse.

As a reminder, Greek banks already depends on the ECB for some €80.7 billion in Emergency Liquidity Assistance which was about 60% of total deposits in the Greek financial system as of April 30. In other words, they are woefully insolvent and only the day to day generosity of the ECB prevents a roughly 40% forced “bail in” deposit haircut a la Cyprus.

But of course Greece will only be just the beginning.  In the end, I expect major banks to fail all over Europe as we head into the greatest financial crisis that Europe has ever seen.  Bank account holders all over the continent could end up having to take “haircuts”, and that would just make the coming deflationary cycle in Europe a lot worse.

And I actually expect events in Europe to start accelerating greatly by the end of this calendar year.  Apparently the top dogs in the European Union are also concerned about the immediate future, because they are rushing to get “bail-in” legislation passed in every nation in the EU by the end of the summer.

Fortunately, the United States has not moved in a similar direction – at least not yet.  It is always possible that during an “emergency situation” anything can happen.  We saw that in Cyprus.  But for the moment, European bank accounts appear to be more vulnerable than U.S. bank accounts.

Not that any of us should have much confidence in the major banks in the United States either.  Since the end of the last financial crisis they have become more reckless than ever.  At this point, the six largest banks in this country collectively have 278 trillion dollars of exposure to derivatives.  A day is coming when the “too big to fail” banks will actually start failing, and that will absolutely cripple our economy.

We are moving into a time of great financial instability.  During such a time, one of the keys will be to not have all of your eggs in one basket.  That way it will be more difficult for your wealth to be wiped out by a single event.

This carefully researched article by Amy Worthington first published by GR in July 2004 sheds light on the unspoken and forbidden truth: geoengineering and environmental modification (ENMOD) techniques for  military use.

It is worth noting that geo-engineering is casually dismissed and excluded from the debate on climate change. It is a scientific taboo. The mainstream media has chosen not to provide coverage of  of aerosol and electronic operations for military use and their underlying impacts on the global environment. 

Michel Chossudovsky, GR Editor, July 29, 2015 

*      *     *

North America is now suffering its seventh year of conspicuous and dangerous aerosol and electromagnetic operations conducted by the U.S. government under the guise of national security. Concerned citizens watch in fear as military tankers discolor the skies with toxic chemicals that morph into synthetic clouds.

We continually witness bizarre meteorological occurrences as powerful electromagnetic devices manipulate both the jet stream and individual storm fronts to create artificial weather and climatic conditions. Black operations projects embedded within these aerosol missions are documented to sicken and disorient select populations with biological test agents and psychotronic mind/mood control technologies.Part of what is happening in the atmosphere above us involves the Pentagon’s secret space weapons program, designed for strategic, operational and tactical levels of war. NASA missions will soon be transferred to Pentagon control.1 The Air Force Space Command declares that, in order to monitor and shape world events, it must fight intense, decisive wars with great precision from space.2 Air Force Secretary James G. Roche has stated: “Space capabilities are integrated with, and affect every link in the kill chain.”3A glimpse into new death technologies under construction is in legislation introduced by Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinch. His unsuccessful Space Preservation Act of 2001 was intended to ban space deployment of:4

* electronic, psychotronic and information weaponry* high altitude ultra low frequency weapons

* plasma, electromagnetic, sonic and ultrasonic weapons

* laser weapons

* strategic, theater, tactical or extraterrestrial weapons

* chemical biological, environmental climate or tectonic weapons

* chemtrails (this item was stricken from a later version, suggesting duress)

In their quest to remain top dog in the kill chain, the purveyors of perpetual war have deliberately dimmed earth’s life-giving sunlight,5 and reduced atmospheric visibility with lung-clogging particulates and polymers.6 This ecological terrorism has severely compromised public health, according to thousands of testimonials. Years of mass appeals to legislators, media and military officials for information, and for cessation of catastrophic atmospheric degradation, have fallen on deaf bureaucratic ears. Public awareness of what befalls us remains as murky as our skies because those “in the know” are muzzled by national secrecy laws and Americans have no authority to challenge matters of national security. Left to gather clues, we know this much so far:

1. At least part of the aerosol project has been dubbed Operation Cloverleaf,7 probably due to its multi-faceted operations, which include: weather modification, military communications, space weapons development, ozone and global warming research plus biological weaponry and detection testing.2. Dumping tons of particulate matter from aircraft has geo-engineered our planetary atmosphere into a highly charged, electrically-conductive plasma useful for military projects.8 The air we breathe is laden with asbestos-sized synthetic fibers and toxic metals, including barium salts, aluminum, and reportedly, radioactive thorium.9 These materials act as electrolytes to enhance conductivity of military radar and radio waves.10 Poisonous on par with arsenic and a proven suppressant of the human immune system,11 atmospheric barium weakens human muscles, including those of the heart.12 Inhaled aluminum goes directly to the brain and medical specialists confirm that it causes oxidative stress within brain tissue, leading to formation of Alzheimer’s like neurofibrillary tangles.13 Radioactive thorium is known to cause leukemia and other cancers.14

3. Only a small percentage of the military’s atmospheric modification projects are visibly obvious. What we can’t see is equally dangerous. The ionosphere, the earth and its inhabitants are continually bombarded with high frequency microwaves used to manipulate the charged atmosphere for weather modification, information gathering and for tectonic (earthquake-producing) weaponry.15 Independent chemtrail researcher Clifford Carnicom confirms that we are also continuously subjected to extremely low electromagnetic frequencies (ELF) pulsing at 4 hertz multiples, frequencies known to profoundly affect human biological and mental functioning.16

4. There is a well-documented biological component to continuously ongoing atmospheric studies in which nations and regions are furtively inoculated via specially designed delivery systems with combinations of viruses, bacteria, fungi, mycoplasma, desiccated blood cells and exotic biological markers so that testmasters can assess human, animal and plant response.17

5. The multi-organizational megalith perpetrating these bio-chem projects against humanity includes the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and its research arm DARPA, plus the Department of Energy (DOE) with its huge network of national labs and universities. Private defense contractors and pharmaceutical companies are heavily involved.18 Cooperating governments of other nations and probably some United Nations agencies are complicit, since the aerosol projects are global in scope.

Gross chemical and electromagnetic pollution is only part of the horrific realities we endure. The sociopaths who brazenly pervert skies, climate and weather for power and profit are the same madmen who have waged four limited nuclear wars since 1991. Radioactive weaponry, declared both illegal and immoral by the entire civilized world, has been used by the Pentagon in Desert Storm, the Balkans campaign and the on-going occupation-wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Few Americans understand the extent of carnage inflicted in their name across the planet.

By scientific definition, the missiles, tank penetrators and bunker busting bombs unleashed against Iraq and Afghanistan by U.S. and British forces in the so-called war on terror are nuclear weapons.19 Refuse from radioactive weaponry does not disperse, but remains in the atmosphere organotoxic, mutagenic and carcinogenic to all living flesh for 4.5 billion years.

Inhabitants of the Pentagon’s two newly “liberated” nations are now slowly dying of radiation and heavy metal poisoning. Victims of U.S. weaponry used in Afghanistan have a concentration of non-depleted uranium isotopes in their bodies never before seen in civilian populations.20 Tons of depleted and non-depleted uranium contaminating their land, air, food and water guarantee their painful demise. Using data from the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), nuclear scientist Leuren Moret calculates that the estimated 2,500+ tons of depleted uranium used against Iraq in 1991 and 2003 is sufficient to cause 25 million new cancers.21 Is it a coincidence that the population of Iraq, according to the CIA, is 25 million?

The quarter million U.S. and British fighting forces who have helped the Pentagon deliver this holocaust also face inevitable radiological death by slow burn. Rotated into atomic war zones since 2001, coalition troops have inhaled and ingested millions of tiny invisible ceramic uranium particles which emit alpha, beta and gamma radiation as they embed in lungs, kidneys, blood, lymph and bone.22 Radiation exposure to a single internalized U-238 (uranium) alpha particle is 50 times the allowable whole body dose for one year under international standards.23 As U-238 decays into daughter isotopes, it becomes ever more radioactive, causing cell and organ destruction to escalate over time.24 Uranium contamination leads to incapacitating, multi-organ system disorders identical to illnesses suffered by thousands of Gulf War I vets. Bodily fluids poisoned with uranium isotopes sicken spouses and visit upon offspring a genetic Armageddon.25

Who knows what a disabled and prematurely dying military population will mean to future stability and safety of USA? Yet Senator Chuck Hagel (R- Neb.) now demands that America provide more fodder for its atomic battlefields by reinstating the military draft so that “all of our citizens…bear some responsibility and pay some price” in order to “understand the intensity of the challenges we face.”26

Despite disingenuous denials that biological harm will result from atomic warfare,27 the Pentagon knows full well the gruesome realities of uranium weaponry by virtue of its own voluminous studies spanning 60 years. Pentagon documents confirm that America’s war establishment knowingly exposes its own troops to dangerous levels of radiation.28 The resulting illness of those now returning from the war zones is already making headlines.29

Because our military-industrial overlords brazenly poison the very grunts who make their war games possible, we must logically conclude there is virtually nothing they would not secretly and sadistically do to the rest of us. Military officials lie as perniciously about chemtrail operations30 as they do about effects of DU weaponry. If people were to consider the published science regarding chemtrails and DU, they would understand that we are all in mortal jeopardy.

Both the Pentagon’s aerosol operations and its limited nuclear wars are deeply interconnected. We can trace the beginnings of Operation Cloverleaf right to the Strangelove brain of Dr. Edward Teller, father of the hydrogen bomb and proponent of nuking inhabited coast lines to rearrange them for economic projects.31 Before he died in 2003, Teller was director emeritus of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where plans for nuclear, biological and directed energy weapons are crafted. In 1997, Teller publicly outlined his proposal to use aircraft to scatter in the stratosphere millions of tons of electrically-conductive metallic materials, ostensibly to reduce global warming.32

Shortly after Teller’s presentation, the public began seeing frenetic chemtrailing. In 2000, CBS News admitted that scientists were “looking at drastic solutions for global warming, including manipulating the atmosphere on a massive scale.” CBS confirmed that the plan to load the air with tiny particles would “deflect enough sunlight to trigger global cooling.”33

Teller estimated that commercial aircraft could be used to spew these particles at a cost of 33 cents a pound.34 This gives credence to a report by an airline manager, forced by a compulsory non-disclosure agreement to remain anonymous, that commercial aircraft have been co-opted to assist the military in consummating Project Cloverleaf.35 A 1991 Hughes aircraft patent confirms that sunscreen particulate materials can be run through jet engines.36 A science textbook now used in some public schools discusses the sunscreen project by showing a large orange-red jet with the caption, “Jet engines running on richer fuel would add particles to the atmosphere to create a sunscreen.” The logo on the plane says “Particle Air.”37 The implications of this crucial information should not be understated. A program to make America’s millions of annual jet flights a source of specially designed particulate pollution is serious business.

Cloverleaf particles and polymers saturating the air we breathe are smaller than 10 microns (PM 10) and are invisible to the human eye. By comparison, a human hair is 60 to 100 microns in thickness. Scientists and the EPA report that because PM10 and sub-micron pollution particles bypass lung filters and enter the blood stream, they cause radical changes in the endocrine and nervous systems. 38 They can trigger high blood pressure and cause heart attack within two hours of inhalation.39 They cause the blood to become sticky, making it tougher for the heart to pump and increasing the risk of blood clots and vessel damage.40 Now researchers in Taiwan document “a significant increase” in the number of stroke victims when PM10 pollutant levels rise.41 The American Lung Association confirms that we are breathing more toxic air than ever.42 No wonder nationwide asthma rates have been soaring in recent years.43

Tiny synthetic filaments called polymers are part of the brew. In 1990, a NATO report detailed how high-flying aircraft can modify the atmosphere by spraying polymers to absorb electromagnetic radiation.44 U.S. patent number 6315213 describes how cross-linked aqueous polymers dispersed into a storm diminish rain.45

Polymer chemist Dr. R. Michael Castle has studied atmospheric polymers for years. He has found that some of them contain bioactive materials, which can cause “serious skin lesions and diseases when absorbed into the skin.”46 He has identified microscopic polymers comprised of genetically-engineered fungal forms mutated with viruses. He says that trillions of fusarium (fungus)/virus mutated spores, which secrete a powerful mico-toxin, are part of the air we breathe.47 Allergies anyone?

We can safely bet that into our particle-enriched air, experimenters are also dumping nanoparticles, developed for a variety of military and industrial uses. These engineered carbon molecules, as small as one-thousandth the diameter of human hair, display bizarre chemical properties and are known to trigger organ damage.48 A recent study at Southern Methodist University found that fish exposed to one type of nanoparticle suffered severe brain damage after only 48 hours.49

The military’s aerosol operations have been climate altering to the extreme. Air traffic is a huge source of greenhouse pollution. Increasing that traffic exponentially in order to scatter tons of heat-trapping metallic particulates and heat-liberating barium salts have undoubtedly led to accelerated global warming. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including carbon dioxide, have reached a record high this year.50 As carbon dioxide levels rise, oxygen levels decrease.

In 1996, Scientists for Global Responsibility compiled a report contending that dangerous geoengineering, as proposed by Teller and the Global Change Research Coordination Office, would be absolutely ineffective in mitigating global warming. The report noted that climate engineering research is funded by industry with a vested interest in continued high consumption of fossil fuels.51 The hair-brained scheme of particle engineering was contrived to ensure that industry polluters will never be forced to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. But because warming and pollution trends have worsened drastically since the aerosol projects began, we must suspect that the warming mitigation program is a hoax and that chemtrailing is really intended, among other things, to create a series of “hobgoblins.”

The establishment’s modus operandi for maintaining a fierce and lucrative hold upon the collective American mind has been defined precisely by satirist H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) who wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and thus clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

In The Report from Iron Mountain published in 1967, just as the Pentagon’s lucrative Vietnam War was being revved into high gear, establishment braintrusters confirmed that perpetual war is absolutely vital for controlling and manipulating the masses. The document even suggested a number of options for creating fictitious enemies, noting that perpetual war induces populations to give blind allegiance to political authority.52

Since the 1930s, when the Eastern Establishment, including the Bush family, used its New York banks and oil companies to secretly fund Hitler’s German Nazi party,53 our controllers have employed FEAR, the concept of ENEMY and WAR to keep us in bondage. Chemtrailing is a manifestation of the Fourth Reich, an era of corporate fascism ushered in by a powerful military juggernaut, which manufactures enemies and unleashes fake terror attacks to scare us into voiceless submission.

Both Saddam Hussein and the al Queda networks have long been nourished with U.S. government and corporate funding and groomed by U.S. military and corporate advisors to play useful roles as “enemies.”54  Former German Technology Minister Andreas von Bulow recently confirmed on U.S. radio that hijacked planes were able to fly around the eastern U.S. on 9/11 unimpeded by military interdiction because those attacks were part of a carefully-orchestrated “covert operation” designed to coerce America into perpetual conflict with the Muslim world.55

Now, a “secret” Pentagon report has been conveniently leaked to the media. It contends that abrupt climate change is the most fearful hobgoblin yet.56 Authored by change agents with ties to the CIA and the Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the report contends that abrupt climate change will lead to a global catastrophe of monumental proportions, including nuclear war and natural disasters, as whole nations disappear beneath the encroaching sea and survivors fight for dwindling food, water and energy supplies.

Yet the Pentagon has been involved for decades in the drastic manipulation of weather, climate and atmospheric conditions. The U.S. used a chemical agent dubbed Olive Oil during Operation Popeye to induce heavy rains in Vietnam 40 years ago.57 The Air Force document titled “Weather As a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025” lists its weaponized agenda for creating abrupt climate change including: Storm creation and modification, fog and cloud creation, precipitation enhancement, precipitation denial, drought inducement and artificial creation of “space weather.” This document also states that the military’s radical weather modification agenda will “become a part of national security policy with both domestic and international applications.”58

Weather weapons are now routinely used in war zones. A citizen reporting from Serbia noted that during NATO operations in the Balkans, black clouds suddenly materialized out of blue skies, hailstones were the size of eggs, and surreal thunder and lightening terrified the people. He reported that scientists found that the electromagnetic field over Serbia had been punctured, causing rain systems to circumvent the region.59 In addition to manufactured drought, scientists also predict that Serbia will suffer 10,000 cancer deaths from DU weaponry used there.60

According to University of Ottawa Professor Michael Chossudovsky, the military’s High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), operating in Alaska as part of the Strategic Defense Initiative, is a powerful tool for weather and climate modification.61 Operated jointly by the U.S. Navy and Air Force, HAARP antennas bombard and heat the ionosphere, causing electromagnetic frequencies to bounce back to earth, penetrating everything living and dead.62

HAARP transmissions make holes in the ozone,63 creating yet another hobgoblin. HAARP inventor Bernard Eastlund described in his original patent how antenna energy can interact with plumes of atmospheric particles, used as a lens or focusing device, to modify weather.64 HAARP is capable of triggering floods, droughts and hurricanes, much to the chagrin of both the European Parliament and the Russian Duma.65

HAARP also generates sweeping pulses through the ULF/ELF range.66 In 2000, independent researchers monitored HAARP transmissions of 14 hertz. They found that when these signals were broadcast at high output levels, wind speeds topped 70 miles per hour. They watched as these same transmissions dispersed a huge weather front approaching the west coast from California to British Columbia. Although precipitation had been originally forecast, the front was seen shredding apart on satellite photos and rain did not materialize.67 The hobgoblin drought can be an enriching and empowering tool for certain corporate and governing entities.

HAARP is not only capable of destabilizing agricultural and ecological systems anywhere on the planet, but its effects can target select regions to affect human physical, mental and emotional responses during non-lethal warfare projects.68 HAARP frequencies beamed at specific targets can generate catastrophic earthquakes,69 exactly like the quake last December which killed thousands of people in Iran, a nemesis nation according to the Bush administration.

The Pentagon’s warning about climate catastrophe is surely nothing more than a thinly-veiled attempt to prepare the masses for the bizarre atmospheric upheavals we can expect as the military continues to brutalize our planet and near space with its grotesque toys. And we ain’t seen nothing yet. Dr. Eastlund and his ilk have developed plans for solar power satellites designed to modify the weather with electromagnetic beam output that dwarfs the present HAARP system.70 As abrupt climate change is increasingly orchestrated, we will surely need additional fascist agencies, an ever-growing military budget and more poison-particle projects that just happen to ensure population reduction as a side benefit.

Despite visual evidence that every aspect of our physical environment is being manipulated and damaged for war games, some Americans cannot accept that dangerous covert operations are being conducted by a government they still believe to be a virtuous defender of freedom. Their stumbling block is a numbing belief that their own officials would never perpetrate dangerous experimentation on humanity since “they have families too.” History and the release of declassified government documents disprove such naiveté.

<Although “they” had families too, the U.S. government and its defense contractors exposed citizens of the northwest U.S. to huge and deliberate releases of radioactive iodine 131 from the Hanford Nuclear Reservation where plutonium was produced for nuclear bombs.71 Those Cold War releases unleashed radiation illnesses upon thousands of downwinders, some of whom received up to 350 rads of radiation when a maximum safety dose is set at .025 rads annually.72 Between 1949 and 1952, radioactive pellets, dust and particles were tested on the hapless citizens of Utah and New Mexico.73

By 1963, 1,200 nuclear weapons tests conducted at the Nevada test site had exposed every person in the U.S. to deadly radioactive fallout, causing millions of fetal deaths, spontaneous abortions, stillbirths and birth defects.74 The U.S. government also conducted over 4,000 radiation experiments on individual human test subjects without their informed consent.75 The delayed effects of decades of radiation exposure from weapons testing are today demonstrated by a U.S. population plagued with epidemic cancer and heart disease, neurological disorders, low fertility, chronic fatigue, obesity (thyroid involvement), immune system dysfunction and learning disabilities. Approximately half of all pregnancies in the U.S. result in prenatal or postnatal death or an otherwise less than healthy baby.76 As military tankers spew white chemical plumes across America at a cost of $3,448 per hour per tanker,77 we are reminded of Dr. Leonard Cole’s 1994 testimony before a Senate Committee regarding 45 years of open air testing during which military aircraft sprayed American cities with bacteria, fungus and carcinogenic chemicals.78 Between 1962-1973, the U.S. Navy conducted hundreds of bio-chem tests known as Operation SHAD (Shipboard Hazard and Defense). SHAD projects like Autumn Gold and Copper Head exposed 10,000 navy personnel to aircraft spray laden with biological and chemical warfare agents, including sarin nerve gas.79 The cocktails used in those genocidal “tests” are now linked to cancer, heart and lung problems suffered by surviving guinea pigs.

We are told that defense officials perpetrated these atrocities so that scientists could learn about how to “protect” Americans from attack. So why, in the late 80s, would our “protectors” fall all over themselves to supply Saddam Hussein’s war machine with 90 shipments of chemical and biological weaponry, including sarin, anthrax, botulism, brucella and West Nile Virus?80

It will likely be years before Americans are told what is being tested upon them during our present chemtrail/space wars era. The Hanford downwinders did not learn until 1986 what had been unleashed upon them some 30 years earlier; SHAD victims filed suit in 2003 to learn the extent to which they were intentionally exposed to dangerous substances in the 60s.

To understand how our nation has arrived at this doomsday corruption, we must recall that immediately after WWII ended, the U.S. government initiated Operation Paperclip through which a large number of German Nazi scientists were imported to the United States. Once issued new identities, these death industry pros were employed in U.S. military laboratories to develop a dazzling array of secret weaponry projects.81 With congressional funding, the crowning achievement of this nexus was the creation of ghastly new bioweapons, including the AIDS virus82 and an incapacitating chronic fatigue agent engineered from mycoplasma and brucella.83

The military is empowered to continue lethal experimentation by devious wording of Section 1520a Chapter 32 of U.S. Code Title 50. The law states that the Secretary of Defense may NOT conduct any chemical or biological test or experiment on civilian populations, unless such tests are for medical, therapeutic, pharmaceutical, agricultural, industrial purposes or for research in general or for protection against weapons or for law enforcement purposes, including riot control. So DOD may not use us for guinea pigs, unless it is for any “good” reason under the sun! The law states that human subjects must give informed consent. But a nasty loophole in Section 1515 of Chapter 32 allows informed consent to be suspended by executive order during a period of national emergency, a situation under which this nation perpetually labors by deliberate hobgoblin design.

Few American test rats realize that the Pentagon’s boys in Congress have now:

* appropriated millions of dollars for the manufacture and testing of new “mini nukes” and bunker buster bombs.84

* authorized the DOE to resume nuclear testing in Nevada.85

* exempted DOD and DOE from landmark environmental laws in the development of these new weapons.86

America’s 70,000 nuclear weapons manufactured since 1945 are not sufficient! As DOE gears up to develop and test fourth-generation nukes, numerous reports continue to surface about the agency’s sordid corruption and mismanagement. DOE’s habitual cover-up of site contamination and its devious efforts to downplay serious illnesses suffered by many of its nuclear workers are among recent scandals.87

When new “low yield” nuclear weapons (defined as being smaller than 5 kilotons) are tested in Nevada, downwinders might like to know that a mini .5 kiloton nuclear warhead would have to burrow 150 feet to eliminate atmospheric fallout. No weapon yet developed can penetrate more than 40 feet into the earth. A tested nuclear warhead that burrows to only 40 feet will throw a million cubic feet of radioactive debris into the atmosphere.88

The Pentagon’s new nuke era is in the capable hands of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who has so ably presided over the pre-emptive nuclear incineration of Middle Eastern Muslims. Rumsfeld has never adequately explained why his Department was unable to defend the Pentagon building despite a full hour’s notice that hijacked planes were in the air. Should Rumsfeld be replaced due to the Pentagon’s Iraqi torture scandal, we are assured that his Bush-appointed successor will share his have-nuke-will-travel ideology.

Working closely with Rumsfeld is a coven of pro-nukers, including his advisor Keith Payne, a vocal advocate of pre-emptive nuclear war. Payne has written that an “intelligent” nuclear offensive launched by the U.S. would result in only 20 million U.S. casualties, “a level compatible with national survival and recovery.”89

Now that we have tied together the historical and political realities for which we mindlessly wave our flags, we still hope that sufficient numbers of American lab rats will miraculously awaken from their collective stupor and take stock of our appalling situation. After all, rodents have a notoriously short life span and are always killed when no longer useful to those conducting research. The irony of this horror story is that we rats are being plundered to finance our own demise. Our national debt of 7.2 trillion grows by $1.8 billion a day.90 The Pentagon cannot account for $2.3 trillion of its shadowy transactions.91 The radioactive operations in Iraq are costing $3.7 billion a month, those in Afghanistan $900 million a month.92 No one knows how many $billions are being flushed into Operation Cloverleaf and other hobgoblin projects. The U.S. spends $11,000 per second on weapons, according to calculations of celebrated author William Thomas.93

So, while we await the great awakening, have a wonderful, barium-dried summer under a synthetic tarpaulin of aluminum-white, particle-laden, electrically-charged aviation scum that passes for sky. Endure well your respiratory and ocular difficulties while staring at huge oily sun rings and smeary sundogs, the patent signature of chemical assault. Don’t forget to salute and click your heels when you see tanker formations patriotically saturating the atmosphere with such a dense, micro-particulate brew that they cast black shadows alongside or ahead of themselves.

As you witness the noxious drama in the skies, remember, it’s all just part of the “kill chain.”

Notes

1. “USAF Plans to Utterly Dominate, Rule Space,” Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times.com, 9-14-03.

2. Almanac 2000, Journal of the Air Force Association, May 2000, Vol. 83.

3. Roche’s “kill chain” statement was made during his October 2002 speech at the Conference on the Law and Policy Relating to National Security Activities in Outer Space.

4. “Pentagon Preps for War in Space,”Noah Shachtman, http://www.wirednews.com , 2-20-04.

5. “The Theft of Sunlight,” Clifford Carnicom, 10-25-03: “…Measurements show a rapid reduction in the transmission of sunlight from a value of 97% on a ‘clear day’ to the lower level of approximately 80% during the early stages of heavy aerosol operations….The absorption and displacement of this solar energy into environmental, military, biological and electromagnetic operations represents a theft of the natural and divine rights of the inhabitants of this planet.” www.carnicom.com .

6. “Visibility Standards Changed,” Clifford Carnicom, 3-30-01: “It will be noted that in October of 1997, a change in the reporting system of visibility data was reduced from a former maximum of 40 miles to a limit of 10 miles. It is a reasonable question to ask as to why that change was made, and whether or not it was made in anticipation of…large scale aircraft aerosol operations over large scale geographic regions.” http://www.carnicom.com .

7. “A Meeting,” Clifford Carnicom, 7-26-03. See http://www.carnicom.com .

8. “Atmospheric Conductivity,” Clifford Carnicom, 7-09-01, http://www.carnicom.com .

9. For facts on barium toxicity, see Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, September 1995. For references on barium related to chemtrails, see www.carnicom.com for the following articles: “Barium Tests are Positive,” Clifford Carnicom, 5-10-04; “Sub-micron Particulates Isolated,” Carnicom, 4-26-04; “Barium Affirmed by Spectroscopy,” Clifford Carnicom, 11-1-2000; “Electrolysis and Barium,” Carnicom, 5-27-02; “Rainwater Metals,” Carnicom, 7-30-01; “Barium Identification Further Confirmed,” Carnicom, 11-28-00.

10. “The Plasma Frequency: Radar Applications,” Clifford Carnicom, 11-05-01; See http://www.carnicom.com .

11. “Functional heterogeneity in the process of T lymphocyte activation; barium blocks several modes of T-cell activation, but spares a functionally unique subset of PHA-activable T cells,” Clinical Experimental Immunology, Pecanha and Dos Reis, May 1989.

12. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) Safety Data Sheet.

13. Aluminum Toxicity, Barbara Barnett, MD, 11-26-02. See http://www.emedicine.com .

14. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, July 1999; For information on thorium in chemtrails: “The Methodic Demise of Natural Earth,” Dr. Mike Castle, 3-27-04,http://www.willthomas.net .

15. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, 1995; “HAARP: Vandalism in the Sky?” Begich and Manning, Nexus Magazine, January 1996.

16. “Elf Radiation is Confirmed,” Clifford Carnicom, 11-17-02; “Elf Disruption & Countermeasures,” Clifford Carnicom 11-27-02; “A Proposal of Cascading Resonance,” Clifford Carnicom, 4-21-03. Seehttp://www.carnicom.com for these and numerous other frequency studies; also “Electromagnetic Waves Linked to Children’s Brain Tumor,” Kyodo News Service, 6-8-03.

17. Death In the Air, Global Terrorism and Toxic Warfare, Leonard G. Horowitz, Tetrahedron Publishing Group, 2001; “Military Conducting Biological Warfare in Washington,” 12-12-97, www.rense.com; Probing the Chemtrails Conundrum, William Thomas, Essence Publications, 2000, http://www.willthomas.net .

18. For a comprehensive list of those involved in Operation Cloverleaf and associated projects, see: “Chemtrails–Top Intel, Military, and Defense Contractors Watching Carnicom.com,” rense.com, 1-12-00. Among agencies most interested in opposition to chemtrail projects is the United States Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute associated with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. See: “The Monitors of JGI,” Clifford Carnicom, March 17, 2003, carnicom.com. 19. The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War– A paper presented at the World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference at the University of Hamburg, October 16-19, 2003, Dr. Leuren Moret. Dr. Moret is a former staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Her work is highly documented with scientific papers.

20. Uranium Medical Research Centre, “Afghan Field Trip #2 Report,” November 2002; http://www.umrc.com ; also “Astoundingly High Afghan Uranium Levels Spark Alert,” Alex Kirby, BBC News Online, 5-23-03.

21. Moret, op. cit.

22. “Medical Effects of Internal Contamination with Uranium,” Dr. Asaf Durakovich, Department of Nuclear Medicine, Georgetown University School of Medicine, Washington D.C. March 1999. Volume 40, No. 1

23. Moret, op. cit.

24. “Contamination of Persian Gulf War Veterans and Others By Depleted Uranium,” Leonard A. Dietz, 2-21-99.

25. Durakovich, op cit; Dietz, op. cit. Moret, op. cit.

26. “Republican Senator: Bring Back the Draft,” World Net Daily, 4-20-04.

27. “Pentagon’s Uranium Denial,” New York Daily News, 4-27-04; “Pentagon: Uranium Didn’t harm N.Y. Unit,” Associated Press, 5-3-04. “Pentagon-Depleted Uranium No Health Risk,” Dr. Doug Rokke; 3-15-03. Dr. Rokke was an U.S. Army DU expert (1991-1995) and he confirms that the Pentagon is lying about DU risks.

28. Documents in which the hazards of uranium and depleted uranium exposure are discussed include: U.S. Army Training Manual STP-21-1-SMCT: Soldiers Manual of Common Tasks; “Health Effects of Depleted Uranium,” David E. McClain, Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute (AFRRI) Bethesda, Maryland; Marine Corp Memo Concerning DU (unclassified) 9-8-90; US Army Training Video, U.S. Army Depleted Uranium Project video: Depleted Uranium Hazard Awareness, 1995; “Army Not Adequately Prepared to Deal With Depleted Uranium Contamination,” General Accounting Office, January 1993; Office of the Secretary of Defense, Memorandum from Bernard Rostker to chiefs of all military branches re: Depleted Uranium Ammunition Training, 9-09-97.

29. “Soldiers Believe Depleted Uranium Cause of Illnesses,” Associate Press, 4-9-04; “Poisoned?” Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News, 4-4-04. Other stories in this series are: “Inside Camp of Troubles” and “Army to Test N.Y. Guard Unit.”

30. “Air Force Increases Rank of Lie,” letter by Walter M. Washabaugh, Colonel, USAF, denying the existence of chemtrails, received by e-mail on May 22, 2001 and posted at http://www.carnicom.comby Clifford E Carnicom, May 22 2001.

31. Begich and Manning, op. cit. p. 51.

32. Global Warming and Ice Ages: Prospects for Physics-Based Modulation of Global Change, Edward Teller and Lowell Wood, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, prepared for invited presentation at the International Seminar On Planetary Emergencies, Erice, Italy, August 20-23, 1997; also “The Planet Needs a Sunscreen,” Wall Street Journal, 10-17-97.

33. CBS News Eye on America Report : Cooling the Planet in two parts: 1-15-01 and 1-16-01.

34. Teller and Wood, op. cit.

35. “An Airline Manager’s Statement,” Posted by C.E. Carnicom on behalf of the author, 5-22-00. Quote: “The few airline employees who were briefed on Project Cloverleaf were all made to undergo background checks, and before we were briefed on it we were made to sign non-disclosure agreements which basically state that if we tell anyone what we know we could be imprisoned….They told us that the government was going to pay our airline, along with others, to release special chemicals from commercial aircraft….When we asked them why didn’t they just rig military aircraft to spray these chemicals, they stated that there weren’t enough military aircraft available to release chemicals on such a large basis as needs to be done….Then someone asked why all the secrecy. The government reps then stated that if the general public knew that the aircraft they were flying on were releasing chemicals into the air, environmentalist groups would raise hell and demand the spraying stop.”

36. US patent 5003186; Stratospheric Welsbach Seeding for Reduction of Global Warming, Hughes Aircraft Company, issued March 26, 1991.

37. Secondary school text book: Science I Essential Interactions, published by Centre Point Learning, Inc. of Fairfield, Ohio. See “Chemtrail Sunscreen Taught in Schools,” William Thomas,http://www.willthomas.com .

38. “Dirty Air and High Blood Pressure Linked,” Reuters Health, 3-31-01; “Bad Air Worsens Heart Trouble: Study Blames Particulates for Many Sudden Deaths,” Marla Cone, Los Angeles Times, June 4, 2000.

39. “Tiny Air Pollutants In the Air May Trigger Heart Attacks,” John McKenzie, ABC News 6-21-01, u .

40. “Air Pollution ‘Increases Stroke Risk,'” BBC News, 10-10-2003.

41. Ibid.

42. “Americans Breathing More Polluted, Toxic Air Than Ever,” Natalie Pawelski, CNN Environmental Unit, http://www.cnn.com .

43. Asthma Statistics, www.getasthmahelp.org; “Asthma Deadly Serious,” Spokesman Review, 7-6-97; www.asthmainamerica.com .

44. NATO paper: “Modification of Tropospheric Propagation Conditions,” May, 1990.

45. US patent 6,315,213 (Cordani) issued November 13, 2001.

46. “Chemtrails, Bio-Active Crystalline Cationic Polymers,” Dr. Mike Castle, 7-14-03 See u .

47. Ibid.

48. “Nanoparticles Toxic in Aquatic Habitat, Study Finds,” Rick Weiss, Washington Post, 3-29-04.

49. Ibid.

50. “Greenhouse Gas Level Hits Record High,” 3-22-04, http://www.NewScientist.com .

51. Climate Engineering: A Critical Review of Proposals, Scientists for Global Responsibility, School of Environmental Sciences, UEA, Norwich NR47TJ, November 1996.

52. Lewin L. C et al. Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace, New York: The Dial Press, 1967.

53. Trading With the Enemy, Charles Higham, Delacorte Press, 1983; Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Antony Sutton, 1976; “IBM Sued by Holocaust Lawyers –100 other US Firms Targeted for Nazi Links,” Paterson and Wastel, The Telegraph, UK, 2-18-0l; “Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration,” Michael Dobbs, Washington Post, 11-30-98; “How the Bush Family Made Its Fortune From the Nazis,” John Loftus, 7-2-02, http://www.rense.com . (John Loftus was a U.S. Department of Justice Nazi War Crimes prosecutor.)

54. This is a “Google project” that can fill volumes. Go to Google and type “CIA and al Queda,” then “CIA and Saddam.” Do the same with “Carlyle Group” for information on the Bush family’s shady dealings with the “enemy.”

55. Former German Defense Minister Confirms CIA Involvement in 9/11: Alex Jones Interviews Andreas von Bulow, 2-17-21, http://www.apfn.net

56. “Pentagon Tells Bush: Climate Change Will Destroy Us,” Mark Townsend and Paul Harris, The Observer, UK 2-24-04; “Climate Collapse, The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare Could change Radically and Fast,” David Stipp, Fortune Magazine, 2-9-04.

57. The Dead Farmer’s Almanac, Who Really Controls the Weather? Jim Larranaga, Priority Publications, 2001.

58. Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather In 2025, June 17, 1996. This report was produced by directive from the chief of staff of the Air Force.

59. “Very Weird Weather in Serbia, What’s Happening?” Goran Pavlovic, 10-30-03, rense.com.

60. “The Secret Nuclear War,” Eduardo Goncalves, The Ecologist, 3-22-01.

61. “Washington’s New World Order Weapons Have the Ability to Trigger Climate Change,” Center for Research on Globalization, Professor Michael Chossudovsky, University of Ottawa, January 2001.

62. “HAARP: Vandalism in the Sky?” Nick Begich and Jeane Manning, Nexus Magazine, December 1995.

63. Ibid.; also Castle, op. cit. Dr. Castle presents information on how HAARP punches massive holes in the open-air column ozone and how the Air Force then uses toxic chemicals to “patch” the holes it has created: Dr. Castle says: “Welsbach seeding and ozone hole remediation sciences utilize chemistries that are toxic to humans and the environment.”

64. “HAARP: Vandalism in the Sky?” Begich and Manning; Researcher David Yarrow is quoted as saying that Earth’s axial spin means that HAARP bursts are like a microwave knife producing a “long tear–an incision” in the multi-layer membrane of ionospheres that shield the Earth’s surface from intense solar radiation.

65. U.S. HAARP Weapon Development Concerns Russian Duma, Interfax News Agency, 8-10-02.

66. HAARP Update, Elfrad Group, http://elfrad.org/2000/Haarp2.htm    6-27-00.

67. “14 Hertz Signal Suppresses Rainfall, Induces Violent Winds,” 10-25-00, Newshawk Inc.; “When the Army Owns the Weather–Chemtrails and HAARP,” Bob Fitrakis, 2-13-02: In this article HAARP inventor Bernard Eastlund is quoted on how HAARP can affect the weather: “Significant experiments could be performed. The HAARP antenna as it is now configured modulates the auroral electrojet to induce ELF waves and thus could have an effect on the zonal winds.” Find this article with search engine at http://www.rense.com .

68. Angels Don’t Play This HAARP, Begich and Manning, op. cit.

69. Ibid.

70. “Space Based Weather Control: The ‘Thunderstorm Solar Power Satellite,’ ” Michael Theroux. See www.borderlands.com/spacewea.htm .

71. “After 12-year Wait for Trial, Downwinders Losing Hope,” Spokesman Review, 5-18-03; also “Hanford Plaintiffs Seek Details,” Spokesman Review, 4-2-04.

72. “Hanford Put Area At Risk: Spokane, North Idaho Were Exposed to Significant Radiation,” Spokesman Review,” April 22, 1994.

73. “Sick Century,” Eduardo Goncalves, The Ecologist, 11-22-01.

74. Moret, op. cit. “The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War” contains excellent statistics on the U.S. health ramifications of Cold War nuclear weapons testing and includes references to numerous scientific papers which document this tremendous damage to the national health.

75. Undue Risk, Secret State Experiments on Humans, Jonathan D. Moreno, Freeman & Co. 1999: Moreno was a senior staff member of the President’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments which completed in 1995 its studies of horrific U.S. government radiation experiments conducted since World War II.

76. Information reported by the National Research Council of the National Academy of Science Institute of Medicine in a 2000 study titled: Scientific Frontiers in Developmental Toxicology, Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology.

77. “Trouble With Tankers,” William Thomas, http://www.willthomas.net .

78. Testimony by Dr. Leonard A. Cole before the U.S. Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, May 6, 1994; also Clouds of Secrecy, The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas, Leonard A. Cole, Rowman & Littlefield, 1988.

79. “Secret Germ Warfare Experiments?” CBS News, 5-15-2000; “Pentagon to Reveal Biowarfare Tests,” CBS News, 9-20-2000; “US Navy Sprayed BioWarfare Chemtrails on Its Own Ships and Men,” NewsMax.com, 7-8-00; “Sailors: ‘We Were Used,’ ” Florida Today, 1-31-03.

80. Senate Banking Committee Report 103-900 (Riegle Report) issued May 25, 1994. This 551-page document contains a comprehensive list of biological and chemical warfare agents shipped to Saddam by U.S. companies under purview of the U.S. Commerce Department for use against Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the late 80s during the regime of George Bush Sr.

81. Moreno, op.cit. “To this day few Americans know about the special top-secret program that brought German scientists to the United States after World War II, and fewer still know that their number included medical scientists. Code-named Operation Paper Clip…hundreds of ‘specialists’ …entered the United States under Joint Chiefs’ protection, avoiding regular immigration procedures and requirements…It is hard to escape the conclusion that many of the German recruits were for decades important consultants on a myriad of military-medical projects.”

82. Emerging Viruses: Aids and Ebola, Dr. Len Horowitz, Tetrahedron Inc., 1996.

83. The Brucellosis Triangle, Donald W. Scott, Chelmstreet Publishers, 1998.

84. “Bush Signs Bill for New Generation Nuclear Weapons,” rense.com, 12-2-03. The Energy and Water Development Appropriations Act of 2004 allocates millions for new nuclear weapons and bolsters readiness for new weapons testing at the Nevada nuclear test site.

85. Ibid.

86. “House Approves Pentagon Wish List–Bill Includes Military Exemptions From Environmental Laws,” Nick Anderson, Los Angeles Times, 11-8-03.

87. “DOE Count of Worker Injuries Inaccurate,” Spokesman Review, 3-28-04; also “Book Alleges Cover-up at Nuclear Site,” Spokesman Review 3-28-04; also DOE Has Record of Broken Promises, editorial, 4-11-04.

88. “Kennedy Warns on Nuclear Tests,” Julian Borger in Washington, The Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk , 4-30-03.

89. “Rumsfeld’s Dr. Strangelove,” Fred Kaplan, MSN.com, 5-12-03.

90. “Bush Drives the Nation Towards Bankruptcy,” Peter Eavis, The American Conservative, 2-15-04.

91. The War on Waste, 1-29-02, cbsnews.com.

92. “Money for Iraq Fight Running Out,” The Australian 2-12-04 These figures are from U.S Army Chief of Staff General Peter Schoomaker.

93. “Fight of the Century,” William Thomas, http://www.willthomas.net .

Image: File photo shows Secretary General of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization Dmitry Mezentsev.

Secretary general of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) says recent conclusion of Iran’s nuclear talks with the six world powers will pave the way for Tehran’s full membership at the organization.

Speaking to IRNA on the sidelines of a forum of the heads of the leading SCO media outlets in Moscow on Tuesday, Dmitry Mezentsev explained about the positive effects of the recent nuclear agreement clinched by Iran and the P5+1 group of countries in Vienna on July 14.

Mezentsev said “Iran’s full membership in the organization has not been possible so far because of the sanctions” imposed on the country by the United States and European Union over Tehran’s civilian nuclear program.

“However, this obstacle has been removed now,” he added.

Sanctions were imposed on Iran by the US and EU at the beginning of 2012, alleging that there was diversion in Iran’s nuclear program toward military objectives; an allegation that Iran categorically rejected.

On July 14, Iran and the P5+1 group – the US, the UK, Germany, France, China, and Russia – reached the conclusion of negotiations over Tehran’s civilian nuclear program, with the Islamic Republic and the sextet sealing an agreement.

According to the agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), all economic and financial sanctions against Iran will be removed. In addition, all bans on Iran’s Central Bank, shipping, oil industry, and many other companies will be lifted.

The official added that after the implementation of the JCPOA begins, the SCO will put Iran’s membership request on its agenda and the country can become a full member of the organization.

The secretary general of the SCO said the organization is currently cooperating with Iran on various levels, noting, “Since 2005, Iran has been attending the Shanghai Cooperation Organization’s meetings as observer member.”

Mezentsev stated that cooperation between the Islamic Republic and the SCO covers all levels, including ministerial level and among secretaries of the member states’ national security councils, and the cooperation will increase once Iran becomes a full member.

At present, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has six permanent members, including China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Iran, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Mongolia are observer states of the SCO while Turkey, Sri Lanka, and Belarus are “dialogue partners” of the organization.

The forum of the heads of the leading SCO media outlets, opened in the Russian capital Moscow, themed “Towards a Common SCO Information Space.”

According to Russia’s Sputnik news agency, the event, which is organized by Rossiya Segodnya and Russia’s Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media, is attended by representatives of the Xinhua news agency (China), IRNA (Iran), TRT (Turkey), Kabar National News Agency (Kyrgyzstan), Khovar National Information Agency (Tajikistan), RTRK Kazakhstan, and India Today Group.

Quando in Gre­cia Tsi­pras è andato al governo, in Israele è suo­nato l’allarme: Syriza, soste­ni­trice della causa pale­sti­nese, chie­deva di porre fine alla coo­pe­ra­zione mili­tare della Gre­cia con Israele. Di fronte alla bru­tale repres­sione israe­liana con­tro i pale­sti­nesi, avver­tiva Tsi­pras, «non pos­siamo rima­nere pas­sivi, poi­ché quanto accade oggi sull’altra sponda del Medi­ter­ra­neo, può acca­dere sulla nostra sponda domani». Sette mesi dopo, ces­sato allarme: Panos Kam­me­nos, mini­stro della difesa del governo Tsi­pras, è andato in visita uffi­ciale a Tel Aviv, dove il 19 luglio ha fir­mato col mini­stro israe­liano della difesa, Moshe Ya’alon, un impor­tante accordo mili­tare. Per tale mossa, Kam­me­nos, fon­da­tore del nuovo par­tito di destra Anel, ha scelto il momento in cui la Gre­cia era atta­na­gliata dalla que­stione del debito. L’«Accordo sullo sta­tus delle forze», comu­nica il Mini­stero greco della difesa, sta­bi­li­sce il qua­dro giu­ri­dico che per­mette al «per­so­nale mili­tare di cia­scuno dei due paesi di recarsi e risie­dere nell’altro per par­te­ci­pare a eser­ci­ta­zioni e atti­vità di cooperazione».

Un accordo simile Israele lo ha fir­mato solo con gli Stati uniti.

Nell’agenda dei col­lo­qui anche la «coo­pe­ra­zione nel campo dell’industria mili­tare» e la «sicu­rezza marit­tima», in par­ti­co­lare dei gia­ci­menti off­shore di gas che Israele, Gre­cia e Cipro con­si­de­rano pro­pria «zona eco­no­mica esclu­siva», respin­gendo le riven­di­ca­zioni della Tur­chia. Sul tavolo dell’incontro «le que­stioni della sicu­rezza in Medio­riente e Nor­da­frica». Facendo eco a Ya’alon che ha denun­ciato l’Iran quale «gene­ra­tore di ter­ro­ri­smo, la cui ambi­zione ege­mo­nica mina la sta­bi­lità di altri Stati», Kam­me­nos ha dichia­rato: «Anche la Gre­cia è nel rag­gio dei mis­sili ira­niani; se uno solo rie­sce a rag­giun­gere il Medi­ter­ra­neo, potrebbe essere la fine degli Stati di que­sta regione». Ha quindi incon­trato i ver­tici delle forze armate israe­liane per sta­bi­lire un più stretto coor­di­na­mento con quelle gre­che. Con­tem­po­ra­nea­mente il capo della marina mili­tare elle­nica, il vice-ammiraglio Evan­ge­los Apo­sto­la­kis, ha fir­mato con la con­tro­parte israe­liana un accordo di coo­pe­ra­zione su non meglio pre­ci­sati «ser­vizi idrografici».

Il patto mili­tare con Israele, sti­pu­lato a nome del governo Tsi­pras, non è solo un suc­cesso per­so­nale di Kam­me­nos. Esso rien­tra nella stra­te­gia Usa/Nato che, nell’offensiva verso Est e verso Sud, mira a inte­grare sem­pre più stret­ta­mente la Gre­cia non solo nell’Alleanza ma nella più ampia coa­li­zione com­pren­dente paesi come Israele, Ara­bia Sau­dita, Ucraina e altri. Il segre­ta­rio gene­rale Stol­ten­berg ha dichia­rato che il «pac­chetto di sal­va­tag­gio» Ue per la Gre­cia è «impor­tante per l’intera Nato», essendo la Gre­cia un «solido alleato che spende oltre il 2% del pil per la difesa» (livello rag­giunto in Europa solo da Gran Bre­ta­gna ed Estonia).

Par­ti­co­lar­mente impor­tante per la Nato la base aero­na­vale della baia di Suda a Creta, usata per­ma­nen­te­mente dagli Stati uniti e altri alleati, negli ultimi anni per la guerra con­tro la Libia e le ope­ra­zioni mili­tari in Siria. Uti­liz­za­bile ora, gra­zie al patto con la Gre­cia, anche da Israele soprat­tutto in fun­zione anti-Iran.

In tale qua­dro stra­te­gico si ricom­pon­gono i con­tra­sti d’interesse fra Gre­cia e Israele, da un lato, e Tur­chia dall’altro.

La Tur­chia, dove la Nato ha oltre 20 basi e il Comando delle forze ter­re­stri, in nome della «lotta all’Isis» bom­barda i curdi del Pkk (veri com­bat­tenti anti-Isis) e, insieme agli Usa e ai «ribelli», si pre­para a occu­pare la fascia set­ten­trio­nale del ter­ri­to­rio siriano. Appel­lan­dosi all’articolo 4 del Patto Atlan­tico, in quanto ritiene minac­ciate la pro­pria sicu­rezza e inte­grità territoriale.

Manlio Dinucci

 il manifesto, 28 luglio 2015

The Greek people’s efforts to end the economic depression, recover their sovereignty and reverse the regressive socio-economic policies, which have drastically reduced living standards, have been thrice denied.

First, the denial came as tragedy: When the Greek majority elected Syriza to government and their debts increased, the economy plunged further into depression and unemployment and poverty soared.  The Greek people voted for Syriza believing its promises of ‘a new course’.  Immediately following their victory, Syriza reneged on their promise to restore sovereignty – and end the subjugation of the Greek people to the economic dictates of overseas bankers, bureaucrats and political oligarchs.  Instead Syriza kept Greece in the oligarchical imperialist bloc, portraying the European Union as an association of independent sovereign countries.  What began as a great victory of the Greek people turned into a tragic strategic retreat.   From their first day in office, Syriza led the Greek people down the blind alley of total submission to the German empire.

Then the tragedy turned into farce when the Greek people refused to acknowledge the impending betrayal by their elected leaders.  They were stunned, but mute, as Syriza emptied the Greek treasury and offered even greater concessions, including acceptance of the illegal and odious debts incurred by private bankers, speculators and political kleptocrats in previous regimes.

True to their own vocation as imperial overlords, the EU bosses saw the gross servility of Syriza as an invitation to demand more concessions – total surrender to perpetual debt peonage and mass impoverishment.  Syriza’s demagogic leaders, Yanis Varoufakis and Alexis Tsipras, shifting from fits of hysteria to infantile egotism, denounced ‘the Germans and their blackmail’ and then performed a coy belly-crawl at the feet of the ‘Troika’, peddling their capitulation to the bankers as  ‘negotiations’ and referring to their overlords as . . . ‘partners’.

Syriza, in office for only 5 months  brought Greece to the edge of total bankruptcy and surrender, then launched the ‘mother of all deceptions’ on the Greek people:  Tsipras convoked a ‘referendum’ on whether Greece should reject or accept further dictates and cuts to bare bones destitution.  Over 60% of the Greek people voted a resounding NO to further plunder and poverty.

In Orwellian fashion, the megalomaniac Tsipras immediately re-interpreted the ‘NO’vote as a mandate to capitulation to the imperial powers, accepting the EU bankers’ direct  supervision of the regime’s implementation of Troika’s policies – including drastic reductions of Greek pensions, doubling the regressive ‘VAT’ consumption tax on vital necessities and a speed-up of evictions of storeowners and householders behind in their mortgage payments.  Thus Greece became a vassal state:  Nineteenth century colonialism was re-imposed in the 21^st century.

Colonialism by Invitation

Greek politicians, whether Conservative or Socialist, have openly sought to join the German-led imperial bloc known as the European Union, even when it was obvious  that the Greek economy and financial system was vulnerable to domination by the powerful German ruling class.

From the beginning, the Greek Panhellenic Socialist Party (PASOK) and their Conservative counterparts  refused to recognize the class basis of the European Union.  Both political factions and the Greek economic elites, that is, the kleptocrats who governed and the oligarchs who ruled, viewed entry into the EU as an opportunity for taking and faking loans,  borrowing, defaulting and passing their enormous debts on to the public treasury!

Widely circulating notions among the Left that ‘Germany is responsible’ for the Greek crisis are only half true, while the accusations among rightwing financial scribes that the ‘Greek people are spendthrifts’ who brought on their own crisis is equally one-sided.  The reality is more complex:

 The crash and collapse of the Greek economy was a product of an entrenched parasitic rentier ruling class –both Socialist and Conservative – which thrived on borrowing at high interest rates and speculating in non-productive economic activities while imposing an astronomical military budget.  They engaged in fraudulent overseas financial transactions while grossly manipulating and fabricating financial data to cover-up Greece’s unsustainable trade and budget deficits.

German and other EU exporters had penetrated and dominated the Greek markets.  The bankers charged exorbitant interest rates while investors exploited cheap Greek labor.  The creditors ignored the obvious risks because Greek rulers were their willing accomplices in the ongoing pillage.

Clearly entry into and continued membership in the EU has largely benefited two groups of elites: the German rulers and the Greek rentiers:  The latter received short-term financial grants and transfers while the former gained powerful levers over the banks, markets and, most important, established cultural-ideological hegemony over the Greek political class.  The Greek elite and middle class believed ‘they were Europeans’ – that the EU was a beneficent arrangement and a source of prosperity and upward mobility.  In reality, Greek leaders were merely accomplices to the German conquest of Greece.  And the major part of the middle class aped the views of the Greek elite.

The financial crash of 2008-2009 ended the illusions for some but not most Greeks.  After 6 years of pain and suffering a new version of the old political class came to power: Syriza! Syriza brought in new faces and rhetoric but operated with the same blind commitment to the EU.  The Syriza leadership believed they were “partners”.

The road to vassalage is rooted deep in the psyche of the political class.  Instead of recognizing their subordinate membership in the EU as the root cause of their crisis, they blamed ‘the Germans, the bankers, Angela Merkel, Wolfgang Schnauble , the IMF, the Troika... The Greek rulers and middle class were in fact both victims and accomplices.

The German imperial regime loaned money from the tax revenues of German workers to enable their complicit Greek vassals to pay back the German bankers…  German workers complained.  The German media deflected criticism by blaming the ‘lazy Greek cheats’.  Meanwhile, the Greek oligarch-controlled media deflected criticism of the role of the parasitical political class back to the ‘Germans’.  This all served to obscure the class dynamics of empire building — colonialism by invitation.  The ideology of blaming peoples, instead of classes, is pitting German workers against Greek employees and pensioners.  The German masses support their bankers, while the Greek masses have elected and followed Syriza – their traitors.

From Andreas Papandreou to Alexis Tsipras:  Misconceptions about the European Union

After Syriza was elected a small army of instant experts, mostly leftist academics from Canada, the US and Europe, sprang up to write and speak, usually with more heat than light, on current Greek political and economic developments.  Most have little knowledge or experience of Greek politics, particularly its history and relations with the EU over the past thirty five years.

The most important policy decisions shaping the current Syriza government’s betrayal of Greek sovereignty go back to the early 1980’s when I was working as an adviser to  PASOK Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. At that time, I was party to an internal debate of whether to continue within the EU or leave.  Papandreou was elected on an anti EU, anti NATO platform, which, like Tsipras, he promptly reneged on– arguing that ‘there were no alternatives’.  Even then, there were international and Greek academic sycophants, as there are today, who argued that membership in the EU was the only realistic alternative- it was the ‘only possibility’.  The ‘possibilistas” at that time, operating either from ignorance or deceit, were full of bluster and presumption.  They denied the underlying power realities in the structure of the EU and dismissed the class capacity of the working and popular masses to forge an alternative.  Then, as now, it was possible to develop independent alternative relations with Europe, Russia, China, the Middle East and North Africa.  The advantages of maintaining a protected market, a robust tourist sector and an independent monetary system were evident and did not require EU membership (or vassalage).

Above all, what stood out in both leaders, Andreas Papandreou and Alexis Tsipras, was their profound misconception of the class nature of the dominant forces in the EU.  In the 1980’s Germany was just beginning to recover its imperial reach.  By the time Syriza-Tsipras rose to power (January 2015), Germany’s imperial power was undeniable.  Tsipras’ misunderstanding of this reality can be attributed to his and his ‘comrades’ rejection of class and imperial analyses.  Even academic Marxists, who spouted Marxist theory, never applied their abstract critiques of capitalism and imperialism to the concrete realities of German empire building and Greece’s quasi-colonial position within the EU.  They viewed their role as that of ‘colonial reformers’ –imagining that they were clever enough to ‘negotiate’ better terms in the German-centered EU.  They inevitably failed because  Berlin had a built-in majority among its fervently neo-liberal ex-communist satellites plus the IMF, French and English imperial partners.  Syriza was no match for this power configuration.  Then there was the bizarre delusion among the Syriza intellectuals that European capitalism was more benign than the US version.

EU membership has created scaffolding for German empire-building.  The take off point was West Germany’s annexation of East Germany.  This was soon followed by the incorporation of the rightwing regimes in the Baltic and Balkans as subordinate members of the EU – their public assets were snapped up by Germany corporations at bargain prices.  The third step was the systematic break-up of Yugoslavia and the incorporation of Slovenia into the German orbit.  The fourth step was the takeover of key sectors of the Polish and Czech economies and the exploitation of cheap skilled labor from Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary and other satellite states.

Without firing a shot, German empire-building has revolved around making loans and financial transfers to the new subordinate member states in the EU.   These financial transactions were predicated upon the following conditions: 1) Privatization and sale of the new member states’ prized public assets to mainly German as well as other EU investors and 2) Forcing member states to dismantle their social programs, approve massive lay-offs and meet impossible fiscal targets.  In other words, expansion of the contemporary German empire required austerity measures, which transformed the ex-communist countries into satellites, vassals and sources of mercenaries – a pattern which is now playing out in Greece.

The reason these new German ‘colonies’ (especially Poland and the Baltic States) insist on the EU imposing harsh austerity measures on Greece, is that they went through the same brutal process convincing their own beleaguered citizens that there was no alternative – resistance was futile.  Any successful demonstration by Greek workers, farmers and employees that resistance to empire was possible would expose the corrupt relationship between these client leaders and the German imperial order.  In order to preserve the foundations of the new imperial order, Germany has had to take a hardline on Greece.  Otherwise the recently incorporated colonial subjects in the Baltic, Balkan and Central Europe states might “re-think” the brutal terms of their own incorporation to the European Union.  This explains the openly punitive approach to Greece – turning it into the ‘Haiti of Europe’ analogous to the US’ long standing brutalization of the rebellious Haitians – as an object lesson to its own Caribbean and Latin American clients.

The root cause of German intransigence has nothing to do with the political personalities or quirks of Angela Merkle and Wolfgang Schnauble: Such imperial leaders do not operate out of neurotic vindictiveness.  Their demand for total Greek submission is an imperative of German empire-building, a continuation of the step-by-step conquest of Europe.

German empire-building emphasizes economic conquests, which go hand-in-hand with US empire-building based on military conquests.  The same economic satellites of Germany also serve as sites for US military bases and exercises encircling Russia; these vassal states provide mercenary soldiers for US imperial wars in South Asia, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere.

Syriza’s economic surrender is matched by its spineless sell-out to NATO, its support of sanctions against Russia and its embrace of US policies toward Syria, Lebanon and Israel.

Germany and its imperial partners have launched a savage attack on the working people of Greece, usurping Greek sovereignty and planning to seize 50 billion Euros of vital Greek public enterprises, land and resources.  This alone should dispels the myth, promoted especially by the French social democratic demagogue Jacques Delores, that European capitalism is a benign form of ‘social welfarism’ and an ‘alternative’ to the savage Anglo-American version capitalism.

What has been crucial to previous and current versions of empire-building is the role of a political collaborator class facilitating the transition to colonialism.  Here is where social democrats, like Alexis Tsipras, who excel in the art of talking left while embracing the right, flatter and deceive the masses into deepening austerity and pillage.

Instead of identifying the class enemies within the EU and organizing an alternative working class program, Tsipras and his fellow collaborators pose as EU ‘partners’ , fostering class collaboration – better to serve imperial Europe: When the German capitalists demanded their interest payments, Tsipras bled the Greek economy.  When German capitalists sought to dominate Greek markets, Tsipras and Syriza opened the door by keeping Greece in the EU.  When German capital wanted to supervise the take-over of Greek properties, Tsipras and Syriza embraced the sell-off.

There is clear class collaboration within the Greek elite in the destruction of nation’s sovereignty:  Greek banker oligarchs and sectors of the commercial and tourist elite have acted as intermediaries of the German empire builders and they personally benefit from the German and EU takeover despite the destitution of the Greek public.  Such economic intermediaries, representing 25% of the electorate, have become the main political supporters of the Syriza-Tsipras betrayal.  They join with the EU elite applauding Tsipras’ purge of left critics and his authoritarian seizure of legislative and executive power!  This collaborator class will never suffer from pension cuts, layoffs and unemployment.   They will never have to line up at crippled banks for a humiliating dole of 65 Euros of pension money.  These collaborators have hundreds of thousands and millions stashed in overseas bank accounts and invested in overseas real estate.  Unlike the Greek masses, they are ‘European’ first and foremost – willing accomplices of German empire builders!

Tragic Beginnings:  The Greek People Elect a Trojan Horse

Syriza is deeply rooted in Greek political culture .A leadership of educated mascots serving overseas European empire-builders.  Syriza is supported by academic leftists who are remote from the struggles, sacrifices and suffering of the Greek masses.  Syriza’s leadership emerged on the scene as ideological mentors and saviors with heady ideas and shaky hands. They joined forces with downwardly mobile middle class radicals who aspired to rise again via the traditional method: radical rhetoric, election to office, negotiations and transactions with the local and foreign elite and betrayal of their voters.  Theirs is a familiar political road to power, privilege and prestige.  In this regard, Tsipras personifies an entire generation of upwardly mobile opportunists, willing and able to sellout Greece and its people.  He perpetuates the worst political traditions:  In campaigns he promoted consumerism over class consciousness (discarding any mobilization of the masses upon election!).  He is a useful fool, embedded in a culture of clientelism, kleptocracy, tax evasion, predatory lenders and spenders – the very reason his German overlords tolerated him and Syriza, although on a short leash!

Tsipras’ Syriza has absolute contempt for democracy.  He embraces the ‘Caudillo Principle’:  one man, one leader, one policy!  Any dissenters invite dismissal!

Syriza has utterly submitted to imperial institutions, the Troika and their dictates, NATO and above all the EU, the Eurozone. Tsipras/ Syriza reject outright independence and freedom from imperial dictates.  In his ‘capitulation to the Germans’ Tsipra engaged in histrionic theatrics, but by his own personal dictate, the massive ‘NO to EU’ vote was transformed into a YES.

The cruelest political crime of all has been Tsipras running down the Greek economy, bleeding the banks, emptying the pension funds and freezing everyday  salaries while ‘blaming the bankers’,  in order to force the mass of Greeks to accept the savage dictates of his imperial overlords or face utter destitution!

The Ultimate Surrender

Tsipras and his sycophants in Syriza, while constantly decrying Greece’s subordination to the EU empire-builders and claiming victimhood, managed to undermine the Greek people’s national consciousness in less than 6 months.  What had been a victorious referendum and expression of rejection by three-fifths of the Greek voters turned into a prelude to a farcical surrender by empire collaborators.  The people’s victory in the referendum was twisted to represent popular support for a Caudillo.   While pretending to consult the Greek electorate, Tsipras manipulated the popular will into a mandate for his regime to push Greece beyond debt peonage and into colonial vassalage.

Tsipras is a supreme representation of Adorno’s authoritarian personality:  On his knees to those above him, while at the throat of those below.

Once he has completed his task of dividing, demoralizing and impoverishing the Greek majority, the local and overseas ruling elites will discard him like a used condom, and he will pass into history as a virtuoso in deceiving and betraying the Greek people.

Epilogue:

Syriza’s embrace of hard-right foreign policies should not be seen as the ‘result of outside pressure’, as its phony left supporters have argued, but rather a deliberate choice.  So far, the best example of the Syriza regime’s reactionary policies is its signing of a military agreement with Israel.

According to the Jerusalem Post (July 19, 2015), the Greek Defense Minister signed a mutual defense and training agreement with Israel, which included joint military exercises.  Syriza has even backed Israel’s belligerent position against the Islamic Republic of Iran, endorsing Tel Aviv’s ridiculous claim that Teheran represents a terrorist threat in the Middle East and Mediterranean.  Syriza and Israel have inked a mutual military support pact that exceeds any other EU member agreement with Israel and is only matched in belligerence by Washington’s special arrangements with the Zionist regime.

Israel’s ultra-militarist ‘Defense’ Minister Moshe Yaalon, (the Butcher of Gaza), hailed the agreement and thanked the Syriza regime for ‘its support’.  It is more than likely that Syriza’s support for the Jewish state explains its popularity with Anglo-American and Canadian ‘left’ Zionists…

Syriza’s strategic ties with Israel are not the result of EU ‘pressure’ or the dictates of the ‘Troika’.  The agreement is a radical reversal of over a half-century of Greek support for the legitimate national rights of the Palestinian people against the Israeli terrorist state.   This military pact, like the Syriza regime’s economic capitulation to the German ruling class, is deeply rooted in the ‘colonial ideology’, which permeates Tsipras’ policies.  He has taken Greece a significant step ‘forward’ from economic vassal to a mercenary client of the most retrograde regime in the Mediterranean.

On Sunday, the right-wing Greek daily Kathimerini released a partial transcript of a teleconference of hedge fund managers that former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis took part in earlier this month. The teleconference call was attended by 84 people.

Varoufakis claimed that under the instruction of then-party leader, now Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, he looked into setting up a parallel banking system based on IOUs. If necessary, it could be changed “overnight” to make payments in drachmas if Greece was forced to abandon the euro currency and restore the Greek drachma.

The instruction came from Tsipras in December, a month before the Syriza victory in the January general election.

“There is the website of the tax office where citizens go and use their tax file number and transfer monies to their tax,” he says.

“We were planning to create, surreptitiously, reserve accounts attached to every tax file number without telling anyone.

“That would have created a parallel system so while the banks were shut, thanks to the ECB’s aggressive action, it would give us some breathing space … it could have become a functioning parallel system. It would have been euro denominated but it could have been transferred to drachma at the touch of a button.”

According to his account, he recruited a childhood friend, now an IT expert, to hack into the public revenues system within the finance ministry, which is “controlled fully and directly by the troika.”

The plan was not completed, however, as

“the difficulty was to go from the five people who were planning it to the 1,000 people that would have to implement it. For that I would have to receive another authorisation, which never came.”

On Monday, Greece’s right-wing TV channel Skai reported that 24 New Democracy deputies plan to question Tsipras on whether Varoufakis should face a judicial probe and parliamentary inquiry, as his actions entailed not just “political but also criminal liability.” These efforts are supported by the other main opposition parties, Pasok and To Potami (The River).

Denying that he ever planned to engineer an exit from the eurozone, Varoufakis said Monday that his opponents were attempting to “have me indicted for treason.”

The attack on Varoufakis also extends to Syriza’s Left Platform, which belatedly made a token display of opposing Tsipras’ July 13 agreement to implement the demands of the troika, and his betrayal of the overwhelming vote opposing austerity in the July 5 referendum.

Prior to Kathimerini’s release of the transcript, on Friday the Financial Timesclaimed that Syriza’s Left Platform made moves to return to the drachma in the hours after Tsipras’ capitulation.

It alleged that Panayotis Lafazanis, the then-energy minister, wanted the government to take control of the reserves held by Nomismatokopeion, the Greek mint. The FT said under the Left Platform’s plan,

“the central bank would immediately lose its independence and be placed under government control. Its governor, Yannis Stournaras, would be arrested if, as expected, he opposed the move.”

Lafazanis denied there was any plan to arrest Stournaras and said the FT report was based on “lies, fantasy, fear-mongering, speculation and old-fashioned anti-communism.”

The source of the leak of Varoufakis’ comments remains unclear. However, the leak came just as representatives of the European Union, European Central Bank and International Monetary Fund began talks with Greece over the terms of a new loan deal. In this context, the issue of Varoufakis’ remarks was rapidly harnessed to escalating pressure for more austerity in Greece.

The talks began with warnings from Germany that Greece had to accept even deeper levels of austerity than what it has already signed up to. The weekend edition of Der Spiegel reported, “The German government regards it as obligatory that a lot of Greek citizens will lose their jobs in line with the third aid package.”

In a parliamentary answer to Germany’s Left Party, Parliamentary State Secretary Jens Spahn of the governing Christian Democratic Union listed the austerity measures that “have to be taken in the field of employment markets,” including, “mass layoffs according to the schedule and scale, which are agreed with the institutions,” that is, the troika.

Slovakia’s Finance Minister Peter Kažimír tweeted on the Varoufakis leak, “We need to make sure that such two-faced ‘games’ will be avoided when debating & drafting the third bailout package for Greece.”

None of this means that Varoufakis’ plan was any alternative to the policy of collusion with the troika’s austerity agenda that he pursued jointly with Tsipras from the outset until his resignation on July 26.

The teleconference took place on July 16. Tellingly, Varoufakis was talking to an audience of hedge fund managers from the Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum at a meeting called by the former Conservative chancellor of the UK, Norman Lamont , whom Varoufakis has previously described as a close friend.

Varoufakis’ remit was only to organise, behind the backs of the Greek and European working class, measures to keep the Greek financial system afloat, should Greece be forced, against its will, out of the eurozone.

On Monday, US economist James Galbraith said he had worked closely with Varoufakis while he was finance minister and,

“…at no time was the Working Group engaged in advocating exit or any policy choice. The job was strictly to study the operational issues that would arise if Greece were forced to issue scrip or if it were forced out of the euro.”

Varoufakis’ scheme was never implemented because in the end Tsipras did enough, at least temporarily, to reassure Greece’s creditors that he was prepared to do their bidding. If it had been made necessary, it would have been carried out as a desperate attempt to rescue Greek capitalism from disaster.

Varoufakis indicated that one of the major problems he faced in drawing up his plan was that Syriza had handed control of the main levers of Greece’s economy to the troika. “The General Secretary of Public Revenues within my ministry is controlled fully and directly by the troika,” he said. “It was not under control of my ministry, of me as minister, it was controlled by Brussels.”

While media attention has centred on his planning for a parallel banking system, Varoufakis also revealed divisions between Berlin and Paris over Germany’s plan for Europe-wide austerity. He stated,

“The French are terrified. They are terrified because they know that if they’re going to shrink their budget deficit to the levels that Berlin demands, the Parisian government will certainly fall. There is no way that they can politically handle the kind of austerity that is demanded by Berlin.”

German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble was “hell-bent” on a Greek exit from the eurozone, as it would give him “sufficient bargaining power, with sufficient terrorising power in order to impose upon the French that which Paris is resisting … a degree of transfer of budget-making powers from Paris to Brussels”, said Varoufakis.

China’s stock market suffered its biggest one-day sell-off since 2007 on Monday, with share values plunging by more than 8.5 percent.

Panic selling triggered the automatic suspension of trading for over 1,000 companies, leading Chinese financial authorities to announce a new round of share purchases in an attempt to stop the rout. However, Chinese stock indexes continued to fall in early trading on Tuesday.

The plunge in the Chinese market sparked a global run on both stocks and commodities. Share prices in Europe fell by more than 2 percent. In the US, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 117 points, or 0.73 percent, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq declined by nearly 1 percent.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index posted its first five-session loss since the beginning of the year, while the Dow hit its lowest level since February. Nearly 500 major US stocks hit 52-week lows Monday, the most in nearly a year. Nine out of 10 sectors of the S&P 500 closed down for the day, led by the energy sector, which fell by 1.35 percent.

Growing concerns over a slowdown in the Chinese and global economy sparked a further sell-off in commodities in tandem with the stock plunge. Oil prices hit a four-month low, while other commodities sensitive to economic growth, such as copper, fell to a six-year low.

Investors responded to the global decline by moving into safe-haven assets, including gold, whose price rose 1 percent, US Treasury bills, whose yields fell from 2.26 percent to 2.22 percent, and more conservative stocks such as utilities.

Monday’s panic selling occurred only weeks after the Chinese government injected some $800 billion into the country’s stock market, banned large shareholders from selling stock, stopped initial public offerings, and restricted short selling. These actions were temporarily successful in stopping the rout, helping the Chinese stock market recover in three weeks 14 percentage points of the 30 percentage points it had lost over previous weeks.

But even these measures appear to have exhausted themselves. Fortunemagazine, commenting on the most recent sell-off, declared, “The readiest explanation among analysts was that traders have lost faith that the government can slow the selling.”

Analysts noted that 60 percent of stocks listed on Chinese exchanges were suspended from trading Monday, meaning that the fall in share prices would have been much worse had trading in these stocks been allowed to continue.

Before the beginning of the decline in June, the Chinese stock market had increased in value by more than 150 percent over a single year, fueled by Chinese government efforts to boost share prices amid an economic slowdown.

There are indications that the collapse of China’s stock bubble is feeding back into the country’s real economy, with one significant purchasing manager’s index falling to a 15-month low over the weekend. China’s economic growth rate fell to 7.4 percent last year, the slowest pace in nearly a quarter century. The country’s economy is set to grow at a rate of 7.0 percent this year.

Corporate profits have continued to falter in China, with official figures released this week showing profits for industrial companies falling by 0.7 percent in the first half of the year.

Zhu Baoliang, director of the economic forecast department of a leading Chinese government research agency, told Reuters that the sell-off was having a significant impact on the real Chinese economy. He called on financial authorities to impose a further cut in interest rates.

The latest sell-off in China may indicate that the worsening state of the real economy internationally may be finding a reflection in global stock markets, which have become wildly inflated as a result of nearly seven years of near-zero interest rates by the Federal Reserve and other central banks. Earlier this month, the International Monetary Fund predicted that 2015 would be the worst year for global growth since 2009.

“There remain very few buyers out there and there are some growing concerns that we’re looking at a slowdown in global economic growth,” Sean Lynch of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute told the Associated Press.

Monday’s plunge in share values followed the announcement of a series of mass layoffs. On Friday, Anglo American, the world’s fifth largest mining company, said that it would slash over one-third of its workforce, eliminating 53,000 jobs in the coming year as a result of the fall in commodity prices. Last week, Qualcomm Incorporated announced 4,700 layoffs, following the announcement of 1,500 layoffs at Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia and 1,200 layoffs at a Mitsubishi Motors plant in Normal, Illinois.

US corporations have announced significant declines in earnings and revenues for the second quarter of the year, making current stock prices appear even more overvalued. Reuters reported that “the S&P 500 is trading near 16.9 times forward 12-month earnings, above the 10-year median of 14.7 times.”

Citizens of the U.S. are being denied the right to know what they are feeding their families. Despite the fact that 90 percent of American citizens want GMO labeling on their food, big business is doing everything it can to prevent people from accessing their rights. Representative Pompeo’s bill, popularly known as theDARK Act (Denying Americans the Right to Know), has been written almost entirely by the biotech industry lobby. While American citizens are advocating for their rights to knowledge and healthy, affordable food, Monsanto’s legal team is busy on every legislative level trying to prevent this from happening.

Monsanto’s subversion of democratic legal processes is not new. In fact, it is their modus operandi, be it the subversion of LA’s decision to be GMO free by amending the California Seed Law—equating corporations with persons and making seed libraries and exchange of seedbeyond 3 miles illegal—or suing Maui County for passing a law banning GMOs.

Decades before there was a “debate” over GMOs and Monsanto’s PR and law firms became the busiest of bees, India was introduced to this corrupting, corporate giant that had no respect for the laws of the land. When this massive company did speak of laws, these laws had been framed, essentially, by their own lawyers.

Today, Indian cotton farmers are facing a genocide that has resulted in the death of at least300,000 of their brothers and sisters between 1995 and 2013, averaging 14,462 per year (1995-2000) and 16,743 per year (2001-2011). This epidemic began in the cotton belt, in Maharashtra, where 53,818 farmers have taken their lives. Monsanto, on it’s own website, admits that pink bollworm “resistance [to Bt] is natural and expected” and that the resistance to Bt “posed a significant threat to the nearly 5 million farmers who were planting the product in India.” Eighty four percent of the farmer suicides have been attributed to Monsanto’s Bt Cotton, placing the corporation’s greed and lawlessness at the heart of India’s agrarian crisis.

There are three outright illegalities to Monsanto’s existence in India.

First, Monsanto undemocratically imposed the false idea of “manufacturing” and “inventing” a seed, undermining robust Indian laws—that do not allow patents on life—and by taking patents on life through international trade law. Since 1999, Monsanto has had the U.S. government do its dirty work, blocking the mandatory review of the Monsanto Law in TRIPS (the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights Agreement implemented through the WTO).

Second, since they do not have a patent for Bt-Cotton, Monsanto’s collection of royalties as “trait value” or as a “fee for technology traits” (IPR category that does not exist in any legal framework and was concocted by Monsanto lawyers to work outside of the laws of the land) is illegal. These illegal royalty collections have been collected from the most marginal farmers, pushing them to take their own lives.

Third, the smuggling of a controlled substance without approvals (and thus Monsanto’s very entry into India) is a violation and subversion of India’s Biosafety Regulations. This includes the illegal introduction of GMOs into the food system in India, which poses grave risks to the health of ordinary Indian citizens.

Illegal entry of Bt Cotton into India

The Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee (GEAC), the apex body constituted in the Ministry of Environment and Forests, is solely entrusted with the responsibility of approving field trials of any genetically modified organisms (GMOs). India’s biosafety framework—one of the strongest in the world—is  governed by The Rules for the Manufacture, Use, Import, Export and Storage of Hazardous Micro Organisms, Genetically Engineered Organisms or Cells (notified under the Environment Protection Act, 1986).

ARTICLE (7) OF THE RULES STIPULATES:

APPROVAL AND PROHIBITIONS ETC.

(1) NO PERSON SHALL IMPORT, EXPORT, TRANSPORT, MANUFACTURE, PROCESS, USE OR SELL ANY HAZARDOUS MICROORGANISMS OF GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ORGANISMS/SUBSTANCES OR CELLS EXCEPT WITH THE APPROVAL OF THE GENETIC ENGINEERING APPROVAL COMMITTEE.

On 10 March 1995, MAHYCO (which became Monsanto-Mahyco in 1998) imported 100 grams of cottonseed that contained the MON531-Bt Gene into India without approval from the GEAC. MAHYCO, under undisclosed circumstances, had obtained permission from the RCGM (Review Committee of Genetic Manipulation under the Department of Biotechnology (DBT)), which does not have the authority to approve such an import. Without the approval of the governing body responsible for the approval of the import (GEAC) Monsanto had smuggled a controlled substance into India.

ARTICLE (4) OF THE RULES STIPULATES:

(4) GENETIC ENGINEERING APPROVAL COMMITTEE (GEAC)

THIS COMMITTEE SHALL FUNCTION AS A BODY UNDER THE DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENT FORESTS AND WILDLIFE FOR APPROVAL OF ACTIVITIES INVOLVING LARGE SCALE USE OF HAZARDOUS MICROORGANISMS AND RECOMBINANTS IN RESEARCH AND INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION FROM THE ENVIRONMENTAL ANGLE. THE COMMITTEE SHALL ALSO BE RESPONSIBLE FOR APPROVAL OF PROPOSALS RELATING TO RELEASE OF GENETICALLY ENGINEERED ORGANISMS AND PRODUCTS INTO THE ENVIRONMENT.

Open field trials are a deliberate release of GMOs into the environment and, under the above Indian law, require approval by the GEAC. Eager to get to market and establish a monopoly in the cotton sector of India in 1998, Monsanto-Mahyco, without the approval of the sole agency allowed to grant permission for open field trials—the GEAC—started large scale, multi-centric, open field trials of Bt Cotton in 40 locations spread across nine states of India.

The eventual clearance, long after the commencement of these field trials, came once again from the Review Committee of Genetic Manipulation (RCGM), which is not authorized to grant clearance for field trials. RCGM’s mandate is restricted to guidelines for lab research. Without approval from the GEAC, Monsanto’s open field trials of Bt Cotton in 1998 were blatantly illegal and an act of biological warfare against India through genetic pollution.

Furthermore, no post harvest management and safety was ensured in these trials by Monsanto-Mahyco. Monsanto was not concerned with the findings of the trials at all; they just wanted GM seeds to be introduced into Indian soil and they did so without due process. GMO traits, once released into the environment, cannot be contained or recalled. In fact, genetically engineered cotton was sold in open markets. In some states, the trial fields were replanted the very next season with crops including wheat, turmeric, and groundnut, violating Para-9 on “Post harvest handling of the transgenic plants” of the Biosafety Guidelines (1994), according to which,the fields on which GMO trials were conducted should be left fallow for at least one year.

It was in the face of these violations of Indian laws and the risks of genetic pollution India faced, that the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology (RFSTE) filed a petition in the Supreme Court of India in 1999 against Monsanto and MAHYCO. Clearly, Monsanto and MAHYCO had violated the 1989 rules for the use of GMOs under the Environmental Protection Act (1986). The government had allowed Monsanto to carry out field trials without the mandatory scientific biosafety tests.

Without waiting for the outcome of the petition pending in the Supreme Court—around President Bill Clinton’s visit to India—in March 2000 the Department of Biotechnology gave biosafety clearance to Monsanto’s Bt Cotton and in July 2000 the GEAC cleared large-scale field trials of Bt Cotton despite the pending Supreme Court case. This was two years after Monsanto first started illegal trials. CD Mayee, Co-Chairman of the GEAC, also became the first Indian board member of ISAAA, a biotech evangelist group, in 2006. He is the chairman of the sub-committee on Bt Cotton of the GEAC and interestingly, also sits of on the Agriculture Ministry’s Committee on Endosulfan, an insecticide with acute neurotoxin properties developed by Bayer CropScience, which is a major funder—along with Monsanto—of ISAAA.

Monsanto Bt Cotton seeds had not yet been cleared for commercial release. While the RFSTE case against Monsanto was still in the Supreme Court of India, Monsanto reported to the GEAC, in 2001, that Navbharat Seeds Pvt. Ltd., a company in Gujarat, was selling Navbharat 151 seeds, which had the MON531 Bt gene. This was not a cowboy company selling on the black market. This was a company with enough Bt Cotton seeds for the 10,000 Hectares of Navbharat 151 planted at the time. On Monsanto’s complaint, the GEAC started an investigation, carried out by the two-member team of CD Mayee and T.V. Ramanaiah (from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT)), who found Bt traits in the cotton. A case was filed in Gujarat against Navbharat Seeds Pvt. Ltd.

Post investigation, the GEAC ordered all standing crops of Navbharat 151 to be uprooted and destroyed along with seed production plots due to the major risks posed by Bt. In a submission to the court, the GEAC stated:

“12 (I) THE CROP WHICH IS STANDING MAY PASS TO THE SOIL THAT MODIFIED GENES WHICH IT CONTAINS. THE EFFECT ON SOIL MICROORGANISMS CAN NOT BE ESTIMATED AND MAY CAUSE AN IRREVERSIBLE CHANGE IN THE ENVIRONMENT STRUCTURE OF THE SOIL. IT IS A STANDARD PRACTICE TO UPROOT CROPS WHICH POSE SUCH A THREAT. THE DESTRUCTION BY BURNING IS TO ENSURE SAFETY TO ENVIRONMENT AND HUMAN HEALTH AND TO OBVIATE ANY POSSIBILITY OF CROSS-POLLINATION.

(II) THE DESTRUCTION OF THE COTTON PRODUCE AS WELL AS SEEDS HARVESTED FROM THIS PLANT IS ALSO EQUALLY NECESSARY. THE COTTON WHICH HAS BEEN PRODUCED IS GENETICALLY MODIFIED COTTON, THE EFFECT OF WHICH I.E. ALLERGENICITY AND OTHER FACTORS ON MAMMALS ARE NOT TESTED. THE PRECAUTIONARY PRINCIPLES WOULD REQUIRE THAT NO PRODUCT, THE EFFECT OF WHICH IS UNKNOWN BE PUT INTO THE MARKET STREAM. THIS COTTON WHICH IN APPEARANCE IS NO DIFFERENT FROM ANY OTHER COTTON WILL INTERMINGLE WITH ORDINARY COTTON AND IT WILL BECOME IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTAIN ITS ADVERSE AFFECT. THE ONLY REMEDY IS TO DESTROY THE COTTON AS WELL AS THE SEEDS PRODUCED AND HARVESTED IN THIS MANNER.

(III) SINCE THE FARMERS ARE BEING PUT TO A LOSS, THE FURTHER PROCESS TO DETERMINE THE COMPENSATION PAYABLE TO FARMERS, WHO HAVE UNWITTINGLY USED THIS PRODUCT HAS TO BE DETERMINED AND UNDERTAKEN.

13. I WOULD RESPECTFULLY SUBMIT THAT EVERY DAY OF DELAY IN THIS MATTER POSES A THREAT TO THE ENVIRONMENT.”

Having just concluded that Bt was dangerous and all of it had to be uprooted and burned, a few weeks later the GEAC approved the commercial release of Monsanto-Mahyco Biotech (MMB) Bt Cotton.

The national farmers unions made a joint petition to the GEAC and asked for an inquiry committee to be set up and liability and compensation fixed on the basis of the “polluter pays” principle. Since Monsanto-Mahyco is admittedly the source of the GM pollution, they, along with Navbharat Seeds Pvt. Ltd, which has further spread the pollution, are jointly liable for the pollution caused.

Monsanto’s Bt Cotton has also found its way into edible vegetable oils in India.

In a government document, the Department of Biotechnology states:

COTTON SEEDS CAN BE TOXIC IF INGESTED IN EXCESSIVE QUANTITIES BECAUSE OF THE PRESENCE OF ANTI-NUTRITIONAL AND TOXIC FACTORS INCLUDING GOSSYPOL AND CYCLOPROPENOID FATTY ACIDS.

but then goes on to say in the next sentence:

THE OIL AND LINTERS ARE USED AS PREMIUM VEGETABLE OILS AND AS CELLULOSE DIETARY ADDITIVES FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION, RESPECTIVELY. TRADITIONALLY, WHOLE COTTON SEED IS USED AS CATTLE FEED IN INDIA. HOWEVER, THE INCREASE IN DEMAND OF EDIBLE OILS HAS NECESSITATED PROCESSING OF COTTON SEED FOR ITS OIL. THEREFORE, COTTON SEED OILCAKE/MEAL AFTER EXTRACTION IS NOW USED AS CATTLE FEED.

Monsanto’s Bt Cotton, without the support of necessary precautions and scientific studies, has illegally found its way into the Indian food chain, endangering the health of 1.26 billion Indians. The health effects of Bt Cotton seed oil in “premium vegetable oil” (as the DBT calls it) must be investigated and the damage to people’s health must be compensated by Monsanto.

Monsanto’s illegal collection of super-profits as royalties

India’s laws do not permit patents on seeds and in agriculture. But that hasn’t stopped Monsanto from collecting close to USD 900 million from small farmers in India, pushing them into crushing debt. This is roughly the same amount of money Monsanto spent buying The Climate Corporation—a weather big data company—in a bid to control climate data access in the future.

Monsanto-Mahyco Biotech Ltd collected royalties for Bt Cotton by going outside the law and charging “technology fees” and “trait value”. These are just clever names for royalty collection. In 2006, out of the INR 1600 (per 450 grams) price tag, INR 1250—almost 80 percent—wascharged by MMB as the trait value. Compared to Bt Cotton, local seeds used to cost INR 5-9 per kg before Monsanto destroyed alternatives, including local hybrid seed supply, through licensing arrangements and acquisitions.

In January 2006, the Andhra Pradesh Government filed a complaint with the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Commission (MRTPC) against Monsato-Mahyco Biotech (MMB), accusing MMB of overpricing genetically modified Bt Cotton seeds. The Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology had to intervene in the MRTPC case. In its submission, the Andhra Pradesh Government pointed out that Monsanto charged only about INR 400 for the same packet of seeds in China and only about INR 200 in the U.S.—9 times less than the amount they were forcing Andhra Pradesh farmers to pay. MMB said the royalty it charged reflected its research and development costs for Bt Cotton, admitting that they were charging Indian farmers royalty and that for some reason, Indian farmers owed them more for their research and development than farmers in the U.S..

On May 10,  2006, the MRTPC ruled in favor of the Andhra Pradesh government and directed MMB to reduce the trait value it was unfairly charging the farmers of Andhra Pradesh. Following this, on May 29, 2006, the Andhra Pradesh Agricultural Commissioner fixed the price of Bt Cotton seeds at INR 750 for a 450-gram packet and directed MMB and its sub-licensees to comply with its order. Monsanto challenged the Andhra Pradesh Government and the MRTPC’s decision in the Supreme Court, saying that the government’s move was illegal and arbitrary. The Supreme Court did not stay the MRTPC’s order, but while the appeal was pending before it, five states— Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh (now Maharashtra as well)—followed Andhra Pradesh’s lead and ordered that Bt Cotton should be sold at a reduced price, dealing a blow to the inflated profits Monsanto was taking from Indian peasants and repatriating to their headquarters in St. Louis.

To side-step price control measures and avoid any regulation that had been applied to Bt Cotton, which was marketed in India as Bollgard, Monsanto introduced Bollgard II, its apparently ‘upgraded’ version with two Bt proteins. Monsanto’s intentional scientific ignorance (despite the availability of scientific studies at the time) is obvious. GMOs which release the Bt toxin in high doses in every cell of every plant are highly toxic to pollinators and friendly insects and are a recipe for creating super pests through the emergence of resistance. The pink bollworm underwent what every intelligent being does—it evolved—it became resistant to Bt. On it’s website, Monsanto admits, “Measures to delay resistance are critically important” and “application of insecticide sprays during the crop season and proper management of crop residue and unopened bolls after harvest will help limit insects in cotton fields”. What are farmers being made to pay for if normal bollworm control measures are still required, they are still expected to buy and spray insecticides and 80 percent of the cost of the seed goes for failed R&D?

Monsanto admitted that the pink bollworm was resistant to Bollgard and claimed Bollgard II, with it’s two Bt proteins would control the bollworm epidemic. This allowed Monsanto to continue looting marginalised small farmers. By claiming Bollgard II was better technology than the first version, Monsanto was able to mislead farmers and charge even higher prices. (Oblivious to it’s earlier Bt failures, Monsanto is currently working on a 3-protein Bt variety to continue it’s looting)

And Monsanto still claims Bt Cotton is resistant to Bollworm and have all their hired mouthpieces claim that there is reduced pesticide usage due to this inherent trait. In reality, requirements of pesticide increase every year with Bt Cotton. Clearly misrepresenting their lacklustre product, the only reason for the existence of Bt Cotton is royalties. Monsanto itself is on record at the 52nd Meeting of the GEAC (held on 4 March 2005) saying that Bt is not resistant to Bollworm.

“TO A QUERY ON WHETHER THE BT VARIETY IS RESISTANT TO BOLLWORM COMPLEX OR ONLY EFFECTIVE AGAINST AMERICAN BOLLWORM IT WAS CLARIFIED THAT BT COTTON IS TOLERANT TO BOLLWORM AND NOT RESISTANT.”

SOURCE: MINUTES OF THE 52ND MEETING OF THE GEAC

This ruthlessness is central to the crisis Indian farmers are facing. Farmers leveraged their land holdings to buy Bt Cotton seeds and the chemicals it demanded, but the golden promise of higher yield and lower input costs failed to deliver. They were left with no option but to take their own lives. (Incidentally, CD Mayee was the chair of the GEAC subcommittee on Bt Cotton, which still monitors the performance of Bt Cotton and his reports on the performance of Bt Cotton were and still are, very different from the real experiences of the farmers driven to suicide by failed harvests and inferior quality cotton yield.)

In 2007 Andhra Pradesh was forced to introduce the Andhra Pradesh Cotton Seeds Act to control the price of cottonseed, since Bollgard II prices were still astronomically high due to a majority royalty component.

The following Act of the Andhra Pradesh Legislature received the assent of the Governor in August 2007:

ACT NO.29 OF 2007

SHORT TITLE AND COMMENCEMENT

DEFINITIONS

AN ACT TO REGULATE THE SUPPLY, DISTRIBUTION, SALE AND FIXATION OF SALE PRICE OF COTTON SEEDS AND FOR THE MATTERS CONNECTED THEREWITH OR INCIDENTAL THERETO.

WHEREAS, COTTON SEEDS OF CERTAIN VARIETIES ARE NOT NOTIFIED UNDER SECTION 5 AND CONSEQUENTLY NO SALE OF SUCH SEEDS ARE REGULATED UNDER SECTION 7 OF THE SEEDS ACT, 1966;

AND WHEREAS, COTTON SEED IS NOT AN ESSENTIAL COMMODITY WITHIN THE MEANING OF THE ESSENTIAL COMMODITIES ACT, 1955 AS AMENDED BY THE ESSENTIAL COMMODITIES (AMENDMENT) ACT, 2006;

AND WHEREAS, THE PROVISIONS OF THE SEEDS (CONTROL) ORDER, 1983 ISSUED UNDER SECTION 3 OF THE ESSENTIAL COMMODITIES ACT, 1955 ARE NOT APPLICABLE IN SO FAR AS THEY RELATE TO THE COTTON SEEDS W.E.F. 12.2.2007;

AND WHEREAS, THERE IS NO PROVISION IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ACT, 1986 TO REGULATE THE SUPPLY, DISTRIBUTION AND SALE OF TRANSGENIC AND GENETICALLY MODIFIED COTTON SEED AND TO CONTROL THE SALE PRICE OF SUCH COTTON SEED IN THE STATE;

AND WHEREAS, THE TRADERS IN COTTON SEED INCLUDING TRANSGENIC COTTON SEED ARE EXPLOITING POOR FARMERS BY COLLECTING EXORBITANT PRICES;

AND WHEREAS, THERE IS NO PROVISION TO REGULATE THE SUPPLY, DISTRIBUTION, SALE OF COTTON SEEDS AND TO CONTROL THE SALE PRICES OF SUCH COTTON SEEDS IN THE STATE;

AND WHEREAS, IT HAS BECOME IMPERATIVE ON THE PART OF THE STATE TO REGULATE THE SUPPLY, DISTRIBUTION AND SALE OF COTTON SEEDS BY FIXING THE SALE PRICE IN THE INTERESTS OF THE FARMERS IN THE STATE;

BE IT ENACTED BY THE LEGISLATURE OF THE STATE OF ANDHRA PRADESH IN THE FIFTY-EIGHTH YEAR OF THE REPUBLIC OF INDIA AS FOLLOWS :- 1. (1) THIS ACT MAY BE CALLED THE ANDHRA PRADESH COTTON SEEDS

(REGULATION OF SUPPLY, DISTRIBUTION, SALE AND FIXATION OF SALE PRICE) ACT, 2007.
(2) IT SHALL BE DEEMED TO HAVE COME INTO FORCE ON AND FROM THE 28TH JUNE, 2007.

This restriction on their profits did not sit well with Monsanto, which then challenged the Andhra Pradesh Cotton Seeds Act. The Research Foundation for Science Technology and Ecology had to intervene in the case once more, which is still before the Andhra Pradesh High Court.

While Monsanto does not have a patent on Bt cotton in India, it goes outside the law to collect royalties as “technology fees”. Most of the 300,000 farmers suicides in India since 1995 (when the WTO came into force) are concentrated in the cotton belt. And 95 percent of the cotton in India is controlled by Monsanto.

Out of India’s 29 states, those with Bt Cotton have the highest suicide rates.

Correlation is the first step to understanding causation. Monsanto does not see the above correlation because the next logical step would be to plead guilty for the deaths of all the farmers whose lives have been reduced to numbers on a table, or a bank account in St Louis.

Additionally, Monsanto knows that Bt Cotton is dependent on irrigation. Despite this knowledge, Monsanto has pushed its Bt Cotton into regions that depend solely on rainfall, as opposed to irrigation. These include Vidarbha in Maharashtra, where most cotton farms are less than 1 hectare and are dependent solely on rainfall. The costs of Bt cottonseed and insecticide increase the risk of farmer bankruptcy in low-yield rainfed cotton. The criminal negligence of knowingly setting up marginal farmers—who can’t afford to irrigate and whose options for obtaining seeds have been acquired by Monsanto—for dire failure, cannot be ignored.
A recent research paper published by Environmental Sciences Europe concluded:

“[THE] INABILITY TO USE SAVED SEED AND INADEQUATE AGRONOMIC INFORMATION TRAP COTTON FARMERS ON BIOTECHNOLOGY AND INSECTICIDE TREADMILLS. ANNUAL SUICIDE RATES IN RAINFED AREAS ARE INVERSELY RELATED TO FARM SIZE AND YIELD, AND DIRECTLY RELATED TO INCREASES IN BT COTTON ADOPTION (I.E., COSTS). HIGH-DENSITY SHORT-SEASON COTTONS COULD INCREASE YIELDS AND REDUCE INPUT COSTS IN IRRIGATED AND RAINFED COTTON. POLICY MAKERS NEED HOLISTIC ANALYSIS BEFORE NEW TECHNOLOGIES ARE IMPLEMENTED IN AGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT.”

“Fourteen years after U.S. multinational Monsanto brought the genetically modified (GM) Bt Cotton (Bollgard) to India, there is no clarity on the discovery having ever been patented in the country,” states a recent Times of India article. India does not recognize patents on life, including seeds. The royalties Monsanto has collected over the last 14 years are based on a patent that does not exist and is therefore, quite simply, theft. Monsanto is robbing the people who have the least, of the very last thing they can give—their lives.

Illegal patents on life through Monsanto’s laws in the WTO

In 1980 the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case that is now famous for being the point in world history where life forms were first allowed to be patented—not only in the US, but through the WTO, in many other parts of the world. Ananda Mohan Chakrabarty, a General Electric employee, had applied for a patent for a process of producing a bacterium capable of eating crude oil spills and on the bacteria itself. The claim was rejected by the U.S. Patent office, but on appeal, was granted by a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court.

“The decision of the Supreme Court in Diamond v. Chakrabarty, 447 U.S. 303, 206 USPQ 193 (1980), held that microorganisms produced by genetic engineering are not excluded from patent protection by 35 U.S.C. 101”

4. “This is not to suggest that § 101 has no limits or that it embraces every discovery. The laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas have been held not patentable.”

5. “Thus, a new mineral discovered in the earth or a new plant found in the wild is not patentable subject matter. Likewise, Einstein could not patent his celebrated law that E=mc2; nor could Newton have patented the law of gravity.”

Source: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2105.html

Genetic engineering has not been able to deliver on its promises—it is just a tool of ownership. Bt Cotton is not resistant to Bollworm, RoundUp Resistant varieties have only given rise to super weeds and the new promises being made by biotech corporations of bio-fortification are laughable. There is no benefit to things like Golden Rice. By adding one new gene to the cell of a plant, corporations claimed they had invented and created the seed, the plant, and all future seeds, which were now their property. Monsanto does not care if your cotton field has Bollworm infestations, just so long as the crop can be identified as theirs and royalty payments keep flowing in. This is why the failure of Bt Cotton as a reflection of bad science does not bother them—the cash is still coming into St Louis. At its core, genetic modification is about ownership.

In 1981, shortly after the precedence of life forms being patented had been set in the U.S., Monsanto, which was a chemical company at the time, decided—as it lays out on it’s own website—that biotechnology would be its strategic research focus in the future. Selling chemicals requires raw materials that eat into profit. Intellectual Property, on the other hand, just pays. In the decade and a half since 1981, with this new “strategic research focus” and all the R&D dollars you can imagine, Monsanto has only been able to produce failures—failures that pay royalties from all across the world.

Monsanto saw that by claiming ownership of life forms, especially seed—the first step in the food chain—and destroying alternatives or making them illegal, would allow them to charge royalties for the source of food, fibre and fuel. It was easy money and a lot of it. The limited achievements of Monsanto’s research focus have not given us better cotton, corn, canola or soya—they’ve merely made it all theirs.

Monsanto required new forms of property rights, inspired by the U.S. Supreme Court, to be able to claim as an invention that which is not invented by them—seed and life forms. This was achieved through the World Trade Organization (WTO), working closely with the U.S. Government and with the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreement.

Patents are granted for inventions and give the patent holder the right to exclude everyone from the use or marketing of a patented product or process. Over the last two decades, patent laws have taken a different direction under the influence of corporations like Monsanto, from protecting the interests of genuine inventions and ideas to ownership of life and control over survival essentials like seed and medicine.

JAMES ENYART OF MONSANTO IS ON RECORD ILLUSTRATING JUST HOW DEEPLY THE TRIPS AGREEMENT IS ALIGNED TO CORPORATE INTEREST AND AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF NATIONS AND THEIR CITIZENS:

“INDUSTRY HAS IDENTIFIED A MAJOR PROBLEM FOR INTERNATIONAL TRADE. IT CRAFTED A SOLUTION, REDUCED IT TO A CONCRETE PROPOSAL AND SOLD IT TO OUR OWN AND OTHER GOVERNMENTS… THE INDUSTRIES AND TRADERS OF WORLD COMMERCE HAVE PLAYED SIMULTANEOUSLY THE ROLE OF PATIENTS, THE DIAGNOSTICIANS AND THE PRESCRIBING PHYSICIANS.”

Corporations defined a problem—farmers saving seed—so that they could forcefully open the market. In turn, they offered a solution and the solution was the introduction of patents and intellectual property rights on seed, making it illegal for farmers to save their seed. This is how the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement of the WTO was born. For the U.S. Government, with an economy where the manufacturing industry was slowing, the idea of royalties coming in to fuel the economy was perfect.

ARTICLE 27.3 OF THE TRIPS AGREEMENT STATES:

3. MEMBERS MAY ALSO EXCLUDE FROM PATENTABILITY:

(A)    DIAGNOSTIC, THERAPEUTIC AND SURGICAL METHODS FOR THE TREATMENT OF HUMANS OR ANIMALS;

(B)    PLANTS AND ANIMALS OTHER THAN MICRO-ORGANISMS, AND ESSENTIALLY BIOLOGICAL PROCESSES FOR THE PRODUCTION OF PLANTS OR ANIMALS OTHER THAN NON-BIOLOGICAL AND MICROBIOLOGICAL PROCESSES. HOWEVER, MEMBERS SHALL PROVIDE FOR THE PROTECTION OF PLANT VARIETIES EITHER BY PATENTS OR BY AN EFFECTIVE SUI GENERIS SYSTEM OR BY ANY COMBINATION THEREOF. THE PROVISIONS OF THIS SUBPARAGRAPH SHALL BE REVIEWED FOUR YEARS AFTER THE DATE OF ENTRY INTO FORCE OF THE WTO AGREEMENT.

This is the Monsanto Law of the TRIPS Agreement. Drafted by Monsanto lawyers and riding on the U.S. taxpayer’s dollar, it bulldozes the world leaving behind nothing but royalty liabilities.

Section 3(b) of Article 27 is what is cleverly designed to be a trojan horse and to prohibit the free exchange of seeds between farmers, threatening their subsistence and their ability to save and exchange seeds. Shooting a gene into an organism through a gene gun is not a biological process. A seed growing into a plant that gives seed is a biological process. But the non-biological process of the insertion of a gene is patentable according to Article 27.3(b). Genetic engineering has been defined as “non-biological” and/or “microbiological” by the same lawyers that put the Monsanto Law into the TRIPS agreement, allowing the patentability of seeds and other life forms through genetic manipulation.

Objections to the Monsanto Law were raised owing to the basic idea that life cannot be patented.

India, in its submission, stated:

Clearly, there is a case for re-examining the need to grant patents on lifeforms anywhere in the world. Until such systems are in place, it may be advisable to:- (a) exclude patents on all lifeforms

The African group stated:

The African Group maintains its reservations about patenting any life forms as explained on previous occasions by the Group and several other delegations. In this regard, the Group proposes that Article 27.3(b) be revised to prohibit patents on plants, animals, micro-organisms, essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals, and non-biological and microbiological processes for the production of plants or animals. For plant varieties to be protected under the TRIPS Agreement, the protection must clearly  and not just implicitly or by way of exception, strike a good balance with the interests of the community as a whole and protect farmers’ rights and traditional knowledge  and ensure the preservation of biological diversity.

Due to the strong objections raised at the WTO it was decided that the Monsanto Law (TRIPs clause on patents on life) would be due for a mandatory review within the first 4 years of the WTO—by 1999. The review of the clause on patents on life has been blocked and subverted for the last 16 years by Monsanto and the Monsanto-friendly government of the United States, to protect the royalties that are moving money from impoverished farmers world over to the United States of America.

“Before I was shot I did not bother anyone or get angry with anybody,” says Basel Kamal Safi from Deir Ammar refugee camp, near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank.

He was just 17 when an Israeli soldier shot him with live ammunition.

“Now I get angry because of the pain, especially when someone accidentally touches my injury,” he says in the short video below.

It is one of two videos published recently by Defense for Children International–Palestine (DCI-Palestine), highlighting the experiences of children shot by Israeli occupation forces with live ammunition.

The second video, below, features Fadel Abu Odwan, a 14-year-old in Gaza whose injury will leave him unable to have children.

In 2014, live ammunition fired by Israeli soldiers killed 11 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank.

Another 299 children sustained gunshot injuries, according to data from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Israeli human rights group B’Tselem condemned in June Israel’s continued use of live ammunition to kill and injure unarmed Palestinians.

The Israeli military’s own regulations say that live ammunition must only be used in circumstances where a soldier is in direct, mortal danger.

But B’Tselem says that just this year it “has documented dozens of cases in the Ramallah area of the West Bank in which Palestinians were injured, some severely, by live ammunition fired by Israeli security forces.”

The group says that “the large number of persons injured and the types of injury, indicates that live ammunition was used against demonstrators even when security forces were not in mortal danger.”

But even in the gravest of cases, where Palestinian children are killed or permanently disabled, perpetrators are rarely brought to justice, DCI-Palestine notes.

While demonstrations against armed occupation forces do not provide a valid excuse to shoot and kill, in other well-documented cases Israeli occupation forces have ambushed, shot and killed Palestinian children without even that pretext.

In such cases too, occupation forces continue to enjoy impunity.

West Bank: Basel’s story

On 4 December 2014, Basel Kamal Safi found himself in the midst of confrontations between Israeli occupation forces and Palestinian youths in the village of Beitillu in the West Bank.

Occupation forces fired tear gas and live ammunition at the youths.

Basel was hit with a live bullet on his left side, which lodged in his back.

This led to two surgeries, and now Basel must use a wheelchair to get around.

Bullet fragments scattered throughout Basel’s lower abdomen, fracturing his pelvis and part of his spine.

The shrapnel, which cannot be removed, causes him pain, and he experiences nightmares. He is dependent on family members to help him move around.

Basel can no longer help his father’s work to support the family.

As of the time the video was published in May, Israeli occupation forces had denied the permits requested by the family to take their son to al-Maqasid hospital in Jerusalem for treatment.

No Israeli soldier has been charged with any crime for his shooting.

Gaza: Fadel’s story

“I wish I could go back in time and be the same boy I used to be,” says Fadel Abu Odwan. “They’ve ruined my life.”

The 11-year-old was shot in the groin by Israeli soldiers deployed near the Israel-Gaza border fence, near his village of Shokat in southern Gaza, on 21 February 2014.

“They left me there bleeding for about four hours,” Fadel recalls, “with dogs trying to attack me.”

Doctors placed him in intensive care before transferring him to surgery to extract the bullet lodged in his thigh and remove his testicles.

More than a year later, the shooting has had a devastating impact on his life.

He still has nightmares: “I dream of dogs coming to get me and eat me.” Other children, he says, can be cruel to him because of his injury.

Fadel’s mother Aisha says her son has lost all motivation to study and gets into trouble.

“He won’t be able to have children,” she says.

“Fadel needs therapy,” Aisha says, “but I don’t know from where to get it.”

Israeli occupation forces continue to shoot and injure Palestinian youths across the Gaza boundary fence – despite last August’s ceasefire agreement – for no apparent reason.

Part One of this analysis set out the main parts of the shift in U.S. government from democracy to National Security State. In this part, we will complete and analyze this development.

5) Do not count (foreign or domestic) civilians as important to State functioning

First, abroad, civilians are “collateral damage,” like destroyed property.

The Bush administration and its generals did not consider the category of discrimination to be of importance. The Obama administration has continued this policy. This is demonstrated by two facts: first, the U.S. military spokespersons have stated directly and consistently that the U.S. does not count the civilian dead in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, the U.S. government either does not release or downplays civilian casualties in Libya, Syria, Yemen, or from U.S. drone attacks. If it was truly U.S. policy to protect noncombatants from a brutal dictator (e.g. Saddam Hussein; Muammar Gaddafi, Bashir al Assad, etc.) and to avoid injuring or killing them, one would think that knowing how many they have killed or for whose deaths they are at least partly responsible would be something the military would want to know and engage, not suppress.

Contradictory to that practice, by a long and time-honored tradition in ethics and in international law, when the practice of either ignoring (by not taking into account) or intending civilian deaths becomes commonplace, whether proportional or not to the good intention of defeating the enemy, any military action may be said to be conducted unjustly. How the civilians came to be killed is critical, because it tells us directly about the conduct of the war.

Second, the State becomes repressive of citizens domestically. When Supreme Emergency becomes the order of the day, it uses its force against its citizens. For example, Hitler’s February 28 “Decree for the Protection of the People” suspended the articles of the Weimar Constitution concerning personal liberties, and was never repealed.

We are witnessing a similar movement in the U.S. Beginning in 2001 with the USA PATRIOT Act, civil liberties have been deliberately and systematically eroded, while elite privilege has expanded. There are particular issues concerning due process rights and habeas corpus that were eroded under this model. This can be seen in the arrests of both Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi, both of which concern due process and habeas corpus rights, denied by the government. Both are U.S. citizens. Hamdi was arrested in 2001, and held without charge by the U.S. government in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. It was only with the Supreme Court decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld that Hamdi was released. Padilla was arrested in 2002 and held without charge until 2006. For most of their period of detention without charge, neither was permitted legal counsel, or a hearing. It was only due to the pressure of civil liberty groups that each was finally given a hearing.

For Obama’s contribution to this, note his deepening of unchecked surveillance powers (including warrantless wiretapping of citizens, accessing personal records, monitoring financial transactions, and tracking email, internet and cell phone use), his position that the federal government cannot be sued for illegal spying on U.S. citizens, his claims of Executive privilege to order assassinations of U.S. citizens, and his continuation of torture and Guantanamo Bay prison.

All of these actions and others are instances of the direct legislative erasing of any legal status of the individual, in some cases individual U.S. citizens. As if to underscore this point, witness General Wesley Clark stated on MSNBC, on July 17, that dissident citizens should be put in internment camps “for the duration” of the U.S. war on terrorism—i.e. forever.

Kevin Phillips (Wealth and Democracy) and Chalmers Johnson (The Sorrows of Empire) have eloquently traced how these structural mechanisms of government in Rome, Spain, Portugal, and Britain all led to repressive governments which fell quickly when they began to govern through a structure of repression. Today we see the similar structures in place in the U.S., not only in such draconian pieces of legislation as the USA PATRIOT Act, but most chillingly in “continuity of government” (COG) plans, prepared twenty years ago by elite government insiders, which calls for warrantless surveillance, warrantless detention, and militarizing domestic security to keep dissent nonexistent (see Peter Dale Scott, “The Doomsday Project, Deep Events, and the Shrinking of American Democracy” The Asia-Pacific Journal, January 24, 2011).

Conclusion: Three steps for making change

The obvious question is: how can we stop this and make the critical changes needed to and in our government apparatus? I would conclude this essay by suggestion three actions that may be taken.

First, recognize that U.S. citizens themselves must make the changes required to and in government. With the foundational mode of state structure and purpose being to achieve and maintain complete state hegemony in the world, radical change of state structure is required. This can only be done with some kind of people’s push to return the power to themselves, as we saw in Egypt and Tunisia, and now see in Greece. It will come slowly and painstakingly, but without it, state mechanisms will continue to be structured as hegemonic agencies, and perpetual war and continued assault upon citizen rights will be the ongoing and deepening modus operandi of the state.

Second, focus objective analysis on ethical and legal prescriptions as well as empirical facts and consequences. Too often political analysis revolves around a theme of “this move, that consequence” by our political leaders. However, ethically speaking, objective analysis can be done by analyzing how government actions fit or do not fit universal ethical norms. A good norm would be, as the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas puts it, to recognize that for authentic communication between parties to take place, all affected must be able to accept the consequences of any proposed norm.

This strategy does two things: it pre-empts the charge from opponents that one believes only according to one’s ideology; and it allows one to see and show the pattern of a movement from democracy to fascism.

Here is an application of such analysis. Let us examine the crime of aggression of Obama’s drone strikes, specifically the U.S. use of drones in Yemen and Pakistan. The U.S. first said it used targeted killing in November 2002, with the cooperation and approval of the government of Yemen. But as of 2013, the U.S. had more than 6,000 drones, more than 160 of which were Predator drones controlled by the U.S. Air Force. These drones are being used in Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, but most of all in Pakistan, where in eight years the drones killed close to 4,000 people (see Gregoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone).

On June 3, 2009, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) delivered a report sharply critical of US tactics. The report asserted that the US government has failed to keep track of civilian casualties of its military operations, including the drone attacks, and to provide means for citizens of affected nations to obtain information about the casualties and any legal inquests regarding them.

Obama’s response: ignore the U.N. report, and increase the drone attacks, thus instantiating what neocon architect Francis Fukuyama stated: the U.N. is “perfectly serviceable as an instrument of American unilateralism” When it isn’t, the National Security State can and does ignore them. (see Chomsky, Hegemony or Survival).

Contradictory to that, we would have a solid ethical and legal analysis of U.S. drone actions by quoting a tentative definition of aggression which was adopted by the U.N.  International Law Commission on June 4, 1951. It stated:

“Aggression is the use of force by a State or Government against another State or Government, in any manner, whatever the weapons used and whether openly or otherwise, for any reason or for any purpose other than individual or collective self-defence or in pursuance of a decision or recommendation by a competent organ of the United Nations.”

Further, in 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI, specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:

(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

Again, we should apply the Geneva Conventions against Attacking Civilians. Article 51, Section 2 proscribes “indiscriminate attacks:” those not directed at specifically military targets; those attacks or weapons that cannot be limited to military objectives and that strike civilians or civilian objects as well as military ones; and attacking military targets that the belligerent has reason to believe in advance will cause excessive and disproportionate damage to civilians or civilian objects, the latter defined simply as non-military objects.

Protocol II, “relating to the Protection of Victims of Non-International Armed Conflicts,” specifically calls upon all nations to refrain from all “violence to the life, health, and physical and mental well-being of [noncombatant] persons.”

Finally, the Hague Conventions of 1899 ban the attacking of towns and cities that are undefended, and collective punishment. Prescriptions to limit the conduct of war include the requirements to warn towns of impending attacks, to protect cultural, religious, and health institutions, and to insure public order and safety.

Third, understand that civil disobedience is the only weapon citizens have to fight such overwhelming methods of force that are now in place. The state—on both federal and local government levels—now possesses so much military-level force and political-economic power that they can fairly easily respond to any type of violent action. Nonviolence is the only option, especially since, to work, nonviolence requires a force in numbers. When that happens, the fear moves from the people to the government officials and their economic elite controllers who currently rule the country.

The motivating factor for such disobedience is often said to be economic hardship, such as the citizens of Greece are undergoing. That is certainly true, but in addition to that, U.S. citizens are used to a more developed and robust conception of human and civil rights, and the practice of limited government in terms of such rights. This assumption of most citizens makes a full-blown totalitarian state such as Hitler’s or Mussolini’s unlikely. Nonetheless, it is certainly conceivable and possible that a totalitarian-light state can exist while leaving in place the main skeleton of a republican democracy that has long since been reduced to a minimal democracy, virtually without most citizens seeing it and without angering citizens too much. This is especially true if the citizens live in fear and are willing to grant the government significant leeway in its responses to the trumped-up fear of terrorists. That is precisely what has happened since 9/11, and precisely what civil disobedience attempts to overcome.

Objective, public analysis and civil nonviolent action are our best weapons against government power. They are, in fact, not just our best hope; they are all we have left with which to fight.

Dr. Robert Abele holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Marquette University and M.A. degrees in Theology and Divinity. He is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College, in California in the San Francisco Bay area. He is the author of four books, including A User’s Guide to the USA PATRIOT Act, and The Anatomy of a Deception: A Logical and Ethical Analysis of the Decision to Invade Iraq, along with numerous articles. His new book, Rationality and Justice, is forthcoming (2016).

Washington’s foreign policy towards Africa was highlighted recently through the visit of President Barack Obama to Kenya and Ethiopia.

Also the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, came to the United States the previous week and held high-level meetings with Obama along with other officials in the State Department and the Pentagon.

Obama’s term ends next year and many have criticized him for not visiting the country where his father was born since he was elected to office in 2008. Kenya has been a longtime ally of the U.S. since the early days of independence in 1963 under the leadership of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of the East African state.

The president attended a business development conference in Kenya. He emphasized during his trip the much-touted phenomenal economic growth on the continent.

Although there has been the enhanced exploitation of natural gas and other strategic resources in East Africa, economic problems persist. Kenya is a capitalist country that is heavily dependent upon the marketing of agricultural, clothing and tourism to the West.

Unemployment and poverty continues to trap millions while economic relations with the imperialist states do not offer any significant prospects for the absorption of large segments of the population into the urbanized labor market. Most people still work in the agricultural sectors of the economy through the production of tea, coffee, sisal and other products.

During the 1990s, Kenya was unable to pay its loans to the international financial institutions and instituted reforms which made the country more attractive to multi-national corporations and banks for investment. With the institution of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in the U.S. under the administration of President Bill Clinton, the country began to produce clothing for export to the western states.

The mineral exploitation taking place inside the country is limited at present.

Nonetheless, there has been exploration for offshore oil resources on the border between Kenya and Somalia. These new areas of potential investments by the multi-national petroleum firms may be clearly related to the Kenya Defense Forces (KDF) intervention in Somalia which was carried out in late 2011 at the aegis of Washington through the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

The Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Nairobi was opened by Obama who pledged over a billion dollars in investments from the U.S. government along with U.S.-based banks, foundations and donors. 50 percent of the investments will go to women and young people, who face obstacles when trying to start businesses, says Obama.

“If half of your team is not playing, you’ve got a problem,” Obama told the conference, ostensibly referring to women who face gender oppression in Kenya.

Yet the major thrust of U.S. policy in Kenya, Somalia and other East African states has been militaristic along with extracting minerals, exploiting labor and exporting commodities from the these countries. The current crisis in Somalia is a direct result of failed U.S. policy during both the former Bush administration and the present government.

In an article published last year in Somalia Current it says that “what is currently taking place across the Somalia-Kenya offshore border where Kenya recently awarded six oil and gas blocks to the international oil companies (IOC), within Somali offshore territory approximately 120,000 km2. Italy, Norway, the USA and France are tended to be exploiting the trans-boundary area. It was apparent that those greedy alliances’ aim is to plunder Somalia’s offshore hydrocarbon resources and this has become more obvious since Kenya started invading southern Somalia in October 2011 while its allies such as France, Italy and Norway kept quiet about the invasion.” (Sept. 23, 2014)

Failed Imperialist Counter-terrorism Strategy

The counter-terrorism strategy of Washington through AFRICOM has still not stabilized the political situation in Somalia or Kenya. On July 26, the same day that Obama arrived in the neighboring Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, a car bomb exploded outside the Jazeera Hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia killing 13 people, at least one of whom was a Chinese national.

In December of 2006, under the previous administration of President George W. Bush, the U.S. encouraged the Ethiopian government to invade Somalia in order to overturn the growing influence of the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). After a two-and-a-half year occupation, the Al-Shabaab guerrilla movement emerged from the ICU and continued a war of insurgency against the U.S. and European Union (EU) supported regime in Mogadishu.

At present some 22,000 troops from the African Union Mission to Somalia (AMISOM) are still occupying the Horn of Africa state. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Pentagon regularly conducts drone strikes in Somalia where they have bases of operation.

Ethiopian Post-Revolution Role

The 1974 Ethiopian Revolution and its socialist orientation were overthrown in 1991 just several months prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under Gorbachev, support for national liberation movements and national democratic revolutionary governments in Africa was withdrawn creating a crisis throughout the international community.

The post-revolution government in Addis Ababa has been closely aligned with the U.S. and other western states. Ethiopian troops although withdrawn in early 2009 after defeats in Somalia, have re-entered the country.

The presence of both the KDF and Ethiopian troops are a cause for concern even within the Somalia Federal Government that is recognized by Washington and Wall Street.

Obama also addressed the security and political crisis in the newly-independent Republic of South Sudan. This state is a result of a western-supported secessionist movement which resulted in the partition of the Republic of Sudan based in Khartoum, which previously was the largest geographic nation-state in Africa.

South Sudan leaders have been split since December 2013 over the future course of the country. President Salva Kiir and former Vice-President Reik Machar have led separate factions within the ruling Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA/M) resulting in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and the deaths of several thousand in a civil war in the continent’s and the world’s most recent United Nations and African Union recognized state.

In a joint statement issued by Obama with Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn, it says that “We have agreed to intensify the campaign against terrorism in the region, and we both noted with satisfaction the progress AMISOM forces and Somali National Army are making, with the support of the U.S. and other partners, in their fight against al-Shabaab.”

This same statement continues stressing “We have agreed to deepen our intelligence cooperation both bilaterally as well as regionally. We have both noted and underscored that this cooperation is essential to curb the menace posed by terrorism. The terrorist attack that was launched in Mogadishu yesterday is a stark reminder that we need to work even more in this respect.” (White House Press Release, July 27)

Obama was scheduled to address the AU Commission based in Addis Ababa on July 28.

Nonetheless, there were no plans to meet with President Robert Mugabe of the Republic of Zimbabwe who is the sitting chair of the continental body. Instead he will likely meet with Dr. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, the AU Commission Chairperson, who is originally from the Republic of South Africa.

Such a situation of not meeting with a head-of-state that leads the continental body is reflective of the character of U.S. imperialism even under Obama. Zimbabwe is not a favored state by Washington particularly since the land reform program of 2000 which redistributed white-owned farms to Africans who were expropriated during the colonial wars of the late 19th century.

The Constitution – or, rather, limitations that the Constitution places on government – doesn’t matter much these days to many of our elected officials. Indeed, many have often speculated that if our founding fathers were somehow able to step into modern America, the technology would blow them away, of course, but they would not recognize our governing system.

California’s recent law mandating that all children have to be vaccinated in order to attend public and private schools in the state is a case in point: This Stalin-like “solution” to a non-existent problem – a rampant threat to public health from non-vaccinated kids – turned parental rights on its head.

Now, however, one state lawmaker says he isn’t prepared to let what he views as a major constitutional usurpation go unchallenged. Democratic Rep. Mike Gatto, a constitutional and appellate lawyer by trade, has hinted he may seek to get the law overturned.

‘Such intimate decisions are not for government to make’

In a recent USA Today column, he wrote:

I swore an oath to uphold the U.S. and California constitutions. Sometimes, that means voting against “responsible” bills that nevertheless represent government overreach. California’s broad new mandate, that a child cannot attend school unless vaccinated for 10 conditions and “any other disease deemed appropriate,” was such an occasion.

The legislation affects four fundamental rights: to parent one’s children; to refuse medical treatment; to practice one’s religion (for those whose creed genuinely eschews medicine); and to attend school (a unique right recognized in California).

Gatto went on to note that even if the state government does have a compelling interest in slowing the spread of disease, lawmakers and Gov. Jerry Brown cannot infringe on constitutional and civil liberties with overly broad laws, especially if less-restrictive means of achieving the compelling interest are available.

“Consider the following examples. There are 1.2 million Americans with HIV and 178 this year with the measles. Just as vaccines slow or halt the spread of measles, prophylactics slow or halt HIV,” he notes. “But could the government mandate that everyone use condoms to stop the spread of HIV? Of course not. Such intimate decisions are not for government to make.”

He also wrote that about 56,000 Americans die annually from the flu or from pneumonia. If one were to prohibit the travel and assembly of anyone who was suspected of suffering from either of these conditions, that would go a long way towards curbing the spread of each illness and thus, save lives.

However, the right to assemble and travel freely around the country are bedrock liberties in the U.S., guaranteed by the Constitution, and governments could not deny them to people on the basis of having the flu.

Gatto said scholarly writings have noted that court rulings permitting mandatory vaccinations are narrow, outdated and originate from a line of precedent that also gave government power to sterilize anyone it deemed genetically unfit.

Proponents of mandatory vaccinations say that supporters of parental rights/vaccine choice ought to “trust scientists.” And while Gatto says he does, he also notes that vaccination proponents “would be wise to trust constitutional lawyers.”

“A law mandating vaccinating kindergarteners for an STD, shots for tetanus (not communicable) and ‘any other’ vaccines that some bureaucrat chooses — or a child loses the right to education — is too broad to be constitutional,” he asserted.

No wonder our elected leaders have tanking approval ratings

It wasn’t clear from his op-ed whether Gatto planned to file a legal challenge to the law, but the fact that he has bucked his own political party over fundamental constitutional issues is refreshing.

By contrast, the Editorial Board of USA Today, a gatekeeper of progressive elitism in media, not only approves of California’s restrictive law, but is urging all states to adopt something like it.

Nothing like a little authoritarianism to throw our founding fathers through a loop – if they ever make it back to the future.

The good news is, in poll after poll, Americans are showing their displeasure with their elected leaders. Trust has evaporated, and institutions like Congress and the Supreme Court have seen their approval ratings plunge to record depths. Perhaps at some point the anger will manifest itself in a political revolution that spells the end to career politics and disproportionate influence from special interests like Big Pharma.

Sources:

http://www.usatoday.com

http://healthimpactnews.com

http://www.nvic.org

The Palestinians are poor. They are powerless. They have no voice or influence in the halls of power. They are demonized. They do not have well-heeled lobbyists doling out campaign contributions and pushing through pro-Palestinian legislation. No presidential candidate is appealing to donors—as Hillary Clinton did when she sent a letter tomedia mogul Haim Saban denouncing critics of Israel—by promising to advance the interests of the Palestinian people. Palestinians, like poor people of color in the United States, are expendable.

Justice for Palestine will never come from the traditional governmental institutions or political parties that administer power. These institutions have surrendered to moneyed interests. Justice will come only from us. And the sole mechanism left to ensure justice for Palestine is the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Sanctions brought down the apartheid regime of South Africa. And they are what will bring down the apartheid regime of Israel. BDS is nonviolent. It appeals to conscience. And it works.

All Israeli products including Jaffa citrus fruits, Ahava cosmetics, SodaStream drink machines, Eden Springs bottled water and Israeli wine must be boycotted. We must refuse to do business with Israeli service companies. And we must boycott corporations that do business with Israel, including Caterpillar, HP and Hyundai. We must put pressure on institutions, from churches to universities, to divest from Israeli companies and corporations that have contracts with Israel. The struggle against apartheid in South Africa was long and hard. This struggle will be too.

Israel, like the United States, is poisoned by the psychosis of permanent war. It too is governed by a corrupt oligarchic elite for whom war has become a lucrative business. It too has deluded itself into carrying out war crimes and then playing the role of the victim. Israeli systems of education and the press—again mirrored in the United States—have indoctrinated Israelis into believing that they have a right to kill anyone whom the state condemns as a terrorist. And Israel’s most courageous human rights campaigners, intellectuals and journalists are slandered and censored in their own country, just as American critics such as Norman Finkelstein, Max Blumenthal andNoam Chomsky are in the United States.

Those who become addicted to the wielding of the instruments of war, blinded by hubris and a lust for power, eventually become war’s victims. This is as true for Israel as for the United States.

Israel’s goal is to make life a living hell for all Palestinians, ethnically cleansing as many as it can and subduing those who remain. The peace process is a sham. It has led to Israel’s seizure of more than half the land on the West Bank, including the aquifers, and the herding of Palestinians into squalid, ringed ghettos or Bantustans while turning Palestinian land and homes over to Jewish settlers. Israel is expanding settlements, especially in East Jerusalem. Racial laws, once championed by the right-wing demagogue Meir Kahane, openly discriminate against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians.Ilan Pappe calls the decades-long assault against the Palestinian people “incremental genocide.”

In Gaza, Israel practices an even more extreme form of cruelty. It employs a mathematical formula to limit outside food deliveries to Gaza to keep the caloric levels of the 1.8 million Palestinians just above starvation. This has left 80 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza dependent on Islamic charities and outside aid to survive. And the periodic military assaults on Gaza, euphemistically called “mowing the lawn,” are carried out every few years to ensure that the Palestinians remain broken, terrified and destitute. There have been three Israeli attacks on Gaza since 2008. Each is more violent and indiscriminate than the last. Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said that a fourth attack on Gaza is “inevitable.”

During its 51-day siege of Gaza last summer Israel dropped $370 million in ordinance on concrete hovels and refugee camps that hold the most densely packed population on the planet. Two thousand one hundred four Palestinians were killed. Sixty-nine percent—1,462—were civilians. Four hundred ninety-five were children. Ten thousand were injured. (During the attack six Israeli civilians and 66 soldiers were killed.) Four hundred Palestinian businesses were wiped out. Seventy mosques were destroyed and 130 were damaged. Twenty-four medical facilities were bombed, and 16 ambulances were struck, as was Gaza’s only electrical power plant. Israel tallied it up: 390,000 tank shells, 34,000 artillery shells, 4.8 million bullets. Most of the civilians who died were killed in their homes, many of the victims torn to shreds by flechette darts sprayed from tanks. Children were burned with white phosphorous or buried with their families under rubble caused by 2,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs. Others died fromdense inert metal explosive, or DIME, bombs—experimental weapons that send out extremely small, carcinogenic particles that cut through both soft tissue and bone. The Israel Defense Forces, as Amira Hass has reported, consider any Palestinian over the age of 12 to be a legitimate military target. Max Blumenthal’s new book, “The 51 Day War,” is a chilling chronicle of savage atrocities carried out by Israel in Gaza last summer. As horrible as the apartheid state in South Africa was, that nation never used its air force and heavy artillery to bomb and shell black townships.

A report by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) found Israel killed and injured more civilians with explosive weapons in 2014 than any other country in the world. Hamas’ indiscriminate firing of wildly inaccurate missiles—Finkelstein correctly called them “enhanced fireworks”—into Israel was, as a U.N. report recently charged, a war crime, although the report failed to note that under international law Hamas had a right to use force to defend itself from attack.

The disparity of firepower in the 2014 conflict was vast: Israel dropped 20,000 tons of explosives on Gaza while Hamas used 20 to 40 tons of explosives to retaliate. Israel’s wholesale slaughter of civilians is on a scale equaled only by Islamic State and Boko Haram. Yet Israel, in our world of double standards, is exempted from condemnation in Washington and provided with weapons and billions in U.S. foreign aid to perpetuate the killing. This is not surprising. The United States uses indiscriminate deadly force in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia that outdoes even Israel, leaving behind civilian victims, refugees and destroyed cities and villages in huge numbers.

Israel is not an anomaly. It is a window into the dystopian, militarized world that is being prepared for all of us, a world with vast disparities of income and draconian systems of internal security. There will be no freedom for Palestine, or for those locked in our own internal colonies and terrorized by indiscriminate police violence, until we destroy corporate capitalism and the neoliberal ideology that sustains it. There will be no justice for Michael Brown until there is justice for Mohammed Abu Khdeir. The fight for the Palestinians is our fight. If the Palestinians are not liberated none of us will be liberated. We cannot pick and choose which of the oppressed are convenient or inconvenient to defend. We will stand with all of the oppressed or none of the oppressed. And when we stand with the oppressed we will be treated like the oppressed.

Economist Joseph Stiglitz says Troika demands for more bailout funds “make no sense either for Greece or its creditors.” The so-called “third memorandum” will devastate economic and financial conditions more than already.

The entire scheme is misguided, Stiglitz explains. Structural adjustment programs loot countries instead of helping them – “turning downturns into recessions, recessions into depressions,” wherever they’re imposed, says Stiglitz.

Greece’s future includes increasingly unrepayable debt peonage, greater unemployment and poverty with diminishing resources for vital public services.

“Austerity is largely to blame for Greece’s current depression” – deepening as more demands are imposed. Conditions are “like a 19th century debtors’ prison, Stiglitz stresses. “Just as imprisoned debtors could not make the income to repay, the deepening depression in Greece will make it less and less able to repay.”

Troika mandated demands won’t work. Greece’s third bailout will fail like both previous ones. Expect “depression without end, unacceptable levels of unemployment (and poverty, as well as) ever growing inequality,” Stiglitz maintains.

Instead of helping Greece recover through economically sound policies, Troika bandits will keep “(b)lam(ing) the victim” like they always do.

Things are so bad Athens zoo animals may starve. On the one hand, scarce resources can’t provide for human needs.

On the other, capital controls impede supplying imported dietary supplements (not available domestically) for about 2,200 animals.

Attica Zoological Park founder Jean-Jacques Lesueur says lives of dolphins, seals, penguins and numerous other species are “endangered.” With capital controls in place prohibiting money transfers into or out of the country, suppliers demand full pre-payment before filling orders.

“From the first moment of capital controls, our three main suppliers informed us that every food shipment has to be fully paid in advance. We only have two weeks to receive a big fish shipment,” Lesueur explained.

France, Germany and the Netherlands are Greece’s main suppliers of specialized food items not found domestically – including beta carotene-rich pellets, fish and worms essential to feed flamingos.

Attica Zoological Park is Athens only zoo – home to more than 340 species, mostly birds. Normally it attracts many thousands of visitors annually. Crisis conditions exacerbated by capital controls took its toll on attendance – besides increasing human suffering nationwide to pay bankers and other large creditors ahead of all other obligations.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Since the newly released video of Texas State Trooper Brian Encinia detaining then arresting Sandra Bland, it has become clear that the entire arrest was itself illegal. But watching and listening to the video is one thing. When you see it all laid out in black and white, it becomes impossible to justify the hard copy language used by the officer. It is clear that he gave illegal commands and made a false arrest. If that arrest had never happened – as it should not have – Sandra Bland would be alive still today.

The African American civil rights and police accountability activist had simply asserted her rights, when the trooper gave her unlawful orders, which were only permissible if phrased (and accepted) as requests.

Three days after the false arrest, Bland was found dead in her jail cell.

Now, since that death, the video footage of the dashcam stop has come under increasing scrutiny. But long before it was judged in the court of public opinion, traffic stops just like the one in question were ruled on by the Supreme Court of the United States.

Democratic Texas state Senator Royce West weighed in on the video, saying that “once you see what occurred, you will probably agree with me she did not deserve to be placed in custody.”

The United States Supreme Court has proven to agree with this position.

Encinia’s conduct clearly violates a decision handed down by the Supreme Court last April.

In the case of Rodriguez v. United States it was determined that police were not allowed to extend the length of a routine traffic stop. That ruling effected lengths of even a few minutes, unless there was a clearly demonstrable safety concern or an additional crime that had been committed in the course of the stop.

But what is clear now, from the video, is that there was no other crime, nor a safety concern. The officer was acting in violation of the law, as defined by the Supreme Court.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke it down like this, saying that “the tolerable duration of police inquiries in the traffic-stop context is determined by the seizure’s ‘mission’ — to address the traffic violation that warranted the stop, and attend to related safety concerns.” A police stop may last no longer than is necessary to effectuate that purpose. Authority for the seizure thus ends when tasks tied to the traffic infraction are — or reasonably should have been — completed.”

Encinia was clearly completing the traffic stop when he escalated things because of Bland’s refusal to put out her cigarette. He later even indicates in the video that she had been “trying to sign the fucking ticket” when things got ugly.

That means his extension of the stop past that point – when there was no safety concern, nor any criminal offense that had been committed during the stop at that point – constituted illegal detention and a subsequent false arrest.

Trooper Encinia broke the law and he is not being held accountable for it.

The fact is that a lit cigarette has no jurisprudence precedence in being regarded as a “safety threat” to police officers. He had no grounds to tell her to put it out, nor did he even phrase his request as a command.

Encinia, in fact, neglected to even mention the cigarette in his official incident report. He also failed to mention his threats or the fact that he pulled and aimed his Taser at Bland over this illegal command.

It is clear from the video that the Supreme Court ruling is directly relevant to this case. Trooper Encinia made a false arrest, and in this case, he is not exempted by qualified immunity. He can and should be held accountable and punished for the false arrest.

The following exchange was transcribed thanks to the Huffington Post’s Matt Ramos and Dhyana Taylor. It shows what happens in the dashcam video, as Encinia quickly drives up on Bland. Seeing it all in print seems to highlight just how illegal the trooper’s actions were.

State Trooper Brian Encinia: Hello ma’am. We’re the Texas Highway Patrol and the reason for your stop is because you failed to signal the lane change. Do you have your driver’s license and registration with you? What’s wrong? How long have you been in Texas?

Sandra Bland: Got here just today.

Encinia: OK. Do you have a driver’s license? (Pause) OK, where you headed to now? Give me a few minutes.

(Bland inaudible)

(Encinia returns to his car for several minutes, then approaches Bland again.)

Encinia: OK, ma’am. (Pause.) You OK?

Bland: I’m waiting on you. This is your job. I’m waiting on you. When’re you going to let me go?

Encinia: I don’t know, you seem very really irritated.

Bland: I am. I really am. I feel like it’s crap what I’m getting a ticket for. I was getting out of your way. You were speeding up, tailing me, so I move over and you stop me. So yeah, I am a little irritated, but that doesn’t stop you from giving me a ticket, so [inaudible] ticket.

Encinia: Are you done?

Bland: You asked me what was wrong, now I told you.

Encinia: OK.

Bland: So now I’m done, yeah.

Encinia: You mind putting out your cigarette, please? If you don’t mind?

Bland: I’m in my car, why do I have to put out my cigarette?

Encinia: Well you can step on out now.

Bland: I don’t have to step out of my car.

Encinia: Step out of the car.

Bland: Why am I …

Encinia: Step out of the car!

Bland: No, you don’t have the right. No, you don’t have the right.

Encinia: Step out of the car.

Bland: You do not have the right. You do not have the right to do this.

Encinia: I do have the right, now step out or I will remove you.

Bland: I refuse to talk to you other than to identify myself. [crosstalk] I am getting removed for a failure to signal?

Encinia: Step out or I will remove you. I’m giving you a lawful order.

Get out of the car now or I’m going to remove you.

Bland: And I’m calling my lawyer.

Encinia: I’m going to yank you out of here. (Reaches inside the car.)

Bland: OK, you’re going to yank me out of my car? OK, alright.

Encinia (calling in backup): 2547.

Bland: Let’s do this.

Encinia: Yeah, we’re going to. (Grabs for Bland.)

Bland: Don’t touch me!

Encinia: Get out of the car!

Bland: Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me! I’m not under arrest — you don’t have the right to take me out of the car.

Encinia: You are under arrest!

Bland: I’m under arrest? For what? For what? For what?

Encinia (to dispatch): 2547 county fm 1098 (inaudible) send me another unit. (To Bland) Get out of the car! Get out of the car now!

Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You’re trying to give me a ticket for failure …

Encinia: I said get out of the car!

Bland: Why am I being apprehended? You just opened my —

Encinia: I‘m giving you a lawful order. I’m going to drag you out of here.

Bland: So you’re threatening to drag me out of my own car?

Encinia: Get out of the car!

Bland: And then you’re going to [crosstalk] me?

Encinia: I will light you up! Get out! Now! (Draws stun gun and points it at Bland.)

Bland: Wow. Wow. (Bland exits car.)

Encinia: Get out. Now. Get out of the car!

Bland: For a failure to signal? You’re doing all of this for a failure to signal?

Encinia: Get over there.

Bland: Right. yeah, lets take this to court, let’s do this.

Encinia: Go ahead.

Bland: For a failure to signal? Yup, for a failure to signal!

Encinia: Get off the phone!

Bland: (crosstalk)

Encinia: Get off the phone! Put your phone down!

Bland: I’m not on the phone. I have a right to record. This is my property. Sir?

Encinia: Put your phone down right now. Put your phone down!

(Bland slams phone down on her trunk.)

Bland: For a fucking failure to signal. My goodness. Y’all are interesting. Very interesting.

Encinia: Come over here. Come over here now.

Bland: You feelin’ good about yourself?

Encinia: Stand right here. Stand right there.

Bland: You feelin’ good about yourself? For a failure to signal? You feel real good about yourself don’t you? You feel good about yourself don’t you?

Encinia: Turn around. Turn around. Turn around now. Put your hands behind your back.

Bland: Why am I being arrested?

Encinia: Turn around …

Bland: Why can’t you …

Encinia: I’m giving you a lawful order. I will tell you.

Bland: Why am I being arrested?

Encinia: Turn around!

Bland: Why won’t you tell me that part?

Encinia: I’m giving you a lawful order. Turn around …

Bland: Why will you not tell me what’s going on?

Encinia: You are not complying.

Bland: I’m not complying ’cause you just pulled me out of my car.

Encinia: Turn around.

Bland: Are you fucking kidding me? This is some bull…

Encinia: Put your hands behind your back.

Bland: ‘Cause you know this straight bullshit. And you’re full of shit. Full of straight shit. That’s all y’all are is some straight scared cops. South Carolina got y’all bitch asses scared. That’s all it is. Fucking scared of a female.

Encinia: If you would’ve just listened.

Bland: I was trying to sign the fucking ticket — whatever.

Encinia: Stop moving!

Bland: Are you fucking serious?

Encinia: Stop moving!

Bland: Oh I can’t wait ’til we go to court. Ooh I can’t wait. I cannot wait ’til we go to court. I can’t wait. Oh I can’t wait! You want me to sit down now?

Encinia: No.

Bland: Or are you going to throw me to the floor? That would make you feel better about yourself?

Encinia: Knock it off!

Bland: Nah that would make you feel better about yourself. That would make you feel real good wouldn’t it? Pussy ass. Fucking pussy. For a failure to signal you’re doing all of this. In little ass Praire View, Texas. My God they must have …

Encinia: You were getting a warning, until now you’re going to jail.

Bland: I’m getting a — for what? For what?

Encinia: You can come read.

Bland: I’m getting a warning for what? For what!?

Encinia: Stay right here.

Bland: Well you just pointed me over there! Get your mind right.

Encinia: I said stay over here. Stay over here.

Bland: Ooh I swear on my life, y’all are some pussies. A pussy-ass cop, for a fucking signal you’re gonna take me to jail.

Encinia (to dispatch, or an officer arriving on scene): I got her in control she’s in some handcuffs.

Bland: For a fucking ticket. What a pussy. What a pussy. You’re about to break my fucking wrist!

Encinia: Stop moving.

Bland: I’m standing still! You keep moving me, goddammit.

Encinia: Stay right here. Stand right there.

Bland: Don’t touch me. Fucking pussy  — for a traffic ticket (inaudible).

(door slams)

Encinia: Come read right over here. This right here says ‘a warning.’ You started creating the problems.

Bland: You asked me what was wrong!

Encinia: Do you have anything on your person that’s illegal?

Bland: Do I feel like I have anything on me? This a fucking maxi dress.

Encinia: I’m going to remove your glasses.

Bland: This a maxi dress. (Inaudible) Fucking assholes.

Encinia: Come over here.

Bland: You about to break my wrist. Can you stop? You’re about to fucking break my wrist! Stop!!!

Encinia: Stop now! Stop it! If you would stop resisting.

Female officer: Stop resisting ma’am.

Bland: (cries) For a fucking traffic ticket, you are such a pussy. You are such a pussy.

Female officer: No, you are. You should not be fighting.

Encinia: Get on the ground!

Bland: For a traffic signal!

Encinia: You are yanking around, when you pull away from me, you’re resisting arrest.

Bland: Don’t it make you feel real good don’t it? A female for a traffic ticket. Don’t it make you feel good Officer Encinia? You’re a real man now. You just slammed me, knocked my head into the ground. I got epilepsy, you motherfucker.

Encinia: Good. Good.

Bland: Good? Good?

Female officer: You should have thought about it before you started resisting.

Bland: Make you feel real good for a female. Y’all strong, y’all real strong.

Encinia: I want you to wait right here.

Bland: I can’t go anywhere with your fucking knee in my back, duh!

Encinia: (to bystander): You need to leave! You need to leave!

(Bland continues screaming, but much of it is inaudible)

Encinia: For a warning you’re going to jail.

Bland: Whatever, whatever.

Encinia: You’re going to jail for resisting arrest. Stand up.

Bland: If I could, I can’t.

Encinia: OK, roll over.

Bland: I can’t even fucking feel my arms.

Encinia: Tuck your knee in, tuck your knee in.

Bland: (Crying): Goddamn. I can’t [muffled].

Encinia: Listen, listen. You’re going to sit up on your butt.

Bland: You just slammed my head into the ground and you do not even care …

Encinia: Sit up on your butt.

Female officer: Listen to how he is telling you to get up.

Bland: I can’t even hear.

Female officer: Yes you can.

Encinia: Sit up on your butt.

Bland: He slammed my fucking head into the ground.

Encinia: Sit up on your butt.

Bland: What the hell.

Encinia: Now stand up.

Bland: All of this for a traffic signal. I swear to God. All of this for a traffic signal. (To bystander.) Thank you for recording! Thank you! For a traffic signal — slam me into the ground and everything! Everything! I hope y’all feel good.

Encinia: This officer saw everything.

Female officer: I saw everything.

Bland: And (muffled) No you didn’t. You didn’t see everything leading up to it …

Female officer: I’m not talking to you.

Bland: You don’t have to.

Encinia: 2547 county. Send me a first-available, for arrest.

Female officer: You okay? You should have Tess check your hand.

Encinia: Yeah, I’m good.

Encinia: She started yanking away and then she kicked me, so I took her straight to the ground.

Female officer: And there you got it right there… I’ll search it for you if you want.

Female officer: Yeah.

Second male: I know one thing for sure, it’s on video.

Female officer: Yeah.

Second male: You hurt?

Encinia: No.

Encinia (to female officer): Did you see her when we were right here?

Female officer: Yeah, I saw her cause that’s where I (inaudible).

Encinia: This is when she pulled with the cuffs.

Paramedic: Your ring got you there?

Encinia: I had the chain, well, not the chain, but

Paramedic: You got the two loops?

Encinia: She didn’t kick me too hard but she still kicked me though.

Paramedic: Not through the skin, but you got a nice scratch.  I’m a paramedic, that’s why I know.

Encinia: I know that, that’s why I made you look.

Paramedic: Did she do that?

Encinia: Yeah that’s her.

Paramedic: Yeah that’s cut through the skin.

Encinia:  I wrapped it around her head and got her down.

Encinia (on radio): This is a traffic stop, had a little bit of a incident.

(Silence for several minutes.)

Encinia (apparently to a supervisor): I tried to de-escalate her. It wasn’t getting anywhere, at all. I mean I tried to put the Taser away. I tried talking to her and calming her down, and that was not working.

Well, I know, that was when she was in custody, and now I tried to get her detained and get her to just calm down and just calm down. Stop throwing her arms. You know what? She never swung at me, just flailing and stomping around. I said alright that’s enough, and that’s when I detained her.

There was something going on and she started kicking and kicking.

Yeah, and once I got her in the back of the car, that’s why I’m calling you now, because …

No, we were in the middle of a traffic stop and the traffic stop was not completed. I was just trying to get her out, over to the side and just explain to her what was going on because I couldn’t even get her to do what I was telling her. She just started going this is an mf, and you give mf for a ticket and lane change, she just started going.

I just stepped back from the car and was like are you done ma’am? I need to tell you why and what I’m giving you and she just kept on going.

I mean, I don’t have serious bodily injury (laughing) but I was kicked.

Assault is if a person commits an offense of intentionally, knowingly or recklessly causing bodily injury to another or you intentionally threaten another with bodily injury.

She’s in the back of the car right now. She requested EMS. She said, she said I threw her down intentionally, for nothing. No, I put you down because you kicked me. You were fighting back. I kept telling her to calm down, calm down.

Evading arrest or detention. (Inaudible). Resisting arrest … She was detained. That’s the key and that’s why I am calling and asking because she was detained. That’s when I was walking her over to the car, just to calm her down and just to (say) stop.

That’s when she started kicking. I don’t know if it would be resist or if it would be assault. I kinda lean toward assault versus resist because I mean technically, she’s under arrest when a traffic stop is initiated, as a lawful stop. You’re not free to go. I didn’t say you’re under arrest, I never said, you know, stop, hands up.

Correct, that did not occur. There was just the assault part.

Like I said, after I got her all her situated and buttoned up as far as getting her in a safe vehicle, under arrest, that’s why I’m calling you.

She just moved here, according to her, yesterday, she’s from Illinois.

She gave me her driver’s license. I came back to the car and started running her stuff. Print it out. Coming to get back to the car to complete and tell her what’s she receiving and what to do and so forth. 

At that time, she’s still very much irritated and so forth. I’m pulling her over for she didn’t turn on her signal and so forth and so forth.

She wouldn’t even look at me. She’s looking straight ahead, just mad.

I’m at the driver’s side, I need to get her out of the car and over to the side of the car, you know, on the sidewalk, because I don’t want to be in the middle of the road while we’re arguing — or whatever, not arguing, I’m trying to tell her what she’s doing but she’s arguing with me.

That’s the only thing, I mean it too. When I had her down on the ground and the other officer came, I told her stop resisting and that’s when I told her you’re under arrest. At least I don’t think I did.

Yes, she kicked me, she started yanking away and trying to get away. And that’s when I grabbed her arm, she’s in front of me still. I controlled, I grabbed her by the shoulders and I brought her down into the grass away from the pavement.

Like I said, with something like this, I just call you immediately, after I get to a safe stopping point.

No weapons, she’s in handcuffs. You know, I took the lesser of the uhh … I only took enough force as I — seemed necessary. I even de-escalated once we were on the pavement, you know on the sidewalk. So I allowed time, I’m not saying I just threw her to the ground. I allowed time to de-escalate and so forth. It just kept getting. (laughing) Right, I’m just making that clear.

I got some cuts on my hand, I guess that is an injury, but I don’t need medical attention. I got three little circles from I guess the handcuffs when she was twisting away from me.

Over a simple traffic stop. Yeah, I don’t get it. I really don’t.

Why act like that, I don’t know.

Another officer to Bland:  Okay ma’am, you’re under arrest. You’re going to be transported to the Waller County Jail, OK? Alright.

Officer to officer: Alright brother, appreciate it.

(Article by Jackson Marciana and Shante Wooten; intro by Reagan Ali and M. David as well; image via #Op309 Media, as usual; h/t to Huffington Post for the transcription of the video)

Image: Kenneth Kabaka Reynolds President of the Metro Detroit Cab Drivers Association at rally on July 21, 2015.

Shop owners, taxi drivers protest against real estate magnates, unlicensed drivers

A rally and march in Hart Plaza and at the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center (City Hall) on July 21 exposed the false narrative emanating from the corporate media saying that Detroit is being revitalized. The city emerged from a contrived financial emergency and forced bankruptcy late in 2014 with billions stolen from pensioners and residents who witnessed public assets taken over by private interests under the guise of cost-cutting. Over 60,000 households are still facing property tax foreclosures while hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies are being awarded to billionaires such as banker Dan Gilbert and stadium owner Mike Illitch.

Despite the propaganda advanced by the daily newspapers and television stations, the majority African American population has not witnessed any semblance of an economic revival since the Great Recession which began in late 2007. Well over 100,000 bank foreclosures were carried out against the working class city while the politicians did nothing to protect the interests of their constituents.

Detroit rally against ethnic cleansing on July 21, 2015 at City Hall

Even small African American shop owners are being driven out of the downtown and Midtown areas. Taxi drivers are now forced to compete with Uber Technologies, Inc., a transportation service which has generated controversy and protest internationally.

On July 21, both the shop and restaurant owners rallied beginning with a caravan from Eastern Market to Hart Plaza. Bert’s Market Place, a Jazz club and restaurant, owned by an African American Bert Dearing, has been a threatened with closure.

Dearing had owned the location but lost it to foreclosure after a lengthy illness. The property was listed on auction.com with a starting price of $700,000 and Dearing says he has until 2017 to resolve the issue or move.

Bert’s has been a mainstay for people in the downtown area and throughout the city. Dearing opened his doors for a fundraiser in support of people’s attorney Vanessa Fluker in 2011 after she had been fined by a local Wayne County judge in her militant efforts to save a family’s home through appealing an unjust decision that had racial implications.

Other small business people were also present at the demonstration who discussed familiar scenarios. Owners of building have sold to other interests that want the African Americans and their constituents out.

Taxi Drivers Join Demonstration

In addition to the shop owners and their supporters, the Metro Detroit Cab Drivers Association were also present protesting against the growing influence of Uber services which they say puts the local drivers at a disadvantage. Taxi cabs have to undergo expensive inspections, as well as pay excessive fees for insurance and bond plates.

These costs are compounded with the potential for random stops by the police who often ticket drivers for various spurious violations such as not having an updated log of trips.

Kenneth Kabaka Reynolds, the president of the Cab Drivers Association said of Uber that “”They are illegal in the state of Michigan and they’re operating with impunity.”

Reynolds, a longtime activist and professional photographer, said if Uber is to continue operating in Detroit, city officials should regulate it like the traditional taxi cab industry. “And if you’re not going to regulate Uber, deregulate the taxi cab industry.”

During the rally a statement of solidarity was delivered by Cecily McClellan, a leader in the Detroit Active and Retirees Association (DAREA). This organization was formed in the aftermath of the pension and healthcare cuts imposed by Judge Steven Rhodes who presided over the bankruptcy.

DAREA’s leaders were the most vocal opponents of the bankruptcy during the proceedings during 2013-2014. At present they have filed an appeal in federal court to overturn the attacks carried out against municipal retirees.

After the demonstrators marched from Hart Plaza on the Detroit River to City Hall for another rally, dozens of taxi vehicles began to circle the building honking their horns in an act of defiance. Later the rally participants marched around the building chanting slogans against current city policies under the administration Mike Duggan, the first corporate-imposed white mayor in forty years.

Calls for Solidarity Evoking Ferguson and Baltimore

The Moratorium NOW! Coalition participated in the demonstration and addressed the crowd and encouraged them to endorse the upcoming People’s Assembly and Speak Out scheduled for Grand Circus Park downtown on Aug. 29. Moratorium NOW! Coalition reminded the crowd that African Americans still constituted the overwhelming majority of the population of Detroit and that the people of Ferguson and Baltimore had spoken to the concrete conditions prevailing in urban areas and pointed to a way forward.

If African Americans are being ignored by the city administration then the streets must be filled with angry people who are committed to reversing the business as usual atmosphere in the downtown area, the activists concluded. Despite the claims of an economic boom downtown and in Midtown, many businesses are still closing, even those not owned by African Americans.

One major problem is the construction along Woodward Avenue, the main thoroughfare in the city, where the M-1 rail line is being put down. With the disruptions along the street from downtown to the New Center area, there is no parking on the street along Woodward.

Moreover, the poverty and jobless rate among the people who live in the city is hovering near 50 percent. There are no plans for the implementation of a jobs program locally or nationally and consequently hundreds of thousands will remain on the margins of the working class.

The People’s Assembly and Speak Out scheduled for Aug. 29 is being held under the theme, “Rally For Our Future: Stop the War on Detroit! The leaflets being circulated in the city say that “From Greece to Puerto Rico to Spain and Across the United States workers are fighting back against the austerity being imposed by the banks and financial institutions.”

A list of grievances and demands on the leaflet publicizing the event calls for the stopping of police killings and brutality and the jailing of killer cops. In addition other issues to be address includes the need for at least a $15 an hour minimum wage; health care for all and single payer now; the halting of tax and mortgage foreclosures along with a demand that the Hardest Hit Homeowners funds be released to keep people in their residences in Detroit and Wayne County.

This demonstration will emphasize the need for a moratorium on water shut-offs and to stop the ongoing attempts to privatize the Detroit Water & Sewage Department (DWSD), which is undergoing a regionalization process as the Great Lakes Regional Water Authority. The Moratorium NOW! Coalition along with DAREA is supporting a petition drive to force a vote on the regionalization of the water services.

On July 21, the same day that the demonstration was held at City Hall, the Detroit City Council in a 5-4 vote, approved a 7.5 percent water rate increase. These actions prompted by the state- run Detroit Financial Oversight Committee, which really runs the city in the post-bankruptcy and emergency management period. These policies will force more people into poverty risking their water services being terminated.

The Moratorium NOW! Coalition is asking other organizations locally, nationally and internationally to endorse the Aug. 29 rally and demonstration. Anyone interested in supporting the initiative should contact the organization at moratorium-mi.org or call 313-680- 5508.

Yemen is Obama’s war – planned months before conflict began, using Saudi and other regional rogue state partners as proxies, wanting Yemen returned to US client state status at the expense of thousands of mostly civilian deaths so far (many more than officially reported) and unprecedented human suffering, according to the ICRC.

It issued a press release expressing alarm over intensified conflict, saying:

“The suffering of the civilian population has reached unprecedented levels. More than 100 days into the crisis, severe shortages of water, food and fuel continue across the country, together with airstrikes and fighting on the ground,” ICRC Yemen delegation head Antoine Grand explained.

“The last two weeks have seen an intensification of fighting in the southern governorates of Aden and Taiz where it is becoming increasingly difficult for us to reach affected areas, to evacuate the dead and the wounded and to provide life-saving assistance.”

“We remain ready to facilitate the evacuation of the dead and wounded – as we are currently doing in both Aden and Taiz – and to visit detainees on both sides, but all parties must facilitate our access and respect our mandate.”

The ICRC has 262 personnel in Yemen – 144 in Sanaa (the capital), 70 in the southern port city Aden (Yemen’s second largest city), 36 in Saada governorate and 12 in Taiz (the nation’s third largest city).

Well over a million Yemenis were displaced so far – thousands more daily. More than 80% of the population desperately needs humanitarian aid. US-supported Saudi blockade prevents most vital supplies from entering.

Terror bombing and imported takfiri terrors continue ravaging and destroying the region’s poorest country before conflict began.

Over half of Yemen’s 24 million people live on less than $2 a day with no access to clean water. Pre-conflict child malnutrition was severe – much worse as war rages.

Most Yemenis today are food insecure. They don’t get enough to eat. Around of 90% of food needed is imported – greatly impeded by Riyadh’s blockade.

Vitally needed medicines, medical supplies and equipment, fuel and other essentials aren’t getting in as needed – small amounts only.

Saudis are willfully bombing residential neighborhoods and other civilian sites, including the Mazraq refugee camp in Hajjah province.

Banned weapons are used, including toxic chemicals and US-supplied cluster munitions. On Friday alone, Saudi terror bombing murdered 120 Taiz residents, injuring at least 150 others.

A Riyadh-announced five-day truce beginning Sunday night local time is meaningless. It violated two earlier ones straightaway – blaming Houthis for its duplicity. Its proxies on the ground continued fighting. Don’t expect them to stop this time.

An official statement said Saudi forces reserve the right to resume fighting in response to continued Houthi military activity – true or false, even if it’s defensive against imported takfiri attacks.

Separately, Saudi helicopters terror bombed their own territory – targeting Akhdoud, Najran region residential districts bordering Yemen.

The Ahrar al-Najran opposition movement gained control over Akhdoud. A local activist said Riyadh seeks revenge by targeting noncombatant civilians -the same tactic used in Yemen.

It annexed Najran earlier along with other areas bordering Yemen. Another local activist said “(t)he Najran tribes in a statement declared war against the occupying Saudi regime, stressing that the House of Saud represents corruption on the Earth and sheds the blood of innocent people across the globe in a very routine and normal manner.”

Riyadh uses US-made weapons to terror-bomb Yemen daily, arm regional Islamic State and other takfiri terrorists, along with targeting its own people wanting international law guaranteed rights they’re denied.

The US Defense Department just authorized the sale of hundreds more air-to-ground missiles so Riyadh can continue terror-bombing Yemen and internal areas at its discretion.

Saudi Arabia is one of the world’s largest arms buyers. It significantly increased purchases in recent months. So far this year, it’s the world’s top importer of weapons and munitions.

Many are used to murder Yemenis – Obama’s latest atrocity putting an entire population at risk. Who does he have in mind to attack next?

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

This incisive article by Mahdi Nazemroaya was first published by GR in August 2014 at the outset of the US led bombing campaign

The ISIL or IS threat is a smokescreen. The strength of the ISIL has deliberately been inflated to get public support for the Pentagon and to justify the illegal bombing of Syria. It has also been used to justify the mobilization of what is looking more and more like a large-scale US-led military buildup in the Middle East. The firepower and military assets being committed go beyond what is needed for merely fighting the ISIL death squads.

While the US has assured its citizens and the world that troops will not be sent on the ground, this is very unlikely. In the first instance, it is unlikely because boots on the ground are needed to monitor and select targets. Moreover, Washington sees the campaign against the ISIL fighters as something that will take years. This is doublespeak. What is being described is a permanent military deployment or, in the case of Iraq, redeployment. This force could eventually morph into a broader assault force threatening Syria, Iran, and Lebanon.

US-Syrian and US-Iranian Security Dialogue?

Before the US-led bombings in Syria started there were unverified reports being circulated that Washington had started a dialogue with Damascus through Russian and Iraqi channels to discuss military coordination and the Pentagon bombing campaign in Syria. There was something very off though. Agents of confusion were at work in an attempt to legitimize the bombardment of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The claims of US-Syrian cooperation via Russian and Iraqi channels are part of a sinister series of misinformation and disinformation. Before the claims about US cooperation with Syria, similar claims were being made about US-Iranian cooperation in Iraq.

Earlier, Washington and the US media tried to give the impression that an agreement on military cooperation was made between itself and Tehran to fight ISIL and to cooperate inside Iraq. This was widely refuted in the harshest of words by numerous members of the Iranian political establishment and high-ranking Iranian military commanders as disinformation.

After the Iranians clearly indicated that Washington’s claims were fiction, the US claimed that it would not be appropriate for Iran to join its anti-ISIL coalition. Iran rebutted. Washington was dishonestly misrepresenting the facts, because US officials had asked Tehran to join the anti-ISIL coalition several times.

Before he was discharged from the hospital after a prostate surgery, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the highest ranking official in Iran, told Iranian television on September 9, 2014, that the US had requested that Tehran and Washington cooperate together inside Iraq on three different occasions. He explained that the US ambassador to Iraq had relayed a message to the Iranian ambassador to Iraq to join the US, then, in his own words, «the same [John Kerry] — who had said in front of the camera and in front of the eyes of all the world that they do not want Iran to cooperate with them — requested [from] Dr. Zarif that Iran cooperate with them on this issue, but Dr. Zarif turned this [request] down.» The third request was made by US Undersecretary Wendy Sherman to Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi.

Khamenei additionally made it clear that he categorically ruled out any cooperation with Washington on the issue. «On this issue, we will not cooperate with America particularly because their hands are dirty,» he publicly confirmed while explaining that Washington had ill intentions and nefarious designs in Iraq and Syria.

Like Russia, Iran has been supporting Syria and Iraq against ISIL. Also like Moscow, Tehran is committed to fighting it, but will not join Washington’s anti-ISIL coalition.

New Invasion(s) and Regime Change Project(s) in the Pipeline?

As was pointed out on June 20, 2014, in Washington’s eyes Nouri Al-Malaki’s federal government in Baghdad had to be removed for refusing to join the US siege against the Syrians, being aligned to Iran, selling oil to the Chinese, and buying weapons from the Russian Federation. Iraq’s decision to be part of an Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline also undermined the objectives of the US and its allies to control the flow of energy in the Middle East and to obstruct Eurasian integration. [1]

There were also two other unforgivable cardinal sins that Al-Malaki’s government in Baghdad committed in Washington’s eye. These offenses, however, should be put into geopolitical context first.

Remember the post-September 11, 2001 (post-9/11) catchphrase of the Bush II Administration during the start of its serial wars? It went like this: «Anyone can go to Baghdad, but real men go to Tehran!» The point of this warmongering catchphrase is that Baghdad and Damascus have been viewed as pathways for the Pentagon towards Tehran. [2]

Like Syria, Al-Malaki government’s cardinal sins were tied to blocking the pathway to Tehran. Firstly, the Iraqi government evicted the Pentagon from Iraq at the end of 2011, which removed US troops stationed directly on Iran’s western border. Secondly, the Iraqi federal government was working to expel anti-government Iranian militants from Iraq and to close Camp Ashraf, which could be used in a war or regime change operations against Iran.

Ashraf was a base for the military wing of the Iraqi-based Mujahidin-e-Khalq (MEK/MOK/MKO). The MEK is an anti-government Iranian organization that is bent on regime change in Tehran. It has even openly endorsed US-led attacks on Iran and Syria.

Although the US government itself considers the MEK a terrorist organization, Washington began to deepen its ties with the MEK when it and its staunch British allies invaded Iraq. Disingenuously and ironically, the US and Britain used Saddam Hussein’s support for the MEK to justify labeling Iraq as a state-sponsor of terrorism and to also justify the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Since then the US has been nurturing the MEK.

Since 2003, the US has been funding the MEK. Washington has been protecting the MEK, because it wants to keep them on a leash as either leverage against Tehran or to have the option of one day installing the MEK into power in Tehran as part of a regime change operation against Iran. The MEK has literally become incorporated into the Pentagon and CIA toolboxes against Tehran. Even when the US transferred control of Camp Ashraf to Baghdad, the Pentagon kept forces inside the MEK camp.

Eventually the MEK forces would mostly be relocated in 2012 to the former US base known as Camp Liberty. Camp Liberty is now called by an Arabic name, Camp Hurriya.

The Istanbul bureau chief of the Christian Science Monitor, Scott Peterson described how US officials began to really put their weight behind the MEK during the start of the Arab Spring in 2011. This is tied to Washington’s regime change dreams. Peterson wrote that US officials «rarely mention the MEK’s violent and anti-American past, and portray the group not as terrorists but as freedom fighters with ‘values just like us,’ as democrats-in-waiting ready to serve as a vanguard of regime change in Iran.» [3]

Washington Has Not Abandoned Dreams of Regime Change in Tehran

Washington has not abandoned its dreams for regime change in Tehran. Is it a coincidence that the US and EU support for the MEK is increasing, especially when the ISIL threat in Iraq began to be noticed publicly?

Six hundred parliamentarians and politicians from mostly NATO countries were flown in for a large MEK gathering in the Parisian northeastern suburb of Villepinte that called for regime change in Iran on June 27, 2014. Warmongers and morally bankrupt figures like former US senator Joseph Lieberman, Israeli mouthpiece and apologist Alan Dershowhitz, former Bush II official and Fox News pundit John Bolton, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, and French former minister and United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNIMIK) chief Bernard Kouchner all met the MEK to promote regime change and war. According to the MEK, over 80, 000 people attended the regime change rally. Supporters of the insurgencies in Iraq and Syria were also present at the Villepinte gathering calling for regime change in Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

The irony is that the money for the event most probably came from the US government itself. US allies probably contributed too. This money has gone to the MEK’s lobbying initiatives with the US Congress and US Department of State, which in effect is recycling US funding. People like Rudy Giuliani — probably one of the most hated mayors in the history of New York City until he took advantage of the tragic events of 9/11 — are now effectively lobbyists for the MEK. «Many of these former high-ranking US officials — who represent the full political spectrum — have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to speak in support of the MEK,» according to the Christian Science Monitor. [4]

Giuliani has been speaking at MEK events at least as far back as 2010. In 2011, he publicly pushed for regime change in Tehran and Damascus at a MEK gathering. «How about we follow an Arab Spring with a Persian Summer?» he rhetorically declared. [5] Giuliani’s next sentence revealed just how much of a scion of US foreign policy the initiative to support the MEK truly is: «We need regime change in Iran, more than we do in Egypt or Libya, and just as we need it in Syria.» [6]

Joseph Lieberman’s friend and fellow war advocate Senator John McCain was unable to make the trip to the Parisian suburb in Seine-Saint-Denis, but addressed the regime change gathering via video. Congressman Edward Royce, the chair of the US House Foreign Affairs Committee, also showed his support for regime change in Iran through a video message. So did Senator Carl Levin and Senator Robert Menendez.

Large delegations from the US, France, Spain, Canada, and Albania were present. Aside from the aforementioned individuals, other notable American attendees to the June 27, 2014 event included the following:

1. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the lower chamber (House of Representatives) in the bicameral US Congress;

2. John Dennis Hastert; another former speaker of the House of Representatives;

3. George William Casey Jr., who commanded the multinational military force that invaded and occupied Iraq;

4. Hugh Shelton, a computer software executive and former chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff;

5. James Conway, the former chief of the US Marine Corps

6. Louis Freeh, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI);

7. Lloyd Poe, the US Representative who sits on (1) the US House Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia, and Emerging Threats and chairs (2) the US House Subcommittee on Terrorism, Non‐proliferation and Trade;

8. Daniel Davis, a US Representative from Illinois;

9. Loretta Sánchez, a US Representative from California;

10. Michael B. Mukasey, a former attorney-general of the US;

11. Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont;

12. William Richardson, the former secretary of the US Department of Energy;

13. Robert Torricelli, a former legislator in the US House of Representatives and the US Senate senator who is the legally representative of the MEK in Iraq;

14. Francis Townsend, former Homeland Security advisor to George W. Bush Jr.;

15. Linda Chavez, a former chief White House director;

16. Robert Joseph, the former US undersecretary that ran the (1) Bureau of Arms Control, Verification, and Compliance, (2) the Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation, and the (3) Bureau of Political-Military Affairs;

17. Philip Crowley, the former assistant-secretary of state responsible for public affairs;

18. David Phillips, the military police commander who restructured the Iraqi police and was responsible for guarding Camp Ashraf and Saddam Hussein as a prisoner;

19. Marc Ginsberg, the senior vice-president of the public relations firm APCO Worldwide and former US ambassador and US presidential adviser for Middle East policy.

Like the US presence, the French presence included officials. Aside from Bernard Kouchner, from France some of the notable attendees were the following individuals:

1. Michèle Alliot-Marie, a French politician who among her cabinet portfolios was responsible for the military and foreign affairs at different times;

2. Rama Yade, vice president of the conservative Radical Party of France;

3. Gilbert Mitterrand, the president of the human rights foundation France Libertés, which has focused on ethnic groups such as Kurds, Chechens, and Tibetans;

4. Martin Vallton, the mayor of Villepinte.

From Spain the notable attendees were the following:

1. Pedro Agramunt Font de Mora, the Spanish chair of the European People’s Party (EPP) and its allies in the Council of Europe;

2. Jordi Xucla, the Spanish chair of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) Group in the Council of Europe;

3. Alejo Vidal-Quadras, a Spanish politician and one of the fourteen vice-presidents of the European Union’s European Parliament;

4. José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the former prime minister of Spain (who was also visibly accompanied by his wife Sonsoles Espinosa Díaz).

Other notable attendees from other Euro-Atlantic countries included:

1. Pandli Majko, the former prime minster of Albania;

2. Kim Campbell, the former prime minister of Canada

3. Geir Haarde, the former prime minister of Iceland;

4. Ingrid Betancourt, a former Colombian senator;

5. Alexander Carile, a member of the British House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament

6. Giulio Maria Terzi, the former foreign minister of Italy;

7. Adrianus Melkert, a former Dutch cabinet minister, a former World Bank executive, and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s former special envoy to Iraq.

Not only regime change was talked about, but the cross-border crisis in Iraq and Syria was a major subject. Fox News gave the event special coverage. Just in July, the MEK’s leadership had condemned Iranian support to the Iraqi federal government in its fight against the ISIL, yet since the US had began to nominally fight the ISIL the MEK has begun to hold its tongue.

Before the regime change gathering, the MEK’s leader Maryam Rajavi — who the MEK has designated as the president of Iran since 1993 — even meet with the puppet Syrian National Council’s leader Ahmed Jarba in Paris to discuss cooperation on May 23, 2014.

MEK leader Maryam Rajavi and SNC leader Ahmed Jarba meet to discuss cooperating for regime change in Tehran and Damascus.

Regime Change in Damascus through Mission Creep in Syria

The bombing campaign that the US has started in Syria is illegal and a violation of the UN Charter. This is why the Pentagon took the step of claiming that the US-led bombing campaign was prompted by the threat of an «imminent» attack that was being planned against the territory of the US. This allegation was made to give legal cover to the bombardment of Syrian territory through a warped argument under Article 51 of the UN Charter that allows a UN member to legally attack another country if an imminent attack by the said country is about to take place on the UN member.

Barack Obama and the US government have done their best to confuse and blur reality through a series of different steps they have taken to claim legitimacy for violating international law by bombing Syria without the authorization of Damascus. Although US Ambassador Samantha Powers informed Syria’s permanent representative to the UN that US-led attacks would be launched on Al-Raqqa Governate, informing Bashar Al-Jaafari through a formal unilateral notification does not amount to being given the legal consent of Syria.

The US-led attacks on Syria do not have the backing of the UN Security Council either. The US government, however, has tried to spin the September 19, 2014, meeting of the UN Security Council that John Kerry chaired as a sign that the UN Security Council and international community are backing its bombing campaign.

Nor is it a coincidence that just when the US assembled its multinational coalition to fight the ISIL and its pseudo-caliphate, that John Kerry conveniently mentions that Syria has violated the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). While admitting that Syria did not use any material prohibited by the CWC, Kerry told US legislators that Damascus had breached its commitments to the CWC on September 18, 2014. In other words, Washington intends to go after Syria and pursue regime change in Damascus. If this does not make it clear, then the fact that the US will use Saudi Arabia to train more anti-government forces should. [7]

A US brinkmanship strategy to justify a US-led bombing campaign against Syria has been put into action with the intent of creating a pretext for expanding the illegal US-led airstrikes in Syria that started on September 22, 2014.

What the US envisions is a long-term bombing campaign, which also threatens Lebanon and Iran. According to Ali Khamenei, the US wants to bomb both Iraq and Syria using ISIL as a smokescreen on the basis of the model in Pakistan. More correctly, the situation should be compared to the AfPak (Af-Pak) model. The US has used the spillover of instability from Afghanistan into Pakistan and the spread of the Taliban as a pretext for bombing Pakistan. Iraq and Syria have been merged as one conflict zone, which Ibrahim Al-Marashi, using a neologism, has described as the rise of «Syraq.»

The Broader Objective: Disrupting Eurasian Integration

While the US has been pretending to fight the same terrorist and death squads that it has created, the Chinese and their partners have been busy working to integrate Eurasia. America’s «Global War on Terror» has been paralleled with the rebuilding of the Silk Road. This is the real story and motivation for Washington’s insistence to fight and remobilize in the Middle East. It is also the reason why the US has been pushing Ukraine to confront Russia and the EU to sanction the Russian Federation.

America wants to disrupt the reemerging Silk Road and its expanding trade network. While Kerry has been busy frightening audiences about the ISIL and its atrocities, the Chinese have been busy sweeping the map by making deals across Asia and the Indian Ocean. This is part of the westward march of the Chinese dragon.

Parallel to Kerry’s travels, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Sri Lanka and went to the Maldives. Sri Lanka is already part of China’s Maritime Silk Road project. The Maldivians are newer entries; agreements have been reached to include the island-nation into the Maritime Silk Road network and infrastructure that China is busy constructing to expand maritime trade between East Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. Nor is it a coincidence that two Chinese destroyers docked at the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas in the Persian Gulf to conduct joint drills with Iranian warships in the Persian Gulf.

Parallel to east-west trade, a north-south trade and transport network is being developed. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani was in Kazakhstan recently where he and his Kazakhstani counterpart, President Nursultan Nazarbayev, confirmed that trade was due to see manifold increases. The completion of the Kazakhstan-Turkmenistan-Iran railway, which will create a north-south transit route, is being awaited. Cooperation between Tehran and the Eurasian Union was also discussed by the two presidents. On the other western side of the Caspian Sea, a parallel north-south corridor running from Russia to Iran through the Republic of Azerbaijan has been in the works.

The anti-Russia sanctions are beginning to cause uneasiness in the European Union. The real losers in the sanctions in Russia are the members of the European Union. Russia has demonstrated that it has options. Moscow has already launched the construction of its mega natural gas Yakutia–Khabarovsk–Vladivostok pipeline (also known as the Power of Siberia pipeline) to deliver gas to China while BRICS partner South Africa has signed a historic deal on nuclear energy with Rosatom.

Moscow’s influence on the world stage is very clear. Its influence has been on the rise in the Middle East and Latin America. Even in NATO-garrisoned Afghanistan, Russian influence is on the rise. The Russian government has recently compiled a list of over one hundred old Soviet construction projects that it would like to recuperate.

An alternative to US and EU sanctions is beginning to emerge in Eurasia. Aside from the oil-for-goods deal that Tehran and Moscow signed, Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak announced that Iran and Russia had made several new agreements worth seventy billion euro. Sanctions will soon merely isolate the US and the EU. The Iranians have also announced that they are working with their Chinese and Russian partners to overcome the US and EU sanctions regime.

America is being rolled back. It cannot pivot to the Asia-Pacific until matters are settled in the Middle East and Eastern Europe against the Russian, Iranians, Syrians, and their allies. That is why Washington is doing its best to disrupt, divide, redraw, bargain and co-opt. When it comes down to it, the US is not concerned about fighting the ISIL, which has been serving Washington’s interests in the Middle East. America’s main concern is about preserving its crumbling empire and preventing Eurasian integration.

Notes

As Turkey continues to bomb inside Syria and Iraq against alleged ISIS targets and PKK Iraqi Kurds, and as the NATO Article 4 meeting looms over the Middle East, Turkey has clearly taken yet another step toward its goal of establishing a “buffer zone” and “no-fly zone” over Syria.

Turkey has called Article 4 NATO meetings twice – once in 2003 and once in 2013. In the latter incident, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United states sent two PATRIOT anti-missile batteries each as well as soldiers trained in the operation of those missiles. Turkey is now requesting help with its border security due to the crisis in Syria and one can only wonder what the response of the rest of NATO will be when the meeting concludes.

Article 4 allows any member of NATO to “request assistance” when its “territorial integrity, political independence or security is threatened”.

Ironically, the crisis in Syria – in particular, the issue surrounding the Turkish-Syrian border – was largely the fault of Turkey itself as it helped train and funnel terrorists from inside its borders into Syria. Thus, the crisis is entirely one of its own making.

As Tony Cartalucci writes in his article “Implausible Deniability: West’s ISIS Terror Hordes In Iraq,”

Beginning in 2011 – and actually even as early as 2007 – the United States has been arming, funding, and supporting the Muslim Brotherhood and a myriad of armed terrorist organizations to overthrow the government of Syria, fight Hezbollah in Lebanon, and undermine the power and influence of Iran, which of course includes any other government or group in the MENA region friendly toward Tehran.

Image: ISIS corridors begin in Turkey and end in Baghdad. [image credit: Land Destroyer]

Billions in cash have been funneled into the hands of terrorist groups including Al Nusra, Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and what is now being called “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” or ISIS. One can see clearly by any map of ISIS held territory that it butts up directly against Turkey’s borders with defined corridors ISIS uses to invade southward – this is because it is precisely from NATO territory this terrorist scourge originated.

ISIS was harbored on NATO territory, armed and funded by US CIA agents with cash and weapons brought in from the Saudis, Qataris, and NATO members themselves. The “non-lethal aid” the US and British sent including the vehicles we now see ISIS driving around in.

Cartalucci states in a separate article, “NATO’s Terror Hordes In Iraq A Pretext For Syria Invasion,”

In actuality, ISIS is the product of a joint NATO-GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] conspiracy stretching back as far as 2007 where US-Saudi policymakers sought to ignite a region-wide sectarian war to purge the Middle East of Iran’s arch of influence stretching from its borders, across Syria and Iraq, and as far west as Lebanon and the coast of the Mediterranean. ISIS has been harbored, trained, armed, and extensively funded by a coalition of NATO and Persian Gulf states within Turkey’s (NATO territory) borders and has launched invasions into northern Syria with, at times, both Turkish artillery and air cover. The most recent example of this was the cross-border invasion by Al Qaeda into Kasab village, Latikia province in northwest Syria.

Cartalucci is referring to a cross-border invasion that was coordinated with NATO, Turkey, Israel, and the death squads where Israel acted as air force cover while Turkey facilitated the death squad invasion from inside its own borders.

Keep in mind also that, prior to the rapid appearance and seizure of territory by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, European media outlets like Der Spiegel reported that hundreds of fighters were being trained in Jordan by Western intelligence and military personnel for the purpose of deployment in Syria to fight against Assad. The numbers were said to be expected to reach about 10,000 fighters when the reports were issued in March, 2013. Although Western and European media outlets would try to spin the operation as the training of “moderate rebels,” subsequent reports revealed that these fighters were actually ISIS fighters. Those fighters were ultimately funneled into Syria via Turkey.

In addition, on October 2, 2014, Turkey’s parliament passed a resolution to allow the Turkish military to enter the sovereign territory of Iraq and Syria under the pretext of battling Western-backed IS militants.

The resolution also allowed foreign troops to use Turkish territory for the same purpose suggesting that the Incirlik air base may soon be used by the United States for its airstrikes against Syria. Only recently, it was reported by Turkish media that a formal agreement was reached between the United States and Turkey for the use of Incirlik in the faux American campaign against ISIS.

The vote on the resolution regarding foreign troops on Turkish soil (to be used in Syria) was 298 in favor of the motion and 98 opposed.

Despite its claims that the vote was centered around defeating ISIS on its borders, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan, perhaps inadvertently, admitted that the real target of NATO aggression is the Syrian government.

As the BBC reports,

Speaking in parliament earlier on Wednesday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged the West to find a long-term solution to the crises in Syria and Iraq, pointing out that dropping “tonnes of bombs” on IS militants would only provide a temporary respite.

While he said “an effective struggle” against IS would be a priority for Turkey, “the immediate removal of the administration in Damascus” would also continue to be its priority.

Erdogan also called for a “buffer zone” on the Turkey/Syria border – which would be enforced by a no-fly zone – to “ensure security.”

A buffer zone, of course, has been part of the NATO agenda against Syria since the beginning of the Western-controlled crisis in the country. Remember, it was under the guise of a humanitarian corridor or buffer zone in Libya, that NATO bombing took place which ultimately led to the destruction of the Libyan government, the murder of Ghaddaffi, and the subsequent expansion of chaos, anarchy, and genocide across the entire North African country.

Indeed, public discussion of the implementation of a “buffer zone” began as far back as 2012 when the Brookings Institution, in their memo “Assessing Options For Regime Change” stated

An alternative is for diplomatic efforts to focus first on how to end the violence and how to gain humanitarian access, as is being done under Annan’s leadership. This may lead to the creation of safe-havens and humanitarian corridors, which would have to be backed by limited military power. This would, of course, fall short of U.S. goals for Syria and could preserve Asad in power. From that starting point, however, it is possible that a broad coalition with the appropriate international mandate could add further coercive action to its efforts.

The Brookings Institution went further, however, describing a possible scenario that mirrors the one currently unfolding in Syria where Turkey, in coordination with Israel, could help overthrow Assad by establishing a “multi-front war” on Syria’s borders. Brookings writes,

In addition, Israel’s intelligence services have a strong knowledge of Syria, as well as assets within the Syrian regime that could be used to subvert the regime’s power base and press for Asad’s removal. Israel could posture forces on or near the Golan Heights and, in so doing, might divert regime forces from suppressing the opposition. This posture may conjure fears in the Asad regime of a multi-front war, particularly if Turkey is willing to do the same on its border and if the Syrian opposition is being fed a steady diet of arms and training. Such a mobilization could perhaps persuade Syria’s military leadership to oust Asad in order to preserve itself. Advocates argue this additional pressure could tip the balance against Asad inside Syria, if other forces were aligned properly.

Turkey has been whining and groaning for some time over an influx of Syrian refugees as a result of a humanitarian crisis that it helped create with its support and facilitation of Islamic fundamentalist death squad forces funded by the West and allowed to travel into Syria through Turkey’s borders. The most recent influx of refugees came from the city of Kobani, where ISIS fighters were herded by American airstrikes for the purposes of reinforcing the fighters already battling Kurdish and Syrian forces there. Subsequent refugee influxes came from other border-lying towns facing heavy fighting.

As Tony Cartalucci commented in his own article “Turkey Preparing For Syria Occupation?”

Of course, with US airstrikes carving out a vacuum soon to be filled with extremists uncontested by the Syrian Arab Army forced to back off in fear of provoking further Western aggression, the situation will undoubtedly “deteriorate.” Just as Turkey staged false flag operations along its border last year in attempts to trigger a war with Syria directly, and by supporting terrorists resulting in a predictable humanitarian catastrophe now spilling over into Turkey’ territory, the vacuum the US is intentionally creating is meant to be filled with terrorist mercenaries and NATO forces to protect them as the front is inched ever closer to Damascus in the form of a “buffer zone.”

Clearly, the Turkish agenda is not focused on combating ISIS. If it was, the Turks would have long ago sealed their borders with Syria as well as ceased their training and facilitation of terrorist groups flowing into Syria from Turkish territory.

Turkey is not requesting assistance for spillover violence or cross-border attacks, it is requesting a military invasion using a problem Turkey helped create to begin with as justification for such an operation.

The Turks do not need NATO Buffer Zones to end terrorism within their own country. They need to seal the borders with Syria, immediately cease funding, training, and facilitation of terrorists operating inside Turkish borders alongside a massive sting operation netting and eliminating these organizations. Turkey would also greatly benefit by backing away from Erdogan, his idiotic policies, and his equally idiotic Islamist government. Turkey must put aside “political Islam” and return to a culture of secular governance. Lastly, Turkey must pursue a reasonable and fair policy toward the Kurds in its Southeast.

Of course, Turkey has sent every signal possible to announce that they intend to stick with the NATO line of destroying the secular government of Bashar al-Assad and replacing it with a government or governments beholden and favorable to Washington and the Anglo-American oligarchy.

Obviously, a “buffer zone” and/or a “no-fly zone,” of course, is tantamount to war and an open military assault against the sovereign secular government of Syria because the implementation of such a zone would require airstrikes against Assad’s air defense systems.

With the establishment of this “buffer zone,” a new staging ground will be opened that allows terrorists such as ISIS and others the ability to conduct attacks even deeper inside Syria.

While the goal is clearly to establish such a zone before tightening the grip on Assad even further and ultimately leading to his overthrow, one can only wonder as to what pronouncement or “policy” will result from the Tuesday NATO meeting. Whatever it may be, the Syrian people will be the ones to pay the highest price.

Brandon Turbeville is an author out of Florence, South Carolina. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from Francis Marion University and is the author of six books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 andvolume 2, and The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria. Turbeville has published over 500 articles dealing on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s podcast Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV.  He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com. 

The devil in Brussels, Frankfurt and Washington wants its due. Everything gotten so far from Greece isn’t enough.

On Monday, talks began in Athens to clear remaining hurdles before Troika officials release any bailout funds. They demand more.

On Friday, the IMF said about 16.5 billion euros still to disburse under an existing agreement with Athens is now outdated, according to the Financial Times. They’re off the table.

It explained “negotiations between Athens and the IMF could take months. But the decision to pursue a new IMF programme means eurozone leaders may have to open talks on granting Greece significant debt relief much earlier than originally anticipated, since the IMF will not sign on to a new programme unless eurozone lenders agree to restructure their bailout loans.”

“That could lead to political difficulties in Germany, which has fiercely resisted writedowns to levels the IMF has been demanding.”

On Sunday, the FT said Troika officials want greater access to Greek ministries than apparently agreed to earlier. They sent lower-level negotiators to Athens instead of top ones SYRIZA expected.

According to the FT, it’s “the latest sign of concern among Greece’s creditors that, despite the summit agreement two weeks ago to restart talks, there remain deep differences on the way forward that could still derail negotiations before anAugust 20 deadline.”

They’re raising the bar. They want more – additional pounds of flesh before agreeing to release bailout funds.

Greek concessions so far were prerequisites to begin new talks – as well as getting a 7 billion euro bridge loan so its banks could hand most of it back to the ECB and IMF in debt service.

Troika officials now say Greek parliamentarians must legislate further “reforms,” according to the FT. Disbursing bailout funds depends on agreeing to even stiffer austerity and other demands than already.

One Troika official involved in talks said “(t)his, at present, is the big fat issue. They do not want to understand that there will be yet another significant package of ‘prior actions’ before any disbursement. They already have implementation fatigue after two mini-bills.”

Germany especially wants another round of so-called “prior actions” – measures Troika officials demand agreed to by Greek parliamentarians.

Significant differences remain between both sides – including haggling over how much access to Greek ministries to allow, what Athens venue will host talks, and how much more punishing austerity SYRIZA is willing to permit.

Having rolled over twice in two parliamentary votes, it looks like an easy mark for more. Troika officials indicated bailout disbursements depend on it.

They want Athens surrendering unconditionally to all their demands – including future ones, a bottomless pit of looting.

SRYIZA is like the rest – going along against the interests of its own people until there’s nothing left to pillage, Grexit becomes reality after defaulting on its odious debt becomes Athens’ only remaining option, and recovery looms more distant than ever – while ordinary people starve.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

The history of the suppression of medical science in America is a long one, filled with true accounts of pioneering doctors and clinicians being threatened, intimidated and even assassinated in order to bury emerging cures and keep the “sick care” industry in control. (The American Medical Association, for example, has been found guilty by the U.S. federal courts of a conspiracy to destroy the chiropractic industry, by the way.)

Over the last few days, we’ve learned that before being found shot in the chest and floating in the river, pioneering medical researcher Dr. Bradstreet was working with a little-known molecule that occurs naturally in the human body. Called, “GcMAF”, this molecule has the potential to be a universal cancer cure for many people. It has also been shown to reverse signs of autism in the vast majority of patients receiving the treatment.

While GcMAF is perfectly legal as a treatment in dozens of advanced nations around the world, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has outlawed it, calling it an “unapproved drug.” It is with this designation — an effort to suppress the forward progress of medical science — that the U.S. government conducted a raid on Dr. Bradstreet’s clinic, specifically seeking to confiscate GcMAF in order to shut down his research and halt his treatment of patients. Meanwhile, Big Pharma gets special permission to unleash untested, experimental drugs on the public as long as those drugs earn sufficient profits.

In this article, I summarize the videos, articles and documents covering GcMAF and the mysterious death of Dr. Bradstreet. An exhaustive investigation needs to be pursued on this matter, possibly involving private investigators. The timing and manner of Dr. Bradstreet’s death seems highly suspicious, especially in light of the many other holistic doctors who have recently been found dead under mysterious circumstances. (Dr. Nicholas Gonzalez died just days ago…)

Ssuppress a promising cancer treatment breakthrough

Is there a motive for the alleged murder of pioneering cancer researchers working on a possible universal cancer cure? Of course there is… it’s the most common motive in the world: MONEY.

A universal cancer cure would destroy the profitability of the highly lucrative cancer industry and collapse the American Cancer Society, hospitals, oncology clinics and pharmaceutical companies that depend on chemotherapy revenues to stay profitable. Key to their profitability is the inescapable fact that conventional cancer treatments simply don’t work most of the time, creating a reliable profit stream of repeat business from patients who are never cured (by design).

Would the cancer industry murder doctors to protect its profits? Of course it would. The industry kills patients as a routine part of its business operations! For example, an oncologist named Farid Fata was recently sentenced to 56 years in prison for falsely diagnosing patients with cancer so that he could sell them chemotherapy treatments they didn’t need. See the article Cancer doctors ‘fess up to making false diagnoses just to make more money.

Click here to search for “cancer false diagnosis” at GoodGopher.com, the search engine for truth seekers.

INVESTIGATION: Here’s what we know so far

Multiple hat tips to all the outstanding citizen journalists, video creators and bloggers who have created the items cited below:

U.S. govt. search warrant document served against Dr. Jeffrey Bradstreet to confiscate GcMAF from his research facility.

Video that connects the dots between Dr. Bradstreet, GcMAF, cancer cures and the suppression of medical science by the U.S. government.

Video detailing the Dr. Bradstreet search warrant, served June 30, during which the U.S. government seized GcMAF from Dr. Bradstreet’s research clinic:

EzekielDiet.com story that covers the apparent series of murders of holistic doctors, many of whom are working on advanced treatment protocols that render high-profit sectors of conventional medicine OBSOLETE:

Yet another doctor was just found murdered inside his home here on the East Coast of Florida. This makes six doctors to be found dead in the last month just from this region of the country alone. Four out of the six were found dead here in Florida. We lost the holistic Dr. Teresa Sievers, MD, who was found murdered in her Florida home just weeks ago. We’ve also lost the alternative Dr. Jeff Bradstreet, MD, who was found in a river with a gunshot to his chest. He’d recently moved to Georgia from Florida. We’ve also lost the Osteopath. Dr. Riley, who was found in Georgia at her home; just a few hours from the Florida border. She was found with a gunshot wound to her head.

Now we’ve lost Dr. Schwartz MD, who was found murdered in his home, on Sunday, July 19th, 2015. This was four weeks to the day after the death of the first physician: (Dr. Bradstreet MD) who I broke the story on a month ago. His family is still seeking answers as to what happened to him and they’re some of the kindest people I know. The latest MD, Dr. Schwartz, in the picture above, lived just north of the fit, healthy, holistic Dr. Hedendal; who was the second doctor to be found dead this past Father’s Day, in Boca Raton. This was the same day that Dr. Holt died at the age of 33. Both were fathers; and again, both men died here in Florida on June 21st, 2015.

SCIENCE.NaturalNews.com entry describing the extraordinary benefits of GcMAF in a published study:

Stepwise incubation of purified Gc protein with immobilized beta-galactosidase and sialidase generated probably the most potent macrophage activating factor (termed GcMAF) ever discovered, which produces no adverse effect in humans…

After about 16-22 administrations (approximately 3.5-5 months) of GcMAF, these patients had insignificantly low serum enzyme levels equivalent to healthy control enzyme levels, ranging from 0.38 to 0.63 nmole/min/mg protein, indicating eradication of the tumors. This therapeutic procedure resulted in no recurrence for more than 4 years.

In other words, the administration of GcMAF eradicated tumors and left patients cancer-free for 4+ years with no additional treatment!

Both U.S. and UK governments desperately seizing all supply, shutting down clinics, even as millions die from cancer every decade…

UK govt. admission that GcMAF was on track to being commercialized as a pioneering cancer treatment, so they had to confiscate it!

GcMAF (Globulin component Macrophage Activating Factor), a blood product, claims to treat a range of conditions including cancer, HIV and autism…

More than 10,000 vials were seized at this site and production of this unlicensed medicine has now ceased. These products were sold through various European websites and UK patients may have bought it from one of these websites. We are working with colleagues in other countries to alert them to the potential risks. Our investigations are ongoing and we have received no reports to date of side effects caused by this product.

That same page lists some of the websites where GcMAF had been available for purchase:

READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE

Want to know where the dirty money is which is helping to make GMO labeling illegal?

Shockingly, or perhaps not to the individuals who have been observing the biotech charade, house members who voted to keep the public from knowing what is in their food in the latest land-slide win for Big Food supporters of The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act of 2015 (known to its critics as the DARK (Deny Americans the Right to Know Act)) were paid three times as much as representatives who voted to give us the right to label or ban GMO foods.

It seems odd that the bill would float through Congress so easily with a 275 to 150 vote when so many Americans have expressed a wish to have their food labeled. The Center for Food safety says that 93% of Americans want their food labeled if it contains GM ingredients. And that is just one of many surveys showing similar results:

Surveys repeatedly show that 80 percent to 95 percent of people want foods that contain genetically modified organisms to be labeled (in the least). Here is a simple breakdown of some reported polls on consumer demand for GMO labeling:

• The New York Times: 93% found to be in support of labeling GMOs

• MSNBC: 96% in support

• Reuters/NPR: 93% in support of full labeling

• Washington Post: 95% in support of full labeling

• Consumer Reports: 95% agree GM animals should be labeled

• ABC News: 93% want federal GM labeling mandate

Petition: STOP the DARK Act Which Would Make GMO Labeling Illegal!

Really – we label everything from pillows with warning labels – ‘this tag not to be removed’ to our pants. Why not GM foods? What is it that Big Ag is trying to hide from us?

Usually, if everyone wants to purchase something, the free market dictates that companies jump on the bandwagon and try to sell that something – but not with genetically modified food. Our rights have been trampled on, and you have the right to know who has bought in this recent landslide vote in favor of the biotech industry and business as usual that protects profits instead of people.

According to opensecrets.org, this is where the money trail leads:

• …the campaigns of Reps. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.), Frank Lucas (R-Okla.), Rodney Davis (R-Ill.), Mike Conaway (R-Texas) and Kurt Schrader (D-Ore.), all cosponsors of the legislation (most of whom also sit on the House Agriculture Committee), received six-figure dollar amounts from providers of agricultural services and products — one segment of the agribusiness sector — during the 2014 election cycle. That put them high among the top 20 recipients of funds from the industry.
• Cosponsors such as Reps. David Valadao (R-Calif.), Steve Fincher (R-Tenn.), Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) and Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) aren’t on the Agriculture Committee, but nevertheless pulled in six-figure dollar amounts from the crop production and basic processing industry (another part of agribusiness; think Cargill Inc. and the National Corn Growers Association) during the midterm cycle — landing them among the 20 members who received the most from that industry.
• Reps. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.), two original sponsors of the legislation, were the top two current House members receiving the most money from the Grocery Manufacturers Association in 2014. The grocery manufacturers — who have spent $4.1 million lobbying on all issues so far this year, almost as much as they spent in all of 2014 — have lobbied on the bill more than any other organization, mentioning the measure on 14 lobbying reports this year.

Do you see your representative in this list?

If you do, they certainly weren’t representing you.

Shanghai’s Bull Statue on Its Bund Waterfront (left); Bull Statue in Lower Manhattan (right)

Despite unprecedented efforts by the Chinese government to stem the rout in the Chinese stock market that had shaved as much as $4 trillion from share prices before the government’s interventions this month and last, the Shanghai Composite closed down 8.48 percent today at 3,725.558.

The overnight rout has raised speculation in some quarters as to whether we are going to see another “glitch” on the New York Stock Exchange today similar to that of July 8 in the midst of another Chinese stock market tumble. As we reported at the time:

“Yesterday, beginning at 11:32 a.m. and for the next three hours and forty minutes, the iconic New York Stock Exchange shuttered trading in all of its listed securities. The Exchange said it had experienced an internal glitch.

“Unknown to most Americans, some of those shuttered stocks on the New York Stock Exchange were Chinese stocks and among the largest capitalized companies in the world. More than 100 Chinese companies trade on U.S. stock exchanges as American Depository Receipts (ADRs) and almost 200 Chinese company ADRs trade over-the-counter in the U.S. (Individual shares are referred to as ADS, American Depository Shares.) Last year, Thomson Reuters estimated the market value of Chinese companies listed on just the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq Stock Market at more than $1.4 trillion.

“With the Chinese stock market rupturing over the past week and trading in more than a thousand stocks suspended in China, the spillover has hit the U.S. market hard.

“According to PricewaterhouseCoopers’ March 31, 2015 list of the largest 100 global companies by market cap, there are 11 Chinese companies in that group. We took a look at trading in just two of those names yesterday, China Mobile and China Life Insurance, both of which trade as ADRs on the New York Stock Exchange.

“We looked at how China Mobile and China Life Insurance traded before, during and after the New York Stock Exchange halted trading in all of its securities. An interesting pattern emerged…After volume spikes in the morning prior to the trading halt by the Exchange, volume was subdued during the hours the Exchange remained closed. (Other trading venues are supposed to pick up the slack when an exchange goes dark.)  Then volume picked up again when the Exchange reopened. China Mobile (symbol CHL) closed down 5.38 percent yesterday while China Life Insurance (symbol LTR) dropped 6.65 percent in New York trading.”

Read more

CEPR Research Associate, Jake Johnston, reports in Al Jazeera America on US government funding to Mouvement Tét Kale, a political organization with close ties to President Michel Martelly, during the 2010-11 elections:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The U.S. Agency for International Development gave nearly $100,000 to a Haitian political movement with close ties to President Michel Martelly in the country’s 2010 elections, documents obtained by Al Jazeera show. The money was allocated shortly after Washington helped overturn the election results to thrust Martelly into power.

On the afternoon of Haiti’s Nov. 28, 2010, elections, 12 of 18 presidential candidates took the stage at the glamorous Karibe Hotel, high up in the mountains that surround the capital. The elections were a fraudulent mess, they told the gathered press, and the only way out was to cancel the poll and start over. Chaos soon engulfed Port-au-Prince and other cities, as thousands of young Haitians, many clad in the pink synonymous with Michel “Sweet Micky” Martelly, took to the streets to simultaneously denounce electoral fraud and herald the victory of their candidate, many days before any official results would be announced.

In the midst of the mayhem, key international actors mobilized. At an emergency meeting at the home of the head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission, Edmond Mulet, leading diplomats pushed then-President René Préval to accept their offer of a plane to take him out of the country and avoid further confrontation. Mulet also approached the front-runners, including Martelly, telling them they had secured a spot in the second round and to cease calls for the election’s cancellation. Days later, when the electoral council announced preliminary results that did not have Martelly advancing to the runoff, the streets were once again taken over by largely pro-Martelly protesters. The U.S. Embassy released a statement questioning the announced results, fueling the demonstrations in Port-au-Prince.

The pressure of these pro-Martelly demonstrators — on the day of the elections and during the following weeks — was a key factor in convincing the U.S. and other international actors to intervene in Haiti’s elections and force the electoral authority to change the results of the first round, so as to ensure that Martelly remained on the ballot.

According to numerous firsthand accounts, Mouvement Tét Kale (MTK), a political organization with close ties to Martelly, was active in these street mobilizations. Now documents through Freedom of Information Act requests reveal that the U.S. government later provided nearly $100,000 in support to MTK, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

To read the complete article, click here. The document showing the support to Mouvement Tét Kale from the for-profit contractor Chemonics has also been posted online and is available here.

This article establishes that the price of gold and silver in the futures markets in which cash is the predominant means of settlement is inconsistent with the conditions of supply and demand in the actual physical or current market where physical bullion is bought and sold as opposed to transactions in uncovered paper claims to bullion in the futures markets. The supply of bullion in the futures markets is increased by printing uncovered contracts representing claims to gold. This artificial, indeed fraudulent, increase in the supply of paper bullion contracts drives down the price in the futures market despite high demand for bullion in the physical market and constrained supply. We will demonstrate with economic analysis and empirical evidence that the bear market in bullion is an artificial creation.

The law of supply and demand is the basis of economics. Yet the price of gold and silver in the Comex futures market, where paper contracts representing 100 troy ounces of gold or 5,000 ounces of silver are traded,  is inconsistent with the actual supply and demand conditions in the physical market for bullion. For four years the price of bullion has been falling in the futures market despite rising demand for possession of the physical metal and supply constraints.

We begin with a review of basics. The vertical axis measures price. The horizontal axis measures quantity. Demand curves slope down to the right, the quantity demanded increasing as price falls.  Supply curves slope upward to the right, the quantity supplied rising with price.   The intersection of supply with demand determines price. (Graph 1)

A change in quantity demanded or in the quantity supplied refers to a movement along a given curve.  A change in demand or a change in supply refers to a shift in the curves.  For example, an increase in demand (a shift to the right of the demand curve) causes a movement along the supply curve (an increase in the quantity supplied).

Changes in income and changes in tastes or preferences toward an item can cause the demand curve to shift. For example, if people expect that their fiat currency is going to lose value, the demand for gold and silver would increase (a shift to the right).

Changes in technology and resources can cause the supply curve to shift. New gold discoveries and improvements in gold mining technology would cause the supply curve to shift to the right. Exhaustion of existing mines would cause a reduction in supply (a shift to the left).

What can cause the price of gold to fall?  Two things: The demand for gold can fall, that is, the demand curve could shift to the left, intersecting the supply curve at a lower price. The fall in demand results in a reduction in the quantity supplied. A fall in demand means that people want less gold at every price. (Graph 2)

Alternatively, supply could increase, that is, the supply curve could shift to the right, intersecting the demand curve at a lower price. The increase in supply results in an increase in the quantity demanded.  An increase in supply means that more gold is available at every price. (Graph 3)

To summarize: a decline in the price of gold can be caused by a decline in the demand for gold or by an increase in the supply of gold.

A decline in demand or an increase in supply is not what we are observing in the gold and silver physical markets. The price of bullion in the futures market has been falling as demand for physical bullion increases and supply experiences constraints  What we are seeing in the physical market indicates a rising price.  Yet in the futures market in which almost all contracts are settled in cash and not with bullion deliveries, the price is falling.

For example, on July 7, 2015, the U.S. Mint said that due to a “significant” increase in demand, it had sold out of Silver Eagles (one ounce silver coin) and was suspending sales until some time in August. The premiums on the coins (the price of the coin above the price of the silver) rose, but the spot price of silver fell 7 percent to its lowest level of the year (as of July 7).

This is the second time in 9 months that the U.S. Mint could not keep up with market demand and had to suspend sales.  During the first 5 months of 2015, the U.S. Mint had to ration sales of Silver Eagles. According to Reuters, since 2013 the U.S. Mint has had to ration silver coin sales for 18 months. In 2013 the Royal Canadian Mint announced the rationing of its Silver Maple Leaf coins:

“We are carefully managing supply in the face of very high demand.  . . .  Coming off strong sales volumes in December 2012, demand to date remains very strong for our Silver Maple Leaf and Gold Maple Leaf bullion coins.”

During this entire period when mints could not keep up with demand for coins, the price of silver consistently fell on the Comex futures market. On July 24, 2015 the price of gold in the futures market fell to its lowest level in 5 years despite an increase in the demand for gold in the physical market. On that day U.S. Mint sales of Gold Eagles (one ounce gold coin) were the highest in more than two years, yet the price of gold fell in the futures market.

How can this be explained?  The financial press says that the drop in precious metals prices unleashed a surge in global demand for coins. This explanation is nonsensical to an economist. Price is not a determinant of demand but of quantity demanded. A lower price does not shift the demand curve.  Moreover, if demand increases, price goes up, not down.

Perhaps what the financial press means is that the lower price resulted in an increase in the quantity demanded.  If so, what caused the lower price? In economic analysis, the answer would have to be an increase in supply, either new supplies from new discoveries and new mines or mining technology advances that lower the cost of producing bullion.

There are no reports of any such supply increasing developments.  To the contrary, the lower prices of bullion have been causing reductions in mining output as falling prices make existing operations unprofitable.

There are abundant other signs of high demand for bullion, yet the prices continue their four-year decline on the Comex. Even as massive uncovered shorts (sales of gold contracts that are not covered by physical bullion) on the bullion futures market are driving down price, strong demand for physical bullion has been depleting the holdings of GLD, the largest exchange traded gold fund. Since February 27, 2015, the authorized bullion banks (principally JPMorganChase, HSBC, and Scotia)   have removed 10 percent of GLD’s gold holdings.  Similarly, strong demand in China and India has resulted in a 19% increase of purchases from the Shanghai Gold Exchange, a physical bullion market, during the first quarter of 2015. Through the week ending July 10, 2015, purchases from the Shanghai Gold Exchange alone are occurring at an annualized rate approximately equal to the annual supply of global mining output.

India’s silver imports for the first four months of 2015 are 30% higher than 2014. In the first quarter of 2015 Canadian Silver Maple Leaf sales increased 8.5% compared to sales for the same period of 2014. Sales of Gold Eagles in June, 2015, were more than triple the sales for May. During the first 10 days of July, Gold Eagles sales were 2.5 times greater than during the first 10 days of June.

Clearly the demand for physical metal is very high, and the ability to meet this demand is constrained.  Yet, the prices of bullion in the futures market have consistently fallen during this entire period. The only possible explanation is manipulation.

Precious metal prices are determined in the futures market, where paper contracts representing bullion are settled in cash, not in markets where the actual metals are bought and sold.  As the Comex is predominantly  a cash settlement market, there is little risk in uncovered contracts (an uncovered contract is a promise to deliver gold that the seller of the contract does not possess).  This means that it is easy to increase the supply of gold in the futures market where price is established simply by printing uncovered (naked) contracts.  Selling naked shorts is a way to artificially increase the supply of bullion in the futures market where price is determined. The supply of paper contracts representing gold increases, but not the supply of physical bullion.

As we have documented on a number of occasions (see, for example), the prices of bullion are being systematically driven down by the sudden appearance and sale during thinly traded times of day and night of uncovered future contracts representing massive amounts of bullion.  In the space of a few minutes or less massive amounts of gold and silver shorts are dumped into the Comex market, dramatically increasing the supply of paper claims to bullion.  If purchasers of these shorts stood for delivery, the Comex would fail.  Comex bullion futures are used for speculation and by hedge funds to manage the risk/return characteristics of metrics like the Sharpe Ratio. The hedge funds are concerned with indexing the price of gold and silver and not with the rate of return performance of their bullion contracts.

A rational speculator faced with strong demand for bullion and constrained supply would not short the market.  Moreover, no rational actor who wished to unwind a large gold position would dump the entirety of his position on the market all at once.  What then explains the massive naked shorts that are hurled into the market during thinly traded times?

The bullion banks are the primary market-makers in bullion futures. they are also clearing members of the Comex, which gives them access to data such as the positions of the hedge funds and the prices at which stop-loss orders are triggered. They time their sales of uncovered shorts to trigger stop-loss sales and then cover their short sales by purchasing contracts at the price that they have forced down, pocketing the profits from the manipulation

The manipulation is obvious. The question is why do the authorities tolerate it?

Perhaps the answer is that a free gold market serves both to protect against the loss of a fiat currency’s purchasing power from exchange rate decline and inflation and as a warning that destabilizing systemic events are on the horizon.  The current round of on-going massive short sales compressed into a few minutes during thinly traded periods began after gold hit $1,900 per ounce in response to the build-up of troubled debt and the Federal Reserve’s policy of Quantitative Easing.  Washington’s power is heavily dependent on the role of the dollar as world reserve currency. The rising dollar price of gold indicated rising discomfort with the dollar.  Whereas the dollar’s exchange value is carefully managed with help from the Japanese and European central banks, the supply of such help is not unlimited. If gold kept moving up, exchange rate weakness was likely to show up in the dollar, thus forcing the Fed off its policy of using QE to rescue the “banks too big to fail.”

The bullion banks’ attack on gold is being augmented with a spate of stories in the financial media denying any usefulness of gold. On July 17 the Wall Street Journal declared that honesty about gold requires recognition that gold is nothing but a pet rock. Other commentators declare gold to be in a bear market despite the strong demand for physical metal and supply constraints, and some influential party is determined that gold not be regarded as money.

Why a sudden spate of claims that gold is not money?  Gold is considered a part of the United States’ official monetary reserves, which is also the case for central banks and the IMF. The IMF accepts gold as repayment for credit extended. The US Treasury’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency classifies gold as a currency, as can be seen in the OCC’s latest quarterly report on bank derivatives activities in which the OCC places gold futures in the foreign exchange derivatives classification.

The manipulation of the gold price by injecting large quantities of freshly printed uncovered contracts into the Comex market is an empirical fact. The sudden debunking of gold in the financial press is circumstantial evidence that a full-scale attack on gold’s function as a systemic warning signal is underway.

It is unlikely that regulatory authorities are unaware of the fraudulent manipulation of bullion prices. The fact that nothing is done about it is an indication of the lawlessness that prevails in US financial markets.

Paul Craig Roberts, Ph.D., is a former Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Dave Kranzler is a University of Chicago MBA and is an active participant in financial markets.

Opponents of the Iran deal hope to do to the Jewish peace group J Street…

On July 23, the New York Times published an op-ed by Shmuel Rosner, political editor at the Jewish Journal and a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, which made the following claim:

There are American organizations (such as J Street) that support goals that barely any Israeli agrees with, that nevertheless flaunt the pro-Israel label.

No explanation was given of what these goals are, nor was any evidence given that “barely any Israeli” agrees with these goals.

While New York Times editors didn’t make Shmuel Rosner specify what the alleged goals of the avowedly pro-Israel peace group J Street are that “barely any Israeli” agrees with, context suggests the most obvious explanation: J Street has backed the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran and is backing the Iran nuclear deal, and that’s why opponents of the Iran nuclear deal are attacking J Street and saying that J Street’s claim to be “pro-Israel” is dubious.

So let’s assume that this is about diplomacy with Iran and the Iran nuclear deal. (The New York Times should certainly clarify this; you can urge them to do so here.) Should the New York Times have allowed Shmuel Rosner to assert without evidence that J Street’s backing of the Iran nuclear deal represents “barely any Israeli” and calls into question whether J Street is “pro-Israel”?

Here, here, here, and here are examples of senior members of the Israeli national security establishment speaking in support of the Iran nuclear deal. Think about their American counterparts, and imagine that someone claimed that “barely any American” held a view that all those people held. Would theNew York Times print such a claim?

Moreover, polling data indicates that the majority of American Jews back the deal. So if Rosner’s standard for “pro-Israel” is opposition to the Iran nuclear deal, then according to Rosner’s standard, the majority of American Jews would not be “pro-Israel,” which proves that Rosner’s standard would be absurd. If someone claimed that the majority of American Jews are not “pro-Israel,” would the New York Times print that claim?

…what Republican operatives did to Democratic candidate John Kerry’s “swift boat” war record.

It is a kind of swiftboating to claim that J Street is not “pro-Israel” because it backs the Iran nuclear deal, when senior members of the Israeli national security establishment and the majority of American Jews support the deal.

And this swiftboating concerns everyone who supports diplomacy with Iran, because for many congressional Democrats, “J Street supports this” is a marker for “it’s relatively safe for congressional Democrats to stand with the Obama administration on this without too much fear of being attacked as ‘anti-Israel.’” J Street is protecting Democrats who support diplomacy. The opponents of diplomacy are attacking the J Street shield.

Some people cynically dismiss concerns about the New York Times regarding war and peace: What do you expect from the New York Times? Judy Miller, blah blah blah. This response, while perhaps seeming “radical,” is counterproductive to efforts to promote peace. The New York Times has too much power to promote war for people who want less war to ignore it. TheNew York Times has more power to promote war than most members of Congress. Most members of Congress are pretty jazzed if the New York Timesreports something that they say on a single day. The New York Times is shaping debate on war and peace every single day more than most individual members of Congress are on a very good day.

If we want to prevent war in the future, we need to take a “broken windows policing” approach to any hint of warmongering at the Times, and that includes any swiftboating of advocates for diplomacy.

Perhaps you might think: Well, it’s an opinion piece, that’s that guy’s opinion, he’s entitled to his opinion.

But the New York Times claims to factcheck its op-eds; indeed, theyfactcheck letters to the editor. According to the Times, people are not allowed to say whatever they want in the Times, even in an opinion piece.

Critics of the Iran deal are talking about the president of the United States like this. There is a group of people that they are trying to organize and inflame with claims that Obama is “anti-Israel” and the Iran nuclear deal is “anti-Israel” and people who support the Iran nuclear deal are “anti-Israel.” The support of J Street for the Iran deal is a big obstacle to this story line. That’s why these people are going after J Street.

Robert Naiman is policy director at Just Foreign Policy and president of the board of Truthout. A version of this article appeared on Huffington Post(7/26/15).

Research shows that people who live near hydraulic fracturing (fracking) sites have more severe health problems than those who don’t, and wind up in the hospital more often.

Researchers from the University of Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania wrote in a study published in PLOS ONE that those who live close to the natural oil and gas drilling sites are more likely to suffer from heart conditions, neurological illnesses, and cancer. [1]

The scientists analyzed 198,000 hospitalizations records over a four year period (from 2007 to 2011) in Northern Pennsylvania counties, categorized 25 medical scenarios, and then associated each case with its proximity to a fracking area. A larger number of hospitalizations were found in those areas where drilling takes place.

According to the researchers, there are 18 zip code areas with a well density higher than 0.79 wells per square kilometer. That means a person who lives in one of those zip codes has a 27 percent greater risk of suffering from one of the aforementioned conditions. [1]

Fracking involves injecting a mixture of water, sand, and various chemicals into shale rock formations to release the oil and gas trapped inside. The practice is controversial because the chemicals can leak into ground water and release into the atmosphere, polluting both the body and the environment. Hydraulic fracturing has been banned in some states and communities, and other states and locales are trying to prohibit the process in their areas. [1]

“At this point, we suspect that residents are exposed to many toxicants, noise and social stressors due to hydraulic fracturing near their homes, and this may add to the increased number of hospitalizations,” said Dr. Reynold Panettieri, Jr., deputy director of the Center of Excellence in Environmental Toxicology at the University of Pennsylvania, and senior author of the study.

Some of the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing are endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs, which can interfere with the normal functioning of the endocrine system, potentially causing infertility, cancer, and birth defects in residents who live near drilling sites. [2]

“More than 700 chemicals are used in the fracking process, and many of them disturb hormone function,” said Dr. Susan C. Nagel of the University of Missouri School of Medicine. [2]

To put the health and environmental costs of fracking into perspective, here are a few fast facts from 2013 that were published at EnvironmentAmerica.org:

• Fracking Wells since 2005 – 82,000

• Toxic Wastewater Produced in 2012 (billion gallons) – 280

• Water Used since 2005 (billion gallons) –  250

• Chemicals Used since 2005 (billion gallons) – 2

• Air Pollution in One Year (tons) – 450,000

• Global Warming Pollution since 2005 (million metric tons CO2-equivalent) – 100

• Land Directly Damaged since 2005 (acres) – 360,000

Notes

[1] PulseHeadlines (Featured image sourced from PulseHeadlines)

[2] The Telegraph

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The United Kingdom has gone completely crazy. There’s simply no other way to put it. I warned about Britain’s “war on toddler terrorists” earlier this year in the post: The War on Toddler Terrorists – Britain Wants to Force Nursery School Teachers to Identify “Extremist” Children. Here’s an excerpt:

“Nursery school staff and registered childminders must report toddlers at risk of becoming terrorists, under counter-terrorism measures proposed by the Government.

The directive is contained in a 39-page consultation document issued by the Home Office in a bid to bolster its Prevent anti-terrorism plan.

The document accompanies the Counter-Terrorism and Security Bill, currently before parliament. It identifies nurseries and early years childcare providers, along with schools and universities, as having a duty ‘to prevent people being drawn into terrorism’.”

Never fear good citizens of Great Britain. While your government actively does everything in its power to protect criminal financial oligarchs and powerful pedophiles, her majesty draws the line at toddler thought crime. We learn from the Independent:

The fact that this story broke on the same day that chairman of the UK’s Lords Privileges and Conduct Committee, Lord John Sewel, was caught on video snorting cocaine off the breast of a prostitute with a £5 note, is simply priceless. You just can’t make this stuff up.

From the BBC:

Lord Sewel is facing a police inquiry after quitting as House of Lords deputy speaker over a video allegedly showing him taking drugs with prostitutes.

The footage showed him snorting powder from a woman’s breasts with a £5 note.

In the footage, Lord Sewel, who is married, also discusses the Lords’ allowances system.

As chairman of committees, the crossbench peer also chaired the privileges and conduct committee, and was responsible for enforcing standards in the Lords.

Lord Sewel served as a minister in the Scotland office under Tony Blair’s Labour government.

Tony Blair, why am I not surprised:

He has been a member of the Lords since 1996, and is a former senior vice principal of the University of Aberdeen.

The UK government is so far gone that it insists on protecting the public from toddlers, rather than protecting toddlers from powerful sexual predators.

Vor den Wahlen im Januar versprach das Bündnis Syriza dem griechischen Volk, der unmenschlichen Austeritätspolitik den Kampf anzusagen und die Diktatur der Troika zu beenden.

Fünf Monate lang verhandelten Alexis Tsipras und sein Finanzminister Varoufakis mit den Vertretern der EU-Kommission, des IWF und der EZB. Während sie deren finanzielle Forderungen in dieser Zeit vollauf erfüllten, widersetzten sie sich einigen ihrer Forderungen.

Anfang Juli setzten sie ein Referendum an, bei dem ihnen die Bevölkerung den Rücken stärkte und den klaren Auftrag erteilte, die Politik eines „nein“ zur Austeritätspolitik in den Verhandlungen mit der Troika offensiv zu vertreten.

Statt diesen Wählerauftrag zu erfüllen, reagierte Tsipras mit einer 180-Grad-Kehrtwende. Er entließ seinen Finanzminister, fuhr nach Brüssel und akzeptierte bei den anschließenden Verhandlungen ein noch schärferes Austeritätsprogramm als seine Vorgänger.

Inzwischen hat Tsipras zwei Abstimmungen im griechischen Parlament mit Unterstützung genau der Kräfte überstanden, als deren vermeintlicher Gegner er einst angetreten war. Außerdem hat er inzwischen alle politischen Mitstreiter, die auch nur teilweise an ihren früheren Versprechen festhielten, aus seinem Kabinett entfernt.

Nun aber sind er, Varoufakis und ihre parlamentarischen Mitstreiter vom Bündnis Syriza noch einen Schritt weiter gegangen: Mit der Zustimmung zu dem am Mittwoch verabschiedeten Reformpaket billigen sie Maßnahmen, deren Unmenschlichkeit weit über das hinausgeht, was sie ihren Gegnern in der Vergangenheit vorgeworfen haben.

Zum einen dürfen Verfahren zur Zwangsräumung von Wohnungen und Häusern in Griechenland von nun an beschleunigt durchgeführt werden. Angesichts der katastrophalen Wirtschaftslage, der hohen Arbeitslosigkeit und der andauernden Kapitalverkehrskontrollen ist abzusehen, dass neben vielen bereits betroffenen Bürgern zahllose weitere mit ihren Zins- und Tilgungsraten in Verzug und damit in Zahlungsschwierigkeiten geraten werden.

Mit ihrem „Ja“ zeigen Tsipras, Varoufakis und Co, welch falsches Spiel sie getrieben haben, als sie sich in den vergangenen Monaten vor den Augen der Welt als Anwälte der kleinen Leute präsentiert haben. Bei Zwangsräumungen – einer der brutalsten sozialen Maßnahmen überhaupt – stehen sie jetzt offen auf der Seite von Inkassobüros und Geldeintreibern und wenden sich gegen unverschuldet in Not geratene Menschen.

Noch weiter geht die Zustimmung der Syriza-Parlamentarier zu einer Maßnahme, die sie den Bürgern Griechenlands auch noch als Fortschritt verkaufen: Um Steuerzahler, die in der Vergangenheit zur Rettung in Not geratener Banken herangezogen wurden, zu „entlasten“, wird in Zukunft auch in Griechenland die europäische Bankenabwicklungsrichtlinie BRRD in Kraft treten. Sie besagt, dass vor einem Eingreifen des Staates zunächst Aktionäre und Gläubiger der betroffenen Banken zur Kasse gebeten werden müssen.

Wie diese auch als „Bail-in“ bezeichnete Maßnahme in der Praxis aussieht, hat das Eingreifen der Troika in Zypern im Frühjahr 2013 gezeigt. Dort wurden Anleger, die mehr als 100.000 Euro auf ihren Konten hielten, von ihren Banken zu 40 Prozent enteignet – eine Maßnahme, die vor allem den Mittelstand, insbesondere kleinere Unternehmer, mit äußerster Härte traf.

Zwar gilt europaweit offiziell ein Einlegerschutz für Einlagen bis 100.000 Euro, doch sollte niemand glauben, dass Einlagen unter diesem Betrag vor einem Bail-in sicher sind. Die größten vier Banken Griechenlands – die National Bank of Greece, die Piräus Bank, die Alpha Bank und die Eurobank – verfügen derzeit nur über Kundeneinlagen in Höhe von knapp 130 Mrd. Euro. Da Schätzungen zufolge zwischen 40 und 50 Prozent ihrer Kredite nicht bedient werden (bei steigender Tendenz) und nur etwa 40 Prozent der Einlagen über 8.000 Euro liegen, ist die Lage weitaus dramatischer als vor zwei Jahren bei den Banken auf Zypern. Um die faulen Kredite zu kompensieren und ihr Eigenkapital zu erhöhen, brauchen die griechischen Banken unbedingt frisches Geld.

Die Bail-in-Abmachung zwischen der Troika und der zyprischen Regierung von 2013 basierte im übrigen nicht etwa auf einer gesetzlichen Grundlage, sondern auf einer eilig beschlossenen „Vereinbarung“ zwischen zyprischer Regierung und EU. Eine „Notverordnung“ zur Außerkraftsetzung der gesetzlichen Einlagensicherung dürfte der EU im Fall Griechenlands wohl kaum Schwierigkeiten bereiten.

Wie die Financial Times berichtet und eine der betroffenen griechischen Banken inzwischen bestätigt hat, wird eine solche Maßnahme bereits hinter verschlossenen Türen diskutiert. Hierbei soll es um eine 30prozentige Enteignung aller Konten über 8.000 Euro gehen.

Diese Informationen dürften sowohl Tsipras als auch Varoufakis bekannt gewesen sein, als sie am Mittwoch im griechischen Parlament für die Bankenabwicklungsrichtlinie gestimmt haben.

Sie und die übrigen Vertreter von Syriza haben damit wissentlich dazu beigetragen, dass den arbeitenden Menschen in Griechenland, denen bereits sechs Sparprogramme aufgebürdet wurden, deren Renten im Schnitt um mehr als 40 Prozent gekürzt wurden, denen zu einem großen Teil der Zugang zum Gesundheitswesen versperrt ist und deren Ärmste ihren Hunger bekämpfen, indem sie im Müll nach Essbarem wühlen, nun auch ein Teil ihrer lebensnotwendigen Rücklagen genommen werden. Und nicht nur ihnen, sondern auch Millionen von Sparern in Serbien, Albanien, Bulgarien, Mazedonien und Rumänien, die ihre Konten bei den dortigen Filialen der vier größten griechischen Banken unterhalten und in deren Ländern der Lebensstandard teilweise noch unter dem Griechenlands liegt.

Am Wochenende vor der Abstimmung hatte Yannis Varoufakis der spanischen Zeitung El Mundo noch ein Interview gegeben, in dem er die Kreditgeber seines Landes als „Terroristen“ bezeichnete. Kann man die Unaufrichtigkeit einer politischen Bewegung wie Syriza besser auf den Punkt bringen als dadurch, dass man drei Tage nach einer solchen Aussage vor deren Forderungen kuscht und für die teilweise Enteignung arbeitender Menschen zugunsten milliardenschwerer Investoren stimmt?

Black people know Jim Crow remains virulent in America – 1960s civil rights laws did nothing to curb police brutality largely against Black and Brown people.

On Friday through Sunday, hundreds of Black Lives Matter activists from around the country met in Cleveland for the inaugural Movement for Black Lives convention.

Information about the event said it was organized “at a pivotal time for the growing movement for Black lives in the United States.”

“Black people are facing unabated police violence, increasing criminalization, a failed economic system, a broken education system and the loss of our communities to gentrification and development. Our trans and queer communities face the increased risk of physical and economic violence. The list of indignities regularly faced by the Black community is long and untenable.”

Anti-police brutality street protests reflect resistance against what no one should tolerate anywhere. When federal, state and/or local governments abuse their citizens, activism in their own self-defense matters most.

“(O)ur need for space to begin the creation of a collective mission that matches the intensity, scale, urgency, and promise of the moment” is vital.

“This convening presents an opportunity for us to reflect on our histories of struggle, build a sense of fellowship that transcends geographical boundaries and begin to heal from the many traumas we face,”

movement organizers said.

“Open, and created by many voices, The Movement for Black Lives Convening will be a space to realize that promise fully on our terms as Black people.” They’re urged to get involved for their own welfare and futures.

When activist movements demand redress for longstanding grievances, uncaring authorities respond harshly. Rampant police brutality needs no explaining. More below on the latest example.

In 2013, an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit revealed intrusive FBI surveillance of Occupy Wall Street (OWS) activists nationwide. One internal document called them “domestic terrorists.”

Homeland Security, the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Naval Criminal Investigative Service, Domestic Security Alliance Council and even the Federal Reserve (representing Wall Street clout) working jointly with state and local police undermined the movement.

It failed to achieve long sought social justice. Energy driving early activism waned. Organized federal, state and local actions neutralized it effectively.

The same government agencies target Black activists. FOIA obtained documents show Homeland Security began monitoring Black Lives Matter organizers and activities since summer 2014 Ferguson, MO protests against police murdering Michael Brown.

Peaceful protests and gatherings are closely watched wherever they occur. Local authorities are involved – aiming to undermine movements for justice before they gain traction.

First Amendment freedoms are flagrantly violated – including unrestricted expression, peaceful assembly and right to petition government for redress of grievances systematically ignored.

When Black American activists and supporters are considered “domestic terrorists,” police state ruthlessness overrides constitutionally mandated rights. They exist only for rich and powerful elites.

What’s ongoing isn’t new. Decades earlier, COINTELPRO tactics followed J. Edgar Hoover’s orders to infiltrate, disrupt, sabotage, and destroy activist movements for ethnic justice, racial emancipation, and real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines.

Secretive, mostly illegal FBI counterintelligence activities targeted political dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the American Indian Movement; and Black Panther Party among others.

Black Lives Matter activists are in the eye of the storm. Cleveland police targeted some of their Movement for Black Lives participants violently.

Hundreds from across the country came to discuss police repression and social injustice Blacks in America face virtually everywhere – in large and small cities, urban and rural areas.

After concluding Sunday activities, dozens of activists symbolically demonstrated publicly. Video evidence showed police targeted them violently – pepper-spraying them repeatedly without cause. Arrests followed, including a 14-year-old boy, later released to his family with activists chanting “(W)e love you.”

Local organizer Malaya Davis said “Cleveland looks just like Ferguson, looks just like Baltimore, looks just like all of these places (with) high (levels of) oppression. We wanted to highlight that and bring some attention to what’s going on in this city and the state of Ohio as well.”

Police brutality in America is longstanding. Killer cops operate with impunity. Violence against peaceful protesters for justice is commonplace. Sunday in Cleveland was the latest example.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.” http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com. Listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network. It airs three times weekly: live on Sundays at 1PM Central time plus two prerecorded archived programs.

Image: Michael Hastings Facebook Photo

Originally published by WhoWhatWhy.

As readers of WhoWhatWhy know, our site has been one of the very few continuing to explore the fiery death two years ago of investigative journalist Michael Hastings, whose car left a straight segment of a Los Angeles street at a high speed, jumped the median, hit a tree, and blew up.

Our original report described anomalies of the crash and surrounding events that suggest cutting-edge foul play—that an external hacker could have taken control of Hastings’s car in order to kill him. If this sounds too futuristic, a series of recent technical revelations has proven that “car hacking” is entirely possible. The latest just appeared this week.

Hackers, seeking to demonstrate the vulnerability of automobiles to remote attacks, were able to largely take over the Jeep Cherokee driven by a writer for the tech magazine Wired:

Their code is an automaker’s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep’s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

They were able to make his car decelerate suddenly, causing the writer to “narrowly avert death” at the hands of a semi-trailer coming up behind him.

In an earlier demonstration, they had been able to do similar things with other vehicles:

In the summer of 2013, I drove a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius around a South Bend, Indiana, parking lot while they sat in the backseat with their laptops, cackling as theydisabled my brakes, honked the horn, jerked the seat belt, and commandeered the steering wheel.

All of this is increasingly drawing the attention—and action— of the authorities. U.S. Senators Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) and Edward J. Markey (D-MA), members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, introduced legislation Tuesday seeking to establish federal standards for security and privacy of drivers in today’s computer-laden cars.

What we do not hear is any discussion about whether the risk has gone beyond the realm of possibility…to a reality.

What About Hastings?

Back when Michael Hastings died, former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke—by all accounts a sober, no-nonsense man—said that the Hastings’s crash was “consistent with a car cyber attack” and that it was likely that intelligence agencies knew “how to remotely seize control of a car.”

It is worth noting, too, that the day before his death, Hastings had “urgently” requested to borrow his neighbor’s car—he wanted to get out of town, but he feared his own car was being tampered with.

How is it then that “mainstream” publications, including even Wired, do not talk about the very odd circumstances surrounding the death of a journalist who had made powerful enemies? Did the fact that he had caused a famed general to be fired, that he was investigating the CIA chief, that he told colleagues he himself was being investigated by the FBI—did none of this at least raise the slightest suspicion on the part of our journalistic community? How about the fiery explosion when his car hit a palm tree—which automotive experts say should not normally take place; what about the fact that the engine flew out of the vehicle and landed a considerable distance away–which, again, we are told, is highly unusual?

As with so many of these things, the authorities raced to conclude that it was all an unfortunate accident and that there was no more to the story. And virtually the entirety of journalism—Left, Right and Center, Mainstream and “Alternative”—accepted this conclusion without so much as a hint of skepticism.

So, now that it has been dramatically demonstrated that accidents can be caused remotely by those targeting a driver, will we see other media stepping up to take a good hard look at the key question: What really happened to Michael Hastings? We hope so, but we aren’t taking any bets.

Image: Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com

Risk analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb predicted the 2008 financial crisis, by pointing out that commonly-used risk models were wrong.  Taleb – a distinguished professor of risk engineering at New York University, and author of best-sellers The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness – Taleb became financially independent after the crash of 1987, and wealthy during the 2008 financial crisis.

Taleb noted last year that most boosters for genetically modified foods (GMOs) – including scientists – are totally ignorant about risk analysis.   Taleb said that proliferating GMOs could lead to “an irreversible termination of life [on] the planet.”

This month, Taleb – and tail-hedging expert Mark Spitznagel, who also made a hugely profitable billion dollar derivatives bet on the stock market crash of 2008 – wrote in the New York Times:

Before the crisis that started in 2007, both of us believed that the financial system was fragile and unsustainable, contrary to the near ubiquitous analyses at the time.

Now, there is something vastly riskier facing us, with risks that entail the survival of the global ecosystem — not the financial system. This time, the fight is against the current promotion of genetically modified organisms, or G.M.O.s.

Our critics held that the financial system was improved thanks to the unwavering progress of science and technology, which had blessed finance with more sophisticated economic insight. But the “tail risks,” or the effect from rare but monstrously consequential events, we held, had been increasing, owing to increasing complexity and globalization. Given that almost nobody was paying attention to the risks, we set ourselves and our clients to be protected from an eventual collapse of the banking system, which subsequently happened to the benefit of those who were prepared.

***

We were repeatedly told that there was evidence that the system was stable, that we were in “the Great Moderation,” a common practice that mistakes absence of evidence for evidence of absence. For the financial system to be viable, the solution is for it to resemble the restaurant business: decentralized, with mistakes that stay local and that cannot bring down the entire apparatus.

Indeed, a Nobel prize-winning economist and many other experts say that too much centralization destabilizes economies and other systems.

Taleb and Spitznagel by pointing out that the GMO-cheerleaders are making the same anti-scientific arguments as those who said the financial system was stable prior to 2008:

The financial system nearly collapsed, but it was only money. We now find ourselves facing nearly the same five fallacies for our caution against the growth in popularity of G.M.O.s.  [Nearly 80% of all food produced in the U.S. contains GMOs.]

First, there has been a tendency to label anyone who dislikes G.M.O.s as anti-science — and put them in the anti-antibiotics, antivaccine, even Luddite category. There is, of course, nothing scientific about the comparison. Nor is the scholastic invocation of a “consensus” a valid scientific argument.

Interestingly, there are similarities between arguments that are pro-G.M.O. and snake oil, the latter having relied on a cosmetic definition of science. The charge of “therapeutic nihilism” was leveled at people who contested snake oil medicine at the turn of the 20th century. (At that time, anything with the appearance of sophistication was considered “progress.”)

Second, we are told that a modified tomato is not different from a naturally occurring tomato. That is wrong: The statistical mechanism by which a tomato was built by nature is bottom-up, by tinkering in small steps (as with the restaurant business, distinct from contagion-prone banks). In nature, errors stay confined and, critically, isolated.

Third, the technological salvation argument we faced in finance is also present with G.M.O.s, which are intended to “save children by providing them with vitamin-enriched rice.” The argument’s flaw is obvious: In a complex system, we do not know the causal chain, and it is better to solve a problem by the simplest method, and one that is unlikely to cause a bigger problem.

Fourth, by leading to monoculture — which is the same in finance, where all risks became systemic — G.M.O.s threaten more than they can potentially help. Ireland’s population was decimated by the effect of monoculture during the potato famine. Just consider that the same can happen at a planetary scale.

We noted in 2009:

It has been accepted science for decades that when all the farmers in a certain region grow the same strain of the same crop – called “monoculture” – the crops become much more susceptible.

Why?

Because any bug (insect or germ) which happens to like that particular strain could take out the whole crop on pretty much all of the region’s farms.

For example, one type of grasshopper – called “differential grasshoppers” – loves corn. If everyone grows the same strain of corn in a town in the midwest, and differential grasshoppers are anywhere nearby, they may come and wipe out the entire town’s crops (that’s why monoculture crops require such high levels of pesticides).

On the other hand, if farmers grow a lot of different types of crops (“polyculture”) , then a pest might get some crops, but the rest will survive.

Taleb and Spitznagel conclude:

The G.M.O. experiment, carried out in real time and with our entire food and ecological system as its laboratory, is perhaps the greatest case of human hubris ever. It creates yet another systemic, “too big too fail” enterprise — but one for which no bailouts will be possible when it fails.

In the real world – using statistical analysis – GMOs are inferior when compared to other types of food, because GMOs are associated with:

• Decreased crop yield (and the United Nations says that small organic farms are the only way to feed the world)

• Increased pesticide requirements

• An absence of any real safety studies

• Increased CO2 emissions

Rarely in recent years have the foreign travels of a leading German politician caused such a stir as the visit earlier this month to Iran by the German Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Sigmar Gabriel (Social Democratic Party, SPD). With the ink barely dry on the recently-negotiated nuclear program agreement with Iran, Gabriel was already bound for Tehran in the company of a high-level business delegation.

Berlin’s foray into one of the most strategically important and resource-rich countries in the Middle East—Iran has the fourth largest oil and second largest gas reserves in the world—is part of German imperialism’s return to the world stage. Significantly, the visit took place the same week as the federal government enforced a brutal austerity program on Greece and German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier visited Cuba with a delegation.

Gabriel’s trip to Iran was so sudden and his related objectives so obvious that even a number of media outlets, which otherwise regularly beat the drum for a more aggressive German participation in world affairs, felt compelled to comment critically on the expedition.

The Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper called it “embarrassing” and warned: “Now the impression has been given that Germany is mainly concerned about its business interests. Arriving late is stupid, but sometimes flying off too early is a lot more stupid.”

The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also referred to Gabriel’s trip as “quick off the mark, if not over-hasty.” The paper’s columnist wrote that it might perhaps “help German industry to once again secure a foothold in this market after the long years of sanctions.” It was, however, “an ambiguous signal” in relation to German foreign policy, according to FAZ.

Criticism of Gabriel’s delegation even came from within the government’s own ranks: “I’m worried about the declaration that Iran is one of our friends,” said Roderich Kiesewetter (Christian Democratic Union, CDU), the CDU/Christian Social Union (CSU) alliance representative in the foreign affairs committee of the Bundestag (federal parliament). He added that Iran could only be “our friend and a stability factor in the region,” when it “actually recognises Israel’s right to exist.” Former SPD parliamentarian and German-Israeli Society president Reinhold Robbe stated that Gabriel gave the impression “that Germany sets its economic interests above everything else.”

The arrogant bluster of Gabriel certainly helped to confirm this “impression.” Soon after his government plane landed at Mehrabad international airport in Tehran, he told German reporters:

“Traditionally we have good relations [with Iran], and many companies want to build on existing contacts. And the chance for this will emerge when the agreement enters into force early next year. It will be the first major step, but there will certainly be many more that will have to be taken.”

The business representatives in his entourage were even less able to restrain their enthusiasm for the new opportunities opening up for the export and commodity-hungry German imperialism. President of the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK) Eric Schweitzer said, “German industry is highly regarded in Iran,” and continued: “During the reign of the Shah, Iran was Germany’s second most important export market outside Europe. Many want to follow up on that.”

DIHK head of foreign trade Volker Treier proclaimed,

“The Iranian economy is geared more towards industry than one might assume. With its 80 million inhabitants and a strong industrial base, the country is predestined to be an export market for German companies.”

The German business press is also enthusiastic about the development. The monthly Manager Magazin gushed that, in addition to “a highly qualified workforce,” there are “a lot of raw materials” available in Iran. The country is seen as “a sleeping giant” that has “substantial pent-up economic demands as a result of sanctions in recent years.”

German imperialism and German capital consider the Iran nuclear agreement, brokered in part through the efforts of German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as an opportunity to build on their traditionally close relations with Iran and increase their economic and political influence across the whole region.

Die Welt writes that “the opportunities opening up for German companies in Iran are outstanding.” Relations between businesses from both countries are recognised to have “grown over decades,” and “some German companies have been involved in the heartland of the former Persian empire for more than 100 years.”

According to official sources, some 80 German companies are currently operating directly through branches in Iran, and about 1,000 other enterprises have representatives there. Among the largest German concerns on site are Henkel, Siemens and Bayer. Following the sharp decline in economic relations over recent years, the value of German exports had already increased by almost a third to €2.4 billion (US$2.6 billion) in 2014.

The DIHK now expects a doubling of German exports within the next two years to around €5 billion (US$5.5 billion). The Federation of German Industries (BDI) even assumes that German companies could be exporting goods worth more than €10 billion to Iran in the near future.

Following a joint meeting with Iranian oil minister Bijan Namdar Zanganeh on Monday, Gabriel announced that Germany and Iran will resume the operation of a joint economic commission beginning in 2016. Iranian President Hassan Rohani expressed hope that Berlin would play a “positive role” in the development of relations between the two countries and also between Europe and the entire Middle East, “just as it had done in the nuclear program negotiations.”

What Rohani and the Iranian regime describe as “positive” means in fact the complete submission of the country to the plundering of imperialist powers 35 years after the Iranian revolution.

Commenting under the headline “The Great Race,” the Süddeutsche Zeitung suggested that Germany “is not the only country that wants a careful return to normality.” It pointed out that, although Gabriel was the “first high-ranking western politician in Iran” since the nuclear deal, several other EU foreign ministers had already paid visits to Tehran. France had already sent “a 130-strong business delegation to Iran in February 2014,” in which oil giant Total, plant builder Alstom, the Orange telecommunications group and French automakers were represented.

China is also regarded as an obvious competitor. Anton Börner, head of the BGA foreign trade association, predicts that it will probably be “difficult” for the German business community to “once again become Iran’s largest trading partner.” According to Börner, Chinese companies that have exploited the past years of sanctions “to establish themselves in Iran” would “fight to maintain their position, when the sanctions are withdrawn.”

Commenting on increasing competition from Asian countries, Volker Treier said: “Chinese and Korean companies in Iran have now taken our place in the sun.” He said the Chinese now had “a trade volume of US$50 billion in their business with Iran. We won’t be able to get near such a scale of investment.”

The fact that leading German business representatives are again claiming their right to “a place in the sun” has far-reaching historical implications. When the imperialist forces of the so-called “late emerging German nation” first aspired to achieve “a place in the sun” (words subsequently used in Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow’s address to the German parliament on December 6, 1897), the phrase mainly referred to the possession of colonies in Africa and the Middle East, and the development of a unilateral global policy which twice led to disaster in the 20th century.

As in the past, the renewed grandstanding of German imperialism on the world stage will exacerbate tensions with the US. Although not openly discussed in public, the rush of German businesses to stake claims in Iran is driven by an attempt to forestall potential American competition, which will be excluded from the country prior to the US Congress’s vote on the nuclear program agreement. An Iran dominated by German imperialism or German-led European imperialism would also be a direct geo-strategic challenge to US imperialism, which has concluded the nuclear deal primarily in order to defend its own hegemony in the region.

A delayed trial of two Berkut police members in the Maidan Massacre case [1] have produced striking new revelations providing further confirmations of major findings of my Maidan “snipers’ massacre” study about Maidan snipers killing both police and protesters and subsequent cover up and falsification of the official investigation.[2] But these striking revelations have not been reported by the Ukrainian and Western media, even though the trial proceedings were open to the media, were streamed live over the Internet and their recordings were posted on YouTube.

On July 15, 2015, the prosecution made public in court for the first time its charges alleging that two arrested members of the Berkut special company massacred 39 out of 49 killed protesters on February 20, 2014.

However, the prosecution’s case unraveled on July 17 when the brother of one of the victims stated during his questioning by the prosecutors that Andrii Saienko was killed not from Berkut positions but from a top floor of the Maidan-controlled Hotel Ukraina. He made this conclusion on the basis of his brother’s position as shown in a video at the moment of his killing and an entry wound location in upper right chest area and a steep wound channel to the backbone. The prosecutors and relatives of some of the victims reported during the trial that technical expert reports in the investigative file established that Saienko and at least 9 other protesters were killed from the same exact 7.62mm caliber weapon.

This revelation alone means that a significant proportion of the protesters were shot from this Maidan-controlled hotel, since this caliber bullets were extracted from bodies of 16 protesters. But the prosecution charged two Berkut members with their killings, even though Saienko’s brother and his lawyer officially handed to investigators the aforementioned video file in October 2014.

His brother identified the moment when Saienko was killed on Instytutska Street, at 9:08:34am in the video, which was initially filmed from the Hotel Ukraina by Radio Svoboda and then synchronized and time-stamped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IQkB0jZ39k. This video also shows the moment when Bohdan Solchanyk was killed at 9:08:16am, less than 20 seconds before Saienko in the same area, reportedly with a 7.62mm bullet. His apparent position, the blood on the right side of the neck, and louder and different sounds of several shots in rapid succession, compared to the AKMS shots fired by Berkut at the same time, indicate that Solchanyk was most likely shot dead from the Hotel Ukraina. At that time, the Berkut policemen were in front and somewhat to the left from Solchanyk and the other protesters; and a specific shot, which was presented in the video synchronization, made by his acquaintance, as the evidence of his killing by Berkut, was from a 12mm caliber Fort pump rifle.

In the same video, Ihor Zastavnyi is seen in a yellow helmet falling nearby several seconds after Solchanyk was killed. Zastavnyi said in various interviews that he fell to the ground after he was wounded there third time and his leg was severed. He stated that the prosecution informed him earlier this year that they lost a bullet extracted from his body: http://hromadskeradio.org/…/slidchi-prokuraturi-zagubili-ku….

The analysis of the content of the same video and photo compilation indicates that Maksym Shymko was killed in the same area at about the same time, since he was last seen alive at 9:07:15am and by 9:07:46am he was shot and his stick was on the pavement near a wooden shield. Although the exact moment of his killing is missing from the video, his mother in her court testimony confirmed this location and indicated that the investigation found that he was killed from the same weapon as 9 other protesters, including Saienko.

Another bullet, which was stuck in Shymko’s neck and which was publicized as evidence of government snipers, was not of 7.62mm caliber. His mother supported the prosecution charges that Berkut killed her son, but she stated that he was wounded in his neck with an exit wound below his shoulder blade. This indicates a sharp angle, which is consistent with the similar location of the Saienko’s killer and an announcement from the Maidan stage at 9:10am about two or three “snipers” on the pendulum floor of the Hotel Ukraina. This announcement relayed reports of Maidan protesters concerning the killings of Shymko, Solchanyk, and Saienko, since they were a part of the first group of the protesters that came under deadly live ammunition fire. One of the charged Berkut members indicated during the trial that the investigative file contained testimonies of protesters about Maidan “snipers” at the Hotel Ukraina.

The list of the 39 protesters whose killing the prosecution attributed to Berkut was only released nearly one and a half years after the massacre. The killings of the other 10 protesters were simply omitted from the charges, even though 8 of them were shot dead at the same time and place as these 39 protesters. The special Council of Europe investigative panel reported that the Ukrainian investigation had evidence that ten protesters were killed by “snipers” from top of the buildings, but that investigation did not find any evidence that these were snipers from the Security Service of Ukraine Alf unit and other government units. [See here for an April 2015 news report. And here is the 188-page report of the panel, dated March 31, 2015.]

The omitted list confirmed information that the investigation omitted the killings of Oleh Unshnevych, Evhen Kotliar, Ustym Holodniuk and Oleksander Kharchenko because of clear evidence they were killed from the Maidan-controlled locations, such as Hotel Ukraina. In addition, the prosecution charges also omitted the killings of Vasyl Aksenyn, Vladyslav Zubenko, Volodymyr Chaplynsky and Volodymyr Melnychuk. My study presents various evidence that these protesters were also killed from the Maidan-controlled buildings, mostly Hotel Ukraina, starting from about 9:18am till almost 5pm. For instance, the much publicized Zelenyi Front video shows at 10:26am (32:13) that Chaplynsky was shot dead when he was running away from the massacre area: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdFHNE8WxOA. A Spline TVrecording of its live broadcast, which is now removed from a list of its videos on the Internet, shows sparks flying from the Hotel Ukraina when a loud gunshot killed this protestor. Zubenko was killed in the same area at 9:49am, reportedly with a 5.45 caliber bullet.

The prosecution charges confirmed earlier reports that the investigation did not find specific evidence linking specific Berkut members to specific killed protesters. But these charges also revealed that the prosecution did not specify the exact time of killing of specific protesters and policemen, although such information can be determined from live broadcasts and synchronized and time-stamped videos, and it is presented in my study. These charges deliberately omitted various evidence, including videos, interviews, and public admissions, of Maidan “shooters” of the police.

The prosecution case for the first time de facto admitted an absence of a specific top government order to massacre the protesters on February 20. The prosecution stated that after an unspecified escalation of the conflict around 8am on February 20, the Berkut commander himself ordered the commander of the special Berkut company to disperse the protesters on the Maidan and block them from advancing to the parliament and presidential administration. It would have been irrational for the Berkut commander to issue such an order on his own and use only about two dozen members of a special company. The prosecution itself stated that then-president Viktor Yanukovych and the Minister of Internal Affairs ordered to disperse the protesters on the Maidan by force close to midnight on February 18. The attempt to storm the parliament on February 18 was presented by the prosecution as a peaceful rally, and subsequent clashes, the killing of some 30 policemen and protesters and a computer technician at the office of the Party of Regions were omitted.

The charges stated that following the Berkut commander order, the Berkut special company commander ordered the use of AKMs and Fort 500 pump guns with lead pellets, although no evidence was presented as to why this elite police unit would start using hunting ammunition. Contrary to the prosecutor charges account, various evidence cited in my study and later confirmed by BBC and other sources show that the Maidan protesters forced Berkut and Internal troop units, which did not have then live ammunition, to flee from the Maidan around 8:50am by killing and wounding about 20 of them, specifically with pellets and 7.62mm bullets, from the Music Conservatory and Trade Union buildings. The Berkut special company was first filmed being deployed and shooting with live ammunition on Instytutska street at 9:05am and then briefly moving to Zhovtnevyi Palace to allow remaining policemen there to flee.

The prosecution claimed that around 9am on February 20, 2014, unidentified persons of unknown allegiance started to shoot at the police and that they killed from an unknown weapon one member of the Berkut special company and wounded another. In response to this, the accused from the Berkut company and unidentified members of this company and other law enforcement units became hostile to protesters and started to shoot in the direction of the unarmed protesters with AKMS and Fort 500 with lead pellets in order to kill them. This timeline is also deliberately misleading, because recordings of live broadcasts, time-stamped and synchronized videos, cited in my study, show that at least five protesters were killed starting at exactly 9:00 am before the member of the special Berkut company was shot dead with pellets at 9:16am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYjEp1C4hzI.

The prosecution charged two Berkut members with being a part of an organized group that killed 39 protesters with 7.62mm caliber AKMS during the assault of the Maidan and from two barricades on Instytutska Street from 9am till 1pm. During the testimonies and cross-examination of relatives of six killed protesters, only one single direct witness of the killing of one of these protesters (Eduard Hrynevych) was identified. This witness now happens to serve in a paramilitary unit of the Right Sector, which was involved in the massacre. My study cited videos of protesters referring at 10:25am to the killing of Hrynevych by a shot to his head several meters from them and referring to “snipers” on the pendulum floor of the Hotel Ukraina: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yUingq7eyI. This and other videos show many protesters and journalists witnessing and recording shooting of these protesters.

Remarkably, a recently posted video, which shows “snipers” on the top floors of the Hotel Ukraina shooting at the Maidan protesters was referred to during the trial as evidence of the killing of Ihor Kostenko by Berkut. This video shows Kostenko seconds before and after (0:59) when he was shot at 9:29am: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akVXLbkJsX0. At least seven other protesters were killed within less than three minutes in the same area.

My study presents various evidence, such as videos and eyewitness testimonies, indicating that these and almost all other 39 protesters were also killed from the Hotel Ukraina and other Maidan-controlled buildings, and that the Right Sector, Svoboda, and Fatherland parties were involved in the “snipers” massacre. There are a few protesters whose location and time of the killing are still publicly undisclosed.

A Google News search shows that none of these revelations during the Maidan Massacre trial have been reported by the media in Ukraine and the West. In contrast, there were numerous reports in the Ukrainian media about each of these protesters. Similarly, The New York Times, The Telegraph, and Associated Press previously published articles, respectively, about the killings of Solchanyk and Saienko and wounding of Zastavnyi. The ‘Maidan’ documentary film by Sergei Loznitsa, shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year, included the above-mentioned excerpts of the Radio Svoboda live Internet video stream showing the killings of Shymko, Solchanyk, and Saienko. In media reports and in this documentary, these and other killings of the protesters were typically directly or indirectly attributed to Berkut or government snipers.

In contrast, the Maidan stage announcements concerning the “snipers” at the Hotel Ukraina and other various evidence of the concealed Maidan shooters there and in other Maidan-controlled areas were omitted. The failure to report the striking new revelations from the ongoing trial suggests that the misrepresentation in Ukraine and the West of the Maidan mass killing is driven not by lack of information but by politics.

Notes
[1] The two Berkut policemen currently on trial were arrested last year. Three other policemen were arrested on similar charges this year but their trial has not yet started.
[2] See: The “Snipers’ Massacre” on the Maidan in Ukraine (revised and updated version), by Ivan Katchanovski, Ph.D, published on Academia.edu, Feb. 20, 2015.

Israel is trying to expel the population of a village for the crime of not being Jewish, the same crime for which Israel bombs the people of Gaza for a month or so every few years and blockades them in between these bursts of violence.

Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee declares that making peace with Iran amounts to marching Israelis “to the door of the oven.”

Guess which of the two stories will get more coverage!

A crime of over 70 years ago, part of a war that in my unscientific estimate forms the single most common theme of U.S. historical fiction — whether print or film — is more important news in the view of U.S. editors than is a crime of right now.

And that was true 60 years after World War II and 50 years after and 40 and 20 and even 3 years after World War II.

Eve Spangler has just published a wonderfully well documented book that should be the text for universal history classes, called Understanding Israel/Palestine: Race, Nation, and Human Rights in the Conflict. Spangler, the U.S. child of two holocaust survivors, was a college professor before she had the slightest idea what had happened in Palestine during the twentieth century. When she found out, she went all-in and found out as much as could be known.

Spangler takes students to Israel/Palestine every year. When visiting the Arab market in Hebron, she learned that the heavy metal mesh screen overhead was hung there to protect shoppers from bricks and chairs thrown down from balconies by Israeli settlers. However, Spangler was struck with the contents of one of the objects settlers had learned could penetrate the screen: a plastic bag of human excrement. Israeli settlers behave like prisoners gone mad from confinement even as they steal the land and homes of non-Jewish people with impunity.

How can this be? What went wrong?

Well, at least a part of what went wrong went wrong from the start, from even before the 1948 Nakba in which Israelis-to-be ethnically cleansed the land without a people for the people without a land. The land without a people was more densely populated than the United States, but was seen as populated by subhuman non-people, not even Untermenschen.

Clearly, the aspiration to creating a ‘new man,'” Spangler writes, “defined by a hyper-masculine ethos of physical and military strength and by ‘clean and pure blood’ (and a ‘new woman’ defined by fecundity) had echoes of fascist ideology and profoundly racist implications. Consider, for example, the iconic photo of an Israeli soldier gazing reverently at the Western Wall on the day that the Israeli army conquered East Jerusalem in 1967. He is startlingly Aryan in appearance. Nor did the preference for blondes end in 1967. Recently social workers told an Israeli friend of mine who is waiting to adopt a baby, that her family could have a ‘defective’ baby immediately, but would have to wait about a year for a ‘normal’ baby or up to five years if they insisted on having a blond, blue-eyed child. ‘Defective’ children, this family discovered, were dark-skinned.

Two years after the liberation of the concentration camps in Europe, Jewish militias besieging the town of Beisan (Bet She’an), Spangler notes, “required some Arabs to don yellow armbands, and marked Arab stores with yellow decals, targeting them for looting.” Spangler, whose book covers many subtopics other than the one I’m focusing on, is infinitely careful to stress the obvious, namely that similarities are not exact equivalencies. Her point in noting the similarities is, I think, clearly and legitimately enough to expose the imperfect yet startling mimicry and the motivation of misdirected revenge in the basic policies of the Israeli government from that day to this toward the people who lived in the “uninhabited” land.

Lillian Rosengarten’s forthcoming Survival and Conscience: From the Shadows of Nazi Germany to the Jewish Boat to Gaza is an account by a Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany for the United States as a little girl with her parents. “Nationalism revisited,” she writes, “is now twisted into a parody of the Nazi credo, ‘Deutschland über alles,’ extolling Germany over all others with only pure Germans as inhabitants. Get rid of the undesirables who are beneath contempt. I must not make such a comparison, you say. Yet I must, for I fear a Jewish State that belongs only to Jews is a dangerous road. I must question the profound psychological impairment suffered and internalized by generations of Jews that follows the Nazi Holocaust. The cycle of paranoia and abuse is playing out its destructive course: this is how I understand Palestinians as the last victims of the Holocaust.”

I would question only how Rosengarten can see into the future and find the last victims of the influence of Nazism. After World War II, the military of the United States — which, of course, arms the Israeli military free of charge while whining about how it can’t afford luxuries like schools, housing, and bridges that don’t collapse — hired sixteen hundred former Nazi scientists and doctors, including some of Adolf Hitler’s closest collaborators, including men responsible for murder, slavery, and human experimentation, including men convicted of war crimes, men acquitted of war crimes, and men who never stood trial. Some of the Nazis tried at Nuremberg had already been working for the U.S. in either Germany or the U.S. prior to the trials. Some were protected from their past by the U.S. government for years, as they lived and worked in Boston Harbor, Long Island, Maryland, Ohio, Texas, Alabama, and elsewhere, or were flown by the U.S. government to Argentina to protect them from prosecution. To observe and note the Nazification of the U.S. military is neither to absolve the U.S. military of its pre-WWII crimes nor to pass blame off to the Nazis instead of blaming U.S. officials of later generations for their own actions. Blame is not a limited quantity.

I don’t think we can dismiss Huckabee’s comments about ovens as simply a bid to be dumber than Donald Trump and win the pro-stupidity vote in the Republican primaries. Transforming Iran from devil to negotiation partner victimizes Israel precisely by stripping Israel of some of its victim-status. Without the status of eternally current victim of the fantasized reenactment of long-past crimes, Israel has to be viewed through a filter of actual facts. Were Jews victimized by Germany? Of course! Did Palestinians deserve to suffer for it? Of course not! Did Iran have anything to do with it? Of course not! Would I support pulling all the U.S. military bases out of Germany and turning all of their land over to Jewish settlers? Sure!

But only those who want to leave Palestine should leave it. Only those who want to stay in a nonviolent, pluralist, secular, democratic, state with equal rights for all and compensation for Palestinians harmed over the past many decades should remain.

Saudi war planes killed at least 120 civilians in a series of airstrikes in the city of Taiz late Friday night. The strikes destroyed buildings that were serving as workers’ quarters as well as a nearby agricultural facility.

The attack was only the latest instance of mass killing of civilians in the bombing campaign waged by the Saudi-led, US-backed coalition that began in March.

Despite claims from Riyadh that such events are accidental, a growing body of evidence shows that the Saudi air campaign is systematically targeting civilian areas. The war is aimed at terrorizing the Yemeni masses into opposing the Houthi takeover and acceding to the restoration of US-Saudi control over the country through the re-imposition of the puppet government led by President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

The mass slaughter of civilians has become “the new trend now of the air strikes from the coalition,” a representative from Doctors Without Borders (MSF) told the Associated Press.

“It’s a house, it’s a market, it’s anything,” the MSF representative said, referring to the direct targeting of civilian areas by the Arab coalition.

In May, Saudi military officials declared that the Houthi stronghold of Saada would be considered a “military zone,” i.e. a free-fire area, and ordered leaflets dropped instructing all civilians to leave the city. UN investigators have argued that the Saudi coalition is knowingly targeting “trapped civilians.”

As many as 140 Saudi strikes ripped through areas of Saada on Friday. The strikes intentionally targeted civilian areas where Saudi war planners claim the Houthi insurgents have hidden stores of weapons and ammunition. Further strikes on Friday slammed into residential areas in the coastal town of Mokha.

From all appearances, Saudi pilots have been granted standing authorization to deploy their bombs against civilian areas.

An Amnesty International press release from July 1, titled “Airstrike and weapon analysis shows Saudi Arabia-led forces killed scores of civilians with powerful bombs,” documents the killing of at least 54 civilians by a series of strikes against the cities of Sanaa and Taiz between June 12 and June 16.

In one attack detailed by the report, a 2,000 pound bomb fell directly on a residential suburban home, killing at least 10 civilians.

As a reward for their participation in this bloody air campaign, some 100 Saudi pilots have been offered high-end sports cars.

The humanitarian catastrophe facing the civilian population is now reaching “unprecedented levels,” according to a statement from the International Red Cross on Friday. The punishing Saudi assault has contributed officially to the deaths of at least 1,700 civilians in a matter of months, while devastating Yemen’s infrastructure to the point where some 80 percent of the population lacks reliable access to food and water.

In the aftermath of Friday’s mass civilian deaths, Saudi authorities have called for a five day cease-fire over the weekend, under the pretense of seeking to allow humanitarian aid to enter the country.

There is every reason to believe that the Saudi cease-fire has been called as a tactical maneuver, aimed at gaining breathing space for the Saudi coalition to rearm its bombers and recalibrate its ground strategy. Following the pattern of previous “truces” declared by the Saudis, fighting has continued to rage on the ground in the hours leading up to the official start of the ceasefire.

Houthi representatives have already denounced the cease-fire as aimed at preparing for “the beginning of a new war,” according to statements cited by the Associated Press.

The Saudi-led war, which has killed thousands of civilians and produced a social cataclysm, is now morphing into a full blown hybrid ground war along the lines of those fomented by US imperialism in Libya and Syria.

The Arab powers are preparing to launch a new ground offensive, utilizing an array of freshly trained proxy forces assembled in areas along the southern coast recently reconquered from the Houthis.

In return for their loyalty, formations of pro-Saudi militants who sided with the Saudi-led coalition and the government-in-exile of Hadi have been outfitted by the Gulf states with hundreds of armored vehicles.

Hundreds of fighters have already received training at new military training camps established on the outskirts of Aden by “advisers” from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE and Jordan.

It is no coincidence that such operations bear the imprint of US-orchestrated machinations throughout the region. From the beginning of the war, US military advisers have been helping to orchestrate the bombing campaign from a Joint Planning Cell embedded with the Saudi coalition’s command element.

In the lead-up to the launch of Operation Decisive Storm in March, the Saudi ambassador to the US submitted a list of targets to be vetted by Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan. US Navy vessels have been deployed for months in support of the Saudi blockade of Yemen’s ports.

Washington views the war in Yemen as an opportunity to reshape the regional political order through the development of a new Arab military coalition dominated by its main “regional partners,” in particular Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Gulf monarchies that have been armed to the hilt by the Obama administration.

A new analysis produced by Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a leading think thank of the American military-intelligence establishment, makes clear that beyond its immediate role in prosecuting the war against Yemen, the Saudi-led Arab coalition is being developed as an instrument of US regional hegemony.

In the introduction to his “Arab-US Strategic Partnership and the Changing Security Balance in the Gulf,” soon to be published in the form of a 600-page book, Cordesman argues that the Gulf war coalition must emerge as a strategic force capable of a range of interventions beyond Yemen.

“The strategic partnership between Arab Gulf states, and with the US and other outside states, must now evolve to both deal with conventional military threats and a range of new threats including ideological extremists, non-state actors, their state sponsors, and a growing range of forces design ( sic ) to fight asymmetric wars,”

Cordesman argues.

Cordesman writes that the main political nemesis of the “Arab-US Strategic Partnership” is the government of Iran. He contends that the Arab states should proceed with an aggressive anti-Iranian line in the region, confident in their military superiority over Tehran.

Figures compiled by the CSIS report show that the Gulf states have vastly outspent Iran on armaments and other military expenditures since 2001 by a total of some $600 billion to $140 billion in spending by Tehran.

At the same time as it pursues the war in Yemen aimed at intensifying pressure on Tehran, the US has initiated a shift aimed at potentially bringing Iran into alignment with its broader strategy in the Middle East through the recently-negotiated agreement on the country’s nuclear program.

President Obama has ordered that if the official tasked with investigating corruption in the Department of Justice wants access to sensitive files, he’ll have to get permission from — the Department of Justice.

That directive was part of a 58-page ruling delivered by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and it makes it very hard for the inspector general to get access to wiretaps, grand jury, and credit information necessary to expose fraud and other misdeeds perpetrated by the Justice Department.

“Without such access, our office’s ability to conduct its work will be significantly impaired, and it will be more difficult for us to detect and deter waste, fraud, and abuse, and to protect taxpayer dollars,” Inspector General Michael Horowitz said in a statement published by the Washington Post.

“Congress meant what it said when it authorized Inspectors General to independently access ‘all’ documents necessary to conduct effective oversight,” he added.

A bipartisan group of congressmen agree.

In a statement published on his website on July 23, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) joined three of his colleagues in condemning the Obama administration’s attempt to block the inspector general investigation:

The Inspector General Act of 1978 directs that Inspectors General have a right to access all records, documents and other materials.  If the Inspector General deems a document necessary to do his job, then the agency should turn it over immediately.  The clear command of that law is being ignored far too often by agencies across the executive branch.  By this opinion’s tortured logic, “all records” does not mean “all records,” and Congress’s recent attempt to underscore our original intent with an appropriations restriction is nothing but a nullity. The prospect of the Obama administration using this opinion to stonewall oversight, avoid accountability, and undermine the independence of inspectors general is alarming.

Congressman Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, stated,

Today’s Office of Legal Counsel opinion contains the same kind of outcome-oriented lawyering that produced the Department of Justice’s infamous recess appointments memorandum, which was unanimously rejected by the Supreme Court in 2014. The law is clear that the Office of the Inspector General should have unfettered access to materials for its investigations, but political lawyers at the Department of Justice have engaged in legal gymnastics to shield key information from government watchdogs.

What would the Justice Department have to hide?

The Justice Department is stiff-arming the inspector general’s requests for records relating to several DOJ scandals, including: (1) whether the Department had violated the civil liberties and civil rights of individuals detained in national security investigations following 9/11, (2) Operation Fast and Furious, (3) the FBI’s use of National Security and Exigent letters, (4) the DEA’s (Drug Enforcement Administration’s) sex parties scandal, (5) the DEA’s use of confidential sources, and (6) the DEA’s use of administrative subpoenas to obtain bulk data collections.

Last February, Horowitz told a congressional committee that “the FBI has failed to turn over key records in several whistleblower cases,” the Post reports.

That’s not surprising.

Despite campaign promises to “strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government, President Obama has single-handedly prosecuted (and persecuted) more whistleblowers than any of his predecessors.

With the formal filing of the charges against NSA leaker Edward Snowden, this president has charged eight whistleblowers under the Espionage Act.

One of the targets of the president’s prosecution and persecution of those he promised to protect was trying to expose the details of the Department of Justice’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gun running program. As reported by The New American in October 2013:

The Obama administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) in particular, are under fire from across the political spectrum again after they were publicly exposed trying to censor a key whistleblower in the Fast and Furious federal gun-running scandal by preventing him from publishing a book about it.

Claiming that publication of ATF Special Agent John Dodson’s manuscript would harm agency morale, official documents show that the out-of-control bureaucracy sought to violate the First Amendment in an apparent effort to avoid further scrutiny of its lawless activities. However, that attempt failed miserably, and the scandal is back in the headlines with a vengeance.

The Fast and Furious revelations showed, among other deadly serious scandals, that the ATF, disgraced Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department, and other top officials conspired to send thousands of high-powered weapons to Mexican drug cartels at U.S. taxpayer expense. Many of those guns were used to murder Mexican citizens and even U.S. law-enforcement officers. It was later learned from official documents that the supposed “drug lords” allegedly being “investigated” were already on the FBI payroll, and that the administration was plotting to use the Fast and Furious violence to advance its unconstitutional assault on the Second Amendment.

As for the FBI, that agency has been on a tear through the Fourth Amendment for years.

Just days ago, FBI Director James Comey told the members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that in order to stay a step ahead of the bad guys, the g-men should have access to any available technology to decode encrypted data. And that the government should be the arbiter of when decryption is necessary or not.

Last year, the Obama Justice Department asked that a committee be empaneled to amend Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (FRCP).

In plain terms, Rule 41 mandates that judges may issue search warrants only within the districts where they have jurisdiction. The FBI wants this restriction removed.

Specifically, the FBI wants a judge to be able to issue an electronic surveillance warrant authorizing the feds to search the contents of a computer, regardless of where that computer is physically located.

In an article from April 2013, the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima wrote,

“Driven by FBI concerns that it is unable to tap the Internet communications of terrorists and other criminals, the task force’s proposal would penalize companies that failed to heed wiretap orders — court authorizations for the government to intercept suspects’ communications.”

In that proposal, the FBI would give Internet companies a chance to develop their own plan to place the wiretaps on clients’ online activity. There are limits to this “freedom,” however.

If the company’s solution fails to meet federal muster, the FBI would mandate the enforcement of its own surveillance standards and practices.

Finally, at a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on June 19, 2013, former FBI Director Robert Mueller testified that his agency had used drones to monitor American citizens within the United States.

In light of all these scandals, it’s no wonder the president wants to take extraordinary steps to stop the inspector general from getting eyes on sensitive, likely inculpating evidence of the Justice Department’s darkest deeds.

Image: Green MEPs protested against Shale Gas outside the European Parliament 2012. greensefa under a Creative Commons Licence 

News was announced today (23 July) that a coalition of human rights lawyers and academics will put fracking on trial at hearings to be held in Britain and the United States.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT), based in Rome, is a descendant of the 1967 Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal and hears cases in which prima facie evidence suggests a breach of the basic rights of ordinary citizens. Between 5 and 7 jurists of high standing in international human rights will hear witness testimony on the issue of fracking before deciding whether sufficient evidence exists to indict certain nation states on charges of ‘failing to adequately uphold universal human rights as a result of allowing unconventional oil and gas extraction in their jurisdictions’.

Fracking has taken place around the world in spite of powerful public opposition and with large numbers of citizens claiming that their concerns and human rights have been ignored by those who are meant to represent them. Importantly, this PPT will examine those allegations in an ‘even-handed and judicial way’ and will consider the indictment of nation states, rather than the industry itself, because states, not the fracking companies, bear a direct legal responsibility to human rights law.

The human rights dimensions of a whole range of potential impacts will be examined: human and animal health, environmental, climatic, seismic, hydrologic and economic impacts – as well as those on local physical and social infrastructures.

Exercising a truly global reach, testimony will be invited from witnesses all over the world – who may also wish to hold preliminary mini-tribunals in their own countries. Evidence and findings from those early tribunals can then be submitted to later plenary hearings in the US and Britain which, in turn, will play an important role in laying down an informal but highly expert precedent, with potential for future use in national and international courts of law.

For me, as a campaigner, a crucial feature of this PPT relates to how it will respond to what 20th century philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell described as ‘the crime of silence’. Since the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal of 1967, this term has been widely used to refer to the wrongs suffered by all violated communities. I believe it is extremely relevant for those of us engaged in the current struggle against fracking.

The unconventional gas and oil industry is highly potent. Its wealth affords it the ability to lobby governments and powerful individuals; to engage PR companies and to influence the media with the promotion of its own agenda – at the expense of important truths.

In the US, the ‘Halliburton Loophole’, by which hydraulic fracturing was made exempt from the Safe Drinking Water Act 2005, had the effect of smothering evidence of water contamination by driving those affected by contamination directly to the companies involved. Offers of compensation were often dependent upon the signing of non-disclosure agreements – with lifetime gag orders given to children as young as 7 years old.

While the fracking industry and the politicians who support it continue to deny evidence that fracking causes harm, the List of the Harmed, compiled by the Pennsylvania Alliance for Clean Water and Air, currently itemizes no fewer than 16,000 instances of harm from the oil and gas industry – accounts that are dismissed as ‘anecdotal’ by those who have a vested interest in driving the truth further underground with drilling.

Government reports on the negative effects of fracking are redacted; ministers and industry personnel escape public scrutiny by refusing to attend debates, and democracy is eroded with government plans to limit the consultation periods for communities to object to fracking applications – none of which diminishes the commitment of those same communities to line up against fracking in a fight that might rightly be billed as ‘passions versus payroll’.

While the vast majority of fracking victims cannot afford to gain a legal hearing, let alone reparation for their harm, campaigners have fought on their behalf, and our own, for justice and the exposure of truths that governments and fracking companies would prefer remain hidden in redaction or denial. The PPT on fracking now promises a route to justice by offering a legitimate platform to those whose voices, until now, have been silenced.

There can be no justice without truth and the first step of an important journey toward revealing the truth behind fracking has been taken today with news of the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal.

You can support the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal on fracking by submitting testimony, organizing smaller national re-PPT initiatives and/or helping with the crowdfunding of tribunal costs: tribunalonfracking.org

Julie Wassmer is a writer and environmental campaigner. A member of East Kent Against Fracking and Mothers Against Fracking, she also sits on the Environment Committee of CPRE Kent.

Image: Cubans celebrate the dawn of the Cuban Revolution | Photo: teleSUR

Fidel Castro led the attack along with small group of rebels that sparked the events that ousted the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.

Cubans celebrated on Sunday the 62nd anniversary of the first armed uprising launched by Fidel Castro’s guerrillas against the army of U.S.-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1953.

A crowd of around 10,000 people attended a ceremony marking one of the most important holidays on the Cuban calendar, today known as the Day of Rebellion.

Cuban President Raul Castro addressed the rally as did Vice President attended Sunday’s celebration alongside artistic performances. In his speech, Vice President Jose Ramon Machado Ventura referred to a new era of relations with the U.S but also demanded the ending of the embargo and the return of the Guantanamo Naval Base.

“Now begins a long and complex road toward normalization of bilateral relations that includes among other aspects the end of the blockade and the return of the Guantanamo naval base,” Ventura said.

On July 26, 1953, the struggle against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista began when Fidel Castro led a small group of rebels on a mission to take the Moncada barracks.

The attack was routed, and the Castro brothers were captured by government forces. During a court appearance in the aftermath of the event, Fidel famously stated, “history will absolve me”.

Although the assault failed, five years later the Cuban revolution was victorious. Under Batista, 43 percent of the rural population was illiterate and 60 percent of Cubans lived in huts with dirt floors. Today Cuba is free of illiteracy.