Global Research

“It is Orwellian for Congress to hand over billions of dollars worth of weapons and bombs to a president waging a horrific, unconstitutional war in Yemen—and call that progressive.”

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More than 180 House Democrats joined a nearly united Republican caucus Wednesday night to pass a sweeping $738 billion military spending bill that gives President Donald Trump his long-sought “Space Force,” free rein to wage endless wars, and a green light to continue fueling the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen.

Just 48 members of the House, including 41 Democrats, voted against the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which increases the Pentagon budget by $22 billion. The final vote was 377-48.

“This NDAA is atrocious, and it’s very depressing that only 48 members of congress voted against it,” tweeted anti-war group CodePink.

In a floor speech ahead of Wednesday’s vote, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), the most vocal opponent of the NDAA in the House, said “there are many things you can call the bill, but it’s Orwellian to call it progressive.” Khanna was standing across the aisle from Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), who hailed the measure as “the most progressive defense bill we have passed in decades.”

“Let’s speak in facts,” said Khanna. “This defense budget is $120 billion more than what Obama left us with. That could fund free public college for every American. It could fund access to high-speed, affordable internet for every American. But it’s worse. The bipartisan amendment to stop the war in Yemen: stripped by the White House. The bipartisan amendment to stop the war in Iran: stripped by the White House.”

My friend @RepRoKhanna is right: it is Orwellian for Congress to hand over billions of dollars worth of weapons and bombs to a president waging a horrific, unconstitutional war in Yemen—and call that progressive. pic.twitter.com/6SUmUUhv3q

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 11, 2019

According to the New York Times, Smith—chairman of the House Armed Services Committee—negotiated several provisions of the NDAA directly with Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser.

“It was Mr. Kushner who helped broker a deal to create the Space Force, a chief priority of the president’s, in exchange for the paid parental leave [for federal employees],” the Times reported Wednesday. “It was also Mr. Kushner who intervened on measures targeting Saudi Arabia that would have prohibited arms sales or military assistance to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. He said they were nonstarters for the White House.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) foreign policy adviser Matt Duss expressed outrage that Democrats allowed Kushner—who has close ties to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman—to kill an amendment that would have helped end U.S. complicity in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Congrats to Democratic leadership on getting outnegotiated by JARED KUSHNER. On a provision that was already passed by bipartisan majorities in Congress. To end US support for a war that has created to the world's worst humanitarian catastrophe.

Great goddam job. https://t.co/JmYd57lgds

— Matt Duss (@mattduss) December 11, 2019

Mainstream media perpetrates huge deceptions and promulgates criminal war propaganda as policy. Often the omission is worse than the direct lie. Regularly, mainstream messaging omits context and ROOT CAUSES of events that it claims to be describing. The root cause of the Christmas celebrations in Syria is the FACT that Syria and its allies LIBERATED these areas from WESTERN-SUPPORTED terrorists. If this root cause is not stated clearly, then the messaging intentionally leaves itself open to misinterpretation. It becomes war propaganda that serves to vilify Syria and Syrians as it exonerates the war criminals from their heinous war crimes.

There are no Christmas celebrations in terrorist-occupied areas. They are forbidden. The terrorists BURN CROSSES and DESTROY everything Christian. They have been doing this throughout the course of the entire Regime Change war.

Thank the legitimate Syrian government lead by President Assad, the Syrian military, and Syria’s allies for these scenes of joy and celebration. Denounce the West, NATO, and their allies for the curse of terrorism that has plagued this benighted holy land for nine years. — Mark Taliano

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For the voter, the Democratic Party no longer has any interest in performing its function as an opposition party. The charade of purported constitutional jurisprudence seen in the US House impeachment hearings should forever confirm this. This degradation of political will far too nicely coincides with the long term duality of current and long term speaker Nancy Pelosi who, while dressed in the blue ensemble of a democrat somehow sports the accoutrements of a republican.

Many questions remain as to Pelosi’s long-term resistance to impeachment until recently forced into action by her party members uprising. The two resultant Articles of Impeachment, Abuse of Power and Obstruction of Congress now head to the Senate after the long-expected party-line vote and equally expected defeat. The only defections from this plot were just two Democrats… and the 2020 voter.

Yes, the Dems and their congressional minions have indeed continued their next chapter in the ongoing DNC coup against Donald Trump, however, the televised version in the House is a public distraction from the real coup: Opposition leader Pelosi’s increasing backdoor willingness to allow the republicans to lighten their load within in her private chambers. Pelosi and her impeachment show trial have far too nicely played into the hands of the Republicans and aided her opposition’s November victory.

Is this merely stupidity?

With this political treason, Pelosi has again made a declaration to the upcoming voter that the DNC has abandoned any pretext whatsoever that it is an opposition party and/or interested in winning in 2020. Or that Pelosi is functionally a Democrat.

After Texas congressman, Al Green from the House rostrum called for Trump’s impeachment two years ago Pelosi, as House Speaker and Majority Leader refusedrepeatedly. The Speaker’s intransigence came despite the “sea change”mid-term elections of 2018 where these many new House members took their seats with a mandate for one change-Trump– and a change in the old guard in the corrupt to its core DNC machine. Joining Green were the growing howls from many incoming freshmen Congresspersons that lead to a strongly worded op-ed by seven of them that finally spurred Pelosi to action.

Julian Assange likely sits in stir due to releasing the proof in the weeks before 2016 election which proved forever– with hard evidence-that the DNC, like its sponsored candidates- has a singular interest in offering only a status quo presidential candidate who will functionally mirror the interests of the republicans. Not the voters.

Naturally, many wanted Pelosi out. More than thirty.  So started a behind the scenes battle royale for enough votes to maintain Pelosi’s speaker’s representation of said status quo. Predictably, after enough newbies proved their true congressional worth by rolling over on their voters and their integrity, Pelosi got their votes and so weathered this storm in a teacup, thus prevailing as Speaker. Next, she resumed her previous role of remaining as the ongoing voice of opposition- to her party– again and again. Talk tough she did, but opposition actions against the president, his cabinet, court nominees and the many unilateral executive decisions that affected all Americans was tepid at best or none existent as usual.

Pelosi has a track record of being an opposition leader wrapped in cotton wool. Her voting record and unwillingness to spawn populist legislation or effective house opposition to republican de-legislation along with her wholesale disregard as to effective action against the rise in power of the neo-conservative right-wing zealots in Congress should have lead to her demise years ago. As to impeachments past, even the proven lies of Bush II and Dick Cheney that directly caused the deaths of more than 6,800 US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and spawned the military’s subsequent pillaging of the US economy, neither was enough for her to support that call for impeachment either. Viewing the proceedings of the past two weeks, Pelosi, despite her daily publicly stated disdain for all things Trump, is merely crying crocodile tears to the American voter.

One would have thought that for Pelosi, after the 2016 collapse of the DNC, the choice of impeachment proceedings was the perfect opportunity to right her ship, educate the voter on the reality of Trump and his corporatist entourage in the White House while utilizing the public hearings as the media bully pulpit to sway public opinion towards the Dems?

Nope.

Behind the scenes reportedly Pelosi was going it alone in her efforts to frustrate her colleague’s impeachment efforts. Despite Trump’s ever-growing rap sheet of presidential constitutional violations and internationally embarrassing third-grade level paranoid outbursts, Pelosi was always verbally outraged, but in using her power as Speaker she was as effective as a Nevada boxing commissioner. Hence, when Pelosi did succumb to the majority in her party and allow for impeachment hearings, she remained the sole opposition force working from the top against her party to minimize this majority opinion.

Of all the accrued list of impeachable offences committed by Trump, Pelosi, over demonstrative objection from senior Dems, chose instead the small subset of the Ukraine saga: the one allegation most difficult to ultimately present to the Senate. Or to the public.Worse, her restriction made the day by day black comedy of the hearings a public example of DNC ineptitude, duplicity, and obvious partisan folly of the worst kind: A coup. Or,an utterly biblical election year PR disaster!

Reportedly, Pelosi’s party leader Steny Hoyer along with senior Democratic Caucus members Eliot Engeland Maxine Waters along with Al Green and the majority of the Judiciary Committee insisted that the Speaker go Full Monty with any impeachment effort. Pelosi, showing her true opposition leadership, refused. This being an election year, Ms Pelosi should have been interested in swaying public opinion in her party’s favour by exposing many of the other of Trump’s far more easily proven high crimes and misdemeanours. Au Contraire.

Instead, the actions of Ms Pelosi, in the eyes of the voter, only further destroyed any remaining reason for DNC loyalty-since it has no loyalty to them- while in turn emboldening dramatically the man Pelosi is supposed to be in opposition to on their behalf before November.

The singular Ukraine allegations against Trump too conveniently offered the president plausible denial of the charges that would allow the Senate to acquit. With polls showing that during the 2014 Ukraine coup only one-in-six Americans can so much as finding Ukraine on a globe, this singular avenue of attack by Pelosi did not bode well. Regardless of this coup being forecast to certain failure, Pelosi still eliminated all the other more easily proven and, for the public, easily understood offences. In this decision, Pelosi destroyed all the other political ammunition available for a public examination of Trump’s true track record of venal if not criminal administration- mere months before the 2020.

Of course, Trump supporters will be reluctant to admit to Trump’s many other impeachable offences whatsoever, but on the other side of the aisle, there was certainly a strong flavour developing to include all the many other reasons for impeachment. Starting with the Robert Mueller Q&A before congress on July 24, 2019, it seemed clearthat further examples of Obstruction of Congress (Justice)  were clear-cut and undeniable. Yet, Pelosi remained disinterested except for Mueller’s deflective and specious connections to “the Russians.”These Mueller Report obstructionexamples might have been added to the singular Ukraine linked charges along with further examples from the Stormy Daniels cover-up. However, Pelosi by herself kept the charge to the one harder to prove example of Ukraine.

The Emoluments Clause violations by Trump are staggering and Trump has not denied them. As was the offence with his attempt to bring the June 2020 G-7 Summit and millions in profit to his bank’s Trump National Doral Miami golf resort in Florida,or the many examples of nepotism that has enabled family members direct access to foreign contract opportunities, these violations were more easily proven than the disjointed Ukraine connection. Trump has revelled in these many brazen violations, quid pro-quos and cabinet member criminalities that would have otherwise made Warren Harding drop dead.

Trump’s many unilateral executive orders that have eliminated congressionally ratified international treaties, national regulatory Agencies and regulations and outlawed science have been similarly unopposed by the Dems. His endless delusional and paranoid tweets delivered in the language of a five-year-old child put to bed without supper have been an international embarrassment to American diplomacy and decorum thus making him a buffoon in the eyes of world leaders. This was highlighted as revealed in the recent “hot mic” incident with Canada’s Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Princess Anne, and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte at this week’s NATO summit in London. Their backhanded sinceritylead to Trump and his easily bruised ego running off to sulk, scream and tweet from the sanctity of Air Force One.

This is only a passing list of the allegations that could have been brought to bear by impeachment. One might go on and on to include the president’s adulterous if not criminal indiscretions with enough “ladies” to make Harvey Weinstein a competitor, or Trump robbing $3.7 Billion from the military’s bloated military budget without congressional authority for his wall or his refusal to honour or enforce established environmental regulations and his pathological disinterest in the truth on any subject, or his certification of hatred, bigotry, and first-degree military murder for fun with impunity when Trump granted full pardons to barbarians, First Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Major Mathew Golsteyn, and Special Ops Chief, Edward Gallagher who should have all been put up against a wall and shot instead.

But this misses the greater point: the list of impeachable offences available for examination, no matter how long or short in one’s view, was reduced by the opposition party’s leader to just a single, now seemingly frivolous, phone call, etc., etc.

Pelosi could have rolled the dice on all potential charges, brought all these before a national election year audience for weeks or months and effectively assassinated Trump’s legacy to date in the process. Instead, for no good reason yet offered, Pelosi narrowed the impeachment investigation to a point that ensured that Trump would be able to crow from the Senate belfry about his complete exoneration right up to Nov. 2020.  The current reality is that Pelosi has all by herself done a perfect job of legitimizing all of Trump’s three years of societal crimes… and his 2020 presidency.

Making it as easy as possible for any fence-sitting independent voter to quickly make up their mind, Pelosi scripted an Abbott and Costello routine that left little remaining doubt.  When Jerry Nadler was given the role of “Bud”to Adam Schiff’s “Lou”as the clown princes for the comedy routine show trial in the House, any viewer could smell something rotten behind the curtain decaying quickly into a stench. With today’s day time TV audience quite familiar with many a  fictitious courtroom drama, anyone with a Tele could tell that Schiff and  Nadler were quickly developing their lengthy rap sheet and were the ones more likely than Trump to frog march the next perp-walk.

Certainly, all network and mainstream news put their pro-constitutional spin on this poorly executed coup, while Fox News paddled furiously in delivering the pro-Trump analysis of the plot daily. But there was a new actor that the voter had been told was waiting in the wings, but strangely never made his appearance: MSM media darling and unfathomably anointed DNC frontrunner, Dirty Joe Biden. Pelosi introduced this stink bomb and nothing MSM can do will prevent that foul smell of Biden’s political corruption-past and present- from now reaching the voter.

Dirty Joe, who is only alive in the polls due to the same MSM editorial propagation, already has, in the mind of many voters, a big fat “L” on the tips of his forked tongue to go along with his used car salesman smile. While this may well be the perfect election metaphor for a man seeking to offer up to the voter a broken down clunker of a country desperately in need of a new engine, Pelosi’s incredible bungling means that DNC status-quo favourite Biden, already anointed by MSM in HRC style as the white Barrack Obama… is political toast.

The Nixon Impeachment hearings started and ended in the democratically controlled Senate but at the Watergate Hearings, it was predicted that Tricky Dick would survive. But as the televised hearings continued daily, it was not Senate members only whose opinions of the matter were changing quickly…it was the American public. Helpfully, the bombshell testimony of John Dean and the revelations of the secret White House tapes by Alex Butterfield set public opinion on impeachment forever windward. When the phones within Senate offices began ringing off the hook demanding the impeachment of this crook, the Nixon presidency was terminally reduced to political red meat.

Pelosi, if she had incorporated a full docket of charges to be presented against Trump, would have had the same possibility of similarly swaying public opinion and therefore impeachment in the Senate. If not, at the ballot box. But…

So, what was Pelosi thinking? She has single-handedly certified the Democrats as still being as fraudulent as the 2016 Podesta/ Wasserman-Schultz emails proved just days before Clinton’s complete implosion of late October. Pelosi’s failure has completely failed to shift the political winds of public opinion against Trump one bit, tanked the predicted DNC frontrunner and dramatically showcased for two weeks why any voter faced with the upcoming November choice of the lesser of two evils of democracy will, thanks to Pelosi, choose instead the Republican Turd Sandwich.

Why not?

In America’s fait accompli of a declining monocracy what Pelosi has brought to the full attention of the 2020 voter is that; when it comes to the DNC, the Dems’ and Pelosi’s unwillingness to perform the function of an opposition party, hers is a political fraud designed for failure. The Dems failure at opposition  was further demonstrated to the voter this past week when the same Pelosi lead opposition allowed the Military and their private contractors got a $22 Billion increase to waste as Pelosi’s congress extracted $8.2 Billion from the Food Stamps program. Then, Before the week was out Pelosi’s opposition was revealed be further effective in allowing Trump to have 187 or 25% of federal circuit court judges confirmed… in just three years!

Now facing public defeat, Fearless Leader has shelved her watered-down articles of Impeachment in an obvious further sign of desperation and weakness before the voter. Having failed, she now suddenly tries to retain election year purpose for her Bay of Pigs style effort for she knows what every voter knows who has been tortured by her historic two week act of party impotence: The moment the Speaker of the House hands over the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate, she, at that same moment, hands Trump the victory in November…in a landslide!

Now that’s opposition. That’s leadership. That’s Nancy Pelosi!

After reviewing the last two weeks of Democratic Party leadership and opposition, as to Pelosi and her side of the American political duopoly, the correct colour for her and her party’s banner is not bright blue with an ever reddening hue creeping in around the edges.

In the minds of the 2020 voter, the more accurate colour for the Democratic party is now…transparent… fucking… yellow!

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Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 180 in-depth articles over the past ten years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated and republished. On-scene reporting from important current events has led to his many multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan’s Turkey and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene ((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Marianique Santos

Oskar Lafontaine is a German politician, candidate for Chancellor in the German federal election of 1990, Chairman of the Social Democratic Party from 1995 to 1999, Minister of Finance from 1998 to 1999, leader of The Left in Saarland since 2010.

The United States of America is waging bloody economic wars against the entire world, and now against us Germans. The German government is talking interference with our sovereignty. What a fallacy! We have never been a sovereign state. After the end of the World War II, it is the Americans who have been handling issues of war and peace in Germany.

In 1963, Charles de Gaulle said:

“Having allies… is a matter of course for us in the historical era in which we find ourselves. But to have your own free choice… is also a categorical imperative, because alliances have no absolute virtue, no matter what feelings they are based on. And if you give up control over yourself, you run the risk of never regaining it.”

Later, Francois Mitterrand would add:

“You can’t hand the solution over to others when life or death is at stake.”

American military bases in Germany imperil us instead of protecting. The United States is pushing us to a war with its aggressive policy of encircling Russia and China, with allocating huge amounts of $738 billion for military purposes, by means of withdrawing from the INF Treaty and placing short-range missiles next to the Russian borders. It is in our interest to liberate the German soil from US military bases.

“Ami go home!” the students chanted in 1968, when the United States killed millions of people in Vietnam, using its military bases in Germany. “Ami go home!” the Germans urged when the United States, under the guise of lying about Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction, unleashed the war in Iraq using its military facilities in Germany – a war that claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. “Ami go home!” – this appeal should become the motto of German politics today, when the greatest military power in the world is obviously violating international law and terrorizing all of the world.

This has been taken from Oscar Lafontaine’s Facebook and distributed by the German NachdenkSeiten run by another “heavyweight” of German politics – Albrecht Müller, a long-term ally of German Chancellor Willy Brandt, Bundestag member from 1987 to 1994.

“People like Oscar Lafontaine,” Albrecht Müller writes in his commentary, “able to get across their ideas, are a must-have in politics. The demand [on the US to leave Germany] is by no means radical. It’s appropriate. Many Germans believe so, but not those who shape today’s politics in Berlin. The German establishment and representatives of the major news outlets are either associated with the United States and dependent on them, or serve the interests of the military establishment. There are also people who simply lack courage and consider the ‘Ami go home’ demand unduly radical.

What else should happen? Sanctions have been imposed against us Germans. The weaponization process is at our expense. We are involved in maneuvers next to the Russian borders. Convoys with military equipment block our railways. What is finally going to make the cup run over?”

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Free public transit is a growing movement around the world. 

According to the book Free Public Transit: And Why We Don’t Pay To Ride Elevators, there are 200 cities around the world with some form of fare-free transit, and 97 that are completely fare-free. 

Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, implemented free transit in 2013, and it was adopted nationwide last year. Luxembourg is another country where transit is free. The idea has also gained traction in the United States. Kansas City is set to become the first major city in North America with free public transit. On December 5, their city council voted unanimously to eliminate bus fares.

Fare-free transit makes sense. Basic mobility is essential for all people for work, household tasks and broader participation in society. Transit should be accessible to all as a public service. After all, we don’t charge user fees for libraries, parks, schools and health care.

Moreover, the urgency of the climate crisis demands bold action. Encouraging public transit use would ease congestion and make our streets safer.

In an increasingly expensive and unequal city, abolishing fares would also greatly improve the quality of life for poor and working-class Torontonians for whom the cost of the TTC represents a serious economic hardship. The money currently being spent on fare enforcement could certainly be put to better use.

While transit advocates have historically prioritized improved service over abolishing fares, the two are intertwined. Expanding the transit network, particularly into underserviced neighbourhoods, will create quality jobs and add to the tax base.

Right now, there is little political support for abolishing transit fares in Toronto. Josh Matlow is the only city councillor on record to support the idea.

But in July, CUPE Local 2, which represents TTC electrical workers, came out in favour of free transit. The NDP pledged to support cities interested in moving toward fare-free public transit in the recent federal election. And Michael Coteau, who is running for the Ontario Liberal leadership, has called for the elimination of transit fares in the province within a decade.

It’s certainly true that free public transit is an expensive proposition. Paying for it will require a dramatic shift in political priorities. The Harris government’s cut to the provincial operating subsidy two decades ago – which paid for half of the operating costs – has devastated the TTC. As a result, the transit system is now the least subsidized in North America, with 70 per cent of its operating costs paid for by fares.

How would we pay for free transit?

The $1.2 billion in lost revenue would have to be made up. And that’s not including the cost of expanding the system to accommodate an increase in ridership.

The downloading of operating costs by the provincial government would have to be reversed. Free Transit Toronto is calling for a massive increase in federal and provincial funding financed by a more progressive tax system. Re-allocating provincial spending on highways would help. There is room to contribute at the municipal level as well.

Despite Mayor John Tory’s recent pledge to increase property tax rates to pay for much-needed services, more can be done. A congestion charge and a parking levy, for example, are permissible under the City of Toronto Act. In addition, the city could cut the ever-increasing police budget and abandon the Gardiner Expressway extension.

Free public transit is attainable. The city has already eliminated fares for children 12 and under, and it has been a huge success.

It doesn’t have to happen all at once. Free Transit Toronto is calling for the gradual elimination of transit fares over time, beginning with seniors, people on social assistance and the unemployed, as well as during extreme weather alerts (Paris already does this).

In addition, the group stresses the need for public ownership of all transit services.

With free public transit, we can tackle climate change and growing inequality and create a more livable city.

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Saron Gebresellassi is a human rights lawyer. Matt Fodor is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at York University.

Featured image is from NOW Magazine

Recently Boris Johnson was quoted as saying he had ‘changed his mind’ on whether there could be a ‘reset’ in relations between Britain and Russia. Interviewed when on a visit to Estonia, he said that despite remaining an optimist and hoping for an improvement in bilateral relations, he found that the situation was ‘very, very disappointing’ and that there were ‘terrible problems’ that prevented cooperation between the two nations. He was in particular referring to, of course, the attempted murder of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal on the streets of Salisbury last year, which the UK has always blamed the Russian government for, despite the lack of evidence.

So should we be surprised by this? After all, Boris Johnson has in some ways maintained a more positive attitude towards Russia, despite being Foreign Secretary at the time of the Skripal case. He said back in 2017 that he was a ‘committed Russophile’ and that he wanted to see an improvement in relations with Russia, joking that he was the first ever Foreign Secretary to be called ‘Boris’. In an interview with Deutsche Welle he said that he loved Russia and that the UK had ‘no quarrel’ with the country. Even as recently as November this year he spoke quite sensibly on the topic of alleged Russian interference in UK elections, stating “There’s no evidence of that and you’ve got to be very careful… you simply can’t cast aspersions on everybody who comes from a certain country, just because of their nationality.”

As Mayor of London, Boris forged friendships and contacts within the Russian community, many of whom became wealthy donors to the Conservative party.  Sergei Nalobin, a Russian diplomat and son of a former KGB general, was one such member of the now defunct Conservative Friends of Russia, who once tweeted that he was a ‘good friend’ of Boris Johnson. And as recently as the day after the election, Johnson was at a party held by media guru Evgenii Lebedev, son of Alexander Lebedev, an ex-KGB agent. Indeed before the December election the Prime Minister was having to defend his delay of a controversial report into Russian interference in UK politics, as rumours began it had been suppressed due to details of substantial donations made by Russian oligarchs to his party. Lyubov Chernukhin, wife of Vladimir Chernukhin, paid £200,000 to the Conservative party in recent times, and in the past £160,000 for a tennis match with Johnson and £135,000 for a night with former Prime Minister Theresa May.

And yet, when it comes to policy towards Russia, Johnson has toed the establishment line.  He was criticised at the time of the Skripal case for accusing the Russian President Vladimir Putin for being personally responsible for the poisoning, without any concrete evidence.  He had said that the scientists at the UK’s chemical weapons centre at Porton Down assured him the ‘novichok’ had come from Russia. Later it emerged that Porton Down did not in fact ascertain that the poison had come from Russia, and it was established that Russia had ceased production of the substance long ago. He then asserted that only Russia had the motivation for targeting Skripal, as he was a defector, and yet as some have pointed out, the UK had equal motive. There are indeed many discrepancies in the UK version of events.

This is where Johnson’s Russia policy is laced with hypocrisy. For on the one hand, the country is treated as a pariah state, but on the other, he is more than willing to accept donations from wealthy individuals connected to the Kremlin. Indeed it is likely that if the UK had a similar trade relationship to the one it has with Saudi Arabia, its policy towards Russia would be quite different. One only has to look at the horrific murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul, and its aftermath, to realise that UK foreign policy is very much determined by economic factors, not moral ones. Arms deals worth billions of pounds dictate that Britain will never do more than criticise the murder in passing, despite clear links to Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and international condemnation of the Saudis and their human rights record. The UK court of appeal in fact ruled recently that British arms sales to Saudi Arabia are ‘unlawful’ because of their use in the Saudi onslaught of Yemen. And yet no such Cold War will be waged against the Saudi kingdom, which continues to be an ally of the US and UK in the Middle East.

So, no, we are not to be surprised at Johnson’s statement. British foreign policy towards Russia is consistent in its disdain and contempt for this Eurasian nation, which it has never really understood, or properly attempted to. As Winston Churchil once declared, Russia was a ‘riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma’.  We are no further forward today…

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Johanna Ross is a journalist based in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Featured image is from TruePublica

A spate of leaks from within the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), the international inspectorate created for the purpose of implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention, has raised serious questions about the institution’s integrity, objectivity and credibility. The leaks address issues pertaining to the OPCW investigation into allegations that the Syrian government used chemical weapons to attack civilians in the Damascus suburb of Douma on April 7, 2018. These allegations, which originated from such anti-Assad organizations as the Syrian Civil Defense (the so-called White Helmets) and the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), were immediately embraced as credible by the OPCW, and were used by the United States, France and the United Kingdom to justify punitive military strikes against facilities inside Syria assessed by these nations as having been involved in chemical weapons-related activities before the OPCW initiated any on-site investigation.

The Douma incident was initially described by the White Helmets, SAMS and the U.S., U.K. and French governments as involving both sarin nerve agent and chlorine gas. However, this narrative was altered when OPCW inspectors released, on July 6, 2018, interim findings of their investigation that found no evidence of the use of sarin. The focus of the investigation quickly shifted to a pair of chlorine cylinders claimed by the White Helmets to have been dropped onto apartment buildings in Douma by the Syrian Air Force, resulting in the release of a cloud of chlorine gas that killed dozens of Syrian civilians. In March, the OPCW released its final report on the Douma incident, noting that it had “reasonable grounds” to believe “that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018,” that “this toxic chemical contained reactive chlorine” and that “the toxic chemical was likely molecular chlorine.”

Much has been written about the OPCW inspection process in Syria, and particularly the methodology used by the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), an inspection body created by the OPCW in 2014 “to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic.” The FFM was created under the direction of Ahmet Üzümcü, a career Turkish diplomat with extensive experience in multinational organizations, including service as Turkey’s ambassador to NATO. Üzümcü was the OPCW’s third director general, having been selected from a field of seven candidates by its executive council to replace Argentine diplomat Rogelio Pfirter. Pfirter had held the position since being nominated to replace the OPCW’s first director general, José Maurício Bustani. Bustani’s tenure was marred by controversy that saw the OPCW transition away from its intended role as an independent implementor of the Chemical Weapons Convention to that of a tool of unilateral U.S. policy, a role that continues to mar the OPCW’s work in Syria today, especially when it comes to its investigation of the alleged use by the Syrian government of chemical weapons against civilians in Douma in April 2018.

Bustani was removed from his position in 2002, following an unprecedented campaign led by John Bolton, who at the time was serving as the undersecretary of state for Arms Control and International Security Affairs in the U.S. State Department. What was Bustani’s crime? In 2001, he had dared to enter negotiations with the government of Iraq to secure that nation’s entry into the OPCW, thereby setting the stage for OPCW inspectors to visit Iraq and bring its chemical weapons capability under OPCW control. As director general, there was nothing untoward about Bustani’s action. But Iraq circa 2001 was not a typical recruitment target. In the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1991, the U.N. Security Council had passed a resolution under Chapter VII requiring Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD), including its chemical weapons capability, to be “removed, destroyed or rendered harmless” under the supervision of inspectors working on behalf of the United Nations Special Commission, or UNSCOM.

The pursuit of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction led to a series of confrontations with Iraq that culminated in inspectors being ordered out of the country by the U.S. in 1998, prior to a 72-hour aerial attack—Operation Desert Fox. Iraq refused to allow UNSCOM inspectors to return, rightfully claiming that the U.S. had infiltrated the ranks of the inspectors and was using the inspection process to spy on Iraqi leadership for the purposes of facilitating regime change. The lack of inspectors in Iraq allowed the U.S. and others to engage in wild speculation regarding Iraqi rearmament activities, including in the field of chemical weapons. This speculation was used to fuel a call for military action against Iraq, citing the threat of a reconstituted WMD capability as the justification. Bustani sought to defuse this situation by bringing Iraq into the OPCW, an act that, if completed, would have derailed the U.S. case for military intervention in Iraq. Bolton’s intervention included threats to Bustani and his family, as well as threats to withhold U.S. dues to the OPCW accounting for some 22% of that organization’s budget; had the latter threat been implemented, it would have resulted in OPCW’s disbandment.

Bustani’s departure marked the end of the OPCW as an independent organization. Pfirter, Bolton’s hand-picked replacement, vowed to keep the OPCW out of Iraq. In an interview with U.S. media shortly after his appointment, Pfirter noted that while all nations should be encouraged to join the OPCW, “We should be very aware that there are United Nations resolutions in effect” that precluded Iraqi membership “at the expense” of its obligations to the Security Council. Under the threat of military action, Iraq allowed UNMOVIC inspectors to return in 2002; by February 2003, no WMD had been found, a result that did not meet with U.S. satisfaction. In March 2003, UNMOVIC inspectors were withdrawn from Iraq under orders of the U.S., paving the way for the subsequent invasion and occupation of that nation that same month (the CIA later concluded that Iraq had been disarmed of its weapons of mass destruction by the summer of 1991).

Under Pfirter’s leadership, the OPCW became a compliant tool of U.S. foreign policy objectives. By completely subordinating OPCW operations through the constant threat of fiscal ruin, the U.S. engaged in a continuous quid pro quo arrangement, trading the financial solvency of an ostensible multilateral organization for complicity in operating as a de facto extension of American unilateral policy. Bolton’s actions in 2002 put the OPCW and its employees on notice: Cross the U.S., and you will pay a terminal price.

When Üzümcü took over the OPCW’s reins in 2010, the organization was very much the model of multinational consensus, which, in the case of any multilateral organization in which the U.S. plays a critical role, meant that nothing transpired without the express approval of the U.S. and its European NATO allies, in particular the United Kingdom and France. Shortly after he took office, Üzümcü was joined by Robert Fairweather, a career British diplomat who served as Üzümcü’s chief of Cabinet. (While Üzümcü was the ostensible head of the OPCW, the daily task of managing the functioning of the OPCW was that of the chief of Cabinet. In short, nothing transpired within the OPCW without Fairweather’s knowledge and concurrence.)

Üzümcü and Fairweather’s tenure at the OPCW was dominated by Syria, where, since 2011, the government of President Bashar Assad had been engaged in a full-scale conflict with a foreign-funded and -equipped insurgency whose purpose was regime change. By 2013, allegations emerged from both the Syrian government and rebel forces concerning the use of chemical weapons by the other side. In August 2013, the OPCW dispatched an inspection team into Syria as part of a U.N.-led effort, which included specialists from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.N. itself, to investigate allegations that sarin had been used in attack on civilians in the town of Ghouta. While the mission found conclusive evidence that sarin nerve agent had been used, it did not assign blame for the attack.

Despite the lack of causality, the U.S. and its NATO allies quickly assigned blame for the sarin attacks on the Syrian government. To forestall U.S. military action against Syria, the Russian government helped broker a dealwhereby the U.S. agreed to refrain from undertaking military action if the Syrian government joined the OPCW and subjected the totality of its chemical weapons stockpile to elimination. In October 2013, the OPCW-U.N. Joint Mission, created under the authority of U.N. Security Council resolution 2118 (2103), began the process of identifying, cataloging, removing and destroying Syria’s chemical weapons. This process was completed in September 2014 (in December 2013, the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its disarmament work in Syria).

If the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons was an example of the OPCW at its best, what followed was a case study of just the opposite. In May 2014, the OPCW created the Fact-Finding Mission, or FFM, charged with establishing “facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic.” The FFM was headed by Malik Ellahi, who served as head of the OPCW’s government relations and political affairs branch. The appointment of someone lacking both technical and operational experience suggests that Ellahi’s primary role was political. Under his leadership, the FFM established a close working relationship with the anti-Assad Syrian opposition, including the White Helmets and SAMS.

In 2015, responsibility for coordinating the work of the FFM with the anti-Assad opposition was transferred to a British inspector named Len Phillips (another element of the FFM, led by a different inspector, was responsible for coordinating with the Syrian government). Phillips developed a close working relationship with the White Helmets and SAMS and played a key role in OPCW’s investigation of the April 2017 chemical incident in Khan Shaykhun. By April 2018, the FFM had undergone a leadership transition, with Phillips replaced by a Tunisian inspector named Sami Barrek. It was Barrek who led the FFM into Syria in April 2018 to investigate allegations of chemical weapons use at Douma. Like Phillips, Barrek maintained a close working relationship with the White Helmets and SAMS.

Once the FFM wrapped up its investigation in Douma, however, it became apparent to Fairweather that it had a problem. There were serious questions about whether chlorine had, in fact, been used as a weapon. The solution, brokered by Fairweather, was to release an interim report that ruled out sarin altogether, but left the door open regarding chlorine. This report was released on July 6, 2018. Later that month, both Üzümcü and Fairweather were gone, replaced by a Spaniard named Fernando Arias and a French diplomat named Sébastien Braha. It would be up to them to clean up the Douma situation.

The situation Braha inherited from Fairweather was unenviable. According to an unnamed OPCW official who spoke with the media after the fact, two days prior to the publication of the interim report, on July 4, 2018, Fairweather had been paid a visit by a trio of U.S. officials, who indicated to Fairweather and the members of the FFM responsible for writing the report that it was the U.S. position that the chlorine cannisters in question had been used to dispense chlorine gas at Douma, an assertion that could not be backed up by the evidence. Despite this, the message that Fairweather left with the OPCW personnel was that there had to be a “smoking gun.” It was now Braha’s job to manufacture one.

Braha did this by dispatching OPCW inspectors to Turkey in September 2018 to interview new witnesses identified by the White Helmets, and by commissioning new engineering studies that better explained the presence of the two chlorine cannisters found in Douma. By March, Braha had assembled enough information to enable the technical directorate to issue its final report. Almost immediately, dissent appeared in the ranks of the OPCW. An engineering report that contradicted the findings published by Braha was leaked, setting off a firestorm of controversy derived from its conclusion that the chlorine cannisters found in Douma had most likely been staged by the White Helmets.

The OPCW, while eventually acknowledging that the leaked report was genuine, explained its exclusion from the final report on the grounds that it attributed blame, something the FFM was not mandated to do. According to the OPCW, the engineering report in question had been submitted to the investigation and identification team, a newly created body within the OPCW mandated to make such determinations. Moreover, Director General Arias stood by the report’s conclusion that it had “reasonable grounds” to believe “that the use of a toxic chemical as a weapon has taken place on 7 April 2018.”

Arias’ explanation came under attack in November, when WikiLeaks published an email sent by a member of the FFM team that had participated in the Douma investigation. In this email, which was sent on June 22, 2018, and addressed to Robert Fairweather, the author noted that, when it came to the Douma incident, “[p]urposely singling out chlorine gas as one of the possibilities is disingenuous.” The author of the email, who had participated in drafting the original interim report, noted that the original text had emphasized that there was insufficient evidence to support this conclusion, and that the new text represented “a major deviation from the original report.” Moreover, the author took umbrage at the new report’s conclusions, which claimed to be “based on the high levels of various chlorinated organic derivatives detected in environmental samples.” According to email’s author “They were, in most cases, present only in parts per billion range, as low as 1-2 ppb, which is essentially trace quantities.” In short, the OPCW had cooked the books, manufacturing evidence from thin air that it then used to draw conclusions that sustained the U.S. position that chlorine gas had been used by the Syrian government at Douma.

Arias, while not addressing the specifics of the allegations set forth in the leaked email, recently declared that it is “the nature of any thorough inquiry for individuals in a team to express subjective views,” noting that “I stand by the independent, professional conclusion” presented by the OPCW about the Douma incident. This explanation, however, does not fly in the face of the evidence. The OPCW’s credibility as an investigative body has been brought into question through these leaks, as has its independent character. If an organization like the OPCW can be used at will by the U.S., the United Kingdom and France to trigger military attacks intended to support regime-change activities in member states, then it no longer serves a useful purpose to the international community it ostensibly serves. To survive as a credible entity, the OPCW must open itself to a full-scale audit of its activities in Syria by an independent authority with inspector general-like investigatory powers. Anything short of this leaves the OPCW, an organization that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for its contributions to world peace, permanently stained by the reality that it is little more than a lap dog of the United States, used to promote the very conflicts it was designed to prevent.

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Scott Ritter spent more than a dozen years in the intelligence field, beginning in 1985 as a ground intelligence officer with the US Marine Corps, where he served with the Marine Corps component of the Rapid Deployment Force at the Brigade and Battalion level.

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On December 23rd, the Washington Post ran a piece exploring the possible motivations behind US president Donald Trump’s decision to pause US military aid to Ukraine on July 12th last year. On September 28th 2018 and February 16th respectively, President Trump had signed into law 2 bills from Congress which approved a combined $391 million in military aid to Ukraine, including the provision of lethal weaponry.

The question is extensively explored in the Washington Post article, as in other articles on the issue, as to whether or not Trump’s July 12th decision to withhold the military aid violated the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act, which states that once Congress appropriates funds and the president signs the relevant spending bill, then it is not within the president’s legal power to withhold those funds.

The Washington Post and other media have also tentatively explored the unresolved question as to what connection, if any, Trump’s July 12th decision to withhold the funds might have had to his subsequent July 25th telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodydmyr Zelensky, which became central to arguments for his impeachment. Was Trump using the withholding of aid in order to pressure Zelensky into launching investigations into Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian business-interests, and those of other senior figures in the US Democratic Party? To be fair, the Washington Post article, and a surprisingly high proportion of the other media-coverage of these questions, have been soberly analytical. Refreshingly, the coverage has managed to avoid the worst excesses of liberal Trump Derangement Syndrome.

I believe that the legal debate is largely incidental to what is really happening, and that any moral debate on this issue is even more superfluous than the legal debate. However, before we set the complex legal issues aside, it should be briefly stated that they are not unimportant. Even if we understand that 99% of everybody’s motivations for getting entangled in the legal debate are politically partisan, it is at least conceivable that a person might wish to ask these questions from a non-partisan, purely legal point of view, and that purely juridical concern should not be dismissed out of hand.

Regarding the Bidens’ role in this fiasco, one surprising aspect is that it took so many years for the controversy regarding Burisma Holdings to go viral, even in alt-media. The facts that not only Hunter Biden but also Devon Archer, a former John Kerry campaign manager, sat on Burisma’s board of directors, and that Burisma was extensively invested in shale-gas extraction in the vicinity of the Donbas war-zone, had been public knowledge in the Russian-speaking world ever since 2014.

However, in order to understand what is really happening at the deeper systemic level, we need to also set the endless cycle of allegations and counter-allegations aside. The petty political or financial agendas of the Bidens, or Trump, or this or that member of Congress, are incidental to the big systemic picture. Sure, all the players have their own self-interested petty motivations, but the sum of all those motivations does not amount to an explanation of why the game is being played in the first place. Politicians, and occasionally their wastrel offspring, are merely unwitting instruments of history, not agents of history. The parameters of the game are determined by a core geo-strategic logic.

What vital geo-strategic interest does the United States have in Ukraine?

Back in 2014, there was certainly hope in US business circles that Ukraine could be a profitable colony, and some US companies including Monsanto have profited from their expansion into Ukraine. However, for most US commercial interests, it quickly became clear in the immediate post-coup period that Ukraine was simply too much of a self-destructive black hole to hope that it might ever become a profitable colony. Ukraine’s culture of blatant kleptocracy was simply too pervasive and ingrained for most western concerns’ money to be safe there.

So rather than the economic exploitation of Ukraine, the United States’ vital geo-strategic interest in Ukraine centrally stems from the point that the maintenance of permanent instability in Ukraine presents developmental and security-challenges to Russia. Furthermore, the maintenance of perpetual Ukrainian hostility toward Russia is useful to larger US geo-strategic interests. We need to remember Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1997 statement that “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire.” Brzezinski had identified 3 “geo-strategic pivots” on the Eurasian land-mass which were vital to the task of protecting broader and more global US interests – Iran, Turkey and Ukraine. We have to admit that, as badly as the US foreign policy establishment miscalculated in Ukraine, they still got a piece of what they wanted. The loss of Ukraine’s potential membership was a major blow to the Eurasian Customs Union’s potential for economic reach.

Furthermore, Ukraine’s geography renders it a perfect instrument to drive an economic wedge between Germany and Russia. The trajectory of Russian-German economic integration which has developed steadily over the past 20 years was unquestionably contrary to the decaying hegemon’s interest. Ever since the late 19th century, American geo-strategists have morbidly feared the economic synthesis of Germany’s technological resources with Russia’s human resources and natural resources.

In this regard, all of the legal allegations and counter-allegations regarding Trump and the Bidens are merely incidental noise, and the attached moral arguments are even more absurd.

Here’s what’s really happening:

Trump’s role as a political outsider in Washington is, in this context, manifested in the point that he still thinks like a businessman, not like a geo-strategic planner. As Ukraine is simply too dysfunctional to be turned into a profitable US colony, Trump simply has no meaningful interest in Ukraine. Trump has most probably never bothered reading Halford Mackinder or George Kennan. His critics and political enemies will argue that, as a mere businessman, Trump doesn’t understand is that the game is not about “Ukraine” – the game is about Eurasia.

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Padraig McGrath is a political analyst.

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Watching the impeachment “vote” was hard work. With only a few exceptions, each Congressman rose for roughly 90 seconds and provided a prearranged, almost completely scripted-along-party-lines explanation of how he or she was casting one’s ballot. After four grueling hours of hearing self-serving lies like “no one is above the law,” I was hoping that one of them would either fall off the podium and fracture a leg or actually go mad and break out into a song and dance routine. The entire performance was the strongest possible argument for term limits that is possible to make.

However, one of the more truly interesting aspects of the proceedings was the Democratic Party view of Russia, which was cited constantly. According to most of the Democrats, Russian meddling was the decisive element in getting Donald Trump elected, and many of them also believe that there was collusion between the GOP candidate and President Vladimir Putin. It is a viewpoint that is totally at odds with the facts, even if one actually believes that there was a meeting in the Kremlin at which a malevolent Putin instructed his myrmidons to “get Hillary.” Slippery Adam Schiff, he of the intelligence committee, carefully referred to Russia as an adversary but many other Democrats kept using the word “enemy.”

Regarding Ukraine, it was also interesting to note bipartisan support for supplying lethal weapons to the puppet regime in Kiev so they can kill Russian soldiers. No one, as far as I could discern, made the point that the United States had no real interest in regime change in Ukraine in the first place as it was a dangerous move that was responsive to no actual American interest. After that, funding and arming the locals to confront Moscow also would not seem to be in the US interest. That so many congress critters seem to be hard wired in their Russo-phobia would seem to suggest that they are willfully ignorant on the subject and inclined to take the path of least resistance, which is to blame the Kremlin rather than the horrific US policy that preceded and brought about Moscow’s intervention.

One also has to conclude that while the Republicans continue to mostly quietly support an aggressive foreign policy, the real war party in Congress is now the Democrats. They have incorporated Russia as the enemy so completely into their sense of identity that it has become the fallback position whenever they feel compelled to say something to distance themselves from the GOP. For them Russia and Vladimir Putin are together the real enemy that is out to destroy what remains of American democracy. To put it bluntly, such an argument is ridiculous, but it is clearly believed by many in the House of Representatives and Senate.

While all of that was going on in high definition, there were other things taking place. A week before the “trial” in the House of Representatives, the White House ordered a new round of sanctions directed against Iran. The sanctions in part target the country’s largest private airline Mahan Air, which was accused of “weapons of mass destruction proliferation” and transportation of lethal aid to Yemen. Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin issued a statement claiming that “The Iranian regime uses its aviation and shipping industries to supply its regional terrorist and militant groups with weapons, directly contributing to the devastating humanitarian crises in Syria and Yemen.”

Mahan Air has been targeted by the Treasury Department since 2011, when it was claimed that the planes were being used by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to move troops and military hardware around the Middle East region. The airline has 55 planes and flies to 40 international and domestic destinations.

The airline is now sanctioned under the Executive Order 13382 as a “proliferator of weapons of mass destruction and their supporters.” Apart from the appalling English usage, one might well question the designation itself as Iran is not the party responsible for the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. That honor goes to America’s good friend Saudi Arabia. And blaming the situation in Syria on Iran is also a bit of a misdirection as it is the United States that has prolonged the carnage in that country. And what weapons of mass destruction are involved in both cases is by no means clear. Iran has no nukes and there have been no credible reports of the use of chemical or biological weapons in Yemen, while the stories about Syrian government employment of such weapons have turned out to be fabrications.

The Treasury Department sanctions targeted three general ticket sales agents of Mahan Air, as well as dozens of aircraft belonging to or operated by it. The new sanctions might be viewed as the latest step in the US government campaign to apply “maximum pressure” against Iran. The move will mean that other countries in Europe and the Middle East will stop permitting Mahan Air flights from landing or otherwise using their facilities. The Treasury is clearly willing to use what are referred to as “secondary sanctions” on other countries if the ban on Mahan Air is not supported. It is economic warfare pure and simple and the intent might well be to shut down the airline.

The timing and targeting of the White House move suggest that pressure is being directed against Iran’s transportation links with the rest of the world, thereby isolating it and bringing it that much closer to economic collapse. How Iran will react to the new sanctions is not known, but if it is pushed hard enough it might choose to strike back.

There is also some concern over a bill before Congress that was originally introduced three years ago but which now appears to have sufficient support to pass into law. It would authorize additional sanctions by the US Treasury Department directed against “the Syrian regime, Russia and Iran for past and ongoing war crimes” that it has been claimed took place during the Syrian war. As many of the alleged atrocities in the Syrian war have been exposed as fabrications by groups like the White Helmets, it is by no means clear how Washington will verify its list of “war crimes.” At least one report suggests that the White House now supports the bill and is likely to enforce any sanctions that are put in place.

And, of course, it just might be Israel that will pull the trigger and start a war. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, struggling for his political survival, continuously claims that Iran is planning to attack, requiring his continued strong leadership. Last month, Israel carried out a “very intense” attack on Iranian and Syrian targets in Syria, killing 23 soldiers and civilians. Earlier, the Israeli Air Force claimed that it had destroyed an Iranian weapons depot in Iraq and also used drones to hit alleged Hezbollah targets in Lebanon. Some believe that the Israeli actions are intended to provoke an Iranian response that will bring the US into the fight.

So, Congress continues to whine pointlessly about Russiagate while the pot is boiling over in the Middle East. It will be interesting to see if it will be possible to make it through the year without something very unpleasant happening.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Few could have predicted several years ago that Russia and Ukraine would reconcile with one another to the point of agreeing to ensure the reliable delivery of gas to the EU for the next 5-15 years, but that’s exactly what just happened last week in the most convincing sign yet that the long-awaited “New Detente” is finally beginning to bear some fruit.

Russia and Ukraine took the world by surprise last week after agreeing to ensure the reliable delivery of gas to the EU for at least the next five years and with the option of extending their accord for a full decade after that. This outcome was previously thought to be a political fantasy after the two countries became acrimonious rivals following the neo-fascist consequences of the US-backed EuroMaidan coup in early 2014 and Crimea’s subsequent reunification with Russia shortly thereafter, to say nothing of the presently unresolved Ukrainian Civil War that continues to claim lives in Donbas to this day. It made perfect sense at the time for both parties to disengage from one another and no longer cooperate on the energy front, with Russia instead seeking to diversify its EU-destined transit routes through Nord Stream II and Turkish Stream whereas Ukraine was convinced to buy more expensive American LNG that would be pumped to the country from the West (primarily Poland) through a technique called “reverse gas flow” via existing pipelines.

Both countries made progress on each of these fronts in the years since, which is yet another reason why it was so surprising that they decided to bury the hatchet and agree to prolong their energy cooperation for the benefit of their mutual EU partners. This unexpected development speaks to the enormous achievements that have been made behind the scenes in negotiating the long-awaited “New Detente” since Zelensky’s election earlier this year made it easier for Trump to reverse the anti-Russian policies of their predecessors, Poroshenko and Obama respectively. Without changes at the top of the American and Ukrainian leaderships, it would have been impossible for both of them to reach pragmatic agreements with Russia that would ultimately be to their mutual interests. That’s not to say that the state of relations between the West (which includes Ukraine’s generally pro-Western government in this context) and Russia are perfect, but just that they’re comparatively better than at any time since the onset of the West’s anti-Russian sanctions in 2014.

Russia and Ukraine engaged in a prisoner swap earlier in September which was an important trust-building move signifying their joint intent to break the ice and reopen negotiations on other issues of bilateral interest. That development was importantly preceded by President Putin’s visit to France to meet with his counterpart a few weeks prior, during which time it became apparent that a “New Detente” was certainly in the cards. The subsequent prisoner swap further confirmed that, which was then followed by the resumption of the Normandy Talks earlier this month. The natural evolution of this fast-moving rapprochement was the surprise gas deal which adds some much-needed substance to this otherwise hitherto mostly symbolic process by making the EU as a whole a tangible stakeholder in its continued success. Furthermore, it’s extremely unlikely that this could have occurred had the US not tacitly allowed it, which speaks to its intentions to improve relations with Russia despite the ongoing Ukrainegate impeachment proceedings against President Trump.

Like it was earlier noted, the “New Detente” isn’t perfect, as seen most recently by the US’ decision to impose sanctions on the companies involved in Nord Stream II’s construction, but once again, the state of relations in general are still comparatively better than their nadir in mid-2014 immediately after the EuroMaidan coup and Crimea’s reunification with Russia. The US is still trying to “contain” Russia with mixed success, while Russia is undertaking its best efforts to break out of this “containment” noose and even “flip” some of the US’ traditional partners such as Turkey, so the New Cold War probably won’t end anytime soon. Nor, for that matter, did anybody reasonably expect that it would, but just like during the Old Cold War, there comes a time when the involved parties believe that it’s in their best interests to proverbially take a break and enter into a period of detente. It seems as though that phase is only now just beginning but which has finally borne some fruit after Trump promised to pursue this outcome all throughout the 2016 campaign.

One can argue over why that hasn’t already happened to the extent that he promised (or even if he was fully sincere in the first place), but the point to focus on in the here and now is that some tangible progress has finally been made concerning the future of Russia’s trans-Ukrainian gas supplies to the EU. From the looks of it, all the relevant players — Russia, Ukraine, the EU, and the US — have concrete interests in seeing that this agreement is upheld. It’s convenient for Russia to continue using existing pipelines, Ukraine wants to get paid for its transit role, the EU desires reliable but cheap gas imports, and the US recognizes that this outcome perpetuates the geostrategic role of its Ukrainian proxy that it could then leverage as a “bargaining chip” for reaching a more substantive “New Detente” with Russia sometime next year or the one afterwards. That said, while each player has their interests, they don’t exactly trust one another for different reasons, which means that the “New Detente” might still be offset if any of them decides to play the spoiler or is undermined by their “deep states”.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Still featured on the Turkish Ministry of Affairs website is the “Zero Problems With Our Neighbors” policy that was launched in 2010 with the aim of diffusing Turkey’s many issues with all of its neighbors. However, less than a year into the launch of the new policy, it was quickly abandoned as Turkey decided to support jihadist groups, including Al-Qaeda and ISIS, against Syria despite Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan once calling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as his “brother.”

The Syrian War provided the opportunity for Erdoğan’s grandeur imaginations of a Neo-Ottoman Empire, leading him to quickly abandon Turkey’s “Zero Problems” policy. Today, Turkey has more problems than it had before intervening in the war. Not only has Assad survived the Turkish-backed onslaught (without discounting the role of Western imperialists, Arab dictatorships and Israel), but today there are millions of Syrian refugees in Turkey, terrorist attacks have drastically increased in the country, and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), recognized as a terrorist organization by Ankara, has reemerged in Syria after Assad kicked them out of the country. By supporting the war against Syria, Erdoğan created the very conditions for the PKK to return to Syria under the banner of the People’s Protection Units (YPG). By trying to remove Assad, Erdoğan actually strengthened the PKK and their influence, creating more problems for Turkey, but also justifying the illegal occupation of vast areas of northern Syria.

The Turkish economy has reached a critical crisis, partially because of the Syrian war, with the unemployment rate at approximately 14%. Billions of dollars has been invested into destroying Syria, and the only return has been ISIS-supplied oil for Erdoğan’s son Bilal to profit from. However, Erdoğan has masterfully utilized irrational and fragile Turkish hyper ultranationalism to cover the effects his war against Syria has created in his own country; demographically, economically and security-wise, all for little gain except within his own family. To keep the country united despite the spiralling economic and security problems, Erdoğan has resorted to uniting the country against the one more common enemy – Greece.

There is a reason why Turkish media is ranked among the lowest in the world in terms of freedom – it is Erdoğan’s media. He has also masterfully used the media to manipulate his own people with lies and inaccuracies to claim Greek islands and maritime space, despite international law determining these areas as Greece’s territory. The oil and gas rich Aegean Sea is now being claimed by Turkey despite the UN Charter Law of the Sea favoring Greece – the reason why Turkey is 1 out of 15 countries out of 193 UN members not to sign it. Despite this reality, Erdoğan tells Turkish people through the tightly controlled media that under international law they can claim sovereignty over some Greek territories. It is for this reason that Turkey publishes maps that have Greek islands like Kastelorizo completely missing and other islands like Crete moved from their actual position

With Erdoğan failing to defeat the PKK or remove Assad in Syria, he still insists on his grand project of neo-Ottomanism by wanting to steal Greek maritime space, turning to the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated National Government of Accords (GNA) in Libya’s Tripoli, headed by Fayez al-Sarraj, an ethnic Turk himself, as are many of the top people in the government, to divide Greek maritime space between themselves. However, Erdoğan grossly miscalculated and is now in a much weaker position then he was in late November when he began the provocation against Greece. Not only has no country supported his plans to steal Greek maritime space, but in a rare instance, the U.S., Russia and the EU all condemned Turkey’s provocative move.

General Khalifa Haftar of the Libyan National Army (LNA), in opposition to the GNA, used the Erdoğan-Sarraj aggression against Greece to restart his offensive against the Turkish-backed government and in only a matter of days reached 6 kilometers from Tripoli city center. Much of Haftar’s top military personnel were trained in Greek military schools and he utilized the Turkish aggression to his advantage to gain a European ally. Not only has Greece now backed Haftar, but it is expected that when Haftar visits Greece in the coming days, many other European and NATO countries will begin to unrecognize Sarraj. On Monday, I wrote that Italy had to reverse its backing of Sarraj to protect their interests in Libya. Since then, Italy is now distancing itself from Sarraj with Haftar due to arrive in Rome.

Erdoğan’s adventurism with Sarraj against Greece has only isolated Turkey further and legitimized Haftar’s push into Tripoli. The only ally Erdoğan has in the Eastern Mediterranean was Sarraj, but it is likely he will lose power with Haftar’s offensive on Tripoli. With Egypt promising to respond to Turkey in Libya if it intervenes, can Turkey really afford to be at war with Syria, Libya and Egypt at the same time as its economic crisis continues to worsen?

Turkey has never been more isolated, alone and frustrated by losing in Idlib and Libya, and this is set to get worse in 2020. Greece-Cyprus-Israel will sign a pipeline deal on January 2 in Athens that completely bypasses Turkey in the so-called ‘disputed’ waters, and Greece-Cyprus-Egypt-France will discuss Mediterranean issues on January 4-5 in Cairo. For all the military posturing and rhetorical aggression, Erdoğan’s adventurism has only left his country diplomatically isolated, economically struggling and less secure domestically, a gross miscalculation that he will unlikely reverse in pursuit of regional dominance.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

Once in a blue moon an indispensable book comes out making a clear case for sanity in what is now a post-MAD world. That’s the responsibility carried by “The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs,” by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press), arguably the most important book of 2019.

Martyanov is the total package — and he comes with extra special attributes as a top-flight Russian military analyst, born in Baku in those Back in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working in the U.S., and writing and blogging in English.

Right from the start, Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s ravings but especially Graham Allison’s childish and meaningless Thucydides Trap argument — as if the power equation between the U.S. and China in the 21^stcentury could be easily interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta slouching towards the Peloponnesian War over 2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as the new Genghis Khan?

(By the way, the best current essay on Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora (“Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa, L’Esilio”). No Trap. Martyanov visibly relishes defining the Trap as a “figment of the imagination” of people who “have a very vague understanding of real warfare in the 21st century.” No wonder Xi explicitly said the Trap does not exist.)

Martyanov had already detailed in his splendid, previous book, “Losing Military Supremacy: The Myopia of American Strategic Planning,” how “American lack of historic experience with continental warfare” ended up “planting the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the American military mythology of the 20^thand 21^stcenturies which is foundational to the American decline, due to hubris and detachment of reality.” Throughout the book, he unceasingly provides solid evidence about the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a possible, future war against real armies (not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein’s), air forces, air defenses and naval power.

Do the Math

One of the key takeaways is the failure of U.S. mathematical models: and readers of the book do need to digest quite a few mathematical equations. The key point is that this failure led the U.S. “on a continuous downward spiral of diminishing military capabilities against the nation [Russia] she thought she defeated in the Cold War.”

In the U.S., Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of Net Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto inventor of the “pivot to Asia” concept. Yet Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution), introduced by Soviet military theoreticians back in the 1970s.

One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing land-attack cruise missiles, a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and France can do it. And there are only two global systems providing satellite guidance to cruise missiles: the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. Neither China’s BeiDou nor the European Galileo qualify – yet – as global GPS systems.

Then there’s Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself was coined by the late Admiral Arthur Cebrowski in 1998 in an article he co-wrote with John Garstka’s titled, “Network-Centric Warfare – Its Origin and Future.”

Deploying his mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells us that “the era of subsonic anti-shipping missiles is over.” NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright Emmanuel Macron) now has to face the supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class M54 in a “highly hostile Electronic Warfare environment.” Every developed modern military today applies Net-Centric Warfare (NCW), developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.

Martyanov mentions in his new book something that I learned on my visit to Donbass in March 2015: how NCW principles, “based on Russia’s C4ISR capabilities made available by the Russian military to numerically inferior armed forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were used to devastating effect both at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era Ukrainian Armed Forces military.”

No Escape From the Kinzhal

Martyanov provides ample information on Russia’s latest missile – the hypersonic Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in the Arctic.

Crucially, as he explains, “no existing anti-missile defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of shooting [it] down even in the case of the detection of this missile.” Kinzhal has a range of 2,000 km, which leaves its carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M, “invulnerable to the only defense a U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount – carrier fighter aircraft.” These fighters simply don’t have the range.

The Kinzhal was one of the weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s game-changing March 1, 2018 speech at the Federal Assembly. That’s the day, Martyanov stresses, when the real RMA arrived, and “changed completely the face of peer-peer warfare, competition and global power balance dramatically.”

Top Pentagon officials such as General John Hyten,  vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted on the record there are “no existing countermeasures” against, for instance, the hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard (which renders anti-ballistic missile systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee the only way out would be “a nuclear deterrent.” There are also no existing counter-measures against anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon and Kinzhal.

Any military analyst knows very well how the Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of a Toyota Corolla in Syria after being launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather conditions. The corollary is the stuff of NATO nightmares: NATO’s command and control installations in Europe are de facto indefensible.

Martyanov gets straight to the point: “The introduction of hypersonic weapons surely pours some serious cold water on the American obsession with securing the North American continent from retaliatory strikes.”

Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S. policymakers who “lack the necessary tool-kit for grasping the unfolding geostrategic reality in which the real revolution in military affairs … had dramatically downgraded the always inflated American military capabilities and continues to redefine U.S. geopolitical status away from its self-declared hegemony.”

And it gets worse: “Such weapons ensure a guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov’s italics] on the U.S. proper.” Even the existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to a lesser degree Chinese, as paraded recently — “are capable of overcoming the existing U.S. anti-ballistic systems and destroying the United States,” no matter what crude propaganda the Pentagon is peddling.

In February 2019, Moscow announced the completion of tests of a nuclear-powered engine for the Petrel cruise missile. This is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear propulsion that can remain in air for quite a long time, covering intercontinental distances, and able to attack from the most unexpected directions. Martyanov mischievously characterizes the Petrel as “a vengeance weapon in case some among American decision-makers who may help precipitate a new world war might try to hide from the effects of what they have unleashed in the relative safety of the Southern Hemisphere.”

Hybrid War Gone Berserk

A section of the book expands on China’s military progress, and the fruits of the Russia-China strategic partnership, such as Beijing buying $3 billion-worth of S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missiles — “ideally suited to deal with the exact type of strike assets the United States would use in case of a conventional conflict with China.”

Because of the timing, the analysis does not even take into consideration the arsenal presented in early October at the Beijing parade celebrating the 70^thanniversary of the People’s Republic.

That includes, among other things, the “carrier-killer” DF-21D, designed to hit warships at sea at a range of up to 1,500 km; the intermediate range “Guam Killer” DF-26; the DF-17 hypersonic missile; and the long-range submarine-launched and ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship cruise missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM – the backbone of China’s nuclear deterrent, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland carrying multiple warheads.

Martyanov could not escape addressing the RAND Corporation, whose reason to exist is to relentlessly push for more money for the Pentagon – blaming Russia for “hybrid war” (an American invention)  even as it moans about the U.S.’s incapacity of defeating Russia in each and every war game. RAND’s war games pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia and China invariably ended in a “catastrophe” for the “finest fighting force in the world.”

Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even capable of intercepting hypersonic non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its latest middle-range state of the art air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be operational in 2020.

His key takeway: “There is no parity between Russia and the United States in such fields as air-defense, hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile development, to name just a few fields – the United States lags behind in these fields, not just in years but in generations [italics mine].”

All across the Global South, scores of nations are very much aware that the U.S. economic “order” – rather disorder – is on the brink of collapse. In contrast, a cooperative, connected, rule-based, foreign relations between sovereign nations model is being advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS bank).

The key guarantors of the new model are Russia and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics in Washington. My recent conversations with top analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in Moscow last week once again stressed the futility of negotiating with people described – with  overlapping shades of sarcasm – as exceptionalist fanatics. Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia have figured out there are no possible, meaningful deals with a nation bent on breaking every deal.

Indispensable? No: Vulnerable

Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin’s speech to the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after the unilateral Washington abandonment of the INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S. deployment of intermediate and close range missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at Russia:

“Russia will be forced to create and deploy those types of weapons…against those regions from where we will face a direct threat, but also against those regions hosting the centers where decisions are taken on using those missile systems threatening us.”

Translation: American Invulnerability is over – for good.

In the short term, things can always get worse. At his traditional, year-end presser in Moscow, lasting almost four and a half hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than ready to “simply renew the existing New START agreement”, which is bound to expire in early 2021: “They [the U.S.] can send us the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and send it to Washington.” And yet, “so far our proposals have been left unanswered. If the New START ceases to exist, nothing in the world will hold back an arms race. I believe this is bad.”

“Bad” is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to stress how “most of the American elites, at least for now, still reside in a state of Orwellian cognitive dissonance” even as the real RMA “blew the myth of American conventional invincibility out of the water.”

Martyanov is one of the very few analysts – always from different parts of Eurasia — who have warned about the danger of the U.S. “accidentally stumbling” into a war against Russia, China, or both which is impossible to be won conventionally, “let alone through the nightmare of a global nuclear catastrophe.”

Is that enough to instill at least a modicum of sense into those who lord over that massive cash cow, the industrial-military-security complex? Don’t count on it.

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Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is “2030.” Follow him on Facebook.

Late on December 23, the Turkish-based “Syrian Interim Government” (an entity funded by Turkey in an attempt to legalize its actions in Syria) threatened the real Syrian government with a military action.

In a released statement, it claimed that forces that participated in Turkey’s Olive Branch and Euphrates Shield operations are now moving to Greater Idlib in order to support their counterparts in repelling an attack by “regime forces, Russia and Iranian militias”.

It remains unclear what “forces” the barely existing “defense ministry” is planning to send to Idlib because Turkish-backed militant groups are already supporting al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the battle against the Syrian Army. The Turkish-backed coalition of militant groups, the National Front for Liberation, has always been a useful partner for al-Qaeda in Idlib.

On December 24, united forces of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the National Front for Liberation and several other militant groups launched a counter-attack in an attempt to retake the town of Jarjnaz from the Syrian Army and its allies.

Clashes between militants and government forces erupted near Jarjnaz itself and the villages of Ghadfa and Abud Dawha. Militants used at least one suicide vehicle borne improvised explosive device.

Pro-militant sources that “rebels” destroyed several pieces of military equipment belonging to the army and captured an armoured vehicle and a battle tank. The fighting in the area continued on December 25.

On December 24, a Turkish delegation visited Moscow to discuss the situation in Syria and Libya, as well as the existing bilateral cooperation. Taking into account that Turkey’s soft reaction to the encirclement of its observation post in Surman and the lack of Turkish Army attempts to establish more observation posts to stop the Syrian Army advance, it seems that Ankara once again sold its Idlib proxies to Russia.

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It is no different now.
The yearning still gnaws.
The night dark, utterly silent,
Sky stretched endlessly back
Into an infinity beyond reach.
And the fears, the tears
Are they any different?
It is no different now.
Joy sometimes, hope too, divisions
Seemingly unbridgeable, vast chasms
Opening between those closest.
Little changes, though two thousand years
Dissolve into oblivion behind us.
It is no different now.
Plus ça change,
Plus c’est la même chose.
Always the same.

Yet a word is heard dimly
Laboring out of the deafening black
Silence, almost but not inaudible.
And the angel says, “Go out,”
And the angel said, “Go out,”
Always the angel, always the voice
Bearing us up along the way
(If you do not turn to the inner light,
Where will you turn?), always calling:
“Journey far through strange country,
Follow the light you barely see
But which is the light of your life.
Follow it across the desert of your heart
Where wild beasts seek to devour you.
There is no time, there is no time
To hesitate. Now is the star’s hour,
Now you are called on a fool’s journey
Into a pig’s pen and a child’s strange
And glorious presence.” Thus speaks the angel
Again and again, no matter how dark
The darkest day, nothing changes.
It is no different now.
Now as always is the star’s hour.
Now as then a star is born to men
To lead us on. A light that darkness
Cannot overcome, despite us.

Love is not a sometimes thing,
Though we abuse it like the earth.
It is all we have to hold us up,
And it always will.

A star is always born.

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This poem was originally published on the author’s blog site, Behind the Curtain.

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. Visit the author’s website here.

Does Mr. Trump really not grasp that his sanctions left and right – and now on the Russian-German gas pipeline Nord Stream 2 – is committing economic suicide, not for himself, of course, but for the United States? He attempts to punish not only Russia, but all the corporations, construction companies, Russian, German and from everywhere, which collaborated and are still working on the final stretch of the1,250 km pipeline.

Nord Stream 2 is an under-water pipeline crossing from Kingisepp in Russia to Greifswald in Germany, under the Baltic sea. Its cost is estimated at more than US$ 100 billion. It parallels Nord stream 1 (see map), and is supposed to make Germany energy secure, especially once Germany exits from nuclear energy. After the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, Germany has already permanently shut down eight of its 17 reactors and pledged to close the rest by the end of 2022.

Russia will supply Germany with 55 billion cubic meters (m3) of liquified natural gas (LNG), via Nord Stream 2, roughly the same amount as is already delivered through Nord Stream 1, two pipelines of about 1,250 km running in parallel on the floor of the Baltic Sea. Nord Stream 2 is scheduled to begin operating in mid-2020.

The pipeline is to 90% completed and will not be stopped, come hell or high water. If worse comes to worst, and European companies do quit over the threat of sanctions, Mr. Peskov, the Russian Presidential spokesperson, says Russia can finish the job with her own ships and construction capacity.

President Trump knows it. So why dishing out sanctions? Hoping that one or the other of the “collaborators” will jump ship – and rather work for US fracking giants than for environmentally friendlier Russian gas? There is certainly a risk of that happening. But how likely is that?

Well, likelier than a common-sense reader may believe. The project’s important part of pipeline-laying work is being carried out by the Swiss-Dutch company Allseas, which would be directly affected by the sanctions. As a consequence, Allseas has suspended its work last Saturday, 21 December; they say “pending clarifications on legal, technical and environmental questions with the US.” Other participating companies are Russia’s Gazprom and European OMV, Wintershall Dea, Engie, Uniper and Shell. So far, they have not reacted to the threat of sanctions.

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On December 17, the Senate passed a Sanctions Bill, to punish any company, German or otherwise which contributes to the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. Don’t question the legality and the right of the US of interfering with a business / trade transaction between two sovereign countries. It is outrageous. Even more outrageous, though, is that the world at large the more than 190 UN members are (almost) silent. Many of them are also victims of US sanctions. But most don’t even “sanction” back, peacefully, understood, but as a reply to Washington’s breaking international laws with impunity.

The US bill will enter into effect only 30 days after it is signed which means that work on the pipeline may well be finished when the sanctions will become effective. However, as we know, with the US no rule is viable and trustworthy, sanctions may be applied retroactively.

For once, Ms. Merkel seems to stand firm. She says “US sanctions won’t stop the Nord Stream 2 project”, and so says President Putin. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, slammed the US by saying that “US diplomacy is limited to intimidation, by imposing sanctions, ultimatums and threats.” To that, Heiko Maas, German Foreign Minister added “European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the US.”

The German- Russian Chamber of Commerce expressed yet the strongest position, stating that this project serves Germany’s economic interest and energy security and calling for retaliatory sanctions on the United States. Yes, retaliatory sanctions! But will the Europeans have the guts to do so? – And do so with meaningful sanctions, like tariffs on American goods, or stop importing certain US goods, cars or iPhones, for example.

The US not only wants to sell her own fracking gas – which in addition of violating Germany’s environmental rules – is also much more expensive than Russian LNG. Equally or more important – Washington wants to drive yet another wedge between Germany and Russia. This will not work.

Germany, especially Germany’s business community, has recognized that Russia, the huge landmass of Eurasia all the way to China, is a natural market not only for Germany, but for the whole of Europe – and has been for hundreds of years, before the UK transplanted her empire across the Atlantic, killing millions of indigenous people conquering North America, hoping to have an easier time to reign over the world from her vantage position between two shining seas.

It has almost worked. At least for a while. But now US arrogance, greed and violence around the globe is backfiring. The world is becoming sick and tired of the US exceptionalism. The relatively recent indiscriminate and unlimited sanctions program against anyone, any nation, that doesn’t bend to the whims of Washington, results in economic warfare. It is driving more allies away than it attracts. So, it amounts to America’s economic suicide.

Since the US economy depends on financial hegemony and war – it will be a gradual downfall of the US economy. It may not be a sudden collapse as many may wish, but rather a slow but steady disappearance of the US muscle, exactly the way it ought to be, so as not to hurt countries still depending on the US dollar, giving them time and opportunities to diversify their markets and monetary reserves.

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What may the US holy sanctions for Nord Stream 2 imply? – According to preliminary hints from the State Department they may include individuals involved in the project having their US visas revoked and property blocked. US visa revoked? So what, but property “blocked” – means not just property in the US but around the globe, meaning that property is effectively confiscated, stolen, by US authorities, as we have seen in the case of Venezuela which has lost some 130 billion dollars through outright US asset confiscations – theft – since the beginning of 2017.

All this is possible only because the west is still dominated by a fiat US-dollar run economy that has the capacity to interfere in any western US-dollar based economy. In that sense, US sanctions have a positive long-term effect. They drive foes and allies alike away from the bogus US-dollar economy, towards strong eastern-run, and solid output-based economies, with gold backed currencies, like the Chinese Yuan and the Russian Ruble.

It is puzzling and mind-boggling – that Trump, and the entire financial oligarchs that pull the strings behind Trump, do not see this medium to long-term effect. Do they really believe in their untouchable “exceptionalism” and hope with their superb arrogance, that the world will continue to fall for sanctions, if they see and realize they can live an eastern alternative? – Or, do they know they are doomed, but while going down, they lash around like a dying beast to bring as many countries as possible down with them?

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The exceptional nation US of A displays always the same logic, either you are with us or against us. As could have been expected, Poland along with the Baltic states are anti-Russia and anti-EU, and therefore pro-US. Brussels announced an agreement between the US and these states selling them 112 billion m3 of fracking LNG starting in 2020. The US calls it “freedom gas”. Sounds like “freedom fries’’ instead of French fries, when the French were in a clinch with Washington in 2003 over objecting to the US unilateral invasion of Iraq. – Remember? Same-same. As if people wouldn’t know by now what “freedom made in USA” means.

Maybe the rest of Europe realizes that they owe some loyalty to Russia, as the Russians, the Soviet Union at the time, was the deciding factor in winning WWII against Hitler’s Germany, not the US and her western allies.

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One of Washington’s argument for fighting Nord Steam 2 says that the US does not want to save Ukraine from possible bankruptcy if Kiev loses the $2-3 billion it makes annually from Russian gas transit to Europe. It implies that the new pipeline, by circumventing Ukraine, would deprive Ukraine from the lucrative transit fees. This argument has just become mute, as Russia, after years of legal battles and negotiations has signed a historic agreement with Kiev on an extension to the current gas transit agreement, which expires on December 31, 2019. The agreement will restore the transit fees of US$ 2 – 3 billion per year. In addition, Mr. Putin confirms that Russia is ready to give Ukraine a 25% special discount on its natural gas for domestic consumption. Quite a concession by Mr. Putin towards a country that has in a most ugly way turned its back to Russia, of which it was an integral part for centuries. A laudable and brilliant Russian peace initiative that may have positive implications throughout Eurasia, all the way to China.

In all, still more than 50% of all Russian gas to Europe will continue to be flowing through Ukraine, this is more than 110 billion m3 /year. Both, Russia and Germany have always maintained that Nord Stream 2 was meant as a supplementary route to guarantee stable supplies to Europe, but will not replace transit through Ukrainian territory.

Will this just agreed deal between Russia, Ukraine and the European Commission have an impact on the US sanctions? – Most likely not, because what Russia wants even more than the European market is separating Europe from Russia, and in a wider sense, from Eurasia, including China – a lost cause, of course.

A crucial question is, why does Germany or the EU for that matter not threaten Washington with return sanctions? – Afraid of what? – Is it NATO that runs the EU that will not allow such measures, or else? NATO countries are already divided among themselves – with Germany or the EU imposing sanctions against the US – and over and above NATO’s objections, it might amount to a break-up of NATO. And Europe is not quite ready for this step – yet.

The bottom line is – are the US serious with trying to stop Nord Stream 2 with sanctions, or are they just testing the waters with economic bullying, finding out ‘who is with us and who is against us’ – and where is the limit to unabashed bullying – a lesson Washington then may apply for developing their strategy (sic) of how to subdue Europe in their competitive fight West against East– again, it is a losing proposition, as Washington and Trump’s puppeteers must know. It’s just postponing the downfall into America’s dark doom.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21st Century; Greanville Post; Defend Democracy Press, TeleSUR; The Saker Blog, the New Eastern Outlook (NEO); and other internet sites. He is the author of Implosion – An Economic Thriller about War, Environmental Destruction and Corporate Greed – fiction based on facts and on 30 years of World Bank experience around the globe. He is also a co-author of The World Order and Revolution! – Essays from the Resistance. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from NEO

Media coverage and social media posts went wild when Palestinian photojournalist Muath Amarneh was blinded in his left eye after he was hit by a rubber bullet while covering a protest in the West Bank. 

However, Amarneh was far from unique; Israeli snipers targeting participants in Gaza’s weekly Great Return March protests have aimed for the legs – and eyes. To date, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reports that 50 protesters have been shot in the eye since the demonstrations began March 30, 2018 – leaving them permanently blind.

“Some of these protesters and journalists were hit in the eye with teargas canisters, but most were targeted directly with what is commonly called a ‘rubber bullet,’ giving the impression they are somehow benign,” says Ashraf Alqedra, MD, a treating physician at Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital and spokesperson for the Ministry of Health.

“But there is still steel at the core, and although these bullets don’t usually kill, they do grave damage. It is impossible to save an eye hit directly by a rubber-coated steel bullet.”

However, he adds, due to the Israeli blockade, there are no artificial, glass eyes in Gaza – only a cosmetic improvement, but one that can be a significant psychological aid. These are available only by travelling out of Gaza for treatment and permits for such journeys are often not granted.

According to data released by the World Health Organization, Gaza residents submitted 25,897 applications to travel via Erez Crossing to receive medical treatment in the West Bank or Israel; an average of 2,158 were submitted each month. However, the Israeli government only approved 61 percent.

Mai Abu Rwedah: the most recent victim

Mai Abu Rwedah, 20, grew up in north Gaza’s al-Bureij Refugee Camp in a family of nine children supported by a father who works as a janitor for a UN school. She just graduated from university, hoping to start her professional life as a medical secretary and contribute her income.

But that dream was dealt a severe blow December 6, when she became the most recent Gazan to lose an eye to an Israeli bullet.

Abu Rwedah believes in using peaceful, but active, resistance to reclaim Palestinians’ right to return to their ancestral homeland. So, she has joined participants in the Great Return March protest since its launch on March 30, 2018.

On September 21 of that year, she was shot by a rubber-coated bullet in one of her legs, but that didn’t stop her from participating; she kept on going.

Doctors had to extract Mai’s right eye and the bullet damaged her jaw as well

A sit-in protest takes place in Gaza in solidarity with Mai 

Earlier this month, stood with a few friends about 100 metres from the fence that marks the border between Gaza and Israel. She glimpsed an Israeli soldier waving and pointing his finger to his eye.

“He was trying to intimidate me, but I was not afraid because I was doing nothing wrong. I wasn’t even throwing stones,” Abu Rwedeh recalls.

The soldiers fired tear gas then, and Mai and her friends ran away, but still were in sight of the young man who had threatened her.

“He was watching me; wherever I moved he kept watching. Then, suddenly, he raised his gun and pointed it at me. I was about to flee but he was too fast. He shot me in my eye.”

The bullet damaged her jaw as well. Doctors had to extract her right eye, since it was destroyed, Her determination, however, is intact. Abu Rwedeh continues to protest.

The youngest victim

Mohammed Al-Najar, 12, is the second-oldest son among four children, supported by a father who works in a wedding hall in Khan Younis.

In January, during the mid-year vacation from school, Mohammed begged his parents to allow him to watch the Friday protest with his cousins and other relatives, thinking it would give him an exciting story to share with classmates.

He was given permission to ride one of the government buses that collected people from the various neighbourhoods, taking them to the protest sites. When he disembarked, teargas bombs were flying, and he shouted to warn those around him. Then next one hit him directly in his right eye.

When Mohammad learned later that his eye could not be saved, he locked himself in his room and stopped going to school. When he did go back, he struggled.

“At first his marks at school dropped and he isolated himself. He tried to hide his missing eye,” says his mother, Um Edress.

She took to him an organisation that provided psychotherapy, but he refused to speak. Today, he is socialising, but goes quiet when asked about his injury.

The journalist

According to Dr Alqedra, most people with eye injuries from the Great Return March are journalists or photographers.

One of them is Sami Musran 35, a photographer who works for Al-Aqsa TV. On July 19, he was shot several times – first in his hand, the next two times in his shoulders and the fourth time in the chest. (Fortunately, he was wearing a bulletproof vest, so it did not harm him.) The last time cost him his left eye.

Sami says he had received several calls from Israeli officers warning him not to take photos at the Great Return March. His mother also received calls, saying her son might be killed.

“Forty times, my Facebook account was hacked or deleted for me, and I received death threats as well,” he says. “But I decided to keep on with my work to reveal the Israeli crimes against unarmed Palestinians who participate in the march.”

The night before Musran was shot, his wife tried to insist he stay home, but he refused.

“Minutes before I was hit, my mother called me twice, saying she was very worried about me. But I said that nothing happens that isn’t God’s plan,” he recalls.

He was about 250 metres away from of the Israeli fence when two women and a child were shot. Musran was taking photos of them and went in close. That’s when a rubber-coated bullet hit his eye and he lost consciousness. Two days later, he woke up in the intensive care unit to find out he had a skull fracture and an injured eye. The bullet had damaged the iris, retina and cornea and his vision was gone.

Today, it is hard for him to continue with his job; his depth perception is off, he gets headaches and the sight in his remaining eye “fades” at night. But he will keep trying.

“Israel wants to blind the eyes of the truth by sending messages to photographers saying we will hit your eyes to make you stop taking photos,” he says. “But we do not surrender.”

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All images in this article are from The New Arab

President Donald Trump‘s Environmental Protection Agency—already accused of being “pesticide cheerleader”—threw its weight behind chemical company Bayer AG on Friday when the agency asked a federal appeals court to reverse a lower court’s ruling in favor of a man who said the company’s Roundup weedkiller was responsible for his cancer.

The case centers on Edwin Hardeman of California, who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2015 after using the glyphosate-based pesticide, made by Monsanto, for years on his property. Bayer acquired Monsanto last year.

A federal jury in July ordered the company to pay Hardeman roughly $25 million in damages, a lower amount than the $80 million a federal judge had ordered months earlier.

The EPA maintains—to the outrage of environmental and public health groups—that glyphosate is not a carcinogen. The federal decision notwithstanding, California in 2017 agreed with the World Health Organization’s 2015 classification of glyphosate as a “probable carcinogen.” Trump’s EPA has pushed back on the state’s finding and said that product labels informing users of that cancer risk would “misbranding” and announced in August of this year that the agency would not approve of labels carrying that warning.

In an amicus brief filed Friday with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, attorneys with the EPA and Justice Department said,

EPA approved the label for the pesticide/herbicide at issue here, Roundup, through a registration process that did not require a cancer warning. In fact, EPA has never required a labeling warning of a cancer risk posed by Roundup, and such a warning would be inconsistent with the agency’s scientific assessments of the carcinogenic potential of the product. Mr. Hardeman nevertheless sought damages under California common law, alleging that Monsanto had failed to adequately warn consumers of cancer risks posed by the active ingredient in Roundup. FIFRA therefore preempts Mr. Hardeman’s claims to the extent that they are based on the lack of a warning on Roundup’s labeling.

The filing from the federal government came the same week Bayer AG asked the appeals court to toss out the lower court’s ruling and defended Roundup’s safety.

Bayer is currently facing nearly 43,000 claims related to glyphosate-linked cancer in federal courts. An end to the company’s legal woes is unlikely to happen soon, according to Bloomberg Environment.

“The only vehicle that remotely approaches [an end to litigation] might be bankruptcy,” Loyola Law School professor Adam Zimmerman told the outlet last week. “Short of that, or some victories in court, I don’t see what kind of arrangement would absolve them of future liability.”

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Featured image: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)

Leading up to the 2019 general elections, the ordinary Namibian citizen did not, and even some of those with some level of sophistication did not seem to fully grasp and understand what was happening in the country and why it was happening as such.

External interference in local elections anywhere is a real thing. The understandings of ordinary citizens of current events are influenced by and limited to whatever “information” their preferred candidate or source of political “information” chooses to divulge to them during campaign rallies or through social media platforms. However, the current major divisions among the population are ultimately the result of a broader geopolitical game between The Peoples Republic of China and the Western world. The main reason is that the emergence of China as a global player in international business transactions (i.e. government tenders, international mining, international consulting, etc.) has ruffled many feathers in the Western business world (Anglo-America), and the Western world, which sees itself as the master of capitalism and which is mainly built on the exploited wealth of especially African and other third world nations, does not take easy to being outsmarted in international business transactions (e.g. Trump’s trade wars with China). Once this perspective is understood, it is then no surprise that Western world rating agencies (e.g. Fitch and Moody’s) have been downgrading countries such as Namibia and South Africa over the last few years that the Chinese (geopolitical rival) have enjoyed big business opportunities in those countries.

This geopolitical conflict between the Chinese and the Western world is fiercely playing out and manifesting itself in Africa in general and Namibia in particular, especially now that the elections in the country were about to take place. The game of geopolitics is played by identifying the “weak points” associated with a country (poverty, unemployment, etc.), and those “weak points” are then attacked with full force to stoke up the emotions of the population and put political pressure on the people in power. The same strategy under different circumstances is used against any country that seem not to fully promote Western world business interests (e.g. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.). Namibians must, therefore, understand that due to the ongoing failure of the Western world to compete against The Peoples Republic of China in international business transactions, the Western world might have possibly deployed its local political front-men in Africa to seriously challenge, under the veils of democracy, the seemingly pro-Chinese governments. Local bread and butter issues, which are legitimate and need to be addressed, are the most obvious and effective weapon employed to win over the hearts of local people that anyone seeking power will use to achieve that objective.

Once the local political front-men get in power, however, the Western world is automatically in charge and the overall problems and challenges of the people remain, despite that their “new leader” seems to be ruling. It is very interesting to note that Wikileaks is a Western world organisation, and it only saw it fit to “leak” certain information so close to the date that the country was expected to make decisions at the polls. Unethical behaviour of any kind by whomever should never be condoned, but as free-thinking patriotic Namibians, we must also look at the bigger picture and put things in their right perspectives.

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Abednego Katuushii Ekandjo writes in his private capacity.

Panama marked the 30th anniversary of the U.S. invasion with an official day of mourning for the first time this year:

Panama declared a day of national mourning for Friday, the 30th anniversary of the U.S. invasion that ousted dictator Manuel Noriega and resulted in hundreds of deaths in the Central American nation.

The measure approved Wednesday by members of President Laurentino Cortizo’s Cabinet, a first for the country, has been a main demand of relatives of those killed in the military operation, who see it as a symbolic step toward justice for the deaths of Panamanian civilians and soldiers.

The invasion of Panama was the first regime change war of the last thirty years. No one realized it at the time, but it marked the start of an era of hyperactive militarism that has not ended yet. It is the first U.S. war that I can remember, and it is sobering to consider that the U.S. has been engaged in hostilities somewhere in the world almost every year since then. President Bush had questionable legal authority to launch the invasion, and Congress certainly never had time to debate or authorize it. Because the war was short and has been overshadowed by larger military interventions since then, it has faded into obscurity, but we should remember it for the damage that it did and for the precedent of arbitrary presidential warmaking that it set. It was the first in a series of wars against small, outmatched countries that posed no threat to the United States.

The invasion killed hundreds of Panamanian civilians. During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, The San Francisco Chronicle reported from the neighborhood in Panama City destroyed during the invasion:

Bernabela Vargas, 53, concedes that Noriega’s ouster remains popular despite the destruction wrought by war and subsequent looting. But she said the ferocity of the attack, which involved U.S. Marines, a Ranger regiment and the 82nd Airborne Division pitted against a weak military force with scant resources, was excessive.

“This was not the way to help us,” said Vargas, who says some of her shell- shocked neighbors still flinch at loud sounds.

Police Sgt. Manuel Antonio Melenez, a Chorillo beat cop, is similarly bitter. When he saw U.S. soldiers assaulting Chorillo, he decided to fight the invaders.

“The problem was the magnitude,” he said. “To get one person, you didn’t need so many deaths.”

The invasion of Panama was obviously a war of choice, and it is difficult to see how Operation Just Cause was actually justified at the time. Noriega was undoubtedly an awful ruler, but did his removal from power really require the deaths of hundreds of innocent people?

Three decades later, many of the relatives of those killed during the invasion are still seeking answers:

“Finally there are important signals for the victims as the 30th anniversary approaches,” Ayola said. “The national mourning and the possibility for other families to identify their own so they can be buried properly. They cannot remain in oblivion.”

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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image is from mark reinstein/Shutterstock

Israel’s longtime goal is unchallenged Middle East dominance partnered with Washington.

Achieving it depends on transforming independent regional nations into US/Israeli vassal states by war or other hostile means, Iran most of all.

Along with Turkey, it’s the only regional country able to challenge Israel militarily if attacked.

On Wednesday, IDF chief of staff General Aviv Kochavi claimed Jewish state friction with Iran may increase next year, perhaps leading to war.

Fact: Nonbelligerent Iran threatens no one. Along with the US and NATO, Israel threatens world peace, stability and security.

Kochavi falsely called Iran Israel’s main threat, stressing that close ties to Washington is its key strategic asset.

He ignored Jewish state undeclared war on Palestinians and Syria, time and again terror-bombing Gaza and the Syrian Arab Republic with impunity, the world community ignoring its high crimes of war, against humanity, and slow-motion genocide against long-suffering Palestinians.

Nuclear armed and dangerous Israel falsely claims nonbelligerent Iran poses a nuclear threat.

Its legitimate program has no military component, repeatedly confirmed by the IAEA, its inspectors banned from illegal Israeli nuclear sites, Iran’s legal ones the world’s most heavily monitored.

According to Kochavi, Israel is preparing for war on Iran. If launched, it’ll be preemptive by the Jewish state, possibly together with the US, not the other way around by a nation that hasn’t attacked another one in centuries, what Israel and Washington do repeatedly.

“We will not allow Iran to entrench itself in Syria, or in Iraq,” said Kochavi, failing to explain that Tehran works cooperatively with these nations and others, its military advisors alone in Syria, helping Damascus combat US/Israeli supported terrorists.

Kochavi falsely accused Iran of “smuggl(ing) advanced weapons (into Iraq) on a monthly basis, and we can’t allow that.”

Responding, Iraqi parliamentarian Hassan al-Kaabi called his remarks “incorrect and politically motivated,” bent on “creating sedition and finding an excuse to infiltrate into the Iraqi territory.”

Along with the US, Israel is likely involved in stoking violence, vandalism and chaos in Iraq.

The Jewish state terror-bombed Iraqi sites several times, the Pentagon reportedly providing air support.

According to Kochavi: “In the coming war (with Iran, Syria, Lebanon or Gaza), we will have to attack with great force in populated areas and also target the state structure of the entity that allows terrorism to act against us (sic).”

“Israel will target everything that helps in combat operations, such as electricity, fuel, bridges,” and other targets at its discretion.

Israel considers civilians legitimate targets, striking residential areas indiscriminately in all its wars of aggression, the policy stated earlier by future IDF chief General Gadi Eisenkot, saying:

“We will apply disproportionate force at the heart of the enemy’s weak spot (civilians) and cause great damage and destruction.”

“From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages (towns or cities). They are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved.”

Retired General Giora Eiland earlier said Israel’s war strategy is all about destroying “the national infrastructure (of enemies) and (inflicting) intense suffering among the population.”

This strategy reflects core Israeli policy — to cause maximum casualties, destruction, displacement and human suffering, grave international law breaches.

In November, former Israeli envoy to Washington Michael Oren said the Jewish state is preparing for war with “Iranian proxies,” falsely accusing Tehran of “provocations,” adding:

Senior Israeli officials met “to discuss the possibility of open war with Iran…Israeli troops, especially in the north, have been placed on war footing.”

“Israel is girding for the worst and acting on the assumption that fighting could break out at any time.”

Zionist ideologue Oren once arrogantly said: “We expect the world to stand with us.”

He’s a polarizing figure. Brandeis University students earlier strongly protested against his choice as commencement speaker by university officials.

A letter signed by scores of students slammed his “far-right positions” and marginalization of growing numbers of US Jews who disagree with him.

What’s coming in the new year may be more war at a time when the world community should prioritize ending ongoing ones.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

By establishing facilities in Europe to produce components, Chinese telecom giant Huawei is continuing the process of circumventing US sanctions amid a wider US-led trade war aimed at artificially quelling the growing trend of foreign companies outcompeting long-entrenched US monopolies.

US State Department-funded media platform, Voice of America, in an article titled, “Sanctions-Hit Huawei Plans Components Plant in Europe,” would claim:

Chinese telecommunications group Huawei is working on a plan to build its own components at a site in Europe, its chairman told AFP, after it was hit by U.S. sanctions.

Huawei chairman Liang Hua would be quoted in the article as claiming:

“We are planning to manufacture our own components at a production site in Europe in the future,” he said in an interview at AFP’s headquarters. “We are conducting a feasibility study to open a factory in Europe for this. The choice of country will depend on that study.”

Finally, the VOA article would quote Liang Hua as noting:

“In the area of 5G technology, we are already no longer dependent on the supply of chips and other components from American companies.”

The VOA article would also admit that despite full-spectrum pressure from the US, Huawei continues to break records in terms of sales while it continues investing in both growing its market share and moving around US sanctions.

The US-led trade war aimed at firms like Huawei who have recently begun to pull ahead of their US counterparts was meant to hinder, setback or entirely overturn the competition with minimum effort on the part of US firms. Instead, it seems to have only compounded the troubles of American firms unable to compete against Chinese alternatives, while hurting US companies providing parts for or receiving final products from Chinese companies like Huawei.

Too Little, Too Late 

Huawei is already a massive enterprise with a global-spanning business coupling together it with other businesses and even other nations around the world. It possesses a momentum of its own that even in the face of immense setbacks, is able to continue moving forward.

US efforts to curtail or even cripple the firm appear to only be providing temporary setbacks while providing the Chinese firm with impetus to create a more self-sufficient and resilient business model in the intermediate to long-term.

The fact that US sanctions have led to Huawei circumventing any need to deal with US firms to acquire components for its 5G telecom network technology is one example of this.

The US forcing Huawei to move on without Google appears to only have set back the company temporarily while in the long-term illustrating that Google may not be as indispensable as it and the US government attempted to portray it as.

It is likely that this process will only continue, as the necessity for the US to invest in a genuine strategy to compete in terms of developing better business models and through technological innovation over cheap and unsustainable (not to mention ineffective) political tricks seems lost on Washington and the special interests lobbying it to pursue the current regime of sanctions and smears.

While US tactics have set back Huawei in certain terms, they have also set back the interests of US businesses themselves; both businesses that had until recently supplied Huawei with components and thus were rising alongside Huawei throughout its continued success, but also for companies that sold Huawei products or, like Google, placed their products and services within Huawei’s final products (smartphones).

Stitching China and Europe Closer Together 

While Washington has attempted to portray Huawei and other Chinese firms as global pariahs as well as threats to security, the fact is that many nations prefer to do business with Huawei, having conducted their own assessments of the company regarding any potential security threats it might pose to their respective nations and telecom infrastructure.

Nations acquiescing to US pressure do so for political rather than practical reasons, with many fully understanding the high cost of their acquiescence. The nations of Europe, who find themselves under constant pressure from Washington regarding a wide spectrum of issues, has begun taking steps to likewise move out from under Washington’s shadow and to conduct business freely with whomever it desires and with whomever offers them the greatest benefit.

Huawei’s plans to produce components in Europe will be one step further in helping both the Chinese firm and its European partners step out together from under US coercion.

For Washington, policymakers must begin to understand that in the process of trying to isolate and precipitate the decline of companies like Huawei and entire nations like China, they are only bringing about America’s further isolation and decline. This is done not only to the detriment of US-based companies more than happy to collaborate with and share mutual benefits with Chinese firms, but for foreign firms including those in China who have benefited from doing business with their US counterparts and would continue doing so had it not been for the current trade war and sanctions leveled amid it.

A similar process of US sanctions and pressure backfiring against Washington is taking place in Southeast Asia where nations told by the US to abandon Huawei have decided to disregard US demands and move forward in earnest.

Only through genuine competition can the US reverse its current fortunes. At one point in the past, coercion, threats and punitive actions were able to ensure US hegemony militarily and economically across the globe but no longer.

For US interests lobbying Washington to continue to pursue its current, unsustainable and clearly ineffective policies, they have demonstrated that they no longer deserve the power and influence they possess, lacking the ability to upkeep it and laying down the gauntlet for more responsible and constructive US enterprises to take the reins of American policy while there is still something left to steer into the future.

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Gunnar Ulson is a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from NEO

The United States is building a large military base within the al-Omar oil field, in the province of Deir Ezzor, in Syria, local media reported.

“The U.S. is equipping the base to serve as the command headquarters for the international coalition’s operations,” the Syria Now portal reported.

Besides fortifying the field with logistic and military reinforcements, the U.S. Army is building airstrips for its helicopters, which will be used to monitor oil wells from the air.

According to Syrian analysts, Washington is working to find a mechanism that makes it easier to extract as much Syrian oil as quickly as possible.​​​​​​​

To do so, the U.S. is moving electrical equipment to put the electricity network into operation at the oil fields, which would allow it to begin to exploit them.

@NamanTarcha
GLI STATI UNITI DISINFORMANO LA COMUNITÀ INTERNAZIONALE SULLA SITUAZIONE IN SIRIAhttps://t.co/SxpP5GdR68

— ausoloda (@ausoloda) December 18, 2019

The meme reads, “The U.S. and its allies continue to misinform the international community about the situation in Syria. This hinders the process of returning Syrian citizens to their homeland.”

Previously, the U.S. government withdrew its soldiers from 11 military bases in Syria and concentrated them in the oil fields located in Remelan.

The al-Omar base will replace the base that existed at the Lafarge Cement Factory, from which U.S. troops withdrew in November.

On Dec. 20, the Acting Charge de-Affairs of Syria’s permanent mission to the United Nations, Louay Fallouh, asked Washington to end the theft of oil and gas resources belonging to the Syrian state and to withdraw its forces from the Arab country.

The Syrian ambassador also rejected the draft resolution for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHOA) on his country’s current situation, as it does not address the alleged humanitarian objectives mentioned in its content.

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The opening of the Crimean rail bridge completes Russia’s physical connectivity initiative with the peninsula and will greatly contribute to rejuvenating its economy after the region languished in neglect for nearly two and a half decades under Ukrainian rule.

Daniel Maingi works with small farmers in Kenya and belongs to the organisation Growth Partners for Africa. He remembers a time when his family would grow and eat a diversity of crops, such as mung beans, green grams, pigeon peas and a variety of fruits now considered ‘wild’.

Following the Structural Adjustment Programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, the foods of his childhood have been replaced with maize. He says that in the morning you make porridge from maize. For lunch, it’s boiled maize and a few green beans. In the evening, a dough-like maize dish is served with meat. He adds that it is now a monoculture diet.

The situation is encapsulated by Vandana Shiva who says if we grow millets and pulses, we will have more nutrition per capita. But If we grow food by using chemicals, we are growing monocultures, which leads to less nutrition per acre, per capita.  Monocultures do not produce more food and nutrition but use more chemicals and are therefore profitable for agrochemical companies.

Junk food and free trade

Moving from Africa to Mexico, we can see that agri-food concerns have infiltrated the food system there too. They are taking over food distribution channels and replacing local foods with cheap processed commodities. Free trade and investment agreements have been critical to this process and an alarming picture is set out of the consequences for ordinary people, not least in terms of their diet and health.

In 2012, Mexico’s National Institute for Public Health released the results of a national survey of food security and nutrition. Between 1988 and 2012, the proportion of obese women between the ages of 20 and 49 increased from 9 to 37 per cent. Mexican children are increasingly overweight, while one in ten school age children suffered from anaemia. Diabetes is now the third most common cause of death in Mexico.

The former UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter concluded that the trade policies currently in place favour greater reliance on heavily processed and refined foods. He added that the overweight and obesity emergency that Mexico is facing could have been avoided or largely mitigated if the health concerns linked to shifting diets had been integrated into the design of those policies.

The North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has led to foreign direct investment in food processing and a change in the country’s retail structure. As well as the emergence of global agribusiness companies in Mexico, there has been an explosive growth of chain supermarkets and convenience stores. Traditional corner shops are giving way to corporate retailers that offer the processed food companies even greater opportunities for sales. For example, Oxxo (owned by Coca-cola subsidiary Femsa) was on course to open its 14,000th store sometime during 2015.

In Mexico, the loss of food sovereignty has induced catastrophic changes in the nation’s diet and trade policies have effectively displaced large numbers of smallholder farmers. India should take heed. The Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey 2016-18 highlights similar disturbing trends in India.

Bad food in India

Policy makers have been facilitating the corporatisation of Indian agriculture and the food processing and retail sectors, both of which have tended to be small scale and key to supporting local (rural) economies and livelihoods. There are of course major implications for food security and food sovereignty, but what this could mean for the nation’s diet and health is clear to see.

The commodification of seeds, the selling of more and more chemicals to spray on crops or soil, the chemicalisation of food and the selling of pharmaceuticals or the expansion of private hospitals to address the health impacts of the modern junk food system is ‘good for business’. And what is good for business is good for GDP growth, or so we are told. This is nonsense.

In the latest edition of India’s Current Science journal, a guest editorial by Seema Purushothaman notes the importance that small farms could play in addressing poverty, inequality, hunger, health and climate issues. But the development paradigm is obsessed with a misguided urban-centric GDP ‘growth’ model.  

And that author is correct. Whether it involves Mexico or India, to address nutrition, we must focus on small farmers. They and their families constitute a substantial percentage of the country’s poor (and undernourished) and are the ones that can best supply both rural and urban populations with nutritious foods cultivated using agroecological farming practices. Numerous high-level official reports have emphasised the key role that such farmers could have in providing food security.

However, western agri-food corporations are acquiring wider entry into India and are looking to gain a dominant  footprint within the sector. This is being facilitated by World Bank ‘ease of doing business’ and ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ directives as well as the implementation of the corporate-driven Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture (KIA), which was signed with the US in 2005.

These corporations’ front groups are also hard at work. According to a September 2019 report in the New York Times, ‘A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World’, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies. The article lays bare ILSI’s influence on the shaping of high-level food policy globally, not least in India.

ILSI helps to shape narratives and policies that sanction the roll out of processed foods containing high levels of fat, sugar and salt. In India, ILSI’s expanding influence coincides with mounting rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.

Accused of being little more than a front group for its 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget, ILSI’s members include Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo, General Mills and Danone. The report says ILSI has received more than $2 million from chemical companies, among them Monsanto. In 2016, a UN committee issued a ruling that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup, was “probably not carcinogenic,” contradicting an earlier report by the WHO’s cancer agency. The committee was led by two ILSI officials.

From India to China, whether it has involved warning labels on unhealthy packaged food or shaping anti-obesity education campaigns that stress physical activity and divert attention from the role of food corporations, prominent figures with close ties to the corridors of power have been co-opted to influence policy in order to protect agri-food corporations’ bottom line.

Cultivation

In the absence of government support for agriculture or an effective programme for delivering optimal nutrition, farmers are also being driven to plant crops that potentially bring in the best financial returns. A recent article on the People’s Archive of Rural India website highlights farmers in a region of Odisha are being pushed towards a reliance on (illegal) expensive genetically modified herbicide tolerant cotton seeds and are replacing their traditional food crops.

The region’s strength lay in multiple cropping systems, but commercial cotton monoculture has altered crop diversity, soil structure, household income stability, farmers’ independence and, ultimately, food security. It is also undermining farmers’ traditional knowledge of agroecology which has been passed down from one generation to the next.

Although agri-food capital has been moving in on India for some time, India is an agrarian-based country underpinned by smallholder agriculture and decentralised food processing. Foreign capital therefore first needs to displace the current model before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control.  This is precisely what is happening.

Although this article touches on many issues, at the heart of the discussion is how we regard food. Are we to be denied the fundamental right to healthy food and well-being or is food just another commodity to be controlled by rich corporations to boost their bottom line? 

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 A shorter version of this article initially appeared on Outlook India’s Poshan website.

Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Joyeux Noël  is a 2005 epic war drama film based on the Christmas truce of December 1914, depicted through the eyes of French, Scottish, and German soldiers. It was written and directed by Christian Carion, and screened at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival.

Soldiers in the trenches, December 25, 1914. More than 100 years ago.

Upholding the value of human life against those who plan and finance wars.

The Christmas Truce of 1914 was an initiative of the soldiers on both sides; it was a mark of human solidarity and fraternity against the political and military architects of World War I.

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“In the front lines, the fraternisation of Christmas Eve is continued throughout the day; not all units know about it, and it is not universal but is widespread over at least half of the British front. Many bodies that have been lying out in no man’s land are buried, some in joint burials. Many men record the strange and wonderful events; may men exchange tokens or addresses with German soldiers, many of whom speak English. British soldiers die on this day; a few die in areas that are otherwise peaceful and with fraternisation going on, victims of alert snipers. In other areas, there is considerable activity: 2nd Grenadier Guards suffer losses in a day of heavy fighting. As night fell, things grew quiet as men fell back to their trenches to take whatever Christmas meal that had been provided for them.”

In a comprehensive way, Bolivia’s coup leaders reincarnate the most sinister ghosts of Latin America and the Caribbean’s imperialist torturers and mass murderers. The religious fanaticism of coup figureheads like Camacho and Añez, abject servants of their US owners, invokes the fearsome history of colonial genocide and enslavement of indigenous populations in the name of Christ. Aping events of only forty years ago, the armed forces’ role in the coup of last November 10th reenacted the military coups of Hugo Banzer and Luis Meza. Western racism and fascism are inseparable from these sinister historical motifs of European conquest and endless US intervention.

Despite this reality, the European Parliament has just approved a resolution condemning… Nicaragua. Contrary to fact-free Western media and NGO propaganda, there is no torture in Nicaragua, no arbitrary detention or forced disappearance, no police officers deliberately fire pellets to blind protestors as in Chile, no soldiers fire from helicopters murdering indigenous protestors as in Bolivia. In Nicaragua, the authorities applied minimum force in 2018 to overcome an extremely violent, murderous coup attempt and subsequently amnestied the violent minority opposition’s murderers and torturers for the sake of peace.

Nicaragua’s minority opposition continue mounting persistent provocations because they have no national political project except to obey their US and EU country owners. By contrast, the respective right wing regimes in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador persecute legitimate political opposition and repress democratic majority political initiatives for change. The governments of Cuba. Nicaragua and Venezuela defend their National Human Development policies against US intervention and aggression. The right wing regimes in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Ecuador have no National Human Development policy, because their US and EU owners have ordered them to prioritize corporate profit.

If one single figure embodies the monstrous sadism and hypocrisy of the Western imperialist elites, the governments they own and the media and NGOs that cover up their crimes, it is Klaus Barbie. In 1983, Barbie was arrested in Bolivia and extradited to France for his crimes as a Nazi police chief during Germany’s occupation of France. During that time, Barbie was responsible for overseeing the arrest and torture of more than 14,000 Resistance members. With protection from the US authorities, he escaped prosecution after the war, evading facing trial for the murder of over 4,000 civilians and the deportation of over 7,000 Jews to concentration camps.

Sought by the French authorities in 1956, Barbie escaped to Bolivia with US government help. Eventually, thanks to his own aggressive activism serving US supported dictatorships in Latin America through the 1970s and 1980s, Barbie was found, extradited and processed through a highly publicised trial in France in which his defense rested on the obvious point that Barbie’s crimes were little different from those of innumerable French and other European functionaries in their colonies. Despite, or perhaps as a result of, that cogent defense, Barbie was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, dying in prison four years later in 1991.

As many writers, from Simone Weil to Aimée Cesaire, have pointed out, the supreme crime of the Nazis was to mass murder white Europeans rather than people of color in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But the French authorities did so too on their own territory. In France, the authorities desperately seek to obliterate remembrance of the mass murder of Algerians in Paris and elsewhere in 1961, most notoriously at the Charonne metro station. Maurice Papon, head of the Paris police at the time, was a murderous, racist, right wing extremist no better than Klaus Barbie. Even now, even as it is happening still in the former French African colonies, the odious reality of French imperialism is suppressed as if it never happened at all.

The US and the EU value greatly mass murderers and torturers who serve their imperial needs and interests. Their authorities have protected innumerable criminals similar to Klaus Barbie over the years. For example, the US always protected now deceased anti-Castro terrorists like Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, responsible for blowing up 70 people on a civilian airline flight over Barbados in October 1976, among many other terror attacks. The authorities of the European Union and its member countries have protected their terrorists most obviously in Ivory Coast, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. US and EU protection of terrorist mass murderers is no aberration, but a permanent cynical norm. EU institutions condemning the victims of their terrorist protegés in Nicaragua or in Venezuela and elsewhere should be no surprise at all.

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Syria is Washington’s war, launched by the Obama regime in March 2011, escalated by Trump. 

There’s nothing remotely “civil” about waging war on a nonbelligerent state threatening no one — using ISIS and likeminded jihadists as imperial foot soldiers, supported by US-led terror-bombing, destroying vital infrastructure, massacring civilians, aiming for regime change.

That’s what endless war in Syria is all about, along with wanting Iran isolated, its government toppled, two Israeli regional rivals eliminated, greater US regional control achieved.

Long-suffering Syrians need humanitarian aid to survive, the West and regional allies supplying it only to areas controlled by jihadists they support, Russia providing it through government channels.

At a Friday Security Council session on the country, Moscow’s UN envoy Vassily Nebenzia addressed the humanitarian situation, wanting it depoliticized, urging unobstructed aid to Syrians throughout “the entire territory without…discrimination (or) preconditions,” adding:

“(B)andits and terrorists continue threatening the Syrian people, militants from (al-Nusra).  Terrorists in Syria should be given a resolute retaliation.”

The US, Britain and France blocked a Russian SC resolution to deliver vitally needed humanitarian aid through two checkpoints for a six-month period, Damascus directly involved in aiding its own people.

Separately, Russia and China vetoed a US-supported resolution, authorizing aid through three checkpoints along the Iraq and Turkish borders for the next 12 months — without permission of Damascus.

Moscow argued for two checkpoints, Syrians controlling the process because conditions in the country are far different now than years earlier as most of its territory is liberated from US-supported terrorists.

Ahead of voting, Nebenzia said “Russia will vote against the draft resolution on the cross-border assistance mechanism in Syria” supported by the US, Britain and France, adding:

The resolution for authorized deliveries for one year is “obsolete as it does not consider the changes that have taken place in Syrian since 2014 when Resolution 2165 was adopted for the first time.”

The Security Council’s failure to agree on helping Syrians in need begs the question.

“Who won today,” asked Nebenzia? “No one. And who lost? The Syrians lost, about whom those who blocked our resolution today worry so much, as they assure us.”

Security Council authorization for humanitarian aid for Syrians was approved in July 2014.

SC 2165 authorizes access across four border crossings not controlled by Damascus. Reality on the ground makes this stipulation obsolete.

Russia’s resolution, rejected by the West, aimed to make this reality official. In light of its defeat, Moscow will continue providing Syrians with humanitarian aid on its own.

Syria’s acting UN charge d’affairs Louay Fallouh denounced US-led Western responsibility for endless aggression and humanitarian crisis conditions.

He thanked Russia and China for vetoing a US-supported resolution hostile to providing humanitarian aid to all Syrians.

He explained that aid across Turkey’s border to Idlib province goes to al-Nusra and likeminded jihadists, not to Syrian civilians in need, what Russia’s resolution aimed to prevent.

He also denounced US-allied Security Council members for supporting Washington’s control of Syrian oil producing areas, looting them for profit.

An attack on the Homs area al-Rayyan oil and gas facilities, still controlled by Damascus, caused considerable damage, Syria’s Oil and Natural Resources Minister Ali Ghanim explained.

Reportedly it was conducted by undetected drones, aiming to prevent Syrian oil production and the revenue it provides.

According to the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), the Homs area oil refinery and al-Rayyan gas facilities were struck simultaneously from the air, what Homs Governor Talal al-Barazi confirmed.

Southfront called the attack “the most complex and harmful” to Syrian controlled oil and gas facilities “so far.”

AMN News reported that Saudi Arabia “deployed dozens of combat troops to a major oilfield in Syria’s eastern (Deir Ezzor) province as the United States and some of its regional allies are vying with one another to seize oil reserves and plunder natural resources in the war-battered country,” separately adding:

Saudi Aramco began “exploring oil fields in Syria’s northeastern province of Deir Ezzor.” Company officials visited the area.

According to Middle East expert from Russian State University for the Humanities Professor Grigory Kosach:

“Saudi presence in the form of material assistance, which includes the military component, is a reality for the Deir Ezzor region and the entire east of Syria.”

He calls it a positive development that will provide jobs for Syrian workers.

It’s not positive if Syrian oil resources are looted by a foreign power, Damascus not getting revenues from its own hydrocarbon reserves.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image is from Syria News

In August of 2018, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) first introduced what Graham referred to as a “sanctions bill from hell” targeting Russia and President Vladimir Putin and making it harder for the United States to leave NATO. Despite bipartisan grievances with Moscow the bill didn’t gain much traction.

The measure to push President Trump to take a tougher stance against Russia over alleged election interference, aggression towards Ukraine and involvement in Syria’s proxy war is titled the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act (DASKA) and would impose strict and broad penalties.

In February of this year, DASKA was reintroduced with Senator Graham stating the following,

“Our goal is to change the status quo and impose meaningful sanctions and measures against Putin’s Russia,” and “He should cease and desist meddling in the U.S. electoral process, halt cyberattacks on American infrastructure, remove Russia from Ukraine, and stop efforts to create chaos in Syria.”

During a Senate Floor speech on February 7th, Senator Menendez even went as far as saying that he speculated whether President Trump “is an asset of the Russian government” and concluded his speech by saying, “this Administration’s deference to the Kremlin demands Congress be proactive in shaping U.S. foreign policy toward Russia, especially with respect to sanctions.”

Fast forward to last Wednesday when the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee advanced the bill with a 17-5 vote. The next step is for the legislation to pass the full Senate and House of Representatives before it can be brought to President Donald Trump to sign into law or veto.

However, the White House has already stated their opposition to DASKA, which targets Russian banks, Russia’s cyber sector, new sovereign debt, and would impose measures on its oil and gas sectors.  The bill also imposes several requirements on the State Department including generating reports investigating President Putin’s wealth, opposition figure Boris Nemtsov’s 2013 assassination and whether to designate Russia as a state sponsor of terror.

As for NATO, DASKA would ensure that without approval from a Senate supermajority the United States can not leave. This is in response to President Trump’s various comments about wanting to leave and criticism of other NATO members for not spending enough on defense.

The Trump administration and Moscow are on the same page when it comes to DASKA. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov called DASKA “senseless” and in a 22-page letter to Congress it was referred to as “unnecessary” and in need of “significant changes”. Although the administration stated that they too want to deter and counter Russian subversion and aggression they strongly oppose the bill in its current form.

It seems rather unlikely that this bill will pass and in the very slight chance that it does these sanctions will not deter Moscow or bring about any significant change in their domestic and foreign policies.

Robert Legvold, the Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy at Columbia University, stated

“As has been the experience since the first U.S. and EU sanctions in 2014, the effect on Russian foreign policy behavior will almost certainly be close to zero-other than perhaps encouraging initiatives that the Russian leadership believes may be disruptive in U.S. relations with its European allies.”

Although Democrats and some Republican’s such as Senator Graham sometimes manage to inadvertently bring the Russian and American heads of states together on some issues such as DASKA and President Trump’s impeachment, those moments are usually short lived. As we saw a few days ago, President Trump signed the 2020 National Defense Act with a $738 billion budget which included legislation imposing sanctions on firms laying pipe for Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion gas pipeline project meant to double gas capacity along the northern Nord Stream pipeline route from Russia to Germany, upsetting all parties involved.

Germany firmly rejected the US sanctions and referred to them as incomprehensible as they affect Berlin and other European companies as well. The imposition of sanctions against EU companies who are conducting legitimate business is rejected by the European Union as well. Russia stated that they would stick to the schedule and carry out their projects regardless of sanctions.

The current and previous White House administrations opposed this project over claims that it would embolden President Putin’s influence by increasing his political and economic sway in Europe. With the United States currently ranked as the world’s top oil and gas producer, it’s clear to see that sanctions such as these are meant to influence European allies to buy American instead of Russian oil and products.

On Friday, Allseas the Swiss-Dutch company contracted to do the work announced that it had suspended pipe-laying activities in anticipation of the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). On Saturday, Allseas stated, “Completing the project is essential for European supply security. We together with the companies supporting the project will work on finishing the pipeline as soon as possible.

Russian FM Lavrov met with President Trump at the White house earlier this month and mentioned that they covered at least a dozen substantial issues, and that both the White house and Russia are interested in dialogue. It will be interesting to see if President Trump can successfully balance his desire to expand trade ties and continue dialogue with Russia, by pushing back legislation from Congress to increase sanctions under DASKA, all while sanctioning Nord Stream 2 under the NDAA.  What level of chess would that be?

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

Like the International Brigades consisting of foreign volunteers to assist the Spanish Republic in the 1930s, there is an ‘International Freedom Battalion’ currently fighting with the Kurds in Syria. Unfortunately, its live-action role playing ‘leftist’ mercenaries missed the part about the original International Brigades having been backed by the Comintern, not the U.S. military. Meanwhile, Western media usually hostile to any semblance of radical politics have heavily promoted the Rojava federation as a feminist ‘direct democracy’ utopia, particularly giving excessive attention to the all-female Women’s Protection Units (YPJ) militia while ignoring the female regiments fighting for the secular Syrian government. As a result of the media’s exoticized portrayal of the Kurds and their endorsement by prominent misleaders on the left, from Slavoj Žižek to Noam Chomsky, many have been fooled into supporting them.

If the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for WWII, it remains to be seen if Syria proves to be a run-through for another global conflict. Then again, what has emerged from its climax is an increasingly multipolar world with the resurgence of Moscow as a deterrent to the mutually assured destruction between the U.S. and China.

Leftists today wishing to continue the legacy of those who fought for the Spanish Republic should have thrown their support behind the Syrian patriots bravely defending their country from terrorism and imperialism, not left opportunism.

Thankfully, this time the good guys have prevailed while the Kurds have paid the price for betraying their fellow countrymen. Liberals shedding crocodile tears about Rojava should take comfort in the fact that they can always play the latest Call of Duty: Modern Warfare video game featuring the YPG fighting alongside the U.S. military if they need to fulfill their imperial fantasies. Yes, that’s right, the latest installment of the popular first-person shooter franchise features a storyline inspired by the SDF. It’s too bad for them that in real life all of Syria will be returned to where it rightfully belongs under the Syrian Arab Republic.

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The Syrian Army and its allies delivered a devastating blow to Al-Qaeda-linked Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its Turkish-backed allies in southern Idlib.

Since the start of the operation on December 19, the army, led by the Tiger Forces and their commander Suheil al-Hassan, have liberated over two dozens of villages and towns, including one of the biggest urban centers in the area – al-Tah. Furthermore, government troops deployed in a distance allowing to advance on Jarjanaz and Maarat al-Numan – key stronghold of radicals in this part of Idlib province. Militants conducted at least two major counter-attacks, employing suicide bombers, but were not able to stop the advancing army troops.

The offensive came amid an intense bombing campaign by the Syrian Air Force and the Russian Aerospace Forces that pulverized radicals’ fortified positions. The Syrian Army even conducted a missile strike on militants’ weapons depots near Ras Elhisn and Babsqa, close to the Turkish border.

Warning strikes were also conducted near a Turkish military convoy moving in the area of Kafar Aweed. These actions demonstrate that if Ankara still hopes to use its troops as human shields to rescue militants, this strategy will not succeed, at least taking into account the current number of Turkish troops in the Idlib zone.

Also, the southern Idlib operation was apparently coordinated with joint naval exercises of warships of the Russian naval task force and the Syrian Navy in eastern Mediterranean. This indicates that both Moscow and Damascus expect that foreign powers that support terrorist in Syria may consider carrying out some military provocation in attempt to rescue their protegees.

According to the pro-opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, over 100 members of militant groups were killed in clashes. The Russian Defense Ministry said that over 200 militants were killed or injured in Idlib clashes. The number of the Syrian Army casualties, according to Russia: 17 – killed, 42 – injured. Media outlets affiliated with Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation claimed that the “Assad regime” suffered large casualties and all claims about the army advance is just Assadist propaganda. According to them, the “moderate opposition” just conducted a tactical retreat.

ISIS, so far, has appeared to be more effective that its Idlib counterparts. On December 21, ISIS-launched  drones hit the Homs oil refinery, the al-Rayan gas station and a gas processing facility in the province of Homs. The drone strike put these facilities out of service and caused several fires that were later contained. A day earlier, an ISIS cell killed 3 Syrian troops near Khanasir in the province of Aleppo. On December 22, ISIS claimed that its members had killed 2 Russian soldiers in the province of Daraa. In this case, no visual evidence to confirm these claims was provided.

The increase of ISIS activity amid the Syrian Army advance against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other groups indicates that the terrorist group is directly assisting their colleagues in Idlib.

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I constantly receive such letters; letters which repeat, again and again, year after year, basically the same thing: “If only we would have an opportunity to vote out our damn system!”

Such letters, emails and messages keep coming to me from the United States, but also from the United Kingdom. Particularly, after certain events, like when the Western empire overthrows some progressive government in Asia, Latin America or the Middle East.

I honestly wonder:

“Don’t my readers actually periodically have that proverbial opportunity they are longing for? They can, can’t they, install socialism; to let it storm into Downing Street like an early spring?”

But they keep missing that opportunity, again and again. Or, are they really missing it? Actually, for so many years they have voted in the most extreme forms of capitalism and imperialism, so one has to wonder whether the British voters perhaps truly deserve their rulers?

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The results of the British elections became so radical, so conservative, that even the most conformist British press, like The Economist, doesn’t appear to be able to stomach them, anymore.

Of course, I am being sarcastic, because precisely that the mainstream press is one of the main reasons, why the British electorates vote as they do.

But seriously, could anyone in his or her sane state of mind vote for BoJo?

Just put Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn next to each other, and listen to each of them for ten minutes, and it would appear that anyone who would vote for the leader of the Conservative Party should be ripe for the mental asylum.

Unless… Unless! Yes, precisely: Unless he or she actually openly or secretly longs for those neo-liberal, deeply conservative “values”, which were introduced to the “Western world” by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, after some wild and extremist theories that were floated behind the walls of the Chicago School of Economics by market fundamentalists such as Friedman and Von Hayek. And after entire nations, such as Indonesia and Chile (both of them now lying in ruins), were raped, tied up and then used as guinea pigs.

Unless the British voters really admire Western imperialism, and that notorious, legendary, sadistic hand of the English teacher holding a ruler over the fingers of a petrified pupil, roaring threateningly: “Shall I?” Unless they truly like this kind of arrangement of the world.

I often wonder: What if they do? Perhaps they do. They most likely do, at least many of them. The voters, I mean…

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For years and decades, many thinkers, writers and left-leaning intellectuals are, for some abstract reasons, convinced, that the great majority of Europeans are tricked or coerced into supporting that beastly, insane foreign policy of the United States.

They think that “were Europe to be truly free”, it would embark on a socialist path, as it tried, but was prevented from doing, right after WWII.

I never bought into that argument. Socialist, even Communist European euphoria lasted for only a few years. What followed was the abandoning almost all values and ideals for a series of orgies: food orgies, sex orgies, sports orgies, pop crap culture orgies, and finally the empty travel orgies. Europe is living beyond its means, and is planning to do so, for decades to come. It cannot survive, and it doesn’t want to live without the brutal plunder of the world, or read, without the “conservative neo-liberal regime”.

These days, most of the Europeans support its brutal and unruly offspring, on the other side the Atlantic. Such support guarantees that the complexes of superiority will be pampered, that the working hours will stay short (at the expense of those ‘un-people’ in all corners of the globe), food cheap, and porn and sports free or almost free of charge (at least on television and computer screens).

So, basically, we are talking a clear status quo, which in turn is almost synonymous with the “conservative values”.

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The Economist went mental, commenting on the elections in its leading story “Britain’s nightmare before Christmas”. And that was even before the results were announced. Predictably, it trashed Mr. Corbyn and his “bankrupt views” (among them his refusal to antagonize, loot and provoke Venezuela, Iran and Russia), but then it went after BoJo’s throat:

“Brexit is not the only problem with Mr. Johnson’s new-look Tories. He has purged moderates and accelerated the shift from an economically and socially liberal party into an economically interventionist and culturally conservative one. Angling for working-class, Leave-voting seats in the north, he has proposed extra state aid, buy-British government procurement and a sketchy tax-and-spending plan that does not add up. Also, he has absorbed the fatal lesson of the Brexit campaign: that there is no penalty for lying or breaking the rules. He promised not to suspend Parliament, then did: he promised not to extend the Brexit talks, then did. This chicanery corrodes trust in democracy… For all these reasons this newspaper cannot support the Conservatives.”

How truly heartbreaking!

Deep drift inside the conservative world?

Not really. Boris Johnson simply broke some rules. He showed himself as unreliable, vulgar and embarrassing. He did it all in public. These things are never forbidden, at least not in the U.K. Racism, even sexual crimes, are fine there, as long as they are kept behind closed doors. Well-camouflaged lies are perfectly fine, too, no matter which party leaders utter them, be it Thatcher or Blair.

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But back to voting and the British nation.

To simplify everything: Jeremy Corbyn is a decent man. Not perfect, but decent. It is obvious. He is a person who cares about his fellow citizens. He also cares about those billions, in all corners of the Earth, who have been robbed and brutalized by the Western empire (of which the U.K. is, undeniably, an indispensable part).

Look at Boris Johnson and you get the opposite. And it is not a state secret. I have many friends in the U.K., and a great majority would confirm that he is an upsetting buffoon, if not something much more terrible.

Mr. Corbyn is true Labour. He is trying to reverse what all of us know is taking place: that the U.K. has sunk so low, and many of its children are literally starving. Its social system has collapsed under the right-wing (in the past, both Conservative and “New Labor”) governments. That British citizens cannot afford to live in their own cities, anymore. That both education and medical care, as well as infrastructure, are crumbling, in fact going to the dogs.

He wants to stop the despicable suffering of the millions of victims of the Western reign, in all parts of the Earth.

Of course, these facts would never appear in the pages of The Economist.

Boris Johnson does not give a flying fig about the issues mentioned above. He is on the stage. Since his youth, he has always been playing and acting, as well as self-promoting. He is perhaps the most embarrassing figure in British politics.

And yet… And yet. Perhaps Corbyn’s humanism is his biggest weakness. At least in Europe, particularly in the U.K.

As The New York Times reported:

“As votes were counted on Friday, the Conservatives were projected to win 364 seats in the House of Commons, versus 203 for the Labor Party, according to the BBC, with almost all of Parliament’s seats decided. That would give the Conservatives about a 75-seat majority, their largest since that amassed by Margaret Thatcher in 1987.”

That is clear message where the public stands, isn’t it?

Of course, I know that soon, my friends and comrades will begin to read into the outcome of the elections: that only a fraction of the population voted. That people were confused. That the mass media manipulated the entire narrative. And many arguments of this nature.

And I am sure that they will be correct.

However, the United Kingdom voted, and these are terribly, outrageous results.

People voted for the most extreme, shameless type of neo-liberalism. They voted for a brigand type of imperialism, neo-colonialism and racism.

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My personal observations do not matter, but I’d like to add them, nevertheless.

I come to London at least twice a year. Almost all my visits are work, or “struggle-related”. I am interviewed there, I show my films, promote my books, or speak at the universities.

I used to enjoy my visits. But not anymore.

There is terrible tension in the air. People have become impolite, even aggressive.

As a Russian, I am constantly challenged. Even my very slight accent provokes immediate questions “where am I from?” When I reply, what follows are often direct provocations.

My Chinese friends report much graver abuses.

London is not at peace with itself, that is certain.

I have written about Brexit on several occasions, and as a matter of principle, I refuse to do it in this essay.

Lately, everything is being explained and justified by Brexit.

I don’t believe that it could be. Doing so is a gross simplification.

Perhaps the West is truly an anti-socialist, anti-Communist entity. Perhaps that is why it keeps overthrowing left-wing governments, all over the world. Perhaps that is why it keeps voting in the most unsavory individuals one could imagine.

Perhaps the U.K. deserves the rulers it gets.

There is one little nuance which is being constantly overlooked: the U.K. is not really against Labour. Remember Tony Blair, a closet Thatcherite, and a man who served as an advisor to the murderous Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, responsible for millions of lost lives in the Democratic Republic of Congo? Blair is also a man responsible for hundreds of thousands of the lost human lives in the Middle East. Remember? Well, he was so-called “New Labour”. But that was obviously just fine, as far as the British voters were concerned.

And there is one more ‘little nuance’ worth mentioning: almost the entire Europe is moving to the right; towards the racist, self-serving right. And it is not only Europe which wants to stay in the EU, or Europe which desires to leave the bloc. Both parts are heading in a similar direction.

Perhaps, after all, the voters deserve their leaders!

Right-wing “leaders” are thriving. While rationality, decency and kindness are kicking the bucket in agony.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Five of his latest books are “China Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries, Saving Millions of Lives”, “China and Ecological Cavillation” with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from New Eastern Outlook

When Christian frontline soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land saw the obvious futility of war and just stopped the killing, thus disobeying orders from the out-of-touch Christian Generals and Christian Bishops to whom they had pledged obedience.

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“Good morning; Good morning,” the General said

When we met him last week on our way to the line.

Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of ‘em dead,

And we’re cursing his staff – (those) incompetent swine.”

– An excerpt from Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “The General”, commenting on the standard use of World War I frontline soldiers as “cannon fodder”

“…the ones who call the shots (in war) won’t be among the dead and lame,
And on each end of the rifle we’re the same” — John McCutcheon, from his powerful antiwar (and therefore censored-out) song “Christmas in the Trenches”

“The first casualty, when war comes, is truth”. — Hiram Johnson (1866-1945) – a Progressive Republican US Senator from California, who died on Aug. 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In World War I, as happens to be true in most wars involving Christian soldiers, the Christian church leadership joined in the patriotic fervor with very un-Christ-like, nationalistic and racial/religious superiority stances.

Astonishingly, religious leaders on every side of the conflict truly believed that God was on their particular side.

And so the pulpits all over Europe, including British, Scottish, French, Belgian, German, Austrian, Hungarian, Russian and Italian churches reverberated with flag-waving fervor, with clear messages to their doomed warrior-sons that it was their God-given Christian duty to march off to kill the equally brain-washed young Christian soldier-enemies, who were also certain that God was on their side.

Five months into the miserable death and destruction of the perpetually dead-locked trench war (featuring the now-infamous mass slaughter via the recently developed new technology weapons involving artillery, machine guns and poison gas), the first Christmas of the war came around.

Christmas was the holiest of Christian holidays, but in this time of homesickness, the first one had special meaning. December 24, 1914 reminded the soldiers of the good food, the safe, warm and dry homes and the beloved families that they had left behind – and which they now suspected they would never see again.

The physically exhausted, spiritually deadened, combat-traumatized soldiers on both sides of No Man’s Land desperately sought some respite from the misery of the war, especially the water-logged, putrid, rat-infested, corpse-infested and increasingly frozen trenches.

The frontline soldiers on both sides were at the end of their emotional ropes because of the unrelenting artillery barrages against which they were defenseless. If they weren’t killed or maimed by the bombings, what would eventually destroy them was the “shell-shock” (now known as posttraumatic stress disorder – PTSD), that caused sleep deprivation, horrifying nightmares, depression, suicidal thinking, hyper-alertness and other mental and neurological distresses. Other common “killers” were the bad and insufficient food, lice, trench foot, frostbite and gangrenous toes and fingers.

Poison gas attacks were yet to come but the futile and suicidal “over the top” assaults against machine gun nests were deeply demoralizing. Such attacks were stupidly and repeatedly ordered by senior officers like Sir Douglas Haig, who didn’t have to participate in the assaults themselves.

Winston Churchill, in his British naval command role at the time, had obviously learned nothing from Haig’s disastrous tactic when, a year later, he also ordered repeated suicidal charges against machine gun fire at the infamous massacre of Australian and New Zealand troops at Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula, a blunder for which Churchill resigned his Admiralty commission in disgrace.

The day-to-day horrors of trench warfare were punctuated by the screams of pain coming from the wounded soldiers in No Man’s Land who were helplessly hanging on the barbed wire or lying in the bomb craters – their deaths often lingering on for days.

The effect on the troops in the trenches who had to listen to the desperate pleas for help was psychologically devastating. The morale of the troops on both sides of No Man’s Land had hit rock bottom by Christmas.

Christmas in the Trenches

So on December 24, 1914, the exhausted troops settled down to Christmas gifts from home, special food, special liquor, special tobacco and special rest. A magnanimous (and deluded) Kaiser Wilhelm had even ordered 100,000 Christmas trees with millions of ornamental candles to be sent up to the front, expecting that such an act would boost troop morale.  Using the supply lines for such militarily unnecessary items seemed to be an acceptable investment for the over-confidant emperor. Nobody suspected that the Christmas tree idea would backfire and instead be a catalyst for a famous event in the history of peace-making that was nearly censored out from recorded history.

That spontaneous event, the Christmas Truce of 1914, was expressed in a variety of ways at a multitude of locations all along the 600 miles of trenches that stretched across France, but it was an event that would never again be duplicated in the history of warfare.

The tradition that has emerged from this true story was that, in the silence of Christmas Eve night, German soldiers started singing “Stille Nacht”.

Soon the British, French, Scots and Canadians on the other side of No Man’s Land joined in and all sides sang together in their own tongues. Before fore long, the divine spirit of peace and “goodwill towards men” prevailed over the demonic spirit of war.

Perhaps some Christian soldiers even recalled the often forgotten, indeed, censored-out love-your enemies admonitions and non-violent teachings that had come from Jesus in his Sermon on the Mount teachings.

Listening to the familiar Christmas carols, the troops sensed their common humanity, and the natural human aversion to killing broke through to their consciousness and somehow overcame the brain-washing and pro-war propaganda that they had all been subjected to.

However it happened, for a precious day or two free from the carnage, these men rose to a higher level of humanity and could not be motivated to continue the killing.

Once the spirit of peace was felt, soldiers on both sides dropped their weapons and came out of their trenches to meet their former enemies face-to-face. They had to step around shell holes and frozen corpses, which were soon given respectful burials. And former enemies helped one another with that gruesome and solemn task

And yet there was a celebration of peace and new-found friendship. Pictures from home were shared, as were chocolates, cigarettes, beer, wine, schnapps and soccer games. Addresses were exchanged and every soldier who genuinely experienced the drama was forever changed.

In the Insanity of War, Fostering Peace on Earth is Treason

Fraternization with the enemy (such as refusing to obey orders to kill) has historically been regarded by military commanders and politicians as an act of treason, severely punishable, even by summary execution on the battlefield.

In the case of the Christmas Truce of 1914, trying to not draw public attention to this wide-spread and potentially contagious incident, most commanding officers threatened summary executions and court martials but relatively few executions took place. There were still severe punishments, however, including the transfer of many of the German “traitors” to the even more lethal Eastern Front to kill and die there in the equally suicidal battles against Russian Orthodox Christian soldiers.

The Academy Award nominated movie that beautifully characterizes the spirit of the Christmas Truce is “Joyeux Noel” (French for “Merry Christmas”). “Joyeux Noel” tells a moving tale that has been adapted from the many surviving stories and letters from soldiers who had been there – most of which had not survived the war.

This unique story of war resistance needs to be retold over and over again if our modern-era false flag-generated, highly profitable, corporate-induced wars of empire are to be effectively de-railed.

Lessons that the Ever-present Glorification of War Propaganda is Keeping Americans From Learning 

These poisonous, contagious and futile wars are being endlessly fought by thoroughly indoctrinated, glorification-of-war-influenced male adolescents who, unbeknownst to them, are at high risk of becoming physically, mentally and spiritually damaged because of their training and combat experiences.

These psychologically/spiritually immature (but physically hyper-mature and testosterone-loaded) recruits are highly likely to be doomed to a life overwhelmed by the mental ill health realities of PTSD and sociopathic personality disorder. Those violence-induced realities result in preventable depression, suicidality, homicidality, loss of religious faith, permanent and incurable traumatic brain injuries, toxic drug use (including both legal prescription drugs and illegal street drugs) and a host of other nearly impossible-to-cure problems.

Now, a century after the “war to end all wars”, there are any number of new combat wounds that include 1) post-Anthrax over-vaccination-induced autoimmune and neurological disorders, 2) psychiatric/neurological disorders from a host of new neurotoxic and addictive psychiatric drugs, 3) radiation poisoning from inhaling the dust from depleted uranium armor-piercing weaponry that will poison forever the DNA of soldiers and possibly even future sexual partners and offspring.

Profiteering militarists, corporate oligarchs and corporate-captured politicians do whatever it takes to keep their over-entertained and distracted citizen-subjects from recognizing the humanity of their enemies, whether they are Palestinians, etc. etc/ Iranians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Vietnamese, Chinese, North Koreans, Cubans, Venezuelans, War Refugee immigrant asylum-seekers from countries that have become uninhabitable because of American economic and/or military policies.

Military chaplains, who are supposed to be nurturers of the souls of those soldiers who are in their care, never talk about Jesus’ Golden Rule, his clear command to love their enemies or the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount.

Military chaplains in particular are part of the apparatus of war that pays no attention to most of the Ten Commandments, especially the one that says: “thou shalt not kill” or “thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s oil”. In their defense, military chaplains, in their seminary training and, sadly, even in their Sunday School upbringing, may have never heard about the profoundly important gospel truths about non-domination, non-retaliation, unconditional love and the rejection of enmity.

Theological Blind Spots in Times of War 

These theological blind spots are well-illustrated near the end of the “Joyeux Noel” movie. In a particularly powerful scene there was a confrontation between the Christ-like, antiwar Scottish chaplain and his pro-war bishop that occurred just as the chaplain was administering the “last rites” to a dying soldier. The bishop had come to chastise the chaplain and relieve him of his duties because of his “treasonous and shameful” behavior on the battlefield (ie, being merciful to the enemy and fraternizing with them).

The authoritarian, German-hating bishop refused to listen to the fact that on Christmas Eve the chaplain had just performed “the most important mass of my life” (involving German and Jewish enemy troops). This Christ-like chaplain wished to stay with the troops that were losing their faith, but the bishop angrily denied the chaplain’s request to remain with his men.

Then the bishop, having just de-frocked his chaplain, delivered a rousing pro-war sermon, the exact words of which had been chosen by the film-writers from a homily that had actually been delivered by an Anglican bishop in England later in the war.

The sermon was addressed to the fresh troops that had to be brought in to replace the newly pacifist veteran combatants, who were logically refusing to continue kill their fellow humans on the other side of the battle line.

The dramatic but subtle response of the chaplain to his sacking should be a clarion call to the Christian church leadership in our militarized so-called “Christian” nation – both clergy and lay: the chaplain removed the crucifix from around his neck and left it dangling on a post as he walked out the door. One wonders what happened to his faith in the teachings of Jesus.

“Joyeux Noel” is an important film that deserves to be annual holiday fare. It has ethical lessons far more powerful than “It’s A Wonderful Life” or “A Christmas Carol”.

The lessons of the 1914 Christmas Truce story is summarized in John McCutcheon’s famous – but censored-out – song, “Christmas in the Trenches”:

Christmas in the Trenches 

By John McCutcheon

My name is Francis Tolliver, I come from Liverpool.
Two years ago, the war was waiting for me after school.
To Belgium and to Flanders, to Germany to here,
I fought for King and country I love dear. 

’Twas Christmas in the trenches where the frost so bitter hung,
the frozen fields of France were still, no Christmas song was sung,
our families back in England were toasting us that day,
their brave and glorious lads so far away.

I was lying with my messmate on the cold and rocky ground,
when across the lines of battle came a most peculiar sound.
Says I “Now listen up, me boys!”, each soldier strained to hear
as one young German voice sang out so clear. 

“He’s singing bloody well, you know!” my partner says to me.
Soon, one by one, each German voice joined in in harmony.
The cannons rested silent, the gas clouds rolled no more
as Christmas brought us respite from the war.

 As soon as they were finished and a reverent pause was spent,
‟God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen”, struck up some lads from Kent.
The next they sang was ‟Stille Nacht”, “Tis ‟Silent Night”, says I
and, in two tongues, one song filled up that sky. 

“There’s someone coming towards us!” the frontline sentry cried,
all sights were fixed on one lone figure coming from their side.
His truce flag, like a Christmas star, shone on that plain so bright
as he bravely strode unarmed into the night.

Then, one by one on either side walked into no man’s land,
with neither gun nor bayonet, we met there hand to hand,
we shared some secret brandy and wished each other well,
and in a flare-lit soccer game we gave ’em hell.

We traded chocolates, cigarettes, and photographs from home,
these sons and fathers far away from families of their own.
Young Sanders played his squeeze box and they had a violin,
this curious and unlikely band of men.

Oh, soon daylight stole upon us and France was France once more;
with sad farewells, we each began to settle back to war,
but the question haunted every heart that lived that wondrous night
“Whose family have I fixed within my sights?” 

’Twas Christmas in the trenches, where the frost so bitter hung,
the frozen fields of France were warmed as songs of peace were sung.
For the walls they’d kept between us to exact the work of war
had been crumbled and were gone for evermore.

Oh, my name is Francis Tolliver, in Liverpool I dwell,
each Christmas come since World War I I’ve learned its lessons well,
that the ones who call the shots won’t be among the dead and lame,
and on each end of the rifle we’re the same.

“And so this is Christmas
And what have we done
Another year over
A new one just begun.
And so happy Christmas
We hope you have fun
The near and the dear one
The old and the young.
A very Merry Christmas
And a happy new year
Let’s hope it’s a good one
Without any fear.
War is over, if you want it
War is over now.”

― John Lennon & Yoko Ono, Happy Xmas (War Is Over)

What a year.

It feels as if government Grinches and corporate Scrooges have been working overtime to drain every last drop of joy, kindness and liberty from the world.

After endless months of gloom and doom, it’s hard not to feel like Charlie Brown in A Charlie Brown Christmas as he struggles to feel happy and find the true meaning of Christmas in the midst of rampant commercialism, political correctness and the casual cruelty of an apathetic, self-absorbed, dog-eat-dog world.

Then again, isn’t that struggle to overcome the darkness and find the light within exactly what Christmas—the celebration of a baby born in a manger—is all about? The reminder that we have not been forgotten or forsaken. Glad tidings in the midst of hard times. Goodwill to counter meanness. Innocence in the face of cynicism. Hope in the midst of despair. Comfort to soothe our fears. Peace as an answer to war. Love that conquers hate.

As “fellow-passengers to the grave,” we all have a moral duty to make this world (or at least our small corners of it) just a little bit kinder, a little less hostile and a lot more helpful to those in need.

No matter what one’s budget, religion, or political persuasion, there is no shortage of things we can each do right now to pay our blessings forward and recapture the true spirit of Christmas.

For starters, move beyond the “us” vs. “them” mentality. Tune into what’s happening in your family, in your community and your world, and get active. Show compassion to those in need, be kind to those around you, forgive those who have wronged you, and teach your children to do the same. Talk less, and listen more. Take less, and give more. Stop being a hater. Stop acting entitled and start being empowered. Learn tolerance in the true sense of the word. Value your family. Count your blessings. Share your blessings. Feed the hungry, shelter the homeless and comfort the lonely and broken-hearted. Bridge bridges, and tear down walls. Stand for freedom. Strive for peace.

One thing more: make time for joy and laughter. Shake off the blues with some Christmas tunes, whatever fits the bill for you, be it traditional carols, rollicking oldies, or some rocking new tunes. Watch a Christmas movie that reinforces your faith in humanity.

Here are ten of my favorite Christmas movies and music albums to get you started.

First the movies.

It’s A Wonderful Life (1946). An American classic about a despondent man, George Bailey who is saved from suicide by an angel working to get his wings. This film is a testament to director Frank Capra’s faith in people. Sublime performances by James Stewart and Donna Reed.

The Bishop’s Wife (1947). An angel comes to earth in answer to a bishop’s prayer for help. Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young help energize this tale of lost visions and longings of the heart.

Miracle on 34th Street (1947). By happenchance, Kris Kringle is hired as Santa Claus by Macy’s Department Store in New York City for the Thanksgiving Day Parade. Before long, Kringle, who believes himself to be the one and only Santa Claus, has impacted virtually everyone around him. Funny, witty and heartwarming, this film is stocked with some fine performances from Maureen O’Hara, John Payne and young Natalie Wood. Edmund Gwenn won the Academy Award for best supporting actor for his role as Saint Nick.

A Christmas Carol (1951). This is the best film version of the penny-pinching Scrooge’s journey to spiritual enlightenment by way of visits from supernatural visitors. Alastair Sim as Scrooge gives one of the finest film performances never to win an Oscar. The Man Who Invented Christmas (2017) provides a wonderful glimpse into how Charles Dickens came to write A Christmas Carol.

A Christmas Story (1983). Ralphie is a young boy obsessed with one thing and only one thing: how to get a Red Ryder BB-gun for Christmas. Ralphie’s parents are wary, and his mother continually warns him that “you’ll shoot your eye out.” Based on Jean Shepherd’s autobiographical book In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, at the heart of this timeless comedy is the universal yearning of a child for the magic of Christmas morning. A great cast, which includes Darren McGavin, Peter Billingsley, Melinda Dillon and a voice-over narrative by Shepherd himself.

One Magic Christmas (1985). If you grew up in a family where times were tough, this film is for you. A guardian angel comes to earth to help a disillusioned woman who hates Christmas. This tale of redemption and second chances is a delight to watch. And Harry Dean Stanton makes a first-class offbeat angel.

Prancer (1989). This story of an eight-year-old girl who believes that an injured reindeer in her barn is actually one of Santa’s reindeer is one of the most down-to-earth Christmas films ever made. It’s a testament to the transforming power of love and childhood innocence. Sam Elliott and Cloris Leachman are fine in supporting roles, but Rebecca Harrell shines. Filmed on location in freezing, snowy weather, this film is a treat for those who love Christmas.

Home Alone (1990). Eight-year-old Kevin, accidentally left behind at home when his family flies to Paris for Christmas, thinks he’s got it made. Hijinks ensue when two burglars match their wits against his. A funny, tender tribute to childhood and the bonds of family.

Elf (2003). Another modern classic with a lot of heart. Buddy, played to the hilt by Will Ferrell, is a human who was raised by elves at the North Pole. Determined to find his birth father, Buddy travels to the Big Apple and spreads his Christmas cheer to everyone he meets. This film has it all: Santa, elves, family problems, humor, emotion and above all else, a large dose of the Christmas spirit. One of the best Christmas movies ever made.

The Christmas Chronicles (2018). The story of a sister and brother, Kate and Teddy Pierce, whose Christmas Eve plan to catch Santa Claus on camera turns into an unexpected journey that most kids could only dream about. Kurt Russell’s star turn as Santa makes for movie magic.

Now for the music.

Out of the hundreds of Christmas albums I’ve listened to over the years, the following, covering a broad range of musical styles, moods and tastes, each in its own way perfectly captures the essence of Christmas for me.

It’s Christmas (EMI, 1989): 18 great songs, ranging from John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” to Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” The real treats on this album are Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas,” Kate Bush’s “December Will Be Magic Again” and Aled Jones’ “Walking in the Air.”

Christmas Guitar (Rounder, 1986): 28 beautifully done traditional Christmas songs by master guitarist John Fahey. Hearing Fahey’s guitar strings plucking out “Joy to the World,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “Jolly Old Saint Nicholas,” among others, is a sublime experience.

Christmas Is A Special Day (The Right Stuff, 1993): 12 fine songs by Fats Domino, the great Fifties rocker, ranging from “Amazing Grace” to “Jingle Bells.” The title song, written by Domino himself, is a real treat. No one has ever played the piano keys like Fats.

Christmas Island (August/Private Music, 1989): “Frosty the Snowman” will never sound the same after you hear Leon Redbone and Dr. John do their duet. Neither will “Christmas Island” or “Toyland” on this collection of 11 traditional and rather offbeat songs.

A Holiday Celebration (Gold Castle, 1988): The classic folk trio Peter, Paul & Mary, backed by the New York Choral Society, sing traditional and nontraditional holiday fare on 12 beautifully orchestrated songs. Included are “I Wonder as I Wander,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” and “The Cherry Tree Carol.” Also thrown in is Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

The Christmas Album (Columbia, 1992): Neil Diamond sings 14 songs, ranging from “Silent Night” to “Jingle Bell Rock” to “The Christmas Song” to “Come, O Come Emmanuel.” Diamond also gives us a great rendition of Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over).” A delightful album.

A Charlie Brown Christmas (Fantasy, 1988): 12 traditional Christmas songs by the Vince Guaraldi Trio. The pianist extraordinaire and his trio perform “O Tannenbaum,” “The Christmas Song” and “Greensleeves.” Also included is the Charlie Brown Christmas theme.

The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (Fuel Records, 2003): If you like deep-rooted traditional holiday songs, you’ll love this album. The 16 songs range from “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” to Ian Anderson originals such as “Another Christmas Song” and “Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow.” With Anderson on flute and vocals, this album has an old world flavor that will have you wanting mince pie and plum pudding.

A Twisted Christmas (Razor Tie, 2006): Twisted Sister, the heavy metal group, knocks the socks off a bevy of traditional and pop Christmas songs. Dee Snider’s amazing vocals brings to life “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,” “Deck the Halls,” “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” among others—including “Heavy Metal Christmas (The Twelve Days of Christmas).” Great fun and a great band.

Songs for Christmas (Asthmatic Kitty, 2006): In 2001, independent singer/songwriter Sufjan Stevens set out to create a Christmas gift through songs for his friends and family. It eventually grew to a 5-CD box set, which includes Stevens’ original take on such standards as “Amazing Grace” and “We Three Kings” and some inventive yuletide creations of his own. A lot of fun.

Before you know it, Christmas will be a distant memory and we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming of politics, war, violence, materialism and mayhem.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, there may not be much we can do to avoid the dismal reality of the American police state in the long term—not so long as the powers-that-be continue to call the shots and allow profit margins to take precedence over the needs of people—but in the short term, I hope you’ll do your part to “spread a smile of joy” and “throw your arms around the world at Christmastime.”

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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.

Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His new book Battlefield America: The War on the American People  is available at www.amazon.com. Whitehead can be contacted at [email protected].

Featured image is from Boise

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was brought from Belmarsh Prison yesterday to appear in person at Westminster Magistrates Court and provide video-link witness testimony in the Spanish prosecution of David Morales, the founder of security firm UC Global. Morales, a former Spanish military officer, is accused of spying on Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy and was charged in October with privacy violation, bribery and money laundering.

The hearing was held in private session. No members of the media or the public were allowed inside the courtroom to see or hear Assange, on the remarkable grounds that the Spanish prosecution of UC Global involves “matters of national security.” His appearance took place 24 hours after he appeared via video-link in a case management hearing ahead of the scheduled February 24 trial on the application by the United States to extradite him. Assange has been charged with 17 counts of espionage and is threatened with life imprisonment over his role in WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents leaked by whistleblower Chelsea Manning which exposed US war crimes and diplomatic intrigues.

The Morales case has major implications for the US extradition attempt. UC Global was contracted by the Ecuadorian government to provide security for its embassy in London, where Assange sought and was granted political asylum in June 2012. Instead of protecting Assange, Morales’s company is known to have illegally monitored and recorded every aspect of his personal life from 2015 until March 2018. Investigations published by Spanish newspaper El Paisand Italian newspaper La Repubblica have uncovered evidence that leaves little doubt the surveillance was carried out on behalf of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Among the numerous conversations that were illegally spied on were confidential discussions between Assange and his lawyers and doctors, meaning his fundamental legal right to privacy in these matters was violated.

Assange’s British lawyers made clear again yesterday that they intend to use the evidence arising from the UC Global case to argue that the extradition application should be rejected out-of-hand, as it further proves he will not receive a fair trial in the US. A major precedent was set in the 1970s, when the case against Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg was quashed following the revelation that President Richard Nixon had overseen spying on consultations between Ellsberg and his doctors.

The importance of the UC Global case was underscored when British authorities initially refused to comply with the European Investigation Order (EIO) issued by Spanish Judge José de la Mata requesting that Assange be made available to provide witness testimony. His appearance yesterday only took place due to considerable media coverage of a formal complaint by de la Mata. El Pais observed that the backdown took place because Britain’s stance was “viewed as resistance to an investigation that could hinder Assange’s extradition to the US.”

Morales and UC Global greatly enhanced security equipment and procedures at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2017, the same year Trump announced a stepping up of US intelligence operations against Assange. This included fitting cameras with recording devices and putting secret microphones throughout the spaces used by Assange in the embassy.

According to La Repubblica journalist Stefania Maurizi, who obtained files evidencing UC Global’s spying operation, among those recorded were doctors, journalists, politicians and celebrities who visited Assange. UC Global compiled profiles on Assange’s London-based lawyer Jennifer Robinson and the head of his legal team in Spain, Baltasar Garzon. A series of photographs seen by Maurizi shows that Garzon was also followed. Her own phone and USB sticks were tampered with.

Maurizi wrote on November 18: “Nothing and no one was spared. Even the most inviolable meetings were violated—video and audio footage seen by Repubblica show a half-naked Julian Assange during a medical check-up, the Ecuadorian ambassador Carlos Abad Ortiz and his staff during one of their diplomatic meetings, two of Assange’s lawyers, Gareth Peirce and Aitor Martinez, entering the women’s bathroom for a private conversation with their client.

“It was Julian Assange who suggested holding the legal meetings inside the women’s toilet due to his suspicion of being under intense surveillance. Lawyers had considered it paranoid on Assange’s part, and UC Global had reassured them on this count, but in reality microphones had even been placed inside the women’s toilet.” (See: “A massive scandal: how Assange, his doctors, lawyers and visitors were all spied on for the US”)

According to the New York Times, the 61-page court filing issued by the Spanish public prosecutor states that the information collected in the embassy was sent to UC Global’s headquarters in Jerez de la Frontera, in southern Spain.

In a hearing before Judge José de la Mata, Morales has claimed that all recordings were taken on behalf of the Ecuadorian secret service and that the work was known to the country’s ambassador. He claims that “there was absolutely no outside access” to any information gathered inside the embassy. However, testimony taken from former company employees alleges that Morales travelled once or twice a month to the United States and took hard disks of recordings with him. The employees also allege that Morales ordered them to keep these trips secret from Ecuadorian officials.

In 2015, Morales signed a contract with the casino company Las Vegas Sands, which the prosecution claims functioned as his go-between with the CIA. The owner of Las Vegas Sands is Sheldon Adelson, “one of the main donors to the Republican Party and a personal friend of Donald Trump,” according to El Pais.

Morales is alleged to have returned from a security fair in Las Vegas and told an employee: “From now on, we play in the first league… We are now working for the dark side”—explaining that this meant working for US agencies.

Speaking outside the court yesterday, the former Ecuadorian legal consul in London, Fidel Navraez, rejected Morales’s claim that the surveillance was carried out on behalf of Ecuadorian agencies. “That company [UC Global] was contracted by Ecuador in order to protect the embassy, protect Julian Assange, protect the embassy staff… but it is a corrupt company, we know that now,” he stated.

Illegal spying is just one of the host of outrages perpetrated against Assange by the US, British, Swedish, Ecuadorian and Australian governments. On Thursday, Assange’s legal team submitted several bundles of evidence to be presented in his defence against US extradition early next year. These covered the blatantly political nature of the Espionage Act charges levelled by the US government, evidence relating to Chelsea Manning, public statements by US politicians denouncing Assange and WikiLeaks which jeopardise any prospect of a fair trial, as well as evidence relating to abuse of due process, vindictive prison conditions and denial of medical treatment.

Speaking with the New York Times, Amy Jeffress, a former Justice Department attaché at the American embassy in London, claimed that the illegality exposed in the UC Global case was not relevant to Assange’s extradition. According to the Times, she asserted that “the legal standard is whether extradition would comply with Britain’s Human Rights Act, which protects the right to privacy but balances it against considerations like national security and fighting crime.”

Such statements serve only to underscore the hostility within the political establishment for the fundamental legal rights and democratic principles at stake in the case of Julian Assange. Assange has never committed a crime. In the public interest, and in partnership with major newspapers around the world, WikiLeaks published leaked documents that revealed rampant criminality on the part of the American and other governments.

The relentless nine-year persecution of Assange—including the flagrant violation of his human rights and the monitoring of his every word and movement while he was supposed to be protected by political asylum—is aimed at terrorising all would-be whistleblowers and journalists into silence.

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Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

At the end of the nineteenth century, Lord Palmerston stated what he thought was obvious, that “England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only eternal and perpetual interests.” Palmerston was saying that national interests should drive the relationships with foreigners. A nation will have amicable relations most of the time with some countries and difficult relations with some others, but the bottom line should always be what is beneficial for one’s own country and people.

If Palmerston were alive today and observing the relationship of the United States of America with the rest of the world, he might well find Washington to be an exception to his rule. The U.S., to be sure, has been adept at turning adversaries into enemies and disappointing friends, and it is all done with a glib assurance that doing so will somehow bring democracy and freedom to all. Indeed, either neoliberal democracy promotion or the neoconservative version of the same have been seen as an overriding and compelling interest during the past twenty years even though the policies themselves have been disastrous and have only damaged the real interests of the American people.

The U.S. relationship with Israel is, for example, driven by a powerful and wealthy domestic lobby rather than by any common interests at all yet it is regularly falsely touted as being between two “close allies” and “best friends.” It has cost Americans hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies for the Jewish state and Israeli influence over U.S. policy in the Middle East region has led to catastrophic military interventions in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Mogadishu and Libya. Currently, Israel is agitating for U.S. action against the nonexistent Iranian “threat” while also unleashing its lobby in the United States to make illegal criticism of any of its war crimes, effectively curtailing freedom of speech and association for all Americans.

Far more dangerous is the continued excoriation of the Kremlin over the largely mythical Russiagate narrative. Congress has recently approved a bill that would give to Ukraine $300 million in supplementary military assistance to use against Russia. The money and authorization appear in the House of Representatives version of the national defense authorization act (NDAA) that passed last week.

The bill is a renewal of the controversial Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative that Donald Trump allegedly manipulated to bring about an investigation of Joe Biden’s son Hunter. The new version expands on the former assistance package to include coastal defense cruise missiles and anti-ship missiles as offensive weapons that are acceptable for export to Kiev. It also authorizes an additional $50 million in military assistance on top of the $250 million congress had granted in last year’s bill, “of which $100 million would be available only for lethal assistance.”

Ukraine sought the money and arms to counter Russian naval dominance in the Black Sea through its base at Sevastopol in the Crimea. One year ago the Russian navy captured three Ukrainian warships and Kiev was unable to push back against Moscow because it lacked weapons designed to attack ships. Now it will have them and presumably it will use them. How Russia will react is unknowable.

Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s Deputy Prime Minister for European and Euro-Atlantic Integration, has been in Washington lobbying for the additional military assistance. He has had considerable success, particularly as there is bipartisan support in Congress for aid to Kiev and also because the Trump Departments of Defense and State as well as the National Security Council are all on board in countering the “Russian threat” in the Black Sea. President Trump signed the NDAA last week, which completed the process.

Far more ominously, Kuleba and his interlocutors in the administration and congress have been revisiting a proposal first surfaced under Bill Clinton, that Ukraine and Georgia should be admitted to the NATO alliance. Like the $300 million in military aid, there appears to be considerable bipartisan support for such a move. NATO already has a major presence on the Black Sea with Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey all members. Adding Ukraine and Georgia would completely isolate the Russian presence and Moscow would undoubtedly see it as an existential threat.

The NDAA also provides seed money to initiate the so-called Space Force, which President Trump inaugurated by describing it as “the world’s newest war-fighting domain. Amid grave threats to our national security, American superiority in space is absolutely vital. We’re leading, but we’re not leading by enough, but very shortly we’ll be leading by a lot. The Space Force will help us deter aggression and control the ultimate high ground.”

If that isn’t bad enough, the new defense budget ominously also requires the Trump administration to impose sanctions “with respect to provision of certain vessels for the construction of certain Russian energy export pipelines.” Last week the House of Representatives and Senate approved specific sanctions relating to the companies and governments that are collaborating on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline that will cross the Baltic Sea from Vyborg to Greifswald to connect Germany with Russian natural gas. President Trump has signed off on the legislation.

The United States has opposed the project ever since it was first mooted, claiming that it will make Europe “hostage” to Russian energy, will enrich the Russian government, and will also empower Russian President Vladimir Putin to be more aggressive. Engineering companies that will be providing services such as pipe-laying will be targeted by Washington as the Trump administration tries to halt the completion of the $10.5 billion project.

Now that the NDAA has been signed, the Trump administration has 60 days to identify companies, individuals and even foreign governments that have in some way provided services or assistance to the pipeline project. Sanctions would block individuals from travel to the United States and would freeze bank accounts and other tangible property that would be identified by the U.S. Treasury. One company that will definitely be targeted for sanctions is the Switzerland-based Allseas, which has been contracted with by Russia’s Gazprom to build the offshore section of pipeline. It has suspended work on the project while it examines the implications of the sanctions.

Bear in mind that Nord Stream 2 is a peaceful commercial project between two countries that have friendly relations, making the threats implicit in the U.S. reaction more than somewhat inappropriate. Increased U.S. sanctions against Russia itself are also believed to be a possibility and there has even been some suggestion that the German government and its energy ministry might be sanctioned. This has predictably resulted in pushback from Germany, normally a country that is inclined to go along with any and all American initiatives. Last week German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas asked Congress not to meddle in European energy policy, saying “We think this is unacceptable, because it is ultimately a move to influence autonomous decisions that are made in Europe. European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S.”

German Bundestag member Andreas Nick warned that “It’s an issue of national sovereignty, and it is potentially a liability for trans-Atlantic relations.” That Trump is needlessly alienating important countries like Germany that are genuine allies, unlike Israel and Saudi Arabia, over an issue that is not an actual American interest is unfortunate. It makes one think that the wheels have definitely come off the cart in Washington.

The point is that Donald Trump, Mike Pompeo, Mike Pence and Mike Esper (admittedly too many Mikes) wouldn’t know a national interest if it hit them in the face. Their politicization of policy to “win in 2020” promoting apocalyptic nonsense like war in space has also reinforced an existing tunnel vision on what Russia under Vladimir Putin is all about that is extremely dangerous. Admittedly, Team Trump throws out sanctions in all directions with reckless abandon, mostly aimed at Russia, Iran, North Korea and, the current favorite, Venezuela. No one is immune. But the escalation going from sanctions to arming the Kremlin’s enemies is both reckless and pointless. Russia will definitely strike back if it is attacked, make no mistake about that, and war could easily escalate with tragic consequences for all of us. That war is perhaps becoming thinkable is in itself deplorable, with Business Insider running a recent piece on surviving a nuclear attack. New homes in target America will likely soon come equipped with bomb shelters, just like in the 1950s.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

Early on December 23, the Syrian Air Defense intercepted several missiles launched by Israeli warplanes from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the Lebanese area of Mount Hermon.

SANA claimed that the Israeli missiles reportedly fell in the area of Aqraba in the Damascus countryside. Pro-Israeli sources claim that all the missiles hit their targets. The real impact of the strike remains unclear.

The new Israeli attack in Syria took place as the Syrian Army and its allies were developing an important advance against terrorist groups in the Greater Idlib region. At the same time, ISIS increased their attack on military and civilian targets in the government-controlled part of Syria. It seems that some forces are very unhappy that Idlib militants are on retreat.

Meanwhile, the Syrian Army and pro-government militias liberated the villages of Khirbat Marata, Faul, Abu Dafna and Hadithi, and advanced on Taqana, Kafr Basin and Babulin, where clashes erupted.

The next target of the Syrian Army was the town of Jarjanaz, one of the key strong points of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation in the area. The liberation of the town opened a route to Maarat al-Numan, located on the M5 highway.

By advancing on Maarat al-Numan, the Syrian Army will be able to cut off supply lines of the remaining militants’ positions south of the town and thus get a chance to liberate the entire area.

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2019 has been a difficult year for the European Union (EU) and it appears 2020 will be no different with many challenges and issues remaining unresolved after a turbulent year. The most obvious issue is the lingering Brexit saga that was not achieved and questions remain whether it is likely to be achieved by UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson with the looming January 31 deadline.

The modality of divorce between the UK and its 27 ex-partners will be discussed for months as there still needs to be the discussion of trade agreements, which effectively has become a secondary issue. There are the issues of fishing quotas, tariffs and other economic issues. These will likely go to the background as the British have not considered these questions yet, and of course there are issues on the preservation of the “United” Kingdom with Scotland pushing for a second independence referendum and a United Ireland free of British colonialism becoming a real prospect.

Of course, there are also the issues of borders and security, something that must be a serious consideration during this ugly divorce. The EU loses vital intelligence if the financial and commercial separation does not also consider these areas. EU technocrats in Brussels may be suffering from the loss of the British market, but it would be more dangerous to weaken military and security ties.

Another worrisome issue for the EU would be the inevitable strengthening of commercial and diplomatic ties between the UK and their former colony, the United States.  It is expected the British and Americans will intensify their relations against Russia and China.

In this context, only French President Emmanuel Macron seems to want to move forward with a New European Order. Macron has become a revitaliser in empowering the EU and restoring relations with Moscow, going so far as to say that Europe reaches all the way to the Russian Asian-Pacific port of Vladivostok. It is for this reason that Macron was not afraid to go against NATO and endorses a pan-European security alliance independent of the U.S.

“Brain Dead” NATO was a complaint made by Macron. This comment saw the wrath of many members of the anti-Russian alliance against the French leader. Macron also told NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltemberg, that Russia is not a threat as part of the French leader’s vision is to bring Russia ‘back to Europe.’ Although Macron has some critical opinions towards Russia, his overall policy has been one of improving relations with Moscow, more so than any other major European power. Macron himself explained that although he has a clear vision for improving ties with Russia, this is being resisted by the so-called French “deep state,” as he calls it. Macron has unapologetically called for finding a resolution for Donbass and said that resolution of Syrian crisis needs Russian participation. Macron will continue into 2020 with efforts to improve relations with Moscow, despite domestic and foreign pressures.

It cannot be overlooked that Macron seeks to prevent Moscow from strengthening its ties with Beijing. This very issue demonstrates that the EU are not consistent with their China policy. There is little doubt that China has become a technological, diplomatic and military power. Beijing does not need permission from Brussels to sign commercial and strategic agreements with different EU members. EU members will need a more consistent policy towards China as it is currently divided. This needs to be achieved before the next EU-China Beijing summit in June 2020.

However, the roadblocks with Russia and China are clear for the EU. What they expect with the U.S., especially in a post-Brexit Europe, remains uncertain. This is coupled with the unpredictability of Donald Trump. With Russia and China, the EU maintains deep disagreements, but at least they are clear and each party knows what to expect. With the U.S., Europeans will have a harder time. It is expected that many EU leaders will be secretly hoping for Trump not to be re-elected next year so they can more easily pursue their own independent policies. Whether this is true or not remains to be seen. All attempts by the EU to understand Trump’s foreign and commercial policy only left them confused as he changes his ideas at a whim. Washington’s incoherence misleads the leaders of the EU and even Emmanuel Macron’s friendly or aggressive diplomacy has not succeeded in deciphering the intentions of the American president.

Make no mistake, for the EU, its unresolved and difficult issues of 2019 will just be carried over into 2020. Will Brexit happen? Will Macron successfully push European sovereignty away from Washington’s dominance? How will relations with Russia and China unfold?

2020 is just around the corner and we can only wait and see.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies.

This is not the first time that fake financial news has led to the tumble of stock values.

There is evidence that the 2008 plunge of the US automobile industry was in part the result of manipulation sustained by fake financial news reports:

“General Motors and Ford lost 31 per cent to $3.01 and 10.9 per cent to $1.80 despite hopes that Washington may save the industry from the brink of collapse. The fall came after Deutsche Bank set a price target of zero on GM.” (FT, November 14, 2008, emphasis added)

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Bloomberg News was fined $7.6 million, or five million euros, for reporting fake news that caused shares of French construction company Vinci to tumble.

Two journalists on the Speed Desk of the Paris office of the outlet, owned by Democratic presidential contender Michael Bloomberg, reported on Nov. 22, 2016, on a press release that was purportedly from Vinci, according to AMF, a financial markets watchdog in France.

The broader issue which is casually ignored by both the Philippines government and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) is that “golden” genetically modified rice (GMO) is slated to replace rice varieties which have been cultivated for centuries in the Philippines as well as throughout Southeast Asia. 

The bio-safety evaluation not to mention the focus on “nutritional requirements” is a smokescreen. 

The propaganda ploy consists in supporting the interests of the agro-biotech conglomerates to the detriment of the rice farmer and the local economy. 

What this means is that farmers can no longer reproduce their own seeds. 

Small farmers are obliged to buy GMO seeds. This is revenue for the biotech conglomerates including Monsanto. 

GMO agriculture increases the stranglehold of transnational corporations. In turn, the use of GMO seeds undermines the “reproduction of agriculture”.

Small farmers go bankrupt unable to pay their debts. They become landless farmers. 

GMO seeds undermine “the reproduction of real life”. 

Small-holder agricultural land is taken over. The use of GMO seeds ultimately leads to land concentration, food insecurity and mass poverty. 

The unspoken objective of GMO Golden rice is to trigger famine across the land, undermining rice production for local consumption. 

The impacts of GMO rice are amply documented.

There is a vast literature. GMO engineers famine and despair.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, December 24, 2019

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Philippines approves potentially unsafe GM golden rice for food and feed

by GM Watch

According to an announcement by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), the Philippines Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Plant Industry has stated that it has found GMO golden rice to be “as safe as conventional rice”.

The biosafety permit, addressed to the Department of Agriculture – Philippine Rice Research Institute (DA-PhilRice) and International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), details the approval of GR2E golden rice for direct use as food and feed, or for processing (FFP).

GMO golden rice is engineered to contain the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene and is claimed to target the problem of vitamin A deficiency in developing countries, including the Philippines.

The Stop Golden Rice Network described the move in a press release as “a blow to the millions of rice farmers and consumers not just in the Philippines but also among other countries in Asia where rice is the major staple food”.

The Philippines Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Plant Industry said it reached its decision “after rigorous biosafety assessment”. In 2018, Food Standards Australia New Zealand, Health Canada, and the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published positive food safety assessments for golden rice. A biosafety application is currently undergoing review by the Biosafety Core Committee in Bangladesh.

Not tested for safety

In spite of these opinions, no animal feeding studies have been released to the public that could attest to the food safety of this GM rice. Human trials have focused on efficacy (ability of the subjects to absorb the beta-carotene in the rice) and not safety. So claims of food safety are assumptions that are not evidence-based.

A paper published in 2008 by Prof David Schubert of The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, California, noted that there was “no discussion about safety” in a scientific paper promoting GM golden rice, “despite the fact that simple derivatives of beta-carotene are known teratogens [i.e. cause birth defects]”. Over a decade later, proponents of GM golden rice have still failed to engage in such a discussion.

Beta-carotene levels too low to make health claim – FDA

It’s possible that this particular danger may be averted by the failure of genetic engineers to jack up the beta-carotene in the rice to levels that could actually provide a health benefit – or cause adverse effects. The US FDA stated that GM golden rice does not meet the nutritional requirements to make a health claim. It said, “The concentration of beta-carotene in GR2E rice is too low to warrant a nutrient content claim.“

However, the truth is that we can’t be sure that this GM crop won’t cause teratogenicity problems. This is because the mechanism through which beta-carotene derivatives can cause birth defects is genotoxicity – damage to DNA. And it is a general principle of genotoxic agents that even when the individual doses are very low, they can cause an accumulation of DNA damage over time.

It has been scientifically proven that the beta-carotene in GM golden rice degrades in storage, meaning that breakdown products will accumulate in the rice that will then be eaten. No one has produced any research showing these breakdown products to be safe.

Dr Chito Medina, member scientist of MASIPAG, a farmer-scientist group in the Philippines that opposes GM golden rice, said, “The risks of golden rice far outweigh its supposed benefits. We will be better off improving and diversifying the food crops in the farms and diets of our children to ensure that proper nutrition is achieved.”

What, no butter?

Even if the GM golden rice destined for the Philippines were miraculously to be found to contain enough beta-carotene to make a difference, that in itself would not help the poor and hungry. That’s because beta-carotene doesn’t work on its own – the body needs fat to absorb it. Subjects in a human trial of GM golden rice (designed to evaluate efficacy, not safety) were given butter to eat with the rice. If the target consumers for GM golden rice are too poor to afford a balanced diet and can only afford rice, as we are told, they are certainly too poor to buy butter. So there’s simply no point in launching GM golden rice.

The Stop Golden Rice Network said that undue focus on rice alone is a dangerous trap: “As a coalition of more than 30 organizations across Asia where most of the world’s rice is produced and consumed, we experiences first-hand the damaging public health impacts caused by promoting a single-crop diet. The Green Revolution launched in the 1960s pushed new, potentially high-yielding forms of rice on Asian farmers as a way to increase food production. As a result, white rice has come to dominate the once-diverse Asian diets — with dramatic health consequences.”

The Network explained, “Today, 60 per cent of all people suffering from diabetes are in Asia, 90 per cent of whom suffer type 2 diabetes, the preventable form of the disease. Scientists from Malaysia’s Endocrine and Metabolic Society claim that the soaring obesity in the country is due not to Western junk food, but to white rice. Unhealthy diets will worsen as long as the corporations continue to exert their influence over agricultural research and production and profit from it.”

The Network added, “The Philippines has managed to slash their Vitamin D deficiency (VAD) levels among vulnerable sectors with conventional nutrition programmes. The country experienced significant decrease more than half of VAD cases from 40.1% in 2003 to 15.2% in 2008, due to various interventions. IRRI also recognized this success but still harp on the slight increase of VAD over the next five years to justify the Golden Rice approval.”

The Network called for the Philippines authoritative bodies – the Department of Agriculture-Bureau of Plant Industry, PhilRice and IRRI – to protect and uphold the safety of the people not just in the Philippines but also in other target countries and halt the commercial propagation Golden Rice. The Network said, “malnutrition cannot be isolated from poverty and inequality,” adding that biofortification crops like golden rice do not address the root causes of poverty and malnutrition, but “risk blindly reinforcing it”.

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Saudi Arabia has deployed “dozens” of soldiers to a major oil field in eastern Syria’s Deir Ez-Zor in an  apparent effort to protect the group of Saudi and Egyptian Aramco experts who arrived in the area the previous week, reports have said.

According to the Arabic service of the Anadolu Agency, local sources said that the Saudi soldiers arrived at Al-Omar oil field aboard helicopters. The source also added that this coincided with the arrival of about 30 trucks carrying drilling and digging equipment, which entered Syrian territory from northern Iraq.

The Al-Omar oil field is the largest in the country, which was once seized by Daesh, it is currently under the control of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (formerly YPG), although there has been an increase in American troops being deployed in the area.

It is understood that investments will be made through contracts signed between Aramco and the US government whose own armed forces have steadily been increasing their military presence around the oil fields. Despite initially claiming to scale back troops from Syria, US President Donald Trump announced in October that America had “secured” and taken control of the oil in the Middle East.

The Syrian government, which has not authorised American military presence within its territory, has accused the US of “plundering” the country’s oil resources. Earlier today, the Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Al-Muallem met with his Russian counterpart in Moscow Sergey Lavrov affirming the need for a political solution to the crisis in Syria and mentioned the “looting” of Syrian oil by the US.

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Featured image: Saudi troops [SGT. H. H. DEFFNER/Wikipedia]

Endless US wars rage in multiple theaters throughout the year, including during the holiday season.

Throughout the post-WW II period, US presidents endorsed peace while waging hot wars and by other means on one country after another.

All wars are based on Big Lies and deception because truth-telling would destroy pretexts for waging them.

Washington’s only enemies are invented. No real ones existed since WW II ended.

Endless wars feed the US military, industrial, security, media complex — profiting hugely from mass slaughter, vast destruction and human misery.

Waging them is all about seeking control over other nations, their resources and populations, along with profit-making from setting the world ablaze.

They have nothing to do with humanitarian intervention, responsibility to protect, democracy building, or protecting the US from foreign threats.

Trump earlier said: “Our vision is one of peace, security and prosperity” — while calling for upgrading America’s military might, costing countless trillions of dollars.

With all related categories included, the US spends more on militarism, a global empire of bases, and endless warmaking than all other countries combined — while vital homeland needs go begging, while eroding social justice is on the chopping block for elimination to feed the war machine and corporate profit-making.

US rage for unchallenged global dominance by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives is humanity’s greatest threat.

On December 20, Trump signed the annual US warmaking budget into law. The measure creates a US Space Force as the Pentagon’s 6th branch, DJT saying: “This is a very big and important moment.”

Last February he said: “Our destiny, beyond the Earth, is not only a matter of national identity, but a matter of national security (sic).”

His Space Policy Directive at the time called on the US war secretary to develop plans for establishing a new service branch, its aim to dominate and wage future wars from space.

China slammed the idea, Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang saying:

“US actions are a serious violation of the international consensus on the peaceful use of outer space, undermine global strategic balance and stability, and pose a direct threat to outer space peace and security,” adding:

“We hope that the international community, especially the major powers concerned, will adopt a cautious and responsible attitude to prevent outer space from becoming a new battlefield and work together to maintain lasting peace and tranquillity in outer space.”

The Trump regime earlier falsely accused Russia and China of risking conflict in space by developing anti-satellite weapons.

Both countries are committed to peaceful development of space. Last August, Russia’s envoy to international organizations in Geneva Gennady Gatilov said the following:

“We call on all states to have a meaningful, constructive conversation to prevent an arms race in outer space with a view to jointly developing consensus measures to keep outer space free from weapons and thereby strengthen international peace and global security,” adding:

“There is no time to spare. Missing this chance will be a crime against future generations.”

In 2004, Moscow called for declaring space off-limits for militarization, 21 nations to date joining the initiative, no Western ones included.

Gatilov expressed concern saying: “Thanks to efforts made by individual Western countries, we are entering a new space era.”

“We can say with a high degree of probability that it will be marked by further degradation of trust between nations.”

Russia remains committed to “finding reliable ways to keep outer space free from weapons of any kind.”

He called for “a legally binding treaty on preventing the deployment of weapons in outer space based on the principles and norms of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.”

China expressed concern about a possible arms race in space because of Washington’s aim to militarize it, calling for an international ban on weaponizing space.

If US policymakers authorize it, China, Russia, and other countries will likely follow suit in self-defense.

The 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans nations from deploying WMDs in space, not conventional weapons.

Five treaties address space issues:

1. The 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting nuclear testing in outer space.

2. The 1968 Astronauts Rescue Agreement, requiring the safe return of astronauts and objects launched into space to their country of origin.

3. The 1972 Liability Convention, establishing procedures for determining the liability of nations damaging space objects of others.

4. The 1976 Registration Convention, requiring the registration of objects launched into space.

5. The 1984 Moon Agreement, establishing how space resources may be developed and used.

The 1972 SALT I Treaty, (US abandoned) 1987 INF Treaty, 1992 Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty, 1994 START I Treaty, and other international agreements deal with space-related issues.

The 1972 ABM Treaty banned testing or deploying weapons in space. The treaty became null and void after Bush/Cheney pulled out in June 2002.

If space is militarized, the threat of unthinkable nuclear war will increase.

The US Space Command (USSPACECOM) was created in 1985. Last December, Trump ordered it to be made a unified combat command for war under the US Strategic Command.

His order was a first step toward creating a space force for real time star wars.

Space is the final frontier. US hardliners want it militarized for future warmaking, the ominous direction where things are heading.

US National Security Strategy reserves the right to wage preemptive wars, including with first-strike nuclear weapons, against invented enemies.

The existence of nuclear weapons increases the chance of their being used by accident or design.

Crossing that rubicon could end life on earth. Nuclear disarmament and elimination of these weapons is the only sensible way to prevent it.

We have a choice. We can either end wars or they may end us.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Israel isn’t a member of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Clearly its ruling authorities will reject whatever conclusions it draws, if any, short of exoneration.

Since established by the Rome Statute in 2002, the court never held the US, other Western nations, or Israel accountable for  indisputable high crimes — just their victims.

Time and again, the court breached its mandate to “end  impunity for the perpetrators of the most serious crimes of concern” — including crimes of war and against humanity, aggression and genocide.

On December 20, ICC chief prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said the following:

“Today, I announce that following a thorough, independent and objective assessment of all reliable information available to my Office, the preliminary examination into the Situation in Palestine has concluded with the determination that all the statutory criteria under the Rome Statute for the opening of an investigation have been met,” adding:

“I am satisfied that there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine, pursuant to article 53(1) of the Statute.”

“I am satisfied that (i) war crimes have been or are being committed in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.”

Referring to summer 2014 Operation Protective Edge, she said:

“The Israel Defense Forces intentionally launched disproportionate attacks in relation to at least three incidents which the ICC has focused, as well as intentionally directing an attack against objects or persons using the distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions.”

Note: As Bensouda knows, preemptive war is naked aggression — forbidden by the UN Charter and other international law.

Israel is permanently at war on defenseless Palestinians throughout the Occupied Territories. There’s no ambiguity about its culpability.

Bensouda:

“There is a reasonable basis to believe that in the context of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, members of the Israeli authorities have committed war crimes in relation, inter alia, to the transfer of Israeli civilians into the West Bank since June 13, 2014 (sic).”

“Despite the clear and enduring calls that Israel cease activities in the Palestinian Territories deemed contrary to international law, there is no indication that they will end.”

“To the contrary, there are indications that they may not only continue, but that Israel may seek to annex these territories.”

Ignoring the UN Charter right of self-defense when preemptively attacked, Bensouda falsely claimed that there’s “a reasonable basis to believe that members of Hamas and Palestinian armed groups committed the war crimes of intentionally directing attacks against civilians and civilian objects; using protected persons as shields; willfully depriving protected persons of the rights of fair and regular trial and willful killing; and torture or inhuman treatment and/or outrages upon personal dignity.”

The above statement gives pause to whether her investigation will absolve Israel while holding Palestinians guilty of the “crime” of self-defense.

She also referred the case to a so-called Pre-Trial Chamber to adjudicate on the issue of a “territory,” a delaying tactic that could drag things out until her term of office expires in 2021.

She knows or should know that the “territory” is historic Palestine, 78% of which was stolen by Israel in 1948, the remainder in 1967.

Further, the State of Palestine is a Party to the Rome Statute State, what Bensouda understands.

A PA statement questioned her dubious procedure, saying:

“The State of Palestine notes that the Office of the Prosecutor already stated that it has jurisdiction over the entirety of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and that there are reasonable basis to believe that crimes have been committed therein,” adding:

“In this regard, the State of Palestine views this request as seeking a confirmation of the position already reached by the Office of the Prosecutor on jurisdiction.”

“The State of Palestine will partake in the judicial process to reaffirm that this matter is already clearly settled as a matter of international law.”

“The Office of the Prosecutor has jurisdiction over the occupied territory of the State of Palestine, given that Palestine is a State Party to the Rome Status and that the State of Palestine granted the Prosecutor jurisdiction to look into crimes committed in its territory.”

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Al Haq and Al Mezan said the following:

“After 71 years of continuing Nakba and (over) 52 years of military occupation, the time has come to end impunity for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the furtherance of its aggressive colonization of Palestinian territory, adding:

“We remind the PTC (Pre-trial Chamber), that the starting point in Palestine, unlike other contexts, is the framework of belligerent occupation under the Hague Regulations and Fourth Geneva Convention, which regulates Israel’s control and administration of the territory.”

“To reiterate, Israel does not have sovereign authority, but de facto administrative authority premised on actual and potential effective control in terms of military presence and substitution of authority, in the areas beyond the Green Line.”

“While states’ jurisdiction is primarily territorial, Israel, the Occupying Power, exercises extra-territorial jurisdiction in the occupied Palestinian territory for purposes related to the protection of the occupied population due to the fact that the area is under its temporary control and military occupation.”

“This does not in any way give Israel sovereign rights over the territory.”

“As such, the PTC examination of the question of territorial jurisdiction in the Situation of Palestine is a redundant and moot point, amounting to an unnecessary delay in the progression of the situation to full investigation.”

If Bensouda is serious about investigating Israel, (which appears not) she should get on with it straightaway.

Long-suffering Palestinians have been struggling for justice denied them since the infamous 1917 Balfour Declaration — calling for on a Jewish state on stolen Palestinian land.

Endless conflict, occupation, dispossession, and repression, along with social and cultural fragmentation are what beleaguered Palestinians have endured since that time – over 100 years of suffering, no end of it in sight, the world community dismissive of their rights, including the ICC since established.

There’s no ambiguity about Israeli crimes of war and against humanity, slow-motion genocide, and other atrocities against Palestinians since before and after the Jewish state was artificially created.

Its civilian and military officials should have been held accountable for their high crimes decades ago.

For long-suffering Palestinians, justice delayed is justice denied, the way it’s always been, including during Bensouda’s tenure as ICC chief prosecutor  since June 15, 2012.

The handwriting is on the wall — the same result likely to repeat from the ICC this time.

Bensouda is part of the dirty system. Challenging it might get herself investigated, replaced as ICC chief prosecutor, and/or perhaps something harsher.

What can’t go on forever won’t. One day, accountability for Israeli high crimes may arrive. The same goes for imperial USA and NATO.

Countless millions of corpses and surviving victims of their barbarism cry out for long denied justice.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image is from PNN

Human rights campaigners today vowed to appeal against a “knife-edge” divided tribunal ruling which allowed MI5 to continue authorising informants to commit serious criminal offences.

Privacy International, Reprieve, the Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) and the Pat Finucane Centre took legal action against the government over a policy the groups claim “purports to permit agents to participate in crime” potentially including murder, kidnap and torture.

The campaign groups said the policy effectively “immunises criminal conduct from prosecution” and asked the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) to declare the policy unlawful and grant an injunction to restrain further conduct.

But the tribunal today ruled the policy lawful by a 3-2 majority.

The judgment said that MI5 has “an implied power” under the Security Service Act “to engage in the activities which are the subject of the policy under challenge.”

But it said that “this does not mean that [MI5] has any power to confer immunity from liability under either the criminal law or the civil law.”

Reprieve director Maya Foa said:

“The IPT’s knife-edge judgment, with unprecedented published dissenting opinions, shows just how dubious the government’s secret policy is.

“Our security services play a vital role in keeping this country safe. But history has shown us time and again the need for proper oversight and common-sense limits on what agents can do in the public’s name.”

Privacy International’s legal officer Ilia Siatitsa said two of the IPT’s five members “produced powerful dissenting opinions” in an attempt to “uphold basic rule-of-law standards.”

Ms Siatitsa said:

“As one of them put it, it is wrong to ‘open the door to powers of which we have no notice or notion, creating uncertainty and a potential for abuse.’

“We think the bare majority of the IPT got it seriously wrong. We will seek permission to appeal to protect the public from this abusive secretive power.”

CAJ deputy director Daniel Holder said:

“The practice of paramilitary informant involvement in serious crime was a pattern of human-rights violations that prolonged and exacerbated the Northern Ireland conflict.

“Archival documents show that the unlawful nature of informant conduct here was known at the time and it appears policy since has been even more formalised.

“This close ruling is far from the end of the matter.”

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Featured image is from Morning Star

John and Yoko Lennon’s 1971 ‘Happy Christmas …’ song begins with “So this is Christmas and what have you done?….”. Well, this holiday season, replete with the usual suspects of mass consumer spending, massive traffic jams and accidents, mass pleas for all types of fundraising (some important and most just to lift our wallets), increased house of worship attendance, keen focus on the plight of the downtrodden (if only for but a few weeks), and of course the ever steady feelings of good cheer and gestures of love for all … excepting of course that son of a ***** who just took our parking spot at the crowded Big Box parking lot!

So many of my fellow citizens, most of them good and decent working stiffs, just stay oblivious to this Military Industrial Empire. The same month that President Cheetos cut food stamps, the ever saluting Bi Partisan Congress voted to increase our already obscene military spending by $ 22 billion. The new spending figure (not including many ‘black projects’ that even Congress knows squat about) will be around $ 740 billion in 2020. The House of Representatives vote was 377-48 in favor. In the Senate it was 86-8 in favor. Great work lackeys! One would surmise that as long as the ‘We are at War’ propaganda continues, the good folk out there will buy into that rhetoric… at their own demise. Why, you ask? What in the hell is wrong with celebrating our troops? Well, for starters, how many crippled and permanently traumatized Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq (phony war) vets do we have to stare at each day until we get the message? How many families that are permanently broken up from the dad or mom returning home in a box? Or how about the myriad of suicides and violent spousal abuses caused by those hornet’s nests overseas? Then of course we come to the millions of foreign citizens murdered or maimed for life by our war machine. Factor in the destruction of their infrastructures by our bombs and missiles. While I am on the subject of infrastructure, journalist Larry Romanoff had a great piece on the great Global Research site on December 18th entitled “The Crumbling of America“. He connects the tragedy of this crazy militarism and military spending to the lack of funds to repair and upgrade our nation’s failing infrastructure. Read that piece!

Since it is Christmas season, let’s now concentrate on the most ridiculous mindset of probably the majority of working stiffs. That being either the celebration or the apathy regarding the super rich. We have such a minute amount of super rich, like less than 1/2 of one percent  of our population who earn well over one million dollars a year. Of course, the really select group within that basket earn hundreds of millions, and even billions of dollars per year. This was once simply the CEO community of corporate Amerika. Now it bleeds into our media, sports and entertainment arena: Minions of empire who take to the airwaves earning mega millions a year. Sports athletes and coaches who earn mega millions. Singers, actors, directors and of course producers who match those figures on their paychecks. Working stiffs should finally get it, that these are ALL the people that we look up to… even worship for their talent. How dare any of them speak as if they are part of our world!

Finally, we come to the politicians. Check out how many of them are mega millionaires. It will astound you… or maybe not. It seems that our school system and media have for generations taught us that super rich people should be ‘looked up to’ because they have succeeded and we haven’t … YET! That is how they get away with this con job… the YET. Vote for the super rich person running for office because they must ‘know better’ than us. Oh really? So, we have this total scam of a Two Party/One Party system whereupon many of the top bananas are super rich. Look at this current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, President Cheetos, who loves to use our tax monies to throw at the Pentagon.  He has done nothing in the way of helping we working stiffs, while he continually rewards  the super rich who run Amerika. Sadly, more and more  working stiffs may very well vote again for him. We have a ‘progressive’ running for president like Senator Warren that cannot tell the crowds enough about her brothers who served, as she voted time and again for increases in phony war spending. (In 2017 she actually voted to grant more in military spending than what was requested by President Cheetos). Check it out. Now, running for president,  she comes up with this absurd plan to tax the super rich a mere 2%, ONLY of course if they earn at least $ 50 million a year. Wow, she really wants to come down hard on those super rich. Imagine, with tax rates now at a ceiling of 37 %, when they used to be 90% in 1961 and 70% in 1981, her plan is really going to hurt these super rich. And she is the more ‘moderate’ of the candidates, excluding Senator Sanders. Folks, you want to really have that fraction of 1 % of us pay their fair share, then do a 50% Surtax (with Zero deductions) on all income over one million dollars a year, with only their first million being taxed at the current rate.

The empire just loves Christmas. They get everything they want . They have many of us slide back into our houses of worship, looking to help the poor and downtrodden… even if but for the holiday season. They have the suckers fork out lots of money on presents and other holiday spending, along with oodles of gasoline fill-ups for all the visiting we will do. The empire can roll out our military dressed appropriately in camouflage at all the many public events, with of course the giant flag covering the arena or field of play. This is to ‘honor’ our brave warriors who are spending the holidays, most unfortunately (for them, not the criminals who sent them), overseas in some ‘War Zone’. What better advertising for the Military Industrial Empire at the holidays? Of course, the phony retired military brass and chicken hawk politicians who are now working for the Deep State will use that ‘fear card’ to keep the suckers in line.

You say ‘Happy Holidays’. I say…. HUMBUG!

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Philip A Farruggio is a contributing editor for The Greanville Post. He is also frequently posted on Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust and Off Guardian sites. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 300 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from Salon.com

India’s 2019 Citizenship Act expedites the process for persecuted minorities of Pakistani, Afghan and Bangladesh nationality who resided in India since 2014.

It applies only for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, Jains, and Parsis, Muslims excluded.

According to the UN Human Rights Office, the new law breaches laws, conventions and treaties to which India is a signatory.

“Fundament(ally) discriminatory in nature, (it) undermine(s) the commitment to equality before the law enshrined in India’s constitution and India’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, to which Indian is a State party, which prohibit discrimination based on racial, ethnic or religious grounds,” said the UN office, adding:

“Although India’s broader naturalization laws remain in place, (the new law) will have a discriminatory effect on people’s access to nationality.”

Promoted by BJP Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the measure got strong lower house (Lok Sabha)  support, much less in the upper house (Rajya Sabha), approved by a 125 – 105 margin.

At around 200 million, India has the world’s second largest Muslim population, exceeded only by Indonesia.

A 2015 analysis estimated the global Muslim population at around 1.8 billion, second only numerically to Christianity at over two billion.

India’s Muslims constitute about 15% of the population, making them a significant minority — numerically large in size.

The new Citizenship Law affords them second-class status on a par to how people of color in America and the West are ill-treated.

Large-scale protests in India continue against the law. Public gatherings were banned and Internet service cut to try stopping them.

Defying New Delhi’s orders, they continue, waving Indian flags and shouting anti-government slogans, wanting the law revoked.

Over the weekend, police reported 23 deaths from clashes with protesters, the true number likely higher.

At least 15 deaths occurred in Uttar Pradesh, mostly youths, at least some from live fire, hundreds arrested.

Eyewitnesses accused police of extreme violence, beating peaceful protesters, invading university dorms and accosting students.

Tear gas was fired into a library. Video footage showed journalists assaulted, violence committed by police, not protesters in most cases. Activists called for holding violent cops accountable for their human and civil rights abuses.

Authorities in several states said they won’t obey the new law, calling it unconstitutional.

What’s going on are the strongest anti-Modi protests since he took office in 2014.

On Friday, India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting ordered the nation’s electronic media to refrain from reports that could incite further violence — demanding “strict compliance.”

In Gauhati, Assam state capital, All Assam Students Union leader Samujjal Bhattacharya said:

“Our peaceful protests will continue till this illegal and unconstitutional citizenship law amendment is scrapped” — his view largely shared by countless others based on what’s going on.

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad slammed the new law at a news conference, following conclusion of a Kuala Lumpur Islamic summit, saying:

India is a secular state. “To exclude Muslims from becoming citizens…is unfair.”

Modi’s government lodged an official protest with Malaysia over his remark, accusing Mohamad of interfering in India’s internal affairs.

Prominent Indian historian Ramachandra Guha criticized the new law, saying:

“This piece of legislation strikes at the heart of the constitution, seeking to make India another country altogether. It is thus that so many people from so many different walks of life have raised their voices against it.”

Guha was detained by police for involvement in the protests, then released. When arrested, he said: “I am protesting non-violently, but look they are stopping us.”

News channel video footage showed him being dragged into custody by three policemen.

Opposition to the measure continues in much of the country, including by state leaders from regional parties.

Modi’s government said it won’t be repealed. In an effort to curb protests, two Indian telecom companies cut mobile services to parts of New Delhi on government orders.

Amnesty India executive director Avinash Kumar said the new “bigoted law legitimizes discrimination on the basis of religion. The people of the country have the right to protest against this law peacefully and express their views.”

Around 14 Delhi Metro Rail stations were shut. Blocked roads into the city caused large-scale traffic jams. A number of flights from New Delhi airport were cancelled.

In 2018, Modi’s government endorsed the Global Compact for Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration.

It commits nations to aid refugees, asylum seekers, and other migrants in situations where they’re vulnerable to arbitrary detention and mass expulsion.

India’s Supreme Court will review the new citizenship law. Perhaps it’ll have final say on whether it stands or is struck down as unconstitutional.

Protesters, jurists and human rights activists call for the latter disposition.

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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected]. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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.

Featured image is from UK India Business Council

Mentre si affrontano in un duro scontro sull’impeachment del presidente Trump, Repubblicani e Democratici depongono le armi per votare al Senato quasi all’unanimità l’imposizione di pesanti sanzioni contro le società partecipanti alla realizzazione del North Stream 2, il raddoppio del gasdotto che attraverso il Baltico porta il gas russo in Germania. Ad essere colpite sono le società europee che partecipano al progetto da 11 miliardi di dollari, ormai realizzato quasi all’80%, insieme alla russa Gazprom: l’austriaca Omv, la britannico-olandese Royal Dutch Shell, la francese Engie,  le tedesche Uniper e Wintershall, l’italiana Saipem e l’elvetica Allseas che prendono parte alla posa delle condotte.

Il raddoppio del North Stream aumenta la dipendenza dell’Europa dal gas russo, avvertono gli Stati uniti. Sono preoccupati soprattutto dal fatto che il gasdotto – attraversando il Mar Baltico in acque russe, finlandesi, svedesi e tedesche – bypassa i Paesi di Visegard (Repubblica Ceca, Slovacchia, Polonia, Ungheria), gli Stati baltici e l’Ucraina, ossia i paesi europei più legati a Washington tramite la Nato (ai quali si aggiunge l’Italia).

La posta in gioco per gli Stati uniti, più che economica, è strategica. Lo conferma il fatto che le sanzioni sul North Stream 2 fanno parte del National Defense Authorization Act, l’atto legislativo che per l’anno fiscale 2020 fornisce al Pentagono, per nuove guerre e nuove armi (comprese quelle spaziali), la colossale cifra di 738 miliardi di dollari, cui si aggiungono altre voci portando la spesa militare statunitense a circa 1000 miliardi di dollari. Le sanzioni economiche sulNorth Stream 2 si inseriscono nella escalation politico-militare contro la Russia.

Una ulteriore conferma viene dal fatto che il Congresso Usa ha stabilito sanzioni non solo contro il North Stream 2 ma anche contro il TurkStream che, in fase finale di realizzazione, porterà il gas russo attraverso il Mar Nero fino nella Tracia Orientale, la piccola parte europea della Turchia.  Da qui, attraverso un altro gasdotto, il gas russo dovrebbe arrivare in Bulgaria, Serbia e altri paesi europei. È la contromossa russa alla mossa degli Stati uniti, che nel 2014 riuscirono a bloccare il gasdotto South Stream. Esso avrebbe dovuto collegare la Russia all’Italia attraverso il Mar Nero e via terra fino a Tarvisio (Udine).  L’Italia sarebbe così divenuta un hub di smistamento del gas nella Ue, con notevoli vantaggi economici. L’amministrazione Obama riuscì ad affossare il progetto nel 2014, con la collaborazione della stessa Commissione Europea.

La Saipem (Gruppo Eni), colpita nuovamente dalle sanzioni Usa sul North Stream 2,  fu già pesantemente colpita dal blocco del South Stream: perse nel 2014 contratti per un valore di 2,4 miliardi di euro, cui si sarebbero aggiunti altri contratti se il progetto fosse andato avanti. Nessumo però allora, né in Italia né nella Ue, protestò per l’affossamento del progetto ad opera degli Stati uniti. Ora che sono in gioco gli interessi tedeschi, si levano in Germania e nella Ue voci critiche sulle sanzioni Usa al North Stream 2.

Si tace però sul fatto che l’Unione europea si è impegnata a importare dagli Usa gas naturale liquefatto (Gnl), estratto da scisti bituminosi con la distruttiva tecnica della frantumazione idraulica. Washington, per colpire la Russia, cerca  di ridurre il suo export di gas nella Ue, facendo pagare i costi ai consumatori europei. Da quando il presidente Trump e il presidente della Commissione Europea Juncker hanno firmato a Washington la «Dichiarazionecongiunta sulla cooperazione strategica Usa-Ue incluso il settore energetico», la Ue ha raddoppiato l’import di Gnl dagli Usa, cofinanziando le infrastrutture con una spesa iniziale di 656 milioni di euro. Ciò non ha però salvato le società europee dalle sanzioni Usa.

Manlio Dinucci

Capping months of mind-numbingly repetitive “debates,” the Democrats in the House of Representatives voted on Dec. 17 to impeach President Donald Trump on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The votes on each charge were nearly identical and almost entirely along party lines.

The Democrats’ impeachment case against the despicable Trump regime had nothing to do with what actually makes it despicable. Trump is openly racist, sexist, anti-environment, anti-labor, homophobic, anti-poor, anti-homeless, anti-Palestinian and more. But the Democratic party leaders’ impeachment strategy deliberately ignored all of that and instead revolved around the ludicrous charge that Trump weakened “our national security” by delaying a shipment of anti-tank missiles, sniper rifles, and other military equipment to Ukraine for war against Russia.

No mention was made in the whole impeachment process of immigrant children held in cages, massive attacks on the environment, huge cuts in food stamps, the seven U.S. wars currently underway, the viciously anti-people sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea and many other countries.

Largely lost in the massive mainstream coverage of impeachment was that on Dec. 17, backed by the Democrats’ leadership along with the Republicans and cleared by the House the previous week, a record $738 billion Pentagon budget, larger than the next 10 countries in the world put together, was passed by the Senate and sent on to Trump for signing. It included massive funding for a whole new branch of the military that Trump and the war makers demanded, the Space Force. The aim of the Space Force is to gain nuclear war-fighting superiority, posing a heightened danger to life on Earth.

Even while they fight with each other over who will control the state and governmental apparatus with all the power and wealth that confers, the Democrats and Republicans are united in defense of the Empire.

The overall effect of the impeachment fiasco has been to strengthen the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies politically. Military officers, intelligence agents, and imperialist diplomats have been praised to the skies and presented as heroic “defenders of democracy.”

The neo-con ideology of a new war against Russia has been promoted, and Ukraine, where Obama, Biden and the State Department worked with outright neo-Nazis to overthrow the elected government in 2014, held up as a “democratic ally.”

Now that they have impeached Trump, the Pelosi/Schumer Democrat leadership appears confused about what to do next. The Republican leaders in the Senate, where the actual trial of Trump must take place, have made it clear that they are ready to quickly vote to acquit. Pelosi shocked her supporters by stating, on the day after the House vote, that she might hold off on delivering the impeachment articles to the Senate for as long as a year! Trump himself appears to want to drag out the process, seeing it as helping his re-election campaign.

Impeachment, truly a road to nowhere.

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This article was originally published on Liberation News.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Organization of American States (OAS) election monitors  published a “final report” on December 4—22 days later than promised—on Bolivia’s October 20 presidential election, won by President Evo Morales. The tardy release of the final report contrasted sharply with the way the OAS rushed to impugn the election the day after it took place.

Only three days after the election, the OAS published a preliminary report that reiterated its negative assessment. On November 10, it then issued a press release saying the election should be annulled. In these statements, the OAS claimed that the change in Morales’ lead in the last 16% of the vote count was “drastic,” “inexplicable” and “hard to explain.”

By November 11, mutinous generals and police (combined with armed opposition vigilantes) had driven Morales into exile in Mexico. He and his vice president barely escaped with their lives. Morales’ house was ransacked. Since then, the security forces that refused to protect the democratically elected government have killed some 32 people to prop up the coup-installed dictatorship.

When the final OAS report on the election was belatedly released on December 4, a Reuters article (12/4/19) about it ran with the headline “Bolivia Election Rigging in Favor of Morales Was ‘Overwhelming’: OAS Final Report.” The only critic of the OAS report mentioned in the article was Morales himself.

But the OAS had come under heavy fire from US-based economists and statisticians ever since it began impugning the election on October 21. It’s impossible to learn that fact in 114 Reuters articles about Bolivia since the October 20 election. None even mentions the extensive technical criticism the OAS has received. The criticism should have received much more than a discrete mention in an article or two, but in over 100 articles, the London-based wire service didn’t even provide that. On December 12, I sent an email to several Reuters journalists and editors who have produced articles on Bolivia since October 20. I asked why that criticism has been completely ignored. None have replied.

On October 23, the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) issued a press release asking that the OAS retract its comments about the election. On November 8, the think tank published a paper rebutting the OAS. Mark Weisbrot, co-founder of CEPR, followed up with an op-ed in MarketWatch (11/19/19) that said the OAS “lied at least three times: in the first press release, the preliminary report and the preliminary audit.”

On November 25, four members of the US Congress asked the OAS to respond to very specific questions raised by CEPR. On December 2, the Guardian published a letter signed by 98 economists and statisticians asking the OAS to “to retract its misleading statements about the election, which have contributed to the political conflict and served as one of the most-used ‘justifications’ for the military coup.” Did Reuters really miss all of this?

Not ‘hard to explain’

The graph below substantiates much of CEPR’s case against the OAS. It also exposes common deceptions in Reuters reporting.

Chart: CEPR (11/19)

The light blue dots are a plot of Evo Morales’ lead over his nearest rival against the percentage of the vote counted by the unofficial “quick count.” The dark blue dots do the same for Morales’ political party (MAS) in legislative elections. Following OAS recommendations, Bolivia has a “quick count” (TREP) that keeps the public updated, and a slower, legally binding count (the computo). The legally binding count was never interrupted. The TREP stopped being published at 84% of the count, but the electoral authorities never committed to publishing it past the 80% mark.

Morales’ lead increased steadily as votes from the more pro-MAS areas came in. When the TREP was stopped at 84%, his lead was 7.9 points. By the time all the votes were counted, the official tally had him just over 10 points ahead. The 10-point margin was crucial because to avoid a second round, Morales needed at least 40% of the vote and a 10-point lead over his nearest rival. Morales received 47% of the vote, which was in line with what pre-election pollspredicted.

The two-point lead increase in the last 16% of the vote count was not “drastic”: It was consistent with a gradual increase in his lead throughout the election. It was also not “hard to explain”; CEPR’s precinct-level analysis of where the final votes were coming from showed it was quite predictable.

Parroting the OAS line, Reuters articles were deceptive. One article (11/6/19) stated the vote was “marred by a near 24-hour halt in the count, which, when resumed, showed a sharp and unexplained shift in Morales’ favor.” Others (11/4/19, 11/6/19, 11/6/19, 11/8/19, 11/8/19, 11/10/19) used very similar language describing a “halt” or “pause” to “the count”—thereby obscuring that there were two counts, and that the legally binding one was never halted.

Another deception in many articles was neglecting to tell readers that Morales already had a 7.9 point lead when the quick count was stopped. For example, one Reuters article (11/10/19) ran with the headline “How Did Bolivia End Up in Democratic Crisis?” It vaguely stated that the election seemed to be “heading to a second round” but after an (imaginary) “pause in the count,” Morales had a “10-point-plus lead.”

Notice how it’s left to the reader to imagine by how much Morales’ lead increased after the quick count was stopped. And Reuters also conveyed nothing about the trend. See the graph above. Morales did not have a constant 7.9 point lead for much of the election that suddenly jumped at the end. Nor was his lead declining when the quick count was stopped. The lead had been steadily increasing through almost the entire vote count.

The trend in the last 16% of the count was also extremely similar to what took place in a 2016 referendum on term limits that Morales narrowly lost—an election result viewed as sacrosanct by Morales’ opponents. In that election, there was also about a 2-point increase in the share of the vote for Morales in the last 16% of the vote.

Ducking debate

The Mexican government had agreed to let Jake Johnston of CEPR respond to the OAS final report at the permanent council meeting on December 12. The OAS refused to allow it. Johnston would have presented CEPR’s preliminary response to the 100-page final report. Reuters has thus far said nothing about the OAS ducking its main critics. Of course, to do that, Reuters would have to break its silence on the entire debate.

Among other things, CEPR observed that the OAS final report doubled down on its false claim of a “drastic” and “inexplicable” change in Morales’ lead; that the report focused on a “hidden server” and other “vulnerabilities” in the electoral system, but “conceals or fails to provide information” showing that those vulnerabilities impacted the results; that 226 tally sheets the report  claimed prove “deliberate manipulation” overwhelmingly point to a “well-known phenomenon: In rural areas and smaller voting centers, it is not uncommon for one person to fill in the tally sheet, and then have the individuals each sign it.” The OAS final report also shifted to claiming that manipulation occurred in the last 5% of the count, but Morales received a smaller share of the votes cast in the last 5% of the count compared to the previous 5%. Additionally, CEPR argued, his share of the vote in the last 5% was also “entirely predictable based on the prior trends seen in the geographic areas from where these final votes came.”

Incidentally, David Rosnick, also with CEPR, very recently refuted a separate statistical analysis that apologists for the coup have been citing—mainly on social media, since in outlets like Reuters, there is no debate to be followed at all.

OAS’s unmentionables

The bureaucracy of the OAS is based in Washington and is about 60% funded by the US government. In 114 articles, Reuters never mentioned this either. If the OAS were based in Caracas and 60% funded by Venezuela, do you think that would have been mentioned a few times? OAS “monitoring” of elections in Haiti in 2000, and again in 2011, was used to help Washington disgracefully overrule Haitian voters. The current OAS general secretary, Luis Almagro, recently blamed Cuba and cash-strapped Venezuela for huge protests against neoliberal policies in US-allied states: Colombia, Chile and Ecuador.

Morales, a close ally of Venezuela and Cuba, was gambling when he agreed to let the OAS monitor the election—especially given that the member states of the OAS have shifted towards right-wing, pro-US governments, giving much less of a counterweight to Washington’s influence within the OAS bureaucracy than in previous years. But not allowing OAS monitors would also have been dangerous, providing a different pretext for Washington and compliant outlets like Reuters to impugn the election. That could easily have resulted in the US imposing crippling economic sanctions—whose impact Reuters could also be relied on to bury (FAIR, 6/14/19).

It’s far more likely that Bolivia’s election was clean, and that the OAS audit was dirty, than the other way around. Unprincipled journalism from one of the world’s major news agencies has hidden that from a lot of people.

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Joe Emersberger is a writer based in Canada whose work has appeared in Telesur English, ZNet and CounterPunch.

Featured image is from FAIR

Kelley Vlahos has done excellent reporting on the terrible effects of toxic burn pits on Americans serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. The illnesses and deaths caused by this toxic exposure are among the ongoing, mostly ignored costs of decades of endless war. A new McClatchy report reminds us about other U.S. military personnel that have been exposed to hazardous materials that have caused dozens of them to get cancer. In this case, U.S. forces were based in Uzbekistan in the earliest days of the war in Afghanistan at a site contaminated by radioactive waste and the remains of chemical weapons:

U.S. special operations forces who deployed to a military site in Uzbekistan shortly after the 9/11 attacks found pond water that glowed green, black goo oozing from the ground and signs warning “radiation hazard.”

Karshi-Khanabad, known as K2, was an old Soviet base leased by the United States from the Uzbek government just weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks because it was a few hundred miles from al Qaeda and Taliban targets in northern Afghanistan.

The government has a responsibility to the people that it exposes to such deadly materials. The conditions at this base were clearly not safe for the troops that were sent there, and by exposing its personnel to such terrible conditions the military needlessly endangered them. There is no doubt that the military understood that there were hazardous materials on the site, but that didn’t stop them from continuing to send people there:

The Defense Department knew that K2 was toxic from the start, based on documents obtained by McClatchy that are being reported publicly for the first time.

After Uzbek workers who were preparing the grounds for arriving U.S. forces in October 2001 fell ill, U.S. Central Command directed an intelligence review of the hazards at the base.

“Ground contamination at Karshi-Khanabad Airfield poses health risks to U.S. forces deployed there,” said the classified report, dated Nov. 6, 2001, that was obtained by McClatchy.

That report found the “tent city” the military was building at K2 — including tents for sleeping, eating, showering and working — were “in some cases directly on top of soil that probably was contaminated” by four hazards.

One of those hazards was depleted uranium:

That angers K2 veterans who remember how the Defense Department moved the soil to create the berm, which exposed layers of contaminated soil that was then further dispersed by floods and wind, and during the winter months just became a muddy muck that stuck to everything.

“I never would have had depleted uranium in my system if I hadn’t gone to K2,” Bellard said.

She had chronic fatigue, headaches, respiratory issues and muscle twitches after her deployment and began looking for a cause. A VA-conducted urine test detected depleted uranium, but the amounts were too low to “have any health consequences related to it,” the agency notified her in June 2018.

Massey, who dug up the 250-pound explosive, had to leave the military just before he would have qualified for retirement benefits because of debilitating chronic migraines and other illnesses. He is now seeking additional medical care from the VA because he keeps collapsing without warning.

The Americans who served at this base are still paying a horrific price almost twenty years after they were there, and they are not receiving the assistance they deserve and need. As so often happens in these cases, U.S. forces are exposed to toxic materials while they are deployed as part of a military campaign, and then when they seek help from the government to treat the condition caused by that exposure they are denied:

At least 61 of the men and women who served at K2 had been diagnosed with cancer or died from the disease, according to a 2015 Army study on the base. But that number may not include the special operations forces deployed to K2, who were likely not counted due to the secrecy of their missions, the study reported.

As part of McClatchy’s continued investigation into the rising rates of cancers among veterans, members of those special operations forces units who were based at K2 are speaking out for the first time because of the difficulty they have faced in getting the Department of Veterans Affairs to cover their medical costs.

“After returning from combat years later, we are all coming down with various forms of cancer that the [Department of Veterans Affairs] is refusing to acknowledge,” said retired Army Chief Warrant Officer Scott Welsch, a special operations military intelligence officer who deployed to K2 in October 2001 [bold mine-DL]. He was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in 2014.

Members of Congress should demand a more extensive investigation into the harm that has been done to these veterans, and they should insist on securing these veterans funding for the proper care that they ought to have been receiving all along. The destroyed health and ruined lives of these veterans are part of the cost of the forever war that continues to be paid long after they return home. It is imperative that our government stop neglecting and forgetting these veterans, and it is vitally important to remember the terrible, long-term effects that war can have on them.

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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at TAC, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image is from CreativeCommons/Long Beach VA Hospital

On December 18, in Washington, DC, the CARICOM (bloc of Caribbean states) resolution presented to the OAS reads as follows:

“Rejection of violence and call for full respect for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Plurinational State of Bolivia.”

The Bolivian pro-US coup delegation, in order to stop the resolution from being adopted, claimed it could have been “more constructive and instead of supporting the intention of burning the country as Evo Morales wishes, and contribute to pacification.”

Granada began the meeting by pointing out that the Bolivian Project did not constitute amendments to the CARICOM Project, but a new draft Resolution. On the proposal of another small country, Belize, the Bolivian coup resolution was put to a vote.

The result of the vote on the Bolivian coup plotters’ project was as follows:

In favor 8: Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, USA, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay and Venezuela (represented by the pro US Guiadó)

Against: 17 Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Uruguay, Bahamas, Saint Kitts and Nevis.

Abstention 8: Canada, Costa Rica, Chile, Guatemala, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Peru and Honduras.

Absent 1 : Haiti

So, the Bolivian “government” project was rejected.

Then the ambassador of the United States proposed to vote on the draft Resolution of CARICOM, which resulted in the following, a bad surprise for the US and its OAS puppet Almagro:

In favor 18: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Guyana, Grenada, Jamaica, Mexico, Trinidad and Tobago, Nicaragua, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Suriname, Uruguay and Panama

Against 4: Bolivia, Colombia, USA, Venezuela (the representative of the self-proclaimed Guaidó).

Abstention 11: Canada, Costa Rica, Guatemala, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Peru, Honduras, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay

Absent: 1 Haiti

As a result, the Resolution “Rejection of violence and call for full respect for the rights of indigenous peoples in the Plurinational State of Bolivia” was approved. Great news!

Despite millions of Canadian workers CUPE (680,000 workers), CUPW (54,000) OFL (one 1 million), UNIFOR (300,000) & CLC (3 million) in favour of Evo and opposed to the coup, Canada abstained on the CARICOM resolution at the OAS. This raises serious issues about democracy, not in the pre-Evo Bolivia, nor in current Venezuela, but in Canada!

Trudeau had to take this “neutral stand” (as opposed to his very possible preference to vote against the just CARICOM the resolution) probably as a result of the strong movement in Canada against the coup and in favour of Evo.

This opposition to the Trudeau government’s Bolivia policy was completely censured by Canada’s corporate media. However, Trudeau must have seen the writing on the wall and thus took the cowardly stance, increasingly a trade mark of his government and himself as a politician.

Canadians have to go further and push the Trudeau government to abandon the U.S. altogether.

The OAS result shows that the soft diplomatic approach to Trudeau does not work. Rather, only massive and explicit opposition to his polices holds any sign of hope.

Dare to say the “T” Word, which in Canada does not mean “T” for Trump, which is a no-brainer, but “T” for TRUDEAU!

The OAS resolution is also a defeat for the international and national pressures to smother the anti- U.S. Imperialist sentiment of the Canadian people, and thus convert it into pitiful apologists for the Trudeau government.

Thus, the conclusion is to attend all actions, events, sign letters and petitions that target the Trudeau government on the all issues in Latin America including Chile and Haiti.

And also join the  International Speaking Tour in which I speak with others on the theme:

US-VENEZUELA-BOLIVIA-CUBA-CANADA: The Geopolitics.

One of our next stops is in OTTAWA, February 27, 7 PM. Save that date on your calendar.

Congratulations to the small country members of CARICOM: In many cases tiny islands but with the voice of a giant. They are always ready to speak out against U.S. imperialism, while huge, wealthy Canada is saddled with a pro-Trump government, faithful ally of US imperialism.

For background information on Bolivia, see my five articles here in Global Research.

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Arnold August is a Canadian journalist and lecturer, the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 Elections, Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion and Cuba–U.S. Relations: Obama and Beyond. He collaborates with many web sites, television and radio broadcasts based in Latin America, Europe, North America and the Middle East. Twitter  Facebook.

Featured image is from Andre Vltchek

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Christmas Greetings from Global Research

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Sandro Rizzo, Alberto Piccinni, and Marco Antonio Alessio as the Jolly Reindeer.

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Very special thanks to Linda Isobel Logan

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Noella (Be Nice) was written and composed by Laurence Llewellyn and Natacha Chossudovsky (Nat Ya), and produced by Justin Broad.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) yesterday introduced the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act. The bill will make permanent a ban on new uranium mining on about 1 million acres of public land adjacent to Grand Canyon National Park.

A companion bill has already passed the House with bipartisan support, following an effort led by tribal members and leaders, particularly the Havasupai Tribe with the support of the Hualapai, Hopi Tribe, Navajo Nation, National Congress of American Indians and Intertribal Council of Arizona. A broad coalition of business owners, local government leaders, conservation groups and others who oppose uranium mining in the Grand Canyon region also endorsed the House bill.

Conservation groups issued the following statements in response to Sinema’s bill:

“Thank you to Senator Sinema for the introduction of legislation to protect one of the country’s greatest treasures, the Grand Canyon,” said Laura Dent, executive director of Chispa Arizona. “This legislation ensures that our nation will protect and respect the sacred lands and watersheds surrounding the Canyon, the preservation of our state’s rich cultural heritage, and the wellbeing of our communities. We thank the indigenous leaders that have protected and fought for the preservation of this region for generations, and we look forward to the Senate bill moving forward so that the protection of the Grand Canyon can become law.”

“Sen. Sinema understands that toxic uranium mining and the Trump administration pose tremendous threats to the Grand Canyon region,” said Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Sinema’s important bill respects the magnificence and fragility of this remarkable place. This bill will permanently protect the region, its wildlife and the indigenous communities and others who rely on its life-giving waters. Overwhelming bipartisan support should be a slam dunk.”

“Senator Sinema’s dedication to a priceless Arizona treasure — one that’s inspired generations upon generations of people from across the globe — deserves our praise. Her legislation would help to protect the Grand Canyon area’s air, water and soil and preserve biodiversity,” said Blaine Miller-McFeeley, senior legislative representative for policy and legislation at Earthjustice. “It would strengthen protections for ancestral lands long occupied and held sacred by the first people to inhabit them. It would ensure that the next hundred years of Grand Canyon National Park are filled with the same recreational opportunities as the first hundred. We are proud to support her efforts.”

“There is no reality in which it is worthwhile to endanger the Grand Canyon, the lives and cultures of Indigenous communities, and millions of people and the economies that support them,” said Amber Reimondo, energy program director for the Grand Canyon Trust. “For those reasons, the Grand Canyon region is, and forever will be, too precious to mine and today we are grateful to Senator Sinema for her leadership in advancing a permanent mining ban around the Grand Canyon.”

“We applaud Senator Sinema for her leadership to protect the Grand Canyon, one of our country’s greatest national treasures and the ancestral home to indigenous communities who have cherished and protected these sacred lands for generations and continue to rely on them for sustenance and safe drinking water,” said Laura Forero, legislative representative for the League of Conservation Voters. “This bill is necessary to protect the communities, lands, waters, and ecosystems that have been impacted by harmful extractive pollution. We urge Senator McSally to protect tribal nations and their sacred places, and stop the further desecration of our public lands by supporting this bill.”

“The National Parks Conservation Association applauds Senator Sinema for her leadership and support for advancing the call to permanently protect the Grand Canyon from uranium mining,” said Kevin Dahl, senior Arizona program manager for the National Parks Conservation Association. “The iconic and enduring Grand Canyon is also home to vibrant and vital resources that we must support, for ours and future generations. Uranium mining threatens the entire water supply of the Havasupai people, whose homeland is in the Grand Canyon, and the limited underground sources that feeds the Canyon’s important springs, seeps, and side creeks. Nearly identical legislation passed the House in a bipartisan vote that demonstrated overwhelming support, proving that Americans share a common goal in defending and preserving the Grand Canyon’s fragile and limited water supply. The Senate now has the unique opportunity to create a lasting conservation legacy for this beloved national treasure and World Heritage Site by passing the Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act.”

“This is a bold and important move by Senator Sinema,” said Kabir Green, director of federal affairs for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We cannot afford to leave the Grand Canyon — America’s greatest monument — vulnerable to mining. This would protect a vast swath of lands—and all the biodiversity they foster and recreational opportunities they afford—from encroachment. In addition to preserving our lands, this safeguards our water and air, and does so in a way that respects tribal interests.”

“The Grand Canyon Centennial Protection Act is key to preventing more toxic pollution that has already harmed public, Navajo, Havasupai, and Hopi lands — there are more than 500 abandoned uranium mines on the Navajo Nation alone, contaminating water and harming the health of Diné people,” said Sandy Bahr, chapter director for Sierra Club’s Grand Canyon Chapter. “Introduction and passage of this important legislation is important to protecting the waters, wildlife and people who live and work in the Grand Canyon region.”

“We are thrilled that Senator Sinema has stepped up to lead on behalf of Arizonans and all who love the Grand Canyon, by introducing legislation to permanently protect this place from the dangers of uranium mining,” said Mike Quigley, Arizona state director at The Wilderness Society. “There is enormous support in Arizona and across the country to conserve this treasured landscape. We urge Senator McSally and the rest of the Senate to support this bill.”

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The Trump administration’s still-fuzzy trade deal with China, announced (as usual) via tweet last Friday, has landed in farm country with a thud. Having endured financial losses and trade uncertainty for nearly two years, farmers have reacted with skepticism and even anger.

Meanwhile, a new poll from the Union of Concerned Scientists and Iowa-based RABA Research shows that voters in five key farm states are worried not just about the impacts of global trade on agriculture and rural communities, but also about a host of other threats, from degraded soil to farm runoff and water pollution to weather disasters driven by climate change. More importantly, these voters indicate that they’re looking for new solutions to all these problems—and they can see one such solution in soil.

Voters see agriculture and the future of our food at risk

Before I get to our poll findings, let’s review the truly terrible year many farmers have just had. The Midwest, in particular, was hit with months of non-stop spring rains and unprecedented flooding that made working the ground difficult or impossible. According to USDA data, farmers were unable to plant crops on about 19 million acres nationwide, with more than 70 percent of those acres in the Midwest. And while the total damage may not be tallied until early next year, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports at least 10 weather and climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States in 2019. Meanwhile, ongoing trade disruption meant additional losses for farmers.

A mind-boggling 40 percent of US farm income this year will have come in the form of government assistance, from crop insurance to federal disaster and trade assistance payments. And even with all that help, farm bankruptcies have surged, up 24 percent over 2018.

With that on their minds, here’s what 3,000+ voters in five key farm states—Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Arkansas—had to say in our survey:

• Global trade wars and loss of markets are seen as a significant threat. Large majorities in every state—from 72 percent in Arkansas to 84 percent in Minnesota—agreed with this. It’s perhaps the least surprising finding, given the amount of ink spilled on the topic over the last two years. Still, it’s one that policymakers and political candidates should be aware of, especially if the final China deal doesn’t shake out as planned.

• Heartland voters (including farmers) are waking up to the threat of climate change. Overwhelming majorities of voters in each state—as high as 93 percent in Nebraska and Minnesota—say extreme weather is a significant threat to farmers and communities in their area. More interesting, though, is that when asked specifically if “climate change” is affecting local agriculture, majorities in Iowa (58 percent), Michigan (63 percent), Minnesota (65 percent), and Nebraska (59 percent), and a near-majority in Arkansas (49 percent) agreed that it is. Moreover, bucking conventional wisdom, a majority of farmers in our survey also agreed. Putting real numbers on this recently reported trend, 61 percent of respondents with farmers in their households (n=693 across the five states) said climate change is affecting agriculture.

• Large majorities also see other significant threats involving agriculture. These include water pollution caused by pesticides and fertilizers from farms (seen as a significant threat by 74-86 percent of respondents), soil that is damaged or lost to erosion (69-81 percent), and the high cost of farmland (71-84 percent).

• Voters are tired of cleaning up after disasters. Across the five states, respondents seemed weary of doubling down on global commodity production and paying farmers who’ve suffered financial losses from trade wars, extreme weather, and climate-related disasters. Instead, given the choice, larger numbers of voters (as high as 49 percent in Iowa and Minnesota) reported that they most want to hear political candidates talk about diversifying and developing new markets for the products farmers grow as a way of revitalizing the farm economy. (Perhaps something like this?)

• Even in conservative states, large majorities say government programs offer solutions that help everyone. In numbers ranging from 78 percent in Michigan to 90 percent in Minnesota—also said they support government programs that help farmers try practices that build living soil (which includes applying lots of living and decaying matter to farmland to provide nutrients, hold water, and reduce runoff and pollution). Overwhelming majorities of voters in all five states—as many as 90 percent in Minnesota—agreed that policies and programs that help farmers build healthy, living soil will help everyone, even city dwellers, by keeping water clean, saving taxpayers money on disaster relief, revitalizing local economies, and ensuring a reliable, healthy food supply.

• Voters embrace taxpayer-funded assistance to help farmers protect soil. Majorities in Minnesota, Nebraska, and Arkansas agreed that paying farmers to cover the cost of practices that protect soil, reduce vulnerability to floods and droughts, and prevent water pollution is one of the most important ways to safeguard agriculture and the nation’s food supply. Even larger majorities, as large as 71 percent in Minnesota, said the same about offering tax credits or other tax benefits to farmers who adopt such practices.

Note to presidential candidates: Have a plan for soil health!

In perhaps the most interesting result in our survey, large majorities of voters said they would be more likely to support candidates for public office who propose ways to help farmers build healthy, living soil.

QUESTION 14: If a 2020 presidential candidate or other candidate for public office proposed ways to help farmers and rural communities succeed by protecting and building up the soil instead of depleting it, would you be more or less likely to support that candidate?

So, as 2020 presidential candidates crisscross Iowa and other farm states this winter looking for messages that resonate with voters , they might want to take a good look at the ground beneath their feet.

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Karen Perry Stillerman is a senior communication strategist and senior analyst in the Food & Environment Program at UCS.

Featured image is from UCS

Nord Stream 2 is a pipeline project extending from Russia to Germany that – when completed – will provide a secure means of exporting Russian natural gas to Western Europe – circumventing a  now volatile Ukraine all while tying Russia and Europe together further through mutually beneficial economic activity.

Of course, for special interests residing across the Atlantic in Washington and on Wall Street, Russia and Europe building closer ties through constructive economic activity undermines a long-standing strategy of coercing Europe via the constant threat of a supposedly hostile Kremlin Washington claims undermines a free and united Europe.

Ironically, in order to preserve Europe’s “freedom” the US has now resorted to punishing interests in Europe – and in Germany specifically – for freely choosing to do business with Russia. It not only fully illustrates the supreme hypocrisy that lies at the very root of Washington’s current foreign policy, but also threatens to undermine legitimate US business interests seeking – just as Russia does – to build constructive economic ties with companies and nations around the globe.

Sanctions Approved

The BBC in its article, “Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanctions on Russia gas pipeline,” would report:

President Donald Trump has signed a law that will impose sanctions on any firm that helps Russia’s state-owned gas company, Gazprom, finish a pipeline into the European Union. 

The sanctions target firms building Nord Stream 2, an undersea pipeline that will allow Russia to increase gas exports to Germany. 

The US considers the project a security risk to Europe. 

Both Russia and the EU have strongly condemned the US sanctions.

It may or may not confound objective observers to see the US unilaterally leveling sanctions against foreign companies because of what Washington claims are security threats to the nations these companies reside in.

It is clearly the business of Germany and Germany alone to determine what may or may not be a security risk. The US deciding not only unilaterally that the Nord Stream 2 project is a security risk – but in contradiction to Berlin’s own assessments of these supposed risks – exposes what is a US foreign policy rooted in singular self-interests poorly hidden behind notions of global peace, stability, and progress.

Were Russia the “threat” that Washington claims it is, clearly Germany would not have invested the immense amount of time, energy, and resources required merely to approve of the Nord Stream 2 project – let alone all the time, energy, and resources required to build and operate it.

Stated Motives. Admitted “Hidden” Motives. Larger, Unspoken Motives 

The BBC article gives a glimpse of what is truly motivating Washington’s current posture regarding Nord Stream 2. In its article, it notes that:

The Trump administration fears the pipeline will tighten Russia’s grip over Europe’s energy supply and reduce its own share of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas.

And indeed, US energy interests do stand to lose against Russian natural gas – but only because US energy interests are unable to fairly compete against Russia’s ability to deliver cheaper energy through much more practical means.

There is also another motivation driving Washington’s current foreign policy – unmentioned by the BBC – but one that eclipses the interests of American big-energy – no matter how large these interests may be.

The alleged spectre of a malign Russia preying on Europe serves as – and has served for decades as the foundation of the US-led NATO alliance, the US military presence in Europe and the billions upon billions of dollars of weapon sales, contracts, and all the political influence that constitutes both.

Europe and Russia building a significant pipeline and cooperating over something as key to Europe’s economic security and survival as energy demand obviously and completely undermines NATO’s pretense to exist – and thus threatens the immense racket that constitutes NATO’s continued existence. This not only threatens Washington’s grip on Europe, but all the other wars NATO is used as a vehicle to carry both the American nation and its Western allies into across the globe.

The Western intervention in Serbia in the 1990s, the Afghan war stretching from 2001 to present day, and more recently the Western intervention in Libya beginning in 2011 are all examples of US belligerence made possible by NATO – and belligerence that would be exponentially more difficult to continue onward with if NATO was weakened or rendered entirely unnecessary and disbanded.

Not Serving European Interests, or even US Interests 

One must be careful when saying “the US is imposing sanctions on Germany.” The US is not. A small handful of special interests in Washington, directed by an even smaller handful of interests on Wall Street are imposing sanctions on Europe over the Nord Stream 2 project.

They are doing so clearly to the detriment of Russia. But also obviously to the detriment of Germany and the European companies involved in completing, operating, and receiving benefits from the pipeline when it opens.

They are also imposing sanctions on Europe to the detriment of the American people, American businesses at large, and the American nation itself both as it stands internationally today and to the detriment of how it will stand internationally in the future.

While the US arms and energy industries certainly stand to gain from a status quo in Europe which includes the perpetuation of the artificial wedge driven between Europe and Russia, it benefits nearly no one else.

And while these two industries do certainly employ a lot of Americans, they are unsustainable businesses demonstrably unable to compete fairly – and now – not even effectively able to cheat. The future is bleak for those employed or otherwise dependent on these two industries as they currently exist. Washington’s policies pushed forward on behalf of big-energy and arms manufacturers are pushed forward at the cost of nearly everyone else.

For a world eager to do business with the United States – a nation still populated by talented people capable of contributing to the global economy – policies like sanctions aimed at Germany and other nation’s involved with Nord Stream 2 give pause for thought and force potential business partners of the US to reevaluate future joint-ventures.

Thus, despite the short-term self-serving nature of US sanctions regarding Nord Stream 2, the sanctions only serve to accelerate America’s overall decline. A Washington fixated on such methods to “compete” with Russia and to maintain influence over Europe is not able to focus on or invest in truly needed strategies to improve genuine American competitiveness – competitiveness that serves as the only true and sustainable means of creating and maintaining influence globally.

For the American people and American business owners, divesting away from Washington’s current policies and finding ways to circumvent them just as the rest of the world is finding ways to circumvent US sanctions will hopefully help build bridges, or at least prepare the ground to do so – so when the current circle of special interests misleading the US into further decline fade away, something better can be put in their place.

Nord Stream 2 is just one sign of the shape of things to come. The US will only face more “Nord Stream 2’s” in the future not only in the form of Russian-European cooperation, but also in Asia centered around China and its own rise upon the international stage. Washington doubling down on a losing strategy will only accelerate America’s current woes – not fix them. Until Washington understands this, or until the American people find a way to work around Washington’s agenda – these woes will only multiply and to everyone’s detriment.

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Tony Cartalucci is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Stefan Sauer/dpa

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement hit back at UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s plans to ban public authorities from participating in the international movement boycotting Israeli goods.

“Boris Johnson’s government, like the anti-Palestinian Trump administration, is more than ever directly engaged in Israel’s desperate war of repression on advocacy for Palestinian rights and on BDS in particular,” the BDS movement said in a statement on Wednesday.

The group likened Johnson’s move, which was announced earlier this week, to former PM Margaret Thatcher’s decision in 1988 to ban local British councils from boycotts and divestment against apartheid South Africa.

“It was wrong then, and it’s wrong now,” BDS said.

Boris Johnson is helping Israel wage a desperate war of repression on Palestinian rights and #BDS.

Supporters of freedom of expression, human rights and international law should oppose the UK government’s efforts to repress our peaceful movement for freedom, justice & equality. pic.twitter.com/2Sx8YmIzzD

— BDS movement (@BDSmovement) December 18, 2019

“Supporters of freedom of expression, human rights and international law should oppose the UK government’s efforts to repress our peaceful movement for freedom, justice & equality,” the statement concluded.

Johnson’s promise to ban the BDS movement was featured in his conservaative party’s manifesto, where the movement was described as “undermining community cohesion.”

He is expected to officially announce the proposal on Thursday during the ceremonial launch of his agenda.

Special Envoy for Post-Holocaust Issues Lord Eric Pickles posted a video to the Conservative Friends of Israel lobby group’s Twitter feed, accusing the movement of being a “thin disguise for anti-Semitism.”

VIDEO: @EricPickles welcomes @BorisJohnson plan to outlaw public body boycotts of Israel.
“If we’re being really honest, BDS is just a thing disguise for antisemitism. We as @Conservatives should always tackle racial discrimination” pic.twitter.com/hpLyCum0vc

— CFoI (@CFoI) December 16, 2019

“We’re going to ensure that public sector, places like councils and health authorities, can’t work against Israel, can’t prejudice Israel,” he continued, adding that BDS is “one of the worst, wink wink, nudge nudge, piece of racialism that we know.”

Advocates of Palestinian rights expressed their concerns over Johnson’s move, which would further the false narrative that criticisms of Israel were equal to antisemitism.

Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) tweeted their solidarity and support for local organizations in the UK working to promote the BDS movement, and called Johnson’s plan “frightening” and “anti-democratic.”

Frightening anti-democratic measures afoot in the U.K. Solidarity with our friends @PSCupdates @BrightonBDS and others working for freedom and justice for Palestinians #bds yes https://t.co/d7PiETU3xO

— Jewish Voice for Peace (@jvplive) December 17, 2019

Johnson, who has described himself as a “passionate Zionist” was elected to the role of Prime Minister last week, following a heated campaign against Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

A large part of the campaign was characterized by the discourse on Israel and Palestine, specifically the BDS movement, and the labelling of Corbyn as an “anti-Semite” for his support of Palestinian rights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed his delight at Johnson’s “astonishing victory.”

Congratulations to my friend @BorisJohnson on your astonishing victory. This is more evidence that the people decide, not the media. It's part of a global tidal wave for secure borders, a free economy and sovereignty.

— Benjamin Netanyahu (@netanyahu) December 13, 2019

“I look forward Boris to working with you in the coming years to strengthening even further the important friendship between Israel and the UK. Congratulations my friend,” Netanyahu tweeted.

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Yumna Patel is the Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written an open letter addressed to three senior officials in Britain: John Gardiner, Under Secretary of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs in the British government; Chris Whitty, the Chief Medical Officer for England; and Chris Wormald, Permanent Secretary at the Department of Health and Social Security.

Her letter focuses on the issue of food and the herbicide glyphosate. But the issues she discusses should not be regarded as being specific to the situation in Britain: they apply equally to countries across the world which are facilitating the interests of global agrochemicals conglomerates.

For instance, according to a September 2019 report in the New York Times, ‘A Shadowy Industry Group Shapes Food Policy Around the World’, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies. The article lays bare ILSI’s influence on the shaping of high-level food policy globally, not least in India and China.

Accused of being little more than a front group for its 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget, ILSI’s members include Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo, General Mills and Danone. The report says ILSI has received more than $2 million from chemical companies, among them Monsanto. In 2016, a UN committee issued a ruling that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s weed killer Roundup, was “probably not carcinogenic,” contradicting an earlier report by the WHO’s cancer agency. The committee, it turned out, was led by two ILSI officials.

And this brings us to Rosemary Mason’s letter.

In it, she describes how she established a very successful nature reserve in South Wales, which attracted huge numbers of insects, two bat species and many swallows, house martins and swifts. She says that it was miraculous. But disaster soon followed.

In 2011, the local council was asked to attempt to destroy Japanese Knotweed using the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup.  Japanese Knotweed had become resistant to Roundup in the 1980s. That meant that however much of the chemical was sprayed, it was impossible to kill it; the plant just grew bigger and stronger. Between 2012 and 2017, Mason notes that the number of insects on her reserve began to decline. It ultimately became a wildlife desert.

Mason asks:

“Monsanto, the British government and the UK and EU regulators say that glyphosate is safer than table salt. But would table salt kill all these insects that we recorded in our photo-journals or cause apocalyptic declines globally?”

She adds that the invertebrates in her nature reserve were poisoned. But that was only the half of it:

“My neurologist concluded that I had developed a toxic neurodegenerative disorder secondary to long-term exposure to glyphosate-based herbicides.”

Mason proceeds to outline the cosy relationship between the agrochemicals sector, Cancer Research UK and the British government, the result of which is to promote a disease narrative that diverts attention from the effects of toxic agrochemicals and place the blame on individual lifestyle behaviour, choice of diet and alcohol consumption. She asks:

“Where is the scientific evidence for this?”

Aside from the government’s collusion with pesticides manufacturers, Mason says the corporate media, most notably in Britain, are silent about pesticides that are poisoning the public:

“They haven’t informed the British people about the trials involving Roundup in the US. Bayer estimates that there are currently more than 42,000 plaintiffs alleging that exposure to Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides made by Monsanto caused them or their loved ones to develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma. In the UK, there were 13,605 new cases of Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma in 2015 (and 4,920 deaths in 2016).”

Mason refers to Robert F Kennedy Jr, one of the US attorney’s fighting Bayer (which bought Monsanto). He says that Monsanto told Bayer that a $270-million set-aside would cover all its outstanding liabilities arising from Monsanto’s 5,000 Roundup cancer lawsuits. However, Bayer never saw certain internal Monsanto documents prior to the purchase.

Kennedy explains that for four decades Monsanto manoeuvred to conceal Roundup’s carcinogenicity by capturing regulatory agencies, corrupting public officials, bribing scientists and engaging in scientific fraud to delay its day of reckoning.

He adds that Monsanto also faces cascading scientific evidence linking glyphosate to a constellation of other injuries that have become prevalent since its introduction, including obesity, depression, Alzheimer’s, ADHD, autism, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, kidney disease, inflammatory bowel disease, brain, breast and prostate cancer, miscarriage, birth defects and declining sperm counts.

Moreover, strong science suggests glyphosate is the culprit in the exploding epidemics of celiac disease, colitis, gluten sensitivities, diabetes and non-alcoholic liver cancer which, for the first time, is attacking children as young as 10.

Whether as a weed killer or as a desiccant to dry oats and wheat immediately before harvest, farmers have been spraying Roundup directly on food. Roundup sales rose dramatically to 300 million pounds annually in the US, with farmers spraying enough to cover every tillable acre in the country with a gallon of Roundup.

Glyphosate now accounts for about 50% of all herbicide use in the US. About 75% of use has occurred since 2006, with the global glyphosate market projected to reach $11.74 billion by 2023.

Kennedy asserts that never in history has a chemical been used so pervasively: glyphosate is in our air, water, plants, animals, grains, vegetables and meats. And it’s in beer and wine, children’s breakfast cereal and snack bars and mother’s breast milk. It’s even in our vaccines.

And yet, in the UK, as Mason explains, the Department of Health says pesticides are not its concern. None of the more than 400 pesticides that have been authorised in the UK have been tested for long-term actions on the brain; in the foetus, the child or the adult. But perhaps that’s to be expected: between May 2010 and the end of 2013, the Department of Health alone had 130 meetings with representatives of the agri-food industry.

Mason then says that the Department of Health’s School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme has residues of 123 different pesticides, some of which are linked to serious health problems such as cancer and disruption of the hormone system. Moreover, the scientific community has little understanding about the complex interaction of different chemicals in what is termed the ‘cocktail’ effect.

The effects of these toxins carry through to adulthood. Mason discusses the deleterious effects of glyphosate on the gut microbiome. Glyphosate disrupts the shikimate pathway within these gut bacteria and is a strong chelator of essential minerals, such as cobalt, zinc, manganese, calcium, molybdenum and sulphate. In addition, it kills off beneficial gut bacteria and allows toxic bacteria to flourish. She adds that we are facing a global metabolic health crisis provoked by an obesity epidemic linked to glyphosate.

Gut bacteria are vitally important to our well-being. Many key neurotransmitters are located in the gut. Aside from affecting the functioning of major organs, these transmitters affect our moods and thinking. Findings published in the journal Translational Psychiatry in 2014 provided strong evidence that gut bacteria can have a direct physical impact on the brain. Alterations in the composition of the gut microbiome have been implicated in a wide range of neurological and psychiatric conditions, including autism, chronic pain, depression and Parkinson’s Disease.

Mason then proceeds to provides evidence that shows that Britain (and the US) is in the midst of a barely reported public health crisis.

She refers to a letter written in 2013 by the late Marion Copley (US EPA toxicologist) to her colleague Jess Rowland. She accused Rowland of conniving with Monsanto to bury the agency’s own hard scientific evidence that it is “essentially certain” that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup weed killer, causes cancer. The date of the letter comes after Copley left the EPA in 2012 and shortly before she died from breast cancer at the age of 66 in January 2014:

“Jess, Since I left the agency with cancer [breast] I have studied the tumor process extensively… based on my decades of pathology experience. Glyphosate was originally designed as a chelating agent and I strongly believe that is the identical process involved in tumor formation.”

Dr Copley makes 14 observations about chelators and/or glyphosate, including that they are endocrine disruptors and suppress the immune system and damage the kidneys or pancreas, which can lead to clinical chemistry changes that favour tumour growth. She notes glyphosate kills bacteria in the gut: the gastrointestinal system is 80% of the immune system making the body susceptible to tumours.

Copley adds:

“It is essentially certain that glyphosate causes cancer.”

Mason concludes her letter by saying:

“The probability is that the population in Britain will increasingly suffer from the diseases associated with glyphosate-based herbicides and with the 400-odd pesticides that contaminate our food. The deleterious effects of glyphosate on trees and crops will also continue because it is in the soil, water, air and rainfall.”

On the back of Brexit, the Conservative government in Britain is set to jump into bed with the US via a trade deal hammered out without public scrutiny or parliamentary oversight. That deal could see the gutting of food safety and environmental standards so that they are brought in line with those in the US. With its recent ‘landslide’ election victory (having gained just 29.5% of the electorate’s votes), it seems increasingly likely that, given his stated commitment to do so, Boris Johnson will usher in herbicide-tolerant GM crops.

US agrochemicals and GM seeds manufacturers must be salivating at the prospects of any such trade deal. With the privatisation of an increasingly burdened NHS likely to be part of a deal, private healthcare providers and insurers must be too.

You may read Rosemary Mason’s open letter in full (with all relevant citations) on the academia.edu website.

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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

The anniversary of John Lennon’s death (December 8) was marked in Cuba. Criticism followed on social media: Cuba repressed Beatles music forcing kids under the covers. Abel Prieto and  Guille Vilar, youth in Cuba at the time, say it’s not true. [i] But that’s not the point.

More useful, Prieto argues, is what happened  to Lennon’s message in the US. One result, celebrated this past August, was the “existential explosion” of Woodstock.  Prieto wonders why such a powerful experience did not end in effective resistance to hatred.

Cuba had no “existential explosion”, although Eusebio Leal uses such language. Leal has been city historian for Havana since 1967. When appointed, he had grade five education. He’s directed the restoration of Old Havana, world heritage site since 1982, celebrated at Havana’s 500^thbirthday.

Asked how he did it, Leal says the revolution “exploded” into his impoverished life. He and his single mom were Christians and he still practises. He is philosopher, although never trained, formally. He’s received awards and recognition from around the world.

The Cuban Revolution didn’t exactly “explode”. Leal was awarded his PhD in History for work on Carlos Manuel de Cespedes.[ii] edes freed his slaves in 1868, initiating a war. The 1959 revolution started there, even before. Cespedes was a philosopher, a fascinating one, as Leal explains.

Many such revolutionaries were philosophers. They discovered ideas explaining actions that couldn’t be explained within existing theory. If you act, and can’t explain, at least to yourself, you feel crazy. You can’t sustain direction.

At a Party Congress in 1997, Fidel Castro said direction was everything. He didn’t say getting it right was everything, although it matters. Charles Darwin didn’t get it all right, but he defined direction. He raised questions that led to explanation of what previously had not been explained, and that needed to be explained, to understand what needs to be understood to move forward: in a direction.

“Existential explosion” needed explanation, to define direction. Martha Ackman’s wonderful new book on Emily Dickinson shows a way.[iii] We meet an engaged, active Dickinson whose home was the “wild terrain of the mind”. She wanted her poems to be true, so that a poem does indeed convey the sense of the bird. That her poems were called true was praise she valued most.

Early on, as a student, “Emily wanted to stare [the unknown} down and walk straight into the abyss”: truth. She never shied away from “looking anguish in the eye“. It was her “dominion over misery“. She saw in the dark, that is, she saw things in the dark: life.

Today the only “dominion over misery” is “light at the end of the tunnel”. In an early poem, Dickinson writes, “We grow accustomed to the Dark – Either the darkness alters – Or something in the sight adjusts itself to Midnight.” And so, we see life.

It links her to Cespedes. He saw in the dark. Dickinson thought there could be truth, not just about birds, but about the sense of a bird. Thus, she applies a criterion connected to the world.  Some feelings are true as regards what is lived and can be lived. Some are not so true.

It’s mind/body connection. Feelings, sometimes, are from the world, indicative of how it is, or might be.  But many want “light at the end of the tunnel” and only that.

I was reminded of this by Javier Cercas’ Lord of all the Dead.[iv] Cercas writes about his great uncle who died for Franco. His death was “seared into my mother’s imagination in childhood as what the Greeks called kalos thanatos: a beautiful death.” Like Achilles, he lives on.

By the end of Cercas’ compassionate story, the great uncle is no longer a symbol of shame but rather a “self-respecting muchacho“ lost in someone else’s war. But Cercas tells the story for the sake of telling the story. That’s what he says. The story must be told because it’s better than to “leave it rotting”.

It can’t, for instance, be a story explaining what needs to be explained , such as the “silent wake of hatred, resentment and violence”, left behind by the war. Cercas can’t make this claim. “Silent wake” is a metaphor. It can’t be fact. Cercas sets these in opposition, repeating it, four times: Legend is unreliable, dependent on people, “volatile.” Facts are something different: “safe” and “brutal”.

Mercifully Dickinson didn’t have this view. Otherwise, her poems couldn’t be true. Cercas is in the sordid grasp of an old story, separating the personal from the objective, as if the latter is achievable only if freed of the former. “Beautiful death” is the same story: human beings apart from nature.

It makes freedom from decrepitude worth speculation. And speculate Cercas does. He ends with immortality. Nobody dies, we learn; we’re just transformed, physically, living in an “eternal present”.

It’s better to see in the dark, not with silly views about “hope” but by finding stories that explain direction. To say science and art are connected is not to say they are the same thing. Unless you imagine how the world might be, even if it can’t be that way, you don’t ask why it is the way it really is.

John Lennon sang about this. Europeans pulled apart art and science, in a false view of truth and knowledge, linked to a false view of human beings in nature.

Cuba tells a different story. So does Dickinson.

Cuba didn’t repress Lennon’s message. It explains it, in art and philosophy. Eusebio Leal is part. The beauty of Old Havana is the beauty of the ideas that explain its stunning restoration. Ideas explaining what needs to be known, for a direction that can be lived, with dignity, have claim to truth.

They’re not stories for the sake of stories: European liberalism’s hidden recipe for despair.

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Susan Babbitt is author of Humanism and Embodiment (Bloomsbury 2014). She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[i] http://www.cubadebate.cu/opinion/2019/09/27/la-cebra-que-le-hemos-hecho-a-lennon/#.Xf4JnUdKiM8

[ii] Carlos Manuel de Céspedes : el diario perdido (Havana: Ediciones Boloña, 1998).

[iii] These Fevered DaysW.W. Norton & Company, 2020. Review forthcoming  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/

[iv] Translated by Anne McLean, Alfred A Knopf, 2020.Review forthcoming  https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/

The gloves came off, revealing the iron fist in the velvet glove of U.S. obfuscation condemning innumerable countries for abuse of human rights;  a recorded vote was required on December 18, exposing which countries actually vote in support of UN resolutions protecting human rights, and which country (countries) hold human rights in contempt.

On:  “The Right to Food,” only the U.S. and Israel voted “No.”  188 other countries, including the DPRK, Russia, China, Cuba, Russia, Syria, etc., voted “Yes.”

On:  “Opposing The Use of Mercenaries as a Means of Violating Human Rights and Impeding the Exercise of the Right of Peoples to Self-Determination”  the U.S. and most of the EU voted “No,” while 130 countries, including the DPRK, Russia, China, etc. voted “Yes.”

On:  “The Rights of the Child,” the U.S. and 9 other countries voted “No.”  138 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Russia, Cuba.

On:  “Combating Glorification of Nazism, neo-Nazism and Other Practices That Contribute to Fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance” the US voted “No” together with Ukraine.  133 other countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, China, Russia, Syria, Zimbabwe, etc.  The EU abstained.

On: “Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order” the U.S. voted “No,” along with 52 other countries, largely EU.   128 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Russia, China, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc.

On:  “Implementation of the Outcome of the World Summit for Social Development and of the Twenty-Fourth Special  Session of the General Assembly,” the U.S. voted “No,” together with Israel.  186 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, China, Russia, Venezuela, etc.

On:  “Human Rights and Cultural Diversity”  the U.S. voted “No, along with 55 other countries, largely EU, and 136 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, China, Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, etc.

On:  “Promotion of Equitable Geographical Distribution in the Members of the Human Rights Treaty Bodies” the U.S. voted “No,” along with 51 other countries, mostly EU, and 134 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Russia, China, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

On:  “A Global Call for Concrete Action for the Elimination of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance and the Comprehensive Implementation of and Follow-Up to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action,” the U.S. voted “No,” together with 8 other nations, 135 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Venezuela, Russia, China, Cuba, Syria, Nicaragua, etc.  43 countries abstained, primarily the EU.

On:  “The Right to Development” the U.S. voted “No,” along with 23 other countries, mostly EU, while 138 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, China, Russia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, etc.

On:  “Policies and Programmes Involving Youth, the U.S. voted “No,” along with 14 other countries, while 138 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

On:  “Human Rights and Opposing Unilateral Coercive Measures,” the U.S. voted “No,” along with 54 other countries, mostly EU, while 135 other countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, China, Russia, etc.

On “The Right of the Palestinian People to Self-Determination” the U.S. voted “No,” together with Micronesia, Nauru, Israel.  167 countries voted “Yes,” including DPRK, Russia, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, China, etc.

When it was a question of the “Country-Specific” resolutions of the Third Committee, which are detested by many countries, as these generally unbalanced  one-sided resolutions are  conspicuous for their double standard, and used and abused for biased, politically motivated and repressive purposes, the U.S. enthusiastically voted “Yes” on each and every one, despite principled protest by a large number of states.   These resolutions demonize the nations independent of Western, and especially U.S. control.

These country-specific resolutions included:  “Situation of Human Rights in the Syrian Arab Republic,” for which the U.S. voted “Yes,” along with 105 other countries, with 57 abstentions and 15 “no” votes, including DPRK, China, Russia, Venezuela Zimbabwe, Cuba, Nicaragua, etc.

A similar outcome obtained with the resolution:  “Situation of Human Rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” With the U.S. voting “Yes,” along with 80 other nations, 70 countries abstained, and 30 countries voted “No,” including DPRK, Russia, China, Venezuela, Zimbabwe Nicaragua, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Philippines, etc.

The resolution “Situation of Human Rights in the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the City of Sevastopol, Ukraine,” of course demonizes Russia, which, at this neo-McCarthyite period of Western history serves as the convenient whipping-boy upon which blame is heaped for all the failings and crimes of the capitalist countries (although ascendant China is beginning to share Russia’s dubious distinction).  The U.S. predictably (undoubtedly the driving force for this resolution) voted “Yes,” along with 65 other countries, 83 countries abstained, and 23 countries voted “No,” including the DPRK, China, Russia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Cuba, etc.

The resolution so damning of the DPRK was “adopted by consensus,” which can be explained by the fact that many countries entirely dis-associated themselves from the resolution, making possible the “consensus” of the remaining ones.

Whatever the sanctimonious rhetoric the U.S.  spews forth in its tirades regarding “human rights” at the U.N. Security Council, its actual contempt for universal enjoyment of human rights is revealed in these votes rejecting almost every resolution guaranteeing protection of human rights for every human being on the planet. Ultimately, property is the paramount concern, and property concentrated in the control of the miniscule number of oligarchs who now possess more wealth than over half the human species in the world.  These oligarchs are the only humans who have rights, primarily the right to dictate the course of the lives of the majority of people who inhabit the globe, who now endure a condition very similar to the slavery which was theoretically abolished in the recent past.  The majority of human beings have, in reality, no power, and no rights.  This was revealed in the December 18 vote, as it is daily revealed by the vastly increasing numbers of the homeless, the starving, and the slaughtered in the capitalist “paradise” which Donald Trump promised Kim Jong Un.

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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Featured image is from National Review

The Democratic Party’s electoral strategy of impeaching Donald Trump is backfiring. Before impeachment, Trump was losing to each of the leading Democrats, but the latest USA Today/Suffolk University poll finds for the first time Trump defeating all of the leading Democratic candidates. Gallup reports that Trump’s approval has risen by six points since the launch of the impeachment inquiry. A CNN poll found that support for impeachment fell by five percent over the past month.

Rather than focus on issues that impact people’s lives — like racism and bigotry, the unfair economy that results in low wages, growing inequality, major corporations and the wealthy not paying taxes, as well as expensive and inadequate healthcare coverage — Democrats are focusing on the issue of withholding military aid to Ukraine for a proxy war against Russia when voters are tired of never-ending wars.

The Democrats, while trying to wrap themselves in the Constitution, are using impeachment as a partisan election-year tool to defeat Trump in 2020. It is failing and is confusing people on the Left. As Ajamu Baraka clarifies:

Political Stunt Could Erupt in Dangerous Ways

The Democrats are not focusing on what makes Trump unpopular, his open racism and sexism, his anti-environment and climate denialism policies, and his antipathy for whistleblowers and constant false statements. In fact, Representative Al Green introduced resolutions for impeachment that focused on these issues in 2017 and they were voted down by the House.

Raising Ukraine reminds people that Obama-Biden conducted an open coup there that brought more corruption to that country. Trump demanded an investigation of Joe Biden for interfering with an investigation of the appointment of his son Hunter to a well-paid board seat on Ukraine’s largest gas company — a job for which he lacked expertise. Ukraine-gate reminds people of Democratic Party corruption and their unpopular interventionist foreign policy.

Both the Democrats and Republicans have a long history of corrupt activities from the statehouses to the White House. Unfortunately, many of these activities are done with the cover of domestic law. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that basic needs are met and provide security, but in the United States, the government is a wealth-building tool for the already rich. And the security state is designed to protect the elites from the people. This is causing real hardship for most people in their everyday lives. Impeachment, as it is being conducted, will not improve things and may actually make them worse.

As Chris Hedges wrote in September, impeachment will not restore the rule of law or bring democracy but it will allow President Trump to raise the outrage of his base, which is armed, and potentially increase right-wing violence. This may already be happening in Tazewell County in Southwestern Virginia, where 82% voted for Trump in 2016. They recently deemed themselves a second amendment sanctuary county and passed a resolution asserting their right to form a militia.

To quote Hedges:

“Economic, social and political stagnation, coupled with a belief that our expectations for our lives and the lives of our children have been thwarted, breeds violence. Trump, fighting for his political life, will use rhetorical gasoline to set it alight. He will demonize his opponents as the embodiment of evil. He will seek to widen the divisions and antagonisms, especially around race. He will brand his political opponents as irredeemable enemies and traitors.”

The Democrat’s election-year stunt is also sucking time and activist energy away from working for solutions to the many crises we are facing. In this way, it is fueling insecurity and anger that could erupt in dangerous ways.

Protest at the DNC, Democratic Party Betrayal by John Zangas of the DC Media Group

Democrats Work Against The People’s Interests While Impeaching Trump

Throughout the impeachment process, Democrats lost opportunities to work for people and the planet and differentiate themselves from Trump. They demonstrated their complicity with policies that benefit the elites.

In 2016, Trump campaigned against corporate trade that sent jobs overseas and kept wages low in the US to win key Midwestern states. He railed on NAFTA, which hollowed out Rustbelt communities. During impeachment, the Democrats had the opportunity to show Trump does not represent the people but instead represents big business interests. NAFTA II, which Trump re-named the US Mexico Canada Agreement (USMCA), is a replay of NAFTA. It continues the tradition of corporate trade agreements while shuffling which industries profit from it. Instead of pointing out Trump’s failure, the Democrats signed off on his agreement after some modest amendments. This bi-partisan approval was a victory for Trump and a defeat for those who want corporate trade remade for people and the planet.

Trump also campaigned against never-ending wars and foreign interventions. While focusing on impeachment Democrats failed to point out Trump is doing the opposite of what he promised. On December 12, 188 Democrats joined him and on December 17, 37 Democrats voted for the funding in the Senate when it passed the largest military budget since World War II, $738 billion for the Pentagon. Trump signed it before flying off to his Mar-a-lago resort for the holidays. The corrupt leadership of both parties is shown in the Afghan Papers that expose the fraud of the 19-year failed trillion-dollar war for which the military had no strategy, was incompetent and knew was unwinnable.

The Democrats provided funding for a new branch of the military, the Space Force, which will lead to the greatest arms race in the history of the planet. The military budget continued the trillion-dollar upgrade of nuclear weapons begun under Obama spurring a nuclear arms race when we should be banning nuclear weapons. The Democrats could have pointed to massive spending on an arms race when the US is already spending more than the next 10 countries in the world combined — all at a time of crumbling infrastructure, the need for a rapid transition to a clean energy economy and urgent needs for housing, healthcare, and more. This followed shortly after changes in the rules on food stamps that will create food insecurity for up to 700,000 more people.

Pelosi called for impeachment at the same time as Trump’s embarrassing trip to the 70th anniversary NATO meeting. At the meeting, Trump was mocked by world leaders including French Prime Minister Macron who called NATO ‘brain dead’ because of Trump’s poor leadership. NATO should be ended as it is a force for the expansion of wars and wasteful spending on militarism but Democrats were silent on that reality.

During impeachment, regime change continued causing suffering in Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia. The economic war against Venezuelaescalated with continued efforts to put in place the failing puppet Guaido. Bolivia is suffering from US-supported regime change. US-funded protests in Hong Kong and false reports on the Muslim Uyghurs are escalating conflict with China. And, the US continues its efforts to topple the Iranian government with extreme sanctions and manipulation of protests in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon.

Finally, during impeachment, the UN climate meeting, COP 25, was held. While Trump has committed climate crimes, the Democrats are also guilty of such crimes. The United States has played a negative role throughout this history of the COP meetings. This continued at the Spain meetings where despite the US withdrawing from the Paris agreement, it continued to play a negative role.

Screenshot of final impeachment vote on Article I from MSNBC.

The Popular Movement and Impeachment

There is no “progressive” side to the impeachment battle between the millionaire’s parties. On one side, Donald Trump was using his office to investigate a political opponent. On the other side, the Democrats are protecting the corruption of Joe Biden and using impeachment as an election tool. The reality is past presidents could have been impeached for numerous violations of law including serious war crimes, illegal wars, illegal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions), selling their office for donations to their billion-dollar campaigns and crimes against the environment that risk our future by not only ignoring climate change but making it worse.

Impeachment may define the 2020 election. It is a perfect distraction to keep people from fighting for what we need. In 2020 the necessities of the people and protection of the planet will be silenced. Voters will be told to make no demands because we need to remove Trump and to unite around another corporatist Democratic presidential candidate.

The Democratic leadership and the corporate media are struggling to prevent the nomination of Senators Sanders or Warren because they oppose their progressive agenda. The media is not covering Howie Hawkins, a Green candidate who has put forward the most progressive agenda built around an Ecosocialist Green New Deal and economic equality.

We need to focus on issues in 2020 and fight for a People’s Agenda. Due to the misleadership of the corporate duopoly, the nation and planet are facing multiple crisis situations. Our job in 2020 is to focus on those issues, not on a candidate or on impeachment. We need to build popular support for confronting the climate crisis and changing laws and policies to shrink inequality and end systemic racism and militarism.

To win the People’s Agenda, we need a strong and organized Left in the United States. This requires political education so people understand what is happening around them and the role of government in it. It also requires building participatory democratic structures in our communities. We spoke with Leo Panitch about this in our latest episode of Clearing the FOG: “Corbyn’s Loss: What it means for Sanders and where the Left goes from here,” which you can hear or read the transcript.

When it comes to elections, the mirage democracy of the United States has very little room for the people in manipulated elections that create an illusion of democracy. We must build electoral structures that organize the people’s movements inside the electoral system. For us, this means building an effective independent left party outside of the corporate duopoly.

Impeachment is a partisan exercise. The Democrats had their partisan vote when they impeached Trump in the House. Pelosi is now preventing the Senate from its inevitable acquittal of Trump. No matter how impeachment turns out, it will not make a difference in advancing the people’s agenda. It is our job to focus on building the movement for enacting an agenda for people and planet, something both millionaire parties will fight to stop.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from Popular Resistance

Revelations from The Guardian’s reporting Friday that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wanted snipers to train their weapons on Indigenous water protectors resisting the construction of a natural gas pipeline in unceded Wet’suwet’en territory sparked outrage across the country and led to the worldwide deployment of a hashtag, #WouldYouShootMeToo, from activists in solidarity with the First Nations people.

Climate Strike Canada member Emma Lin was the first to combine the hashtag with a photo of herself holding up a sign with the words on it, sparking a movement of young activists doing the same worldwide.

#wouldyoushootmetoo @RCMP pic.twitter.com/y68I81w12f

— Climate Strike Canada (@canada_strike) December 21, 2019

Hi, I do want to clarify that I am the activist who started this campaign. I started it in solidarity with friends and family who are risking their lives, and I am deeply touched that other people have joined in. This is not a fight we can win alone. https://t.co/Aq2Ywkom36 pic.twitter.com/XZdjM8uYtK

— Emma (@_emareil) December 22, 2019

“It’s time to hold the RCMP and the Canadian government accountable for their racism,” tweeted Ontario-based activist Rayne Fisher-Quann.

we have evidence that the canadian state was willing to shoot and kill Indigenous land defenders. someone that looks like me would never get the same treatment. it's time to hold the RCMP and the Canadian government accountable for their racism. #WouldYouShootMeToo pic.twitter.com/AGLFPhZ1oz

— rayne ''listen to young people'' fisher-quann (@raynefq) December 21, 2019

Other youth climate advocates across the country and the globe joined in, holding up signs asking the RCMP if they too would be targets were they demonstrating for climate.

Solidarität mit Wet'suwet'en @Gidimten ✊#WouldYouShootMeToohttps://t.co/nlszLGwdwf pic.twitter.com/kXFkL7c0B4

— Fiona (@fionaforfuture) December 22, 2019

Solidarity now. Solidarity always. ✊
We, student strikers, are praised for our activism while Indigenous Land Defenders are threatened with lethal force. The RCMP is working as merceries to secure profits for @CoastalGasLink at the cost of our futures. #WouldYouShootMeToo? pic.twitter.com/HSSDigcwNG

— Climate Strike Canada (@canada_strike) December 21, 2019

How far is #Canada willing to go to protect the billionaires who run the oil and gas industry? #wouldyoushootmetoo is a campaign by @canada_strike to show solidarity with Wet'suwet'en land defenders who are fighting all of us. pic.twitter.com/z1Q3QSpA5K

— p a y t o n 🌽 (@paytonrose14) December 21, 2019

According to The Guardian, the RCMP’s determination to break the protesters seemed unhindered by concerns for life and safety of demonstrators:

Notes from a strategy session for a militarized raid on ancestral lands of the Wet’suwet’en nation show that commanders of Canada’s national police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), argued that “lethal overwatch is req’d”—a term for deploying snipers.

The RCMP commanders also instructed officers to “use as much violence toward the gate as you want” ahead of the operation to remove a roadblock which had been erected by Wet’suwet’en people to control access to their territories and stop construction of the proposed 670km (416-mile) Coastal GasLink pipeline (CGL).

In a separate document, an RCMP officer states that arrests would be necessary for “sterilizing the site.”

In a statement, Gidimt’en spokesperson Sleydo’, also known by the name Molly Wickham, said that the conflict was “an issue of rights and title with our sovereign nation, and RCMP are acting as mercenaries for industry.”

“With terminology like ‘lethal overwatch’, ‘sterilize the site’, and the threat of child welfare removing our children from their homes and territory, we see the extent to which the provincial and federal governments are willing to advance the destruction of our lands and families for profit,” said Sleydo’. “The state has always removed our people from our lands to ensure control over the resources. This has never changed.”

Media Statement re: The Gaurdian article. For media backgrounder please go to: https://t.co/vaxGxC4Adj pic.twitter.com/fhbVejeLa4

— Gidimt’en Checkpoint (@Gidimten) December 21, 2019

As Common Dreams reported Friday, the news that RCMP officers wanted snipers to aid the breaking of the Gidimt’en checkpoint blockade by Indigenous activists fighting the TransCanada-built pipeline was met with outrage from around the globe.

That outrage continued through the weekend and begot the #WouldYouShootMeToo hashtag.

The fight continues, said Sleydo’.

“Here we are, nearly 2020, and we are still being threatened with violence, death, and the removal of our children for simply existing on our lands and following our laws,” Sleydo’ said.

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Featured image: Climate Strike Canada member Emma Lin holds up a sign in protest of revelations that Canadian security forces wanted to train snipers on Indigenous protesters. (Image: Climate Strike Canada/Twitter)