Fast Food Nations and Global Nutrition

December 26th, 2019 by Colin Todhunter

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

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

 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.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Fast Food Nations and Global Nutrition

Film: Christmas Truce of World War I. Joyeux Noël (2005)

December 24th, 2019 by Global Research News

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.

***

“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.”

 

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Film: Christmas Truce of World War I. Joyeux Noël (2005)

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on US-EU Interventionism in Latin America and the Klaus Barbie Affair

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on US, Britain, France Oppose Humanitarian Aid for Syrians. Western Aid Channelled to Jihadists
  • Tags: ,

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?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and analyst.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Trump Administration and Moscow Shoot Down Bipartisan DASKA “Sanctions Bill from Hell”

The October decision by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw American troops from northeastern Syria did not only precipitate the Turkish offensive, codenamed ‘Operation Peace Spring’, into Kurdish-held territory which followed. It also sparked an outcry of hysteria from much of the so-called “left” that has been deeply divided during the 8-year long conflict over its Kurdish question.

Despite the fact that the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were objectively a U.S. proxy army before they were “abandoned” by Washington to face an assault by its NATO ally, the ostensibly “progressive” politics of the mostly-Kurdish militants duped many self-identified people on the left into supporting them as the best option between terrorists and a “regime.” Apparently, everyone on earth except for the Kurds and their ‘humanitarian interventionist’ supporters saw this “betrayal” coming, which speaks to the essential naiveté of such amateurish politics. However, there is a historical basis to this political tendency that should be interrogated if a lesson is to be learned by those misguided by it.

Turkey initially went all-in with the West, Israel, and Gulf states in a joint effort to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by stoking the flames of the country’s Arab Spring in 2011 into a full blown uprising. With Istanbul serving as the base for the opposition, Kurdish nationalists hoping to participate were not at all pleased that the alliance had based its government-in-exile in Turkey and naturally considered Ankara’s role to be detrimental to their own interests in establishing an autonomous ethnonationalist state. Likewise, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not bargain on the conflict facilitating such a scenario, with the forty year war with the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in southeastern Turkey still ongoing. When the PKK-linked People’s Protection Units (YPG) militias took control of northern Syrian towns and established a self-governing territory after boycotting the opposition, it was done only after negotiations between Damascus and Kurdish leaders. The Syrian government willingly and peacefully ceded the territory to them, just as we were told that the Baathists were among their oppressors.

The Rojava front opened up when the Kurds came under attack from the most radical jihadist militants in the opposition, some of which would later merge with the Islamist insurgency in western Iraq to form ISIS. Yet we now know for a fact that the rise of Islamic State was something actually desiredby the U.S.-led coalition in the hopes of bringing down Assad, as revealed in a declassified 2012 Defense Intelligence Agency report. Shortly after clarifying that the opposition is “backed by the West, Gulf countries and Turkey”, the memo states:

“If the situation unravels there is the possibility of establishing a declared or undeclared Salafist principality in eastern Syria (Hasaka and Der Zor), and this is exactly what the supporting powers to the opposition want, in order to isolate the Syrian regime, which is considered the strategic depth of the Shia expansion (Iraq and Iran).”

Meanwhile, it was the Kurds themselves who divulged Ankara’s support for Daesh, frequently retrieving Turkish-issued passports from captured ISIS fighters. Even Emmanuel Macron said as much at the recent NATO summit in London, prompting a row between France and Turkey that took a backseat to the more ‘newsworthy’ Trump tantrum over a hot mic exchange between the French President and his Canadian and British counterparts. Then there was the disclosure that the late Senator John McCain had crossed the border from Turkey into Syria in mid-2013 to meet with leaders of the short-lived Free Syrian Army (FSA), dubbed as “moderate rebels”, which just a short time later would decline after its members joined better armed, more radical groups and the ISIS caliphate was proclaimed. One of the rebel leaders pictured with McCain in his visit is widely suspected to be the eventual chosen leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was allegedly killed in a U.S. raid in Idlib this October. Ironically, many of the Turkish-backed FSA militias are now assisting Ankara in its assault on the Kurds while those who supported arming them feign outrage over the US troop removal.

Henry Kissinger reportedly once remarked, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.”

Given that the U.S. was at the very least still using Daesh as a strategic asset, it seems inexplicable that the Kurdish leadership could trust Washington. The SDF had only a few skirmishes with the Syrian army during the entire war— if they wanted to defeat ISIS, why not partner with Damascus and Moscow? To say nothing of the U.S.’s long history of backing their oppression, from its support of Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s to the arming of Turkey’s brutal crackdown against the PKK which ended with the capture of its cultish leader, Abdullah Öcalan, in 1999. Did they really think after enlisting them for its cosmetic ‘fight’ against ISIS that the U.S. would continue to side with them against Ankara? Even so, Kurdish gains against Daesh would pale in comparison to those by the Syrian army with Russian air support. More perplexing is why anyone on the left would choose to back a group being used as a cat’s paw for imperialism, regardless of whatever ideals they claim to hold.

Perhaps the U.S. would not have reneged on its implicit pledge to help with the foundation of a Kurdish state had their “Assad must go” policy been successful, but the U.S. pullout appears to be the final nail in the coffin for both Washington’s regime change plans in Syria and an independent Kurdistan.

The YPG’s makeover as the SDF was done at the behest of the U.S. but this did nothing to to diminish the objections of Ankara (or many ‘leftists’ from supporting them), who insisted the YPG was already an extension and rebranding of the PKK, a group Washington itself designates as a terrorist organization. Any effort to create a buffer state in the enclave was never going to be tolerated by Turkey but it nonetheless enabled the U.S. to illegally occupy northern Syria and facilitate the ongoing looting of its oil. Unfortunately for Washington, the consequence was that it eventually pushed Ankara closer toward the Kremlin, as Turkey went from shooting down Russian jets one year to purchasing the S-400 weapon system from Moscow the next. After backing a botched coup d’etat attempt against Erdoğan in 2016, any hope of Washington bringing Turkey back into its fold would be to discard the Kurds as soon as their usefulness ran out, if it wasn’t too late to repair the damage already.

Why would the U.S. risk losing its geo-strategic alliance with Turkey? To put it simply, it’s ‘special relationship’ with Israel took greater precedent. Any way you slice it, Washington’s foray into the region has been as much about Zionism as imperialism and its backing of the Kurds is no exception. Despite the blowback, the invasion of Iraq and destruction of Libya took two enormous sources of support for the Palestinian resistance off the chessboard. It may have strengthened Iran in the process, but that is all the more reason for the U.S. to sell a regime change attempt in Tehran in the future. Regrettably for Washington, when it tried to do the same in Syria, Russia intervened and emerged as the new peace broker in the Middle East. It comes as no surprise that following the Turkish invasion of northern Syria amid the U.S. withdrawal, the Kurds have finally struck a deal with Damascus and Moscow, a welcome and inevitable development that should have occurred years ago.

One of the main reasons for the Kurds joining the SDF so willingly has the same explanation as to why Washington was prepared to put its relationship with Ankara in jeopardy by supporting them: Israel. The cozy relationship between the Zionist state and the various Kurdish groups centered at the intersection of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria goes back as far as the 1960s, as Jerusalem has consistently used them to undermine its enemies. It is not by chance that their respective interests overlap to a near tee, between the founding of a Kurdish protectorate and the Zionist plan for a ‘Greater Israel’ in the Middle East which includes a balkanization of Syria. Mossad has openly provided the Kurds with training and they have learned much in the ways of the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from the Jewish state in order to carve out a Syrian Kurdistan. One can certainly have sympathy for the Kurds as the largest ethnic group in the world at 40 million people without a state, but the Israel connection runs much deeper than geopolitical interests to the very ideological basis of their militancy which calls all of their stated ideals into question.

The ties between the YPG and the PKK are undeniable, as both groups follow jailed leader Abdullah Öcalan’s teachings which merge Kurdish nationalism with the theories of ‘democratic confederalism’ from the influential Jewish-American anarchist philosopher, Murray Bookchin. While the PKK may have been initially founded as a ‘Marxist-Leninist’ organization in the early 70s, a widespread misconception is that it still follows that aim when its ideology long-ago shifted to that of a self-professed and contradictory ‘libertarian socialism’ theorized by Bookchin who was actually a zealous anti-communist. Not coincidentally, the Western anarchist icon was also an avowed Zionist who often defended Israel’s war crimes and genocide of Palestinians while demonizing its Arab state opponents as the aggressors, including Syria. Scratch an anarchist and a neo-conservative will bleed, every time.

Many on the pseudo-left who have pledged solidarity with the Kurds have attempted to base their reasoning on a historically inaccurate analogy comparing the Syrian conflict with the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. You would think ISIS would be the obvious first choice for the fascists in the Syrian war, but journalist Robert Mackey of popular “progressive” news site The Intercept even tried to cast the Syrian government as Francisco Franco’s Nationalists in an article comparing the 1937 bombing of Guernica by the Condor Legion to the 2018 chemical attack in Douma which remains in dispute regarding its perpetrator. One wonders if Mackey will retract his absurd comparison now that dozens of inspectors from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have dissented in emails published by WikiLeaks showing that the OPCW engaged in a cover-up with the Trump administration to pin blame for the attacks on the Syrian government instead of the opposition, but don’t hold your breath.

In this retelling of the Spanish Civil War, the Kurds are generally seen in the role of the Trotskyite Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) and the anarchist trade union National Confederation of Labour (CNT). In the midst of the conflict between the Nazi-supported Nationalists and Soviet-backed Republicans that was a prelude to World War II, the mobilization effort of all anti-fascist forces into a unified Popular Front was obstructed by the ultra-left and intransigent POUM and CNT who were then expelled from the coalition for their sectarianism. While the government was still fighting the Francoists, the POUM and CNT then attacked the Republicans but were put down in a failed insurrection. Although this revolt did not directly cause the loyalist defeat, it nevertheless sapped the strength from the Popular Front and smoothed the path for the generalissimo’s victory.

In the years since, Trotskyists have attempted to rewrite history by alleging that a primary historical text documenting the POUM’s sabotage of the Republicans — a 1938 pamphlet by journalist Georges Soria, the Spanish correspondent for the French Communist Party newspaper L’Humanite — is a forgery. On the Marxists Internet Archive website, an ‘editor’s note’ is provided as a preface to the text citing a single quote from Soria with the claim he admitted the work in its entirety was “no more than a fabrication”, but his words are selectively cropped to give that impression. While the author did admit accusations that the POUM‘s leadership were literal agents of Franco were a sensationalized exaggeration, the source of the full quote states the following:

“On the one hand, the charge that the leaders of POUM, among them Andrés Nin, ‘were agents of the Gestapo and Franco’, was no more than a fabrication because it was impossible to adduce the slightest evidence. On the other hand, although the leaders of POUM were neither agents of Franco or agents of the Gestapo, it is true that their relentless struggle against the Popular Front played the game nolens volens (like it or not/willingly or unwillingly) of the Caudillo (General Franco).”

In other words, Soria did not say the whole work was counterfeit like the editor’s note misleadingly suggests and reiterated that the POUM’s subversion helped Franco. (The Marxists Internet Archive does not hide its pro-Trotsky bias in its FAQ section.) Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm summarized the inherent contradictions of the Spanish Civil War and the role ultra-leftism played in the demise of the Republic in one of his later essays:

“Of course, the posthumous polemics about the Spanish war are legitimate, and indeed essential — but only if we separate out debate on real issues from the parti pris of political sectarianism, cold-war propaganda and pure ignorance of a forgotten past. The major question at issue in the Spanish civil war was, and remains, how social revolution and war were related on the republican side. The Spanish civil war was, or began as, both. It was a war born of the resistance of a legitimate government, with the help of a popular mobilisation, against a partially successful military coup; and, in important parts of Spain, the spontaneous transformation of the mobilisation into a social revolution. A serious war conducted by a government requires structure, discipline and a degree of centralisation. What characterises social revolutions like that of 1936 is local initiative, spontaneity, independence of, or even resistance to, higher authority — this was especially so given the unique strength of anarchism in Spain.”

Murray Bookchin also wrote at length about the Spanish Civil War but celebrated the decentralized anarchist tactics which incapacitated the Popular Front. The anarcho-syndicalist theorist championed the ‘civil war within the civil war’ as a successful example of his antithetical vision of ‘libertarian socialism’, while his emphasis on the individualist aspects of the former half of his oxymoronic and anti-statist theory often bears a striking resemblance to neoliberal talking points about self-regulating free markets. This would explain why he actually regarded right-wing libertarians to be his natural allies over the the socialist left, whom he considered ‘totalitarian’ as he told the libertarian publication Reason magazine in an interview in 1979. His reactionary demonization of the Soviet Union and dismissal of the accomplishments of all other socialist revolutions was recalled by Michael Parenti in Blackshirts and Reds:

“Left anticommunists remained studiously unimpressed by the dramatic gains won by masses of previously impoverished people under communism. Some were even scornful of such accomplishments. I recall how in Burlington Vermont, in 1971, the noted anticommunist anarchist, Murray Bookchin, derisively referred to my concern for “the poor little children who got fed under communism” (his words).”

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from the author

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on How the Pro-War “Left” Fell for the Kurds in Syria
  • Tags: ,

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Support South Front in its endeavors. If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video: Battle for Idlib: Syrian Army Aims for M5 Highway
  • Tags: ,

In the United Kingdom: Do Subjects Deserve Their Rulers?

December 24th, 2019 by Andre Vltchek

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?

*

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…

*

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”.

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

Unlearned Lessons from World War I: The Christmas Truce of 1914

December 24th, 2019 by Dr. Gary G. Kohls

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.

***

“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.

Check out the video of McCutcheon singing his song here and, for a good pictorial history of the reality of WWI’s  trench warfare, check this.

Watch the official trailer of “Joyeux Noel” below. The movie is apparently available on NetFlix.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice, Dr Kohls has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, Minnesota’s premier alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which have been re-published around the world for the last decade, deal with a variety of justice issues. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image: An artist’s impression from The Illustrated London News of 9 January 1915: “British and German Soldiers Arm-in-Arm Exchanging Headgear: A Christmas Truce between Opposing Trenches” (Source: A. C. Michael – The Guardian; Originally published in The Illustrated London News, January 9, 1915)

“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.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on War Is Over if You Want It: Pointers for Spreading Some Christmas Cheer

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Massoud Nayeri

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Assange Gives Evidence in Spanish Court-Room Case. Security Contractor Accused of Spying on Assange
  • Tags:

An End to the World as We Know It?

December 24th, 2019 by Philip Giraldi

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on An End to the World as We Know It?

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Support South Front in its endeavors. If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video: Israel Strikes Damascus as Syrian Army Crushes ISIS-Al Qaeda Terrorists in Idlib
  • Tags: , , ,

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Brexit, Macron and Russia: Will 2020 be as Difficult for EU as 2019 Was?

Bloomberg News Fined over $7 Million for Fake News Report

December 24th, 2019 by Zachary Stieber

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)

***

 

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 release was titled: “Vinci undertakes an audit of its consolidated accounts for 2015 and the first half of 2016.”

The desk pushes out real-time financial information from press releases and other sources in the form of newsflashes or alerts.

The alleged statement said Vinci fired its chief financial officer and had discovered major accounting errors, prompting the company to issue updated figures for 2015 and the first two quarters of 2016, which resulted in a net loss instead of profits for the time period in question.

But the statement wasn’t actually from Vinci. It was posted on a website, vinci.group, that looked like Vinci’s site, vinci.com, but was not the company’s legitimate website. The fake website included an erroneous address and a mobile phone number that didn’t match the number for Vinci’s spokesman, according to AFP.

After the report, shares of Vinci fell 18 percent, erasing six billion euros from the company’s value. Vinci later issued a statement denying the report and its shares recovered. Vinci filed a legal complaint to the AMF.

A page for the company on the Bloomberg News website lists the correct phone number and website but there are no stories from November 2016 about Vinci. It’s not clear if the company ever apologized for pushing the false information.

AMF, said that Bloomberg News distributed “information that it should have known was false.”

“In considering that Bloomberg LP disseminated information which it should have known to be false, the Enforcement Committee noted that the publication of the dispatches by Bloomberg, which began one minute after receiving the fraudulent news release, was preceded by no verification by the journalists of the Speed Desk, even though the release, which contained several errors, sent to Bloomberg during a trading session and reporting very serious information, suggesting that a dramatic and immediate drop in the share price was likely, required increased vigilance from the journalists,” it said in a statement.

Ethics in journalism requires verifying information prior to publication, which the outlet didn’t do, AMF said.

“The Committee stressed that the protection enjoyed by journalists is subject to the condition that they act in good faith so as to provide information that is accurate and credible,” it stated. The watchdog said that Bloomberg News could appeal.

The fine was the first levied against a media outlet in France, according to the Financial Times.

In a statement sent to news outlets, a spokesman said Bloomberg News would appeal and tried portraying the outlet as a victim.

“Bloomberg News was one of the victims of a sophisticated hoax, like the company that was directly targeted by the fraudsters, and the many other press agencies who were all victims of the same deception,” the statement said.

“We regret that the AMF did not find and punish the perpetrator of the hoax, and chose instead to penalise a media outlet that was doing its very best to report on what appeared to be newsworthy information. “

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Flickr

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Bloomberg News Fined over $7 Million for Fake News Report
  • Tags:

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

***

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”.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Syria: Saudi Troops Deployed to Protect Aramco Experts at Oil Field

December 24th, 2019 by Middle East Monitor

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Holiday Season Warmaking Revisited, New US Space Force Created

ICC to Investigate Israeli War Crimes?

December 24th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Morning Star

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on MI5 Given the Go-ahead to Allow Informants to Commit Crimes
  • Tags: ,

Disconnected at Christmas… Bah Humbug!

December 24th, 2019 by Philip A Farruggio

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!

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Disconnected at Christmas… Bah Humbug!

India’s Discriminatory New Citizenship Law

December 24th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

Strategie e costi nella guerra dei gasdotti

December 23rd, 2019 by Manlio Dinucci

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

 

  • Posted in Italiano
  • Comments Off on Strategie e costi nella guerra dei gasdotti

Impeachment: The Road to Nowhere Leads to . . . Nowhere

December 23rd, 2019 by Richard Becker

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Joe Emersberger is a writer based in Canada whose work has appeared in Telesur English, ZNet and CounterPunch.

Featured image is from FAIR

Iraq and Afghanistan: The Hidden Costs of Forever War

December 23rd, 2019 by Daniel Larison

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Iraq and Afghanistan: The Hidden Costs of Forever War

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Arnold August is a Canadian journalist and lecturer, the author of Democracy in Cuba and the 1997–98 ElectionsCuba 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

Merry Christmas in the Tropics.

Christmas Greetings from Global Research

Noella… Be nice!

Sung by Nat Ya, featuring Snowflake & Elizsabeth

Get the song here

Starring Hainsley Lloyd Bennett as Snowflake, Paola Crisostomo as the Cool Angel.

Sandro Rizzo, Alberto Piccinni, and Marco Antonio Alessio as the Jolly Reindeer.

 

Director Gabriele Quaranta
DOP Gianluca Carluccio
MUAH Paola Rizzo
Set Assistant Homeyra Crespi

Very special thanks to Linda Isobel Logan

Thanks to Tommaso Carbone, Stefano Celesti, Lina Nicolardi and Eliseo Coluccia.

Noella (Be Nice) was written and composed by Laurence Llewellyn and Natacha Chossudovsky (Nat Ya), and produced by Justin Broad.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Video: Tropical Christmas. Noella Be Nice! by Nat Ya

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.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Soil as a Solution to U.S. Agriculture’s Woes

December 23rd, 2019 by Karen Perry Stillerman

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

“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.”

“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.”

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.”

“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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Yumna Patel is the Palestine correspondent for Mondoweiss.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on BDS Movement: Boris Johnson’s BDS Ban Recalls Margaret Thatcher’s Support of Apartheid South Africa
  • Tags: ,

The Right to Healthy Food: Poisoned with Pesticides

December 23rd, 2019 by Colin Todhunter

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

John Lennon, Celebrated in Havana

December 23rd, 2019 by Prof Susan Babbitt

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 500thbirthday.

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Classic Orwellian Obfuscation: U.S. States Condemns DPRK, Syria, China, Zimbabwe, Iran, Venezuela, Russia for Human Rights Abuses

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.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

Featured image is from Popular Resistance

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Impeachment Indicts Both Parties and Clarifies Our Tasks in 2020

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.

“It’s time to hold the RCMP and the Canadian government accountable for their racism,” tweeted Ontario-based activist Rayne Fisher-Quann.

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.

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.”

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.

Common Dreams: Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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)

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on #WouldYouShootMeToo Hashtag Trends After Reports Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Asked Snipers to Target Indigenous Protesters
  • Tags:

The Chief Executive of B’nai Brith Canada has condemned as anti-democratic a vote in late 2019 by Canada’s Trudeau government. In one of its first major international acts, Trudeau’s minority government sided with 166 other member states of the United Nations’ General Assembly. The Jewish organization expressed “outrage” at Canada’s position on a resolution dealing critically with the subject of Israel-Palestinian relations. “This vote reflects poorly on Canada’s record as a defender of democracy and justice. It stains Canada’s reputation,” said B’nai Brith’s CEO, Michael Mostyn.

Apparently Mr. Mostyn thinks nothing of invoking the principles of democracy and justice as justification for discounting as wrong and misguided the dramatic outcome of a free and fair vote by the world’s governments. In Mr. Mostyn’s view, all that is just and democratic adheres to the position of the five dissident governments that voted against the UN Resolution. The naysayers are Israel, the USA, Australia, Micronesia and Marshall Islands.

Mr. Mostyn and many other representatives of the Israel lobby have chastised the Trudeau government for taking a step that pulls Canada into the mainstream of global opinion especially when it comes to conditions in Gaza and the Occupied Territories. The Trudeau government has planted Canada’s flag among those of 167 national delegations. The governments of all these countries agreed to place an international spotlight on the many illegal acts that violate “the permanent sovereignty of the Palestinian people.”

In giving explicit reasons for its condemnation of the now-adopted UN Resolution, B’nai Brith Canada stated that it “rejects the contention that the [Jewish] settlements [in the Occupied Territories including East Jerusalem] are the core issue of the Israel-Palestine conflict.” The UN Resolution details many of the consequences for indigenous Palestinians of the influx of 700,000 Jewish settlers into territories illegally seized through armed conquest by the Israeli Armed Forces in 1967.

The Resolution sanctioned by the government of Canada and most of the world’s other governments “deplores the detrimental impact of the Israeli settlements on Palestinian and Arab natural resources, including the destruction of orchards and crops and the seizure of water wells by Israel Settlers.” It expresses “grave concern about the widespread destruction, caused by Israel, the occupying Power, to vital infrastructure, including water pipelines, sewage networks, and electricity networks in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

The Resolution also lists some of the public health abominations forced on “the Gaza strip during the military operations of July and August of 2014, which, inter alia, has polluted the environment and which negatively affects the functioning of sanitation systems and water supply.” There is reference to “unexploded ordinance” as well as a “chronic energy shortage” in Gaza where “only 5% of the ground water remains potable.”

The Resolution makes specific reference to “the detrimental impact on Palestinian natural resources being caused by the unlawful construction of the wall by Israel, the Occupying power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and in its grave affect as well on the economic and social conditions of the Palestinian people.”

B’nai Brith’s criticism of the Trudeau government ignores most of the explicit content outlined in the now-adopted UN Resolution. Instead of facing the facts, B’nai Brith radically misrepresents as “anti-terror measures” the broad set of changes the Israel government has imposed on the lands at issue.

The Resolution clearly identifies the actions of a government whose goal it is to favor one group by dispossessing and disempowering another. The situation on the ground in the area occupied and controlled by the Israeli government makes it absolutely clear that the real goal is to replace the indigenous Palestinian population. The international emblem of Israel’s replacement project has become the 131 illegal Jewish settlements plus the 110 illegal outposts created to prevent Palestinians from enjoying any security of habitation.

B’nai Brith Canada sometimes represents itself as a “human rights” organization engaged in benevolent philanthropy. It has exploited this image to gain federal recognition as a registered charity capable of granting tax deductions for donations. Perhaps the time has come for an objective federal assessment to see if B’nai Brith Canada has lived up to its side of the bargain. Has B’nai Brith Canada acted like a genuine charity devoted to the ideal of universal human rights or has it acted more as a partisan political lobby?

B’nai Brith Canada announced in its press release that it “remains opposed to Palestinian attempts to internationalize the issue.” How ironic. As I see it, the track record of B’nai Brith Canada is one part of a much larger body of evidence demonstrating the scale of an elaborate Israel lobby based in many countries? Doesn’t the multinational reach of this very active political lobby effectively internationalize the core issues of Israel-Palestinian relations on a 24/7 basis?

The instability of relations between Israel and the Palestinians has significant implications for the domestic and international polices of many countries. For instance, how will the Trudeau government and the Trump government deal with the contentions that have put them on different sides of the recent UN vote? Will the Trudeau government continue to move away from the legacy of Harper government when it comes to correcting the gross inequities permeating almost every aspect of Israel-Palestinian relations?

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Anthony James Hall has been Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between 1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus. The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.

Featured image is from AHT

One of the first bills to be introduced by Britain’s new Conservative government will reportedly stop “local authorities from boycotting individual companies”, a move described as targeting the Palestinian-led boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.

The Conservative Party election manifesto did indeed pledge to “ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries”, on the grounds that such moves “undermine community cohesion”.

Intensified attacks

Meanwhile, Eric Pickles, the British government’s “special envoy for post-Holocaust matters”, told a conference in Jerusalem on Sunday that “BDS is antisemitic and should be treated as such”, in remarks celebrated on Twitter by Conservative Friends of Israel.

According to a report by the right-wing outlet Jewish News Syndicate, “Pickles said Johnson’s government would make BDS illegal for governmental and public bodies, a move that would prevent them from working with anyone who supports the effort to isolate and financially punish Israel.”

For now, it is unclear precisely what the government is planning; there may be an attempt at intimidation, rather than a new law.

In 2016, the government issued a procurement guidance note for local authorities that merely restated existing policy, in contrast to a supposed “ban on boycotts” trailed months previously. Restrictions on Local Government Pension Schemes, meanwhile, are being contested in the courts.

But more radical plans could be afoot – for example, banning pro-BDS groups from using local authorities’ facilities (as seen, and contested, in Germany).

Events in Britain are part of a bigger picture of intensified attacks on Palestinians and their allies, including in the United States and France. What unites such developments is a concerted effort by the Israeli government, and its supporters, to shield apartheid from accountability.

Conflating antisemitism and anti-Zionism

Thus, as Israel cements a single, apartheid state on the ground, two related moves are being made to stigmatise international opposition as a form of “antisemitism”.

Firstly, any kind of action pertaining to accountability – even just accurately labelling Israeli settlement products, never mind boycotting them – constitutes a “singling out” of Israel, and is thus antisemitic.

Secondly, questioning or criticising Israel’s identity as a “Jewish state” because of what that means for Palestinians is also deemed “antisemitic” – which, in a post-two-state era, will be increasingly used to delegitimise calls for the transformation of the apartheid status quo into a single democratic state.

Both of these elements are part of definitions of antisemitism being used to stifle debate, including in the formation of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) document. As Jared Kushner wrote in The New York Times last week: “The Remembrance Alliance definition makes clear what our administration has stated publicly and on the record: Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism.”

And the author of the text on which the IHRA definition is based, Kenneth Stern, last week felt forced to call out how claims of “antisemitism” are being used to attack legitimate free speech. “I suspect that if Kushner or I had been born into a Palestinian family displaced in 1948, we might have a different view of Zionism, and that need not be because we vilify Jews or think they conspire to harm humanity,” Stern acknowledged.

“Further, there’s a debate inside the Jewish community whether being Jewish requires one to be a Zionist. I don’t know if this question can be resolved, but it should frighten all Jews that the [US] government is essentially defining the answer for us.”

Criminalising solidarity activism

The claim that BDS is antisemitic underpins efforts to toxify or even criminalise Palestine solidarity activism. “We are advancing legislation in many countries against the BDS … so that it will simply be illegal to boycott Israel,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, said back in 2016.

In this regard, the Israeli government is working alongside non-state groups that focus on smearing Palestinian, Israeli and international organisations calling out Israel’s violations of international law, as well as attacking any initiative designed to hold Israel to account.

The main protagonists in such efforts are very open about their efforts, as you can see in a video of a panel discussion earlier this year including NGO Monitor, Eugene Kontorovich of the right-wing think-tank Kohelet Forum, Shurat HaDin, and an official from Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs.

Kontorovich, for example, illustrates the overlap between those in Israel seeking to both normalise, and advance, Israel’s permanent hold on the occupied West Bank, including its illegal settlements, while simultaneously placing meaningful opposition to colonisation and annexation beyond the pale.

Battle to intensify

As Joshua Leifer, associate editor of Dissent Magazine, put it earlier this month: “As the two-state paradigm finally passes from the scene, the Israeli government is pushing initiatives around the world to codify opposition to the one-state reality as antisemitic.”

Under British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, there is unfortunately good reason to expect that a Conservative government pursuing a close relationship with the Trump administration – and with a cabinet including committed supporters of Israel – will be eager to play its part in the dehumanisation of Palestinians.

If that sounds too strong, then heed the words of editor Amjad Iraqi, who warned last week of the “chilling message” being delivered by the likes of the US and French governments: namely, that “Palestinians are not entitled to political agency as a people fighting for justice and human rights”.

That is the grim territory being contested, and here in Britain, the battle to insist on Palestinians’ humanity and basic rights is only set to intensify.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Ben White is the author of ‘Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide’ and ‘Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination and Democracy’. He is a writer for Middle East Monitor, and his articles have been published by Al Jazeera, al-Araby, Huffington Post, The Electronic Intifada, The Guardian, and more.

In the Footsteps of Xuanzang in Kyrgyzstan

December 23rd, 2019 by Pepe Escobar

At the start of the Tang dynasty, in the early 7th century, a young wandering monk embarked on a 16-year long voyage from the imperial capital Chang’an (today’s Xian) to India to collect Buddhist manuscripts. At the time Chang’an was six times bigger than Rome at its height, with a population of over one million – the epicenter of Asian civilization.

History ended up converting Xuanzang into a legend and a national hero in China – although in the West he would never reach Marco Polo levels of popularity.

Xuanzang had embarked on a quest that still resonates today. He wanted to know whether all men – or just an enlightened few – could attain Buddhahood. There was only one way to find out: ride all the way to India and bring back Sanskrit texts to China, especially from the Yogacara school of Buddhism, which professed that the outside world did not exist: it was merely a projection of one’s consciousness.

On his epic journey, Xuanzang went through hell and high water: sandy storms in the Taklamakan desert (“You can get in but you never get out”), avalanches in the Tian Shan mountains, pirates in the Ganges. His travels on the ancient Silk Road are mesmerizing, particularly in the years 629 and 630 as he hit northern Silk Road oases such as the kingdom of Hami.

It was at these oases that Xuanzang would reboot his small caravan of camels and horses and interact with local kings, influential merchants and serial warriors. He was already on his way to becoming the most famous pilgrim ever on the oldest trade route in the world.

Sino-Turkic meeting of minds

During my own trip, mixing ancient and new Silk Roads, I crossed Kyrgyzstan from south to north, from the desolate Tajik-Kyrgyz border on the Pamir highway – which looked like a scene from Tarkovsky’s Stalker – all the way to the crossroads of Sary-Tash, with a detour via a made by China road to examine the Kyrgyz-China border at Irkeshtam; then all the way to Osh, the getaway to the Ferghana valley via the mind-bending Taldyk pass; bordering Lake Toktogul, facing myriad other snowed-over passes; and up to the final dash towards the capital Bishkek.

What I really wanted to reach was the pasturage – at this time of the year far from verdant – by Lake Issyk-Kul, where Xuanzang lived an extraordinary historical moment as he met nothing less than the immense tented court of the great khan of the Western Turks.

It was thanks to the king of Turfan – another Silk Road oasis, not far from the current capital of Xinjiang, Urumqi – that Xuanzang was given 24 royal letters to be shown to twenty-four different kingdoms on his way, finally leading to the great khan of the Western Turks. The king of Turfan was in fact a vassal of the great khan, and he was asking for protection for his Chinese friend, invoking a medieval code of honor that applied equally to Europe and Asia.

The empire of the Western Turks at the time extended from the Altai mountains – today in Russia – to territory that’s now part of Afghanistan and Pakistan. To reach the great khan, Xuanzang went through frozen hell. He described mountains of ice that rose up to the sky and ice peaks tumbling down with a mighty roar. It took him one week just to cross the Bedal pass (4,284 meters high) in what was then Chinese Turkestan. The Western Turks used this pass to connect with the Tarim basin. Farther down the road, Xuanzang would still have to face the Hindu Kush and the Pamirsś

Xuanzang and his ragged mini-caravan finally arrived at the southern shore of Lake Issyk-Kul (“Warm Lake”), an inland sea that never freezes, and the second-largest in the world after the Titicaca in Bolivia. That happened to be the winter headquarters of the great khan, while his summer capital remained Tashkent.

Southern shore of Lake Issyk-kul. Photo: Asia Times / Pepe Escobar

I was hosted by a lovely young mother and her baby at a yurt by Lake Issyk-Kul. Xuanzang’s description of the lake, which I got from a 1969 Oriental Books reprint of the original 1884 London version of Si-yu-Ki; Buddhist records of the Western World, by Xuanzang, translated by S. Beal, could have been written today. Except for the dragons and monsters, of course:

A yurt by Lake Issyk-Kul. The design at the top is featured in the Kyrgyz national flag. Photo: Asia Times / Pepe Escobar

“On all sides it is enclosed by mountains, and various streams empty themselves into it and are lost. The color of the water is a bluish-black, its taste is bitter and salt. The waves of this lake roll along tumultuously as they expend themselves. Dragons and fish inhabit it together. At certain occasions scaly monsters rise to the surface, on which travelers passing by put up their prayers of good fortune.”

Meet the balbals

So in the year 630 Xuanzang finally met the great khan of the Western Turks, at the northwest shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, in Tokmak.

Tokmak happens to be very close to the Burana tower, the only major Silk Road site still standing in Kyrgyzstan. We are in the Chuy valley, which was a very busy side branch of the Northern Silk Road, at the crossroads of the Sogdian, Turkic and Chinese civilizations.

Burana Tower, the only Silk Road landmark left standing in Kyrgizstan. Photo: Asia Times / Pepe Escobar

All that remains of what in the 11th century was a sophisticated city called Balasagun – which the Mongols named Gobolik when they rammed through it in 1218 – is the tower, actually a half minaret. Behind the tower we find the cutest stone creatures in living memory: the balbal, 1,500 year-old stone grave markers.

The meeting of Xuanzang and the great khan was a major success. He described “riders mounted on camels and horses, dressed in furs and fine woolen cloth and carrying long lances, banners and straight bows.” Much like the warriors one sees at the extraordinary exhibits at the National Museum of Kazakhstan in Nur-Sultan. The multitude, wrote Xuanzang, “stretched so far that the eye could not tell where it ended.”

This happened to be the last description ever of the great nomad confederation led by the great khan, which collapsed to internal strife still in the early 7th century.

There was also a very important matter to clarify: horses. And that led me to the traditional Sunday animal market at Karakol, not far from the southeast corner of the lake. There I saw multiple descendants of the legendary Przhewalsky horses.

Przhewalsky, after whom the diminutive breed of Central Asian wild horses is named, was the top scientific explorer of Mongolia, the Gobi, Tibet and Xinjiang between 1870 and 1885 – and he died in a hospital near Karakol after contracting typhus. He had led a caravan crossing the Taklamakan – an almost impossible feat. A lovely Soviet-era museum near Karakol pays him due tribute.

Sino-Turkic relations at the time of the great khan were excellent. By the early years of Tang Emperor Taizong, the great khan was at the height of his powers, controlling every latitude between the borders of the Chinese empire and Persia, and from Kashmir in the south to the Altai mountains in the north.

True to the legendary spirit of the ancient Silk Road as a crossroads of cultures and religion, the great khan even knew about Buddhism (a monk from India had tried to convert him). Very close to Tokmak, Soviet archeologists found two Buddhist shrines from the 7th or 8th century.

The top gossip of Xuanzang meeting the great khan is that the khan tried to dissuade him from going to India: “It is such a hot land where people were like savages without decorum.” But the khan soon understood that Xuanzang was a man on a mission. He gave him letters of introduction to all his countless vassals along the way – princes in Gandhara, which today is split between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Xuanzang also got as gifts 50 pieces of silk and beautiful clothes in crimson satin.

And so our wandering monk set out in safety on his Central Asian Turkdom epic, crossing the Syr-Darya, traversing the Desert of Red Sands and arriving at fabled Samarkand. The greatest ever Silk Road pilgrimage – 16,000 km in 16 years – was only beginning. This tale is at the heart of the 21st century New Silk Roads. China is aiming to revive the spirit of one, two, a thousand Xuanzangs.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on In the Footsteps of Xuanzang in Kyrgyzstan
  • Tags:

Sanctions, Security and the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline

December 23rd, 2019 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, construction of which is intended to transport 55 billion cubic metres of Russian gas to Germany per year under the Baltic Sea, is a ragbag of options and promises.  The fruit of a deal between Berlin and Moscow, it has troubled those within Russia, Germany, Europe and the United States, though for different reasons.

On the subject of environment, the ledger of negatives against the project are weighty.  Environmental organisations fear the ecological threat the pipeline poses to the Baltic Sea.  The Russian office of Greenpeace has claimed that Nord Stream 2 AG, owned by Public Joint Stock Company Gazprom, is an ecological misfit. It threatens the Kurgalsky nature reserve even as it promises transplanting various unique plant species affected by the gas pipeline.  According to findings from the V. L. Komarov Botanical Institute, the picture is even uglier than a breach of promise: the plant varieties in question, listed in the Red Book of the Russian Federation and the Red Book of the Leningrad region, were actually destroyed.

Bird life has also been affected, with confirmation that white-tailed eagles, which are also Red-listed, have fled their nesting sites in the reserve.  Nord Stream 2’s response has been one of comparing apples and bananas, an analytical approach doomed to inaccuracy.  “Eagles are known for their resilience.  Documentary evidence from the first Nord Stream project shows us that construction activities did not affect eagles’ behavioural patterns in Germany.”

The United States is less concerned with matters green.  Nord Stream 2 poses a security threat.  Trump’s former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, saw it as “undermining Europe’s overall energy security and stability.”  US energy secretary Rick Perry argues that “Russian gas has strings attached.”  The claim is that Germany will be come too reliant and Ukraine further weakened.  Ukraine had been the premier gatekeeper for Russian gas supply, with 40 percent of Europe’s total amount transiting through Ukrainian soil.  A slump in gross domestic product occasioned by an end to transit fees is considered imminent.

Other European states have been crankily concerned about the prospect of Gazprom’s deepening involvement in the continent’s energy market.  Poland’s anti-monopoly body UOKiK showed a measure of that opposition by fining France’s Engie Energy (ENGIE.PA) 40 million euros in proceedings against Gazprom.  In February, EU ambassadors agreed that the project be subjected to greater scrutiny.  A Franco-German compromise was struck: Nord Stream 2 would be placed “under European control”.

The Trump administration’s actions against Gazprom and Russia’s energy influence, found in a provision of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), can hardly be seen as noble endeavours.  The provision threatens sanctions and the freezing of assets against entities laying down the pipeline unless their activities cease “immediately”.  The United States has its own energy interests in Europe, and wishes to frustrate the effort.  Market share is at stake.

The suspension of laying activities on the part of Allseas, a Swiss company, suggests that Trump’s announcement is already biting.  “In anticipation of the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),” went a company statement, “Allseas has suspended its Nord Stream 2 pipelay activities.”  The company would “proceed, consistent with the legislation’s wind down provision and expect guidance comprising the necessary regulatory, technical and environmental clarifications from the relevant US authority.”

The angle taken by the European Union, Germany and Russia can hardly surprise.  Themes of energy security are reiterated.  The Nord Stream 2 consortium makes the claim that, “Completing the project is essential for European supply security.”  Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova spikily condemned the sanctions measure.  “A state with a $22 trillion national debt prohibits creditworthy countries to develop the real sector of their economies!”

For a EU spokesman, this constituted “the imposition of sanctions against EU companies conducting legitimate business.”  A German government spokesman suggested that such actions “affect German and other European businesses, and we see the move as meddling in our internal affairs.”  Finance Minister Olaf Scholz has sees it as an infringement of sovereignty.  “It is up to the companies involved in the construction of the pipeline to take the next decisions.”

Nothing is quite so simple.  Gas pipeline politics has always been contentious.  One state’s sovereign promise is another’s weakening.  Concessions made to corporate monopolies are risky, capable of fostering insecurity as much as reassurance.  Those who control the tap control a country’s future.

But the imposition of any sanctions regime signals another bout of economic violence.  In the international market, where governments operate as ready gangsters for corporate interests, prompted by such motivations as seeking more natural resources, tools of state become handmaidens of economic self-interest.  And in all this, the prospect of ecological devastation remains genuine but an aside to the jabbering disagreement of political interests.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

On Those Questionable US Wage Statistics… Again

December 23rd, 2019 by Dr. Jack Rasmus

In recent months, various independent business and research sources have been raising questions about the accuracy of US official job and wage statistics. Several more sources have joined the discussion, questioning the oft-cited official—and widespread mainstream press reported–3.1% annual rise in US wages the past year. As many have indicated, the 3.1% grossly over-estimates recent wage increases in the US for several important reasons.

To being with, the figure is not adjusted for inflation, so it doesn’t reflect real wage change. Even official inflation data (which underestimates inflation for most working class households) reduces real wages to no more than 1.5%, per the US PCE price index. And even less, if the official CPI index is used to adjust for inflation. In addition to failing to reduce for inflation, the 3.1% is also an ‘average’, with actual wage increases highly skewed to the top 10% of the work force so workers at the median or below are likely seeing no wage increases or even wage reductions and the top getting more than 1.5%. Moreover, as it has also been pointed out, the 3.1% figure is for full time employed workers only. It therefore ignores the 50-60 million or so part time, temp, gig, contract and other workers in its estimate. Factor all that in and the real wage change for the vast majority of the 160 million plus US work force is flat at best and even falling for millions–not rising as the official government 3.1% would have you think.

Various independent business, bank and other wage surveys area increasingly supporting the alternative view that US wages have hardly risen at all in recent years–either under Trump or before under Obama. Or for decades now for that matter.

Here’s two more recent, independent surveys supporting that alternative view.

The latest Bankrate survey, released just this past week, showed that 51% of all workers (about 82 million) in the US DID NOT GET A WAGE INCREASE at all this past year. (And 22% of the remaining 49%, who did get a raise, got it by moving to another job and not from their employer actually hiking their pay. Moreover, the employer they changed to may have not actually raised their wage on their new job, even if the worker who changed jobs realized a high wage. But the Labor Dept. considers that a wage increase, even if in the real economy no wages were actually raised. So for the economy as a whole even that 22% is likely overestimated as well, even if the individual worker realized a wage hike).

The same Bankrate survey showed that last year nearly two-thirds (62% or 99 million) of US workers said got no wage increase whatsoever.

According to mainstream economists, standard economic theory says that a labor market as tight as today’s (3.7% unemployment) should result in a big demand for labor and therefore a big rise in wages.  But it has not, which must mean either the 3.1% wage increase numbers are false; or the unemployment numbers (3.7%) are wrong and the labor market is not as ‘tight’ as they are saying; or that economists’ theory about the relationship of wages to employment is just bullshit. Or maybe all the above!

As this blog has argued in the past, it is likely the wage hikes are going to the top 10% of professionals, tech workers, managers & supervisors, etc. And the majority of jobs being created are actually added-on 2nd and 3rd part time, temp, contingent, contract jobs that the Labor Dept. stats aren’t reflecting accurately; that is, the official Labor Dept. stats are picking up those contingent jobs that are primary (first) jobs and not counting second or third jobs.

An interesting alternative source also throwing light on the questionable official labor stats is the report released last month by the Brookings Institute. Among the report’s other interesting results, it found that 44% of all US workers, age 18-64 (53 million) now hold low wage jobs with median annual earning of just $17,950. With the cutoff of age 64, that 53 million should be even higher, since the fastest growing segment of new entrants to the labor force are senior workers older than 64, going back to work because they can’t make ends meet in retirement any longer (given the collapse of savings, minimal pensions, and the rise of social security retirement to age 67–soon to go higher). So add at least another 5 million of senior returnees to the labor force to the Brookings’ estimate of 53 million making less than $18,000 a year in wage income.

The 58 million working part time/temp/gig jobs and earning barely $8/hr. likely constitute the majority of the 51% of all US who received no wage hike from their employers this past year (and 62% the year before) per the aforementioned Bankrate Survey.

This has been going on for decades, and not just in recent years: more and more part time/temp/contract/gig jobs are being created while wages are stagnating or even declining. What capitalists, employers, and politicians are saying to 90% of the work force is: “if you want a raise, get a second or third job. Work longer hours for more pay. Don’t expect to get a wage increase for the primary job you’re working. Only if you’re really critical for boosting our productivity and therefore profits, or are highly skilled and necessary for our new tech industry, or if you’re one of us managers–will we give you a wage increase. If not, work more and work harder!”

Talking about working harder, according to the Economic Policy Institute, Americans’ productivity went up 70% from 1979-2019, but wages rose by a mere 12%. That’s an ‘average’ annual wage gain of 12% over the last 40 years! Or about 0.3% of one percent per year. And again even that’s an average. Reduce it for inflation and it’s been a wage reduction for most that’s been going on for a generation and more!

In yet another survey, reported last week by Jonathan Rothwell of the New York Times, the IRS data on jobs increasingly contradicts the official US Labor Dept. data: The latter indicates self-employed (contract, gig, etc.) at only 10% of the labor force, and actually declining in per cent terms last year. Whereas the IRS data indicates 17% and rising in per cent terms. The difference suggested by Rothwell is that the Labor Dept. data shows part time and contract work only for those whose part time job is primary–i.e. is the majority of their work time. Second, third such jobs, cobbled together to try to make ends meet are not being reflected in the Labor Dept. data on contingent jobs (part time, temp, contractor, gig, etc.).

The Labor Dept. officially estimates only 5% of workers (8 million) now hold multiple jobs. That’s of course a joke that few really believe. Even a Gallup survey estimates 28% (45 million) now hold multiple jobs. In other words, like the Labor Dept.’s 3.1% wage increase official estimate, it’s jobs data is also inaccurate and suspect.

Yet another study just released questioning the official data, called ‘Our Great Jobs Demonstration Survey’, the results of which are available in the December 20, 2019 New York Times, showed that 36% of the work force are no longer employed in the traditional one-job with one-employer relationship that the Labor Dept. seems to be myopically focused on. That’s equal to about 57.6 million–and thus about equivalent to our 53-58 million estimate of workers earning $8 an hour or less who likely received no wage increase at all (unless the blue state in which they lived raised its minimum wage above the still federal minimum of only $7.2 an hour).

To summarize, accumulating evidence from various respected independent research and survey sources–including business research companies like Bankrate, ADP, and others–are providing mounting evidence that the official US government estimate of a 3.1% wage increase is a gross misrepresentation of reality which the mainstream press is more than happy to propagate to maintain the myth that the US economy is doing great for everyone. Ditto for the official jobs data that inaccurately reflects what’s going on with part time/temp/contract/gig work where the absence of wage increases are predominantly located.

And once the next recession around the corner hits with full impact, the wage and job numbers will no doubt be even worse. Not even the official obfuscation will be able to cover it up.

The majority of the American public knows from their everyday experience that the official government economic data trumpeted daily in the press and from the mouths of politicians does not reflect their actual experience. They know this isn’t the ‘greatest economy in US history’ (Trump’s tweet).  Even the chairman of the executive committee of the US Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Wilson, admitted to the Wall St. Journal last week (December 13, 20109, p. R2): “We’re in a place where people’s lives have not been made better off”. To which he added “A good portion of the public has lost faith in the capitalist system”.

Got that one right, Wilson!

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the just published book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Economic Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, January 2020, which is available at discount from his blog and website at http://jackrasmus.com

Selected Articles: The Afghanistan Papers

December 23rd, 2019 by Global Research News

We have made some progress in our campaign to meet our running costs and put an end to our monthly deficit, but we still need your help. As grateful as we are to those who have given so far, the total number of donations and membership subscriptions we have received over the past year still only amounts to a very small fraction of the tens of thousands of people who read our website on a daily basis. If you can make a contribution to help secure the future of GlobalResearch.ca, please click below.

Click to become a member (receive free books!):

*     *     *

3,000 Billion Dollars into the Bottomless Well of Afghanistan

By Manlio Dinucci, December 23, 2019

In the London Declaration, the 29 member countries of NATO reaffirmed “the engagement for the security and long-term stability of Afghanistan”. One week later, on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act, (used to empty a number of aging skeletons out of the closets, according to political necessity), the Washington Post managed to force the declassification of 2,000 pages of documents which reveal that “US civil servants fooled the public about the war in Afghanistan”. Basically, they hid its disastrous effects, including the economic effects, of a war which has been dragging on for 18 years.

Afghan Papers Inadvertently Document WaPo’s Role in Spreading Official Lies

By Joshua Cho, December 22, 2019

If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion?

The Afghanistan Fiasco and the Decline and Fall of the American Military

By Philip Giraldi, December 20, 2019

A devastating investigative report was published in the Washington Post on December 9th. Dubbed the “Afghanistan Papers” in a nod to the Vietnam War’s famous “Pentagon Papers,” the report relied on thousands of documents to similarly expose how the US government at the presidential level across three administrations, acting in collaboration with the military brass and civilian bureaucracy, deliberately and systematically lied repeatedly to the public and media about the situation in Afghanistan.

The “Afghanistan Papers”: Deep State Narrative Management

By Kit Knightly, December 20, 2019

The Big Reveal for the Washington Post this week is the release of the Afghanistan Papers. A series of interviews and documents “compiled in secret” and then the subject of a “legal challenge” from the US government.

The WaPo baldly calls it: “A secret history of the war”. But there’s nothing here that’s really secret, and very little actual history. What do they tell us? Absolutely nothing, except what we’re supposed to believe.

War is Good for Business and Organized Crime: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Opium Trade. Rising Heroin Addiction in the US

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, December 20, 2019

In 2004,  the proceeds of the Afghan heroin trade yielded an estimated global revenue of the order of 90 billion dollars. This estimate was based on retail sales corresponding to a total supply of the order of 340,000 kg of pure heroin (corresponding to Afghanistan’s 3400 tons of opium production) (See Michel Chossudovsky, America’s War on Terrorism, Chapter XVI, Global Research, Montreal 2005)

Today a rough estimate based on US retail prices suggests that the global heroin market is above the 500 billion dollars mark. This multibillion dollar hike is the result of a significant increase in the volume of heroin transacted Worldwide coupled with a moderate increase in retail prices.

The Real Lesson of Afghanistan Is that Regime Change Does Not Work

By Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies, December 20, 2019

The trove of U.S. “Lessons Learned” documents on Afghanistan published by the Washington Post portrays, in excruciating detail, the anatomy of a failed policy, scandalously hidden from the public for 18 years. The “Lessons Learned” papers, however, are based on the premise that the U.S. and its allies will keep intervening militarily in other countries, and that they must therefore learn the lessons of Afghanistan to avoid making the same mistakes in future military occupations.

What Everyone Is Missing About the Afghanistan Papers

By Darius Shahtahmasebi, December 18, 2019

If you need more proof that lawmakers in the U.S. couldn’t care less about America’s woeful commitment to human rights abroad—or even care about the public who vote them into office—look no further than the recent Afghanistan papers and the reaction to the publications from Congress.

According to the Washington Post, the outlet had obtained 2,000 pages of notes from interviews with more than 400 generals, diplomats, and other officials directly involved in the war. The documents showed that U.S. officials were lying about the progress being made in Afghanistan, lacked a basic understanding of Afghanistan, were hiding unmistakable evidence that the war had become unwinnable, and wasted close to $1 trillion in the process.

Afghanistan War – The Crime of the Century

By Rep. Ron Paul, December 18, 2019

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t know what we were doing.” So said Gen. Douglas Lute, who oversaw the US war on Afghanistan under Presidents Bush and Obama. Eighteen years into the longest war in US history, we are finally finding out, thanks to thousands of pages of classified interviews on the war published by the Washington Post last week, that General Lute’s cluelessness was shared by virtually everyone involved in the war.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

  • Posted in NO READ MORE LINK
  • Comments Off on Selected Articles: The Afghanistan Papers

Holiday Season Hypocrisy Revisited

December 23rd, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Tis the season for frenzied buying of stuff people don’t need, ignoring what’s most important.

What matters most is what most Americans, others in the West, and most elsewhere are denied — notably peace, equity and justice.

Instead they’re tormented by hollowed out human and civil rights, unemployment and mass underemployment, eroding social services, ecocide, and governance serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of beneficial social change.

Joy to the world during holiday season doesn’t exist. How can it with endless US wars on humanity raging at home and abroad, with democracy a meaningless figure of speech in the West, not reality, with predatory capitalism the beating heart of these nations’ politico/socio-economic systems, enforced by police state harshness.

The American way is all about inequality, injustice, exploitation, militarism, and imperial wars of conquest for control and plunder of resources.

Inside the bubble is paradise for its privileged class, outside growing dystopian hell, especially for the least advantaged.

The wealth gap between rich and most other Americans is greatest since the late 19th/early 20th century robber barons age, poverty and underemployment the nation’s leading growth industries, along with food insecurity and homelessness.

High pay/good benefits jobs continue to be offshored to low-wage countries — replaced by part-time or temp rotten ones.

Imperial wars and predatory capitalism are America’s most defining features, monopolies and oligopolies overwhelming small business, notably family-owned ones.

Agribusiness displaced family farms. The 1935 National Labor Relations Act was the high-water mark of labor/management relations in the US — for the first time creating a collective bargaining level playing field.

Post-WW II, US worker rights steadily eroded, today a shadow of earlier times. Last year, only 10.5% of the nation’s working class were union members — compared to triple that number in the 1940s and 50s, the private sector harmed most.

A scant 6.4% of its workers are unionized, according to Bureau of Labor data, compared to nearly 17% in 1983 — because of steady US de-industrialization, replaced by low-pay service jobs with low-unionization rates.

So-called pro-management “right to work” laws enacted in around half of US states contributed to de-unionization by stipulating that workers don’t have to join them.

Decline in US union membership contributed significantly to low wages, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, saying “evidence (shows) that unions raise wages for less-skilled workers” — by a factor of 15 – 20% because of collective bargaining power.

Workers in the US and other Western countries are exploited by rotten jobs, low wages, poor or no benefits, along with weak or no union representation for maximum corporate profits.

America’s most vulnerable people of color were transformed from chattel to wage slavery. Police state laws and mass incarceration replaced fundamental freedoms.

Resisting the imperial state is met with brute force. Many US inner city minority communities resemble Occupied Palestine.

Killer cops operate like Israeli security forces, killing thousands in America annually, official numbers undercounting reality.

There’s no joy to the world at Christmas or any other time of year with this going on nationwide, with endless imperial wars raging abroad, with countless millions enduring its ravaging, with the worst of all possible worlds for long-suffering people worldwide.

For America’s ruling class, Christmas is all take and no give, bah humbug its message to ordinary people.

Social justice champion Emma Goldman once said “hopes…for the new year depend neither on religious nor political calculations.”

“They rest on the awakened consciousness of the people, upon whom depends the great and glorious future — a new social structure built on freedom and well-being for all.”

Noted anti-war/revolutionary activist Rosa Luxemburg earlier said:

“We stand today…before the awful proposition: either the triumph of imperialism and the destruction of all culture, and, as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration, a vast cemetery; or, the victory of socialism.”

During the holiday season and throughout the year, dark forces in the US and elsewhere trample on the rights and welfare of ordinary people.

Grim tidings define the holiday season over peace on earth, good will to all, and positive change.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Holiday Season Hypocrisy Revisited

Bolivia’s President in exile Evo Morales Thursday announced that Spanish jurist Baltasar Garzon will represent him in the efforts to invalidate the arrest warrant issued by the coup-born government.

“We formed an international team with Baltasar Garzon… We will act legally against this arrest warrant, which is neither constitutional nor legal,” Morales said.

This announcement was made from Buenos Aires, Argentina, where the Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) leader resides with political refugee status.

Former judge Baltazar Garzon acquired international renown in the late 1990s when he succeeded in arresting the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and attempted to convict him of crimes against humanity committed during his government (1973-1990).

On Dec. 18, Bolivia’s coup-born regime led by Jeanine Añez issued an arrest warrant against Morales and accused him of sedition and terrorism.

To justify this paradoxical accusation, the U.S.-backed de-facto regime presented a recording in which Morales was supposedly heard asking his supporters to fight against the Añez regime and block the roads to prevent the supply of food to the cities.

After being forced to leave his country due to a military uprising, which was later discovered to be motivated by economic rewards that the Bolivian far-right promised to security officers, Morales traveled to Mexico where President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador granted him political asylum.

Bolivia: The hypocrisy of the European Union (EU) and other governments of the world justifies violent ruptures of democracy when their allies are not the ones affected​​​​​​​. They are hiding their business and interests. Bolivia lives a coup. The meme reads, “Bolivia at a glance. The international community is setting a dangerous precedent: the lack of unanimous and firm condemnation of coups d’etat.”

Subsequently, once Alberto Fernandez assumed the presidency of Argentina on Dec. 10, the MAS leader traveled to this South American country and requested political refugee status.

“I have so much desire to be in Bolivia; however, comrades, leaders, and authorities ​​​​​permanently come to visit me… The best way to operate is still from Buenos Aires,” Morales said.

The contact between the Bolivian leader and former Spanish judge is not new. On Nov. 13, Garzon submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) a petition to allow Morales to be a candidate in the 2020 elections.

“We submitted this initiative due to the serious situation of violence in Bolivia, which forced President Evo Morales to go into exile in Mexico,” Garzon said, as reported by local outlet La Razon.

At that time, the Spanish lawyer clearly stated that what was happening in Bolivia was the consequence of a coup d’etat.

“The military… rebelled and seized power. Therefore it can be said, without any doubt, that it has been a military coup. And this we express in the petition before the IACHR.”

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons – Victor Santa Maria

In Rome, it is being argued that Italy is in a weak position in Libya, especially as the Libyan National Army (LNA) led by General Khalifa Haftar are in the midst of liberating the capital city of Tripoli from the UN-recognized Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Government of National Accord (GNA). This was first seen with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte being excluded from the Summit of Four (United Kingdom, France, Turkey and Germany) who met in London earlier this month to talk about Libya, a former colony of Italy, on the sidelines of the NATO summit. It cannot be denied that both France and Turkey are significantly stronger on the international scene than Italy. They have much greater international clout and influence because they are willing to use military force to support their interests, which is arranged along the same conflicting lines of the early twentieth century, the era of colonialism.

Despite Italy having a respectable military, the political class has been unwilling to use its military outside multilateral frameworks, such as NATO, which prevents Italy from defining an autonomous line of action. Given the size of the stakes, with Libya just lying to the south of Italy and the source of mass refugees entering the European country, it is difficult for Rome to not get involved.

After announcing a greater Italian military presence in the Eastern Mediterranean to Parliament on November 28 to protect their corporate interests in exploiting Cypriot resources, the Italian Navy dispatched the new Fremm class frigate, a ship capable of firing even a hundred kilometers away, to Cypriot waters that are claimed by Turkey. The Italian ship participated in some exercises just as the Turkish pressure against Cyprus was intensifying, close to where Italian oil and gas company Eni is active, along with France’s Total.

Although Italy is showing its naval prowess in Cypriot waters in defiance of Turkish aggression, the situation is completely different in Libya as Rome has been on the side of the GNA, following the actions of the Obama administration and Turkey. The French however support General Haftar, who is also supported by Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and most recently Greece, along with volunteers from the Russian private military company Wagner.

Italy has not changed alignment even after neighboring and fellow EU-NATO member Greece began backing Haftar, remaining anchored to the Turkish-backed government due to the conditioning of some converging energy and security interests – essentially oil and control of illegal migratory flows. Despite Rome having several hundred of their soldiers deployed in Misrata, a Turkish-majority city, the units sent from Rome remained inert even when the LNA repeatedly bombed targets close to the Italian contingent. The internationally recognized Libyan President Fayez al-Sarraj, an ethnic Turk himself like much of the upper echelons of the GNA, therefore understood that he could not count on Italian protection. Sarraj naturally turned to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with which agreements were reached in recent days concerning the delimitation of their illegal respective exclusive economic zones and cooperation in the field of defense.

With Turkish drones, advisers and special forces arriving in Libya, Italy has limited itself to intensifying aerial reconnaissance over the waters in front of Misrata. This asymmetry of determination seems to diplomatically weaken the Italian position. Sarraj believes, probably not without reason, that he can be better protected by Turkey, even though this remains highly unlikely with Haftar just a few kilometres from Tripoli center.

Under these conditions, negotiating with Erdoğan rather than Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is practically inevitable for Libya as Italy remains on the outskirts of the latest flareup in the North African country. Although the Ottoman Empire lost control over Libya in 1912 when Italy won the Italo-Turkish War, it is Turkey today returning to a position of significant influence over Libya, rather than Italy.

Ankara and Tripoli have transformed the 600 kilometers that separates the Turkish coast from the Libyan coast into an exclusive economic zone, ignoring the existence of the Crete and the other Greek islands in the Dodecanese. But that treaty has serious repercussions in the field of Italy’s energy policies. The agreement recognizes Turkey’s exclusive rights to prospect for gas and oil, putting Eni’s offshore concessions at serious risk. The agreement also indirectly jeopardizes Eni’s prospecting in the waters of Cyprus, effectively blocking the possible construction of the gas pipelines necessary to bring gas to European markets via Israel, Cyprus, Greece and Italy.

With the inevitable success of Haftar against the GNA, Italy appears to be the biggest loser after Turkey for its insistence of ignoring the reality on the ground. With significant Turkish assistance to the GNA not expected to arrive until well into the new year, Haftar is in a position of power to liberate Tripoli, leaving Misrata the only stronghold left for pro-Turkish forces. Whether Italy realizes this reality in time, remains to be seen. But with a new order likely to be established in Libya in the coming weeks, it would be in Rome’s interests to realize this reality and establish relations with Haftar or risk being blocked from lucrative energy deals.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Paul Antonopoulos is a Research Fellow At The Center For Syncretic Studies.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Italy Needs to Accept the Changing Reality in Libya to Protect Its Energy Interests
  • Tags: ,

The Canadian media gets a failing grade when it comes to its coverage of chemical weapons in Syria.

Among the basic principles of reporting, as taught in every journalism school, are: Constantly strive for the truth; Give voice to all sides of a story; When new information comes to light about a story you reported, a correction must be issued or a follow-up produced.

But the Canadian media has ignored explosives revelations from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It’s a stark example of their complicity with belligerent Canadian foreign policy in Syria.

In May 2019 a member of the OPCW Fact Finding Mission in Syria, Ian Henderson, released a document claiming the management of the organization misled the public about the purported chemical attack in Douma in April 2018. It showed that the organization suppressed an assessment that contradicted the claim that a gas cylinder fell from the air. In November another OPCW whistleblower added to the Henderson revelations, saying that his conclusion that the incident was “a non chemical-related event” was twisted to imply the opposite. Last week WikiLeaks released a series of internal documents demonstrating that the team who wrote the OPCW’s report on Douma didn’t go to Syria. One memo noted that 20 OPCWinspectors felt the report released “did not reflect the views of the team members that deployed to [Syria].”

I couldn’t find a single report about the whistleblowers/leaks in any major Canadian media outlet. Theyalso ignored explicit suppression of the leaks.

Journalist Tareq Haddad “resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW letter were refused for no valid reason.” Haddad wrote a long article explaining his resignation, which detailed how an editor who previously worked at the European Council on Foreign Relations blocked it.

There is an important Canadian angle to this story. Twenty-four hours after the alleged April 7, 2018, chemical attack foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland put out a statement claiming, “it is clear to Canada that chemical weapons were used and that they were used by the Assad regime.” Five days later Prime Minister Justin Trudeau supported cruise missile strikes on a Syrian military base stating, “Canada supports the decision by the United States, the United Kingdom, and France to take action to degrade the Assad regime’s ability to launch chemical weapons attacks against its own people.”

Canadian officials have pushed for the organization to blame Bashar al-Assad’s government for chemical attacks since Syria joined the OPCW and had its declared chemical weapon stockpile destroyed in 2013–14. Canada’s special envoy to the OPCW, Sabine Nolke, has repeatedly accused Assad’s forces of employing chemical weapons. Instead of expressing concern over political manipulation of evidence, Nolke criticized the leak.In a statement after Henderson’s position was made public she noted, “Canada remains steadfast in its confidence in the professionalism and integrity of the FFM [Fact-Finding Mission] and its methods. However, Mr. Chair, we are unsettled with the leak of official confidential documents from the Technical Secretariat.”

Amidst efforts to blame the Syrian government for chemical weapons use, Canadian officials lauded the OPCW and plowed tens of millions of dollars into the organization. A June 2017 Global Affairs release boasted that “Canada and the United States are the largest national contributors to the JIM [OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism for Attributing Responsibility for Chemical Weapons Attacks in Syria].”

The statement added that Canada “is the largest voluntary cash contributor to the organization, having provided nearly $25 million since 2012 to help destroy chemical weapons in Libya and Syria and to support special missions and contingency operations related to chemical weapons use, investigation, verification and monitoring in Syria.” Two months after the Douma incident Freeland announced a $7.5 million contribution to the OPCW in a statement heavily focused on Syria.In August Governor General Julie Payette even traveled to The Hague to push OPCW Director-General, Fernando Arias, on Syria. After a “meeting focused on OPCW activities in Syria”, Payette highlighted Canada’s “$23 million in voluntary funds for Syria-related activities.”

Ottawa backed the group that produced the (probably staged) video purporting to show chemical weapons use in Douma. The Liberals backed the White Helmets diplomatically and financially. In a release about the purported attack in Douma Freeland expressed Canada’s “admiration for … the White Helmets”, later calling them “heroes.”Representatives of the White Helmet repeatedly came to Ottawa tomeetgovernment officials and Canadian officials helped members of the group escape Syria via Israel in July 2018. Alongside tens of millions of dollars from the US,British, Dutch, German and French governments, Global Affairs announced “$12  million for groups in Syria, such as the White Helmets, that are saving lives by providing communities with emergency response services and removing explosives.”

Credited with rescuing people from bombed out buildings, the White Helmets fostered opposition to Assad and promoted western intervention. Founded by former British army officer James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets operatedalmost entirely in areas of Syria occupied by the Saudi Arabia–Washington backed Al Nusra/Al Qaeda insurgents and other rebels. They criticized the Syrian government and disseminated images of its purported violence while largely ignoring civilians targeted by the opposition. Their members were repeatedly photographed with Al Qaeda-linked Jihadists and reportedly enabled their executions.

The White Helmets helped establish an early warning system for airstrikes that benefited opposition insurgents. Framed as a way to save civilians, the ‘Sentry’ system tracked and validated information about potential airstrikes.

Canada funded the Hala Systems’ air warning, which was set up by former Syria focused US diplomat John Jaeger. It’s unclear how much Canadian money was put into the initiative but in September 2018 Global Affairs boasted that “Canadais the largest contributor to the ‘Sentry’ project.”

Ottawa is dedicated to a particular depiction of the Syrian war and clearly so is the dominant media. Committed to a highly simplistic account of a messy and multilayered conflict, they’ve suppressed evidence suggesting that an important international organization has doctored evidence to align with a narrative used to justify military strikes.

Journalists are supposed to seek the truth, not simply what their government says. In fact, according to what is taught in J-school, journalists have a special responsibility to question what their government claims to be true.

No journalism program in Canada teaches that governments should always be believed, especially on military and foreign affairs. But that is how the dominant media has acted in the case of Syrian chemical weapons.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from the author

The Madrid Climate Disaster

December 23rd, 2019 by Peter Koenig

Does anyone know what COP25 stands for? Probably very few. Its unimportant. As unimportant as the whole roadshow itself. Just for the hell of it, for those who read this article, COP means Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The 25 stands for the 25th year that such annual conferences have taken place – every year in another country – what a tourist bonanza for the hundreds, if not thousands of attendees and participants who travel – by air – many of them business class, to these most questionable, even useless conferences.

The first of the COP summits took place in Berlin, Germany, in March 1995. The COP’s Presidency rotates among the 5 UN recognized regions and so do the conferences – to make “eco-tourism” most of the time for the same UN and government bureaucrats and jokers more attractive. I can’t help thinking of the enormous cost of these conferences – travel, food, lodging and everything in between – for two weeks – in the case of COP25 Madrid (2-16 December 2019), two days more than planned, because after the scheduled two weeks no agreements were reached, so it was decided to add two days. Add to this all the preparatory meetings and related travels – tens of millions of dollars, possibly more, are spent for nothing, absolutely zilch, nada. That’s the officially recognized outcome at the end of the extended COP25 in Madrid – nothing.

There are UN staff, directors mostly, at the UN in Geneva and in New York, who earn huge salaries in the hundreds of thousands a year, for doing what? Some of them are directing their staff to preparing the extravagant but mostly useless COPs – and of course, they are also attending them. When I see monetary figures like this, and we are now talking of only one kind of UN conferences, it occurs to me that this is money stolen from the poor. It is taken from the very people whom the UN is committed by its Charter to help. – How many simple drinking water supply and sanitation systems could you build with all this money? How many millions of people could you serve with the money wasted for such conferences with safe drinking water and safe sanitation?

According to the WHO-UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program (JMP), some 2.1 billion people have no safe drinking water at home and more than twice this number lacks safe sanitation. At the same time, these agencies also monitor the death toll among less than 5-year-old children from unsafe water and sanitation, from the lack of hygiene, from diarrheal diseases – nearly 400,000 die per year. In addition, contaminated water and poor sanitation also contribute to the transmission of cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A and typhoid. This does not even take into account those who die due to a famine-reduced immune system.

Precious money deviated from the UN system by men-invented rather unproductive, but usually lush conferences – of which the COPs are just one category – could save millions of lives.

This is a real environmental issue, in fact more vital than just environment, it is environmental health. It is certainly competing in importance with the man-made CO2 issue. Climate change is happening, no doubt, it always did for the 4.5 billion years of Mother Earth’s existence. But the way the west is dealing with it is a sheer farce; no, it’s actually worse, much worse, it’s criminal, because it’s knowingly made into a commercial globalized profit-making enterprise. Knowingly, because the elite that pulls the strings behind these events – the same who finance Greta Thunberg – are well aware of what they are doing and why they are doing what they are doing. It helps none, but global corporate finance. Those who suffer most are the people living in the Global South which is, as with most natural disasters, most affected by naturally occurringclimate change.

It’s still worse, because the western propaganda message promises actions towards saving the world from climate change which are entirely deceptive. So, the poor are again being lied to. They are being lured into making huge investments with huge loans – the World Bank, IMF and bilateral lending institutions, let alone Wall Street, stand ready – loans and interest which the borrowing countries have to repay. If they can’t, they have to give their collateral, meaning, let the west privatize their public services and assets, and grab their natural resources for a pittance. That’s how it works – the west preventing climate change from happening.

Not to mention the enormous arrogance with which the eminent COP attendees pretend humans can control Mother Earth’s temperature fluctuations, i.e. to less than 2 degrees C. Or arguing, whether “we” (almighty humans) should agree on limiting a temperature rise in the next 30 or 50 or 100 years to 2 or 3 degrees C, exceeds any reasonable level of human absurdity and conceit. Our assumed power over nature is at best ridiculous.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change. IPCC has 195 members and some 2000 scientists who contribute to IPCC’s work. Any serious scientist knows that the main cause for climate change are variations of solar activities, but they sell us CO2 as chief villain, knowing well, that the world, especially the western world, functioning under a turbo-neoliberal corporate and finance driven capitalist system, based on ‘eternal’ consumption and eternal growth – which drives the ever-growing profit margins – will not change its behavior vis-à-vis nature, unless it collapses under its own weight. Not with a million COPs it will change its profit-making thinking and business motives. – These mostly famous scientists know it. If they don’t follow the line, they risk losing their reputation and, who knows, their jobs?

Ice core records studied by scientists, combined with many types of proxy records to reconstruct past atmospheres and environmental conditions, back from thousands to many millions of years, suggest that climate changes in large cycles, and within them, in smaller cycles. For example, it appears that between 2.6 and 5.3 million years ago, during the Pliocene Epoch, CO2 levels were comparable to those of today. Models suggest global temperatures were 3 to 4 degrees C warmer than pre-industrial levels (see this).

Similar patterns were repeated 400,000 to 600,000 years ago. What is important to notice though, is that temperatures rise first, followed by CO2 levels which is logical, since the sun is heating the earth. It is the complete opposite to what today’s climate gurus are telling us. In the second half of the 1900s, NASA studied during some 30 years temperature fluctuations in the Pacific Ocean, investigating causes and effects of El Niño. The result was similar; the higher the water temperature of the Pacific, the more CO2 was released by the sea into the atmosphere. High CO2 levels are eventually followed by lower temperatures (see this and this).

The world still runs mainly on unrenewable energy, mostly hydrocarbons, oil, gas and even coal – the chief producers of CO2. Of course, we should stop using hydrocarbons and convert our economic systems to renewable energies. Hydrocarbons with their carbon dioxide output pollute the air, soil, surface and underground water ways. They contaminate even our food. Their secondary and tertiary products, plastic bottles and plastic-related packing materials, most of which are not biodegradable and contaminate our oceans, our landscapes, and kill wildlife.

But who convinces the highly profitable petrol titans, packaging giants – not to mention the pharma industry which also thrives on petrochemicals – to turn the wheel back to the 1950’s and 1960s, when we went to the corner stores to buy our staple food, like rice, sugar, flour, potatoes in bulk, put it in used and reusable paper bags. We were not unhappier than we are today. To the contrary. Cancer rates were considerably lower. In 1960, CO2 levels in the atmosphere stood on average at 316 ppm. We had no cell phones. Time moved slower. And – importantly – in the fifties and sixties we lived even in the west in a world more or less in balance; we used less than the total of the resources Mother Earth generously provides for us.

In the mid-sixties, during the post-WWII economic boom, we started rapidly exceeding the world’s resources balance. Today, the west, or Global North, uses some 4 times as many resources as Mother Earth can provide. In Africa and some parts of Asia that ratio is between 0.5 and 0.6. – But no worries, there comes a point when Mother Earth will self-regenerate, that means with a break from us, destructive humans. Looking at geo-history – that has most likely happened already a few times: Civilizations disappeared – often “suicide by greed” – and once Mother Earth has recovered, she may give mankind another chance. She has a lot of patience.

In 2009, at the time of the (in)famous Copenhagen Climate Conference, the average level of CO2 in the air was 386 ppm. The goal was to reduce the level to 350 ppm ten years later. The Copenhagen Climate Conference coined the “350-sologan”. In November 2019, the carbon dioxide level has exceeded 410 ppm – and rising. It is an illusion to believe that Big Business, Big Industry, Big Finance – and Big Growth-driven Profit – will yield to environmental or climate concerns.

And again, those who call the shots know it, but they keep fooling the world, making the purposefully brainwashed and poorly informed populace believe that special taxes, for example on flying, or other taxes on hydrocarbon-based energy, will make a difference; or that “carbon credits” will improve the environment. This is of course nonsense. And the taxes eventually end up in the pockets of the usual villain, the globalized private banking system, instead of being dedicated to intense research into alternative energies. Such efforts happen only in China and Russia.

In the west, intense research into solar energy, the ultimate renewable energy, is not allowed to happen. The big energy lobbies, hydrocarbon, nuclear, and even hydropower, will block any such attempt. Can you imagine, the sun provides the earth with more than 10,000 times as much energy per day than what we use in the entire world in the same period.

Carbon credits are the most ludicrous deceitful banking invention of the last 50 years. How do they work? – A huge corporation in the Global North, instead of making the necessary investments to reduce their CO2 output, it buys “carbon credits” from a country in the Global South, where the pollution level is below a certain limit, so the northern corporation may continue postponing the CO2-reducing investments, and the country in the global south should theoretically invest the money it got from the “carbon credit” sale into alternative energy or otherwise environmentally friendly projects. It hardly ever happens. Many of these countries lack the projects and / or the absorptive capacity for the required investments. And even when it does happen, the carbon dioxide pollution of the monster corporation in the north continues. What a farce!

Maybe one day, in the not too distant future, the breakthrough will happen. It must, if we, mankind, want to survive and not collapse as civilization under the weight of our own wasteful, growth-based luxury lifestyle. We suddenly see the light – the sunlight – and use it, instead of CO2 generating hydrocarbon – and we free ourselves from this horrendous petro-corporate dependency. Our arrogant climate control attitude, temperature-rise fixing and human-manipulating by centigrade – gone – out of the window. Our linear 30, 50- and 100-year projections gone. Finito. What a feeling! – A feeling of real freedom. A full change-over of lifestyle. This moment may come faster than we think. The Chinese, always bashed by the west, have been concentrating at least the last decade much of their research on efficient and sustainable renewable energy – sun energy is in their focus. The East is the future. The East is where the sun rises.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Madrid Climate Disaster
  • Tags:

The Trump administration proposed today to reapprove the pesticide atrazine, an endocrine-disrupting herbicide that castrates frogs and is linked to birth defects and cancer in people. It has been banned or is being phased out in more than 35 countries.

Today’s proposal weakens safeguards for children’s health and the environment, allowing 50 percent more atrazine to end up in U.S. waterways.

“It’s absolutely shameful that while other countries are banning atrazine, the Trump administration is opening up the tap,” said Nathan Donley, a scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This disgusting backward step ignores decades of research and will inflict untold damage on people, wildlife and waters across the country.”

Atrazine is the second-most-used pesticide in the United States and one of the most common pesticide contaminants in waterways and drinking-water supplies.

In allowing the continued use of atrazine, the EPA discarded safety precautions mandated under the Food Quality Protection Act that protect young children from pesticide exposures. In doing so, the agency is ignoring multiple independent epidemiological studies finding that developing embryos and young children are at a high risk of harm from this pesticide.

The EPA also reduced the protection factor it uses to convert toxicity in rat and mouse studies to levels considered safe for humans. The more permissive benchmark proposed by the Trump EPA relies solely on a model developed by the primary manufacturer of atrazine, Syngenta.

With those protections in place, atrazine uses on lawns and turf would likely have been cancelled due to unacceptable harms to children. In today’s decision, the agency is only proposing a modest reduction in application rate for turf.

“Restricting the spraying of atrazine is essential for protecting human health,” said Olga Naidenko, the Environmental Working Group’s vice president for science investigations. “Instead, the Trump EPA’s proposal would increase atrazine discharges, endangering children’s health and harming communities. Since the beginning of the Trump administration, the agency has been working overtime on behalf of chemical agriculture while acting against the interests of children’s health.”

The Trump EPA plan also weakens environmental safeguards put in place in 2006 to protect aquatic life from harmful atrazine exposure, a move that will dramatically increase the amount of atrazine allowed in waterways across the United States.

At issue is the “concentration equivalent level of concern,” or CELOC, a regulatory threshold meant to protect aquatic ecosystems from pesticide pollution. The current CELOC is a 60-day average concentration of 10 parts per billion of atrazine. The proposed action would raise that level to 15 parts per billion, nearly five times higher than the 3.4 parts per billion the EPA identified as safe in 2016. Water concentrations that exceed the CELOC in any given year are subject to mitigation measures by the pesticide companies that are meant to bring the watershed back into compliance.

Today’s proposed weakening of safeguards for atrazine comes after Jeff Sands, a former Syngenta lobbyist, was appointed a senior agricultural advisor to then-EPA administrator Scott Pruitt in October 2017. Sands received a waiver from Trump’s pledge to forbid political appointees from working on issues involving former employers or clients. Sands has since left the EPA.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Trump EPA Proposes to Scrap Protections for Children from Pesticide Linked to Birth Defects, Cancer
  • Tags: , ,

In the London Declaration, the 29 member countries of NATO reaffirmed “the engagement for the security and long-term stability of Afghanistan”. One week later, on the basis of the Freedom of Information Act, (used to empty a number of aging skeletons out of the closets, according to political necessity), the Washington Post managed to force the declassification of 2,000 pages of documents which reveal that “US civil servants fooled the public about the war in Afghanistan”. Basically, they hid its disastrous effects, including the economic effects, of a war which has been dragging on for 18 years.

The most interesting data that emerge are those concerning the economic costs. 1,500 billion dollars have been spent for military operations, a figure that “remains opaque” – or in other words, underestimated – no-one knows how much the secret services have spent on the war, or the real cost of the contractors, the mercenaries recruited for the war (currently about 6,000).

Since “the war was financed with borrowed money”, the accrued interest has risen to 500 billion, which brings the total expenditure to 2,000 billion dollars. To this must be added other posts – 87 billion for the training of Afghan forces, 54 billion for “reconstruction”, of which a large part was “lost to corruption and failed projects”. At least 10 billion more were spent for the “struggle against narco-trafficking”, with the triumphant result of a strong increase in the production of opium – today Afghanistan supplies 80 % of the heroin on the world market.

With the interests which continue to accumulate, (in 2023 they will rise to 600 billion), and the cost of the operations currently under way, expenditure easily overtakes 2,000 billion. We also need to consider the cost of medical assistance for the veterans returning from the war with serious or invalidating wounds. So far, 350 billion dollars have already been spent for those who fought in Afghanistan or Iraq, and this sum will rise to 1,400 billion dollars over the next 40 years. Since half of this sum is spent for veterans of Afghanistan, the cost of the war for the US is more than 3,000 billion dollars.

After 18 years of war, and an unquantifiable number of civilian victims, the results at the military level are as follows – “the Talibans control a major part of the country, and Afghanistan remains one of the greatest sources of refugees and migrants”. The Washington Post therefore concludes that the declassified documents reveal “the brutal reality of the errors and failures of the American effort to pacify and rebuild Afghanistan”.

In this way the prestigious news outlet, which explains the way in which US civil servants have “fooled the public”, now fools the public once again by presenting the war as “the American effort to pacify and rebuild Afghanistan”. The true goal of the war in Afghanistan waged by the USA, in which NATO has been participating since 2003, is the control of this region, which is of capital strategic importance – at the crossroads between the Middle East, Central, Southern and Eastern Asia , particularly taking into account the proximity of Russia and China.

Italy is also participating in this war, under US command, since in October 2002 Parliament authorised the delivery of a first military contingent as from March 2003. The cost for Italy, paid from the public treasury, as is the case in the USA, is estimated to be approximately 8 billion Euros, to which must be added various other costs. In order to convince the population, hard hit by cuts in social expenditure, that further sums are necessary for Afghanistan, they are told that the money is used to guarantee better living conditions for the Afghan people. And the Brothers of the Sacro Convento of Assisi handed President Mattarella “San Francesco’s Lamp of Peace”, thereby recognising that “Italy, with its missions and its soldiers, collaborates actively in the promotion of peace everywhere in the world”.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article appeared on Dec. 17 in the Italian web newspaper, Il Manifesto. Translation is by Pete Kimberley

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Two oil and gas exploration contracts with Russian companies were approved by the Syrian People’s Assembly (Parliament), the vital economic sector for Syria’s rebuilding efforts.

While the US and its camp of thieves continue to loot the Syrian oil, not because of its quantities, it’s less than 10% of what the US gets for almost free from Kuwait and without a sweat.

It’s an additional step by the Trump administration to deprive the Syrian people from one of their main resources.

The two deals approved by the Syrian Parliament include exploration and production in three areas, notably in an oil field in northeastern Syria and a gas field north of the capital Damascus.

Minister of Oil and Mineral Resources Ali Ghanem said that the awarding of contracts to the two companies is part of the Syrian state cooperating with friendly countries that stood by Syria, referring to the ongoing Syrian combating against the US-waged World War of Terror against humanity.

Ghanem said the ministry is continuing to conclude maritime oil investment contracts, but economic sanctions on Syria have prevented naval contracts with a number of international companies.

Last September, the Ministry of Oil and Mineral Resources signed three contracts with Russian companies in the field of surveying, drilling and production in the oil and gas sector as part of the 61st Damascus International Fair.

Syria’s pre-war production of oil barely reached 380,000 bpd, which was almost enough for the country, pre-2011, and a little left for export. However, new findings in Syria’s territorial waters as well as northeast of the country and in the central region between the capital Damascus and Homs are very promising and would be an important source of energy and income for decades to come.

During the past 9 years of the current war on the Syrian people, the looting of the Syrian oil was carried out by the FSA terrorists then Nusra Front (Al-Qaeda Levant), then ISIS, then the Kurdish separatist SDF militia, and now directly to the US, ironically, all of them were stealing Syrian oil and selling it to Turkey (at $ 5 / barrel) which in turn sells it to Israel…!

‘Wherever there’s a push from democracy using terror and direct invasion, i.e. the US style, there’s oil’, in other words, you can say: The Americans are always seeking G.O.D. at all costs: Gold, Oil, and Drugs.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Damascus Approved Two Oil Contracts with Russian Companies
  • Tags: ,

It is no surprise that when the Inspector General’s Report was released in early December, the corporate media, which itself has been knee-deep and complicit in spreading the false Russiagate narrative, chose to focus on one narrow conclusion: that, given DOJ’s ‘lax guidelines,’ the IG found no bias related to opening the Crossfire Hurricane investigation.

Ergo, once the Media labels the IG Report, all dutiful subscribers and readers fall in line with its dictates, nodding in concurrence, as those who refuse to do their own homework get on board and accept the hogwash they are being fed.  Once the Media hypes the repetitive drone that there was ‘no bias,’ the phrase becomes embedded into the collective unconscious and the disinformation becomes gospel.

The question has yet to be asked what role the FISA Court played in its own debasement by blindly accepting the majority of surveillance requests and by lax procedures that allow its own credibility to be violated.

What remains uncertain is exactly how Crossfire Hurricane was born. While it is known that the Clinton campaign (via the DNC) hired GP Fusion to dig dirt on a Republican candidate for President and we know that former MI 6 asset Christopher Steele became involved with creating a salacious Dossier – but the specific links tying those diverse parts to the FBI remains enigmatic.

An almost immediate response to the ‘no bias’ allegation came from AG William Barr stating that

The Inspector General’s report now makes clear that the FBI launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken.” with Special Investigator US Attorney John Durham adding that he

advised the IG that he did not agree with some of the report’s conclusions as to predication and how the FBI case was opened.

Both responses were highly unusual and may be interpreted as affirmation of a deeper level of complicity than the IG discovered although his investigation was limited to DOJ employees and to the FISA Court process.

It was not until IG Horowitz’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee that the true scathing impact of the full Report was understood; thus revealing the true depth of the FBI’s embedded systemic problems.

Horowitz told the Senate panel:

We found and are deeply concerned that so many basic and fundamental errors were made by three separate handpicked investigative teams on one of the most sensitive FBI investigations after the matter had been briefed to the highest levels within the FBI even though the information sought through the use of FISA authority related so closely to an on-going Presidential campaign and even though those involved with the investigations knew that their actions would likely be subjected to close scrutiny. The circumstances reflect the failure not just by those who prepared the applications but also by the managers and supervisors in the Crossfire Hurricane chain of command including FBI senior officials who were briefed as the investigation progressed” 

In dialogue with Sen. Crapo about FBI misconduct as ‘mind-numbing’, Horowitz responded “. There is such a range of conduct here that is inexplicable and the answers we got were not satisfactory that we’re left trying to understand how could all these errors occur over a nine month period or so…”

In other words, the FBI, with a tainted history of deeply embedded corruption, has been out of control for decades with an aggressive pursuit of political opponents, corruption of its Forensic Lab and a COINTEL program against American citizens. It is ironic that some of the FBI’s Congressional supporters are now recipients of that corruption.

In response to Barr’s statement regarding the IG Report, former Attorney General Erik Holder who once referred to himself as “still Obama’s wing man, so i’m there with my boy,” wrote a divisive op ed for the Washington Post provocatively entitled “Eric Holder: William Barr is Unfit to be Attorney General.

In a classic example of covering one’s butt, it can be assumed that Holder is still protecting Obama’s wing as he took cheap shots at Barrfor a “series of public statements and taken actions that are so plainly ideological, so nakedly partisan and so deeply inappropriate” making him ‘unfit to lead the Justice Department.”  Suffering a partisan anxiety attack, Holder has clearly been directed to slander a predecessor who exhibits more candor and principle than he himself demonstrated as AG.

Given the IG report’s otherwise thorough analysis, the Hope and Change crowd may be feeling the heat that those morning tete a tete intel briefings in the

Oval Office may have included updates on Crossfire Hurricane. Holder’s condescension, as if he had special privilege to pontificate on “career public servants,’ falls flat with his thinly veiled threat to Durham:

I was troubled by his unusual statement disputing the inspector general’s findings. Good reputations are hard-won in the legal profession, but they are fragile; anyone in Durham’s shoes would do well to remember that, in dealing with this administration, many reputations have been irrevocably lost.

With focus now on whether Durham will succumb to Holder’s warning may instead   boomerang, inspiring Durham to dig deeper than he had previously planned.

The IG Report cited former FBI Director Jim Comey for “clearly and dramatically” departing from department norms in the investigation of HRC’s email server and that he made a “serious error of judgment” in sending a letter to Congress announcing the re-opening of the Clinton probe.   Comey was fired from the FBI for ‘insubordinate’ acts and ‘dangerous’ behavior in deceiving the FISA Court.

When asked by CNN’s Anderson Cooper,

“When you read what the reportsaid, do you think this is avindication?

Comey responded

It is. The FBI has had to wait two years while the President and his supporters lied about the institution finally the truth gets told.”

Apparently Comey had not read the Report in its entirety, not listened to Horowitz’s testimony to the Senate or he continues to live under a rock.

In a recent interview with NBC News Pete Williams,  Barr explained that

“One of the problems in the IG investigation is that  Comey refused to sign back up for his security clearance and therefore could not be questioned (by the IG) on classified matters...so someone like Durham can compel testimony.”

In other words, Comey is shrewd enough to know how to deliberately avoid pertinent questions from Horowitz without implicating himself but the day will come when Durham has the legal authority to demand Comey’s full participation.

In a Fox News Sunday interview with Chris Wallace, Comey refused to accept and was significantly at odds with many of the IG most significant findings including denial of any personal role in Crossfire.

 “I didn’t know, As Director I am not kept informed on the details of an investigation.  I didn’t know the particulars  with an agency of 38,000 peopleseven layers below.

Wallace repeatedly pushed back with Comey remaining smooth as silk, carefully coached, as he slipped around every iota that he had any responsibility for the investigation of a President and its constitutional screw ups.

When asked if he would resign if all these misdeeds were revealed under his watch, Comey replied “No, I don’t think so.  There are other mistakes I consider more consequential than this during my tenure.” Pray, we await those revelations.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and President of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter.   She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member in the US House of Representatives in Washington, DC.  She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Inspector General’s Report and the False Russiagate Narrative: Malfeasance, Lies, Threats and Denials

Archbishop Atallah Hanna, of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, was allegedly the victim of an Israeli assassination attempt on December 17, just days before Christmas, when an Israeli gas canister was fired into his church in Jerusalem.  He was rushed to the hospital suffering from partial paralysis due to the effects of the poisonous gas.  

The Israeli occupation authorities have long held him in disdain because of his outspoken criticism of the occupation of Palestine, and the suffering of its people. Hanna stated last month,

“The occupation in Jerusalem is treating us as if we are guests and foreigners in our own city. This is the embodiment of apartheid policies and practices against our people in Jerusalem specifically and in Palestine more generally.”

On December 6 he stated, “We will remain in Jerusalem, defending our religious sites and endowments. We reject the policies of the occupation. We will not surrender. Our motto will always be freedom and dignity for the Palestinian people. Our religious sites will remain ours. Jerusalem will remain ours.”

At the recent Feast of Saint Barbara celebration, Archbishop Hanna proclaimed Christmas’ message of hope and consolation for the Palestinian people in a time of suffering. “Despite our grief and suffering, we will continue to love life and struggle for freedom.”, he said. He urged the world to stand up with the Palestinian people and help them claim their right to live in peace and freedom. “There can be no peace without justice and without fulfilling the Palestinian people’s aspirations,” he stressed in the ancient village of Aboud, where Jewish colonial settlements were built in recent years.  He added his “call upon all the churches of the world, in the west and east, to urgently defend Palestine, the children of Palestine, and the Palestinian cause. Let our message this Christmas be to free Palestine and the Palestinian people.”

Recent apartheid conference

The ‘First International Conference on Israeli Apartheid’ was held on November 29 in Istanbul.  The occupation of Palestinian land and the treatment of Palestinians as second-class citizens was discussed, and Archbishop Hanna was one of the most outspoken attendees, which was sure to catch the glare of the Israeli officials.

Archbishop Hanna said,

“The city of Jerusalem is the city of the three Abrahamic religions…Christian and Muslim Palestinians living in Jerusalem suffer from the occupation, suffer from repression, tyranny, and oppression.”

Comparisons were made to the international outcry which toppled the apartheid government of South Africa, which included boycotts of their products.  The current ‘Boycott, Divest, Sanction’ movement, BDS, was a central theme while calling for principals of equality, justice and dignity for all, and the use of all lawful means to achieve their goal.

Ali Kurk said, “International law is ineffective, as the law of power rules,” referring to the US-EU support for Israel’s apartheid system, and of Israel’s policy of evacuating Palestinian homes in occupied East Jerusalem and either allowing Jewish settlers to inhabit them or destroying them.

The ideology of racial and cultural supremacy is the cause of apartheid.  Rima Khalaf said Israel is “the only nation in the world to confer whole citizenship according to inherited faith.”

Archbishop Hanna cautioned that Israel is conducting a slow ethnic cleansing campaign in Jerusalem, to turn it into a strictly Jewish town. The Christian residents of the city have been disappearing, and now are just 1% of the population. Hanna explained the time has come for both Christians and Muslims to join forces since they are both oppressed from the “Israeli” apartheid, which prevents access to places, jobs, resources, and often health care.

The Israeli occupation

The demographic change instituted by Israel is bent on destroying the two-state solution and utilizes violence and apartheid.  Many have voiced support for the one-state alternative where Palestinians are equal to Israelis and apartheid is abolished.  Palestinians living under occupation have documented violations of individual rights and international law that Israel has committed. The Palestinian struggle involves political and human rights, against settler colonialism, and is not based on religious differences.

In 2017 47,000 Palestinian Christians were living in Palestine, referring to the Occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. 98% of Palestine’s Christians live in the West Bank, mainly in Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Jerusalem, while 1,100 live in the Gaza Strip. The Christian population of Palestine today is 10 times less than 70 years ago.

The Holy Land: A Palestinian Christian Perspective”, was the title of a conference held in Johannesburg on October 15. Israel’s strategy to drive all Christians out of their Palestinian homeland is based on immense economic hardships, permanent siege and apartheid, and the severing of communal and spiritual bonds.

The Bethlehem Bible College is a Protestant Evangelical institution headed by Jack Sara, who said, “We are proud of our Palestinian heritage and our national identity.” Archbishop Hanna concurred, “It is important that Palestinian evangelicals communicate with fellow evangelicals around the world and to talk about the Palestinian cause. I disagree that all Christian evangelicals adopt the Zionist narrative.”

Bethlehem and Christmas 2019

70 years ago, Bethlehem, the birthplace of Jesus Christ, was 86% Christian. The city’s mayor reports as of 2016 the Christian population of Bethlehem has dropped to 12 %, just 11,000 people. Israel has built more than 30,000 housing units, and the number of Jewish settlers in Bethlehem today is about 165,000, with 51 miles of the separation wall running through Bethlehem.

Archbishop Hanna had a strong message for Christians throughout the world, “In a few days, Christians will be celebrating Christmas all over the world. The streets and town squares will be decorated with lights, adornments and Christmas trees in Europe and the world. I would like to remind all Christians all around the world: there is no point in celebrating Christmas if you do not pay attention to what is happening in Palestine as it is the birthplace of Christ and where Christianity originated and spread its message throughout the world. The nativity grotto is in Bethlehem. The true light of Christmas emanated from Bethlehem.”

The American and European Christians

Former United Nations human rights investigator Richard Falk stated Israel is continuing the heritage of European-style colonialism by changing entire demographics. Equally disturbing, Israel’s most ardent supporters in the United States and elsewhere are devout Christians. Thomas Getman, former director of World Vision in Jerusalem, said that 80 percent of US evangelicals misrepresent the Bible for political gain.

“We reject America’s unjust decisions which come in support of Israeli policies and the occupation of Jerusalem.”, said Archbishop Hanna.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a political commentator

Featured image is from Mideast Discourse

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on Israel Attempts to Silence the Archbishop of Jerusalem Before Christmas?
  • Tags: ,

Premise

The culture and nation state of the United States of America is founded on the egregious and forceful dispossession of others. You might even call it an earlier version of fascism – institutional dehumanization for private profit. A myth, or grand lie, was created that we are an exceptional people, effectively pre-empting openly experiencing the important feeling of social shame and, in turn, blocking any accountability or genuine inquiry into our genocidal origins built on stolen land and labor, that murdered millions with impunity.

Thus, we live by fantasy of our superiority, which functionally makes us stupid, as if in a stupor. Applying the legal exclusionary rule to the culture at large, the USA is the “fruit of the poisonous tree”, as with most “civilizations”, founded on forcefully stolen land and labor, thereby lacking any moral or legal validity.

Introduction

When I was a child in rural upstate New York in the 1940s and 1950s, I enjoyed small town life and the tranquility of a luscious surrounding nature. I had pictures of baseball stars plastered on all four of my bedroom walls. I recited a grateful prayer in my little sanctuary before going to sleep each night: “Thank you God for allowing me to have been born and raised in the United States, the greatest country in the history of the world, endowed by our Creator to bring prosperity to the impoverished, and Christianity to the heathen”. It was a wonderful story, greatly enhanced by our nation’s celebrated reputed victory over Fascism in Europe. Life was good, or so I thought.

Having been born on July 4, 1941, I was a patriotic baby of the World War II generation. My family was lower middle class, devout Baptists and, like my parents, I believed that the FBI under the “leadership” of J. Edgar Hoover protected our democratic Christian freedoms from the Russians. The Cold War propaganda was nothing short of spectacular, virtually all unchallenged by anyone I knew.

Brian Willson (right)

But there was another factor operating. Coinciding with the celebrated post-World War II victory, the nation experienced a unique 35-year blip in its history – an age of a large middle class imbibing in insatiable consumerism and optimism. My family replaced their icebox with a new electric refrigerator after the war, bought their first automobile, and by 1958 had purchased an 11-inch B&W television set. It was proof that we are an exceptionalpeople, and God’s chosen people to boot. However, this optimism was tempered by fear of the Soviet Union that severely prevented genuine liberal dialogue and critical thinking education.

1950s: “Positive Thinking/Prosperity Gospel” – Norman Vincent Peale and US Exceptionalism

Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993), a Dutch Reformed minister, wrote The Power of Positive Thinkingin 1952, a bestseller for 186 consecutive weeks, a book prominently in our home library, as it was in the Trump family home in Queens, New York. Peale also wrote a monthly magazine, Guideposts,which my parents read regularly.Peale served as a guru for the post-depression, post-World War II generation with his cult-like, self-help “bible” for achieving material success with divine blessings. Peale described himself as a “missionary to American business”, opposing unions and the New Deal. Thus, he was exceedingly popular with ambitious US Americans, especially White folks, both the rich, and those seeking riches.

Donald L. Trump, as a 6-year-old child began to regularly attended Peale’s New York City church with his parents. Peale officiated at Trump’s first marriage with Ivana Zelnickova, and both Trump’s sisters were married at Peale’s church. To this day, Trump lauds Peale for his success, unrestrained self-confidence, and from whom he learned modern branding. In Trump’s 2015 book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again[1], he proclaimed that “I am a Christian…I love God, and I love having a relationship with Him…[and] the Bible is the most important book ever written”.

Many theologians considered Peale as “God’s salesman”, critiquing him as a dangerous con man and fraud since he convinced people to believe that all basic problems were personal, unrelated to social, political, or economic contexts. Personal failures, Peale, said, were a sign of spiritual weakness, preaching that everyone has the power to make oneself happy and rich.  It fits perfectly with US American exceptionalism and Trump’s narcissism[2].

Viet Nam – Great Awakening of the Grand Lie

I was in Viet Nam in 1969 where I turned 28 years, having been drafted in 1966 during my fourth semester of law school. It was there that my Disney bliss rapidly evaporated. The entrance sign to my squadron’s in-country headquarters said, “Welcome to Indian Country”. This reminded me of the slogan, “the only good Indian is a dead Indian”, hinting the same plight for the Vietnamese. Incidentally, Trump, five years my junior, enjoyed five deferments enabling him to avoid Viet Nam.

While performing auxiliary duty as a USAF Combat Security officer, I documented the immediate aftermath of atrocities committed from the air that annihilated inhabited, undefended villages. I was sickened from the sight of hundreds of villagers lying dead and suffering horribly in their villages. I wondered who the fuck am I, a 6’ 3” White man, 9,000 miles from my rural farming village in New York State? These Vietnamese were in their homevillages. Village life was the essence of Vietnamese culture and we were systematically destroying it. I felt depressingly unauthentic, like a dumb ideological robot, and began to realize that being a privileged White man was in fact an emotional and intellectual disability. White male supremacy was a powerful force, as it enabled a kind of mindless “sliding” through life, pre-empting the need to ask serious questions. However, my discovery of empathy began to radicalize me. I wondered whether we had become sadistic criminal psychopaths? Or have we always been?   Hmm?!

Accumulating high body counts, from babies to grandparents, and every age in between, was politically comforting to US politicians and to a large number of their their taxpaying constituents. We simply created a fiction that we were killing the “enemy” to satisfy the emotional, and political momentum of stopping the bogeyman – Communism – when in fact we were murdering innocent Vietnamese peasants. Mass murder was normalized. When the US war ended in 1975, 13,000 of 21,000 Vietnamese villages had been deliberately wiped out. Huge B-52 bombers left 26 million bomb craters, while targeting and destroying almost 950 churches and pagodas, 350 clearly marked hospitals, nearly 3,000 educational institutions, over 15,000 bridges, 18 power plants, 40 factories, 10 million cubic meters of dikes, and 25 million acres of farmland. The US also chemically poisoned food supplies and forests. Our cultural corruption is so extreme we proudly ordered B-52 death machines flying five miles high blessed by God-fearing chaplains to bomb unarmed, mostly Buddhist peasants living nine thousand miles across the Pacific.  What?!

Several million peasants were gruesomely, senselessly murdered, with countless additional millions permanently maimed. It was barbaric. It was genocidal. I felt personal shame for my participation, and intense anger of betrayal. At times I felt suicidal. My White male conditioning had made me “disabled”, i.e., a kind of stupidity whose mind hadn’t even thought to seriously ask whyI was putting my life on the line in a small country across the seas I knew nothing about? I had been part of a massive conspiracy to violate international law and destroy a sovereign people. Huh?! But I had been conditioned to think that “America” was nonetheless, exceptional.

Criminal Cruelty to Prevent Vietnamese Autonomy

US premeditated policy intended to destroy Vietnamese self-determination. As historian William Blum has succinctly concluded: “the thread common to the diverse targets of [US] American intervention…in virtually every case involving the Third World… has been, in one form or another, a policy of ‘self-determination’: the desire …to pursue a path of development independent of US foreign policy objectives”[3].

The US war (as with virtually all wars), was based on a Grand lie, in this case that the majority Vietnamese were being invaded by other Vietnamese who the US called “Communists”. And it was maintained by grotesque lies – every day – such as identifying all dead Vietnamese as a victory (body counts), all carried out by heinous war crimes. Official reports abounded about our making progress in the war – lies. The fictional “democratic” South Vietnamese government created by the US and CIA was so unpopular the US military was forced to invade and occupy South Viet Nam for 10 years with nearly 550,000 troops supported by countless daily bombing missions and unprecedented use of chemical warfare. We murdered millions and it still didn’t work. How demonic can you get?

Fake history about Viet Nam was confirmed in the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers. Despite this, the highly publicized Burns-Novick 2017, The Vietnam War TV documentary, claimed the war was “begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings”. Lies die hard.

Dishonest Intelligence

Ralph McGehee, former starter on three Notre Dame national championship football teams in the late 1940s, a cum laude graduate, became one of the 700 CIA officers in Viet Nam. He was shocked when discovering the daily intelligence he was gathering was totally bastardized in official reports. Depressed about the dishonest intelligence system, he became suicidal. McGehee reported that the repressive, oligarchic government of US puppet Nguyen Van Thieu was so unpopular and corrupt that most Vietnamese were organized, committed, and dedicated to his defeat, and a Vietnamese Communist victory[4].

Cold War Redux

Now 78, fifty years out of Viet Nam, I am aghast that we are living through an even more virulent, Cold War. Cold War I propaganda cast an overwhelming toxic spell on the minds of three generations, including many intelligent people. Relentless rhetoric accomplished a near total indoctrination of our entire US culture. Virtually all systems colluded and cooperated to preserve unquestioning belief in the unique nobility of the US American system while instilling rabid, paranoid fear of “enemies” — in our midst as well as “out there”. We rationalized pathologically inexplicable behavior around the world, as well as at home. Indoctrination is so pervasive it generates a universally compelling mythology that conceals its own contradictions.

Today, the corporate and social media narrative managers so tightly control propaganda that once again our minds are saturated with rages against the evil “adversary”, Russia. The neoliberal religion of privatization makes everyone and everything for sale as a commodity, dictating both domestic and foreign policy. It is enforced at home by an overreaching national security state of surveillance (our Fourth Estate), and abroad with the most brutal “wholesale” terrorist machinery in history. The US government, and its compliant military, enables obscene profits for its Military-Congressional-Intelligence-Banking-Wall Street-Drug Complex. The US population de facto consents to destroying Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syrian and others, i.e, with diabolical imperialism.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, shame on both of us –US author Stephen King.

Orwell

In George Orwell’s novel, 1984[5], the Ministry of Truth rearranges facts and rewrites history. On the face of the building in which it is housed are engraved the slogans: “War Is Peace; Freedom Is Slavery; Ignorance Is Strength”. Language is one of the most important tools of the totalitarian state. If all citizens accept the lies that the ruling party imposes – if all records tell the same tale – then the lie passes into history and becomes truth. All that is needed is an unending series of victories over our own memory. This is called Reality control. In Orwell’s Newspeak, doublethink is the official state language. Everything becomes pretend, the lies told over and over in many different forms throughout time.[6] Meanwhile, wars easily continue[7], facilitated by deceit and lies[8], elaborate propaganda mind-control systems[9] that permeate our education institutions[10] and Hollywood[11] and are promoted by the concentrated monopoly of corporate mass media[12]. Our collective minds are systematically colonized to accept the unacceptable.

This McCarthy-like new Cold War dangerously speeds the world toward nuclear holocaust. I raise the question: Are we stupid? Can we not see that our behavior is leading to our ecocide/suicide – climate catastrophe and nuclear war?

US Exceptionalism Has Been Fatal – Creates Stupid, Shameful Monsters

The origins of the Grand Lie of Viet Nam, and the horrific cruelties committed there, are discoverable in the very origins of US America. The psychological and cultural conditioning growing up in US America, especially for a Eurocentric White male like myself, is emotionally and intellectually comfortable. But the noble “exceptional” history we have been taught about ourselves proves to be fantastic fakery which continues to serve as a comfortable escape from experiencing and feeling the horrible truth of the collective shame of our unspeakable criminal genocidal origins. Capitalism itself would not have existed without centuries of egregious colonial plunder of millions of Indigenous Americans, or millions of enslaved Africans. So, not only does the lie of “exceptionalism” enable us to avoid extremely unpleasant thoughts and feelings, but it also discourages asking enlightening, delving questions, about who we really are as a people. This makes us dangerously stupid. Why mess with the apparent successful myth of being exceptional? But thoughtlessness – a suspension of critical thinking – today leads to a dangerous, nuclear, arrogant war-making society. Not unintelligent, but stupid. And the power brokers, and many in the population, have a vested interest in remaining stupid to protect the comfortable original lie, that requires countless subsequent lies, in turn, to preserve that original lie. We have told ourselves a nice story. But it is a lie and as long as we continue to believe in our superiority we deepen our stupidity.

Thus, throughout our history we have lived by a slick Grand “American” lie, granting us comfort and security in our “superior” cultural identity. Spellbound and flattered we live by our favorite mythological maxims: “Founding Fathers”, “democracy”, “Constitution”, “Rule of Law”, and “greatest country ever”. Our political-religion of US American predatory corporate capitalism (privatization)blocks experiencing the most critical of all social emotions – empathy– that ties all humanity together, something I so painfully, but thankfully learned in Viet Nam. The Grand lie is so huge and pervasive we do not generally recognize it.

Cultural analysts such as Lewis Mumford have described how unchecked “power punctuates the entire history of mankind with outbursts of collective paranoia and tribal delusions of grandeur mingled with malevolent suspicions, murderous hatreds, and atrociously inhumane acts”.[13] So, in effect, much of human civilization history is based on institutionalized dehumanization, a form of Fascism.  Mumford again: “A personal over-concentration of power as an end in itself is suspect to the psychologist as an attempt to conceal inferiority, impotence, and anxiety. When this inferiority is combined with defensive inordinate ambitions, uncontrolled hostility and suspicion, and a loss of any sense of the subject’s own limitation, ‘delusions of grandeur’ result, which is the typical syndrome of paranoia, one of the most difficult psychological states to exorcise”[14].

The US nation, as a criminal enterprise, is a perfect example of what Mumford described as a civilization maintained by “collective paranoia” without sense of “limitation”, the result being “delusions of grandeur”, the typical syndrome of paranoia, one of the most difficult psychological states to exorcise”. Built on forceful dispossession, deceit, and fantasy, the USA lives with a DNA of selfishness, arrogance and violence that began long ago, and we seem content to leave it be, increasing our dangerousness to ourselves and the world.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Viet Nam veteran, trained lawyer, author, Blood on the Tracks: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson (PM Press, 2011); Don’t Thank Me For My Service: My Viet Nam Awakening to the Long History of US Lies (Clarity Press, 2018); subject of documentary Paying the Price For Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson(Bo Boudart Productions, 2016); essays: brianwillson.com.  

Brian Willson is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

Notes

[1] Simon & Schuster, pp 130-1.

[2] Chris Lehman, “The Self-Help Guru Who Shaped Trump’s Worldview: How the Commander-in-Chief Succumbs to the Perils of Positive Thinking”, In These Times, December 13, 2017; Gwenda Blair, “How Norman Vincent Peale Taught Donald Trump to Worship Himself”, PoliticoMagazine, October 6, 2015.

[3] William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II(Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995), 15.

[4] Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA(New York: Sheridan Square, 1983), 125-26, 147-157.

[5] George Orwell, 1984: A Novel(New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1949).

[6] S. Brian Willson, “The Pretend Society,” http://www.brianwillson.com/the-pretend-society

[7] Norman Soloman, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death (Hoboken,

NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2005).

[8] David Model, Lying for Empire: How to Commit War Crimes with a Straight Face(Monroe, ME:

Common Courage Press, 2005); Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of

Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq(New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2003); John R. MacArthur, Second

Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).

[9] Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare1945-

1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Herbert I. Schiller, The Mind Managers(Boston: Beacon

Press, 1973).

[10] John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling(Vancouver,

Canada, New Society, 1992); Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society(New York: Harper & Row, 1971).

[11] Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard, The Hollywood War Machine: US Militarism and Popular Culture(Boulder,

CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2007).

[12] Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly(Boston: Beacon Press, 2000).

[13] Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine: Technics and Human Development(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1967), 204.

[14] Mumford, 1967, 218.

  • Posted in English, Mobile
  • Comments Off on Fake U.S. History: How “American Exceptionalism” Hides Shame, Creates Stupidity and Dangerous Imperialism

Propaganda im Jugoslawienkrieg

December 22nd, 2019 by Swiss Propaganda Research

Der Jugoslawienkrieg in den 1990er Jahren war ein klassischer imperialer Krieg zur Neuordnung Süd ost europas. Die USA setzten dafür unter anderem auch jene Milizen ein, mit denen sie zuvor in Afghanistan die UdSSR bekämpften, und die sie später »Al Kaida« nennen sollten.

Die politische und mediale Propaganda zum Jugoslawien krieg ist inzwischen gut erforscht. Interes santer weise versuchen dennoch zahlreiche Medien und Kommentatoren bis heute an der offiziellen Darstellung von damals festzuhalten, im Unterschied etwa zum Irak krieg.

Hierfür mag es verschiedene Gründe geben. Einerseits stammt die fragliche Propaganda noch aus der Frühzeit des Internets und ist deshalb in der Öffentlichkeit im Allgemeinen etwas weniger bekannt. Andererseits sind die Implikationen für Europa in diesem Fall besonders groß.

Aus heutiger Sicht ist es freilich eine triviale Feststellung, dass gewisse Medien den Jugo sla wien krieg der NATO unterstützten, doch damals glaubten selbst Kritiker noch an ein mediales »Versagen«, zumal die entscheidenden Medienstrukturen noch nicht allgemein bekannt waren.

Aus Schweizer Perspektive ist ferner die tragische Rolle der UNO-Chef an klägerin hervor zu heben, die vermutlich bis heute nicht realisiert hat, wofür sie in Den Haag letztlich eingespannt wurde.

Es folgt eine Übersicht der bekanntesten Propagandabeispiele aus dem Jugoslawienkrieg sowie Hinweise auf weiterführende Literatur und Dokumentationen.

Propagandabeispiele

1. Das serbische »Todeslager« (1992)

Eines der bekanntesten Propagandabeispiele aus dem Jugoslawienkrieg ist das angebliche serbische Todeslager von Trnopolje in Bosnien. Dabei besuchten drei britische Journalisten im August 1992 ein Flüchtlingslager, dessen Insassen betonten, sehr gut behandelt zu werden (siehe unten).

Die Journalisten begaben sich indes auf ein abgesperrtes Trafo-Areal direkt neben dem Flüchtlings lager und filmten die Männer durch einen Stachel draht zaun hindurch, was den Eindruck erweckte, die Männer seien eingesperrt. Sodann baten die Journalisten einen aufgrund von Krankheit oder kriegsbedingter Mangelernährung abgemagerten Mann, sein T-Shirt auszuziehen.

Das so entstandene Foto landete – sorgfältig zurecht geschnitten – auf den Titelseiten der meisten westlichen Medien als »Beweis« für serbische »Todeslager«, die wiederum als Begründung für die nachfolgende NATO-Intervention in Bosnien dienten, beginnend mit einer Flugverbotszone.

Der deutsche Journalist, der die Täuschung 1997 aufdeckte, wurde von den britischen Journalisten wegen Verleumdung verklagt und verurteilt, da er Ihnen keine Absicht nachweisen konnte.

Der Chef einer amerikanischen PR-Agentur, die die Falschmeldung der Todeslager aktiv verbreitete, erklärte in einem späteren Interview: »Wir sind Professionals. Wir hatten einen Auftrag und wir erledigten ihn. Wir sind nicht dafür bezahlt, moralisch zu sein.«

Ausschnitt aus dem Film Yugoslavia: The Pictures that Fooled the World (2000)

TV, Presse und Lageplan zum Lager bei Trnopolje

2. Die Marktplatz-Massaker in Sarajewo (1992-1995)

Ein weiteres bekanntes Propaganda beispiel sind die sogenannten Marktplatz-Massaker in Sarajewo, darunter insbesondere das Bäckerei-Massaker vom Mai 1992 sowie die beiden Markale-Massakervom Februar 1994 und August 1995.

Diese Massaker erfolgten durch Granatenbeschuss (oder Bombenexplosionen) und fanden zumeist kurz vor wichtigen politischen Beratungen der UNO oder EU statt. Sie führten letztlich zu einem direkten militärischen Eingreifen der NATO und damit zur Wende im Bosnienkrieg.

In den oben genannten sowie einigen weiteren Fällen kamen Untersuchungen durch Offiziere der UNO-Schutzmission zum Ergebnis, dass diese Massaker wahrscheinlich von der bosnischen Seite auf ihre eigene Bevölkerung verübt wurden (sogenannter False-Flag-Angriff).

Die entsprechenden UNO-Berichte wurden jedoch geheim gehalten. Stattdessen behaupteten amerikanische Medien – insbesondere CNN – sowie die US-Regierung meist innerhalb von wenigen Stunden, dass der jeweilige Angriff vermutlich von serbischer Seite erfolgt sei.

Im Folgenden finden sich die wichtigsten Artikel aus der damaligen Zeit von Journalisten, die die geheim gehaltenen UNO-Berichte einsehen oder mit Beteiligten darüber sprechen konnten:

Als der Auslandschef der Schweizer Weltwoche den obigen Text von Peter Brock unter dem Titel »Bosnien: So logen Fernsehen und Presse uns an« 1994 auf Deutsch veröffentlichte, gab es derart starke Proteste durch andere Medien, dass er ein vorläufiges Schreibverbot zu Bosnien erhielt.

Zwanzig Jahre später wurden die bosnischen Markale-Massaker von 1994/95 wieder in Erinnerung gerufen, als sich Giftgas-Angriffe im Rahmen des Syrienkrieges als inszeniert herausstellten und wie damals Unter suchungs ergebnisse der UNO bzw. OPCW unterdrückt wurden.

Das Markale-Massaker vom Februar 1994 (Quelle: BBC, The Death of Yugoslavia, 1995)

3. Der »Genozid von Srebrenica« (1995)

Als trauriger Höhepunkt des Bosnienkriegs gilt der »Genozid von Srebrenica« im Juli 1995. Dabei sollen laut westlichen Angaben mehr als 8000 bosnische Zivilisten umgebracht worden sein.

Auch in diesem Fall deutet die tatsächliche Evidenz jedoch auf einen komplexeren Sachverhalt und Kontext hin. Der Politologe Edward Herman und der ehemalige CIA-Offizier Robert Baer, der damals in Jugoslawien operierte, sprachen in diesem Zusammenhang sogar von einem »Betrug«.

Für weitere Details sei beispielsweise auf folgende Artikel und Bücher verwiesen:

Generell müssen auch Ereignisse mit sehr hohen berichteten Opferzahlen bisweilen kritisch hinter fragt werden. Dies zeigte etwa das »Timisoara-Massaker« von 1989 mit angeblich 4630 Toten, das sich später als psychologische Operation im Rahmen der rumänischen Revolution herausstellte.

Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed (60 Minuten, 2010, Wikipedia)

4. Kosovo: »Hufeisenplan«, Račak und Rogovo, etc. (1999)

Nach der Abtrennung von Slowenien, Kroatien und Bosnien starteten die USA und die NATO 1999 einen weiteren Krieg gegen das verbleibende Jugoslawien bzw. Serbien zur Abtrennung der Provinz Kosovo. Auch dieser Krieg musste durch Propaganda und Desinformation begründet werden.

Hierzu wurden insbesondere angebliche Vertreibungspläne, Konzentrationslager und Massaker medial thematisiert, die sich später jedoch als erfunden oder fragwürdig herausstellten. Beispiele hierfür sind etwa der angebliche »Hufeisenplan« sowie die Vorfälle von Račak und Rogovo.

Für weitere Details wird im Folgenden die WDR-Doku »Deutschlands Weg in den Kosovo-Krieg – Es begann mit einer Lüge« von 2001 gezeigt. Diese belegt, dass westliche Politiker und Militärs die Falschinformationen bewusst veröffentlichten, um den Krieg legitimieren zu können.

Deutschlands Weg in den Kosovo-Krieg – Es begann mit einer Lüge (WDR, 2001) Dokumentation zur Sendung (AKF Heidelberg)

  • Posted in Deutsch
  • Comments Off on Propaganda im Jugoslawienkrieg

Medical Opinion, Torture and Julian Assange

December 22nd, 2019 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

On November 27 this year, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nils Melzer, delivered an address to the German Bundestag outlining his approach to understanding the mental health of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.  These comprised two parts, the initial stage covering his diplomatic asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy, the second dealing with his formal detention in the United Kingdom at the hands of the UK legal and judicial system.  The conclusion was a recapitulation of previous findings: that Assange has been subjected to a prolonged, state-sponsored effort in torture, nothing less than a targeting of his being.

Melzer’s address is an expansive portrait of incremental inter-state torment that led to Assange’s confinement “in a highly controlled environment within the Ecuadorean embassy for more than six years.”  There was the eventually justified fear that he would be sought by the United States in extradition proceedings.  The Swedish authorities threw in their muddled lot between 2010 and 2019, attempting to nab Assange for rape claims despite “not being able to produce enough evidence for an indictment, and which now, after almost a decade, has been silently closed for the third time based on precisely that recognition.”

Then came the British contribution, consisting of encouragement to the Swedes by the Crown Prosecution Service that the investigation should not be closed, inspiring them not to get “cold feet”.  (The cold feet eventually came.)  The Ecuadorean contribution completed the four-piece set, with the coming to power of a pro-Washington Lenín Moreno.  Embassy personnel in London were encouraged to make conditions that less pleasant; surveillance operations were conducted on Assange’s guests and meetings.

Melzer, along with a medical team, attended to Assange on May 9, 2019 in Belmarsh, finding a man with “all the symptoms that are typical of persons having been exposed to psychological torture for a prolonged period of time.”  There was little doubt, in Melzer’s mind, that symptoms “already measurable physically, neurologically and cognitively”, had been shown.

These calls went unheeded.  Melzer, in early November, accused the UK authorities of showing “outright contempt for Mr Assange’s rights and integrity.”  Despite warnings issued by the rapporteur, “the UK has not undertaken any measures of investigation, prevention and redress required under international law.”  Melzer’s prognosis was bleak.  “Unless the UK urgently changes course and alleviates his inhumane situation, Mr Assange’s continued exposure to arbitrariness and abuse may soon end up costing his life.”

This point has been restated by Dr. Stephen Frost, a chief figure of the dedicated outfit calling itself Doctors for Assange. “We repeat that it is impossible to assess adequately let alone treat Mr Assange in Belmarsh prison and that he must as a matter of urgency be moved to a university teaching hospital.  When will the UK government listen to us?”

The medical degrading of Assange has assumed ever greater importance, suggesting unwavering state complicity.  On November 22, over 65 notable medical doctors sent the UK Home Secretary a note based on Melzer’s November 1 findings and Assange’s state at the October 21 case management hearing at Westminster Magistrates Court.  “It is our opinion that Mr Assange requires urgent expert medical assessment of both his physical and psychological state of health.  Any medical treatment indicated should be administered in a properly equipped and expertly staffed university teaching hospital (tertiary care).”

In a second open letter to the UK Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice dated December 4, the Doctors for Assange collective warned that the UK’s “refusal to take the required measures to protect Mr Assange’s rights, health and dignity appears [to] be reckless at best and deliberate at worst and, in both cases, unlawfully and unnecessarily exposes Mr Assange to potentially irreversible risks.”

The same grounds were reiterated in a December 16 letter to Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, with a curt reminder that she had “an undeniable legal obligation to protect your citizen against the abuse of his fundamental rights, stemming from US efforts to extradite Mr Assange for journalism and publishing that exposed US war crimes.”  In the event that Payne took no action on the matter, “people would want to know what you […] did to prevent his death.”

In the addendum to the open letter, further to reiterating the precarious state of Assange’s health and medical status as a torture victim, the doctors elaborate on the circular cruelty facing the publisher.  An individual deemed “a victim of psychological torture cannot be adequately medically treated while continuing to be held under the very conditions constituting psychological torture, as is currently the case for Julian Assange.”  Appropriate medical treatment was hardly possible through a prison hospital ward.

A lesson in understanding mental torture is also proffered.  “Contrary to popular misconception, the injuries caused by psychological torture are real and extremely serious.  The term psychological torture is not a synonym for mere hardship, suffering or distress.”

At Assange’s case management hearing on December 19, restrictions on medical opinion were again implemented; psychiatrist Marco Chiesa and psychologist David Morgan were prevented from attending.  Both had been signatories to the spray of open letters.  According to Morgan, he had hoped to “provide some observations about Julian Assange’s health, psychologically, and with my colleagues, physically.”  Instead, it transpired that access was denied, according to psychologist Lissa Johnson, “despite members of the public offering to give up seats for them.”

Cold-shouldering expert opinion can be counted as one of the weapons of the state in punishing whistleblowers and publishers.  The State has always made it a bureaucratic imperative to sift the undesirable evidence from the apologetic message.  Accepting Assange’s condition would be tantamount to admission on the part of UK authorities, urged on by the United States, that intolerable, potentially martyring treatment, has been meted out to a publisher.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]

Featured image is from Medium

Claire Edwards in conversation with Phillip Farruggio of It’s the Empire, Stupid talking about the dangers of 5G, 4G, 3G, all wireless technology and cell phones. Claire explains the history of electromagnetic radiation’s health effects and how the US military has hidden the devastating biological effects from the public in order to be able to develop microwave weapons; how the TETRA communications system used by the police in the US and Europe is deleting their capacity for empathy and pushing them to rage and violence; the devastating health consequences of 25 years of cell phone use, including astronomical rates of autism; the true cause of colony collapse disorder and much more …

***

Listen to the interview below. Claire Edward and Philip A. Farruggio

Research references

UN & 5G

UN Staff Member: 5G is a War on Humanity (CE).

Appeal

International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (CE).

History of Electricity

Summary of the Invisible Rainbow: A History of Electricity and Life by Arthur Firstenberg

RT Dutch – 5G The Trojan Horse ((CE) video – at 1 hour point)

The 5G Dementors Meet the 4G Zombie Apocalypse (CE)

Microwaves

Jerry Flynn, Canadian microwave weapons expert

Wireless Technology: The Worst Threat to our Health, Personal Privacy, Democracy and National Security in Canada’s Entire History by Jerry Flynn 

Barrie Trower, UK microwave weapons expert

Confidential Report on TETRA for the Police Federation of England and Wales

Mind Control

CIA Project Pandora Radio Remote Brain Manipulation

Currently Deployed Psychotronic Mind-Control Technologies

Tim Rifat: Mass UK Mind Control Technology Now A Reality

… Use of the TETRA system by the police will lead to psychotronicaly controlled officers who may be totally controlled in any situation and are very useful for states of economic or social chaos where extreme and violent behaviour is needed without any conscious or moral compunction – so-called police robots. 30,000 transmitters will be placed around the country to maximise the effects on the local UK population – mass mind control. …

Reports in 2019 on Health Effects

How the Telecom Companies Are Losing the Battle to Impose 5G Against the Will of the People (CE)

(Numbers may be subject to change as the article is updated)

3          Autism

2          Exposure to Cell Phone and Wireless WiFi Radiation Can Reduce Impulse Control and Cause Violence

4          Irritable behaviour

7          Vienna EMF injuries

15        Italian Court: brain tumour caused by cell phone

16        US Senator Blumenthal: no safety studies on 5G

19        Swiss  study: “smart” phones may impair memory in teens

27        Insurers announce premature death trend

77        US suicide rates at highest level since World War II; life expectancy – first             three-year drop since 1915-1918

83        UK: Glastonbury festival-goers guinea pigs in 5G trial

103      Swiss mainstream magazine L’Illustréreports first 5G injuries

109      US: Cardiology Magazine: “smart” phones promote obesity

115      Children’s exposure to magnetic fields from cell phones breaches WHO safety limit by a factor of 20,000

113      Medical doctor warns that cell phone use of teenagers and children is disabling compassion and empathy

117      Kuwait Timeshighlights 5G health threats

171      Smartphones and tablets detrimental to toddlers’ speech, thinking, and reading skills

174      France: 4 times more new cases of glioblastoma in 2018

182      US: Cell tower company President tells child she will not get cancer if tower is installed at her school

198      Taiwan has removed 1,700 towers from a heavily populated area due to miscarriages, cancers, neurological damage, depression and suicide

5G Satellites

Video: The Madness of Putting 53,000 5G Satellites in Space (CE)

Video: The 5G Space Weapon, Mind Control Agenda & Kill Grid (CE)

5G Satellites and NATO Putting the World at Risk (CE)

Operation Gladio

Operation Gladio is undisputed historical fact. Gladio was part of a post-World War II program set up by the CIA and NATO supposedly to thwart future Soviet/communist invasions or influence in Italy and Western Europe. In fact, it became a state-sponsored right-wing terrorist network, involved in false flag operations and the subversion of democracy …

Professor Olle Johansson

To bee, or not to bee, that is the five “G” question – Olle Johansson

Cancer trends during the 20th century

Skin melanoma is a cancer that started to explode in 1955 (see Figure 3). It is interesting to note that a similar steep increase in melanoma mortality was also reported from Queensland, Australia, when comparing 1951-1959 with 1964-1967.10  This increase was related to the introduction of high power TV broadcasting transmitters. Skin melanoma has also been associated with the expansion of broadcasting networks in Sweden, Norway, Denmark and USA.  Lung cancer has an almost identical development as melanoma has had in Sweden with a scale factor of 10 (see Figures 3 and 4). Breast, bladder, prostate, lung, colon and cutaneous melanoma cancers are all associated with each other. Figures 15-17 and ref. 11 relate melanoma to radio-frequency EMF.

Fake news on 5G 

BBC Fake News on 5G Decoded (CE) 

Alternatives

SafeG

What is SafeG? SafeG means safe, fast, reliable, secure Internet and telecommunications services brought into our homes and businesses by wired technology. It means technology that safeguards our health, privacy and security and that evolves over time with the goal of reducing exposure to harmful wireless radiation.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image: Demonstrators at the anti-5G protest in Bern on Friday. (© Keystone / Peter Klaunzer)

  • Posted in English
  • Comments Off on The Health and Environmental Dangers of 5G Technology. A Lethal Multi-Trillion Dollar Operation

During a hearing before the Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London, Julian Assange’s lawyer, Edward Fitzgerald, requested Thursday that the founder of Wikileaks not be extradited to the United States arguing that the alleged crimes of his defendant have a political character.

Fitzgerald mentioned that the United Kingdom-United States extradition treaty bans extradition of persons linked to political offenses, which is precisely the situation of his defendant.

Today’s judicial action is part of the preparation of Assange’s extradition trial to the U.S., which is expected to take place on February 24, 2020.

On this matter, however, Clair Dobbin, representing the U.S. authorities, asked for the case to be delayed until April, which the Westminster Court did not accept.

The defense lawyer also reiterated his complaints about the “big problems” his team faces in contacting Assange in prison and recalled that the Australian journalist does not have access to a suitable computer to prepare his argument.​​​​​​

In November, 60 doctors from several countries sent an open letter to British Home Secretary Priti Patel warning her him that Assange could die in jail if he did not receive urgent medical attention.​​​​​​​

Although he already served the 50-week jail sentence for breaking the conditions of his probation in 2012, he remains jailed because a court considered that he could escape the U.K. if he left the cell.

In June, former Home Secretary Sajid Javid signed an order to allow Assange to be handed over to the United States, where he could be sentenced up to 170 years in prison.​​​​​​​

The U.S. authorities accuse him of conspiring to hack government computers and extract secret documents, which ​​​​​​​would have been published at the WikiLeaks portal.

On Friday, the Spanish judge Jose de la Mata will take a statement from Assange about the alleged espionage he was subjected to during his stay at the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

This interrogation is part of an investigation of the Spanish company Undercover Global, which was responsible for the security of the embassy.​​​​​​​

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

The Washington Post’s publication of the “Afghanistan Papers” (12/9/19) unveiled over 2,000 pages of unpublished notes of interviews with US officials involved in the Afghanistan War, from a project led by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to investigate waste and fraud. Hailed by some as the “Pentagon Papers of Our Generation” after the Post won access to those documents under the Freedom of Information Act in a three-year legal battle, the Post’s exposé found that

senior US officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.

The paper published direct remarks on the war by US officials who assumed that “their remarks would not be made public”:

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to US military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

While more explicit admissions of deception on the part of US officials involved in wars are always appreciated, one question rarely discussed among the reports and opinion pieces praising the “Afghanistan Papers” is what this scoop says about the Washington Post.

If the Post is now publishing material demonstrating that US officials have been “following the same talking points for 18 years,” emphasizing how they are “making progress,” “especially” when the war is “going badly,” shouldn’t the paper acknowledge that it has been cheerleading this same line for all of those 18 years? Doesn’t it have a responsibility to examine how it served as a primary vehicle for those officials to spread these same “talking points” to spin the coverage in the desired fashion?

FAIR has been tracking the Post’s coverage of the Afghanistan War from the very beginning, when the paper—along with the rest of corporate media—was actively following the Bush administration’s “guidance” on how to cover the war. In 2001, a FAIR survey (11/2/01) of the Post’s op-ed pages for three weeks following the September 11 attacks found that

columns calling for or assuming a military response to the attacks were given a great deal of space, while opinions urging diplomatic and international law approaches as an alternative to military action were nearly nonexistent.

Eight years later, FAIR (3/1/09) found that the Post’s cheerleading coverage didn’t change much from 2001, as 7 out of 9 Post op-eds and 4 out of 5 editorials supported some kind of military escalation from the day Barack Obama was elected president (11/4/08) through March 1, 2009, as the US was debating a “surge” of additional troops in Afghanistan later that year.

Another study (Extra!, 11/1/09) of the first ten months of the Post’s opinion columns that same year found that

pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on US military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views. Of the pro-war columns, 31 were for escalation and 30 for an alternative strategy.

The Post offered this lopsided coverage even though there were several polls at the time showing a majority of the US public opposed the war, because they believed that the Afghan War was “not worth fighting.”

The Post also has a history of facilitating official spin for the war. When WikiLeaksposted tens of thousands of classified intelligence documents related to the Afghanistan War, FAIR (7/30/10) found that the Post either dismissed them as not being as important as the Pentagon Papers (7/27/10), or absurdly spun the leaks as good news for the US war effort (7/27/10) because the “release could compel President Obama to explain more forcefully the war’s importance,” and because they “bolstered Obama’s decision in December to pour more troops and money into a war effort that had not received sufficient attention or resources from the Bush administration.”

The Post also buried attempts by whistleblowers and other journalists who were working to expose official lies and war crimes in Afghanistan. When US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning was sentenced to serve 35 years in prison for sharing intelligence documents that first exposed what the “Afghanistan Papers” are now corroborating, the Post, along with other corporate outlets, largely neglected Manning’s legal trials and punishment (FAIR.org, 12/4/12, 6/18/14, 1/18/17, 4/1/19). The New York Times, to its credit, did give Manning space for an op-ed (6/14/19) to explain why she risked her freedom to expose matters that the US military recorded but left unreported, including hundreds of US military attacks on Afghan civilians. The Post, for its part, found room to publish frequent op-eds by the Brookings Institution’s Michael O’Hanlon (e.g., 11/16/09, 6/26/10, 6/3/11, 2/10/13, 7/12/13) spouting the same optimistic US official talking points that the Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” has now exposed as lies (FAIR.org, 1/3/14).

In fact, one major reason why the Afghanistan Papers are unnecessary to discern deceit from US officials is that—as Michael Parenti pointed out in The Face of Imperialism—when US officials constantly provide new and different justifications for invasions, it’s a sign that they’re being dishonest, not incompetent.

The Post (12/9/19) admits this when it mentions that the US “largely accomplished what it set out to do,” with Al Qaeda and Taliban officials “dead, captured or in hiding,” yet “veered off in directions that had little to do with Al Qaeda or 9/11.” This is consistent with FAIR’s finding (Extra!, 7/11) that corporate media largely ignored the question of whether to end the Afghanistan War after the ostensible goal of the invasion—to capture or kill the leader of the group that carried out the September 11 attack—was accomplished in the death of Osama bin Laden.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Post’s Afghanistan Papers have inadvertently exposed the Post as a subservient accomplice in disseminating US official lies; corporate media rely on official sources for free content and “scoops” to subsidize their journalism, which often spreads dishonest but convenient talking points by these same sources to retain “access” to this information, trustworthy or not (Extra!, 5/02; New York Times, 4/20/08; FAIR.org, 12/12/19).

Political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall pointed out, in an account (Common Dreams, 12/11/19) of being marginalized by corporate outlets like the Post:

“The Afghanistan Papers” is a bright, shining lie by omission. Yes, our military and civilian leaders lied to us about Afghanistan. But they could never have spread their murderous BS—thousands of US soldiers and tens of thousands of Afghans killed, trillions of dollars wasted—without media organizations like the Washington Post, which served as unquestioning government stenographers.

Press outlets like the Post and New York Times weren’t merely idiots used to disseminate pro-war propaganda. They actively censored people who knew we never should have gone into Afghanistan and tried to tell American voters the truth.

It’s this mutually beneficial relationship between the need for corporate media outlets like the Post for “access” to US official sources, and US officials who need corporate media outlets to propagate their preferred spin on US foreign policy to manipulate public opinion, that explains what the Afghanistan Papers expose as the Post’s own role in deceiving the US public. It’s why the Post’s coverage and editorial board can argue that the Trump administration shouldn’t “abandon the country in haste” (even though it’s been 18 years), and rally around the US’s “forever war” in Afghanistan (FAIR.org, 1/31/19, 9/11/19), even as the paper investigates the official lies the continuing occupation depends on.

Of course, this is also the reason why it’s systemically impossible for corporate outlets like the Post to take the opportunity to raise more substantive and provocative questions about whether deceit is a constant and essential aspect of US foreign policy, and not merely confined to isolated military invasions of “quagmire” countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan, despite the Afghanistan Papers providing a perfect opportunity to do so. To say nothing of challenging a worldview that invokes “winnable” wars, in which predictions of increasing numbers of (enemy) human deaths are best described as “rosy.”

There’s quite a long history of US media assisting officials in fabricating moral pretexts for invasion—from fictional accounts of North Vietnamese attacks on American destroyer ships in the Gulf of Tonkin (FAIR.org, 8/5/17), to conflating very different Islamic groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda, or claims that formerly US-backed dictator Saddam Hussein possessed WMDs and the intent to use them against the US (CounterPunch, 6/11/14; FAIR.org, 3/19/07).

Observers note that the Afghanistan Papers “only confirm what we already know” (Daily Beast, 12/14/19), or that “the shocking thing about the Poststories…is how unshocking they are” (Atlantic, 12/9/19); even the Washington Post (12/12/19) reminds us that only people who “haven’t been paying attention” to the Afghan War are “surprised” by what’s found in the Afghanistan Papers.

Perhaps instead of pursuing FOIA requests to confirm the obvious, the Post could just interrogate its own contradictory coverage of the Afghan War and stop functioning as credulous mouthpieces for the US government. But to do that would also require confronting the lie that this entire so-called “War on Terror” has any moral credibility, when the US is a leading terrorist state that consciously pursues imperial policies that inflame hatred against the US to serve corporate interests (FAIR.org, 3/13/19, 11/22/19).

Absent that, an exercise like the Afghanistan Papers come off more as a “please consider” note to the Pulitzer judges than as an earnest effort to use the spotlight of journalistic investigation to speak truth to power and halt the ongoing, generation-long destruction of a foreign nation.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Joshua Cho is a writer based in Virginia.

Featured image is from FAIR

Behind the U.S. Anti-China Campaign

December 22nd, 2019 by Sara Flounders

In order to evaluate the claims of massive human rights violations of the Uyghurs, an ethnic and religious minority in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China, it is important to know a few facts.

Xinjiang Province in the far western region of China is an arid, mountainous and still largely underdeveloped region. Xinjiang has significant oil and mineral reserves and is currently China’s largest natural-gas-producing region.

It is home to a number of diverse ethnic groups, including Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs, Tibetans, Tajiks, Hui and Han peoples.

Xinjiang borders five Central Asian countries, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, where more than 1 million U.S. troops and even more mercenaries, contractors and secret agents have operated over four decades in an endless U.S. war.

What is happening in Xinjiang today must be seen in the context of what has been happening throughout Central Asia.

Xinjiang is a major logistics center for China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. Xinjiang is the gateway to Central and West Asia, as well as to European markets.

The Southern Xinjiang Railway runs to the city of Kashgar in China’s far west where it is now connected to Pakistan’s rail network under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, a project of the BRI.

The U.S. government is deeply hostile to this vast economic development project and is doing all it can to sabotage China’s plans. This campaign is part of the U.S. military’s “Pivot to Asia,” along with naval threats in the South China Sea and support for separatist movements in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet.

Map features Central Asia and China, including Xinjiang.

No U.N. report on Xinjiang

The U.S. and its corporate media charge that the Chinese government has rounded up 1 million people, mainly Uyghurs, into concentration camps. News reports cite the United Nations as their source.

This was disputed in a detailed investigative report by Ben Norton and Ajit Singh titled, “No, the UN did not report China has ‘massive internment camps’ for Uighur Muslims.” (The Grayzone.com, Aug. 23, 2018) They expose how this widely publicized claim is based entirely on unsourced allegations by a single U.S. member, Gay McDougall, on an “independent committee” with an official sounding name: U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has confirmed that no U.N. body or official has made such a charge against China.

CIA/NED-funded ‘human rights’

After this fraudulent news story received wide coverage, it was followed by “reports” from the Washington-based Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. This group receives most of its funds from U.S. government grants, primarily from the CIA-linked National Endowment for Democracy, a major source of funding for U.S. “regime change” operations around the world.

The Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders shares the same Washington address as Human Rights Watch. The HRW has been a major source of attacks on governments targeted by the U.S., such as Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Syria and China. The network has long called for sanctions against China.

The CHRD’s sources include Radio Free Asia, a news agency funded for decades by the U.S. government. The World Uighur Congress, another source of sensationalized reports, is also funded by NED. The same U.S. government funding is behind the International Uyghur Human Rights and Democracy Foundation and the Uyghur American Association.

The authors of the Grayzone article cite years of detailed IRS filing forms to back up their claim. They list millions of dollars in generous government funding — to generate false reports.

This whole network of supposedly impartial civil society groups, nongovernmental organizations, think tanks and news sources operates under the cover of “human rights” to promote sanctions and war.

CIA-funded terror

Central Asia has experienced the worst forms of U.S. military power.

Beginning in 1979, the CIA, operating with the ISI Pakistani Intelligence Service and Saudi money, funded and equipped reactionary Mujahedeen forces in Afghanistan to bring down a revolutionary government there. The U.S. cultivated and promoted extreme religious fanaticism, based in Saudi Arabia, against progressive secular regimes in the region. This reactionary force was also weaponized against the Soviet Union and an anti-imperialist Islamic current represented by the Iranian Revolution.

For four decades, the CIA and secret Pakistan ISI forces (Pakistan Military, Inter Services Intelligence) in Afghanistan sought to recruit and train Uyghur mercenaries, planning to use them as a future terror force in China. Chechnyans from Russia’s Caucasus region were recruited for the same reason. Both groups were funneled into Syria in the U.S. regime-change operation there. These fanatical religious forces, along with other small ethnic groups, formed the backbone of the Islamic State group (IS) and Al-Qaida.

After the Sept. 11, 2001, World Trade Center bombing, the very forces that U.S. secret operations had helped to create became the enemy.

Uyghurs from Xinjiang were among the Al-Qaida prisoners captured in Afghanistan and held in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo for years without charges. Legal appeals exposed that the Uyghur prisoners were being held there under some of the worst conditions in solitary confinement.

U.S. wars dislocate region

The U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the massive U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 created shockwaves of dislocation. Social progress, education, health care and infrastructure were destroyed. Sectarian and ethnic division was encouraged to divide opposition to U.S. occupations. Despite promises of great progress, the U.S. occupations sowed only destruction.

In this long war, U.S. prisons in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were notorious. The CIA used “enhanced interrogation” techniques — torture — and secret rendition to Guantanamo, Bagram and the Salt Pit in Afghanistan. These secret prisons have since been the source of many legal suits.

According to U.N. investigations, by 2010 the U.S. held more than 27,000 prisoners in over 100 secret facilities around the world. Searing images and reports of systematic torture and prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Bagram airbase in Afghanistan surfaced.

Exposing coverup of war crimes

In July 2010 WikiLeaks published more than 75,000 classified U.S./NATO reports on the war in Afghanistan.

In October of that year, a massive leak of 400,000 military videos, photos and documents exposed, in harrowing detai,l torture, summary executions and other war crimes. Army intelligence analyst former Private Chelsea Manning released this damning material to WikiLeaks.

Based on the leaked documents, the U.N. chief investigator on torture, Manfred Nowak, called on U.S. President Barack Obama to order a full investigation of these crimes, including abuse, torture, rape and murder committed against the Iraqi people following the U.S. invasion and occupation.

The leaked reports provided documentary proof of 109,000 deaths — including 66,000 civilians. This is seldom mentioned in the media, in contrast to the highly publicized and unsourced charges now raised against China.

Prosecuting whistle blowers

The CIA’s National Endowment for Democracy pays handsomely for unsourced documents making claims of torture against China, while those who provided documentary proof of U.S. torture have been treated as criminals.

John Kiriakou, who worked for the CIA between 1990 and 2004 and confirmed widespread use of systematic torture, was prosecuted by the Obama administration for revealing classified information and sentenced to 30 months in prison.

Chelsea Manning’s release of tens of thousands of government documents confirming torture and abuse, in addition to horrific photos of mass killings, have led to her continued incarceration. Julian Assange of WikiLeaks is imprisoned in Britain and faces deportation to the U.S. for his role in disseminating these documents.

Rewriting history

How much of the coverage of Xinjiang is intended to deflect world attention from the continuing crimes of U.S. wars — from Afghanistan to Syria?

In 2014 a Senate CIA Torture Report confirmed that a torture program, called “Detention and Interrogation Program,” had been approved by top U.S. officials. Only a 525-page Executive Summary of its 6,000 pages was released, but it was enough to confirm that the CIA program was far more brutal and extensive than had previously been released.

Mercenaries flood into Syria

The U.S. regime-change effort to overturn the government of Syria funneled more than 100,000 foreign mercenaries and fanatical religious forces into the war. They were well-equipped with advanced weapons, military gear, provisions and paychecks.

One-third of the Syrian population was uprooted in the war. Millions of refugees flooded into Europe and neighboring countries.

Beginning in 2013, thousands of Uyghur fighters were smuggled into Syria to train with the extremist Uyghur group known as the Turkistan Islamic Party. Fighting alongside Al-Qaida and Al-Nusra terror units, these forces played key roles in several battles.

Reuters, Associated Press and Newsweek all reported that up to 5,000 Turkic-speaking Muslim Uyghurs from Xinjiang were fighting in various “militant” groups in Syria.

According to Syrian media, a transplanted Uyghur colony transformed the city of al Zanbaka (on the Turkish border) into an entrenched camp of 18,000 people. Many of the Uyghur fighters were smuggled to the Turkish-Syrian border area with their families. Speaking Turkish, rather than Chinese, they relied on the support of the Turkish secret services.

China follows a different path

China is determined to follow a different path in dealing with fanatical groups that are weaponized by religious extremism. China’s action comes after terror attacks and explosives have killed hundreds of civilians in busy shopping areas and crowded train and bus stations since the 1990s.

China has dealt with the problem of religious extremism by setting up large-scale vocational education and training centers. Rather than creating worse underdevelopment through bombing campaigns, it is seeking to engage the population in education, skill development and rapid economic and infrastructure development.

Terrorist attacks in Xinjiang have stopped since the reeducation campaigns began in 2017.

Two worldviews of Xinjiang

In July of this year, 22 countries, most in Europe plus Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, sent a letter to the U.N. Human Rights Council criticizing China for mass arbitrary detentions and other violations against Muslims in China’s Xinjiang region. The statement did not include a single signature from a Muslim-majority state.

Days later, a far larger group of 34 countries — now expanded to 54 from Asia, Africa and Latin America — submitted a letter in defense of China’s policies. These countries expressed their firm support of China’s counterterrorism and deradicalization measures in Xinjiang.

More than a dozen member countries of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation at the U.N. signed the statement.

A further statement on Oct. 31 to the Third Committee of the U.N. General Assembly explained that a number of diplomats, international organizations, officials and journalists had traveled to Xinjiang to witness the progress of the human rights cause and the outcomes of counterterrorism and deradicalization.

“What they saw and heard in Xinjiang completely contradicted what was reported in the [Western] media,” said the statement.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on Workers World.

Featured image is from United World International