Global Research

After the Soviet collapse, Russia  maintained strong and time-tested relations with African countries, and of course, the Soviet Union had played an important role during the decolonisation of Africa. The African continent comprises a diverse collection of countries, each with its own set of development setbacks and challenges. The political culture and investment climate are, in fact, diverse but are important forces in the economy.

According to several development reports, Africa is one of the fastest growing regions in the world: the average annual GDP growth rate reaches from 3.5% to 5% on the continent. The reports have strongly encouraged African leaders to prioritise sustainable development as a step towards raising the living standards of millions of impoverished population and further guide against the revival of neo-colonialism, the destructive attitude towards the resouces in Africa.

In this economic cooperation between the two regions as well as Russia’s role in sustainable development in Africa and expectations from the forthcoming summit in Sochi, Russia.

***

Kester Kenn Klomegah: African leaders and business people will be in Sochi for the first Summit. What are the perceptions and attitudes toward this new dawn in the relations? How do the political and business elites interpret the benefits of the new relationship for both Africa and in Russia?

George Nyongesa: The impending Russia-Africa Summit is a timely and opportune congregation given current global events involving Africa’s traditional partners – the US’ recent years’ protectionist policy, China’s trade wars with the US, Brexit from the European Union – all of which directly impact Africa’s economic reality. For African leaders and business people, the utility and strategic importance of the Russia-Africa Summit is tied to how aptly it addresses this immediate reality and outlines future prospects.

To-date the US, European Union, China, India and Japan have partnered with African leaders to pursue development goals for mutual benefit. Accordingly, these partners have long articulated their engagement plans for Africa through comprehensive frameworks such as the US-Africa Leaders’ Summit and Power Africa Initiative, the European Union-Africa Summit, the Forum for China Africa Cooperation, the India-Africa Summit and Tokyo International Conference for African Development. The first Russia-Africa Summit therefore signals the dawn of deeper and stronger relations between Russia and Africa as Russia takes on a more active presence.

At Sochi, African leaders and business community will be looking to understand the proposed Russian framework for political and economic cooperation going forward, particularly long-term cooperation that takes into account Africa’s risk profile and the current competitive landscape for those seeking to invest. The business community will be keen to identify in-roads and opportunities for African businesses to grow and thrive in Russia vis-a-vis Africa’s development priorities on Agenda 2063, SADC’s industrialisation strategy and AfCFTA platform.

KKK: During the parliamentary conference held in July, the Chairman of the State Duma stressed that “it is necessary to prevent the revival of neo-colonialism, the destructive attitude towards the African resources.” How would you explain neo-colonialism by foreign players in Africa? What countries are the neo-colonizers in your view?

Image on the left is George Nyongesa

GN: Neo-colonialism could be viewed as the renewed interest and methods employed from western and eastern countries in relation to exploitation and management of Africa’s rich resources – both from an economic and political paradigm. Traditionally, Western aid for African development has been laced with conditionalities tagged to defending human rights and promoting good governance via anti-corruption campaigns. This approach has seen compliant countries favored and non-compliant ones sanctioned by such Western nations. The interference with independent states has widely been castigated as neo-colonialism in many quarters. The alternative development model offered under the Belt and Road Initiative has facilitated the rise of China to displace the West as Africa’s largest development partner.

With the entire African continent (save for one country) signed up to BRI, Western countries’ worries about China expansionism has escalated. In this regard, BRI has been hit with accusations of debt trap diplomacy as far as its roll out in Africa. This is because the projects are run by Chinese businesses and where African nations struggle to repay the debt, then China is primed to step in and run the projects. The warning is that these seemingly friendlier loan terms could foster unsustainable debt and economic drain on African economies.

Outside of the economic dynamic, China has been accused of supporting authoritarian governments by its loan terms, and that in default situations, China’s remedies result in significant geopolitical expansion for China. To counter the growing Chinese influence, the United States has itself set up an African focused development agency that facilitates American businesses to flourish in developing Africa. These hegemonic tussles make for the neo-colonial danger that sees these development partners prosper to the exclusion of Africa itself.

KKK: In fact, Africa needs investment in infrastructure, agriculture and industry, to create employment for the young graduates. What role can Russia play here, we are referring to Sustainable Development Goals?

GN: Africa’s regional development priorities are largely articulated by the African Union’s Agenda 2063, the SADC’s Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap, 2015-2063 and the implementation of the recently adopted African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). Briefly, these priorities include industrialisation for economic and technological transformation; competitiveness; and regional integration. Africa is keen to shift away from industrialisation powered by increased labour and capital investment, to one powered by efficient resource deployment in production processes. AfCFTA particularly presents a significant consolidated voice for African states to negotiate economic and trade opportunities in e-commerce, technology transfers, manufacturing growth, scholarship and training; and infrastructure financing. Additionally, each of Africa’s 54 states have nationally articulated development priorities. These development goals have been designed as steps in pursuit of the attainment of the Millenium Development Goals.

Towards achieving these goals China has offered as much as US$60 billion, Japan US$32 billion, and India US$25 billion, while large investment funds have also come from the United States and the European Union. Similarly, Russia could design a funding vehicle focused on supporting Africa’s development priorities, particularly industrialisation and trade facilitation, for mutual benefit. Russia could further share knowledge on its own steps towards the MDGs and train professionals with the relevant skills for development projects. Such training could either be by the rollout of inter-university student exchange programs or the collaboration amongst academia to teach relevant skills in local curriculum in vocational institutions.

KKK: With trade specifically, there are surging competition, rivalry and trade wars in Africa, and recently the adoption of African continental free trade. What is your interpretation of all these and how profitable could it be for corporate Russian exporters?

GN: Russia has progressively engaged Africa on bilateral basis at country level, as well as through regional blocs such as AU and SADC, at continental level. The adoption of the largest trade agreement since the WTO, the AfCFTA, signals the exponential potential of Africa as a trading bloc, going forward. The intention of AfCFTA is to provide a significant consolidated voice for African states to negotiate economic and trade opportunities in e-commerce, technology transfers, manufacturing growth, scholarship and training; and infrastructure financing. It is anticipated that there will be an additional 1.3 billion people in Africa by 2050. This is a massive market for Russian corporates to explore if they can leverage mutually beneficial engagement at the AfCFTA level.

KKK: In your expert view, what are the key challenges and problems facing Russian companies and investors that wanted business operations in Africa?

GN: Africa’s active business development partners have been the United States, European Union, China, India and Japan, but less so Russia. As such, there’s limited shared knowledge on the value proposition of development and business collaboration between the two. Additionally, the absence of an articulated collaboration framework has meant that African and Russian policy makers are yet to design appropriate collaboration channels and tools that would facilitate mutually beneficial investment and ease of doing business. Related gaps include the prevailing language and cultural barrier that is, as yet, to be actively addressed. These, coupled with other prevailing hurdles to doing business in Africa such as limited infrastructure, high local unemployment rates, semi-skilled workers and protection of local industries, have hindered the set up of local business operations by Russian companies and investors.

KKK: On the other hand, why the presence of African companies on the Russian market is extremely low? Why Russia is not attractive to African exporters? Under the circumstances, what should be done to improve the current situation, a two-way trade?

GN: The African perception of Russia and vice versa has largely been painted by other Western powers that are active on the African continent. That public persona is not one that has been enticing for African exporters. As such, Africa’s knowledge of the opportunities in trading with Russia is significantly limited. Opportunities for driving up trade relations between Russia and Africa include the facilitation of trade expos that create a platform for investors and businesses from both parties to interact and understand the opportunities and challenges to their export and import businesses. In addition, continued interaction between Russia and Africa, such as through exchange programs for students, or business cultural trips, will facilitate the chipping away at the language and cultural barrier that in turn hinders easy trade. If both Russia and Africa are able to showcase the available market for each other’s products, then trade engagement is likely to increase.

KKK: Could we finally talk about media cooperation between Russia and Africa, social platforms and the use of soft power as important instruments for strengthening the relations? What are your suggestions to these aspects in the existing relations between the Russia and Africa?

GN: As part of Russia’s desire to adopt a comprehensive strategic roadmap for a more integrated cooperation and to find effective ways of improving public diplomacy in Africa, the Russian government is supporting a pilot programme organised for African media groups for a two-year period from 2018 to 2020. The utility of this approach is to develop a cohort of champions that will facilitate a positive post-Soviet economic and cultural narrative, as well as demystify Russia for Africa’s political, business and general population. Through this, Russians and Africans will be able to leverage soft power to build trust from shared experience, shift towards normalisation of relations through increased familiarity, set the stage for increased reciprocity such as Russia granting accessibility for African correspondents to match Russia’s increased media presence in Africa. In a nutshell, there will be an avenue for demystification and contextualisation (getting to know the truth about each other through moderated content) and so help counter any negative public persona, share cultural experiences and begin to wear down language barriers.

*

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 Russia Insider

I recently watched Marianne and Leonard, a documentary film about Leonard Cohen, the great Canadian poet and musician. The film, directed by Nick Broomfield, focuses on Leonard’s relationship with Marianne Ihlen, but also dwells extensively on Cohen’s depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and other life struggles.

While watching the movie, I got the impression that Leonard, throughout his life, knew that something profoundly important and necessary was missing, not only in his own life, but in the lives of many, if not most.

Leonard did not seem to understand, though, what, exactly, was missing; what was wrong; what was making him feel so profoundly sad, for himself and for society as a whole; what the source of his profound sense of yearning was.  He searched for answers, but failed to discover the cause or remedy for the individual and collective sickness of the soul that he deeply sensed.

Through his poetry and music, however he succeeded marvelously in expressing his deep sense of unresolved longing.  At the same time, in the same songs, he also expressed a sense of hope, even jubilation, that great goodness might be possible.  As one listens to “Anthem,”²for example, one notes this mixture of two opposites: on the one hand, it seems to express a profound sadness for suffering souls who are desperately longing for meaningfulness; on the other hand it expresses an exhilarating hope for imagined goodness. Both are expressed, simultaneously, which is an interesting and unusual accomplishment.

Both Leonard and his admiring audiences and fans have always seemed to sense that he was beautifully and movingly expressing something profound and important.  Leonard deserves great credit for caring to express, and being able to so beautifully and humbly express, both his deep despair and his great hope, simultaneously, in the same song.

What was it that Leonard yearned for, desperately searched for, and seemed to never fully understand or find?  I would suggest that, perhaps, it was Social Beauty for which he so deeply longed. (Please see an explanation of Social Beauty at the end of this essay.)  I don’t think he ever recognized that a paucity of Social Beauty might have been a major cause of his sadness and disappointment.  Neither he, nor those around him (nor the director of this movie, for that matter) seemed to understand that the root cause of their sickened souls may well have been a paucity of Social Beauty in their lives, and the lives of most.

In his desperate attempts to deal with his longing, Leonard delved into all kinds of unsuccessful “searching” experiences and behaviors: LSD and other drugs, “free love,” “loving everyone,” trying Buddhism, relying on the adulation of adoring fans and the exhilaration of concert performances.  None of these searchings worked, probably because they missed the point.  They did not address the probable root cause of the profound emptiness and disappointment he appeared to feel.  Instead, his searchings (except for his Buddhist experience, perhaps) proved to be destructive substitutes that served only to partially and superficially assuage his pain.

As much as he loved and appreciated Marianne, she, by herself, could not satisfy his yearning for Social Beauty. No single person can.  She could have helped him much more, if she had understood what, exactly, he was missing—but she, too, did not realize that a paucity of Social Beauty was a likely source of most people’s sickened souls.

So, the movie depicts a tragic story of a complex man who, to his great credit, was deeply aware that something was missing, something was wrong, not only in his life but in the lives of most people, and who cared to beautifully share that concern through his gifted musicianship; but who did not understand what, exactly, was missing.  As a result, he succumbed to one failed search after another, never figured out the root cause of his (and society’s) sadness, never received help in doing so, and never found what he was missing. Nor did his friends, including Marianne. Unfortunately, the director of the movie also missed this point.

Returning to Leonard’s marvelous music, perhaps the reason it is so much appreciated is that it powerfully expresses a profound, though vague, yearning for Social Beauty—a yearning that so many of us share. While listening to his song “Hallelujah,” for example, consider the possibility that it is profoundly expressing both a sad longing for Social Beauty and the exhilaration we might feel if we could experience more Social Beauty.  Especially in K.D. Lang’s singing of this song, some of the “hallelujahs” sound like cries of deep anguish; while other “hallelujahs” sound like cheers of sheer joy.  Some of her “hallelujuas” sound cold and broken; others feel warm and hopeful.  As you listen to the song “Democracy is coming to the USA,³” think of it as a wishful expression of hope that Social Beauty might soon be coming to the USA.

I think Leonard’s music appealed because he so movingly tapped into people’s (largely unrecognized) longing for Social Beauty, while simultaneously providing an exhilarating glimpse of how Social Beauty could feel.  Leonard, Marianne, their talented but confused friends, and the director of the movie, probably did not fully understand this.

In short, Leonard seemed to be suffering, more than anything else, from a deep unfulfilled yearning for Social Beauty—-unfulfilled because Western culture is so short on Social Beauty and so long on its powerful opposite.  In other words (since Big Pharma likes to make up new diagnostic labels and give them abbreviations), we could say that Leonard was suffering from Social Beauty Deficit Disorder (SBDD), not to mention the PTSD that current western culture also creates. Big Pharma would prefer to treat SBDD with some sort of mind-altering pill; but the better treatment would be to publicly discuss how we could democratically create more Social Beauty and democratically decrease its opposite.   Whether he realized it, or not (probably not), maybe that is what Leonard’s songs (subconsciously, on his part) were asking us to do.

Poor Leonard.  He knew something was profoundly wrong; but he could not clearly identify cause or solution, and, sadly, no one effectively helped him. He cared deeply. Despite his SBDD, or probably because of it, he at least created wonderful music that expressed both the current dearth of Social Beauty and the exhilarating potential for future creation of more of it.

But, Leonard’s angst is not the most important story here.  His is one cautionary tale that introduces us to a much bigger, more important story—which is that most people in the USA (and elsewhere in Western cultures) appear to be suffering from SBDD to one extent or another, mostly to a huge extent.  SBDD appears to be epidemic—much more epidemic than even the enormous opioid crisis, which is most likely just an extreme manifestation of SBDD.  Pathological societies—ones that produce so little Social Beauty and create so much of its opposite—breed pathological individual and collective behaviors. For the sake of all who suffer from SBDD, perhaps we should democratically create new social arrangements that generate Social Beauty (for example, create vast Public Activity, comprehensive Public Economies, and uplifting Public Cultures), while we democratically disassemble the old mean social arrangements that have been generating the opposite of Social Beauty.  That would be a far better tribute to the late Leonard Cohen than is the movie Marianne and Leonard.  (Leonard died in November, 2016.)

Social Beauty[1]

Social Beauty refers to social arrangements, and the effects generated by those arrangements, that increase expression and practice of the best capacities of our human nature—e.g., our capacities for kindness, empathy, compassion, altruism, creativity, and the arts. Such social arrangements generate high levels of individual and collective Human Spirit, high feelings of gratitude for Life, Nature, and each other, including gratitude for opportunities to contribute to the well-being of others.  These arrangements are reflections of a deep love and respect for Humanity and the Earth; and these arrangements beget even deeper and more practiced love and respect.  These arrangements and the social activities and effects associated with them, are things of Social Beauty, and they increasingly generate further Social Beauty.  They encourage, support, create, and give practice to escalating levels of individual and collective kindness, dignity, grace, calmness, confidence, and competence.

These social arrangements, the social activities associated with them, and the effects generated by them, move our hearts and minds via the senses and emotions, as well as intellectually. Like great music, great visual art, and Nature’s beauty, they deeply touch and stir our humanity.  They inspire, motivate, deepen, heal, awaken, empower, and liberate; they up-regulate feelings of gratitude, caring, and love.  They increase consciousness, address profound social longings, enhance the meaningfulness of life, provide clarity, enliven imagination and conscience, and give us confidence in ourselves and Humanity.  These arrangements and activities teach us what it means to be human; they transform people, individually and collectively, as all increasingly participate in the creation of ever-more Social Beauty.

The Opposite of Social Beauty

The opposite of Social Beauty are the social arrangements, social activities, and the effects generated by them, that increase expression and practice of the worst capacities of our human nature—e.g., our capacities to be selfish, mean, callous, ungrateful, uncaring, untrusting, and spiteful.  The opposite of Social Beauty are mean social arrangements that degrade us, individually and collectively, suppress us, seduce us, exploit us, depress us, discourage us, and crush our souls. These “mean arrangements of man” (as Victor Hugo would call them), and the activities and effects associated with them, represent the opposite of Social Beauty.  They are reflections of a lack of deep love and respect for Humanity and the Earth, or at least inadequately practiced love and respect; and they increasingly beget further lack of love and respect. These mean social arrangements are extraordinarily powerful; they have the characteristics of malignancy, and as such, they are difficult to disassemble.

Excerpts from Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem”[2]

Ring the bell that still can ring,

Forget your perfect offering,

There is a crack, a crack in everything,

That’s how the light gets in.

Excerpts from Leonard Cohen’s “Democracy is Coming to the USA” (but substituting Social Beauty for Democracy)”[3] 

It’s coming through a hole in the air,
From those nights in Tiananmen Square,
It’s coming from the feel that this ain’t exactly real,
Or, its real, but it ain’t exactly there. 

From the war against disorder,
From the sirens night and day,
From the fires of the homeless,
From the ashes of the Gay, 

Social Beauty is coming…to the USA.

Its coming from the sorrow in the street,
The holy places where the races meet,
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen,
To determine who will serve and who will eat, 

From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray,
For the grace of God in the desert here,
And the desert far away, 

Social Beauty is coming… to the USA.

It’s here the family’s broken,
And its here the lonely say,
That the heart, it’s got to open,
In a fundamental way, 

Social Beauty is coming… to the USA.

Sail on, Sail on,
O mighty ship of state,
To the shores of need,
Past the reefs of greed,
Through the squalls of hate, 

Sail on, Sail on, Sail on….

I’m sentimental, if you know what I mean,
I love the country, but I can’t stand the scene,
And I’m neither left or right,
I’m just staying home tonight,
Getting lost in that hopeless little screen, 

But I’m stubborn as those garbage bags,
That time cannot decay,
I’m junk but I’m still holding up,
This little wild bouquet. 

Social Beauty is coming…to the USA…to the USA….

*

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

At Global Research, our mandate is to increase awareness on the broadest possible level while maintaining full independence in our reports and analyses. Our commitment is to make our articles and videos available to the broadest possible readership, on a non-commercial basis, without the need for a login for paid subscribers. This is why you will never have to pay to access the important articles and videos that our contributors are tirelessly preparing because they believe that truth – not war – is the way to peace.

We, on the other hand, do have to pay in order to provide you with this service. In fact, for several months now, we have been unable to cover our monthly running costs. Please help us reverse our deficit by subscribing to a recurring membership (receive free books!) or by making a donation. Details below:

Click to donate:

Click to make a one-time or a recurring donation

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

Click to view our membership plans

Thank you for supporting independent media.

The Global Research Team

The entire Trump presidency has been a sequence of “watch this space” moments.  Dismissals and political executions; attacks and distractions; gestures of deal making and promises of apocalypse. Perhaps it was high time for another bit of material to be added to this sprawling tapestry of mayhem.  The elements seemed to form the basis of a badly told joke: a Ukrainian president, a US president and a whistleblower walked into a bar, and…? 

Coming on the heels of another juicy sample from President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who had testified before the House Judiciary Committee on efforts by Trump to recruit him to halt the Russia probe, a rumour was filtering through: a whistleblower from the intelligence community, it seemed, had been irate about the president’s conduct.

The letter, written by the whistleblower in August this year, is positively pungent.  President Trump, it argues, “is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.  The interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”  Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and US Attorney General William Barr also feature. 

The letter does have a qualifying note.  The author admits that what is being conveyed is in the realm of hearsay, the tittle tattle of agency talk.  “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described.”  Credibility has been assumed, however, because the pattern emerging in various accounts seem consistent: we share, because we care.

Central to the complaint is the July 25 call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  The subject of the conversation: Democratic presidential contender and former vice president Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his son, Hunter Biden.  The allegation: that Zelensky and Ukrainian sources were essentially being urged to conduct an investigation into the conduct of the Bidens for Trump’s own electoral delectation.  Then came the efforts by the White House to prevent any discussion of the call from getting out.   

For all that, the letter itself forms an already rusting arsenal of claims based on information that is already in the public domain.  As the Washington Post suggests, “if it continues to be relied upon as evidence of justifying impeachment, Democrats will have to make some hard choices about how to proceed.”

No matter.  The whistleblower has become a well-timed sensation of deliverance for the Democratic caucus.  The ecstatic thrill shown by Democrats lies in sharp contrast to the pre-Trump era, when those inclined to disclose secrets or classified information were sneered at as irresponsible and unpatriotic.  The Obama administration made a habit of resorting to the 1917 Espionage Act against those daring to blow the whistle.  Standing at eight prosecutions, it came to more than double those of all previous presidents combined. 

In all the fuss, it was easy to ignore those remarkable words endorsed by the Continental Congress in its approved resolution of July 30, 1778: “It is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earlier information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanours committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge”.

When considered together, be it the tactical or careless leak, or the well intentioned disclosure of sensitive information, inconsistency prevails.  At points, such activities have drawn savage retribution from the state.  On other occasions, the activity has been left unpunished, suggesting the inconstancy and unevenness of approaches to information.  Lamentably, they also suggest favouritism, malice and convenient exploitation. 

The case of General David Petraeus, for instance, was deemed a misdemeanour, despite disclosing notebooks to his biography scribbling mistress containing “classified information regarding the identities of covert officers, war strategy, intelligence capabilities and mechanisms, diplomatic discussions, quotes and deliberative discussions from high-level National Security Council meetings and [his] discussions with the President of the United States of America.” 

The March 6, 2015 letter to the US Department of Justice from Abbe David Lowell, the attorney representing Stephen Kim, one of the unfortunates charged and convicted for providing national defence information to a person without authorisation to receive it, outlined the asymmetrical nature of information disclosure in the security environment.  Lowell contrasted his client’s situation with that of the General.  “Despite the nature of the information and these intentional false statements [from Petraeus] the [Department of Justice] is not only permitting but is actively recommending that General Petraeus plead guilty to a misdemeanour.” 

Lowell had suggested that the act of disclosure be treated as a misdemeanour regarding the mishandling or retention of classified material.  Besides, his client, in discussing US ignorance of North Korea’s military capabilities with Fox News, had not intended to harm his country. This was dismissed out of hand: Kim had lied to FBI agents, which more or less sealed the matter.  But as Lowell explained with pertinent sharpness, the decision to permit the general “to plead guilty to misdemeanour demonstrates more clearly than ever the profound double standard that applies when prosecuting so-called ‘leakers’ and those accused of disclosing classified information for their own purposes.” 

The situation now is one of sublime convenience.  The elections are next year.  The Democratic contenders look more like sandpit debaters than clear-eyed candidates.  But the whistleblower’s revelations are heralded as the stuff of gold dust; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, usually reluctant in the matter, has announced the beginnings of the inquiry. 

The anger shown by Trump at the whistleblower’s disclosure is being treated as abnormally sinister.  It has been noted, for instance, that the president is willing to reward anybody keen to divulge who furnished the information to the whistleblower with a bounty of $50,000.  But the US security establishment is famed for targeting the careless and the noble when it comes to revealing what is rotten in a state.  The question to ask is what makes this particularly whistleblower the exception that proves the rule?  The answer, in all likelihood, is the politics of convenience rather than the nobility of patriotism.

*

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]

Syrians under the occupation of US illegals and their terrorist SDF are continuing public protests against the illicit militia that burns agricultural fields, appropriates or bombs homes, kidnaps Syrian children for criminal training in military camps. In a recent chaotic situation, four SDF terrorists were killed in a possible grenade bombing of a ‘militia center.’

The SDF terrorists, acting under the protection of its US creators have previously torched wheat fields when Syrian farmers refused to capitulate to their mafiosi – type tax demands. More recently, this gang has begun destroying agricultural lands to dig trenches near to the border with terrorist Erdogan’s Turkey (reminder that most of the 350k foreign human detritus invaded Syria through the Turkish border, and not one lost a leg to the almost 200k landmines not cleared, despite Turkey joining the Mine Ban Treaty in 2003).

The US has been dumping convoys of military trucks and weapons into its regions of criminal occupation on a regular basis, since August, for increased arming of its mini SDF militia. Currently, these thugs are engaged in violent mayhem in Hasaka, Raqqa, and Deir Ezzor countryside.

To date, the largest number of Syrians abducted by the Trump regime thugs in one day, was 30, certainly a distorted way to honor 9/11 martyrs.

US Americans currently endure crumbling infrastructure, mass homelessness & related outbreaks of diseases in urban centers (e.g., Hep A in Philly), drug addiction, substandard public transit, closure of hospital universities (e.g., Hahnemann University Hospital, also Philly).

They suffer the indignity of crowd-funding to help defray health care costs.

Nonetheless, they have been made into well-behaved creatures, currently made to argue over which partisan team is more corrupt related to activities in the post-Maidan Ukraine (which cost US taxpayers $5 billion bipartisanly). They are completely unaware of the hundreds of millions of their tax monies being dumped to fund and arm terror against Syria.

• Attempting to blow up Christian churches (perversely ignored by various Christian organizations, including the Vatican)
• Sadistically burned Syrian wheat fields to the ground
• Signed an illegal agreement to sell stolen Syrian oil to an Israeli-American ‘businessman’ (involved in the theft of artifacts from the Eliyahu Hanav Synagogue, ostensibly protected as a UNESCO World Heritage site)
• Has closed down dozens of public and vocational schools in areas of the Syrian Arab Republic that it occupies under the protection of the Trump regime military

As the Pavlovian, Mockingbird training of the American populace includes mandatory geopolitical memory deficits, the author asks them to try to consider why the SDF is no longer featured prominently in NATO media, as it was during the Obama administration.

In the early days of the foreign war of terror against Syria, the Obama State Department gave frequent press conferences in which the criminal attacks against the State by the YPG would be cheered. Given the YPG is ‘military arm’ of the PKK which is actually on the US terror list, United States Special Forces Commander Gen. Raymond A. Thomas declared the name change was required (the various flags of the many armed terrorists against Syria, here. They include photos of US-approved terrorists with US-unapproved terrorists.)

The re-marketed, YPG-cum-SDF Obama regime creation was such a hit with western colonial serfs that they missed the fact that Obama actually put together a NATO wetworker run SDF — advertised as a ‘minority’ fighting against the also the US – created ISIS terrorists.

This charming gentleman, Brace Belden — who told media that he was a teen drunk and druggie — is not Kurdish, nor is he Syrian. He is an American who assisted in the obliteration of al-Raqqa. The fifth column known as ‘Hollywood‘ is making a movie about him. It is unlikely that anyone will notice the colonial aggression, aggression and impunity, and by the time it is in theaters, American colonial serfs will probably have managed to disassociate, completely, that the Trump regime has continued and accelerated the atrocities against Syria, begun during the Obama regime, and which normalized SDF terror attacks against Syrian farms, schools, churches, homes….

The American Empire may change flags of its terrorist militias on the ground, in Syria, but they are all the same, despite the occasional infighting.

Syria’s Tabqa Dam has been under US occupation since February 2013. Officially, though, the FSA branch of al Qaeda ”liberated” it from the Syrian government, after which the ISIS branch of al Qaeda magically liberated it from the FSA when arriving to seek a most bizarre sanctuary, after which it was re-re-liberated by the US’s updated YPG terrorists, the SDF.

Tice is the former Marine who illegally entered Syria, and who chose to embed himself with the FSA al Qaeda branch. Somehow, Ortagus — and various MSM — have managed to ignore Tice’s last tweet, 12 August 2012, which was “hands down, best birthday ever.” One might wonder if the FSA slipped a roofie into the whiskey they got him for that pool party (no mention of whose home the FSA had expropriated, nor if the owners were murdered or simply evicted) and sold him to ISIS, as may have happened to another American illegal, Sotloff.

The anti-Syria propaganda by the Trump regime has increased around the UNGA meetings. One the occasions the western media are not drowning their audiences in impeachment stories, they slip in short reports on the threats to the Syrian Arab Republic.

These NATO media do not report on the Syrians protesting against the crimes of the SDF. These media also ignore President Assad’s promise:

*

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.

All images in this article are from Syria News

A personal note: Throughout his tenure, I’ve been a sharp Trump critic for numerous legitimate reason.

He escalated wars of aggression  inherited from Bush/Cheney and Obama, continuing the rape and destruction of nonbelligerent states threatening no one.

He’s waging economic terrorism on Iran and Venezuela, causing pain and suffering to their people.

All of the above are Nuremberg-level high crimes of war and against humanity.

He’s hostile to unwanted aliens from the wrong countries, notably Muslims, Latinos and Blacks — proving he’s America’s racist-in-chief.

He broke virtually every positive campaign and inaugural address pledge, serving privileged interests exclusively, exploiting ordinary people — his tax cut for the rich and continuing neoliberal harshness the clearest examples.

His trade war with China has nothing to do with trade, everything to do with wanting its economic, industrial, and technological development undermined.

His no-peace/peace plan is all about serving Israeli interests exclusively, abandoning Palestinian rights altogether.

His outreach to North Korea was and remains head-fake deception, making unacceptable demands in return for empty promises.

Instead of rapprochement with Russia, he escalated sanctions war and other hostile actions.

There’s nothing redeeming about a figure who time and again says one thing, then goes another way, whose serial lying shows nothing he says is credible, who can never be trusted because of his unacceptable actions.

That said, judge him based on cold hard facts, not politicized attacks, wanting his triumph over Hillary delegitimized.

The Russiagate witch hunt, cooked up by John Brennan, Obama’s CIA director, was exposed and debunked as a colossal hoax.

The same goes for fake news about nonexistent Russian US election meddling.

Yet it’s the Big Lie that still won’t die, even though the Mueller witch hunt failed to uncover an illegal or improper Trump team connection to Moscow or any evidence of Kremlin interference in the US political process — because none exists to prove either phony accusation.

Ukrainegate is a Russiagate spinoff, concocted because Plan A for undemocratic Dems to muddy him for political advantage failed.

Both schemes are clear proof that Washington’s deeply corrupted political process is too debauched to fix.

The CIA/Dem-enlisted character assassin/so-called “whistleblower” is a spinoff from the DNC/Hillary campaign’s Christopher Steele dodgy dossier about Trump.

It contained spurious accusations without evidence, unverified rubbish alleging misconduct and collusion between Trump, his campaign, and Russia during the presidential campaign – including phony claims of Russian US election interference.

It was politicized character assassination fake news.

The same goes for claims by an unidentified anti-Trump CIA/Dem-recruited hired gun — unjustifiably justifying an impeachment inquiry.

The scheme is solely for political advantage ahead of 2020 presidential and congressional elections — supported by the NYT, CNN, and other anti-Trump media.

It’s no more likely to remove him from office than the failed Russiagate scheme. Aiming to make him unre-electable, it may backfire by improving his chances.

The so-called whistleblower’s accusations are based hearsay, not cold hard facts of wrongdoing based on credible evidence.

Ukrainegate reveals Joe Biden’s culpability for forcing Ukraine’s Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin from office over an investigation of his son Hunter’s dubious dealings as a Ukrainian Burisma Holdings board member.

In a sworn statement ignored by US establishment media, Shorkin accused Biden of “directly manipulat(ing) the political leadership of Ukraine on false pretexts…”

The CIA and undemocratic Dems want Trump held accountable over nothing — burying information about Biden’s wrongdoing, abusing the power of his office in dealings with a foreign government.

He publicly admitted blackmailing Ukraine’s government in remarks at the Council on Foreign Relations, saying:

“If the prosecutor general is not fired, you’re not getting the money” — referring to a US billion dollar loan guarantee for Kiev.

Biden added:

“Well, son of a bitch. He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time (sic).”

The investigation of Hunter Biden’s involvement with Bursima Holdings’ dubious dealings was dropped. VP Biden’s blackmail threat did the trick.

Weeks after the Obama regime’s February 2014 coup in Ukraine, replacing democratic governance with Nazi-infested putschist rule, Hunter Biden joined Bursima Holdings’ board when the gas company was being investigated for corruption and tax evasion.

He was offered a high-paying figurehead position, protection money for the firm — solely because his father was US vice president, able to influence Ukrainian policies, precisely what happened.

Will Tulsi Gabbard, Warren, Sanders, and/or other Dem presidential aspirants use this credible dirt and other damaging revelations about Biden to discredit him.

He’s vulnerable to legitimate muddying, potentially able to knock him out of contention if this strategy is used.

Ukrainegate points dirty fingers at him, not Trump. Dems handed him red meat to aid his reelection campaign.

They likely shot themselves in the foot twice — over the Russiagate and Ukrainegate scams, both schemes without anti-Trump/anti-Russia credibility.

*

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 TruePublica

Wannabe sultan Erdogan covets expanding Turkey’s borders to include oil-rich northern Iraqi and Syrian territory. 

Combatting Kurds in Syria, posing no cross-border threat, is part of his annexation scheme — what Damascus officials condemn and won’t tolerate.

In cahoots with US aggression in Syria, including aid to ISIS and likeminded terrorists, Erdogan is pursuing his long-planned land grab, Russia doing nothing to deter what demands universal condemnation.

Press TV, Reuters, the Jerusalem Post, and other media reported that he intends spending $27 billion for constructing scores of villages and 10 towns in northern Syria, including 200,000 residences.

His unlawful land grab involves stealing it from its rightful owners, breaching the country’s sovereignty more than already on the phony pretext of constructing a large scale “safe zone” from the Euphrates River to the Iraqi border.

He aims to control 250 miles of northern Syrian territory bordering Turkey, 20 miles deep into its sovereign land.

Claiming it’s to resettle one to two million Syrian refugees now in Turkey is a ruse. Ending aggression by the US and its imperial partners, including Ankara, is the only way to ensure their safety, facilitating their return home.

Erdogan turned international law on its head, claiming establishing a cross-border “safe zone” justifies Turkish occupation of northern Syrian territory.

Press TV said Turkey’s scheme is to “carv(e) out a patch of land in the Arab country for itself.”

Erdogan wants Syrian refugees prevented from returning home to Aleppo and other areas he wants them excluded from — wanting them resettled in territory controlled by the US and its terrorist foot soldiers.

He wants northern Syria demographically changed from historically Kurdish to territory housing Turkish-supported Syrian refugees.

The project if undertaken will take years to complete, along with greatly taxing Turkey’s financial ability to pursue it without foreign funding.

Reuters said he “called on France and Germany to provide additional financial aid for the project.”

In his UN address, he said “I call on all countries to support our efforts regarding Syria” — no matter the flagrant breach of international law.

Damascus slammed what it called Erdogan’s “blatant aggression,” a flagrant breach of Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity — what the UN Charter and other international laws prohibit.

In August, the Trump and Erdogan regimes agreed to establish, “coordinate, and manage the implementation of the safe zone” in northeastern Syria.

At the time, a Damascus statement said the unlawful scheme “exposed the US-Turkish partnership in the aggression against Syria, which serves the interest of the Israeli occupation entity and the Turkish expansionist ambitions,” adding:

“Syria calls on the international community and the UN to condemn the US-Turkish flagrant aggression which constitutes a dangerous escalation and poses a threat to peace and security in the region and the world and hinders all positive efforts for finding a solution to the crisis in Syria.”

Longstanding US/Israeli plans call for redrawing the Middle East map — partitioning Syria part of the scheme.

If implemented, Erdogan’s land grab will make resolution of endless war in Syria more unattainable than already.

Russian involvement is key to preserving Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity, what it stressed numerous times it supports.

It involves preventing Turkish annexation of sovereign Syrian territory, what it failed to do so far, and may not to strengthen political and economic ties to Ankara.

Note: On Sunday, Press TV reported that US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (infested with terrorists) “kidnapped hundreds of people in” northern Syria, adding:

“(T)he terrorists continue to perpetrate criminal and abusive practices against ordinary citizens in areas under their control.”

Damascus is committed to liberate its territory controlled by these elements.

Restoration of peace and stability to the country is unattainable without eliminating their presence, along with ending unlawful US/Turkish occupation of its territory.

*

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.

The British political crisis continues, with the latest developments consolidating the hard right takeover of the Tory Party and Government that began with the Brexit referendum in 2016 and is now leading to the development of a potentially mass neo-fascist movement. This is taking place against the backdrop of similar developments across Europe and beyond.

The suspension of Parliament – a key stage in the UK process – has been defeated but Boris Johnson’s trajectory remains on track. The unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court, announced on Tuesday 24th September, was that Boris Johnson and the Tory government had acted unlawfully in proroguing parliament from the 9th September to the 14th October. It was for most an unexpected verdict and represented a deepening of the split within the establishment. The judiciary, or at least its most significant component, had sided with parliament against the government.

The most obvious and immediate effect was that parliament returned on 25th September and did not enter a recess for the Tory Party conference. This was a significant setback for the strategy of Johnson and his special advisor Dominic Cummings, and an opportunity for the Labour Party – not through their own efforts but through an individual’s legal challenge backed by other opposition parties.

The first instinct of the Johnson cabal has been to double down and attack the judiciary through the Tory press and in parliament. Johnson’s key ally Jacob Rees-Mogg has also attacked the judges calling their verdict a ‘constitutional coup’. No doubt this will harden their base in the Tory party, the Home Counties and the Northern leave areas, but it also creates a serious problem for them.

An important section of the ruling class are not yet disposed to attack the judiciary in this way and recognise the dangers for their class in the Cummings strategy. Moreover the re-opening of parliament makes the no-deal manoeuvres of the Tory government less likely to succeed. This strengthens the position of the Brexit party which is waiting in the wings. Cummings had hoped to undercut the Brexit party with a general election in the wake of a 31st October Brexit leading to a Johnson victory. The verdict of the judiciary therefore makes a Tory/Brexit Party electoral coming together more likely. It’s unlikely that the Tories now could win a majority in a general election without some kind of deal with the Brexit Party. In the old industrial areas there are sections of the electorate that would never vote Tory but are already willing to vote for Farage and co. Objectively, Brexit and the Brexit party are the mechanisms to split the working class and prevent a left alternative – Labour – coming to power

Johnson was at the UN in New York when the Court judgement was announced, but before he came back to London he met publicly and privately with Trump. No doubt yesterday’s strategy – for how to handle parliament – would have been discussed and Trump is in no doubt that some kind of alliance between Farage and Johnson is necessary.

Johnson was forced to return to parliament and gave an aggressive performance in the House of Commons last night in which it became clear exactly what the labour movement – and indeed wider society – is facing. There was outrage at the insult to the memory of murdered MP Jo Cox – Johnson said the best way to honour her (she was a Remainer) was to deliver Brexit – and the taunting of MPs as traitors and surrender merchants. Today neo-fascists across social media have claimed him as their own and it is absolutely clear that he is building a base amongst the neo-fascists and far right. Wider sections of the population are now open to far right arguments.

Notwithstanding Johnson’s attempts to turn it to his advantage, the Supreme Court decision has been very significant as a mainstream blow to Johnson’s disgraceful anti-democratic actions. Of course it does little to alter the fundamentals – economic and political crisis and the shift to the right in British politics. Although it may be true that the mass of the population do not hold judges, politicians or parliament in great esteem we are not yet at the stage where there is a widespread support for dispensing with bourgeois democracy. Those who do wish to do that largely hail from the far right. The verdict has the effect of moving the Johnson cabal further out of the political and establishment mainstream; they will harden a base around them but they are more clearly identifiable for what they actually are. The crucial next step for the left is to confidently press forward, further isolate them and diminish and defeat their base.

Can the Labour Party do this, given its current failure to give a clear lead on key issues? At this week’s Labour Party conference, the atmosphere was relatively low energy, fractious and insular until the decision was announced from the Supreme Court. The conference had started with a ham-fisted bureaucratic manoeuvre to try and get rid of Deputy Leader Tom Watson and was swiftly followed by news of a senior policy advisor’s resignation. The Another Europe is Possible’s (AEIP) anti-Brexit position was lost because the conference was persuaded that it was a Trojan horse for the Blairite right in the party, who also back remain but on a different basis to the left Remainers, like AEIP. Corbyn’s ‘we aren’t either leavers or remainers but socialists’ line won in the hall. The problem with this is that an election campaign conducted on an anti-austerity basis is going to crash into the brick wall of Brexit. In effect it will be a one-issue election and to ignore that reality will be catastrophic.

The great danger is that the labour and trade union movement is proceeding as if nothing much has changed and this underpinned the support for the conference motion which essentially advocated sitting on the fence – the leadership’s preferred Brexit outcome at conference. There is a misguided belief that the coming election is going to be a reprise of 2017 where Labour broke Theresa May’s majority. Labour has now a much more radical policy programme than 2017 but is in a much weaker political position with poor showings in the opinion polls. At least part of this is because it doesn’t have a clear position on opposing Brexit.

So the decision of the judiciary has deepened the split in the ruling class and hardened up the no deal far right around Johnson and Farage. This is very dangerous politically, but it also opens up political space for Labour – which it is vital that it does not squander – and it creates space for political work from the radical left too. Over the past few weeks we have seen massive protests against Johnson’s closure of parliament – under the slogans ‘Stop the Coup’ and ‘Defend Democracy’; these were largely either spontaneous or organised by the anti-Brexit left.  At the same time we have seen huge protests, including extensive civil disobedience, on the issue of climate change. Young people have led the struggles here as elsewhere, and now other movements are joining forces to support them. So this is a period of intensive mobilisation across Britain, with sharper political divides – and a greater risk to our rights and democracy – than have been seen perhaps since the General Strike of 1926. The Labour Party and the radical left must rise to the challenge, in the interests of us all, for much is at stake. We are entering a struggle for the future: not just of this country but across the world. It is a struggle for humanity as a whole – for social justice, equality and economic democracy, to meet the needs of all peoples.

*

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.

Global Research, like many independent voices all over the globe, is feeling the effects of online measures set up to curtail access to our website, and by consequence, hinder our finances. We sail on despite the unpredictable currents and unfavourable forecasts. We can’t steer this ship alone however, we need your help!

We would be greatly indebted to you for any donation large or small. Can you contribute to help us meet our monthly running costs? Make no mistake, we intend to be here for years to come, but for the time being we ask for your help to stay afloat as we ride the storm out. Here’s how you can help:

*     *     *

Unified Action to Fight Deforestation

By Nicole Polsterer, September 30, 2019

Jair Bolsonaro defied his critics at the UN General Assembly in New York this month – as expected – denouncing those maintaining that his policies have fanned the flames of the Amazon fires.

Houthis Claim Ambush of Saudis Killed Hundreds

By Kurt Nimmo, September 30, 2019

The ambush follows on the heels of a claimed Houthi missile and drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco’s Abqaiq facility and the Khurais oilfield earlier this month.

The Majority of Jews, 8 Million, Have No Wish to Live in a Conflicted Israel

By Hans Stehling, September 30, 2019

Out of a global Jewish population of 14.8 million, over 54% do not, and presumably have no wish to live in the hard-Right, Likud-dominated, settler-controlled, extremist state that is today’s Israel.

The Untold Story of the Trump-Ukraine ‘Scandal’: The Routine Corruption of US Foreign Policy

By Joe Lauria, September 30, 2019

The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine “scandal,” which has led to impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by Republicans.

The Disaster of Negative Interest Rates

By Ellen Brown, September 30, 2019

The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory.

The ‘Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act’ Will Intensify the Hybrid War on China

By Andrew Korybko, September 30, 2019

As if the ongoing “trade war” wasn’t an intense enough Hybrid War against China as it is, the US might soon pass the so-called “Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act” in order to take its asymmetrical aggression even further and institutionalize it as the “new normal” for at least the next three decades.

The Bee: “The Most Important Living Being on the Planet”

By Physics and Astronomy Zone, September 30, 2019

Bees around the world have disappeared up to 90% according to recent studies, the reasons are different depending on the region, but among the main reasons are massive deforestation, lack of safe places for nests, lack of flowers, use uncontrolled pesticides, changes in soil, among others.

*

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: IBAMA operation against illegal loggers in the Brazilian Amazon, courtesy of IBAMA.

Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), China has achieved the dream of the millennium, marched toward national rejuvenation, and led one-fifth of the world’s population to approach the center of the global stage, said the article titled “Striving to create a miracle in human history.”

The article pointed out that China made a massive success in the economic field and became the most stable and prosperous economy in the world. In just several decades, the country has finished what took developed countries several hundred years to complete.

It has fully proved that the Communist of China (CPC) plays a crucial role in leading the country and the people to make new advances unseen in the century and supporting the nation to manage its own affairs well. It also shows the world that the CPC and the Chinese people are fully confident to provide a Chinese solution for the exploration of a better social system for all humankind.

Shanghai (Photo/Pudong Times)

The main points of the article are summarized as follows:

Seventy years is merely a fleeting instant in the history of human development. However, the Chinese people have created a magnificent miracle with 70 years of hard work. Since the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the CPC has led the people to create a miracle of rapid economic development and a miracle of long-term stability and guided the country to stand up and become vibrant and influential.

The past 70 years is a historical process in which the ancient civilization pursued the dream of the millennium and marched toward national rejuvenation. It is also a process for China to lead one-fifth of the world’s population toward the center of the global stage.

Chairman Mao Zedong described China’s national industry as incapable of producing a plane, a tank, a car or a tractor. Besides, there were doubts that the CPC did an excellent job in making military strategies and political strategies, but performed poorly in the aspect of developing the economy. Some even asserted that the victory of the CPC would not last long.

Reform and opening-up was a game-changing move in making China what it is today. It enables the country to liberate the mind and break institutional barriers that hinder its development, replace the highly centralized planned economic system with a socialist market economy full of vigor, become an open economy from a closed and semi-closed one, and put its economy on a fast track of development.

From 1952 to 2018, China’s GDP jumped from 67.9 billion yuan to 90 trillion yuan, an increase of 174 times. The GDP per capita increased from 119 yuan to 64,600 yuan, an increase of 70 times.

China has risen to the second-largest economy in the world, the number one trader of goods, holder of the world’s most substantial foreign exchange reserve and home to the longest high-speed mileage and largest banking system in the world.

In one day, China’s GDP increases by 246 billion yuan, trade of goods by $12.6 billion. In one day, 140 million parcels are delivered and sent, and 76,000 vehicles are manufactured in China.

These achievements were beyond imagination in the past.

Today, China is one of the world’s 20 top players in terms of innovation and is home to more than 100 million market entities. With a strong determination to pursue high-quality development with unceasing efforts, the country has become full of innovation momentum, and everyone aspires to become better.

US economist Jeffrey Sachs said that China is a very successful story in the world of economy.

From stressing that youth is the hope of the nation, to yearning for rebirth and reconstruction of the nation and calling for national rejuvenation, generations of our predecessors have fought for the country.

Those who could not stand on their own feet cherish most the joy of being able to stand up; those who were impoverished aspire to become wealthy; those who are marching toward rejuvenation are most confident to become strong and healthy.

China, which contributed 30 percent to global economic growth for years in a row, has become the primary stabilizer and source of power for world economic growth. The country, which has managed to lift 700 million impoverished rural people out of poverty, or 70 percent of the total world impoverished population, has created a miracle in global poverty reduction.

China, which has been through ups and downs in the past 70 years, is still full of energy to swim against the tide in the new era. The country, having a long history, embraced modern civilization along its development course. The country, which has undergone many vicissitudes, carries the dream of rejuvenation with it while making strides toward a better future.

With a burning passion to strive for what it pursues China has experienced the joy of handling crises successfully. With the spirit of never retreating in the face of setbacks, the country has made epic accomplishments.

The grand rejuvenation of the nation, which carries the exploration of people with high ideals in the past more than a century and gathers together aspirations of millions upon millions of people, is like a sun shining in all its splendor.

For many people, what is amazing about the dramatic changes in China is that they are enormous in terms of scale. China has a population of nearly 1.4 billion, which is much bigger than the total population of all other major countries in the world before its rise. Besides, China made these achievements in a very short time. In just several decades, China has finished what took developed countries several hundred years to complete.

While making considerable achievements in a short time, China has also maintained long-term social stability, and let vitality of economic and social development come out in an orderly manner. In this way, it has struck a balance between vigor and order, and between development and stability.

The principles of historical development have indicated that a country experiences social contradictions and risks while it is in the process of modernization.

China was compared to a “compressed capsule” on the way of modernization, as it had been through many changes in a short time while meeting and solving all kinds of contradictions and problems. A tiny issue will be maximized in China, given its huge size.

From this perspective, China’s capacity to maintain stability is as important as its capability to create a development miracle. It should be valued that the country, even after undergoing complicated and drastic economic and social changes, remains a stable society in the long run. After thorough research on China’s development, a foreign scholar pointed out that the correct economic strategies and the stable political system of China are the secrets of China’s continuous economic growth.

With effective social governance and good social order, today’s China can deliver a better sense of gain, happiness, and security to its people. The country is hailed by foreign guests as one of the safest countries in the world and the most stable and prosperous economy in the world by foreign media.

Looking back on Chinese history, stability seemed intertwined with chaos, and unity was usually followed by separation. For thousands of years, China had witnessed more turbulent days than peaceful ones, not to mention prosperous times. The long-term turmoil and frequent wars had caused people to suffer.

As a result, whether the country can maintain lasting peace and order has become the essential criterion for people to decide whether the regime and system are good enough.

From such a historical perspective, it is a miracle that China has maintained long-term stability for the past 70 years.

Amazed at the miracle, some western scholars said that whoever could explain China’s success deserved a Noble Prize. Some even claimed that China is an exception of all the rules.

What are rules at any rate? Rules are the intrinsic connections between things and the constant and deep-seated truths of the changing and empirical world. They determine the inevitable trend of the world’s development.

(Photo/Pudong Times)

As Friedrich Engels said, the course of history is governed by the general rules of history, and the problem is to discover these rules.

Development is like a long river composed of tributaries and reaches. Only by understanding and grasping the laws of the development of human society, which is the “long river”, the rules of the development of our own country, which is the “tributary”, and the principles of the historical stage, which is “the reach”, can we swim with the historical trend and rush forward.

In the past 70 years, the CPC has continuously deepened its understanding of the law of its governance, the building of socialism and the development of human society, which is how the Chinese miracle has been made.

It is generally acknowledged by international observers on China affairs that the CPC has made continuously incredible achievements with a magical power to overcome the difficulties.

Over the past 70 years, China has encountered blockades and containment from the outside as well as impetuous and rash decisions from within. The country has been challenged by significant disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and epidemics and by international turmoil like financial crises and trade frictions.

It is under the strong leadership of the CPC that China has been able to survive a series of risks and challenges, overcome difficulties and obstacles, and steer a steady course in the right direction.

The leadership of the CPC enables China to concentrate resources to accomplish large undertakings and organize and carry out various tasks effectively. The CPC has led the Chinese people into a new stage of development, proving that its leadership is the key to doing well China’s own affairs.

The CPC is a party of Marxism and the people and has always exercised its power in the interests of the people. It believes that the Party and the people are interdependent like fish and water, considers public opinions the most important thing in politics and people’s support the greatest strength in its governance.

It is a proven fact that the CPC is a political party in the interests of the country and the people, instead of in the interests of itself.

The miracle in China is a mirror of the 70-year-long tireless practice and investigation of the ruling political party in China.

The CPC firmly believes that only by finding a way that actually suits the country can China’s problems be addressed.

While introducing the market economy system, it did not undergo the radical “shock therapy” following the so-called Washington Consensus. Instead, it has taken a road of gradual reform, which not only let the market play the decisive role in allocating resources but also let the government play its functions in effectively curbing the cyclical ups and downs of the market economy. In this way, China has maintained stable growth on the whole.

In rural land reform, the CPC did not simply privatize the land. It introduced the household responsibility system and encouraged the separation of farmland ownership rights, contract rights, and management rights.

China promoted human-centered urbanization, creating conditions for peasants to settle in the cities and avoiding slums in the urban areas.

For the past 70 years, the miracle has witnessed the ceaseless experiment and innovation of a Chinese Marxist party.

To understand the Chinese miracle, it is necessary to understand socialism and the practice of the CPC on building socialism.

A former foreign ambassador to China once said that China had an urban population of more than 300 million, basically equaling the total population of Europe, and the country’s rural population which stood at over 800 million was also equivalent to that of Africa. So China was Europe and Africa combined, the former ambassador said.

Based on such national conditions, the CPC creatively put forward the theory of the primary stage of socialism. It has been completely clear about this fundamental dimension of the national context and based its work on this most important reality—the primary stage of socialism.

It also has been fully committed to the Party’s primary line as the source that keeps the Party and the country going and that brings happiness to the people.

From 1949 to 2018, the average per capita disposable income of Chinese residents increased 59.2 times factoring in inflation, and the average life expectancy also rose to 77 from 35. These drastic changes happening to the life of the Chinese people have well defined the people-oriented philosophy that China has always been upholding.

If China’s development is considered a unique “Chinese path,” then its development goals and continuously improved livelihood over the past 70 years are demonstrating to the world the “Chinese value” – also the value of socialism.

Since 70 years ago, socialism with Chinese characteristics has showcased strong vitality and enormous advantages by adhering to Party leadership, the people running the country, law-based governance and democratic centralism. During this period, China’s development reflected the essence of socialism and enriched the connotation of socialism.

The development miracle created by socialism with Chinese characteristics is telling the world that socialism can also be a leading player in human development practices, and the CPC and Chinese people will make unremitted efforts to achieve this goal.

A piece of information about the building of the pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics in Shenzhen attracted colossal attention in August this year. From a special economic zone to today’s pilot demonstration area, Shenzhen’s development is an epitome of the Chinese miracle.

There is no precedent for a massive country like China to achieve modernization, and a new path which suits itself must be made. To understand the Chinese miracle, one must understand the Chinese path and how the country perceives the development laws of human society.

China was considered a weak country a century ago, and such weakness was at materialistic, systematic as well as spiritual levels. However, the country has evolved from a world factory to a world market, and then a world platform as it is releasing stronger and stronger spillover effect. Also, the Chinese philosophy that propels China’s development is also now expected to drive the development of the entire world.

Entering the new era, the glorious Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era has attracted attention from the globe for its broad vision, marvelous political wisdom, and remarkable strategic foresight.

Today, the CPC has stepped into a new realm thanks to its understanding, mastering and applying of the three laws of dialectical materialism, namely the unity and conflict of opposites, the passage of quantitative changes into qualitative changes, and the negation of the negation.

American scholar Ross Terrill said in his book “Xi Jinping’s China Renaissance” that Xi is completing the three leading ideals of Chinese governance — the governance of the ruling party, nation, and the global community.

Even those who hyped the so-called “end of history” theory started “correct” their views given the new miracles that are springing up in China.

Chinese voices are now widely heard on multiple international conferences, and Chinese development mode is becoming central topics.

A Mozambican consultant from the country’s finance ministry who studied at the Institute of South-South Cooperation and Development three years ago noted that he wanted to find a development path that suited his own country by learning from China’s development model.

Forty years ago, China’s per capita income was less than even 1/3 of those in the sub-Saharan countries, while today, many African countries are learning from China in an attempt to find a development path of their own.

This is a representative story from the time, and it is not about only Chinese, but also the entire human being. This is how foreign media has described Chinese development.

Such voices resonate with Xi’s remarks that the CPC and Chinese people have every confidence in their ability to provide a Chinese solution to aid the exploration of a better social system for humanity.

The national rejuvenation of the Chinese nation is not only the manifestation of improved comprehensive national strength but also the rise of a civilization that carries rich connotation.

Facing the rising tides of anti-globalization, trade protectionism and populism, China firmly believes that to channel the waters in the ocean back into isolated lakes and creeks is simply not possible. With confidence, it welcomes each country aboard the express train of China’s development, proposes to joint construct the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), shares its development experiences with the world and shoulders the responsibility to protect free trade, multilateralism and economic globalization.

Chinese miracles prove that economic globalization is an irreversible trend of history, and peace and development remain an aspiration held dear by all of mankind. Only by jointly building a community with a shared future for humanity can the world embrace a bright future. Such a perception of the development law would only help to make a massive contribution to the development of human society.

The CPC is the most opening and inclusive political party in history. The Marxism it believes in is the essence of the human spirit, and socialism it commits to is a common aspiration of human society.

Since the reform and opening up, the CPC has been actively learning from the remarkable civilizations created by global people and has been applying what they learn by its own national conditions.

Looking into the future, the CPC, which is determined to strive for human progress, will keep promoting China’s development and creating more opportunities for the world, explore the laws of human progress and share the experiences with the world, and take more responsibilities to make more contribution to humanity.

Xi had an inspection tour in Guangdong province last October and visited an exhibition that was opened to celebrate accomplishments pertaining to Guangdong’s development during the past 40 years since the reform and opening up.

During the visit, the Chinese president remarked that coming to Shenzhen, his first destination for inspection after the 18th CPC National Congress, he wanted to declare to the world that China will never drag its feet on reform and opening-up, and the country is sure to show the world impressive new achievement in the future.

What he said once again indicated the firm belief, faith, and confidence of the CPC, as well as China’s ambition for development.

*

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.

Note

Right after having published this article, BBC posted this which illustrates the point.

Granma International shares facts and figures from Cuba’s report, presented by Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, on Resolution 73/8 of the United Nations General Assembly

***

The significant negative impact of measures recently adopted by the U.S. to tighten the blockade is not reflected in the following account, since this escalation occurred after the time period analyzed.

Overview

• Losses April 2018-March 2019: 4,343,600,000 dollars
• Damages accumulated over six decades of this policy, at current prices: 138,843,400, 000 dollars
• Total quantifiable harm caused by the blockade has reached more than: 922,630,000,000 dollars (depreciated as compared to the price of gold)
• Damages caused by exclusion from to U.S. market: 163,108 659
• Damages caused by use of intermediaries in purchases and higher prices in distant markets: 173,210,916
• Damages due to increased costs for shipping & insurance: 72,160,602
• Potential export income lost: 2,343,135,842
• Higher financing costs due to national risk rating: 47,290,204
• Prohibitions on use of the U.S. dollar: 85,139,436
• Other: 12,535,892
• Total: 2,896,581,555

Health

The damage caused by sanctions on Cuba in the field of health is unquestionable. This hostile policy obstructs the acquisition of technology, raw materials, reagents, diagnostic tools, equipment and spare parts, as well as medicines for the treatment of serious diseases like cancer- Between April 2018 and March 2019, damages in this sector amounted to $104,148,178, a figure that far exceeds last year’s estimate of $6,123,498.- Relatives of patient JCHC, with medical history number 68100309926 at the Hermanos Ameijeiras Clinical-Surgical Hospital, who died on June 15, 2018 due to spongiform cardiomyopathy with terminal heart failure, can never forget that if circulatory support had been available from an Impella device, produced by the U.S. company Abiomed, the life of JCHC could have been saved.- The import-export company Medicuba S.A. made requests to 57 U.S. providers to acquire supplies necessary for health. To date, 50 of these have not responded.- Several U.S. companies were contacted for the purchase of novel cancer drugs. Thus far none has responded.- The U.S. corporation Bruker was unsuccessfully contacted for the purchase of spectrophotometers, devices used in laboratories for the analysis of substances and microorganisms.

Photo: José Manuel Correa

Food and Agriculture

The consequences of the blockade in this sector, of vital importance to any nation, have been estimated at a value of 412,230,614 dollars.

Food processing companies import approximately 70% of their raw materials from different markets, including Spain, Brazil, etc. The blockade prevents access to the U.S. market, which is more convenient in terms of prices, proximity, and the wide range of materials and equipment available to modernize production.

Havana Club, one of the most prestigious rum makers in this sector, was denied potential earnings of $41,300,000 by the blockade.

Education, Sports and Culture

The University of Sancti Spíritus was not allowed to purchase 20 Smart Brailler typewriters and auditory accessories from the Perkins company, essential to the training of special education teachers.

January 23, 2019, the French bank Société Générale de París retained a bank transfer of 7,474 euros from Equatorial Guinea to Cuba, compensation for professional educational services provided.

Purchases of sports equipment required by official regulations of international federations have been restricted.

The 22nd edition of the Terry Fox Run in Cuba could not be held this year, with the director of this International Foundation informing organizers that the fund could no longer help with the event or continue to support cancer research here.

The Caribbean Baseball Federation has been unable to establish with the U.S. a legal way to pay the prizes won by our players.

The financial persecution of Cuba has made it impossible to collect payment for services provided by the Cubadeportes agency, both for the technical assistance and commercialization of activities in Cuba.

Of 37 artistic companies that could have promoted their work in the United States, only 24 have obtained permission to enter that country.

Tourism

In the tourism industry, damages amount to 1.383 billion dollars. If the blockade did not exist, studies indicate that 35% of all visitors to Cuba annually would be from the United States.

The Cubatur travel agency suffered monetary-financial losses of at least $497,800.

The Havanatur company suffered damages due to the refusal of correspondent banks to process payments; the closing of bank accounts in third countries; the retention of funds; and the cancellation of credit card transactions.

Photo: Julio Martínez Molina

Biopharmaceutical Industry

The Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) reports revenues not received from potential exports to the U.S. of Heberprot-p, the only medication of its kind for the treatment of diabetic foot ulcers. Projecting that if only 5% of U.S. patients with this condition used Heberprot-p annually, income from its export would have reached a value of $103 million in 2018.

The Import-Export Company Farmacuba experienced difficulties in acquiring raw materials for the production of medicines.

The Oriente Pharmaceutical Laboratory Company, affiliated with BioCubaFarma, reported shortages of Vitamin A for its Nutriforte multivitamin, as a result of the blockade, thus limiting production by 78,694,200 tablets.

The delivery of printed aluminum foil for Nicotinamide in the month of March 2019 was affected, and it is possible that production of Dipirona and Alprazolam will be limited in September and October for this reason.

Transportation

Total damages in this arena during the analyzed period exceeded 170 million dollars, an increase of more than 69 million with respect to the previous report.

The Caterpillar supplier in the Netherlands prohibited the Dutch company Damen – main supplier of Caterpillar and Cummings spare parts for the Damex shipyards in Santiago de Cuba – from selling its products to Cuba, necessary for the repair and maintenance of pilot boats and tugs.

Cubana de Aviación is unable to use the services of the company ATCO, which is responsible for publishing the air fares of more than 500 airlines.

The Spanish airline Air Europa (UX) refrained from specifying the “Shared Code Agreement” and fulfilling its commitment to Cubana Airlines.

Industry

The blockade’s impact on Cuban industry caused losses of 49 million dollars, which could have been used to acquire necessary raw materials.

The construction sector continues to face serious difficulties in acquiring more efficient, lightweight technologies that require less energy and materials.

The chemical industry state enterprise group, GEIQ, was unable to acquire spare parts or replace machinery.Communications, Information Technology & Telecommunications.

The economic damages caused to the communications system are estimated at more than 55 million dollars. Cuba’s telecommunications company Etecsa continues to feel the greatest impact.

The blockade policy limits the Cuban people’s access to content available on the Internet.

Cuba is denied access to official information from top-of-the-line technology sites, making professional development and distance training difficult.

The blockade obstructs access to high-performance brands and equipment from leaders in the telecommunications industry.

Energy and Mines

Damages in this area amount to 78,336,424 dollars, an increase of more than 18 million over the last period analyzed.

Cuba’s national electrical company continues to face very limited access to spare parts for Bazan engines, manufactured by the Spanish company Navantia.

The British Compair Consortium, upon becoming part of a U.S. group, cut all relations with projects using its technology in Cuba for the centralized management of compressed air.

In September and November of 2018, two contracts were signed with General Electric International for the additional supplies of turbines at the Antonio Guiteras Thermoelectric Power Plant and for modernization of the Pico Santa Martha Power Plant. However, on February 5, 2019, a notification was received from the U.S. Centennial Bank, stating that, given the activation of Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, financing for these two contracts would not be granted.

Foreign Trade

Total damages caused by the U.S. blockade in the area of foreign trade were valued at 2,896,581,555 dollars, given an increase in incidents that hinder the conducting of international commercial activity.

The greatest effect was evident in lost income from exports of goods and services, reaching 2,343,135,842 dollars. The decreased number of U.S. travelers visiting the island during this period had a significant impact.

Damages caused by the geographical relocation of commerce are estimated at over 1.020 billion dollars, which represents a growth of 18% with respect to the previous period.

The effects of Cuba’s inability to access the U.S. market were valued at 163,108,659 dollars.

The negative impact of being obliged to use commercial intermediaries and the consequent increase in prices was estimated at 173,210,916 dollars, reflecting an increase of 189% as compared to the last period analyzed.

*

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.

As if the ongoing “trade war” wasn’t an intense enough Hybrid War against China as it is, the US might soon pass the so-called “Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act” in order to take its asymmetrical aggression even further and institutionalize it as the “new normal” for at least the next three decades.

***

There will be no deal between Iran and the US as long as President Donald Trump is unwilling to lift his aggressive sanctions against the “Islamic Republic”. Washington and Riyadh’s top leaders have asked Pakistan  and  Iraq  to mediate with the Tehran leadership to ease tensions and stop the attacks that are jeopardising the turbulent peace in the Middle East.  Iran’s answer is clear: all attacks are deniable and its only request has not changed. Iran wants  all sanctions lifted and will then be ready to sit around the table offering more concessions to world leaders to make sure no nuclear bomb is prepared in any nuclear site in the country. 

But that is not really what Trump and his Israeli allies want. The nuclear deal is not the real issue – Iran believes – because the International Atomic Agency already has the necessary access and has acknowledged on many occasions that Iran’s programme – despite its breach of the JCPOA – is not  headed towards the fabrication of nuclear weapons. Two points are essential for Trump and Israel, identified by the US as “destabilising behaviour”. These are the Iranian missile  programme, and Iran’s allies in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Afghanistan. The US implicitly recognises that Iran is a proven and recognised regional power- and thus wants to pull its teeth out.

When President Barack Obama signed off on the nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), it was because his sanctions against Iran, and those of his predecessors, never worked. The agreement he negotiated would have delayed  any Iranian military nuclear programme, if it existed, for another 15-20 years. He also tried to put on the table the Iranian missile programme and containment of Iran’s allies in the Middle East but was met with clear rejection  from Iran. The “Islamic Republic” leadership was adamant that only the nuclear issue could be discussed, and nothing else. The deal was agreed between parties with no trust in each other but who nevertheless agreed to “sort out” their differences and conflicts.

Today Trump believes he can twist Iran’s arm with his “maximum pressure” and severe sanctions to force its leaders to the table and negotiate the two taboo topics. Iran informed those mediators seeking to ease the situation of its readiness to stop its missile programme if the world disarms Israel of all its nuclear bombs and if every country in the region becomes missile free. Otherwise, Iran will never give up its advanced missile programme, which enables the country to defend itself against any attacks and violations of its airspace—as, for example, happened with the US drone downed  this summer.  Moreover, for Iran to cease or continue supporting its allies in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan is not a matter of choice. It is part of its ideology, its constitution, its very existence.

Iranian decision-makers said:

“If we stop support for Palestine, Israel will annex the West Bank and wipe Gaza from the map while the world stands watching, applauding Israel’s right of self-defence! If we stop support for Hezbollah in Lebanon, Israel will confiscate the disputed water and land borders and walk into Lebanon any time it wishes to. The Lebanese Army is not allowed to be armed with deterrent weapons to stop hundreds of violations of Lebanon’s sovereignty every single month by Israel. If we do not support Syria, the Golan Heights will be lost forever and Israel and the US will have a foothold in north-east Syria for good. If Iraq is left alone, it will be divided into three parts as was the case in 2014 when ISIS occupied a third of the country. All these countries will be crushed by US hegemony and subjected to Israel’s will and arrogance.”

What Trump doesn’t want to understand is that Iran’s missile programme represents the right hand of the country; its allies are its left hand. The entire body cannot survive if they are amputated, so it will naturally reject the process. Iran refuses to become the “toothless shark” the US and Israel want Iran to make of it.

The absence of trust  between Iran and the US is all-pervasive. Trump has changed his mind about many agreements and has shown much aggression since he took office. Among both his allies and enemies, many are seriously thinking about – and some are already acting in this direction – detaching themselves from any relationship with the US, from its currency, and from doing any business with them. The US can no longer be considered a viable partner for peace for the following reasons: it offers what doesn’t belong to it (the Golan Heights and Jerusalem), and its foreign policy is unstable, with an inexperienced President and similarly inadequate advisors leading the country. It was the US that revoked the nuclear deal and imposed typically harsh sanctions on Iran: this sparked such serious tension in the Middle East that it has driven the region to the edge of the abyss.

Iran is also showing how incompetent Trump and his team really are, and how unwilling he is to defend Arab countries. He is merely interested in drying up their money and resources.

US leaders will not be able to calm the situation in the Middle East and meet with Iranian officials until sanctions are not lifted, or unless France and other EU members are allowed to open lines of credit for Iran to use (again leading to lifting the US sanctions).

It is difficult for Trump to withdraw the sanctions because that will mean a visible victory for Iran and a defeat for the US and its Middle Eastern allies. It will also indicate that all he has done in the last year or so against Iran was ineffectual. This will be an opening for his political enemies to embarrass him while he is seeking to be re-elected for another term. Iran won’t give him the satisfaction of taking pictures shaking President Hassan Rouhani’s hand for nothing. Iran will not give up its missile programme, nor its allies in whom Iran has heavily invested since 1982.

The situation will remain the same; pressure will continue to mount in the Middle East unless Trump takes his hand off the trigger and allows Iran to export its oil. The initiative that would help Trump to come down from the tree he has climbed up does not exist! Iran will not be coerced into giving up its missile programme and its allies. Trump and his allies have been upstaged and outclassed.

*

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 Iranian Presidency/Anadolu Agency

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

“For the first time in 35 years, I am not packing my bag to travel to the Tory party conference tomorrow. The party I joined as a student and first campaigned for in the 1979 general election is suffering a convulsion that makes it — for now at least — unrecognisable to me. Gone is the relaxed, broad-church coalition, united by a belief in free-trade, open markets, fiscal discipline and a fear of the pernicious effects of socialism, but tolerant of a wide range of social and political opinion within its ranks. In its place is an ideological puritanism that brooks no dissent and is more and more strident in its tone.”

These are the words of former Chancellor Phillip Hammond. In this article for The Times, Hammond admits that Boris Johnson is going all out, at all costs, do or die, for a no-deal Brexit because he is financially supported by disaster capitalists who now want a return on their investment.

This is what happens when you have unprotected sex with cocaine jammed prostitutes from the hedge-fund industry that get their real highs from the chaos they cause. Taking money from these people and from the far-right American Jihadists of the free-market contaminates the political and economic ecosystem of the state. It’s like the plague – once it arrives, you can’t easily get rid of it without extreme strategies.

Accusations that dark money is infiltrating the Boris Johnson snap election campaign are rife. The UK’s most senior civil servant is now under pressure to investigate Boris Johnson’s financial backers following cross-party claims that unnamed individuals stand to benefit from the prime minister’s willingness to pursue a no-deal Brexit. Johnson’s own sister, a person close to him, has said exactly that.

“Johnson is backed by speculators who have bet billions on a hard Brexit – and there is only one option that works for them: a crash-out no-deal that sends the currency tumbling and inflation soaring,” Hammond wrote in the Times.

Guto Bebb, a former Tory minister who was thrown out of the party for opposing a no-deal Brexit, said:

“The dubious financiers who supported the ‘leave’ campaign and the prime minister’s leadership campaign are betting against Britain. The PM should put the interests of the country first rather than facilitating a financial bonanza for a few.”

Anna Soubry, the leader of Change UK, said:

“This week’s events are damning evidence that Boris Johnson has no moral compass. It gives me no pleasure to believe that Johnson is in hock to all manner of people and in particular those who don’t give a toss about the livelihoods of our constituents but simply get even more rich gambling on our children’s future.”

Finally, the mainstream media have opened their eyes. TruePublica has published dozens of stories about dark money, corruption, hedge-funds, bankers and foreign state actors, most particularly American ones involved in the architecture of this disaster. But it doesn’t end there. Think tanks and front charities funded by right-wing extremists from the USA have plans to plunder and exploit Britain. And here we are, 30 something days until the do-or-die date when Johnson collapses the last vestige of political normality and only now the MSM are getting really worried about what comes next.

Boris Johnson’s push towards a no-deal Brexit is a “free lunch” for hedge funds and currency traders trading off the collapse of the pound, the former chairman of Goldman Sachs’ Asset Management Sir Jim O’Neill said.

As Business Insider wrote – ‘However, Baron O’Neill (no connection), who advised David Cameron’s government, said that his former colleagues in the industry saw the push to a no-deal Brexit as a “chance to make some money.”

An example of this is Crispin Odey, the pro-Brexit Conservative donor, who has reportedly waged a £300m bet against some of Britain’s biggest businesses on the implication their share prices will crash after Brexit.

The conflict of interest code for members of the House of Commons states:

“Given that service in parliament is a public trust … members are expected … to fulfil their public duties with honesty and uphold the highest standards so as to avoid real or apparent conflicts of interests, and maintain and enhance public confidence and trust in the integrity of each member and in the House of Commons.”

Do you see any of that in Boris Johnson? Phillip Stevens from the FT says there’s none of that expectation in Johnson anywhere in sight – “There is not a soul in the long corridors of Whitehall who believes the prime minister is telling the truth” – and he means about anything. Stevens goes on to say that – “The lying reveals a profound disdain for the traditions, institutions and laws that sustain Britain’s parliamentary ecosystem. Whitehall officials say rules of proper behaviour are simply torn up.”

In July this year, well before the MSM decided that Brexit really was going to end in tears I wrote about how dark money was infiltrating the Johnson campaign:

“I said all along that democracy had been subverted and the evidence is there to support it. I said all along that Theresa May would be a danger to democracy and usher in something worse and that has happened. I said all along that America sees Britain as a morsel to be exploited. This is a project that has costs hundreds of millions, probably billions. We’ll never find out because dark money, off-shored laundered money and dodgy money – has funded this trajectory of national failure that places Britain in America’s exploitative lap. But it’s payback time and Johnson walking through the door at No10 is a significant victory towards that aim. The two worst Prime Ministers of modern times, David Cameron and Theresa May are about to be replaced by another. Britain’s democracy has been bought just like the man about to lead it.”

Finally, the penny is dropping in the national media. They are uttering those same words as Britain heads for its no-deal Brexit. The headlines are starting to drum up some concern:

• “Calls for inquiry into claims Johnson backers benefit from no-deal Brexit.“
• “Hedge fund managers back Boris Johnson’s leadership campaign”
• “How Dark Money From Overseas Flows Into Boris Johnson’s Government“
• “Tory leadership donations: who’s really backing Boris Johnson”
• “Labour calls for probe into currency speculators backing Boris Johnson and a no-deal Brexit”

In one month’s time, we’ll find out if Boris Johnson is bluffing his hand or really will crash the economy over the proverbial cliff. But no-one should be in any doubt – any politician, any government or other entity that plots to pit the government against the monarchy, the state against the people, or now, as is the big worry, civil society against itself in street violence, should be quickly rounded up and dealt with.

The state rounds up non-violent anti-fracking and environmental protestors and now classifies them as terrorists. The state is passing laws that treat whistleblowers and journalists who break those stories that are very definitely in the public interest as foreign spies as well – with threats of lengthy prison sentences. And now, the state is actively involved in parliamentary plots to close down dissenting voices in Britain’s own house of representatives, has abandoned its electoral watchdog and accused its supreme court judges of bias, hinting that both should be broken up. Whatever you voted for, this is not the answer. The current trajectory that the disaster capitalists are funding, is that even worse is yet to come.

It was Milton Friedman, the American economist who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy that once said: “Only a crisis, actual or perceived, creates real change.” That has been the plan all along – crisis.

*

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

Jair Bolsonaro defied his critics at the UN General Assembly in New York this month – as expected – denouncing those maintaining that his policies have fanned the flames of the Amazon fires.

Today, over 100 activists came together at the northern banks of the Dead Sea to reclaim Palestinian rights to land and its natural resources amidst the deepening Israeli occupation of the West Bank. After decades of apartheid and colonialization, and amidst the ongoing threats of full annexation, the demonstration was led by Palestinian activists from across the West Bank and included Israeli and international human rights defenders.

The activists arrived at 10:30am at the site of a former Dead Sea hotel and restaurant, near the illegal Israeli settlements of Kalya and Almog, with signs calling for a reclamation of Palestinian sovereignty over its land and resources. According to a statement released by the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), the activists came together to protest “being deprived of our rights to our land, water and natural resources as a colonized people.”

Joined by Israeli and international solidarity activists, the PSCC “aims to reclaim Palestinian access to water for basic drinking needs, agriculture and livelihoods, and recreation, in the face of colonization.” In response to this non-violent demonstration, dozens of Israeli soldiers forcibly evicted the activists, arrest attempts were made, and one Palestinian activist was detained. Even after eviction, the Israeli army set up checkpoints along the road, to ID Palestinian demonstrators as they left the site.

For decades, Israel’s illegal settlement regime has exploited Palestinian natural resources and threatens the right of the Palestinian people to basic water needs. While the World Health Organization recommends 100 liters of water per person per day, Palestinians receive an average of 80 liters /day, while Israelis, including in settlements, receive an average of 280 liters/day. As today’s use of force demonstrates, Israel’s concerted efforts to maintain its control over Palestinian land and its natural resources comes at the expense of Palestinian rights to development, health, and adequate standards of living.

Thus far in 2019, Israel has demolished water related infrastructure across the West Bank and continues to deny Palestinians the right to repair existing water networks, dig wells, or carry out any work to achieve basic water access. Over 60 Palestinian springs have been taken over by Israeli settlements, and Palestinians have no access or legal allocations to the Jordan River or the Dead Sea. These bans are compounded with the on-going illegal policy of land confiscation, settlement expansion, property demolition, and wall construction.

The PSCC further notes that

“the systematic restrictions on our access to our own land, natural resources and water, including the Dead Sea and the Jordan River, has dealt a heavy blow to the agriculture sector, which is one of the main pillars of Palestinian economy and heritage.”

As youth from over 200 nations led a strike this month, demanding urgent actions on climate change, today’s demonstrators called on global leaders to join the Palestinian struggle for water justice, as communities lacking the basic access to land and water security are more vulnerable to the effects on climate change in the region. In this context, the action demonstrated a Palestinian reclamation of water resources to not only meet basic needs for drinking, agriculture, and livelihoods, but also for rights to this critical resource for generations to come. The PSCC also drew attention to the environmental concerns of Israel’s water policies, noting that “when Israel denies us access to our water resources in the Jordan Valley, it effects not only the Palestinian livelihood, but also has detrimental effects on the environment, as the Dead Sea is shrinking by 1 meter/year.”

Joining Palestinian activists from across the region were Israeli and international activists who are supporting Palestinian efforts to reclaim and remain on their lands in recent years.

Sahar Vardi from Jerusalem said,

“I am standing here in solidarity with my Palestinian partners because it is our duty, as Israelis, to resist these policies of resource theft, which are done in our names. At a time where Israeli politicians say that they will annex Area C, even further depriving Palestinians from their lands and resources, and in places like here, at the Dead Sea, we have no time to waste. It is our responsibility as Israelis to resist this in our actions and not just with words. It is also the responsibility of the international community to move from words to action, and sanction human rights violations and breaches of international law.”

Dana Mandler, a member of All That’s Left: Anti-Occupation Collective in Jerusalem said,

“We come together because we believe in justice, equality and freedom for all. Water is a basic right and Palestinians must have that right – full access and agency over water resources – guaranteed.”

The PSCC concludes its statement by noting that

“our resistance represents a refusal to allow the perpetuation of the reality of the segregation walls, violence, and discrimination to stand in our way. We will tirelessly continue to march forward together, rebuilding, where the occupation destroys, preserving life, where the occupier shatters it, and planting, where the settler-colonial regime razes and uproots. “

After decades of apartheid and colonialization, the nonviolent demonstration today was an act of resistance against the threat of annexation, made by Israeli leaders and its global defenders, by enacting Palestinian sovereignty over its borders and its environment. Organizers are calling on those who stand in solidarity around the world to hold decision-makers responsible, and for those who can, to join the struggle for Palestinian rights to its land and the water that flows above and beneath its surface, so that basic needs of its people are met.

*

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.

It is being reported Houthi fighters, aka Ansarallah, have pulled off a major military offensive against Saudi troops in northern Yemen. 

.

.

.

.

Yemen's Houthis say attacked Saudi border frontline, no immediate Saudi confirmation https://t.co/2ba748JR4Y pic.twitter.com/Jq7TIxzGYE

— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) September 28, 2019

Houthis have released videos of captured Saudi soldiers. They claim to have captured thousands in an offensive near the Najran town of Saudi Arabia.
Man Saudis must have the most incompotent military in the world. Shiniest American toys money can buy, yet getting beat by farmers pic.twitter.com/G1rqsLTrdE

— Fives (@Kishkinda2) September 29, 2019

The ambush follows on the heels of a claimed Houthi missile and drone attack on Saudi Arabia’s Aramco’s Abqaiq facility and the Khurais oilfield earlier this month.

There is no way to tell if this ambush really happened as the Houthis claim. The video shows very few uniformed soldiers, yet plenty of men dressed in traditional Yemeni clothing. 

On the other hand, photos posted to social media show what appear to be Saudi soldiers in military uniforms. 

Houthis have released videos of captured Saudi soldiers. They claim to have captured thousands in an offensive near the #Najran town of #Saudi Arabia.#Yemen
📸 pic.twitter.com/crrfu1SBPJ

— Mete Sohtaoğlu (@metesohtaoglu) September 29, 2019

Other reports claim the majority of the captured soldiers are Pakistani. 

Pakistani Gen. Raheel Sharif is currently serving as the Commander-In-Chief of the so-called Islamic Military Alliance. If it indeed turns out the Saudis suffered a major defeat, it is likely Sharif will be sent packing to Islamabad. 

Sec. Of State Mike Pompeo has yet to release a statement blaming Iran for the embarrassing incident. He may be busy, though, preparing for battle following a subpoena issued by House Democrats itching to impeach Donald Trump.

*

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.

Kurt Nimmo writes on his blog, Another Day in the Empire, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

Netanyahu’s Likud finished second to Gantz/Lapid’s Blue and White party in September 17 rerun elections.

President Rivlin broke precedent by choosing Netanyahu to form a coalition government, showing partisanship in breach of his mandate to serve interests of the state, not favoritism of one party over another.

Through Saturday, things are deadlocked, Netanyahu unable to cobble together a 61-seat ruling coalition. Likud won 32 seats, barely more than 26% of the vote, one less than Blue and White.

Reportedly on Friday, Gantz rejected Netanyahu’s demand to form a Likud-led unity government with Blue and White and two religious fundamentalist parties, leaving him in power as prime minister.

A Blue and White statement said the following:

“It is clear that the stance taken in setting these two preconditions is aimed at dragging the state of Israel into a third round of elections, in line with the interests of the prime minister.”

Netanyahu has two key objectives — remaining prime minister, along with avoiding indictment and prosecution on fraud, bribery, and breach of trust charges, following an early October hearing.

Failure on both counts will likely end his political career and personal freedom, leaving office defrocked and disgraced.

His key reelection strategy was and remains keeping Israel safe from nonexistent threats — none from Palestinians, Syria, or Lebanon’s Hezbollah except in self-defense if attacked.

Countless billions of dollars given national security interests in the West and Israel is a hoax for their self-enrichment, along with mass deception about barbarians at the gate, requiring a strong national defense against them.

On Sunday, Israeli media reported that Netanyahu will likely tell Rivlin he’s unable to form coalition governance, according to unnamed Likud party sources.

In its latest edition, Haaretz said Netanyahu may tell Rivlin “he is giving up efforts to build a government within a few days if (Blue and White’s) negotiation team remains adamant in its refusal to accept a plan proposed by Rivlin as a basic guideline for talks” — leaving Netanyahu empowered as prime minister Gantz rejects.

On Friday, negotiations between representatives of both parties broke down with no agreement. Further talks scheduled for Sunday aren’t likely to fare better.

A Blue and White statement said Likud negotiators demanded B & W “agree to a government with Netanyahu at the helm as prime minister” head of minority rule.

B & W rejected the demand, explaining the Likud team knew in advance its diktat was unacceptable, showing its “intention to send Israel to a third election, as the prime minister desires” — a way for him to stay in power with things unresolved.

His reported strategy involves heading coalition rule, seeking Knesset legislation granting him immunity from prosecution, along with another measure, preventing Israel’s Supreme Court from overturning it.

Rivlin is likely to give Gantz a mandate to form a new government if Netanyahu fails. Far-right Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu is the wild card.

Its eight seats can swing things for either major party. He remains neutral, refusing to join a Netanyahu coalition with religious fundamentalist parties.

Nor will he ally with Gantz as long as Joint (Arab) List is part of his ruling coalition — even though Arab MKs are powerless, having no say over Israeli policies.

As of Sunday, things are at impasse, another election next year most likely unless a party allied with Netanyahu or Gantz breaks ranks, shifting allegiance in return for control over one or more key ministries.

Wanting Netanyahu’s toxic grip on Israel ended, Haaretz editors said the following:

“Netanyahu and his proxies’ absurd attempts at posturing concern to heal the wounds of the people are a cynical smoke screen, behind which lies the fear of another election.”

“Gantz and the rest of the opposition members must not fall into this wretched trap.”

“They must remember exactly why they received 57 Knesset seats: to end the insanity, deceit and confusion of the Netanyahu era.”

No matter who heads Israeli coalition rule, conditions for Occupied Palestinians and Arab citizens remain intolerable — terrorized by apartheid viciousness, notably in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and especially in besieged Gaza.

In the week following Israel’s September 17 elections, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) reported the following Israeli abuses:

“Israeli forces wounded 125 (nonviolent) Palestinian civilians in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank” — including dozens of children, two women, two paramedics and a journalist.

“Israel carried out 110 incursions into the West Bank, including occupied East Jerusalem, and raided civilian houses, attacking and enticing fear among residents in addition to shooting(s) in many incidents” — 124 Palestinians threatening no one arrested, including 14 children.

“Israeli forces raided the office of ADDAMEER Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association in Ramallah and sized a number of laptop(s) and other equipment” — the third such unlawful incident this year alone.

The IDF conducted three belligerent cross-border incursions into Gaza, terrorizing residents, making arrests.

In the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli forces stole a construction vehicle, destroyed a residential house, destroyed the foundation and retaining wall of another home, along with walls of a third residence.

“Israeli settlers carried out 6 attacks (on) Palestinian civilians and their property in the West Bank,” said the PCHR.

An Al-Haq documentary calls Gaza “uninhabitable.” The PCHR said intolerable Strip conditions continue, suffocating illegal siege in its “14th consecutive year, without any improvement to the movement of persons and goods and ongoing isolation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank and the rest of the world,” adding:

The West Bank “is divided into separate cantons with key roads blocked by the Israeli occupation since the Second Intifada and with temporary and permanent checkpoints, where civilians’ movement is restricted and others are arrested.”

Militarized occupation maintains virtual open-air imprisonment for millions of persecuted Palestinians, terrorized Gazans suffering most.

Since Israel’s 1948 creation, the world community failed to hold it accountable for high crimes of war and against humanity too grievous to ignore.

Horrendous Palestinian victimization continues with no resolution of their suffering under brutalizing conditions, aiming to break their will to resist.

It hasn’t happened in over 70 years, over 53 years under apartheid occupation. Nor is it likely ahead.

Palestinians continue struggling for their soul to end decades ruthless/illegal Israeli occupation.

A Final Comment

On Sunday, the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu and Gantz will meet again “on Wednesday evening in a last-ditch attempt to form a unity government,” adding:

A Likud spokesman said Sunday morning talks with Likud and B&W negotiating teams ended “without any progress.”

There’s little chance of agreement ahead because Netanyahu won’t bend on relinquishing his grip on Israel as prime minister.

*

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.

Out of a global Jewish population of 14.8 million, over 54% do not, and presumably have no wish to live in the hard-Right, Likud-dominated, settler-controlled, extremist state that is today’s Israel.

These population figures, recently published in the American Jewish Year Book, are instructive because they prove that Netanyahu’s claims to speak for the worldwide Jewish Diaspora, are demonstrably false.

But that should not come as any surprise to us about a failed politician desperately trying to avoid prosecution for alleged bribery and corruption during his term in office as Prime Minister.

Many Jews around the world, in New York, London, Paris and other centres of Jewish life, find the Netanyahu political influence both in Israel and outside, a shocking example of racist, even Fascist, political ideology – and are acutely ashamed by his actions.

The reports of heavily-armed IDF soldiers shooting young Palestinian protesters dead at the Gaza border, are repulsive and appalling to many thousands of observers worldwide, both Jewish and Gentile, who believe in human and civil rights for everyone – even protesting Palestinian schoolchildren with their mothers and fathers.

These observers of Netanyahu’s politics know full well that in addition to flouting U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334 that demands the repatriation of all illegal settlers in the Occupied Territories back to their homes in Israel, the continued blockade of essential goods against 1.8 million in Gaza is a shocking stain on the claimed democratic principles of the Israeli state under Netanyahu’s influence.  The sooner he is gone and a true democratic leader elected, the better will be the future for both Jew and Arab in the land of Palestine and within the international Holy City of Jerusalem.

We can but hope that the international community of nations will come to a consensus that will condemn the illegal settlements and annexations and take concrete steps to bring about a long overdue equity to the indigenous peoples of Palestine.

*

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.

Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The most crucial aspects of the Trump-Ukraine “scandal,” which has led to impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, are not being told, even by Republicans.

Trump was very likely motivated by politics if he indeed withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for Kiev launching an investigation into Democratic presidential frontrunner Joe Biden, though the transcript of the call released by the White House between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelinsky does not make certain such a quid-pro-quo.

But what’s not being talked about in the mainstream is the context of this story, which shows that, politics aside, Biden should indeed be investigated in both Ukraine and in the United States.

We know from the leaked, early 2014 telephone conversation between Victoria Nuland, then assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, and Geoffrey Pyatt, then U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, that then Vice President Biden played a role in “midwifing” the U.S.-backed overthrow of an elected Ukrainian government soon after that conversation.

That’s the biggest crime in this story that isn’t being told. The illegal overthrow of a sovereign government.

As booty from the coup, the sitting vice president’s son, Hunter Biden, soon got a seat on the board of Ukraine’s biggest gas producer, Burisma Holdings. This can only be seen as a transparently neocolonial maneuver to take over a country and install one’s own people. But Biden’s son wasn’t the only one.

Image on the right: Left to right: Kerry, post-coup president Petro Poroshenko, Pyatt and Nuland, June 2014. (State Dept.)

A family friend of then Secretary of State John Kerry also joined Burisma’s board. U.S. agricultural giant Monsanto got a Ukrainian contract soon after the overthrow.  And the first, post-coup Ukrainian finance minister was an American citizen, a former State Department official, who was given Ukrainian citizenship the day before she took up the post.

After a Ukrainian prosecutor began looking into possible corruption at Burisma, Biden openly admitted at a conference last year that as vice president he withheld a $1 billion credit line to Ukraine until the government fired the prosecutor. As Biden says himself, it took only six hours for it to happen.

Exactly what Biden boasted of doing is what the Democrats are now accusing Trump of doing, and it isn’t clear if Trump got what he wanted as Biden did.

Threats, Bribes and Blackmail

That leads to another major part of this story not being told: the routine way the U.S. government conducts foreign policy: with bribes, threats and blackmail.

Trump may have withheld military aid to seek a probe into Biden, but it is hypocritically being framed by Democrats as an abuse of power out of the ordinary. But it is very much ordinary.

Examples abound. The threat of withholding foreign aid was wielded against nations on the UN Security Council in 1991 when the U.S. sought authorization for the First Gulf War. Yemen had the temerity to vote against. A member of the U.S. delegation told Yemen’s ambassador: “That’s the most expensive vote you ever cast.” The U.S. then cut $70 million in foreign aid to the Middle East’s poorest nation, and Saudi Arabia repatriated about a million Yemeni workers.

The same thing happened before the Second Gulf War in 2003, as revealed by whistleblower Katharine Gun (who will appear Friday night on CN Live!). Gun leaked an NSA memo that showed the U.S. sought help from its British counterpart in signals intelligence to spy on the missions of Security Council members to get “leverage” over them to influence their vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq.

In 2001 the U.S. threatened the end of military and foreign aid if nations did not conclude bilateral agreements granting immunity to U.S. troops before the International Criminal Court.

More recently, the U.S. used its muscle against Ecuador, including dangling a $10 billion IMF loan, in exchange for the expulsion of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from its London embassy.

This is how the U.S. conducts “diplomacy.”

As former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros Ghali wrote:

“Coming from a developing country, I was trained extensively in international law and diplomacy and mistakenly assumed that the great powers, especially the United States, also trained their representatives in diplomacy and accepted the value of it. But the Roman Empire had no need for diplomacy. Nor does the United States. Diplomacy is perceived by an imperial power as a waste of time and prestige and a sign of weakness.”

This fundamental corruption of U.S. foreign policy, which includes overthrowing elected governments, is matched only by the corruption of a political system that exalts partisan political power above all else. Exposing this deep-seated and longstanding corruption should take precedence over scoring partisan scalps, whether Biden’s or Trump’s.

*

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 Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, Sunday Times of London and numerous other newspapers. He can be reached at  [email protected] and followed on Twitter @unjoe .

Yemen is Washington’s war, ongoing for nearly 18 years, the heaviest fighting since March 2015. 

The Saudis are used as the main US strike force against the country and its long-suffering people, intermittently throughout the conflict, largely in most recent years.

The US, Britain and France are the kingdom’s main suppliers of heavy weapons, munitions, and other military assistance.

Israel is involved in the war. So are US, UK, and French special forces, operating in Yemen on the ground.

US drone war on the country has been ongoing throughout years of conflict, begun by Bush-Cheney.

According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama greatly escalated what his predecessor regime began, adding:

US drone wars in all its conflict theaters increased to an unprecedented level under Trump – notably in Yemen, a six-fold increase over 2016.

The UK-based human rights group Reprieve reported that illegal US drone wars expanded exponentially under Trump.

“(E)ven individuals not considered to pose a ‘continuing and imminent threat’ can be targeted for death without trial” under a secret US assassination program, the group reported – involving murder by drones, conventional warplanes, and/or special forces operations, as well as by proxy jihadist fighters.

The program was begun by Obama’s CIA chief John Brennan, a so-called “disposition matrix” or “kill list” — targeted assassinations continued by Trump.

According to Reprieve,

“(t)he CIA’s own leaked documents concede that the US often does not know who it is killing, and that militant leaders’ account for just 2% of drone-related deaths.”

The vast majority of victims are defenseless civilians in harm’s way — in Yemen, Syria, and other US war theaters.

Note: Trump earlier banned disclosure of civilian deaths by US drone terror-bombings.

Resolution of conflicts in all US war theaters are unattainable because bipartisan hardliners in Washington reject restoration of peace and stability in targeted countries.

In Yemen, Ansarullah Houthis proved they’re a formidable fighting force, using sophisticated weapons and munitions, combatting Saudi aggression in self-defense.

Their explosive-laden drones and missiles struck strategic targets deep into kingdom territory numerous times, key infrastructure targets hit.

The September 14 attack on the Saudi’s Abqaiq refinery (the world’s largest) and Khurais oil field was the latest example of its capabilities, more major strikes vowed if Saudi aggression continues.

Not a shred of credible evidence suggests Iran was involved in striking key Saudi oil facilities this month or other attacks on kingdom territory — nor Persian Gulf, Hormuz Strait and Sea of Oman incidents it was falsely accused of.

Intermittently throughout years of fighting, ceasefires were proposed and breached by the Saudis and its coalition partners.

Washington calls the shots in Yemen. Riyadh most likely wants out of the conflict because of its enormous cost and significant damage to kingdom infrastructure — its oil facilities vulnerable to further Houthi strikes.

Earlier this month, the Houthis again proposed a halt in fighting. Riyadh agreed rhetorically, then continued striking Yemeni targets.

On Thursday, Southfront reported the most recent ceasefire violations, Saudi warplanes terror-bombing the port city of Hudaidah and other areas.

On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Riyadh “agree(d) to a partial ceasefire in Yemen, say people familiar with the plans.”

The Journal falsely claimed the move followed what it called “the Houthis’ surprise declaration of a unilateral cease-fire in Yemen last week” — failing to explain numerous earlier Houthi overtures to halt fighting rejected by the Saudis because of US pressure for conflict to continue.

Houthis are justifiably dubious about the latest Saudi-proposed halt in fighting, the movement’s co-leader Mohammed Ali al-Houthi saying:

“Yemen will only accept a comprehensive cessation of aggression and lifting of the siege”— by the US, Riyadh and their imperial partners.

“Houthi officials said Friday that the Saudi-led coalition had recently carried out more than two dozen airstrikes in two of the four provinces where the truce is supposed to curtail attacks,” the Journal reported.

Partial ceasefires are especially deceptive — invitations to escalate fighting at the discretion of aggressor forces, unjustifiably justified by invented pretexts, a US specialty.

Is restoration of peace and stability in Yemen more likely now than earlier?

As long as hardliners in Washington want war, ending it is off the table.

If Riyadh halts its involvement, US drone war will surely continue as long as Houthis control most or all Yemeni territory — elements Washington doesn’t control.

Both right wings of the US war party want pro-Western puppet rule installed in Yemen.

They’re intolerant of sovereign independent Houthi rule, elements not bending to their will, why prospects for conflict resolution are dim.

*

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 Yemen Press

President Trump wants negative interest rates, but they would be disastrous for the U.S. economy, and his objectives can be better achieved by other means.

The dollar strengthened against the euro in August, merely in anticipation of the European Central Bank slashing its key interest rate further into negative territory. Investors were fleeing into the dollar, prompting President Trump to tweet on Aug. 30:

The Euro is dropping against the Dollar “like crazy,” giving them a big export and manufacturing advantage… And the Fed does NOTHING!

When the ECB cut its key rate as anticipated, from a negative 0.4% to a negative 0.5%, the president tweeted on Sept. 11:

The Federal Reserve should get our interest rates down to ZERO, or less, and we should then start to refinance our debt. INTEREST COST COULD BE BROUGHT WAY DOWN, while at the same time substantially lengthening the term.

And on Sept. 12 he tweeted:

European Central Bank, acting quickly, Cuts Rates 10 Basis Points. They are trying, and succeeding, in depreciating the Euro against the VERY strong Dollar, hurting U.S. exports…. And the Fed sits, and sits, and sits. They get paid to borrow money, while we are paying interest!

However, negative interest rates have not been shown to stimulate the economies that have tried them, and they would wreak havoc on the U.S. economy, for reasons unique to the U.S. dollar. The ECB has not gone to negative interest rates to gain an export advantage. It is to keep the European Union from falling apart, something that could happen if the United Kingdom does indeed pull out and Italy follows suit, as it has threatened to do. If what Trump wants is cheap borrowing rates for the U.S. federal government, there is a safer and easier way to get them.

The Real Reason the ECB Has Gone to Negative Interest Rates

Why the ECB has gone negative was nailed by Wolf Richter in a Sept. 18 article on WolfStreet.com. After noting that negative interest rates have not proved to be beneficial for any economy in which they are currently in operation and have had seriously destructive side effects for the people and the banks, he said:

However, negative interest rates as follow-up and addition to massive QE were effective in keeping the Eurozone glued together because they allowed countries to stay afloat that cannot, but would need to, print their own money to stay afloat. They did so by making funding plentiful and nearly free, or free, or more than free.

This includes Italian government debt, which has a negative yield through three-year maturities. … The ECB’s latest rate cut, minuscule and controversial as it was, was designed to help out Italy further so it wouldn’t have to abandon the euro and break out of the Eurozone.

The U.S. doesn’t need negative interest rates to stay glued together. It can print its own money.

EU member governments have lost the sovereign power to issue their own money or borrow money issued by their own central banks. The failed EU experiment was a monetarist attempt to maintain a fixed money supply, as if the euro were a commodity in limited supply like gold. The central banks of member countries do not have the power to bail out their governments or their failing local banks as the Fed did for U.S. banks with massive quantitative easing after the 2008 financial crisis. Before the Eurozone debt crisis of 2011-12, even the European Central Bank was forbidden to buy sovereign debt.

The rules changed after Greece and other southern European countries got into serious trouble, sending bond yields (nominal interest rates) through the roof.  But default or debt restructuring was not considered an option; and in 2016, new EU rules required a “bail in” before a government could bail out its failing banks. When a bank ran into trouble, existing stakeholders–including shareholders, junior creditors and sometimes even senior creditors and depositors with deposits in excess of the guaranteed amount of €100,000–were required to take a loss before public funds could be used. The Italian government got a taste of the potential backlash when it forced losses onto the bondholders of four small banks. One victim made headlines when he hung himself and left a note blaming his bank, which had taken his entire €100,000 savings.

Meanwhile, the bail-in scheme that was supposed to shift bank losses from governments to bank creditors and depositors served instead to scare off depositors and investors, making shaky banks even shakier. Worse, heightened capital requirements made it practically impossible for Italian banks to raise capital. Rather than flirt with another bail-in disaster, Italy was ready either to flaunt EU rules or leave the Union.

The ECB finally got on the quantitative easing bandwagon and started buying government debt along with other financial assets. By buying debt at negative interest, it is not only relieving EU governments of their interest burden, it is slowly extinguishing the debt itself.

That explains the ECB, but why are investors buying these bonds? According to John Ainger in Bloomberg:

Investors are willing to pay a premium–and ultimately take a loss–because they need the reliability and liquidity that the government and high-quality corporate bonds provide. Large investors such as pension funds, insurers, and financial institutions may have few other safe places to store their wealth.

In short, they are captive buyers. Banks are required to hold government securities or other “high-quality liquid assets” under capital rules imposed by the Financial Stability Board in Switzerland. Since EU banks now must pay the ECB to hold their bank reserves, they may as well hold negative-yielding sovereign debt, which they may be able to sell at a profit if rates drop even further.

Wolf Richter comments:

Investors who buy these bonds hope that central banks will take them off their hands at even lower yields (and higher prices). No one is buying a negative yielding long-term bond to hold it to maturity.

Well, I say that, but these are professional money managers who buy such instruments, or who have to buy them due to their asset allocation and fiduciary requirements, and they don’t really care. It’s other people’s money, and they’re going to change jobs or get promoted or start a restaurant or something, and they’re out of there in a couple of years. Après moi le déluge.

Why the U.S. Can’t Go Negative, and What It Can Do Instead

The U.S. doesn’t need negative interest rates, because it doesn’t have the EU’s problems but it does have other problems unique to the U.S. dollar that could spell disaster if negative rates were enforced.

First is the massive market for money market funds, which are more important to daily market functioning in the U.S. than in Europe and Japan. If interest rates go negative, the funds could see large-scale outflows, which could disrupt short-term funding for businesses, banks and perhaps even the Treasury. Consumers could also face new charges to make up for bank losses.

Second, the U.S. dollar is inextricably tied up with the market for interest rate derivatives, which is currently valued at over $500 trillion. As proprietary analyst Rob Kirby explains, the economy would crash if interest rates went negative, because the banks holding the fixed-rate side of the swaps would have to pay the floating-rate side as well. The derivatives market would go down like a stack of dominoes and take the U.S. economy with it.

Perhaps in tacit acknowledgment of those problems, Fed Chairman Jay Powell responded to a question about negative interest rates on Sept. 18:

Negative interest rates [are] something that we looked at during the financial crisis and chose not to do. After we got to the effective lower bound [near-zero effective federal funds rate], we chose to do a lot of aggressive forward guidance and also large-scale asset purchases. …

And if we were to find ourselves at some future date again at the effective lower bound–not something we are expecting–then I think we would look at using large-scale asset purchases and forward guidance.

I do not think we’d be looking at using negative rates.

Assuming the large-scale asset purchases made at some future date were of federal securities, the federal government would be financing its debt virtually interest-free, since the Fed returns its profits to the Treasury after deducting its costs. And if the bonds were rolled over when due and held by the Fed indefinitely, the money could be had not only interest-free but debt-free. That is not radical theory but is what is actually happening with the Fed’s bond purchases in its earlier QE. When it tried to unwind those purchases last fall, the result was a stock market crisis. The Fed is learning that QE is a one-way street.

The problem under existing law is that neither the president nor Congress has control over whether the “independent” Fed buys federal securities. But if Trump can’t get Powell to agree over lunch to these arrangements, Congress could amend the Federal Reserve Act to require the Fed to work with Congress to coordinate fiscal and monetary policy. This is what Japan’s banking law requires, and it has been very successful under Prime Minister Shinzō Abe and “Abenomics.” It is also what a team of former central bankers led by Philipp Hildebrand proposed in conjunction with last month’s Jackson Hole meeting of central bankers, after acknowledging the central bankers’ usual tools weren’t working. Under their proposal, central bank technocrats would be in charge of allocating the funds, but better would be the Japanese model, which leaves the federal government in control of allocating fiscal policy funds.

The Bank of Japan now holds nearly half of Japan’s federal debt, a radical move that has not triggered hyperinflation as monetarist economists direly predicted. In fact, the Bank of Japan can’t get the country’s inflation rate even to its modest 2 percent target. As of August, the rate was an extremely low 0.3%. If the Fed were to follow suit and buy 50% of the U.S. government’s debt, the Treasury could swell its coffers by $11 trillion in interest-free money. And if the Fed kept rolling over the debt, Congress and the president could get this $11 trillion not only interest-free but debt-free. President Trump can’t get a better deal than that.

*

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 first posted on Truthdig.com.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and author of thirteen books including Web of Debt, The Public Bank Solution, and Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, manufacturer of the Reaper drone, has recently been awarded a US Air Force contract to demonstrate the  ‘Agile Condor’ artificial intelligence system with the MQ-9 Reaper drone.  According to General Atomics President David R. Alexander,

a“The Agile Condor project will further enhance RPA [remotely piloted aircraft] effectiveness by specifically allowing a MQ-9 to surveil a large area of operations, autonomously identify pre-defined targets of interest and transmit their locations.”

This type of capability represents a tangible step further towards the development of autonomous weaponised drones able to operate without human input – flying killer robots, in other words.  From identifying targets without the need for a human decision to destroying those targets is a very small step which could be achieved with existing technology.

The Agile Condor system is intended to send information back to a human analyst. There’s no intention for it to be used in an autonomous mode, and current US military policy on autonomous weapons is that there should always be ’appropriate levels of human judgement’ over the use of force.  However, there is no guarantee of such a restrained approach to autonomous weapons in the future, by the US or any other nation (or indeed by an non-state group). The danger is, as we detail in  our report on the development of autonomous military drone (see below), lethal autonomous weapons (LAWS) are likely to develop though step-by-step upgrades in technological capability.

Agile Condor is a high-performance computing system which uses AI techniques to enable on-board processing of large quantities of data from the drone’s sensors – for example video footage, synthetic aperture radar imagery, or infra-red camera imagery.  The system is mounted in a pod which can be fitted to the drone, and has been designed for installation in a variety of configurations including sea-based, ground based, and fixed-site weapon systems as well as on aircraft.

The demonstration flights which General Atomics will be undertaking will be used to experiment with the Agile Condor system to optimise AI and machine learning techniques for finding, identifying, and tracking targets.  It’s possible that they will include ‘training’ of the AI system to identify potential targets, with human operators confirming whether the computer has made a correct decision in order to refine and improve its performance.

In due course the Air Force Research Lab anticipates using the system to enable real-time processing of data during intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions.  A video (below) prepared by SRC Corporation, which manufactures the Agile Condor pod, shows a drone using AI processing to identify an insurgent who is preparing to attack a military convoy.  An alert is sent to a ground commander, and as a result of the signal the convoy is diverted; the insurgent surrenders; and everyone lives happily ever after.

AI technology of this type enables thousands of hours of video footage to be processed autonomously – only targets of potential interest would be flagged up to commanders.  Another benefit of the on-board processing capability is expected to be a dramatic reduction in the satellite bandwidth needed to pass data between the drone and the ground.  With much of the work of handling and analysing data from the drone’s sensors conducted on board the aircraft, far less information would need to be transmitted to the ground station, reducing the costs of satellite capacity.

Hans Vreeland, a former targeting officer in the US Marines, has written recently about how AI can transform intelligence analysis when used alongside existing hardware and sensor capabilities.  According to Vreeland: “Currently, both information collection and processing are manual, labor-intensive endeavors. AI can relieve human operators of much of that burden, performing the same tasks better and faster.”

Vreeland is enthusiastic about the potential of AI systems such as Agile Condor which can analyse data from sensors and flag up situations of potential concern.  “If we had autonomous drones programmed to search specified areas and identify activity by fusing several sensor inputs”, he writes, “and if we had had the ability to process the information at the edge with Project Maven  [a US military project to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to process drone video footage], it would be difficult to overstate the increase in the amount of activity that we could have collected and analyzed”.

Vreeland is one of a long, long line of writers arguing that technology will make war better. “AI has paradigm-shifting potential to be a force-multiplier, provide better information to commanders, and quicken the operational tempo,” says Vreeland. “In other words, it will provide more better outcomes faster, a recipe for success in combat”.

Adding new capabilities to an existing platform is not a novel step for the military.  The history of the Predator drone shows that drones have evolved in incremental steps to incorporate new technology and undertake new missions.  The RQ-1 Predator entered service with the US military and was used for unarmed reconnaissance operations over the former Yugoslavia from 1995 onwards.   The role of the Predator first began to extend into combat operations when the drone was fitted with a laser designator, allowing it to illuminate targets for guided missiles fired from conventional aircraft.  In 2001 the drone was modified to fire Hellfire missiles, enabling it to undertake armed strikes on its own.  The MQ-9 Reaper, a larger version of the Predator which entered service in 2007, can now be fitted with a much broader range of weapons than the RQ-1.  General Atomics is continuing to make improvements to the MQ-9 and increase its range of automated features as it remains in service.

As we have shown in our ‘Off The Leash’ study into the development of autonomous drones, killer robots are likely to evolve in a similar manner, through small, step-by-step upgrades in technological capability.  The extent to which increased autonomy might raise concerns will depend upon the level of human control over ‘critical functions’ required to select and attack targets.  Intelligence gathering and analysis is on the borderline of being a critical function: in itself, it is a non-lethal function, but on the other hand it is an essential part of the process of identifying and tracking a target.

The Agile Condor modification to the Reaper crosses a line.  It is an important enabling technology which could allow a decision on lethal strikes to be taken by the drone itself, with no human intervention, and is a significant step towards the development of an autonomous weapon system.  To control and prevent the development of such ‘killer robots’, we need to rapidly develop an international legal instrument to prevent the development, acquisition, deployment, and use of fully autonomous weapons and ensure that humans are always in control of lethal force decisions.

Before it’s too late.

*

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.

The world’s biggest supplier of burgers has been fuelling the destruction of the Amazon rainforest by sourcing cattle from ranches linked to deforestation – and British companies are still buying thousands of tonnes of its beef.

Marfrig, a Brazilian meat company that has supplied McDonald’s, Burger King and other huge fast food chains around the world, bought cattle from a farm using deforested land in a part of the Amazon currently ravaged by forest fires. One of the key causes of those fires is farmers clearing land for eventual beef pasture.

The company boasts of its green credentials and recently offered $500m in bonds aimed at environmentally conscious investors. Marfrig claims that none of the cattle it buys come from farms involved in deforestation and that it is the only beef company that can guarantee this.

Yet research by Repórter Brasil, working with the Bureau and the Guardian, traced cattle that the company purchased this year back to a farm that had grazed cows in an area of illegally felled rainforest.

Our investigation has also revealed the full extent of the UK’s involvement in the Amazon crisis. Nearly £1bn worth of beef supplied by Marfrig and two other meat giants which have been accused of deforestation — Minerva Foods and JBS — was directly imported to the UK in recent years.

Unprecedented research to be published today claims that the supply chains for exported beef from these three companies are between them linked to up to 500 square kilometres of deforestation every year.

Responding to our findings, Neil Parish, MP, chair of the Commons environment, food and rural affairs select committee, said:

“This investigation shows the importance of supply-chain transparency, from farm to fork. We must think more carefully about the environmental impact of food and the greater degree of control we have with British made products. I’m sure British consumers will not want to be contributing to deforestation in the Amazon.”

Bill McKibben, the veteran environmental campaigner, told the Bureau:

“It’s hard to know what’s worse — companies that don’t acknowledge our environmental crisis at all, or those that … do so and then don’t live up to the promises they make.”

In January, inspectors from Ibama, Brazil’s environmental watchdog, found cattle from Limeira Ranch grazing on illegally deforested land inside a protected region, the Triunfo do Xingu Environmental Protection Area in Pará state. The region has been devastated by the largest number of forest fires in Brazil this year.

The land where the cattle were found had been placed under an official embargo — which prohibits grazing — three years before, due to illegal felling. Embargoes are imposed for environmental violations and serve both as a punishment and protective measure to allow land to recover.

For breaking the embargo, the ranch was fined R$ 1.19m ($300,000) this year. Despite this, documents obtained by Repórter Brasil show that 144 cattle from Limeira Ranch were subsequently supplied to a Marfrig abattoir in Tucumã, also in Pará. The company also bought cattle from the ranch on multiple occasions in late 2018. There is no evidence that the cattle Marfrig purchased were raised on illegally deforested land.

In response, Marfrig did not dispute that the ranch had broken an embargo at the time of the purchase, but said that official checks it carried out using Ibama data at the time had given the ranch the all-clear.

A spokeswoman for Marfrig said:

“Ibama issued a negative certificate assuring that on that date nothing was against the supplier … That’s the only way companies — not just Marfrig — can look for official information in real time.”

The company added that it had stopped buying from the ranch as soon as it learnt of the fine. According to documents seen by the Bureau, Ibama had publicly listed the fine on its website two weeks before the cattle purchase.

Ten years ago Marfrig committed “not to purchase any livestock originating from deforested or conservation areas”, and said in 2017 that it was tightening up its protocols for cattle purchases, adopting a system that “blocks, rather than permits, cattle purchases in the case of any doubts”.

This July Marfrig launched a controversial “transition” bond designed to tap into the growing sustainable investment market. Like “green bonds”, which allow environmentally friendly firms to raise cash, bankers have designed transition bonds for companies with the potential to clean up their practices to fund that change.

However, there is no single definition of a “sustainable transition”. Experts have suggested that the absence of minimum standards could leave the bonds open to exploitation by greenwashers – businesses seeking to exaggerate their environmental commitments.

Joshua Kendall, senior environmental analyst at Insight Investment, said that while the Marfrig bond showed credible sustainable objectives and a commitment to improvement, he had not invested. In his opinion,

“it doesn’t go far enough beyond ‘business as usual’ spending. It also lacks indicators that would give us a sense of whether or not it has made improvements,” he said.

Limeira Ranch is not the only deforestation case that can be linked to Marfrig. According to new figures from Trase — a supply-chain initiative run by the Stockholm Environment Institute and NGO Global Canopy — Marfrig’s beef exports could be linked to up to 100 square kilometres of deforestation a year in Brazil.

Trase also calculated figures for JBS, the world’s biggest meat company, and Minerva Foods, another large global supplier of Brazilian beef. JBS beef exports could be linked to up to 300 square kilometres of deforestation per year, and Minerva Foods linked to up to 100 square kilometres, the research says.

JBS and Minerva both said they did not buy cattle from farms in deforested areas and that they had systems in place to block non-compliant suppliers.

The Trace research mapped supply chains for beef from international markets back to the specific areas of Brazil where the cattle were raised. By cross-referencing these chains with official data on new pastures, deforestation and cattle numbers, the researchers calculated a potential deforestation “risk” — presented as an area in sq km — associated with companies and even specific international markets.

Overall, up to 5,800 sq km of forest — an area four times the size of Greater London — is being felled in the Amazon and other areas annually to be converted into pasture used for cattle farming, according to the Trase report.

How it ends up on your plate

The Bureau has established that Marfrig, along with Minerva Foods and JBS and their subsidiaries, has shipped at least 147,000 tonnes of beef to the UK in the past five years – enough to make 170m burgers a year.

That much meat is worth £1bn. Much of it was canned corned beef destined for supermarkets and other retailers, as well as frozen meat imported for wholesalers and manufacturers.

From there it could end up in hospital dinners, ready meals and fast food, through a chain of little-known catering and food production companies. The Bureau has identified several of these chains, including one that ends with the Ministry of Defence.

Brazilian canned beef from Marfrig or JBS has been found by the NGO Earthsight at Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Aldi, Lidl and Asda. The Bureau has also found JBS-produced canned beef at the Co-op. That can was marked with a stamp showing the beef had come from Brazil.

But the link is not always so clear, and it can be impossible for consumers to always know if their food is from companies linked to the destruction of the Amazon. JBS canned beef is also sold to NHS Supply Chain, which manages the sourcing and supply of food across the health service, including at hospital trusts.

Weddel Swift, part of the Randall Parker Food group, is hardly a household name, but it supplies meat products to caterers, wholesalers and retailers. The company has bought £30m worth of Brazilian beef since 2015 from Minerva. The group told the Bureau that only 1.5% of its sales had come from Brazil and that it has only imported £240,000 worth of beef this year. Weddel Swift also said it believes Minerva is a responsible beef producer.

Earthsight discovered that beef from Minerva was being supplied to the Ministry of Defence, but the department could also be feeding soldiers JBS beef as well. Vestey Foods, which holds the catering contract for Armed Forces personnel on active deployment in the UK, buys Brazilian beef from JBS.

The MoD said it did not directly contract with Minerva or JBS, and added that it was working with suppliers “to address any concerns surrounding the recent link between sourcing beef from Brazil and deforestation.”

It is impossible to trace specific cans of Brazilian corned beef or a supermarket cottage pie directly back to fields burned out of the Amazon rainforest. Many retailers insist their supply chains contain only sustainable beef, but continue to bolster the profits of businesses which have been linked to deforestation.

Toby Gardner, the Trase director, said that all those involved in the Brazilian beef chain needed to act:

“Buyers, whether traders, processors, retailers, need to demand and invest in transparency systems that can guarantee they are sourcing from areas that have not been recently deforested, whilst at the same time working to support producers’ shift to more sustainable and at the same time more productive systems.”

In a statement to the Bureau, Minerva Foods said:

“100% of Minerva’s purchases come from zero-deforestation areas … Our sustainability department blocks any suppliers that are not compliant … which effectively means that Minerva can’t buy any animals coming from these suppliers.”

The company also said all of its cattle procurements were completed after checks on the supplier ranches using public government databases on embargoed areas. It said it has blocked more than 2,000 cattle suppliers who were found not to be in compliance with standards.

JBS told us:

“We have a zero deforestation policy in the Amazon and prohibit cattle from deforested farms in the region from entering our supply chain … To date, more than 7,000 potential suppliers have been blocked from our system.”

They added that a recent audit found 100% of their cattle purchases were in compliance with their responsible sourcing policies.

Responding to the findings on behalf of supermarkets Aldi, Sainsbury’s, Asda and The Co-op, Leah Riley Brown, of the British Retail Consortium, said:

“Illegal deforestation is completely unacceptable, and retailers are collaborating to tackle deforestation and drive greater uptake of certified sustainable products in their supply chains.”

Burger King said:

“Our goal is to eliminate deforestation within our global supply chain, and we are working toward this” and that all their suppliers were required to comply with their sustainability and forest protection policies.

McDonald’s said it aimed to eliminate deforestation from its global supply chains by 2030 and that it had “made a commitment not to purchase raw material from any farm in the Amazon … linked with deforestation”.

NHS Supply Chain said:

“We are committed to procuring products responsibly and sustainably and actively work with our suppliers on important issues such as sustainability.”

*

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.

Andrew is an award-winning investigative journalist specialising in food and farming issues.

Alexandra Heal joined the Bureau in 2018 after completing an MA in Investigative Journalism at City University in London.

André Campos is a Brazilian journalist specialising in supply chain investigations linked to human rights and environmental crimes

Featured image is from Peakpx

First published on January 31, 2014

Today a good deal of what qualifies as propaganda is much more subtle than overt. When an entire civilization or way of life is to be significantly altered the tried-and-true method of “repeating a lie until it becomes truth” needs to be done over a period of many years and in a multitude of varying ways to take hold and change the very assumptions and beliefs of a people.

This process is especially vital for reaching a given society’s more elite demographic—the opinion leaders who perceive themselves as “smarter than the average bear” and thus impervious to simple appeals and indoctrination.

A case in point is the agenda backed by powerful global elites and recognizable under names such as “climate change” and “sustainability.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report, released on September 27, 2013, came replete with an assemblage of legitimizing features along these lines (“scientific,” “scholarly,” “authoritative,” “peer reviewed,”). Also termed the “Climate Bible,” journalists and policymakers alike regard it as “authoritative” and “the gold standard” of climate science. The public is told that the official body’s findings are now clearer than ever: “human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”[1]

Among the most vociferous agitators for the IPCC’s climate change orthodoxy are the foundation-funded, tax-exempt, progressive-left media that sit alongside the bevy of similarly tax-exempt, foundation-funded environmental organizations that together uphold and publicize the theory of CO2-based anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change (ACC).[2] Self-professed as “independent,” “investigative,” even “educational,” the so-called “alternative media” turn a blind eye to seriously scrutinizing the highly questionable IPCC’s “scientific” review of the climatological literature and its implications for the array of ambitious programs and policies stealthily introduced throughout the industrialized world, many of which are seldom subject to popular plebiscite. Think “smart grid” and “smart growth.”

Logical questions from such apparently independent organs might include, “How does the IPCC produce its findings?” and “Who benefits?” Instead, there is an almost knee-jerk response on behalf of progressive-left editors and readerships to trust and support the UN group’s purportedly objective and meticulous review of the peer-reviewed climatological literature.

Between August and December 2013 such progressive outlets published dozens of articles and commentaries whole-heartedly touting the IPCC report. For example, Truthout.org posted 25 articles, Alternet.org ran 40, MotherJones.com circulated 38, and DemocracyNow.org featured 11.

These were often presented with bleak headlines accenting the urgent appeals found in the IPCC publicity. For example, “International Scientists Warn Climate Deniers Are Enabling Earth’s Suicide” (Truthout, 9/13/13), “6 Scary Conclusions in the UN’s New Climate Report” (Mother Jones, 9/27/13), “Greenhouse Gas in Atmosphere Hits New Record: UN,” (Alternet, 11/1/13), and “’Africa is Being Pushed Closer to the Fire’: Africans Say Continent Can’t Wait for Climate Action” (Democracy Now! 11/22/13).

Uncritical advocacy of the IPCC’s anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming extended beyond headlines to media criticism. In December, for example, the progressive Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) observed that corporate controlled network newscasts routinely failed to link “extreme weather” to “global warming.” “In the first nine months of 2013,” FAIR observes,

there were 450 segments of 200 words or more that covered extreme weather: flooding, forest fires, tornadoes, blizzards, hurricanes and heat waves. But of that total, just a tiny fraction–16 segments, or 4 percent of the total–so much as mentioned the words “climate change,” “global warming” or “greenhouse gases.[3]

What is left unmentioned is that fact that all of these “extreme weather” incidents have one common denominator that FAIR and corporate and progressive media alike consistently overlook: the sun. As University of Winnipeg climatologist Dr. Tim Ball explains (here at 35:00), the IPCC’s “terms of reference” through which the body proceeds to generate its findings exclude the sun and its many demonstrable atmospheric effects as factors in the warming and cooling of the earth’s climate. It is thus no wonder that at best fringe or nonexistent causes of “climate change”–such as minuscule alterations in atmospheric gases–are pointed to with great alarm by the IPCC and its proponents.

Despite far more unambiguous and compelling scientific explanations the notion that “carbon emissions” are the foremost cause of natural climactic events has become something of a religion, and this is especially the case on the progressive-left, where adherents mechanically accept the curious agenda and its ostensibly “scientific” basis while vehemently condemning non-believers as “climate deniers.”

As Canadian journalist Donna LaFramboise has documented in her important 2011 exposé, the IPCC’s scholarly personnel is in fact heavily weighted toward what are often third-or-fourth-rate scientific talent whose eco-political stances are strictly in accord with the IPCC’s “research” agenda pushing anthropogenic climate change. IPCC authors often include climatology graduate students and even environmental activists from organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund—indeed, figures with little-if-any scientific training but with clear agendas to promote.

LaFramboise further found that one third of the literature reviewed and cited by the IPCC in its 2007 report was–contrary to IPCC chief publicist Ragendra Pachauri’s pronouncements–not even peer-reviewed, and in many cases included citations of promotional literature devised and distributed by environmental activist organizations.

These unethical and compromising relationships are not difficult to explain if one is to recognize the IPCC for what it in fact is—a powerful political organization with the overarching objective of manufacturing consent and achieving transnational policy harmonization around the largely discursive construct of anthropogenic carbon-centric climate change.

The fact that the IPCC is capable of forthrightly carrying out one of the greatest scientific frauds in human history, setting long range governmental policies while enlisting allegedly intellectual sophisticates and “progressive” news media as its most devoted foot soldiers, is no small-scale feat. It is, rather, an immense achievement in modern propaganda and thought control that only hints at the powerful forces behind a much more far-reaching agenda.

Notes

[1] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Human Influence on Climate Clear: IPCC Says,” Geneva Switzerland: World Meteorological Organization. The notion of “a 97% consensus” has itself become a common mantra for climate change fear mongering and grounds for labeling someone a “climate denier.” Yet there is limited evidence of any such consensus concerning ACC among climatologists. The oft-cited 2009 American Geophysical Union survey alleging a 98% consensus among scientists on ACC cannot sustain even modest scrutiny. See Larry Bell, “That Scientific Global Warming Consensus … Not!” Forbes.com, July 7, 2012. Another study held up as “proof” of scientific consensus, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” asserts only carefully qualified claims along these lines. “A broad analysis of the climate scientist community itself,” the authors point out, “the distribution of credibility of dissenting researchers relative to agreeing researchers, and the level of agreement among top climate experts has not been conducted and would inform future ACC discussions.” The brief paper assesses “an extensive data set of 1,372 climate researchers” to conclude that the scientific expertise and prominence of those who accept the IPCC’s ACC tenets surpass those who remain “unconvinced.” This begs the question, To what degree are the requisites of foundation funding related to espousing IPCC/ACC opinion? William R. L. Anderegg, James W. Prall, Jacob Harold, and Stephen H. Schneider, “Expert Credibility in Climate Change,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2010.

[2] James F. Tracy, “The Forces Behind Carbon-Centric Environmentalism,” Global Research, November 12, 2013.

[3] “TV News and Extreme Weather: Don’t Mention Climate Change,” Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, December 18, 2013. It might be added that corporate media and progressive-left counterparts uniformly fail to consider other possible causes of such unusual weather events, such as geoengineering and similar “environmental modification techniques” acknowledged by the US military and undertaken in many industrialized countries. See, for example, Michel Chossudovsky, “Climate Change, Geoengineering, and Environmental Modification Techniques,” Global Research, November 24, 2013.

In spite of online censorship efforts directed against the independent media, we are happy to say that readership on globalresearch.ca has recently increased. We wish to thank all of you who share our articles far and wide.

We cover a diversity of key issues you would be hard pressed to find on any other single online news source. This is truly independent news and analysis, a dying breed.

Our costs have increased and our revenue has gone down over the past year. We are running a monthly deficit. Help us keep the independent voice alive by becoming a member or making a donation today!

*     *     *

Annals of Impeachment: From Nixon’s “Smoking Gun” Tape to Trump Zelensky Summary

By Juan Cole, September 29, 2019

Trump went on to withhold $250 million in military aid from Ukraine, which Congress appropriated, and many suspect the suspension of aid was a way of pressuring Zelensky to look into Hunter Biden.

Annexation of Kashmir: Pakistan Just Warned the World About the 21st Century’s Munich Moment

By Andrew Korybko, September 29, 2019

Pakistani Prime Minister Khan warned the world that India’s annexation of Kashmir is akin to Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland and might even lead to a nuclear war if New Delhi proceeds to follow in the Fuhrer’s footsteps and attack its neighbor.

Greta Thunberg and Big-Biz’ Climate Charade

By Tony Cartalucci, September 29, 2019

Just like the “war on terror” was a fraudulent campaign aimed at very real terrorists – Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” climate movement is a fraudulent campaign aimed at the very real environmental damage being done around us.

The Climate Action Summit Fiasco

By Dr. Arshad M. Khan, September 29, 2019

No one could fail to be touched by the fear (for the future) and urgency in Greta Thunberg’s young voice as she broke down while addressing world leaders on the last day of the UN Climate Summit.  The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on the oceans showed a worse prognosis, the patient is clearly worse.

Green New Deal and the Climate Movement. Trojan Horses for the Billionaire Class?

By Michael Welch, Naomi Wolf, and Cory Morningstar, September 29, 2019

During the week from September 20-27th, an estimated 6 million people in thousands of towns and cities around the world, took part in “climate strikes” intended to spur world leaders into action around the mitigation of climate change.

Turkey Gives the US a Deadline in Syrian ‘Safe-zone’

By Steven Sahiounie, September 27, 2019

hile most of Syria struggles to recover from 8 years of bloody conflict, Idlib is left as the last hot-spot.  The population in Idlib today includes foreign terrorists following the tenets of Al Qaeda.  The terrorists have wives and children, and while they may be seen as innocent, they remind us of the ISIS wives and children now in the Al Hol “concentration camp”, who is seen to be the seeds of the next ISIS resurgence.

5G Cell Phone Transmission Across Poland: Prime Minister Morawiecki Did not Sign the Global 5G Appeal

By Julian Rose, September 27, 2019

This week, according to the parliamentary schedule, Mateusz Morawiecki will lead his government into presenting a new Act that will annul the existing law on ‘acceptable levels’ of Electro Magnetic Frequencies (EMF) in order to introduce microwave frequency transmission levels 10 to 100 times more intense than current levels.

*

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 Disney-ABC Television Group/flickr/cc

On August 5, 1974, Nixon was forced by the Supreme Court to release the smoking gun tape in which he and his chief of staff H. R. Haldemann had a conversation, in the course of which Nixon could be heard acknowledging his knowledge of the burglary of the Democratic National Committee office files in the Watergate building and the bugging of those offices, and discussing ordering the CIA to lean on the FBI to stop its investigation of the break-in. This tape caused his support among a majority of Republicans in Congress to collapse, making it clear that he would be impeached, and so he resigned.

Nixon did not need to steal the DNC files (which he probably did order, but certainly tried to cover up)– he likely had been well-placed to win reelection. He was just so paranoid that he was sure that the Democrats were conspiring against him and he had to know how.Nixon tried to set in train a break-in at the liberal Brookings Institution and his aide Chuck Colson suggested they firebomb it so that its files could be stolen and it could be wiretapped. (The planned bombing did not take place. But when we used to chant against the “mad bomber in the White House,” we had no idea how right we were).

Nixon was a habitual crook, but he at least retained some notion of what normal people would think of him if they knew who he really was. He at least tried to cover it up.

Trump and his cronies are so far gone that they actually thought that staffers’ summary of his July conversation with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky would exonerate him. Instead, it has so many Nixonian smoking guns that it single-handedly provoked a smog alert on Capitol Hill.

I edited down the summary a little, and it is clear that Trump began by holding out a carrot (how much we are doing for Ukraine), and then urged him to look into the (untrue conspiracy) theory that Hillary Clinton’s emails were on a server in Ukraine (“crowdstrike”).

Trump went on to withhold $250 million in military aid from Ukraine, which Congress appropriated, and many suspect the suspension of aid was a way of pressuring Zelensky to look into Hunter Biden.

And then Trump wanted to reignite the investigation of the Burisma Holdings natural gas company, on the board of which Hunter Biden served. That investigation had begun years before and went nowhere, and was shelved.

Trump and his fellow conspiracy theorists are convinced that Joe Biden pushed for the firing of prosecutor general Viktor Shokin because he was too energetically looking into Burisma and its CEO. It was the opposite. Shokin, despite his own protestations, was known to have dropped the ball on that and many other investigations, and the European Union, the IMF and the US all wanted him gone.

So Biden would have had to be trying to get Hunter’s company in trouble if he pushed out the do-nothing Shokin. Actually Burisma and Hunter were not the issue. Hunter himself was never under investigation, and the company had long since announced the end of the investigation and its willingness to repay any taxes it still was held to have owed. Biden wasn’t acting on his own behalf but rather was a messenger of the international community in pushing for Shokin’s ouster.

Rudy Giuliani was lobbying for the restart of the Burisma investigation before Zelensky was elected, last spring, and then tried to get his hooks into the new president. Giuliani thinks that Biden will be the Democratic standard-bearer, and that Trump can do to him what he did to Hillary Clinton by spinning crazy conspiracy theories that are amplified by Bob Mercer and Vladimir Putin’s St. Petersburg troll farms on social media, and which might tip the election to Trump.

Zelensky is a comedian and actor who starred in a popular TV show, playing the president of the Ukraine. So he is a neophyte (sort of like Trump) and perhaps easily manipulated.

Here’s the edited summary, which clearly shows that Trump solicited the interference of a foreign power in a US election (which is illegal) and that he held US aid over Zelensky’s head in exchange for a kind of oppo research, which is a form of buying a thing of value for the election and is also illegal.

A smoking gun.

*

UNCLASSIFIED

Declassified by order of the President
September 24, 2019

MEMORANDUM OF TELEPHONE CONVERSATION

SUBJECT: Telephone Conversation with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine

PARTICIPANTS: President Zelenskyy of Ukraine

Notetakers: The White House Situation·Room

DATE, TIME July 25, 2019, 9:03 – 9:33 a.m. EDT
AND PLACE: Residence

The President: Congratulations on a great victory. We all watched from the United States and you did a terrific job. The way you came from behind, somebody who wasn’t given much of a chance, and you ended up winning easily. It’s a fantastic achievement. Congratulations . . .

President Zelenskyy: [spelling error sic] Well yes, to tell you the truth, we are trying to work hard because we wanted to drain the swamp here in our country. We brought in many many new people. Not the old politicians, not the typical politicians, because we want to have a new format and a new type of government. You are a great teacher for us and in that.

The President: Well it’s very nice of you to say that. I will say that we do a lot for Ukraine. We spend a lot of effort and a lot of time. Much more than the European countries are doing and they should be helping you more than they are. Germany does almost nothing for you . . .

President Zelenskyy: Yes you are absolutely right. Not only 100%, but actually 100% . . .

The President: I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it, if that’s possible.

President Zelenskyy: Yes it is very important for me and everything that you just mentioned earlier. For me as a President, is very important and we are open for any future cooperation. We are ready to open a new page on cooperation in relations between the United States and Ukraine . . .

The President: Good because I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great. The former ambassador from the United States, the woman, was bad news and the people she was dealing with in the Ukraine were bad news so I just want to let you know that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.

President Zelenskyy: I wanted to tell you about the prosecutor. First of all, I understand and I’m knowledgeable about the situation. Since we have won the absolute majority in our Parliament, the next prosecutor general will be 100% my person, my candidate, who will be approved by the parliament and will start as a new prosecutor in September. He or she will look into the situation, specifically to the company that you mentioned in this issue. The issue of the investigation of the case is actually the issue of making sure to restore the honesty so we will take care of that and will work on the investigation of the case. On top of that, I would kindly ask you if you have any additional information that you can provide to us, it would be very helpful for the investigation to make sure that we administer justice in our country with regard to the Ambassador to the United States from Ukraine as far as I recall her name was Ivanovich. It was great that you were the first one who told me that she was a bad ambassador because I agree with you 100%. Her attitude towards me was far from the best as she admired the previous President and she was on his side. She would not accept me as a new President well enough.

The President: Well, she’s going to go through some things. I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair prosecutor so good luck with everything. Your economy is going to get better and better I predict. You have a lot of assets. It’s a great country. I have many Ukrainian friends, their incredible people.

President Zelenskyy: I would like to tell you that I also have quite a few Ukrainian friends that live in the United States . . . I would like to thank you very much for your support.

The President: Good. Well, thank you very much and I appreciate that. I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call. Thank you. Whenever you would like to come to the White House, feel free to call. Give us a date and we’ll work that out. I look forward to seeing you.

President Zelenskyy: Thank you very much. I would be very happy to come and would be happy to meet with you personally and get to know you better . . .

The President: Okay, we can work that out. I look forward to seeing you in Washington and maybe in Poland because I think we are going to be there at that time.

President Zelenskyy: Thank you very much Mr. President.

The President: Congratulations on a fantastic job you’ve done. The whole world was watching. I’m not sure it was so much of an upset but congratulations.

President Zelenskyy: Thank you Mr. President bye-bye.

— End of Conversation —

*

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 Informed Comment

Trump and Johnson’s populism have shaken the old Establishment, and raised some very interesting questions about who is and who is not nowadays inside the Establishment and a beneficiary of the protection of the liberal elite. Yesterday two startling examples in the news coverage cast a very lurid light on this question, and I ask you to consider the curious cases of Hunter Biden and Brendan Cox, two of the most undeserving and unpleasant people that can be imagined.

The BBC news bulletins led on the move to impeach Donald Trump for, as they put it, his efforts to get the President of Ukraine to undermine a political opponent. To be plain, I think Trump was quite wrong to get personally involved in this, but please park the entire subject of Donald Trump to one side for the next ten minutes.

What I find deeply reprehensible in all the BBC coverage is their failure to report the facts of the case, and their utter lack of curiosity about why Joe Biden’s son Hunter was paid $60,000 a month by Burisma, Ukraine’s largest natural gas producer, as an entirely absent non-executive director, when he had no relevant experience in Ukraine or gas, and very little business experience, having just been dishonorably discharged from the Navy Reserve for use of crack cocaine? Is that question not just little bit interesting? That may be the thin end of it – in 2014-15 Hunter Biden received US $850,000 from the intermediary company channeling the payments. In reporting on Trump being potentially impeached for asking about it, might you not expect some analysis – or at least mention – of what he was asking about?

As far as I am aware, the BBC have not reported at all the other thing Trump was asking Zelensky about – Crowdstrike. Regular readers will recall that Crowdstrike are the Clinton linked “cyber-security” company which provided the “forensic data” to the FBI on the alleged Russian hack of the DNC servers – data which has been analysed by my friend Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA, who characterises it as showing speeds of transfer impossible by internet and indicating a download to an attached drive. The FBI were never allowed access to the actual DNC server – and never tried, taking the DNC’s consultants word for the contents, which itself is sufficient proof of the bias of the “investigation”.

Crowdstrike also made the claim that the same Russia hackers – “Fancy Bear” – who hacked the DNC, hacked Ukrainian artillery software causing devastating losses of Ukrainian artillery. This made large headlines at the time. What did not make any MSM headlines was the subsequent discovery that all of this never happened and the artillery losses were entirely fictitious. As Crowdstrike had claimed that it was the use of the same coding in the DNC hack as in the preceding (non-existent) Ukraine artillery hack, that proved Russia hacked the DNC, this is pretty significant. Trump was questioning Zelensky about rumours the “hacked” DNC server was hidden in the Ukraine by Crowdstrike. The media has no interest in reporting any of that at all.

It is plain in that case that Trump is the media’s villain and the Bidens, father and son, are therefore heroes being protected by the Establishment media. Now let us look at the case of Brendan Cox.

Boris Johnson’s behaviour in the Commons two nights ago was reprehensible. Watching the unrepentant and aggressive braying of the Tory MPs, I was genuinely concerned about the consequences for democracy should these empowered right wingers ever get a majority. Johnson has removed the social restraint which used to cloak their atavistic instincts.

This Tory display also very much reinforced what I have been saying for years, that we will not gain Scottish Independence through a repeat of 2014. We were allowed a referendum with only moderate cheating by the British state purely because they believed there was no chance we could win. They have been disabused. There will never be a Section 30 order an an agreed referendum again. We will have to seize Independence by means which the British state will deem unlawful. Anybody not prepared to do that is not serious about Independence.

I digress. Johnson’s behaviour is appalling and he is at an interesting stage where the Establishment and its media is unsure whether to embrace or repudiate him, the calculation depending on whether they think he will win, and on the impact of Brexit on their personal financial interests. But as with Trump, I ask you to set aside your judgement on Johnson and not think of him for a moment.

Yesterday BBC news programmes brought us repeated appearances of Brendan Cox to comment on Boris Johnson and other MP’s parliamentary behaviour. This Brendan Cox:

One such allegation was that Cox pinned a co-worker to a wall by her throat while telling her ‘I want to fuck you’. Cox left the organisation before being subjected to scrutiny on this and other allegations. However, another woman, a senior US official who met him at a Harvard University event, made similar allegations against him, ‘of grabbing her by the hips, pulling her hair, and forcing his thumb into her mouth’ ‘in a sexual way’. In contrast to Assange’s treatment, and despite a social-media furore, for nearly three years there was largely a media blackout on the story. At last, in February 2018, a right-wing tabloid broke the embargo and reported the allegations, and other news organisations had to follow suit. Finally, ‘Cox apologised for the “hurt and offence” caused by his past behaviour’ and announced he was withdrawing from public life.

I strongly recommend you to read that last linked article. Cox is very much on the wavelength of the Establishment media, a full member of the New Labour neo-liberal elite who shuttled between jobs in the Labour Party and in high paying neo-liberal propaganda organisation Save the Children. Cox was personally pocketing £106,000 a year plus expenses from donations to the “charity”. A serial unfaithful sexual aggressor, his wife’s murder sees him recast by the media as the grieving survivor of a perfect marriage. Precisely his strongest political supporters – Jess Phillips, Stella Creasy etc – are Julian Assange’s bitterest opponents due to far flimsier, hotly denied and less attested sexual allegations than those against Cox. But neo-liberals get a free pass from the modern feminist movement (cf Bill Clinton).

Boris Johnson’s behaviour was a dsgrace. But that is no reason for the BBC rehabilitation of the “retired from public life” sexual predator.

The fascinating thing is the binary, good versus evil, narrative which is being pursued in the liberal media. Trump and Johnson are bad. Therefore Hunter Biden and Brendan Cox must be good. The truth, of course, is much more complex than that. I am afraid to say that if you want an excessive simplification, a more accurate one would be that the entire political elite on all sides are self-serving and venal.

There is a more interesting story inside that, where significant portions of the public have lost respect for the Establishment, due in large part to the vast and increasing wealth gap in society, but this disillusion has been battened on by populist charlatans, and particularly directed against immigrants. This feels like an extremely unstable phase in society and politics. But instability brings the possibility of radical change, which is indeed much needed. We must all work for good from 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.

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore

According to an exclusive report published by Greek online media Rizospastis this week, within the framework of the “Greece-USA Mutual Defense Cooperation Agreement,” Washington and Athens have agreed to expand and increase U.S. military installations in the Mediterranean country. This comes off the recent U.S. announcement that it wants to privatize the port of Alexandroupolis near the strategic Dardenelles.

U.S.-Turkish relations have traditionally been strong because of Ankara’s submissiveness to Washington’s demands in the framework of NATO, but have soured in recent years because of the U.S.’s support of the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the Syrian extension of the Turkey-based Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK) that Ankara, and hypocritically Washington, consider as a terrorist organization. Because of Washington’s support for what Ankara considers a terrorist organization, it has only pushed Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan closer to NATO’s main adversary, Russia, where the two countries now work in committees to find peace in Syria and have significantly increased economic and military ties.

Greece however has at times been renegade in NATO, especially during the breakup of Yugoslavia where food, oil, and arms were transported from Greece into Serbia in violation of the UN embargo; Greece was the only European Union state to back Belgrade’s position that Serbian forces had only entered Bosnian territory in response to their provocations; Greece voted against NATO air strikes on Serbian positions; the Aegean country refused any use of the NATO air base in Preveza on the Ionian Sea; and, Athens refused to supply Greek troops to the UN peacekeeping mission in Bosnia. NATO plans were also leaked directly to Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić so frequently that NATO allies ceased sharing NATO military plans with the Greek authorities, according to Professor C. Wiebes’ report to the Dutch government, titled Intelligence en de oorlog in Bosnie 1992-1995. There was also the famous case of the Greek Captain of the Themistocles warship, Marinos Ritsoudis, who was awarded by the Serbian Orthodox Church the Order of Emperor St. Constantine for refusing his orders to join NATO’s war against Serbia in 1999, and with the support of all his sailors returned the ship back to her port.

Greece was the only European country researched by Pew in a 2013 study where favorable views towards Russia prevailed (63% favorable vs. 33% unfavorable), demonstrating that Moscow could have a real ally within the NATO bloc where the majority of civilians look at Russia favourably and where the political, military and intelligence apparatuses of the state have significantly defied NATO before. However, in a strange oddity, it is Greece pivoting strongly towards the U.S. while Turkey strongly pivots towards Russia. This is despite the fact that according to a November 2018 INR poll, less Turks view Russia favourably compared to the Greeks at 51% and more Turks view Russia unfavourably compared to the Greeks at 43%, and also the fact that Turkey is directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of tens of Russian soldiers in Syria.

Because Turkey violates Greece’s maritime and air space on a daily basis; makes continued threats to invade the rest of Cyprus; Erdoğan weeks ago made a speech in front of a map that shows Greece’s eastern Mediterranean islands occupied by Turkey; the Turkish government removed the inhabited Greek island of Kastellorizo from online maps to claim sovereignty over oil and gas reserves; and making continued threats to flood Greece again with illegal immigrants, Greece has major security concerns that has been ignored by both Washington and Moscow, until now.

It is an odd choice that Greece would pivot towards the U.S. to address its security concerns since only 36% of Greeks view the U.S. favourably, but it has only been the U.S. that has offered boosted security. With Russia increasing its relations with Turkey, Greece is left at the mercy of the U.S. to guarantee its security from external aggression, even if that external threat is from a fellow NATO member. It was inevitable that with the successful recent election of neoliberal President Kyriakos Mitsotakis, Greece would become closer with Washington that was mostly resisted by the previous left-wing Syriza government. The Syriza administration period also represents a missed opportunity for Moscow to increase military ties with Greece to ensure its Mediterranean access.

U.S.  Secretary of Defense Mark Esper presented to Congress last week a list of 127 plans to expand, renovate or build new U.S. military infrastructure and bases abroad, many of which are in Greece. This suggests that the U.S. is fortifying Greece as a means to block Russia in the Black Sea, the location of Russia’s only ice-free ports, if it ever had too. With U.S.-Turkish relations souring, and the latter controlling the Dardanelles that connects the Black Sea to the Aegean/Mediterranean Seas, the U.S. is now turning to Greece as Plan B to contain Russia in the Black Sea if it was ever needed.

Although the narrow Dardanelles spills open into the northern Aegean Sea, when considering there are thousands of islands in the Aegean, it makes the sea a naval labyrinth with limited manoeuvrability. The Greek Navy however has thousands of years of experience in navigating these waters, winning famous battles such Salamis in 480 BC, despite having inferior numbers to the Persians but having knowledge of the islands and currents. This is not to ignore the obvious differences in ancient and modern naval warfare, but it is to emphasize that the landscape and environment always influences battles, even in the age of robotic and drone warfare.

With Greece spending the second highest amount of GDP out of the all NATO states on its military, making it a Small Power in the Eastern Mediterranean and Balkan regions, the country has a formidable Navy and Air Force superior to Turkey’s, and perhaps formidable enough to be able to block Russia with U.S. assistance in a hypothetical situation. Despite the favorable views the majority of Greeks have towards Russia, the new Greek government does not only tolerate the U.S. plans, but encourages them. Therefore, Greece in its endless efforts to completely ensure its security from Turkish aggression, is also becoming a U.S.-supported Small Power that could be weaponized against Russia. However, there is also little evidence that the new Greek government is anti-Russian, or would willingly back U.S. aggression against Russia, despite the increased U.S. military presence in Greece, which in Athens’ view, is aimed against Turkey, but of course Washington also has its eyes on Russia.

*

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.

Paul Antonopoulos is director of the Multipolarity research centre.

Featured image is from InfoBrics

As Congress moves toward a possible formal impeachment of President Donald Trump, they should consider words spoken at the Constitutional Convention, when the Founders explained that impeachment was intended to have many important purposes, not just removing a president from office.

A critical debate took place on July 20, 1787, which resulted in adding the impeachment clause to the U.S. Constitution. Benjamin Franklin, the oldest and probably wisest delegate at the Convention, said that when the president falls under suspicion, a “regular and peaceable inquiry” is needed.

In my work as a law professor studying original texts about the U.S. Constitution, I’ve found statements made at the Constitutional Convention explaining that the Founders viewed impeachment as a regular practice with three purposes:

• To remind both the country and the president that he is not above the law
• To deter abuses of power
• To provide a fair and reliable method to resolve suspicions about misconduct.

The Convention delegates repeatedly agreed with the assertion by George Mason of Virginia, that “no point is of more importance … than the right of impeachment” because no one is “above justice.”

Need for deterrence

One of the Founders’ greatest fears was that the president would abuse his power. George Mason described the president as the “man who can commit the most extensive injustice.” James Madison thought the president might “pervert his administration into a scheme of [stealing public funds] or oppression or betray his trust to foreign powers.” Edmund Randolph, governor of Virginia, said the president “will have great opportunitys of abusing his power; particularly in time of war when the military force, and in some respects the public money will be in his hands.”

Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania worried that the president “may be bribed by a greater interest to betray his trust and no one would say that we ought to expose ourselves to the danger of seeing [him] in foreign pay.” James Madison, himself a future president, said that in the case of the president, “corruption was within the compass of probable events … and might be fatal to the Republic.”

William Davie of North Carolina argued that impeachment was “an essential security for the good behaviour” of the president; otherwise, “he will spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.” Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts pointed out that a good president will not worry about impeachment, but a “bad one ought to be kept in fear.”

Creating a powerful oversight procedure

Until the very last week of the Convention, the Founders’ design was for the impeachment process to start in the House of Representatives and conclude with trial in the Supreme Court.

It was not until Sept. 8, 1787, that the Convention voted to give the Senate instead the power to conduct impeachment trials.

This is clear evidence that the Convention at first wanted to combine the authority and resources of the House of Representatives to conduct the impeachment investigation – a body they called “the grand Inquest of this Nation” – with the fairness and power exemplified by trial in a court.

Even though trial of impeachments was moved from the Supreme Court to the Senate, Congress can still draw on the example of court procedures to accomplish an effective inquiry, especially if they are trying to get information from uncooperative subjects. In many of the investigations that are now part of the House’s impeachment inquiry, the Trump administration has refused to hand over documents and blocked officials from testifying to Congress.

The Constitution makes clear that impeachment is not a criminal prosecution: “Judgment in cases of impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from office.” If impeachment trials had remained at the Supreme Court, the Court could therefore have consulted the rules it has approved for civil cases. It makes sense that when the Convention at the last minute decided Congress would have complete power over impeachment, the delegates intended Congress would have at least the same powers the Supreme Court would have exercised.

When courts are stonewalled

In civil cases, courts have powerful tools for dealing with someone who blocks access to the very information needed to judge the allegations against him.

The most commonly known method is the rule that says that once a person is legally served with a lawsuit against them, they must respond to the complaint. If they don’t, the court can enter a judgment against them based on the allegations in the complaint. But there are other processes as well.

One court tool that could easily be adapted to the impeachment process comes from the federal rules of civil procedure. In a process called “request for admission,” one party to a lawsuit can give their opponents a list of detailed factual allegations with a demand for a response.

If the party does not respond, the court can treat each allegation as if it were true, and proceed accordingly. If the respondent denies one or more particular allegations, there is a follow-up procedure called a request for production, demanding any documents in their possession or control supporting the denial. If the respondent refuses, again the court has the power to order that the alleged fact be taken as true.

Getting to the truth

In an impeachment process against President Donald Trump, the House of Representatives could present the president with a request for admission to the following two simple factual statements, which could be inferred from a whistleblower complaint:

1. “In July 2019 President Trump personally issued instructions to suspend all U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.”
2. “President Trump issued these instructions with the intent to pressure the government of Ukraine to conduct a formal investigation of Hunter Biden and his father Joe Biden.”

The House could give Trump a brief amount of time to respond, including providing any evidence that might disprove the allegations.

If he refused to respond, or if he denied but refused to produce supporting documentation, the House could assume the set of alleged facts to be true and include them in articles of impeachment. Then the House could vote and, depending on the outcome of that vote, the matter would then proceed to the Senate for trial.

Congress could engage in a long, drawn-out battle trying to use its oversight and subpoena powers to force various executive branch officials to release documents or testify about what they saw, heard and did. Or they could try this simple and quick procedure, which does not require the cooperation of the Department of Justice or court action.

Good for the president and the country

Benjamin Franklin told his fellow delegates the story of a recent dispute that had greatly troubled the Dutch Republic.

One of the Dutch leaders, William V, the Prince of Orange, was suspected to have secretly sabotaged a critical alliance with France. The Dutch had no impeachment process and thus no way to conduct “a regular examination” of these allegations. These suspicions mounted, giving rise to “to the most violent animosities & contentions.”

The moral to Franklin’s story? If Prince William had “been impeachable, a regular & peaceable inquiry would have taken place.” The prince would, “if guilty, have been duly punished — if innocent, restored to the confidence of the public.”

Franklin concluded that impeachment was a process that could be “favorable” to the president, saying it is the best way to provide for “the regular punishment of the Executive when his misconduct should deserve it and for his honorable acquittal when he should be unjustly accused.”

*

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.

Clark D. Cunningham, W. Lee Burge Chair in Law & Ethics; Director, National Institute for Teaching Ethics & Professionalism, Georgia State University

Pakistani Prime Minister Khan warned the world that India’s annexation of Kashmir is akin to Nazi Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland and might even lead to a nuclear war if New Delhi proceeds to follow in the Fuhrer’s footsteps and attack its neighbor.

***

Donald Trump said he believes the Constitution lets him do “whatever I want as President.” In over two and a half years, Trump has been a serial violator of the Constitution, unmatched by any president in American history. Just about every day he is a constitutional outlaw.

Constitutional scholar Bruce Fein has documented twelve categories of major constitutional transgressions. Some are also statutory crimes. Many of these involve Trump overpowering the critical separation of powers that our founders rigorously established to assure that the president does not become a monarch like King George III.

The framers were very clear that Congress and only Congress can appropriate monies for the Executive branch to spend; that only Congress can declare war; that the president must faithfully execute the laws; and that the Congress has the full authority to investigate the executive branch for abuses, irregularities, illegalities, or the need for new laws. Trump totally defies Congressional subpoenas for documents and witnesses. That grave overthrow of constitutional government is alone enough for eviction from office.

When he is not openly violating the Constitution, Trump lies and commits impeachable offenses.

The most recent violation was in seeking from a foreign power—Ukraine—assistance in influencing our presidential election in his favor by investigating a major challenger—former Vice President Joseph Biden and his son. He dangled a $250 million military aid package (maybe more) to Ukraine by suspending it before speaking to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on the telephone.

This “betrayal of his oath of office, betrayal of our national security, and betrayal of the integrity of our elections,” in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s words, finally moved the reluctant House leader. After being AWOL on all the other serious, repeated flouting of constitutional behavior, she is now focusing on Trump and Ukraine.

Much has been reported about Trump’s chronic lying. He lies daily, sometimes hourly, with his tweets and public blather. The Washington Post has catalogued over 12,000 prevarications and false statements since January 2017. Not enough, however, has been made of the aggregate effects of such lying as a living. Trump creates illusions about himself, about his alleged achievements, and about conditions in the United States and world. He spreads constant lies and transmits the lies of others. Often these are monstrous lies, which slander innocent people and trick his supporters into believing him because they think no president could possibly lie like that to them. These are dangerous obsessions for a president.

Trump says he wants everyone to have “beautiful” health insurance, yet he pushes Congress to change Obamacare, stripping twenty million people of health insurance without any substitute program.

Trump brags about consistently defying Congressional statutes by dismantling federal agencies established to protect all Americans where they live, work, and raise their families.

Trump says we have the cleanest air and water ever, yet his henchmen are running these agencies into the ground and repealing or weakening life-saving pollution controls. The result is more toxic air in your lungs, more child asthma, and dirtier drinking water.

Trump lies about voter fraud, about not using his office to enrich his business, and about all the new factories coming to the U.S. He even lies about the weather, damaging the credibility of the National Weather Service. He denies his sexual exploits and hush money payments. He rejects without evidence ten serious obstruction of justice actions documented in the Mueller Report.

Trump denies that his cuts in food stamps will leave over half a million children without a free school lunch. He denies that his tax cut overwhelmingly benefited the super-rich and major corporations.

Trump says his nominees are extremely qualified. In reality, whether it is the EPA, the public lands agency, the Department of Labor, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Trump has chosen lawless people whose main qualification was urging the abolition or weakening of these federal law enforcers against corporate crimes and abuses.

Trump falsely says that climate disruption is not scientifically established, but a “Chinese hoax,” while our country in plain sight is being battered by record breaking heat waves, hurricanes, floods, droughts, and tornadoes.

Trump says coal, oil, and gas are better for America than wind power (which he says causes cancer) and solar energy, which are cheaper and safer.

Trump is actually increasing deadly greenhouse gases as a result and worsening the climate crisis that the Pentagon calls a national security risk.

Trump keeps promising to control soaring drug prices while refusing to get that job done.

Trump lies about the massiveness of his wealth, yet opposes any release of his tax returns.

Trump says brutal dictators are doing great for their people, ignoring the obvious facts.

Trump operates in a vast cocoon of falsity and refuses to read and consult with people who are not sycophants. This is an egomaniacal, narcissistic illusionist who could start wars, has his hand on the nuclear trigger, and believes he is about the law and Congressional controls.

Trump regularly calls legislators investigating him “sick,” “treasonous,” “crooked,” and “low-IQ.” Truthfully these are descriptions of him.

Trump, unlike Clinton who was impeached by the House in 1998, has successfully resisted testifying or being questioned under oath. He is a many sided fugitive from justice, one or more steps above of the law.

Pelosi is making a mistake if she doesn’t go forward with the full articles of impeachment against Trump. Relying on the Ukraine betrayal is not enough to counter the attack by Trump’s avalanche of lies, phony distractions, and possibly a “wag the dog,” desperation overseas.

*

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.

Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate, lawyer, and author. His latest books include: To the Ramparts: How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why It Isn’t Too Late to Reverse Course, How the Rats Re-Formed the Congress, Breaking Through Power: It’s easier than we think, and Animal Envy: A Fable. 

Featured image is from Flickr

A 16 year old girl is obviously not behind a “global movement” demanding “climate action” from governments.

The massive corporate Western media is. And anything the corporate media is behind certainly cannot be described as “grassroots.”

It is the Western media’s daily promotion of this 16 year old that has created “her” movement for her.

Her family background of entertainers and performers is particularly interesting in this regard – Greta Thunberg being the daughter of entertainer Malena Ernman and actor Svante Thunberg, and granddaughter of actor Olof Thunberg. She is the perfect candidate surrounded by the perfect coaches to become a central figure in an exercise of corporate public relations.

Also behind the growing momentum of this “climate action” movement is a myriad of corporate-foundations – notorious for their support of regime change around the globe, the protection and promotion of corporate-financier special interests, and the co-opting of legitimate causes ranging from human rights to now concerns over our collective impact on the environment.

Just like the “war on terror” was a fraudulent campaign aimed at very real terrorists – Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” climate movement is a fraudulent campaign aimed at the very real environmental damage being done around us.

And just like the “war on terror” where the US was caught in fact arming and funding the very terrorists they were supposed to be fighting – all as a pretext to advance otherwise indefensible wars of aggression, “Fridays for Future” is supported by and being advanced for the very worst environmental offenders on Earth to advance an agenda that allows for otherwise indefensible and unpopular policies – many of which will be easily delayed or redirected in the West while forced on developing nations.

“Climate action” forced on the developing world is aimed at crippling progress and granting the West a reprieve from its otherwise irreversible economic, political, and military decline upon the global stage and its ability to coerce and exploit these nations, their people, and their resources.

What is “Fridays for Future?” 

Following the money is particularly easy in unravelling “Fridays for Future.” The “movement’s” own website – under “About” contains a list of websites that make up the “movement’s” network.

Each page listed contains the School Strike 4 Climate (SS4C) logo. They also contain links to various supporters and affiliates. The Canadian page – for example – has a “Promo Toolkit” page full of resources provided by corporate foundations.

One foundation in particular that turns up repeatedly is 350.org.

350.org has published the “Climate Resistance Handbook” which includes a “foreword” by Greta Thunberg herself.

The handbook itself lists zero relevant concerns or actions regarding actual environmental issues and instead is a rehash of familiar CIA-honed tactics used by the US for its so-called “color revolutions” around the globe.

The handbook even cites the US overthrow of Serbia and Ukraine as examples for environmental activists to follow.

Regarding Serbia, the handbook would claim:

A group of young people in Serbia nonviolently fought their powerful, ruthless dictator in Serbia. Tey required every person who joined their movement to learn the upside-down triangle. They led trainings to explain the concept and their plan to remove the pillars they saw.

This approach was a key ingredient to their movement. And they were successful in overthrowing the brutal Serbian dictator.

In reality, the US itself would eventually reveal no such tactics worked and instead it was the millions of dollars the US government funneled into Serbia to back a covert coup that eventually overthrew the Serbian government.

This coup was not to stop a “brutal dictator,” but rather to fold Serbia, its people, and resources into America’s eastward expansion toward Russian borders.

The New York Times in its article, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?,” would admit:

Backed by extensive financing from the United States, Otpor steadily coaxed them from the inertia and introspective desperation of the 1990’s, when the most decisive act of the best and the brightest was emigration or draft evasion. Through marches and mockery, physical courage and mental agility, Otpor grew into the mass underground movement that stood at the disciplined core of the hidden revolution that really changed Serbia. No other opposition force was as unsettling to the regime or as critical to its overthrow.

The New York Times would also admit details of the extent of US financing:

American assistance to Otpor and the 18 parties that ultimately ousted Milosevic is still a highly sensitive subject. But Paul B. McCarthy, an official with the Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy, is ready to divulge some details. 

The article continues:

…McCarthy says, “from August 1999 the dollars started to flow to Otpor pretty significantly.” Of the almost $3 million spent by his group in Serbia since September 1998, he says, “Otpor was certainly the largest recipient.” The money went into Otpor accounts outside Serbia. 

Not only were the “young people of Serbia” successful only because of dubious, secretive US funding, they were successful and their “efforts” lauded by the Western media only because their efforts ultimately served US special interests.

Serbia is no more “free” or “democratic” today than it was under Milosevic. The only real change has been efforts to draw the broken nation westward into Washington and NATO’s orbit and away from its traditional ties to Russia. In essence, the youths of Serbia were drawn in as unwitting participants in expanding American hegemony, not promoting “democracy.”

In many ways then – 350.org picked the perfect example to help illustrate just exactly what “Fridays for Future” is really about – a cynical public relations exercise obviously funded and directed by Western special interests using “youths” and a well-meaning agenda as cover.

Instead of specifically and explicitly targeting the worst environmental offenders on Earth – corporations like Monsanto, Bayer, DuPont, and Syngenta spraying our food and environment with poison, or Exxon, BP, and Shell for their attempts to perpetuate petrol-driven energy, or labor unions like America’s United Automobile Workers which is part of a concerted effort to sabotage electric vehicle manufacturers like Telsa – “Fridays for Future” is allied with them in making ambiguous demands and giving naive youths the illusion that something is being done.

Worst still is the likelihood that this movement will actually result in much of the burden for these corporations’ offenses against the environment and human health being shifted onto the public in the form of new taxes and regulations.

Who Funds 350.org? 

Since 350.org has written the handbook “Fridays for Future” is following, it would be useful to know who exactly is behind 350.org itself and thus the agenda and movement it is promoting.

The organization lists around 200 different private and corporate foundations funding its activities.

This includes notorious actors like CREDO – a for-profit telecom corporation that uses the cover of activism to build up a loyal – if not fanatical – customer base. It also includes the big-pharma linked Burroughs Wellcome Fund.

The KR Foundation both directly funds 350.org and also funds other foundations listed on 350.org‘s donor list including the New Venture Fund and the European Climate Foundation.

The Oak Foundation also not only directly funds 350.org – it too funds many other donors appearing on 350.org‘s list including the Climate Works Foundation and the European Climate Foundation.

The Oak Foundation is deeply involved in virtually every aspect of US “soft power,” sponsoring organizations involved in US-funded “color revolutions” as well as fronts posing as human rights advocates like Amnesty International whose role is to fabricate human rights offenses to justify US wars of aggression in which very real human rights abuses thus unfold.

Alongside The Oak Foundation is George Soros and his Open Society Foundation as well as the US government’s own National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its various subsidiaries and affiliates.

On “Fridays for Future’s” official website Amnesty International is openly listed as one of several organizations assisting the movement with legal matters. The Open Society-linked Tides Foundation also appears on 350.org‘s list of donors.

NED-linked “labor unions” – the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) – are also heavily involved in the “Fridays for Future” movement. Labor unions in other countries like Australia openly admit they are involved in organizing the actual protests themselves.

Older stories from Democracy Now! like, “Unholy Alliance? The AFL-CIO and the National Endowment for Democracy in Venezuela,” illustrate the ties between the NED and AFL-CIO and their role in promoting US foreign policy. The NED has since deleted links from its webpage documenting its direct funding for the AFL-CIO and its activities worldwide.

The Sierra Club is also listed as one of 350.org‘s donors.

Time  reported in a 2012 article on just one instance of the Sierra Club’s big-oil sponsorships that:

TIME has learned that between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club accepted over $25 million in donations from the gas industry, mostly from Aubrey McClendon, CEO of Chesapeake Energy—one of the biggest gas drilling companies in the U.S. and a firm heavily involved in fracking—to help fund the Club’s Beyond Coal campaign.

While Time claims the Sierra Club “stopped” taking this money – it was only because the information became public – not because of any fundamental issue against taking big-oil money or working on behalf of big-oil’s agenda.

What is also revealed by the 2012 article is that the Sierra Club promoted an “anti-coal” agenda – not on behalf of the environment – but on behalf of the shale gas industry.

“Fridays for Future” – a movement ultimately sponsored and directed by these very same collection of interests and organizations – has no intention of helping the environment – but rather helping the special interests that created the movement under the cover of promoting “environmentalism.”

Good Intentions Aren’t Enough   

The youths joining these movements undoubtedly have the right intentions at heart – but the movement itself is marketed toward youths specifically because they lack the experience and discernment needed to understand the difference between how government “works” in their school books and how it actually works when money and special interests are involved.

Greta Thunberg and “her” movement – should they in any way acutally threaten the special interests that still dominate Western society – would be marginalized, censored, smeared, and attacked across the media. At their protest venues – they would be tear-gassed, beaten, and chased off the streets. And any tangible “action” that threatened to undermine big-business they advocated for would be promptly outlawed.

The fact that those responsible for repressing actual change in the West are eagerly aiding and abetting Greta Thunberg and “Fridays for Future” should tell the average onlooker all they need to know about the legitimacy and agency of these protests even without looking into the financials and ties of organizations openly sponsoring, promoting, and even directing the movement.

But the financials and ties are undeniable and quite familiar evidence that closes the case on “Fridays for Future.”

The Environment Needs Real Help 

Human civilization – without doubt – is negatively impacting the environment.

Big-agriculture poisons our land and water with chemicals and genetic contamination. Big-oil chokes our air. Big-defense litters battlefields with depleted uranium constituting a modern-day equivalent of plowing the earth with salt. Plastic packaging necessary for “globalized” consumerism fills our land and seas.

Even if one does not believe in mainstream notions of “climate change,” petroleum-based transportation has a direct and undeniable impact on human health that must be reduced if not entirely eliminated. The wealth and power consolidated by big-energy is also a major social problem that needs to be confronted.

If Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future activists wanted to “save the Earth,” they would be gathering outside the headquarters of the corporations responsible for these offenses – not protesting outside the offices of the politicians they own.

When “Fridays for Future” begins advocating boycotts of big-box stores and their oil-dependent, global-spanning supply chains in favor of local industry and business – when they protest genetically modified organisms and big-ag food in favor of locally produced organic produce, and when they begin advocating and investing in alternative energy rather than demanding the government do it for them – they will finally be on the road with a growing number of very real activists already working to truly save the environment.

They will also realize that these real activists – toiling for years – have never been known to them because the cameras and studios eagerly promoting “Fridays for Future” and their anemic, co-opted “activism” have already long ago worked hard to marginalize, censor, smear, and attack these genuine activists.

Genuine activism – like promoting and investing in local manufacturing and agriculture – has already been targeted by legislation to outlaw it or at the very least – seriously complicate it to the point of being impractical to pursue.

This is how one can tell the difference between genuine activism and co-opted or even manufactured activism – by seeing where the corporate media’s camera’s are pointed and who corporate special interests through their faux philanthropic fronts are promoting.

The environment is indeed facing an emergency – not only because of the real damage human civilization is doing to it – but also because of who the public has put their faith in to fix it.

And finally – if the environment is in such dire straits why is the world entrusting it to a 16 year old and a movement allegedly comprised of children?

Children are being enlisted because they are the only demographic left that are still capable of putting their faith into fronts like the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, The Tides Foundation, The Oak Foundation, and many other instruments of Western corporate-financier power long since exposed, distrusted, and disdained by the rest of the global public.

Greta Thunberg’s story isn’t one of inspiration and activism – it is one of child exploitation, one of manipulating public perception, and one of re-entrenched special interests desperately seeking an audience – any audience – still gullible enough to believe in and help reconstruct the facades used to cover up their otherwise transparent and self-serving agenda.

The environment needs to be saved, but not by big-business’ “Fridays for Future” charade.

*

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 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.

All images in this article are from NEO

Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan’s largest cash crop remains opium. Yet farmers there do grow other crops for export. Villagers in the Wazir Tangi area of Nangarhar province, for example, cultivate pine nuts. As a precaution, this year at harvest time, village elders notified the governor of the province that they would be bringing in migrant workers to help them collect the nuts. Hired laborers, including children, would camp out in the pine nut forests, they informed the officials. They hoped their letter could persuade U.S. and ISIS forces, which had been fighting in or near their villages, not to attack. 

On September 17, 2019, exhausted from a long day of work, the migrant workers reached their rest spot for the night, and began building fires and making camp. In the early hours of the following morning, a U.S. drone attacked, killing at least thirty-two people. More than forty others were wounded. The U.S. military claims that ISIS fighters were hiding among the farmers who were killed.

I followed this story while recuperating from surgery after breaking my hip on a train from Chicago to Washington, D.C. Before the train even reached the first stop out of Chicago, kindly emergency services workers had bundled me off to the Memorial South Bend hospital. I was well cared for, and now a physical therapist is already helping me with movement and exercise.

I read about the laborers who survived the attack on the pine nut forest. According to Haidar Khan, the owner of the pine nut trees, about 150 workers were there for harvesting, and some are still missing. One survivor described people asleep in tents pitched near the farm when the attack happened.

“Some of us managed to escape, some were injured but many were killed,” said Juma Gul, a resident of northeastern Kunar province and one of the migrant workers who had travelled to harvest and shell pine nuts.

I can’t help but wonder: Where are the missing? What care was available for wounded survivors? How many were children? Did a nearby facility offer X-rays, surgery, medications, clean bandages, prostheses, walkers, crutches, nourishing food and physical therapy?

I remember on visits to Afghanistan watching disabled victims of war in the capital city of Kabul as they struggled along unpaved roads, using battered crutches or primitive prostheses. They were coming to collect free duvets being distributed to people who otherwise might not survive the harsh winter weather. Their bodies so clearly bore the brunt of war.

In Kabul, earlier this month, my twenty-one-year-old friend Muhammad Ali reminded me of the importance of asking questions. Wanting me and others to understand more about the impact of war on his generation, he prodded:

“Kathy, do you know about Jehanzib, Saboor, Qadeer, and Abdul, these brothers who were killed in Jalalabad?”

The brothers, ranging from twenty-four to thirty years of age, were killed by an Afghan “strike force” trained by the CIA, according to the news. In Jalalabad, two of them worked for the government and two ran their own businesses. The squad that entered their homes beat them severely and then killed them.

Family and friends felt sure the brothers had no links to militias.

“They were kind and humble people, anyone who knew them loved the boys,” Naqeeb Sakhizada, who owns a shop in the area and knew the brothers for more than ten years, told Al Jazeera.“They cared for people and also had a good sense of humor.”

In her WWI memoir, Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain wrote about volunteering as a nurse toward the end of WWI. Her clinic, in France, received European soldiers from the western front who arrived mutilated, maimed, exhausted and traumatized. One day, she thought she must be imagining the line of soldiers who marched past the clinic tents looking robust, upright and well fed. Then she realized they were from the United States.

New recruits come, and the war machine grinds on.

Looking forward, perhaps we won’t see so many lines of U.S. soldiers marching through villages and cities in Afghanistan. A soldier operating a drone can continue the United States mission from afar.

We must still bear in mind Vera Brittain’s pertinent comments about the realities of war:

“I have only one wish in life now and that is for the ending of the War. I wonder how much really all you have seen and done has changed you. Personally, after seeing some of the dreadful things I have to see here, I feel I shall never be the same person again, and wonder if, when the War does end, I shall have forgotten how to laugh. The other day I did involuntarily laugh at something and it felt quite strange. Some of the things in our ward are so horrible . . . one day last week I came away from a really terrible amputation dressing I had been assisting at—it was the first after the operation—with my hands covered with blood and my mind full of a passionate fury at the wickedness of war, and I wished I had never been born.”

I look forward to going on with my life, once I recover from this broken hip. I can only imagine Vera Brittain’s overwhelming ordeal. And I can only imagine the trauma of a child laborer awakened by an aerial attack in a pine nut forest, racing through the trees in hopes of escape, and perhaps surviving in great pain without a limb, or missing a brother, or wishing he had never been born.

*

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.

Kathy Kelly ([email protected]) co-coordinates Voices for Creative Nonviolence.

Featured image is from the author

No one could fail to be touched by the fear (for the future) and urgency in Greta Thunberg’s young voice as she broke down while addressing world leaders on the last day of the UN Climate Summit.  The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Special Report on the oceans showed a worse prognosis, the patient is clearly worse.

Sad to say, despite all Greta’s efforts, nothing happened — no commitment by any of the major polluters.  Trump sauntered by before going on to mock her in his address — a grown man bullying a 16-year old girl!

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres wanted a commitment to the higher ambition of limiting global warming to 1.5C instead of 2C.  He got excuses, and of course no promise of net zero by 2050 from any major polluter.  Net zero implies balancing carbon emissions with carbon removal.  He also wanted a commitment to no new coal plants beyond 2020. Instead China, India and Turkey will be shamelessly expanding coal power well beyond that date.

China wanted the developed nations to take the lead due to their long history of emissions and consequent responsibility.  It refused to make concrete commitments unless the US and EU did so.  The EU blames Poland, a coal exporter; the US has Mr. Trump.  In the end none of the major polluters (China, India, EU, US) did although 80 other countries pledged to reach net zero by 2050.

Included in the 80 who pledged were 47 least developed countries (LDCs) although they are the least responsible for the emissions.  They have also been victimized by past colonialism, slavery, and for many the IMF’s notorious structural adjustment programs.

The climate data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) presented at the summit is sobering:  Global temperatures are up 1.1C since 1850 of which a 0.2C (or near 20 percent) rise occurred from 2011 to 2015.  The five-year period from 2014 to 2019 is the hottest on record while carbon emissions over the same period are up 20 percent from the previous five years.  Sea level rise since 2014 has averaged 5mm annually while the 10-year average up to 2016 was only 4mm.

One consequence of the sea level rise and warmer temperatures has been the human catastrophe from the unprecedented storms in Mozambique and the Bahamas recently.

Ninety percent of the excess heat from climate change is absorbed by water, and the WMO recorded the highest ocean heat content on record in 2018.  It poses a special danger for the Greenland ice sheet and the Arctic.  New research (July 2019) also finds melt under the water surface from glaciers reaching the sea and icebergs is ‘orders of magnitude’ greater than previously believed.  It threatens a dramatic sea level rise by the end of the century.

Professor Brian Hoskins, a meteorologist from Imperial College London warns, “Climate change due to us is accelerating and on a very dangerous course,” adding “We should listen to the loud cry from the school children …”  No one is listening Professor, despite human-induced warming exacerbating storms, wildfires, heatwaves, coastal flooding, etc.  No, not a single major polluter stood up to make a commitment.  The EU blames Poland which relies on coal exports and has veto power over any EU-wide policy; the US, Brazil and Saudi Arabia scrupulously avoided the event as if it were a plague.

The IPCC officially adopted its report on oceans and the cryosphere (those portions of Earth’s surface where water is in solid form, including sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground).  Compiled by 100 scientists, it  forecasts a catastrophic rise in sea levels, coastal flooding and worsening disasters.  It moved none of the implacables — not even the terrifying fact that Greenland’s ice sheet alone can raise sea levels by 20 feet.  All of it was ignored and instead of a breakthrough, the IPCC was left touting its evidence and reports at the end of the summit.

To summarize, nothing happened.  The climate action summit became a climate inaction summit, and the climate can was kicked down the road to Chile for the next IPCC meeting in December.

*

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 Arshad M Khan (http://ofthisandthat.org/index.html) is a former Professor based in the U.S. whose comments over several decades have appeared in a wide-ranging array of print and internet media.  His work has been quoted in the U.S. Congress and published in the Congressional Record.

Featured image is from Countercurrents

There are now far fewer nuclear weapons than at the height of the Cold War, the five major nuclear powers – US, Russia. China, France and UK -having all signed-up to the principle of eventual nuclear disarmament.

But there are other states that possess nuclear weapons and which have not signed up to any arms control treaties. One of those is Israel: another is North Korea neither of which have signed and ratified the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Both being free to build, stock and deploy nuclear, and also chemical, weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

It should be noted here, in this context, that the state of Iran has no nuclear weapons and never has had. And with fears of a renewed nuclear arms race between the US, Russia and China, that topic is high on the agenda at this year’s UN General Assembly.

With maverick nuclear states that hold the UN Security Council in contempt, these are dangerously fraught times for the international community. Will the world destroy itself by nuclear war and radioactive contamination before the effect of the dramatic increase in ocean temperatures – as a result of global warming and climatic change making many of our populated towns and cities, uninhabitable? Thanks to Trump, Netanyahu and possibly Johnson, the answer to that vital question now appears to be that the former seems increasingly likely.

*

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.

Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

• Two women out walking do not stop talking. An elderly man and woman out dining do not start talking.

Who says the most?

“Hello in There,” John Prine

• Every morning at sunrise, a simple, mild, and gentle man, seemingly somehow disabled, a camera hanging around his neck, stands stock still and half-hidden by reeds and bushes at the edge of a lake.For hours he waits to take photos of wildlife – deer, coyotes, bear, herons – emerging from the woods and lake’s edges.

What is it about wildness that he seeks to capture with his camera?

“The Wild Colonial Boy, The Irish Rovers

• In a small New England town known as a haven for tourists and wealthy second-house ownersfrom the city, the local Saturday morning farmers’ market features a parade of dogs being shown off by their visiting owners.

Who is on the leash?

“Hound Dog,” Elvis

• A new 6^th grade teacher reports to her department head that she is disturbed by the large number of her students who want to be addressed as “they.” She recounts how she just returned from taking her daughter to college at a prominent state university where all the professors who gave talks to parents and new students introduced themselves by saying how they wished to be addressed: he, she, they, etc.

Is this what it’s all about in today’s schools of show and tell?

“What Did You Learn in School Today,” Tom Paxton

• A liberal New England regional newspaper refuses to publish an op ed article by a well-known local writer about how the chief U.S. propagandist has recently been named the new CEO of National Public Radio.When the writer asked the paper’s editor if he would consider it newsworthy if the newspaper named the chief propagandist it’s CEO, he received no reply.

Why might that be?

“I Ain’t Marching Anymore,” Phil Ochs

• On an old town road in the hills of western Massachusetts, passers-by comment on a certain small stretch where the smell of wild thyme overwhelms the senses when they go by. No thyme can be found.

Are these people imagining that the time has passed away, or they?

“Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” Judy Collins

• A violent thunderstorm with massive lightning bolts brings down scores of trees and power lines

in the early fall evening.  Roads are flooded and rivers and streams overflow their banks.

Where, asks an eight-year-old boy to vacant faces, was the lightning before it flashed?

“Chimes of Freedom,” Bob Dylan

• In Afghanistan, the U.S. military kills 32 sleeping pine nut farmers and 40 other civilians at a wedding, including children, between September 19-23, 2019 as part of the American “war on terror.”

Whom does this keep awake at night and who sleeps soundly thinking they are safe?

“A Love Song to Americans,” Edward Curtin and David Neal

• An old woman named Martha is overheard saying to her son, who is sitting beside her , “Martha is dying.” The son asks, “Why are you referring to yourself in the third person?” The mother answers, “It’s more comforting that way.”

Is this truth or denial?

“Changes,” Phil Ochs

• Another old woman is heard to say to her daughter, “Sometimes you don’t know where you are until you’ve left.”

And when we’ve left, where do we want to be?

“Where’ve You Been,” Kathy Mattea

• Graffiti spray painted on a wall near the railroad tracks: “You come early of late, but you used to be behind before, but now you’re first at last.”

And you?

“It’s Too Late,” Carole King

• The orange and black sign by the winding lake road up the hill from the twisting river announces “Rough Road.” It sits there in the fall air like a glowing jack-o-lantern announcing some enigmatic truth. The town authorities wish to repave the road and remove the sign. A poor man protests to the Select Board, a group of successful residents. They are flabbergasted by his reasoning. He says they are trying to smooth over the truth of life.

Which side of the road are you on, or do you usually walk the line?

“Walk the Line,” Johnny Cash

• Julian Assange’s father, after visiting his son in prison, where he is ill and held in solitary confinement 22 hours a day, is asked by an interviewer what are his concerns if his son is extradited to the U.S. under the Espionage Act. “They will murder Julian one way or another,” says John Shipton.

Why do so few Americans and Aussies care that their countries are run by mass murderers?

   “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” Liam Clancy

• Radio announcer: “I’ll talk about the weather with you in a few minutes.”

Is this the intimacy we crave?

 “The Dangling Conversation,” Simon and Garfunkel

• A big sign on the wall inside a General Dynamics military defense plant announces: “Nothing important ever shows up in the newspaper.Reality is top secret.”

What is this reality that we are not supposed to know?

“Follow,” Richie Havens

• The local community college announced in the fall of 2018 a new certificate program: Training to become an Addiction Recovery Assistant to work in the substance abuse field. In the fall of 2019, as the college’s enrollment continued to fall and pot stores were springing up all around the area, the same college offered a new certificate program: A Cannabis Certificate Program that offers students training in cannabis cultivation, processing, preparation, retail, and outreach.

Guess what’s next?

 “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” Kris Kristofferson

• On March 28, 2019, the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, David Trachtenberg, testifies in front of a Congressional committee that the American policy of first use of nuclear weapons is necessary for American security. In August 2019 the world is given notice that the U.S. has officially withdrawn from the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.In September 2019, the Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Kahn, warns the world that the conflict with India over Kashmir is making the chance of nuclear war far likelier. As the U.S. continues to surround Russia with military forces, Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to warn of the growing threat of nuclear war.

It looks like the world is heating up, doesn’t it?

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Bob Dylan

*

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.

Distinguished author and sociologist Edward Curtin is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

The culmination of Toronto’s Global Climate Strike on Friday September 27, 2019 made history. 20,000 demonstrators flooded downtown Toronto with a dazzling array of colourful, often witty, some devastating posters, vowing to stay the course in the battle with corporate society gone mad in a race to destroy the planet.

Here are a few of my highlights (please forgive heads and banners cut off!). I was astounded at the creativity both in image and word. I managed to scribble down 80 (more or less). Not quite Mao’s hundred, but i’m sure I missed at least 80 more.

Leading the march were #FridaysforFuture, S27 Coalition Demands and #Climatestrike

Students were the large majority with parents supporting them:

• If we are done our education, why are kids schooling us?
• If you don’t act like adults, we won’t get to BE adults.
• Eco not Ego.
• The climate is hotter than my boyfriend.

(variation *The climate should not be hotter than my girlfriend, or better ‘than ME’)

Some math students: *The planet > profit. (variation *Planet Before Profit)

• Capitalism = death (or extinction).
• Water = life.
• System Change, not Climate Change.

• Cancel Capitalism and *Heat warning Heed the warning: The time is NOW.
• There’s no place like the place you live in.

(Eva from Holland and Madalena from Italy ‘It’s like we’re at home. These demos are around the world. What a huge crowd!)

Some science students: *There is no ‘planet’ B. (variation *Mars ain’t the kind of place to live in)

• Science, not silence. (variation *Science not to conquer nature but to live in it.)
• 1.5 – stay alive. (over 1.5 centigrade and we’re cooked)

Some chess players: *We’re in the Endgame.

General student angst:

• What use is money if we aren’t here to spend it?
• This is the ONLY issue.
• End capitalism before it ends us. (variation *Save the planet – End capitalism)
• Action not Transaction.
• You break it, you fix it.
• You’ll die of old age before we die from climate change.
• Think or swim.

• Boomers, we will not forget. (variation *STFU Boomers! (shut the fuck up))
• Or more simply, Fuck this Shit.

Some much less polite: *Keep earth clean. It’s not Uranus.

• Frack Off Gassholes (variation *Go frack yourself. and *Stop fracking Mother Earth,)
• Stop fucking killing us.
• Fuck ur profit.
• Did you buy Earth dinner before you fucked her?

(variation *Your mama is fucking dying!

More politely *She didn’t consent.

Even more politely (a mother carrying her baby): *Love your mother! And another mother-baby: *You only have one mother. Love, respect and listen to her!))

• No Justice No Peace

The vegans were among the few with a solution: *Animal agriculture – 51% of human footprint.

Veganism is the single biggest way to reduce your footprint.

• The elephant in the room is a COW.
• Fight climate change with a diet change. (variation *You can’t eat MONEY (see below))

The natives were the star: *No pipeline on stolen land.

• This moment isn’t new for the 500+ years of indigenous resistance.

Drumming and chanting set the serious but uplifting tone of the demo.

Witty: *More climate action, less hot air.

• Don’t be a fossil fool.
• Leave the oil in the soil.
• Save Earth, the only planet with cats.
• Feed G8 leaders to the Polar Bears.
• When all is said and done, more is being said than done.
• This is NOT a fire drill. (This Is Not A Drill: An Extinction Rebellion Handbook)
• Make the Earth Great Again (MEGA)
• Be the person David Attenborough wants you to be.
• The sea is rising and so are we. (variation Oceans are rising) + *You can’t eat money.
• Standing with the trees.
• Are we in the age of stupid?
• Winter is NOT coming

Lots of anti-coal rhetoric: *It’s getting hot. Take off your coal.

A jolly green giant and helpers, a mini-float of modest cyclists: *We Have part of the Solution

Michael is chairman of the Green Committee at his apartment building (‘We reduced garbage by half with recycling. I took the day off work for this.’) *Fill the swamp. Restore wetlands. (and on the back: *Recycle refuse. Reuse rot.)

Jeff was inspired to write some poems: *My world’s on fire. How about yours? That’s not the way I like it and I’m getting really bored!

(and on the back: *The ice we skate is getting pretty thin. The water’s getting warm so we might as well swim.)

UofT students Sue (*Let’s get together and love the Earth) and Reza (*Bob Dylan quote) recalled 60s student radicalism. Anthropology student Nick does NOT want oil ‘digs’ (*Fossil fuels in the Ground).

As I was leaving Queens Park, a tree hugger and a surreptitious smoke shared a tree moment.

A nice Mexican touch as the party ended, with Lennon’s Image wafting over the thinning crowds and Monarch butterflies preparing for a long journey south:

*No creo en fronteras.

*

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.

Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia

All images in this article are from Orinoco Tribune

“As the oligarchs financed, shaped and largely managed the climate movement – it’s only natural that they alone benefit from it. The power-elites repackaged our oppression as revolution and sold it back to us. By exploiting the innocent youth, which in turn exploited our emotions and fears as a collective populace, we devoured it.  And soon, young Greta, and all the youth they have exploited, will be thrown under the bus.” – Cory Morningstar, from Act IV of the series ‘The Manufacture of Greta Thunberg – with Consent’ [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

During the week from September 20-27th, an estimated 6 million people in thousands of towns and cities around the world, took part in “climate strikes” intended to spur world leaders into action around the mitigation of climate change. [2]

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who inspired these mobilizations with her solitary protests outside the Swedish parliament and her uncompromising stance in her public messaging and demeanour, has become an international celebrity. The youngster, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, spoke at Friday’s 500,000 strong mobilization in Montreal, in the Canadian province of Quebec:

“…The numbers are still coming in, but it looks like well over 6.6 million people have joined the Week For Future through strikes on this and last Friday. That is one of the biggest demonstrations in history!

The people have spoken, and we will continue to speak until our leaders listen and act! We are the change! And change is coming!”

We live in a world where over 200 unarmed protesters in Gaza, including 52 children can be killed by Israeli snipers with impunity, as happened last year following the Great March of Return, and where Israel’s economic strangulation of Gaza is having devastating impacts on the people living there. We live in a world where sanctions on countries like Iran and Venezuela are devastating the populace of those counties, and where children die and a major humanitarian catastrophe continues unabated in Yemen under U.S.- backed Saudi military brutality. Where hundreds of millions of children live in extreme poverty. All with the tacit if not overt consent of major governing institutions like the United Nations.

Yet it appears millions of youth, along with their 16 year old role model who shames world leaders who “dare” to pursue money at the expense of her future, are successfully pricking the consciences of those same leaders with the threat of withdrawing from school. This at a time when 61 percent of children aged 15 to 17 are already denied access to school in the world’s poorest countries.

To be certain, human-induced climate disruption is a reality acknowledged by the vast majority of climate science experts, and therefore a legitimate focus of public concern. Aggressive measures are certainly called for to address an environmental catastrophe posing a clear and present threat to humans and to all life on Earth.

But given the proven track record of major powers invoking humanitarian pretexts such as the “responsibility to protect” to conceal imperial aggression, sincere activists need to scrutinize with excruciating detail the solutions being planned and prepared by those same elites.

This week’s episode of the Global Research News Hour proposes to do just that.

In our first half hour, we interview Naomi Wolf, CEO of the Daily Clout who has found fault with the Green New Deal tabled by the upstart Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In a recent conversation, Dr. Wolf elaborates on what she sees as the undemocratic and problematic implications of this resolution. She also comments on groups like the Sunrise Movement, and how the popular movement for climate justice is potentially being exploited for non-grassroots purposes.

Dr. Wolf’s more complete critique of the GND can be found in the following video.

In our second half hour, we revisit an interview from earlier this year with London, Ontario based Cory Morningstar. Her series The Manufacture of Greta Thunberg – For Consent explores the young woman’s privileged background and the involvement of high level NGOs and business interests from the very start of her climate activism. More importantly, she reveals less than wholesome objectives on the part of global elites under the guise of “climate solutions.” Cory outlines some of these goals, as well as the cynical campaigns to herd youth and the general public behind an agenda that ultimately undermines the very social and environmental goals they aspire to.

Naomi Wolf is a Rhodes Scholar, a noted journalist, writer and political consultant. Her works of non fiction include the 1990 bestseller The Beauty Myth:How Images of Female Beauty Are Used Against Women (1991), The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot (2007), and its sequel Give Me Liberty: A Handbook for American Revolutionaries (2008). She is founder and CEO of the Daily Clout, an online media company which reviews and interprets legislation for the lay public in the United States.

Cory Morningstar is an independent investigative journalist, writer and environmental activist, focusing on global ecological collapse and political analysis of what she calls the non-profit industrial complex. She resides in London, Ontario, Canada. Her writings can be found on Wrong Kind of Green, The Art of Annihilation, Political Context, Canadians for Action on Climate Change and Countercurrents. Both volumes of her multi-part series The Manufacture of Greta Thunberg – For Consent are available through this link.

(Global Research News Hour episode 270)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 3pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time.

Notes:

1. http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/2019/02/03/the-manufacturing-of-greta-thunberg-for-consent-the-house-is-on-fire-the-90-trillion-dollar-rescue/
2. Matthew Taylor, Jonathan Watts and John Bartlett (Sept. 27, 2019), ‘Climate crisis: 6 million people join latest wave of global protests’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/27/climate-crisis-6-million-people-join-latest-wave-of-worldwide-protests

Four million people participated in the global climate strike across every continent on Friday, many of them students who skipped school on that day. Demonstrations at more than 5,800 locations in 161 countries began in Australia and the Pacific, moved to Asia, Antarctica, Africa and Europe, and then to North and South America. This is the third such climate strike this year, following similar mass global demonstrations this past March and May, and the largest to date.

The protests were directed against the inaction and inability of world governments to take any significant measures to resolve the crisis, despite increasingly dire warnings from the United Nations and other agencies that if greenhouse gas emissions are not immediately halted, at least half the world’s population will likely face one or more climate-related catastrophe in the next decade. Similar outrage was directed against international climate summits such as the 2015 Paris Agreement, which have proven worthless in the face of the crisis.

Some of the largest demonstrations occurred in Germany, where over 100,000 protested in front of Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, according to news reports, and up to 270,000 according to the protest organizers, for a total of 1.4 million people across the country. More than 330,000 demonstrated across Australia, 100,000 in Britain and up to 300,000 in the United States. Thousands more took to the streets in Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana and across North Africa. Thousands more demonstrated in Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, Japan and New Zealand.

Significant protests were also held across the South Pacific, including in the Solomon Islands and Fiji. Countries in that region are among the hardest hit by the deepening climate crisis as a result of rapidly rising sea levels.

The political views of those who attended were very varied. Capitalism, however, was a dirty word for the overwhelming majority of the protesters. Many expressed their outrage over the refusal of governments to take any action over years to address the issue, and spoke about the subordination of life to the interests of the rich under capitalism.

“The problem is that the big companies aren’t being held accountable,” said Ondina, a Salvadorean worker IT worker living in Stuttgart, Germany. “They shouldn’t be allowed to be so powerful. They want to get the most out of everything—from the markets, from their workers, and from the environment. Everyone who is aware of this exploitation should begin to take action. Governments won’t change that—that’s why we have to do something.”

Many protesters, including many born after 2001 who have lived their entire lives amidst US-led wars, connected the environmental crisis to social inequality and the danger of war. Sarah, a Canadian student in Paris, noted that “there’s so many causes today, so much you can fight for… I’m also concerned about war. It’s because they spend so much money on the military and have these guns and tanks and they want an excuse to use them.”

Members of the Socialist Equality Party and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) and other supporters of the World Socialist Web Site attended demonstrations in several countries, where they distributed copies of the WSWS statement “The only solution to climate change is world socialism,” explaining the SEP’s fight to mobilize the working class against capitalism.

Kourosh, a law student in San Diego, agreed that capitalism is the source of the climate crisis. “Any talk about climate change must include socialism and the economic system,” he said. “Also, the military is a huge polluter as well that doesn’t get talked about in liberal circles. I’m definitely for socialism.” Kourosh also mentioned that he is studying law to defend democratic rights, including the protection of whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.

The US under both militant wings of its war party is an unparalleled global menace.

For the first time in world history, one nation threatens everyone everywhere at home and abroad. It risks destruction of planet earth to own it, along with all its life forms.

Nations not subordinating their sovereign rights to its interests are considered enemies of the state threats to its national security.

At the height of its power and influence post-WW II, the US has been declining for decades, notably post-9/11. The same dynamic taking down other empires dooms US rage to dominate.

China, Russia, and other nations are rising, America declining because of its imperial arrogance, endless wars against invented enemies, exploitation of ordinary people at home and abroad, and unwillingness to change.

The nation I grew up in long ago no longer exists. Never beautiful, today it’s feared globally, not respected, exploiting its working class, the country transformed into a ruler-serf society — unsafe and unfit to live in.

Nonbelligerent Russia threatens no one. It’s the world’s leading proponent of peace and stability among major powers.

Yet the US considers Moscow a threat to its national security — the notion invented, not real.

Cooperative relations for the mutual benefit of both sides is unattainable because Washington’s hardline ruling class rejects rapprochement with a nation on its target list for regime change.

US sanctions war on Russia rages. The so-called Magnitsky Rule of Law Accountability Act of 2012 is one of numerous unacceptable Cold War 2.0 actions against Moscow.

US lawmakers hold its authorities responsible for Russian national Sergey Magnitsky’s death in police custody.

An investigation ordered by then-President Medvedev blamed his death on medical neglect.

Magnitsky Act legislation imposes visa bans, asset freezes, and other sanctions on Russian nationals accused of committing human rights abuses.

Sergey Lavrov called the Magnitsky Act “anti-Russian.” Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov warned of tough countermeasures, calling the measure “outrageous…inadmissible” extraterritorial legislation.

It was and remains all about beating up on Russia, one of many examples of unacceptable US actions — while the world’s leading human rights abuser at home and abroad USA blames other nations for its high crimes.

Following the Obama regime’s coup d’etat in Ukraine, replacing democratic government with Nazi-infested putschist rule, Russia was falsely accused of “aggression” in Ukraine, a US specialty, unacceptable sanctions imposed — including for allowing Crimeans to correct a historic mistake by rejoining the Russian Federation.

The 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) targeted Russia for 2016 US election interference, despite no evidence suggesting it — also its (nonexistent) involvement in Kiev’s war on Donbass, and legitimate involvement in aiding Syria combat US-supported terrorists.

Under Obama and Trump, scores of Russian diplomats were unacceptably expelled from the US, its authorities illegally seizing Russian diplomatic properties.

Following the poisoning of Sergey and Yulia Skripal in the UK, no evidence suggests Moscow had anything to do with, more illegal US sanctions were imposed on the country.

Additional ones followed the November 2018 Kerch Strait incident, a likely made-in-the-US provocation, involving three Ukrainian vessels that entered Russian waters without requesting permission as required.

They failed to respond to legitimate demands, forcing Russia to respond defensively against their hostile action, the vessels interdicted and seized.

Their crew members were arrested for violating Articles 19 and 21 of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Russia acted legally.

In August, more US sanctions on Moscow were authorized by Trump’s executive order (EO), imposing international financial restrictions on the country.

Pursuant to EO 13685 (December 2014), Trump’s Treasury Department on Thursday sanctioned one Russian entity, five vessels, and three individuals for delivering jet fuel to Russian forces in Syria — involved in aiding Damascus combat US-supported jihadists in the country.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry slammed the hostile action, calling it “blatant (US) support for terrorism,” adding:

Newly imposed US sanctions on “Russian nationals, several vessels and one entity (are) the 75th (ones) since 2011 when Washington abandoned its policy to ‘reset’ bilateral relations and began destroying them.”

“Since then, the US initiators of the sanctions policy against Russia have not achieved any result. This time, they probably excelled their own recklessness.”

“The United States has exposed its open support for terrorism…Masks have…fallen off as we are talking about direct (US) plans to prevent complete elimination of terrorists on the Syrian territory.”

“The Russian side has long noted with worry that Washington is ‘supervising’ (ISIS, al-Nusra and other) terrorists…provid(ing) them with everything necessary, and tr(ying) to shield them from strikes even though (they) are recognized as terrorist organizations everywhere.”

“For Russia, the sanctions are nothing new. Fighting terrorists in Syria will continue despite the United States patronizing them and illegally occupying a part of this sovereign country’s territory, hampering the settlement of the Syrian conflict.”

“We decisively condemn the cynicism and unscrupulousness of Washington’s policies.”

There’s no ambiguity about US support for ISIS, al-Qaeda, its offshoot in Syria, along with likeminded jihadists in the region and elsewhere.

Using them as imperial proxies, the Pentagon and CIA actively arm, fund, train, and direct these elements — establishment media maintaining a regime of silence about reality in US war theaters.

How will Moscow respond to the latest hostile US action? Will it finally recognize that extending diplomatic outreach to both wings of its war party is an exercise in futility?

Failure to confront its unacceptable actions is a sign of weakness, encouraging more of the same.

Will the Kremlin respond in kind to US hostility? Recognition of reality and acting appropriately is long overdue.

Toughness is the only language Washington’s ruling class understands.

Will Kremlin policies toward the US reflect reality henceforth, acknowledging adversarial relations not about to change, abandoning the notion that both nations are partners?

*

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.

The Syrian war ends in Idlib

While most of Syria struggles to recover from 8 years of bloody conflict, Idlib is left as the last hot-spot.  The population in Idlib today includes foreign terrorists following the tenets of Al Qaeda.  The terrorists have wives and children, and while they may be seen as innocent, they remind us of the ISIS wives and children now in the Al Hol “concentration camp”, who is seen to be the seeds of the next ISIS resurgence.  Every war has an ending, and the Syrian conflict is ending in Idlib in slow-motion: with deals, ceasefires and eventual peaceful transition.

North-east Syria                    

The Kurds are an ethnic group that accounts for 10% of the Syrian population, but they are a minority in north-east Syria.  To establish their Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (NES), aka Rojava, they led a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, while advertising themselves in the western media as standing for equality, freedom, democracy and social justice.  The homeless and hopeless Syrians who were driven off their lands, farms, and homes at the butt of an American weapon bear testimony to the atrocities committed by the Kurds in Afrin, Jazira, Euphrates, Raqqa, Tabqa, Manbij, and Deir Ez-Zor.  The fact the area holds Syria’s richest oil resources should come as no surprise.

The fight against ISIS

When ISIS declared its existence in Reqaa, the first line of attack should have come from the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), but the US wouldn’t consider aligning with the legitimate Syrian forces, or their allies the Russian forces.  Instead, the US employed Kurdish mercenaries, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), who lost about 11,000 fighters before they defeated ISIS in northern Syria.  The SDF is now guarding 10,000 ISIS prisoners, and the US and other foreign countries refuse to take these men back home to be incarcerated or rehabilitated.  The prison camp is financed by the US, but it is the SDF who are the guards.  There is no plan on what is the future for those men, the area, or their wives and children.

The US betrayal of the Kurds

The Kurds will not end up with a ‘homeland’ carved out of stolen land in Syria.  The US used them and paid them well for services rendered, and the US continues to deliver support to them with about 200 trucks from Iraq at the Semelka crossing recently, while previously they delivered 55 trucks of four-wheel-drive vehicles, excavators, closed boxes, and 60 trucks.

Turkey demands security

Turkey is a NATO ally and commands the most powerful armed force in the Middle East.  Pres. Trump angered Pres. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with his support of the SDF, who Turkey views as extensions of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is deemed a terrorist group by Turkey, the US, and the EU, and has killed more than 40,000 people in its 30-year terror campaign against Turkey. Erdogan has promised to clear out the SDF on the Turkish border, and he has given a specific time to achieve his results.  Sunday, October 6^th is the deadline, and if the Turkey-US ‘safe-zone’ has not proved successful, then Turkey will initiate its plans.

“We have no wish to come face to face with the US,” Erdogan said. “However, we cannot afford to overlook the support that the US is giving to a terrorist organization.”

The safe-zone

Turkey and the US military agreed in August to set up a safe-zone in northern Syria, with a plan to move millions of Syrian refugees from Turkey and Europe there.  The US Congress is calling for the State Department to spend $130 million on stabilizing Syria next year, including $25 million for programs inside the ‘safe- zone’, and has raised as much as $300 million for the effort from allies and partners, such as the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Christopher Maier leads the Pentagon’s Defeat-Islamic State Task Force.  He said the combined operations center in the ‘safe-zone’ is staffed by US and Turkish one-star generals and is conducting helicopter reconnaissance flights and ground patrols.  An official of the SDF said recently they have pulled back from the border 5 to 14 kilometers in various places.

Trump’s 2020 election

Trump had a promise to get the US out of Syria, and he tried to implement his plan, only to be thwarted by his military advisors.  He still wants to get out of Syria, but he might not be able to give the pull-out order until after the November 2020 election.  The Turkish may agree to allow the SAA to re-take the area, securing it from SDF, while Moscow coordinates with Ankara.

*

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.

In the second half of 2019, the Middle East entered yet another turbulence zone created by a sharpened conflict between Iran and regional Shia groups on the one side and the US-Israeli-Saudi alliance on another. In contrast to the 2015-2017 period, when key players were mainly focusing on Syria and the surrounding part of the region, in 2019 the main point of tensions moved to the Persian Gulf and the Saudi-Yemeni battleground. The situation is marked by increased chances of an open military confrontation between the US-Israeli-Saudi bloc and Iran. Drone shootdowns, oil tanker detentions, open military buildups and wartime-like rhetoric became something common or at least not very surprising.

The US, Saudi Arabia and Israel point at Iran as the main instigator of tensions. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo even described the recent attack on Saudi oil facilities, attributed by the Washington-led bloc to Iran, as “an act of war”. Iran, in own turn, rejects all the accusations of its supposed involvement calling them “lies” and supports the version provided by Yemen’s Houthis (Ansar Allah). The movement took responsibility for the strike saying that it came, as multiple previous ones, in response to the siege imposed by the Saudi-led coalition on Yemen. Regardless who was behind the recent attack on the Saudi oil infrastructure, the key question is “who would benefit from this new round of escalation?”

The September 14 strike on facilities of Saudi oil giant Aramco in Buqayq and Khurais shut down a half of the Kingdom’s oil output and caused a crisis on the world oil market. Saudi Arabia’s production capacity was reduced by about 5.7 million barrels per day, or 5% of the global oil supply. Brent crude spiked over $70 a barrel and West Texas Intermediate climbed over $60 a barrel. Aramco pledged that production would return to 11 million barrels per day by the end of September causing some decline in oil prices. If the Kingdom appears to be not capable of turning this promise into reality and the situation in the region continues to escalate, oil prices may grow even further reaching $75-80 a barrel.

Watch the video here.

An open military conflict between the US-led bloc and Iran in the region will have a devastating impact to the global economy even more than the so-called economic war between the US and China. Iran has repeatedly demonstrated that it is capable to close the Strait of Hormuz and disrupt oil trade in the event of the military confrontation in the close proximity to its shores.

However, even if there is no open military conflict, the threat of attacks on oil fields, pipelines, refineries, production plants and other objects infrastructure make Saudi Arabia a potentially unstable oil supplier. According to Nikkei Asian Review, Aramco already notified Japan’s top oil distributor, JXTG Nippon Oil & Energy, about a potential change in shipments in October. The report says that Aramco wants to change the delivered oil grade from light to heavy and medium and suggests that Aramco would need more time than expected to repair its desulfurization facility, which is necessary to produce light-grade crude. This oil grade is used in the production of gasoline and light gas oil. These factors are expected to prevent a further decline of oil prices and force large crude oil buyers to consider diversifying their sources of light-grade crude.

Here, there United States enters the game. In the last decade, it has more than doubled oil production to 12.3 million barrels a day, becoming the world’s largest producer. Right now, the US is finalizing additional infrastructure to transport crude out of Texas oil fields and onto the world market. According to Citigroup, the new pipelines could help grow US oil exports from the current 3 million barrels a day by 1 million barrels more by the end of 2019 and another million barrels in 2020. Some sources suggest that in 2019-2020, the US oil export potential may grow to 4.7 million barrels per day thanks to launches of new pipelines and currently ‘drilled but uncompleted’ shale oil wells (over 8,500 are available now).

Relatively high oil prices would contribute to the economic policy provided by the Trump administration. They remain within the comfort zone of the industrial sector and oil consumers of the US. At the same time, the industry of large oil consumers, like China and Germany, would bear additional costs because of the growth of energy prices. Therefore, the Trump administration would get additional odds in its economic war with China and protectionist policy against the EU industrial states.

Additionally, the September 14 attack and the growth of tensions in the Persian Gulf, in general, gave the Trump administration a formal pretext to increase its activity in the region. The US already announced that it is deploying additional troops and missiles in Saudi Arabia and imposing a new round of sanctions on Iran. If Washington fuels the war-hysteria and further, the Trump administration may even venture upon a deployment of limited military contingent to combat ‘Iranian proxies’ in Yemen or a limited strike on some non-critical ‘Iranian targets’ in the region.

This ‘controlled escalation’ would allow Washington to consolidate existing and gain additional levers of pressure on global energy prices, including the influence on Saudi Arabia, and, therefore, manipulate the global energy market in own interests. A similar motivation stands behind the US geopolitical activity towards Venezuela.

Besides these, the fight against the ‘Iranian threat’ is an important part of Donald Trump’s foreign policy agenda promoted in the framework of the 2020 presidential campaign. This gives his administration additional motivation to support the “Iran attacked Saudi Arabia” narrative.

In own turn, the attack on Saudi oil infrastructure gives little benefits to Iran whose economy, including the energy sector, is already under a strong sanction pressure. The confrontation with an artful foreign enemy helps to consolidate the nation in the face of the sharpening standoff the country’s competitors, but this is a not sufficient motivation. Instead, the constant threat of regional war may impact negatively prospects of the China-Iranian strategic partnership in the energy sphere in the framework of which, Beijing plans to invest $280bn developing Iran’s oil, gas and petrochemicals sectors and another $120bn in upgrading Iran’s transport and manufacturing infrastructure.

As to Russia, another MSM-created bogeyman ‘undermining democracy’ in the Middle East, it, as well as other large oil producers and financers, would get additional revenues thanks to the growth of oil prices in the short-term. Nonetheless, it would be hard for Moscow to get some strategic advantages on this situation.

Meanwhile, Yemen’s Houthis would continue to pursue their main goal – to achieve a victory in the conflict with Saudi Arabia or to force the Kingdom to accept the peace deal on favorable terms. To achieve this, they need to deliver the maximum damage to Saudi Arabia’s economy through strikes on its key military and infrastructure objects. In this case, surprising missile and drone strikes on different targets across Saudi Arabia have already demonstrated their effectiveness. If the Houthis continue to act in a similar audacious and considered manner, there are high chances that the September 14 attack was only the first sign of future challenges that Riyadh would face in this conflict.

*

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

As the United Nations General Assembly conducts its fall session, Popular Resistance is in New York City for the People’s Mobilization to Stop the US War Machine and Save the Planet. Themes of the mobilization are connecting militarism and climate change and raising awareness that the United States regularly violates international laws, including the United Nations Charter. These laws are designed to facilitate peaceful relationships between countries and prevent abuses of human rights. It is time that the US be held accountable.

The People’s Mobilization arose out of the Embassy Protection Collective after the US government raided the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington DC last May in blatant violation of the Vienna Convention to install a failed coup and arrested Embassy Protectors even though they were in the embassy with the permission of the elected government of Venezuela. This was an escalation of US regime change efforts – the coup failed in Venezuela but the US recognized the coup leader and started turning Venezuela’s assets over to him anyway. Members of the Collective sought to bring the message that it is dangerous for the world and a threat to the future of all of us if the US continues on its lawless path.

We participated in the Climate Strike on Friday where our messages about the impact of US militarism on climate were well-received. On Sunday, we held a rally in Herald Square and on Monday, we held a public event: “A Path to International Peace: Realizing the Vision of the United Nations Charter.” We need to build an international people’s movement that complements work the Non-Aligned Movement and others are doing to bring countries together that are dedicated to upholding international law and take action together to address global crises.

In front of the United Nations after the rally and march with our message. By Yuka Azuma.

The US Military is a Great Threat to our Future

We wrote about the connections between militarism and the climate crisis in our newsletter a few weeks ago so we won’t go too deeply into those details here. The US military is the largest single user of fossil fuels and creator of greenhouse gases on the planet.

It also leaves behind toxic pollution from burn pits and weapons such as depleted uranium (DU). The use of DU violates international law, including the Biological Weapons Convention. As described in David Swanson’s article about a new study, which documents the horrific impact of DU on newborns in Iraq,

“…every round of DU ammunition leaves a residue of DU dust on everything it hits, contaminating the surrounding area with toxic waste that has a half-life of 4.5 billion years, the age of our solar system, and turns every battlefield and firing range into a toxic waste site that poisons everyone in such areas.”

The US military poisons the air, land, and water at home too. Pat Elder, also with World Beyond War, has been writing, speaking and organizing to raise awareness of the use of Per and Poly Fluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) by the military across the US and the deadly effects it has. Elder states that the military claims to have “sovereign immunity” from environmental laws. In other words, the US military can poison whomever and wherever it chooses without risk of legal consequences.

As scary as the climate crisis and a toxic environment are, another existential threat is a nuclear war. The US military is upgrading its nuclear weapons so it can use them. The US National Security Strategy is “Great Power Conflict” and the new National Security Adviser to Trump, taking John Bolton’s place, Robert C. O’Brien, advocates for more military spending, a larger military and holding on to US global domination. These are dangerous signs. How far is the US military willing to go as US empire clings to its declining influence in the world?

In “Iran, Hong Kong and the Desperation of a Declining US Empire,” Rainer Shea writes, “There’s a term that historians use for this reactive phase that empires go through during their final years: micro-militarism.”

Alfred McCoy defines micro-militarism as “ill-advised military misadventures… [that] involve psychologically compensatory efforts to salve the sting of retreat or defeat by occupying new territories, however briefly and catastrophically.”

Micro-militarism is on display in Venezuela, where the US has been trying for two decades to overthrow the Bolivarian Process without success. It is on display in US antagonism of Iran, a country that has never attacked the US and that upheld its end of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. When the US called for countries to join its escalation of military presence in the Straits of Hormuz, there was little enthusiasm from European allies. And when the US tried to blame the attack on Saudi oil refineries on Iran, even Japan refused to go along. Now, Iran is participating in INSTEX, a mechanism for trade that bypasses institutions controlled by the US.

Micro-militarism is manifested in the US’ failed attempts to antagonize China. With KJ Noh, we wrote an Open Letter to Congress, explaining why the Hong Kong Human Rights Act must be stopped as it will further entangle the US with Hong Kong and Mainland China, providing a foundation for US regime change campaign there. As China celebrates 70 years as the Peoples Republic of China, which ended over a century of exploitation by imperialists, it is in a very strong position and indicates it has no interest in caving in to US pressure. Instead, China is building its military and global relationships to rival US hegemony.

Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese at the People’s Mobe Rally. By Ellen Davidson.

Holding the US Accountable

Micro-militarism is a symptom of the ailing US empire. We are in a period where the US military and government behave in irrational ways, consuming US resources for wars and conflicts that cannot be won instead of using them to meet basic needs of people and protection of the planet. The US is blatantly violating international laws that make regime change, unilateral coercive measures (aka sanctions) and military aggression illegal.

The US is conducting economic terrorism against scores of nations through illegal unilateral coercive measures (sanctions).  In the case of Cuba, the economic blockade goes back nearly six decades since the nation overthrew a US-backed regime there. The US blockade cost Cuba $4.3 billion in 2019, and close to $1 trillion over the past six decades, taking into account depreciation of the dollar. In Iran, sanctions have existed since their independence from the Shah of Iran’s US dictatorship in 1979 and in Zimbabwe, sanctions go back to land reform that occurred at the beginning of this century. The United States is conducting ongoing regime change campaigns in multiple nations among them Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran and now Bolivia.

The US is also abusing its power as the host country of the United Nations by ordering diplomats out of the country for spurious reasons and curtailing the travel of diplomats of countries the US is targeting. This week, the US ordered two Cuban diplomats to leave the United States. The reason was vague, i.e., their “attempts to conduct influence operations against the US.” This undefined phrase could mean almost anything and puts all diplomats at risk if they speak in the US outside of the UN. We expect this is one reason diplomatic representatives from some of the countries that planned to participate in the Monday night event stayed away.

Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza was the first Foreign Minister to be sanctioned while he was in the United States on official business. Arreaza was sanctioned on April 25, just after he spoke to the United Nations General Assembly as a representative of the Non-Aligned Movement denouncing the US’ attempts to remove representatives of the sovereign nation of Venezuela from the UN.

On July 30, the US imposed sanctions on Iran’s foreign minister Javad Zarif saying he was targeted because he is a ‘key enabler of Ayatollah Khamenei’s policies.’  Does that mean the Foreign Minister was punished for representing Iran? When Zarif came to the UN for official business this July 14, the US took the unusual step of severely restricting his travel,  limiting him to travel between the United Nations, the Iranian UN mission, the Iranian UN ambassador’s residence, and New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. Traditionally, diplomatic officials were allowed a 25-mile radius around Columbus Circle. The US said Zarif “is a mouthpiece of an autocracy that suppresses free speech” and suppressed his freedom of speech in response.

As the United States becomes more brazen and ridiculous in its attempts to stay in control, it is driving other countries to turn away from the US and organize around it. There are growing calls for the United Nations to consider leaving the US and reestablish itself in a location where the US cannot sanction people for its own political purposes. Perhaps there is a need for a new international institution that does not enable US domination.

Civil society panel at the Path to International Peace event. By Ellen Davidson.

People are Uniting For Peace, Security and Sustainable Development 

The US’ actions point to the need for peace and justice activists to build an international network to demand the upholding the rule of law. Popular Resistance and its allies are contributing to the formation of that transnational solidarity structure through the new Global Appeal for Peace.

This July, delegations from 120 countries of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) united to oppose US policy against Venezuela and demand an end to sanctions as part of The Caracas Declaration.  NAM was founded in 1961 and the UN General Secretary described the importance of the movement highlighting that “two-thirds of the United Nations members and 55% of the world’s population” are represented by it, making it the second-largest multinational body in the world after the UN.

From August 29 through September 6, 38 countries and hundreds of foreign and local companies participated in Syria’s 61st Damascus International Fair despite the threat of US economic sanctions against corporations and countries that participated. The Damascus International Fair is considered the Syrian economy’s window to the world, re-started in 2017 after a 5-year hiatus due to the war against Syria. Despite a NATO bombing of the Fair in 2017, people kept coming and the Fair has continued.

Countries are also working to find ways around US economic warfare by not using the US dollar or the US financial industry to conduct trade. China is challenging the US by investing $400 billion in Iran’s oil and gas industry over 25 years and has added $3 billion investment in Venezuelan oil in 2019. Russia has also allied with Venezuela providing military equipment, and porting Navy ships in Venezuela as well as providing personnel. France has called on the EU to reset its relationship with Russia, and Germany and Russia are beginning to work together to preserve the Iran nuclear agreement.

The Global Appeal for Peace is uniting people to demand of our governments in their interactions with all nations – for the sake of world peace, international security and peaceful co-existence  – to respect the principles of the United Nations Charter and to follow and defend international law. The Global Appeal urges people to immediately join this initiative and help redirect the world toward an era of global stability and cooperation.

We seek to build a transnational movement that is multi-layered. People and organizations from civil society representing different sectors, e.g. laborers, academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers, as well as representatives of governments impacted by violations of international law by the United States, need to join together. The seeds of such a network have been planted and are sprouting. If this transnational network develops and the rule of law is strengthened internationally, we will be able to achieve the goals of peace, economic sustainability, and human rights and mitigate the impacts of a dying empire gone rogue.

Watch part of the People’s Mobe Rally here:

Watch the People’s Mobe March here:

Watch the “Path to International Peace” here:

*

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.

The Polish Ministry of Digitalisation has denied (June 11) that Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki signed the Global Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space.[1]

The refute was put out by the Ministry of Digitalisation, the government department that deals with telecommunications. It states

“The opponents of 5G are heating-up the mood, serving customers fake news – we want to give Poles a reliable source of information about 5G so that no one misleads them.”

Hopes raised that Prime Minister Morawiecki might have some genuine humanitarian concerns for his people have been proved unduly optimistic.

This week, according to the parliamentary schedule, Mateusz Morawiecki will lead his government into presenting a new Act that will annul the existing law on ‘acceptable levels’ of Electro Magnetic Frequencies (EMF) in order to introduce microwave frequency transmission levels 10 to 100 times more intense than current levels. This is being done to satisfy the telecommunications industry’s ambition to install tens of thousands of 5G transmitters across the length and breadth of the Country.

If this Act is passed, the Prime Minister and government parliamentarians will be complicit in introducing a completely untested technology which over 2,000 scientists and 1,400 medical doctors from all over the World have described as presenting a direct threat to the health of humans, animals, insect and plant life.

The government of Poland appears determined to ignore such warnings. Also to ignore the safety-net known as ‘the precautionary principle’ in which anything judged as causing potential harm cannot be put in the public domain without first undergoing independent assessment for its safety.

This refusal to follow responsible principles demonstrates that the Prime Minister is ready to sell the freedom of Poland, the health of the  electorate and future generations, to corporate interests. The fact is that all decisions on 5G are made without any public consultation or any opportunity to object.

Awareness of the threat that 5G poses is rapidly growing. Protests in different parts of Poland are demonstrating the anger people feel at being forced to accept this highly controversial technology. Some protesters held-off for a while in the hope that Prime Minister Morawiecki had shown a human face. But since it is now officially denied that he supports stopping 5G, resistance will undoubtedly grow, with the effect that in the Autumn election the Polish government (Pis) is likely to be shown a red card for its refusal to listen to the 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.

Julian Rose is author of  ‘Overcoming the Robotic Mind – Why humanity Must Come Through,   now available from Amazon and Dixi Books. See www.julianrose.info for more information  www.julianrose.info. Julian is an international activist, writer, organic farming pioneer and actor.  In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi.

Note

[1] https://www.5gspaceappeal.org/

Featured image is from Waking Times

Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and Belarusian President Lukashenko are publicly at odds over the issue of Ukraine’s federalizaton as a possible outcome of Kiev finally implementing the Minsk Accords in the event of the “New Detente” succeeding, with this serious disagreement over the future of their mutual neighbor’s domestic administrative system representing yet another geopolitical fault line between the two members of the so-called “Union State”.

Along with clear evidence of US meddling in scores of foreign elections, wanting ruling authorities serving its interests installed, the US political process was rife with fraud and other dirty tricks time and again since early in the 18th century. More on this below.

The Russiagate witch hunt hoax was and remains all about delegitimizing Trump’s triumph over media darling Hillary, bashing Russia at the same time, falsely claiming an improper or illegal Trump team connection to Moscow, along with the Big Lie that won’t die accusation of Kremlin US election meddling no evidence suggests occurred because none exists.

Ukrainegate is a Russiagate spinoff, a second bite of the apple, another politicized attempt to vilify Trump for the wrong reasons, aiming to give whoever becomes undemocratic Dem standard bearer an edge in the 2020 presidential election.

Like Russiagate, Ukrainegate is a tempest in a teapot, much ado about nothing. In politics, perception becomes reality in the public mind, notably from a steady manipulative media drumbeat, pushing their worldview, featuring advocacy over journalism the way it should be.

An impeachment inquiry, initiated by Dems, over allegations that Trump asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to investigate Joe Biden and his son Hunter on corruption related issues, along with allegedly delaying military aid as a bargaining chip, is a scam likely to backfire like Russiagate.

It’s compounded by CIA involvement, a so-called agency whistleblower, alleging that Trump “is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 US election.”

The individual admitted not being “a direct witness to most of events described.”

Claiming Trump’s actions “pose risks to US national security and undermine the US government’s efforts to deter and counter foreign interference” is politicized malarkey.

Expressing outrage over whatever Trump may or may not have done is like Captain Renault expressing shock about gambling at Rick’s from the film Casablanca – as Emile hands him his winnings and is thanked.

US political shenanigans began in the early days of the republic. In 1824, after no clear electoral winner emerged, a “corrupt bargain” was agreed on after weeks of intense lobbying, John Quincy Adams chosen over Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, and William Crawford as president. Outrage followed because deal-makers prevailed over voters.

Jackson was later elected and reelected president in 1828 and 1832.

In 1876, Dem Samuel Tilden got over two million more votes than Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. With 20 disputed Electoral College votes uncounted, Tilden led by a 184 – 165 margin.

A secretly struck “bargain of 1877” elevated Hayes to the nation’s highest office, power brokers deciding things, not voters.

In 1948, Lyndon Johnson’s Senate campaign overcame a 20,000 vote deficit to gain an 87-vote victory. According to historian Robert Caro, it wasn’t “the only (US) election…ever stolen, but there was never such brazen thievery” to that time.

Digital age technology, featuring corporate-programmed electronic voting machines, makes electoral fraud easier than ever.

Despite losing to Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, GW Bush served two terms as president — electronic ease and majority Supreme Court justices elevating him to power.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter was chosen to defeat Gerald Ford for a one-term post-Watergate interregnum, following the railroading of Richard Nixon, forcing his resignation, ahead of Republicans regaining control of the White House in 1980.

In 2008, the absurd McCain/Palin ticket was chosen to lose, handing the election to Obama.

Democracy in America is pure fantasy, how it’s been from inception. Secrecy and back room deals substitute for a free, fair and open process.

Party bosses choose candidates. Big money owns them. Ordinary Americans have no say over how they’re governed.

Voters get the best democracy money can buy — what realpolitik’s dark side is all about.

Election 2016 surprised. Media vilified billionaire real estate businessman Trump, a political outsider, triumphed over establishment figure Hillary — groomed and selected to succeed Obama.

How possible? Scandals surrounding her likely made her damaged goods, too contentious to serve – especially with key House Republican committee chairmen promising endless investigations into her wrongdoing to maintain relentless pressure on her.

Trump is a political anomaly – an establishment figure coming across to supporters as populist, effectively enough to elevate him to the nation’s highest office.

Was it by fair or foul means? Favorites don’t usually lose to outliers in America. Make your own judgment.

Investigative journalist Greg Palast believed the 2016 process was rigged, citing “caging, blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to ‘provisional’ ballots that (were) never be counted,” along with potential millions of people “voting many, many times” in key states.

If so, it wasn’t the first or last time US election results aren’t what they seem. Power brokers have final say on how things turn out.

Dirty tricks like Russiagate and Ukrainegate are part of the US political landscape, each right wing of the one-party state, seeking an edge over the other.

That’s what the Dems-initiated anti-Trump impeachment inquiry  is all about.

It’s also clear proof that politics in America (and most other countries) is no place for the fainthearted.

*

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.

During a meeting with Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro held on last Wednesday Russian President Vladimir Putin said that Russia supports Venezuela’s legitimate government against the continued U.S.-backed coup led by opposition leader Juan Guaidó. However, the Russian president also said he supported the dialogue with different factions of the opposition and stressed that the rejection of talks would be harmful and unreasonable.

“Russia consistently supports all legitimate Venezuelan bodies, including the presidential institution and the parliament. In addition, we support the dialogue you, Mr President, and the government have with the opposition. We regard any refusal of dialogue as irrational, harmful to the country and a threat to the welfare of the population,” Putin said.

The Venezuelan president said Moscow and Caracas “proved that together they can overcome any difficulties.”

“We continue to cooperate in a number of areas. In May this year, a meeting of the high-level intergovernmental commission was held, and many issues that were discussed in that committee were successfully resolved. We are talking about a number of areas, such as food, health, energy, among others,” Maduro said.

The U.S. has not given up their efforts to have Maduro ousted from power, despite increasing and crippling sanctions, assassination attempts and coup attempts.  The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced on Wednesday that it will allocate more than $50 million to the Venezuelan opposition.

“Today, United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Administrator Mark Green, while standing alongside Venezuelan lawmakers, human-rights activists, and the Venezuelan Ambassador to the United States, Carlos Vecchio, announced $52 million in development assistance to help Venezuela’s Interim President Juan Guaido,” said the statement, which also said “this money will go to programs that support the Venezuelan [opposition-controlled] National Assembly, independent media, civil society, and restoration of the health sector.”

This financial aid adds to the “hundreds of millions of dollars in humanitarian assistance the U.S. Government has already provided in response to the Venezuelan regional crisis,” as well as supporting Venezuelan refugees in Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru and elsewhere in the region, added the statement.

Venezuela has been experiencing increased political tensions since January, after Guaidó proclaimed himself president of the country and gained support from the U.S. and more than 50 other states. Since Guaidó launched the sustained coup attempt against the Maduro administration, the U.S. has only increased the sanctions against Venezuela, which in turn, has completely destroyed the health sector, the same health sector that the U.S. now claims to be aiding. Over 40,000 Venezuelans since 2017 have been killed as a result of U.S. sanctions, according to a report titled Economic Sanctions as Collective Punishment: The Case of Venezuela.

“The sanctions are depriving Venezuelans of lifesaving medicines, medical equipment, food and other essential imports,” said Mark Weisbrot, the Center for Economic and Policy Research Co-Director and co-author of the report. “This is illegal under international laws and treaties that the U.S. has signed. Congress should move to stop it,” he added.

Therefore, it must be rejected that the U.S. has the well being of the Venezuelans in mind, especially since U.S. sanctions take out tens of billions of dollars from the economy, meaning the $52 million aid assistance is an insignificant amount. The aid assistance is rather to ensure that the long-sustained coup attempt that is slowly destroying the economy can be sustained.

As the Bolivarian Revolution, that began with Hugo Chávez’s (Maduro’s predecessor) election in 1999, brought an end to rampant neoliberal capitalism in Venezuela, the U.S. has taken every measure bar a military invasion to see the toppling of the ruling democratically elected government. As U.S. corporate interests were under threat in the Latin American country that has the largest oil reserves in the world, it has orchestrated and financed several coup attempts, all ultimately resulting in failure.

With Russia helping Venezuela diplomatically, it also supported the country by expanding economic and military ties. With China also taking a hands-on position by also backing the Maduro government diplomatically and economically, it demonstrates that the Age of Multipolarity has arrived where states now have options against U.S. unilateralism. However, the case of Venezuela is especially unique as it is in the Latin American region that the U.S. has since at least the mid-1800’s called it’s “backyard.” Therefore, Maduro has every right to say that Moscow and Caracas “proved that together they can overcome any difficulties.”

*

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 director of the Multipolarity research centre.

The old maxim that “the U.S. government exists to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad” was never truer than today. Our defense budget is soaring to previously undreamed-of heights and overseas weapons deals are setting new records.

Indeed, the arms sales industry has become so multi-faceted that while some American corporations push weapons, other U.S. firms are making money by acting on behalf of the buyers. Thus a Lockheed Martin-Raytheon team recently dispatched to Riyadh to negotiate the finer points of the ongoing $15 billion deal for seven Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) batteries jointly manufactured by the two companies, found themselves facing not Saudis across the table, but a team of executives from the Boston Consulting Group. This behemoth, which has $7.5 billion in global revenues, is just one of the firms servicing Mohammed “Bone Saw” Bin Salman’s vicious and spendthrift consolidation of power in the kingdom.

Among other lucrative revenue streams, BCG enjoys a contract to overhaul the defense ministry’s arms buying practices, a challenging task given the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons MBS has on order.

For arms dealers doing business in the kingdom, the most visible overhaul to date has been the consolidation of control over Saudi weapons purchases, and all branches of the armed forces, in the hands of MBS himself.

Previously, control in this area had been distributed among different factions of the ruling family, thus enabling each to enjoy the financial rewards (read: kickbacks) traditionally attendant to such deals. But MBS has made it his business, in every sense of the word, to cut out potentially rival middlemen by centralizing all Saudi defense business under the umbrella of the General Authority of Military Industries, with management in the trustworthy (he hopes) hands of close relatives and henchmen such as Mutlaq bin Hamad Al Murashid, the Princeton-trained nuclear engineer charged with developing the Saudi nuclear program.

The Boston Group has cultivated a market in advising foreign governments on arms buying, promoting the fostering of their own military-industrial complexes, or, as BCG executives demurely expressed the strategy in a 2018 paper: “Unlike the way business was done in the past, today’s buyers want the defense contractor to invest in their country’s infrastructure, help develop their local defense capabilities, and diversify their economies.”

So-called “offset” agreements have long been a feature of major weapons export deals in which the exporter undertakes to award sub-contracts for the weapon system in the purchasing country, or else offer some other quid quo pro in the form of business or technology transfer. Their massive expansion in recent times, as highlighted in the BCG paper, brings an additional benefit for all parties involved. But it comes at a risk of sending U.S. defense jobs overseas, and opens up security vulnerabilities, since sensitive technology is now being shared with foreign arms manufacturers abroad.

But the promise of a lucrative offset contract to a company in which an influential figure on the buy side has an interest could be a powerful inducement to swing the decision in a favorable direction, an elegant solution to pesky prohibitions against bribery, including the hated 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that was inspired in part by revelations of arms-deals bribes by Lockheed and others. 

As the well-informed Paris-based security news service Intelligence Online delicately puts it: “One of the reasons for [the success of such arrangements] is that they are not totally covered by the transparency criteria governing commission payments [AKA bribes] which were brought into force by OECD convention in 1997.” (Not, of course, to suggest that BCG itself has base motivations in facilitating offset deals today.) 

Of course, if the Riyadh based BCG office (“always buzzing with a motivating and inspiring vibe,” according to the corporate website) had the true interests of Saudi Arabia at heart, they would have thrown the THAAD sales force out on their ears. THAAD is a system distinguished not only by its enormous cost ($1 billion plus per six-launcher battery),  but also by its total uselessness for the Saudis.  Presumably, the Saudis have been sold on the THAAD as a defense against Iranian ballistic missiles like the old Soviet Scud and its various Iranian upgrades.

As its name suggests, the THAAD aims to intercept  incoming short range or medium range ballistic missiles arcing down into the top of the atmosphere 25 to 90 miles up and no further away than 125 miles. The THAAD’s radar must therefore “acquire”–spot– the actual missile warhead, distinguishing it from nearby broken up pieces of its spent booster rocket or from  decoys deliberately launched with it. The radar must then track and predict the future trajectory of the warhead itself, not confusing it with any of the accompanying bits and pieces. Relying on the radar’s predictions, the THAAD missile interceptor,  once launched, must quickly accelerate to MACH 8 speed and guide with absolute precision to hit the target warhead  directly, like a bullet. Near misses won’t do.

After a series of early, disastrous failures, the Pentagon is now touting a fifteen out of fifteen string of successful THAAD launchings. Needless to say, not one of these tests has been against a ballistic missile target accompanied by booster debris or decoys, much less against half a dozen of such missiles fired at once.

This alone should be reason enough for the Saudis to toss the deal, but even if the system could perform as advertised, it would have been entirely irrelevant as a defense against the September 14 Houthi attacks on Abqaiq and Kurais.  The drones and cruise missiles employed clearly came in at low altitude, while THAAD is designed to operate against high altitude targets. The Patriot and Hawk batteries already in place are of course no better suited to confront low altitude threats, which are inevitably masked by ground clutter.

Even if the attackers had been obliging enough to send in ballistic missiles with a high-altitude trajectory, the THAAD would have offered little succor, since its infra-red seeker, as noted, cannot distinguish between actual warheads and decoys. Nor would the Russian S-400 system cheekily offered by Putin in the aftermath of the attack have fared better, and for many of the same reasons.

Such realities have found little place in the outpouring of commentary on the attacks, with little or no attention paid to easily available evidence. For example, published pictures of the damage at Abqaiq clearly show a number of liquified natural gas storage tanks pierced in the same place on their western sides.  As former Pentagon analyst Pierre Sprey pointed out to me, this clearly shows that the attacks came from the west, not the north, as claimed in numerous media reports.

The consistent accuracy demonstrated by these impact holes indicates that the terminal guidance was not GPS, but rather human drone controllers, manually steering the slow flying drones, via the drones’ video cameras, into the target.  For control purposes they would have to have been in line of sight to the drones (the only alternative would be an easily detectable satellite link) so they could have been no further than 36 miles away at most, assuming the drones were flying at a likely 300 feet altitude.

Instead of such cogent analysis, we have been presented with unquestioning reports of Saudi “evidence” that the attacks came directly from Iran in the form of pictures of an alleged wrecked Iranian drone discovered somewhere close to the targeted area.

Motivated and inspired, presumably, by the enormous sums of money to be made, the Boston Consultants and others advising the Saudi regime must have little interest in drawing attention to such tiresome details. There are arms to be bought and sold, and that is the whole point, bringing that old maxim, “the U.S. government exists to buy arms at home and sell arms abroad,” into a sharper, and yet more twisted, focus.

*

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.

Andrew Cockburn is the Washington editor of Harper’s Magazine and the author of five nonfiction books, including Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-Tech Assassins (2016). He has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Playboy, Vanity Fair, and National Geographic, among other publications. 

The US and Israel are manoeuvring between the internal Iraqi differences in order to hit Hashd al-Shaabi, the “Popular Mobilisation Forces” (PMF). These forces have gathered significant domestic support and created many enemies among the Iraqis. The reason for this antipathy is the Iranian fingerprint within the PMF. Yet Iran is supposed to be close to Iraq, a neighbouring country, with which it shares a strong religious bond. Iran supported the country when Baghdad was threatened by ISIS.

It goes back to when Moqtada was terrorising the city of Najaf with his thugs and threatening Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Ali Sistani, Sheikh Bashir al-Najafi and Sheikh Ishac al-Fay’yad. Moqtada was then Iran’s favourite pawn because he took the initiative to stand against the US forces. It was only after five years of Iran’s full support to Moqtada before the relationship started to degenerate in 2008, and became embittered a few years later. Al-Sadr accused Iran of splitting the Sadrist leadership into several groups: “Asaebahl al-Haq”, “Harakat al Nujabaa and “Kataeb Imam Ali”. But Moqtada was not the only one with an issue with Iran.

The Marjaiya held Iran responsible for supporting Moqtada at the start and disapproved of the 2003 and 2004 confrontation with the US forces, even if the Grand Ayatollah Sistani was the one who saved Moqtada’s life and prevented US forces from capturing him. Sayyed Ali Sistani todaymaintains a  cordial relationship with the Sadrist leader – without necessarily endorsing his un-strategic acts– and shares with Moqtada his discontent with Iran’s policy and interferencein Iraqi affairs. Sayyed Sistani wanted to avoid Iraq becoming the theatre for the Iran-US struggle and continues to think along the same lines today. The Marjaiya in Najaf accused Soleimani and Hezbollah, tacitly, of intervening in Iraq and manoeuvring the formation of several governments.

To the displeasure and disagreement of both Sayyed Sistani and Moqtada al-Sadr, Iran played, along with Hezbollah, an essential role in routing a strong ideology among militants and security forces and in the formation of several Iraqi governments from just after the Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari until the current Premier Adel Abdel Mahdi. Sayyed Sistani, for the first time ever, wrote a letter in black and white to prevent al-Maliki from winning a third term. Haidar al-Abadi replaced al-Maliki, to the disapproval of Soleimani. Abadi was very hostile to Soleimani throughout his mandate, but the IRGC commander played an essential role in the election of Adel Abdel Mahdi and helped to bring down Abadi.

When ISIS occupied a third of Iraq and all differences were suspended- but not resolved- Hashd was formed through the call of Sayyed Sistani, armed by Iran who delivered weapons to Baghdad and Erbil to fight a common enemy before it reached the doorstep of Iran itself. Sayyed Sistani formed units within Hashd and armed them using the money of “beit al-mal” (the Islamic treasury).

The US and Iraq are now present within the same perimeter, in different military bases spread throughout Iraq. And the American forces have full control, independence and autonomy over thelarge sections of each base under their control. That was Abadi’s “gift” to the Americans because the (ex) Prime Minister had agreed to give the US forces full immunity and autonomy in the bases.

But the US – according to the Iraqi intelligence services in Baghdad who rely on friendly radar and trusted intelligence– is believed to be using the bases as a logistic support for Israel. The Iraqi sources have reason to believe that the suicide drones used against the Iraqi security forces, and the drone responsible for the assassination against the Iraqi commander, took off from different parts of Iraq itself.

Israel is renowned for its more than adequate reading of the political situation,most of the time, in every country it is operating in or with- essential knowledge for assessing threats and consequences. Indeed, the political situation in Iraq today does resemble the Lebanese political situation in 2006 when Israel decided to wage war on Lebanon. In 2006, Lebanon was divided between the group called the 8^thof March that supports the “Axis of the Resistance” and the pro-US group called the 14^thof March. Israel benefitted from the domestic internal division among Lebanese and wanted – but failed – to disarm Hezbollah and force its withdrawal from the entire south of Lebanon and the borders with Syria. The Lebanese government led by a 14^thof March member unsuccessfully attempted to dismantle the most secret fibre-optic closed circuit Hezbollah communication system linking the various parts of Lebanon, including a few lines that connected with Syrian officials.

Today, in 2019, Iraq is in a similar situation to Lebanon in 2006. Even worse, in Iraq, the Shia are divided over the function and continuity of the Iraqi security force, Hashd al-Shaabi and how to “dilute” it within the Federal Police and the Army so as to avoid the emergence and officialising of an independent entity.

These domestic differences are providing a loophole for Israel to sneak in and fight Iran’s allies in Tehran’s backyard. US-Iran tension has reached its peak and a possible war against Iran continues to loom over the Middle East. Iran is said to have delivered precision missiles to the Iraqi forces. Regardless, the Shia Iraqi leader Sayyed Ammar al-Hakin said: “Iraq is not a warehouse for all non-Iraqi weapons; Iraq is not a theatre in any other war. We should putour differences aside.”

Iran wants Hashd to gain strength because ISIS and the US still have strong presences in Iraq. Tehran wishes to continue benefitting financially from Iraq’s stability to ease the US administration “maximum pressure” on its economy, sell its oil and electricity and promote its commerce. This is allowing the US and Israel to have some sort of free hand in Mesopotamia but not for long. Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu can no longer repeat, against Iraq, his hundreds of attacks on Syria in the last years because he will endanger US forces, for certain. Iraq is now starting, with its serious contacts with Russia, Iran and China, to look for alternative missile capabilities in order to prevent future aggression. Unlike Syria, for now Mesopotamia will not become Israel’s playground.

*

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.

All images in this article are from the author

On September 22, 1979, a US Vela satellite detected a “double flash” signal far off the coast of South Africa. It was the tell-tale sign of an atmospheric nuclear explosion: US Vela satellites, launched to help enforce the Partial Test Ban Treaty, had detected 41 previous double flashes, and all of them were caused by known nuclear tests. That night, President Jimmy Carter wrote in his diary:

“There was indication of a nuclear explosion in the region of South Africa—either South Africa, Israel using a ship at sea, or nothing.”

His administration would eventually decide, contrary to the evidence, to push the theory that it was the last of these three possibilities that had occurred.

While publicly available information cannot definitively prove that Israel conducted an illegal nuclear test that night, Foreign Policy has published a collection on the 40^th anniversary of the event that shows how evidence in support of that theory is mounting, and why the mysterious flash still matters.

At the time, within the White House, there was apparently little doubt about what had happened. Several months after the event, on February 27, 1980, Carter wrote in his diary,

“we have a growing belief among our scientists that the Israelis did indeed conduct a nuclear test explosion in the ocean near the southern end of Africa.”

Still, the administration put together a panel, led by Jack Ruina, to determine the cause of the double flash signal. In May 1980, the panel laid out an alternative theory in its report: that a tiny meteor had hit the satellite and broken into smaller particles that then perfectly reflected the sunlight in such a way as to mimic the signal from a nuclear explosion. Even though the panel hedged on the likelihood that its explanation was the correct one, it nevertheless concluded that, in any event, the signal was “probably not” from a nuclear explosion.

The optical signal recorded by one of the Vela satellite’s sensors on September 22, 1979. Credit: 1980 Ruina Report, shaded for clarity.

In recent years, more data about the event has become available in declassified documents, as Bulletin contributors have previously noted. Drawing on some of this data, Lars-Erik De Geer and Christopher Wright co-authored two scientific papers in which they conducted independent analyses of the raw data. In the first, they obliterate the meteoroid theory. In the second, they examine iodine 131 found in the thyroid glands of Australian sheep that were slaughtered in October and November 1979 and conclude that the data was consistent with a nuclear detonation on September 22.

Once one is convinced that there was in fact a nuclear explosion, it’s only a short step to figuring out who did it. None of the five recognized nuclear weapons states at the time would have had any need to perform a small clandestine test at sea. Pakistan, India, and South Africa could be ruled out too, since such a test would not have been feasible for them given the nuclear development and logistical difficulties it entailed. That left Israel, which had both the motivation and capability, as the sole candidate.

The consequences of acknowledging that Israel had conducted a nuclear test would have been grave, and that’s why the Foreign Policy contributors believe the Carter administration refused to admit it. Such a test would have been a violation of the Partial Test Ban Treaty, which Israel had ratified in 1964. More important, US laws would have required the triggering of sanctions against Israel, which for political reasons Carter was keen to avoid.

Though keeping the matter a secret may have been politically expedient at the time, the opposite may be true now. As Henry Sokolski writes in his contribution, the prospect of the US government sharing what it knows about the incident now “would seem to make sense, as it would help discourage future violations of pledges not to test by countries such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, South Korea, Japan, and other aspirational nuclear states.” Or, put differently, to acknowledge the test would be to uphold an important nonproliferation norm, whereas continued silence leaves the United States open to the charge of hypocrisy.

*

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.

John Krzyzaniak is an associate editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

The US has put sanctions on several Chinese companies and their top officials for allegedly shipping Iranian oil, putting dozens of supertankers off limits to western energy traders. As a direct impact of the blacklisting of Chinese shipping company Cosco, 145,000 tonnes of Indian Oil is at risk.

The US Treasury department on Wednesday blacklisted two oil tanker subsidiaries of Cosco, a leading Chinese shipping and logistics company, although the parent company remains unaffected.

China Concord Petroleum, Pegasus 88 Limited, Kunlun Shipping Company and Kunlun Holding Company were also sanctioned.

The sanctions against Cosco subsidiaries alone could affect 40-50 tankers, about half of which are very large crude carriers — the giant supertankers used by international oil traders for long-haul voyages, said Erik Broekhuizen, head of tanker research and consulting at Poten & Partners, an energy broker in New York.

The Financial Times reported in August that the Trump administration was tracking the movement of tankers linked to Bank of Kunlun, a subsidiary of China’s biggest state-run oil company China National Petroleum Corporation, amid signs that the vessels are helping to transport Iranian crude to China in defiance of US sanctions against Tehran. In August at least three Kunlun-linked tankers had been spotted interacting with Iranian vessels since May through Planet Labs satellite imagery, which was provided to the Financial Times by TankerTrackers alongside maritime data from MarineTraffic.

Indian Oil Corp is also examining the impact of U.S. sanctions on its chartering of a crude carrier owned by a subsidiary of China’s Cosco Shipping Corporation.

“The matter is being examined,” IOC said in response to a Reuters email seeking comment after the U.S. Treasury Department on Wednesday imposed sanctions on five Chinese nationals and six entities it said had violated Washington’s unilateral curbs on Tehran.

IOC has chartered Da Yuan Hu, owned by Cosco Shipping Tanker Dalian, for the lifting of 145,000 tonnes of Mexican Isthumus oil. The vessel is expected to start its voyage to Paradip port in eastern India on Oct. 10, Refinitiv Eikon data shows.

More than two months and 20,000 kilometers (12,000 miles) ago, the tanker Da Yuan Hu left Singapore and headed to Mexico to pick up a shipment of crude oil. On Thursday, with less than two weeks to go until it reaches its destination, its long quest could be in jeopardy. The ship, along with dozens of others, is now ensnared in the standoff between the U.S. and Iran.

Da Yuan Hu – last spotted on 15 Aug somewhere pass Cape Town. Now that its operating Chinese Shipping Co Cosco has been blacklisted by Americans for shipping Iranian Oil it may be intercepted by US Navy before Dos Bocas Port Mexico leaving 145000 tonnes of Oil for India in limbo. pic.twitter.com/bcZFjkzhoc

— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) September 27, 2019

The announcements by the U.S. Treasury and State departments left shipbrokers and charterers scrambling to cancel bookings with sanctioned companies and letting provisional charters lapse. Uncertainty still remains on whether cargoes that have already been loaded onto the vessels of sanctioned firms would be allowed to deliver, or whether they would have to transfer their loads to unsanctioned tankers, reported Bloomberg.

US sanctions come amid a new escalation of tensions in the Middle East after Saudi Arabia’ Aramco Oil facilities were attacked by drones on 14th September. In April, Washington had announced countries including India and China, which are currently important Iranian crude oil, will either have to end their imports completely or be subjected to American sanctions. China and India were the largest importer of Iranian oil.

While the Chinese are resisting what the call their sovereign right to a free and fair maritime trading, India has drastically cutoff its import of Oil from Iran and meanwhile have signed billion dollar deals with Saudi Aramco and American Tellurian Inc.

*

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 GreatGameIndia.

Featured image is from the author

In 2013, the Conservative party famously went about purging its website and the internet of press releases it made about its 2010 manifesto promises. Basically, they lied to get into power and U-turned on the most significant of promises.

In the week before the 2010 general election, David Cameron promised that there would be no top-down reorganisations of the NHS and no cuts. “What I can tell you is, any cabinet minister, if I win the election, who comes to me and says: “Here are my plans,” and they involve front-line reductions, they’ll be sent straight back to their department to go away and think again. After 13 years of Labour, there is a lot of wasteful spending, a lot of money that doesn’t reach the front line.”

They got into power and have since sacked tens of thousands from the front lines of the NHS, the fire services, emergency ambulance services and police.

In an interview with Jeremy Paxman on 23 April 2010, Cameron said:

“We have absolutely no plans to raise VAT. Our first Budget is all about recognising we need to get spending under control rather than putting up tax.”

VAT was subsequently raised from 17.5 per cent to a record high of 20 per cent in George Osborne’s emergency Budget.

Cameron went on – “I wouldn’t means-test child benefit” and then did. And froze it for everyone else. Other social policies sacrificed to the altar of Conservative economic extremism were Educational Maintenance Allowances, the children’s SureStart programme, the Future Jobs Fund and other ‘pledges’ such as completely reversing on halting excessive banker bonuses, pulling green taxes and government transparency.

So don’t be conned by what Boris Johnson will offer at this snap election.

However, a leaked document (we don’t know if deliberately leaked) now confirms 100 per cent that the Conservative’s privatisation programme for the NHS, is not just a complete failure – but this too will be a huge U-turn. It is in the same vein as putting 20,000 more police officers on the streets to curb increasing violence.

“Privatisation of NHS care will be significantly curbed under confidential plans that health service bosses expect Downing Street to include in the Queen’s speech next month.

Local NHS bodies in England would no longer have to put out to tender any contract worth at least £615,278. That requirement has contributed to a big increase in outsourcing of services and a record £9.2bn of the NHS’s budget now being handed to private firms.

Under NHS England’s proposals, Boris Johnson would have to scrap key elements of Andrew Lansley’s shake-up of the NHS in England in 2012, which bitterly divided the then coalition government.”

The Guardian has obtained an NHS England document which summarises 22 key changes it believes will be included in an NHS reform bill due to be published next month.

“A twin-pronged attempt to severely restrict future privatisation would involve scrapping section 75 of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 and removing the commissioning of healthcare services from the remit of the Public Contracts Regulations 2015.”

I won’t go into the detail as there’s something missing in the Guardian article. Something really big.

Obviously, the reason Johnson will offer this is purely to win votes and has nothing at all to do with the best way to run the NHS. And apparently, the cross-party Commons health and social care select committee has already given its backing to all the proposed legislative changes.

If Boris Johnson does, in fact, go ahead with this proposal, then the US trade deal with America is dead in the water. At least, according to Donald Trump’s negotiating team.

Just two days ago, Johnson reaffirmed that the NHS was off the table in US trade deal negotiations. Mr Johnson claimed he would tell the president “that when we do a free trade deal, we must make sure that the NHS is not on the table, that we do not in any way prejudice or jeopardize our standards on animal welfare and food hygiene in the course of that deal, and that we open up American markets.”

As the snap election call is only a few weeks away now, we’ll soon find out. Whatever happens, after the pollsters accepted huge sums of cash to distort the Brexit outcome by selling illegal information to hedge-funds so they could short the pound Sterling when it came to Brexit – don’t believe anything you read in the papers.

*

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

Washington had sent over the past hours new reinforcements to its occupation troops in Syria, according to local sources in Qameshli.

The sources said that a convey composed of dozens of cars and trucks carrying weapons plus military and logistic equipment illegally entered the Syrian territories coming from the north of Iraq through Simalka crossing.

The convey crossed the countryside of Malekeyeh city to the north-east of Hasaka and it was delivered to the US occupation troops in the Syrian Jazeera area.

On the 22^nd of this month, Washington sent to its militia [the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Its Arabic acronym is QASAD] 175 trucks carrying weapons and logistic equipment.

In the mid of this month, the US occupation forces sent a convey composed of 150 trucks loaded with militarily and logistic reinforcements to the SDF militias through the same crossing.

Within the framework of its plots to devastate and fragment the region, the US troops had sent since last March more than 3000 trucks to Hasaka through illegal crossing with aim of offering military, technical and logistic support to the SDF militia, which step up its aggressive practices against civilians in the northeast of the country.

The U.S. claims that it supports the SDF to fight against ISIS terrorists. However, world reports confirm that there is a strong relation between Washington and ISIS terrorists.

The coalition formed by the US without UN approval has committed scores of massacres against Syrians.

*

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.

The Democrats know that there is no impeachable offense.  What they intend to do is to use the investigation to look into every aspect of Trump’s life and try to make dirt out of things unrelated to his talk with the Ukrainian president.  This “impeachment investigation” is a political act to help their candidate win the next presidential election.  

Democrats themselves describe it in this way. For example, here is how Rob Kall, the director of one of the progressive Democrat websites, described the purpose of the investigation:

“The idea should be to keep the impeachment going as long as possible, with new testimonies and new releases of disclosures of alleged corruption and treason on a regular basis.

“Looking at impeachment as a process for removing the president is the wrong way of thinking about it. Looking at it as a key that gives access to investigative tools is the smarter, more strategic, way of looking at it.

“Ideally, it will get so bad for Trump that the Republicans will end up putting up someone else to run in the general election. 

“But keeping him under investigation, at least through the November election, will increasingly erode the support of both Trump and the Republican party brand, making a Democratic takeover of the Senate and the White House, and an increased control of the House even more likely.”

In other words, it is a political power play.

The outcome depends on whether Americans see the impeachment investigation as another orchestrated hoax like Russiagate or whether they fall for the hoax as they iniatially did with the Russiagate investigation.

The United States does not have a media.  It has a propaganda ministry that helps the ruling elites control the explanations that Americans are given.  Polls show that Americans have lost confidence in the media.  If so, the impeachment investigation will backfire on the Democrats.

The ultimate purpose of the constant attacks on Trump is to teach the American voters that electing a president who is disapproved by the Establishment is futile.  The Establishment simply will not permit any change and will frustrate and destroy any president not selected by them as a candidate. 

This is the real way so-called “American democracy” works.  The establishment guides the selection of the Democrat and Republican candidates. Whichever wins, the Establishment wins.  This didn’t happen in Trump’s case, and so he has to be prevented from altering the Establishment’s agendas.

*

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. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published.

Just as unfolded in 2014 during the so-called “Umbrella protests” or “Occupy Central” movement, a growing backlash has begun across Hong Kong against US-funded protests that have attempted to disrupt governance and commerce as part of a floundering movement to maintain Western influence in the region.

The Sydney Morning Herald in its article, “Triads linked to violent pro-China gangs as Hong Kong protests enter dangerous new phase,” ignored weeks of violence carried out by US-backed protests in Hong Kong, and portrayed locals retaliating as “violent pro-China gangs.” It should be pointed out that Hong Kong is in China.

The article claims:

Turbulence in Hong Kong has reached a dangerous new phase, analysts say, amid escalating violence and the failure of Chief Executive Carrie Lam to respond to the political crisis. 

Television broadcasts on Monday were dominated by scenes of white-shirted men believed to be triad members caning and chasing train commuters as they hunted for democracy protesters on Sunday evening. People screamed as the gangs entered train carriages at Yuen Long station.

Having failed to attract wider public support, US-backed protesters have begun resorting to increasingly disruptive activities including raiding government buildings, storming commercial districts to intimidate visitors from mainland China and even targeting public transportation.

Backlash Follows Weeks of Violence and Vandalism by Pro-Western Protests

Before the SMH’s “violent pro-China gangs” showed up, US-backed protesters had admittedly stormed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (LegCo) building.

The BBC in its article, “Hong Kong police evict protesters who stormed parliament,” admitted:

Activists had occupied the Legislative Council (LegCo) building for hours after breaking away from a protest on the anniversary of Hong Kong’s transfer of sovereignty to China from Britain.

The BBC also admitted the protesters carried out vandalism inside the building:

Inside, they defaced the emblem of Hong Kong in the central chamber, raised the old British colonial flag, spray-painted messages across the walls, and shattered furniture.

The Financial Times in their article, “Hong Kong protesters target Chinese government office,” mentioned another government building targeted by the protesters, the Liaison Office for Hong Kong representing Beijing. The article reported:

Demonstrators spray-painted over the lenses of security cameras in front of the building and one threw an egg that splattered on its glass facade. Others wrote graffiti on a wall including an insult against China, and defaced lettering on the building’s gate.

The Guardian attempted to conceal the nature of the protests in its article, “Hong Kong protest ends in chaotic clashes between police and demonstrators,” which was ultimately about protesters targeting a shopping centre popular with mainland visitors.

The article would claim:

Violent clashes have erupted between Hong Kong police and protesters at the end of a peaceful demonstration against the controversial extradition bill. The incidents took place late on Sunday in a bustling town between Hong Kong island and the border with China. 

The scene descended into chaos shortly before 10pm local time (1400 GMT), after riot police chased protesters into a shopping centre in Sha Tin.

However, the Financial Times in its article, “Hong Kong protesters try to woo Chinese tourists to their cause,” admitted the protesters intentionally targeted the shopping centre rather than merely being “chased into it.” The article admits:

Hong Kong protesters against a controversial extradition bill for the first time targeted a busy shopping district popular with mainland Chinese tourists in an attempt to raise awareness of the issue across the border.

A recently built high-speed train station connecting Hong Kong with mainland China was also targeted. AFP-JIJI in its article, “Hong Kong protesters march on station to get message across to visiting Chinese mainlanders,” would admit:

Tens of thousands of anti-government protesters on Sunday rallied outside a controversial train station linking the territory to the Chinese mainland, the latest mass show of anger as activists try to keep pressure on the city’s pro-Beijing leaders. 

The US-backed protesters have also targeted journalists. The New York Times in its article, “Hong Kong Protesters’ New Target: A News Station Seen as China’s Friend,” attempted to defend the targeting of journalists perceived as being “pro-Beijing” claiming:

The confrontation on Wednesday, when the TVB journalist was surrounded, was not an isolated incident. Last month, protesters heckled another TVB video journalist, unfurling umbrellas to block his camera and chanting, “TVB news, selling out the people of Hong Kong!”

The New York Times fails to mention that opposition media is almost exclusively funded and supported from abroad, particularly out of Washington DC. If Beijing has no say or influence in Hong Kong, territory literally within its own borders, what say does Washington have so many thousands of miles away?

Together, the increasingly disruptive behaviour of the protesters coupled with growing violence and overt endorsement and even support being provided by the United States and other foreign interests, are attempting to target and impact virtually every aspect of life in Hong Kong linked to stability, peace and prosperity.

If the United States cannot maintain Hong Kong as its foothold inside Chinese territory and enjoy the benefits of its prosperity, no one else will either.

Hong Kong is China 

The government of Hong Kong is elected by both the people and organisations representing influential business communities there. The government is overwhelmingly pro-Beijing because Hong Kong is now firmly part of China. It was handed back to China in 1997 by the UK after over 170 years of British subjugation.

An influx of mainlanders, major infrastructure projects and flourishing business between the former British colony and China’s mainland has begun the irreversible re-integration of Hong Kong back into China.

Notions including “Basic Law” and “one country, two systems” were imposed on Beijing which at the time still lacked the political, economic and military power it now possesses. Both Basic Law and the “one country, two systems” arrangement were imposed on Beijing by London specifically as a means of technically handing Hong Kong over, but in practice, maintaining Western influence and the region’s role as Anglo-American foothold within Chinese territory.

As British influence across Asia-Pacific waned over time, Washington took over. Core leaders of Hong Kong’s ongoing protests against Beijing are funded and directed by Washington with many of these leaders, including Martin Lee, Joshua Wong and Benny Tai having literally travelled to Washington to receive support and even awards for their continuously disruptive behaviour.

Beijing has patiently weathered the West’s disruptive activities within its territory. In addition to Hong Kong, the US has nurtured separatism and terrorism in China’s Xinjiang region as well as armed insurrection and separatism in Tibet that has spanned more than half a century.

All of this is part of an admittedly decades-long strategy of encircling and containing China’s rise as a global power in order to preserve American primacy.

China’s answer has been meeting US-backed identity politics designed to divide and destroy, with massive infrastructure, education and economic programmes that have clearly gained the upper-hand even in places like Hong Kong where Western influence has been so deeply entrenched.

When faced with the choice of political instability or infrastructure and economic prosperity, the choice is very simple for the people of not only Hong Kong, but also Xinjiang and Tibet.

It is no wonder residents in Hong Kong have responded negatively to the violence and disruption perpetrated by US-backed protesters. The majority of Hong Kong has nothing to gain from disrupting commerce, targeting infrastructure, blocking roads and the vandalism of public property especially considering why it is really being done.

It is not being done for the people of Hong Kong or the nation of China of which Hong Kong once again now belongs. It is being done for Washington and is just one small part of a much wider, global slash-and-burn foreign policy. The protests in Hong Kong are also part of that policy failing. As US primacy fades across the globe, Washington has resorted to increasingly desperate and spiteful acts of destabilisation, as seen in Hong Kong.

The protests have no future in Hong Kong. They are led by an increasingly unpopular minority backed by a fading global power, and fighting against a growing global colossus within its own borders. The only real question is; how much damage will Washington and its proxies do as they throw this final tantrum?

*

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.

Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Hisham Ahmed was born in Deheisheh refugee camp on the outskirts of Bethlehem, Palestine in 1963.  Blind from birth, Hisham somehow surmounted all odds and ultimately earned a PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara.  He taught for many years at Birzeit University in Palestine, before coming to Saint Mary’s College of California in 2006. He died of cancer in July 2019, age 56.  The following remembrance was given at his memorial service held on 25 September 2019 at St Mary’s College.

*

Sometimes you meet someone who is unforgettable. Hisham Ahmed was such a person.

I recall the first time I met him. It was about twelve years ago, soon after he came to the Bay Area. He was speaking about the reality of Palestine before a big crowd. The other guest speaker was the Jewish American activist Anna Baltzer. I remember him with his braille computer, reading his prepared speech as his fingers slid across the computer which he kept by his side, supported by his shoulder strap.

That scene of Hisham with his computer and shoulder strap became very familiar. Hisham was always willing to speak at our events, never asking for anything in return. He was an important part of our community outreach and education about Palestine and the Middle East. We were especially happy when he agreed to join the board of the Mt Diablo Peace & Justice Center. He immediately made a mark with his positive suggestions and ideas. He was that kind of person.

Hisham was sensitive to others. In the hospital he would always ask and remember the name of  different nurses and doctors. If time permitted, he would inquire about the background of a nurse or doctor. Hisham would make some insightful comments and suddenly the staff would realize this blind person was very sharp. One of the night nurses was from Florida and was shocked and delighted to learn that Hisham had previously taught at his university there. Suddenly Hisham was not just another patient.

Image on the right: Hisham with Yasser Arafat

At the same time, Hisham stood up for himself and was unafraid to challenge authority.  Whether it was Israeli regime, the PA, or the Kaiser medical bureaucracy …. Hisham was unafraid to speak out. And he got the attention of Kaiser; his constructive criticisms made a difference.

Hisham was diplomatic and full of humor. I noticed that his academic advisor at UC Santa Barbara, from 25 years ago, recommended him highly. In addition to commenting on his academic work and achievements, the professor remarked that Hisham was ……….  “a live wire”. A live wire ….. Hisham lived life to the full, bicycling dangerously around the UC Santa Barbara campus.

Two years ago we had a forum in Orinda. It was ambitiously  titled “Stop the War Machine / Save the Planet”. And we ambitiously had 16 excellent speakers. It was a terrific lineup including the lead organizer from the California Nurses Union, the former Green Party mayor of Richmond, etc. But of course we had to strictly limit the time of each speaker. When his turn came, Hisham warmed up the audience by saying, “If you ever want to know how to punish a professor I will tell you how. Just limit their speaking time to seven to ten minutes …” The audience loved it. Hisham went on to deliver a sharp and prescient analysis of events. He described how Arab Spring had become Arab Hell with the destruction of Libya and war on Syria. He warned of the danger of all out war.

Image below: Hisham and Mother Agnes

Hisham showed his political courage and insight when he invited Mother Agnes Mariam to speak at St Mary’s College and to meet college leaders. Mother Agnes was a Palestinian Lebanese nun who lived in Syria. She  had been demonized in the media for saying the sarin gas attacks in Syria in 2013 were not done by the government. She was later proven correct by the research of Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry, Theodor Postol and others with track records of accuracy and objectivity. But at the time she was viciously attacked in western media, including  by some on the so-called Left. Those who wanted the US to intervene directly attacked Mother Agnes and threatened to disrupt her program at St Mary’s. The opposition even threatened violence at the college. Hisham told me there was enormous pressure to cancel the event. But Hisham was not deterred. The program went ahead and was outstanding.

Hisham was most devoted to his family. He was always talked admiringly of his wife Amneh, how he was worried because she was doing so much. When their son Ahmed was graduating from elementary school, Hisham was in the hospital. They did not want him to leave but he said “Hell no …. I am going to Ahmed’s graduation!” And he did. Later, when Hisham was home and monitoring his own health, his daughter Nour was at his side taking his blood pressure and  temperature. Hisham loved it and proudly called her Dr. Nour.

Because he was so articulate I assumed that Hisham came from the Palestinian upper class. Thus I was surprised to learn that his father was day laborer. Another surprise: Because Hisham taught at St Mary’s College and supported the Palestinian Christian Sabeel movement, I assumed he was Christian. Thus I was surprised to hear the Muslim call to prayer playing on his cell phone when we were in the hospital at 4:30 am. Hisham’s body rests at the Islamic cemetery in Livermore. His spirit and actions represent the best of the religion of peace and the best of all religions because Hisham did not discriminate.

My last memory of Hisham is the night before he passed away. He had arranged for his wife Amneh to have a barbecue dinner at their home. Nancy and Wendy were there, who had helped so much. He said we are missing Marty. I was happy that he said I was like a brother. It was a wonderful feast and party. Hisham ate with gusto, laughing and having a good time. I think he knew it was going to be his last chance to do that. And it was.

But that is how I remember Hisham. Full of fun. Wanting other people to have fun. And living life to the maximum. He was a man of principle, resolute but fun loving, polite but strong.

In some ways, Hisham embodied the Palestinian cause: overcoming huge challenges, resilient, proud, undaunted, steadfast. Let us do as he would want:  continue the fight for peace with justice in Palestine and beyond.

*

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.

Rick Sterling is a journalist on international issues. He lives in the SF Bay Area and can be contacted at [email protected]

All images in this article are from the author

The environmental justice movement that is surging globally is intentionally intersectional, showing how global warming is connected to issues such as race, poverty, migration and public health. One area intimately linked to the climate crisis that gets little attention, however, is militarism. Here are some of the ways these issues–and their solutions–are intertwined.

1. The US military protects Big Oil and other extractive industries. The US military has often been used to ensure that US companies have access to extractive industry materials, particularly oil, around the world. The 1991 Gulf War against Iraq was a blatant example of war for oil; today the US military support for Saudi Arabia is connected to the US fossil fuel industry’s determination to control access to the world’s oil. Hundreds of the  US military bases spread around the world are in resource-rich regions and near strategic shipping lanes. We can’t get off the fossil fuel treadmill until we stop our military from acting as the world’s protector of Big Oil.

2.  The Pentagon is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world. If the Pentagon were a country, its fuel use alone would make it the 47th largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, greater than entire nations such as Sweden, Norway or Finland. US military emissions come mainly from fueling weapons and equipment, as well as lighting, heating and cooling more than 560,000 buildings around the world.

3. The Pentagon monopolizes the funding we need to seriously address the climate crisis. We are now spending over half of the federal government’s annual discretionary budget on the military when the biggest threat to US national security is not Iran or China, but the climate crisis. We could cut the Pentagon’s current budget in half and still be left with a bigger military budget than China, Russia, Iran and North Korea combined. The $350 billion savings could then be funnelled into the Green New Deal. Just one percent of the 2019 military budget of $716 billion would be enough to fund 128,879 green infrastructure jobs instead.

4. Military operations leave a toxic legacy in their wake. US military bases despoil the landscape, pollute the soil, and contaminate the drinking water. At the Kadena Base in Okinawa, the US Air Force has polluted local land and water with hazardous chemicals, including arsenic, lead, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), asbestos and dioxin. Here at home, the EPA has identified over 149 current or former military bases as SuperFund sites because Pentagon pollution has left local soil and groundwater highly dangerous to human, animal, and plant life. According to a 2017 government report, the Pentagon has already spent $11.5 billion on environmental cleanup of closed bases and estimates $3.4 billion more will be needed.

5. Wars ravage fragile ecosystems that are crucial to sustaining human health and climate resiliency. Direct warfare inherently involves the destruction of the environment, through bombings and boots-on-the-ground invasions that destroy the land and infrastructure. In the Gaza Strip, an area that suffered three major Israeli military assaults between 2008 and 2014. Israel’s bombing campaigns targeted sewage treatment and power facilities, leaving 97% of Gaza’s freshwater contaminated by saline and sewage, and therefore unfit for human consumption. In Yemen, the Saudi-led bombing campaign has created a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, with more than 2,000 cases of cholera now being reported each day. In Iraq, environmental toxins left behind by the Pentagon’s devastating 2003 invasion include depleted uranium, which has left children living near US bases with an increased risk of congenital heart disease, spinal deformities,  cancer, leukemia, cleft lip and missing or malformed and paralyzed limbs.

6. Climate change is a “threat multiplier” that makes already dangerous social and political situations even worse. In Syria, the worst drought in 500 years led to crop failures that pushed farmers into cities, exacerbating the unemployment and political unrest that contributed to the uprising in 2011. Similar climate crises have triggered conflicts in other countries across the Middle East, from Yemen to Libya. As global temperatures continue to rise, there will be more ecological disasters, more mass migrations and more wars. There will also be more domestic armed clashes—including civil wars—that can spill beyond borders and destabilize entire regions. The areas most at risk are sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and South, Central and Southeast Asia.

7. US sabotages international agreements addressing climate change and war. The US has deliberately and consistently undermined the world’s collective efforts to address the climate crisis by cutting greenhouse gas emissions and speeding the  transition to renewable energy. The US refused to join the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Climate Accord was the latest example of this flagrant disregard for nature, science, and the future. Similarly, the US refuses to join the International Criminal Court that investigates war crimes, violates international law with unilateral invasions and sanctions, and is withdrawing from nuclear agreements with Russia. By choosing to prioritize our military over diplomacy, the US sends the message that “might makes right” and makes it harder to find solutions to the climate crisis and military conflicts.

8. Mass migration is fueled by both climate change and conflict, with migrants often facing militarized repression. A 2018 World Bank Group report estimates that the impacts of climate change in three of the world’s most densely populated developing regions—sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America—could result in the displacement and internal migration of more than 140 million people before 2050. Already, millions of migrants from Central America to Africa to the Middle East are fleeing environmental disasters and conflict. At the US border, migrants are locked in cages and stranded in camps. In the Mediterranean, thousands of refugees have  died while attempting dangerous sea voyages. Meanwhile, the arms dealers fuelling the conflicts in these regions are profiting handsomely from selling arms and building detention facilities to secure the borders against the refugees.

9. Militarized state violence is leveled against communities resisting corporate-led environmental destruction. Communities that fight to protect their lands and villages from oil drills, mining companies, ranchers, agribusiness, etc. are often met with state and paramilitary violence. We see this in the Amazon today, where indigenous people are murdered for trying to stop clear-cutting and incineration of their forests. We see it in Honduras, where activists like Berta Caceres have been gunned down for trying to preserve their rivers. In 2018, there were 164 documented cases of environmentalists murdered around the world. In the US, the indigenous communities protesting plans to build the Keystone oil pipeline in South Dakota were met by police who targeted the unarmed demonstrators with tear gas, bean-bag rounds, and water cannons—intentionally deployed in below-freezing temperatures. Governments around the world are expanding their state-of-emergency laws to encompass climate-related upheavals, perversely facilitating the repression of environmental activists who have been branded as “eco-terrorists” and who are subjected to counterinsurgency operations.

10. Climate change and nuclear war are both existential threats to the planet. Catastrophic climate change and nuclear war are unique in the existential threat they pose to the very survival of human civilization. The creation of nuclear weapons—and their proliferation–was spurred by global militarism, yet nuclear weapons are rarely recognized as a threat to the future of life on this planet. Even a very “limited” nuclear war, involving less than 0.5% of the world’s nuclear weapons, would be enough to cause catastrophic global climate disruption and a worldwide famine, putting up to 2 billion people at risk. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has set its iconic Doomsday Clock to 2 minutes to midnight, showing the grave need for the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The environmental movement and the anti-nuke movement need to work hand-in-hand to stop these threats to planetary survival.

To free up billions of Pentagon dollars for investing in critical environmental projects and to eliminate the environmental havoc of war, movements for a livable, peaceful planet need to put “ending war” at the top of the “must do” list.

*

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.

Medea Benjamin is cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. For a full understanding of the intersection between war and the climate, read Gar Smith’s War and Environmental Reader.

It was always an impossible challenge for America to retain the unrivalled power she enjoyed in 1945, when the country controlled both ends of the earth and had a massively powerful economy. At the end of World War II, the United States’ competitors were lying in ruins, including the USSR, which had almost been destroyed by the Nazis. Britain’s economy was decimated and its role as a great imperial power was long over.

America controlled about half of the world’s wealth in 1945, until the first blow swiftly fell in 1949 with the “loss of China”, the world’s fourth largest country, as communist forces took charge in Beijing. From therein, there has been a further decline of American power, but a gradual one. South-east Asia was threatening to pull free of Washington’s control, resulting in the highly destructive war in Vietnam, and other American-led interventions such as in resource-rich Indonesia during the mid-1960s.

By 1970, America’s share of global wealth had declined to about 25%, with the world economy becoming “tripolar”, shared between the affluent countries of western Europe along with Japan in east Asia. Since the early 1970s America’s financial decline has largely stabilised, and her share of world wealth still stands at over 20% today.

The greatest challenge to American hegemony is now undoubtedly China, a nation that has emerged at a rapid rate, catching the unsuspecting West by surprise. China’s vast financial programs, such as her Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), are a threat to the American and European financial order.

China is a very old country with a rich history dating thousands of years – and it is not easily bullied. When Washington shakes its fist occasionally at Europe or even Israel, their leaders usually acquiesce; but China has a habit of ignoring American wishes, and that is a disconcerting outcome for those in the US capital.

Unlike America, however, China has significant issues within its own borders, because of political and social unrest occurring in north-west China, and likewise in Hong Kong, which is an important commercial hub with trade links to the West. China also has a decades-long dilemma relating to the large island of Taiwan, which lies just over 400 miles east of Hong Kong.

In January this year, China’s president Xi Jinping said that Taiwan “must and will be” reunited with China and that “independence will only bring hardship”. Yet these aspirations could result in a military confrontation with the US, which nobody desires.

American governments have long pursued a close relationship with the Taiwanese, and the Donald Trump administration is attempting to increase collaboration with Taipei, Taiwan’s capital city. This year, American warships have sailed with growing frequency through the strategically important Taiwan Straits, a narrow stretch of water separating south-eastern China from Taiwan’s coastline.

Beijing has expressed “deep concern” over these policies, which are indeed highly provocative and a demonstration of American military power. The US government has also approved recent arms sales to Taiwan, including the selling of dozens of F-16 fighter jets to the island worth a potential $8 billion.

Western media reports on China’s “increasingly muscular military posture” in the South China Sea, while the United States pursues “freedom of navigation patrols” in the Eastern hemisphere. There are of course no Chinese warships sailing through the Caribbean or near the coast of California, which provides a revealing picture of America’s far greater strategic superiority. These navy patrols, beside the Chinese mainland and South China Sea, are resulting in rising tension between our planet’s two strongest nations. America and China are also nuclear-armed and have advanced weapons systems, meaning that any incident could have very serious consequences.

Since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, China has shifted more towards a capitalist-style economy. Unfortunately, China’s modern health and education systems have significantly declined in standards over the past four decades.

The death rate is today higher in China than during the Maoist years; while since the early 1980s, China’s education system has mostly been decentralised and privatised, moving it away from government control and funding to vested interest groups – borne out by the introduction of fee-paying initiatives in Chinese education, having impacts upon poorer families the most.

Further proof of China’s drift towards capitalism is relating to the rise of income inequality in the country, which is approaching that of America. Conservative estimates reveal that the level of China’s private wealth has increased four times over from 1978 until 2015: Rocketing from 115% to 478% in the decades following Mao’s death; while the share of China’s public property has fallen from around 70% in 1978 to 30% in 2015.

Moreover, the level of national income among the top 10% of Chinese society has increased from 27% in 1978 to 41% in 2015 – while, over the same years, income totals of the bottom 50% of Chinese earners has declined from 27% to 15%.

Figures relating to the Human Development Index (HDI) are also revealing, which is a format that measures a combination of life expectancy, education, per person income, etc. In 2017, China ranked 86th on the Human Development Index, just two places ahead of war-torn Ukraine and 13 slots behind Cuba in 73rd, which has been under a crippling US embargo for six decades. America holds 13th position in the HDI table, Russia is in 49th and India ranks as low as 130th.

It may worth highlighting that it was a remarkable achievement on the part of the Castro government, to have produced an overall higher standard of living in Cuba by comparison to great nations like China, India and also Brazil – the latter country was situated six places below Cuba on the 2017 HDI. Led by Fidel Castro for almost 50 years, and succeeded by his brother Raul earlier this century, Cuba maintained its position in the “High Human Development” bracket, despite decades of intense pressures enacted by American governments.

Altogether, the United States remains the planet’s richest nation. No other country can afford to dispense each year with hundreds of billions of dollars on its armed forces. America’s position as 13th in the above index, is a reflection of the growing chasm between rich and poor in the country. Since the 1970s until today, wealth has accumulated in the top 1% of US society, who comprise the elite that largely dictates government strategy. About 70% of the American population has become disenfranchised over these past 40 years, effectively excluded from policy-making.

Income levels for the bulk of America’s populace have stagnated, while the health and education systems deteriorate. The death rate in America is increasing for young and middle-aged adults, which is almost unheard of in the developed world. Offshoring of production has been harmful too for American communities, as urban infrastructure crumbles. Cities that were once commercial heartlands like Detroit and Pittsburgh are today strongly associated with the “Rust Belt”.

China’s share of national wealth, on a per capita (per person) basis, has in fact gradually decreased from the late 1970s until today, while her Gross Domestic Product (GDP) sharply increases, papering over the cracks. The vast majority of China’s wealth has gathered in the pockets of the minority. There are now hundreds of thousands of millionaires in China, and the number is rising, while homelessness becomes a growing issue.

Meanwhile, America has a much larger military by comparison to China, not in terms of manpower, but relating to her overall apparatus, ranging from expensive warships and submarines to missiles and drones. In 2018, Washington spent at least three times more on its military than Beijing – while the Pentagon has shifted about two thirds of its armed forces to Asia-Pacific regions, with China surrounded by hundreds of US army bases.

One of the core elements of US foreign policy is regarding her armed capacities: Gunboat diplomacy. We have seen this with NATO’s 70 year existence, which was founded on the basis of “keeping the Russians out”. When the Russians disappeared in the early 1990s, NATO almost instantly expanded eastwards by absorbing the reunified Germany, in violation of verbal promises made to the Russians. NATO membership has almost doubled in size since 1999, taking in countries that border Russia like Estonia and Latvia, while North Macedonia will soon become the 30th NATO state.

In spite of appearances, NATO is fast losing its relevance as Washington becomes somewhat disinterested with the organisation. Then president-elect Trump had gone so far as to describe NATO as “obsolete”. Trump, like his predecessors this century, has largely been fixated on China.

The George W. Bush administration had expressed fears over growing Chinese influence, but Washington’s real shift in focus towards China can be traced to Barack Obama. It was president Obama who outlined America’s “pivot” to Asia in November 2011.

Beijing’s challenge to Washington is more a financial and industrial one, rather than a military conundrum. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), also called the “alliance of the east”, is a Chinese-led political and economic association that ranks as its members other major powers like Russia, India and Pakistan – which in addition are all nuclear-armed nations.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), founded in 2015 and headquartered in Beijing, is a Chinese-led multilateral institution which has attracted dozens of nations, including long-time American allies such as Germany, France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, Australia and South Korea.

A remarkable development in international affairs is Beijing’s ability to lure American-friendly states, much to the dismay of US political leaders. It is a reflection of China’s elite financial scope, which is now challenging World War II-era organisations like the IMF and World Bank.

In addition there is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which is a Chinese-designed infrastructural program including investments in over 150 countries, and spanning thousands of miles across Eurasia. All of these developments have been of increasing concern to the Americans.

*

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

Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.