Global Research

This week, Denmark granted Gazprom approval for its Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project, a project that is set to bring 55 billion cubic meters of Russian gas into Europe annually. It is one of the most controversial pipeline projects in the world and is now moving ahead despite strong opposition from multiple EU members and the United States.

The geopolitical tensions surrounding the development of Nord Stream 2 are unprecedented. To begin with, Russia has very poor relations with the Baltic states and Poland, nations who will almost always fight against anything they see as empowering Russia geopolitically. Then there is Ukraine, a nation that is strongly against the pipeline due to its fear of losing the transit fees that it currently charges Russia for exporting gas to Europe. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the United States sees this pipeline as a direct threat to its soft power in Europe as well as a threat to its growing LNG exports.

But for all the politics and attention that this pipeline is attracting, the simple truth of the matter is that Europe, and more specifically Germany, needs this natural gas. Germany plans to shut down all its nuclear reactors by 2022. Many have questioned the wisdom—and some even the sanity—of that decision, but it remains government policy. The generation capacity the is being lost in that sector will need to be replaced, in the short term at least, by natural gas.

Despite its green reputation, Germany is a country that generates a surprisingly large portion of its total energy from coal. Its total installed coal-fired capacity is close to its solar capacity, at 44.9 GW, versus 47.9 GW for solar. At today’s growth rates, it’s current solar and wind capacity will not be enough to replace the retired nuclear plants. The only other option, which would be boosting the share of coal in the country’s energy mix, is a political non-starter in Germany. Natural gas is, therefore, the only viable replacement and Germany is fully aware that its gas consumption is set to soar in the coming years.

Now, this gas doesn’t have to come from Russia, of course. It could come from the United States in LNG tankers. In fact, the European Union as a whole earlier this year promised President Trump to double its imports of U.S. LNG over the next five years. But they didn’t make the promise voluntarily. It came in response to a threat from Trump to slap import tariffs on European cars.

One may wonder why the EU, for all its anti-Russian rhetoric and sanctions, and legislative amendments aimed at curbing Gazprom’s role on the European gas market would need the incentive of a tariff threat to diversify away from Russian gas. The answer is, again, simple. It’s the price.

U.S. liquefied natural gas has to be, well, liquefied first, then loaded on a tanker and shipped across the ocean to Europe. Russian gas runs through pipelines as is. And, even if LNG were there answer, there is Novatek’s Yamal LNG plant that is exporting the liquefied fuel to Europe, which is much nearer Yamal than the Gulf Coast.

Abundant natural gas production and the subsequent low prices have made the U.S. a growing exporter and a force to be reckoned with. Yet producers still want to make profits rather than pump gas for political purposes. Ultimately it all comes down to one simple fact, Europeans pay more for U.S. LNG.

“Given our heavy dependence on imports, U.S. liquefied natural gas, if priced competitively, could play an increasing and strategic role in EU gas supply,” said the European Energy Commissioner, Miguel Arias Canete, earlier this year.

The operative phrase is “if priced competitively”, as supported by the statement of a Total official commenting on Trump’s tariff threat at the time.

“We need to create the demand in order to justify these logistics and this investment,” said Total’s president of gas operations, Laurent Vivier in May. “That will come to European policy and setting what role we want gas to play in Europe”.

Ultimately, for all the political posturing and threats of sanctions, the Trump administration and its allies on this matter have never been in a position to stop Nord Stream 2.  While geopolitics are powerful, the fundamentals will almost always win out. If there is demand, supply will follow. The message to the U.S. from Europe when it comes to natural gas is loud and clear, “Make it competitive and we’ll take it”.

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Irina Slav is a writer for Oilprice.com with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

Khalid still remembers the first time he heard about drones. He was 10 years old, sitting in his school classroom in Khogyani, a district near the Durand Line in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province. A group of his friends animatedly discussed the recent death of a local man.

“Then the drone came,” one of them said, imitating the whistling noise of an unmanned aircraft, “and he was dead.”

Khalid didn’t understand what they were saying. It was as if he was the only one left out of a secret. He finally decided to ask his teacher. What did the other boys mean? What was a drone?

The teacher’s response was both ominous and prescient. “It’s something that, once you come to its attention, you will not be left to live,” he told Khalid.

That was in 2007. Khalid is 22 now, a young man. American military involvement in Afghanistan—sparked by Al Qaeda’s attacks on September 11, 2001—was already six years deep by the time he learned about drones, but the strikes go back nearly as far.

The first instance of a drone killing civilians in Afghanistan was in 2002, when a man by the name of Daraz Khan was killed by a Hellfire missile dropped by a Predator drone in the eastern province of Khost. The US suspected that he was Osama bin Laden; residents maintain that Khan was merely out searching for scrap metal.

Since then, Khalid’s province of Nangarhar has become a hub for armed groups—first the Taliban, and later forces claiming allegiance to ISIS—and a bustling drug trade. It has also become one of the most drone-bombed provinces in the most drone-bombed country in the world.

The American public, though, has largely forgotten this. The war in Afghanistan has been running for 18 years, making it the longest conflict in American history (it passed the previous milestone, set by the Vietnam War, in February 2019). Over the years, press coverage has fallen dramatically. According to the Pew Research Center for Journalism and the Media, Afghanistan accounted for 1% of all media coverage in the US in 2007 and just under 4% in 2010, when the Pentagon deployed 100,000 troops and dropped 5,101 bombs on the country. Today, the level of coverage is insignificant: Pew no longer even tracks it as a topic.

In fact, military activity in Afghanistan is on the increase again. The number of US troops there started rising again under the Trump administration; there are now 15,000 American military personnel officially deployed in the country. Air strikes are at a record high, according to the US Air Forces Central Command: 2018 saw 7,362 bombs dropped by US forces in Afghanistan.

As of August 31 this year, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism had documented at least 4,251 aerial strikes in Afghanistan for 2019, more than double the total for the whole of 2018. Most of these, it says, are thought to be by drones. These attacks are exacting an increasing toll on the Afghan people. This year, according to the United Nations, foreign coalition forces were responsible for more civilian deaths than the Taliban or ISIS-allied forces for the first time since its Afghanistan mission began recording civilian casualties in 2009. Between January 1 and June 30, international military forces were responsible for 89% of the 519 civilian casualties—363 deaths and 156 injuries—caused by aerial operations.

It’s not just drone warfare that has expanded dramatically, however. The US military has used the war to test and improve other tactics, too.

Information warfare

In 2007, American forces began taking photographs, fingerprints, and iris scans of almost every Afghan they came across. By 2011, almost two million people—more than 5% of the population—had had their biometric details captured by the US military. In most cases it was claimed that this was done in a check for suspected militants, or as part of the application process for jobs with government security forces or on coalition bases, but it could happen at any time, and for almost any reason.

The Pentagon said the move, a tactic it calls “identity dominance,” was intended to spot insurgents and prevent infiltration. But it’s believed that US Navy Seals used their identity system to confirm that they had found Osama bin Laden during the raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011. And in Iraq, where the US had previously tried biometric capture, it was used to control people’s movements, especially in high-conflict areas like Fallujah.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the fear of surveillance is pervasive among ordinary Afghans. Rumors circulate about new techniques being used to spy on people: Khalid and his friend Naimatullah tell stories about a substance that can be rubbed on your clothes to make you more easily traceable. These tales have apparently led to a new defense mechanism among Nangarharis. “You just take off your clothes and run into some water. They say that somehow jams the signals,” said Naimatullah.

Obaid Ali, a Kabul-based analyst at the Afghanistan Analysts Network, who has written extensively on aerial operations, says he has been told about physical tracking devices—albeit slightly more traditional ones. “They’re really small electronic devices that are slipped into someone’s clothing,” he told me.

A Department of Defense spokeswoman said the Pentagon could not comment on tactics, techniques, or procedures for operational security reasons. Rahmatullah Nabil—a presidential candidate who twice served as Afghanistan’s chief of intelligence during 2010 to 2015—says people are definitely tracked: but that most of that is done through mobile-phone signals. This, says Nabil, has led the Taliban to rely on some familiar tactics to keep them from being traced: “They use the simplest possible mobile phones and are constantly changing their locations every few hours. They never spend more than 48 hours in a single area.”

In many areas of the country, phone service is cut off, usually by the Taliban, at sundown. And in August, the Taliban announced that they would begin targeting employees of the state-run provider Salaam Telecom, saying the company’s workers are “tied to intelligence agencies.”

In many areas under Taliban control, simply owning a smartphone can create suspicion that someone is an intelligence agent. That means even though people often use phones to check on loved ones after a terrorist attack or security operation, some have chosen to give up on them altogether.

But even if you throw away your mobile phone, avoid bumping into a US soldier on patrol, and can keep your biometric information to yourself, you can still get caught up in the war.

Mother load

The device that fell on a small village in Nangarhar’s Achin district, an hour’s drive along a treacherous road from Jalalabad, in April 2017 wasn’t just any bomb. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, or MOAB, weighed 21,600 pounds (9,800 kilograms) and cost $170,000. It was the most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever used, capable of destroying an area the size of nine city blocks. It quickly became known as the “Mother of All Bombs.”

The Afghan government tried to justify the strike by saying it had killed at least 94 ISIS fighters. But former president Hamid Karzai called it a prime example of how the US was using Afghanistan for what amounted to experimental warfare. “This is not the war on terror but the inhuman and most brutal misuse of our country as testing ground for new and dangerous weapons,” he wrote on Twitter.

Nabil, the former intelligence chief, agrees. “Did they ever use such a weapon anywhere else in the world? No,” he told me. “It’s clear that Achin was just a convenient place for them to test out their weapons.”

The government claims that the bomb killed foreign fighters from a number of countries. But in the days and weeks following the bombing, the village itself was still under the watch of the US military. Journalists were not allowed within 10 kilometers, and it became clear that local military and government officials had not been given access either. In the two and a half years since, journalists and investigators have still not been able to get to the exact site of the attack in order to decipher what happened.

So why was such a large bomb used? A few days after MOAB dropped, Vice President Mike Pence suggested one motive: as a demonstration of power. “Just in the past two weeks,” he said in an address in Seoul, “the world witnessed the strength and resolve of our new president in actions taken in Syria and Afghanistan. North Korea would do well not to test his resolve or the strength of the armed forces of the United States in this region.” He added, “The era of strategic patience is over.”

Uninvestigated

All this is made worse because the US military has not always been transparent about its operations. Human Rights Watch said in a 2018 report that neither the American nor Afghan governments have been doing enough to investigate possible violations of the laws of war.

Afghans on the ground agree. I have spoken to hundreds of people since 2015, in provinces all over the country. Each time, they have said that not enough people have inquired about strikes in their areas. And even when there are independent reports, they are accused of political bias by officials in Kabul and the US-led coalition.

Emran Feroz, an Afghan-Austrian journalist and author who has been tracking aerial operations in Afghanistan since 2011, concurs: “The central problem is most of these strikes are conducted under the cover of night in hard-to-reach areas, often under the control or influence of groups like the Taliban, which makes it very difficult for anyone to go and investigate in a timely manner.”

Nearly 20 years in, and with the conflict once more intensifying, there are no signs of an ending. Diplomacy between the Taliban, the Afghan government, and the Trump administration seems to be making little progress. Trump, who claimed to have canceled a secret meeting with the Taliban on US soil planned for September, has vowed to halt talks so long as Taliban fighters keep attacking Afghan civilians and US forces.

As long as military intelligence is weak, however, it is not just the Taliban that Afghans have to fear. In July, the deaths of at least seven civilians, including three women, led to protests in the Eastern province of Maidan Wardak, where residents threatened to boycott the upcoming presidential election unless action was taken. But the outcry has done little to change military action. In September, at least 30 civilians were killed in a US drone strike near a pine nut field in Khogyani. Provincial officials say the attack was meant to target a hideout of ISIS forces, but residents say it was civilians who paid the price once again.

Nabil, the former intelligence chief, says the best way to improve things is to shift away from technology and back toward proper intelligence gathering. “We have to be better than the Talibs—we must ensure that we protect civilian life at all costs,” he says. During his tenure at the National Directorate of Security, he says, aerial operations were allowed to take place only when he had verified information on suspected targets. “You can’t go from the word or suspicions of just one or two people. You must do your due diligence, otherwise you end up in a situation like today where civilians are constantly being killed by our own forces,” he told me.

Khalid and Naimatullah agree that the increasing frequency of strikes serves no purpose. “Even people in the villages know where the Taliban and Daesh [ISIS] are, but why is it that civilians keep dying in these attacks?” they asked.

“I was 16 when I saw someone die from a drone strike,” said Naimatullah. “Since then I’ve cleaned up so many bodies, their blood, their brains. My heart is stone now, because it’s always innocent people dying.”

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Ali M. Latifi is a journalist based in Kabul.

Casting aspersions over the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Russia’s seasoned Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov claimed [1] while speaking to Rossiya 24 broadcaster that the Islamic State and its slain “caliph” were the spawns of the United States. Being a skilled diplomat having intimate knowledge of happenings on the ground in Syria, his statement merits serious consideration.

It’s important to note in the news coverage about the killing of al-Baghdadi that although the mainstream media had been trumpeting for the last several years that the Islamic State’s fugitive chief had been hiding somewhere on the Iraq-Syria border in the east, he was found hiding in the northwestern Idlib governorate, under the control of Turkey’s militant proxies and al-Nusra Front, and was killed while trying to flee to Turkey in Barisha village five kilometers from the border.

The reason why the mainstream media scrupulously avoided mentioning Idlib as al-Baghdadi’s most likely hideout in Syria was to cover up the collusion between the militant proxies of Turkey and the jihadists of al-Nusra Front and the Islamic State.

In fact, the corporate media takes the issue of Islamic jihadists “commingling” with Turkey-backed “moderate rebels” in Idlib so seriously – which could give the Syrian government the pretext to mount an offensive in northwest Syria – that the New York Times cooked up an exclusive report [2] a couple of days after the Special Ops night raid, on October 30, that the Islamic State paid money to al-Nusra Front for hosting al-Baghdadi in Idlib.

The morning after the night raid, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported [3] on Sunday, October 27, that a squadron of eight helicopters accompanied by warplanes belonging to the international coalition had attacked positions of Hurras al-Din, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group, in Idlib province where the Islamic State chief was believed to be hiding.

Despite detailing the operational minutiae of the Special Ops raid, the mainstream news coverage of the raid deliberately elided over the crucial piece of information that the compound in Barisha village five kilometers from Turkish border where al-Baghdadi was killed belonged to Hurras al-Din, an elusive terrorist outfit which had previously been targeted several times in the US airstrikes.

Although Hurras al-Din is generally assumed to be an al-Qaeda affiliate, it is in fact the regrouping of the Islamic State’s jihadists under a different name in northwestern Idlib governorate after the latter terrorist organization was routed from Mosul and Anbar in Iraq and Raqqa and Deir al-Zor in Syria and was hard pressed by the US-led coalition’s airstrikes in eastern Syria.

Here, let me try to dispel a myth peddled by the corporate media and foreign policy think tanks that the Islamic State originated from al-Qaeda in Iraq. Many biased political commentators of the mainstream media deliberately try to muddle the reality in order to link the emergence of the Islamic State to the ill-conceived invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Republican Bush administration.

Their motive behind this chicanery is to absolve the Obama administration’s policy of nurturing the Syrian opposition against the Syrian government since the beginning of Syria’s proxy war in 2011 until June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul in Iraq and the Obama administration made a volte-face on its previous “regime change” policy of providing indiscriminate support to Syrian militants and declared a war against a faction of Syrian rebel groups, the Islamic State.

After linking the creation of the Islamic State to the Iraq invasion in 2003, interventionist hawks deviously draw the risible conclusion that the Obama administration’s premature evacuation of American troops from Iraq in December 2011 gave birth to the Islamic State.

Moreover, such duplicitous spin-doctors misleadingly try to find the roots of the Islamic State in al-Qaeda in Iraq; however, the Anbar insurgency in Iraq was fully subdued after “The Iraq Surge” in 2007. Al-Qaeda in Iraq became a defunct organization after the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi in June 2006 and the subsequent surge of troops in Iraq.

The re-eruption of insurgency in Iraq was the spillover effect of nurturing militants in Syria since 2011-onward, when the Islamic State overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in January 2014 and subsequently reached the zenith of its power after capturing Mosul in June 2014.

The borders between Syria and Iraq are highly porous and it’s impossible to contain the flow of militants and arms between the two countries. The Obama administration’s policy of providing funds, weapons and training to Syrian militants in training camps located at the border regions of Turkey and Jordan bordering Syria was bound to backfire sooner or later.

Notwithstanding, during the eight-year proxy war in Syria, Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the chief of al-Nusra Front which currently goes by the name of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), emerged as one of the most influential militant leaders, second only to the Islamic State’s slain “caliph” al-Baghdadi. In fact, since the beginning of Syria’s proxy war in early 2011 to April 2013, the Islamic State and al-Nusra Front used to be a single organization that followed Saudi Arabia’s Salafi ideology and chose the banner al-Nusra Front.

Although the current al-Nusra Front has been led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, he was appointed[4] as the emir of al-Nusra Front by Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the leader of Islamic State, in January 2012. Thus, al-Jolani’s Nusra Front is only a splinter group of the Islamic State, which split from its parent organization in April 2013 over a leadership dispute between the two organizations.

In early 2011, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who was based in Iraq, began sending Syrian and Iraqi jihadists experienced in guerrilla warfare across the border into Syria to establish an organization inside the country. Led by a Syrian known as Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, the group began to recruit fighters and establish cells throughout the country. On 23 January 2012, the group announced its formation as al-Nusra Front.

In April 2013, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi released an audio statement in which he announced that al-Nusra Front had been established, financed and supported by the Islamic State. Al-Baghdadi declared that the two groups were merging under the name the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The leader of al-Nusra Front, Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, issued a statement denying the merger and complaining that neither he nor anyone else in al-Nusra’s Syria-based leadership had been consulted.

Al-Qaeda Central’s leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, tried to mediate the dispute between al-Baghdadi and al-Jolani but eventually, in October 2013, he endorsed al-Nusra Front as the official franchise of al-Qaeda Central in Syria. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, however, defied the nominal authority of al-Qaeda Central and declared himself the caliph of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.

Keeping this background in mind, it becomes abundantly clear that a single militant organization operated in Syria and Iraq under the leadership of al-Baghdadi until April 2013, which chose the banner of al-Nusra Front, and that the current emir of the subsequent breakaway faction of al-Nusra Front, al-Jolani, was actually al-Baghdadi’s deputy in Syria.

Thus, the Islamic State operated in Syria since early 2011 under the designation of al-Nusra Front and it subsequently changed its name to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in April 2013, after which it overran Raqqa and parts of Deir al-Zor in the summer of 2013. And in January 2014, it overran Fallujah and parts of Ramadi in Iraq and reached the zenith of its power when it captured Mosul in June 2014.

In conclusion, it would be misleading to fall for the ruse of finding the roots of the Islamic State in al-Qaeda in Iraq. Although the remnants of al-Qaeda in Iraq might have joined the ranks of Syria-bound militants in Iraq in 2011, the principal cause of the creation of the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front and myriads of other militant outfits in Syria and Iraq was the “regime change” policy pursued by the Obama administration from 2011 to 2014 to topple the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

During the course of Syria’s proxy war, billions of dollars [5] worth weapons and ammunition, including American-made antitank missiles, were provided to militants in training camps located in border regions of Turkey and Jordan, and possibly in Iraq too, by the Western powers and the Gulf states. It also bears mentioning that for the initial several months of Syria’s proxy war, American troops were still deployed next door in Iraq, as the war in Syria began in early 2011 whereas the US forces evacuated from Iraq in December 2011.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] Al-Baghdadi was US ‘spawn’, his death is still an open question – Lavrov

[2] ISIS Leader Paid Rival for Protection but Was Betrayed by His Own

[3] Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi killed in US raid

[4] Al-Jolani was appointed as the emir of al-Nusra Front by al-Baghdadi

[5] U.S. Relies Heavily on Saudi Money to Support Syrian Rebels

Featured image is from Flickr

Remember, those who can, the utter joy of going to the circus as a child? It was quite an experience to walk through the sideshow, watching the clowns or viewing the main acts on center stage. This writer sat there, mesmerized by all this for the two hours running. The colors, the costumes, the music all transported me into a wonderland!

Well, stroll down the dial of your boob tube and catch any of those news talk shows to revisit such an experience. The best bumper sticker I have seen recently was ELECT A CLOWN AND GET A CIRCUS! Imagine that  around 50% of those who actually voted chose an orange haired, deep tanned reality television and multi bankrupted man to be our president. Now, those with even an iota of intelligence realize that if the Democrats ran Donald Duck in 2016 they would have defeated Donald Trump. They chose not to and we got President Cheetos. Rather than ‘Drain the Swamp’ he went ahead and filled it! Of course, if Ms Hillary got in, as with Mr. Obama, working stiffs nationwide would have seen little in the way of dynamic change.. maybe even an increase in a new Cold War with the Russians. Regardless of whichever of the two phony parties occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, the thing they all claim they cherish, the Middle Class, would be strangled.

Look, we all know there are so many issues that working stiffs should care about, as was always the case.  What is disgusting is when both parties keep on sucking up to the super rich. The mainstream media, from both sides of this phony political spectrum, even criticizes Ms. Warren as being radical  for her ridiculous plan to ‘level the playing field’ by an added 2% Surtax on all wealth over $50 million.

Wow! That must really have those jet setters trembling in their $ 2000 shoes and high heels! For my Door #1, this writer has always trumpeted a real plan of taxing all income of one million dollars and over at a 50% Flat Surtax… with Zero deductions. Your first million is taxed at the current rate, and thereafter the Surtax would kick in. THAT would fill our treasury with enough moola to fix our infrastructure, give viable Medicare for All (without needing the private insurers), begin subsidizing public banking, especially nonprofit mortgage banking at rates which only include overhead… to name but a few ideas.

Door #2 is because of the disgraceful bowing by both parties at the altar of the War Economy. This obscene spending signed off by both the Republicans and Democrats that equals HALF of our federal tax revenue is slowly bankrupting this empire. With even a modest 25% cut in military spending  and the closing of most of our 1000+ overseas military bases, added to the aforementioned savings from a real Surtax of the super rich, there would be enough funding for what I already mentioned, plus so much more.

Sorry, this circus only wishes to show us the Forever Food Fight between the two parties, hosted by the clown of clowns.

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

Featured image is from GMWatch

Under Thailand’s new government, efforts to ban toxic pesticides and herbicides including those made by US agricultural giant Monsanto were first accelerated, and have now finally succeeded.

Thailand’s Deputy Prime Minister and Health Minister Anutin Charnvirakul bluntly stated that “the US was worried only about trade. The Thai government was concerned about the health of Thai consumers,” in response to complaints from the US embassy over the ban, Bangkok Post would report in its article, “Govt rejects US opposition to farm chemicals ban.”

Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria. After the drawdown of US troops at Erdogan’s insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria, the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and at al-Tanf military base.

Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria, Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which serves as a lifeline for Damascus. Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained several Syrian militant groups there.

It’s worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel’s concerns regarding the expansion of Iran’s influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Regarding the oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it’s worth pointing out that Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil for domestic needs before the war – roughly 400,000 barrels per day, which isn’t much compared to tens of millions barrels daily oil production in the Gulf states.

Although Donald Trump crowed in a characteristic blunt manner in a tweet after the withdrawal of 1,000 American troops from northern Syria that Washington had deployed forces in eastern Syria where there was oil, the purpose of exercising control over Syria’s oil is neither to smuggle oil out of Syria nor to deny the valuable source of revenue to the Islamic State.

There is no denying the fact that the remnants of the Islamic State militants are still found in Syria and Iraq but its emirate has been completely dismantled in the region and its leadership is on the run. So much so that the fugitive caliph of the terrorist organization was killed in the bastion of a rival jihadist outfit, al-Nusra Front in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers away from the Islamic State strongholds in eastern Syria.

Much like the “scorched earth” battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic State which early in the year burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds in eastern Syria – Washington’s basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus.

After the devastation caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington hampering efforts to provide international aid to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over Syria’s own resources with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.

Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria’s oil wealth, it bears mentioning that “scorched earth” policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep state. President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been misled by the Pentagon and Washington’s national security establishment.

Regarding Washington’s interest in propping up the Gulf’s autocrats and fighting their wars in regional conflicts, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister threatened [1] that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals.

Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment in Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf’s investments in North America and Western Europe.

Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf’s oil in the energy-starved industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data: Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3 million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788 billion barrels, more than half of world’s 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.

No wonder then, 36,000 United States troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of 1980, which states: “Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”

Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry’s sales of arms to the Gulf Arab States, a report [2] authored by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during its eight-year tenure.

Similarly, the top items in Trump’s agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were: firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led “Arab NATO” to counter Iran’s influence in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales.

Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind, during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.

Similarly, when King Abdullah’s successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars’ worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.

In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf’s petro-sheikhs contribute substantial investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.

Regarding the Pax Americana which is the reality of the contemporary neocolonial order, according to a January 2017 infographic [3] by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed all over the world, including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.

Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of US troops, particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops are stationed in Germany since the end of the Second World War, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is already shared between Washington and host countries.

Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.

Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar – pay two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of world’s proven oil reserves are located and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Review.

Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: Location of Syria. Source: CIA World Factbook.

National improved Medicare for all is making tremendous progress during the 2020 election cycle. Democratic presidential candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who advocate for it, are achieving record numbers of contributions and performing strongly in the polls. Candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden, who opposes Medicare for all, and Senator Kamala Harris, who came out with a phony plan she called Medicare for all, are losing ground.

This is happening because of the decades of work by the single-payer movement to educate people, organize and build consensus for National Improved Medicare for All (NIMA). The opposition is gearing up too but the Medicare for All movement is responding to their false claims, which are repeated in the corporate media and by insurance-funded candidates. If the movement continues to build support and keeps Medicare for all a central issue in the 2020 election, we can win National Improved Medicare for All in the early 2020s.

To learn more about NIMA, sign up for the HOPE campaign and join the national calls. The next call will be on Monday night, November 4 at 9:00 pm Eastern/6:00 pm Pacific. Wendell Potter will speak about the opposition’s tactics and how to counter them. Register here.

People want health care, not health insurance

A whistleblower for the insurance industry tells the truth:

“The business model of for-profit health insurance depends on denying care to people who need it. These corporations can’t be reasoned with, only defeated.”

One of the false talking points of opponents of NIMA is that people want to keep their private insurance. In reality, the employer-based healthcare system is not working for employers or employees. The current system is resulting in very high costs to individuals, now surpassing $20,000 annually for the average family. The cost of insurance is rising faster than incomes, making insurance impossible to afford. This is one reason why the number of uninsured, now 27.5 million, is growing.  The soaring cost of healthcare is one reason why 58 percent of small business owners support Medicare for all.

A recent poll found that pollsters can manipulate the outcome by using anti-Medicare talking points, but when voters are told the truth they prefer Medicare for all. For example, this survey found that when people hear that under Medicare for All you can keep your preferred doctors and hospitals, support climbs to a clear majority of 55 percent. Support among Democrats gets to 78 percent. For independents, 56 percent support Medicare for all. People also said they trust the federal government over private insurers to control healthcare costs, by 20 points. Kaiser, which has been tracking public opinion of the issue, finds a majority of the public supports Medicare for all.

Polls actually find that what people hate is instability in their health insurance. Instability is inherent in private health plans as employers will change insurance, shrink coverage or increase prices. They will even cut-off insurance due to the cost or when there is a labor conflict. Medicare for all is the most stable option — from birth to death people would be fully covered by NIMA. This allows people to change jobs or stop working to take care of children or elderly parents and still keep their health coverage.

NIMA means real choices for people as they can go to any doctor, hospital, clinic or other providers they prefer while with private insurance, patients are limited to narrow insurance networks of providers and limited choices of care. People believe in universal access and only Medicare for all can accomplish that. And, people understand that healthcare should be treated as a right, not as a commodity. Healthcare is a human right, not something employees should have to bargain for.

The truth is that people don’t love their insurance, they love having access to health care and put up with insurance companies because that is how the current healthcare system is financed. Health insurers use their media connections and the politicians they fund to put forward the false message that private insurance is essential. We do not need private insurance as it is an expensive middleman that adds nothing to health care except tremendous administrative costs and bureaucracy accounting for one-third of total healthcare spending.

Bogus Argument: We can’t afford it

One of the most senseless arguments against NIMA is that we can’t afford it. In reality, the current system is the most wasteful, inefficient and costly in the world. The spectre of high costs is a bogeyman promulgated by industry astroturf groups. Medicare for all will save money by cutting the bureaucracy and negotiating for fair prices for goods and services. We can’t afford NOT to move to a Medicare for All single-payer healthcare system.

Currently, nearly one third the cost of healthcare is due to the complex for-profit health insurance industry. About half of that is insurance company costs, e.g., advertising, executive salaries, dividends, real estate. The other half is the administrative cost they create for providers. Many hospitals have more staff working on billing to deal with the insurance industry than they have nurses. Healthcare is approaching 20 percent of GDP. Under NIMA, it will gradually go down to about 12 percent, similar to other wealthy countries with single-payer or national health service systems.

There is a lot of fearmongering about Medicare for all but the reality is people will pay less, have better care and more choice. Groups that oppose single-payer, like the Urban Institute, use false assumptions to heighten the cost of Medicare for all. Unfortunately, the false information on cost is likely to continue as the Congressional Budget Office has packed its 19-member panel that advises them on health policy with insurance, pharmaceutical, and hospital interests.

One way to confuse people on cost is by claiming federal spending on healthcare will go up.  Of course, it would because Medicare for all is a federally-funded program. While total spending will decrease and costs for people and businesses will go down, federal spending will go up.
When the media reports on the cost of NIMA, it often seems like they have lost the ability to do the math. They do not report that over a decade the cost would be $2.1 trillion less than projections of spending under the current US healthcare system. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting finds that the Washington Post does not want voters to know that Medicare will save money. This is part of an effort by the media to make it seem like Medicare for all is impossible to afford.

Sanders has not put forward a specific plan for paying for improved Medicare for all because there are many ways to pay for improved Medicare for all. This week, Elizbeth Warren released her plan to pay for Medicare for all. She described it as the biggest tax cut in history because she does so without adding taxes on working people.

A major cost problem is the high price charged by hospitals. The current system allows them to charge just about whatever they like, prices vary wildly, and they fleece the poor. Some hospitals even sue people over their medical bills, though some have stopped collecting medical bills because of exposure and public pressure.  Other hospitals are closing, leaving towns without access to healthcare and creating a crisis in many rural and poor urban areas.  Medicare for all would control hospital pricing and ameliorate the problem of hospitals closing.

Pushing False Alternatives to Medicare

As Medicare for all becomes more popular, opponents put forward false solutions. The medical industry gives tens of millions of dollars to House candidates who oppose Medicare for all. The movement has exposed these false approaches. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the lead sponsor of the health bill in the House, has criticized Democrats for using the Medicare label for policies that are not Medicare for all.

Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, the biggest recipient of health care dollars, is pushing a false approach, Medicare for Some, which is merely a public option and cannot solve the health crisis. Biden, who urges fixing the Affordable Care Act, puts out false information about Medicare for all. The ACA is fundamentally flawed as it is based on the inefficient private health insurance industry. Harris has waffled on her support for Medicare for all. Her bad policy was also bad politics as it coincided with her drop in the polls.

The Republicans don’t have a realistic solution to the healthcare crisis. When they sought to shrink health insurance coverage in the 2018 elections, there were massive protests. Trump’s actions to further privatize Medicare are also counterproductive. The insurance industry’s Medicare Advantage, which the industry is pushing because they profit from it, is more expensive and provides less coverage than traditional Medicare.

Real Solutions to the Healthcare Crisis

The US is in a healthcare crisis. This is a snapshot of the gravity of that crisis.

• 28,300,000 – People uninsured in the United States in the first quarter of 2018.
• 530,000 – Estimated number of families who file bankruptcy each year due to medical issues and bills.
• 44% – People who didn’t go to a doctor when they were sick or injured because of the cost.
• 34% – Cancer patients who borrowed money from friends or family to pay for care in 2016.
• 79% – Increased death rate for cancer patients who filed for bankruptcy in 2016.
• $75,375 – Cost of a heart bypass operation in 2016 in the U.S.
• $15,742 – Cost of a heart bypass operation in 2016 in the Netherlands.
• $1,443 – US per capita spending on pharmaceutical costs in 2016, the highest in the world.
• 840% – Increase in spending for insulin from 2007 to 2017 on Medicare Part D (Medicare’s prescription drug plan).
• $5,110,000,000,000 – Estimated 10-year cost savings of a single-payer healthcare system

Medicare for all would be transformative in many ways.  It would not only solve the healthcare crisis but would also cut poverty by more than 20 percent and would be a big tax cut for workers.

The first step to solve the US health crisis is National Improved Medicare for All. A majority of House Democrats have signed on to the Medicare for all bill, HR 1384. They need to be pushed to be more active in their advocacy for it. Presidential candidate, Howie Hawkins, has a plan that goes beyond NIMA to a fully public, community-controlled healthcare system. Hawkins’ system would prevent the healthcare profiteers from being able to game the system.

We have come a long way in the past ten years from single-payer healthcare being “off the table” to it being a major topic in the 2020 presidential election. We have the opportunity to win this if we keep educating, organizing and pushing candidates and elected officials. Visit our HOPE campaign for the tools and information you need to be an effective advocate for National Improved Medicare for All.

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

All images in this article are from Popular Resistance

Introduction

On Saturday, 17^th August 2019, an international conference, “MH17: The Quest for Justice” was held at the International Islamic University Malaysia (UIIM) in its Main Auditorium in response to the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) Report made public in June. The Conference was jointly organised by the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), The Perdana Global Peace Foundation (PGPF) and the Montreal based Centre of Research on Globalisation (CRG) in collaboration with UIIM. The JIT Report had accused three Russian nationals and a Ukrainian of having shot down the MAS flight MH17 overflying the war zone of East Ukraine on July 17^th, 2014..  

The aim of the Conference, as the name suggests, was to try and see that justice is done. It determined the flow, structure and sub-titles of the six sessions. It was a whole day conference, starting at 8.45 am and winding up around 7 pm. The pre-lunch sessions of the screening of the documentary, “ MH17: Call for Justice”; “Review of Evidence and Background’ and” The Legal Dimension”were followed after lunch with sessions giving the whole tragedy a human dimension: “Ground Zero: The Unsung Heroes” and “In Memory”, talks by Malaysians on the ground, firstly, in Donetsk, East Ukraine, where the aircraft fell and, secondly, in The Hague where the then Malaysian ambassador to the Netherlands was tasked with identifying and the logistics of arranging for the return of, the remains of the Malaysian victims, home. The final session was an attempt at drawing a framework for further action to meet the main objective of the conference.

Experts, who have been following the progress of the JIT and the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) Reports were flown in, all speaking before lunch making their cases to together draw a picture of flawed investigations led by the Dutch. The decision to leave the Dutch to lead the investigations were agreed upon because a majority of the victims were Dutch.

The Opening

The conference opened with introductory remarks by Dr Chandra Muzaffar, President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). He spoke of the objective of the Conference given the state of global geopolitics where the hegemon has no qualms about lying and staging false flag events to engineer a public consensus for war as in the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the Iraq invasion where lies were blatantly orchestrated to justify the Vietnam war and the invasion of Iraq, respectively.

Officiating the event was Tan Sri Dzulkifli bin Abdul Razak, the UIIM Rector, who made available to the organisers the auditorium for free.

Session 1: Documentary — Call for Justice

The body of the Conference began with the screening of a documentary followed by questions and answers from the floor. The director of the Film Ms Yana Yerlashova and the Malaysian sound expert interviewed in the documentary, Mr Akash Rosen, who declared the sound bites used by JIT as evidence to charge the four accused had been tampered with. During the Q and A session which ensued, it emerged from the floor that Malaysia refused to lead the investigation because the authorities were busy with the disappearance of MH370 which happened in March 2014. Significantly, too, an answer elicited by a question to Ms Yerlashova drew the distinction between the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) and the Joint Investigative Team (JIT) investigations, the latter included Malaysia appointed only later. The former investigated the technical aspects of the shooting while JIT conducted a criminal investigation. Another important information that emerged during the session was that of the black-boxes of MH!7 which was retrieved by the East Ukraine separatist rebels and handed over to Malaysia who then brought them to Farnborough , England, to be deciphered. A preliminary report was given to the Malaysian government. Yana asked whether the black boxes were returned to Malaysia, the answer to which was “NO” because all evidence was kept by the Dutch as lead investigator.

Ms Yarleshova concluded that there is a need for a neutral investigation done by a neutral country.

Session 2: Review of Evidence and Background

Speaker 1

Professor Michel Chossudovsky of the CRG then kicked off Session 2, which was moderated by Tan Sri Ahmad Fuzi Haji Abdul Razak, former Secretary-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Malaysia. Chossudovsky lamented the state of the contemporary world where “Lies have become the consensus” thus indicating his position quite unequivocally. He contended that the US Administration fronted by Obama’s Secretary of State, John Kerry, carried a narrative that was to suit their lies. Even without hard evidence their immediate action was to pin the blame on Russia. Meanwhile, both the DSBand JIT investigations had relied on information from the SBU, the corrupt Ukraine Intelligence outfit. All other evidence not from the SBU were discarded.

Professor Chossudovsky then pointed out that there was a second aircraft flying overhead at the same time. This is according to a BBC report which carried eyewitness accounts but has since been removed. He pointed out that there were bullet holes in the fuselage of MH17, which was later corroborated by the next speaker, Peter Haisenko. A BUK missile — identified by the JIT report as the weapon used — cannot make these holes. The third point raised as evidence that the JIT report is flawed is the fact that there was no BUK missile fired in the vicinity at the pertinent time because it would have left a visible vapour trail that would remain in the air for at least 10 minutes before evaporating. There is no satellite evidence of such a trail. Professor Chossudovsky concluded from this that a BUK was never fired and that, therefore, MH17 was not downed by a BUK missile. There was also no evidence that the separatist rebels had deployed BUK neither before nor after the event.

Another absurdity pointed out by Professor Chossudovsky was the position adopted by the JIT before Malaysia was allowed to join the body that all JIT decisions should be by consensus. This gave all four members of the JIT at that time – Netherlands, Belgium, Australia and kraine — a veto each. Since there were grave doubts from the outset about the role of the Ukrainian authorities in the July 17^th incident, this implied that Ukraine could disallow all evidence except those from its SBU.

He ended his presentation with the question, “Is the shooting of MH17 deliberate?” to which he answered that one can only speculate since there is no proof.

Speaker 2

The next speaker was Mr Peter Haisenko a German pilot formerly of Lufthansa Airlines with considerable flying hours under his belt flying wide bodied jets. He went for the jugular by asserting that it was not a BUK that brought down flight MH17. BUK was not intended to bring down commercial airplanes but rather small fighter planes. It was not a BUK for three reasons. Firstly, because there was no loud boom heard nor a vapour trail sighted. Secondly, there were no exit markings of BUK shrapnel. The circular holes present in the wreckage of the MH17’s body could not have been made by the BUK system. Thirdly, there is some evidence suggesting that another aircraft, a SU-25, was present. He asked why the JIT Report carried blurry pictures when there are available sharp, focused pictures ?

Mr Haisenko concluded that there must be a new, neutral investigation because the JIT Report is technically flawed.

Speaker 3

The third speaker in Session 2, Professor Kees van der Pijl from Amsterdam dealt with the geopolitical and economics contexts of the tragedy. He began his presentation by praising the Malaysian Prime Minister’s courage when declaring he was not convinced given the evidence presented and the powers behind the JIT Report. The JIT Report says there was murder. If there is murder what is the motive, the Professor asked. The geopolitics and economic context would provide some answers.

Before addressing the geopolitical context to establish motive Professor Kees Van der Pijl touched on the DSB investigations which, he remarked did not identify who brought down MH17. He argues that the DSB itself is compromised. Established in 2010 it cannot report on anything that is against the interest of the Netherlands and anything that might mar the relations between Netherlands and NATO and the EU. The choice of people sitting on the DSB suggests that there was intention to curb its independence.

Professor van der Pijl touched briefly on the missiles and then went on to suggest that the 1.3 tons of lithium-ion battery that was carried by MH17, a commercial flight was a threat to air safety.Who allowed this to happen? A question not investigated by the DSB. He charged, too, that other than the SBU the information taken into consideration was from Bellingcat, a proven unreliable source of information. The question asked was why were more reliable sources of information not used?  Why were national intelligence outfits, other than the SBU, not tappedfor information?

Professor van der Pijl also asked why the JIT rejected the information offered by a German investigator, Mr Joseph Resch. His extensive documents amounting to 10 packages were rejected. He argued that the investigator is now a man afraid for his life hence his demand that the handing over of the documents must be in the presence of the media. According to Professor van der Pijl, Resch has now offered the information to Malaysia and Russia but to date there has been no response.

He then arrived at the geopolitical context citing the “race between the US and post-USSR Russia where the prize was Ukraine. Crimea which hosts Ukraine’s most strategic port voted to be reintegrated into Russia. On 16 July 2014 US declared this was unacceptable and imposed sanctions on Russia but the Europeans were reluctant to follow suit given their reliance on Russian gas.

Then the Middle East happened and the jostling for oil and gas pipelines to supply Europe. Whose territory would the pipelines pass through?

The Question and Answer Session that followed the presentations raised the need to make mandatory the closing of airspace over war zones to commercial flights. According to Professor van der Pijl, this issue was addressed in the 2^nd part of the DSB Report. As to the restrictions on carrying lithium-ion batteries on commercial flights the Professor pointed out that within two weeks after the MH17’s downing the US banned lithium batteries on commercial flights. There was mention of the fabric of power that can make white black at which point Professor Chossudovsky intervened, remarking that the statements by Obama and Kelly on the very day of the tragedy suggest conspiracy.

Session 3: The Legal Dimension

The last session of the morning, Session Three dealt with the legal dimensions of the shooting down of MH17. Moderated by Professor Datin Dr Mary George of University Malaya’s Law Faculty, the first speaker, Canadian lawyer and human rights specialist Mr John Philpot began by stating that warfare is transitioning into lawfare, the continuation of war into law. Mr Philpot felt that the JIT Report was unfair and biased with no respect for the Rule of Law. He pointed out the use of “could” to establish guilt cannot be the basis for making a charge in law because the word “could” suggests a measure of doubt.

His assertion was that the JIT Report is primarily flawed. Firstly, the initial non-inclusion of Malaysia in the Investigation Team, despite the fact that as operator of MH17, Malaysia was entitled to lead the investigation. Secondly, the suspect country, Ukraine, however, was part of JIT from the beginning. Finally, with the March coup, US influence over Ukraine is overwhelming.  Mr Philpot said that Holland was not in a position to run the prosecution because the case is based on a flawed investigation.

Furthermore there is no extradition treaty with Russia nor Ukraine. So a trial would be inabsentia.This would mean that the evidence which is based on a flawed report cannot be countered.

He also contended that the Dutch legal system allows the victim a voice. As a result, in order to control the narrative the Dutch is said to be trying to shape that voice. He did not see the International Criminal Court (ICC) as a solution either, given its track record.

Mr Philpot ended his presentation with possible solutions. He proposes a Commission of Enquiry more or less formal be established given the volume of evidence that has not been looked into by the JIT investigation. It could be led by Malaysia and could take place in Holland. The other solution is to establish diplomatic contact to persuade Holland to change its direction. He pointed out, too, that in international law the forthcoming trial is dangerous because it can end in a declaration of guilt that cannot be expunged if the decision is found to be unfounded later.

Finally, to a question whether international law can be a recourse for the pursuit of justice, Philpot’s reply was that it cannot. International law is being manipulated to serve geopolitical goals. The trial is set to go on in Holland in March next year but the Dutch prosecutor does not view the evidence as flawed.

Speaker 2

The second speaker of the Session was Dato’ Dr Gurdial Singh Nijar, a Malaysian advocate and solicitor who started by pronouncing that the MH17 air tragedy was a complicated legal issue. Here was a civilian aircraft, a shared coach between KLM and MAS flying from Holland to Kuala Lumpur overflying a war zone that the country does not control. Dato’ Gurdial Singh plunged directly into the challenges and what can be done in the face of a pending prosecution, to demonstrate the inequities etc. To start with,there is an abundance of evidence that has been ignored. How to introduce them during trial? Family witnesses, who to determine who to be heard?

Malaysia as operator of the airlines can take the initiative. Should this become futile then and only then can there be a commission after demonstrating that there has been perpetration of injustice

He said that trial in absentia is inevitable and does not provide opportunities. If it is not possible then it is clear that parties involved are not allowing for justice to be done. Then there can be civil recourse to establish wrongdoing. Where? In Ukraine to establish the negligence of the State.

After Session Three the Conference broke for lunch and resumed with Session Four.

Session 4: Ground Zero: The Unsung Heroes

The session, was moderated by Ms Amy Chew, a freelance journalist. The speaker was Colonel Haji Mohd Sakri Hussin the officer who headed a team of 12 to go into the war zone and retrieve MH17’s black boxes. Colonel Sakri recounted his mission from the moment he left Kuala Lumpur for Kiev with some 150 personnel of the Royal Malaysian Police and the Armed Forces. In Kiev he received orders from the then Malaysian Prime Minister to retrieve the flight and data recorders, the black boxes from the leader of the separatists. This he succeeded in doing, going through a war zone, through ten check points of the Kiev government despite the Malaysian ambassador’s warning that Kiev was aware of his mission and that they did not approve. Orders being orders Colonel Sakri ignored the advice which made the journey even more dangerous.

He recounted, too, how after retrieving the black boxes, the Kiev government and the FBI had tried to persuade him to hand over the black-boxes but he refused and instead surrendered them to the Dutch after which the boxes were brought to Farnborough in England to be deciphered. So ended his mission. He was not party to what happened afterwards to the black boxes.

Session 5: In Memory

The programme of the following session had to be altered at the final hour because of the last-minute withdrawal of the speakers, next of kin to two victims both part of the crew of the ill-fated flight. Instead those attending the conference were given a picture of what happened in Holland where the remains were being handled and made ready for their return to Malaysia by the then Malaysian ambassador to Holland, Datuk Dr Fauziah Mohd Taib. During a brief session she spoke of how her embassy was turned into an Operations Room, of her staff and herself staying back and manning it overnight to handle all administrative work involved for the Malaysian government. What took her aback was the ‘quick-to-blame the Russians’ attitude which they criticised her for not supporting. The Dutch took immediate action to block exports to Russia of fresh produce and flowers. She was disappointed by their attitude towards the Russian ambassador to the Netherlands who was suddenly shunned. At the end of her talk she briefly mentioned that the speakers who had withdrawn from the Conference were both very supportive of the JIT Report and wanted nothing to do with the Conference, which they felt was against the JIT Report. She had little knowledge of what happened outside of her purview of handling grieving family members and arranging for the return of the remains of 43 Malaysians who lost their lives needlessly.

The ensuing question and answer session was brief and did not give rise to any new information.

Session 6: Formulation of an Action Plan

The Final Session, Session Six was made up of a panel of four moderated by Tan Sri Jawhar Hassan, a member of the JUST Executive Committee. The panel was made up of Professor Chossudovsky of CRG, Datuk Dr Zulaiha Ismail of PGPF, Ms Askiah Adam, the JUST Executive Director and Dr. Chandra Muzaffar, the JUST President. The objective was to draw up a Plan of Action to map the way forward.

Professor Chossudovsky started the session by saying that the direction of this endeavour has been set by the legal dimensions, the finding that this Conference cannot participate nor accept the flawed JIT findings and process. Where the interests of the families are not served then the way to go would be a civil legal suit. For the Malaysians it should be in Malaysia. With regard to MH17 there is a fragile consensus because it is based on lies. The consensus must be reversed. This consensus built on lies is a consequence of the media’s uncritical reporting. There must be a relationship with the media towards the reversal of the consensus.

The organisers of the Conference are considering the setting up of a study group to achieve justice including for the families. Datuk Dr Zulaiha was in full agreement with Professor Chossudovsky. She was concerned that the ICAO a UN agency, up to this day, has not taken Ukraine to task for having kept its airspace over a war zone open. She is not sure whether a tribunal of conscience or a formal legal suit against Ukraine should be the way forward. Ms Askiah Adam as the day’s rapporteur gathered the proposals and opinions voiced throughout the day that might fill the Plan of Action. As such what was contained in her presentation is already found in the earlier parts of the proceedings of the Conference.

The final speaker, Dr Chandra Muzaffar outlined four points that have emerged from the proceedings. Firstly, it was to suspend the JIT process since the investigation is flawed. Any conviction in a court of law arising from such an investigation would be a gross travesty of justice. To alert the Malaysian Prime Minister about this so that he can get in touch with his Dutch counterpart. This would be the most important recommendation from our Conference.  Secondly, if the first point succeeds there is a need for an alternative process to bring closure. We could set up a committee of legal minds to suggest alternative routes to justice for the families of the victims.  Thirdly, civil society organisations should come together to support this alternative process. This would be part of the mobilisation of public opinion. Fourthly, to develop an alternative narrative about the entire episode with the help of the media. The most critical dimension of this narrative would be to show how MH 17 is part of the unfolding geopolitical scenario related to the attempt by the dominant hegemonic forces to perpetuate their power and control in the midst of the most serious challenge ever to Western dominance in the last 200 years.

The most striking feature of the Question and Answer session that followed the presentations was the inability of media practitioners to see as hard evidence the points raised to show the flawed nature of the JIT investigations which were at best opaque and at worst fraudulent. The media practitioners have no appreciation of this. It shows that there is much work to be done ahead.

The Conference ended at about 7pm.

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The above report was prepared by the Conference Rapporteur, Ms. Askiah Adam.

For last thirty years, the world has been watching the saga of downfall of the Japanese economy.

In particular, the world has been watching with curiosity and even worry about the amazing adventure of Abenomics.

The disappointing performance of the Japanese economy and the amazingly inefficient Tokyo’s policies have produced the “Japanzation” of the economy meaning the three-decades of  economic recession followed by depression and deflation.

There is no reason why other economies will not share the same hateful experience in the future. In fact, there were some voices, thought weak, of worry about such possibility in Korea before the take- over of power by Moon Jae-in in 2017.

Since the declaration of Abenomics, in 2013, the growth rate of Japan’s GDP is no longer of minus figure, but still the lowest among the advanced OECD countries.

The per capita GDP fell from US$ 44,674 in 2010 to US$ 39,295 in 2018.

True, there are a few encouraging signs. The number of jobs has increased; the consumer price index is no longer zero but still below 2% which had been the policy target. The value of Yen fell by 20% but did not help much Japan’s exports.

You may say that these data mean a success of Abenomics, but, if it is, its social cost is high. The fiscal incentive policy has imposed on the Japanese people a national debt ratio of 250%, the highest in the world of advanced countries.

The central bank of Japan has applied so called “quantity easing” in order to prepare and inject liquid money amounting as much as 88% of GDP into the financial market with no convincing results.

But, before anything else, the suffering that the Japanese people had to endure because of the wrong policies of the government should deserve our attention.

Declining real household income and increasing non-regular jobs, the lack of adequate care for the elderly, the refusal of the young to get married are some of the collateral damages of the wrong judgements of policy choices and execution.

What is really surprising is this. Despite such long deflation and suffering, Japanese people have not shown massive protest. Is this due to their legendary docility? Or is it attributable to their fear of severe punitive reaction by the government?

Many will ask the question: Is Abenomics a failure or a success?” This question is of course important, but the more important question is: “What is the lesson of the deflation of thirty years?” I will try to answer this question later.

This paper has four parts.

First, we will see how the Japanese economy has evolved since WWII. Here, we borrow some of the ideas found in the theory of economic development by stage.

Second, we will see who were responsible for the creation of the bubble in the first place and its explosion in 1989.

Third, we will discuss the policy measures adopted by the government.

Fourth, the focus will be on the reason for the policy failure. And we will seek for policies better suited for the recovery of the Japanese economy.

1. Evolution of the Japanese Economy

There can be several indicators of economic growth and development, but GDP is, perhaps, one of the useful yardsticks. The evolution of the Japanese economy has gone through the following stages: take-off, accelerated growth, stable growth and stagnation followed by deflation.

It appears that the Japanese economy took off in the 1950s and the first half of 1960s. During this period, Japanese economy grew, at time, as fast as more than 20% per year in the 1950s, 9.2 % in the first half of the 1960s and 11.4 % in the latter half of the 1960s.

This period of rapid growth was attributable to American Dodge Plan, the Korean War, the successful adaptation of American high technologies to Japan’s needs, managerial innovations undertaken by major corporations such as “just in time delivery” and the Confucian human resource management such as life-time job and seniority-based wage system.

This period was one of the “Japanese Miracle.” Japan was admired; Japan was envied; Japan was imitated.

Then, from 1970s for two decades, the Japanese GDP grew at about 4.5% per year. This period was the stage of stable growth. One thing unusual was that the rate of GDP growth dramatically fell by 60% (6.9 percentage point), compared to previous stage (11.4%); this was unusually violent fall.

This could have been due to Japan’s loss of technological edge. In fact, much of Japanese technologies were modified versions of American technologies; they were not the original technologies invented by Japan; they were relatively easily transferred to other countries, such as South Korea and Taiwan

Moreover, this period was the beginning of significant moving of a number of Japanese firms to low-wage countries. This was another factor responsible for the decrease in the GDP growth rate.

However, the most significant factor was the weakening global competitiveness of Keiretsu firms (large industrial, financial and trade corporations) which were the post-WWII version of Meiji Era’s Zaibatsu. The Zaibatsu played the central role for the success of the Meiji Restoration in the latter half of the 19th century.

This period was also the period of the creation of the bubble and dramatic bursting of the bubble. We will come back later to this issue.

The decades of stable growth was followed by the decades of deflation and stagnation. After the bubble explosion in 1989, the average annual rate of GDP growth in the first half of the 1990s dropped to 1.72% from 5% of the preceding five years. This was the beginning of three decades of painful stagnation and deflation.

During the period of 1996-2018, the annual GDP growth rate never exceeded 1.0% with the exception of the first half of the 2000s when the growth rate was 1.22%

There were periods of minus growth rates. In 1998, GDP fell by 2.0% and in the following year, it came down by 0.2%. In 2007, the growth rate was minus 1.0%, while it was as low as minus 5.5% in 2008. In 2011, the Japanese GDP shrank by 0.5%.

Such is the saga of the incomprehensible breakdown of the number-two economy of the world

2. The Bubble and the Oligarchy

The world was shocked by the explosion of the huge bubble in 1989. The value of stocks fell by 60% in 1990; the value of real estate had a free fall of 80%. This bubble bursting hit hard Japan, very hard.

Why such a dramatic fall? The answer: “It is because the price went up too high in the past!” In 1988, the price of Ginza area land of one square meter was US$139,000.

The area of the Japan’s territory was 37% of that of the U.S., but the value of Japanese real estate was in 1988, four times that of the U.S. The value of stocks in the Tokyo stock market soared from 60% of GDP in 1985 to 152% of GDP in 1989.

Who and what were responsible for such a bubble? It is true that the Plaza Accord of 1985 was perhaps responsible in part. The resulting dramatic appreciation of Yen in comparison with the value of US dollar might have attracted foreign capital to be invested in real estate and stocks for speculative purpose.

In 1985, to get one US dollar, Japan had to pay 242Yens, but in 1988 the cost of one US dollar declined to 120 Yens. This was an increase of 50% in the value of Yen.

But the real factor was, most likely, the speculative investments in stocks and real estate undertaken by the well connected Japanese individuals, big business firms and banks.

The 1980s were an era of economic honeymoon for Japan. GDP grew more slowly, but things were plenty for most of the Japanese people. Japanese were proud of having caught up with the U.S. economy, in part any way.

Catching up with US in economic development was the ardent dream of the Japanese; this was perhaps their way of revenging for Hiroshima-Nagasaki humiliation.

The money was abundant. There was a lot of savings at banks. The amount of postal savings alone was 70% of the regular government annual budget. The liberalization of the global finance opened the door for banks and companies to international money market. The Keiretsu corporations had their own banks.

So they had the money, they had the chance to make money in the stock market and the real estate market. In fact, the members of the Japanese elite groups engaged themselves in the game of “Zaitech” meaning “techniques of making quick money”; it was the favoured pass time for the elite groups to make money by buying and selling assets for capital gains.

Some of the Japanese investors went to the country of Uncle Sam and bought the Rockefeller Center, the Columbia Picture Company and, even the Pebble Beach Golf Course.

The champion of speculative investors in real estate and stocks was, most likely, the powerful tripartite oligarchy composed of policy maker (politicians), policy executors (bureaucrats) and money makers. (Keiretsu).

The interesting and important question is why the government let the human greed to go wild and paralyze the whole economy.

The possible answer lies in the complicity of the oligarchy members to ignore the danger of the bubble so that they all can become millionaires.

If the oligarchy was responsible for the creation of the bubble, it was also responsible for the failure of properly dealing with the post-bubble problems.

There is no doubt that the oligarchy was the master of the Japan Inc. which made the Japan miracle possible. But, the oligarchy’s policies designed to restore the Japanese economy after the bubble relied on the conventional economic policies, namely the monetary policy, the fiscal policy and the structural adjustment policy.

True, these conventional policies were strengthened by Abe to make it, in 2013, his Abenomics policies, but still they were conventional policies.

Japan should have applied non-conventional policies such as a bold reform of Keiretsu and the expansion of the domestic market through more equal income distribution in favour of the ordinary people

 3. Government Policies

The monetary policy applied before global financial crisis of 2007-2008 was the monetary policy based on the manipulation of interest rate. This policy was applied during the violent recession after the explosion of the asset price bubble in 1989.

The price of assets rose so high and increased so rapidly that the Bank of Japan had to do something; it did something all right; it jacked up the bank rate from 2% to 6 % in order to stop possible hyper-inflation.

This was too much. Everything came down. The stock price index in Tokyo hit the ground from 30,000 to less than 15,000; the average real estate price had a free fall of 80%. The panic was inevitable. Japan had to face the threat of a huge recession which could invite deflation.

The phenomenon of deflation is something which happens rarely. It starts with the drastic fall of asset (real estate) price below the value of mortgage (debt). This means that the debtor has no longer the capacity to pay back the debt. The debtor has one realistic choice; the debtor has to sell the property. If many debtors do the same thing, then price falls more.

Since the amount of debt is greater than the value of the asset, the borrower cannot pay the debt, the banks end up with huge amount of bad debts. Then, cash crunch follows; banks cannot make new loans. The consumer demand weakens; the production of goods and services falls; the number of jobless increases. The household income goes down and the vicious circle gets worse. The vicious circle continues until such time as the economy crumbles.

This was what happened in 1991 in Japan. The policy measure needed immediately was the downward adjustment of the central bank rate. But, the Bank of Japan waited until 1994 before its rate came down almost to 0 %.  Here, Japan made the first mistake. The pulling down of interest rate came too late; the recession after the bubble explosion never recovered; the period of deflation followed.

The post-1994 policy was the conventional monetary policy of adjusting the central bank interest rate in order to adjust the demand for money for business investment and consumer demand. Given the depth of the deflation, the Bank of Japan had to keep the interest as low as possible to near 0 % until the middle of the 2000s.

Once you have zero interest rate, you have what is called “liquidity trap” and the conventional monetary policy is no longer working.

Having failed to produce expected results with the conventional monetary policy, the Bank of Japan began the policy of “quantity easing” (QE) in the 2000s. It became the major tool of Abenomics in 2013. The QE policy consists in opening at the central bank the current account of commercial banks. This means the creation of money which can be used by the commercial banks

It amounted to no less than US$ 923 billion in 2013, US$ 1,055 billion in 2014 and US$ 656 billion in 2015. By 2018, the cumulated amount of QE was as much as 88% of GDP in Japan as compared to 24% in the U.S., 34% in EU and 24% in UK.

Many countries including the U.S. and China used QE after the 2007-2008 global financial crisis produced by the American financial sector. But no country was flooded with liquid money as much as Japan.

Such huge injection of money has ended up by increasing the supply of money (M3) so much that, in the early 2010s, it accounted for 252.1% of Japanese GDP as against 151.5 % in Korea, 199.1% in China and 89.5% in the U.S. Money was not scarce; there was huge money flood in Japan.

The question is: “What did QE do in order to revitalize the ailing Japanese economy?” Most of the money was spent for prolonging the life of companies which were unproductive, insolvent and uncompetitive. This policy has prevented the Japanese companies from improving their global competitiveness. The money was spent for giving grants, bailing out and nationalizing companies in trouble.

In 1997, the Sanyo Securities and the Yamaichi Securities were bailed out. In 2000, the Deici Retail chains were bailed out. In 2013, Rosana Bank got the same treatment. Countless zombie firms were saved.

In 1999, Daiwa Bank and Asahi Bank were given large amount of grants. Similarly in 2002, the Sogo Retail Store chain received generous financial aid.

It is true that the government has also tried the M&A of banks; in 2008, 27 banks were merged into 4 banks groups.

What did the commercial banks do with the flood of liquid money apart from financing the bailouts of troubled companies? Not much; the QE policy was not able to restore the Japanese economy.

The primary reason was that there was not much demand for money.

This is explained by two reasons.

First, for decades, the household income stopped to increase; so, there was not much new demand for money needed for the consumption of goods and services. The increasing inequality of income distribution has worsened the income situation of the Japanese people

The inequality of income distribution is measured by the Gini coefficient which goes from zero to 100. The lower the Gini, the more equal the distribution of income is; the higher the Gini, the more unequal the distribution becomes.

The Gini coefficient in Japan has increased from 32.1 in 2008 to 37.9 in 2011. If this trend continued, the Gini in 2019 could be much higher.

Second, there was not enough demand for money by exporters, for Japanese exports did not increase due to the loss of global competitiveness of Japanese companies, especially the Keiretsu companies.

Under this situation, the banks had the burden of managing the huge stock of idle liquid money. So, they made loans to pay back existing debts; they could invest the interest-free money in assets abroad.

The second policy was the fiscal policy. The government of Japan spent an astronomical amount of money in order to recover from the decades-long deflation. For this, the government had to borrow heavily; in fact, the public debt is now more than 250% of GDP amounting 13 trillion USD.

Most of these funds were used for the construction of infrastructure facilities including a bridge in the Tokyo area, a bridge which went nowhere..

The fiscal policy has not done any better than the monetary policy in saving the Japanese economy from deflation. It is possible that much of money spent went to constructions firms which were directly or indirectly related to the oligarchy members.

Now, the third Arrow of structural adjustment policy was designed, in theory, to change the structure of the whole system of the economy. This was announced in 2015 when the second stage of Abenomics was explained.

The policy tackled the problems of education, labour force, innovations, fee trade and host of other problems. But this policy came too late and did not deal with the real problems of improving the competitiveness of large corporations and the underdevelopment of SMEs.

4. Conclusion

Three sets of policies were applied: monetary policy, fiscal policy and the structural adjustment policy. None of these policies was successful in restoring the sinking Japanese economy. Why?

The primary factor responsible seems to be the loss of global competitiveness of the Japanese economy. The loss of the strength of Japan’s global competitiveness is primarily due to the poor performance of Keiretsu corporations.

Between 2005 and 2011, the foreign market share (percentage of sales abroad) of Japanese auto makers’ production dropped in a dramatic manner. The foreign market share of Toyota fell from 51% to 41%, while that of Honda dropped from 39% to 29%.

The performance of the electronic industry was even worse. For instance, from 1995 to 2007, Japan’s foreign market share of the production of DRAM Memory came down from 42% to 9%. In the case of car navigation equipment, the foreign market share which had been 100% collapsed to 0%.

The picture of auto makers profit was not pretty either. Between 2001 and 2011, Mazda’s profit slipped from 4.3% to 2.8%; in the case of Toyota, it came down from 9.9% to 1.9%; in the case of Honda, it dropped from 8.8% to 2.9%

These figures show by what extent the Keiretsu companies have lost their place in the global market.

There is another factor which must be dealt with, if Japan wants to restore its economy.

It is Japan’s isolationism. Japan should come out of isolationism. One of the challenges which Japan must deal with is the declining population. The absolute number of population has been declining to reach 126.5 million in 2019 and it will go down to 100.0 million by 2050.

To make the matter worse, the proportion of elderly of 65 years or more has reached already 28.0% in 2018 from 17.4% in 2000. This means the decrease of active population of 15-64 years which accounted for 67.9% in 2013 dropped to 59.3% in 2019, or a decline of 1.4% point per year. This is too much.

This demographic aspect of the Japanese society must be dealt with, but it seems rather difficult to do so, because of Japan’s isolationism or racism. Perhaps, the only way to deal with declining population and the shortage of working population is immigration.

Japan is one of the most anti-immigration nations in the developed world. In 2016, immigrants in Japan were merely 1.6% of the total population as against 12.2% in OECD countries. In Canada, immigrants represent more than 25% of its total population

Japan’s isolationism is also represented by the reluctance of Japanese youth to go abroad to study. Japan’s another problem is its reluctance of accepting foreign direct investments (FDI). It was only 5% of GDP in 2019 as compared to 15% in Korea and 50% in the UK.

I was told that Ph.D. obtained abroad is not as much valued as Ph.D. obtained in Japan

Such anti-foreign things could be a factor which prevents Japan from importing new technological know-how and needed labour force.

Another factor which might be included in the strategy of revitalizing the economy is the mechanism through which the people can prevent any given party from monopolizing the power for ever, as did the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party) of Abe.

There is close positive correlation between the longevity of political party power and the corruption of the government. The corruption of the government can easily lead to policies which can be used for the selfish interests of the oligarchy at the expense of the national interests.

So, it is important for the Japanese people not only to watch closely government policies but also participate actively in the policy making process

To conclude, the saga of “japanization” provides a very useful lesson for us all.

The lesson is this. In Japan, Korea and in many other countries, the oligarchy plays a vital role in the early stage of economic development for the mobilization of national resources, capital formation, construction of industrial and social infrastructure facilities, market development and the development of all sorts of institutions needed for the take-off and the sustained growth of the economy.

But, there is a trouble. In order to accelerate the development of the economy, at the early stages of the economic development, the government allocates most of available resources to large corporation at the expense of the development of SMEs and the welfare of the people.

As long as the large corporations remain competitive, the economy continues to grow, but when they lose their competitiveness, we have problems.

Large corporations lose their competitiveness primarily because of the intensifying international competition and the lack of flexibility due to large size.

But there is another reason. Their global competitiveness has been assured, in part, owing to government subsidies and other forms of aids. But as the rate of economic growth slows down, the government can no longer provide such aids

When this happens, the growth of the economy slows down.

SMEs should take over the big firms and restore the economy. After all, SMEs in Japan account for 99.7% of the total number of firms and 87% of job creation. But the SMEs could not have developed because of the government’s pro-large corporation policies; SMEs cannot be a great help.

The only solution is the bold structural reforms which should aim at the following objectives: supply of needed labour force through immigration of people, liquidation of non-competitive large corporation, strengthening SMEs competitiveness, widening and deepening the domestic market through more balanced income distribution and sustained communication between the government and the ordinary people.

What has happened in Japan is the story of how the economic miracle can be realized owing to the devotion and strong will of the oligarchy; it shows, at the same time, how the economy can crumble because of wrong policy choices made by the oligarchy and the unfair distribution of the fruits of the miracle.

This can happen to many countries, especially developing countries. There is only way to prevent it; it is the direct participation of the ordinary people in policy decision making.

It is happening in Korea where, since Moon Jae-in took over the power in 2017, if more than 200,000 people ask the Blue House to take certain measures, the government must reply and react.

Moreover, the greater freedom of press and the interventions of NGOs constitute effective mechanism of watching over public policies and preventing the abuse of power and privileges by the elite of the society

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Professor Joseph H.Chung is professor of economics and co-director of the East Asia Observatory (OAE) of the Study Center for Integration and Globalization (CEIM), Quebec University in Montreal (UQAM). He is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization (CRG).

Once upon a time, there was a very bright little boy who grew up moving around Australia, never really taking roots. As an adolescent he found his own world in cyberspace, which offered a field for his insatiable curiosity. As he learned about that great world out there and its secrets, he developed his very own rigorous ethic: his vocation was to search for true facts and share them with the public. His moral compass developed free of conformist social codes. Truth was truth, deception was wrong, lies on the part of the powerful should be exposed.

The original sin of Julian Assange was the same as that of Galileo Galilei.  Galileo sinned by revealing to the people things the elite already knew or at least surmised, but wished to keep secret from the masses, in order not to shake the people’s faith in the official truth. Assange did the same thing with the formation of Wikileaks. The official version of reality was challenged. All lies should be exposed. By far the most sensitive targets of his wide-ranging reality revelations were the lies, the hypocrisy, the inhuman brutality of the United States in its wars of global hegemony. To Assange, these things were simply wrong.

At first, Wikileaks attracted a great deal of popular attention and even acclaim. Julian Assange became famous. He was a geek, but he didn’t look like a geek. Tall, handsome, striking with his nearly white hair, Julian was something strange: a charismatic geek.

He arrived in Sweden with near superstar status. Swedish women contrived to get him into their beds. They bragged about having sex with Julian: he was a trophy lover. But the charismatic geek didn’t know the social codes of the peculiar Swedish forms of virtuous promiscuity. This lacuna was exploited by his enemies in extravagantly unpredictable ways.

Julian Assange tried to straighten out what seemed to be a serious misunderstanding before leaving Sweden. But the Swedish side failed to make matters clear and he left for London.

In London, he was quickly taken up by the radical chic branch of the British upper class, the champagne and caviar humanitarians. The naïve charismatic geek who didn’t know the social codes no doubt thought he was among friends. He didn’t belong to any political or social movement in the UK, he depended on the beautiful people who for a time found him an interesting outsider, one of their latest causes.

Julian Assange may have been socially naïve, but he very acutely perceived what the imperial powers were working up against him. The totally unjustifiable demand for extradition to Sweden for questioning – unjustifiable because they had declined to question him while he was there and then declined to question him in the UK – appeared to Julian to be an obvious device to enable Sweden to extradite him to the United States, given the total obedience of post-Olof Palme Sweden to the wishes of Washington. Others didn’t see this so clearly, except for the excellent President of Ecuador at the time, Rafael Correa. Correa offered Assange asylum in the tiny Ecuadorian embassy in London. Assange, unconventional, negligent of the codes, but with a clear view of the danger stalking him, jumped the bail set up for him and moved into the embassy.

This was the beginning of his alienation from the caviar humanitarians. At first the smart set defended him. Such glamorous personalities as Jemima Khan and Amal Amamuddin (not yet Clooney) initially defended him and then lost interest. He was not of their world. He did not know how to compromise, he was a geek after all, less and less charismatic as he faded in the shadows of the embassy of Ecuador. It’s all very well to denounce lies and tell the truth, but one mustn’t overdo it. It’s delightful to have a cause when you have a solid social and financial background to fall back on, and when you know how to play the game so as to be in and out at the same time. Julian had none of those social graces. He was honest, intent, stubborn. He was incapable of hypocrisy, even in his own interest. He would not abjure, as Galileo did.

Such stubborn honesty on the part of someone who has nothing – no influential family, no fortune, no social status, no political party, nothing but his stubborn devotion to truth – is unbearable in a society based on lies. The media who profited from his scoops became the most zealous in denouncing him. No wonder: his honesty was a living reproach to the scribblers who had sold out all down the line, who get ahead by adding new touches to the mendacious “common narrative” required by the masters of their careers.

Lies were spread. Someone so honest must have hidden vices. He must be as bad as we are, or worse. The mob gathers. This man who knows the truth but not the social codes is an insult to us all, a freak, a monster, who must be destroyed.

The lynch mob is enormous. The media, politicians, even the judicial authorities. There are no loud shouts for blood but silent cruelty as the Anglo-American ruling Establishment shamelessly contrives to halt the last breath of the outsider who dared expose them for what they are.

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This article was originally published on AntiWar.com.

Diana Johnstone is the author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions. Her new book is Queen of Chaos: the Misadventures of Hillary Clinton. The memoirs of Diana Johnstone’s father Paul H. Johnstone, From MAD to Madness, was published by Clarity Press, with her commentary.

Diana Johnstone is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from 21st Century Wire

New border-wall construction in southeastern Arizona is imperiling the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge, and encroaching into an active jaguar movement corridor where the jaguar known as “Sombra” most likely crossed the border into the United States.

The new 30-foot-high bollard wall will block the natural migration of wildlife, replacing existing waist-high vehicle barriers that allow most wildlife to move freely. Massive groundwater pumping for the project threatens to destroy rare desert springs that harbor several imperiled species that live nowhere else in the United States.

“Trump’s wall is destroying some of the most beautiful, fragile landscapes in the borderlands,” said Laiken Jordahl, borderlands campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Construction here could push the endangered species in this wildlife refuge to extinction and encroach on vital jaguar territory. The Border Patrol’s reckless pumping of desert groundwater threatens to dry up the single most valuable resource for wildlife, ranchers and border communities. This lawlessness shows outrageous disrespect for our public lands and most vulnerable wildlife.”

The 20-mile-long segment also cuts through the historic Slaughter Ranch and neighboring public and private lands. Drone footage of the construction site shows the damage already being done.

Crews have cleared land for a concrete batching plant and staging area just west of the wildlife refuge. They have also tapped a well to extract limited groundwater resources to mix concrete during construction. Water usage estimates for the project run from 70,000 to 700,000 gallons per day.

The San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge is home to eight threatened and endangered species, including four species of endemic fish, Chiricahua leopard frogs, Huachuca water umbel, Mexican garter snakes and Aplomado falcon. The only known population of San Bernardino springsnails in the world is limited to just a couple of fragile springs in the area.

Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity.

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Featured image: An excavator sits at the eastern edge of the San Bernardino National Wildlife Refuge. Photo: Laiken Jordahl

The late Chalmers Johnson, a CIA consultant from 1967 – 1973, called for Langley’s abolition, stressing that democracy and the agency’s existence are incompatible.

Along with collecting and disseminating intelligence, agency operatives “perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may direct.”

The above quote is all about the CIA’s dark side, an unaccountable force unto itself, operating extrajudicially worldwide.

The late William Blum documented its involvement in assassinating foreign leaders, removing others by coup d’etats, propping up friendly despots, operating secret torture prisons, and other unlawful practices. Its agenda includes virtually every conceivable form of wrongdoing.

It tried or succeeded in toppling scores of governments worldwide, Blum saying:

“If you flip over the rock of American foreign policy (throughout) the past century, this is what crawls out: invasions, bombings, (subversion), overthrowing governments, suppressing (popular) movements for social change, assassinating political leaders, perverting elections, manipulating labor unions, manufacturing ‘news,’ death squads, torture, (chemical), biological (and nuclear) warfare, (radiological contamination), drug trafficking, mercenaries,” police state repression, and endless wars on humanity.

From 1968 – 1973 in Southeast Asia, the CIA ran or was involved in the Phoenix Program with US Special Forces and its own Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Special Operations Group (MACV-SOG).

Their mission was crushing National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) resistance to US imperialism.

One individual involved called what went on “depersonalized murder” to remove opposition elements and terrorize the population into submission.

An analyst at the time said it was “the most indiscriminate and massive program of political murder since the Nazi death camps of world war two.”

Even US military personnel and members of the South Vietnamese government were targeted for elimination if considered security risks.

An estimated 80,000 victims were murdered before Operation Phoenix ended. In the 1980s, CIA-recruited death squads were responsible for over 300,000 deaths in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, countless thousands more brutally tortured, and millions forced into exile.

An International Tribunal on Genocide in Central America said years of extreme violence during the period was responsible for “genocide and ethnocide…against indigenous groups,” accountability never forthcoming.

High crimes included massacres, torture, forced military service, land seizures, arbitrary arrests and imprisonments, population relocations, and attacks amounting to genocide under the UN Convention.

Since Bush/Cheney preemptively attacked Afghanistan without just cause in October 2001, the CIA and US special forces have been involved in extrajudicial killings, torture and other atrocities in the country, wanting elements opposed to US aggression and occupation eliminated.

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh earlier said the US has been (and continues to be) responsible for targeted assassinations and other lawless actions in numerous countries.

“It’s been going on and on and on,” he said, no matter which right wing of the US war party is in power.

On Thursday, Middle East Eye (MEE) reported about continued CIA orchestrated assassinations in Afghanistan.

Even during Trump regime/Taliban talks, seeking accommodation between both sides, its officials were targeted for elimination, one of countless examples why the US can never be trusted.

Last March, MEE reported that Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi crown prince in the UAE, offered to assassinate senior Taliban officials during a meeting with Pompeo.

Since established on September 18, 1947, a day that will live in infamy, the CIA has been involved in orchestrating targeted killings and other high crimes worldwide on a massive scale.

Afghan forces recruited and trained by the US have been involved in CIA atrocities. MEE said “community elders, health workers and others” called what’s going on “a daily fact of life” in the country, death squad assassinations a Langley specialty.

The agency falsely claims its operations comply with the rule of law. Polar opposite is true. Countless numbers of corpses in numerous countries attest to its brutality.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

People being killed by wildfires in California, and people dying because they can’t afford their insulin are the same thing. Both represent the capture of government by corporations — in other words, both are symptoms of democracy in the United States being replaced by a corporate state with little regard for morality, life or the law.

In 1976, for the first time in America’s history, five conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that rich people owning their own personal politicians was constitutionally protected because the money they were using to buy legislators and legislation was “free speech.” The case was Buckley v. Valeo. In 1978, SCOTUS extended that logic to corporations in First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti.

The result was predictable. Rich people and corporations rose up and took over the government, as money poured into Reagan’s coffers and the corporate-funded GOP began to dominate the American political scene. And, also predictably, the most predatory and least scrupulous among those billionaires and corporations ended up with the most influence.

This Supreme Court-written law, reaffirmed in 2010’s Citizens United decision, was never proposed by any legislature, governor, or president, and, in fact, struck down a series of “good government” laws restricting money in politics that went all the way back to 1907.

And it has largely reduced democracy in the United States to its trappings. The public is engaged in a series of rather empty rituals, at least for the moment.

A representative democracy, of course, is generally agreed to mean that the majority of the people vote for what they want from government and most often then get it via the people they elected. When the majority wanted, for example, the right to unionize, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, Social Security, civil rights laws, and Medicare, our government brought those things into existence.

All that was, of course, before the Supreme Court eradicated what democracy we had in 1976 and 1978.

Those decisions brought a river of money into politics and thus swept Reagan into office. He did pretty much everything his donors wanted and screwed the rest of us.

The corporate and billionaire takeover of the American government that began with Reagan in 1981 (based on the Supreme Court decisions of 1976 and 1978) has gotten more complete and more brazen with every election.

In 2014, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, professors at Princeton and Northwestern universities, respectively, published an extraordinary study that found that in this post-Reagan era, the political goals — the legislative outcomes hoped for — of Americans in the bottom 90 percent of income were, essentially, ignored by the U.S. Congress and presidency, at least when it came to actually passing and signing legislation. The probability of their wants and needs being addressed legislatively was even less likely than random chance.

The political goals of the top 10 percent, however, predictably happened, with the most elite and wealthy Americans getting the legislation they wanted, when they wanted it.

This is not democracy; it’s oligarchy or, at the very least, a corporate state. President Franklin D. Roosevelt challenged the corporate state that had emerged in the deregulated Hoover administration head-on, and his efforts largely kept it under control until the Reagan era.

In a 1938 speech to Congress, FDR said:

“[T]he liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.”

We’ve reached that point that FDR warned us about, regardless of the word you use to describe it.

As Gilens and Page wrote for the Washington Post, explaining their research, “strong support among the affluent is associated with about a 25 point greater probability of a policy being adopted… while strong support among the middle-class is actually associated with a small decline in the likelihood that a policy will be adopted….

“In other words,” they continued, “strong support among high-income Americans roughly doubles the probability that a policy will be adopted; strong support among the middle class has essentially no effect.”

What Professors Gilens and Page documented is that the Supreme Court killed democracy in the United States. The will of the people — the very definition of democracy — no longer matters.

As a result, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) felt safe diverting billions of dollars that could have been used for maintenance or burying their high-tension lines into bloated executive salaries and fabulous shareholder dividends; after all, they owned or could strongly influence the majority of California politicians.

As Judge William Alsup ruled, “PG&E pumped out $4.5 billion in dividends and let the tree [trimming] budget wither.”

Now they feel free to cut off people’s power and tell San Francisco to go screw itself when it tried to buy their SF operations.

It’s also why one of the largest purchasers of drugs in the U.S. — Medicare — is now barred by law (the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003) from negotiating prices for those drugs and must pay full retail for everything, a windfall worth hundreds of billions to the pharmaceutical companies.

This law, promoted by the Bush administration, was passed back in 2003 but is still on the books because the drug industry owns the majority of our federal politicians, even though 93 percent of Democratic and 74 percent of Republican voters agree that the government should be able to negotiate prices. In addition to being a Medicare-funded windfall for pharmaceutical CEOs, it has led to drug prices exploding across the board, and that has led to dying Americans.

Most Americans want clean air, pure water, and a healthy environment; every administration since Reagan has, instead, cut thousands of corners or even driven roadways through previous laws and regulations protecting us. The majority of Americans want affordable college, strong Social Security, and a livable minimum wage; instead, since 1980, the trendlines have all been in the opposite direction.

Industry after industry has poured their largesse into political coffers, and in nearly every case they get what they want, the voting public be damned.

Americans know this. It’s one of the reasons why, when a buffoonish reality TV star and mobbed-up New York real estate mogul ran for president promising to “drain the swamp” and “break Washington,” millions voted for him. But he’s not giving us democracy, either; he’s just accelerating the slide to a totally corporate-owned state.

When the five conservatives on the Supreme Court betrayed America by handing our political system over to the morbidly rich and corporations, the Reagan administration, bowing to newly empowered corporate pressure, stopped enforcing a century of anti-trust and anti-monopoly laws.

No administration since has felt the need to reverse that, as industry after industry — from media to airlines to insurance to hotels to social media to food — have become dominated by cartels of a small handful of companies.

At this scale, it’s much easier to purchase and lead legislators, as we learned this week happened when it was revealed that last year a paid-off member of Congress slipped language into law written by or for Boeing that essentially put them in charge of FAA airworthiness certification. The result was the 737 Max and 346 dead human beings.

In the Democratic primaries, several candidates started backing away from Medicare for All when people from drug, hospital, doctor and insurance interests began to financially support their campaigns. The Republican Party sold their souls back in the 1980s; only about half of the Democratic Party is in a similar condition of servitude, which has put the party at a severe electoral disadvantage since that era.

When I asked President Jimmy Carter about Citizens United and this doctrine of money as speech in 2015, he said: “It violates the essence of what made America a great country in its political system. Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and Congress members.

“So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over,” said President Carter.

In nation after nation throughout modern history, every time government has been taken over by oligarchs and corporations, democracy has died — usually to be replaced by a strongman form of oligarchy or outright fascism.

Congress could have reversed the Supreme Court’s decision at any time with either legislation that explicitly says money is not speech and that (per Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution) this issue is an “exception” on which the Supreme Court may not rule.

It could also be done by two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states passing a constitutional amendment declaring that money is not the same thing as speech, and that corporations are not persons.

Because of a corrupt Supreme Court, oligarchs and the corporations that made them rich have taken over the American political system. If we don’t take it back from them soon, the entire experiment of an American democratic republic will come to an end.

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Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of “The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America” and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

US involvement in Syria has nothing to do with regional peace, stability and security, nothing to do with combatting ISIS-Daesh terrorists. It’s all about killing a nation, partitioning it for easier control, installing puppet rule, eliminating an Israeli rival, isolating Iran, and confiscating its oil resources. 

On Thursday, US war secretary Mark Esper repeated what he said days earlier. Heavily armed Pentagon forces will continue controlling Syrian oil producing areas, on the phony pretext of “deny(ing) their access to ISIS — the scourge created and supported by the US he failed to explain.

During a Thursday joint press conference with his Australian counterpart Linda Reynolds at the Pentagon, Esper said the following:

“Our National Defense Strategy emphasizes that our principal concern is the Indo-Pacific region” — to counter China’s sovereign independence, its growing regional and global influence, it economic, financial, military and technological development, he failed to explain, adding:

“I need to redeploy (Pentagon) forces to the area” to increase the US military footprint in a part of the world not its own.

Asked to comment on Trump’s remark about wanting to take Syrian oil, Esper said the following:

“Yeah, the – the mission is, as – as I’ve spoken to, and I’ve conveyed it to the commander, and that is, we will secure oil fields to deny their access to ISIS and other actors in the region (sic), and to ensure that the SDF has continued access, because those resources are – are important, and so that the SDF can – can do its mission, what it needs to do in the region (sic).”

Asked “(i)s that a new mission, he failed to say it’s part of the overall Pentagon objective to transform Syria into a US vassal state, plunder its resources, and achieve the other aims explained above.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the US is stealing and smuggling $30 million worth of Syrian oil monthly “under the pretext of fighting ISIL.”

Separately, Zakharova explained that US/NATO-supported al-Qaeda-connected White Helmets are planning a new chemical weapons attack to be falsely blame on Damascus, saying:

“New confirmations of the information about the White Helmets’ activities emerge all the time.”

“According to the existing information, which the Syrian government regularly provides to the United Nations, the White Helmets, jointly with terrorists, are preparing new chemical provocations in Syria. They obviously aim at disrupting the peace process in the country,” adding:

They’re working with (US-supported) al-Nusra jihadists in Idlib province, the last major terrorist stronghold in the country — these elements heavily armed with US, other Western, Turkish, and Saudi-supplied weapons.

So-called ceasefire in northern Syria is illusory. On Friday, Russian reconciliation center head General Yuri Borenkov said 14 ceasefire breaches occurred in the last 24 hours alone — in Hama, Idlib, Aleppo, and Latakia provinces, adding:

Syrian forces in “Acre, Tel Rasha and Zuweiqat in Latakia province have been shot at by (US-supported) Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (al-Nusra) and foreign militants.”

On Friday, Southfront reported that “al-Qaeda (and) Turkish-backed radical militants launch(ed) (a) large-scale attack in northern Latakia” province “on Syrian military positions and civilian areas,” adding:

The assault “reportedly (was) led by” (US/Ankara-supported) al-Nusra jihadists, along with “(o)ther factions of the terrorist group and elements of the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army (SNA).”

“The new attack…coincides with a Turkish offensive on Kurdish-majority areas in northeast Syria. Radical SNA militants are leading the offensive, committing war crimes against civilians in the region.”

The struggle to liberate Syria from foreign occupation and plunder has miles to go because of US, NATO, Turkish, Saudi, and Israeli rage to eliminate the Syrian Arab Republic as it now exists.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from The Grayzone

The United States is to keep forces at the oil fields in Syria despite the troops’ withdrawal from the north of the country. The formal justification of the move is the need to “deny ISIS access” to the oil fields. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that the US military is already “taking some actions” to strengthen and reinforce their position in Deir Ezzor. This, Esper said, will include “some mechanized forces”.

US military convoys already started entering Syria from Iraq and moving towards the US-controlled oil fields on the eastern bank of the Euphrates. The Pentagon provided few details regarding numbers of troops and equipment that will remain in the area. Media reports speculate that around 500 personnel reinforced with dozens of pieces of military equipment  will be stationed there. For example, Newsweek reported that the US is seeking to deploy a half of an US Army armored brigade combat team battalion that includes as many as 30 Abrams battle tanks to the oil fields. The US is also going to keep its military garrison in the al-Tanf area, on the Damascus Baghdad highway, where about 150-200 troops remain.

The version of the troops’ withdrawal from Syria that the media is trying to sell its audience says that the US is leaving the country. In reality, the US actions look more like re-deployment than withdrawal.

Firstly, the withdrawal of “a majority of 1,000 troops” is hardly possible if, at the same time, 650-700 troops are to remain in the Deir Ezzor oil fields and al-Tanf.

Secondly, the Trump administration, including the Defense Secretary, said that it was moving troops out of northern Syria, but not that they would be leaving the country. Trump himself described the withdrawal from Syria as a “process”.

Watch the video here.

Thirdly, the US military convoys which left northern Syria during the active phase of Turkey’s Operation Peace Spring for western Iraq are now returning. Dozens of US military vehicles accompanied by fuel tankers entered Syria on October 26 and 27 alone. US forces also remained deployed at the Qasrak base on the Tell Tamr-Qamishli highway.

Therefore, in the best case the US contingent is being reduced, while the rest of the forces just change their deployment area. The stance of Iraq, which at the highest level rejected the long-term presence of the US troops withdrawing from Syria to western Iraq, also played its own role. Some experts initially suggested that Washington could keep forces on the Iraqi side of the border to project military power to Syria while keeping the troop withdrawal promise at the same time. However, this plan caused too much resistance from the Iraqi government, which is already in much closer relations with Iran than the US has ever wanted.

Another factor is money. The control of a part of Syrian oil does not impact the US economy in general. However, it does open particular prospects for the US campaign in the region and gives the Trump administration additional leverages of pressure on Syria and its allies.

Before 2011, Syria had a lucrative oil industry, pumping about 400,000 barrels a day and having 2.5 billion barrels of reserves. The ensuing war and wide-scale Western sanctions devastated the country’s economy, cutting production by around 90% and forcing the Assad government to rely heavily on foreign imports of oil, mainly from Iran.

The known oil reserves are mainly in the eastern part of the country near its border with Iraq and along the Euphrates River. The largest and most mature fields are the Omar and Jbessa fields, which reportedly had production capacities of 100,000 and 200,000 barrels a day, respectively, in 2010. This is the area where the US is planning to keep its military presence. It is estimated that around 75% of Syrian oil reserves are under the direct or indirect control of the US. A number of smaller fields are located in the center of the country, which is controlled by the Syrian Army, and in the country’s northeast, which is now under the joint control of the Syrian Army and the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

When the SDF and the US-led coalition seized the fields, the revenue from smuggling of Syrian oil was estimated at around $10 million a month with the price of around $30 per barrel. However, thanks to assistance from companies affiliated with US intelligence agencies and private military companies the oil output and thus revenue grew significantly.

According to an October 26 report by the Russian Defense Ministry, the US military and private military contractors are now actively involved in protecting and managing oil smuggling in eastern Syria. The oil production itself is carried out using equipment provided by Western corporations bypassing all US sanctions. The oil exportation is implemented by the US-controlled company «Sedkab», created under the so-called Autonomous Administration of Eastern Syria, a political body created by the SDF, when US troops were deployed in northern Syria. The income from the smuggling goes through brokerage companies interacting with various accounts of US private military companies and US intelligence agencies. The Russian side says that the barrel cost of smuggled Syrian oil is $38 and estimates a monthly revenue for the US “business” involved in the operation of over $30 million.

The business interests of US agencies and entities involved in the operation offer more reasons for the US presence in the area. It can be expected that if the situation in this part of Syria remains unchanged, the Trump administration will indeed go forward with its withdrawal “process” and more and more US troops will be replaced by US-linked private military contractors. Meanwhile US agencies and private military corporations will use revenue from the oil smuggling for further operations across the Middle East.

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“Neoliberalism was born in Chile and will die in Chile.”

– rallying cry from Chilean protest movement. (October, 2019) [1]

During the first two weeks of October, Ecuadorians took to the streets by the thousands, with Indigenous communities reportedly blocking major roads and protesters occupying oil fields and government offices as well as reportedly looting businesses. This all in response to IMF-brokered austerity measures announced by Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno at the beginning of the month. In spite of the president’s initially defiant stance and violent State reprisals, the government eventually backed away from its package of reforms and has resolved to working within a UN-mediated joint commission alongside Indigenous representatives to create a new economic development package. [2][3][4]

Just as the Ecuadoran protests were winding down, Chile started to flare up with anger over a 30 peso increase in Santiago subway fares escalating into generalized protests against 3 decades of neoliberal policies instigated under fascist dictator Augusto Pinochet and built on by his successors. By October 25th, more than one million Chileans took to the streets in opposition to President  Sebastian Piñera’s economic medicine and the brutal measures he was taking against demonstrators. According to an October 31st statement from the Chilean prosecutor’s office, 23 people died in the week following the October 19th declared state of emergency. Amnesty International has raised concerns about human rights abuses carried out under the military crackdowns. By October 30th, the president announced the cancellation of two major international summits in November and December which were to have been hosted by the South American country – a necessary measure given the instability in the country. [5]

As pointed out by Bloomberg, Chile has been experiencing during the month of October “the worst civil unrest since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1990, and hundreds have been detained.”

Elections held in Uruguay, Argentina and Bolivia all revealed the advancement or maintenance of left-leaning leaders critical of IMF-backed austerity measures. Argentina’s President-elect Alberto Fernández, in particular just publicly thanked Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro for congratulating him on his election victory, while proposing Latin Americans “work together to overcome the poverty and inequality it suffers. “ It would seem Argentina’s days as a member of the Lima Group of countries calling on the ouster of Maduro are likely numbered.

Western capitals are convincing themselves that the Venezuelan, Cuban and possibly Kremlin agents are playing a role in fostering these popular revolts, since, apparently, the neoliberal policies pushing the bulk of the population into increassed hardship and destitution presumably has nothing to do with it. [6]

If we can, however take these developments at face value as a wide-spread resistance to the a status quo putting the interests of the ruling classes ahead of those of the general population, then it stands to reason that true democracy on the South American continent is expressing itself and putting predatory capitalist interests on the defensive.

On a week following a month of protest and resistance, the Global Research News Hour attempts to analyze some of the currents shaking up the continent with three former guests.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky was a visiting Professor of Economics in the 1970s and lived through the coups both in Chile and in Argentina. In our first half hour he shares his personal perspective and places the events of this past October in a historical context, including the the development of neoliberalism since the days of Pinochet in Chile.

Following this discussion, Pepe Escobar addresses some of the geopolitical dimensions of these uprisings, including the recent cancellation of two international conferences which had formerly been planned for Chile, and the prospect of Argentina under Fernandez functioning as a ‘game-changer’ for other Latin American countries.

Finally, John Schertow, of Intercontinental Cry focuses on the role specifically of Indigenous peoples, both in Ecuador and beyond, in confronting the exploitative neoliberal policies that are putting lives and communities at risk.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Ottawa and the award-winning author of 11 books including his most recent The Globalization of War: America’s Long War Against Humanity. He is also the founder and director of the Centre for Research on Globalization and editor of Global Research.

Pepe Escobar is a veteran Brazilian Journalist, geopolitical analyst and Correspondent at large for Asia Times based out of Hong Kong. He has written for Tom Dispatch, Sputnik News, and Press TV, and RT.  He is frequent contributor to Global Research

John Ahniwanika Schertow is an award-winning journalist and multimedia artist of Mohawk and European descent. He is the founder and lead editor of Intercontinental Cry, an on-line media source of news of world-wide Indigenous struggle and resistance. As a poet and freelance journalist, John’s work has been featured in the Guardian, Toward Freedom, the Dominion, Madre, Swerve Magazine and many other publications. To support his work, including an upcoming ‘Indigenous Report’ podcast and television broadcast, please leave a donation at the site https://donorbox.org/ic-magazine.

(Global Research News Hour episode 275)

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Notes:

1. mintpressnews.com/chile-protests-revolt-against-neoliberalism-media-refuses-acknowledge/262565/

2. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/10/ecuador-unrest-led-mass-protests-191010193825529.html
3. https://sputniknews.com/latam/201910151077050428-ecuadors-president-calls-back-controversial-decree-says-people-will-get-needed-subsidies/
4. https://intercontinentalcry.org/victory-ecuadors-president-repeals-austerity-decree-and-ends-violence/
5. https://www.mintpressnews.com/chile-protests-revolt-against-neoliberalism-media-refuses-acknowledge/262565/
6. https://www.mintpressnews.com/chile-protests-revolt-against-neoliberalism-media-refuses-acknowledge/262565/

Western politicians are perception managers, puppets, deep state stooges. They bow to diktats from largely unelected polities. They are hollow, straw figures who sell out their countries and those whom they proclaim to represent with a whim. They have failed to “Stand on guard for thee”. They project “progressive perceptions” as they support Al Qaeda/ISIS and the conduct of war crimes under a fake humanitarian mandate. 

So, it is refreshing when a political figure tells the truth and takes a bold stand against the international cancer that is destroying international law, nation-state sovereignty, and humanity itself, with its war lies and its international terrorism.

President Assad of Syria tells the truth, for all who care to listen. In an interview with al-Sourya and al-Ikhbarya TV he discusses a number of important issues.

In reference to the Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Hollywood-inspired narrative, he succinctly notes:

“This is part of the tricks played by the Americans.  That is why we should not believe everything they say unless they come up with evidence.  American politicians are actually guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around.”

Very true. He might have added that the evidence must be from non-partisan sources, and certainly not from Western terrorist-embedded sources.

When questioned about the Russian-Turkish agreement, Assad immediately iterated another important, but neglected truth.

“Russian principles,” he notes, “have been clear throughout this war and even before the Russian base that started supporting the Syrian army in 2015.  These principles are based on international law, Syrian sovereignty and Syria’s territorial integrity.”

Russian principles present a stark contrast to the unprincipled Western rogue coalition (Washington-led NATO and allies) that daily commits Supreme International war crimes in its Regime Change war against Syria and its peoples.

Whereas most Westerners refuse the truth and thus share responsibility for the crimes committed by those who falsely claim to represent them, Assad shines light on foundational truths. He understands the root of the cancer destroying the world, and he understands the imperative for a correct “diagnosis”. In the following statements he shatters the lies of “Fake Progressives”, of “humanitarian interventions”, of those who pretend to be “liberal” whilst at the same time supporting al Qaeda and ISIS:

“As for Trump, you might ask me a question and I give you an answer that might sound strange.  I say that he is the best American President, not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president.  All American presidents perpetrate all kinds of political atrocities and all crimes and yet still win the Nobel Prize and project themselves as defenders of human rights and noble and unique American values, or Western values in general.  The reality is that they are a group of criminals who represent the interests of American lobbies, i.e. the large oil and arms companies, and others.  Trump talks transparently, saying that what we want is oil. This is the reality of American policy, at least since WWII.  We want to get rid of such and such a person or we want to offer a service in return for money.  This is the reality of American policy. What more do we need than a transparent opponent?  That is why the difference is in form only, while the reality is the same.”

When asked about the Kurds, Assad again shattered orientalist, divisive notions, with these observations:

“As for the Kurds themselves, most of them had good relations with the Syrian state, and they were always in contact with us and proposed genuine patriotic ideas. In some of the areas we entered, the reaction of the Kurds was no less positive, or less joyful and happy than the reaction of other people there.”

He understands the imperial machinations behind balkanization projects and refuses to demonize all “Kurds”, especially since most would likely prefer to remain in a sovereign, pluralist, democratic Syrian state.

Finally, with reference to the Constitution, Assad underscores the importance of international law and UN Resolution 2254 which reinforces foundational rights of sovereignty and self-determination: UN Resolution 2254 reaffirms

“its strong commitment to the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic, and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations …. ”

Indeed, the failure of the UN and its agencies to implement and enforce its own stated principles has been self-evident throughout the course of this hideous, holocaust-generating imperial war against Syria, and against civilization itself.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net where this article was originally published.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

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There is a certain irony in President Donald Trump’s frequently expressed desire to withdraw from the endless wars that have characterized the so-called “global war on terror” initiated by George W. Bush in 2001. The problem is that Trump has expressed such sentiments both when he was running for office and also as recently as last week without actually doing anything to bring about change. In fact, the greatly ballyhooed “withdrawal” from Syria turned out to be more like a relocation of existing military assets, with soldiers moving from Syria’s northern border to take up new positions to continue control of the Iraqi oil fields in the country’s southeast. Indeed, the number of American soldiers in Syria may have actually been increased with armor units being transferred from their base in Iraq.

The all too characteristic Trumpean flip-flop on Syria may have been due to pressure from Congress and the media, who were bleating over how the departure of U.S. troops was a grave mistake, but if that is true it is a tribute to the abysmal ignorance of America’s Solons on the Potomac and the presstitutes who echo their bipartisan myopia. In truth, clinging to the Syrian oil wells makes no sense just as the war in the north served no purpose. The petroleum production is not enough to pay for the occupation, even if the oil is successfully stolen and sold, by no means a certainty as the rest of the world minus Israel regards it as the property of Damascus.

And to be sure, congress-critters know all about winners and losers. The mainstream media has been full of utter nonsense, including claims that Russia, Iran and Syria were all winners due to the American pull-out while neoliberal democracy promotion in the Middle East has suffered a defeat and Israel is now under threat. And, of course, the United States has to its shame betrayed yet another ally in the Kurds while also losing all credibility worldwide.

No one has, of course, examined any of the claims being made by the interventionist crowd. How Russia has won in taking on a client state that it cannot afford, or Iran in maintaining an extraterritorial presence that is regularly bombed by Israel, is by no means clear. President al-Assad meanwhile has the not so enviable task of putting his country back together. Meanwhile the Kurds will manage by cutting their own deal with Syria and Turkey with Russia serving as guarantor of the arrangement.

The real reasons for maintaining a U.S. military presence in Syria all have to do with Israel, which has long supported a fracturing of that country into its constituent parts both to weaken it as an adversary and to enable the Jewish state to steal still more of its land, possibly to include the sparsely populated oil producing region. Israel also wants a robust American military presence in Syria to prevent Iran from turning it into a base for attacks across the border, an unlikely prospect but one that has resonated with the U.S. Congress. Indeed, deterring Iran is the reason most often cited by both Washington and Tel Aviv for American interference in Syria, where it has no other actual interest apart from an apparent demented desire to remove President Bashar al-Assad.

In fact, all of the turmoil about what Trump might or might not do, plus the killing of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, has enabled the White House to move quietly ahead with its major foreign policy objective, which is, not surprisingly, destroying Iran. On October 28^th, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin was in Israel – of course – where he announced at a press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the United States would increase economic pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, saying that  “We have executed on a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions. They have worked, they are working, they are cutting off the money. We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more …” Turning to Netanyahu he added “I just came from a very productive working lunch with your team. They gave us a bunch of very specific ideas that we will be following up.” Netanyahu responded “So I want to thank you for what you’ve been doing and encourage you, Steve, to do more – more, a lot more.”

Mnuchin the Poodle, who did not seem to know that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, was referring to the latest round of sanctions, announced in Washington three days before, that are clearly intended to make it impossible for Iran to use the international banking system to engage in any commerce at all. To achieve that objective, the Trump administration sought to exclude Iran from the global financial system by declaring that the country is a “jurisdiction of primary money laundering concern.”

The new designation, which comes on top of the Office of Foreign Assets Control’s (OFAC) similar designation for the Iranian Central Bank, requires U.S. banks to conduct “special due diligence” on accounts maintained by foreign banks if those foreign banks themselves hold accounts for Iranian financial institutions. The chain of secondary sanctions means that, in practical terms, U.S. banks will press their foreign correspondents to close any accounts maintained on behalf of Iranian banks so as to eliminate sanctions risk. This will further sever Iran from the global financial system, as Iran’s few remaining non-designated banks will find it increasingly difficult to maintain accounts abroad.

Treasury’s designation of Iran as a primary jurisdiction of money laundering will make it impossible for the few Iranian banks that deal internationally to maintain what limited overseas accounts continue to be available to them. The blocking of those accounts, either held directly by the Iranians or through other banks, will mean that Iranian importers will be unable to pay for medicine or food coming into the country, the so-called humanitarian goods that are normally exempted from sanctions. The new OFAC regulation does provide a framework for banks to continue hold Iranian accounts by filing detailed monthly reports, but the paperwork and other procedures are deliberately onerous and it is likely that few international banks will be interested in making the effort to comply.

That there is a coordinated scheme being pursued to continuously increase the punishment of the Iranian people was also suggested last Wednesday when the Trump administration joined six Persian Gulf nations in sanctioning over two dozen corporations, banks and entities that, it was claimed, are connected to Iranian support of Hezbollah and other groups the Department of State designates as terrorists. In a statement, the Treasury Department announced the sanctions mark the “largest joint designation to date” by the Terrorist Financing Targeting Center (TFTC) — which includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S. According to the Treasury Department, several of the companies sanctioned were financially supporting a subsidiary of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the U.S. designated as a terrorist organization earlier this year.

Treasury Secretary Mnuchin, on his tour of the Middle East, remarked that “This action demonstrates the unified position of the Gulf nations and the United States that Iran will not be allowed to escalate its malign activity in the region.”

Make no mistake, the United States is conducting an economic war against Iran that is undeniably aimed at making the Iranian people so miserable that they will rise up in revolt. And the punishment being meted out will hurt the poorest and weakest most of all while also hardening support for the regime rather than weakening it. Not only is the White House action directed against Iran immoral, it is also illegal as Iran and the United States are not at war and Iran does not threaten Americans in any way. The whole affair is just one more example of how powerful domestic constituencies, in this case that of Israel, have distorted U.S. foreign policy and driven it in directions that are both shameful and that serve no plausible national interest.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

Featured image: Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin in meeting with PM Netanyahu, on October 28, 2019. Credit: U.S. Embassy Jerusalem/ flickr

The west has colonized, exploited, ravaged and assassinated the people of the Global South for hundreds of years.

Up to the mid-20^th century Europe has occupied Africa, and large parts of Asia.

In Latin America, though much of the sub-Continent was “freed” from Spain and Portugal in the 19^th century – a new kind of colonization followed by the new Empire of the United States – under the so-called Monroe Doctrine, named after President James Monroe (1817 -1825), forbidding Europeans to interfere in any “American territory”. Latin America was then and is again today considered Washington’s Backyard.

In the last ten years or so, Washington has launched the Monreo Doctrine 2.0. This time expanding the interference policy beyond Europe – to the world. Democratic sovereign governments in Latin America that could choose freely their political and economic alliances in the world are not tolerated. China, entering into partnership agreements with Latin American countries, sought after vividly by the latter – is condemned by the US and the west, especially vassalic Europe.

Therefore, democratically elected center-left governments had to be “regime-changed’ – Honduras, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, Paraguay. So far, they stumbled over Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua – and maybe Mexico.

Venezuela and Cuba are being economically strangled to exhaustion. But they are standing tall as pillars in defending the Latin American Continent – with economic assistance and military advice from China and Russia.

Latin America is waking up – and so is Africa.

In Latin America, street protests against the US / IMF imposed debt trap and de consequential austerity programs, making the rich richer and the poor poorer, are raging in Honduras, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina and even in Brazil. In Argentina, in a democratic election this past weekend, 27 October, the people deposed neoliberal President Macri. He was put in the Presidency via “tricked” elections by Washington in 2015. Macri ruined the prosperous country in his 4 year-reign. He privatized public services and infrastructure, education, health, transportation – and more, leading to hefty tariff increases, worker layoffs, unemployment and poverty. Poverty, at about 15% in 2015, when Macri took office, soared to over 40% in October 2019.

In 2018 Macri contracted the largest ever IMF loan of US$ 57.2 billion – a debt trap, if there was ever one. The new, just elected Fernandez-Fernandez center-left Government will have to devise programs to counter the impact of this massive debt.

All over in Latin America, people have had enough of the US / western imposed austerity and simultaneous exploitation of their natural resources. They want change – big style. They seek to detach from the economic and financial stranglehold of the west. They are looking for China and Russia as new partners in trade and in financial contracts.

The same in Africa– neocolonialism by the west, mostly France and the UK, through financial oppression, unfair trading deals and wester imposed – and militarily protected – despotic and corrupt leaders, has kept Africa poor and desolate after more than 50 years of so-called Independence. Africa is arguably still the Continent with the most natural resources the west covets and needs to preserve its luxury life style and continuous armament.

People, who do not conform, especially younger politicians and economists, who protest and speak out, because they see clearly through the western imposed economic crimes committed on a daily basis, are simply assassinated or otherwise silenced.

Africans are quietly seeking to move out of the claws of the west, seeking new relations with China and Russia. The recent Russian-African summit in Sochi was a vivid example.

China is invited to build infrastructure, fast trains, roads, ports and industrial parks – and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is more than welcomed in Africa, as it projects common and equal development for all to benefit. BRI is the epitome for building a Community with a Shared Future for Mankind. China also offers a gradual release from the US / western dominated dollar-debt claws. Freeing a country from the dollar-based economy, is freeing it from the vulnerability of US / western imposed sanctions. This is an enormous relief that literally every country of the Global South – and possibly even Europe – is hoping for.

However, as could be expected, the west, led by the US of A, is pouncing China for engaging in “debt trap diplomacy” (see this). Exactly the contrary of what is actually happening.

The truth is, though, countries throughout the world, be it in Africa, Asia, South Pacific and Latin America, are choosing to partner with China by their free will. According to a statement by a high-level African politician “China does not force or coerce us into a deal, we are free to choose and negotiate a win-win situation.” – That says it all.

The difference between the west and east is stark. While anybody and any country that does not agree with the US dictate and doctrine, risks being regime-changed or bombed, China does not impose her new Silk Road – the BRI – to any country. China invites, respecting national sovereignty. Who wants to join is welcome to do so. That applies as much to the Global South, as it does to Europe.

China’s President Xi Jinping launched the BRI in 2013. In 2014 Mr. Xi visited Madame Merkel in Germany, offering her to be at that time the western-most link to the BRI. Ms. Merkel under the spell of Washington, declined. President Xi returned and China continued working quietly on this fabulous worldwide economic development project – BRI – THE economic venture of the 21^st century, so massive that it was incorporated in 2017 into the Chinese Constitution.

It took the west however 6 years to acknowledge this new version of the more than 2000-year-old Silk Road. Only in 2019, the western mainstream media started reporting on the BRI – and always negatively, of course. The preaching was and still is – beware of the Chinese Dragon, they will dominate you and everything you own with their socialism.

This train of thought is typically western. Aggression seems to be in the genes of western societies, of western culture, as the hundreds of years of violent and despotic colonization and exploitation – and ongoing – are proving. Does it have to do with western monotheistic doctrines? – This is pure speculation, of course.

Again, the truth is multi-fold. – First, China does not have a history of invasion. China seeks a peaceful and egalitarian development of trade, science and foremost human wellbeing – a Tao tradition of non-aggression. Second, despite the “warnings” from the throne of the falling empire, about a hundred countries have already subscribed to participate in BRI – and that voluntarily. And third, China and Russia and along with them the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are in a solid economic and defense alliance which encompasses close to half of the world population and represents about one third of the globes total economic output.

Hence, SCO members are – or may be, if they so choose – largely detached from the dollar hegemony. The western privately run and Wall Street controlled monetary transfer system, SWIFT, is no longer needed by SCO countries. They deal in local currencies and / or through the Chinese Interbank Payment System (CIPS).

It is no secret, that the empire, headquartered in Washington, is gradually decaying, economically as well as militarily. It’s just a matter of time. How much time, is difficult to guess. But Washington’s everyday behavior of dishing out sanctions left and right, disrupting international monetary transactions, confiscating and stealing other countries assets around the world, puts ever more nails in the Empire’s coffin. By doing this, America is herself committing economic and monetary suicide. Who wants to belong to a monetary system that can act willy-nilly to a county’s detriment? There is no need for outside help for this US-sponsored pyramid fiat monetary system to fall. It’s a house of cards that is already crumbling by its own weight.

The US dollar was some 20-25 years ago still to the tune of 90% the domineering reserve currency in the world. Today that proportion has declined to less than 60% – and falling. It is being replaced primarily by the Chinese yuan as the new reserve currency.

This is what the US-initiated trade war is all about – discrediting the yuan, a solid currency, based on China’s economy – and on gold. “Sanctioning” the Chinese economy with US tariffs, is supposed to hurt the yuan, to reduce its competition with the dollar as a world reserve currency. To no avail. The yuan is a worldwide recognized solid currency, the currency of the world’s second largest economy. By some standards, like accounted by PPP (Purchasing Power Parity), the most important socioeconomic indicator for mankind, China is since 2017 the world’s number one economy.

This, and other constant attacks by Washington, is a typical desperate gesture of a dying beast – thrashing wildly left and right and above and below around itself to bring down into its grave as many perceived adversaries as possible. There is of course a clear danger that this fight for the empire’s survival might end nuclear – god forbid!

China’s and Russia’s policy, philosophy and diplomacy of non-aggression may save the world from extinction – including the people of the United States of America.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

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

He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization. 

According to the MAGA nationalists, the “deep state” only persecutes “conservatives” while liberals get a free pass. 

The Gestapo-style raid of liberal journalist Max Blumenthal earlier this week demonstrates quite vividly that the state does indeed attack leftist or left-leaning activists and journalists, not only MAGA supporters and “New Right” nationalists.

. 

I was arrested on Friday on a COMPLETELY FALSE charge manufactured by the Venezuelan opposition related to their siege of the embassy in DC. I spent 2 days in jail, was shackled for extended periods & was denied my right to call a lawyer. Here's the facts: https://t.co/2Nco0OzQ7P

— Max Blumenthal (@MaxBlumenthal) October 28, 2019

MAGA has deluded itself into the false belief the deep state is primarily comprised of Democrats on the warpath against “conservative” Republicans and New Right types. In fact, the state is apolitical in regard to national partisan politics. It favors Democrats and Republicans only if they tote the neoliberal and corporate line. If they deviate, they may suffer the fate recently experienced y Max Blumenthal. For now, this fate is reserved for those with high visibility such as Blumenthal. 

For really serious violations of the neoliberal code and the establishment’s prearranged political construct, the state prefers torture and slow death. It is currently doing this to Julian Assange. For the national security state, it is a cardinal sin and high crime to expose the dirty and murderous secrets of the state. 

Assange will not be killed outright like the journalists Michael Hastings and Gary Webb. Both Hastings and Webb exposed the crimes of the national security state and paid for it with their lives. Assange, on the other hand, will be slowly and sadistically tortured to death, thus revealing how the state responds when “national security secrets” are exposed and disseminated to millions of people. 

"This is the continued descent into a fascist state. When the US government is arresting journalists then what else can one call it?" – @LeeCamp doesn't f–k around when discussing @MaxBlumenthal's dramatic detention. Full story I wrote in @MintPressNews https://t.co/R3l1VVtDHm

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) November 1, 2019

As should be expected, zero corporate media propaganda conduits have thus far reported on the Blumenthal raid, which is supposedly connected to his behavior at the Venezuelan embassy in Washington. 

Assuming there will be an outcry from @nytimes @washingtonpost @pressfreedom about this assault on the free press. https://t.co/3PWFsws8Nd

— Andrew Cockburn (@andrewmcockburn) October 29, 2019

At least one establishment connected organization that claims to protect journalists from government persecution has refused to defend Blumenthal. 

We are aware of Blumenthal's arrest and based on the information available it does not meet the threshold for categorization on our site because he was not in the course of reporting when it happened.

— U.S. Press Freedom Tracker (@uspresstracker) October 31, 2019

This is, of course, a technicality. Blumenthal is a journalist. He was reporting on the effort by Juan Guaido’s thugs to starve out and intimidate activists defending the Venezuelan embassy—with the permission of the elected Venezuelan government—although at the time of the purported incident he wasn’t writing or reporting. 

This should be expected. The US Freedom Tracker has partnered with Poynter, an organization working to circumvent alternative media. It is funded by George Soros’ Open Society and the Omidyar Network. Together both organizations pledged nearly a million and a half dollars to fund a supposed fact-checking network, that is to say identify and eradicate media that strays from permissible parameters established by the state.  

“Poynter has a longstanding history as an anchor in the journalism business. Its board of trustees includes execs from The New York Times, ESPN, Harvard, Vox, CBS, ABC, and The Washington Post. Poynter is currently working with Facebook and Google for its fact-checking programs,” writes Corinne Weaver.   

MAGA types and conservatives believe the jihad against media freedom by the corporate state is aimed exclusively at them and the perpetrators are largely Democrats and a handful of RINOS. This mindset is an unfortunate result of an ongoing operation to polarize and divide those holding differing political ideologies, a tactic that goes back to Julius Caesar, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Immanuel Kant. 

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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

This article was first published on March 13, 2019

In all the press coverage of the “the SNC-Lavalin affair,” not enough attention has been paid to the company’s involvement in Site C – the contentious $11 billion dam being constructed in B.C.’s Peace River valley.

The Liberals say that any pressure they put on Jody Wilson-Raybould to rubber-stamp a “deferred prosecution agreement” for SNC-Lavalin was to protect jobs at the company. But the pressure may have been to protect something much bigger: the Liberals’ vision for Canada’s future. Site C epitomises that vision.

The “Many Lives” of Site C

Birthed in 1959 on the drawing boards of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and BC Electric (then owned by Montreal-based Power Corp), the Site C dam has been declared dead, then alive, then dead again several times over the next five decades until 2010, when BC Premier Gordon Campbell announced that Site C would proceed. [1]

Tracking SNC-Lavalin’s involvement in Site C during recent years has been difficult, but Charlie Smith, editor of The Georgia Straight, has filled in some of the missing information.

Site C dam (Source: CC BY-SA 3.0)

Sometime in 2007, the Site C dam project was quietly moved to Stage 2 of a five-stage process. Smith wrote,

“SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger were prime consultants for Stage 2 of the Site C project. This had to occur before the project could proceed to Stage 3 in the five-stage planning process. The decision to advance to Stage 3 was based on a prediction in the Stage 2 report that demand for B.C. electricity will increase 20 to 40 percent over the next 20 years. ‘As extensive as BC Hydro’s hydroelectric assets are, they will not be enough to provide future British Columbians with electricity self-sufficiency if demand continues to grow as projected,’ the Stage 2 report [Fall, 2009] declared. Bingo. This gave the pro-Site C politicians in the B.C. Liberal party … all the justification they needed.” [2]

On April 19, 2010 Premier Campbell announced that Site C would proceed. At the time, Chief Roland Willson of the West Moberly First Nation called the entire five-stage process a “’farce,’ and said the government hadn’t finished the second stage of the development process, so he doesn’t know how it can go ahead to the third. Willson said First Nations in the area haven’t seen studies on land use, wildlife, the fishery or the cultural significance of the region, and the process can’t move on to environmental assessments [Stage 3] without that work.” [3]

Nevertheless, the process did move on, and SNC-Lavalin may have been involved in the next stage of the planning process, as well. The Dogwood Institute recently reported that SNC Lavalin was “an environmental consultant for Site C.” [4]

In 2011, SNC-Lavalin Chair Gwyn Morgan (image on the right) became an advisor to BC Liberal leadership winner Christy Clark during her transition to the premiership. Morgan had joined the SNC-Lavalin board in 2005 and was chair of the company from 2007 until 2013.  As The Tyee reported in 2014,

“Morgan retired in May 2013, the month after SNC-Lavalin agreed to a 10-year corruption-related ban from the World Bank related to a power project in Cambodia and a bridge in Bangladesh. Among the SNC-Lavalin companies on the World Bank [corruption] blacklist are divisions involved in publicly funded B.C. projects like the Bill Bennett Bridge, Canada Line and Evergreen Line.” [5]

Going Forward

At the time of Gwyn Morgan’s 2013 retirement from the SNC-Lavalin Chairmanship, the company was being investigated in at least ten countries, including: Bangladesh, Cambodia, Ghana, India, Kazakhstan, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia. [6]

While we have no way of knowing whether Gwyn Morgan, as an advisor to Christy Clark as of 2011, in any way lobbied on behalf of SNC-Lavalin, we do know that “Morgan’s personal, family and corporate donations to the BC Liberals totalled more than $1.5 million.” [7]

At the same time, in 2011 SNC-Lavalin had won the engineering, procurement and construction management (EPCM) contract for the Muskrat Falls hydro project in Newfoundland. But the company was apparently so “distracted” by corruption charges internationally that eventually crown utility Nalcor had to take over the project, which went way over budget and is now the subject of an inquiry. [8]

That didn’t dissuade the B.C. Premier from going forward. On December 16, 2014, the Christy Clark provincial government gave approval for Site C, despite recommendations by the Joint Review Panel (JRP), which had concluded two months previous that Site C’s hydropower was not needed in the time-frame that BC Hydro was arguing. (Recall that the Stage 2 report had claimed a 20-40% increase in demand over the next 20 years.) JRP member Harry Swain had concluded that demand for electricity in B.C. has been flat dating back to 2005.

While the newly elected B.C. NDP government in 2017 debated the cancellation or suspension of Site C, the Financial Post reported that Montreal’s SNC-Lavalin is “part of the lead design team for the [Site C] project.” [9] That little-known contract may have been signed much earlier.

On February 21, 2018 the Journal of Commerce reported on the progress being made by Site C’s lead design team, comprised of SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger and involving “approximately 40-plus engineers, nine modellers and 15 drafters”. [10] SNC-Lavalin Building Information Modeling (BIM) Manager Rodrigo Freig told the Journal that,

“In three years and 43 models later, we only had two model crashes, related to slow server speeds.” [11]

That comment would suggest that the lead design contract had quietly been issued to SNC-Lavalin and Klohn Crippen Berger sometime in 2015.

A few days ago (March 7), the Canadian Press reported:

“SNC-Lavalin is working on the five biggest infrastructure projects in Canada, according to trade magazine ReNew Canada. Those contracts alone amount of $52.8 billion, and include projects for Bruce Power and the Darlington nuclear plant in Ontario as well as the Site C dam in B.C.” [12]

While the exact amount of the Site C lead design contract is not known, it is likely at least $1 billion in B.C. taxpayer dollars. If the lead design contract was indeed issued in 2015, this would fit with Christy Clark’s effort to push the project past “the point of no return.”    

Help From Trudeau

In February 2015, under the Harper government, federal fraud and corruption charges were filed against three of SNC-Lavalin’s legal entities over its dealings in Libya. But after the Trudeau Liberals were elected in Fall 2015, the company “signed a deal with Ottawa that will allow the engineering and construction company to continue bidding on federal contracts until criminal charges it faces are resolved.” [13]

As we know now, SNC-Lavalin also began lobbying extensively for a Deferred Prosecution Agreement (DPA) that would effectively free the company of charges without forcing it to admit wrongdoing. In exchange, the company would pay a fine and prove that it has changed its practices to prevent a repeat of any wrongdoing. The Trudeau government quietly inserted changes to the criminal code allowing for DPAs in its 2018 Budget. According to recent report by the Buffalo Chronicle (March 11), SNC-Lavalin’s in-house attorney Frank Iacobucci “was instrumental in persuading” Trudeau to insert that new legal provision into the budget bill. [14]

The Buffalo Chronicle also notes that in October 2018, Trudeau asked Iacobucci to lead the government’s negotiations with indigenous communities in B.C. regarding the TransMountain Pipeline expansion project – a project that SNC-Lavalin hopes to construct.  Quoting an unnamed source, the Chronicle states:

“Iacobucci, who was already angry that [Jody] Wilson-Raybould was refusing to allow his client [SNC-Lavalin] to negotiate a deferred prosecution agreement, feared that his consultations in British Columbia could be construed as improper. He would only agree to take the role on the condition that Trudeau replaced her with a ‘more doting’ Member of Parliament.” [15]

The full story of Iacobucci’s role in the SNC-Lavalin scandal has yet to emerge, but it’s clear that the Trudeau government has been exceedingly accommodating to the company’s wishes.

The Georgia Straight’s Charlie Smith has further spelled out the Trudeau government’s help:

“Keep in mind that Trudeau helped SNC-Lavalin with its World Bank problem by endorsing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. This entity was created by China as a rival to the U.S.-led World Bank on infrastructure financing. SNC-Lavalin might be debarred from World Bank financings, but it can bid on AIIB-backed projects. Trudeau also helped SNC-Lavalin and other companies involved in huge public projects by creating the Canada Infrastructure Bank. And the Trudeau government accelerated construction of the Site C dam by awarding federal permits over the opposition of First Nations in the area.” [16]

Bulk Water Export

In two slightly different chapters within two recent books, I have argued that the Site C dam on the Peace River is perfectly placed to facilitate bulk water export east of the Rockies and into the American Southwest. Readers can consult my Chapter 10, “Water Export: The Site C End-Game” in editor Wendy Holm’s Damming the Peace: The Hidden Costs of the Site C Dam (Lorimer 2018), and the chapter entitled “Site C and NAWAPA: Continental Water Sharing” in my latest book Bypassing Dystopia: Hope-filled Challenges to Corporate Rule (Watershed Sentinel Books 2018).

SNC-Lavalin’s involvement in Site C has been so well-hidden that the company name does not appear anywhere in Damming the Peace. But by the time I was writing the water-chapter for my own book, SNC-Lavalin’s connections to Site C were becoming clear enough for me to state that the company “is intricately involved in Site C”. Only now are we learning just how involved they are.

SNC-Lavalin has had its eye on continental water-sharing for at least three decades. Back in the 1980s the SNC Group (as it was called at the time) was part of a consortium called Grandco, which was promoting a continental water-sharing plan entitled the Grand Canal Project. Grandco’s other consortium members included the UMA Group of Calgary, Underwood McLellan Ltd. of Saskatoon, Rousseau, Sauve & Warren Inc. of Montreal, and Bechtel Canada Ltd. (son of U.S. Bechtel, the world’s largest engineering firm).

Grandco’s head lobbyist was Canadian financier Simon Reisman (uncle of current Bilderberg member Heather Reisman). After Simon Reisman publicly advocated for Canadian water export, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (himself an advocate for large-scale water exports) appointed him as Chief Negotiator for the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the predecessor to NAFTA, signed by Jean Chretien in 1994. Both the FTA and NAFTA essentially strip Canada’s sovereign right to protect our water resources and make Canada vulnerable to massive water export.

While Site C may provide energy and water for fracking in B.C. and potentially for tar sands mining in Alberta, in the long term the “end-game” of Site C, according to Wendy Holm, is water export because that freshwater water “will have a far higher value” than oil and gas. The vast 83-kilometres-long reservoir needed for the Site C dam will submerge 78 First Nations heritage sites (including burial grounds) and flood about 3,816 hectares (9,430 acres) of prime agricultural land in the Peace River Valley

A similar scenario is being played out in Quebec with Hydro-Quebec’s massive $5 billion Romaine Complex, which is damming the River Romaine and flooding 100 square miles of land; in Newfoundland where the Muskrat Falls mega-dam project “boondoggle” is now the subject of a public inquiry; in Manitoba where several mega-dam projects are poised to flood First Nations land.

Now, thanks to the Trudeau government’s Mid-Century Long-term Strategy, that same scenario is poised to repeat itself many times in the coming years.

Long-Term Strategy

In 2017, the Trudeau government released its Mid-Century Long-Term Strategy (MCS) intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gas (GHG) at rates to comply with its Paris Climate commitments.

Scientist David Schindler has summarized the MCS:

“In brief, Canada has agreed to reduce its GHG emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, using 2005 emissions as a baseline. This sounds wonderful, until one reads how this is to be done, as described in the report. All the scenarios used to achieve the miraculous carbon reduction goals rely on replacing fossil fuels by generating massive amounts of hydroelectric power, which is assumed to emit no GHG. … The required hydro development would require the equivalent of building over one hundred Site C dams in the next thirty-two years, an extraordinary plan…” [17]

Once all that water has been impounded behind the dams, it is subject to NAFTA treatment (including in the rewritten USMCA agreement) as a tradable “good” or commodity. Chrystia Freeland and the negotiators for the USMCA did not secure an explicit exemption for water under the goods, services, and investment provisions of the deal. According to Bill C-6 (which became law in 2001), as Minister of Foreign Affairs, Freeland has water-export licensing authority and can issue permits for water export.

As I explain in some detail in Damming the Peaceand Bypassing Dystopia, massive drought and over-use of freshwater in the Colorado River region and in the U.S. Southwest have prompted big investors like the Blackstone Group (with Brian Mulroney on its board) to look north for water-investment opportunities. The Blackstone Group has been involved in water issues for years, and in 2014 it announced a new portfolio company called Global Water Development Partners to “identify, develop, finance, construct, and operate large-scale independent water development projects.”

The Blackstone Group is just one of many investment firms eyeing Canada’s freshwater resources. The Bank of America Merrill Lynch – which designed the Canada Infrastructure Bank – has predicted a global water market worth $1 trillion by 2020.

Obviously, SNC-Lavalin wants to be in on all that MCS hydroelectric development and other projects to be financed by Trudeau’s Canada Infrastructure Bank in the coming years. But if they have to face prosecution, the company risks being barred from federal contracts for ten years.

The Trudeau government says it is attempting to protect SNC-Lavalin jobs. That may be true, but it is also likely that the Trudeau government is attempting to protect its long-term vision for Canada: a vision that jettisons “reconciliation” and the environment in favour of damming the country and then draining it.

Freshwater has been turned into a commodity and it will be worth far more than oil or gold in the near future. Follow the money. That’s what SNC-Lavalin is doing.

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Joyce Nelson is the author of seven books, including Beyond Banksters and its sequel Bypassing Dystopia. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca

Notes

[1] “The Site C Dam: a Timeline,” The Narwhal, December 12, 2017.

[2] Charlie Smith, “Does Andrew Weaver’s response to Site C justify his removal as head of the B.C. Greens?” The Georgia Straight, December 15, 2017.

[3] Quoted in “Site C dam project moving forward on Peace River,” The Canadian Press, April 19, 2010.

[4] Lisa Sammartino, “SNC-Lavalin tentacles reach deep into B.C.,” dogwoodbc.ca, February 25, 2019.

[5] Bob Mackin, “Ex-Head of Troubled SNC-Lavalin Named Chair of BC Crown Corp,” The Tyee, May 5, 2014.

[6] “Public Risks, Private Profits: Profiles of Canada’s Public-Private Partnership Industry,” Polaris Institute & CUPE, June 2013.

[7] Sammartino, op. cit.

[8] Andrew Nikiforuk, “Redeemable? SNC-Lavalin’s Criminal Record,” The Tyee, February 22, 2019.

[9] Jesse Snyder, “’It’s going to cost a fortune’: Cancellation of $8.8B Site C dam would scrap billions of dollars in contract work,” The Financial Post, June 2, 2017.

[10] Warren Frey, “UPDATED: Site C’s virtual construction a complicated endeavour,” Journal of Commerce, February 21, 2018.

[11] Quoted in ibid.

[12] Christopher Reynolds, The Canadian Press, “Here’s what a 10-year ban on federal contract bids would mean for SNC-Lavalin,” Toronto Star, March 7, 2019.

[13] Ross Marowits, “SNC-Lavalin Gets OK From Ottawa To Bid on Contracts, Despite Criminal Charges,” The Canadian Press, December 10, 2015.

[14] “’Political grandmaster’ Frank Iacobucci is at the center of SNC Lavalin, Kinder Morgan scandals,” The Buffalo Chronicle, March 11, 2019.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Smith, op. cit.

[17] David Schindler, “Will Canada’s Future Be Dammed? Site C Could Be the Tip of the Iceberg,” chapter in Wendy Holm, editor, Damming the Peace: The Hidden Costs of the Site C Dam, Toronto: James Lorimer & Co., 2018.

Featured image is from HuffPost Canada

India has lost a $7 billion WTO case against US.  Meanwhile China has won its case with the WTO now allowing the Chinese to impose a $3.6 billion sanction on American goods. The verdict comes days after India and US officially suspended defense cooperation in what is now giving rise to a full-fledged India-US Trade War. India, meanwhile, is engaged in negotiations with China and Southeast Asian nations over a new RCEP Agreement seen by observers as a threat to India’s Seed Sovereignty.

The U.S. won a case against India at the World Trade Organization alleging improper use of export subsidies valued at more than $7 billion, reported Bloomberg.

The WTO’s dispute-resolution panel agreed that “India gives prohibited subsidies to producers of steel products, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, information technology products, textiles, and apparel, to the detriment of American workers and manufacturers,” the U.S. Trade Representative in Washington said in a statement Thursday.

WTO rules prohibit export subsidies, but makes exceptions for developing countries until they reach certain economic benchmarks. India’s exemption expired, according to USTR, and the Geneva-based trade body rejected the country’s position that it was entitled to more time even after hitting the threshold.

The case was filed in March 2018 by the U.S., challenging what it said were illegal export subsidies provided to Indian firms. The decision, which can be appealed, comes amid a brewing India US Trade War.

According to leaked information of a high-level meeting, the United States and India’s failure to reach a long-expected trade deal on Sept. 24 has sparked fears of a full-fledged India US #TradeWar.https://t.co/CusYEQWAdB

— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) October 1, 2019

The Trump administration earlier this year canceled India’s preferential access to the U.S. market under a scheme for developing countries and since then the two sides have been engaged in stop-start negotiations to resolve their differences.

On Sept. 24, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and Indian Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal met on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, raising expectations that the two sides were poised to reveal a new trade deal following months of talks.

But according to information leaked from the meeting as reported by Stratfor, the negotiators failed to agree on Indian concessions on information and communication technology, dairy, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, e-commerce, and data localization — in short, every bone of contention that have stymied an agreement for months. Still, U.S. President Donald Trump told visiting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi the same day that they would be able to announce a trade deal soon.

Bilateral trade, which totaled $142.1 billion last year, remains the major friction point in the U.S.-India relationship. India exported $83.2 billion worth of goods and services to the United States and imported $58.9 billion, resulting in a $24.3 billion surplus. Trump, pointing to the imbalance, has singled Modi out in the past as the “tariff king,” demanding that New Delhi reduce its trade surplus with Washington and lower tariff barriers for American commerce in India.

After #TradeWar now #India suspends #Defense Cooperation after Americans refuse to give India high-end Jet Engine technology.

Is the Indo-US Strategic Partnership officially dead?https://t.co/AMmn0myshD

— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) October 25, 2019

The US imposed on India an additional tariff of 25% and 10% on import of steel and aluminum products in March last year. In April, a Congressional Research Service brief on US-India trade relations noted, “Bilateral tensions have increased over each side’s tariff policies.” Then, on May 31 – the day after the inauguration of NDA government to start its second term – the Trump administration announced that it was terminating India’s participation in the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) which allows eligible developing countries to import to the United States duty free. Last year, the GSP accounted for approximately $5 billion of the $83.2 billion in imports India sent to the US.

In response, the government of India imposed retaliatory tariffs on 28 products originating or exported from the US with effect from 16th June this year. India is expected to get an additional $217 million of revenue from the retaliatory tariffs. This tit-for-tat created substantial tension in the India-US relationship going into the G20 Summit.

Most recently, in a major development brewing for sometime now, India and US have officially suspended Defense Cooperation after Americans refused to give India high-end jet-engine technology. At the heart of the Indo-US Strategic Partnership is what is known as the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative or DTTI. Under the 2012 DTTI, India and the US set up joint working groups (JWGs) for cooperation on aircraft carriers and jet engine technology, all of the 4 pathfinder projects have now been shutdown. The move comes days after former US Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger’s visit to India.

RCEP agreement if implemented will bypass #WTO & offload excess #agricultural produce from #China into #Indian markets freely. Shifting our balance of payment & #foodsecurity into Chinese hands will be detrimental to our #SeedSovereignty says @IndraSsingh. https://t.co/evCTeWGZR9

— GreatGameIndia (@GreatGameIndia) November 1, 2019

India, meanwhile, is engaged in negotiations with China and Southeast Asian nations over a new Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. RCEP Agreement seen by observers as a threat to India’s Seed Sovereignty would create a vast free-trade bloc spanning the Indo-Pacific from New Zealand in the east to India in the west and China and Japan to the north. The RCEP agreement, if implemented, will offload all the excess agricultural produce from China into the Indian markets freely shifting our balance of payment and food sovereignty into Chinese hands.

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A historical moment was achieved on October 29 for the Armenian lobby in the U.S. after the House of Representatives recognized the Armenian genocide, with 405 votes in favor and 11 against the Resolution. This timely move was certainly aimed at provoking Turkey, who has consistently denied that the foundation of the modern Republic of Turkey was built on the ethnic cleansing of the Christian minorities in the country, particularly the Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. There is little doubt that this belated recognition by the U.S. was chosen to be announced on Republic Day, a public holiday in Turkey commemorating the proclamation of the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. 

Although the resolution focusses primarily on the Armenian genocide, it also recognizes the genocide against “Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.” The resolution also makes mention of U.S. Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1913 to 1916, Henry Morgenthau, who described the empire’s “campaign of race extermination,” and was instructed on July 16, 1915, by U.S. Secretary of State Robert Lansing “to stop Armenian persecution.”

The resolution also highlights other instances in history where the U.S. recognized the genocide, but of course makes no mention of why the recognition has occurred now? The Armenian lobby in the U.S. has been pushing for genocide recognition for decades, but recognition was only achieved on Tuesday. With over 400 votes in favor, President Donald Trump cannot veto the resolution even if he wanted.

Normally at odds with each, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), along with all other sectors of Turkish society and political establishment, denounced the U.S. recognition. There is little doubt that the recognition is politically motivated, with Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu claiming the U.S. are wanting “to take revenge” over their differences in Syria and CHP leader Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu stating that “You cannot use the events of history to take revenge politically.”

With Washington-Ankara becoming increasingly distant because of Turkey’s insistence on buying the Russian S-400 and conducting an operation against the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Worker’s Party (PKK), the People’s Protection Units (YPG), that the U.S. has financially and military supported despite Ankara’s insistence that they’re a terrorist organization, Washington’s move to recognize the Armenian genocide is in conjunction to sanctions and bitter rhetoric between the two countries.

Rather, this proves that the Armenian genocide recognition should have been a moral imperative for the U.S., but Washington never did so to appease Turkey. As the U.S. and Turkey are members of the anti-Russian NATO, the issue of genocide recognition, despite significant pressures from the Armenian lobby, found no success in Washington. Turkey controls the Dardanelles and the Bosporus straits, Russia’s only access to its only warm water ports in their country. Although international law guarantees freedom of navigation through the waterways, in any hypothetical war between NATO and Russia, blocking Russia in the Black Sea would be a priority.

With Turkey continually defying the U.S. and improving its relations with Russia, Washington are now finding alternatives to Turkey. It is for this reason that the U.S. has opened three new military bases in Greece and made the Mediterranean country a Plan B option against Russia in case of Turkey’s continued insubordination. With a bolstered American presence in Greece, the U.S. feels it is in a comfortable position to potentially blockade Russia and/or Turkey if it ever had to do so, making it another well-time moment to recognize the genocide.

Çavuşoğlu and Kılıçdaroğlu are justified in their claims that the U.S. recognition of the Armenian genocide is politically motivated, but also the very fact that the recognition was not made decades ago was also politically motivated to appease Turkey and ensure their loyalty to NATO. With Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan claiming that the resolution has “no legal force” as only “historians […] and not politicians, should decide on this issue,” he does not build a strong case for Turkey as it is nearly unanimous by genocide historians and scholars that the ethnic cleansing of the Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and other Christians in the late Ottoman period definitely occurred with organization and structure.

More curiously is the fact that several Kurdish organizations and political parties have not only recognized the Armenian genocide, but also apologized for their ancestor’s role in following orders from Turkish authorities in Constantinople to massacre and ethnically cleanse Armenians and Assyrians. Included in recognizing and apologizing for the genocide are the PKK, the Turkey-based Peoples’ Democratic Party and the Iraqi-based Kurdistan Democratic Party.

With the modern Republic of Turkey built on a Turkification process, with some of my own family members forced to change their surname into a more Turkish-sounding name in living memory, coupled with Turkish national hero Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s slogan of “Ne mutlu Türküm diyene!” (How happy is the one who calls themself a Turk!) that had to be recited by every student in Turkey as an Oath until it was annulled by the AKP government in 2013, the Armenian genocide recognition by the U.S. is a step in restoring Armenian, Greek and Assyrian ethnic and religious identity in Turkey.

Justice Minister Abdulhamit Gul is justified to say that the U.S. should look at its own history before accusing others of genocide. This argument though does not absolve Turkey from facing its dark history, apologize and try and create more friendly relations with Greece, Armenia and the Christian minorities who remain in Turkey.

Russia has recognized the Armenian genocide since 1995 and today it has little impact on Russian-Turkish relations. Rather, this latest provocation by the U.S. against Turkey is likely to just push Ankara closer to Moscow because of the motive and timing of the Armenian recognition.

There is little doubt that the U.S. recognizing the Armenian genocide is politically motivated. However, this does not negate the fact that the decades of non-recognition was also politically motivated. Although late in recognizing the genocide compared to other European countries, it is likely that Washington’s recognition will have a far greater impact than the Russian, French or German recognition. It is likely we will begin seeing extremely pro-U.S. states like the United Kingdom, and perhaps even Israel, following this move.

Therefore, does it matter why the U.S. has decided to now recognize the genocide when it did?

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Paul Antonopoulos, a research Fellow at the Center for Syncretic Studies, writes for InfoBrics where this article was originally published.

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Update, November 2, 2019

Friday, November 1, “Regime Rotation” at the ECB. 

Ms. Christine Lagarde, former French finance minister and Managing Director of the IMF took over as president of the European Central Bank (ECB), replacing Mario Draghi. 

“Lagarde takes office at a time when the ECB’s governing council is divided as rarely before over its latest round of monetary stimulus”.

The media applauds: she is lawyer and the first woman to head the ECB, with a commitment to supporting female staff appointments as well “climate action”.

But there is something else regarding her appointment (including fraud and corruption at the highest levels) which has been withheld from public debate.

Scroll down: This article was first published on October 18, 2019.

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France’s president Emmanuel Macron acting on behalf of powerful banking interests was instrumental in Ms. Lagarde’s nomination. Praised by the Western media, Lagarde was also endorsed by Wall Street and the US Federal Reserve.

What media reports fail to mention is that Lagarde is a corrupt official involved in financial fraud. She has a criminal record.

Is the Eurozone in danger? Financial fraud is embedded at the highest levels of political and economic decision-making. A senior official in high office with a criminal record can easily be manipulated. Indelibly this will affect the way she manages the ECB, with potential impacts on the very fabric of monetary policy.

Lagarde’s appointment to head the ECB has not been a matter of debate or concern. EU citizens have not been informed.

She is an obedient instrument of the financial and banking establishment which controls both the IMF and the European Central Bank. The European Parliament is silent.

On December 20, 2016, A French court found IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde guilty of “negligence” in relation to a multimillion Euro fraud while she was France’s Finance Minister in 2008. She is said to have approved “an award of €404m ($429m; £340m) transfer to businessman Bernard Tapie, [a crony of president Sarkozy] for the disputed sale of a firm.”

International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde has been convicted over her role in a controversial €400m (£355m) payment to a businessman.

French judges found Ms Lagarde guilty of negligence for failing to challenge the state arbitration payout to the friend of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy [Bernard Tapie].

The 60-year-old, following a week-long trial in Paris, was not given any sentence and will not be punished.

 .

 The Court of Justice of the Republic, a special tribunal for ministers, could have given Ms Lagarde up to one-year in prison and a €13,000 fine. (The Independent, December 19, 2016, emphasis added)

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Screenshot: The Independent, December  2016 

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Unusual in France? Lagarde was found “guilty” without the enforcement of a one year jail term ordered by the Court: criminals in high office are given special treatment. She was accused of “negligence” rather than “complicity”  in a multimillion euro fraud.

In a bitter irony, Lagarde was rewarded rather than penalized. Despite her criminal record, her career was in no ways impeded: she was appointed to lead both the IMF (2011-2019) and the ECB (2019- )

Of significance, this ‘negligence” has cost French taxpayers more than 400 million Euro “in a payout to Mr Tapie”, a crony of Lagarde and Sarkozy.

While Lagarde’s management at the IMF (2011-2019) has been an absolute disaster, the IMF executive board confirmed that it retained “full confidence” in her leadership. (BBC, December 20, 2016).

What a nonsensical statement: The IMF Executive Board of 24 members was chaired by the IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde during her entire mandate (2011-2019) (most probably with exception of the meeting held to express the IMF Executive Board’s “full confidence” in Christine Lagarde).  The French judges took the decision to withhold a one year prison sentence pertaining to the accused pursuant to a decision of the IMF Executive Board which is routinely chaired by the accused.

Christine Lagarde is on record in expressing here thanks to the IMF and the IMF Executive Board. 

The record of this IMF Executive board meeting in support of Christine Lagarde has not been made public.

No questions asked. Her nomination to head the ECB was confirmed by the European Council last July. Despite her criminal record, she will be commencing her mandate as president of  the European Central Bank (ECB) on November 1st, –i.e. a watershed date in the unstable evolution of currency markets coinciding with Boris Johnson’s Brexit deadline on October 31st. 

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Ecuador: An IMF Model of Neoliberal Reform under the Helm of Christine Lagarde

In January 2019, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde met up with Ecuador’s president Lenin Moreno at the Davos World Economic Forum. Two months later an IMF “package” of deadly economic reforms was finalized.

The financial establishment (which supported her nomination both to the IMF and the ECB ) wants to replicate the IMF-style  “economic medicine” imposed on developing countries throughout the European Union. No more double standards in favor of the so-called “developed countries”. Brutal economic reforms to be applied Worldwide.

What can we we expect? A scenario of systematic and engineered impoverishment of the European Union through the imposition of the same brand of neoliberal reforms imposed on so-called developing countries.

The Eurozone in Crisis

Moreover, the ECB under the helm of Christine Lagarde will facilitate the dollarization of the Euro not to mention the fraudulent manipulation of currency markets which also constitutes a means to impoverish millions of people.

Eight years ago, Flashback to May-June 2011. Lagarde’s Fraudulent Appointment to Head the IMF 

The Dominique Strauss Khan (DSK) Honey Trap Scandal was instrumental in Lagarde’s accession to the IMF despite the fact that her role as France’s Minister of Finance in the Euro 400 million financial fraud was already known and documented.

Media focus at the time centered on the story of  the alleged victim, the hotel housemaid, rather than on who was pulling the strings behind the scenes in what visibly was a political frame-up.

Regime Change: Dominque Strauss Khan (DSK), managing director of the IMF was framed and Christine Lagarde was appointed to replace him.

There was no firm evidence against Strauss-Kahn.  This was known to prosecutors at an early stage of the investigation. The framing of Strauss Kahn consisted in dropping the charges against Strauss Kahn only after the appointment of Lagarde to replace him as Managing Director of the IMF.

The report from the the prosecutor New York District Attorney Cyrus Vance Junior exonerating Strauss Kahn of all charges against him was released three days after Lagarde’s confirmation as Managing Director of the IMF.

If this information had been revealed a few days earlier, Lagarde’s candidacy to head the IMF would no doubt have been questioned. Regime change was implemented at the IMF.

It is worth noting that prosecutor Cyrus Vance Junior (son of former Secretary of State of Cyrus Robert Vance) is reported to be a friend of president Nicolas Sarkozy who allegedly played a behind the scenes role in the framing of Strauss Khan.

Concluding Remarks

The European Central Bank as an instrument of economic and social development has been hijacked. Monetary policy has de facto been privatized.  The president of the central bank is controlled and manipulated by financial interests. The European council was unduly pressured into ratifying the appointment of Christine Lagarde.

Citizens across Europe should take a firm stance. Mass mobilization against Christine Lagarde’s appointment should be envisaged.

The recent appearance in some Western media sources of insults, jokes, and unfounded accusations in response to tragedies affecting the Russian people is shocking in its coarseness and barbarity, disturbing in its lack of compassion for fellow human beings, and irresponsible in its professional ethics.

Concerning the suicide bombing in the St. Petersburg metro of 3 April 2017, in which 13 people were killed and 45 wounded, an article from Consortium News cites numerous examples of high-profile individuals and media sources who blamed the bombing on Pres. Putin (ostensibly in order to increase his power or to deflect attention from last week’s very likely foreign-staged protests in Russia against Prime Minister Medvedev).ⁱ Such reasoning defies logic and is nothing more than mean-spirited and ideologically-infused. Blaming the overwhelmingly popular leader of a sovereign country for terrorist attacks that have brought suffering to that country’s people can benefit only those seeking to undermine the people’s support for their president. Clearly the misguided and ill-wishing pundits want to drive a wedge between Putin and Russia. And to what end?

Terrorist attacks have occurred in recent years in several cities in Germany, the UK, Belgium, and France. If the mainstream media were to write about and accuse the leaders of those European countries of masterminding terrorism against their own people, there would be a sustained outcry. This would be classified as racism, prejudice, unacceptable to “freedom-loving people.” But it is inconvenient for the West to promote anything but outdated stereotypes of Russia, to frame any incident in Russia as somehow worse than if the same incident were to occur in a European country.

Another example of the West’s insensitivity and lack of compassion, described in the same Consortium News article, relates to the airline crash on 27 December 2016 near Sochi, Russia; this flight carried many members of the Alexandrov Ensemble (Red Army Choir). The beloved, distinguished, and internationally known ensemble consisting of Russian singers, dancers, and musicians brought ethereally beautiful and noble-spirited performances to people all over the world in fine acts of cultural diplomacy. In the air tragedy 64 members of the ensemble were killed; they were traveling to perform for Russian troops stationed in Latakia, Syria. The Hill website noted the cynicism and inhumanity of France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine, describing three cartoons the Hebdoeditors printed about the plane crash:

One cartoon shows a choir member singing “AAAAAA” as the plane is going down. The caption says the Russian choir has expanded its repertoire.

Another cartoon illustrates the whole choir singing to fish at the bottom of the Black Sea with the downed plane in the background. The caption reads, “Red Army choir conquers a new audience.”

A third cartoon shows the plane nosediving with the words: “Bad news … Putin was not on board.”ⁱⁱ

This is not humor; it is pure evil. Would the U.S. find amusing jokes created by European countries about the bombing of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the lives lost on 11 September 2001?

The West’s double standard regarding Russia goes back at least as far as World War II, when Russia lost more people than all other countries combined, and Russia was treated by Hitler far worse than he treated the European countries he invaded. J.T. Dykman explains:

Unlike his earlier conquests, Hitler ordered his generals in 1941 to conduct the war against the USSR as one of annihilation rather than capture and coercion . . . The results of Hitler’s beliefs concerning the Jewish populations is widely known because of the Holocaust, but his dark convictions concerning peoples he called Slavs are much less well known in the west. Every reputable biography of Hitler and his own writings and speeches confirm that he regarded them as subhuman . . .This was not just the looting of art or precious metals that went on in Europe; this was stripping the land for depopulation by starvation.ⁱⁱⁱ

In the 1990s, after the Soviet government decided to disband the Soviet Union and evolve a more democratic style of government, the economic reforms imposed on Russia by then U.S. Pres. Bill Clinton, with the acquiescence of Russian Pres. Boris Yeltsin, were so severe that no American would ever have accepted them. The “economic genocide” that resulted has been called worse than the Great Depression in the U.S. of the late 1920s and early 1930s. According to medical authorities in Russia at that time, the nation was on the verge of a “demographic apocalypse.” Stephen F. Cohen termed the effects of the U.S.’s actions in the 1990s towards Russia “the literal demodernization of a twentieth-century country”:

When the infrastructures of production, technology, science, transportation, heating, and sewage disposal disintegrate; when tens of millions of people do not receive earned salaries, some 75 percent of society lives below or barely above the subsistence level, and millions of them are actually starving; when male life expectancy has plunged as low as fifty-eight years, malnutrition has become the norm among schoolchildren . . . when even highly educated professionals must grow their own food in order to survive and well over half the nation’s economic transactions are barter . . .^iv

These policies brought about an enormous tragedy and seemed designed to destroy, rather than rebuild a country struggling to make a transition to a more viable political system. If a foreign government were to impose such drastic policies on the American people, one can only imagine the result. Once again, a double standard with respect to Russia: what is acceptable for Russia would be unacceptable for the U.S.

The question arises whether the U.S. and Western Europe view Russia in racist terms, as somehow less ‘civilized’ or not as ‘advanced.’ The West’s comparisons usually elevate materialism and money, while not considering as equally or more valuable the spiritual or educational levels, or human values, of Russian society.

But the real irritant is that Russia will not bow down to Western dictates. The very fact that Western sanctions have not crippled and destroyed Russia makes Western leaders irate. In a surprising, though understandable way, the sanctions have helped the Russian home-grown production of goods to flourish. After all, Russia must make its own decisions for the survival of its people. It is the West’s growing irrelevance to Russia, which it itself caused, that enrages its governments.

Another irritant to the West is that, despite NATO’s expansion, the Russian government has maintained a patient and consistent posture, refusing to plunge the nation into another war: World War II and the 1990s were enough. NATO in its provocations right at Russia’s doorstep–on the territory on which Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941–rubs salt in the wounds felt by the Russian people. Can the U.S. not understand how it would react if an enemy, say, from Mars, were to position tanks, weapons, and other war materiel along Canada’s southern border? Can the U.S. not imagine how it would react if a combined naval fleet of multiple countries hostile to it were to institute and increase naval drills in the Gulf of Mexico—as NATO currently practices and plans to increase naval drills in the Black Sea, one of the cornerstones of Russia’s national security? It is so obvious. The politicians in decision-making positions are blinded by their lust for power, the military-industrial complex whose lobbies support them, and what has to be a deep-seated prejudice against Russia–Russophobia.

Economic and financial sanctions do adversely affect people, their standard of living, their ability to buy food, medicine, household goods. They are not just a theoretical proposition, a political tool aimed at specific targets. But despite the fact that sanctions hurt the Russian people, they live by more than “bread alone” and desire to be treated with dignity and empathy: the deeper injury inflicted by other countries’ laughter and ridicule at their suffering is longer-lasting.

What Western Europe, and in particular the U.S. government, are in effect trying to do is undermine Russia’s historic achievements by demeaning and vilifying its people, culture, religion, and way of life. The reader can only wonder why.

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This article was originally published on Russia Insider.

Valeria Z. Nollan is professor emerita of Russian studies at Rhodes College, and a faculty affiliate at Texas Tech University. She was born in Hamburg, West Germany; she and her parents were Russian refugees displaced by World War II. Her books and articles on Russian literature, cinema, religion, and nationalism have made her an internationally-recognized authority on topics relating to modern Russia. Her new biography of Sergei Rachmaninoff is forthcoming by Reaktion Books of London.

Notes

ii http://thehill.com/homenews/media/312154-russians-slam-charlie-hebdo-for-plane-crash-cartoons

iii http://www.eisenhowerinstitute.org/about/living_history/wwii_soviet_experience.dot

During the Senate hearing into Boeing on October 29, Senator Jon Tester told the company’s CEO Dennis Muilenburg: “I would walk before I would get on a 737 MAX. I would walk.” He added: “There is no way … You shouldn’t be cutting corners and I see corners being cut.”

That’s all fine and well, but the hearing, which continues today, Wednesday, lays bare a giant gap in US law: that of accountability. Muilenburg is the “ultimately responsible” in a chain of command that is responsible for killing 346 people. But he is still the CEO, even if he was demoted from the chairman of the board position. Which was taken over by another -10 year- veteran of the company by the way. Fresh insights galore.

If you are employed by a large company, you can sign off on such decisions, the ones that kill people, and walk away unscathed. It reminds one of Monsanto/Bayer, which just annnounced that the number of Roundup lawsuits against it went from 18,000 in July to 43,000 today. Bayer at the same time announced that its turnover rose by 6% in Q3. 43,000 lawsuits and they’re doing fine, thank you.

In that same vein, Boeing shares rose 2.4% last night after the hearing (“a sign investors were relieved.”) What the “investors” buying those shares may have missed is that India’s budget carrier IndiGo ordered 300 new aircraft from Airbus, at an initial cost of $33 billion -which will be subject to a juicy discount, but still-.

Now, Boeing is America’s biggest exporter. It’s also one of the cornerstones of Pentagon policy, a huge provider for the US military. So one can only expect the Senate to be lenient, to appear to be tough but let things more or less go. Still, the fact remains that Muilenburg et al made cost-cutting and other decisions that killed 346 people. But CNCB still labeled this a “brutal Senate hearing”. Yeah. Define ‘brutal’.

Maybe the thing is that those deaths were not in the US, but in Indonesia and Ethiopia. Think maybe the Senate is influenced by that? What do you think would have happened if two 737 MAX’s had fallen out of the sky in the US, even if only in deplorables’ territory? We can sort of imagine, can’t we?

And no, it’s not an all black and white picture, some people involved made some sense (via Seattle Times):

Boeing 737 MAX Should Be Grounded Until Certification Process Is ‘Reformed’ – Senator

..at least one member of the Senate committee that grilled Muilenburg on Tuesday suggested the troubled aircraft shouldn’t be flying again until a much-maligned Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) oversight program retreats from its practice of delegating authority to Boeing and other aerospace manufacturers.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal — citing revelations in recent news reports of a Boeing engineer’s claims that the MAX’s safety was compromised by cost and schedule considerations, and that the company pushed to undercut regulatory oversight — pushed back against findings that the FAA’s practice of delegating more safety certification authority is only likely to increase.

“The story of Boeing sabotaging rigorous safety scrutiny is chilling to all of us — and more reason to keep the 737 MAX grounded until certification is really and truly independent and the system is reformed,” said Blumenthal, D-Conn.

But, you know, the entire narrative is about ‘the company’, not about the people in the company who make these fatal decisions. They can do whatever they want, secure in the knowledge they will never be held to account. For financial losses perhaps at some point, but not for the loss of life. At best, they’ll get fired and walk away with a huge bonus. And that’s just wrong.

And it’s not like there were no warning signs (via Seattle Times again, from Oct 3):

Boeing Rejected 737 MAX Safety Upgrades Before Fatal Crashes – Whistleblower

Seven weeks after the second fatal crash of a 737 MAX in March, a Boeing engineer submitted a scathing internal ethics complaint alleging that management — determined to keep down costs for airline customers — had blocked significant safety improvements during the jet’s development. The ethics charge, filed by 33-year-old engineer Curtis Ewbank, whose job involved studying past crashes and using that information to make new planes safer, describes how around 2014 his group presented to managers and senior executives a proposal to add various safety upgrades to the MAX.

The complaint, a copy of which was reviewed by The Seattle Times, suggests that one of the proposed systems could have potentially prevented the crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia that killed 346 people. Three of Ewbank’s former colleagues interviewed for this story concurred. The details revealed in the ethics complaint raise new questions about the culture at Boeing and whether the long-held imperative that safety must be the overarching priority was compromised on the MAX by business considerations and management’s focus on schedule and cost. Managers twice rejected adding the new system on the basis of “cost and potential (pilot) training impact,” the complaint states.

This one is from AP, Oct 18. These are just the most recent revelations, this stuff goes back years. Neither Boeing nor the FAA ever did anything, until the planes started falling from the skies:

Messages From Former Boeing Test Pilot Reveal 737MAX Concerns

A former senior Boeing test pilot told a co-worker that he unknowingly misled safety regulators about problems with a flight-control system that would later be implicated in two deadly crashes of the company’s 737 Max. The pilot, Mark Forkner, told another Boeing employee in 2016 that the flight system, called MCAS, was “egregious” and “running rampant” while he tested it in a flight simulator.

“So I basically lied to the regulators (unknowingly),” wrote Forkner, then Boeing’s chief technical pilot for the 737. The exchange occurred as Boeing was trying to convince the Federal Aviation Administration that MCAS was safe. MCAS was designed at least in part to prevent the Max from stalling in some situations. The FAA certified the plane without fully understanding MCAS, according to a panel of international safety regulators.

Forkner also lobbied FAA to remove mention of MCAS from the operating manual and pilot training for the Max, saying the system would only operate in rare circumstances. FAA allowed Boeing to do so, and most pilots did not know about MCAS until after the first crash, which occurred in October 2018 in Indonesia.

As I covered extensively before the issue at hand is that Boeing, in order to cut costs, among other things, decided to have just one -active- “angle-of-attack” sensor (which measures the angle of the plane vs income air, it’s located at the bottom front of the fuselage) on the plane. All it takes is one bird flying into it to compromise and/or deactivate that sensor. And then neither the software not the pilots know what to do anymore. But yeah, it’s cheaper… One sensor won’t do, nor will two, you need at least three in case one is defective. But yeah, that costs money. Seattle Times once again:

Messages From Former Boeing Test Pilot Reveal 737MAX Concerns

Boeing’s chief engineer for commercial airlines acknowledged that the company erred by not specifically testing the potential for a key sensor to erroneously cause software on the 737 Max to drive down the plane’s nose. In both fatal crashes, faulty data from one of two angle-of-attack sensors, which measure the pitch of the plane against the oncoming stream of air, caused the 737 Max’s Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, to drive down the jet’s nose, which pilots struggled to counteract before ultimately entering a fatal dive.

John Hamilton, vice president and chief engineer of Boeing Commercial Airplanes, told senators that the company “did test the MCAS uncommanded inputs to the stabilizer system, due to whatever causes was driving it, not specifically due to an AOA sensor.’’ Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington, the Senate Commerce Committee’s top Democrat, asked if he now thought that was wrong. “In hindsight, senator, yes,’’ Hamilton replied.

They didn’t test the hardware at all, they tested the software! And all they have to say is that that was wrong. But only in hindsight! And then they tried to fix the mess they created with a new software program, MCAS, but didn’t even tell the pilots it existed. I kid you not! They did this because it might have required pilots to do more training, which raises the price of a plane, and they were already losing out to Airbus.

And lest we forget, this all happened because when Boeing was busy spending its capital on buying back its own shares, Airbus had developed a new plane to accommodate a much more energy-efficient -though larger- engine. When Boeing figured that out, they had neither the time nor the money left (because of the share buybacks) to develop their own new plane.

So what they did was they stuck such an engine (which they did have) onto a 737 model that was not equipped for the much bigger and heavier load. That in turn lead them to work on a software solution to lift the nose of the plane despite that load, which might have worked in theory but was always a bad idea, something in the vein of putting a giraffe’s neck on a hummingbird.

But Muilenburg and his people kept pushing it all, because they knew they had been caught awfully wanting, and they needed that more cost-efficient plane. And this is how all the ensuing mess started. It was all because of money. Of the execs being caught with their pants down, and trying to hide their naked hairy asses.

And then, as I started out this essay, they are still not held accountable. The company will face billions in ‘repair’ damages, some of them may lose their jobs or bonuses, but none will be held responsible for the deaths of those 346 people.

That is just not right. Not in the case of Monsanto, and not in that of Boeing. Not all Boeing planes are disasters, but the 737 definitely is. Donald Trump a few months ago suggested they should just rebrand the plane, give it another name, do some expensive PR work and bob’s your uncle. But let me ask you, would you fly on a 737, even if under another name? Far as I know, all they did was change the software, not the hardware.

Plus, the other day some airline, was that in South Korea?!, grounded a whole bunch of 787’s because of cracks on their wings. Look, I’m not saying Boeing’s in trouble. I’m just saying Boeing’s in deep trouble. But then, you know, they’ll kick out Muilenburg and some other guys, and a few FAA heads will retire, and they’ll declare the rotten apples gone, and we’re off to a whole new start. Yay! But the 346 people will still be dead.

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From one or more illegally established airbases in Syria, as well as other other regional ones, Pentagon warplanes, attack helicopters, and drones continue terror-bombing Syrian sites at the discretion of its commanders.

US troops still occupy large parts of northern and southern Syrian territory indefinitely, including oil producing areas — looting them for private and CIA profiteering, as well as wanting Damascus denied revenues from its own resources. That’s what grand theft is all about.

All of the above are war crimes as defined under the UN Charter and other international law. The US and its imperial partners remain unaccountable for crimes of war and against humanity in all their war theaters.

The same goes for US economic terrorism against Iran, Venezuela, North Korea, Cuba, and other countries — high crimes gone unpunished.

An immoral, unethical nation, operating extrajudicially at home and abroad by its own rules to empower and enrich its privileged class at the expense of ordinary people everywhere is what fascist tyranny is all about.

That’s the disturbing state of the US, a fantasy democracy threatening everyone everywhere, defined by its arrogance and rage to dominate.

Its war secretary Mark Esper warned that the Pentagon will use “overwhelming force” to maintain control over Syrian oil producing areas, wanting Damascus sovereignty over all its territory as mandated under international law denied.

The Trump regime and Russia OK’d Turkey’s cross-border aggression in northern Syria. Begun on October 9, it continues despite an October 18-declared ceasefire.

Sporadic clashes are ongoing in Aleppo, Hasakah, and Raqqa provinces.

On October 31, AMN News reported that “Turkey has failed to abide by its obligations under the Syria ceasefire as it continues military activities in Syria’s border areas…”

Commander of Kurdish YPG forces Mazloum Abdi tweeted the following:

“Turkey has not adhered to the ceasefire agreement with the USA and is continuing its war. Turkey, with jihadists, began to occupy Christian villages, trying to break into Tall Tamir dominated by Assyrians, and threatened with annihilation.”

Turkish aggression has nothing to do with its national security, nothing to do with concern for Syrian refugees, everything to do with President Erdogan’s revanchist aims, notably coveting Syrian oil producing areas.

More broadly, he aims to control oil-rich Iraqi Kurdistan. Deals he cut with the US and Russia conceal his real objectives.

On October 30, the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) reported that

“(u)nits of the Syrian Arab Army on Wednesday clashed with Turkish occupation forces in Tal al-Ward village in Ras al-Ayn countryside,” adding:

“Fierce clashes…erupted between the Syrian Arab Army and the Turkish occupation forces in Tal al-Ward village in Ras al-Ayn southern countryside.”

“Meanwhile, the Turkish offensive and its mercenary terrorists targeted with artillery shells locals’ houses in the villages of Tal Tamr northern countryside, causing the displacement of a large number of people.”

“…Turkish forces also attacked Abu Rasin area in Ras al-Ayn eastern countryside synchronizing with artillery strikes on its neighborhoods.”

“…Turkish forces occupied al-Mahmoudiya and al-Darbu villages in Ras al-Ayn countryside after targeting them with aerial and artillery bombardments.”

Separately, Tass reported that Turkey handed over 18 captured Syrian soldiers to Russian forces. At least two were injured during clashes.

The battle for restoration of Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity continues because the US hasn’t ceased its aim to control the country as a vassal state — wanting Bashar al-Assad toppled, pro-Western puppet rule replacing him.

US aggression remains ongoing in its 9th year with no near-term prospect for restoring peace and stability to all parts of the country.

Millions of long-suffering Syrians are hostage to US, NATO, Turkish aggression — along with Israeli terror-bombing at its discretion, on the phony pretext of combatting an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist.

A Final Comment

In its latest edition, the Wall Street Journal perpetuated the myth of “civil war” in Syria.

There’s nothing “civil” about US aggression in its 9th year — responsible for devastating the country and causing the gravest refugee crisis since WW II.

The Journal also maintained the myth of “US troop withdrawal” from the country — despite knowing Pentagon and CIA occupation of northern and southern areas continues indefinitely with no plans for leaving.

Syrian sovereignty and territorial integrity are inviolable under international law.

Occupation by foreign forces without permission from Damascus is flagrantly illegal — ignored by the Journal.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Establishment media support for what’s going on is all about wanting undemocratic Dems gaining a political advantage ahead of 2020 presidential, congressional, state, and local elections.

The impeachment inquiry scam is unrelated to legitimate wrongdoing by Trump and his regime — notably high crimes of war and against humanity in multiple theaters, economic terrorism against targeted nations, and support for monied interests at the expense of exploited ordinary people at home and abroad.

Dems and establishment media aren’t going near this because the vast majority of congressional members from both right wings of the nation’s one-party state and the fourth estate are complicit in the above high crimes.

Targeting Trump on these issues would implicate themselves. So they’ll never be raised as long as the impeachment scam continues.

On Thursday, the undemocratic Dem controlled House passed a procedural resolution on how the anti-Trump impeachment inquiry will be handled going forward.

The 232 – 196 vote was nearly entirely along party lines. All Republicans rejected it, along with two Dems in congressional districts won by Trump in 2016, facing close reelection contests.

The politicized vote by House members was one of the body’s most shameful.

Even anti-war/progressive Tulsi Gabbard supported the resolution she should have rejected.

Not a single House Dem profile in courage rejected the scam, not Gabbard, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, or my own congressman Danny Davis.

NYT anti-Trump rage is all about seeking revenge for his triumphing over media darling Hillary.

The broadsheet has been conducting a near-daily post-election jihad against him, largely for the wrong reasons, ignoring the most important right ones.

During the 2016 campaign, the Times virtually operated as Hillary’s press agent, a shameful example of advocacy reporting.

It flagrantly breached journalistic standards, publishing daily supportive rubbish about an unindicted war criminal/racketeer/perjurer.

The Times: “Since taking office in 2017, President Trump and his administration have sought to remove — and in some cases, destroy — many of the guardrails of precedent and tradition surrounding the conduct of the executive branch.”

Fact: There’s virtually nothing politically, economically, financially, militarily, or socially redeemable about Trump regime actions.

Fact: They follow in the footsteps of most of his predecessors, notably the Clinton co-presidency, Bush/Cheney and Obama/Biden — regimes hostile to peace, equity, and justice the Times wholeheartedly endorsed.

Speaker Pelosi represents the worst of debauchery infesting Capitol Hill. She mocked truth and full disclosure, falsely saying:

“What is at stake in all of this is nothing less than our democracy.” What doesn’t exist isn’t at stake. The US is a warmongering fascist police state, masquerading as democratic, a notion the vast majority in Washington abhor — especially ruling authorities of both wings of its war party.

White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham denounced the “sham impeachment” resolution, calling it “a blatantly partisan attempt to destroy the president.”

Trump called what’s going on “the greatest witch hunt in American history.” It’s one of the greatest moments of shame since the republic’s founding — a politicized scam against a sitting president for illegitimate reasons.

Pro-Hillary/anti-Trump media manipulated a majority of Americans to support what should be strongly denounced and opposed.

Thursday’s shameful House vote virtually assured Trump’s impeachment ahead, likely before yearend.

Removing him from office by a required two-thirds GOP-controlled Senate super-majority is another matter entirely, what’s highly unlikely to happen.

Thursday on the House floor, one Republican after another denounced the politicized witch hunt sham — a coup attempt with no legitimacy by any standard.

Speaker Pelosi and Dem committee chairpersons involved in one of the most shameful chapters in US history should be impeached and removed from office.

They include lead anti-Trump witch hunt instigator/House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, called a “disgraced liar” by GOP spokeswoman Elizabeth Harrington.

Others are House Committee on Oversight and Reform chairwoman Carolyn Maloney, Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel, and Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler.

“Lock ‘em up,” and their co-conspirators, for high crimes and misdemeanors against the rule of law.

A Final Comment

The anti-Trump character assassin, masquerading as a whistleblower, was ID’s as 33-year-old Eric Ciaramella.

According to Real Clear Investigations’ Paul Sperry, he’s “a CIA analyst who at one point was detailed to the White House and is now back working at the CIA.”

He’s “a registered (Dem) held over from the Obama White House (who) previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia ‘collusion’ (scam) during the 2016 election.”

According to an unnamed National Security Council official: “He was accused of working against Trump and leaking against Trump.”

Former CIA analyst/Trump regime national security advisor Fred Fleitz accused Dems of “hiding him because of his political bias.”

Yet the media, White House and Congress know his identity and what he’s up to. He was involved generating the phony “Putin fired (former FBI director James) Comey narrative.”

It was part of trying to invent an illegal or improper Trump team/Russia connection that never existed.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore

The Democrats and corporate media don’t really oppose what Donald Trump is doing in Syria or anywhere else.

“In the end it doesn’t matter if Baghdadi is dead or when or how he died.”

Donald Trump says that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed by the United States military. Baghdadi was the founder of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), which is also known as ISIS and Daesh. The name is less important than the fact that ISIL carried out a reign of terror against the people of Iraq and Syria. They did so with the blessing and connivance of the United States government, which used Baghdadi and his ilk to continue a 40-year long practice of using jihadists proxies against secular states in the region.

The announcement of Baghdadi’s death is problematic for several reasons. For one thing, he was said to have been killed on several other occasions. No one knows if he died when Trump said he did, died sooner, or is still alive somewhere. Secondly, in his usual way of undermining establishment protocol Trump publicly thanked Turkey and Russia for assisting. In an odd twist that could only happen in the Trump administration, the Russian defense ministry denied any participation  in the action or any knowledge of it having taken place at all.

“ISIS carried out a reign of terror against the people of Iraq and Syria with the blessing and connivance of the United States government.”

The corporate media, Democrats and Republicans all joined in celebrating Baghdadi’s reported demise. Even those who count how often Trump tells lies suddenly expressed complete confidence in the version of events. Once again we see the embrace of Trump by the so-called resistance if he adheres to imperialist orthodoxy.  The same man who they claim to want to impeach suddenly gets praise as he did when he launched an attack on Syria in 2017. The man mocked as a buffoon can be seen as “presidential” if he kills or even claims to kill people in a far away land.

The tale of an assassination should not be accepted without question. The U.S. claimed that Baghdadi’s body was identified with the help of a DNA sample  provided by an informant who secured a pair of his underwear. The imperialists’ ability to spin tall tales has definitely diminished over time.

The story of Kurds, Turks and ISIL in Syria is complicated but the root cause of all the twists and turns is an old and very simple story. The United States under president Barack Obama used ISIL and al-Qaeda terrorists in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government. The project was a completely bipartisan affair, with the supposed political rivals in the republican and democratic parties on board with using Baghdadi and his forces for their own purposes.

“The United States under president Barack Obama used ISIL and al-Qaeda terrorists in an attempt to overthrow the Syrian government.”

Trump may be telling the truth when he says he wants to bring troops home from Syria, but the task is more complicated than the sub par president can muster. He is left with trying to mimic Barack Obama, and claiming that the purported Baghdadi assassination is of greater import than Obama rubbing out Osama bin Laden.

Trump has been quite consistent in one way. From the days of his presidential campaign he determined the value of any action through the lense of “taking the oil.” He says out loud what other imperialists try to hide behind talk of humanitarian intervention. Now Syria is his target but his detractors rarely care about the blatant theft of other country’s resources. Usually they turn up their noses because of Trump’s lack of finesse. They don’t really oppose what his administration is doing in Syria or anywhere else.

The Trump team excels only in their level of ludicrous scheming. Iranian oil tankers are mysteriously bombed, a coup is attempted in Venezuela that looks more like a badly managed film shoot, and drones are sent over the Persian gulf in hopes that a shoot down will be a casus belli. Now a man who is seldom mentioned any longer because he may already be dead is said to have been assassinated at an opportune moment.

“Trump may be telling the truth when he says he wants to bring troops home from Syria, but the task is more complicated than the sub par president can muster.”

The corporate media and Democrats are after Trump, not because they want to remove him from office but because they hope the impeachment process is a tool for his defeat. The last thing they want to do is mobilize their voters with policies that would appeal to them. Dragging Trump through the mud of his own making because of an ill considered phone call to Ukraine is their preferred method of returning to the White House.

In the end it doesn’t matter if Baghdadi is dead or when or how he died. The regime change plot failed, other nations like Russia, Iran and Syrian itself are in control of events. Americans may snicker when Trump pays homage to an army dog that he says helped to track Baghdadi but they should remember that Bush and Obama and now Trump are responsible for far greater suffering.

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Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Featured image is from BAR

It all started with a minor misdemeanour by school students who collectively refused to pay fares on the Santiago metro in rejection of a price hike (to 830 pesos: US$1.17). This was part of a brutal austerity package, decreed by Chile’s President, Sebastián Piñera on 6^th October 2019. 

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On October 18-19, 78 metro stations, some banks, 16 buses and a few public buildings were set on fire by mysterious hooded men who were able to operate with impunity. On October 19, Eric Campos, President of the Metro Workers’ Union, declared,

“strange that the Police who were supposed to have been guarding the stations, were not there when they were set on fire.”¹

On Oct 18, Piñera declared a state of emergency (not used since 1987 under Pinochet), which included a curfew and, in typical neoliberal fashion, brutal police repression. He deployed the army against the civilian population. Next day Piñera promised to freeze the metro price hike hoping, unsuccessfully, to defuse the protests. Demonstrations kept growing, so on October 20 he expanded the state of emergency to most of the country. He said his government was “at war against a powerful and implacable enemy.” Repression intensified massively, with many killed by both police and the military. This infuriated Chileans thus making the demonstrations stronger, larger, more militant and spreading the length of the country.

No matter how brutal the repression, defying state of emergency and curfew, they continued to demonstrate in ever-larger numbers and involving growing sections of the middle class. Actors, pop artists, celebrities, and football players joined.

Mainstream journalists spread fake news, broadcast lies, attributing all violence and the crisis to vandalism, delinquency and ‘external forces.’ They became the target of hostility from protestors. Grotesquely, Luis Almagro, Secretary General of the Organization of American States, issued a statement blaming Venezuela and Cuba for the events in Chile.²

Soldiers and police officers perpetrated gross violations of human rights, including shooting demonstrators at point blank, beating them to death, firing live ammunition, and torturing, denigrating, degrading, beating and raping women and detainees. There are thousands of videos filmed by bystanders, protestors, and the victims themselves of these atrocities (videos show, for example, police officers stacking a patrol car’s boot with plasma TV sets; another shows soldiers throwing the body of a dead detainee from a moving police van, and threatening neighbours not to look).³ Chileans were not intimidated and continued to stage demonstrations defying the curfew, the military, the police, and the government.

On October 23, a thoroughly deflated Piñera, went publicly to apologise for “not having understood” that millions of Chileans were complaining about the unacceptable levels of social and economic inequality. He announced the suspension of the austerity package and the implementation of some palliatives.

This ‘Chilean model’ involves some impressive macroeconomic figures such as a GDP per capita of around US$19,000 and a reduction of poverty from 38,6% in 1990 to about 8% in 2019. However, this rather than being an “oasis” is in fact, a mirage.

Most Chileans have very low pensions; in 2013, 1,031,025 pensioners got an average pension of 183.213 pesos (87% of the minimum wage). Women pensioners are paid even less. Meanwhile, pension companies continue to extract contributions monthly from about 10 million workers.

Inequality in Chile is gross: the richest fifth of households receive 71% of GDP, whilst four fifths receive the remaining 29%.⁴ Half of salary earners in Chile take home 350.000 pesos monthly (US$481), with 74.3% earning less that 500.000 pesos (US$688).⁵

Health is privatized through a health insurance system with highly restrictive policies that benefit powerful companies. In 2018, through price hikes the key six companies made as much profit in one quarter as they did in the whole of 2017.

The public system of health serves 80% of the population, but is ramshackle, deficient, short of resources, and has extremely long waiting lists for operations and/or specialised treatment. Three national chains of pharmacies control 92% of the sales⁶, charge prices arbitrarily and, illegally collude to fix prices to the detriment of consumers, patients and the poor.

The transport system is one of the most expensive in Latin America, is inefficient and unable to resolve the transport needs of Santiago (city of six million); it generates annual deficits for being linked to a private bus service that gets most of the proceedings. Water, gas, electricity, and telephone have been privatised leading to constant and arbitrary price increases.

There is a recent gratuity for university education for about 60% of the population, but the system remains elitist. Working class kids go to poor schools, get poor-quality education, and are unlikely to be equipped to get into higher education. Thus, there is little social mobility leading most people to end up in the 80% that earn less than 500.000 pesos.

People find a way out by getting into debt, irresponsibly and widely available at exorbitant interest rates. Supermarkets and retail chains issue credit cards for purchases in their stores. Thus in 2019, 55% of household national debt is from consumption (21% from mortgages).⁷

Chileans have also seen how easy is for the rich to evade taxes; have witnessed major corruption scandals among politicians (mainly, but not exclusively from the right), but also the massive embezzlements in the Army and Police Force, with generals pocketing millions of public money.

No wonder Chileans were on the move. On October 23 Chile’s trade unions declared a general strike, and on Friday 25, people staged the largest demonstration in Chile’s history with 1.2 million in Santiago plus huge rallies in cities throughout the country. They demanded Piñera resign.

On Saturday 26 October Piñera announced he had asked for the resignation of all his ministers pointing out that a new cabinet (and government) was being formed, promising to lift the state of emergency. The defeat of his austerity package was complete and the question is how will the change of the neoliberal model be carried out. The mass movement has no apparent leadership, and it has no tangible political vehicle to articulate its demands. Even more interesting, Allende’s generation, their children, and their grandchildren marched and resisted together.

Allende’s image became common in thousands of the mobilizations, and the people adopted Victor Jara’s beautiful song “The right to live in peace” that he composed back in 1971 in homage to Ho Chi Minh and the people of Vietnam, as their hymn. Allende’s dream is very alive and the masses have not forgotten the moral debt Chile’s Pinochetista Right owes society for the coup in 1973, the assassination of their president and, the 17 years of atrocities under their dictatorship.

They will not forget the atrocities committed in October 2019 either, and Piñera is likely to face a constitutional accusation over them. The latest toll is 25 dead; 41 gravely wounded by firearms, 23 people gravely wounded by having been run over by police or army vehicles; 62 with severe eye trauma; more than 1700 injured; and 5845 arrested.

Chileans came onto the streets to bring the oppressive, abusive and exploitative neoliberal model to an end, but it is not yet clear what they will replace it with. A reasonable proposal involves a Constituent Assembly to replace Pinochet’s constitution, nationalization of all utilities and natural resources, punishment for corruption, respect for the ancestral land of the Mapuche, and decent health, education and pensions.

One of the biggest effects has been the well-deserved demystification their mobilisation brought on Chile’s “neoliberal miracle”. The dent they have inflicted on the already diminished prestige of neoliberalism (especially after Macri’s Argentine catastrophe and Moreno’s defeat in Ecuador) is irreparable. The New Battle for Chile will be tough and difficult, but their victory will help us the world over. All our solidarity with the struggle against neoliberalism of the Chilean people!

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This article was originally published on Public Reading Rooms.

Dr Francisco Dominguez is a senior lecturer at Middlesex University, where he is Head of the Research Group on Latin America, and secretary of the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign. Dominguez came to Britain in 1979 as a Chilean political refuge. Ever since he has been active on Latin American issues, about which he has written and published extensively.

Notes

Yesterday, the Keystone pipeline leaked an estimated 383,000 gallons (9,120 barrels) of oil into wetlands in North Dakota. The leak is already the eighth-largest pipeline oil spill of the last decade. The tar sands oil transported through the Keystone pipeline is particularly hard to clean up because, unlike crude oil, it sinks in water.

Keystone operator TC Energy’s (formerly TransCanada) alarming spill and safety record has come under scrutiny as it attempts to build the controversial and much larger Keystone XL pipeline through the midwestern United States and Indigenous treaty lands.

In response, Greenpeace USA Senior Research Specialist Tim Donaghy said:

“I wish I could say I was shocked, but a major spill from the Keystone pipeline is exactly what multiple experts predicted would happen. In fact, this is the fourth significant spill from the Keystone pipeline in less than ten years of operation. History has shown us time and again that there is no safe way to transport fossil fuels, and pipelines are no exception. In the last ten years, US pipeline spills have led to 20 fatalities, 35 injuries, $2.6 billion in costs, and more than 34 million gallons spilled. New pipelines are locking us into carbon emissions that will push our climate past safe limits. That is not the future I want for my children.

“In the past decade, every proposed tar sands pipeline — including the Keystone XL pipeline — has been stopped or delayed by a powerful movement fighting for Indigenous rights, a clean energy economy, and our environment. It is past time to leave fossil fuels in the ground and begin a just transition to a Green New Deal and 100 percent renewable energy.”

Greenpeace analysis from 2017 estimates that, if completed, the Keystone XL pipeline could expect 59 significant spills over a 50-year lifetime. With this latest spill, TC Energy has seen a total of 20 spills from its US pipeline network since 2010, which have released 696,276 gallons (16,578 barrels) of oil and hazardous liquids into the environment.

While Donald Trump moved to “fast-track” the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines in his first month in office, multiple Democratic frontrunners have already come out against the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.

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Ryan Schleeter is a senior communications specialist with Greenpeace USA covering climate and energy. His writing has appeared in National Geographic, Grist, GreenBiz, EcoWatch, and more. Find him on Twitter @ryschlee.

A Brazilian appeals court has decided in favor of Monsanto, the global agribusiness conglomerate, in a landmark class-action lawsuit filed by Brazilian farmers’ unions.

The court’s nine justices unanimously ruled on Oct. 9 that farmers cannot save seeds for replanting if the seeds are harvested from Monsanto’s patented Roundup Ready soybeans, which are genetically engineered to withstand direct application of the company’s Roundup herbicide.

The Brazilian ruling aligns with similar decisions in the U.S. and Canada. Courts in all three countries determined that, as a product of genetic engineering, Roundup Ready soybeans are protected by domestic patent law.

In a public statement, Monsanto – which was acquired by Bayer in 2018 – said the decision will strengthen “agricultural innovation in Brazil.”

How strict patenting of seeds affects innovation, however, is a matter of debate. And the lawsuits challenging Monsanto’s aggressive pursuit of its patent rights raise a vexed legal issue: When intellectual property laws that protect companies conflict with the rights of farmers to plant their fields, who should win?

Monsanto ‘owns everything’

The Brazilian lawsuit is a sign of growing uneasiness with the control Monsanto has over farmers, my research on biotechnology and seeds finds.

Founded as a chemical manufacturer in 1901, Monsanto has invested heavily in agricultural biotechnology to become the world’s largest seller of seeds. Its biotech seeds have proved attractive to farmers because they simplify farm management. Monsanto says its genetically modified seeds also increase crop yields, and thus farmer income – but evidence on this subject is not probative.

In the United States and Canada, Monsanto requires buyers of its genetically modified seeds to sign extensive licensing contracts that prevent them from saving seeds. North American farmers who violate those agreements have been sued for patent infringement and compelled to pay tens of thousands of dollars in damages.

In Brazil, Monsanto charges 2% royalties on the sale of its patented soybeans, a conventional industry practice. More unusually, the company charges an additional royalty – 3% of farmers’ sales – when soybeans are grown from saved Roundup Ready seeds.

Soybeans are Brazil’s biggest export. The royalties in dispute in the class action, which is likely to be appealed to the Brazilian Supreme Court, are estimated at US$7.7 billion.

“I can’t stand it anymore – seeing those Monsanto people showing up at the grain elevator and behaving as if they own everything,” one grain cooperative manager told the Brazilian Congress during a special commission on agriculture I attended in December 2017.

‘Amoral’ royalty collection

The Brazilian appeals court’s Oct. 9 decision reverses a past ruling establishing the rights of small farmers in Brazil.

In their original petition, farmers’ unions in 2009 asserted that Monsanto’s royalty collection system is arbitrary, illegal and abusive. They argued that it extends Monsanto’s intellectual property rights to their own production and violates their right to freely save seeds for replanting, as guaranteed under Brazil’s Plant Variety Protection Act.

In April 2012, a civil court agreed with the farmers, affirming their rights to save seeds and sell their harvests as food or raw material without paying royalties.

Monsanto got this ruling overturned on appeal. The Brazilian farmers’ unions then appealed that decision, leading to the Oct. 9 ruling against them.

“Monsanto is amoral,” Luiz Fernando Benincá, a soybean producer and litigant in the class action suit told me in January 2017. “It will do anything for profits.”

Controversial products and practices

Monsanto is accustomed to litigation. Several of its other products – such as Agent Orange, the synthetic chemicals PCBs and, more recently, the glyphosate-based herbicide Roundup – have been embroiled in legal controversies.

For decades, the St. Louis-based company, valued at $63 billion last year, used its deep pockets and large teams of lawyers to intimidate farmers and defeat opponents in courts.

From 1997 to 2018 Monsanto won every single intellectual property lawsuit that went to trial in the U.S. and Canada.

It has had less success abroad. Courts in Argentina, the European Union and other countries with stronger farmers’ rights have checked the company’s aggressive use of royalties to profit off the byproducts of patented products.

Judges in these cases confront a tricky legal issue.

In theory, a genetically engineered DNA sequence like the one that confers herbicide resistance to Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soybeans can be protected under patent law. Yet the plant variety in which the genetic sequence is introduced may also be legally protected, as it is under Brazil’s Plant Variety Protection Act.

In practice, however, it is virtually impossible to separate genetically engineered DNA sequences from the rest of the physical plant. So the two laws – one recognizing the rights of farmers to save seeds for replanting in their fields, the other protecting Monsanto’s intellectual property – conflict with each other.

Defend farmers or protect corporations?

Faced with this conundrum, the Canadian and U.S. Supreme Courts have ruled that the exclusive rights of a patent holder over plant genetic sequences extend to the plants themselves, thereby allowing companies like Monsanto to prohibit farmers from saving seeds.

Brazil has effectively agreed with this interpretation – for now. The lawyer for the Brazilian farmers unions, Néri Perin, says the ruling “disregards Brazil’s international commitment to guarantee farmers’ rights.”

But more troubles await Bayer-Monsanto.

In a separate lawsuit, Brazilian soybean farmers are challenging the validity of Monsanto’s patent on second-generation Roundup Ready soybeans. In India, the courts have been asked to rule on the validity of Monsanto’s patent for a cotton variety genetically engineered to be insect resistant.

Monsanto has long had the upper hand over the farmers who use its products. But the momentum may be shifting.

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Karine Eliane Peschard is an Anthropologist and Research Associate, Graduate Institute – Institut de hautes études internationales et du développement (IHEID).

Featured image is from Mike Mozart/Flickr/CC

Part 1 : Another look at the Federal Reserve’s panic in September 2019

You may recall that from 17 September 2019, the United States Federal Reserve injected massive amounts of liquidity into banks due to a quite abnormal situation on the repo market [1]. The repo market designates a mechanism used by banks to obtain short-term financing. They sell securities they hold in repurchase agreements (repo). For example they place US Treasury bonds or Triple-A company securities in repo overnight, to serve as warranty or collateral for the loan they are making, and they buy them back on the following day. In exchange for these securities, they obtain cash at a rate of interest close or equal to the policy interest rate fixed by the Fed which is close to 2% (see the video on the financial channel CNBC).

Who provides the cash for this short-term lending? The lenders are their counterparts on the interbank market [2] or other financial institutions such as Money Market Funds. [3]

From 16 September, there has been a crisis situation: banks financing themselves on the repo market found themselves facing abnormally high interest rates, the interbank market had almost dried up, a situation called credit crunch, in other words banks were not ready to lend one another cash even overnight. Other lenders such as Money Market Funds took advantage of the situation to demand very high returns. While the normal rate was 2%, lenders were demanding up to 10%.

So the big banks knocked at the Fed’s door, asking it to substitute as a lender at rates they would consider normal, that is, about 2%. The Fed hesitated for a moment before massively intervening, in a highly uncertain climate bordering on panic, [4] by injecting over 50 billion dollars of liquidity on 17 September 2019. [5] Thus the Fed acted as a substitute for the markets.

It is striking to note how, among finance commentators of both private and public media, none have pointed out that the markets, which are supposed to be self-regulating, do not actually function as they should. Indeed, the mainstream media, with their strong links to the world of banking and large investment funds, have remained silent about the fact that once again, the public authorities are forced to come to the rescue of big banks and help the market to keep going. After having injected, on 17 September, 53 billion dollars into the banks, substituting for the interbank market and other private lenders, the Fed has made fresh injections of liquidity every day, bringing the amount from the second day on to a daily maximum of 75 billion dollars, then up again to a maximum of 100 billion dollars. On the date of writing, the Fed continues its daily interventions and has announced that it will continue to do so until 4 November at the earliest. (See the televised interview by the Bloomberg agency).

In short, the crisis is still with us. The markets concerned have not returned to ‘normal’. The explanations put forward to justify the Fed’s interventions as ‘one-offs’ – such as a tax bill to be paid by banks at this time of year or the fluctuating price of petroleum due to the closure of two Saudi refineries– cannot explain a situation that has lasted for more than three weeks. Further on we will see that the other explanation produced, namely that liquidity regulations are far too restrictive, is no more convincing but directly serves the interests of the big private banks.

A Paradoxical Situation

As I have repeatedly explained, banks are not short of liquidity… In fact, the Fed has been injecting massive amounts of liquidity into the US banking system since 2008.

The problem then is not a structural lack of liquidity but the use banks make of the liquidity available to them. To put it simply, they use the liquidity placed at their disposal to buy up massive amounts of debt. They buy public bonds guaranteed by States, and especially, in the case of US banks, US Treasury bonds. They also buy massive amounts of bonds issued by major private companies (banks, industrial companies, the information technology and commercial sectors, the extractive sector – mining, oil, and so on). There are two main categories of bonds: low-risk securities issued by Triple-A corporations like Apple on the one hand, which have a relatively low yield, and on the other, junk bonds. These are bonds issued by companies with a bad reputation, that is, a low credit rating (BBB, CCC, and worse). Junk bonds give high yields but are high risk. Banks also buy structured products which may be highly toxic.

The banks’ behaviour is a response to the capitalist logic of making maximum profits in minimum time. Consequently, their managers try to keep as little cash as possible in their coffers as this is money that is ‘sitting idle’ in the bank (just an image) and not yielding any profit. When this happens, banks will buy as many bonds as possible. This is what they see as the best short-term investment. They buy safe bonds (mainly US Treasury bonds) that they can use as collateral to conduct a repo or similar operation in order to get cash to buy junk bonds or other financial products (structured products, derivatives, swaps, and so on) which may produce a high yield.

While the Fed maintains a high level of injection of liquidity on the bank market (by buying from banks the bonds that they bought from the US Treasury or private companies), banks use the liquidity to buy securities of various kinds or in some cases, shares. In short, the money goes round and round in a truly vicious circle. This produces one speculative bubble on the bond market, another on the stock market and a third on the property market. Banks are not investing in the real economy; they lend very little to small and medium-sized companies for investment in production. This action on the part of private banks, supported and actively encouraged by the policies of the Fed (the same happens in Europe with the policies of the ECBand the Bank of England, in Japan with the policies of the Bank of Japan –BoJ, in China with the policies of the China Central Bank) leads to what was first named by the economist J. M. Keynes ‘the liquidity trap’ (see my article).

Does the Fed not see the signals sent by the markets?

Some claim that the Fed does not see the signals coming from the markets. First of all, I consider it dangerous to adopt such a magical sounding concept, one which seems to support the myth that blind market forces make for a successful economy. (See Box: The religion of markets).

The reality, I believe, is more complex. The Fed is perfectly aware that the banks are in a bad way and it is not entirely true that it does not see the signs sent from the markets. On the contrary, what is reprehensible is the way it defers to the markets’ requirements. There have to be radical changes in the policies, missions and the very structure of the central bank.

The Fed knows perfectly well that the wealth of the directors and share-holders of the big private banks has increased while day after day they implement and expand unacceptable procedures; procedures which will soon lead to another brutal crisis. The Fed also knows that the US economy is in a bad way despite Trump’s self-congratulatory discourse and despite a historically low unemployment rate. The low unemployment rate is deceptive and induces a false sense of security as employers, supported by successive governments, have forced workers to accept ever more precarious contracts and ever lower wages. Not only that, but millions of unemployed have given up trying to get unemployment benefit and thus disappeared from unemployment figures. The Fed knows only too well that the allegedly healthy US economy is bolstered up by a mountain of private and public borrowing mainly used for speculation which sooner or later will lead to a major new crisis. Add to this that the growth of production in the United States’ industrial sector has fallen sharply in 2019 and could stagnate, or even shrink, in 2020 (see this). Exports of manufactured goods are falling.

The Fed knows that if it were to raise interest rates and to cease constantly injecting liquidity, certain big companies (including banks) would fail. The Fed knows that if, in the interests of preventing a banking crisis, it were to demand that banks increase the amount of equity and liquidity that they must hold, there would be an outcry. They would make a huge fuss and ask Trump to intervene. So the Fed, meekly albeit reluctantly, complies with the demands of the markets. At present, the markets’ demands are quite clearly those of about fifteen big private US banks (four of which collectively hold $377 billion of cash reserves— they are JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo) and by big investment funds such as BlackRock.

One thing is sure: the current situation of the private financial sector in the US (and elsewhere in the world) is definitely a source of deep concern, otherwise there is no reason for the Fed to have constantly been injecting liquidities since 17 September. [6]

Still, if we want to fight them effectively, we have to understand the expectations and motivations of banks and their allies.

I am convinced that since mid-September 2019 major banks have been trying to use the situation in the US to put pressure on the supervisory authority and on the Fed to lower the ratio of liquidity that is demanded to face most real systemic hazards. Indeed since the 2008 crisis, the supervisory authorities have demanded that systemic banks keep more liquidity compared with what was the case before 2008, to be able to deal with an accident.

Taking advantage of the support of the Trump administration, and making the most of the laxity of the Fed and the supervisory authorities, they are trying to get a lower liquidity ratio. They thus hope to be able to use their liquidity quite legally to buy and speculate on risky financial securities. As a result, the drying up of the interbank market is partly caused and/or maintained by this strategy. As they pursue this objective, they are campaigning in the media to have the public believe that it is this liquidity requirement (to deal with a possible accident of the kind that occurred in September 2008) that makes it hard to find liquidity on the interbank market. They are therefore lobbying the Fed and the supervisory authority to get the surplus liquidity requirement removed.

They managed to get the Trump administration to have the Volcker Rule abrogated from January 2020 onward.

The Volcker Rule is a federal regulation that generally prohibits banks from conducting certain investment activities with their own accounts and limits their dealings with hedge funds and private equity funds, also called covered funds.

The Volcker Rule was introduced in 2013 under Barack Obama’s presidency, in the context of the Dodd-Franck Act, that had been passed in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis. It prohibits banks from speculating with deposit money. A former director of the Federal Reserve, Paul Volcker did not only warn against the versatility of financial markets, he also considered that trading activities distracted banks from their core business, namely financing the economy.

The banks want to go further and question the Liquidity Coverage Ratio [7] (LCR) that was adopted in the US and the rest of the world after the 2008 crisis. The LCR is the requirement whereby banks must hold an amount of high-quality liquid assets sufficient to fund cash outflows for 30 days. Liquidity ratios are similar to the LCR in that they measure a company’s ability to meet its short-term financial obligations.

They also question the percentage of intraday liquidity, which is added to the Liquidity Coverage Ratio. Early every morning around 7 am, banks go to the repo market to make up the liquidity they need to meet their legal obligations. The big banks’ lobby claims that the amount required is too high and that this accounted for the crisis of 17 September 2019. The Financial Times devoted an article to the topic under the suggestive title ‘Fed analyses regulation’s role in sudden rates rise’, published on 2 October in the paper edition, while it had been published on line on the 1^st under the title: ‘Fed wrestles with role of regulation in repo squeeze’. The article cautiously sanctions the US banking lobby’s argument. The European banking lobby expressed the same view concerning the implementation of a liquidity ratio on the old continent and in the UK. A forthcoming article will be devoted to the situation in Europe, and more specifically in connection with the ECB’s intervention under Mario Draghi (2011-2019).

Clearly it cannot be the banks’ obligation to hold enough liquidity to face a possible crisis that led to the shortage of liquidity on the US repo market. The real cause was the banks’ decision to use a maximum of their liquidities to speculate so as to maximize profits for their shareholders and executive officers.

This overview of the banks’ situation would not be complete if we did not draw attention to the risks for society entailed by the ‘financial markets’ and the US repo market. We also have to be aware that merging operations have led to a far more concentrated US banking sector and that competition among banks has sharply decreased since a real oligopoly has emerged: a cartel of banks that exerts a constant pressure on the government for it to develop policies that favour Capital. This cartel is responsible for decisions that run against the interests of the majority of people: enforcing abusive mortgage contracts as was exposed by the subprime crisis and the many ensuing litigations, abusive contracts for student loans (student debt in the US runs to over $1,500 billion and affects 44 million people), tampering with interest rates (Libor), speculating on basic commodities, laundering drug money, investing in activities that contribute to the climate emergency, etc. See a series of articles I published on this topic and which I hope to update in the coming months.

We also have to expose the amount of money paid to banks’ executives and to shareholders. We should again denounce the fact that in spite of several crimes and offences perpetrated by bankers none of them so far has been sentenced to jail and no major bank has had its banking licence withdrawn. Let us take the case of Wells Fargo. This bank, which ranks fourth in the US in terms of stockmarket capitalization and control on the banking market, was allowed to continue operating even though a US court had concluded that its executives had knowingly incited their employees to open 1,300,000 fictitious bank accounts in order to increase the bank’s profits thanks to bank charges levied on each ‘customer’. The bank merely paid a fine. None of its executives was sentenced to jail. [8]

Part 2 : Solutions to the crisis

Let us not wait for the next crisis before we take clear positions on banks and initiate action

The factors that could trigger a new financial crisis on a world scale are present in the US as in other major economies (see this). But it is no good waiting for it to burst before taking action. Beyond attempting to avoid the consequences of another financial crisis, we must put an end to the daily robbery of capitalist banks. We must also radically change the status and mission of the central bank.

We need immediate measures

We have to give the central bank a new mission of granting zero rated loans to governments. Contrary to what is done by the Fed (or the ECB because of EU treaties), a central bank should be able to finance projects initiated by the State or all national and local public bodies (collectivities, hospitals, social housing bodies, etc.) at a zero interest rate so as to carry out socially just policies as part of our struggle against the ecological crisis.

We need a new banking regulation that will impose the following measures: [9]

• significantly increase the banks’ ratio of equity in their balance sheets, which ought to be above 20%;
• implement all necessary measures to force banks to clean up their off-balance sheet commitments including all speculative transactions and all other unsafe transactions that are not in the interest of the community;
• prohibit credit relations between deposit banks and investment banks;
• prohibit securitization; each of the banking activities will thus bear the risk it generates through appropriate regulatory requirements;
• prohibit High Frequency Trading;
• prohibit OTC financial markets;
• prohibit any connection between banking institutions and shadow banking as well as tax and legal havens;
• prohibit the socialization of losses;
• put an end to banking secrecy;
• systematically prosecute managers responsible for financial offences and crimes and withdraw banking licences from institutions that do not respect prohibitions and are guilty of embezzlement;
• establish real financial responsibility of the major shareholders, in particular in the case of bankruptcy. The aim is to restore the unlimited liability of major shareholders so that the cost of their hazardous activities can be recovered from their own assets;
• increase taxation on banks. 
  But this is not enough.

We also need more radical solutions [10]

Because capitalists have demonstrated just how far they are willing to go, taking risks (risks whose consequences they refuse to be held accountable for) and committing crimes for the sole purpose of increasing their profits, because their activities regularly result in heavy costs borne by society as a whole, because the society we want to build must be guided by the pursuit of the common good, social justice and the reconstitution of balanced relations between human beings and the other components of nature, the banking sector must be socializedve demonstrated just how far they are willing to go, taking risks (risks whose consequences they refuse to be held accountable for) and committing crimes for the sole purpose of increasing their profits, because their activities regularly result in heavy costs borne by society as a whole, because the society we want to build must be guided by the pursuit of the common good, social justice and the reconstitution of balanced relations between human beings and the other components of nature, the banking sector must be socialized. As Frédéric Lordon proposes, a ‘total de-privatization of the banking sector’ needs to be carried out. [11]

Liberating citizens and public bodies from the hold of financial markets 

Socializing the banking sector means:

• expropriation without compensation (or compensated by one symbolic euro), of major shareholders (small shareholders will be fully compensated);
• granting a monopoly of banking activities to the public sector, with one single exception: the existence of a small cooperative banking sector (subject to the same fundamental rules as the public sector);
• defining, with citizen participation, a charter covering the goals to be attained and the missions to be carried out and which places the public savings, credit and investment entities at the service of the priorities defined by a democratic planning process;
• transparency in the financial statements, which must be shown to the public in understandable form;
• creating a public service for savings, credit and investment, with a twofold structure: a network of small ‘high street’ branches, on the one hand, and on the other, specialized agencies in charge of those activities of managing funds and financing investments not handled by the ministries in charge of public health, education, energy, public transport, pensions, the environmental transition, etc. These ministries will be provided with the budgets necessary to assure their investments and efficient functioning. The specialized agencies will intervene in areas and activities that are beyond the competence and spheres of action of the ministries in order to ensure that all needs are covered.

Imagine what this means: the end of private banks —that is, once they have been expropriated (and their small shareholders indemnified), their staff would be taken on in the public banking and insurance sectors, with their length of service and pay levels guaranteed (up to authorized maximums, in order to crack down on excessive incomes) and wage increases for the lower paid; and their working conditions would be improved (the end of benchmarking [12] and high pressure selling). New recruits would share the advantages enjoyed by public service employees.

Banks which serve the public

The disparity between big urban agglomerations with a large number of competing bank branches and small towns, rural or poor neighbourhoods with a shortage or lack of branches will be rectified. A comprehensive network of local branches will be developed in order to improve the availability, to the population, of banking, insurance and financial services run by competent employees in a context of public service. Nobody should be refused access to free public banking services.

Local public service agencies will manage the current account and savings account deposits which will be fully guaranteed. The savings will be managed without taking risks. They will be used, under citizens’ control, to finance large-scale local projects and investments aimed at improving the living standards of the population, combating climate change, abandoning nuclear energy, developing local markets, and financing local land development that adheres to strict social and environmental standards. The savers themselves may choose which project or projects they wish their savings be used to support.

The local agencies would grant non-risk loans to individuals, households, small and medium companies and private local structures, associations, local institutions and public administrations. A portion of their resources could be used for projects that have wider than local use, of course in a democratically defined framework.

Banks which serve the community

Local agencies would be managing reasonably sized financial portfolios. This would allow a high level of control of all the elements of the financial markets; objectives, programmes and repayment schedules would be made clearly understandable making it easier to monitor the different actors.

Local projects would be financed under the best conditions of democratic participation.

Local agencies would also have the possibility of offering insurance services to the public and to companies.

Support the transition towards a social, sustainable and ecological economy

The ministries for health, education, energy, public transport, pensions and the ecological transition – to name but a few – would also have development funds from the State budget at their disposal.

Specialized transversal agencies would intervene to coordinate projects involving several ministries and interested parties. Their job would be to carry out specific or cross-cutting missions with citizen participation, like the programme to completely abandon nuclear power, including long term treatment of nuclear waste.

The socialized banking sector will make it possible to recover a virtuous circle of public financing: public bodies will issue securities bought by public services beyond the grasp of financial markets.

Many aspects of this project still need to be elaborated. We are in the preparatory phase of a completely new system. This work will require ambitious collective efforts to bring together ideas and suggestions. This is only the beginning.

Citizens’ control at all levels

Citizens’ control of banks means control by an instance comprising the employees, customers, local elected representatives, representatives of small, medium sized and micro companies, the self-employed and local associations’ delegates. And of course banking oversight authorities.

The word ‘socialization’ is used in preference to ‘nationalization’ or ‘state ownership’ to make clear the essential role of citizen oversight, with decision-making shared between directors, personnel representatives, clients, non-profit associations, local officials and representatives of the national and regional public banking entities. How that active citizen oversight will be exercised will need to be defined by democratic means. Similarly, the exercise of oversight over the banks’ activities by workers in the banking sector and their active participation in the organization of the work must be encouraged. Bank administrators must issue an annual public report on their clear and transparent stewardship. Preference must be given to local, quality service, breaking with the policies of externalization currently being pursued. The personnel of financial establishments must be encouraged to provide the customers with authentic counselling and to have done with current aggressive sales policies.

Socializing the banking and insurance sectors into public services will make it possible

• for citizens and public authorities to escape the influence of the financial markets;
• to finance citizens’ and public authorities’ projects;
• to dedicate the activity of banking to the common good, with among its missions that of facilitating the transition from a capitalist, production-intensive economy to a social, sustainable and environment-friendly economy.

Because currency, savings, credit, borrowing, security of deposits and the preservation of the integrity of payment systems are matters of general interest, we recommend that a public banking service be created by socializing all the firms in the banking and insurance sectors.

Because banks are today an essential tool of the capitalist system and of a mode of production that is ransacking our planet, generating unequal distribution of its resources, creating wars and impoverishment, eroding, little by little, social rights and attacking democratic institutions and practices, it is essential to take control of them so that they become tools placed at the service of the community.

Socializing the banking sector cannot be conceived of as a mere slogan or demand, sufficient unto itself, and which decision-makers would put into practice once they had understood why it makes sense. It must be seen as a political goal to be reached through a process driven by a citizens’ movement. Not only is it necessary for existing organized social movements (including trade unions) to place it at the top of their agenda and for the different sectors (local government bodies, small and medium companies, consumer associations, etc.) to adopt the same position, but also – and above all – for bank employees to be brought to an awareness of the role played by their profession and the fact that it would be in their interest for banks to be socialized; and for bank users to be informed at the point of use (for example, through coordinated occupation of bank branches everywhere on the same day) so that they can participate directly in defining exactly what a bank should be.

Socializing the banking sector and relying on popular support are the necessary conditions for a change in depth

Only very large-scale mobilization can guarantee that socialization of the banking sector can actually be achieved in practice, because it is a measure that strikes at the very heart of the capitalist system. If a government of the Left does not take such a measure, its action will not be able to truly bring about the radical change needed to break with the logic of the capitalist system and bring about a new process of emancipation.

Liberating the banking sector from the hold of private capital through socialization is an unavoidable condition for the implementation of an economic programme that breaks away from capitalism and its logic.

At this point in history, socialization of the entire banking system is an urgent economic, social, political and democratic necessity.

Socializing the banking and insurance sectors is a key element in a much broader project including other measures which make it possible to trigger a transition to a post-capitalist and post-productivist model. Such a programme should have an international dimension even if it is at first only implemented in only one country or a small number of countries. It would include abandoning austerity policies, radically re-orienting the mission of the central bank, cancelling illegitimate public and private debts, setting up overall tax reform with heavy taxation of capital, reducing working hours with compensatory hiring and maintaining wage levels, socializing the energy, water and health sectors, measures for ensuring gender parity, development of public services and social benefits and the implementation of a strongly determined ecological transition policy.

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Translated by Vicki Briault and Christine Pagnoulle

This article was originally published on CADTM.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France. He is the author of Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc. He co-authored World debt figures 2015 with Pierre Gottiniaux, Daniel Munevar and Antonio Sanabria (2015); and with Damien Millet Debt, the IMF, and the World Bank: Sixty Questions, Sixty Answers, Monthly Review Books, New York, 2010. Since the 4^th April 2015 he is the scientific coordinator of the Greek Truth Commission on Public Debt.

Notes

Exactly two weeks after announcing a thousand US troops would be withdrawn from northeastern Syria with a portion relocated to Syria’s Jordanian and Israeli borders and others sent to Iraq, US President Donald Trump announced on Sunday plans to keep US soldiers in Syria to “secure” oil fields. President Trump even mentioned that he intended to make a deal with ExxonMobil or another company to go in there and do it “properly”, that the goal would be to “spread the wealth” from “massive amounts of oil”. With 500 US troops, Trump also said if need be, they would fight for the oil.

It’s truly amazing that the leader of a superpower would be so honest and transparent about his overly arrogant and entirely illegal aspirations to pillage and plunder a sovereign foreign nation. Publicly stating in advance and with abundant clarity, the violations he is prepared to commit on the world stage.

There no longer exists a need for Washington’s intentions to be hidden under a cloak of morality by claiming that their actions are intended to protect their nation’s security by allegedly fighting terrorism. Or that its “heroic” ambitions are to spread democracy and liberty for all, one bomb at a time. Or that their purely humanitarian motivations to save babies from being thrown out of incubators or kitten sanctuaries by being barrel bombed by ruthless dictators are entirely warranted and that these threats do in fact exist. There’s no need to continue using these fabricated recycled pretexts because by now the vast majority of people understand that fairytales have more truth to them.

People are waking up to the fact that the most rampant of war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed by the most powerful nations including the United States, France, Canada, Germany, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Turkey, and other members of the UN and NATO. For many decades vulnerable nations have been attacked so that larger and more powerful nations can grow and thrive.

Make no mistake, Pirate Trump wants to seize, pillage, and outright steal a sovereign nation’s oil, just two weeks after clearly stating he was ready for the majority of US troops to leave Syria. At that point he had wanted the nations in the region to work out their own problems and no longer have the US acting as the “world police” he wanted to stop the hemorrhaging of funds to the tune of over eight trillions of dollars which has been spent on endless wars in the Middle East.

Trump seemed entirely uninterested in getting involved in any further confrontations between the Kurdish militias and NATO ally Turkey in northeastern Syria. Trump was even approving of the Turkish-Russian agreement which was negotiated on the same day that the 120-hour ceasefire ended between the Kurdish militias and Turkish forces. So much so that he took all the credit for de-escalating the situation and supposedly saving the lives of Kurds. Trump even lifted sanctions on Turkey after they discontinued their “Operation Peace Spring”, the third cross border military operation to push back Kurdish militias from their borders in as many years.

Trump’s honesty in this case is refreshing especially after dealing with Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama who used his charisma to sell war to the masses. Here’s a guy that didn’t let a single day go by where he wasn’t bombing at least a few out of the seven countries he ended up destroying during his eight years in office, and yet he was and continues to be praised like he’s some sort of saint, totally neglecting all the death and destruction that he is responsible for.

Trump hasn’t necessarily started any new wars, war hawks around him pushed for “regime change” in Venezuela and Iran and were pushing for war with North Korea, but thankfully nothing came to fruition, unfortunately he is still bombing five of the seven nations.

Why does Trump want Syria’s oil? Trump thinks there was a missed opportunity in Iraq, and that previous administrations were foolish for not “taking the oil” after bombing third world countries back to the stone age. One has to wonder whether he understands the legal ramifications of his actions, were they explained to him? Was a plan even drawn out or was he given advice that could land him in hot water?

Another reason for this newfound obsession with controlling or “securing” Syrian oil fields is that the Kurdish militias and in turn Israel would benefit. Kurdish militias in both Iraq and Syria have been selling oil to Israel for cheap for years, in addition to sharing intelligence.

Before Trump continues to violate international laws, treaties, Geneva conventions and even the very same military authorization from Congress that was used to enter Syria, by trying to expropriate Syrian oil by pillaging it, it might be a good idea for him to understand that Syria’s oil isn’t the vast amounts he envisions, it’s barely enough to help get the country back in order.

During the war production significantly decreased and is barely enough to run the country. The US has absolutely no right to be let alone take any of Syria’s oil. If anything, the US should offer to repair, at no cost, the oil fields it has destroyed with its illegal airstrikes.

The excuse that the US is protecting the oil fields from ISIS is also bogus. Especially since Trump claims he has destroyed 100% of their territorial caliphate and just killed their leader Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, which is still debatable since we have nothing to go off other than Trump’s words.

When deciding between a military confrontation to restore rightful ownership of the oil fields currently occupied by US and Kurdish forces and fomenting a united resistance front by restoring patriotism to counter aggressors and occupiers, the Syrian state prefers the latter.

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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. Focused on exposing the lies and propaganda in mainstream media news, as it relates to domestic and foreign policy with an emphasis on the Middle East. Contributed to various radio shows, news publications and spoken at forums. For media inquiries please email [email protected].

Featured image is from InfoBrics

It gets funny, this shallow analysis of the deep state that is currently big news.  There’s something ghoulish about it, perfectly timed for Halloween and masked jokers.  What was once ridiculed by the CIA and its attendant lackeys in the media as the paranoia of “conspiracy theorists” is now openly admitted in reverent tones of patriotic fervor.  But with a twisted twist.

The corporate mass-media has recently discovered a “deep state” that they claim to be not some evil group of assassins who work for the super-rich owners of the country and murder their own president (JFK) and other unpatriotic dissidents (Malcom X, MLK, RK, among others) and undermine democracy home and abroad, but are now said to be just fine upstanding American citizens who work within the government bureaucracies and are patriotic believers in democracy intent on doing the right thing.

This redefinition has been in the works for a few years, and it shouldn’t be a surprise that this tricky treat was being prepared for our consumption a few years ago by The Council on Foreign Relations.  In its September/October 2017 edition of its journal Foreign Affairs, Jon D. Michaels, in “Trump and the Deep State: The Government Strikes Back,” writes:

Furious at what they consider treachery by internal saboteurs, the president and his surrogates have responded by borrowing a bit of political science jargon, claiming to be victims of the “deep state,” a conspiracy of powerful, unelected bureaucrats secretly pursuing their own agenda. The concept of a deep state is valuable in its original context, the study of developing countries such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Turkey, where shadowy elites in the military and government ministries have been known to countermand or simply defy democratic directives. Yet it has little relevance to the United States, where governmental power structures are almost entirely transparent, egalitarian, and rule-bound.

The White House is correct to perceive widespread resistance inside the government to many of its endeavors. But the same way the administration’s media problems come not from “fake news” but simply from news, so its bureaucratic problems come not from an insidious, undemocratic “deep state” but simply from the state—the large, complex hive of people and procedures that constitute the U.S. federal government.

Notice how in these comical passages about U.S. government transparency and egalitarianism, Michaels slyly and falsely attributes to Trump the very definition – “unelected bureaucrats” – that in the next paragraph he claims to be the real deep state, which is just the state power structures. Pseudo-innocence conquers all here as there is no mention of the Democratic party, Russiagate, etc., and all the machinations led by the intelligence services and Democratic forces to oust Trump from the day he was elected.  State power structures just move so quickly, as anyone knows who has studied the speed with which bureaucracies operate. Ask Max Weber.

Drip by drip over the past few years, this “state bureaucracy” meme has been introduced by the mainstream media propagandists as they have gradually revealed that the government deep-staters are just doing their patriotic duty in trying openly to oust an elected president.

Many writers have commented on the recent New York Times article, Trump’s War on the ‘Deep State’ Turns Against Him” asserting that the Times has finally admitted to the existence of the deep state, which is true as far as it goes, which is not too far. But in this game of deceptive revelations – going shallower to go deeper – what is missing is a focus on the linguistic mind control involved in the changed definition.

In a recent article by Robert W. Merry, whose intentions I am not questioning – “New York Times Confirms: It’s Trump Versus the Deep State”– originally published at The American Conservative and widely reprinted, the lead-in to the article proper reads: “Even the Gray Lady admits the president is up against a powerful bureaucracy that wants him sunk.”  So the “powerful bureaucracy” redefinition, this immovable force of government bureaucrats, is slipped into public consciousness as what the deep state supposedly is.  Gone are CIA conspirators and evil doers. In their place we find career civil servants doing their patriotic duty.

Then there is The New York Times’ columnist James Stewart who, appearing on the Today Show recently, where he was promoting his new book, told Savannah Guthrie that:

Well, you meet these characters in my book, and the fact is, in a sense, he’s [Trump] right. There is a deep state…there is a bureaucracy in our country who has pledged to respect the Constitution, respect the rule of law. They do not work for the President. They work for the American people. And, as Comey told me in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’ because they are protecting the Constitution and the people when individuals – we don’t have a monarch, we don’t have a dictator – they restrain them from crossing the boundaries of law. What Trump calls the deep state in the United States is protecting the American people and protecting the Constitution. It’s a positive thing in this sense.

So again we are told that the deep-state bureaucracy is defending the Constitution and protecting the American people, as James Comey told Stewart, “in my book, ‘thank goodness for that,’” as he put it so eloquently. These guys talk in books, of course, not person to person, but that is the level not just of English grammar and general stupidity, but of the brazen bullshit these guys are capable of.

This new and shallow deep state definition has buried the old meaning of the deep state as evil conspirators carrying out coup d’états, assassinations, and massive media propaganda campaigns at home and abroad, and who, by implication and direct declaration, never existed in the good old U.S.A. but only in countries such as Egypt, Turkey, and Pakistan where shadowy elites killed and deposed leaders and opponents in an endless series of coup d’états.  No mention in Foreign Affairs, of course, of the American support for the ruthless leaders of these countries who have always been our dear allies when they obey our every order and serve as our servile proxies in murder and mayhem.

Even Edward Snowden, the courageous whistleblower in exile in Russia, in a recent interview with Joe Rogan, repeats this nonsense when he says the deep state is just “career government officials” who want to keep their jobs and who outlast presidents.  From his own experience, he should know better.  Much better.  Interestingly, he suggests that he does when he tells Rogan that “every president since Kennedy” has been successfully “feared up” by the intelligence agencies so they will do their bidding.  He doesn’t need to add that JFK, for fearlessly refusing the bait, was shot in the head in broad daylight to send a message to those who would follow.

Linguistic mind control is insidious like the slow drip of a water faucet. After a while you don’t hear it and just go about your business, even as your mind, like a rotting rubber washer, keeps disintegrating under propaganda’s endless reiterations.

To think that the deep state is government employees just doing their patriotic duty is plain idiocy and plainer propaganda.

It is a trick, not the treat it is made to seem.

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

Bolivia has recently had a presidential election that without foreign interference would have passed without notice outside Latin America. President Evo Morales was re-elected democratically to a forth term without the need of a run-off election with incumbent Carlos Mesa, which shows his strength as the chosen candidate. However, nine days after the elections the Foreign Ministry of the Canadian government issues a statement expressing “concern” about “reports of serious election irregularities.”

We are used to expecting that kind of political position towards a popular left-leaning government from the US, which in fact has not recognised the Morales elections yet. But why is Canada so adamant in questioning the Bolivian election in the face of weak evidence of so-called irregularities?

To start, it is important to establish that US and Canada’s involvement in the region is very well coordinated. In 2017 Ottawa and Washington formed an association that “called on [the two governments] to take economic measures against Venezuela.” The focus on Venezuela should not hide the reality of the mandate, which is to produce a regime change wherever leftist governments are present, albeit Venezuela is at the top of the list. This is an association based on common ideology to be carried out with a division of tactical labour: Canada uses its “soft power” while the US hits with its brute financial force.

For instance, while the US government is punishing Venezuela with a severe economic and financial blockade, Canada’s “job” has been instrumental in subverting the progressive support base in the region to the extent of even breaking the strong Cuba-Venezuela friendship. Canada has become the self-appointed “leader” within the OAS, an organisation that gathers mostly Latin American and Caribbean countries; only Canada and the US are not from those geographical areas.

Under the direction of Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland from 2017, Canadian foreign policy seems to have taken an overt pro-corporation approach with a strong pro-neoliberal ideology. She came to that office from being Minister of International Trade where she would have heard many “complains” of lost business in Venezuela from Canadian mining corporations, which are nevertheless questioned in some cases.

With that background and reputation she helped create the so-called Lima Group of a dozen mostly Latin American rightwing governments some of which have appalling records of human rights violations and of breaking the institutional order (Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and Paraguay among others).

Therefore Canada is a willing partner of US sponsored Color Revolutions that are taking place in Latin America by omission or by commission.

While the ongoing recent unrest that we observe in Ecuador, Chile and Bolivia manifest the same sentiments of rebellion and indeed desire for regime change, not all Revolutions are created equal. Ecuador and Chile have rightwing conservative neoliberal governments, the kind that are supported by the Canadian regime, unlike Bolivia.

It is imperative to pay attention to the political alignment and interests of the major geopolitical players to be able to discern, more that the methods, the goal of the intended change. Canada, which has been called The Empire’s Shadowy Cousin, has decidedly engaged in delegitimising the Nicolas Maduro government in Venezuela because as we previously reported Canada is bound to gain a large “prize” in mining resources if it manages to oust Maduro.

In the case of Bolivia the main trade interest also seems to be in mining. In 2017 Canadian imports totaled $274.35 million (mainly in mineral ores, metals and precious stones and vegetables). But this has to be weighed vis-a-vis Bolivia’s claim on “Sovereignty over natural resources” as one of its pillars established in the Economic and Social Development Plan 2016-2020, which states,

“The strategic sectors of hydrocarbons and mining are the cornerstones of the Plurinational State of Bolivia economy as a result of the nationalization process and because of the role of the State in the administration of these strategic resources owned by the Bolivian people.”

To the ears of neoliberal politicians this must sound like outright socialism.

In conclusion, the claim of election “irregularities” may just be Canada’s public (readily unverifiable) excuse for more political interests. In fact, at the time of writing the OAS has accepted an invitation by the Morales government to audit the election results. If there should be any proven irregularity a second round of vote is proposed. The findings should be binding by both sides. However the political damage has already been done because the opposition has declared that will only accept a new election.

What has been a crass irregularity and interference is the public statement by the OAS Mission of election observers that overstepped its mandate by issuing “preliminary conclusions” calling for a second round before the vote count was completed.

It is important to recognise that Canadian involvement in the region has a dangerous and questionable implication as suggested by its actions in Bolivia’s elections.

The application of sanctions or public statements, propagating unwarranted false or misleading information with the sole intention of countering the resurgence of countries’ chosen socialist governments that are opposed to neoliberal austerity policies in Latin America, is a provocation against the sovereignty of those countries and their established social order. This is clearly the case towards Venezuela, and Canada is now attempting to include Bolivia by using similar language in casting “doubt over the legitimacy of the [electoral] results.”

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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and freelance writer based in Vancouver. He is a retired researcher from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who follows and writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is the editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” (2014). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

For several days in a row, an intense fighting is ongoing between the Syrian Army and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham near the town of Kbanah in the southern part of the Idlib de-escalation zone.

Pro-militant sources claim that the Syrian Army carried out several attempts to advance in the area, but failed and lost at least 2 battle tanks and several other pieces of military equipment. Pro-government sources say that the clashes were a result of ceasefire violations by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its al-Qaeda linked allies.

Artillery strikes on fortified positions of militants were also reported to the west of the M5 highway, near Jabala.

Watch the video here.

Tensions continue growing around the Turkish-occupied town of Ras al-Ayn in northeastern Syria. Clashes between the Syrian Army and Turkish-backed forces erupted in the villages of Tal Abu Rasin, Arab Khan, Soda and Manajeer. Turkish Leopard battle tanks shelled army positions.

Up to 20 Syrian soldiers were captured by Turkish-backed forces in these clashes. At least one of them was executed on the site. Joint Turkish-Russian patrols are yet to be launched. The Russian Defense Ministry says that the Military Police conducts patrols around Manbij, Kobani, and western and east of Qamishly. The area, to the south from Ras al-Ayn, remains unsafe.

According to pro-Kurdish sources, Turkey and its proxies are aiming to capture the town of Tell Tamir. If Ankara and Moscow undertake no needed actions to put an end to the violation of the ceasefire regime, the town’s countryside may turn into a battleground.

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Thailand’s opposition faces sedition charges after conducting a seminar in Thailand’s troubled deep south where they recommended amending the Thai constitution and paving way for the nation’s territorial division.

Thailand’s English language newspaper The Nation in an article titled, “Army’s sedition charges against opposition, academics ‘could aggravate southern conflict’,” would report (my emphasis):

On Thursday, sedition charges were pressed against 12 people, including six key opposition party leaders and academics who have been campaigning to amend the charter. The group held a seminar in Pattani on September 28. Speaking at the event Chalita Bandhuwong, a lecturer at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Faculty of Social Sciences at Kasetsart University, called for the amendment of Section 1 and said the current Constitution could not resolve the prolonged political violence in the deep South. Section 1 states that Thailand is one and an indivisible Kingdom.

Predictably leaping to the accused’s defence is a familiar collection of US-funded fronts posing as human rights advocates. Citing “free speech,” these fronts ignore the fact that even in the Western nations sponsoring their daily activities, calls for a nation’s division and destruction is not protected as “free speech” any more than the violence and terrorism used to answer such calls falls under “freedom of expression.”

Thailand’s opposition lost recent elections with billionaire fugitive Thaksin Shinawatra’s Phue Thai Party (PTP) losing the popular vote to the military-linked Palang Pracharath Party (PPRP). Coming in distant third was nepotist billionaire Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit and his Future Forward Party (FFP) which includes among its ranks staff drawn from US government funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations.

While Future Forward campaigned as being distant and even opposed to Thaksin’s Pheu Thai, Thanathorn and his party literally campaigned side-by-side with Pheu Thai and now jointly acts with Pheu Thai on every issue, including at the above mentioned seminar, revealing it as little more than a poorly disguised subsidiary of Thaksin’s political machine.

Divide and Conquer Across Asia 

Divide and conquer is a tried and tested tool of empire. It was expertly used by the Romans over two millenia ago, perfected by the British Empire more recently and is eagerly used by its Transatlantic heirs in Washington today.

Across Asia, separatism and the division and destruction that often accompanies it can be seen working its way through various nations of the continent. China in particular faces multiple fronts seeking to carve out territory at Beijing’s expense.

US-funded agitators in Hong Kong have demanded independence from China under threat of burning the special administrative region to the ground if their demands are not met.

In western China, US-Saudi funded extremists seek to carve the Xinjiang region out of China’s borders and create a new nation they and their Washington sponsors call “East Turkestan.”

Tibet has also weathered decades of US-funded sedition stretching back to the 1950s.

China’s closest allies in Asia also face growing political conflict stirred up by US National Endowment for Democracy (NED) funded fronts.

Cambodia has been working diligently to uproot US NED-funded networks from its streets, airwaves and across its information space online.

Thailand’s entire opposition divides its time between carrying out NED-funded campaigns in the streets and clicking wine glasses together with US and European diplomats within the halls of their lavish embassies.

Though Vietnam is not a close ally of China’s, it faces similar interference from Washington in its internal political affairs. In addition to facing down opposition groups funded and directed from overseas, it is working to displace the unwarranted and eagerly abused monopoly US-based social media firms hold over its information space by creating domestic alternatives, as reported previously.

Thailand’s Opposition Wades into Separatism Waters 

Thailand’s opposition in particular has a history of extreme violence. Thaksin, between 2009 and 2010, organised street mobs which carried out attacks, arson and armed insurrection using war weapons claiming nearly 100 lives and causing billions in damage.

In the past, links have also been uncovered between Thaksin’s political party and his violent street fronts with militants operating out of Thailand’s deep south.

Thailand’s deep south is the scene of a bloody multi-year terror campaign carried out by separatists who seek to carve off the Kingdom’s 3 southern most provinces of Pattani, Yala and Narathiwat.

After a 20-year period of peace, Thaksin’s administration which held power from 2001 to 2006 reignited the conflict through heavy-handed policies seemingly designed to purposefully trigger a crisis. Since then, the conflict has become a favorite pressure point of Thaksin’s and his political allies seeking to undermine the current Thai government, its military as well as the nation’s unity and stability.

This is also a goal shared by Thaksin’s US sponsors.
Ties between Thaksin’s networks and the deep south conflict have been revealed by the US Embassy itself through leaked communications.

A classified 2009 US diplomatic cable titled, “Southern Violence: Midday Bomb Attack in Narathiwat August 25 Meant to Send a Signal,” released by Wikileaks, reveals that the US Embassy maintained contact with an individual associated with militants in the deep south, claiming (my emphasis):

Insurgents did confirm to a close embassy contact late August 25 that they had carried out the attack, intended as a signal for Buddhists to leave the deep south. With local elections scheduled for September 6 and a string of election-related acts of violence occurring in recent weeks, however, not all deep south violence is automatically insurgency related.

The cable would reveal that Sunai Phasuk, of foreign-funded Human Rights Watch, is their “contact” who regularly speaks with militants.

The US Embassy then admits that Thaksin’s political forces are also likely operating in the south, using the conflict as cover:

The posting of the anti-Queen banners on her birthday, a national holiday, was both unusual and significant, but the fact that the banners were professionally printed on vinyl, written in perfect central Thai rather than the local Malay dialect, and touched on issues which don’t resonate in the south suggests those behind it were not local but national actors. Most in the know blame the red-shirts seeking to take advantage of inaction in the mosque attack case to undermine the Queen in particular and the monarchy in general.

The US Embassy cable would also admit (my emphasis):

Yala Vice-Governor Gritsada appeared surprised when we mentioned these banners to him on August 19, but he confirmed that the banners were written in perfect central Thai and mentioned issues that do not resonate down south, like the blue diamond. Gritsada said Pranai Suwannarat, the director of the Southern Border Provinces Administrative Center (SBPAC) had agreed these banners were the likely work of the UDD, not the insurgents. Sunai told us that the widespread presence of the banners indicates the strong organization and funding available to the UDD in Pattani province.

With this in mind, this most recent seminar and the opposition’s suggestion of amending the constitution and giving hope to armed terrorists that their demands may be one day met, at the very least encourages militants to continue or even expand their campaign of violence.

Alternatively, it provides further evidence of collusion between Thailand’s US-backed opposition and violent terrorism in the nation’s deep south.

The highly irresponsible actions of the opposition is no accident. It fits well into the wider regional pattern of Western-sponsored divide and conquer where protests and violence are a favorite tool of Western interests seeking to coerce or oust political circles obstructing Western primacy across Asia.

Considering the US role in facilitating the very worst forms of armed terrorism in nations like Libya during the overthrow of the government there in 2011 and in Syria from 2011 to present day, there is nothing far-fetched at all about the notion of the US seeking to do so in Asia as well.

For example, while Hong Kong opposition leader Joshua Wong tours Washington D.C., the protesters he represents and seeks additional US support for are burning subway stations, attacking storefronts and pummeling bystanders who refuse to join their campaign of self-destruction in Hong Kong’s streets.

The fact that Thailand’s opposition is backed by the US government and demonstratably seeking to exasperate terrorism in Thailand’s deep south serves as proof that a similar game is being played there.

How Thailand’s government handles this, only time will tell. This move made by the opposition will likely prove highly unpopular even among the opposition’s own supporters. It appears to be an act of desperation by an increasingly unpopular opposition who recently lost elections and faces dissolution for a whole host of alleged improprieties in addition to these more recent sedition charges.

Roman and British divide and conquer worked well until it didn’t anymore. An inflection point where a targeted nation becomes just strong enough while the empire targeting it declines to just the right point allows nations and even regions to finally escape the corrosive impact of foreign-fuelled sedition and separatism.

In addition to confronting sedition directly, nations like Thailand must also continue working on factors that affect the arrival of that inflection point sooner rather than later.

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Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. 

Featured image is from NEO

At first glance, it would appear to be a businessman’s plan to plunder the profits of Syria, and he has quoted profits expected and even ear-marked the profits to support the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who are a Syrian Kurdish militia who had been on the US payroll as mercenaries in the past fight against ISIS.

The oil production facility at Deir Ez Zor is destroyed, and incapable of production or generating profits.  The Syrian oil ministry was producing oil there in 2011, eventually the Al Qaeda branch in Syria, Jibhat al Nusra, over-ran the place, and began a period of stealing the oil and smuggling it to Turkey, where Bilal Erdogan, son of President Erdogan, handled the black-market oil and re-sold it to European customers, with the profits going to the Erdogan family privately. Erdogan sought to legitimatize the source of the oil, by using the term “Syrian Opposition”.

ISIS then burst onto the scene, and captured the place from their enemy Jibhat al Nusra; however, the smuggling business and Erdogan partnership continued uninterrupted.  During the US Coalition airstrikes on ISIS targets in Syria, the location had numerous direct hits, which left the facility destroyed and inoperable, and by 2017 was in the hands of SDF. Russia was invited by the Syrian government to enter Syria militarily in late September 2015.  By October Russian air force had begun striking ISIS convoys of tanker trucks carrying smuggled oil to Turkey. This action was one of the main causes of ISIS’s defeat.

In 2008 Syria’s production ranked globally #43 in gas and #31 in oil.  Experts suggest the current losses to the Syrian energy production are over $62 billion. There are oil and gas fields scattered all over Syria, and many are in the northeastern section which is currently a conflict-zone.  The SDF alongside a very small contingent of US troops had been in control of the northeast of Syria, but recently Trump surprised many when he ordered a total withdrawal of US troops in the area, ahead of a Turkish invasion named “Operation Peace Spring”, which was more about war than peace.  For years, Erdogan had complained to Trump that the SDF were armed terrorists aligned with the PKK, who have killed over 40,000 people in Turkey over 30 years of terrorism.

Trump did not condone the Erdogan invasion of Syria, or the heavy-handed attack on Kurds, including unarmed civilians.  Erdogan was using Syrian mercenaries who had formerly fought in the ranks of Jibhat al Nusra and ISIS, while the US-NATO plan for ‘regime-change’ was being waged against President Assad, which had been formulated and supported by President Obama, and almost every leader of the ‘free’ world.

The US occupation of the oil production facility at Deir Ez Zor is strategic for the US, and EU foreign policy on Syria, which depends on sanctions to keep the Syrian civilians and government from importing any necessary supplies to repair and re-build Syria, now that the war is over.  Syrians are prevented from importing oil due to the sanctions, and without oil, the country cannot re-build. If the Syrian oil production facilities were to be in the hands of the legal owners, the Syrian Ministry of Oil, then repairs could be carried out and Syria would no longer need to import oil, and they could go back to being energy sufficient, as they were before 2011.

Russian Defense Ministry, Maj. Gen. Igor Konashenkov spoke about satellite images in Syria which show the extent of past US involvement in the oil smuggling business, which was conducted with the Kurds using a US company “Sadcab”, and the profits were funneled through US private military contractors.

It is, therefore, of the utmost strategic importance for the US to keep its foot in the door, and prevent being shut-out.  Trump acted too quickly in withdrawing troops, and without consulting the authors of the US foreign policy on Syria, which many analysts agree is written in Tel Aviv.  He then corrected the course by ordering the troops and tanks to occupy the Deir Ez Zor oil facility.

The US occupation of the Deir Ez Zor oil production facility is about politics, not economics.  Trump is the author of “The Art of the Deal”, and his end-game may be about using the Deir Ez Zor card as a bargaining chip.  The main reason for the US-NATO attack on Syria, beginning in 2011, was to take control of the oil and gas fields in the Mediterranean Sea off the coast of Syria, and to control the route of oil/gas pipelines through Syria, and to prevent Russia from being involved; however, Russia was able to thwart the plan.

Trump inherited the war in Syria, which the US lost.  The future of Syria includes roles by Russia, Iran, Iraq, and China.  The US backed the Muslim Brotherhood, and their allies in Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, which ended up to be the losing ticket in the horse race.

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This article was originally published on Mideast Discourse.

Steven Sahiounie is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In response to US President Donald Trump‘s personal triumphalism over the slaying by US forces of Daesh’s leader, Kurdish militia Commander Mazloum Abdi tweeted,

“For five months there has been joint intel cooperation on the ground and accurate monitoring, until we achieved a joint operation to kill Abu Baker Al Baghdadi. Thanks to everybody who participated in this great mission.”

Abdi followed up this message by tweeting on Monday that Baghdadi’s senior aide Abu Hassan Al Mouhajir “was targeted in a village named Ein Al Baat near Jarablous city, the mission was conducted via direct coordination of [Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces] & US military [as part of] ongoing ops to hunt [Daesh] leaders”. Another Kurdish official subsequently revealed that the Kurds had a spy in Baghdadi’s compound in northwestern Syria when US troops arrived in eight helicopters to kill him.

The tweets and the revelation of the spy are tragic for several reasons. First and foremost, they reveal cooperation between the US and Kurdish intelligence agents had been taking place for “five months” before the US killed Baghdadi on October 26. This had continued despite Trump’s October 6th betrayal of the Kurds when he decided to pull out US troops from northeastern Syria and permit Ankara to occupy a wide strip of Syrian territory along the Turkish border.

On October 9, Ankara sent troops, surrogate Syrian militiamen and tanks into a 30-kilometre-wide, 120-kilometre-long zone stretching from the border town of Tal Abyad to Ras Al Ain, where Kurdish fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) fought the Turkish invaders. More than 300,000 Kurdish civilians were driven from this zone after being shelled, shot, beaten and sexually assaulted.

Second, the New York Times reported the day after Baghdadi’s demise that Trump knew of the CIA special operations plan to kill Daesh’s leader months before he announced his intention of withdrawing US troops from northeastern Syria. He fully intended to leave the SDF and Kurdish civilians exposed to a Turkish onslaught.

The New York Times article by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Julian Barnes also revealed that Trump’s “abrupt withdrawal order… disrupted the meticulous planning underway and forced Pentagon officials to speed up the plan for the risky night raid before their ability to control troops, spies and reconnaissance aircraft disappeared with the pullout”. Therefore, Baghdadi’s death in the raid, officials told the authors of the article, “occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, …Trump’s actions”.

His actions, they wrote, “put commanders on the ground under even more pressure to carry out the complicated operation” for which planning had begun in summer when the CIA received information that Baghdadi had settled in a village in Idlib province dominated by Hay’at Tahrir Al Sham, the deadly rival of Daesh. “The Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, one [US] official said, provided more intelligence for the raid than any single country.” Trump mentioned the Kurds after thanking Russia, Syria and Turkey for allowing the US hit team to use airspace they controlled.

Third, Kurdish forces, which took part in the March assault on Daesh’s last redoubt, the town of Baghouz in southeastern Syria, handed over captive fighters to US and British intelligence agents, who de-briefed them and secured information that led to the raid that killed Baghdadi.

Fourth, the US helicopters and support aircraft, reportedly, took off from an air base near Irbil in the autonomous Iraqi Kurdish region. The Pentagon did not dare to go in from Turkey and the main US base in western Iraq is too far away.

In his press statement on the operation, the inconstant Trump said,

“The Kurds have worked along incredibly with us, but, in all fairness, it was much easier dealing with the Kurds after they went through three days of fighting, because that was a brutal three days.”

This was an outright lie. The Kurds were providing intelligence of Baghdadi’s location and movements from the time it was discovered he was in Idlib, more than four months before Trump decided to pull out US troops from the Syrian-Turkish border area.

These words were a pathetic attempt to justify his betrayal by saying that after they suffered attack by Turkey’s far larger and better armed forces, the Kurds were more cooperative. They should have halted their collaboration on October 6, pulled their agent out of Baghdadi’s compound and urged their Kurdish brothers in Iraq to cease cooperation.

Without the Kurdish component of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) there would have been no ground troops to fight Daesh in Syria. The US-led effort consisted of warplanes to bomb the taqfiris in their capital Raqqa and elsewhere. At least 11,000 Democratic Forces fighters, the majority Kurds, died in the campaign to root out Daesh in Syria. Kurds continue to mount operations against Daesh remnants despite Trump’s abandonment to the tender mercies of Turks intent on ethnic cleansing and grabbing land in northeastern Syria.

As far as the Kurds are concerned, Trump has added insult to injury by reconsidering his decision to withdraw all US troops from Syria. Having pulled out 1,000 who had been deployed along the Syrian-Turkish border and prevented the Turkish invasion, Trump has decided to retain several hundred at Tanf in Syria’s southeast and to deploy more in Deir Al Zor province east of the Euphrates River to maintain a US grip on Syria’s main oil fields. Since Trump is a businessman, he will demand a quid pro quo from someone over his illegal seizure of Syria’s oil.

A correspondent recalls that during a trip to Deir Al Zor city in September 2017, she and other members of a group of journalists were told that that the Syrian army was on its way to reclaim the oil fields on the basis of an agreement with the US-backed Kurds. However, the Kurds reneged and reached the fields first, presumably under pressure from the US, then ruled by the Obama administration. Trump is not alone in seeking oil assets. The Kurds could have used the oil to secure advantageous terms for reconciliation with Damascus.

Trump is not the first, and will not be the last, US politician to exploit and then drop the Kurds, who have been betrayed every decade by one Western power or another since World War I.

Nationalist Kurds and Arabs were also bombed by the colonial powers as they settled into Iraq and Syria following the collapse of the Ottoman empire. Iraqi Kurds and Arabs relate tales told by their grandfathers about how they rose up against British imperial rule after the 1919 carve-up of the region and were targeted from the air by Britain with poison gas and phosphorus bombs.

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Featured image is from The Bullet

What happened in Geneva this Wednesday, in terms of finally bringing peace to Syria, could not be more significant: the first session of the Syrian Constitutional Committee.

The Syrian Constitutional Committee sprang out of a resolution passed in January 2018 in Sochi, Russia, by a body called the Syrian National Dialogue Congress.

The 150-strong committee breaks down as 50 members of the Syrian opposition, 50 representing the government in Damascus and 50 representatives of civil society. Each group named 15 experts for the meetings in Geneva, held behind closed doors.

This development is a direct consequence of the laborious Astana process – articulated by Russia, Iran and Turkey. Essential initial input came from former UN Envoy for Syria Staffan de Mistura. Now UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen is working as a sort of mediator.

The committee started its deliberations in Geneva in early 2019.

Crucially, there are no senior members of the administration in Damascus nor from the opposition – apart from Ahmed Farouk Arnus, who is a low-ranking diplomat with the Syrian Foreign Ministry.

Source: Asia Times

Among the opposition, predictably, there are no former leaders of weaponized factions. And no “moderate rebels.” The delegates include several former and current parliament members, university rectors and journalists.

After this first round, significantly, the committee’s co-chair, Ahmad Kuzbari, said: “We hope that our next meeting could take place in our native land, in our beloved Damascus, the oldest continuously inhabited capital in history.”

Even the opposition, which is part of the committee, hopes that a political deal will be clinched next year. According to co-chair Hadi al-Bahra: “I hope that the 75th anniversary of the United Nations next year will be an opportunity to celebrate another achievement by the universal organization, namely the success of efforts under the auspices of a special envoy for political process, who will bring peace and justice to all Syrians.”

Join the patrol

The committee’s work in Geneva proceeds in parallel to ever-changing facts on the ground. These will certainly force more face-to-face negotiations between Presidents Putin and Erdogan, as Erdogan himself confirmed: “A conversation with Putin can take place any time. Everything depends on the course of events.”

“Events” seem not to be that incandescent, so far, even as Erdogan, predictably, releases the whiff of a threat in the air: “We reserve the right to resume military operation in Syria if terrorists approach at the distance of 30km to Turkey’s borders or continue attacks from any other Syrian area.”

Erdogan also said the de facto safe zone along the Turkish-Syrian border could be “expanded,” something that he would have to clear in minute detail with Moscow.

Those threats have already manifested on the ground. On Wednesday, Turkey and allied Islamist factions launched an attack against Tal Tamr, a historic Assyrian Christian enclave 50km deep inside Syrian territory – far beyond the scope of the 10km patrol zone or the 30km “safe” zone.

Poorly-armed Syrian troops pulled out under fierce attack, and with no apparent Russian cover. The Syrian military on the same day issued a public statement calling on the Syrian Democratic Forces to reintegrate under its command. The SDF has said a compromise must be reached first over semi-autonomy for the northeastern region. Thousands of residents in the meantime fled farther south to the more protected city of Hasakeh.

Two facts are absolutely crucial. The Syrian Kurds have completed their pull out ahead of schedule, as confirmed by Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu. And, this Friday, Russia and Turkey start their joint military patrols to the depth of 7km away from the border, part of the de facto safe zone in northeast Syria.

The devil in the immense details is how Ankara is going to manage the territories that it now actually controls, and to which it plans to relocate as many as 2 million Syrian refugees.

Your oil? Mine

Then there’s the nagging issue that simply won’t go away: the American drive to “secure the oil” (Trump) and “protect” Syrian oilfields (the Pentagon), for all practical purposes from Syria.

In Geneva, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov – alongside Iran’s Javad Zarif and Turkey’s Mevlut Cavusoglu – could not have been more scathing. Lavrov said Washington’s plan is “arrogant,” and violates international law. The very American presence on Syrian soil is “illegal,” he said.

All across the Global South, especially among countries in the Non-Aligned Movement, this is being interpreted, stripped to the bone, for what it is: the United States government illegally taking possession of natural resources of a third country via a military occupation.

And the Pentagon is warning that anyone attempting to contest it will be shot on sight. It remains to be seen whether the US Deep State would be willing to engage in a hot war with Russia over a few Syrian oilfields.

Under international law, the whole “securing the oil” scam is a euphemism for pillaging, pure and simple. Every single takfiri or jihadi outfit operating across the “Greater Middle East” will converge, perversely, to the same conclusion: US “efforts” across the lands of Islam are all about the oil.

Now compare that with Russia-Iran-Turkey’s active involvement in a political solution and normalization of Syria – not to mention, behind the scenes, China, which quietly donates rice and aims for widespread investment in a pacified Syria positioned as a key Eastern Mediterranean node of the New Silk Roads.

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This article was originally published on Asia Times.

Pepe Escobar is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

As the brutal war in Yemen continues to worsen the humanitarian situation for civilians in the country, the World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that 250,000 Yemenis are on the brink of death from hunger.

“The ongoing conflict and its resulting economic crisis are the key factors behind food insecurity in Yemen,” WHO said, adding that around 20 million Yemenis were “food insecure.”

“Nearly a quarter of a million people are on the brink of starvation, if not urgent intervention,” the humanitarian organization stressed.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is the former Saudi defense minister, and Saudi Arabia’s allies launched Operation Decisive Storm in March 2015. The ongoing war has resulted in the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, with an estimated 24 million people, close to 80% of the population, are in need of assistance and protection in Yemen, according to the U.N. The Saudi-led coalition is continuing to target residential areas, with the latest U.N. report showing that 729 Yemeni children were killed or injured during 2018. Save the Children reported in March that 37 Yemeni children a month had been killed or injured by foreign bombs in the last year. Many atrocities have been reported so far, which have revealed multiple violations of human rights.

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Featured image is from Creative Commons/Felton Davis

On Monday, anti-Trump Speaker Pelosi released the text of the undemocratic Dems’ impeachment resolution, aiming to remove Trump from office for the wrong reasons, ignoring legitimate right ones.

For Dems and supportive media, it’s the second time around against DJT after the failed Russiagate witch hunt scam, Ukrainegate with no legitimacy its spinoff.

The resolution outlines procedures for conducting the impeachment probe — to be voted on Thursday, according to Pelosi, passage virtually certain in the Dem controlled House.

House Rules Committee chairman James McGovern said the Dem-led House “continue(s) (its) investigation (into) whether sufficient grounds exist for the House…to exercise its constitutional power to impeach” the president.

According to unnamed White House official, the Rules Committee said Trump will be to participate in the probe, adding: “(E)xplicit participation for the White House…is not in the resolution.”

It states the Judiciary Committee is authorized to conduct impeachment proceedings, “including such procedures as to allow for the participation of the president and his counsel.”

Thursday’s vote, if held as announced, will be the first one since Dems began their impeachment inquiry in late September.

According to a mid-October Gallup poll “52% of Americans now support Trump’s impeachment and removal,” his approval rating at 39%, adding:

“Currently, 87% of Republicans, 34% of independents and 5% of Democrats approve of the job Trump is doing.”

Support for impeachment among Dems “approaches 90%,” only 6% by Republicans.

House members are constitutionally authorized to impeach a sitting president. Senate members have sole power to try the executive or other US officials if impeached.

The Constitution’s Article II, Section 4 states: “The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Impeachment is only warranted when criminal offenses of a president or other officials are too serious to ignore.

That’s clearly not what Dems want Trump removed from office for, ignoring legitimate reasons the vast majority in Washington are guilty of, notably high crimes of war and against humanity, along with time and again betraying the public trust.

Removing a president or other US official requires a two-thirds Senate super-majority, a high-hurdle never gotten in US history.

The Constitution’s Article I, Section 3 states: “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose…”

“When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.”

“Present” is the key word. Anti-Trump Senate Dems no doubt would show up in force to vote for removing him from office in an impeachment trial is held.

If unknown numbers of GOP senators unenthusiastic about supporting him aren’t present, he could be removed from office with a two-thirds majority as long as a minimum of 51 senators participated in the vote.

House and Senate Dems want him sullied for political advantage, seeking an edge in November 2020 elections, what the impeachment scam is all about.

It’s unclear how Republicans will respond to their strategy. If numbers in both houses up for reelection in close races fear possible defeat by supporting Trump’s retention in office, they might jump ship to boost their own reelection chances.

At this stage, how things may or may not play out is pure speculation. Most often, politicians do what it takes to stay in office.

Ukrainegate is no more credible than Russiagate, what Trump’s legal team should be able to use to his advantage.

Targeting him over dealings with Ukrainian President Zelensky is a hurdle his legal team should be able to overcome.

The wildcard is whether he’s able to retain enough GOP Senate support to prevent Dems from getting a super-majority of voting members present to remove him.

What never happened before is unlikely ahead but clearly possible.

The impeachment train left the station. Will it be derailed before reaching its destination or be able to remove a sitting president for the first time in US history?

John Adams once said it would take a national convulsion to do it. No doubt, hardcore Trump supporters would be enraged.

How removing him from office, if happens, might affect 2020 presidential and congressional elections is a big unknown.

It could backfire on Dems instead of helping them. Nothing is certain. The fullness of time will tell what’s impossible to know now for sure now.

A Final Comment

If removed from office, consider who’ll replace him. Elevating evangelical fundamentalist, neocon hardliner, white supremacist, imperial war cheerleader, Islamophobe, Russophobe and homophobe, hostile to unwanted aliens, people of color, equity and justice Pence could make diehard Trump haters yearn for his return.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Russia has the world’s largest natural gas reserves. Iran ranks second. Both nations have far larger reserves than the US, Saudi Arabia and other countries. 

When completed, Russia’s Nord Stream 2 will be the world’s longest underwater pipeline, able to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas from beneath the Baltic Sea, its capacity to be doubled by an additional line.

In early October, Russia’s Gazprom said 83% of Nord Stream 2 construction was completed, nearly 1,300 miles, the remainder to be finished by yearend. (see map below)

After Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met his Danish counterpart Jeppe Kofod at the UN General Assembly’s annual session in September, agreement came Wednesday between both countries “to construct a section of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipelines on the Danish continental shelf southeast of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea,” according to the Danish Energy Agency, adding:

Denmark will “allow the construction of transit pipelines with respect to resources and the environment and if necessary to assign the route where such pipelines should be laid.”

According to a Nord Stream 2 statement,

“(p)reparatory work…as well as pipe laying will begin in the coming weeks. To date, more than 2,100 kilometers of two pipeline legs have already been laid.”

“Pipe laying has been completed in the waters of Russia, Finland, and Sweden as well as being nearly complete in the waters of Germany. Work on both onshore sections is nearing completion.”

A statement by the German Committee on Eastern European Economic Relations said the following:

“Nord Stream 2 will provide much-needed additional capacity to supply Europe with natural gas without making other routes redundant.”

“Each additional import option increases competition on the European gas market and, therefore, benefits all EU countries as well as neighboring states.”

Another Nord Stream pipeline when constructed will carry Russian natural gas to European countries through Denmark, Finland, Germany, and Sweden.

Cost-effective Russian natural gas is around 30% cheaper than US liquified natural gas (LNG), putting US suppliers at a competitive disadvantage.

It’s why the Trump regime has been going all out to undermine the project by threatening sanctions on countries, companies and individuals involved in Nord Stream 2 construction.

Given Russia’s proximity to other European markets, its plentiful reserves of natural gas make it the most reliable, cost effective supplier.

Notably economic powerhouse Germany wants access to Russian gas. It’s essential for Europe’s energy needs. Nord Stream 2 supplies should begin flowing early next year.

Along with two Nord Stream 1 parallel lines, one completed in May 2011, the second in October 2012, the longest underwater pipeline to that time at 1,222 (759 miles) in length, Russia will be able to supply European markets with 110 billion cubic meters (3.9 trillion cubic feet) of natural gas annually when Nord Stream 2 begins operating.

Last June, Trump falsely said the new pipeline “makes Germany a hostage to Russia,” polar opposite reality.

Threatened US sanctions on countries, enterprises and individuals involved in Nord Stream 2 haven’t been imposed.

Germany’s economic affairs and energy minister Peter Altmaier said purchases of US LNG will only be made to supplement Russian gas if needed, provided the price is right.

With Nord Stream 2 nearing completion, the project strongly backed by Germany, it’s too late for the US to undermine it.

Owned by Gazprom, half the construction cost of about $10.5 billion is being paid by Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall, Austria’s OMV, France’s Engie, and the Netherlands’ Royal Dutch Shell.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The hideous treatment of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange continues and many observers are citing his case as being symptomatic of developing “police state” tendencies in both the United States and in Europe, where rule of law is being subordinated to political expediency.

Julian Assange was the founder and editor-in-chief of the controversial news and information site WikiLeaks. As the name implies, after 2006 the site became famous, or perhaps notorious, for its publication of materials that have been leaked to it by government officials and other sources who consider the information to be of value to the public but unlikely to be accepted by the mainstream media, which has become increasingly corporatized and timid.

WikiLeaks became known to a global audience back in 2010 when it obtained from US Army enlisted soldier Bradley Manning a large quantity of classified documents relating to the various wars that the United States was fighting in Asia. Some of the material included what might be regarded as war crimes.

WikiLeaks again became front page news over the 2016 presidential election, when the website released the emails of candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign manager John Podesta. The emails revealed how Clinton and her team collaborated with the Democratic National Committee to ensure that she would be nominated rather than Bernie Sanders. It should be noted that the material released by WikiLeaks was largely documentary and factual in nature, i.e. it was not “fake news.”

Because he is a journalist ostensibly protected by the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, the handling of the “threat” posed by journalist Assange is inevitably somewhat different than a leak by a government official, referred to as a whistleblower. Assange has been vilified as an “enemy of the state,” likely even a Russian agent, and was initially pursued by the Swedish authorities after claims of a rape, later withdrawn, were made against him. To avoid arrest, he was given asylum by a friendly Ecuadorean government seven years ago in London. The British police had an active warrant to arrest him immediately as he had failed to make a bail hearing after he obtained asylum, which is indeed what took place when Quito revoked his protected status in April.

As it turned out, Julian Assange was not exactly alone when he was in the Ecuadorean Embassy. All of his communications, including with his lawyers, were being intercepted by a Spanish security company hired for the purpose allegedly by the CIA. There apparently was also a CIA plan to kidnap Assange. In a normal court in a normal country, the government case would have been thrown out on constitutional and legal grounds, but that was not so in this instance. The United States has persisted in its demands to obtain the extradition of Assange from Britain and London seems to be more than willing to play along. Assange is undeniably hated by the American political Establishment and even much of the media in bipartisan fashion, with the Democrats blaming him for Hillary Clinton’s loss while Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has labeled him a “fraud, a coward and an enemy.”

WikiLeaks itself is regarded by the White House as a “hostile non-government intelligence service.” Sending Julian Assange to prison for the rest of his life may be called justice, but it is really revenge against someone who has exposed government lies. Some American politicians have even asserted that jail is too good for Assange, insisting that he should instead be executed.

The actual charges laid out in the US indictment are for alleged conspiracy with Chelsea Manning to publish the “Iraq War Logs,” the “Afghan War Logs” and the US State Department cables. On May 23rd, the United States government further charged Assange with violating the Espionage Act of 1917, which criminalizes any exposure of classified US government information anywhere in the world by anyone. Its use would create a precedent: any investigative journalist who exposes US government malfeasance could be similarly charged.

Assange is currently incarcerated in solitary confinement at high-security Belmarsh prison. It is possible that the Justice Department, after it obtains Assange through extradition, will attempt to make the case that Assange actively colluded with the Russian government, a conspiracy to “defraud the United States” to put it in legalese. Assange is unlikely to receive anything approaching a fair trial no matter what the charges are.

Assange’s prison term ended on September 22^nd, but an earlier procedural hearing at Westminster Magistrates’ Court had already decided that a full hearing on extradition to the US would not begin until February 25^th, 2020. District Judge Vanessa Baraitser ruled that Assange would not be released even though the prison term had ended, because he was a flight risk. His status in the prison system was duly changed from a serving prisoner to a person facing extradition and his final hearing would be at the high security Belmarsh Magistrates’ Court rather than in a normal civil court. Belmarsh is where terrorists are routinely tried and the proceedings there permit only minimal public and media scrutiny.

Most recently, on October 21^st, 2019, Assange was again in Westminster Magistrates’ Court for a “case management hearing” regarding his possible extradition to the US Judge Baraitser denied a defense team request for a three-month delay so that they could gather evidence in light of the fact that Assange had been denied access to his own papers and documents in order to prepare his defense. British government prosecutor James Lewis QC and the five US “representatives” present opposed any delay in the extradition proceedings and were supported by Judge Baraitser, denying any delay in the proceedings.

Another procedural hearing will take place on December 19^th followed by the full extradition hearing in February, at which time Assange will presumably be turned over to US Marshalls for transportation to the Federal prison in Virginia to await trial. That is, of course, assuming that he lives that long as his health has visibly deteriorated and there have been claims that he has been tortured by the British authorities.

Former British Ambassador Craig Murray, who knows Julian Assange well, was present when he appeared in court on the 21^st. Murray was shocked by Assange’s appearance, noting that he had lost weight and looked like he had aged considerable. He was walking with a pronounced limp and when the judge asked him questions, to include his name and date of birth, he had trouble responding. Murray described him as a “shambling, incoherent wreck” and also concluded that “one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes.”

The British court was oblivious to Assange’s poor condition, with Judge Baraitser telling the clearly struggling prisoner that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. Objections to what was happening made by both Assange and his lawyers were dismissed by the Crown’s legal representatives, often after discussions with the American officials present, a process described in full by Murray, who, after describing the miscarriage of justice he had just witnessed observed that Julian Assange is being “slowly killed in public sight and arraigned on a charge of publishing the truth about government wrongdoing.” He concluded that “Unless Julian is released shortly he will be destroyed. If the state can do this, then who is next?” Indeed.

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

Featured image is from Another Day in the Empire

Chemical pesticides pose an escalating threat to some of the nation’s most imperiled wildlife, according to a new Endangered Species Coalition report released today.

The report, Poisoned: 10 American Species Imperiled by Pesticides, describes how the massive overuse of pesticides in the United States is helping to push protected species like the San Joaquin kit fox and Indiana bat toward extinction. About 1 billion pounds of pesticides are applied every year to agricultural land and other areas in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“There’s no denying that pesticide use in the U.S. is out of control, and these beautiful and highly endangered animals are paying the price,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “With the so-called pesticide regulators in Trump’s EPA more invested in pesticide industry profits than protecting wildlife, it’s up to all of us to act to protect these animals, before it’s too late.”

The other species highlighted in the report are the California red-legged frog, pink mucket pearly mussel, Chinook salmon, monarch butterfly, northern spotted owl, streaked horned lark, Crotch’s bubble bee and Salado salamander.

The California red-legged frog’s permeable skin causes it to be at high risk of harm from the 66 pesticides known to be present in its habitat. Those include the endocrine-disrupting herbicide atrazine, which is the second most-used herbicide in U.S. agriculture following glyphosate.

The Indiana bat, which can eat up to 3,000 insects in one feeding, is especially harmed by widespread spraying of insecticides like malathion used in municipal mosquito control.

In the Southeast pesticides have played a direct role in the decline of the beautiful pink mucket pearly mussel. Glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, is known to kill the extremely fragile young mussels outright.

Insecticide exposure kills about one-tenth of the San Joaquin kit fox population. They are especially vulnerable to rodenticides. In California 70 percent of tested mammals have been exposed to rodenticides.

The report comes as the Environmental Protection Agency is under new pressure to meet its legally required duty to fully assess pesticides’ harms to protected species.

Last week the Center for Biological Diversity and allies obtained a court order forcing the EPA to assess the risks that eight of the nation’s most harmful pesticides pose to protected plants and animals.

Under the agreement the agency must complete by 2021 assessments of four pesticides, including atrazine. Assessments of four rodenticides, including the widely used rat poison brodifacoum, must be finalized in 2024.

A 2017 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service report found that two commonly used pesticides — malathion and chlorpyrifos — are so toxic that they jeopardize the continued existence of nearly 1,300 endangered species. The release of that report, however, was blocked by political appointees at the Department of the Interior, including David Bernhardt, who now oversees the department.

In addition the Trump administration has overruled EPA experts and rejected a ban on chlorpyrifos, which is also linked to brain damage in children.

Background

The Endangered Species Coalition’s member groups nominated species for the report. A committee of distinguished scientists reviewed the nominations and chose the 10 species to be highlighted.

The full report, along with photos can be viewed and downloaded at http://endangered.org/poisoned.

The Endangered Species Coalition produces a Top 10 report annually, focusing on a different theme each year. Previous years’ reports are also available on the coalition’s website.

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Featured image: San Joaquin kit fox/courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

On Wednesday, the S&P 500 closed at a record high, the Dow and Nasdaq just shy of record territory.

Yet according to economist John Williams, noted for reengineering official data to how it was accurately calculated decades earlier, the “US economy remains in intensifying downturn.”

“Broader unemployment measures and employment stress levels still signal deep recession” ahead.

Year-over-year payroll growth is at a level “last seen going into and coming out of the great recession,” indicating significant economic weakness.

A “confluence of unusual risk factors (are) developing or already in play.”

New and existing home sales are declining. Inflation adjusted durable goods orders are down. Non-annualized Q III GDP growth “was not meaningfully different from zero.”

“September 2019 manufacturing remained 4.8% (-4.8%) shy of ever having recovered its pre-recession peak activity.”

“In the 101-year history of industrial production, that reflects a record 142 consecutive months of economic non-expansion, as measured by the Federal Reserve Board’s monthly surveying.”

The CASS Freight Index declined for 10 consecutive months, “signaling economic contraction.”

So why are US equities at or near record highs?

Money printing madness (quantitative easing – QE) is back with a vengeance, along with three cuts this year in the fed funds rate.

It’s the interest rate banks and other depository institutions charge when lending money to each other, most often on an overnight basis, the lower the rate, the cheaper the borrowing cost.

Interest rate cuts and QE don’t stimulate economic growth or create jobs. Money created flows to bank balance sheets for speculation, high salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, stock buybacks, along with mergers and acquisitions for reducing competition by consolidating to greater size.

Money dropped on Wall Street facilitating all of the above fuels higher asset prices.

From 2006 until December 2015, the fed funds rate was zero. During this decade, QE created $3.5 trillion in virtually free money for corporate America and speculators, fueling the longest bull market in US history.

As much as $23.7 trillion went for bailout funding, according to former Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) administrator Neil Barofsky, the greatest of grand theft.

In October 2018, Project Censored reported that “the Department of Defense and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) may have accumulated as much as $21 trillion in undocumented (unaccounted for) expenses between 1998 and 2015.”

All of the above grand theft came and continues to come at the expense of eroding social justice and other vital homeland needs.

The greatest US wealth disparity was created and now exists since the late 19th/early 20th century robber barons age.

According to Wall Street on Parade, the “Fed up(ped) its Wall Street bailout to $690 billion a week” in late October.

The “giant money spigot” began flowing freely in mid-September, “growing exponentially” at present, adding:

“The New York Fed will now be lavishing up to $120 billion a day in cheap overnight loans to Wall Street securities trading firms, a daily increase of $45 billion from its previously announced $75 billion a day.”

Benefitting firms are getting cheap money “continuously rolled over,” effectively making funds “permanent loans…exactly what happened during the 2007-2010 Wall Street collapse…without the authorization or even awareness of Congress or the American people.”

Citigroup alone got over $2.5 trillion in near-free money. What the mother-bank New York Fed is now doing “is unprecedented in US history.”

Yet establishment media aren’t reporting what should be regular headline news.

No Wall Street or economic crisis was declared by the Fed. No congressional hearings were held on what’s going on.

No one authorized what’s happening. Loans are going “to the New York Fed’s primary dealers, which are stock and bond trading houses on Wall Street who count hedge funds among their largest borrowers,” Wall Street on Parade explained.

Dodd-Frank financial reform was supposed to prevent what’s going on. Yet it’s happening with a vengeance, fueling speculative excess and the great wealth disparity.

The Federal Reserve isn’t federal. It’s owned and controlled by major Wall Street banks, serving their interests, not the economy or public welfare.

According to the Economic Collapse Blog (ECB), 14 signs show economic weakness — what money printing madness isn’t addressing.

“Not since the last recession have we seen numbers this bad.  The ‘mini-boom’ that we witnessed for several years has now turned into a ‘bust,’ and very tough times are ahead,” said ECB, listing the signs it sees as follows:

“#1 US business hiring has fallen to a 7 year low.

#2 Consumer confidence in the United States has now declined for 3 months in a row.

#3 Defaults on ‘subprime’ auto loans are happening at the fastest pace that we have seen since 2008.

#4 The percentage of ‘subprime’ auto loans that are at least 60 days delinquent is now higher than it was at any point during the last recession.

#5 Vacancies at US shopping malls have hit the highest level since the last recession.

#6 Destination Maternity has announced that they will be closing 183 stores as the worst year for store closings in US history just continues to get worse.

#7 The Cass Freight Index has now fallen for 10 months in a row.

#8 US rail carload volumes have plunged to the lowest level in 3 years.

#9 In September, orders for class 8 heavy duty trucks were down 71 percent.

#10 Tesla’s US sales were down a whopping 39 percent during the third quarter of 2019.

#11 The bad news just keeps rolling in for the real estate industry.  Last month, existing home sales in the United States declined by another 2.2 percent.

#12 New home prices have fallen to the lowest level in almost 3 years.

#13 According to one recent report, 44 percent of all Americans don’t make enough money to cover their monthly expenses.

#14 A recent survey found that more than two-thirds of all US households ‘are preparing for a possible recession.’ ”

Small businesses are being hit hardnest by economic weakness. ECB quoted investor Michael Pento saying:

“When this thing implodes, we are all screwed. On a global scale, we have never before created such a magnificent bubble.”

“These central bankers are clueless, and they have proven that beyond a doubt. All they can do is to try to keep the bubble going.”

What can’t go on forever, won’t. An eventual day of reckoning is inevitable. When arrives it won’t be pretty.

Like always before, ordinary people will be hit hardest.

*

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.

There is a revolution in Lebanon without a revolutionary ideology. It is spontaneous, and if memory serves one well, spontaneous revolutions end up badly for the left. Although the left was at its peak in the less spontaneous German uprising of 1918-1919, the right-wing militias defended the state, won and murdered Rosa Luxemburg.

There is practically very little left left, and the slogans of the Lebanese spontaneous revolution are as shallow and insidious as any of its Arab Spring predecessors. Calling for the removal of the sectarian system without removing its associated capital will rotate the same class into power with another form of sectarianism.

Sectarianism is the form of working-class differentiation or the basis of capital, a social relationship rooted in history and incarnated by much of the working class. To misunderstand the impulsiveness of the uprising is suicidal for remnants of the socialist forces. People want bread and democracy, but it is geostrategic-rent bread, as opposed to homegrown bread, and Western-style democracy, or the rule of US-led capital delegated to its local proxies that they want. ‘Words mean so many different things’ and there is paucity of alternative revolutionary concepts.From the spectrum of democratic choices, only shades of selective democracy are being proposed.

These are democracies that alienate the masses. They are based on the central democratic model where most vote for an imperial government to bomb and invade a developing country because they share a vested interest in imperial rents. In a selective democracy there are natural underlings and theworking-class lets capital to do what is best for capital. The ideology of capital incarnate in the working class, now the thingified people who replicate the thingified capitalists, reflects the short-termism of profit making. In Lebanon much has been invested in the idea that what is good for business is good for me. In short, there is a crisis of revolutionary consciousness and alternatives as elsewhere.

The crisis in Lebanon however is severe. For thirty years, the private Lebanese banks owned by the comprador ruling class charged five to ten times the prevailing world interest rate on bonds of the Lebanese government. Today, the state’s debt to the national banking sector is close to twice the income of the country. After thirty years of borrowing to reconstruct, Lebanon has no potable water supply, public transport, electricity, and cannot even remove its trash. Its capital city and only freshwater lake are possibly the most polluted on earth. Jobs are scarce, and emigration is high. The neoliberal policy of fighting inflation under open capital account, dollarized the economy, usurped much of national wealth, and brought the share of the wage bill from national income from about 50 percent in the late nineties to twenty five percent in 2015. With so much rationing of credit to production and indirect taxes dragging down demand, most private-sector loans owed to the banking sector are non-performing or unlikely to be repaid. The state cannot service its debts without draconian tax and privatisation measures. After years of austerity to pay exorbitant interests on a self-fuelling debt, the public, business and household sectors are all effectively insolvent. If the US decided to delay disbursements to finance future spending with more debt, the house of cards could come tumbling down.

In development finance, this latter point of US-governed international financial institutions (IFIs) lending US dollars on time to pay for state spending or imports, lest otherwise the national currency tumble and inflation lead to hunger and riots, is called the short-leash policy. It is a textbook case. In Ghana for instance, President Kufuor had to abide by the conditionality of privatising the Ashanti gold mines as loan disbursement was postponed forcing the population onto the streets just before the 2001 elections. In Lebanon too, the newly proposed reform programme by the incumbent prime minister proposes a fire-sale bonanza of most public assets. Through resource divestiture, neoliberalism imparted inimical growth in the productive forces, including productive capital stock, employment and growth in the incomes of the poorest working strata. Capital-biased institutions blocked broader participation in the decision-making process as the state retreated and vacated the ground for the imperialistically-funded civil society. Neoliberalism, the reigning ideology, does not choose people who are corrupt and in the business of promoting their self-interests. It creates the historical context into which it is only possible for corruption to grow. Corruption defined not in terms of personal ethical considerations is integral to a market economy and gauged by the rate of transfer of public into private wealth. The open capital account, the peg to the dollar, the tax on the poor and the privatisation of public assets are examples of context/corruption.

The prevailing concepts with which the crisis is being tackled are the same ones that were used as weapons against people in the past. Tax workers and privatise public assets – that is Moses and the prophets. Clearly, such measures, or the demands to try the corrupt without eliminating the context of corruption, are not at all revolutionary. To be sure, there are no revolutions without revolutionising the concepts with which reform is carried out. In view of the socialist ideological disaster, the only concepts available for public consumption are the putative neoliberal ones. The working class asks how do we pay for a debt that has become the wealth of the comprador class, as opposed to how we get rid of the comprador and its neoliberal policies. The comprador, to be sure, is a class, a historical social relationship of power reproduced by ideology, by the idea that not only our bread is imported, but our conceptual framework as well. For now, the salient conceptual alternatives are all about increasing state revenues from bread and butter tax to service an odious debt. In the case of Lebanon, the leakages are so pronounced that no matter the earnings from privatisation, the remedy would still be short-term. No one is talking about debt cancelation or, lesser serious reforms, like standstill agreements whereby the banks take zero interests until the economy recovers.

In Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria and to a lesser extent Tunisia, the spontaneity of the Arab Spring, the revolution in times of socialist ideological retreat, resulted in deeper crises. The revolutionary spontaneity in Lebanon appears to further destroy the national sources of people’s incomes, which are already quite low. However, the Lebanese banks also have put themselves at risk by lending at rates that brought the economy to a halt. Had they accepted lower rates of return over longer periods to allow the country’s productive capacity and demand to rise in order to earn more in the future, their business would be more secure; that is simple arithmetic. However, the chemistry of sectarianism, the political process by which capital fakes its differences to acquire more rents from the state, is quite complex. It is sort of like a Buick competing with a Chevrolet although both are General Motors. The banks do not truly belong to Lebanon. They are institutions of the international financial class, the social relation that has organised the resilience of capital for centuries. It is a class that personifies the reason of the commodity as self-expanding value. It is impersonal and objective, it is history and knows no right or wrong. It is a class neither obtuse nor short-sighted. It risks some funds for the bigger booty, prospects of control and the business of militarism.

The Middle East is a region of war and oil. Physicians for Social Responsibility noted that the global war on terror has killed 4 million or more.[1] The US has spent 32 Million per hour on war since 2001, which means some financial institution was absorbing the war debit as credit and billions were made in the spinoffs of the financial markets.[2] Now these numbers are gross underestimates, but they are indicative of how true, as Karl  Liebknecht pointed out, that war is big business. Lebanon is at the heart of this region and it has almost always been in war whether with US-Israel or its Lebanese proxies. The now dormant inter-communal proxy war may awaken again. There is much more to be gained by the international financial class as it scapegoats its Lebanese compradors and immiserates Lebanon to the point of eroding the social basis by which Lebanon conducts people’s war in self-defence. The world ruling combination of finance and militarism could set Lebanon ablaze again. The evident objective of imperialism is to contain Hezbollah, but the not so obvious objective is the de-valorisation process, which reduces the costs of inputs for capital over its economic cycle. To shed light on the situation in deeply divided Lebanon, it is best to project the course of developments by moving from the broader political picture to the narrower one inside Lebanon.

Looking at Lebanon from the outside in

Had these been revolutionary times, or times in which radical concepts prevailed, nothing short of the expropriation of the robber baron class, the nationalisation of the banking sector, and the regulation of the capital account, could have been proposed as remedies. A revolution in revolutionary times and in this bloodied area may involve immediate violence against the ruling class. However, never in the past 200 years have the socialist alternatives available to humanity to organise its metabolic rate of reproduction been so absent. So far, the anarchy of production has overconsumed man and nature, yet economic planning, the historical priority by which to respond to the existentialist calamity, does not even figure on the spectrum of debate. The rich die earlier as a result of pollution related diseases, but not as early as the poor. The Veblenian consumption trap of recognition for status and power self-consumes the participants of all social classes. Impulsive uprisings are afoot across the planet, yet the people one sees on the streets are not the masses. They are not armed with progressive ideology, with ironclad modes of organisation, and a preparedness for peoples’ war. Capital is pure violence. People or working classes without revolutionary thought and the exercise of violence in self-defence are neither masses nor proletariat. They are appendages to capital, thingified people.

The business of imperialism in the Middle East is bigger than the business of Lebanese banks. Nearly nothing to do with Lebanon’s internal political landscape has to do with Lebanon. Lebanon’s development and politics are all about the US’s ambitions to control the region, especially to retain hegemony over the Persian Gulf. Reigning over the Gulf is the power that underwrites global dollarization and the imperial rents attendant thereupon. In fact, the United States is already on a low-key war-footing with Iran, a war whose boomerang effect is part of the effort to contain China. The deepening sanctions, the US armed proxies and Kurdish secession are but the tip of the US-offensive. Unmistakably, no matter the calculated costs, US-capital whose mind is the reason of the commodity is preparing to strike the Eastern flank of the Persian Gulf. For the commodity and its reason, war is a means but also end in itself. The Gulf happens to be a most strategic waterway from which thirty percent of seaborne world oil supply passes every day. Hegemony over the Gulf is priceless. True, the US exports oil, but hegemonising oil is a source of controlcumpower, and power, both military and ideological, is the primacy in the primacy of politics. Without that primacy, without arresting the development of others and regulating labour reproduction, there will be no profits. Power is what makes a subject of history; a subject who is capable of moulding social relations to accommodate low-cost production. The subject in value relationships also shapes how much of what is being produced goes to capital, and how much goes to labour, albeit over the lifecycle of society. A powerful subject implements the demands of possibly the most egregious of laws, the law of value. This is no simple double entry bookkeeping in dollars designed and printed by the US-treasury. Capital is not a person; it has real people working for it. It is a social being or a social relationship, which political economy names capital for brevity or coquetry.

The US is the operating structure of capital.  It already controls the western shores of the Gulf and to control the eastern shores would undoubtedly strengthen its position at the helm in the international division of labour. If the US leaves things as they are and accepts Iranian partial control over Gulf waters, it would also have to accept a downgrading of its imperial stature, which would imply massive tectonic realignments of global powers, including perhaps an orderly workout of the US’s debt and its overstretched US dollar, among other losses de-structured around imperial rents. But the Gulf for US imperialism is an indispensable condition of empire. It epitomises an existential question for an empire whose crisis deepens with the ascent of China. Lebanon, bordering Israel to the North and in possession of effective weaponry, threatens the imperial security arrangement for the surrounding region.

That Lebanon is socially and constitutionally sectarian and geopolitically rent-based is no anomaly under the rule of capital. Working class division or sectarianism is the normal condition of the labour process under capital. Without labour differentiation, capital, the ruling social relation, will appear for the fiction that it really is and cease to be. The French, former colonial power in Lebanon, and their heirs invested heavily in Lebanon’s sectarianism. Lebanon is sort of a precursor in sectarianism or a first experiment in the process applied in distinct ways in Iraq. As a society disarticulated along sectarian lines, a country whose national productive capacity was destroyed by war, Lebanon survives by geostrategic rents. It imports nearly twenty billion US$ and exports around three billion US$.  These imports require the county to raise its interest rate and set aside nearly the equivalent of its GDP in reserves to finance imports. And although the country almost always has a primary surplus, as it reduces spending on schools and health to service the debt, it runs a significant fiscal deficit as a result of servicing high interest-internal borrowing. The interest rate is kept too high to account for the risks and to draw in dollars to address balance of payments shortfalls.

Most of debt is internal, 80 or 90 percent. Such is an odd case for a small country recovering from years of war in the developing world. Lebanon’s debt to GDP is said to be at nearly150 percent, but it is in fact bigger (total income is about 50 billion US dollars). Only countries under the financial umbrella of US-led international finance can boast such an internal borrowing record while maintaining a currency peg and low inflation rates. A caveat is in order here: the debt to GDP ratio may be much higher because sometimes after 2005, the private bank responsible for issuing national statistics corrected the GDP figures upward to make the debt to GDP ratio look smaller. In December 2006, the debt to GDP ratio was 183 percent, and oddly enough, it went down to 151 percent in 2018. Lebanon did not have a national bureau of statistics then and most statistics were produced by one of its private banks. One must use the qualifying ‘nearly’ when speaking of figures, for although statistics everywhere are a point of view, they are even more so in Lebanon.

Lebanon’s Banks are family and political nomenklatura-owned. These financial institutions have drawn tremendous profits from holding high-interest state debt. They did so knowing that the faulty reconstruction efforts boosted by a constitution that denied the representation of labour in the state made sure that all funds destined for reconstruction went to banks and to the ruling comprador class. Without social reconstruction nothing constructs, and people build the sect leader not themselves. The post-war constitution reconfirmed sectarianism de jure, and the masses became many sects competing for rents from the state through their own sectarian leadership.  Lebanon’s financial institutions are overstocked with cash because of banking privacy, and a considerable portion of their assets is of dubious origin. Their assets are about quarter of a trillion US$. They have an interest in putting the state into debt and buying the debt to launder much of their illegitimate cash. A former finance minister complained that the central bank overruled him and issued bonds at high interest rates even when the state did not need to borrow.

In 1990, the government issued reconstruction bonds at about forty percent yearly rates. The banks gladly obliged and doubled their initial loans in about two years.  As noted above, the complex chemistry of baleful sectarianism is more complicated than the calculus of the debt. Banks earned tremendous rents on bonds and placed part of the capital abroad, while the remaining portions rolled over into additional debts. As time went by, new loans financed old and new debts, especially as internal and external deficits gaped wide. The debt grew as Lebanon’s tepid growth rates, powered by public and private borrowing to boost consumption, induced further austerity. Austerity compressed demand far below what was necessary to boost state revenues to settle new interest payments. As in typical Ponzi schemes, the debt grew at higher rates than the economy. If the scheme unfolds now, the earlier huge banking profits have been deposited abroad. The resulting runaway inflation would cripple the economy.

Non-oil exporting states in the Near East are traditionally geopolitical rent states. After the first Arab oil boom in the seventies, these countries became more dependent on rents. It was a combination of IFI supported structural adjustment and Gulf aid and remittances that gradually de-industrialised them. De-industrialisation deepened their dependence on handouts, or properly put, imperialist investments in social divisions and imperialist securitisation. It would be bizarre to believe that the US-Euro imperialism that has mown down nearly a billion people in its wars since 1500 A.D. benevolently delivers aid to humanity, or it would make efforts to arrest wars and the natural disaster. It is rather odder to entertain the thought that the Gulf states enjoy any significant autonomy to deliver aid without American consent.

As is typical of social processes under capitalism, which homogenise cultures and traditions and erase variety, Gulf aid to almost starving lower strata laced with Salafism homogenised the multifarious traditions of Islam. From dress codes to burial customs, the otherwise tolerant Islamic world was becoming more like a Xerox version of Saudi Islamism. To be sure, the Saudi version of Islam is a modern, colonially reared and concocted tradition meant to hold cultural and industrial development at bay while Arabian oil falls into the grip of empire. Gulf rents delivered to Lebanon and other states were plainly linked to the US’s political objectives to contain socialism and to create weak and internally divided states.  US-sponsored rents from the Gulf not only eroded national production requiring indigenous knowhow, they reduced the state-distribution functions and the capacity of the state to deliver social welfare. Almost everywhere, the vacuum was filled by US-supported Islamists and liberals. During the Arab Spring, Islamists commandeered the revolts and with unconditional funding from the Gulf, they either attacked their states or were elected and introduced yet more neoliberal programmes than their predecessors. For post-war Lebanon things were no different. Rents bred either the liberal NGO’s or the Islamists. The former on paper declare women or any identity to be equal, but in actuality they do not deliver them from poverty. Liberalism is arguably more devastating than Islamism because it completely erases the social class or reality under the banner of freedom. It is indeed a freedom for humans to perish early from hunger while enjoying the liberty of fitting into an identity pre-selected for them by capital, the social power and the agent of history. Islamists, on the other hand justify the demobilisation of resources by divine fiat. Neither speaks of freedom from want.

Post-war Lebanon which had suffered the destruction of its infrastructure and industry depended more on external sources of funding to maintain consumption.  As the state emerged weaker after the war and its social function was delegated to US-European sponsored civil society or to the parallel institutions of the sect. To rephrase an earlier point, what we see in the demos of Lebanon today is a thirty years investment in reactionary politics personified in people who suffer the same dire class conditions under phantasmagorical doses of intense neoliberalism. The social reaction could boil into a solid class position, but the left is weak in terms of organisation and resources, while the Gulf or European backed NGOs and sects have at their disposal extensive financial means.

In addressing the causes of lapses in development, mainstream social science falsely dichotomises constituents of the agency of history into internal and external. It blames the victimised classes for their self-inflicted misery. It does it so that history absolves the US-European structure of capital. But these Arab working classes are too weak and consistently under assault, often by the belligerence of war and poverty, and violently prohibited from organising into agents of history. The defeated are consistently stripped of agency.  The truly powerful make historical choices. They truly vote in historical time. The colonials or later US imperialism lay down with the power of their bombs, starvations, invasions, and tailored constitutions the margins of actions available for subjugated people. These powers impose the historical imperatives. They empower and institutionalise sectarian and ethnic forms as purveyors of rent from the subjugated state such that the state is always in a state of low or high intensity civil war. They set the material foundations and impose a false scarcity to promote inter working-class war. And by doing this they make profits from the war and set the stage by the continual disempowerment of people to make future profits.

The Lebanese, for instance, can cast this or that vote for the sectarian lackey of imperialism who will do whatever to provide jobs for some of his sect members. However, his rent acquisition action always comes at the expense of other sect members and the working class as a whole. Incomes under capital are rents and if sects bid against each other they lower the share of social wage from the total income pie for the whole of the working class.  The dividedness also weakens the state by the loss of sovereignty arising upon the living insecurity of the working class and holds it hostage to imperialist strategy. In the case of Lebanon, the short leash of finance, the few billion dollars needed to service the debt are currently being delayed and US imperialism is calling the shots. It has something up its sleeve and it has to do with Hezbollah. The US-led financial class through its control of the Lebanese finance casts the real vote in real historical time. It just sits back and watches, while the vote of the vanquished Lebanese population, rhetorically speaking, appears as a mere ornament of modern-day slavery.

The big divide and Iran

The US spares no effort to destabilise the region. As should be obvious, it does so because by devastating and warring it empowers itself and reduces the reproduction costs of labour. This latter point is at the heart of higher profit rates not only because the pressure of refugees on wages, but also in terms of the real value, the real commodities and the hours of labour it takes to sustain the working class, much less is expended on labour. In political economy parlance, that is called a reduction of necessary labour, which is another way of saying if capital pays less than is necessary for people over their lifetime, it makes more profits. In-fighting lowers the cost of people and what they own in resources.

At this historical juncture, fomenting the Sunni-Shiite divide, the in-fighting at play in Iraq and elsewhere is both an end in itself and end to weaken Iran. Also, by raising tensions in the Gulf, and by virtue of its gigantic military presence there, US-led capital holds the world in suspense relative to the instability it injects in oil supply routes. Imperial ransom from the rest of the world tallies with protracted military tension or turmoil in the Gulf. The scurry to the safety of the dollar market alone resituates the US atop of the global pyramid. War or tension in the Gulf is a win-win situation for ‘US-led capital.’ The use of the term US-led capital is more appropriate than the use of the term US because the poor in the US are also subjected to the wrath of their home grown imperialism. The recent figures on poverty in the US indicate that half the population subsists at below the poverty line.[3]

Regionally, Israel, a state constructed around Jewish identity, has an innate aversion for Hezbollah and a less-sectarian Lebanon. Although Israel has no aversion to its adversaries wallowing in class conflict painted over by religion, Hezbollah is a successful paramilitary force and a model for people’s war. To be sure, Hezbollah’s power, its victory in liberating South Lebanon, had reconfirmed the effectiveness of people’s war. No weapon superiority bestows an occupier with the power to rule over a people against their will. Outright victory of an occupying force over an occupied people was and is no longer possible, short of complete annihilation – naturally under the rule of capital that means the continuation of wars. Hezbollah is stronger after its experience in the Syrian war and better armed. For that reason, Israel is keen to have Hezbollah consume itself in Lebanese misery or in an inter-communal war. Aware of Israel’s intentions, Hezbollah had solidified its ties to other progressive forces in Lebanon and the region.

As per the old lessons of national liberation wars, the premise of larger and deeper fronts, especially ones that involve grassroots support that combine security with development, better positions liberation struggles. Although anti-imperialism is not a class-inherent characteristic of the Iranian ruling classes, imperialism deprives peoples, peoples from all sort of classes and not only the working class in developing formations, not only of their control over resources, but also of their lives or longevity. Imperialism often consumes the peripheral comprador, the labour aristocrat and possibly the whole of social nature with its uranium-laced bombs. It depopulates to earn profits. The prematurely wasted life in wars or war related austerity is itself a product of militarism, just as a coke can is a product of the Coca-Cola corporation and industrialism. The more cokes and wasted-lives are consumed-realised, the more returns capital generates.

The Iranian ruling class is a rentier class. While some in Iran delude themselves with mini imperialist ambitions, the struggle of Iran’s people is a struggle to literally exist. Dreams of grandiosity related to past empire is delusional for Iran. The reality that Iran will meet the fate of Iraq or Afghanistan is demonstrably present. The barometer of the strength of its national front remains the extent to which it socialises, subsidises basic commodities, and creates social employment positions founded on a national money cycle – free from international finance, to cement the grounds for people’s war. Iran may have inroads in the Near East, but these were cavities purposefully carved by the US, not by some conspiracy, but by the reason of history abiding by the desires of the self-expanding commodity. Fetishism, the rule of commodities, through its ideology commands real processes and people believe that their imaginary relations to these real processes are real. Their relationship to the sect is not real because the only reality is that of the social class as it produces what people need to survive. Put differently, it is living labour deprived of better living conditions that produces and reproduces people and not identity. A reading of the historical moment, the balance of forces, would clearly show that Iran is in a position of self-defence. Its present government, however, is short on the delivery of jobs and welfare to solidify the social grounds for people’s war. Based on the premise that encroachment wars in this region are an industry of militarism and that imperialism reinforces waste accumulation through depopulation, the security of Iran through Hezbollah is a shared and co-dependent security with Lebanon.

Security in Lebanon is inversely related to sectarianism – here one has in mind the historically determined modern identity sect that acts a conveyor belt for rents. The sect imposed by imperialism as a form of social organisation vitiates class unity, consciousness and the solidarity required for anti-imperialist struggle. The degree to which sectarian divisions surface and security sinks principally corresponds to the retreat of socialist ideological crisis worldwide. In better times, before the Lebanese war, working class cohesion was in the process of formation diluting sectarian differences. Some indicate that inter-sectarian rapprochement under progressive parties and slogans was the reason for which imperialism unleashed its right-wing cronies against the masses igniting the Lebanese war of 1975-1989. After the war ended in 1989, the right learnt its lesson and rents were channelled to sects by degree of loyalty. Such was the effort to obviate the real social being of people, the working class and its institutions. The Lebanese revolution faces the weight of a history in which a cultural identity instrumentalised by capital has acquired a supernatural power. Received perception has it that against all odds such identity exists in the same shape and form it is across history.

The demos prove that class is the reality that resurfaces in times of crisis. Penuries of bread and democracy, poverty in Lebanon, are cross-sectarian. Bread and democracy are presupposed by social relationships before they become things or acts. They are historical and power relationships obtained from class struggle. These concepts, the bread and the democracy, even for the left they have become reified and ahistorical. They are simply the things and the boxes of the ballot boxes. They are maintained as such because Western Marxism peddles them as such. The Western left-intellectuals, with slightly more leisure than others in the developing world, churn out concepts that fit the R2P designs. Overlooking capital’s history and the current social and natural calamity, these pseudo-leftists harbour a deep fascination for the selective democratic model of Western capital and see its atrocities as prerequisites for progress.

Conceptualised differently, bread is the social wage share that requires delinking from the West, working class solidarity and, necessarily but not exclusively, armed struggle against imperialism. Development obtains from combining security with resistance. Poverty in Lebanon could have been worse than Egypt’s without Hezbollah and its resistance. Some sectarian leaders are using the poverty they inflicted upon people through their banks to negotiate a higher share of imperial rents as a price for handing over Hezbollah.

Democracy is an end to alienation. People no longer relinquish the popular will through the voting system. It is about the organs of labour consistently voting for labour in state policy with or without the ritual ballot box. Democracy is not labour as ‘an’ organic constituent of the state, it is ‘the’ organic constituent of the state. Yet, few understand the depth of the conceptual crisis and the idea that people’s representation in the state has to be organic. Demanding one-man one-vote realises democracy only when man is social man; the real man of society reproduced by the value of society, the socially necessary labour invested in him or her. Social man is a subcategory of the working class and, therefore, democracy is the rule of the working class.

Who is more democratic China whose revolution of 1949 heralded prosperity and eliminated poverty or the US which sinks half of its population and half the world into poverty? The working class is there, but it is not brought into focus because people have been taught to think in forms devoid of history, in the ‘now,’ while indeed the ‘now’ or the present do not exist in real time. Capital paid teachers, universities and media to distort people’s minds and erase the social alternatives. The cliché capitalism won against socialism has become truth as if history is a football game and not an ongoing process of massacres and environmental destruction. Without being democratically armed with weapons, without revolutionising concepts and ideology, the working class will always be a proletariat in waiting.

People negate the system, but adopt the conceptual alternatives of the system itself as their alternatives. As they uncritically assimilate the rule of capital, no matter what procedure of voting they choose, they will be electing capital’s authoritarianism. As capitalists and working people personify things or commodities, the development attendant upon the production-consumption of commodities by commodities will continue to end in the human and environmental waste visible all around.

Lebanon again

The crisis in Lebanon was inevitable. Why the banks usurped so much so as to debilitate the state has to do with capital’s objectives to create a social crisis capable of weakening Hezbollah. As the currency falls and the cost of living rises, sectarians and their NGOs are at work to derail the uprising. History bereft of socialist ideology is on their side. The NGO’s will divert cries for justice into a cry against Hezbollah. The US’s conditionality here is being put as such: hand over the weapons of Hezbollah and get the funding needed to maintain the consumerist standard of living. But borrowing short term will only delay the onslaught of poverty for few months. For imperialism, the reason of the commodity adopted by history, the poverty of all sects is necessary because it cheapens inputs from humans and otherwise in production and profits.

To reiterate: the reason why the private banking sector has sucked the country dry with exorbitant interest rates for such a long time is because its patron the international financial class makes more money out of poverty and war in Lebanon and the region. The bigger world financial class and its militarism may sacrifice the smaller Lebanese banking class. However, no matter how sects are positioned on the inside, events in Lebanon will unfold in synch with how the US fares in its regional war offensive. A glimmer of hope exists here as the rise of China arrests the growth of European civilisation, a store of culture whose ethos is to waste or to accumulate by waste. The real world happens to be a planet plagued with overproduction crises, which necessitate that money should be made in wars and in socially imposed under-consumption. Waste produced under waste accumulation also produces a consumerist man indulged in an overly entropic mode of self-consumption. Scarcity constructed to differentiate labour or to pit the working class against each other by designating quaweaponizing identity as the vehicle for rent acquisition abounds. In terms of the real physical scarcity however, not even oil is scarce anymore.

Capital’s logic of cost minimisation, the production of waste for profit, becomes the repository of the system. In times of socialist ideological retreat, the absurd becomes real as reality conforms to the logical forms of mainstream economics. Value relations become waste relations, the ruling class becomes the wasting class and the working class becomes the wasted class. The formalism of capital’s mainstream logic, the two-dimensional diagrammatic in which prices clear excess commodities, becomes more and more a condition in which the excess commodity to be cleared is living labour. Arresting European civilisation, the body of knowledge and traditions of expansion by war, the structural embodiment of that wasting capital, is the historical necessity.

Subordinately, the flux of this spontaneous revolution in Lebanon is a test of the left’s resolve. The left is poised against imperialist NGOs with logistical support from the Gulf states destined to lure the support of despairing people with bribes needed for survival. As people lose income, the left has to provide the alternatives. For the working class to become a proletariat, it must broadly align against reactionary positions. So far, spontaneity mixed with liberal or Islamist NGOs has been a suicide-trap for socialism. The left can commit the anecdotal suicide, it could jump from the superstructure and hit the base, but it could also through struggle carry the day.

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Renowned author and Middle East analyst, Professor Ali Kadri teaches Economics ath the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

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Notes

[1] https://www.mintpressnews.com/do-the-math-global-war-on-terror-has-killed-4-million-muslims-or-more/208225/

[2] https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/03/21/we-have-spent-32-million-hour-war-2001

[3] Yes, Half of Americans Are In or Near Poverty: Here’s More Evidence https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/10/16/yes-half-americans-are-or-near-poverty-heres-more-evidence

The World Bank’s World Development Report (WDR), published every year since 1978, plays a similar role to that of the state of the union address in the US, in which the president hopes to keep the faith of the Congress and public. Its task is to persuade state leaders, policy-makers and academics, directors of industry and media commentators of the ever-expanding benefits of American-led globalisation. Economic growth, liberalisation of trade and openness to foreign capital are part and parcel of its project of integrating the world of production, trade and finance.

WDR 2020, ‘Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains (GVCs)’ published this month, is no exception. It boldly proclaims that GVCs ‘boost incomes, create better jobs and reduce poverty’. These positive effects it cites are achieved through two interrelated processes. Firstly, industrial production has become globally dispersed rapidly since the 1990s. Secondly, this dispersal generates novel possibilities for firms in developing countries to integrate themselves into increasingly high-tech international production.

In a world of GVCs, developing countries no longer need to establish entire industries. Through linking up with so-called lead firms, which are usually trans-national corporations (TNCs), they can access best-practice techniques and latest technologies, and match them with their competitive ‘factors of production’ of cheap labour and natural resources.

Since the 1990s, increased production and the trade of intermediate manufactured components has integrated the world economy in unprecedented ways. Hyperspecialisation is the novel process, identified in the report, whereby supplier firms access advanced markets by focussing on the production of a limited range of components. This kind of sub-product specialisation is organised through GVCs and coordinated by lead firms. By 2008, 52% of world trade occurred under such arrangements.

Take bicycles for example. No longer are leading brands manufactured within one country. The Italian firm Bianchi undertakes its design work in Italy. Its bicycles are assembled in Taiwan and China, using components from Malaysia, Japan, Italy and China and other parts of the world. Each supplier is a component specialist, such as Japan’s Shimano, which provides brakes.

With a little bit of intellectual digging, WDR 2020’s good news story becomes a revelation of globalisation’s rotting sub-structure, justified by a liberal creed increasingly at odds with reality.

The consequences of this new global division of labour is articulated from a liberal perspective of mutual gains, at the start of WDR 2020: ‘[P]articipation in global value chains can deliver a double dividend. First, firms are more likely to specialize in the tasks in which they are most productive. Second, firms are able to gain from connections with foreign firms, which pass on the best managerial and technological practices. As a result, countries enjoy faster income growth and falling poverty’.

What could be better? The core message of WDR 2020 is that GVCs generate win-win outcomes — for lead and supplier firms, for employers and for workers, for developed countries (whose populations can access lower-cost goods) and for developing countries (which can, at last, experience the benefits of modern economic systems).

But dig deeper into the report, and the reality of global capitalism looks quite different. World Development Reports, just like state of the union addresses, have a distinctive two-track method of dealing with critiques of their position. The first is to ignore anything that would undermine their core message. The second is to recognise problems — such as poverty and environmental destruction — and pose solutions to them that reinforce their overriding project of global economic integration.

No surprise, then, that WDR 2020 does not respond to radical critiques of GVCs and the World Bank’s role in promoting them. An increasing body of scholarship has demonstrated how GVCs represent mechanisms for powerful lead firms to dominate and capture value from supplier firms. Such globally coordinated wealth transfer requires new mechanisms of labour control. Women workers are often preferred by supplier firms, because they are seen as easy to manipulate. In case after case, these workers do not earn enough to sustain themselves and their families and must engage in excessive overtime, or take other jobs to survive. Throughout WDR 2020 such observations are either ignored, or interpreted as incidental to the proliferation of lead-firm dominated GVCs.

Nevertheless, the report is unable to escape completely from the realities of global capitalism. With a little bit of intellectual digging, WDR 2020’s good news story becomes a revelation of globalisation’s rotting sub-structure, justified by a liberal creed increasingly at odds with reality.

Lead firm–supplier firm links: mutual or exclusive gains?

A much-vaunted rationale for firms in developing countries to become suppliers of lead firms is integration into productivity-boosting innovation networks, which keeps them at the cutting edge of the world market, delivers economic growth and above average profits. WDR 2020 begins its analysis of GVC firms’ profitability by stating how: ‘[S]ince the 1980s there has been a widespread rise in firms’ profits. In 134 countries, the average global markup increased by 46 percent between 1980 and 2016, with the largest increases accruing to the largest firms in Europe and North America and across a broad range of economic sectors.’

It might be expected that, given the power asymmetries between lead and supplier firms, the former would pocket the lion’s share of profits generated in GVCs. Indeed, WDR 2020 recognises that the benefits from participating in GVCs may be distributed unequally. Crucially, however, it argues that the benefits are still greater than for firms that do not participate in GVCs. However, really existing global capitalism tells a different story, which even WDR 2020 cannot hide. It finds evidence that: ‘Although buyer firms in developed countries are seeing higher profits, supplier firms in developing countries are getting squeezed. Across 10 developing countries, the relationship between markups and forward participation is negative… in the textile and apparel sector.’

Furthermore: ‘the more intensely a firm is integrated into a GVC… the lower is its markup. As Ethiopian firms become integrated into GVCs, they also experience reductions in their markups’. Likewise, ‘[i]n South Africa, markups charged by manufacturing exporters are on average significantly lower than those charged by nonexporters.’

Such observations of how asymmetric power relations between firms within GVCs ensure value transfer from southern to northern world regions represent a staple of critical GVC analysis but this is never recognised by WDR 2020.

This ignorance of issues that cast a shadow upon the world of GVCs extends, most damningly, to the labour question.

WDR 2020 claims that GVC participation by supplier firms in developing countries can enhance workers’ incomes and livelihoods. The opening lines of the report waxes lyrical about Vietnam’s successful integration into the electronics GVC, recounting how: ‘Samsung makes its mobile phones with parts from 2,500 suppliers across the globe. One country—Vietnam—produces more than a third of those phones, and it has reaped the benefits. The provinces in which the phones are produced, Thai Nguyen and Bac Ninh, have become two of the richest in Vietnam, and poverty there has fallen dramatically as a result.’

As much of the critical GVC literature shows, productivity gains go to capital, not labour.

The report ignores Samsung Vietnam’s record of labour rights violations. For example, in 2018 three UN inspectors found widespread maltreatment of its mainly female workforce. Based on in-depth interviews with 45 women workers, ‘researchers reported testimonies of dizziness or fainting at work from all study participants and high noise levels that violated legal limits. Miscarriages were reported to be common and workers reported pain in their bones, joints, and legs which they attributed to standing at work for 70 to 80 hours a week’.

WDR 2020’s ignorance of this case is a reflection of its big-business bias. It heralds lead and supplier firms as representing dynamic and innovative actors in the world economy. By contrast, workers are portrayed as bearers of labour, a ‘competitive’ ‘factor of production’ which can be used by developing country states and firms to attract foreign direct investment by TNCs.

Misconstruing data on productivity and wages

Perhaps the lowest point of WDR 2020 is its selective use of data to support its win-win portrayal of the world economy. A core argument in the report is that participation in GVCs enhances supplier firms’ productivity and wages.

The report claims that the productivity of Labour increases because supplier firms receive technical assistance from TNCs. New production technologies and techniques lead to a higher level of output per worker. The increases in Labour productivity translate into rising wages.

WDR 2020 reports that ‘across a sample of developing countries, firms that both export and import pay higher wages than import-only and export-only firms and nontraders’. It supports this claim, citing an article by Ben Shepherd and Susan Stone. The report claims that the article finds that ‘firms with the strongest international linkages—export, import, and foreign-owned—pay higher wages.’

Not so fast. The purpose of Shepherd and Stone’s study is to provide ‘evidence on the links between Global Value Chains (GVCs) and labour markets, focusing on developing economies, particularly the OECD’s Key Partner countries (Brazil, India, Indonesia, China, and South Africa)’. These countries account for the majority of workers employed in global value chains in developing countries. A positive link with wages is found for a large sample of 108 countries, but crucially, when the study focusses on these developing economies, they find that: ‘There is… no discernible impact of international linkages on wage rates in these data for the key partner countries… the effects of GVCs may be primarily felt in emerging markets through increased employment rates rather than higher wages.’

The simple message here is that in these countries, GVC integration is not associated with higher wages. As much of the critical GVC literature shows, productivity gains go to capital, not labour. Supplier firms across many developing world regions have drawn upon vast pools of low-cost labour to integrate themselves into GVCs. These workers suffer low pay, very long working hours, and dangerous conditions, as noted above in the example of Vietnamese Samsung workers.

WDR resorts to desperate measures to keep its good news globalisation story on the road. Like a stumbling president delivering his state of the union address, it cannot contemplate that reality has caught up with it. WDR 2020 tells us less about trade and development in an epoch of global value chains than it does about the World Bank’s attempts to airbrush reality.

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Dara Leyden is a Trustee and Treasurer of Rethinking Economics (REPCE) and writes in a personal capacity.

Benjamin Selwyn is a Professor of International Development at the University of Sussex and author of The Struggle for Development.

Featured image is from Le Monde diplomatique

This article was originally published in 2017.

Ivanka Trump on Twitter, how shameless you are to be proud of your father’s murderous bombings of Syria.   Are you both afraid because Syria is protecting Syrians from foreign terrorists armed and funded with US tax monies?

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Mrs. Ivanka Trump, you should tell your father to stop murdering us.  Stop causing Syrian women to be widows, Syrian students to end studies from bombs on buses, and Syrian kids to be orphans.  How can you know nothing about the horrible war the Syrian women, Syrian men, Syrian children have been going through since this ugly, western war was imposed on us, in 2011.

Syrian women spend their lives rearing their children, to see them grow into good men.  They spend days and nights to make the child a real man, or a good woman. We are not rich in material wealth, but rich in our morals, and this is why we love our homeland.

A beautiful Syrian wife lost her young husband, her love, because of your father’s crimes, Ivanka.  This husband was her knight, a well educated man, a brave officer who was defending his country, Syria, against the mercenaries who came here from all over the world, killers sponsored by the US, Europe, Turkey and the wahhabi Saudi and Qatar.

Her husband was not in someone else’s country, invading it, or bombing it, like what your American soldiers have done to Iraq in 2003, and have been doing in Syria since 2013.

Unlike your invaders, Firas Hammoud is a true hero, a Syrian man who was murdered by your father, while he was defending his own country, within his own country.

They Sha’ayrat airbase which terrorist President Trump has bombed is one of the important airfields in the fight against the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.  It has been used to defeat the alQaeda terrorists in Palmyra, Hama, and Homs.

The successful advances of the Syrian Arab Army against foreign terrorists is the cause of the terrorists in Idlib, and the US, to go crazy. Every time our army advances against your savages, the US or Israel comes to their rescue.  Military service is required of all men and voluntary by women.  Every Syrian family has someone fighting to defend our country.  Our blessed soldiers protect us; they do not invade other countries to slaughter their populations.

Many civilians in the Sha’ayrat village were also murdered by your father’s illegal bombings. Your father murdered 7 civilians and 4 of them were children. People ran out of their homes thinking they would be safer outside in case your father thought of bombing their houses, too.

Your father continues to spread the horrors against us that Obama began and Clinton promised to continue.

I feel the words of this young widow Ghanea, her tears and her broken heart.

When they carried the coffin, I cried.  I cried because it is a pain to die at this age, it is a pain, Firas…. The colonel that later died together with Firas had ordered that he come to the base.  Through the speaker, he said, “Firas Hammoud, come to the base.”  As his friend later told me, just when Firas arrived at the base the fire exploded.  There aren’t sufficient words to explain all.  The man is gone and talking aboout it doesn’t make sense.  This is horrible:  A mother is raising her son, teaching him to be an amazing and exceptional boy who is growing.  And the suddenly in a certain moment, the US from a ship in the Mediterranean Sea bombs an airbase and innocent people, not important who they may be, a general or the Senior Lieutenant Firas, they bomb us to kill us all and say it is a fight against terrorism. — Ghanea Hammoud

All of Syria knows her grief, grief that your country has given us. I too have lost a family member in this ugly and unjust war you have imposed on us.

Every soldier in the Syrian Arab Army has a Syrian family, so why would he kill his own family? Yet this is the lie of your country and your father who suddenly used the CNN that he called “fake news!” as his reason to murder more of us.

It is more of the western media lies against our people.  The only ones who bomb Syrians are the US and its terrorist-sponsoring allies, companions in death and destruction, companions in genocide.

US uses its soldier invaders as cannon fodder and then uses their funerals to advertise for more foreign wars.

However for the SAA, when we lose a soldier we can’t replace him.  Every soldier is a unique human being, moral and well educated. They are not interchangeable. They have joined this dirty war imposed on our country to defend our country.

Have you, Ivanka, thought of the children of the people your father bombed? Or don’t you have time to see beyond CNN’s fake news? To see that the man your news used as source is a British man illegally here.  He is a British man whose medical license was taken away by his country.  Don’t you have time to see that this man spent the day giving interviews and asking for money?

Have you thought about how many of our families sleep without food and can’t have medicine because of the war your country put to our country, because of the terrible sanctions your country put to our country (except not to your terrorists sent to us who vacation in Turkey).

Where is your humanitarian care for Kafarya and al Fou’aa’s besieged children? For the children of Yemen, of Iraq, Somalia, and the Ukraine?

Oh, come on! You only know about Khan Sheikhoun because fake news! CNN was the conduit for a fake doctor (who was charged in kidnapping in UK) illegal in our country?

Syria joined the OPCW in 2013, under Russian and American supervisors! The removal of Syria’s chemical weapons was completed by June 2014.  Your terrorist “rebels” threaten us with chemical and biological weapons and fast poisons since 2012.  One of your American mercenaries illegal in Syria wrote a friend that “FSA” had chemicals and could use them to blame our president. They used them to murder our soldiers in Khan al Asal, they used them in al Ghouta and when they killed us and them they told the world the weapons were given by Saudi Bandar.  Your “moderate” terrorists might have chemical weapons stolen from Libya after the US turned that country to al Qaeda’s hands.  Your paid terrorists in our homeland have a path between Idlib and Turkey.  They go back and forth and bring weapons from around the world.  They might also bring in more chemical weapons.

But the victims of the fake chemical attacks in Khan Sheikhoun were kidnapped in Majal and Khattab the week before.  Some were brought to Khan Sheikhoun to be murdered and use their bodies for news so your father made the excuse to murder more of us.  Your fake news showed your CIA- and British intelligence-owned White Helmets (killers and organ traders) running around without proper protection for a chemical attack, but like a miracle not hurt by it. And your fake doctor was lying on what kind of chemical it was even though he would have been killed by it, if it had really been used.

Our civilization is thousands of years old and you try to erase us. This will not happen, no matter how many lies you tell.

Ivanka, I wonder how you sleep at night, to be proud of your father’s murders. You and Nikki Haley with all this death you promote against us, against us who have never harmed you.  Condoleeza Rice made similar lies.  She joked about “creative chaos” and “birth pains” while supporting genocide in this region.

We Syrians are civilized.  It is a crime here, to kill a cat.  We don’t murder.  We defend ourselves through our heroic Syrian Arab Army.

This is our fearless leader, our lion President Bashar al Assad.

You brag that you are proud that your father murders us.  Have you no shame? — Afraa Dagher

Syrian first lady Asmaa Bashar Al Assad held a reception on the occasion of Mother’s Day, 21st March 2013, to show the gratitude of all Syrians to over 5,000 Syrian mothers whom each of them sent all of her sons to defend the country in the face of an unprecedented NATO and stooges alliance with all evil forces on the planet including Al Qaeda terrorists to destroy Syria, the mother of all mothers.

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Featured image: Syrian girl injured when moderate terrorists fired moderate bombs at her Sariah Hassoun primary school; all images in this article are from Syria News

French health officials want cell phone users to be better informed of potential risks and are urging them to take precautionary steps to limit their radiation exposures.

The move comes after an government health and safety agency (ANSES) issued an October 21 advisory warning the public not to carry phones in shirt or trouser pockets.

The French government wants the European Commission to require measurements indicating how much energy is absorbed (SAR) when the phone is next to the body —that is, with the phone in simulated contact with the user. Current protocols allow a 5 mm separation.

On October 25, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health issued a statement with these key points[1]:

1. France will ask the European Commission to reinforce the requirements for new mobile phones put on the market. As recommended by the National Agency for Safety, Environment and Labor (ANSES), the Government will request that the approval tests be carried out in contact with the apparatus, and not 5 mm away as is currently the case. This will be more representative of actual exposures;

2. The National Frequency Agency (ANFR) will develop tools to improve user information:

• The mobile application “Open Barres” will be completed by the end of the year to allow each user to know the emissions of his mobile phone model;
• The recommended usage distance will also be indicated on the ANFR website, which already cites distances for the telephones checked, as well as the “Open Barres” application. If there is cooperation from manufacturers, they will be available by the end of the year.

3. The Government will bring together major manufacturers to take voluntary steps to update the software of their models already on the market, before the adoption of recent, more restrictive emission standards;

4. ANFR’s monitoring of products placed on the market will be increased by 30% in 2020.

The government reaffirmed its advice that users take these safety steps:

1. Use a hands-free kit
2. Favor text messages over phone calls
3. Favor areas with good reception
4. Avoid holding your phone to the ear when in a car, bus or train
5. Pick a mobile phone with a low SAR
6. Avoid long conversations

The full announcement (in French) is here, an English version is here.

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Note

[1] Adapted from Google Translate.

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D, is a trained liberation psychologist and widely published journalist. She has authored the book “Wikileaks, the Global Fourth Estate: History Is Happening”. In an exclusive interview with Eresh Omar Jamal, Hayase talks about WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange, and the most recent developments in Assange’s US extradition case currently happening in the UK.

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Eresh Jamal: On October 21, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared in Westminster Magistrates’ Court in his fight against extradition to the US, where Judge Vanessa Baraitser denied Assange’s legal team’s request for a trial extension. Can you tell us about this move?

Nozomi Hayase: At the case management hearing, Assange’s lawyer Mark Summers requested a three-month delay of extradition hearing, and also asked for a preliminary hearing to hear arguments that the extradition request was prohibited, on the grounds that the prosecution and charges against him are politically motivated.

The extension request was made because Assange has been denied access to legal documents and computers in Belmarsh prison and has not been able to adequately prepare for his defense. Also, evidence has emerged indicating that the CIA ordered a Spanish security firm to conduct surveillance inside the Ecuadorian Embassy while Assange was living there. They have spied on the women’s bathroom, and also privileged conversation between Assange and his lawyers. Now, a Spanish Court has initiated a case and it requires more time for his defence team to incorporate the evidence in their argument.

The judge denied this routine extension request because she was just doing what was expected of her to be doing, which is to serve the interests of the US government. By looking at Assange’s case, I think by now, many people can clearly see how the British court system has lost its independence.

Her move is only shocking to those who still believe the legal system has something to do with justice. The UK judicial system has proven to have become an instrument used for political means. Assange’s case really exposes the truth that the US empire rules the world. This superpower can expand its judicial authority to bring charges against anyone it dislikes and physically capture and possibly even put someone to death. This is carried out under the guise of legal process, such as the government making an extradition request etc., but in essence, it is just one state acting in a rogue and lawless manner.

The public has to be informed about what has been taking place in this kangaroo court, and truly be witness, to challenge this US dictatorship of the world. If we don’t stand up for Assange, our societies will quickly turn into despotism, or maybe we are already in it.

EJ: UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer said at the UN General Assembly that during Assange’s “prolonged arbitrary detention”, he has been exposed to what amounts to “psychological torture”. Given your psychology background, how do you assess this? 

NH: During his prolonged arbitrary detention inside the Ecuadorian Embassy, his basic human rights have long been violated. He has been denied access to medical treatment, fresh air, sunlight and adequate space to exercise. Journalist John Pilger who visited Assange reported that the embassy had turned into a prison by proxy.

This already untenable situation got worse during the last year of his political asylum, when the President of Ecuador, Lenin Moreno cut Assange’s communication to the outside world. Human Rights Watch’s Legal Counsel Dinah PoKempner at that time described Assange’s living conditions as more and more like solitary confinement.

Now, Assange is in London’s Belmarsh Prison, where he spends 23 hours a day in complete isolation. Those who know Assange’s situation like Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, indicated that Assange is prohibited from fraternising with other inmates and visitors are not allowed to see him or when they see him, severe restrictions are placed.

He is being treated worse than a murderer. The serious effect of solitary confinement has been well recognised. It can have a destructive effect on a person’s personality and their psychological well-being that may be irreversible. This is why the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture designated solitary confinement as a form of torture and banned the use of prolonged solitary as a punishment or extortion technique.

Those who know what to look for can see clear signs of psychological torture in the way Assange presented himself in court last week. After the hearing, clinical psychologist Lissa Johnson also confirmed that Assange exhibited signs of psychological torture.

Being subjected to this psychological torture, for such a long time, has had serious consequences on Assange’s health. The anxiety and stress caused by long deprivation of liberty endangers his life. When Assange’s mother, Christine Assange, described how the state is slowly murdering her son, she wasn’t exaggerating. This is the truth of what has been, and continues to be done to Assange.

EJ: Why has the western mainstream media remained silent about this? Doesn’t the prosecution of Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing secret documents open the door for the US government to go after other media outlets?

NH: For those who are willing to look at, it is very clear that this prosecution of Assange will inevitably lead to the end of national security reporting. Anyone who is engaged in real journalism should be scared, and recognise the fact if the US government can go after Assange and WikiLeaks for publishing classified documents, then they can be next. You would think this would make them speak up for Assange, not necessarily to defend him as an individual, but at least out of their own self-interest of protecting themselves. But as we can see, there aren’t enough journalists coming forward to do that.

This apparent silence on Assange’s plight for freedom is a clear indication of where their allegiance lies. Those who remain silent are on the other side of truth and justice and by not speaking up for Assange now, they are betraying the public, which they have been doing for a long time. They might even feel they are immune from any of the things that are happening to Assange.

To me, Assange’s case brings a real test for journalists to show whether they can live up to their own principles and demonstrate their commitment to the idea of free press. We are now seeing how most journalists don’t have values and integrity and that’s why they have been able to keep their job within the media institutions in a first place.

EJ: Why is the US government seeking to prosecute Assange and WikiLeaks in this unprecedented manner?

NH: The existing structure of power is based on what is often described as “an anonymity of corporate state” or “networks of conspiracy”. In this system, force of control is kept hidden and maintained through secrecy and manipulation of public perception. At the core, this lucid power relies on deception created through the notion of liberal democracy. Media plays a critical role in sustaining this illusion of democracy so as to aid the ruling class to exert its power over the populace. So, freedom of speech became conditional—we can speak freely as long as we don’t challenge the existing power structure, with people not fully realising the restrictions being placed. What WikiLeaks did was shatter this illusion of democracy and expose reality, letting the public see how the world really works.

With WikiLeaks’ disclosures of government secrecy, the public’s trust in governments and institutions weakened. This has led to a global crisis of legitimacy, creating a spark for revolutions and protests around the world. The establishment is fighting back because they are quickly losing their grip on people. They are now desperate to try to reclaim their authority by deploying the old tactics of character assassination and smearing. That is why they demonise Assange to discredit WikiLeaks and are trying to distract public attention from the actual documents that his organisation has released.

EJ: Do you believe this case is bigger than just Assange and WikiLeaks? How? 

NH: Yes, this is definitely bigger than just Assange as a person and WikiLeaks as an organisation.

The prosecution of Assange is an attack on freedom of the media. The Trump Administration bringing criminal charges against a foreign national, who published information in the public interest outside of the US working with other media organisations, possibly under the Espionage Act, will set a perilous precedent for press freedom around the world. This will enable extra-territorial prosecution of media across the globe!

This will not only lead to the criminalisation of journalism, but also bring a tragic death of free speech everywhere. Mario Savio, a prominent figure of the free speech movement in the ‘60s once said, “Freedom of speech represents the very dignity of what a human being is”. The US government’s prosecution of Assange is an assault on free speech and it concerns our fundamental right to be a human.

Restriction of free expression through this kind of total control that the US government is trying to exert around the world brings stagnation and rigidity of thoughts. This force of monotony destroys our creativity and homogenises unique cultures, forcing us all to adapt our identities to a single vision of elite control. Being denied our autonomy, we become automatons and cease to fully exist as a living being. That is what makes this a battle that involves not just Assange and WikiLeaks. It is not a fight that concerns only journalists and media organisations, but all of us. WikiLeaks has been, and is on the frontline of this battle. It is crucial that we all, too, engage and participate in it.

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Eresh Omar Jamal is a member of the editorial team at The Daily Star, Bangladesh. His Twitter handle is: @EreshOmarJamal; Nozomi Hayase‘s Twitter handle is: @nozomimagine

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This article is a continuation of my last article about what’s really going on in Lebanon. According to many Lebanese and my regular taxi driver and friend in Beirut, Hussein, Lebanon no longer exists for the Lebanese. According to the recent census, there are about 2 million Syrian refugees in addition hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and Indians in contrary to the rich Europeans, Americans, and other states’ citizens who live in Beirut. The Lebanese people have become the minority. The economic burden is too heavy. The gap between rich and poor is overwhelming and shows when you drive through the streets of Beirut.

The narrow re-election of long-serving Bolivian President Evo Morales earlier this month during the first round of voting has been exploited by his internal and external foes alike as the trigger event for inciting preplanned Color Revolution unrest in this lithium-rich landlocked socialist state.

Bolivia’s boiling with Color Revolution unrest after the narrow re-election of long-serving President Evo Morales during the first round of voting earlier this month. The socialist leader is the only survivor of the “Pink Tide” that swept most of South America in the first decade of the 21st century but has since forcibly receded following the US’ covert continental-wide regime change operation colloquially referred to as “Operation Condor 2.0”. Morales’ landlocked country is geostrategically located in the South American heartland and is rich in the lithium that’s recently become an essential component in many modern-day gadgets that form the basis of contemporary society, hence why it’s been targeted for destabilization.

Color Revolutions and the Hybrid Wars that they oftentimes lead to are commonly driven by the external exploitation of preexisting identity differences in diverse states, with Bolivia being no exception. The country is still mostly inhabited by its indigenous people, though severe socio-economic disparities exist within this demographic and between it and the non-indigenous minority, a state of affairs that was institutionalized for decades until Morales’ rise to power rectified this historic wrong and sought to promote equality among the population. The non-indigenous people are predictably much better off than the indigenous ones, and it’s they who historically formed the core of the anti-Morales opposition.

It should also be said that they mostly reside in the eastern lowlands rich in gas while the indigenous population lives mostly in the highlands where lithium is mined, and the former have been vehemently against Morales’ wealth redistribution policies that they feel are unfairly depriving them of the revenue that they believe that they deserve from their natural resource sales. Their activism even briefly took the form of the “Media Luna” (half moon) quasi-separatist movement that might even be revived in the present day if the destabilization intensifies. Having said that, there are also some indigenous people who have turned against Morales for their own reasons, whether out of “leadership fatigue” or the Amazon rainforest fires.

Returning to the present moment, this state of affairs made it relatively easy for external forces to encourage unrest after the latest election, especially since Morales’ campaign for a fourth term was previously denied after he narrowly lost a referendum on this issue a few years ago but was then eventually overturned by the courts that allowed him to run again. This backdrop seeded doubts about his legitimacy, which were watered by the brief pause in reporting the recent election results that ultimately found that he won 10% more votes than his closest opponent by a razor-thin margin and thus avoided a second round that could have seen the anti-Morales forces pool their efforts into collectively defeating him as was most probably planned in advance.

It’s for this reason why the US and its regional vassals are doing everything that they can to discredit his latest re-election since they bet on the vote going to a second round where they believed that they had the best chance of “democratically” unseating him. The ethno-political and domestic regional context within the country makes it ripe for Color Revolution unrest, which serves the strategic goal of either overthrowing Morales or compelling him into cooperating with the US to the point of becoming yet another of its proxies in order to relieve the Hybrid War pressure that’s being increasingly put to bear on his country. The greatest obstacle to this plan, however, is that since Morales has many passionate supporters who would fight for his presidency.

He’s done more than any leader in his country’s history to right the historical wrongs of ethno-regional inequality and finally bring dignity to Bolivia’s majority-indigenous population through his effective implementation of socialist policies, so millions of previously destitute people feel like they literally have everything to lose if he’s illegally deposed and the progress that he made over the past decade and a half is rolled back to the old days of neo-colonialism. Bolivia could therefore very well be on the path to civil war in the worst-case scenario, especially since opposition leader Carlos Mesa already declared that he won’t recognize the outcome of the OAS’ audit of the recent election, which strongly suggests that powerful forces are pushing him to provoke a Color Revolution that could rival the ongoing destabilization in Venezuela and ultimately dwarf the humanitarian crisis that it created by virtue of the landlocked country’s greater vulnerability to logistical disruptions.

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This article was originally published on OneWorld.

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

Featured image is from OneWorld

Afghan forces backed by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have been carrying out summary executions, abducting individuals and attacking healthcare facilities, according to Human Rights Watch (HRW).

In a report published on Thursday, the NGO said it had identified 14 incidents between late 2017 and mid-2019, some of which it said amounted to war crimes, and called on the US and Afghan governments to investigate.

The alleged abuses occurred while US and Taliban representatives were engaged in negotiations that could eventually lead to the withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan. Those talks came to an official halt in September.

Earlier this year, Middle East Eye reported that Mohammed bin Zayed, the crown prince of Abu Dhabi, had offered to assassinate Taliban leaders during a meeting with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Pompeo is said to have looked taken aback while saying nothing.

HRW’s findings suggest that such a programme may already have been underway, without Emirati assistance.

Following interviews with 39 people in nine provinces, and working in collaboration with Afghan human rights groups which have also investigated the incidents, HRW accused the CIA of being responsible for abuses perpetrated during counter-insurgency operations that are running in parallel with US military operations in Afghanistan.

In one incident in Wardak province in July, Afghan forces attacked a medical clinic, accused staff of treating Taliban fighters, and killed four of the staff members, the organisation reported.

In Paktia province the following month, a paramilitary unit is said to have killed eight men who were visiting their families for the Eid holidays and three others in the same village.

Witnesses said none offered any resistance before being shot. The attackers killed a 60-year-old tribal elder by shooting him in the eye and his nephew, a student in his 20s, by shooting him in his mouth.

The previous October in Nangarhar province, Afghan forces raided a home and shot dead five members of one family, including an elderly woman and a child, HRW said.

CIA enabled Afghan forces to commit atrocities

Afghan community elders, health workers and others described abusive raids as having become a daily fact of life for many communities – with devastating consequences.

Speaking to HRW, one diplomat familiar with strike force operations referred to them as “death squads”.

HRW said that the troops responsible have been recruited, trained and equipped by the CIA, and that the agency oversees their activities. US special forces sometimes operate alongside them during their missions, it said.

“In ramping up operations against the Taliban, the CIA has enabled abusive Afghan forces to commit atrocities including extrajudicial executions and disappearances,” said Patricia Gossman, associate Asia director at HRW and author of the report.

“In case after case, these forces have simply shot people in their custody and consigned entire communities to the terror of abusive night raids and indiscriminate airstrikes.”

Taliban forces have also been responsible for war crimes and human rights abuses, including indiscriminate attacks in which civilians have been killed.

The CIA said its operations were conducted in accordance with the law.

“Unlike the Taliban, the United States is committed to the rule of law,” the agency said in a statement.

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Stephen Cohen and I emphasize that the state of tension today between the United States and Russia is more dangerous than during the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union. For calling needed attention to the risk of nuclear war heightened by the current state of tension, both Cohen and I have been called “Russian dupes/agents” by PropOrNot, a website suspected of being funded by an element of the US military/security complex.

Cohen and I emphasize that during the Cold War both sides were working to reduce tensions and to build trust. President John F. Kennedy worked with Khruschev to defuse the dangerous Cuban Missile Crisis. President Richard Nixon made arms control agreements with the Soviet leaders, as did President Jimmy Carter. President Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev worked together to end the Cold War. President George H.W. Bush’s administration gave assurances to Gorbachev that if the Soviets agreed to the renunifcation of Germany, the US would not move NATO one inch to the East.

These accomplishments were all destroyed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama neoconized regimes. President Donald Trump’s intention to normalize US/Russian relations has been blocked by the US military/security complex, presstitute media, and Democratic Party.

The Russiagate hoax and currently the illegitimate impeachment process have succeeded in preventing any reduction in the dangerous state of tensions between the two nuclear powers.

Those of us who lived and fought the Cold War are acutely aware of the numerous occasions when false warnings of incoming ICBMs and other moments of high tension could have resulted in nuclear Armageddon.

Former CIA official Ray McGovern reminds us that on October 27, 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a single Soviet Navy submarine captain, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, prevented the outbreak of nuclear war. Arkhipov was one of two captains on Soviet submarine B-59. After hours of B-59 being battered by depth charges from US warships, the other captain, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky readied a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon capable of wiping out the entire USS Randolph carrier task force, to be readied for launch. It didn’t happen only because Arkhipov was present and countermanded the order and brought the Soviet submarine to the surface. Ray McGovern tells the story here and you can read it in Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine. The really scary part of the story is that US intelligence was so incompetent that Washington had no idea that Soviet nuclear weapons were in the combat area on a submarine undergoing debt-charging by the US Navy. The brass thought they could teach the Soviets a lesson by sinking a submarine and came close to getting the United States destroyed.

Another Soviet hero who prevented nuclear war was Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov who disobeyed Soviet military protocol and did not pass on reports of incoming US ICBMs. He did not believe that there was a military/political basis for such an attack and concluded it was a malfunction of the Soviet satellite warning system, which it was.

Many times both Americans and Soviets overrode warnings on the basis of judgment. My colleague, Zbigniew Brezezinski told me the story of being awakened at 2AM with reports of incoming Soviet ICBMs. It turned out that a simulation of an attack had in some way gotten into the warning system and was reported as real. It was a very close call. Someone doubted it enough to detect the error before Brezezinski woke the president.

Today with tensions so high and neither side trusting the other, the probability of human judgment prevailing over official warning systems is much lower.

Over the years I have tried to correct the widespread misunderstanding and misrepresentation of President Reagan’s military buildup/starwars hype and hostility toward Marxist, or perhaps merely leftwing reform movements, in Granada and Nicaragua. With his economic program in place and stagflation on the way out, Reagan’s plan was to bring the Soviets to the bargaining table by threatening their broke economy with the expense of an arms race. The plan also depended on preventing any “socialist advances” in Central America or offshore islands. The Soviets had to see that there were no prospects for communist expansion and that they needed to get down to peace in order to free resources for their broken economy.

Reading Ben Macintyre’s The Spy and The Traitor, the story of KBG colonel Oleg Gordievsky, an asset of Britain’s MI6, made me aware for the first time how dangerous Reagan’s plan was. American intelligence was so far off-track that Washington did not realize that a plan designed to scare the Soviets into peace was instead convincing them that the US was readying an all-out nuclear attack.

At the time the Soviet leader was the former KGB chief, Yuri Andropov. The ABLE ARCHER NATO war game during the first part of November 1983 simulated an escalating conflict culminating in a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. The Soviets did not see it as a war game and regarded it as American preparation for a real attack. What prevented Soviet preemptive action was Gordievsky’s report to MI6 that the Americans were raising Soviet anxiety to the breaking point. This woke up Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to the threat they were creating with their bellicose words and deeds. The CIA later confessed: “Gordievsky’s information was an epiphany for President Reagan . . . only Gordievsky’s timely warning to Washington via MI6 kept things from going too far.”

In my seasoned opinion and in that of Stephen Cohen, with Hillary almost elected president branding the president of Russia as “the New Hitler,” with constant provocations and demonizations of Russia and her leaders, with the accumulation of nuclear-capable missiles on Russia’s borders, with an orchestrated Russiagate by US security agencies blocking President Trump from normalizing relations, things have already gone too far. The kinds of false alarms and miscalculations described above are more likely to have deadly consequences than ever before.

Indeed, this seems to be the intention. Why else are people such as Stephen Cohen and myself branded “Russian agents” for telling the truth and giving accurate heartfelt warnings about the danger of such high tensions when neither side trusts the other?

It is reckless and irresponsible to demonize people of integrity such as Stephen Cohen and myself as “Russian agents.” When telling the truth becomes the mark of being a disloyal American, what hope is there?

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Dr. Paul Craig Roberts writes on his blog, Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy, where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.