Global Research

Rainforests are a crucial feature of Earth’s biosphere. Apart from being critical to Earth’s climate and vital carbon sinks, the major player in Earth’s hydrological (water) cycle, a massive producer of oxygen and home to most of the world’s species, rainforests are the home of a large indigenous human population. They are also the source of many vital resources, including medicines, used by humans around the world.

However, the vast range of ecological services that rainforests have provided ongoingly for the 400 million years of their existence, and which have been critical to the survival of homo sapiens since we first walked the Earth 200,000 years ago, are not measured and valued by accountants and economists: Have you ever seen a balance sheet or set of national accounts that includes an entry for ‘Value of ecological services taken from nature and on which life and our entire production of goods and services depend’?

Because these services have been available without the need for human management or intervention, and given the primitive conception of accounting and economics that humans use, the ecological services of rainforests are given no monetary value. Hence, essential ecological services are treated as worthless by virtually everyone in the industrialized world. As a result, modern industrialized humans have decided to systematically destroy the rainforests in order to extract a vast amount of short-term profit for the benefit of a few and the temporary satisfaction of many. So if we do not value ecological services such as oxygen and water generation as well as climate and weather-moderating capacities, what is it that we do value by destroying rainforests?

A small proportion of rainforest is logged to provide attractive rainforest timbers – such as teak, mahogany, ebony and rosewood – for a variety of decorative purposes, including making furniture, which can last hundreds of years.

However, a much wider range and vastly greater quantity of rainforest trees are cut or burnt down for purposes such as the following: acquiring timbers used in construction, clearing land to establish cattle farms so that many people can eat cheap hamburgers, clearing land to establish palm oil plantations so that many people can eat processed (including junk) foods based on this oil, clearing land to establish palm oil and soy bean plantations so that some people can delude themselves that they are using a ‘green biofuel’ in their car (when, in fact, these fuels generate a far greater carbon footprint than fossil fuels), mining (much of it illegal) for a variety of minerals (such as gold, silver, copper, coltan, cassiterite and diamonds), and logging to produce woodchips so that some people can buy cheap paper, including cheap toilet paper.

In essence then: We trade the essential life-giving and sustainably-available ecological services of Earth’s rainforests, also home to indigenous peoples and countless wildlife, for hamburgers and other processed junk foods, carbon-intensive ‘biofuels’, paper and some building and furniture materials, as well as some minerals. Obviously, some humans are far from clever at ‘making deals’.

But if you think that is bad, consider this: ‘by one estimate, a hectare of livestock or soy is worth between $25 and $250, while the same hectare of sustainably managed forest can yield as much as $850’ harvesting, depending on the location, such products as medicinal plants, rubber, nuts and fruits while benefitting from a range of ecotourism services and research opportunities. See ‘Rainforest on Fire: On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe’. Of course, you have to know how to manage the forest sustainably to yield this much income but that sort of intelligence is rare and invariably escapes those focused on destruction for short-term profit.

So how bad is this rainforest destruction? Well, worldwide we are currently destroying rainforests for these unsustainable and mainly short-term products at the rate of 80,000 acres each day. See ‘Measuring the Daily Destruction of the World’s Rainforests’.

Moreover, beyond the devastating impact this has on indigenous peoples, forcing increasing numbers of them to leave their destroyed homes in the rainforest to try to survive elsewhere, this rainforest destruction is also the key driver of species extinctions globally with one million species of life on Earth threatened with extinction. As reported in the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services researched and published by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the scientific body which assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem services this provides to society – ‘Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPBES Global Assessmentranks, for the first time at this scale, the 5 direct drivers of change in nature with the largest global impact. So what are the culprits behind nature’s destruction?’ Number 1. on the IPBES list is ‘Changes in land and sea use, like turning intact tropical forests into agricultural land’.

Let me briefly illustrate the nature and extent of this destruction by discussing rainforests in just three locations (the Brazilian Amazon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia/West Papua) where the destruction of rainforest was greatest in 2018 – see ‘The World Lost a Belgium-sized Area of Primary Rainforests Last Year’– and which are representative of elsewhere around the planet where even World Heritage listed areas are ongoingly under threat.

The Brazilian Amazon

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

While the Amazon in South America occurs in several countries, two-thirds of it lie within the borders of Brazil. Unfortunately, since his fraudulent election in 2018, the neofascist, corrupt and insane president Jair Bolsonaro – see the definition of sanity, which Bolsonaro does not come close to meeting, in ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’– has promptly eliminated years of painstaking effort by committed indigenous and environmental activists to convince previous governments to protect the Brazilian Amazon from the worst corporate and other depredations.

For just a taste of the documentation on Bolsonaro’s actions in accord with elite interests and to the detriment of indigenous and environmental well-being, see ‘Bolsonaro Caps Natives’ Lands, Pleasing Farmers in One of First Acts’, ‘Rainforest on Fire: On the Front Lines of Bolsonaro’s War on the Amazon, Brazil’s Forest Communities Fight Against Climate Catastrophe’, ‘Bolsonaro’s Clearcut Populism. “The Barbarism has Begun”’, this report from Amazon Watch: ‘Complicity in Destruction II: How northern consumers and financiers enable Bolsonaro’s assault on the Brazilian Amazon’ and ‘Amazon Deforestation Accelerating Towards Unrecoverable “Tipping Point”’.

The key drivers of rainforest destruction in the Amazon are soy production and cattle ranching. Brazilian soy accounted for 14.3% of the country’s total exports, generating $31.0 billion in 2017, while cattle exports accounted for about $5.4 billion. Because Brazil leads the world in exports of both of these commodities, it is the world market for these products that is driving these industries to aggressively expand activities to the detriment of the rainforest and indigenous peoples.

But the Amazon is huge, you might say: Does it matter if we destroy some of it for soy and cattle farming? Well, one recent study suggested that deforestation of 20–25% of the Amazon would be the tipping point beyond which it would cease to be a functioning rainforest ecosystem and this, as you might expect, would be catastrophic. Moreover, recent severe droughts appear to be ‘the first flickers of this ecological tipping point’ suggesting that it is already imminent. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point’.

So, to reiterate, the key driver of rainforest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon is consumer-generated demand for certain products in other parts of the world. And while the US and European countries play critical roles in destruction of the Amazon, China is the largest importer of agricultural products from Brazil so its government and consumers are complicit too. For example, as China’s demand for Brazilian soy surges due to the trade war between the United States and China, ‘it could drive further ecological catastrophe: 13 million hectares (50,000 square miles) in the Amazon and Cerrado could ultimately be cleared to meet this additional demand.’ See ‘Complicity in Destruction II: How northern consumers and financiers enable Bolsonaro’s assault on the Brazilian Amazon’.

The point then, is this: governments and ordinary people (in their role as consumers) in other parts of the world can play a vital role in defending the Amazon and its indigenous peoples – see, for example, Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation– by choosing what they buy from Brazil. Boycotting rainforest timber, beef and soy bean products are powerful options to consider. But don’t forget, there is no point simply identifying and boycotting Braziliantimbers, beef and soy beans. If you want impact on the total market (to prevent one country’s timber, beef and soy beans being substituted for another’s), then you must boycott them all (unless you can clearly identify the source of the product as local and sustainable). Obviously, this takes commitment. The future of the Amazon depends largely on enough of us making that commitment.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo in Central Africa

The rainforests of the Congo Basin in central Africa are the second largest on Earth. Much of this rainforest lies within the borders of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, crippled by corrupt government for decades and a new president elected earlier this year who has inherited a corrupt and inefficient state apparatus. See ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo: Overview of corruption and anti-corruption’.

Unfortunately, therefore, rainforests in the Congo have long been under siege on several fronts. With rebel soldiers (such as the Rwanda-backed M23), miners and poachers endlessly plundering inadequately protected national parks and other wild places for their resources, illegal mining is rampant, over-fishing a chronic problem, illegal logging (and other destruction such as charcoal burning for cooking) of rainforests is completely out of control in some places, poaching of hippopotami, elephants, chimpanzees and okapi for ivory and bushmeat is unrelenting (often despite laws against hunting with guns), and wildlife trafficking of iconic species (including the increasingly rare mountain gorilla) simply beyond the concern of most people.

The Congolese natural environment – including the UNESCO World Heritage sites at Virunga National Park and the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, together with their park rangers – and the indigenous peoples such as the Mbuti (‘pygmies’) who live in them, are under siege. In addition to the ongoing mining, smaller corporations that can’t compete with the majors, such as Soco, want to explore and drill for oil. For a taste of the reading on all this, see ‘Virunga National Park Ranger Killed in DRC Ambush’, ‘The struggle to save the “Congolese unicorn”’, ‘Meet the First Female Rangers to Guard One of World’s Deadliest Parks’ and ‘The Battle for Africa’s Oldest National Park’.

Unfortunately too, as with rainforests elsewhere, ‘What Happens in the Congo Basin Doesn’t Stay in the Congo Basin’: it impacts on regions across Africa playing a part, for example, in recent droughts in Ethiopia and Somalia causing millions of people to depend on emergency food and water rations. See ‘Congo Basin Deforestation Threatens Food and Water Supplies Throughout Africa’.

As with the Amazon, you have some powerful options to consider if you want to save the Congolese rainforests and their indigenous peoples. Again, refusing to buy rainforest timbers, conflict minerals and wildlife products is a good start but remember that key minerals in your computer and mobile phone are illegally sourced from the Congo so your thoughtful consideration of minimizing how many of these devices you own can play a part too. For a fuller account of this exploitation and its destructive impact on the rainforests and its indigenous peoples, with references to many other sources, see ‘500 years is long enough! Human Depravity in the Congo’.

Indonesia and West Papua

Indonesia has the most extensive rainforest cover in Asia – and is home to hundreds of distinct indigenous languages and over 3,000 animal species including Sumatran tigers, pygmy elephants, rhinoceros and orangutans – but the forests are being systematically degraded and destroyed. Rainforest cover has steadily declined since the 1960s when 82 percent of the country was covered with forest; it is less than 50 percent today. The rainforest is being destroyed by logging, mining, large-scale agricultural plantations (especially for palm oil), colonization, and subsistence activities like shifting agriculture and cutting for fuelwood. Much of the remaining cover consists of logged-over and degraded forest although large areas, including of the island of Kalimantan/Borneo (shared with Malaysia and Brunei), have been stripped bare.

Logging for tropical timbers and pulpwood (to make paper) is the biggest cause of rainforest destruction in the country where as much as 75 percent of the logging is illegal. Indonesia is the world’s largest exporter of tropical timber, which generates more than $US5 billion annually. And more than 48 million hectares (55 percent of the country’s remaining rainforests) are concessioned for logging. Destruction of the rainforest in Indonesia has opened up some of the most remote places on Earth to development: as rainforests in less remote locations have been decimated, timber corporations have stepped up practices on the island of Kalimantan/Borneo and the occupied West Papau, where great swaths of forests have been cleared in recent years. In fact, 20 percent of Indonesia’s logging concessions are in West Papua, despite ongoing resistance by West Papuans.

Unfortunately, the fastest and cheapest way to clear rainforests for plantations is by burning. Hence, every year ‘hundreds of thousands of hectares go up in smoke as developers and agriculturalists feverishly light fires before monsoon rains begin to fall. In dry years – especially during strong el Niño years – these fires can burn out of control for months on end, creating deadly pollution that affects neighboring countries and causes political tempers to flare’. See ‘Indonesian Rainforests’.

Mining operations, including for coal, also have a devastating impact on the rainforests and their peoples. See ‘New report exposes World Bank links to destructive coal mining in Indonesia’.  By far the worst of these projects, however, is the gigantic gold, silver, and copper mine in occupied West Papua, run by Freeport-McMoRan. As widely documented, the mining company has dumped appalling amounts of waste into local streams, rendering downstream waterways and wetlands ‘unsuitable for aquatic life’. Relying on large payments to Indonesian police and military officers, the mining operation is ‘protected’; this has resulted in many West Papuans being killed.

The waste from the mine, estimated by Freeport at 700,000 tons each day, covers several square miles and Government surveys have found that tailings from the mines have produced levels of copper and sediment so high that almost all fish have disappeared from vast areas of wetlands downstream from the mine.

Like other powerful corporations in Indonesia (and elsewhere), Freeport-McMoRan is well aware that there is little official interest in its abuses of local people and the environment as long as corrupt officials are given sufficient incentive to ignore them. As elsewhere in many parts of the world, therefore, corporate access to resources includes serious human rights abuses and persistent conflicts between companies and local communities which is ignored by corrupt politicians. See ‘Indonesian Rainforests’.

Apart from the rainforest itself and the millions of people who live in them, destruction of the rainforest threatens the habitat of iconic species like Sumatran tigers and orangutans, as well as many others, and plays a part in destroying the climate too.

But the damage does not stop with the issues noted above. Forests across the world are being destroyed to make fabrics for clothing we wear every day. Fabrics like rayon, viscose and modal are all made from trees and, every year, more than 120 million trees are cut down to make clothing. This is done by companies such as Forever 21, Under Armour, Foot Locker, Prada Group and Michael Kors. You can join the Rainforest Action Network in campaigning to get these laggard companies to adopt responsible sourcing policies for their forest-based fabrics. See ‘Does your clothing contain rainforest destruction?’

Bizarrely, while its incredible rainforests, along with its coral reefs and beaches, play a part in attracting tourists from across the world to see Indonesia’s charismatic native species – such as orangutans, Sumatran tigers, Komodo dragons, whale sharks, sea turtles and manta rays – and to experience its adventure and dive destinations, this tourism also contributes significantly to the destruction as rainforests make way for tourist facilities.

So, as with Brazil and the Congo, you can boycott rainforest products from Indonesia and other countries where rainforests are being destroyed. Along with suggestions made earlier, responsible choices about the clothing you wear and the tourist destinations you choose (or boycott) will all make a difference.

The ‘Big Picture’ Fight for the Rainforests: What can we do?

A great deal. Halting rainforest destruction might be a complex undertaking but it is imperative if we are to have any prospect of preserving life on Earth. So I hope that you will consider the many options I have offered above and those I mention now and do as many as you can, even if you are already working on other critical issues such as the climate and the struggle to end war and the threat of nuclear war.

If you want easy options, you can support the campaign efforts of organizations that defend rainforests, indigenous peoples and wildlife such as the Rainforest Action Network, the Rainforest Information Centre, the Rainforest 4 Foundation and Rainforest Rescue which work closely with indigenous and local communities while campaigning against the governments and corporations destroying rainforests, as well as the banks and insurance companies that support this destruction.

If you recognize the pervasiveness of the fear-driven violence in our world, which also drives the massive over-consumption of resources by people in industrialized countries – see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ – then consider addressing this directly starting with yourself – see ‘Putting Feelings First’ – and by reviewing your relationship with children. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you want to understand and address the fundamental cause of violence in our world, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

If you wish to campaign strategically in support of indigenous peoples and local communities in their struggles to halt the destruction of Earth’s rainforests. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

The governments and corporations that profit from the destruction of the rainforests are deeply entrenched and not about to give way without strategically focused campaigns to make it untenable and unprofitable for them to do so. This will include convincing key personnel, whether company directors of corporations involved in rainforest destruction, cargo ship owners, trade unionists (in many industries) and the many other agents involved in the rainforest destruction-to-customer supply chain, as well as ordinary consumers of rainforest products, to make conscious choices about the products they supply, use and/or buy. So strategy is imperative if we are to get corrupt and/or conscienceless governments and corporations, as well as people further removed from the source of the destruction, to end their role in rainforest destruction before it is too late.

The big deforestation drivers are timber, palm oil, cattle and soy while mining, oil drilling, clothing and dam construction all play significant roles too, depending on the country. And, as reported by the CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project): ‘The ABCD (The Archer Daniels Midland Company [ADM], Bunge, Cargill and Louis Dreyfus Company) trader companies have a large impact on countless commodity supply chains. For example, they represent up to 90% of the global grain trade. With a wide array of clients that go from Nestlé to McDonald’s, their role in managing deforestation risk is crucial’ and, so far, grossly inadequate. See ‘Revenue at risk: Why addressing deforestation is critical to business success’ which contains a long list of hundreds of companies (on pages 39-46) which are making zero effective effort to end their rainforest-destroying business practices.

Given the strategic sophistication necessary to tackle this complex problem effectively, if you want to view a 15 minute video of (or read a couple of short articles about) the inspirational Melbourne Rainforest Action Group (MRAG) that successfully led a national campaign from 1988 to 1991 to halt imports of rainforest timber into Australia, you can view it here: ‘Time to Act’.

In those cases where corrupt elites control or occupy countries, such as those controlling Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and West Papua, it might be necessary to remove these corrupt governments as part of the effort – see Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy – thus helping to restore the political space for local populations to defend rainforests and their rights.

You might also consider joining the global network of people resisting violence in all contexts by signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

But if you do nothing else while understanding the simple point that Earth’s biosphere, including its rainforests, cannot sustain a human population of this magnitude of whom more than half endlessly over-consume, then consider accelerated participation in the strategy outlined in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Or, if none of the above options appeal or they seem too complicated, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge 

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that: 

1. I will listen deeply to children(see explanation above)
2. I will not travel by plane
3. I will not travel by car
4. I will not eat meat and fish
5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
7. I will not buy rainforest timber
8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
9. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
10. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Feeling overwhelmed? Still prefer something simpler?

I wish I could, in all sincerity, offer you that option. If it were still 1990, I would. But the time for simple actions to make a difference is long past and time is now incredibly short. See ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’.

In essence, you have a choice: understand and act on the crucial importance of rainforests before we destroy their integrity and lose them completely. Or help to accelerate the human rush to extinction as a consequence of failing to do so.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

It remains unclear at the time of writing whether the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs really did back India’s unilateral actions in Kashmir or not, with the mysterious circumstances surrounding its now-viral alleged statement of support suggesting that it might have even been invented by Indian intelligence as part of their third infowar against Moscow in as many years.

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Russian Rumors

ANI, one of India’s leading international information outlets and considered extremely close to the country’s ruling BJP Hindutva ultra-nationalists, reported on Saturday that the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs backed New Delhi’s unilateral “Israeli-“like actions in Kashmir. The original tweets announcing this strong statement of support said that Moscow “proceeds from fact that the changes associated with the change in the status of the state of J&K and its division into two union territories are carried out within framework of the Constitution of the Republic of India”.

No mention was made about the specific time or context in which this position was articulated, but other media companies such as the Times of India claimed that it was said “in response to questions from the media” on Friday. ANI’s online article about this event that was released on the same day says that the statement was actually made on Saturday and omits any reference to it being done in response to questions from the media, though it should be noted that the report says that it was updated since publication so it’s possible that the original did in fact include that important tidbit of information.

The Q&A That Never Happened

This is a crucial detail because it’s since been proven through video footage available on YouTube that Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova wasn’t asked about the issue during her press conference on Friday, meaning that the reports about her allegedly making the statement on that day are patently false.

It might be the case that ANI received either a press release from the Russian Embassy in India or had it leaked to them by one of India’s many “agents of influence” in the Russian “deep state” (whether based in the New Delhi Embassy or embedded in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself back in Moscow), but then initially misreported the day and context of the statement, after which other outlets such as the Times of India picked up the originally inaccurate report and then virally spread it across the international media.

Those like Reuters (which says that ANI is one of its partners) and the Indian public service broadcaster DD News that missed the initial report and only saw the updated version didn’t include any mentioning of the now-debunked claims that Russia’s statement was publicly articulated on Friday and in response to questions from the media.

India’s First & Second Infowars Against Russia

Pakistan Today, however, pointed out on Saturday that no such statement was available on the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website or twitter handle, raising concerns that this might actually be fake news. It’ll remain to be seen by next week whether or not this is the case since Moscow will obviously be compelled to clarify these claims by then, but in the event that it was all fake news, then it wouldn’t exactly be unprecedented.

Indian intelligence was likely behind two separate infowars that their country launched against Russia since 2016 that were designed to pressure Moscow into supporting New Delhi. The first one happened in September of that year and claimed without any source or purportedly quoted statement that Russia had called off what was about to be its first-ever joint anti-terrorist drills with Pakistan in the coming month. That obviously didn’t happen, yet that failed attempt didn’t stop India from trying to influence Russia once more earlier this year.

Back in February, their national media deliberately misinterpreted platitudes about the state of bilateral relations issued by the Russian Minister of Trade and Industry when provocatively asked by Indian reporters about his country’s position towards Masood Azhar despite this issue having nothing at all to do with him, which in hindsight was more than likely a trick to get him to say something generally positive that could then be misreported in the “wishful thinking” way that Indian intelligence intended in order to weaponize it as part of their campaign of pressure on Moscow.

Bearing these relatively recent experiences in mind, it wouldn’t be altogether surprising if ANI — which is extremely close to the BJP — was ordered by the country’s intelligence services to step it up a notch and outright invent a Russian diplomatic statement as part of an intensified third attempt at waging an infowar against Russia designed to pressure it into supporting India on Kashmir following its conspicuous official silence on the issue over the past week.

Pressuring Russia To Diplomatically “Contain” China

It should be said that Russia’s silence could understandably be interpreted as tacit approval, but India probably wants an overt unambiguous statement thereof (if it wasn’t already truly expressed through a speculative press release sent by the Russian Embassy in India on Saturday per the previously described scenario) in order to be assured of its support ahead of Pakistan’s Chinese-backed attempt to take the topic up at the UNSC.

The international strategic context is ultra-sensitive after China condemned India’s moves last week for infringing on its territorial integrity, especially after Indian Home Minister Amit Shah even threatened that people “can die” over his country’s claims to Chinese-administered Aksai Chin, (see map right) so India wants to be assured at the very least of Russian diplomatic support for its position ahead of what seems poised to be a diplomatically explosive upcoming couple of weeks.

This backdrop would explain why an unprecedentedly audacious third infowar might have been launched against Russia over the weekend through the spreading of potentially false but very specific statements about Moscow’s position towards New Delhi’s latest moves in Kashmir.

Concluding Thoughts

As was written earlier, these controversial claims will more than likely be cleared up by sometime next week since they’ve already created such a stir that Russian officials are now compelled to publicly respond to them one way or the other. Should Russia reaffirm what was reported about its diplomatic position towards Kashmir, then it would more than likely be doing so in order to not risk losing out on multibillion-dollar arms contracts with India that its budget is partially depending upon to help finance the ambitious “Great Society“/”National Development Projects” that are supposed to be the crowning achievement of President Putin’s domestic socio-economic legacy.

Even so, Russia is unlikely in that scenario to support India to the point of submitting to its political fantasy of helping to “contain” China, even if the two end up disagreeing at the UNSC about Kashmir. On the other hand, in the event that Moscow contradicts the claims that were spread over the weekend, it would be doing so out of solidarity with Islamabad since Kashmir is Pakistan’s Crimea and with the intent of reinforcing its regional “balancing” act that started with its recent “Return to South Asia“. It also goes without saying that Russian-Indian relations would never be the same again if this turns out to be a fake news fiasco.

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This article was originally published on The Info Corridor.

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.

In 1933, soon after Hitler’s ascent to power, the British ambassador to Germany made this assertion: “I have the impression that the persons directing the policy of the Hitler government are not normal. Many of us, indeed, have a feeling that we are living in a country where fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand.” 

Well, fast forward to Amerika 2019 and what have we got? Well, not only does this president fit the bill, but what of those who work under him, sometimes overtly and sometimes covertly, and the millions who trash any dissent towards him?

This is the 2nd anniversary of the infamous Charlottesville white supremacy march and melee. What struck me then and of course now is the utter apathy so many of my fellow citizens had and still have over what  transpired on August 11-12 2017.

Those white supremacy fanatics, are they not in these early stages similar to the Nazi mobs who first marched, and then destroyed Jewish business, burnt down synagogues, and of course beat up or killed Jewish citizens of Germany? Do not many of them desire to harken back to those ‘Good old days’? After all, they carried those similar torches and repeated those similar mantras of ‘Blood and Soil’ and ‘Jews will not replace us’.

The real spin & sin of it all is when Mr. Trump decided to mention, after the Charlottesville street attacks between white supremacists and Antifa, that “Both sides had bad people and some nice people too.” So what he was doing was to give a backhanded legitimacy to the Neo Nazis who marched with such vitriol. The outrage should still be echoing throughout this nation… especially but not restricted to Jewish people. Where was the outrage coming from the Israeli government and mainstream media? Where was Jared Kushner and his wife? Where were all those Jews who either worked for this administration or support it?

Sadly, anyone who still resides under the Trump/Republican tent, ignoring the Charlottesville truth , and of course now the El Paso shooter truth is walking down a dangerous road. The white supremacist march, to this writer, most likely gave manna to  Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh, before he decided to go into that synagogue and kill Jews. Trump’s references to those coming to our southern border as rapists, drug dealers and of course ‘invaders’ may have just influenced that 21 year old to drive all the way from Dallas to do his deed in El Paso. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist once you have seen  that young man’s writings and postings etc. Of course, the right wing media is trying to use the Dayton, Ohio shooter as a foil to this argument. Why? Because he called himself a socialist and admired Sen. Warren? The analogy is ludicrous as she never used any such similar rhetoric of casting right wingers as ‘invaders’, coming to take away our way of life. Both shooters were obviously mentally unbalanced, for them to do such terrible deeds. Yet, that is even more reason for our so called leaders to tone down such rhetoric, because it stirs up emotions for violence. Check out Mr. Trump’s talks and speeches since 2015 and see for yourselves.

All this leads to another outgrowth of this Neo Fascist plague that has gripped our nation. One of the two most favorite websites that I write for regularly has been under a total attack by trolls… very  technically  savvy ones. The site has been attacked two or three times before, costing the site masters lots of money to counteract the damage done. Recently, myself and seven other writers, some who are much more popularly known than me, cannot even get our submissions to the site via email. Nor can the site contact us back. I have to ask friends to submit my work via their emails. Sad. Why is this being done? Well, the site is famous for its stance against Imperialism and Steroid Capitalism. It has also been very keen to criticize both of our two major political parties. As a baby boomer, I have never seen such overt rage directed toward anyone who stands up to this Neo Nazi fanaticism disguised as patriotic conservatism. Alas, many true conservatives and libertarians stand with we on the left who disdain attempts to shut out our free speech. The threats and use of brute force is what made a wonderful and advanced society like Weimar Germany fall from grace. Does that rabbit hole await us here?

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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].

This week, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a long-awaited report on land, climate change and agriculture.[1] The report’s findings confirm that the agriculture and food systems on which we now depend are no longer viable. 

Individual consumer choices in the global north, about what to eat, won’t be enough to get rid of a bad system, nor will they be enough to build a just transition to a better one.

While much of the media coverage of the new IPCC report on land and agriculture focus on diet, the report needs to be understood as saying this: we (in protein-rich countries, at the very least), must replace our current large-scale industrialized systems of agriculture and food production with those based on agroecological and regenerative practices. Food security and agricultural resilience, in the face of a changing climate, depends on this.

From IATP’s perspective, replacing our current industrialized system requires dismantling the power of large-scale corporate agribusiness to manipulate markets, drive consumer demand, and influence everything from our food safety regulatory system to the rules laid down in international trade agreements.

For agroecological and regenerative systems sector-wide, we must achieve widespread public understanding of the productive, environmental, and economic legitimacy of these systems; invest heavily in them, in the farmers designing them and in the rural communities in which they prosper; and reawaken ourselves to the cultural and societal significance of our agriculture and food systems.

Globally, industrialized agriculture now emits extraordinarily high levels of GHG emissions as a sector. In our 2018 in-depth report, Emissions Impossible, IATP and GRAIN calculated total GHG emissions by a corporation, rather than by country. This gave us new insights into the astonishing lack of accountability for GHG emissions of the world’s largest 35 meat and dairy corporations. Responsible for the design, promotion, perpetuation and performance of large-scale industrialized agricultural systems of meat and dairy production, these corporations must also be accountable for their role in perpetuating, or curbing, climate change, system-wide.

It is imperative not to confuse large-scale industrialized meat and dairy corporations with agroecological and regenerative livestock producers, whose vision and practice is precisely what is needed. Fueling that confusion is the entanglement (at some point in their supply chains), of large, vertically integrated corporations with producers of all kinds and sizes. Vertical integration and corporate concentration in agribusiness is another tough problem to solve. We can start by enforcing what is left of antitrust laws and stopping more mega-mergers.

It is imperative, too, that we think far beyond single-note dietary changes. For example, consumer campaigns focused on the importance of reduced meat consumption should not rest their case with individual consumer choice, but instead, recognize the role of corporate influence in the system, as well as promoting the importance of livestock to regenerative agricultural systems. A simplistic “no meat” message can too easily and swiftly fall into a populist and misdirected movement harmful to farmers worldwide who are, right now, responsibly building our agroecological and regenerative agricultural systems.

Plant-based diets that continue to rely on agricultural inputs that are themselves high emitters of GHGs (such as fertilizer), pollutants and toxic chemicals are of no use. Nor are plant-based diets dependent on GMOs. Nor are plant-based diets that depend on the continued exploitation of farm labor, farmers forced to sell their commodities for less than the cost of production, and inequity in their ability to purchase and hold farmland. There is the possibility that the choice to eat less meat, (or none at all), could be erroneously seen by those who make it, as an act that naturally leads to agriculture that is good for the land, for farmers, for ecosystems, for consumers. Just not so.

The shift from agrarian societies to industrial, to digital, has come at a high cost when it comes to the general public’s knowledge of agriculture. The value of that loss cannot be over-estimated when it comes to consumer campaigns and the role they can and must play in promoting the system changes we need for a just transition to sustainable agriculture, sector-wide.

The wildly expanding market for organic food tells us that consumers can and do understand the importance of what they eat as individuals, yet it remains unclear how and if this market growth signals a much-needed change in societal values when it comes to the land and the people who farm it. We certainly are not seeing a change in values reflected in the apparent market growth for fake meat, for example. We do not need more unregulated start-up fake meat labs designed to exploit our addiction to fast food. We already know that the societal cost of fast food is much too high a price to pay for private profits gained. What we do need is a consumer u-turn of sorts, away from one-note dietary panaceas, and toward recognizing and insisting on the extraordinary and unimaginably crucial diversity of the ecological and biological systems necessary for the food that sustains life.

Consumers will not understand how agricultural systems work (and what we must do to maintain them), without being taught. Agribusiness will not cede power without the strong insistence of the public and political will. Farmers will not change their practices with no support to do so and little role in defining what a just transition to sustainable and resilient agriculture and food systems should look like.

All of these changes require the responsibility of people committed to our civic role in governance, mindful of the stakes, confident in our role’s legitimacy in a democracy, and tenacious in our determination to get it right.

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Note

1 Officially titled “Climate Change and Land, an IPCC Special Report on Climate Change, Desertification, Land Degradation, Sustainable Land Management, Food Security, and Greenhouse Gas Fluxes  in Terrestrial Ecosystems”

According to unnamed US officials, Epstein was found dead in his federal Manhattan Metropolitan Correctional Center cell at around 7:30AM Saturday.

Was it suicide as reported or was he silenced to prevent revelations of high-level US and international figures involved in charges against him — including sex with and trafficking of minors.

After found injured/semi-conscious in his cell two weeks earlier, reportedly he was on suicide watch, meaning round-the-clock monitoring — likely by video camera, bright lights kept on in his cell round the clock, and regular guard inspections.

So how did he manage to take his own life under these conditions and not found until early morning, a suspicious conclusion, raising an obvious red flag.

Reportedly he was taken off suicide watch in late, perhaps less monitoring as well in a special housing unit continued.

Was it to leave no videotape evidence of murder, reported as suicide? The official report of his death leaves important questions unanswered.

The likelihood of silencing him to avoid trial and its damaging revelations about powerful people far outweighs the notion that he took his own life, and managed to do it unobserved with nothing in his cell enabling it.

Since arrested on July 6, he was held without bail, charged with one count of sex trafficking, another of sex trafficking conspiracy — with under-age girls.

If convicted in judicial proceedings, he faced up to 45 years in prison — likely for the rest of his life at aged-66.

According to Prison Resource.com,

“(s)urviving prison can be extra tough for a sex offender, especially if their offenses include possessing, distributing, or producing child pornography, or soliciting minors for sexual activity.”

“Sex offenders face being ostracized or targeted by other prisoners, and are subjected to enhanced monitoring to ensure they are not engaging in risk-relevant behaviors.”

Epstein was a wealthy hedge fund manager/financier, the extent of his wealth unclear. According to New York magazine and Vanity Fair, there’s much about his business dealings and private life that’s shrouded in mystery.

NY magazine said he broke the mold of investors and financiers by operating privately and secretly.

“Most everyone on (Wall Street) heard of him, but nobody seems to know what the hell he is up to. Which is just the way he likes it,” said the publication.

Trump said he’s known him for 15 years, calling him “fun to be with. (H)e likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Vanity Fair called him “(a) man who loves women – lots of them, mostly young. Model types have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a familiar face to many of the Victoria’s Secret girls.”

He was the main investor and money manager for the founder of Limited Brands, Leslie Wexner, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret and other retailers.

Vanity Fair also described him as generous, vicious, reckless, and mysterious, adding “(h)e’s been untouchable, given a free pass by the very rich people, the very powerful people with whom he socializes and perhaps over whom he has leverage” — meaning dirt he may have as potential blackmail to get away with virtually anything until his past caught up with him this summer.

During his weeks earlier arraignment, he pleaded not guilty to federal criminal charges.

In 2008, he pleaded guilty to soliciting and procuring prostitution in Florida, received a slap-on-the-wrist 13 month sentence, letting him spend 12 hours daily at his office six days a week, shielded from federal prosecution, and became a registered sex offender.

In April, a federal judge ruled that Florida prosecutors (overseen by Alexander Acosta, Trump’s labor secretary until replaced for this issue) acted illegally by granting Epstein a secret plea bargain deal without letting his accusers know about it.

In July, Wikipedia scrubbed his page, removing mention of Dems and certain other high-profile figures alleged to have flown on his infamous Boeing 727 Lolita Express sex plane.

Bill Clinton reportedly flew on it 26 times. So did other high-profile figures on trips to Palm Beach, FL, the US Virgin Islands and elsewhere.

According to a Miami Herald report, Epstein sexually abused dozens of young girls at his homes in Florida and New York.

Given his close ties to numerous high-profile political, business, entertainment, and other figures with possible dirt he knows related to their sexual activities, did he take his own life or was he silenced to take his secrets to the grave?

As the saying goes, dead men tell no tales.

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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.

After three days of intense negotiations in Ankara, US and Turkish officials reached an agreement on Wednesday to create a joint operations center and set up a safe zone east of the Euphrates in north eastern Syria. Deal details have not yet been disclosed.

This last minute deal between Washington and Ankara is in response to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s announcement on Sunday that Turkey was prepared to carry out a unilateral cross-border operation to push back Kurdish militias on the Syrian Turkish border east of the Euphrates river, if the Washington didn’t cut ties with the Kurdish militias and create a safe zone in northern Syria.

The two NATO allies agreed that the Turkish based joint operations center would be created as soon as possible to address Turkey’s security concerns.  The safe zone would become a “peace corridor”, and efforts would be made so that Syrian refugees could return home.

However, wanting peace is just a front for Erdogan’s true motives. The Syrian government categorically rejects the deal as a blatant attack on Syria’s territorial sovereignty and warns of Erdogan’s real reasons for establishing a so-called safe-zone on Syrian soil.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said

“The agreement constitutes a partnership between the US and Turkey over aggression against Syria that would serve the interest of the Israeli occupation entity. It also reflects how evasive and misleading the policies of the Turkish regime are.”

On Thursday an official Syrian source at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told SANA

“Syria expresses categorical rejection of the agreement announced by the US and Turkish occupations on establishing the so-called [safe zone] which constitutes a blatant aggression against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Syrian Arab Republic and a flagrant violation of the principles of international law and the UN Charter.”

Turkey is using the excuse of protecting its borders against the US-backed Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) who Turkey views as the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), to fulfill its long-term mission of expanding its territory by invading and balkanizing its sovereign neighbor.

Many nations including the United States, who designated the PKK as a terrorist group in 1997, and Turkey who has been in conflict with the PKK since their inception in 1984, consider them to be a terrorist organization.

Another Turkish goal is to replace the indigenous diverse ethnic population in northern Syrian with extremists that are sympathetic to Erdogan, like we have seen in Afrin and other towns on Turkey’s border in northern Syria.

Erdogan’s plans for invasion and annexation will put Christian minorities in danger, some of whom can trace their lineage back to the original inhabitants of this land. However, Kurdish militias have also targeted them by using forced conscription and other Daesh-like intimidation tactics. The Kurdish Connection: Israel, ISIS And U.S. Efforts To Destabilize Iran explains more about how Kurdish militias have been used by the US to achieve their own objectives in the Middle East.

A statement issued by the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs states

“This agreement has very clearly exposed the US-Turkish partnership in the aggression against Syria which serves the interest of the Israeli occupation entity and the Turkish expansionist ambitions and it unequivocally exposed the misleading and evasiveness which govern the policies of the Turkish regime.”

“Syria calls on the Arab people to be aware of the dangers of the expansionist ambitions of the Turkish regime which is spreading the killing and chaos in different parts of the Arab world from Syria to Libya and the Sudan and it will not stop till it will satisfy its illusions on reviving the Ottoman Sultanate,” the source said.

The Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs representative concluded by saying that

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

All the major players involved in the proxy war in Syria, including Turkey, Russia, and Iran want the US to leave, except of course the US-backed Kurdish SDF which are just a rebranding of the YPG.

US President Donald Trump has expressed interest multiple times in a swift troop withdrawal, and to let the local regional players figure things out. However, the war hawks surrounding him in Washington, along with the Pentagon have derailed his plans since last December. They have stressed that US interests need to be protected by having a long-term presence in the oil-rich, agriculturally rich, breadbasket of Syria, to keep an eye on Iran while protecting their ally, Israel.

As I have stated previously establishing an independent Kurdish state in Syria is just part of the decades-long Israeli-American plan to weaken and divide all the nations neighboring Israel.

Although it might seem like Russia has been uncharacteristically quiet this week regarding the latest developments with Turkey and the US in north eastern Syria, Russia has consistently stood by the Syrian government’s right to protect its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Whether its occupation and annexation by the Kurds or Turks, Kurdification or Turkification, the Syrian government and military categorically reject any infringement on their land, and have adamantly stated they will take back every inch of Syrian territory from terrorists or occupiers.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

Sarah Abed is an independent journalist and political commentator. For media inquiries please email [email protected].

There seems no longer any attempt, or semblance, of seeking diplomacy by Washington. Sanctions and aggression are wielded with reckless abandon. Russia, China, and even America’s own supposed European allies are subject to sanctions by Washington in a high-handed dismissal of any mutual dialogue to resolve alleged grievances.

US President Donald Trump has evolved a certain shrill maximalist attitude in international relations. It can be coined thus: my way or no way.

One recent example is the imposition of sanctions on Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. That indicates the US cutting off any possibility of a negotiated de-escalation of tensions in the Persian Gulf.

Iran’s Zarif revealed this week that when he was on a diplomatic visit to the US last month he was told by officials that he was expected at the White House for a meeting with President Trump. If Zarif baulked at the “offer” then he would be put on a sanctions list, he was allegedly informed. The Iranian top diplomat declined under the circumstances of apparent coercion, only to find that he was indeed later slapped with sanctions. What kind of American diplomacy is that? Sounds like a mafia-type offer not to refuse.

This heavy-handed approach to “diplomacy” suggests that there is in fact no diplomacy emanating from Washington. President Trump tweeted last week that his administration was “running out of options” in dealing with Iran over mounting tensions in the Persian Gulf. It seems the White House is “offering” faux attempts for negotiation, while all the while mounting military options to strike at Iran.

Another example of failed diplomacy is the resignation this week of US ambassador to Russia, John Huntsman. He quit his post partly out of frustration over the futility of his diplomatic duty to facilitate bilateral dialogue with Moscow. Huntsman’s job became untenable due to the manic anti-Russian animus now embedded in Washington, whereby any attempted dialogue would be portrayed as some kind of “treasonous act”.

Still another example of US repudiation of diplomacy is Trump’s executive order this week to impose a total trade embargo on Venezuela. The South American country is effectively being starved into submission to accept Washington’s demand that elected President Nicolas Maduro stand down, according to US dictate, in order to allow a US-backed dubious opposition politician take the reins of power in Caracas.

These examples, among many more, demonstrate that Washington has no intention of seeking diplomatic discourse with other nations, and is fully intent on issuing dictates – or else; in order to achieve its geopolitical aims.

The appalling and dangerous thing is that Washington is operating on a basis of zero-sum ultimatum. The premises for its dictates are invariably unsubstantiated or irrational. Russia is treated like a pariah state over outlandish allegations of interference in US elections; Iran is treated like a pariah state over hollow claims about Iranian aggression; Venezuela is treated like a pariah state over allegations against an elected president. China is vilified over claims it is a “currency manipulator”. Europe is allegedly “taking advantage” of US trade terms. And so on, and so on. It is tyranny run amok.

The standard of international law and norms of diplomacy are being trashed in the most willful and wanton ways, purely on the basis of American whim and self-serving agenda for domination.

This is an extremely dangerous global situation whereby American political bias, and irrational bias to boot, is being made the standard instead of principles of international law and sovereignty of nations. There is absolutely no diplomacy. Only the writ of American demands for obeisance to Washington’s irrational dictate to satisfy its demands for hegemony.

There seems no other way to describe the present global lawlessness of American presumed power and self-righteousness other than to call it a form of rogue-state fascism on steroids.

When diplomacy, negotiations, dialogue and respect for sovereignty are so utterly disrespected by Washington – whose only response is sanctions and military aggression – then we should know that the present description of American power is not hyperbole. It is a lamentable description of reality whereby American diplomacy is no longer extant. It is becoming way past the possibility of conducting normal relations with this paranoid, lawless rogue regime. A nuclear rogue state, too, capable of destroying the planet on a whim or paranoid rush to its sick brain.

Can American citizens rein in such an errant, irrational regime? Time will tell. But one thing seems for sure, world peace is continually endangered by the regime in Washington which is operating in its own realm of fantasy and criminal megalomania.

Of course US diplomacy is an utter failure. Because in the twisted warmongering megalomania of Washington, diplomacy seems to have become totally irrelevant. Is that not fascism?

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“Britain has no leverage, Britain is desperate … it needs an agreement very soon. When you have a desperate partner, that’s when you strike the hardest bargain.” So warned former US treasury secretary Larry Summers on Radio 4 ‘Today’ programme this morning, as new foreign secretary Dominic Raab jets off on a tour of North America to investigate potential trade deals.

“Britain has much less to give than Europe as a whole did, therefore less reason for the United States to make concessions,” said Summers, a senior figure in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. “You make more concessions dealing with a wealthy man than you do dealing with a poor man.”

Summers is of course right. But he makes a key mistake. He assumes that Raab, Johnson and the new cabinet care about defending the interests and autonomy of most people in the UK. He seems to be under the impression that Brexit was about taking back control.

In reality, the brand of Brexit promoted by Tory hardliners has long been about pulling Britain under the shadow of American capital. Not as a 51st state, with votes and constitutional rights, but as an outhouse for US business, a sort of colder, paler version of Puerto Rico.

We will be forced to accept US-style deregulation, with its poor standards for workers and consumers. We will have our assets stripped clean off the bone. Even before Brexit, we are fast becoming a pawn in the Pentagon’s global games.

We won’t become Americans, though. We’ll have no say in the standards that will govern our new Atlantic common market. Nor will we be permitted to help decide who stands in the planet’s biggest pulpit. Nor will we have much significant say in our own foreign policy. The UK has chosen to shift from participating in one power block to sitting on the outer edges of another.

Victory of the lobbyists

If that wasn’t clear before (though it was), the events surrounding the arrival of Boris Johnson in Downing Street have confirmed it.

During the leadership election there was, of course, the failure to defend Kim Darroch, the British ambassador to the US. Then there is the ongoing confrontation with Iran, in which Britain’s post-empire is being enlisted in the schemes of US neoconservatives. There is the revelation that a new US pro-Brexit campaign group has launched, and Steve Bannon’s insistence on ‘Today’ that Boris Johnson should deliver a “no deal, hard out”.

Over the past three years, we’ve seen Britain’s lobbying industry and think-tanks auction their access to our politicians off to US corporations and oligarchs – from the firm which ran Johnson’s leadership campaign bragging in Washington about its ability to shape Brexit for US business, to the Institute for Economic Affairs offering to broker meetings between senior ministers and US companies wishing to get their piece of the Brexit pie.

We’ve seen one former Washington lobbyist – Shanker Singham – move to London and secure unprecedented access to our politicians, even writing the so-called Malthouse compromise, while lobbyists also drove the team that ensured their preferred candidate was elected prime minister.

And now that they’ve got their Johnson in place lobbyists have taken over the cabinet.

We’ve seen Trump confirm that “everything” – including the NHS – “will be on the table” in a US trade deal, before his spin-doctors reminded him that he’s not supposed to say that out loud.

“Britain Trump”

We see it in the ascent of Johnson himself – a rise which has coincided with the arrival in the UK of the sorts of institutions and culture we’re more used to watching from a safe distance across the Atlantic. On openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how Definers Public Affairs, the smear machine which destroyed Hillary Clinton, has set up shop in the UK, how a US-style super PAC is being rolled out across Europe and how Brexit is the biggest outsourcing of public policy in British history.

Johnson, who has surfed this wave, has been anointed “Britain Trump” by his US admirer. It’s a fair nickname, not because they have the same character, but because they both epitomise the elitist myths embedded in their respective national characters. Trump is the millionaire’s son who pretends to be rich because of merit, the brash bully-boy billionaire in a culture whose dream equates wealth and cruelty with merit and success.

Johnson, on the other hand, comes from the school on whose playing fields the battle of Waterloo was mythologically won. He epitomises an Anglo-British exceptionalism built on a mystical link between nation, royalty and aristocracy: a link forged in the failed revolution of the civil war and bought with imperial plunder, and which reminds the British bourgeois of an era when you didn’t need to do your homework to attain power – you got it by dint of your nation, gender, class and skin colour.

Likewise, their identikit ideologies are the same: oligarch enrichment woven round national mythologies.

Johnson pretends to be a free trader in the way that earlier British politicians claimed to support free trade whilst using their military might to force China to buy opium, commit genocide in Tasmania and smash up cotton looms in India. Trump claims to be a protectionist just as earlier US presidents used a pretence of isolationism to pretend they weren’t building an empire, at the same time preaching that the US was manifestly and justifiably destined to conquer the whole North American continent, committing genocide against Native American peoples as they did so.

Both Trump and Johnson have been contorted by the distorting lenses of their respective nationalisms, confusing many into thinking that they ooze truth or charm or talent. Strip off those red white and blue tinted goggles and you quickly see them for what they are: rich racists willing to trample anyone to secure the world for their kind.

Ultimately, they both represent the same interwoven set of interests: oligarchs, mafiosi, disaster capitalists, Gulf oil millionaires, hedge fund speculators and any other corner of the elite which has spotted that the neoliberal era is coming to an end, they have few places left to invest and their best option is to hide away as much money as they can behind the biggest walls they can build.

This is what Johnson meant when he said “fuck business” – that he and his friends no longer have anything invested in traditional industries, so are happy to see them disappear. It is why Trump is perfectly happy to fuck America’s car industry as he slashes tax for the hyper-rich.

Useful scraps of empire

At openDemocracy, we’ve revealed how millions of pounds were pumped into the Leave campaigns in the first place. That money came through the same British Overseas Territory and Crown Dependency secrecy areas that the billionaires of the world use to stash the cash they can no longer figure out how to get a return from – the same post-empire that the Pentagon is so keen to get a closer grip on.

For while the UK’s network of semi-colonies is useful as a money-laundry for the world’s oligarchs, we’ve seen in recent weeks how it plays a different strategic role, too – why America might see it as a valuable asset to begin to enclose under its wings.

When the British territory of Gibraltar captured an Iranian tanker, supposedly to enforce an EU embargo against oil to Syria, it did so despite the fact that Iran isn’t in the EU, and the EU doesn’t force non-members to comply with its embargoes. The Spanish have, according to The Guardian, claimed that the UK is acting under the influence of the US, and the former Swedish prime minister and senior EU figure Carl Bilt has hinted as much. It looks very much like this wasn’t so much an act of British foreign policy as one of submission to the US Department of Defense.

Britain captured Gibraltar in 1704 because of its strategically important location. To this day, one-third of the world’s oil and gas passes through its straits. Likewise, another strategically vital waterway will define this conflict: the Gulf of Oman, which connects the Strait of Hormuz to the Arabian sea. Oman isn’t formally a British territory, but it has been a de facto UK colony since the nineteenth century, with London helping to prop up the slave-owning ruling family over two centuries. As Ian Cobain has outlined, its current sultan was put in place by an MI6 coup in 1970.

The relationship remains strong. Shell owns 30% of the national oil company and Britain’s military presence is significant. According to Duncan Campbell, the journalist who originally revealed the existence of GCHQ, the Snowden leaks revealed Oman hosts a vital British intelligence base, tapping the vast number of communications cables that run under the Gulf. Last year, the UK opened a permanent naval base in the country, and in February this year, the British government announced it had signed an historic defence agreement with the sultanate, “bringing us even closer to one of our most important partners”.

For those with long memories, this might start sounding familiar: the 45-minute claim intended to frighten the British into accepting the 2003 Iraq war was based on the claim that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction could be ready to deploy not against London, but against the British Overseas Territories in Cyprus.

If the Pentagon is to keep a firm grip on the world, Britain’s post-imperial web of semi-colonies will be vital fingerholds, and Brexit offers the US a unique opportunity to expand its control over the UK and its overseas assets.

The Great British Asset Striptease

This wasn’t inevitable. In theory, Brexit could genuinely have been about ‘taking back control’ for the British people. It would be possible to turn the UK into a new Cuba, for instance, substituting home-grown products for international imports. Not a suggestion that would please the millions of Leave voters who opted to quit the EU essentially because they wanted to become another Japan instead: wealthier than the UK, industrialised, with less income inequality, richly forested and deeply racist.

But these are not the options before us.

Instead, Brexit means plonking the corpse of post-imperial Britain in a vulture restaurant for US asset strippers, and pretending not to notice that China perches nearby, ready to pluck at whatever it fancies too.

The Great British Asset Striptease isn’t new, of course. For decades, the country has mostly stayed afloat in the world by auctioning off the plunder we accumulated through centuries of empire. As Joe Guinan and Thomas Hanna point out, the Treasury has calculated that Britain sold off 40 per cent of all assets privatised across the OECD between 1980 and 1996.

But as the new foreign secretary heads off on his ‘everything must go’ tour of North America, the people of the UK are going to have to fight hard to stop him selling the whole country to Trump and his friends. Just as thousands mobilised against the EU-US trade deal known as TTIP, we’re going to have to stand together and fight against any UK/US trade deal. We’re going to have to fight to protect our public services and our workers’ rights and our ecosystems from the new plunderers of the planet. Because Britain doesn’t have any power in its negotiations with Trump. And we have a government that will be delighted to turn the country into an offshore theme park for American, Saudi and Chinese billionaires.

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The HBO miniseries “Chernobyl” is a timely reminder of the horrors of nuclear technology gone wrong.

In the early hours of 26 April 1986, an accident occurred in northern Ukraine that revealed once again that all the genius and inventiveness of nuclear technology is powerless against human error. Machines could save no-one.

The HBO drama painstakingly detailed the events of that night: the botched experiment that led to an explosion that ripped a 2,000 ton concrete roof off the reactor; the fire that lasted ten days and released 100 times the amount of radioactivity as Hiroshima.

Vivid portrayal 

We watched as the scientists struggled in the first ten days to avoid an even worse outcome. If the molten mass were to penetrate through the concrete floor and come into contact with water, a nuclear explosion might take place with huge swathes of Europe rendered uninhabitable.

We observed the work of the “liquidators”, the army of men, numbering anywhere between 600,000 and 800,000, drafted in from all over the Soviet Union, to clean up the site and the contaminated territory.

Some shovelled graphite off the roof of Reactor 4, in an atmosphere so radioactive that they could stay only a minute or two before retreating. Over the next few years, the liquidators built the first sarcophagus, cleared away topsoil, buried whole villages, washed down roofs, and shot radioactive dogs and cats abandoned in these villages.

We watched as the men who were exposed to the highest levels of radioactivity died, decomposing from within, and contaminating anyone who came near them, including their wives and unborn children.

The miniseries was a brilliant piece of work: well written, well acted and well filmed. It did exactly what a good drama should do. It portrayed vividly what it was like for those people to face the worst technological disaster in history. It was hard to watch and hard not to cry.

Debunking myths

So far so good. The viewing public learnt how devastating a nuclear accident can be. How disappointing then that the opportunity to understand Chernobyl, its true health effects and the cover-up of those health effects, has been squandered.

The series has done nothing to debunk the myths about Chernobyl. We will not be able to avoid a repeat of history unless we face up to these realities.

The first myth is that Chernobyl was a “Soviet” accident. Surely, the West is told, only the USSR would cut corners and produce a second-rate nuclear reactor with inherent defects that needed only human error to result in a nuclear catastrophe.

The nuclear industry in the West was perfectly aware of RBMK reactor technology and there is no evidence that the West ever warned that an accident was waiting to happen. At that time, the capacity of the USSR to develop nuclear technology and expand its fleet of nuclear power stations was a source of admiration and perhaps a little fear in the West.

Besides, the UK had experienced its own nuclear accident in 1957 at Windscale, the US in 1979 at Three Mile Island and in 1999, days before the millenium, the French escaped a near meltdown at a nuclear power station near Bordeaux.

Nuclear accidents

On the night of 27 December 1999, a storm destroyed forests across Europe but before crossing the continent, the winds hit the French coast and a hundred million litres of water broke over the sea walls and flooded the Blayais reactor. The cooling system failed, then the diesel back up system failed, and finally two of the four essential service pumps failed.

A government spokesperson admitted that they were within twelve hours of a meltdown. This accident at Blayais bears many similarities to the accident at Fukushima in 2011. The nuclear lobby would like the public to believe that Fukushima was the result of a natural disaster, but even the Japanese parliamentary panel reporting in 2012, a year after the accident, said that it was a “man-made” disaster.

TEPCO had simply not built the reactor to withstand the earthquakes and tsunamis which occur regularly in Japan. Equally, a French parliamentary report had recommended in 1997 that the sea wall around Blayais be heightened half a metre, but EDF had postponed the work till 2002.

There is nothing “Soviet” about nuclear accidents.

Death toll 

The second myth surrounding Chernobyl concerns the death toll from the accident. The majority of sensible people are suspicious of the figures put about by the nuclear lobby (30 to 50 deaths) but struggle to understand the larger figures put out by organisations like Greenpeace, that involve tens or hundreds of thousands of deaths.

It suits the nuclear lobby for this discrepancy to exist in our minds. It allows them to paint Greenpeace and similar organisations as extremists and doom mongers. The discrepancy also conveniently obscures the dangers of low level radiation that causes illness and premature death in the vicinity of every nuclear reactor in Europe.

It is perfectly true that between thirty and fifty people died in the weeks following the accident from acute external radiation poisoning. The HBO drama concentrated on these (admittedly horrific) deaths, but it is not acute radiation poisoning that accounts for the hundreds of thousands of deaths following Chernobyl.

Illnesses and premature deaths caused by Chernobyl are due instead to chronic internal low level radiation from the ingestion of food grown on contaminated soil.

Apart from the victims of acute external radiation poisoning, who died in 1986, there are three other groups of people who suffer illness and premature death in the contaminated territories of Chernobyl.

Liquidators

The first are the liquidators, whose mortality and illness is mentioned briefly at the end of the HBO drama. Whether they removed graphite from the roof of Reactor 4 – the “organic robots”, who received horrendously high levels of radiation, or whether they dug up fields and villages and received a lower dose, the liquidators all inhaled particles of radioactive material in varying amounts. These particles remain in the body and will eventually lead to cancer or other illnesses.

In 2001 at a World Health Organisation conference in Kiev, the Chief Medical Officer of the Russian Federation said that 10 percent of his liquidators had died and 30 percent were ill. Extrapolated over the total number of liquidators from all over the USSR, this suggests that even in 2001, between 60,000 and 80,000 liquidators had already died and between 200,000 and 300,000 were ill.

The average age of the liquidators in 1986 was 33. We do not know about these men because the USSR not only lied about the levels of radioactivity they received but they also forbade doctors and hospitals from attributing illness and death to the accident.

Likewise, we do not know how many are still alive today, and if they have died, their cause of death will never be verified.

Evacuees

The second group of victims are the evacuees from the towns and villages in the vicinity of the reactor who should have been evacuated immediately but remained for a few days in extremely dangerous conditions.

The third group are the million peasant farmers living in the most contaminated villages in Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Their illness and premature death is the result of the chronic ingestion of food, morning noon and night, contaminated at low levels with radionuclides.

The radionuclides accumulate in the body and have effects on every organ of the body, in the medium and long term. There are villages where no children are healthy.

It must be remembered that children are far more vulnerable to the effects of radiation. A foetus is 100 times more vulnerable to the same amount of radiation as an adult male. (Just for the record, our internationally accepted “safe” limits are based on an adult male).

Health effects

The viewer watching Craig Mazin’s miniseries will be moved to tears but will be no nearer to understanding the devastating health effects that continue today in the contaminated territories around Chernobyl.

The harm comes from tiny particles lodged in the organs of the body, accumulating gradually over time. “No matter how small, if an area that has been subjected to intense ionisation for a sufficient time, cancer will proliferate throughout the body. It is in fact the body’s reaction to the exhaustion it experiences from trying to repair one very specific site that has been destroyed innumerable times”.

But cancer with its long latency period is not the only illness caused by this chronic internal low level radiation, which causes disorders in every organ and system of the body. The list (not exhaustive) includes cataracts, heart irregularities, diabetes, digestive problems, neurological problems, fertility problems, birth defects, chronic infections, and genetic effects.

The illness and death suffered by the victims of Chernobyl has been documented in a book published by the New York Academy of Sciences in 2009. Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe on People and the Environment brings together 5,000 scientific papers mainly from the three worst affected countries but also from the rest of Europe.

It is often forgotten that 57 percent of the radioactive fallout occurred outside Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. By way of illustration, one of the studies in the NYAS book details the doubling of the incidence of Down’s Syndrome in Lothian Scotland, an area that received fallout from Chernobyl (Ramsay et al,1991).

Valeri Legasov

The real disinformation in Craig Mazin’s miniseries is the almost total absence in his account of the role played by the nuclear lobby.

Any accident, anywhere in the world at a nuclear power station is of intense concern to the nuclear lobby because it threatens the industry. As early as August 1986, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) were in Moscow, directing the cover up. They remained in constant communication over the next five years, making abstract calculations about radiation levels and health effects and manipulating the data.

IAEA officials were carefully scrutinising the Soviet scientists they met, strengthening ties with those who adopted the nuclear industry line, and disparaging those wayward individuals who inconveniently insisted on telling the truth. Legasov was one of these wayward individuals.

The central character of the HBO miniseries is Valeri Legasov, brilliantly portrayed by Jared Harris. Legasov was a good man, who helped oversee the extinction of the fire in the first ten days, knew the true extent of the contamination, and the health consequences that would result.

When Legasov took his own life on the second anniversary of the accident, it was the culmination of a two year battle with the nuclear lobby.

Persecution

From August 1986, four months after the accident, the IAEA and the ICRP (International Commission on Radiological Protection) were already at work, pressuring the USSR to lower their estimates of deaths resulting from the accident.

Legasov had presented them with a voluminous document consisting of a general report and an Annexe. The stumbling block for the West were the 70 pages of Annexe 7 entitled “Medical and Biological Problems” in which Legasov contended that there would be at least 40,000 deaths.

Over the next year of so, Legasov and other independent scientists were worn down in a process one commentator has called “the stages of submission to the lies”. A collaboration of IAEA officials and tame Soviet establishment scientists minimised future health effects, threatened economic ruin if large populations were evacuated, and attacked independent scientists.

Four days before his death, Legasov, already persecuted in Moscow, heard that the nuclear lobby at an UNSCEAR conference on Sydney had massaged his figures down again, to a mere 4,000 possible deaths.

At the same conference, the IAEA made the decision that the Soviet people living in the “nuclear gulag” could live perfectly healthy lives with levels of radioactivity five times higher than officially recommended levels elsewhere on the planet. Legasov felt he had betrayed his people and he saw only one way out.

Ethos

The nuclear lobby has been active in the contaminated territories ever since. Organisations with names like Ethos, funded by the French nuclear lobby, were sent in to advise the population that “living with Chernobyl means learning to live again, to live another way, integrate the presence of radioactivity into daily life as a new component of existence”.

Ethos has no expertise in health and offers no medical care. They muzzle the few independent scientists and doctors who are genuinely involved in the health of the population and who accurately measure levels of radioactivity in soil and foodstuffs.

While the independent scientists and doctors working in the contaminated villages receive no money other than donations from charitable NGOs in the West, Ethos has seemingly limitless funds, which allow it to bribe the corrupt governments of the three countries concerned, whose overwhelming priority is to minimise the health effects and save money.

Ethos is now active around Fukushima in Japan, persuading the population to return to areas contaminated at levels higher than the evacuated zones of Chernobyl. “Ethos Japan” organises “rehabilitation” programmes, oversees confidentiality agreements between various university hospitals and the IAEA, and disparages the work of independent scientists.

Ethos threatens legal action against journalists like Mari Takenouchi who have the temerity to suggest that returning people to contaminated areas amounts to an experiment on human beings.

Responsibility

Fukushima was the price the Japanese paid for the lies told about Chernobyl. The lie told by the nuclear lobby is that a nuclear accident is not only survivable but something for which we should prepare.

We are being prepared now for the next nuclear accident with funding being provided by the EU for agricultural research into growing crops after large scale radioactive contamination of our lands.

Evacuation plans for a future nuclear accident are being prepared and it is proposed that the safety limits be raised from 1 mSv per year to 20 mSv per year in a post-accident scenario, as has happened in Japan.

Mazin lays the blame for the accident and for the lies told about the health effects at the door of Soviet Russia. But why be surprised that the USSR tried to cover up the accident and its likely effects? They have always lied to their people.

It is the nuclear lobby in the West who are effectively responsible for the world’s ignorance on this matter. The leaders of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia are simply the local administrators of policies that emanate from the Permanent Members of the Security Council of the United Nations (United States, France, Great Britain, China and Russia) and are legitimised by the IAEA and other organisations of the nuclear lobby.

The World Health Organisation has shamefully abdicated its responsibility in matters of radiation and health because it is subordinate in the UN hierarchy to the IAEA.

Debt to the truth

In his book The crime of Chernobyl, Wladimir Tchertkoff wrote: “A deliberate scientific crime has been going on for twenty eight [now 33] years at the heart of Europe, sanctioned at the highest level against the background of disinformation and general indifference.

“In order to preserve consensus about the nuclear industry, the nuclear lobby and the medical establishment are knowingly condemning millions of human guinea pigs to experience new pathologies in their bodies in the vast laboratories of the contaminated territories of Chenobyl”.

Craig Mazin has barely scraped the surface in uncovering the truth about Chernobyl: “Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth, Sooner or later that debt is paid”.

These are the words spoken by Legasov, the hero of Mazin’s miniseries. It is the central emotional message of the drama. But Mazin has betrayed Legasov, and all the other brave independent scientists, not named in the series, and he has betrayed the victims who still live in “the nuclear gulag”, by telling only half of the story.

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Susie Greaves translated The Crime of Chernobyl: The Nuclear Gulag, a 700-page account of the accident and its aftermath by Wladimir Tchertkoff. The book was published in France in 2006 by Actes Sud, in the UK and the USA in 2016, and now also published in Russia and Japan.

Featured image is from Pixabay

In our recent article entitled – Rise of the Techno Stasi-State we asked the question was that too strong a news headline after the High Court decided the government’s architecture of mass surveillance over the population was perfectly legal. The legal representative, Chamberlain QC, said on the High Court steps after Liberty-Human-Rights lost the challenge said:

“the possibility of abuse of power necessarily exercised in secret and the generally chilling effect on individuals’ communications and expression of ideas is caused by the existence of such powers.”

Slowly, Britain’s authorities are shutting down press freedom – without a murmur from the mainstream media.

That ‘abuse of power’ possibility was demonstrated recently when the Met Police threatened to prosecute journalists for publishing government documents related to the Kim Darroch affair. This was about the leak of diplomatic memos in which Britain’s ambassador to the US criticised President Donald Trump’s administration and then subsequently resigned. The Met’s counterterrorism command launched an investigation and stated it was a criminal matter –

“I would advise all owners, editors and publishers of social and mainstream media not to publish leaked government documents that may already be in their possession, or which may be offered to them, and to turn them over to the police or give them back to their rightful owner, Her Majesty’s Government.”

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat former health secretary, told The Independent that these remarks were “intolerable” and

“it strikes at the heart of the principle of a free press. We undermine this principle at our peril. It is central to our liberal democracy and must be defended. We do not live in a police state.”

Mr Lamb is supposed to be right of course – we should not be living in a police state.

However, just this week it emerged that there is a court hearing to decide whether journalists will be forced to hand over their notes from interviews with “ISIS bride” Shamima Begum. It has been adjourned in order to find a suitable judge.

You might remember that Begum was thrust into the media lights as one of three girls from Bethnal Green, east London, who left the UK aged just 15 in February 2015 and travelled to Syria to join Islamic State. Within days of her arrival, she married a Dutch-born ISIS fighter.

She was eventually tracked down while nine months pregnant by Times war correspondent Anthony Lloyd in a refugee camp in northern Syria in February this year and later gave interviews to other media outlets including ITV News and Sky News.

The Metropolitan Police is now seeking a court order under the Terrorism Act 2000 compelling media organisations to hand over their notes from their meetings with Begum.

The case was due to be heard by Mr Justice Sweeney, a High Court judge, at the Old Bailey last week but was adjourned after he ruled the case must be first heard by a circuit judge.

The date of the next hearing or who will hear the case has yet to be set.

Lawyers for The Times, Sky News and ITN have instructed legal representation to resist the application

The question has to be asked here – why is the Met Police so concerned about what Begum has to say? What is so damning or sensitive to counter-terror police that Begum – at the time just a pregnant teenager – would be so damaging for the public to hear.

Intrusive surveillance of journalists

On July 17th this year, Ministers were questioned about police surveillance of journalists.

Home Office Minister, Nick Hurd responded by telling MPs;

“Our security, and intelligence and law enforcement agencies will, in very limited circumstances, have a legitimate need to investigate a journalist or their source. But there need to be protections around that. The Investigatory Powers Act we believe does provide strong protections in relation to the use of investigatory powers for the purpose of identifying or confirming a journalistic source and for the obtaining of confidential journalistic information.“

Three weeks later that very same Act, The Investigatory Powers Act was challenged by Liberty the civil liberties charity, in the High Court as to its lawfulness. The court gave the government its blessing to do as it pleased when it comes to surveillance and that includes intrusive powers over journalists and their sources. The QC fighting Liberty’s corner eventually said after losing the challenge:

“the possibility of abuse of power necessarily exercised in secret, and the generally chilling effect on individuals’ communications and expression of ideas is caused by the existence of such powers”

Just six months ago the state was back in the dock defending its latest intrusive power grab – with the rather innocent sounding “Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Bill.”  The result – the National Union of Journalists, News Media Association (NMA), Reporters Without Borders and a number of press freedom groups all criticised the governments proposed Bill for lacking basic journalistic safeguards.

Broadly speaking – the new bill, creates a general power for the police to access electronic communications which are stored on overseas servers – such as those belonging to social media companies – for the first time.

The NMA said the scope of this would be “far greater than many realise, given the majority of UK citizens’ emails, social media messages and other electronic communications is stored on servers overseas, typically the US”.

In other words – currently, a judge must be consulted over attempts of the state to grab journalistic material, which can be contested by news organisations in court. The new bill only contains a requirement to notify organisations when something is deemed confidential i.e. the police can simply go for what they want without legal permission.

Rebecca Vincent, RSF’s (Reporters Without Borders) UK bureau director, said:

“We are concerned about the press freedom implications of this bill, particularly in light of other moves that could serve to further restrict press freedom in the UK, such as the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill, and a recent proposal by [intelligence department] GCHQ that would force a backdoor into encryption tools.”

The bill became the Crime (Overseas Production Orders) Act 2019 – on 12th February. It was sponsored by the Home Office under Sajid Javid.

The Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill also became an Act having been given Royal assent on the same day – 12th February.

“The Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act crosses a line that takes the law very close to prohibiting opinions,” said Index on Censorship’s Head of Advocacy Joy Hyvarinen. “This is a very dangerous legislative step to take in a democratic society,” Hyvarinen added.

Index on Censorship is also concerned about the implications of the new legislation for press freedom in the UK where government agencies now have wide-ranging new border security powers contained in Schedule 3, which lack adequate safeguards to protect journalists and their confidential sources.

The civil liberties organisation Committee on the Administration of Justice (CAJ) identified a catalogue of problems related to Northern Ireland within the same (Act), which also threw its general flaws into sharp relief. As a CAJ briefing paper noted:

“We can quite properly criticise this legislation for criminalising what could often be innocuous or trivial behaviour. When looked at in the light of Northern Ireland reality, however, it looks grossly disproportionate if not ridiculous. The idiocy of applying these measures to Northern Ireland ought to give legislators pause for thought before they pass them for the whole of the UK.”

The journalism campaigner Press-Gazette said prior to this Bill becoming an Act that is was – “a death sentence for investigative journalism in the UK.” At the time, over 130,000 members of the public signed a government petition to stop the legislation – which was ignored.

It was only a few days ago that TruePublica reported that the state was fully censoring Boris Johnson’s tour of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland with several highly experienced broadcast journalists confirming that both BBC Wales and ITV Wales were “refused the opportunity to ask Boris Johnson a single question on camera”.

Right-Wing hate rag and the Met Police

In the governments’ recent surge to right-wing politics, the Met Police have appointed without question The Daily Mail’s Chris Greenwood as the force’s head of media. Greenwood joined the Mail as crime correspondent in 2010. The Met Press Bureau operates 24/7 and is one of the busiest press offices in the country, tasked with, and this should be of no surprise – handling requests from all sections of the media.

The frank question to be asked here – why have the police not appointed someone with huge experience and political impartiality in the massive public relations sphere – instead of from a right-wing hate rag like The Daily Mail that has willfully been deceiving and lying to the general public for decades?

Skripal and the D-Notices

The Skripal affair resulted in the state issuing not one but two ‘D-Notices’ (British government instruction preventing particular information from being made public) to the British media, which were marked private and confidential. Even publication of the D-Notices could have resulted in prosecution. The Skripal affair is well documented. Less well known is the story about Pablo Miller – the MI6 agent inside the Estonian embassy who had recruited Sergei Skripal in the first place.

Millar was also implicated – as was Christopher Steel in the controversial dossier on Donald Trump and Russia that turned out paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Convention. You can read about all of this HERE.

The point here is that the state was losing control of the public narrative on the Skripal affair and at the tipping point, then issues notices to prosecute even though this story was very much in the public interest.

Without Irony

The UK already had one of the worst environments for press freedom in western Europe, according to a global ranking that places Britain below the likes of Jamaica, Latvia and Ghana for restrictions on reporters as they seek to hold power to account.

On July 10th this year, the government issued a press release stating that it supported global media freedom.  It headlined as – “UK aid “bold new support” to promote media freedom around the world” – and promised to “pioneer new approaches to keeping media outlets free and independent.” On the very same day of that press release – 400 miles away in Strasbourg, UK government lawyers were fighting for the right to continue spying on journalists and the press in the highest human rights court in Europe.

As Jeremy Hunt, the then Foreign Secretary made his magnanimous address in London to the Global Conference for Media Freedom, in Strasbourg the British government were defending its harsh regime of mass surveillance of data — including that of journalistic communications. At that conference, Britain and Canada publicly led a push to secure more protections for journalists, saying a free press “protects society from the abuse of power.”

Two months earlier – the 2019 World Press Freedom report said –

“Canadian journalists are not immune to attempts from government officials to deny them access to events of public interest, and the relationship shared between authorities and journalists is particularly tense.”

Of Britain, they were much more scathing adding that Britain should -formally repeal Section 40 of the Crime and Courts Act 2013, cease efforts to force a backdoor into encryption tools, implement the Magnitsky Amendment without further delay, and lift the ongoing threat of legal action against journalists Trevor Birney and Barry McCaffrey in Northern Ireland, who remain under police bail. 

Trajectory

The route to shutting down of oppositional voices and those seeking to hold power to account has been through government legislation. Reporters Without Borders are right to say of Britain –

“Too often steps taken in the name of national security trample press freedom, and too often legislation is adopted without adequate protection for journalists. Press freedom must be respected at the very core of domestic law, policies and practices, in line with the UK’s international human rights obligations.”

Without press freedom and protection of journalist and their sources, the flame of democracy is snuffed out. The current trajectory is one where political power is taking a stranglehold on the national narrative which in itself is the fastest route to political corruption. After that, everything has a price.

If the political debate slides surreptitiously, which it is, towards a combative atmosphere, in which journalists are treated as scapegoats on the one hand, and denied the ability to do their jobs without government aggression, then democracy is in great danger. That is the current path of Britain’s press freedom today.

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The Sikhs For Justice, a purely peaceful organization that’s campaigning for a plebiscite on the independence of Indian Punjab as Khalistan, are taking their support for Kashmir to the next level by filing a complaint at the UN about India’s recent “Israeli”-like unilateral actions in the occupied territory and seeking the urgent deployment of UN peacekeepers there prior to a referendum on the disputed region’s future political status.

The Sikhs For Justice (SFJ) are leading the international activist community in their support for the people of Kashmir after India’s recent “Israeli”-like unilateral actions in the occupied territory, proverbially putting their money where their mouth is by not just verbally supporting them like they earlier declared but actually going as far as to file a complaint on their behalf at the UN. The organization’s legal advisor Gurpatwant Singh Pannun informed the world in a press release that the SFJ officially urged the global body “to deploy the UN Peacekeeping Force in Indian occupied Jammu and Kashmir to stop the genocidal violence against Muslims by the Indian security forces” and “to hold a plebiscite to determine the will of the people of Kashmir regarding the status of Indian-held Kashmir as already decided in UN resolutions on Kashmir.” He also drew important attention to the alliance between Kashmiri Muslims and pro-Khalistan Sikhs when declaring that they “have joined hands in liberating their respective homelands from Indian occupation through referenda”, after which he emphasized their common struggle for self-determination and pointed out how their people have the UN-enshrined right to peacefully determine their political futures.

The SFJ’s actions are immensely significant because they represent the most profound political support that the Kashmiris have received since India attempted to annex them last week. They also raise awareness of the Khalistani cause as well and can contribute to inspiring the international activist community to learn more about their struggle in order to understand why these two movements support one another. The Sikhs, just like the Kashmiris, have a long history of victimization by the Indian state, with the most dramatic example of this being the military’s attack against one of the holiest shrines of the world’s fifth-largest religion during the infamous “Operation Blue Star” in 1984 that also resulted in the destruction of the Sikh Reference Library that housed thousands of irreplaceable documents related to this faith. India’s subsequent “Operation Woodrose” saw the military hunting down the Sikhs of Punjab in the months after this unprecedented assault, after which they were killed en masse during the genocidal state-sponsored pogroms that took place all across the country following the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by two of her Sikh bodyguards later that year.

Indian Punjab in the 1990s was also remarkably similar to current-day Kashmir in that the military often engaged in arbitrary detentions and extrajudicial executions in its campaign to crush the Khalistan movement. Not only that, but the government has done so little to counter the drug scourge there and address Punjub’s crisis of farmer suicides that it begins to look like the state is waging Hybrid War on its own Sikh citizens in order to remove them from that region as part of its “final solution” for stopping this separatist threat. Not coincidentally, there are now very serious concerns that India is planning to carry out a more rapid ethnic cleansing against the Kashmiris too by unleashing countless “Weapons of Mass Migration” into the disputed territory after revoking a constitutional clause that had hitherto prohibited the purchase of land in the region by non-residents in order to retain its demographic balance. The Chief Minister of Haryana openly hinted as much when he said that non-Kashmiri men can now marry Kashmiri women, which was widely interpreted as a dog whistle encouraging the country’s innumerable rapists to abuse women from that occupied region.

The slow-motion ethnic cleansing of the Sikhs from Indian Punjab was therefore a precedent for what might be about to happen at a much faster speed in Indian-Occupied Kashmir (IOK), which further explains why the SFJ are so active in trying to stop the impending catastrophe there because their people can personally relate to it. In an effort to bring about accountability for what’s happening in that closed-off region, they’re also seeking European arrest warrants for Indian Prime Minister Modi and Home Minister Shah ahead of their planned participation in this year’s G7 Summit later this month in France, as their legal advisor revealed in a joint press conference that he held with Lord Nazir Ahmed. Not only that, but the organization and its Kashmiri partners disclosed their joint plans to symbolically raise their movements’ flags all across the world in defiance of Indian Independence Day on 15 August, which will certainly generate substantial international media coverage and further their shared causes. Therefore, as it stands, the SFJ are doing more than anyone else to help the Kashmiris, and the rest of the international activist community can learn a lot from their example.

The author writes for this publication in a private capacity which is unrepresentative of anyone or any organization except for his own personal views. Nothing written by the author should ever be conflated with the editorial views or official positions of any other media outlet or institution.

Imagine just for a moment, the World would stand up in unison, sick and tired of the aggressive killer arrogance of the United States and her vassals – and their joint war-force called NATO – and this World, our World, what’s left of it when you deduct Washington and its Brussels allies, would at once block every shipment of everything destined for the ports of the United States of America; every sea port, airport and road port. Hermetically. Nothing would enter. Nothing, no food, no medicine, no electronics, no cars – no nothing. And nothing could leave. No exports, no petrol, no grains, no meat, no pharmaceuticals and foremost, no weapons. Nothing.

And now, take your mind a step further – and imagine the same – exactly the same, a total and full blockage of Israel – nothing would enter, no food, no fuel, no medication, no machinery and especially no weapons – and nothing would leave; a full and total blockage.

This would of course be totally illegal; illegal and unacceptable, by any international law, by the standards of the UN Charter, by the Human Rights Laws and Directives – by any ethical values of human morals. Wouldn’t it? – Yet, this is exactly what these countries are doing, have been doing for decades, sanctioning to strangle and murder entire populations into death or submission. The US with Cuba; Israel with Palestine. And the coercion and strangulation go on, unabated.

The longest embargo – illegal, inhuman and outright criminal – Washington imposed on Cuba – 60 years. Because Cuba has chosen socialism as her form of state and government. Cuba survived and will never give in to the tyrant of the north.

Now the US is expanding her palette of killing by impunity to dominate and subjugate nation after nation which they do not consider bending sufficiently to the dictate of their masters. Venezuela has been targeted for two decades, ever since former President Hugo Chavez was democratically elected in 1998; and Iran, ever since the US-imposed Shah was deposed in 1979 – exactly 40 years ago – by Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Both Venezuela and Iran are rich in natural resources, especially hydrocarbons but also in gold, rare earths and other precious metals and stones.

Contrary to what one would like to imagine, international world bodies, like the United Nations and her sister and associated organizations remain just about silent. When a high-level official utters some benign criticism of the US or Israel – it flairs up for a moment in the ‘news’, then it disappears again, as if it never happened. And indeed, nothing happens. They – the US and Israel – go on with their crimes in impunity.

The latest is an open declaration of economic warfare by Washington, a total embargo on Venezuela; the embargo is now being turned into a naval blockade. Similar steps are to be taken for Iran. That literally means that no merchandise – no matter how vital for survival, like food and medication, is allowed into Venezuela. Three days ago, the US seized, totally illegally, a cargo ship attempting to deliver food and medication to Venezuela – in the Panama Canal, territory which the US does not own or control anymore.

The ship was carrying soy cakes, from which Venezuela was to produce food. Never mind, that the cargoes are fully paid for by Venezuela. And this seems to be just the beginning. Vessels leaving Venezuela with petrol deliveries to client countries are also targeted for blockage, thus confiscating, or rather stealing, Venezuela’s main source of income on which she intends to survive and feed and provide health care for her people. This, in addition to the more than 130 billion dollars total Venezuelan assets confiscated – stolen – by the US worldwide.

And nobody says beep. Almost. Yes, there are some collective protests by countries in solidarity – like key members of the Sao Paulo Forum, as well as more than 60 members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM – total 120 members) that have become especially active in recent years in defense of Venezuela within the United Nations. Protests and protest declarations also take place by ALBA members, a Latin American trade alliance (ALBA – Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, 11 members [Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica, Ecuador, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Saint Lucia, Grenada and the Federation of Saint Kitts and Nevis]).

>But most interesting are the hypocrites, those who write and scream that Venezuelans are starving to death, that the Maduro government neglects its people – yet these accusers-in-falsehood – let the US and her vassals strangle Venezuela and steal her foreign assets, including foreign reserves and gold, food and medical imports – they are saying zilch, nada, nothing. Just watching.

To top it all off, the Human Rights Commissioner, Madame Michelle Bachelet, Hypocrite-in-chief, who recently visited Venezuela, at the invitation of President Nicolas Maduro, on a Human Rights mission, and who delivered a devastating report about Venezuela’s HR, full of lies, half-truths and outright omissions, not mentioning with one word the US inspired coup attempts, the US-funded opposition and its bloody atrocities perpetrated on the Chavista population, and the strangulating and starving by the US and US-dictated European sanctions – Madame Bachelet now came forward condemning the naval blockade. Great. But she did not stand up against the deadly embargo by the US and the European Union. – What credibility remains for the Human Rights Commission? – The world can see it – it’s all bought, coerced into submission, like so many other UN agencies by the Murderers Inc.

If we are not careful, they are soon going to rule the globe. Thanks god, for Russia and China – which are also subjects of US-EU sanctioning and targeted for take-over. But they are a tiny little bit too big and too strong for this sort of games by the decaying US empire and her obedient rats on the sinking ship.

Similarly, the European Union – despots as they have been for hundreds of years as colonialists in Africa, Asia and Latin America – and continue in a modern colonial role through economic control of much of Africa – this very EU, has been sanctioning Venezuela for years on the orders of Washington, naturally, who else? – Now they condemn the naval blockade, but continue their routine sanctions regime.

According to a study carried out by the Washington DC based Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), under guidance of Mark Weisbrot, CEPR co-director and Jeffrey Sachs, economics professor, Director, Center for Sustainable Development, Columbia University, New York, US and EU sanctions have cost some 40,000 Venezuelan lives. This mainly since August 2017, when Washington escalated its unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela and her state oil company, PDVSA, cutting them off international financial markets.

Yes, the world would have plenty of reasons to stand up and dish out similar naval and air blockades against the US and Israel. Just as a teaser to begin with, and if that doesn’t send a strong enough wake-up message, perhaps such embargoes should be considered on a longer-term indefinite scale. It’s illegal. But we are living in a world where international laws don’t count – where laws are made, as we go, by the self-declared hegemon, the US of A, and her symbiotic Middle East ally, Israel. – So, why not nudging the legal, moral and ethical order back into balance?

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

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; 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.

 

In late 2018 and numerous other times, Trump falsely claimed ISIS was defeated.

Last December he tweeted: “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there…”

In his January State of the Union address, he falsely said: “(T)he coalition to defeat ISIS has liberated very close to 100% of the territory…in Iraq and Syria.”

In July he said: “We (eliminated) 100% of the caliphate, and we’re rapidly pulling out of Syria. We’ll be out of there pretty soon” — not a message US hardliners want to hear.

 

He’s a geopolitical know-nothing, proved time and again, aware only of what his handlers want him to know, along with rubbish from Fox News, his favorite propaganda TV channel.

He may not know what followers of reliable independent sources, largely online, explained many times.

ISIS, al-Qaeda, its al-Nusra offshoot, and likeminded terrorist groups are US creations.

They’re recruited, armed, funded, trained, and directed by the Pentagon and CIA — using these jihadists as imperial foot soldiers in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, even the Philippines.

In a 2006 article and in his book on America’s “War on Terrorism,” Michel Chossudovsky explained the following:

“The US military-intelligence has created it own terrorist organizations. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program (pretending) ‘to go after’ these terrorist organizations,” adding:

“To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism in the Iraqi war theater (and later in Syria) must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat” — unaware of its US creation.

In 2014, Chossudovsky discussed 26 things to know about the Islamic State (aka ISIS, ISIL, Daesh). Here’s some of what’s discussed:

“The US has been protecting both Al Qaeda and ISIS-ISIL-Daesh.”

“The US Airforce has consistently acted on behalf of the terrorists, bombing Syrian government forces.”

“The Islamic State (ISIS) was until 2014 called Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).”

“Al Nusra is an al Qaeda affiliate which has committed countless atrocities in Syria. It is now considered by the US (to be) the ‘Moderate Opposition,’ fighting against Syrian government forces.”

“The terrorists are described as the victims of Syrian government aggression. From the very outset, the atrocities committed by the terrorists are casually blamed on Syrian government forces.”

“Those who recruited, trained and financed the terrorists are upheld by the ‘international community’ as the guardians of World Peace.”

“The latter include the heads of state and heads of government of the US, Britain, France and Turkey among others. It’s called ‘Responsibility to Protect’ (R2P).”

“The US led war against the Islamic State is a big lie.”

“Going after ‘Islamic terrorists,’ carrying out a worldwide pre-emptive war to ‘Protect the American Homeland’ are used to justify a military agenda.”

“The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a creation of US intelligence. Washington’s ‘Counter-terrorism Agenda’ in Iraq and Syria consists in Supporting the Terrorists.”

There’s more vital information in the article to know about ISIS, its origin, and why it was created. Along with likeminded jihadist groups, it’s used to further US imperial interests wherever these elements are deployed.

US aggression in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere is unjustifiably justified as aiming to combat and eliminate the scourge US dark forces support — establishment media going along with the subterfuge.

State terrorism is official US/NATO/Israeli policy, waging war on nations threatening no one and defenseless Palestinians for not being Jewish.

Proxy fighters have been used by the US since the 1980s in Afghanistan and Central America.

Now they’re largely used in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia — but can show up wherever US ruling authorities, the Pentagon, and CIA want them deployed, aided by US terror-bombing of vital infrastructure and other targets.

On August 2, the US war department’s inspector general said the following:

During Q II 2019, ISIS became resurgent in Syria and Iraq, adding:

“According to the Combined Joint Task Force–OIR (CJTF-OIR), ISIS carried out assassinations, suicide attacks, abductions, and arson of crops in both Iraq and Syria.”

“In addition, ISIS established ‘resurgent cells’ in Syria and sought to expand its command and control nodes in Iraq.”

“CJTF-OIR reported that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and US-backed (terrorists called) Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) were unable to sustain long-term operations against ISIS militants.”

The report claims ISIS has up to 18,000 fighters, new ones recruited to replenish its ranks, Pentagon officials opposed to a US drawdown in Syria and Iraq.

As long as the US and its imperial partners support the scourge of ISIS, the group remains active, not defeated as Trump falsely claimed.

The same goes for other terrorist groups in the region and elsewhere. They exist because of support from the US, NATO, Turkey, Israel, the Saudis, UAE, Jordan, and other US imperial partners.

Their heavy and other weapons don’t materialize out of thin air. They’re supplied cross-border from war theaters by Western and other countries.

Their fighters are trained by the Pentagon and CIA at US regional bases, including in northern and southern Syria.

Turkey bordering Iraq and Syria gives these jihadists safe haven in its territory, letting them move back and forth freely cross-border while pretending to combat this scourge.

The August 2 US war department report was a commercial for wanting a permanent Pentagon, NATO, CIA presence in Syria and Iraq — along with more funding for militarism and warmaking.

Wherever the US shows up militarily, mass slaughter, vast destruction, human misery, and permanent occupation follow.

It’s true in all US post-9/11 war theaters, as well as in the former Yugoslavia following the Clinton co-presidency’s rape of the country in the 1990s.

Instead of a hoped for peace dividend after Soviet Russia dissolved in December 1991, endless US-led wars continue to rage in multiple theaters with no prospect for peace and stability.

Countless millions of corpses, wrecked lives, and trillions of dollars spent for aggression attest to US barbarity.

Throughout the post-WW II period from 1950 to the present day, preemptive US wars of aggression raged and continue raging against nonbelligerent nations threatening no one.

That’s what the scourge of imperialism is all about.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: stephenlendman.org (Home – Stephen Lendman). Contact at [email protected].

My newest book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

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

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization

Ireland, North and South, is facing a political and economic crisis. But the key to preventing it lies in Irish hands. One Irish political party has the power to change the balance of power at Westminster and to alter the dynamics of British politics, prevent a no-deal Brexit, avoid a hard UK-Ireland border and save the economy of Northern Ireland from catastrophe. It can do this without compromising its principles. All it needs is boldness, imagination and patriotism.

Here’s how.

Boris Johnson’s radical right-wing administration has no effective majority in the House of Commons, even with the support of the DUP. But given the fragmented state of the opposition, Johnson may still be able to drive onwards towards the Brexit deadline of October 31st and over the edge of the cliff. There is one party that can stop him: Sinn Féin.

Sinn Féin holds seven seats at Westminster but leaves them vacant. Calling on the party to take those seats is rhetorically satisfying but pointless. In the first place, it has an impregnable argument for not doing so. It won these seats on an abstentionist platform. And it did so in 2017, when Theresa May was pushing for a very hard Brexit. Its voters knew the dangers and supported abstention anyway. That fact cannot be set aside.

And secondly, even if Sinn Féin was somehow able to make an immediate decision to occupy its seats when the Commons returns in September, the effect would probably be counterproductive. The Brexiteers and their media wing would generate hysteria about the Provos thwarting the will of the British people. Johnson would relish it. Wavering Tories would step back into line

To read complete article on The Irish Times click here

On August 5, India’s Hindu nationalist government unilaterally revoked the autonomy of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, while flooding the region with troops, imposing a curfew, and shutting down all communications.

The state is to be broken in two, with the eastern portion (Ladakh) under direct rule by New Delhi.

The government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi shut down Internet connections, mobile phone services, and land-line phones in the besieged region. The fragmentary news that has trickled out speaks of arrests of leading politicians and widespread fear among the region’s 12 million inhabitants.

Presenting the stunning news to India’s parliament, India’s Minister of the Interior, Amit Shah, statedthat these moves would bring “better government, a flood of outside investment, and peace.”

The government of mostly Muslim Pakistan has contested for influence in the region with mostly Hindu India. Pakistan now occupies the northern third of historic principality of Kashmir. Pakistan reacted to the August 5 measures with angry condemnation.

Modi heads a “fascist regime,” government minister Fawad Chaudhry told the Pakistani parliament on August 7. Another war over Kashmir was not off the table, he added. “Pakistan should not let Kashmir become another Palestine,” Chaudhry stated. “We have to choose between dishonor and war.”

70 Years of Rivalry

Pakistani-Indian rivalry in Kashmir goes back more than 70 years. In 1947, “British India” divided into two independent states: Pakistan and India. Jammu and Kashmir was the only state allocated to India with a majority Muslim population. Muslims made up only 15% of India’s post-independence population; their fellow believers in Kashmir felt isolated and vulnerable.

Leaders of Left parties burn an effigy of the Modi government in India.

Acknowledging strong support in Kashmir for self-determination, the United Nations provided for a referendum on the region’s status, but this never took place. Nonetheless, the terms for region’s incorporation into India did include addition of two clauses in the constitution, providing for wide-ranging autonomy for the state of Jammu and Kashmir (Article 370) and banning ownership of land by non-Kashmiris (Article 35A).

The Muslim population considered autonomy plus the land-ownership protection as essential to protect them from being swamped and sidelined by India’s Hindu majority. These measures stood as a barrier against the danger of a colonial settler invasion from outsiders that would convert the Muslims into a marginalized minority in their own land.

Both these safeguards were swept aside by the Indian government on August 5, 2019.

Palestinian Parallel

The Muslims’ present status, as the Pakistani government minister noted, has an uncanny resemblance to that in west-bank Palestine, where a hostile Israeli occupation has in fact turned into a colonial settler project to marginalize the indigenous Palestinian population in their own land.

Given that India has abolished the land-protection clause, the prediction of its Minister of the Interior, Amit Shah, that Kashmir will experience “a flood of outside investment” could well signify a plan for extensive colonialist dispossession of Kashmiri Muslims through land purchases by outsiders.

An Urgent Danger of Nuclear War

Even during the decades in which constitutional safeguards existed, Jammu and Kashmir have known little tranquility. Frictions with the central government have been frequent; New Delhi’s incursions into regional governance have provoked resistance. There have been armed clashes on the Pakistani border, and on two occasions the Pakistani and Indian armies fought brief wars. An armed resistance in the 1980s seeking Kashmiri self-determination met strong Indian military retaliation. Casualties were heavy, a low-level conflict has persisted, and security forces have often attacked unarmed popular protesters.

And now the armies of both India and Pakistan have nuclear weapons. Both countries possess more than 100 nuclear warheads, each one capable of causing incalculable slaughter of civilians on the other side.

In February this year, following on a bomb attack that killed 40 Indian security personnel, India and Pakistan each carried out an air raid against the other’s territory. Under these conditions, India’s crackdown in Kashmir could very possibly result in a military conflict escalating into nuclear war.

Voices of Opposition in India

Although many press reports speak of strong popular support in India for the government crackdown, opposition parties were quick to criticize these measures.

Speaking for the largest Indian opposition group, the Congress Party, Ghulam Nabi Azad stated that “the Bharatiya Janata Party has murdered the constitution. It has murdered democracy.”

Five left-wing parties issued a joint statement condemning Modi’s measures as “an assault on federalism, a fundamental feature of the Indian Constitution” and called a joint national protest for August 7.¹

“It is universally acknowledged that the unity of India lies in its diversity,” the Communist Party of India (Marxist) stated August 5. “They are treating Jammu and Kashmir as an occupied territory.”

A Role for the United Nations?

Given that Kashmir’s disputed status was originally established recognized by the United Nations by calling for a referendum, the UN would seem to have some responsibility to assist in overcoming the present crisis. This point is strongly made in an August 7 appeal by the Kashmir Scholars Consultative and Action Networkto UN Secretary-General António Guterres. The UN should appoint a Special Rapporteur, the Kashmir scholars state, to work toward an end to violence against Kashmiri civilians and a restoration of human rights.

A year ago, on June 14, 2018, the UN High Commission on Human Rights (UNHCHR) submitted a reportcalling for an investigation of human rights violations in Kashmir.

The UNHCHR described credible reports of massacres, gang rapes, abductions, and “wilful blinding using pellet guns” by Indian security forces, which have not met with any official response.

The Indian government opposes UN mediation over Kashmir and refused to admit UNHCHR researchers into the region. It denounced the UNHCHR report as fallacious and prejudiced.

Canada’s Role in Kashmir

Zafar Bangash, director of the Toronto-based Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, has pointed outthat the UNHCHR decision to look into the Kashmir conflict resulted in part from a UK-based petition with strong backing from Canadians resulting in some 50,000 signatures worldwide. This is perhaps the only significant Canadian contribution to Kashmir peacemaking in recent years.

During the two-month Kashmir war between India and Pakistan that followed on their independence in 1947, Canada’s government played an active role in shaping the terms of armistice, and for a time a Canadian general, Andrew McNaughton, headed the armistice commission. Even today, that fact is remembered with gratitude by Kashmiri self-determination activists. But in recent years, Canada has abstained from such initiatives, and its government is now an obedient ally of both the US and Israel, both of whom are closely aligned with the Modi government. •

This article first published on the JohnRiddell.com website.

1. The five parties are: Communist Party of India (Marxist), Revolutionary Socialist Party, All-India Forward Bloc, Communist Party of India, and the CPI(ML) Liberation.

Que os EUA mantém bombas nucleares em cinco países da NATO – Itália, Alemanha, Bélgica, Holanda e Turquia – está há muito comprovado (em especial pela Federação dos Cientistas Americanos). No entanto, a NATO nunca o admitiu oficialmente. No entanto, algo aconteceu por lapso. No documento “A new era for nuclear deterrence? Modernisation, arms control and Allied nuclear forces”, publicado pelo Senador canadiano, Joseph Day em nome da Comissão de Defesa e Segurança, da Assembleia de Defesa da NATO, o “segredo”veio a público. Através da função “copiar/colar”, o Senador informou, inadvertidamente, nesse documento o seguinte parágrafo (numerado 5), extraído de um relatório confidencial da NATO:

 “No contexto da NATO, os Estados Unidos instalaram em posições avançadas, na Europa, cerca de 150 armas nucleares, especificamente bombas gravitacionais B61. Estas bombas estão armazenadas em seis bases dos EUA e Europa: Kleine Brogel, na Bélgica, Buchel, na Alemanha, Aviano e Ghedi-Torre na Itália, Voikel na Holanda Incirlik na Turquia

No cenário hipotético de serem necessárias, as bombas B61 podem ser transportadas por aviões de dupla capacidade, dos EUA ou da Europa”.

Ao acusar a Rússia de manter muitas armas nucleares tácticas no seu arsenal, o documento afirma que as armas nucleares instaladas pelos EUA em posições avançadas na Europa e na Anatólia (ou seja, perto do território russo) servem para “garantir o amplo envolvimento dos Aliados na missão nuclear da NATO e como confirmação concreta do compromisso nuclear USA com a segurança dos aliados europeus da NATO”.

Assim que o documento do Senador Joseph Day foi publicado online, a NATO interveio, excluindo-o e tornando a publicá-lo numa versão corrigida. No entanto, tarde demais. Alguns sites (sobretudo, o belga ‘De Morgen’) já o tinham registado na versão original completa. Nesta altura, o autor descuidado correu a proteger-se, escrevendo no ‘The Washington Post‘ que se tratava, simplesmente, de um rascunho para a preparação de um relatório da Assembleia Parlamentar NATO, que será publicado em Novembro. No entanto, não pode negar o que estava escrito no parágrafo mencionado no relatório confidencial da NATO.

Esta ocorrência confirma o que documentámos há anos no Manifesto [16 de Dezembro de 2015]: em Aviano, os caças F-16C/D estão prontos para um ataque nuclear com 50 bombas B61 (número estimado pela Federação de Cientistas Americanos); em Ghedi-Torre, os Tornado PA-200 italianos estão prontos para o ataque nuclear sob comando USA, com 20 bombas B61. A partir de 2020, as B61 serão substituídos pelas B61-12, destinadas especialmente aos novos caças F-35.

Tudo isto violando o Tratado de Não-Proliferação, ratificado quer pelos EUA, quer pela Itália. Enquanto o Parlamento se mantém dividido sobre o TAV, mas não sobre a Bomba, que aprova, tacitamente, por unanimidade.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Artigo original en italiano :

Gaffe nucleare della Nato

il manifesto

Tradutora : Luisa Vasconcelos

Che gli Stati uniti mantengano bombe nucleari in cinque paesi della Nato – Italia, Germania, Belgio, Olanda e Turchia – è provato da tempo (in particolare dalla Federazione degli scienziati americani). La Nato però non l’ha mai ammesso ufficialmente. Qualcosa tuttavia è andato storto. Nel documento «A new era for nuclear deterrence? Modernisation, arms control and Allied nuclear forces», pubblicato dal senatore canadese Joseph Day per conto del Comitato Difesa e Sicurezza dell’Assemblea parlamentare della Nato, il «segreto» è venuto alla luce. Attraverso la funzione «copia-incolla», il senatore ha inavvertitamente riportato nel suo documento il seguente paragrafo (numerato 5),  tratto da un rapporto Nato riservato:

«Nel contesto Nato, gli Stati uniti  hanno dispiegato in posizioni avanzate in Europa circa 150 armi nucleari, in specifico le bombe di gravità B61. Queste bombe sono stoccate in sei basi statunitensi ed europee Kleine Brogel in Belgio,Buchel in Germania,Aviano e Ghedi-Torre in Italia,Voikel in Olanda Incirlik in Turchia. Nello scenario ipotetico che siano necessarie, le bombe B61 possono essere trasportate da aerei Usa o europei a duplice capacità».

Accusando la Russia di mantenere nel proprio arsenale molte armi nucleari tattiche, il documento afferma che le armi nucleari dispiegate dagli Usa in posizioni avanzate in Europa e Anatolia (ossia in prossimità del territorio russo)  servono ad «assicurare l’ampio coinvolgimento degli Alleati nella missione nucleare della Nato e quale concreta conferma dell’impegno nucleare Usa per la sicurezza degli alleati europei della Nato».

Appena il documento del senatore Joseph Day è stato pubblicato online, la Nato è intervenuta cancellandolo e ripubblicandolo poi in versione emendata. Troppo tardi però. Alcuni siti (anzitutto il belga De Morgen) l’avevano già registrato nella versione originale completa. A questo punto l’incauto autore è corso ai ripari, scrivendo sul ‘The Washington Post’ che si trattava semplicemente di una bozza per la redazione di un rapporto dell’Assemblea parlamentare Nato che sarà pubblicato in novembre. Non ha potuto però negare quanto scritto nel paragrafo riportato dal rapporto Nato riservato.

Esso conferma quanto da anni documentiamo sul Manifesto [16 dicembre 2015]: ad Aviano caccia Usa F-16C/D sono pronti all’attacco nucleare con 50 bombe B61 (numero stimato dalla Federazione degli scienziati americani);  a Ghedi-Torre TornadoPA-200 italiani sono pronti all’attacco nucleare sotto comando Usa con 20 bombe B61. Dal 2020 le B61 saranno sostituite dalle B61-12, destinate in particolare ai nuovi caccia F-35.

Tutto questo violando il Trattato di non-proliferazione, ratificato sia dagli Usa che dall’Italia. Mentre il Parlamento si spacca sulla Tav ma non sulla Bomba, che tacitamente approva all’unanimità.

Manlio Dinucci

Troops of both countries illegally occupy northern Syrian territory bordering Turkey, including its oil rich area.

On the phony pretext of protecting Turkey’s security, President Erdogan is intermittently battling Kurdish YPG fighters cross-border in Syria — despite their posing no threat to Ankara.

His real aim is wanting the territory annexed. The same goes for Kurdish controlled/oil-rich northern Iraq.

The US seeks regional control, including over its oil and gas resources.

In late July, Russian General Staff/Main Operational Directorate commander General Sergey Rudskoy accused US and allied forces of “highjack(ing)” Syrian oil from ISIS, profiting from its sales — perhaps shipping it cross-border to Turkey and/or elsewhere, the Trump regime running a black market operation with looted Syrian oil, adding:

US-supported ISIS and other jihadists were also trained to destroy Syrian (and perhaps Iraqi) oil and gas infrastructure, along with continuing attacks on government forces and civilians, using heavy and other weapons supplied by Western and regional countries, including Israel, Turkey, the Saudis and UAE.

Rudskoy added that the Trump regime is arming Arab and Kurdish fighters, working with them as well in the illicit trafficking of stolen Syrian oil.

On Wednesday, the Trump and Erdogan regimes agreed on establishing a so-called “safe zone” in northern Syria, a pretext for the US and Turkey to pursue their imperial interests.

Turkey’s war ministry said a Joint Action Center will be set up “as soon as possible,” falsely claiming a “corridor of peace” will follow to let refugees return home — Syrian victims of US aggression, Washington and Ankara indifferent to their rights and welfare.

Damascus denounced the move, calling it a “blatant attack” on the country’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, along with a “dangerous escalation and a threat to peace and stability in the area.”

A Syrian source added that “the agreement has very clearly exposed the US-Turkish partnership in the aggression against Syria which serves the interest of the Israeli occupation entity and the Turkish expansionist ambitions, and it unequivocally exposed the misleading and evasiveness which govern the policies of the Turkish regime.”

It’s unclear if Kurdish YPG fighters will agree with the US/Turkish scheme, details of how it’s to be implemented unclear so far.

According to the Syrian Arab News Agency, Kurdish citizens of Syria “have been misled (to become) a tool and a pretext for this US-Turkish hostile project.”

They bear…responsibility for that emerging situation, and it is time to reconsider their calculations and to stand by the side of all the Syrians and the Syrian Arab Army in defending the sovereignty of the Syrian Arab Republic and its territorial integrity.”

An earlier US/Turkish agreement in northern Syria was never implemented, perhaps the latest one to go the same way.

Leadership of both countries time and again say one thing and do another. Neither can be trusted, especially not when they have imperial aims in mind.

Obama-launched aggression, escalated by Trump, rages in its 9th year with no prospect for resolution because the US rejects restoration of peace and stability to the country.

On Thursday, Turkish Foreign Minister Melvut Cavusoglu said Ankara won’t allow establishment of a northern Syrian zone free from YPG fighters to be delayed.

Either Washington and Ankara will create it together or Turkey will go it alone.

On Wednesday, Turkish war minister Hulusi Akar said

“(w)e witnessed with satisfaction that our partners (the US) grew closer to our position. The meetings were positive and quite constructive,” adding:

“Our plans, preparations, the deployment of our units in the field are all complete. But we said we wanted to act together with our friend and ally, the United States. If that isn’t possible, we have said multiple times that we will do what is necessary.”

On paper, both countries agreed to the following:

“1. the rapid implementation of initial measures to address Turkey’s security concerns;

2. to set up as soon as possible a joint operations center in Turkey to coordinate and manage the establishment of the safe zone together;

3. that the safe zone shall become a peace corridor, and that any additional measures shall be taken for our displaced Syrian brothers to return to their country.”

Reportedly the so-called “peace corridor” will extend 30 to 40 km into northeastern Syria — Damascus having no say over how its territory is carved up by two illegal occupying powers, the Trump and Erdogan regimes.

Meanwhile, endless war rages. Wherever US forces show up, mass slaughter, destruction, and human misery follow.

The US came to Syria and its other war theaters to stay. Millions of corpses attest to its barbarity.

Millions more victims suffer from the fallout of its imperial rage — no end of it in prospect.

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

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The US Empire is not a term you will commonly hear when people refer to the United States of America. Nor is the Greater United States, American Empire or even just Empire. There is something of a taboo quality to using the word empire to refer to the US. Yet, that is precisely what it is. With numerous territories and land acquisitions, around 1000+ military bases worldwide and the ability to project its power to influence and coerce foreign territories and nations, the USA is the biggest empire the world has ever known. Countless foreign nations, victims of US aggression and invasion, have denounced the US for its imperialism, a word with the same etymological root as empire. So why is it so strange to describe it as the US Empire?

USA: From Republic to Empire

It is a telling example that the American experiment in self-governance has turned out like this. What began as an attempt to set up one of the most limited, constrained and decentralized governments ever has transmogrified into a sprawling empire whose breadth, power and influence is unprecedented in world history. Those who believe humanity should run society without government (anarchists) based only on voluntary cooperation (voluntaryists) point to the results of the American experiment as proof that government by its very nature grows out of control. The results, they say, show that no matter what limits you attempt to put on government, they can always be undone, because politicians can simply change laws and find way to bypass constitutions once they are in power. For one example of many, look at how the US bypassed many privacy and surveillance laws in the Bill of Rights by dreaming up a new idea (terrorism), defining it in law (first international terrorists, then domestic terrorists), changing the definition to describe their political enemies (gun carriers, conspiracy theorists), then applying that by name-calling its citizens. Suddenly, the usual rules don’t apply when terrorism and the fake war on terror are invoked. All of this is gives credence to the idea that no government is better than small government in the anarchy vs minarchy debate.

The actual Greater United States. Image credit: Daniel Immerwahr

US Empire Land Acquisition

Right from the start, the US has always looked west. The original 13 colonies soon expanded. Just to name a few highlights, the US Republic bought Louisiana from the French in 1803, annexed Texas in 1845 and took California away from Mexico in 1848 (at the conclusion of the Mexican-American War). The US then expanded further, such that it then had a mainland of 48 contiguous states and territory beyond that. It bought Alaska from Russia in 1867 and it conquered Hawaii in 1893 after a coup by a small group of rich landowners put a gun to the head of Hawaiian Queen Liliuokalani. A watershed moment in the history of the US Empire, and its land and territory acquisition, came in 1898. At that time, the Spanish colonial Empire was falling, and Spain was having problems quelling dissent in its colonies such as Cuba. Through a false flag operation revolving around the USS Maine, the USA entered the conflict (named the Spanish-American War), defeated Spain and established itself as a new colonial and imperial power. While it was at it, it either purchased or annexed the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa and Wake Island. Thus, by end of the 19th century, the US had already transformed itself into the US Empire. In this video and in his book, Daniel Immerwahr makes the point that around this time, Americans began to redraw their maps and take pride in their new status; however later on, they sought more to play down and hide their power, figuring it would serve them better to keep it concealed. At one point in the video clip, Immerwahr tells the story of an American GI soldier in the Philippines during WW2, who was told by a Filipino that the US had colonized the Philippines, but didn’t realize it. “What?” he said, thinking he was fighting in a foreign country not on US territory, “We colonized you?”

Hiding the Empire: 1000+ Military Bases

Fast forward around 120 years, and just look at the state of affairs. The US emerged as the sole world superpower after WW2, but unlike the British Empire, it decided not to outright conquer or annex territory, but rather to build military installations on virtually every continent. The US hides the official number of its military bases so as to conceal the true extent of its imperial reach, however based on the research of people like Chalmers Johnson and Nick Turse, we know that it is at least 1000 bases, and quite probably more. Johnson died in 2010, but in a talk now removed from YouTube claims that in 2004, the Pentagon’s official number was 725 (as published in the Base Structure Report). However, he acknowledged that the Pentagon disguised many of its bases and had 300+ unacknowledged ones. Turse has written many articles and books on the topic of US military bases including this 2019 one Bases, Bases, Everwhere … Except in the Pentagon’s Report:

“Officially, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains 4,775 “sites,” spread across all 50 states, eight U.S. territories, and 45 foreign countries. A total of 514 of these outposts are located overseas, according to the Pentagon’s worldwide property portfolio. Just to start down a long list, these include bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, in Djibouti on the Horn of Africa, as well as in Peru and Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom. But the most recent version of that portfolio, issued in early 2018 and known as the Base Structure Report (BSR), doesn’t include any mention of al-Tanf. Or, for that matter, any other base in Syria. Or Iraq. Or Afghanistan. Or Niger. Or Tunisia. Or Cameroon. Or Somalia. Or any number of locales where such military outposts are known to exist and even, unlike in Syria, to be expanding.”

To put this number in perspective, the emerging rivals to the US Empire have barely any foreign military bases: Russia has 21 (according to this source) and China has 2.

Hallmark of the US Empire: The Projection of Power without Annexation of Territory

The rulers of the United States Inc. have done a very good job of concealing the power and reach of the US Empire. Through domestic propaganda, they have obscured the reality of the empire such that not many Americans make the connection. They have also avoided colonizing too many weaker nations, instead preferring to project power without actually annexing land. This is achieved through economic warfare such as forcing smaller nations to buy US products, or the infamous use of sanctions as accelerated by Trump against nations like Venezuela and Iran. Then there is also the method described by former economic hitman John Perkins.

But, but … the US is a Republic, Right?

Some people at this point may say, “Well, the US may be an Empire, but its form of government is still a Constitutional Republic. Therefore, the US is a Republic.” Yes, the US is a republic in the sense that it has (highly controlled) elections where (s)elected individuals ascend to power, however, despite this form of governance, the US still behaves as an imperial bully, aggressor and invader to nations outside of it. That behavior is what defines it as an empire. In this context, the word “republic” means nothing. Have you noticed the irony with which nations around the world use the word republic in their official country titles? Both of the communist totalitarian nations of China and North Korea are “republics” since they are called People’s Republic of China and Democratic People’s Republic of Korea respectively. Never mind the censorship and control via social credit. In the so-called “free” West, in the Federal Republic of Germany, if you investigate the truth about the Holocaust you can be fined or imprisoned. In the French Republic, people are so taxed to the hilt they donned yellow vests to spark a worldwide protest movement. Republic means “a state in which supreme power is held by the people and their elected representatives.” Do you really think the people hold the supreme power in the US, China, North Korea, Germany or France?

Conclusion

Words have power. Propagandists and magicians alike know this, since they know words help to mold perception and create reality. This is why you “spell” words, since uttered words are like a (magic) spell. The power of the US Empire lies in its narrative control and perception control. Whoever controls words, controls narrative; whoever controls narrative, controls perception. It’s a simple formula. Orwell’s great work 1984 showed what can come from word control. The question we must ask ourselves here is this: why is it so strange, uncomfortable and unfamiliar to call a spade a spade, and to admit internally to ourselves and externally to others that the USA is an empire? Surely this uncomfortability itself is evidence of the magic of word control and propaganda. Are we so programmed and conditioned with ideas of “USA = freedom and democracy” that we can’t fathom the idea of a US Empire? If so, then it is more crucial than ever that people begin to use terms like US Empire and Greater United States to take a small yet bold step of breaking the conditioning that holds them in chains.

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This article was originally published on The Freedom Articles.

Makia Freeman is the editor of alternative media / independent news site The Freedom Articles and senior researcher at ToolsForFreedom.com. Makia is on Steemit and FB.

Sources

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/anarchy-vs-minarchy-pros-cons/

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-mz7x2RAmI

*https://www.salon.com/2019/01/11/bases-bases-everywhere-except-in-the-pentagons-report_partner/

*https://theintercept.com/2018/12/01/u-s-military-says-it-has-a-light-footprint-in-africa-these-documents-show-a-vast-network-of-bases/

*https://www.newsweek.com/russias-military-compared-us-which-country-has-more-military-bases-across-954328

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/google-project-dragonfly-helps-china-censorship/

*https://thefreedomarticles.com/sesame-credit-gamification-control/

Featured image is from The Freedom Articles

U.S. farmers have never experienced a year quite like this.  During the first half of 2019, endless rain and unprecedented flooding were the major problems.  As a result of the incredibly wet conditions, millions of acres of prime farmland didn’t get planted at all, and tens of millions of other acres are going to yield a lot less than usual.  Even without anything else happening, we were going to see farm bankruptcies soar to absolutely crazy levels, but now the Chinese government is essentially cutting off U.S. agricultural imports.  This will greatly depress the prices that U.S. farmers get for their crops, and so many farmers that were still hoping to squeeze out a profit for this year will be hit with a loss instead.  Ultimately, the truth is that 2019 is going to be a death blow for countless U.S. farmers that were barely hanging on financially after a string of really tough years.  Many will leave the industry entirely and never go back to farming again, and our nation will be worse off because of it.

When the Chinese announced that they were going to completely stop buying U.S. agricultural products, it sent shockwaves across the middle portion of the country.  According to the executive vice president of the American Farm Bureau, our farmers and ranchers will now be facing “just a really tough, tough time”…

“This is a body blow to farmers and ranchers all across the country,” Dale Moore, executive vice president of the American Farm Bureau, told FOX Business. “That’s one of the things that we are feeling the effects of, and this is on top of a year when mother nature has been a terrible business partner in many parts of the country. It’s just a really tough, tough time for farmers and ranchers in this country.”

Shares of industrial, farming, oil and transportation companies have plummeted, a direct result of the increased tensions between the world’s two largest economies.

Of course President Trump is trying to be upbeat and he is promising that the Chinese will not be able to hurt our farmers, but the truth is that they already have.

Chinese imports of U.S. agricultural products fell by more than half from 2017 to 2018, and now they are going to zero.  The following comes from Fox Business…

Despite Trump’s tweet, American farmers now stand to lose all of what was a $9.1 billion market in 2018, which was down sharply from the $19.5 billion U.S. farmers exported to China in 2017.

Unfortunately for U.S. farmers, they are caught right in the middle of a tug of war between the Chinese government and President Trump, and China specifically went after U.S. farmers in order to hurt Trump politically…

China’s new agricultural ban has an additional benefit to the Chinese of maximizing negative political impact to Trump.

Important presidential election swing states in the Midwest grain belt such as Iowa and Wisconsin were vital to his 2016 election victory. Cutting this particular area of bilateral trade at a time when American farmers are recovering from the after-effects of this year’s floods is a potent way for Beijing to punch back against President Trump’s new tariffs.

If the presidential election was held this November, it would be really difficult for Trump to win in Iowa in Wisconsin.  Of course much can change between now and November 2020, but right now Trump is definitely losing support in the middle of the country.

Speaking of Wisconsin, it just happens to be one of the states that currently has the highest number of farm bankruptcy filings…

Since last June, there have been a staggering 535 Chapter 12 bankruptcy filings, a 13 percent increase. Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin had the highest number of filings.

As a result, Congress passed the Family Farmer Relief Act to update the eligibility requirements for Chapter 12 bankruptcy, raising the debt limit from $4.1 million to $10 million — giving more farmers the chance to declare bankruptcy, thereby offering their producers and creditors a better chance to recognize and avoid mass liquidation.

President Trump will try to keep as many farms going as possible with his massive aid packages, but the truth is that even with those aid packages it is inevitable that farm bankruptcies will continue to surge.

In fact, they are already at the highest level that we have seen since the last recession.

What U.S. farmers really need is an end to the trade war and for the Chinese to start buying from them again.

Sadly, that is just not going to happen.  At this point, even Goldman Sachs is admitting that there will not be a trade deal with China before the 2020 presidential election…

Analysts at Goldman Sachs no longer think the U.S. and China will manage to negotiate a trade deal ahead of the 2020 presidential election — which is more than 15 months away.

“We had expected a final round of tariffs targeting remaining Chinese imports at a 10 percent rate,” the analysts, led by chief U.S. economist Jan Hatzius, wrote in a note to clients. “But news since President Trump’s tariff announcement last Thursday indicates that U.S. and Chinese policymakers are taking a harder line, and we no longer expect a trade deal before the 2020 election.”

This means that things will continue to go from bad to worse for U.S. farmers, and this will take a major toll on the U.S. economy as a whole.

We have entered the time of “the perfect storm”, and things are definitely not going to get any easier in the months ahead.

I wish that I had better news for you, but I don’t.  Global events are starting to greatly accelerate, and so many of the things that we have been warned about are starting to happen right in front of our eyes.

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Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. 

Short on time and fuel, the crew members of the B-29 bomber Bockscar flew over Nagasaki, Japan, scanning for an opening in the clouds. They had already abandoned their initial target, the city of Kokura, due to low visibility. Over Nagasaki, in the vicinity of a massive Mitsubishi arms plant, the crew found the clear patch of sky they needed to complete the mission: to drop the world’s most powerful weapon, a 4.5-ton plutonium bomb dubbed Fat Man. The detonation killed tens of thousands and decimated the city, all in an instant. Amid the ruins, just 500 meters from ground zero, were the collapsed roof, damaged pillars, and charred sculptures of the Urakami Cathedral, the locus of a vibrant Catholic community spawned during Nagasaki’s history as a trading port.

To the Nagasaki Christians, the bombing was yet another trial for a group long accustomed to persecution and adversity. They’d been tortured, banished, and executed. The shoguns who ruled feudal Japan maintained a ban on Christianity for hundreds of years, forcing adherents to practice their faith in secrecy until the ban was lifted in 1873. Then on Aug. 9, 1945, just 20 years after the Urakami Cathedral was completed, the atomic bomb destroyed it. Along with a priest and several parishioners who were inside at the time, much of the church’s history was lost. But 74 years later, the since-rebuilt cathedral got back a small piece of that history: a cross, mostly forgotten, that had been taken from the rubble. Tanya Maus, the director of Wilmington College’s Peace Resource Center, gave the cross that had hung in the rural southwest Ohio college for decades to the archbishop of Nagasaki on Tuesday.

Maus said a former US Marine, Walter Hooke, gave the artifact to the Quaker college in the early 1980s. Hooke, who died in 2010, had been stationed in Nagasaki after the bombing and had developed a relationship with the bishop of the city, who may have given the cross to Hooke. After seeing visitors from Nagasaki react to the cross—some moved, others perplexed as to how Hooke got a hold of it—Maus reached out to church officials in Nagasaki in April.

“I started to think about the idea of ‘should it really be here? Maybe it needs to be in Nagasaki, where people can sort of explore that history more and the meaning of the cross more.’”

A memorial service being held near the atomic-bombed Urakami Cathedral. Credit: Nagasaki City Office / sensai via Wikimedia Commons.

At the Peace Resource Center, the cross had been a starting point to engage local Christians in conversations about the atomic bombs and nuclear issues.

“For me, it shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you’re Catholic, or whether you’re religious; it’s an issue of humanity–the use of nuclear weapons,” Maus said. “But for some people, that was an entry point to understand the atomic bombings and have a sense of their destructiveness.”

According to the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum, the church in Urakami had 14,000 devotees, several of whom died inside along with a priest. They were crushed by falling debris. Back at Wilmington College, the cross from the ruined cathedral had helped visitors understand the story of the bomb.

“The fact that the United States, a country that in some sense based itself in Christian ethics, was dropping an atomic bomb on a Christian community–I think for me, I hoped that would make a strong impact on people,” Maus said.

“For me the cross represents human depravity. The utter stripping away of values, in this case Christian values, but it could be any values, that keep human beings from killing each other and destroying each other,” Maus said. “Part of giving it back was letting go of that and making it accessible to people who want to find their own meaning in it.”

Exactly how Hooke came to possess the cross is uncertain. His son told The Asahi Shimbun that Hooke had befriended Nagasaki’s bishop, who gave the cross to Hooke, perhaps in the hopes that it might change American’s perceptions of the bomb. What is clear, Maus said, is that the guitar-case-sized cross came from the cathedral. The archbishop, journalists, and others who looked into the issue found a photo in which the cross appears to be lying in the ruins. The story has generated intense media coverage in Japan, where, Maus said,

“people are surprised. Why after all these years, is this place giving the cross back? There are lots of mysteries. How did it get there? Who is this Walter guy?

Maus said the cross will be displayed alongside another artifact from the cathedral, the head of a wooden Virgin Mary sculpture known as the Bombed Mary, whose glass eyes were melted by the atomic blast. According to TheJapan Times, the cross will be on display in time for a mass Friday that will reflect on the 74^th anniversary of the bombing.

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Featured image: A cross from the rubble of Nagasaki’s Urakami Cathedral. Credit: Randy Sarvis / Wilmington College.

Chlorpyrifos producer Dow Chemical falsely claims the pesticide “protects.” It’s been poisoning the earth and people for nearly half a century.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) “for a healthy planet and safer world” said Dow is the main beneficiary of the EPA’s failure to ban chlorpyrifos.

The agency “said (it’s) OK to spray this brain-damaging chemical on the array of fruits, nuts, vegetables, and cereal crops that we and our children consume on a daily basis,” UCS explained, adding:

“With this decision, the EPA continues to sideline science, put public health at risk, and roll back public safeguards in favor of private interests.”

Chlorpyrifos is a significant health hazard to pregnant women, their fetuses, young children, farmworkers, and virtually everyone else eating the crops they harvest.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) denounced Trump’s ecocidal threat to people and the planet by gutting environmental protections — serving corporate polluters at the expense of public health.

FOE explained that

“(c)hlorpyrifos is a pesticide that was designed to attack the brain and nervous system — and studies show links to brain damage in children.”

Earth Justice attorney Patti Goldman said the

“EPA has repeatedly found chlorpyrifos unsafe, especially to children, yet time and time again it refuses to protect kids.”

“But Earth Justice and our clients won’t stand for this. The science and the law call for a chlorpyrifos ban. We are hopeful the courts will do the same for the sake of children and farmworkers.”

Chlorpyrifos is an organophosphate pesticide in use since 1965. It’s harmful to human health if touched, inhaled or otherwise ingested.

It blocks an enzyme that controls messages between nerve cells. When blocked, the nervous system can’t send normal signals, causing it to malfunction — how it kills pests.

Exposure to small amounts of the pesticide can cause headaches, nausea, dizziness, abdominal muscle cramps, muscle twitching, tremors, weakness, loss of coordination, diarrhea, and blurred or darkened vision.

Heavy exposure resulting in severe poisoning can cause unconsciousness, loss of bladder and bowel control, convulsions, difficulty in breathing, and paralysis. It’s not believed to be carcinogenic.

In 2000, the EPA banned chlorpyrifos for household use. In 2007, the Pesticide Action Network North America (PANNA) and Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) unsuccessfully petitioned the EPA to ban all uses of the pesticide.

In 2015, the Obama regime announced it would ban its use, based on scientific evidence and assessment of EPA scientists of its risk to human health. It didn’t happen.

In March 2017, shortly after Trump took office, his EPA rejected a petition to ban the pesticide, falsely claiming the decision was based “sound science.”

Hawaii banned chlorpyrifos. California announced it’ll follow suit. New York approved legislation to ban it by December 2021. New Jersey and Maryland are considering statewide bans. The EU may ban it in 2020.

Earth Justice, health, and labor organizations are suing the EPA for not prohibiting its use.

National Hispanic Medical Association Dr. Elena Rios said

“scientific evidence (of chlorpyrifos’ toxicity) has been clear for years,” adding:

“Trump’s EPA might want to dismiss the science and the law to protect corporate profit, but we are confident the courts won’t stand for this.”

According to Farmworker Justice attorney Iris Figueroa,

“Trump’s EPA has yet again failed farmworkers and children when it refused to ban chlorpyrifos despite all the science that called for the opposite,” adding:

“We hope the courts will take the lead and amend this grave mistake. Farmworkers, families, and developing children must be safe from chlorpyrifos and most importantly, from preventable illness.”

Pesticide Action Network executive director Kristin Schafer expressed outrage over having to ask a court to force the EPA to do its job.

Established by Richard Nixon’s July 1970 executive order, the EPA is mandated to protect human and environmental health. The agency’s website states:

EPA works to ensure that:

“Americans have clean air, land and water…reduce environmental risks…based on the best available scientific information (so that) human health and the environment are” protected.

Most often the EPA protects the sales and profits of corporate polluters at the expense of public health and welfare.

Straightaway in office, Trump proved he’s no friend of the earth, letting Big Oil, Big Chemical, and other corporate polluters contaminate air, water, and soil unbstructed for profit.

According to the Center for Public Integrity, corporate polluters, oil and drug giants, insurers, tobacco companies, automakers, and tech giants bought Trump straightaway by donating millions of dollars to his inauguration.

Dow Chemical alone donated $1 million in December 2016. Numerous other companies made six-figure or larger contributions to the event.

United Farm Workers of America national vice-president Erik Nicholson said

“(h)aving chlorpyrifos in our fields means that women and men who harvest our food are in harm’s way every day.”

“We will fight to right this wrong in the court of law and the court of public opinion until a ban is in place.”

Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) senior scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman stressed that the

“EPA knows this stuff is toxic. Its own scientists have been sounding the alarm for years now, but this administration is shameless in its push to keep it on the market.”

“We are urging the court to side with children over a powerful chemical industry with friends in high places. Chlorpyrifos does not belong on our food or in our fields.”

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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.

In promoting destructive “Western values,” hardline academic Samuel Huntington once said the following:

“The West must exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests — to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate western interests and values (sic).”

Likeminded academic hardliner Bernard Lewis originated the clash of civilizations phrase in his 1990 essay titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage, saying:

“(W)e are facing a mood and movement in Islam far transcending the level of issues and policies and the governments that pursue them. This is no less than a clash of civilizations.”

Today the clash applies to all nations unwilling to bend to US interests. There’s no “clash” with the Saudis and other despotic Muslim/Arab states allied with the US war OF terror — nor with nations worldwide bending to its will.

In his scholarly works, Edward Said explained notions of colonizers and the colonized — the US-dominated West v. other parts of the world.

In The Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad said

“the conquest of the Earth which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion, a slightly flatter noses than ourselves is not a pretty thing, when you look into it too much.”

Modern-day US manifest destiny is all about controlling planet earth, its resources and populations by whatever it takes to achieve its objectives — imperial rage and Pax Americana enforced dominance by another name.

Irreconcilable difference define Sino/US relations. The US prioritizes militarism and warmaking, along with pressuring, bullying, and threatening other nations to bend to its will.

China favors cooperative relations with other nations, along with economic, financial, and technological development to grow the nation into a preeminent power on the global stage.

Both countries are rivals, not partners, the US wanting Beijing’s goals undermined to further its own, toughness its favored strategy in dealing with all independent nations it doesn’t control.

Diplomacy and reason with Washington don’t work, considered a sign of weakness, not strength.

The Trump regime’s war on China by other means heads toward becoming more serious than already.

On Thursday, his State Department called Beijing a “thuggish regime” in response to personal information released about a Hong Kong-based US official.

The unacceptable remark followed a complaint by China’s Hong Kong-based Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs over US official Julie Eadeh’s meeting with individuals involved in the city’s US-supported protests.

They’ve been ongoing for months, aiming to destabilize China, a common US tactic against nations it doesn’t control, including color revolution attempts to topple sitting governments.

China state media called demonstrations and related violence a “conspiracy with the West.”

China’s Global Times (GT) earlier said the city’s “future won’t be held hostage by (the) opposition and its Western supporters,” adding:

“(I)nternational forces have increasingly collaborated with the opposition in Hong Kong.” In May individuals involved visited the US to meet with House Speaker Pelosi and Pompeo, clearly discussing anti-Beijing strategy.

“Washington has been particularly active in meddling in Hong Kong affairs…to pressure China,” said GT.

The US is collaborating with opposition elements, its longstanding practice in sovereign independent countries it doesn’t control, a flagrant international law violation.

Beijing’s Hong Kong foreign ministry office demanded the US “immediately make a clean break from anti-China forces who stir up trouble in (the city), stop sending out wrong signals to violent offenders, refrain from meddling with Hong Kong affairs, and avoid going further down the wrong path.”

Days earlier, the State Department expressed strong support for Hong Kong protesters — unrelated to “freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly.”

On Friday, the People’s Daily, China’s official broadsheet, said Beijing “made it clear that it will not allow this situation to continue,” adding:

“Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region gives the central authorities ample methods and sufficient strength to promptly settle any possible turmoil should it occur.”

“It would be wise if both the radical protesters and the foreign forces colluding with lawbreakers in Hong Kong” understand this and cease their disruptive actions.

What’s going on is part of the Trump regime’s war on China by other means, including unacceptable tariffs, Pentagon South China Sea provocations near Beijing’s territorial waters, the same thing near its airspace, enlisting support from regional nations against Beijing, and advancing America’s military footprint in the Indo/Pacific.

Washington treats all parts of the world like its own, heightening global tensions, risking confrontation with nations able to defend their interests if belligerently challenged.

The US Info/Pacific agenda, strengthening military, economic, and political ties with Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Myanmar, Singapore and Vietnam is an unacceptable effort to form an Asia/Pacific-type Lima Group against China.

Hostile US policies against the country haven’t worked and won’t likely ahead.

Instead of fostering cooperative relations China, Washington is alienating its ruling authorities, biting off more than it can chew against a nation able to defend against whatever toughness the US employs.

Escalating war on China by other means is a losing strategy — what geopolitical know-nothing Trump and hardliners surrounding him don’t understand — harming the US and world economies by their unacceptable actions.

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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.

Acting in response to public statements from the President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, on the need to open up indigenous lands in the Amazon Basin to extractive industries, an estimated 20,000 illegal miners are reported to have invaded the lands of the Yanomami peoples in Brazil. Although the 9.7 million hectare area was established as an Indigenous Park in 1992, meaning it could only be exploited for mining subject to special decisions in the national legislature, over the past 20 years it has been repeatedly threatened by mining invasions which have caused epidemics and violent clashes.

Concerns have also been raised about copycat invasions of Yanomami lands across the border in Venezuela, where the Government of President Maduro has announced plans for a Mining Arc embracing the whole of the south of the country. Currently, owing to a nation-wide gasoline shortage, illegal mining in the Upper Orinoco and Caura rivers in Venezuela have been scaled back.

The American Association of Anthropologists has also appealed to human rights organisations to demand the protection of the Yanomami’s rights.

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Featured image is from Forest Peoples Programme

Legendary journalist John Pilger has been to see Assange in Belmarsh Prison in London and his report is not encouraging.

Journalist John Pilger visited imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday and has raised an alarm about Assange’s “deteriorated” health.

Pilger said in a Tweet on Wednesday that Assange is “isolated” and treated “worse than a murderer.”

“I now fear for him,” Pilger wrote.

Do not forget Julian #Assange. Or you will lose him.
I saw him in Belmarsh prison and his health has deteriorated. Treated worse than a murderer, he is isolated, medicated and denied the tools to fight the bogus charges of a US extradition. I now fear for him. Do not forget him.

— John Pilger (@johnpilger) August 7, 2019

Assange is suffering from an undisclosed ailment and has been confined to the hospital ward at the maximum security prison for several weeks.  He was arrested on April 11 by British police who were called by the Ecuadorian government into its London embassy in apparent violation of international asylum law. Assange had been granted political asylum by Ecuador in 2012. He had been suffering health problems in the embassy but British authorities refused to allow him to leave the embassy for treatment and return without being arrested.

Almost immediately after his eventual arrest the United States unveiled an indictment against him for alleged intrusion into a government computer although the indictment itself describes normal procedures of investigative journalism:  encouraging a source to provide more information and working to protect the source’s identity.

On May 23, Assange was charged under the U.S. Espionage Act for possession and dissemination of classified information given to him by WikiLeak‘s source, Chelsea Manning, a former U.S. army intelligence analyst. It was the first time the Espionage Act was used against a journalist for publishing classified information.

Manning, meanwhile, is imprisoned in Alexandria, VA for refusing to testify to a grand jury on Assange’s case. Since Assange has already been twice indicted, it is not clear if a new indictment against him is being prepared. On Wednesday, the judge in Manning’s case denied her a hearing and said $1,000-a-day fines against her did not amount to “punishment.”

Assange is now fighting an extradition request from the United States as he serves a 50-week sentence in Belmarsh for having skipped bail in an unrelated Swedish investigation into sexual assault allegations, which had been dropped twice before by Swedish authorities, but was revived after his arrest. Assange had sought asylum in the Ecuador embassy because he feared extradition to the United States, fears that have been borne out by events.

He faces 175 years in prison in the U.S.

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With the US decision to impose added tariffs on more than $300 billion of China trade, and the US Treasury declaring China a “currency manipulator”, global financial markets have reacted with sharp selling. The question is whether this is the beginning of a genuine currency war that will trigger a new Financial Tsunami as bad if not worse than that of the Lehman Crisis in 2008. The timing also coincides with escalation of geopolitical clashes between Washington and Venezuela, between India and China and Pakistan over Kashmir, between Turkey with Syria and with Cyprus, as well as the escalating tensions between Hong Kong and Beijing. Are we on the verge of a so-called “perfect storm” that will transform the post-1945 global order?

After the breakoff of talks between Washington and Beijing at end of July, US President Trump announced his decision to impose added tariff sanctions on another $300 billion of China products. At that point the Peoples’ Bank of China (PBOC) let the exchange rate of the yuan fall below a psychological resistance level of 7.0 to the US dollar. It had kept the currency above 7.0 for more than a decade to stabilize US trade flows. US stocks reacted with one-day falls of well over 3%, paper losses over $1 trillion and a sharp rise in gold, as investors began to prepare for what could become a dangerous currency war with the world’s second largest economy. In addition, reneging on previous pledges to import more US agriculture products, the Beijing government ordered state buyers to stop all US agriculture purchases at the same time. As well, evidence grows that Beijing is making business more difficult for certain foreign firms in China.

Renminbi Currency Reserves

Although the PBOC over the next two days moved to stop the fall of the Renminbi (RMB), easing fears of all-out currency wars, as of this writing the China currency is poised to fall significantly, putting major pressure on other Asian export countries such as Japan and South Korea and India. At the same time China’s special financial window to the Western markets, Hong Kong, stands on the brink of a possible martial law and military crackdown from the PLA troops of the mainland, to end weeks of huge popular protest against new laws that would weaken agreed provisions of Hong Kong autonomy. Martial law in one of Asia’s major financial centers would not be positive for China’s efforts to get the China currency accepted as a major reserve currency for trade, a cornerstone of the government’s long term strategy. It would also not help China attract hundreds of billions of foreign investment in its own bond and stock markets.

What is not yet clear is whether this series of events portends the end of the globalization of the world economy on which China has built its impressive economic expansion on for the past three decades or so. One key issue is what impact the latest escalation of economic tensions between Washington and Beijing will have on the long-term strategy of making the China currency a major world reserve currency, a critical step for their future ability to fully integrate with global capital markets and expand their ambitious Belt Road Initiative. Here is where signs are that the latest moves to allow the Renminbi to break the critical 7.0 level may be more psychological warfare than actual full financial warfare.

After years of trying, China finally won acceptance of the Renminbi as one of only five world currencies composing the IMF Special Drawing Rights (SDR) currency basket along with the US dollar, British Pound, Japan Yen, and Euro in beginning of 2016. The aim has been that the Renminbi could begin to partly replace the dollar in world trade. Were that to happen it would be a major gain for China as a global financial factor and a major reduction of the role of the US dollar and US influence. Since 1945 US global hegemony has rested on two pillars–the US military as dominant and the dollar as world reserve.

Since the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement, the US dollar has been the dominant currency in world trade and also in world central bank reserves. With introduction of the Euro almost two decades ago, many predicted the dominance of the dollar would end and with it, an enormous advantage the US has to run US budget deficits financed by others including China whose trade surplus dollars inevitably go to buy US Treasury and related debt. Since the Greek crisis after 2010 exposed major flaws in the Euro architecture and the weakness of EU banks, the challenge from the Euro as alternative to the dollar has stagnated.

Latest IMF data show the dollar still holds some 61% of the world central bank reserves and still dominates world trade currencies with 40% of all payments in dollars while 30% are in Euro including the large intra-EU trade. As of 2018 the China RMB accounted for less than 2% of all global payments and around 1% of world central bank reserve holdings. This will become of vital importance to China now as it sees 25 years of unprecedented trade and balance of current account surpluses turn to deficit beginning this year or next.

China Surplus Falling

Current account surplus has defined China’s economic rise and her status as major source of global credit as the Peoples Bank of China (PBOC) invested record export surpluses into foreign assets, mainly government bonds, and much of that US government bonds. Some economists warn that the PBOC could deploy its financial weapon against US pressure by dumping an estimated $1.3 trillion of US bonds, likely collapsing the US economy in the process. Such dramatic action is however unlikely as China would become a major loser in the process. Not only would the value of China US bonds collapse, also China’s ability to attract hundreds of billions of foreign investment in China bond markets would be at high risk.

This year for the first time in 25 years China is likely to run a deficit in its current account. Current account, the sum of trade balances and capital flows, has been hugely positive for China since the mid-1990s as it became the cheap labor “workshop of the world.”

China Needs Foreign Investors

This year for the first time in nearly 25 years China is expected to have a deficit on its Current Account. This is no small matter. A new report by Wall Street bank, Morgan Stanley, estimates that to balance this growing deficit China will need to attract billions in foreign investment. The report states, “Due to the ongoing transition to a consumption-led economy and a decline in savings amid an aging population, China’s annual current-account deficit could reach as much as 1.6% of GDP—or $420 billion—by 2030.” If true, that is a huge shift in dependence for China. In terms of surplus in goods exports, China has already gone from a surplus of 10% of GDP in 2007 before the major financial crisis, to 2.9% in 2018. This year could be a small deficit.

Today foreign investment in China bonds is small at about $35 billion. Morgan Stanley estimates the size of China’s bond market, the heart of the debt system, to be over $12 trillion, third behind Japan with $13 trillion and USA with $40 trillion, but larger than say UK or France.

As China’s economy undergoes a major shift to current account deficit over the next few years, it must be able to attract new inflows of investment in its debt from outside. This is a huge problem potentially. This also explains a major reason behind China’s push to develop state-of-the-art advanced industry in its Made in China 2025 strategy that is the true target of Washington trade pressure.

At this juncture it looks like a high-risk game of financial chicken between Beijing and Washington. It appears clear that Xi Jinping has decided to hunker down and hold out until the US elections next year in hopes Trump will lose to a pro-China Democrat. What is clear is that this is about far more than any imbalance in China’s trade with the USA.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

Featured image is from NEO

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This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

When the Royal Marines seized the Iranian-owned Grace 1 supertanker off Gibraltar on July 4th, then British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt hailed the seizure as a sign that Iran had “no place to hide.” On July 19th, when the Iranian government retaliated by authorizing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps to seize the Swedish-owned, British-registered tanker Stena Impero in Hormuz, Hunt described it as an act of “state-piracy.”

Now, at first glance, this looks like just another tedious example of the blatant double-standards which we’ve come to expect from western politicians in relation to non-vassal states, and it is certainly that. This is not the first article in which I have drawn attention to Hunt’s tendency to practice blatant double-standards such as these. However, it has subsequently transpired that Jeremy Hunt’s recent campaign for the leadership of the British Conservative Party was largely financed by a close associate of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman. The South African banker and philanthropist Ken Costa has been described in some quarters as Bin Salman’s “point-man” in the UK.

Or bagman, if you prefer.

It is unsurprising, then, that Hunt publicly bats for Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) at every available opportunity, for example in deflecting criticism regarding the Saudi role in the precipitation of the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, and also in consistently demonstrating hostility toward Iran.

On August 7th, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry met with Saudi Minister for Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources Khalid Al-Falih. They are reported to have discussed ways of countering what they see as Iranian attempts to “destabilize” world-oil markets, with Al-Falih indicating that KSA favours the policy of increasing oil-production to moderate any surges in the world-price of crude.

Well, when the US withdraws from the JCPOA as a pretext for unilaterally imposing new sanctions on Iranian oil, “destabilization” is inevitable, but there wouldn’t be any point in making that argument to someone to whom it was not already self-evident.

It turns out that Perry also has a lot of Saudi grit under his fingernails. The US Senate House Oversight Committee has just published a report which is extremely critical of Perry’s role in advocacy for the sale of nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. Attempts have been made by IP3, an energy-consulting firm, to persuade the US Department of Energy to facilitate the sale without requiring the Saudis to sign a Section 123 agreement, which would be a commitment regarding the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.

Can you imagine Saudi Arabia with nuclear weapons?

Not that these dubious Saudi entanglements mark the Trump administration in particular, of course. Enormous Saudi funding for the Clinton Foundation prior to 2016 was well documented. During Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, US arms-sales to Saudi Arabia increased by 97%, including a $29.4 billion sale of over 80 F-15 fighters to KSA, and her 2016 campaign-manager John Podesta’s consulting firm was paid $140,000 per month to lobby on behalf of the KSA government. The Clinton Foundation itself also received about $10 billion in donations from the Saudi government while Clinton was Secretary of State.

And let’s not even talk about the Bush family’s history with the Saudis.

So we see, then, that the level of penetration which the Saudi government has achieved in the west’s political systems transcends both nationalities and ideological boundaries. British and American hostility toward the Islamic Republic of Iran is usually analyzed as being primarily ideologically driven. This interpretation is certainly valid on a number of levels.

The Iranian Islamic revolution has been one of the most stunningly resilient and successful anti-colonial movements in history, and therefore many imperial strategists see it as an imperative that the Islamic revolution must be crushed, not simply in order for Iran’s immense natural resources to be looted as they were before 1979, but also for the same strategic-ideological reasons that the western geo-strategic perspective has historically seen it as an imperative that all revolutionary societies be crushed.

Furthermore, we can discern a deeper ideological confluence between Saudi Wahhabism and liberal universalism, currently the Occident’s dominant (but rapidly decaying) ideological paradigm. Both are rooted in 18th century excessively transcendental thought, in an explicitly ahistorical, anti-historical or post-historical way of thinking. Both explicitly reject historical comparison or collective historical experience as a normative basis for the evaluation of social, political, ideological or ethical questions.

While the French philosophers of the 18th century sought to ground their worldview in something which they called “pure reason,” unburdened by any considerations of historical embeddedness or context (a form of philosophical naiveté thankfully not shared by any of the most notable figures in the German enlightenment), Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab sought to rediscover a “pure” version of Islam, unburdened by the allegorical Koranic hermeneutics of sophisticated Persian intellectuals.

In an Inforos column on August 1st, my colleague Sarah Abed argued that the United States’ ultimate objective in Iran remains regime-change, hence the willingness to use any spurious pretext whatsoever in order to re-impose sanctions. She argues that there is a strategy of continuing to economically pressure the Iranian state until it collapses in its current form.

I certainly agree with this analysis, but in breaking down the various motivating factors behind it, our broadly justified emphasis on ideological and geo-strategic issues sometimes blinds us to the role of straightforward corruption and influence-peddling in the process. Saudi financial power has led to a situation wherein KSA exerts very arguably more influence on the foreign policies of western governments than any other foreign entity.

Paranoid liberal fantasies about the Kremlin’s influence in subverting the internal political processes of western countries used to make us laugh, but by now they are simply tedious, and paranoid fantasies about pervasive Israeli influence are almost as tedious. We overlook the point that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has arguably more raw bribery-power than any other nation-state.

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A recent report issued by the U.S. Pentagon’s Inspector General warns of conditions in Syria and Iraq which potentially could allow for ISIS to spread once again. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had not read the report but recalled the U.S. defeat of ISIS. The report warned of an ISIS goal to create turmoil in areas it had previously lost in Iraq and Syria.

The Iraqi government forces have continued to fight terrorism, and have conducted raids in Northern Iraq for ISIS sleeper cells. The military track is not the only way to fight ISIS, which espouses Radical Islam, which is a political ideology and is not a religion or a sect. Education is the key to eradicating Radical Islam. The Iraqi government must develop a program in rural areas, as well as the cities, which will educate young and old to transform hearts and minds away from terrorism. Some experts had dubbed Radical Islam as a “Death Cult”.

The regional governments should also shut down access to satellite TV channels which preach Radical Islam and Jihad. Almost every home in Syria and Iraq has a satellite dish on their roof, and reception is free for hundreds of channels. TV has become the main source of religion, politics, and entertainment. Many channels are exclusively promoting, teaching and brainwashing viewers into Radical Islamic edicts, promoting Jihad in Syria, and are most frequently broadcast from the Arab Gulf countries, and receive their funding from Saudi Arabia and others who export Radical Islamic ideology, such as Qatar.

The regional governments must stop the transfers of funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and other sources to groups promoting Radical Islam. Experts agree that Saudi Arabia has been a state sponsor of Radical Islamic ideology across the globe, dating back to the 1960s, during which time they began missionary efforts in Europe and the U.S.

The defeat of ISIS  was accomplished by the Iraqi military on the Eastern side, and by the Syrian Arab Army and their Russian allies from the Western side. The U.S. played a very limited role in the defeat of ISIS, by focusing on an air campaign at Raqqa, which ended in its destruction. The U.S. focused on capturing and occupying the Syrian oil wells, which are still in their hands, under their mercenary Kurdish militia (SDF, YPG, PKK). When Russia entered Syria to fight terrorism in 2015, they began by attacking ISIS positions. They bombed oil tanker convoys taking the stolen Syrian oil to be sold in Turkey and then re-sold to European Union countries.

The Pentagon report points out that there are domestic disputes between the Iraqi government at Baghdad and the Kurdish administration in the North at Erbil. This internal rift between the two groups can be exploited by ISIS, as they prey upon the weakness of disunity. The Kurds must face reality, that the U.S. is not loyal to allies; for example, Ben Ali of Tunisia, Mubarak of Egypt, Gaddafi of Libya, Erdogan of Turkey.

Iraqi Kurdistan is the Kurdish-populated region incorporated into Iraq, and first gained autonomous status in a 1970 agreement with the Iraqi government and has a population of approximately 5.8 million people. The Kurds in Syria are occupying the North East section of Syria, and are supported by the U.S. military occupation of Syria.

The U.S. has used the Kurds to create chaos and division in Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds today are getting support from the Israeli occupation government, as they have business and oil deals with them. The U.S. views the Israeli occupation government as their closest and strongest ally in the Middle East. Israel is benefiting from the Kurds in Syria and Iraq, as they buy oil from them, and it is transported through the port at Ceyhan in Turkey. The Syrian oil is stolen from wells occupied by the Kurds and the U.S.

The Kurds could negotiate with officials in Baghdad, and Damascus, to preserve their interests and future through unity with their region, instead of being a U.S. satellite state surrounded by enemies. The Kurdish goal should be to fight terrorism in the entire region, not just in their small conclave of occupied lands. They should be full partners with Iraq and Syria in defeating terrorism and the ideology. As long as the Kurds of Syria and Iraq consider themselves as special, different, and above the law, the terrorists will target them, because their disunity and isolationism will cause them to be permanently weak, and exposed to attack and infiltration.

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On the morning of August 7, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and the Tiger Forces advanced on positions of radical militants in northwestern Hama. During the day, units of the SAA and the Tiger Forces liberated the villages of Arbeen and al-Zakah.

Government troops also cut off the supply line between the militant-held towns of Kafr Zita and al-Lataminah and increased artillery and air strikes on positions in this area.

Kafr Zita and al-Lataminah are the key strong points of Jaysh al-Izza and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) in this part of the so-called Idlib de-escalation zone.

On August 5, the Syrian Armed Forces released a warning to militants that, if they continue to violate the ceasefire regime, the SAA would have to resume military operations. On August 6, violations continued. So, since August 7, the SAA has been conducting active actions to push radical militants out of the supposed demilitarized zone around Idlib.

It’s expected that in the coming days he SAA will continue its advance aiming to liberate Kaf Zita and then al-Lataminah.

On August 7. Russian warplanes destroyed two militant early warning posts, known as the 20th post and the Eagle post, in northern Hama. Opposition activists acknowledged that four militants, including two commanders known as Abu Jalbib and Abdo al-Nasan, were killed in the strike.

Such posts are usually stationed in plain sights. They are used to monitor flights of Russian and Syrian warplanes and warn militants throughout Greater Idlib of possible airstrikes on their positions.

On August 6, a Kurdish rebel group, the Afrin Liberation Forces, announced that its forces had killed 13 Turkish-backed militants in operations near the town of Marea and the village of Brad. Over the past month, the AFL has carried out a series of successful operations against Turkey-led forces in the Afrin region.

Turkey and U.S. have concluded their talks on northeastern Syria with an agreement to establish a “peace corridor” in the US-occupied region, the two countries announced in a joint statement on August 7.

The sides agreed on the following steps:

• “the rapid implementation of initial measures to address Turkey’s security concerns;
• to set up as soon as possible a joint operations center in Turkey to coordinate and manage the establishment of the safe zone together;
• that the safe zone shall become a peace corridor, and that any additional measures shall be taken for our displaced Syrian brothers to return to their country.”

The Turkish Anadolu Agency claimed that the joint “peace corridor” will be 30 to 40 kilometers deep in northeastern Syria. The state-run agency said that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the People’s Protection Units (YPG) will be moved out of the “peace corridor” and forced to surrender their heavy weapons. The irony of the situation is that these two groups, very hostile towards Turkey, are the core of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces that technically control the region. Therefore, the implementation of the agreement will likely face some serious difficulties.

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The historically unstable Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan was suddenly thrown into yet another crisis after the former president and his supporters opened fire on the special forces that were dispatched to serve a warrant for his arrest on corruption charges following his refusal to comply with earlier requests for his surrender, with the latest violence threatening to spiral into a Color Revolution or even a civil war in the worst-case scenario.

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Russia’s CSTO mutual defense ally and fellow Eurasian Union member Kyrgyzstan has been suddenly thrown into yet another crisis earlier this week after a long-simmering power struggle between the current and former presidents finally turned violent. Former President Atambayev was stripped of immunity earlier this summer and charged with corruption by incumbent President Jeenbekov, his former protege, but he refused to comply with previous requests for his surrender. The authorities therefore dispatched special forces to serve a warrant for his arrest but they were met with gunfire at Atambayev’s compound outside the capital. The initial operation ended in a total failure but he finally agreed to give himself up the day after. The former leader claimed that he’s a victim of political repression, while the current one says that his predecessor just blatantly violated the constitution by resisting arrest, among his other alleged offenses, especially after he admitted to firing on the forces that were sent to arrest him. In turn, Atambayev called on his supporters to protest in Bishkek, raising fears that the latest violence might spiral into a Color Revolution or even a civil war in the worst-case scenario given the unstable Central Asian country’s history of unrest in recent years.

The core of the current problem appears to be that Atambayev assumed that he’d be able to control Jeenbekov and therefore continue to exercise indirect influence over the state indefinitely, but his successor had other plans and decided to assert his independence by holding his former patron to account for his alleged violations of the law. The incumbent might have done so as part of a genuine anti-corruption drive, but he could very well have also had political motives in dismantling the shadow network that his predecessor had established and which might have been functioning as a “state-within-a-state”. After all, earlier constitutional changes made it so that Kyrgyz Presidents can only serve one six-year term in office, so it’s possible that Atambayev wanted to continue functioning as the de-facto head of state through various proxies, both official ones like Jeenbekov and unofficial ones like the armed supporters who had already assembled at his compound when the first unsuccessful raid was attempted. So influential was Atambayev even after serving his term that he still maintained ties with Putin and even visited him in Moscow late last month in a last-ditch Russian-mediated attempt to avoid what ended up being the inevitable standoff that just took place.

Casual observers might not be aware of this, but Kyrgyz political culture is still largely centered on clans, which is why the latest situation is so potentially explosive because two Color Revolutions already happened in less than 15 years after dissatisfied clansmen took to the streets to protest in 2005 and 2010. Per the traditional Color Revolution template, the police responded to various provocations at those times and the situation quickly escalated to the point where the incumbent was eventually removed from office, with the latest regime change being especially bloody following inter-ethnic clashes between the Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in the Fergana Valley. That’s why Atambayev’s request that his supporters rally in the capital in his support was so inflammatory because it could very well trigger a repeat of those two previous scenarios, as was unsuccessfully attempted Thursday night after the former head of state’s ultimate surrender. It’ll remain to be seen whether that’ll still be the case during the coming weekend or not, but the security services seem prepared to deal with another Color Revolution attempt if active efforts are made to return the country to its recent history of unrest.

Looking forward, the only sustainable solution is for Kyrgyzstan to reduce and ultimately eliminate the influence that clan-centric shadow networks play in its “national democracy”, so in hindsight this week’s dramatic operation against the former head of state had to have happened sooner or later in the interests of the country’s long-term stability. It might very well prove to be an uphill battle that the state itself might not be properly prepared to handle given the likelihood that elements of its security and other apparatuses could already be infiltrated by those said networks. Therefore, one can simplify the challenge ahead by saying that Kyrgyzstan must “cleanse” its “deep state” (permanent bureaucracy) simultaneously with cracking down on organized crime (which is sometimes affiliated with some “deep state” forces), but this might lead to serious societal disruptions depending on how entrenched the problem might be. That could explain why it hasn’t been seriously attempted before, though it’s more likely that previous leaders and influencers preferred to exploit the preexisting system in place for their own benefit than reform it and risk losing out on their self-interested perks. As such, Kyrgyzstan probably has some tough times ahead of itself and should therefore be kept an eye.

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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.

We’re told that the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty singed in 1987 between the US and Soviet Union was based on claims that Russia had violated it.

While we continue waiting for Washington to provide evidence to prove these claims, the US itself admitted it had already long begun developing missiles that violated the treaty.

A February 2018 Defense One article titled, “Pentagon Confirms It’s Developing Nuclear Cruise Missile to Counter a Similar Russian One,” admitted that:

The U.S. military is developing a ground-launched, intermediate-range cruise missile to counter a similar Russian weapon whose deployment violates an arms-control treaty between Moscow and Washington, U.S. officials said Friday. 

The officials acknowledged that the still-under-development American missile would, if deployed, also violate the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

Just as the US did when it unilaterally walked away from the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002, the goal is to blame Russia for otherwise indefensible and incremental provocations aimed at Moscow. For example, after the US walked away from the ABM Treaty in 2002, the US began deploying anti-missile systems across Europe.

But if Russia is the problem, why did the US also begin deploying similar missiles in Asia?

It is Washington’s goal of hemming in its competitors anywhere and everywhere that is at the heart of these serial treaty terminations, not any particular “violation” on Moscow’s part.

China Too   

That the US already had missiles under development that would undoubtedly violate the INF Treaty before it accused Russia of such violations, is one indicator of Washington’s true intentions. Another is the fact Washington is rushing to encircle China with both defensive and offensive missile systems as well.

China is not a signatory of either the ABM Treaty or the INF Treaty. Its missiles are deployed strictly within its mainland territory with no plans by Beijing to deploy them anywhere else in the future.

The only threat they pose is to any nation that decides to wage war on China, in or around Chinese territory.

Washington’s behavior post-INF Treaty indicates that it was its intent to violate the treaty all along, creating the same precarious security crisis in Asia the treaty sought to prevent in Europe.

The New York Times in its article, “U.S. Ends Cold War Missile Treaty, With Aim of Countering China,” would explain:

The United States on Friday terminated a major treaty of the Cold War, the Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, and it is already planning to start testing a new class of missiles later this summer. 

But the new missiles are unlikely to be deployed to counter the treaty’s other nuclear power, Russia, which the United States has said for years was in violation of the accord. Instead, the first deployments are likely to be intended to counter China, which has amassed an imposing missile arsenal and is now seen as a much more formidable long-term strategic rival than Russia. 

The moves by Washington have elicited concern that the United States may be on the precipice of a new arms race, especially because the one major remaining arms control treaty with Russia, a far larger one called New START, appears on life support, unlikely to be renewed when it expires in less than two years.

Here, the NYT admits that despite Washington claiming its termination of the INF Treaty was prompted by Moscow, its own actions since indicate Washington was already well underway of violating it itself. It did so not only to threaten Russia, but also to threaten China.

After months of accusing Russia of undermining the INF Treaty, the NYT itself reveals it was Washington who solely benefited from it, and specifically in terms of targeting China:

…the administration has argued that China is one reason Mr. Trump decided to exit the I.N.F. treaty. Most experts now assess that China has the most advanced conventional missile arsenal in the world, based throughout the mainland. When the treaty went into effect in 1987, China’s missile fleet was judged so rudimentary that it was not even a consideration.

The prospects of the US signing a new treaty with either Russia or China (or both) are nonexistent. The NYT article also reported that:

Chinese officials have also balked at any attempt to limit their missiles with a new treaty, arguing that the nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia are much larger and deadlier.

The NYT fails to mention the other, and perhaps most important factor preventing Beijing from signing any treaty with Washington; Washington has already demonstrated categorically that it cannot be trusted. It just walked away from the INF Treaty based on deliberate lies implicating Russia while Washington all along was developing missiles it planned to deploy around the globe to hem in both Russia and China.

Dangerous Desperation 

While the Cold War is remembered as a precarious time, it was a time when agreements like the ABM and INF treaties were not only possible, they were signed and for the most part adhered to by two global powers who could agree an uneasy balance of global power was preferable to large scale war (nuclear or not) between the two.

During the Cold War, Washington was confident that it could not only maintain that balance of power, but eventually tip it in its favor, resulting in global hegemony. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the US invasion of Iraq certainly seemed to prove those behind this mindset right. But the window was already closing on the establishment of an uncontested US-led international order.

Today, Russia, China and a number of other emerging regional and global powers have all but assured US hegemony is no longer a viable geopolitical objective. The confidence that allowed the US to sign previous treaties and uphold them along with their Soviet counterparts no longer exists.

We live in a world today where the US has become a tremendous danger to global peace and security. The inability of treaties to exist that were even possible during the tense days of the Cold War takes us into unprecedented and dangerous territory.

Only time will tell if both Moscow and Beijing can find other mechanisms to avoid a dangerous and wasteful arms race in their backyards as a stubborn United States not only refuses to leave, but insists on bringing in incredibly dangerous weapons that will wreck havoc not on the territorial United States, but on the nations of Europe and East Asia should Washington’s desperation progress even further amid its wanning global power.

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

Featured image is from NEO

The blinkered security establishment is standard fare in politics.  From Washington to Manila, we hear of terrors and concerns which tend to more spectral than not.  Legitimate concerns such as catastrophic environmental failure, or a nuclear accident, are treated with a sigh, its warners doomsday advocates rather than reasoned citizens.  It is the unseen demon that preoccupies. 

One such blinkered devotee is Andrew Hastie, an Australian member of parliament who prides himself as something of a security sage.  (Suffice to say that experience serving as a member of the Special Air Services Regiment does not necessarily qualify you as an expert in world politics.)  He chairs the Parliamentary Joint Committee for Intelligence and Security, a grouping of parliamentarians that has done more harm to Australian civil liberties than most institutions.  Lacking an inner cabinet role, he has the freedom to mouth some of his richer views, possibly with promptings from the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison.  Best get the lowly man to do the damage if you want a view known widely. 

Being no Sinophile, Hastie has deemed the People’s Republic of China the great Satan of international politics, something that will earn him a fan base in certain circles in the Washington cocktail set.  In doing so, he reiterates fears of Yellow-Red horde coursing its way through Asia to the idyllic, peaceful antipodes.  He scolds Australians for not appreciating the “ideology” of the Chinese Communist Party.  This is the new domino effect, and like that haphazard assessment formulated during the Eisenhower years, it is equally unconvincing. 

In The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald on Thursday, Hastie expressed an opinion dressed up in the language of urgency, an attempt to awaken a certain consciousness.  In that sense, he is an options shop, hand-me-down George Kennan, who penned his famous Long Telegram as US chargé d’affaires in Moscow warning of the Soviet mindset.

“At bottom of Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs is traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity,” he noted. 

Hastie makes no mention of Kennan, preferring, instead, the convenient findings of Stephen Kotkin of Princeton to disabuse those silly sods who thought that “Stalin’s decisions were the rational actions of a realist great power.”  In Kotkin’s views, it turned out that the embroidering of Marxist terms through meetings, discussions and policies in the Kremlin were really due to one tendency: “the Communists were Communists!”

For Hastie, the planes finding their incendiary conclusion in the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon did not supply the defining “geopolitical moment” of the 21^st century.  That dubious honour went to the colliding encounter between a J-8 fighter jet of the People’s Liberation Army Navy and a US Navy EP-3 signals intelligence aircraft off Hainan Island that same year.  The PLAN pilot perished; the 24 crew of the EP-3 were subsequently held by the PRC for 11 days.  The aircraft was duly stripped and examined, and returned in parts. 

“The Hainan Island incident laid down the contours for the present challenge facing Australia. It portended the agonising security and economic balancing act we must now perform.”

Hastie is less anthropological, and more reactionary than Kennan. 

“Right now,” writes Hastie, “our greatest vulnerability lies not in our infrastructure, but our thinking.” 

This is nothing less than an “intellectual failure” rendering Australia and other states “institutionally weak.  If we don’t understand the challenge ahead for our civil society, in our parliaments, in our universities, in our private enterprises, in our charities – our little platoons – then choices will be made for us. Our sovereignty, our freedoms, will be diminished.”  Strong language from a politician in the service of a country whose sovereignty has always been susceptible to modification, being an annex of Washington’s imperium.

What was needed, in the view of a worried Hastie, was for Australians to accept and duly respond “to the reality of the geopolitical struggle before us – its origins, its ideas and its implications for the Indo-Pacific region”.  Australia found itself facing “every strategic and economic question […] refracted through the geopolitical competition of the US and the PRC.”  The solution?  Continue to trade with the PRC for reasons of prosperity, yet maintain a firm security posture against it.   

Shaky historical comparisons make their way into the piece.  Australia, he insisted, found itself in the same position as those French strategists worried about the rise of Nazi Germany.  The “Maginot Line” built to protect France against Germany prior to the Second World War finds a modern equivalent in the theory that “economic liberalisation would naturally lead to democratisation in China.”  The French failed against the German panzers; Australia has, in turn, “failed to see how mobile our authoritarian neighbour has become.”  

The extrapolations are inevitable: the Munich analogy that corrupted so much thinking in US foreign policy, leading to defeat in Vietnam; the need to take steps to avert disaster and avoid appeasing authoritarianism. Many an idiotic policy has arisen from shonky historical analogies.

The Chinese response was curt, coming in a statement from the embassy. 

“We strongly deplore the Australian federal MP Andrew Hastie’s rhetoric on ‘China threat’ which lays bare his Cold War mentality and ideological bias.” 

Its assessment was conventional: there was a “world trend of peace, co-operation and development” that was undermined by such remarks. 

Hastie has his glum faced backers unnerved by the “might is right” view of the world order, be it US President Donald Trump’s penchant for tearing up treaties, Russian disruptions, strong man popularity or disunity in Europe.  Anne-Marie Brady, based at the University of Canterbury, defers to the MP’s wisdom, making the common mistake about a joint parliamentary committee that often sees haunting forms rather than substantive matters.  That committee, after all, “helped pass the new counter-foreign interference legislation which will help address the Chinese Communist Party’s aggressive united front work activities in Australia”.    

We have seen this in history: the hysterical prophet who insists on self-fulfilling prophecies. If you proclaim the end of the world is nigh, you might just get what you wish for.  Terrifying your opponents, unsettling them into something rash, is the stuff historical blunders are made from.  The march of history is not that of an orderly, planned sequence, but a messy stumble occasioned by blundering leaders.  With individuals like Hastie, a reasoned balance will not be struck.  Those in Washington will remain confident that they have Australia on their side in any future skirmish.

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

When the Federal Reserve cut interest rates on July 31^st for the first time in more than a decade, commentators were asking why. According to official data, the economy was rebounding, unemployment was below 4%, and GDP growth was above 3%. If anything, by the Fed’s own reasoning, it should have been raising rates.

The explanation of market pundits was that we’re in a trade war and a currency war. Other central banks were cutting their rates and the Fed had to follow suit, in order to prevent the dollar from becoming overvalued relative to other currencies. The theory is that a cheaper dollar will make American products more attractive on foreign markets, helping our manufacturing and labor bases.

Over the weekend, President Trump followed the rate cuts by threatening to impose a new 10% tariff on $300 billion worth of Chinese products effective September 1^st. China responded by suspending imports of U.S. agricultural products by state-owned companies and letting the value of the yuan drop. On Monday, August 5, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 770 points, its worst day in 2019. The war was on.

The problem with a currency war is that it is a war without winners. This was demonstrated in the beggar-thy-neighbor policies of the 1930s, which just prolonged the Great Depression. As economist Michael Hudson observed in a June 2019 interview with Bonnie Faulkner, making American products cheaper abroad will do little for the American economy, because we no longer have a competitive manufacturing base or products to sell. Today’s workers are largely in the service industries – cab drivers, hospital workers, insurance agents and the like. A cheaper dollar abroad just makes consumer goods at Walmart and imported raw materials for US businesses more expensive. What is mainly devalued when a currency is devalued, says Hudson, is the price of the country’s labor and the working conditions of its laborers. The reason American workers cannot compete with foreign workers is not that the dollar is overvalued. It is due to their higher costs of housing, education, medical services and transportation. In most competitor countries, these costs are subsidized by the government.

America’s chief competitor in the trade war is obviously China, which subsidizes not just worker costs but the costs of its businesses. The government owns 80% of the banks, which make loans on favorable terms to domestic businesses, especially state-owned businesses. Typically, if the businesses cannot repay the loans, neither the banks nor the businesses are put into bankruptcy, since that would mean losing jobs and factories. The non-performing loans are just carried on the books or written off. No private creditors are hurt, since the creditor is the government, and the loans were created on the banks’ books in the first place (following standard banking practice globally).

As observed by Jeff Spross in a May 2018 Reuters article titled “China’s Banks Are Big. Too Big?”:

[B]ecause the Chinese government owns most of the banks, and it prints the currency, it can technically keep those banks alive and lending forever.…

It may sound weird to say that China’s banks will never collapse, no matter how absurd their lending positions get. But banking systems are just about the flow of money.

Spross quoted former bank CEO Richard Vague, chair of The Governor’s Woods Foundation, who explained,

“China has committed itself to a high level of growth. And growth, very simply, is contingent on financing.” Beijing will “come in and fix the profitability, fix the capital, fix the bad debt, of the state-owned banks … by any number of means that you and I would not see happen in the United States.”

To avoid political and labor unrest, Spross wrote, the government keeps everyone happy by keeping economic growth high and spreading the proceeds to the citizenry. About two-thirds of Chinese debt is owed just by the corporations, which are also largely state-owned. Corporate lending is thus a roundabout form of government-financed industrial policy – a policy financed not through taxes but through the unique privilege of banks to create money on their books.

China thinks this is a better banking model than the private Western system focused on short-term profits for private shareholders. But U.S. policymakers consider China’s subsidies to its businesses and workers to be “unfair trade practices.” They want China to forgo state subsidization an it’s d other protectionist policies in order to level the playing field. But Beijing contends that the demanded reforms amount to “economic regime change.” As Michael Hudson puts it:

This is the fight that Trump has against China.  He wants to tell it to let the banks run China and have a free market.  He says that China has grown rich over the last fifty years by unfair means, with government help and public enterprise.  In effect, he wants the Chinese to be as threatened and insecure as American workers.  They should get rid of their public transportation.  They should get rid of their subsidies.  They should let a lot of their companies go bankrupt so that Americans can buy them.  They should have the same kind of free market that has wrecked the US economy. [Emphasis added.]

Kurt Campbell and Jake Sullivan, writing on August 1^st in Foreign Affairs (the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations), call it “an emerging contest of models.”

An Economic Cold War

In order to understand what is happening here, it is useful to review some history. The free market model hollowed out America’s manufacturing base beginning in the Thatcher/Reagan era of the 1970s, when neoliberal economic policies took hold. Meanwhile, emerging Asian economies, led by Japan, were exploding on the scene with a new economic model called “state-guided market capitalism.” The state determined the priorities and commissioned the work, then hired private enterprise to carry it out. The model overcame the defects of the communist system, which put ownership and control in the hands of the state.

The Japanese state-guided market system was effective and efficient – so effective that it was regarded as an existential threat to the neoliberal model of debt-based money and “free markets” promoted by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to William Engdahl in A Century of War, by the end of the 1980s Japan was considered the leading economic and banking power in the world. Its state-guided model was also proving to be highly successful in South Korea and the other “Asian Tiger” economies. When the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, Japan proposed its model for the former communist countries, and many began looking to it and to South Korea as viable alternatives to the U.S. free-market system. State-guided capitalism provided for the general welfare without destroying capitalist incentive. Engdahl wrote:

The Tiger economies were a major embarrassment to the IMF free-market model.  Their very success in blending private enterprise with a strong state economic role was a threat to the IMF free-market agenda.  So long as the Tigers appeared to succeed with a model based on a strong state role, the former communist states and others could argue against taking the extreme IMF course.  In east Asia during the 1980s, economic growth rates of 7-8 per cent per year, rising social security, universal education and a high worker productivity were all backed by state guidance and planning, albeit in a market economy – an Asian form of benevolent paternalism.

Just as the US had engaged in a Cold War to destroy the Soviet communist model, so Western financial interests set out to destroy this emerging Asian threat. It was defused when Western neoliberal economists persuaded Japan and the Asian Tigers to adopt the free-market system and open their economies and their companies to foreign investors. Western speculators then took down the vulnerable countries one by one in the “Asian crisis” of 1997-98. China alone was left as an economic threat to the Western neoliberal model, and it is this existential threat that is the target of the trade and currency wars today.

If You Can’t Beat Them …

In their August 1^st Foreign Affairs article, titled “Competition without Catastrophe,” Campbell and Sullivan write that the temptation is to compare these economic trade wars with the Cold War with Russia; but the analogy, they say, is inapt:

China today is a peer competitor that is more formidable economically, more sophisticated diplomatically, and more flexible ideologically than the Soviet Union ever was. And unlike the Soviet Union, China is deeply integrated into the world and intertwined with the U.S. economy.

Unlike the Soviet Communist system, the Chinese system cannot be expected to “crumble under its own weight.” The US should not expect or want to destroy China, say Campbell and Sullivan. Rather, we should aim for a state of “coexistence on terms favorable to U.S. interests and values.”

The implication is that China, being too strong to be knocked out of the game as the Soviet Union was, needs to be coerced or cajoled into adopting the neoliberal model. It needs to abandon state support of its industries and ownership of its banks. But the Chinese system, while obviously not perfect, has an impressive track record for sustaining long-term growth and development. While the U.S. manufacturing base was being hollowed out under the free-market model, China was systematically building up its own manufacturing base, investing heavily in infrastructure and emerging technologies; and it was doing this with credit generated by its state-owned banks. Rather than trying to destroy China’s economic system, it might be more “favorable to U.S. interests and values” for us to adopt its more effective industrial and banking practices.

We cannot win a currency war by competitive currency devaluations that trigger a “race to the bottom,” and we cannot win a trade war by competitive trade barriers that simply cut us off from the benefits of cooperative trade. More favorable to our interests and values than warring with our trading partners would be to cooperate in sharing solutions, including banking and credit solutions. The Chinese have proven the effectiveness of their public banking system in supporting their industries and their workers. Rather than seeing it as an existential threat, we could thank them for test-driving the model and take a spin in it ourselves.

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This article was first posted on Truthdig.com.

Ellen Brown chairs the Public Banking Institute and has written thirteen books, including her latest, Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age.  She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Think tanks sprout like weeds in Washington. The latest is the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which is engaged in a pre-launch launch and is attracting some media coverage all across the political spectrum. The Institute is named after the sixth US President John Quincy Adams, who famously made a speech while Secretary of State in which he cautioned that while the United States of America would always be sympathetic to the attempts of other countries to fight against dominance by the imperial European powers, “she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”

The Quincy Institute self-defines as a foundation dedicated to a responsible and restrained foreign policy with the stated intention of “mov[ing] US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.” It is seeking to fund an annual budget of $5-6 million, enough to employ twenty or more staffers.

The Quincy Institute claims correctly that many of the other organizations dealing with national security and international affairs inside the Beltway are either agenda driven or neoconservative dominated, often meaning that they in practice support serial interventionism, sometimes including broad tolerance or even encouragement of war as a first option when dealing with adversaries. These are policies that are currently playing out unsuccessfully vis-à-vis Venezuela, Iran, Syria and North Korea.

The Quincies promise to be different in an attempt to change the Washington foreign policy consensus, which some have referred to as the Blob, and they have indeed collected a very respectable group of genuine “realist” experts and thoughtful pundits, including Professor Andrew Bacevich, National Iranian American Council founder Trita Parsi and investigative journalist Jim Lobe. But the truly interesting aspect of their organization is its funding. Its most prominent contributors are left of center George Soros and right of center and libertarian leaning Charles Koch. That is what is attracting the attention coming from media outlets like The Nation on the progressive side and Foreign Policy from the conservatives. That donors will demand their pound of flesh is precisely the problem with the Quincy vision as money drives the political process in the United States while also fueling the Establishment’s military-industrial-congressional complex that dominates the national security/foreign policy discussion.

There will be inevitably considerable ideological space between people who are progressive-antiwar and those who call themselves “realists” that will have to be carefully bridged lest the group begin to break down in squabbling over “principles.” Some progressives of the Barack Obama variety will almost certainly push for the inclusion of Samantha Power R2P types who will use abuses in foreign countries to argue for the US continuing to play a “policeman for the world” role on humanitarian grounds. And there will inevitably be major issues that Quincy will be afraid to confront, including the significant role played by Israel and its friends in driving America’s interventionist foreign policy.

Nevertheless, the Quincy Institute is certainly correct in its assessment that there is significant war-weariness among the American public, particularly among returning veterans, and there is considerable sentiment supporting a White House change of course in its national security policy. But it errs in thinking that America’s corrupted legislators will respond at any point prior to their beginning to fail in reelection bids based on that issue, which has to be considered unlikely. Witness the current Democratic Party debates in which Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate who is even daring to talk about America’s disastrous and endless wars, suggesting that the Blob assessment that the issue is relatively unimportant may be correct.

Money talks. Where else in the developed world but the United States can a multi-billionaire like Sheldon Adelson legally and in the open spend a few tens of millions of dollars, which is for him pocket change, to effectively buy an entire political party on behalf of a foreign nation? What will the Quincies do when George Soros, notorious for his sometimes disastrous support of so-called humanitarian “regime change” intervention to expand “democracy movements” as part his vision of a liberal world order, calls up the Executive Director and suggests that he would like to see a little more pushing of whatever is needed to build democracy in Belarus? Soros, who has doubled his spending for political action in this election cycle, is not doing so for altruistic reasons. And he might reasonably argue that one of the four major projects planned by the Quincy Institute, headed by investigative journalist Eli Clifton, is called “Democratizing Foreign Policy.”

Why are US militarism and interventionism important issues? They are beyond important – and would be better described as potentially life or death both for the United States and for the many nations with which it interacts. And there is also the price to pay by every American domestically, with the terrible and unnecessary waste of national resources as well human capital driving American ever deeper into a hole that it might never be able to emerge from.

As Quincy is the newcomer on K Street, it is important to recognize what the plethora of foundations and institutes in Washington actually do in any given week. To be sure, they produce a steady stream of white papers, press releases, and op-eds that normally only their partisan supporters bother to read or consider. They buttonhole and talk to congressmen or staffers whenever they can, most often the staffers. And the only ones really listening among legislators are the ones who are finding what they hear congenial and useful for establishing a credible framework for policy decisions that have nothing to do with the strengths of the arguments being made or “realism.” The only realism for a congress-critter in the heartland is having a defense plant providing jobs in his district.

And, to be sure, the institutes and foundations also have a more visible public presence. Every day somewhere in Washington there are numerous panel discussions and meetings debating the issues deemed to be of critical importance. The gatherings are attended primarily by the already converted, are rarely reported in any of the mainstream media, and they exist not to explain or resolve issues but rather to make sure their constituents continue to regard the participants as respectable, responsible and effective so as not to interrupt the flow of donor money.

US foreign policy largely operates within narrow limits that are essentially defined by powerful and very well-funded interest groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hudson Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but the real lobbying of Congress and the White House on those issues takes place out of sight, not in public gatherings, and it is backed up by money. AIPAC, for example, alone spends more than $80 million dollars per year and has 200 employees.

So, the Quincy Institute intention to broaden the discussion of the current foreign policy to include opponents and critics of interventionism should be welcomed with some caveats. It is a wonderful idea already explored by others but nevertheless pretty much yet another shot in the dark that will accomplish little or nothing beyond providing jobs for some college kids and feel good moments for the anointed inner circle. And the shot itself is aimed in the wrong direction. The real issue is not foreign policy per se at all. It is getting the corrupting force of enormous quantities of PAC money completely removed from American politics. America has the best Congress and White House that anyone’s money can buy. The Quincy Institute’s call for restraint in foreign policy, for all its earnestness, will not change that bit of “realism” one bit.

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Philip Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer and a columnist and television commentator. He is also the executive director of the Council for the National Interest. Other articles by Giraldi can be found on the website of the Unz Review. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The US is hostile toward all nations it doesn’t control, waging war on them by naked aggression and other means, including against China.

Pressuring and bullying the country to bend to its interests failed, what Trump and hardliners surrounding him don’t understand.

If his counterproductive policies escalate things toward recession, possibly a long overdue stiff protracted one after a decade of fiscal and monetary excess, he may learn the hard way by electoral defeat in November 2020.

China has lots of ways to counter hostile US policies, including by letting its currency weaken to offset unacceptable US tariffs, perhaps heading for 25% on all Chinese imports.

Last week, Trump said he intends to impose 10% tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese goods, effective September 1, the levies to hit cell phones, computers, and other consumer goods.

China retaliated by suspending purchases of US soybeans and other agricultural products, along with letting its yuan fall, making its exports cheaper.

According to economist Gregory Daco, what’s going on “add(s) further stress to an already stressed trade environment, (risking) a very significant slowdown in economic growth,” adding:

A 10% tariff on all remaining Chinese imports could rise to 25% in the coming months. Along with duties on European auto imports, a late 2019 or early 2020 recession is most likely.

As Trump regime toughness on China escalates, its ruling authorities may let the yuan weaken further and take other steps to offset the damage, including by increased trade with Russia.

In July, Chinese and Russian commerce ministers met to discuss ways to increase bilateral trade. Each country considers the other a reliable political, economic, financial, trade, and military partner.

Agreement was reached on increasing trade in soybeans and other agricultural products. In June at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping agreed to increase bilateral trade from $107 billion in 2018 to $200 billion ahead.

On Wednesday, the White House banned federal agencies from buying products and services from Huawei and other Chinese tech companies.

Citing national security reasons is pure deception. The action is part of longstanding US policy to undermine China’s developmental aims, Trump doubling down on earlier actions.

The announcement came a year ahead of congressionally mandated August 2020 cessation of business relations with Chinese tech companies by federal contractors — reflecting bipartisan US hostility toward the country.

Republicans and Dems consider China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and other sovereign independent countries the US doesn’t control as “adversaries.”

A Huawei spokesman responded to the latest announcement, saying:

“The news today was not unexpected…Huawei continues to challenge the constitutionality of the ban in federal court,” adding:

It “will do nothing to ensure the protection of US telecoms networks and systems and rather is trade barrier-based on country of origin, invoking punitive action without any evidence of wrongdoing.”

“Ultimately, it will be rural citizens across the US that will be most negatively impacted as the networks they use for digital connectivity rely on Huawei.”

Trump regime rage to undermine China’s aim to be a leading industrial, economic, and technological power is heading things toward full-blown war on the country by other means.

Its actions come at a time of growing economic weakness and geopolitical tensions in the Indo/Pacific, Middle East and Latin America — mainly because of hostile US policies toward nations on its target list for regime change.

A Final Comment

On Tuesday, China slammed US war secretary Mark Esper’s unacceptable accusation — falsely claiming Beijing is destabilizing the Indo/Pacific region, its Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying saying:

“It’s crystal clear who is undermining regional stability in the Asia-Pacific region” — and other parts of the world she could have added.

China is at peace with other nations, threatening none. The US is at war with humanity, Hua stressing the following:

“We develop military power out of self-defense purpose. We do not intend to and will not pose a threat to any country.”

“All of China’s land-based short- and intermediate-range missiles are deployed within our territory, which testifies to the defensive nature of our defense policy.”

“(I)f the United States deploys intermediate-range missiles in Asia-Pacific, especially around China, its aim will apparently be offensive.”

“China will not just sit idly by and watch our interests being compromised. What’s more, we will not allow any country to stir up troubles at our doorstep. We will take all necessary measures to safeguard national security interests.”

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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.

Venezuela Vice President Delcy Rodriguez

Under both extremist right wings of the US war party, the incremental Nazification of America may become full-blown in our lifetimes if not strongly challenged by the world community.

The Trump regime exceeds the worst of its predecessors. Based on the trend since the 1980s, whatever leadership succeeds it is likely to be even more contemptuous of world peace, equity and justice.

Abandoning the JCPOA and INF Treaty, waging war on China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and other nations by other means, entirely discarding the rule of law, fostering destabilization worldwide, substituting brute force for diplomacy, along with its rage for global dominance ups the stakes for possible nuclear war against one or more nations.

In 1992, future secretary of state Madeleine Albright, relatively less hardline than her successors, once asked Joint Chief’s chairman General Colin Powell

“(w)hat’s the point of having this superb military you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”

Perhaps she meant including its super-weapons to accomplish  geopolitical objectives unable to be achieved another way.

Trump regime hardliners are waging all-out war by other means on Iran and Venezuela, heading toward a similar policy against China.

Their latest shoe to drop against the Bolivarian Republic occurred Wednesday.

A vessel carrying 25,000 tons of soy cake for Venezuelan food production was illegally seized when passing through the Panama Canal, according Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.

The ship is “being kept in the Panama Canal due to the criminal blockade imposed by” the Trump regime, she explained, adding:

“Venezuela calls on the UN to stop this serious aggression by Donald Trump’s govt against our country, which constitutes a massive violation of the human rights of the entire Venezuelan people, by attempting to impede their right to food.”

US Security Council veto power prevents the body from censuring the Trump regime’s crime against humanity.

US establishment media are either largely or entirely silent about what happened, supporting Trump regime high crimes against sovereign Venezuela and its population based on Big Lies.

Its unlawful seizure (a maritime piracy act) followed Trump’s Tuesday executive order, illegally imposing an embargo on Venezuela, his hostile action constituting a crime against humanity.

Under Article 7 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, “inhumane acts…intentionally causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or to mental or physical health” constitute crimes against humanity.

The US is guilty of these high crimes repeatedly, its criminal class considered hostis humani generis – enemies of mankind. Their high crimes against peace violate the jus gentium – the law of nations.

Time and again with no letup, its actions breach fundamental UN Charter principles, other international laws, and the US Constitution.

The Nuremberg Tribunal established fundamental Principles, holding that

“(a)ny person who commits an act which constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment…

“Crimes against international law are committed by men, not by abstract entities, and only by punishing individuals who commit (them) can the provisions of international law be enforced.”

The Rome Statute’s Article 25 of the International Criminal Court (ICC) codified this principle, affirming the culpability of persons committing crimes of war and against humanity.

Commanders and their superiors are specifically culpable if they “either knew or, owing to the circumstances at the time, should have known that the forces were committing or about to commit such crimes, (and) failed to take all necessary and reasonable measures within his or her power to prevent or repress their commission or to submit the matter to the competent authorities for investigation and prosecutions.”

Nuremberg established that immunity is null and void, including for heads of state, other top officials, and top commanders.

Genocide, crimes of war and against humanity are so grave that statute of limitation provisions don’t apply.

On Wednesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying denounced the Trump regime’s illegal embargo on Venezuela, calling it “gross interference,” a major breach of international law.

Beijing will continue to maintain cooperative relations with the Bolivarian Republic “no matter how the situation changes,” she stressed.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called Trump regime actions against Venezuela “economic terror…in its customary cowboy manner.”

“These steps have no legal justification from the standpoint of international law and domestic Venezuelan law,” she stressed, adding:

“Clearly, the Trump regime “ miscalculated the level of popular support for the legitimate President and his readiness to defend the genuine independence of his country.”

Its hardliners are enforcing “efforts to aggravate the socioeconomic situation, (including by) brutal indiscriminate restrictions (against) senior citizens, unwell people and children.”

Separately, Moscow vowed to continue “military-technical,” political and economic relations with the Bolivarian Republic, including oil deals regardless of US threats.

The Trump regime is waging war on the Venezuelan economy and people. Blocking a vessel with food for the country shows it wants them starved into submission.

The human toll is of no consequence to US policymakers in pursuit of their aims. Their endless war on humanity at home and abroad threatens everyone everywhere.

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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.

Until literally a couple of years ago, courtesy of its enviable position in Asia Minor positioned in direct proximity of USSR (during the Cold War), Iran (after the Islamic Revolution), Iraq, and of course Syria in most recent years, Turkey enjoyed remarkably positive press as “NATO’s Number 2 Army” and in general a stalwart and reliable ally.

Greece, by contrast, even though a member of the same NATO alliance and the European Union to boot, and a country whose political institutions were more similar to those of the European members of NATO, was a neglected backwater. Whereas Greece currently has only one US military base, namely the Souda naval base on the island of Crete, Turkey boasts Izmir and Incirlik airbases, the latter of which having a nuclear weapons’ storage facility. One only needs to look back to the shoot-down of a Russian Su-24 bomber by a Turkish F-16, an event that was triumphantly reported by the English-speaking world media, perhaps as a portent of things to come, to realize just how important Turkey was to the implementation of NATO military plans in the Middle East.

However, in what surely ranks as one of the most egregious cases of NATO’s “White Privilege” in recent decades, the alliance made the grievous error in assuming that while Turkey was obliged to be at the beck and call of Washington and Brussels, the reverse was not true. Turkey had no interests NATO key players, first and foremost the United States, felt bound to respect. Therefore it’s little wonder Turkey’s leadership grew dismayed by the threat to their country’s national security posed by the war in Syria, the ignoring of what it viewed as its vital interests in the form of preventing a Kurdish autonomy from appearing anywhere in the Middle East, not to mention the abortive military coup against Turkey’s president Erdogan which was viewed with curious equanimity by NATO countries.

Beware of Greeks Bearing Grudges

Turkey’s NATO “rebellion” had the effect of increasing the importance of Greece to the NATO leadership. It didn’t hurt that the Greek political elite appears to have made a decision to pursue policies that are entirely opposite to that of Turkey’s, namely never challenging Western policies no matter what effect they have on Greece. Their country’s economic suffering notwithstanding, Greek political leaders show no sign of resisting the disastrous economic policies imposed on the country, in the form of EU-pushed “fiscal austerity” whose main aim is rescuing Western European (mainly German and French) financial institutions. The list of recent Greek decisions bound to please the West include the ending of its 27-year opposition to the Republic of Macedonia’s use of the term “Macedonia”, thus allowing the country, now officially called the Republic of Northern Macedonia, to begin the NATO accession process. Greece also partook of the “Russian meddling” craze, expelling four Russian diplomats for alleged efforts to prevent the Macedonia agreement from taking place.

To a considerable extent, the Greek wooing of the Western favor is rooted in the ancient rivalry with Turkey, rivalry which shared NATO membership did nothing to quell. Much as the post-WW1 Greece attempted to capitalize on the Ottoman Empire’s defeat by launching an invasion of Turkey which eventually ended in defeat at the hands of Kemal Pasha Ataturk, so today’s Greece hopes to capitalize on the growing rift between Turkey and the West to fulfill its own national objectives. Greek officials and commentators were among the most vocal in demanding that Turkey not be allowed to procure F-35 combat aircraft from the United States following Ankara’s decisions to acquire the Russian S-400 air defense batteries. For its part, Greece is actively considering procuring F-35s of its own, possibly the very same aircraft that were originally built for Turkey, in order to tip the balance of power in favor of the Greek Air Force in case the two countries clash again in the Aegean.

The Cyprus Card

One of the areas of dispute between Greece and Turkey is the island of Cyprus which, following the Greek military junta’s attempt to annex it to Greece in 1973, was invaded by Turkey which then established the Turkish-Cypriot administered area in the north of the island which does not answer to the official Cypriot government. Further complicating matters, Cyprus is a member of the European Union with all the rights and obligations that entails (though the Turkish zone is not subject to EU laws, pending reunification), and there are two British “sovereign base areas” of Akrotiri and Dhekelia on the island. While Western powers have not recognized Turkey’s de-facto control over half of Cyprus, they also have not made active efforts to force Turkish forces off the island. As noted above, Turkey was too important a partner to NATO to warrant disrupting the relationship for the sake of satisfying Greek demands. But now that the Turkey-West relationship has changed for the worse, there are signs the West will join Greece in actively opposing Turkish designs on Cyprus.

Turkey’s growing divergence from the West has resulted in what amounts to a still-mild version of the “maximum pressure” campaigns the United States is pursuing against Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. While the Trump Administration is yet to “pull the trigger” and do irreparable harm to US-Turkish relations, there is the unmistakable combination of economic, political, and even military measures aimed at isolating and weakening Turkey. 

In what may have been a message intended not only for Syria and Russia but also Turkey, Great Britain briefly deployed a squadron of F-35 fighters to the Akrotiri air base in Cyprus for a training mission. A number of sources reported that the United States are exploring options on expanding military cooperation with Cyprus, possibly including the establishment of a US military base or at least permanent presence at one of  the British bases, prompted a negative reaction from the Russian government warning Cyprus against adopting anti-Russian policies.

To drill or not to drill?

It would seem no international crisis can be complete without a major stash of hydrocarbons resting somewhere under a hotly contested piece of real estate, and Cyprus certainly is not bucking that trend. The continental shelf around Cyprus is believed to hold huge reserves of natural gas, and that kind of store of prospective wealth has already led to an escalation of tensions. On a few occasions, exploratory vessels belonging to drilling firms contracted by the Cyprus government were chased off by Turkish gunboats, though on at least one occasion in 2018 a US Navy-escorted ExxonMobil vessel was allowed to perform its studies unmolested.

For its part, Turkey is also gearing up to drill off the coast of the Turkish portion of the island, prompting a negative reaction from virtually every member of the European Union. The European Council went so far as to suspend the high-level EU-Turkey dialogue and negotiations on an air transport agreement, and to reduce pending pre-accession funds for Turkey until Ankara abandons its plans to drill for natural gas. While the United States urged restraint, it also demanded Ankara stop its natural gas exploration off Cyprus.

Russia, in contrast, limited itself to issuing a note of concern, but without even hinting at any possible negative impact on Russia-Turkey relations. At the same time, Moscow did not endorse Turkey’s actions either. Adopting any other course of action at this point would be pointless, since Turkey, NATO, and the EU are in a midst of a complex process of renegotiating their political, military, and economic relationships. To put it more plainly, Erdogan simply wants the West to take Turkey seriously. It is yet plausible the West will take the hint and back down on matters of vital interest to Turkey, even at the cost of sacrificing US, British, and French interests in the region. Should that happen, Turkey would be back in NATO’s fold as the important pillar of the alliance in the Eastern Mediterranean it once was.

Still, Moscow’s public restraint notwithstanding, the fact that Russia has lodged no objections to active Turkish activities so close to Russia’s military bases in Turkey suggests the two countries are already conducting high-level consultations on the future of Turkey’s natural gas exploration off Cyprus, adding this to the already impressive list of joint projects which include the “Turkish Stream” pipeline, the prospective nuclear power plant in Turkey, the aforementioned S-400 purchase and discussions on Su-35 and/or Su-57 fighters, and the growth of bilateral trade in general.

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Readers from myriad latitudes have been asking me about Hong Kong. They know it’s one of my previous homes. I developed a complex, multi-faceted relationship with Hong Kong ever since the 1997 handover, which I covered extensively. Right now, if you allow me, I’d rather cut to the chase.

Much to the distress of neocons and humanitarian imperialists, there won’t be a bloody mainland China crackdown on protesters in Hong Kong – a Tiananmen 2.0. Why? Because it’s not worth it.

Beijing has clearly identified the color revolution provocation inbuilt in the protests – with the NED excelling as CIA soft, facilitating the sprawl of fifth columnists even in the civil service.

There are other components, of course. The fact that Hong Kongers are right to be angry about what is a de facto Tycoon Club oligarchy controlling every nook and cranny of the economy. The local backlash against “the invasion of the mainlanders”. And the relentless cultural war of Cantonese vs. Beijing, north vs. south, province vs. political center.

What these protests have accelerated is Beijing’s conviction that Hong Kong is not worth its trust as a key node in China’s massive integration/development project. Beijing invested no less than $18.8 billion to build the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau bridge, as part of the Greater Bay Area, to integrate Hong Kong with the mainland, not to snub it.

Now a bunch of useful idiots at least has graphically proven they don’t deserve any sort of preferential treatment anymore.

The big story in Hong Kong is not even the savage, counter-productive protests (imagine if this was in France, where Macron’s army is actually maiming and even killing Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests). The big story is the rot consuming HSBC – which has all the makings of the new Deutsche Bank scandal.

HSBC holds $2.6 trillion in assets and an intergalactic horde of cockroaches in their basement – asking serious questions about money laundering and dodgy deals operated by global turbo-capitalist elites.

In the end, Hong Kong will be left to its own internally corroding devices – slowly degrading to its final tawdry status as a Chinese Disneyland with a Western veneer. Shanghai is already in the process of being boosted as China’s top financial center. And Shenzhen already is the top high-tech hub. Hong Kong will be just an afterthought.

Brace for blowback

While China identified “Occupy Hong Kong” as a mere Western-instilled and instrumentalized plot, India, for its part, decided to go for Full Occupy in Kashmir.

Curfew was imposed all across the Kashmir valley. Internet was cut off. All Kashmiri politicians were rounded up and arrested. In fact all Kashmiris – loyalists (to India), nationalists, secessionists, independentists, apolitical – were branded as The Enemy. Welcome to Indian “democracy” under the crypto-fascist Hindutva.

“Jammu and Kashmir”, as we know it, is no more. They are now two distinct entities. Geologically spectacular Ladakh will be administered directly by New Delhi. Blowback is guaranteed. Resistance committees are already springing up.

In Kashmir, blowback will be even bigger because there will be no elections anytime soon. New Delhi does not want that kind of nuisance – as in dealing with legitimate representatives. It wants full control, period.

Starting in the early 1990s, I’ve been to both sides of Kashmir a few times. The Pakistani side does feel like Azad (“Free”) Kashmir. The Indian side is unmistakably Occupied Kashmir. This analysis is as good as it gets portraying what it means to live in IOK (Indian-occupied Kashmir).

BJP minions in India scream that Pakistan “illegally” designated Gilgit-Baltistan – or the Northern Areas – as a federally administered area. There’s nothing illegal about it. I was reporting in Gilgit-Baltistan late last year, following the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Nobody was complaining about any “illegality”.

Pakistan officially said it “will exercise all possible options to counter [India’s] illegal steps” in Kashmir. That’s extremely diplomatic. Imran Khan does not want confrontation – even as he knows full well Modi is pandering to Hindutva fanatics, aiming to turn a Muslim-majority province into a Hindu-majority province. In the long run though, something inevitable is bound to emerge – fragmented, as a guerrilla war or as a united front.

Welcome to the Kashmiri Intifada.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Palestinian journalists covering the weekly protests against the decades-long Israeli occupation are complaining of being the target of Israeli snipers stationed along the border of the blockaded territory. 

Since the protests began in March of last year, two journalists have been shot dead and dozens injured by Israeli gunfire near Gaza-Israel buffer zone.

Last week, two journalists were shot injured as they were covering protests against the Israeli occupation, according to the Journalist Support Committee (JSC) in Palestine.

Osama Al-Kahlout, a photojournalist, was shot in the leg with a live bullet while Hatem Omar, working for China’s Xinhua news agency, was injured by a rubber bullet.

“No one has immunity along Gaza border,” Al-Kahlout, 33, who was shot east of al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, told Anadolu Agency.

“The [Israeli] occupation forces target journalists, paramedics, citizens and even the handicapped,” he said. “Everyone is within the target of Israeli snipers.”

Al-Kahlout said he had received a phone call from an unknown number before being shot in the leg.

The photojournalist believes that

“the call was from the Israeli army so that he could be accurately located and targeted directly”.

He confirmed that he was wearing a shield bearing a press badge and was working in an area relatively far from the demonstrators.

Israeli crimes

According to al-Kahlout, four journalists had previously been injured while covering the weekly protests in the same area where he was shot east of al-Bureij refugee camp.

“Israeli forces target journalists in an attempt to prevent them from exposing their crimes and violations against peaceful protesters to the world,” he said.

Xinhua news agency’s Omar was also shot by a rubber bullet while covering demonstrations east of Khan Younis city in the southern Gaza Strip.

“I was shot by two rubber bullets in both legs, although I was wearing a press shield and working in an area far from the demonstrators,” Omar told Anadolu Agency.

Accusing the Israeli army of internationally targeting journalists in Gaza, Omar said:

“In many incidents, groups of journalists were targeted by teargas or bullets while working in areas away from the demonstrators.”

Ahmed Ghanem, a correspondent for Al-Mayadin television, said the Israeli army targets journalists “to prevent them from carrying out their duty”.

“Palestinian journalists have proven their strength and ability to expose the crimes of the occupation and to convey the message of the Palestinian people in Gaza to the world,” he said. “This disturbs Israel and embarrasses it before the international community.”

Hit himself by an Israeli gas shell while covering the demonstrations in January, Ghanem called on human rights organizations to “provide protection to Palestinian journalists from the ongoing Israeli attacks”.

Prosecution

Tahseen al-Astal, vice president of the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, said his organization was preparing “legal files on Israeli violations against journalists, to be lodged with international courts to prosecute Israeli leaders”.

He said the Journalists Syndicate has sent letters to the International Federation of Journalists, the Union of Arab Journalists, and the UNESCO “to brief them on Israeli violations against journalists”.

According to Salama Maarouf, a government spokesman in Gaza, around 360 journalists have been injured by Israeli army fire since the Gaza rallies began in March 2018.

Demonstrators demand an end to Israel’s 12-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has shattered the coastal enclave’s economy and deprived its two million inhabitants of many basic amenities.

Since the Gaza rallies began last year, nearly 270 protesters have been martyred — and thousands more wounded — by Israeli troops deployed near the buffer zone.

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The Mainstream Media reported earlier this month on an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May alleging that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and then ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that people who don’t believe the official narrative about various events automatically qualify as potential terrorists.

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The de-facto criminalization of free speech is an ongoing trend in American society that’s already pressured a lot of people to self-censor their beliefs in public in order to avoid official scrutiny from the authorities or harassment by their political opponents, but an intelligence bulletin released by the FBI’s Phoenix office back in May and only reported on by the Mainstream Media earlier this month might spread the dragnet even further by de-facto criminalizing the online pursuit of additional information that contradicts the official narrative about various events.

The “secret police” (as they’d be described by the Mainstream Media if any other country’s version of the FBI was being reported on) believe that a connection exists between so-called “conspiracy theories” and domestic terrorism, and while there have veritably been some people who hold such controversially defined beliefs and ended up killing others, it’s anti-American to suspect that anyone engaged in seeking out all sides of every story (no matter how possibly implausible) automatically qualifies as a potential terrorist.

Screenshot of FBI document

Appendix B of the document says that

“the conspiracy theories referenced in this intelligence bulletin have been categorized as anti-government, identity based, or fringe political because they assert selective, malevolent acts either by an allegedly hostile and tyrannical federal government, by racial, religious, or social minority groups, or by political opponents.”

The examples given for each category are “NWO”, “UN”, and “False Flags”; Zionist Occupied Government” and “Islamberg”; and “Pizzagate” and “QAnon”, respectively, followed by a very brief description of each one. What’s so dangerous about these categorizations is that some of them are broad enough to be applicable to practically anyone who’s skeptical about recent events, which in turn could put these individuals on terrorist watch lists and possibly even result in restrictions on their civil liberties, such as their right to exercise the Second Amendment if so-called “red flag laws” are applicable in their state and Big Tech companies inform the authorities that someone was researching or discussing such unofficial narratives online.

For instance, the FBI describes the “NWO” “conspiracy theory” as asserting that “a group of international elites controls governments, industry, and media organizations, instigates major wars, carries out secret staged events, and manipulates economies with the goal of establishing global rule”, which basically summarizes the modus operandi of the American-led neoliberal system.

By the Bureau’s own definition, anti-war dissidents who expressed their belief that the US’ 2003 War on Iraq was launched on the media-driven manufactured pretext of non-existent “Weapons of Mass Destruction” in order to advance American influence in the tri-continental geopivotal and energy-rich region of the Mideast would be classified as “conspiracy theorists” who would then be suspected of being at risk of committing “domestic terrorism”. That so-called “conspiracy theory”, however, has since been vindicated as “conspiracy fact”, though in the contemporary context, those tarred and feathered as “conspiracy theorists” for believing modern-day analogues such as the US and its allies manufacturing fake pretexts to “contain” Russia, China, and Iran might soon be seen as unofficial enemies of the state.

For another perfect example of just how potentially all-encompassing the FBI’s alleged “conspiracy theorist”-terrorist connection is, one need look no further than its description of the “UN” “conspiracy”, which it describes as asserting that “the UN is being used by an evil global cabal to erode American sovereignty, strip away individual liberties, and bring foreign troops to American soil in order to replace democracy with global tyranny.”

None other than the sitting US President himself has publicly questioned the UN’s role in eroding American sovereignty, as have most of his supporters, yet the FBI’s bulletin classifies that belief as a “conspiracy theory” that could potentially indicate a “terrorist” in the making. Many more such examples could be shared about how the “secret police” could easily use the Phoenix office’s definition of “conspiracy theories” to “justify” unethical surveillance of domestic targets for political reasons, which is anti-American to the core even though it’s taken for granted that this is already going on to an uncertain extent. If “red flag laws” are expanded nationwide, then Trump’s own supporters might find themselves forcibly disarmed just for agreeing with him.

The Democrats should be concerned too because they might also find themselves on government watch lists as “conspiracy theorists” just like their rival Republicans if they simply go to the “wrong” website that questions official narratives. That could potentially be Russian international media like RT or even independent/ alternative American online outlets, it just depends on how “conspiracy theories” are defined by internet service providers, which sites they “flag” as “suspicious”, and whether or not the user is being tracked by cookies to link them to that page.

Democrats might not worry too much about having their Second Amendment rights restricted through “red flag laws”, but they could come under other forms of targeted state harassment as well on a selective basis dependent on the “secret police’s” subjective whims. It’s for these reasons that opposition to the FBI’s de-facto criminalization of online research (which builds upon the already de-facto criminalized expression of free speech in many instances) should be a bipartisan issue because it goes against everything that the US purports to stand for.

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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.

Arab Bedouins living in the “unrecognised” village of Al-Araqeeb have been ordered to pay 1.6 million shekels ($0.46 million) to cover the cost of the Israeli occupation’s demolition of their homes 149 times.

Al-Araqeeb was demolished for the 149th time yesterday, the third such demolition in the space of two weeks. This time, Israeli police stormed the village and dismantled the residents’ tents and threw them into their four-wheel-drive vehicles. They did not bring bulldozers or demolition vehicles.

The demolition forces left the village after it was confirmed that all the tents belonging to the residents had been demolished, destroyed and removed.

Forces returned this morning to arrest one of Al-Araqeeb’s residents, Salim Mohammed Al-Turi Abu Medegham.

Located in the Negev (Naqab) desert, the village is one of 51 “unrecognised” Arab villages in the area and is constantly targeted for demolition ahead of plans to Judaise the Negev by building homes for new Jewish communities. Israeli bulldozers, which Bedouins are charged for, have demolished everything, from the trees to the water tanks, but Bedouin residents have tried to rebuild it every time.

Bedouins in the Negev must abide by the same laws as Jewish Israeli citizens. They pay taxes but do not enjoy the same rights and services as Jews in Israel and the state has repeatedly refused to connect the towns to  the national grid, water supplies and other vital amenities.

In its ruling the court said the villagers had “broken into state-owned land” by rebuilding their demolished homes.

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Venezuela’s Vice President Delcy Rodriguez denounced Wednesday that a ship containing 25 thousand tons of soy-made products has been seized in the Panama Canal due to the U.S. blockade while calling on the United Nations to take action against the “serious aggression” that impede Venezuela “right to food”.

“Venezuela denounces before the world that a boat that holds 25 thousand tons of soy, for food production in our country, has been seized in the Panama Canal, due to the criminal blockade imposed by Donald Trump,” the vice president said in a tweet.

“Venezuela calls on the UN to stop this serious aggression by Donald Trump’s govt against our country, which constitutes a massive violation of the human rights of the entire Venezuelan people, by attempting to impede their right to food.”

In a subsequent tweet, the Venezuelan senior official explained that the owner of the vessel carrying the merchandise of food was informed by the insurance company that it was prevented from moving that cargo to Venezuela.

The shipment seizure comes just days after Trump signed an executive order Monday that imposes a near-total blockade on government assets in that country, which includes an embargo against food suppliers, among other basic inputs. This is the first time in 30 years that Washington has taken such an action against a sovereign country.

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There are striking structural similarities between Kashmir and Crimea that should make Russian decision makers think twice before endorsing the unilateral actions of their decades-long Indian partners if they want to remain politically consistent.

Kashmir and Crimea share many structural similarities that most observers might have missed upon first glance or if they were earlier influenced by the anti-Pakistani and -Russian infowars waged by their geopolitical opponents, but both countries should be aware of them and use these commonalities to take their strategic partnership even further in the future. These two highly geostrategic regions were left out of those two Great Powers as part of the legacy of subjectively defined administrative borders carved out by political entities that no longer exists, which were the British Raj and the USSR respectively. Had Kashmir and Crimea’s people been able to vote on their political futures in 1947 and 1991, they’d have joined Pakistan and Russia, but both of them were denied their UN-enshrined rights to self-determination and instead found themselves unwilling parts of India and Ukraine.

They key difference, however, is that the UNSC mandated that a plebiscite be held in Kashmir, while the global body never issued such a recommendation when it came to Crimea. It’s already been seven decades and the Kashmiris still haven’t been able to vote on their future, yet the Crimeans were able to assemble a referendum in roughly seven days owing to the urgent threat of ethnic cleansing that they were facing in 2014 from the new fascist authorities of post-coup Ukraine. The Kashmiris are also facing a similar such threat nowadays too, as Pakistani Prime Minister Khan recently warned, yet they’re unable to hold their planned plebiscite owing to the much worse degree of Indian military occupation that they’re presently under when compared to the relatively weaker Ukrainian one that the Crimeans were subjugated to at the time.

It’s here where Russia has the chance to show the world that it’s politically consistent in supporting what structurally amounts to Pakistan’s Crimea of Kashmir by at the very least not openly endorsing the unilateral actions of its Indian partners earlier this week. New Delhi might nevertheless order its international perception managers to frame Moscow’s silence as tacit approval, though, which is why Russia should consider speaking out against India’s violation of international law and especially what The Times of India quoted Home Minister Amit Shah as saying on Tuesday. The Cabinet official also serves as the President of India’s ruling BJP religious extremists and was on record telling parliament that

“Kashmir is an integral part of India, there is no doubt over it. When I talk about Jammu and Kashmir, Pakistan occupied Kashmir and Aksai Chin are included in it and can die for it”.

Russia routinely criticizes Ukrainian officials whenever they claim that they’re willing to retake Crimea by force, so it should in the interests of political consistency also do the same when one of the most influential men in the nuclear-armed state of India threatens to kill people in the parts of Kashmir currently under Pakistan and China’s control, especially seeing as how both similarly nuclear-armed states are SCO members together with Russia and the second-mentioned one is a part of BRICS too. Moscow, however, might be wary of New Delhi weaponizing their military-industrial ties and more rapidly pivoting towards Western suppliers as punishment for Russia refusing to tow its narrative line or even outright rejecting it, which could contribute to the Eurasian Great Power possibly sacrificing its soft power for the sake of not disrupting its budgetary revenue in that scenario.

That said, Russia has earned the envied reputation among Western and non-Western audiences alike of solidly standing up for the rules-based international order as defined by the UN Charter, so it might not want to ruin this intangible strategic benefit no matter how high the financial costs are that India could impose on it. In fact, India might not even be able to use those current and future contracts as economic blackmail because its armed forces can’t rapidly transition away from Soviet- and Russian-provided equipment, so any fears that Moscow’s decision makers might have in this respect could turn out to be overblown fearmongering peddled by New Delhi’s “agents of influence” in their “deep state”. Russia’s “Return to South Asia” has seen it trying to carefully “balance” the region, but it could all be for naught if it takes a partisan approach by backing India’s illegal actions, which is why it should think twice before falling for the temptation to reactively do so.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

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 Cafe Dissensus Everyday blog

Consider the following facts as you wend your way to the Guggenheim Museum and its uppermost gallery, where you will presently find The Death of Michael Stewart (1983), Basquiat’s gut-punching tribute to a slain artist, and the centerpiece for an exhibition that could hardly be more timely. Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. According to mappingpoliceviolence.org in 2014, fewer than one in three black people killed by police in the U.S. were suspected of a violent crime and allegedly armed. As American pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock once observed,

“Most middle-class whites have no idea what it feels like to be subjected to police who are routinely suspicious, rude, belligerent, and brutal.”

Such brutality is the focal point for Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story, an exhibition that commences from a painting created by Jean-Michel Basquiat in honor of a young, black artist – Michael Stewart – who met his tragic end when he was supposedly caught by the New York City Transit Police tagging a wall in an East Village subway station during the early morning hours of September 15, 1983. What precisely transpired that night remains unsettled to this day, but what is sufficiently known is that the twenty-five year old Stewart was handcuffed, beaten and strangulated by a chokehold with a nightstick – likely causing a massive brain hemorrhage, whereby he fell into a coma and never regained consciousness, dying two weeks later.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart), 1983. © The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / ARS, New York 2016.

Other artists, among them Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, responded to Stewart’s death with commemorative works of their own, which are featured in the exhibition. Also included is a yellow flyer created by David Wojnarowicz – portraying the officers with vicious, skeletal faces –  to announce a September 26, 1983, rally in Union Square in protest of Stewart’s “near-murder”, when the young man was still languishing in a coma, “suspended between life and death”. In fact, Basquiat must have seen Wojnarowicz’s poster (which was taped “all over” downtown, as another artist recalls), and apparently it served as a direct source for the composition of Basquiat’s painting.  The Death of Michael Stewart (informally known as Defacement) was originally painted directly onto the drywall of Haring’s Cable Building studio; later cut out of the wall and placed within an ornate gilded frame which Haring hung immediately above his bed. There the painting remained until Haring’s death from AIDS-related illness in February 1990.

Two positively ravenous officers – with pink flesh and blue uniforms – wield their nightsticks above a solitary, black and haloed figure fixed motionlessly between them. In the upper register of the painting, above the trio of figures is the word ¿DEFACEMENTO? – a word that during the 1980s was often used as a term for graffiti. In the context of the painting, the artist draws our attention to the reality that what was truly being defaced was not a piece of property but a life: it is the police officers, teeth bared and thirsty for blood, who are committing the act of defacement, of disfigurement. Basquiat’s art was constantly in dialogue with the history of Western painting; and in this case, his work may in fact be seen as revisiting and restaging a classic theme – namely, the flagellation of Christ.

The exhibition includes several other works by Basquiat, dealing with closely related subjects that occupied him throughout his relatively short but intense and extraordinarily prolific career. Irony of a Negro Policeman (1981), La Hara (1981) and Untitled (Sheriff) (1981), all take up the themes of white power, authority and law enforcement – generally portraying the police as frightening and monstrous.  La Hara is an especially mesmerizing work, the title of which – repeated four times in the upper left-hand portion – refers to a Nuyorican/Boricua slang term for a police officer; derived from O’Hara, since at one time a large contingent of New York City law enforcement was Irish. The officer in this work is downright scary: with a ghostly white complexion, blood shot eyes and crooked, menacing teeth, set within a jaw that is open wide enough for the figure to be talking to us  – all of which serves to convey a kind of seething rage, ready to explode in violence at the slightest provocation. As with many of his figures, Basquiat has painted this officer with his rib cage exposed, and in certain areas we can see right through him to the fire-engine red background. In other words, what we have is a skeletal figure, whose bleached white bones invoke a kind of living dead: not simply a monster but an abomination.

Charles the First (1982) and CPRKR (1982), both references to jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, are among the paintings of Basquiat to champion and glorify the father of bebop – granting him, in fact, the stature of a king. These two works, different as they are from Defacement, nevertheless share with it certain themes. At a basic level, all three works are concerned with death, and precisely the death of the young, black, male artist. CPRKR is a kind of grave marker for Parker who was dead at thirty-five: a minimalist work consisting almost entirely of the initials in the title, references to the place (“THE STANHOPE HOTEL”) and year of Charlie Parker’s death (“NINETEEN FIFTYFIVE”), and a cross. At the bottom of the work, Basquiat has printed the name “CHARLES THE FIRST”.

Charles the First abounds with references to the life and work of the great musician; but two features are particularly notable in the present context: at the painting’s top left corner is the word “HALOES” – indicating that in Basquiat’s scheme of things Parker is also a kind of saint, one of a number characteristics he shares with the Stewart of Defacement.  At the bottom of the painting, Basquiat issues the warning “MOST YOUNG KINGS GET THEIR HEADS CUT OFF” – which at the very least reminds us that, for Basquiat, a premature death is the price that the black artist pays for genius. Basquiat himself died in 1988 at the age of twenty-seven from a heroin overdose.

The Guggenheim’s glance back to 1983 and the death of Michael Stewart accomplishes what art exhibitions should, but all too rarely do – it grants us perspective on our present moment; a way of confronting the reality that we are currently living and navigating. We all know the names of unarmed black men who recently had their lives cut short – Trayvon Martin (killed in 2012), Eric Garner (killed in 2014, by an illegal chokehold like the one that killed Stewart), twelve-year old Tamir Rice (shot dead in 2014 by white police officer Timothy Loehmann), eighteen-year old Michael Brown (also shot dead by white Ferguson police officer Daren Wilson), Philando Castile (killed in 2016) – and the list goes on. The show does not allow us to forget that this violence has a long, painful history in America. Basquiat’s “Defacement”: The Untold Story does what exhibitions should do – it tells us a story we don’t want to hear but need to hear.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City.

On July 30 and 31 the attention of the national media in the United States was focused on the Fox Theater in downtown Detroit where 20 Democratic Party candidates for the presidency debated various issues presented to them by anchors from the Cable News Network (CNN).

What went largely unmentioned by CNN and other corporate and government-sponsored media outlets were the events taking place in the surrounding blocks near the debate venue.

On Tuesday July 30, several organizations led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), along with a number of environmental and social justice groups, held a rally at Cass Park beginning four hours before the commencement of the first night of the debate. SEIU workers began to arrive before 4:00pm in buses deployed from cities as far away from Detroit as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Flint, among other municipalities.

Detroit demonstration of workers, environmentalists and community activists outside the Democratic Party debate on July 30, 2019.

The members wore t-shirts which said “Unions for All.” The SEIU organizes low-wage employees such as janitors, security guards, restaurants and fast food workers.

Speakers from the podium discussed issues involving the need for a $15 per hour minimum wage and the right to union representation for the purposes of collective bargaining. Other speakers were invited by a coalition of largely non-profit organizations known as “Frontline Detroit.”

Sunrise, a nationwide group said to have been inspired by the newly-elected New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, had in conjunction with SEIU, put together the alliance which sponsored the rally. An entry on the Sunrise website says of the group that:

“We’re building an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people…. We are not looking to the right or left. We look forward. Together, we will change this country and this world, sure as the sun rises each morning.”

Many of the rally participants held signs calling for the implementation of the “Green New Deal”, a campaign which in broad generalities proposes the conversion of some aspects of the productive capacity in the U.S. to environmentally safe industries curbing the utilization of fossil fuels, a major component in the rapid process of climate change. Nonetheless, there were no specific demands from the July 30 rally proponents of the “Green New Deal” urging the transformation of the U.S. economy from capitalism to socialism, a prerequisite for genuine change towards social equality, the economic empowerment of working people and the nationally oppressed.

Detroit activists block the entrance and exit to the tunnel to Windsor Canada near the Democratic Party debate on July 31, 2019

Climate Change and Imperialist War

Of all the various organizations which spoke from the podium and marched in the demonstration from Cass Park to Grand Circus Park, just one block south of the Fox Theater, only the Detroit-based Moratorium NOW! Coalition and the Michigan Emergency Committee Against War & Injustice (MECAWI) staffed a literature table which distributed leaflets, pamphlets, placards and t-shirts which attacked the role of the Pentagon budget, the imperialist wars fought against peoples around the world, and the prominent role of the Defense Department in fostering environmental degradation internationally.

A two-sided flyer circulated by Moratorium NOW! Coalition and MECAWI pointed out that:

“The U.S. military is the world’s largest institutional consumer of Fossil fuels and the world’s worst producer of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and many other toxic pollutants. The U.S. military accounts for almost 80% of the federal government’s fossil fuel consumption. If the Pentagon were a country, it would rank 47^th in annual fossil fuel consumption, it would rank 47^thin annual fossil fuel consumption, ahead of 140 countries.”

Moratorium NOW! Coalition and MECAWI members felt that it was essential to raise these issues in any discussion of the impending global environmental catastrophe. The failure to criticize the imperialist war machine renders the demands for any reforms aimed at the reversal of climate change insufficient and even superfluous.

On the second side of the same flyer the organizations take on the failure of liberal Democrats and even “Social Democrats” to firmly oppose military interventions in various geo-political regions of the world including the Middle East. The statement warns of the impending threat of a full blown war against Iran by Washington and its allies. In addition, the leaflet expresses solidarity with the people of Palestine who have been subjected to Israeli occupation for 71 years. The funding of Israel by the U.S. represents an affront not only to the people of the Middle East, notwithstanding the peace and freedom loving masses of this country.

The Moratorium NOW! Coalition and MECAWI statement concluded in part by saying:

“Overall we want to express our solidarity with the oppressed and struggling peoples of the region in their fight for liberation, social justice, peace and prosperity. Our plight in the U.S. as oppressed and working class people has worsened as a direct by-product of the imperialist militarism of the White House and Wall Street. Every allocation for weapons, fighter jets, military occupations and destabilization efforts takes away potential funding for good jobs, guaranteed incomes, quality schools, environmental justice, public services, water resources, housing and other necessities for working, oppressed and poor people.”

Immigration and National Oppression

On the second night of the debate (July 31), a demonstration in solidarity with the targeted immigrant communities from Latin America and other regions of the world populated by people of color took place beginning at Hart Plaza. The plight of migrant workers on the southern border seeking asylum was not raised at all from the podium by the sponsoring groups on the previous night.

Detroit activist Renla Sessions holds sign summing the sentiment of many outside the Demoratic Party debate beginning on July 30, 2019.

The focus on immigrant rights was led by Movimiento Cosecha of Michigan and supported by the Moratorium NOW! Coalition, MECAWI, as well as several other local organizations in Detroit. This manifestation began with a rally and later march to the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, a major border crossing separating the U.S. and Canada.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border and Customs Patrol (CBP) are very active in Detroit targeting communities of Mexican, Central American, Middle Eastern and African populations. When the several hundred protesters arrived at the tunnel entrance and exit, 21 people blocked the area by sitting down and refusing to move. Traffic was blocked at the extremely busy border crossing during rush hour.

Detroit police, who were largely deployed at the Fox where the debate was scheduled to take place soon, were caught off guard and took at least 15 minutes to arrive at the scene. CBP agents were seen in the background when police arrived. After three warnings, the 21 activists blocking the tunnel were immediately arrested and taken into custody. They are to be charged with both misdemeanors and civil infractions and were released from detention within 90 minutes.

Hundreds of other demonstration participants marched back to Hart Plaza and then north on Woodward Avenue to Grand Circus Park near the site of the Democratic debate. Activists were seeking to expose the role of corporate media-designated Democratic Party presidential frontrunner Sen. Joe Biden who served as Vice President in the administration of the previous head-of-state President Barack Obama. The Obama administration deported three million people from the U.S., the largest expulsion of people from the country in history.

The Need for an Independent Political Party of the Workers and Oppressed

Of course the CNN-orchestrated debate on both nights failed to even remotely address the concrete issues impacting Detroit and other urban areas in Michigan as well as throughout the U.S. There was no specific discussion of the current crises in housing affordability and displacement, water shut-offs and contamination, the collapse of public education systems, the phenomenon of corporate capture of tax resources, mass impoverishment, racial violence, police terrorism, the evisceration of local democratic governance, environmental deterioration, inadequate public transportation and healthcare along with community security.

There was much emphasis placed on the necessity to defeat the current President Donald Trump based upon his vile racism and anti-immigrant policies, misogyny, attacks on the Affordable Care Act, etc. Yet while the Democratic candidates viciously criticized and attacked each other on stage, many people both inside and outside the Fox, felt frustrated due to the total absence of a concrete program to empower the majority of working and nationally oppressed peoples in the U.S.

The reality is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans can provide a solution to the monumental domestic and global crises of politics, economics, the environment and imperialist militarism. On the first night of the debate, the Moratorium NOW! Coalition and MECAWI carried a banner in the march which summed up the current situation emphasizing in part that:

“Trump and the Democrats Support Wall Street Wars; U.S. Hands off Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Africa, North Korea, Free Palestine from the River to the Sea; Money for People’s Needs, Not the Pentagon.”

Establishment Democratic Party candidate in 2016, former Secretary of State and Sen. Hillary Clinton, lost Michigan in both the primary (to Sen. Bernie Sanders) and the runoff elections (to now President Trump). This represented the contradiction facing the Democratic Party which is a capitalist organization that differs only in the composition of its constituencies (workers, liberals, progressives, nationally oppressed) to the Republicans.

The Democrats could very well lose again in 2020 despite the widespread hatred of Trump in the U.S. Deep divisions in rhetoric and style between the so-called Left-wing of the party and moderates poses a major challenge in the electoral arena. If the Democrats cannot select a candidate who can spark enthusiasm among broad sections of the population they will not be able to succeed in recapturing the White House and the Senate.

Moreover, what is desperately needed is a party of the masses of workers and people of color communities, organized independent of the Democrats and Republicans, which speaks in its own name with a genuine commitment to full equality, worker empowerment, self-determination and socialist construction. Until this imperative is realized, the people will remain pawns in a vicious political game of the two ruling class parties which are incapable of addressing the needs of the masses in their need for revolutionary liberation.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

All images in this article are from the author

After years of being kept in the doldrums by orchestrated short selling described on this website by Roberts and Kranzler, gold has lately moved up sharply reaching $1,510 this morning.  The gold price has continued to rise despite the continuing practice of dumping large volumes of naked contracts in the futures market.  The gold price is driven down but quickly recovers and moves on up.  I haven’t an explanation at this time for the new force that is more powerful than the short-selling that has been used to control the price of gold.

Various central banks have been converting their dollar reserves into gold, which reduces the demand for dollars and increases the demand for gold.  Existing stocks of gold available to fill orders are being drawn down, and new mining output is not keeping pace with the rise in demand.  Perhaps this is the explanation for the rise in the price of gold.

During the many years of Quantitative Easing the exchange value of the dollar was protected by the Japanese, British, and EU central banks also printing money to insure that their currencies did not rise in value relative to the dollar. The Federal Reserve needs to protect the dollar’s exchange value so that it continues in its role as the world’s reserve currency in which international transactions are conducted.  If the dollar loses this role, the US will lose the ability to pay its bills by printing dollars.  A dollar declining in value relative to other countries would cause flight from the dollar to the rising currencies.  Catastrophe quickly occurs from increasing the supply of a currency that central banks are unwilling to hold.

One problem remained. The dollar was depreciating relative to gold.  Rigging the currency market was necessary but not sufficient to stabilize the dollar’s value. The gold market also had to be rigged. To stop the dollar’s depreciation, naked short selling has been used to artificially increase the supply of paper gold in order to suppress the price.  Unlike equities, gold shorts don’t have to be covered. This turns the price-setting gold futures market into a paper market where contracts are settled primarily in cash and not by taking delivery of gold.  Therefore, participants can increase the supply of the paper gold traded in the futures market by printing new contracts. When large numbers of contracts are suddenly dumped in the market, the sudden increase in paper gold supply drives down the price. This has worked until now.

If flight from the dollar is beginning, it will make it difficult for the Federal Reserve to accommodate the growing US budget deficit and continue its policy of lowering interest rates. With central banks moving their reserves from dollars (US Treasury bonds and bills) to gold, the demand for US government debt is not keeping up with supply.  The supply will be increasing due to the $1.5 trillion US budget deficit.  The Federal Reserve will have to take up the gap between the amount of new debt that has to be issued and the amount that can be sold by purchasing the difference.  In other words, the Fed will print more money with which to purchase the unsold portion of the new debt.  

The creation of more dollars when the dollar is experiencing pressure puts more downward pressure on the dollar.  To protect the dollar, that is, to make it again attractive to investors and central banks, the Federal Reserve would have to raise interest rates substantially.  If the US economy is in recession or moving toward recession, the cost of rising interest rates would be high in terms of unemployment.  

With a rising price of gold, who would want to hold debt denominated in a rapidly depreciating currency when interest rates are low, zero, or negative?

The Federal Reserve might have no awareness of the pending crisis that it has set up for itself.  On the other hand, the Federal Reserve is responsive to the elite who want to rid themselves of Trump.  Collapsing the economy on Trump’s head is one way to prevent his reelection.

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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.

In 2019, the World Bank (WB) and the IMF will be 75 years old. These two international financial institutions (IFI), founded in 1944, are dominated by the USA and a few allied major powers who work to generalize policies that run counter the interests of the world’s populations.

The WB and the IMF have systematically made loans to States as a means of influencing their policies. Foreign indebtedness has been and continues to be used as an instrument for subordinating the borrowers. Since their creation, the IMF and the WB have violated international pacts on human rights and have no qualms about supporting dictatorships.

A new form of decolonization is urgently required to get out of the predicament in which the IFI and their main shareholders have entrapped the world in general. New international institutions must be established. This new series of articles by Éric Toussaint retraces the development of the World Bank and the IMF since they were founded in 1944. The articles are taken from the book The World Bank: a never-ending coup d’état. The hidden agenda of the Washington Consensus, Mumbai: Vikas Adhyayan Kendra, 2007, or The World Bank : A critical Primer Pluto, 2007.

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Robert McNamara and president Luis Echeverria (1970-1976) were thick as thieves. The Mexican president had cracked down on the radical left. From 1973 on, Mexico’s foreign currency revenue soared thanks to the tripling of oil prices. This increase in currency revenue should have prevented Mexico from borrowing. However the volume of WB loans to Mexico rose sharply: it quadrupled from 1973 to 1981 (from USD 118 million in 1973 to 460 million in 1981). Mexico also borrowed from private banks with the World Bank’s backing. The volume of loans from private banks to Mexico multiplied by 6 between 1973 and 1981. US banks led the field, followed in decreasing order by banks from the UK, Japan, Germany, France, Canada, and Switzerland. The amounts loaned by private banks were ten times those borrowed from the World Bank. When the crisis broke in 1982, there were no less than 550 banks to which the Mexican government owed money! Lending money to Mexico was the World Bank’s way of keeping its hold on Mexican authorities. From 1974 to 1976, the predicament of Mexican public finances seriously worsened. Yet the World Bank insisted that Mexico should contract more debts while the alarm signals were flashing.

On 3 February 1978 the World Bank boldly projected a rosy future:

“The Mexican government almost certainly will experience a large increase in the resources at its disposal by the early 1980s. Our most recent projections show that … the balance of payments will show a surplus on current account by 1982… large increases in export revenues, mainly from petroleum and products, should make both the foreign debt problem and the management of public finance much easier to manage by the 1980s. The debt service ratio of 32.6% (of export revenue) in 76, will increase progressively to 53.1% en 78, and thereafter will decline to 49.4% in 1980 and about 30% in 1982.” [1]

The exact opposite was to occur. Every word of this prediction was contradicted by facts!

In October 1979, when Paul Volcker, then chairman of the US Federal Reserve, decided on a steep rise in interest rates that would inevitably lead to the debt crisis (which was to start in Mexico), the World Bank had reassuring words. On 19 November 1979 we read: “Both the increase in Mexico’s external public debt and especially the increase in the debt service ratio, which in 1979 may become as high as 2/3 of its exports (…), suggest a very critical situation. In fact, the truth is exactly the opposite.” (author’s emphasis). [2] This is quite simply astounding.

The World Bank’s message consists of repeating that even when everything suggests there is cause for alarm, actually all is well, the situation is excellent, and you should just contract further debts. What would we think of a crossing-keeper who would tell pedestrians they should cross the railway lines when a red light clearly indicates that a train is arriving? What would a court say if such behaviour had resulted in loss of life?

Private banks of the North loaned exponentially higher amounts to developing countries, starting with Mexico.

One of the Bank’s economists in charge of monitoring the situation sent a most alarming report on 14 August 1981. [3] He explained that he disagreed with the optimistic view held by the Mexican government and its representative Carlos Salinas de Gortari, minister of Planning and Budget. [4] He later had serious problems with his hierarchy, and even decided to lodge a lawsuit against the WB (which he won). [5] In 1981 the World Bank granted Mexico a 1.1 billion dollar loan (scheduled over several years): it was by far the largest loan granted by the WB since 1946. In the early months of 1982 the World Bank still claimed that the increase in the Mexican GDP would average 8.1% a year between 1983 and 1985. On 19 March 1982, i.e. six months before the crisis, the president of the World Bank, Alden W. Clausen, sent the following letter to the Mexican president José Lopez Portillo: [6]

“Our meeting in Mexico City with your top aides reinforced my confidence in the economic leaders of your country. You, Mr. President, can be rightfully proud of the achievements of the last five years. Few countries can claim to have achieved such high growth rates, or have created so many jobs… I wish to congratulate you on the many successes already achieved. As I stated during our meeting, the recent setback for the Mexican economy is bound to be transient, and we will be happy to be of assistance during the consolidation process” (author’s emphasis). [7]

Less than a year earlier, Alden W. Clausen still chaired the Bank of America, which was busy providing loan on loan to Mexico.

On 20 August 1982 Mexico, which had paid back considerable amounts over the first seven months of the year, stated that it could not pay any more. It decreed a six month moratorium (August 1982 to January 1983). It had only 180 million dollars in reserve and was expected to pay 300 million on 23 August. Already in early August Mexico had told the IMF that its currency reserve was down to 180 million dollars. At the end of August the IMF convened with the Federal Reserve, the US Treasury, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Bank of England. The director of the IMF, Jacques de Larosière, told the Mexican authorities that the IMF and the BIS were willing to grant currency loans in December 1982 on the twofold condition that the money be used to refund private banks and that Mexico implement drastic structural adjustment measures. Mexico accepted. It steeply devalued its national currency, considerably increased domestic interest rates, saved Mexican private banks from bankruptcy by nationalizing them and taking over their debts. In exchange, it seized the 6 billion dollars cash they had on hand. President José Lopez Portillo presented this measure to the Mexican people as though it were a nationalist move. He of course refrained from divulging that the 6 billion dollars would be used to pay back foreign bankers.

Who was really responsible for the Mexican debt crisis? Did Mexico start it?

Generally speaking, the reasons are obvious: a rise in interest rates decided in Washington, plummeting oil revenues and a huge debt are the structural causes. The first two are external factors and Mexico was helpless against them. The third one results from choices made by the Mexican leaders, whom the WB and private bankers encouraged to take on enormous loans.

Beyond these structural causes, which are fundamental, an analysis of how one thing led to another shows that private banks of the North started the crisis in that they significantly reduced the loans granted to Mexico in 1982. Aware that almost all available currency in the Mexican Treasury had been used to pay back the debt, they considered it was time to reduce their loans. In this way they brought one of the world’s largest indebted countries to its knees. Seeing that Mexico was facing the combined effects of a rise in interest rates – from which they profited – and a fall in its oil revenues, they chose to act first and move out. An aggravating circumstance was that foreign bankers had aided and abetted Mexican ruling circles (CEOs and leaders of the party-State called the Institutional Revolutionary Party) who were frantically transferring their capital abroad in order to invest it safely. It is estimated that in 1981-1982, no less than 29 billion dollars left Mexico as capital flight. [8] After precipitating the crisis private bankers then further benefited from it – and left it for others to mend matters. The evidence can be seen in the following tables.

Table 1. Foreign banks’ loans without any state guarantee and repayments to the banks (in million dollars)

Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance, 2005

The table traces the evolution of loans granted by private foreign banks without any guarantee by the state. We note that after a huge increase from 1978 to 1981, loans fell drastically in 1982. On the other hand repayments did not decrease. On the contrary they increased by close to 40% in 1982. In 1983 bank loans had completely stopped. Yet repayments were still well underway. The evolution of debt net transfer, which had been positive until 1981, became seriously negative from 1982 on. All in all, between 1978 and 1987, negative net transfer accounted for more than 10 billion dollars in profits for the bankers.

Table 2. Foreign banks’ loans with state guarantee and repayments to the banks (in million dollars)

Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance, 2005

Table 2 shows the evolution of loans from foreign private banks that were guaranteed by the Mexican state. We note the increase in loans from 1978 to 1981. In 1982 loans decreased by 20% while repayments increased. Bank loans decreased sharply until 1986. By contrast repayments by the Mexican state continued at a very high level. Net transfer on the public debt to foreign banks contracted with a state guarantee, which had been positive from 1978 to 1982, became very seriously negative from 1983. All in all, the net negative transfer between 1978 and 1987 accounts for over 10 billions dollars in profits for the banks.

If we add up negative transfers in the two tables we reach a sum of over 20 billion dollars. Private banks in the North extracted juicy benefits from the Mexican people.

Table 3. WB loans to Mexico and repayments (in million dollars)

Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance, 2005

Table 3 shows the evolution of World Bank loans to Mexico. We note a sharp increase from 1978 to 1981. The WB was then frantically competing with private banks. In 1982 and 1983 we note a moderate decrease. Loans increased again from 1984 on. The Bank behaved as a last resort lender. Loans were conditioned on the Mexican state repaying private banks, a majority of which were North American. Net transfer remained positive because Mexico did use WB loans to repay private banks.

Table 4. IMF loans to Mexico and repayments (in million dollars)

Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance, 2005

Table 4 shows the evolution of IMF loans to Mexico. There were none between 1978 and 1981. Yet in those years Mexico repaid old loans. From 1982 on the IMF loaned massive amounts on two conditions: 1) the money had to be used to repay private banks; 2) Mexico had to implement a structural adjustment policy (reduction of social expenditure and of expenditure for infrastructures, privatization, rise in interest rates, increase in indirect taxation, etc.). Net transfer remained positive because Mexico did use IMF loans to repay private banks.

Table 5. Loans from countries of the North to Mexico and repayments (in million dollars)

Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance, 2005

Table 5 shows the evolution of loans granted by the most industrialized countries. Like private banks and the World Bank, countries of the North sharply increased their loans to Mexico from 1978 to 1981. Then they did more or less what the WB and the IMF were doing. While private banks reduced their loans, they followed the IMF and the WB in loaning to Mexico in order to make sure that it could repay private banks and that it would implement the structural adjustment programme.

Table 6. Evolution of the Mexican external debt from 1978 to 1987 (in million dollars)

Source: World Bank, Global Development Finance, 2005

Table 6 shows the evolution of Mexico’s total external debt. It multiplied by 3 from 1978 to 1987. During this period the amounts that were paid back were 3.5 times the amount owed in 1978. Total negative net transfer accounts for over 26 billion dollars.

Since 1982 the Mexican people have been bled dry to assuage their various creditors. Indeed the IMF and the World Bank have exacted the last cent back from what they loaned to the country so that it could pay private banks. Mexico has been forcefully subjected to the logic of structural adjustment. The shock of 1982 first led to a steep recession, massive layoffs and a dramatic drop in purchasing power. Next structural measures resulted in hundreds of publicly owned companies being privatized. The concentration of wealth and of a large part of the national assets in the hands of a few Mexican and foreign industrial and financial corporations is staggering. [9]

In a historical perspective it is evident that the road to overindebtedness in the 1960s and 1970s, the explosion of the debt crisis in 1982 and the way it was managed in the following years marked a radical break with the progressive policies implemented from the start of the Mexican revolution in 1910 to the 1940s with Lazaro Cardenas as president. From the revolution to the 1940s, living standards notably improved, Mexico made great strides in economic terms and adopted an independent foreign policy. From 1914 to 1946 Mexico did not pay back any debt and eventually won a resounding victory over its creditors when the latter agreed to give up 90% of the amount owed in 1914 without claiming any interest either. Since the 1982 crisis Mexico has lost control of its destiny. Historically, this has been the US’s objective since the 19^th century.

In 1970, Mexico’s public external debt amounted to USD 3.1 billion. 33 years later, in 2003, it had multiplied by 25, reaching 77.4 billion (public and private external debts together amounted to 140 billion). Meanwhile the Mexican government paid back 368 billion (120 times the amount owed in 1970). Net negative transfer from 1970 to 2003 amounts to USD 109 billion. From 1983 to 2003, i.e. over a period of 21 years, net transfer on the public external debt was positive only in 1990 and 1995.

We trust the day is approaching when the Mexican people will be able to win back their freedom to decide their own future.

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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. 

Notes

Over 100 people gathered outside police headquarters in a suburban municipality east of Detroit to demonstrate against the failure of local authorities to hold several police officers accountable in the shooting death of 29 year old African American Theoddeus Gray.

Gray was shot six times from the rear while he was walking away from officers outside Lakeland Manor banquet hall in St. Clair Shores, Michigan on November 4, 2018.

Within a matter of two weeks Macomb County Sheriff Anthony Wickersham had cleared the law-enforcement personnel of any wrong doing. This decision follows a long held pattern in the United States where police routinely kill African Americans and other people of color without fear of disciplinary action let alone criminal prosecution.

A crowd composed of many family members and friends of Theo Gray rallied and marched at St. Clair Shores police headquarters on the afternoon of Saturday August 3. The group spoke out about the unjust use of lethal force and the distortions perpetuated by the police and the corporate media involving the circumstances of the incident on November 4.

Demonstration demanding justice for Theo Gray outside the St. Clair Shores police station on Aug. 3, 2019 (Photo by Abayomi Azikiwe)

Spokespersons for the family noted that the initial explanation for the shooting of Gray centered on the culpability for the death of a police dog identified as “Axe.” Law-enforcement officials claimed Gray had shot the dog prompting them to take down the young man in a hail of bullets.

This story was later changed by St. Clair Shores police and the Macomb County Sheriff. Relatives of the deceased say that all of the evidence leads to the conclusion that the law-enforcement officers had shot the animal to death themselves while firing at Gray.

Family members who were eyewitnesses to the killing said that the six wounds inflicted upon Gray were in the rear of his body including the head, back, thighs, legs and feet. They also emphasized that there was no threat posed to the officers by Gray therefore his death was completely unprovoked.

Five police officers fired 48 shots at Gray. He was pronounced dead at a hospital as a result of the six bullets which struck him.

Law-enforcement Review Seeks to Justify Killing

In order to address public concern about the killing of Gray, Wickersham and St. Clair Shores Police Chief Todd Woodcox held a press conference on November 28 at the Macomb County Sheriff’s office. Wickersham stated that a further ballistic investigation was needed to determine the cause of death of the police animal.

A public funeral was held for Axe at the Assumption Greek Orthodox Church in St. Clair Shores where tens of thousands of dollars were raised. No public apology or acknowledgment of wrongdoing was made by either the St. Clair Shores police or the Macomb County Sheriff’s office in regard to the brutal death of Gray.

According to an article published by the Detroit Free Press, citing statements by law-enforcement officials in Macomb County:

“After the dog was struck, he ran back toward Lakeland Manor and was found by a side door, Wickersham said. Axe was taken to an animal hospital and died. Wickersham said ballistics information is pending on bullet fragments found inside the police dog on its left front leg and right shoulder blade. Gray’s FN57 5.7mm pistol is believed to have jammed after he fired the first shot, Wickersham said. He said the gun was found under Gray, and that a loaded, AK47 semi-automatic rifle was found next to the banquet hall, though he released no additional details about that weapon.” (See this)

This same above-mentioned report presented the police rationale for the killing of Gray, noting:

“’There was gonna be a shootout in St. Clair Shores that night,’ Wickersham said. City police said officers responded to the hall after receiving calls of a man with a rifle outside. About 70 people were inside, police said. ‘Upon officer arrival, a male matching this description was observed standing outside the banquet hall,’ an initial news release from St. Clair Shores Police stated. ‘The male ignored several demands from officers and attempted to flee the scene on foot.’”

Family members of Gray were accused by police of refusing to participate in the investigation during the aftermath of the killing. Wickersham said during the press conference that through an attorney letters were sent to the family of Gray and no responses were received.

An attorney for the family, Vince Colella, said he had received no correspondence from the Macomb County Sheriff. Colella emphasized that it was up to law-enforcement to conduct the investigation and not the family of Gray.

Family Demands Justice

Members of the Gray family have contacted the newly-elected Democratic Attorney General for the State of Michigan Dana Nessel requesting another probe of the case. Nessel announced on August 2 that she would review the evidence for possible future legal action.

However, several members of the family and friends of Gray expressed skepticism related to the statement made by the State Attorney General. They want immediate action aimed at bringing the killers to justice.

A Facebook page has been set up entitled “Justice for Theo Gray.” Family spokesperson Oliver Gantt addressed the demonstration on August 3 at the St. Clair Shores police station stressing that further demonstrations will be held. (See this)

Members of the Detroit-based Moratorium NOW! Coalition attended the August 3 protest in St. Clair Shores providing a sound system which was utilized during the picket line and rally. An organizer for the Moratorium NOW! Coalition spoke to the crowd pledging unconditional support, along with inviting those present to the August 10 gathering in downtown Detroit commemorating the second anniversary of the Charlottesville, Virginia disturbances where neo-fascist and racists marched through the city advocating violence against oppressed people.

Heather Heyer, an anti-racist activist, was killed when neo-Nazi James Alex Fields, Jr. rammed his vehicle into a crowd of counter-protesters on August 12, 2017. Dozens of anti-racist activists were injured as a result of Field’s actions and other racists who had gathered that weekend to oppose the removal of a statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee.  Fields was arrested, prosecuted and sentenced to life in imprison for his crimes.

The police killing of Gray and the subsequent exoneration of the law-enforcement officers in St. Clair Shores is by no means an isolated incident. Over the last five years, there have been countless demonstrations across the U.S. in response to police brutality and terrorism directed against African Americans and other people of color communities.

In a report published by The Root website which covers issues related to African American affairs, 1,165 people were killed by police in 2018. A large percentage of these victims were disproportionately African Americans.

This publication says in its conclusion to the article that:

“There were only 22 days in all of last year where police didn’t kill someone. Despite all the protests, marches, training seminars, thoughts and prayers, in 2018, cops killed 36 more people than they did the year before, according to Mapping Police Violence and the Washington Post. And despite being 12.6 percent of the U.S. population, Black people were 26.7 percent of the people killed by police where the race was known. The number of Black people killed by police in the last year (215) was more than all the police who died in the line of duty (148), U.S. servicemen killed in action (2) and Americans killed by Islamic terrorists (0) combined.” (See this)

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

All images in this article are from the author

The latest 13th round of talks in Astana between the Syrian state with Russia and Iran as its guarantors on one side, and Al-Qaeda and the Turkish regime as it guarantor on the other side, would have slowly but steadily resolved the odd situation in the Al-Qaeda occupied Idlib province through the agreements it reached and the acknowledgment by Turkey, finally, that there are terrorist groups in Idlib and not only civilians and hospitals.

Hours after the announcement of the truce from the latest round of talks at Nur-Sultan (Astana), the commander of Nusra Front, or whatever name his group has adopted recently, declared his group’s rejection to the ceasefire. Nusra Front is the dominant power in the last NATO’s stronghold of terror in Syria.

Dima Nassif, chief of Damascus bureau of Lebanese news channel Al-Mayadeen details further in this report, we added English subtitles to, and the English transcript of the translation below the video:

Transcript of the English translation of the above video report:

The Idlib truce could have passed peacefully had Nusra Front not declared its rejection of the ceasefire.

The Syrian optimism to give the agreement an opportunity to propose a solution that is in line with the Syrian situation, progressing even on the international conventions which allows the Syrian army to continue its operations on the fronts which involve armed groups participating in the agreement and the other rejecting it as the Nusra Front.

Despite that, the army froze its operations to strengthen the chances of a solution in Idlib on the basis of Ankara’s fulfillment of its obligations in the withdrawal of armed groups and its heavy and the medium weapons a distance of 20 kilometers and to isolate Nusra Front as stipulated by Sochi, which allows for the redeployment of Syrian forces and the adaptation of military operations to the remaining open fronts in the Lattakia and Aleppo countryside.

The military operations will not wait to resume again and to define its directions, and it will not wait for any political understanding with the parties sponsoring the talks of Astana and the Sochi agreement, for the first time, the Syrian army is issuing a statement announcing the resumption of the military resolution against terrorism in conjunction with its fighter jets hitting the strongholds of Nusra Front in the countrysides of southern Idlib and northern Hama.

Stopping the war on Idlib in order to balance the talks in Astana, was the strategy that Ankara bet on for a full year to secure an advantage for its factions represented in Astana’s political course and to enhance its bargaining ability politically and militarily in a province that it owns the decision and loyalty of all armed factions, including Al-Qaeda affiliates, and that is what the Syrian army will not allow being repeated.

Contrary to all the optimism that followed the Nur-Sultan (Astana) meeting, the cease-fire collapsed quickly although for the first time the talks put the political and military tracks on two parallel lines, and the absence of a reference to oversee the armed factions and Ankara’s lack of commitment to control it, reflect the fact that these factions retain a margin of maneuver or flip against any understanding or agreement whenever Ankara wants.

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Well, the Neo Con Dem party, lately much more the ‘Lesser of two evils’, was just given a gift.

The sad, tragically sad reality is that this most terrible example of white (and Christian) murder via hate in Texas can and should propel the Dems into the White House… and controlling the Senate too.

What transpired in El Paso, with the proof of the shooter’s rage against Latinos (representing to him the ones who are here undocumented – labeled by him as ‘Invaders’). He wrote that he was a Trump supporter whose main focus was building a wall at our Southern border. Did anyone realize that he drove 10 hours or so from Dallas to get to that Wal-Mart in a predominately Latino area? Well, politically, and of course for his many sins, morally, The Donald is Trumped!

One could write a book on all the times since 2015 that Donald Trump has played the ‘subhuman, evil, rapist, infestation, shithole’ and a slew of other cards to stir up his Base. When I say ‘Base’ I do NOT mean all those who voted for him in 2016. Many whites who picked him over ‘The Wicked Witch’ did so for a few different reasons.

Some hated Hillary and her phony husband for years, and would never support a Clinton. Others only cared about which candidate would increase better their financial portfolio. Some were ‘closet racists’ and wanted to end ‘entitlements’, not knowing that corporate Amerika and the War Economy got more of them by the mega $ billions!

Finally, many Soccer Moms and even ‘not too far out’ religious Christians were most concerned about family values and … and this is key …. Security for their kids!! They watched the (mostly) Fox News shows that played the infamous ‘Fear Card’ to make them worry about their kid’s safety outside of the home. Of course, their main motivation in voting for Republicans, and of course Trump, was, in all candor, To keep the n*****s and sp*cs away from my neighborhood and my kids!  It never dawned on them that craziness sometimes causes, as Donnie Rumsfeld always termed it, Collateral Damage. Automatic weapons can hit more than their target folks.

So, the Dems should remember the anniversary next week of the Charlottesville melee. This occurred  the day after young, male and female whites marched at night carrying Nazi era torches (image left), singing a Nazi mantra of ‘Blood and Soil’ and saying over and over ‘Jews will not replace us’. Let me repeat that: ‘Jews will not replace us’. Trump, as we know, did not immediately condemn this as a Neo Nazi action by white supremacists. No, he waffled and waited a few days to finally state that there were bad people on both sides but ‘There were some fine people on both sides’. This is something that the Dems should still be onto. They cannot. Why? Because then the Deep State’s media spinsters would associate the Dems with Antifa, the anti fascist group that battled with the white supremacists. That would totally push away any such white Soccer Mom and Bible thumping white Christian woman. You see, in today’s Neo Con Amerika, the term ‘Anti Fascist’ is the same as ‘Commie’… period!

Thus, the best course of action for this gutless Dem party is to, for the next 15 months, shower the media with the transparency of a president’s rants against people of color and the results of this. The El Paso tragedy becomes fodder for a ‘righteous, not just politically motivated, campaign to get this guy out of office… along with his minions.

Methinks that, regardless of whatever affection or lack of Robert G Bowers had for Trump, he must have heard about the Charlottesville incidents. Could it be that he realized  when a president of the USA does not condemn white supremacy, and of course the blatant anti Semitism of those marchers, then maybe his, Bowers, anti Semitism, is not so crazy? He then ‘lost it’ and killed 11 Jewish worshippers at that Pittsburgh synagogue last October 27th. It will be those white Soccer Moms and Family Values Christians that may realize that this president is not securing their lives and those of their kids. Factor that with the closet filled with sex scandals which follows Trump for years, and maybe those ‘Swing voters’ may just swing the other way in 2020 and realize that he does NOT represent family values.

If that happens, folks, it will be time for we true ‘lefties’ to get back on the streets and town squares (and politicians offices) and rattle those 2 Party/One Party cages. Elections are only the beginning.

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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 Palácio do Planalto, Flickr

Syrian security units and Syrian Arab Army units operating in Hama northern countryside, northwest of Syria, and Daraa countryside, south of Syria, had a busy day busting, discovering, and confiscating large stashes of weapons, munition, gears, armored vehicles, illicit drugs and 1.5 million Captagon pills, courtesy of the Nusra Front and its affiliated terrorist groups, gifted to them by the ever-generous US taxpayers and other western citizens, not to forget the Gulfies.

The terrorists killing tools are shown in the following compiled video report by SANA and Syrian Ikhabriya news channel, details below the video:

In Hama northwestern countryside, the Syrian Arab Army units cleaning the region from NATO-sponsored terrorists discovered a large number of armored vehicles and weapons left by the Nusra Front terrorists, Turkistan anti-Islamic Islamist Party, and Izzat Army terrorists defeated in the area by the SAA. Hundreds of the terrorists were terminated, the rest retreated to safe zones under the protection of NATO-member state Turkey.

In the south of the country, in the province of Daraa, the birthplace of the Syrian version of the PNAC’s plan to destroy the Arab World aka Arab Spring, Syrian security forces securing the region after defeating NATO-terrorists foiled an attempt to smuggle 1.5 million Captagon pills (potentiated amphetamine) and bags of other illicit drugs.

The drugs shipment this time was heading to Jordan, in a weird twist of the usual route, where for years drugs were coming from Jordan, Lebanon, and NATO-member state Turkey to the terrorists in Syria. Either the stage is being prepared for Jordan’s episode of the Arab Spring, or the terrorists wanted to smuggle the quantities back to their warehouses.

Also in the southern region, Syrian security units confiscated US-made TOW anti-tank rockets, a Phantom 4 drone, assorted rifles and machine guns, and more than 200,000 rounds of bullets.

US journalists are mourning the back-to-back mass shootings of American civilians and are too busy to report on the confiscation of these major weapons that have been used to slaughter Syrian civilians and destroy their homes, schools, and work places.

Not confiscated in El Paso Texas or Dayton Ohio.

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All images in this article are from SANA

Maximum pressure is a Trump regime euphemism for unlawful political, economic and financial collective punishment against a sovereign state, its leadership and population — for not bending to Washington’s will.

Binding international law Fourth Geneva’s Article 33 prohibits it, stating:

“No (one) may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.”

“Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.”

“Pillage is prohibited. Reprisals against (individuals) and their property are prohibited.”

Fourth Geneva and other international laws to which the US is a signatory are automatically constitutional law.

The US under Republicans and undemocratic Dems operate by their own rules exclusively, time and again breaching the UN Charter and other binding international laws, norms and standards — by waging war on humanity at home and abroad.

Venezuela and Iran are in the eye of the Trump regime’s “maximum pressure” storm, the world community collectively and UN doing nothing to challenge its lawless actions.

In May 2018, Pompeo issued the following Orwellian statement, saying:

“The United States stands with the brave people of Venezuela as they strive for a return to dignity and democracy (sic).”

Fact: The Bolivarian Republic is the hemisphere’s preeminent social democracy, the majority of its revenues directed toward providing vital services to all its people — polar opposite how the US and other Western states operate.

Fact: US policy toward Venezuela from the Clinton co-presidency to Trump has been and continues aiming to replace its democratic rule with US-controlled fascist tyranny.

Fact: That’s what Trump and hardliners infesting his regime are going all out to institute short of hot war — so far. While unlikely, by no means is it ruled out.

Fact: Key for the US is controlling Venezuela’s vast oil reserves, the world’s largest, along with sending a message to the world community that nations unwilling to bow to its will face the force of its wrath.

Effective August 5 by executive order, Trump unlawfully ordered an embargo of Venezuela, prohibited by international law unless ordered by the UN Security Council. No nations may legally take this action on their own.

Under Trump’s executive order, nations, entities or individuals maintaining normal relations with Venezuela, their legal right, face (unlawful) US sanctions and other harshness.

On Tuesday, neocon hardliner Bolton said

“(w)e are sending a signal to third parties that want to do business with (Maduro). Proceed with extreme caution.”

Anyone continuing normal relations with Venezuela “risk(s) (their) business interests with the United States.”

He called support for Maduro by Russia, China and other nations “intolerable.” He mocked talks between government representatives and opposition elements in Barbados as “buying time (sic),” adding:

“We will not fall for these old tricks (sic),” again stressing “all options are on the table.”

In July, Trump’s envoy for regime change in Venezuela Elliott Abrams said he’s “absolutely” confident of Maduro’s ouster by yearend.

Asked how Caracas intends to respond to Trump’s new executive order, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza said:

“I’m going to paraphrase Donald Trump…All options are on the table.”

A Foreign Ministry statement said

“Washington has issued another executive order that aims to formalize the criminal economic, financial and trade embargo already underway, which has caused severe harm to Venezuelan society in recent years,” adding:

“The ruling elite in the United States aim to grant legal status to the embargo of all assets and properties belonging to the Venezuelan state.”

Venezuela’s UN envoy Samuel Moncada asked Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the Security Council to intervene against the Trump regime, saying:

“This is an act of war by the United States. Venezuela is not a threat to anyone and the United States is fabricating this aggression just to take the oil.”

On issues of war and peace, the UN is a virtual appendage of US imperial policies. US Security Council veto power prevents the body from censuring its unlawful actions.

Separately, Moncada denounced “the racist-ever (US regime) in the history of this continent…trying to fabricate a war on Venezuela,” adding:

“The militarization of the relations with Venezuela is one of the dangers that we are trying to expose.”

The Trump regime is an enemy of “international peace,” Bolton (and its other hardliners “enem(ies) of dialogue.”

On Tuesday, Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called new Trump regime actions against Venezuela “economic terror,” adding:

“Such steps have no legal basis either in terms of international or domestic Venezuelan law. Obviously, the White House is driven by the ideology of intolerance and dictatorship, which are put above the interests of Venezuelans.”

She stressed that Moscow will continue to support legitimate President Maduro.

Russia’s upper house Federation Council International Affairs chairman Konstantin Kosachev denounced Trump executive order on Venezuela, calling it an act of “international banditry.”

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi earlier warned that more sanctions on Venezuela “will only bring the law of the jungle…It is up to the people of a country to decide its internal affairs” — free from foreign interference.

Beijing supports Venezuela, Wang earlier saying the relationship with Maduro will be maintained “no matter how the situation evolves,” adding at the time:

“China will continue to support the search for a political solution in Venezuela through dialogue with the government and the opposition, so as to keep the country stable and the people safe.”

Trump’s action upped the stakes. His regime instituted similar actions against Iran.

In a letter by its UN envoy Takht-e Ravanchi to Secretary General Guterres, he said the following:

“Infatuated with rogue, unreasonable conducts at the international level, this well signifies that the US regime despises diplomacy, which is one of the greatest achievements of humanity to preserve and uphold peace and security among nations,” adding:

“It reveals the deeply-rooted hypocrisy of the United States’ authorities in their different but paradoxical claims.”

“The Islamic Republic of Iran deems such illegal action a flagrant infringement of the fundamental principles of diplomatic law, in particular the principle of inviolability and immunity of high-ranking foreign officials, including immunity of incumbent ministers of foreign affairs, as a universally accepted norm and rule of customary international law.”

“The US’ illegal action is also in brazen violation of Article 105(2) of the United Nations Charter regarding the privileges and immunities of representative of Member States in exercising their functions in connection with the United Nations.”

“In this context, any restriction on discharging the duties of Ministers of Foreign Affairs is also in contravention of the Convention on the Privileges and immunities of the United Nations, the well-established customary principles enshrined in the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and the Agreement regarding the Headquarters of the United Nations.”

“Likewise, it is in contradiction with many relevant consensual resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly, the latest of which is resolution 73/212 that, by underlining the obligation of the United States for the observance of the privileges and immunities of the missions accredited to the United Nations, ‘which cannot be subject to any restrictions arising from the bilateral relations of the host country, urges the host country to remove without delay any restrictions applied (and) ensure respect for such privileges and immunities.”

“Coercing nations into complying with the United States’ illegal demands threatens multilateralism, as the foundation of international relations, and sets a dangerous precedent, paving the way for those who aspire to rather divide, not unite, nations.”

Ravanchi called on the international community and world body to condemn unlawful US actions — maybe someday, not any time soon.

Today is the most perilous time in world history because of US rage for dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations by whatever it takes to achieve its imperial objectives.

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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 Ministry of Defence’s two flagship drone projects – the ‘Protector’ programme to introduce the Certifiable Predator B drone into service with the Royal Air Force, and the Army’s Watchkeeper surveillance drone – continue to face ‘significant issues’ according to a government spending watchdog.

The latest annual report (published in July 2019) of the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA),  an agency of the Cabinet Office and the Treasury, has highlighted continuing problems, delays, and failures to meet delivery targets in each of the two programmes.  According to the IPA the Protector programme “will deliver two years late and over original predicted cost” and the Watchkeeper programme, originally intended to be fully operational by 2010, is not expected to achieve “embodiment of final functionality” until the 2020/21 financial year.

Protector has been flagged with an Amber / Red programme rating by the IPA, which warns that that “successful delivery of the project is in doubt, with major risks or issues apparent in a number of key areas”.  Although this is an improvement from the Red rating awarded last year, urgent action is still deemed necessary to address the problems or assess whether it is feasible to resolve them.

Source: Ministry of Defence via Drone Wars UK

The IPA study reveals that the Protector programme has been ‘rebaselined’, pushing the target date for Interim Operating Capability for the aircraft back back until November 2023, and for Full Operating Capability to October 2025.  Delivery of Protector will now be two years late.

Civil servants have been forced to undertake a detailed financial review for the Protector programme, including adjustment of costs and renegotiation of contracts with suppliers.  Although the review has now been concluded, the Review Note has yet to be approved and a new Mandate will be required for the project under the MoD’s programme management procedures.

During the 2018/19 financial year, there was a considerable underspend on the Protector programme, representing 18% of the budget for the year, which was caused by an increase in Joint Forces Command infrastructure costings and changes in foreign exchange rates.  Despite this, the overall programme is predicted to come in at above the originally budgeted cost.

The woeful story of the Watchkeeper programme and the challenges it has faced has been well documented, but it seems that the difficulties, alas, have yet to be fully resolved.  Watchkeeper has been awarded an ‘Amber’ project status rating by the IPA – the same as for the previous three years – meaning that “successful delivery appears feasible but significant issues already exist, requiring management attention”.  However, the fact that the IPA study, published in July 2019, records the latest approved end date for the project as 3rd July 2017 speaks for itself.

The IPA report states that Watchkeeper finally achieved its Full Operating Capacity on 30th November 2018.  However, a letter from Stephen Lovegrove, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Defence, to the Chair of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee, Meg Hillier, in January 2018 indicated that Watchkeeper would not be granted release to service (RTS) clearance, also known as type certification, which is needed to show that it is safe and reliable enough to be used in routine training and operations.

“Despite this, the capability could be deployed operationally without formal Type Certification should the operational imperative warrant the necessary Operational Emergency Clearance,” Lovegrove wrote, somewhat alarmingly suggesting that the Army could be permitted to fly unsafe drones.

To date, no announcement has been made to indicate that Watchkeeper has been granted formal RTS certification, and until this happens the aircraft will only be able to fly under severe restrictions.

The IPA notes that remaining project deliverables for Watchkeeper are “ongoing” and that final functionality for the aircraft is expected in the 2020/21 financial year – ten years late.  Only costs for Full Operating Capability are covered in the IPA assessment, which states that it does not include costs for “mid life obsolescence work planned for the next decade”, raising questions about MoD’s plans for the future of Watchkeeper.

The IPA report presents a somewhat chequered scorecard for the Protector and Watchkeeper programmes, suggesting that the Ministry of Defence is still in the learning phase for the procurement of its military drone programmes.  Whether the learning will accelerate fast enough to ensure the successful delivery of Protector and future drone programmes remains to be seen.

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It is clear that the United Kingdom could not have thought this through.  Was it a touch of the Suez jitters, the haunting syndrome of 1956 leaving a false impression that the Old Empire still had it?  To taunt a power already under the watchful and punitive eye of the United States was never a recipe for equanimity and calm repose. But taunt they did, using 30 Royal Marines to detain an Iranian tanker Grace I in Gibraltar last month.

The official justification was unconvincing: the need to enforce European Union sanctions against the regime of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad.  The vessel had been supposedly on route to Syria. Some in the diplomatic fraternity were perplexed: it had not previously been UK policy to diligently pursue the impounding of vessels bound for Syria with Iranian cargo.

Local Spanish authorities sensed the hand of US pressure, of which squeezing oil revenue is one; as well as they might, given the unbridled joy expressed by President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, John Bolton.

“Excellent news: UK has detained the supertanker Grace I laden with Iranian oil bound for Syria in violation of US sanctions.” The US and its allies would “continue to prevent regimes in Tehran & Damascus from profiting off this illicit trade.”

Former Swedish prime minister and co-chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations outlined some of the inconsistencies in the UK approach.

“The legality of the UK seizure of a tanker heading for Syria with oil from Iran intrigues me.  One refers to EU sanctions against Syria, but Iran is not a member of the EU.  And the EU as a principle doesn’t impose its sanctions on others.  That’s what the US does.”

Becoming the US running dog on enforcement was not going to sit well with Iran.  The Mullahs are spoiling for a fight.  On May 20, Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, cast an eye to historical examples of Persian resistance.  President Donald Trump would fail as others had in their efforts to subdue his country.  Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan had tried, and not succeeded.  (The foreign minister’s sense of history is only as good as his sense of relativity: the Persian entity was, for a time, conquered, but the conquest was never indefinite.)

The seizures of vessels constitute a recipe for a tit-for-tat calamity.  We are already seeing the bitter fruit of the harvest arising out of the seizure of Grace I. Two oil tankers – the UK registered Stena Impero, and the Mesdar, another Liberian registered vessel though British operated – were subsequently seized in the Strait of Hormuz.  The Mesdar’s detention was threatening though teasingly brief; the Stena Impero, on the other hand, was to be made an example of.

Another oil tanker has since fallen into the hands of the Iranian forces, one accused of smuggling some 700,000 litres of fuel to Arab states.

“The seizure of the oil tanker,” noted IRGC commander Ramezan Zirahi, “was in coordination with Iran’s judiciary authorities and based on their order.”

In all of this, the UK has made a fateful decision: the US is there to be supported in a policy to protect merchant ships against Iranian efforts.  But Washington has assisted in creating the problem for which it now claims to have the solutions.  It is the supplied choice of a current empire to a former one, and the current empire is keen on misbehaving.  The forces of the US imperium have been doing their bit to ensnare Iran in a troubling vice, be it from al-Asad airbase in Iraq, to Qatar.  At sea, the US Navy holds forth with its carrier strike group.  Sanctions have been ramped; the Iran nuclear deal dumped upon and exited.  The Trump administration persists in causing a certain modicum of mayhem.

Putting up your hands for an unconditional commitment to a US-led effort cuts against the grain for a united European-controlled mission in the strait.  European powers also feel they must be firm, just not in the Trump way. The result has seen hesitation and concern about whether Germany and France might be added to any cobbled coalition.  Farther afield, Australia has also fielded a request from Washington described as “serious and complex”, one that would see oil shipments from Iranian incursions being protected.  Australian Defence Minister Linda Reynolds has not been exactly forthcoming in any way on what qualifies the request as complex and serious, though, like a long retained servant to the lord of a manor, makes it sound grander than it is.

Now, Britain finds itself stretched, the rubber man of international relations keen to maintain shape, if only in distorted fashion.  Iran was bold, even brazen, but its forces feel they have every right to be.  The current conventions are for ditching; the protocols of old are being thrown out like stagnant dishwater.  Now, in with the new, the asymmetrical teasing, be it through sponsored agents in Yemen, allies in Iraq, or a chance to seize, if only arbitrarily, various assets in the Strait of Hormuz.

The Iranian actions have done their bit to strike a degree of consternation.  Moez Hayat, penning a view in The National Interest, exemplifies that consternation.  Iran struck when the UK lacked awareness and cogency.

“Functionally, Britain was leaderless as Iranian forces boarded the vessel.  Prime Minister Theresa May was a lame duck, unable to act as the Conservative Party elected a successor.”

The problems go far deeper than that, telling of European disunity and continued US bellicosity.  On this occasion, a simpler assessment is that Britain was caught in the strait, a true US set-up with continuing consequences.

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

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

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The new ceasefire agreement designed to cease hostilities in northwestern Hama and southern Idlib has just collapsed.

On August 3, the leader of Hay’at Tahir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra), Abu Mohammad al-Julani, announced that his group would not withdraw “a single fighter or a weapon” from the demilitarized zone and vowed to recapture the areas, which had been liberated by the Syrian Army. The withdrawal of radicals from this demilitarized zone had been the key demand behind the establishment of the ceasefire.

On the same day, Abu al-Walid al-Tunisi, a senior commander of al-Qaeda-affiliated Horas al-Din, was killed in an improvised-explosive device (IED) explosion in Taftanaz in eastern Idlib. Some pro-militant sources immediately blamed Damascus.

On August 4, the al-Qaeda-linked coalition of militant groups, “Wa Harid al-Muminin”, shelled the town of Slanfah in northern Lattakia with rockets inflicting civilian casualties. The terrorists also claimed that they had foiled a Russian special operation near Khirbat al-Naqus in northwestern Hama. The coalition said that 2 of its fighters were killed in the clashes.

On August 5, Syria’s General Command of the Army and Armed Forces announced that militant groups in the Idlib de-escalation zone refused to abide by the ceasefire and continued attacking civilians in nearby areas. In the released statement, the General Command said that Syrian forces will resume combat operations against militants regardless of  the names that they are using and described the Turkish presence in the country as a destabilizing one. Syrian air and artillery strikes were reported in northwestern Hama and southern Idlib.

Earlier reports appeared that the Syrian Army may resume full-scale ground operations against militants after the end of Eid al-Adha on August 15 if they continue to violate the ceasefire.

According to the Damascus government, since the start of intervention in Syria, Turkey has deployed inside the country 10,655 military personnel, 166 battle tanks, 278 armored vehicles, 18 rocket launchers, 173 mortars, 73 vehicles armed with heavy machine guns, 41 anti-tank missile launchers, and around 280 policemen.

On August 4, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced that Turkey is planning to enter northeastern Syria, currently controlled by US-backed Kurdish armed groups, and has already shared these plans with the US and Russia. On August 5, the Turkish-backed Syrian National Army shelled positions of Kurdish groups east of the towns of Marea and Herbel.

Meanwhile, the Afrin Liberation Forces, a Kurdish insurgency organization created to carry out attacks on Turkish targets in the area of Afrin announced that the recent AFL operations resulted in the killing of 19 members of Turkish-backed factions. Tensions in the area are growing.

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Fidel Castro was an unparalleled leader. Although some of his adversaries had hoped that the ideals and objectives of the Cuban Revolution would die with him, they have in fact persevered, thereby supporting Fidel’s view that ‘a combatant may die, but not his ideas’.

Miguel Mario Díaz-Canel Bermúdez became President of the Council of State and the Council of Ministers on April 19, 2018. While it might be a little too early to make a definitive statement on his ruling style, many of his remarks pertaining to domestic and international policies offer some insight into his beliefs and the possible direction of Cuban policy under his rule. Based on the contents of some of his speeches, interviews and social media posts, it would be reasonable to infer that president Díaz-Canel’s  domestic and foreign policy will be an extension of those implemented by Fidel and Raúl Castro before him.

On many occasions, Díaz-Canel has indicated that Venezuela can always count on Cuba’s support, while strongly condemning the recent interventions and sanctions aimed at reversing its Bolivarian Revolution. On April 29, 2019, he issued a tweet in response to the Trump Administration’s accusations that Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro is a ‘Cuban puppet’ and that ‘the Venezuelan military are risking their lives, and Venezuela’s future, for a man controlled by the Cuban military’, stating that:

With nearly 800 bases and hundreds of thousands of troops around the world, US is accusing Cuba of having military personnel in Venezuela. A mockery of the world. An insult to two sovereign nations. Bolton lies again and his purpose is criminal. Hands off Venezuela.

Then, on April 30, 2019, president Díaz-Canel tweeted that Cubans:

strongly reject threat by Trump of full and complete embargo against Cuba. There are no Cuban military operations or troops in Venezuela. We call upon the international community to stop dangerous and aggressive escalation and to preserve Peace. No more lies.

On May 8, 2019, president Díaz-Canel referenced the Monroe Doctrine when addressing the hostile policies of the Trump administration with the following tweet:

The statements by members of the US Government against Cuba and Venezuela have the same purpose and are part of the perverse, arrogant and Monroeist plan of the empire of the North. The dignified peoples will defend independence and sovereignty.

Subsequently, on May 23, 2019, president Díaz-Canel further demonstrated his country’s unwavering support for Venezuela by stating:

Fierce aggression against sister Venezuela continues. Cuba denounces and condemns approval by US Senate Foreign Relations Cmte. of a bill seeking more economic and commercial sanctions against the Bolivarian Republic.

Most recently, at the national commemoration of the 66^th anniversary of the assaults on the Moncada and Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Garrisons, which took place on July 26, 2019, president Díaz-Canel stated that:

Venezuela under siege, robbed, literally assaulted with the approval or complicit silence of other powerful nations, and what is worse, with the shameful collaboration of Latin American governments, is today the most dramatic scene of the cruelty of the decadent empire’s policies that combine the work of the world’s policeman with that of the supreme court of the global village.[i]

In that same speech, Díaz-Canel also praised the ‘intelligent, heroic, exemplary resistance of Venezuela’s civic-military alliance, its government, and people to the non-conventional war, with which new methods to subjugate us are being rehearsed every day.’[ii] He also reaffirmed Cuba’s solidarity with Venezuela when he addressed the 73^rdGeneral Assembly of the United Nations on September 26, 2018, in addition to many other nations in South America, Central America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East:

The current U.S. administration has proclaimed the relevance of the Monroe Doctrine and, in a new deployment of its imperial policy inthe region, is attacking Venezuela with special cruelty.

It is in this threatening context that we wish to reiterate our absolute support to the Bolivarian and Chavista Revolution, the civic-military union of the Venezuelan people and its legitimate and democratic government, led by the constitutional president Nicolas Maduros Moros. We reject the intervention attempts and sanctions against Venezuela, aimed at suffocating her economically and hurting Venezuelan families.

We likewise reject the attempts at destabilizing the Nicaraguan government, a country of peace that has made remarkable social, economic and public safety progress in favor of its people.

We denounce the politically-motivated imprisonment of former president Luiz Incicio Lula da Silva, and the decision to prevent the people from voting and electing Brazil’s most popular leader to the Presidency.

We stand in solidarity with the Caribbean nations who demand legitimate reparation for the horrible effects of slavery as well as the fair, special and differential treatment that they deserve.

We reaffirm our historic commitment with the self-determination and independence of our brother people of Puerto Rico.

We support Argentina’s legitimate sovereignty claim over the Malvinas Islands, South Sandwich and South Georgia Islands.

We reaffirm our steadfast solidarity with the Saharan people, and support the search for a final solution to the question of Western Sahara, which will allow the exercise of self-determination and to live in peace in their territory.

We support the search for a peaceful and negotiated solution to the situation imposed in Syria, without foreign interference and with full respect for its sovereignty and territorial integrity. We reject any direct or indirect intervention, carried out without the legitimate authorities of the country[iii].

This speech clearly articulated Cuba’s opposition to foreign interference, pressure, retaliation, and militarisation, as well as the imposition of unilateral and unfair sanctions designed to destabilize national governments and impose the American political agenda in other countries. Instead, he calls for peaceful coexistence based on a mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, and advocates for negotiated resolutions to restore peace and security in the event of a conflict.

President Díaz-Canel consistently condemns the American trade embargo[iv] against Cuba, denouncing ‘the most lasting blockade in mankind history’[v] as inhumane and the most significant obstacle to the economic development of his country. He emphasized the point that the embargo represents the key mechanism by which Washington has been attempting overthrow the island’s socialist government for almost six decades. World opinion is clearly on the side of Díaz-Canel, as evidenced by the fact that a UN General Assembly resolution[vi] condemning the economic, commercial and financial embargo against Cuba and calling for it to be lifted has passed with overwhelming support in each of the past 27 years. On May 14, 2019, he tweeted:

In face of US sanctions against Cuba, we have nearly unanimous support of the nations that every year demand the end of the blockade at the UN General Assembly and with their vote make evident the isolation of such cruel policy.

Washington’s hostility towards Cuba has been ramped up during the Trump Presidency, which began enforcing Titles III and IV of the Helms-Burton Act as of May 2, 2019. The Helms-Burton Act was enacted in 1996 to expand the U.S. commercial and financial blockade against Cuba, while Title III, which had previously not been enforced, allows for the ‘protection of property rights of United States nationals.’ More specifically, Title III permits Americans, ‘including naturalized Cuban-Americans, to sue any foreign company conducting business that involves properties that were owned by American citizens before being confiscated by the Cuban socialist government after the 1959 Revolution.’[vii] On April 26, 2019, president Díaz-Canel tweeted that:

The Helms-Burton Act is not a law. Its articles run counter to international law. It’s the blockade, condemned by 189 countries. It’s interference, extraterritoriality and a colonial plan. Cuba is a socialist State under rule of law.

On May 3, 2019, president Díaz-Canel elaborated further, explaining that:

The purpose of the Helms-Burton Act is economic suffocation and preventing the economic development of Cuba, attacking the sovereignty of third countries and destroying the Cuban Revolution. The implementation of the Helms-Burton Act will not put a stop on the march of Cubans.

President Díaz-Canel firmly believes that the Helms-Burton Act ‘goes against peace, solidarity, peaceful coexistence and friendship. It’s a law to neo-colonize and enslave.’ To that effect, on May 25, 2019, he tweeted that:

Our foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez and EU High Representative Federica Mogherini ratified their rejection to the US activation of the Helms-Burton Act, and the need to suspend the arbitrary law.

Additionally, on June 4,2019, the US government reinstated travel and trade restrictions that were previously lifted by the Obama[viii] administration, including visits for educational trips and cultural exchanges, on the basis that these policies only benefited Cuba’s ‘despotic and oppressive’ regime. That same day, president Díaz-Canel issued a defiant response via Twitter:

Cuba will not be frightened or distracted with new threats and restrictions. Work, creativity, efforts and resistance is our response. They haven’t been able to suffocate us. They won’t be able to stop us.[ix]

The following day, commented further on the new travel restrictions:

The US Government keeps at its perverse efforts to crush Cuba. New measures intensify the blockade and violate International Law. We strongly condemn this policy. They won’t be able to stop us: we’ll survive and we shall overcome.

Then, on June 20, 2019, he tweeted that:

The unjust, genocidal and cruel blockade of US being tightened with the Helms-Burton Act, may affect financial flows and resources but it will never block the principles, convictions, patriotism, independence and sovereignty of the Cuban people.

On July 13, 2019, president Díaz-Canel issued a tweet expressing his feelings about the current US National Security Advisor, who is suspected of having played a significant role in the decision to activate Titles III and IV of the Helms-Burton Act:

John Bolton is International Insecurity Advisor for interference and threats to those who don’t yield to the empire.

John Bolton began ‘his career as a cog in the machine of Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, helping his political action committees evade legal restrictions and federal fines. Helms, the most powerful reactionary in the Senate, sponsored Bolton’s rise to Reagan’s justice department.’[x] The Helms–Burton Act was named after Jesse Helms, one of its original sponsors, who sought to strengthen embargo against Cuba in 1995 by fortifying the 1992 Torricelli Act with new legislation. Bolton’s ideological views were shaped by Helms’ anti-Cuban policies, and it appears that he remains committed to achieving the objectives of the Helms-Burton Act.

In response the hostile actions and destructive policies of the Trump administration towards Cuba, president Díaz-Canel stated that Cubans ‘vigorously reject this new provocation, meddling, threatening and bullying, in violation of international law.’ Like Fidel and RaúlCastro before him, president Díaz-Canel maintainsthat Cuba is open to establishing normal relations with the United States, provided that Washington respects the island’s sovereignty as an independent nation on equal footing. President Díaz-Canelhas often reaffirmed that the principles, policies and goals of the Cuban revolution are non-negotiable in any resolution that might be reached with Washington. Such positions expressed by Cuba’s new president should dispel any notions that the island could possibly revert to its pre-revolution status as a US neo-colony under his leadership. President Díaz-Canel is very clear that there will be no regime change in Cuba, because the Cuban Revolution remains strong and Cubans are faithful to her principles. If he is correct, then Cuba will never voluntarily return to the social and economic slavery and exploitation that characterized it before the success of the revolution in 1959.

Based on his statements and policies[xi] since assuming the presidency of Cuba, Miguel Díaz-Canel does not appear to represent a departure from the ideals of the Cuban Revolution. Instead, it seems that, under his presidency, Cuba will continue on its path of standing firm against ‘the most powerful empire on earth that sought to destroy’ its Revolution, while instituting reforms to improve its economic and social development, thereby allowing Cuba to remain a sovereign, independent, socialist, prosperous and sustainable state, free from ‘all foreign tutelage’. Like the Castros before him, Díaz-Canel wants Cuba to remain a symbol of global anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements by demonstrating that the government exists for the revolution, and the revolution exists for the people. However, by not demonstrating any inclination to dismantle the Cuban Communist regime, Díaz-Canel has made himself a candidate for regime change by the neo-imperialistTrump administration, which would prefer to have a corrupt and brutal dictator that they could influence, perhaps in the mold of Fulgencio Batista (1901-1973).

On the 60^th anniversary commemorating the independence of Cuba, which took place on January 1, 2019, Raul Castro indicated that the Cuban revolution was on the right track thanks to the efforts of president Díaz-Canel. In particular, he stated that:

The revolution has not aged, it remains young.

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Global Research contributor Dr. Birsen Filip holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa.

Notes

[i] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2019-07-29/the-world-will-see-what-we-are-capable-of-doing-and-the-world-will-join-us-in-our-resistance?fbclid=IwAR2-HC-TEjAkvUxSzBL41vXicE0oLKvKiYtfrhr67ar0iSSkIxB99l2vTNw

[ii] http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2019-07-29/the-world-will-see-what-we-are-capable-of-doing-and-the-world-will-join-us-in-our-resistance?fbclid=IwAR2-HC-TEjAkvUxSzBL41vXicE0oLKvKiYtfrhr67ar0iSSkIxB99l2vTNw

[iii] https://www.globalresearch.ca/cubas-president-miguel-diaz-canel-at-the-un-general-assembly-global-capitalism-triggers-war-and-poverty/5656218

[iv] Washington imposed a commercial, economic and financial embargo on Cuba in 1962, which ‘blocked virtually all trade between the two countries and banned U.S. citizens from travelling to Cuba. The U.S. administration regarded the trade embargo as the best mechanism to achieve its objectives’ (http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cuban-revolution-the-u-s-imposed-economic-blockade-and-us-cuba-relations/5433797).

[v] ‘It is well-known that the U.S. embargo has had tremendous consequences on the development of the Cuban economy. According to Havana, the direct economic damages to Cuba attributable to the embargo would exceed $1.1 trillion11 since 1962, “taking into account the depreciation of dollar against gold”, with specific damages including the loss of earnings, monetary and financial restrictions, and social damages with regards to health, education, culture, the availability of food, etc. Additionally, “the embargo penalizes the activities of the bank and finance, insurance, petrol, chemical products, construction, infrastructures and transports, shipyard, agriculture and fishing, electronics and computing.”’ (2015, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cuban-revolution-the-u-s-imposed-economic-blockade-and-us-cuba-relations/5433797).

[vi] On November 1, 2018, 189 UN Member States voted in favour of this resolution, while only the US and Israel opposed it.

[vii] https://www.globalresearch.ca/enacting-title-iii-helms-burton-act-us-revisits-cold-war-era/5671648

[viii] ‘Under the Obama agreement, diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba were officially normalized on December 17, 2014. Additionally, a number of trade and travel agreements were signed between the two countries, including contracts for business deals between Havana and 60 American companies. These measures contributed a 60% increase in American tourism to the island between 2014 and 2016.’ (https://www.globalresearch.ca/enacting-title-iii-helms-burton-act-us-revisits-cold-war-era/5671648)

[ix] https://twitter.com/DiazCanelB/status/1136031607041789952

[x] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/10/usa.comment

[xi] President Díaz-Canel’s first major reform was to update the 1976 Constitution last February in a manner that benefits the Cuban people.