Within 13 hours, two mass shooting took place—in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio—killing 31 innocent people and injuring twice as many. We normally hear about these horrifying incidents, express sorrow and bewilderment, talk about gun control, and move on. Politicians, including Trump, dispatch their old and tired expressions of condolences and offer prayers to console the bereaved families of the victims. But then we go about our daily routine, knowing that the next mass shooting looms as if it were a natural phenomenon like a thunderstorm, in the face of which we can do nothing. And tragically, the vicious cycle continues.
This time, however, something far more sinister and profoundly troubling is at play. Race, guns, and immigration were so artfully combined by a racist president who is sworn not to pass meaningful gun control laws to please his base, promotes racism to divide the country, and calls Hispanic immigrants “invaders” to make them targets. During the past few months, Trump spent over a million dollars on Facebook ads with the word “invasion” in big letters to spread fear among his constituents and create an atmosphere ripe for violence against people of color.
In the first 216 days of this year, 251 mass shootings took place—killing over 520 people and injuring at least 2,000. Is it just a coincidence that of the ten worst mass shootings in American history, five took place since 2016? Can anyone suggest that Trump has nothing to do with it? Leave it of course to Trump to blame the press, mental illness, and even video games of being behind the frequency of mass shootings.
Darker and more ominous days await us. Mass shootings cannot be addressed in isolation but in the context of the general environment in which we are living. The country is politically divided, our values are being stomped on, racism is consuming our social fabric, white supremacists parade their bigotry with pride, and the president contributes to the epidemic of gun violence by spreading hate to promote his political agenda.
When a president makes racism and bigotry the order of the day, and Republican leaders condone it by virtue of their silence, it poisons our social and political organs and defies the very premise on which this country was founded.
The mass shooting in El Paso was explicitly motivated by hate, claiming there is a “Hispanic invasion of Texas”. It was a hate crime targeting Hispanics, whom Trump sees as alien, rapists and criminals, taking away jobs, sapping public resources, and above all changing the color of the country. This is the message that Trump is conveying to his white supremacist followers, that America is becoming ‘browner’ and something must be done to prevent that from happening, all while pointing the finger at Hispanic immigrants as the culprits.
True, mass shootings have occurred before and may continue for years after Trump leaves office. The degree to which mass shootings slow or escalate, however, depends not only on the passage of strict gun control laws but on the action or inaction from Trump and the Republican party, because they must bear the full responsibility for the sorry state of affairs in which we find ourselves. I do not hold my breath waiting for our racist-in-chief to do anything about it.
In fact, the precise opposite will happen. At a time of looming elections, Trump will continue to drum up his racism and dehumanizing of immigrants, and use toxic language against anybody who looks Hispanic. He believes that fomenting social division is a brilliant strategy to nurture his white supremacist base which listens to him and follows his preaching. The shooter in El Paso echoed precisely Trump’s sentiment. And while Trump is talking about some gun control legislation, neither he nor his submissive Republican Senate will consider or debate any such laws that may alienate any segment of his followers.
While the Democratic candidates for president continue to bicker about healthcare, taxes, and climate change, however important these issues maybe, they have not only ignored the need for gun control laws, but more important failed to address where the country is headed under Trump’s watch. While they labeled Trump as a racist, they have not focused on the implications of his racist utterances and how devastatingly that impacts America’s social cohesiveness and tolerance, which is the moral glue that keeps the country together.
The Republicans, on the other hand, seem to have totally abdicated their moral responsibility and resolved to enable Trump and use him to promote their socio-political and economic agenda. The fact that America’s international standing is at an all-time low and domestic social disintegration is alarmingly unfolding does not seem to bother the Republicans, who put their personal and party interest above the nation’s.
Just imagine what might happen if Trump loses the next election? Having polarized the country politically to the degree that he has, his poisonous rhetoric against people of color, concoction of a Hispanic invasion, alignment with white supremacists, and catering to his base has created an extraordinarily ominous environment that invites extremism and violence.
Although at this juncture enacting gun control laws remains critically important, they are not enough to remedy the damage that Trump has done to America. Under his watch, America has lost its soul. He has sown hatred, nurtured divisiveness, and pitted one segment of the American people against the other. Antisemitism has reached a new high, people of color are targets of disdain and discrimination, corruption and obstruction of justice is at the top, and alas, mass shootings are further escalating.
Trump will be damned by history for tearing the country apart, and as long as he is in power, we should expect that America’s values and its moral standing will continue to degrade potentially to a point of no return.
Trump is dangerous, and the American public must unseat him to save America’s soul before it’s too late.
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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected]Web: www.alonben-meir.com
Today, we are in the grip of a globalised system of capitalism which drives narcissism, domination, ego, anthropocentrism, speciesism and plunder. A system that is using up oil, water and other resources much faster than they can ever be regenerated. We have poisoned the rivers and oceans, destroyed natural habitats, driven wildlife species to (the edge of) extinction and have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere with seemingly devastating effects.
With its never-ending quest for profit, capitalism thrives on the exploitation of peoples and the environment. It strides the world hand in glove with militarism, with the outcome being endless destabilisations, conflicts and wars over finite resources and the capture of new markets.
This is sold to the masses as part of an ongoing quest to achieve human well-being, measured in terms of endless GDP growth, itself based on an ideology that associates such growth with corporate profit, boosted by stock buy-backs, financial speculation, massive arms deals, colonialism masquerading as philanthropy, manipulated and rigged markets, corrupt and secretive trade deals, outsourced jobs and a resource-grabbing militarism.
That such a parasitical system could ever bring about a ‘happy’ human condition for the majority is unfathomable.
Over the last 70 years, material living standards in the West have improved, but how that wealth was obtained and how it is then distributed is what really matters. Take the case of the UK.
While much of manufacturing has been outsourced to cheap labour economies, welfare, unions and livelihoods have been attacked. Massive levels of tax evasion/avoidance persist and neoliberal policies have resulted in privatisation, deregulation and the spiralling of national and personal debt. Moreover, the cost of living has increased as public assets have been sold off to profiteering cartels and taxpayers’ money has been turned into corporate welfare for a corrupt banking cartel.
Meanwhile, the richest 1,000 families in the UK saw their net worth more than double shortly after the 2008 financial crisis, the worst recession since the Great Depression, while the rest of the population is confronted with ‘austerity’, poverty, cutbacks, reliance on food banks and job insecurity.
But let’s not forget where much of the UK’s wealth came from in the first place: some $45 trillion was sucked from India alone according to renowned economist Utsa Patnaik. Britain developed by underdeveloping India. And now the West and its (modern-day East India) corporations are in the process of ‘developing’ India by again helping themselves to the country’s public wealth and natural assets (outlined further on).
Under this system, it is clear whose happiness and well-being matters most and whose does not matter at all. According to researcher and analyst Andrew Gavin Marshall, it is the major international banking houses which control the global central banking system:
“From there, these dynastic banking families created an international network of think tanks, which socialised the ruling elites of each nation and the international community as a whole, into a cohesive transnational elite class. The foundations they established helped shape civil society both nationally and internationally, playing a major part in the funding – and thus coordinating and co-opting – of major social-political movements.”
Additional insight is set out by David Rothkopf in his 2008 book ‘Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making‘:
“The superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the world’s population. They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet-flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world, people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid … They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military… and other shadow elites.”
These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-7, G-20, NATO, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization. They decide which wars are to be fought and why and formulate global economic policy.
Tryst with destiny
In 1947, on the steps of the Red Fort in Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru spoke optimistically about India’s tryst with destiny. Free from the shackles of British colonialism, for many the future seemed bright.
But some 72 years on, we now see a headlong rush to urbanise (under World Bank directives – India is the biggest debtor nation in the history of that institution) and India’s cities are increasingly defined by their traffic-jammed flyovers cutting through fume choked neighbourhoods that are denied access to drinking water and a decent infrastructure. Privatisation and crony capitalism are the order of the day.
Away from the cities, the influence of transnational agricapital and state-corporate grabs for land are leading to violent upheaval, conflict and ecological destruction. The links between the Monsanto-Syngenta-Walmart-backed Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the associated US sanctioning and backing of the opening up of India’s nuclear sector to foreign interests show who really benefits from this.
Under the guise of ‘globalisation’, Western powers are on an unrelenting drive to plunder what they regard as ‘untapped markets’ in other areas of the globe. Foreign agricapital has been moving in on Indian food and agriculture for some time. But it first needs to eradicate the peasantry and displace the current model of production before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control.
Other sectors have not been immune to this bogus notion of development. Millions of people have been displaced to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other large-scale projects. And the full military backing of the state has been on hand to forcibly evict people.
To help open the nation to foreign capital, proponents of economic neoliberalism are fond of stating that ‘regulatory blockages’ must be removed. If particular ‘blockages’ stemming from legitimate protest, rights to land and dissent cannot be dealt with by peaceful means, other methods are used. And when increasing mass surveillance or widespread ideological attempts to discredit and smear does not secure compliance or dilute the power of protest, brute force is on hand.
The country’s spurt of high GDP growth was partly fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population has widened enormously to the point where rural India consumes less calories per head of population than it did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, unlike farmers, corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans but have failed to spur job creation.
Millions of small-scale and marginal farmers are suffering economic distress as the sector is deliberately made financially non-viable for them. Veteran rural reporter P Sainath says what this has resulted in is not so much an agrarian crisis but a crisis of civilisation proportions, given that the bulk of the population still lives in the countryside and relies on agriculture or related activities for an income.
Independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land is to be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and remaining farmers will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.
US agribusiness corporations are spearheading this process, the very companies that fuel and thrive on a five-year US taxpayer-funded farm bill subsidy of around $500 billion. Their industrial model in the US is based on the overproduction of certain commodities often sold at prices below the cost of production and dumped on the rest of the world, thereby undermining farmers’ livelihoods and agriculture in other countries, not least India.
It is a model that can only survive thanks to taxpayer handouts and only function by externalising its massive health, environmental and social costs. And it’s a model that only leads to the destruction of rural communities and jobs, degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water, water shortages and spiralling rates of ill health.
We hear certain politicians celebrate the fact India has jumped so many places in the ‘ease of doing business’ table. This term along with ‘foreign direct investment’, making India ‘business friendly’ and ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ embody little more than the tenets of US neoliberal fundamentalism wrapped in benign-sounding words.
Of Course, as Gavin Andrew Marshall notes, US foundations have played a major part in shaping policies and co-opting civil society and major social-political movements across the world, including in India. AsChester Bowles, former US ambassador to India, says:
“Someday someone must give the American people a full report of the Ford Foundation in India. The several million dollars in total Ford expenditures in the country do not tell 1/10 of the story.”
Taking inflation into account, that figure would now be much greater. Maybe people residing in India should be given a full report of Ford’s activities too as well as the overall extent of US ‘intervention’ in the country.
A couple of years ago, economist Norbert Haring (in his piece A well-kept open secret: Washington is behind India’s brutal experiment of abolishing most cash) outlined the influence of USAID and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in furthering the incorporation of India into the US’s financial (and intelligence) architecture. But this is the type of thing just the tip of a very large iceberg that’s been going on for many decades.
After the recent general election, India seems destined to continue to capitulate to a programme that suits the needs of foreign capital for another five years. However, the focus is often on what India should or should not do. It’s not as if alternatives to current policies do not exist, but as Jason Hickel wrote in The Guardian back in 2017, it really is time that the richer countries led the way by ‘de-developing’ and reorienting their societies to become less consumption based. A laudable aim given the overexploitation of the planets resources, the foreign policy implications (conflict and war) and the path to environmental suicide we are on. However, we must first push back against those forces which resist this.
On 15 August, India commemorates independence from British rule. Many individuals and groups are involved in an ongoing struggle in India to achieve genuine independence from exploitation and human and environmental degradation. It’s a struggle for freedom and a tryst with destiny that’s being fought throughout the world by many, from farmers and indigenous peoples to city dwellers, against the same system and the same forces of brutality and deceit.
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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.
India hitherto thought that the US needed it more than the reverse and that’s why took its nascent military-strategic alliance with it for granted by trying to play “hardball” in pressing for a better trade deal, yet it’s now finding out the hard way that it isn’t America’s exclusive ally after Washington decided to follow in Moscow’s footsteps and “balance” South Asian affairs by providing $125 million worth of F-16s to its rivals in the global pivot state of Pakistan.
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The Indian Ministry of External Affairs expressed “grave concern” to the US last week over the decision taken by their country’s new military-strategic ally to provide $125 million worth of F-16s to the global pivot state of Pakistan, something that totally caught New Delhi’s decision makers off guard after they hitherto assumed that Washington needed them more than the reverse and therefore wouldn’t arm their chief rival ever again. India has been under the Bollywood-crafted illusion that it’s the indispensable component of the US’ so-called “Indo-Pacific” strategy for “containing” China, especially after the summer 2017 standoff in the Donglang/Doklam Plateau, so it took its nascent alliance with it for granted by recently trying to play “hardball” in pressing for a better trade deal. That was absolutely unacceptable to the US’ billionaire businessman president who demands full support on his country’s terms when it comes to “containing” China in the military and economic domains, which when coupled with India’s refusal to reconsider its S-400 deal with Russia, provoked the US to play some “hardball” of its own.
The US stood in shock for the past several years as Russia advanced its 21st-century grand strategy of becoming the supreme “balancing” force in Afro-Eurasia by masterfully exploiting America’s missteps in the Mideast and beyond, but Moscow’s “Return to South Asia” earlier this year inspired Washington to recalibrate its regional strategy if it wanted any chance of succeeding with its “Indo-Pacific” plans. The reemergence of Russia as a credible “balancing” alternative to the US and China in this part of the world satisfies a crucial strategic demand that was sorely lacking up until that point and negatively impacts on the prospects of America’s zero-sum plans succeeding there. As such, it was only a matter of time before the US pragmatically decided to engage in its own “balancing” act — largely in response to India’s recalcitrance in accepting the comprehensive partnership deal on offer — by entering into a fast-moving rapprochement with Pakistan, whose irreplaceable peacemaking role in Afghanistan is much more immediately important for Trump than anything that India could provide.
The writing was on the wall for the past few months already ever since India was dealt a bloody nose by Pakistan earlier this year, which prompted the US to debunk New Delhi’s conspiracy theory that Islamabad used American-provided F-16s against it during their famous dogfight in late February. The issue is super sensitive for India because it can’t publicly accept that a JF-17 fighter jet that Pakistan jointly produced with China was responsible for the downing of its Russian-provided MiG-21, nor did it want the US “rebalancing” its regional strategy by reverting back to its historically strong strategic partnership with Pakistan in the aftermath of that embarrassing event, which is why the US’ decision to sell more F-16s to Pakistan is a stinging slap in India’s face. So too, for that matter, is the ambitious commitment that Trump made during his summit with Pakistani Prime Minister Khan last month to increase trade between their two countries by a factor of twenty, which would make the US a de-facto stakeholder in CPEC and explain its interest in mediating the Kashmir Conflict.
Everything is going from bad to worse for India and faster than it could have ever thought possible, all due to the fact that its over-hyped policy of so-called “multi-alignment” has totally failed to bring any tangible dividends for it over the years. India always intended to pivot towards the US at the expense of its “fellow” Russian and Chinese BRICS partners but thought that it could hide behind this “publicly plausible” euphemism the entire time, yet Modi made a serious blunder earlier this year by wanting to play “hardball” with Trump and therefore ruined years of hard diplomatic work in an instant. India’s relations with those three leading Great Powers will therefore never be the same after the self-inflicted damage that he’s done to his country’s reputation through his botched “balancing” act. All of this was entirely avoidable too had India not been blinded by the Bollywood narrative that it’s supposedly a “superpower” despite close to one million children dying there a year from lack of water, sanitation, proper nutrition, and basic health services.
India’s finding out the hard way that it’s not the US’ exclusive ally, nor is it Russia or China’s exclusive one either for that matter. In fact, by trying to be “friends with everyone” through its disastrous policy of “multi-alignment”, it ended up earning each of their distrust by openly “balancing” against whichever one of them was the targeted third party in its various bilateral arrangements, which is no easy feat to pull off when one would ordinarily think that India would naturally be the object of fierce competition between them because of its geostrategic potential. Instead, India defied conventional International Relations theory by behaving as though it’s the most important country in the world and expecting that it could do whatever it wants without consequence because it assumed that everyone else needs it more than the reverse. That fatal flaw in “thinking” is responsible for the seemingly never-ending series of Indian debacles as of late, and should be a lesson to all interested scholars of International Relations about the wrong way to carry out a “balancing” act.
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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.
The FBI has published a document that concludes that “conspiracy theories” can motivate believers to commit crimes.
Considering the growing acceptance of pre-emptive arrest, that is, arresting someone before they can commit a crime that they are suspected of planning to commit, challenging official explanations, such as those offered for the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King or the official explanation for 9/11, can now result in monitoring by authorities with a view to finding a reason for pre-emptive arrest.Presidents George W. Bush and Obama created the police state precedents of suspension of habeas corpus and assassination of citizens on suspicion alone without due process.If Americans can be preemptively detained indefinitely and preemptively assassinated,Americans can expect to be preemptively imprisoned for crimes that they did not commit.
As Lawrence Stratton and I explained in our book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, the historic achievement of forging law into a shield of the people is being reversed in our time as law is being reforged into a weapon in the hands of the government.
The FBI document says that conspiracy theories “are usually at odds with official or prevailing explanations of events.”Note the use of “official” and “prevailing.”Official explanations are explanations provided by governments.Prevailing explanations are the explanations that the media repeats.Examples of official and prevailing explanations are: Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, Assad’s use of chemical weapons, Iranian nukes, Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the official explanation by the US government for the destruction of Libya.If a person doubts official explanations such as these, that person is a “conspiracy theorist.”
Official and prevailing explanations do not have to be consistent with facts.It is enough that they are official and prevailing.Whether or not they are true is irrelevant.Therefore, a person who stands up for the truth can be labeled a conspiracy theorist, monitored, and perhaps pre-emptively arrested.
Consider 9/11.No forensic investigation of 9/11 was ever officially conducted.Instead the destruction of the buildings was blamed on Osama bin Laden, and scenarios and simulations were created to support the allegation, not to find the truth.Architects, engineers, scientists, pilots, and first responders on site cannot reconcile the official prevailing explanation with the facts.The scientific and testimonial evidence that they have produced is dismissed as “conspiracy theory.”It is those experts who stand on the evidence who are defined as conspiracy theorists, not those who created the story of Osama bin Laden’s 9/11 conspiracy.
Consider Russiagate.Here we have an alleged conspiracy between Trump and Russia that was the official prevailing explanation.Yet, to believe in the Russiagate conspiracy did not make one a conspiracy theorist as this conspiracy was the official prevailing explanation.But to doubt the Russiagate conspiracy did make one a conspiracy theorist.
What the FBI report does, intentionally or unintentionally, is to define a conspiracist as a person who doubts official explanations.In other words, it is a way of preventing any accountability of government.Whatever the government says, no matter how obvious a lie, will have to be accepted as fact or we will be put on a list to be monitored for preemptive arrest.
In effect, the FBI’s document reduces the First Amendment, that is, free speech, to the right to repeat official and prevailing explanations. Any other speech is a conspiratorial belief that can lead to the commission of a crime.
Every American should be greatly concerned that the government in Washington does not see this FBI document as an open invitation to tyranny, repudiate it, and demand its recall.
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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.
The war on Syria is a war against children, and men, and women. It is a war against Christians, and Muslims, and civilization itself. It is a war for terrorism and sectarianism and extremist ideologies. It is a war for dictatorship, permanent war, and enduring poverty. It is a war that seeks to destroy Syria as a functioning state, to balkanize, to loot, to plunder.
It is a war that empties Western treasuries, and impoverishes the aggressors, the countries that commit Supreme International War Crimes as policy.The West and its agencies that are perpetrating this holocaust are degrading themselves, and humanity. Silence and compliance from Western populations makes monsters of us all.
Rare glimpses of what is really happening on the ground in Syria are lightning flashes that tear apart the dark nights of Western war propaganda. Reverend Ashdown has been to Syria numerous times during the war, and he is imminently qualified to offer this assessment of the retrograde barbarity that we, in the West, support, beneath the lies of “humanitarianism”:
“Syria is home to the most diverse Christian presence in the Middle East. All five ‘families’ of the Christian Church, and the Antiochene Patriarchates of the Syriac Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox and Greek Melkite Churches are situated in the country, whose State Constitution guarantees freedom of religious expression and worship. These Christian communities have coexisted for centuries alongside diverse expressions of Islam to create a society noted for its cultural and religious plurality. Ever since the beginning of the current conflict, Christians, along with Muslims who do not follow the radicalised ideology of the jihadists whom western and gulf nations support, have been specifically targeted, with Christian villages being besieged, ethnically cleansed, and constantly attacked by the multiple ‘rebel’ groups. Nationally, it is estimated that the Christian population has been more than halved during the conflict, with all the remaining Christian population living in the safety of government-controlled areas where they live peacefully alongside other members of Syrian society, and where Christian and Muslim leaders stand side by side promoting tolerance, reconciliation and the provision of welfare for all affected by the conflict.”
Vanessa Beeley, too, has studied the war from inside Syria. In the interview below we witness the violent struggle of Syrian Christians who are defending themselves, and Christianity, from the vicious assaults of Western-supported terrorists.
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net.
Featured image is from Vanessa Beeley
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
In what would be Turkey’s third cross-border military operation in Syria since the war began, in as many years, Erdogan announced on Sunday that he would be launching a military operation east of the Euphrates river, to push back Kurdish militias on Turkey’s southern border.
Although Erdogan did not set a timeframe, preparations have been underway for well over a month. Increased deployment of Turkish military forces along with weaponry, and tanks, etc. have been reported by various sources, on the Turkish side of the southern border with Syria.
Preparations are also underway by Kurdish militias, to counter any possible Turkish aggression. Both sides have said that if the other attacks they will be ready to respond.
The same announcement, regarding a military operation east of the Euphrates, was made by Erdogan over nine months ago, but was then called off due to talks with US President Donald Trump who agreed to set up a safe zone on Turkey’s border to appease Erdogan. However, this never came into fruition, and a buffer zone was not created because of a difference of opinion on the depth. Erdogan now feels the US is stalling, and his latest threats seem to indicate that his patience is running thin.
Some believe that the chances of Erdogan carrying out his mission this time, are higher because he has notified Russia and the US, in advance of his plan.
However, if Turkey carries out this third operation, the outcome will most likely not be a swift defeat and take over by Turkish armed forces and their terrorist ally the Free Syrian Army (FSA) like we have seen in the past. The stakes are also much higher due to the presence of US troops, intelligence officers and US personnel stationed in northeastern Syria.
On Tuesday, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Espersaid that
“the U.S. intends to prevent any unilateral invasion by Turkey into northern Syria, saying any such move by the Turks would be unacceptable.”
Esper seemed hopeful that negotiations and talks would lead to some sort of agreement but did not disclose what that could be.
Some speculate that specific airstrikes targeting Kurdish militia installations are more likely to occur, than a unilateral land invasion. The demographics are such that all of the various ethnicities whether they be Syrian Muslims, Assyrians, Armenians, Kurds, Arameans, etc. would most likely bond together against any Turkish aggression.
The first cross-border Turkish operation Euphrates Shield in 2017, focused on targeting a “terror corridor” made up of Daesh and Kurdish fighters further east from Afrin along its southern frontier with Syria. After completing that operation, Turkey set up local systems of governance in the swath of land captured, stretching from the area around Azaz — located to the northeast of Afrin — to the Euphrates River and protected by Turkish forces present there.
The second, Operation Olive Branch, which began January 2018 and was completed in two months with Afrin being captured by the Turkish Armed Forces and their ally the Free Syrian Army. They quickly established control over Afrin and all of the villages that had remained under the control of Kurdish YPG (the People’s Protection Unit) north and northwest of the city. Many YPG fighters and their families fled to government-held parts of Aleppo.
In primarily the second operation, YPG fighters felt abandoned and betrayed by the US who stated that they would not get involved and seemingly allowed Turkey to carry out its operations without much objection. There was a noticeable silence from Russian and Syrian forces as well.
In order to understand Turkey’s contentions with the Kurdish militia’s it’s important to clarify the major players. The YPG is a Kurdish-majority militia that is the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), a Kurdish democratic confederalist political party in northeastern Syria. The YPG is the Syrian offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which is an organization based in Turkey and Iraq that has been engaged in armed conflicts with the Turkish state since 1984.
Turkey considers all these Kurdish organizations to be terrorists and has urged the United States for years to sever ties with them and has demanded a buffer zone. Both the United States and Turkey view the PKK as a terrorist organization.
The United States justified its military and economic support for the YPG by claiming they were the most reliable fighters in Syria against Daesh. Kurdish factions have been used throughout history to create chaos in the Middle East.
To disassociate the YPG from the PKK, General Raymond Thomas, the commander of the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM), revealed — at a Security Forum on July 21, 2017 at the Aspen Institute — that he personally discussed the importance of changing its name with the YPG. As he states in this video (watch below), he was impressed that they included the word “democratic” in their rebranding: their new name, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), would help them enter into political negotiations, where they had been excluded previously owing to their association with the PKK.
Recently tensions have been high between the United States and Turkey over the latter’s purchase of the S-400 missile defense system from Russia which the former disapproved of and then subsequently removed the latter from the F-35 fighter jet program. The United States has also threatened to impose sanctions if Turkey activates the S-400 system which Erdogan has stated they have every intention of doing by April 2020.
On Monday, an American military delegation met with Turkish officials in Ankara to continue negotiations and discuss an alternative Turkish military operation which wouldn’t threaten U.S. troops stationed in the area. The U.S. is urging Turkey not to carry out its proclaimed mission.
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After a month of intensifying criticism from far-right President Jair Bolsonaro concerning data revealing a spike in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon over recent months, the Brazilian President has fired the head of the government agency in charge of tracking forest loss, raising concerns over the future of an institution recognized nationally and internationally for its cutting-edge satellite-imaging and monitoring program.
On August 2, Bolsonaro fired the head of the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE), Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão. The announcement was made by Galvão himself after a meeting with the Minister of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication, Marcos Pontes.
Image on the right: Physicist Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, former head of the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE). Image courtesy of Giro720 CC BY-SA 4.0.
“I will be fired… The way I reacted to the president[‘s accusations of data inaccuracy and data manipulation] has created an embarrassment that is untenable,” Galvão told journalists in Brasília.
In July, INPE issued an alert identifying deforestation and degradation totaling some 2,072 square kilometers (800 square miles) in June for Legal Amazonia — a federal designation that includes all or parts of nine Brazilian states — as detected by DETER, the institute’s real-time detection system. INPE noted that DETER alerts should not be used as exacting measures of deforestation rates compared year-to-year; rather the figures aim to support surveillance and enforcement.
However, a 2018-2019 month-to-month comparison does show a drastic uptick in deforestation. According to DETER, Brazil’s Amazonian deforestation in June 2019 was 88 percent greater than for the same month in 2018, while deforestation in the first half of July was 68 percent above that for the entire month of July 2018.
INPE is not scheduled to post its detailed 2019 annual deforestation analysis (conducted between August and July by its PRODES satellite monitoring system) until later this year. PRODES determines annual deforestation using NASA Landsat satellite imaging. Data gathered from August 2017 to July 2018 detected an increase in deforestation of 7,536 square kilometers (2,910 square miles) in Legal Amazonia, which represented an increase of 8.5 percent compared to 2017, measured from August 2016 to July 2017, when an area of 6,947 square kilometers (2,682 square miles) was cleared.
Experts recently contacted by Mongabay endorsed INPE’s cutting-edge satellite-imaging used to track forest loss and dismissed the Bolsonaro administration’s accusations of data manipulation. The government has offered no significant evidenceto back up its charges that INPE data is inaccurate.
Beyond challenging INPE data, Bolsonaro has also criticized the way INPE works, claiming that he should have been notified before monthly deforestation statistics were released. The day before Galvão’s firing, Bolsonaro accused him of working in conspiracy with “an NGO.” The administration has repeatedly accused international nonprofits working in the Brazilian Amazon of having undue influence over Brazil’s national environmental policies — including NGO participation in the implementation of the Amazon Fund, long seen as a fairly successful initiative for curbing Amazon deforestation.
“If all this devastation you accuse us of doing, and that has already been done in the past, [were true] the Amazon would have been extinct,” said Bolsonaro in a press conference on August 1 when he dismissed INPE’s figures. “I am convinced that INPE’s data is [a] liar.… In our feeling, this is not consistent with reality. It even looks like he’s [Galvão’s] on duty of an NGO,” he added.
Worrying future
Galvão’s removal triggered an outcry from scientists, NGOs, federal prosecutors and INPE officials.
“Bolsonaro knows that his government is primarily responsible for the current scenario of destruction of the Amazon. The dismissal of INPE’s head is just an act of revenge against those who show the truth,” said Márcio Astrini, public policy coordinator at Greenpeace Brasil, in a statement.
“The new government has been implementing in the country an anti-environmental project, which scrap[s] the State’s ability to combat deforestation and favor[s] those who commit environmental crime. And now, when it comes to facing the consequences of his decisions, he [the president] tries to hide the truth shamefully and blame others,” Astrini added.
Bolsonaro’s cabinet did not comment on Galvão’s removal. Instead, it forwarded a statement from the Ministry of Science, Technology, Innovation and Communication that confirmed the dismissal, thanked Galvão for his work and stated that the choice of a new head will be made based on “the necessary merit [required for] the position.”
Two INPE officials who talked to Mongabay under condition of anonymity expressed “serious concerns” not only about who will next head the institution, but also about the future of INPE’s decades-long monitoring system.
“I’m very concerned about the future. I worry greatly about ensuring that the systems will keep working as they are, with transparency… I hope the government won’t stop our work,” the INPE official told Mongabay.
“Galvão’s dismissal was shocking to us. It’s scary to have a president who discredits a scientific institution that has its work recognized worldwide, simply due to his political interests… It is a complete disrespect to people who are dedicated to science, education, culture. We are being scolded. The scientists are scared,” a second INPE official said.
According to this official, the government’s attacks against INPE seem a strategy to discredit the institution in order to pave the way to set up a private system to monitor the country’s deforestation. In March, the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper reported that Environment Minister Ricardo Salles was preparing an alternative private system to that employed by INPE, at a cost of at least $8.5 million, using satellite imagery to be provided by Planet, a U.S.-based company. According to the newspaper, INPE currently pays some $150,000 annually for NASA Landsat satellite imagery that it uses to assess PRODES annual deforestation rates, while DETER alerts use images from CBERS, Sino-Brazilian satellites, which are free.
Galvão’s removal and his replacement have yet to be published in the country’s official gazette, Diário Oficial da União. In an interview with Radio Eldorado on August 5, Pontes said that INPE’s new head will be announced by August 6. According to the minister, an Air Force officer and a PhD researcher with deforestation expertise top the list.
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Featured image: Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in Rondônia state. This 2016 satellite image shows the smoke from fires which are typically set to clear rainforest in preparation for grazing and farming. Image courtesy of Planet Labs, Inc CC BY-SA 4.0.
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One day after China finally snapped, and demonstratively refused to intervene and keep the CNH above 7.00 vs the dollar, escalating the trade war into a currency war, stocks are tumbling and Wall Street analysts – all of whom had been bullish until now – are scrambling to adjust their narrative.
China’s Commerce Ministry announced Tuesday that the Asian country will suspend the purchase of U.S. agricultural goods in response to the recent announcement that the President Donald Trump administration will increase tariffs to Chinese exports.
China is rising, heading toward becoming the world’s leading economy — already No. 1 ahead of the US on a purchase price basis, what a basket of goods costs in both countries.
Over this weekend, China’s Yuan currency broke out of its band and devalued to more than 7 to $1. At the same time China announced it would not purchase more US agricultural goods. The Trump-US Neocon trade strategy has just imploded.
The trade war and technological competition with China are symptomatic of a much larger issue: a dangerous gridlock in US-China relations that may become permanent, with dire consequences not just for the two countries’ economies but also for the global economy and quite possibly East Asia’s and international security.
Financial markets around the world fell on Friday as a result of the shock wave from US President Trump’s surprise announcement Thursday that he intended to impose a 10 percent tariff from September 1 on a further $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.
Don’t look now, but there is a new monetary craze going on in some parts of the world, and it is the new so-called ‘unconventional’ monetary policy adopted by some central banks to push interest rates to ultra-low levels, and even into negative territory.
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August 6th and 9th mark 74 years since the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where only one nuclear bomb dropped on each city caused the deaths of up to 146,000 people in Hiroshima and 80,000 people in Nagasaki. Today, with the US decision to walk away from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) negotiated with the Soviet Union, we are once again staring into the abyss of one of the most perilous nuclear challenges since the height of the Cold War.
With its careful verification and inspections, the INF Treaty eliminated a whole class of missiles that threatened peace and stability in Europe. Now the US is leaving the treaty on the grounds that Moscow is developing and deploying a missile with a range prohibited by the treaty. Russia denies the charges and accuses the US of violating the treaty. The US rejected repeated Russian requests to work out the differences in order to preserve the Treaty.
The US withdrawal should be seen in the context of the historical provocations visited upon the Soviet Union and now Russia by the United States and the nations under the US nuclear “umbrella” in NATO and the Pacific. The US has been driving the nuclear arms race with Russia from the dawn of the nuclear age:
In 1946 Truman rejected Stalin’s offer to turn the bomb over to the newly formed UN under international supervision, after which the Russians made their own bomb.
Reagan rejected Gorbachev’s offer to give up Star Wars as a condition for both countries to eliminate all their nuclear weapons when the wall came down and Gorbachev released all of Eastern Europe from Soviet occupation, miraculously, without a shot.
The US pushed NATO right up to Russia’s borders, despite promises when the wall fell that NATO would not expand it one inch eastward of a unified Germany.
Clinton bombed Kosovo, bypassing Russia’s veto in the UN Security Council and violating the UN treaty we signed never to commit a war of aggression against another nation unless under imminent threat of attack.
Clinton refused Putin’s offer to each cut our massive nuclear arsenals to 1000 bombs each and call all the others to the table to negotiate for their elimination, provided we stopped developing missile sites in Romania.
Bush walked out of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and put the new missile base in Romania with another to open shortly under Trump in Poland, right in Russia’s backyard.
Bush and Obama blocked any discussion in 2008 and 2014 on Russian and Chinese proposals for a space weapons ban in the consensus-bound Committee for Disarmament in Geneva.
Obama’s rejected Putin’s offer to negotiate a treaty to ban cyber war.
Trump now walked out of the INF Treaty.
From Clinton through Trump, the US never ratified the 1992 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty as Russia has, and has performed more than 20 underground sub-critical tests on the Western Shoshone’s sanctified land at the Nevada test site. Since plutonium is blown up with chemicals that don’t cause a chain reaction, the US claims these tests don’t violate the treaty.
Obama, and now Trump, pledged over one trillion dollars for the next 30 years for two new nuclear bomb factories in Oak Ridge and Kansas City, as well as new submarines, missiles, airplanes, and warheads!
What has Russia had to say about these US affronts to international security and negotiated treaties? Putin at his State of the Nation address in March 2018 said:
I will speak about the newest systems of Russian strategic weapons that we are creating in response to the unilateral withdrawal of the United States of America from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty and the practical deployment of their missile defence systems both in the US and beyond their national borders.
I would like to make a short journey into the recent past. Back in 2000, the US announced its withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. Russia was categorically against this. We saw the Soviet-US ABM Treaty signed in 1972 as the cornerstone of the international security system. Under this treaty, the parties had the right to deploy ballistic missile defence systems only in one of its regions. Russia deployed these systems around Moscow, and the US around its Grand Forks land-based ICBM base. Together with the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, the ABM treaty not only created an atmosphere of trust but also prevented either party from recklessly using nuclear weapons, which would have endangered humankind, because the limited number of ballistic missile defence systems made the potential aggressor vulnerable to a response strike.
We did our best to dissuade the Americans from withdrawing from the treaty.
All in vain. The US pulled out of the treaty in 2002. Even after that we tried to develop constructive dialogue with the Americans. We proposed working together in this area to ease concerns and maintain the atmosphere of trust. At one point, I thought that a compromise was possible, but this was not to be. All our proposals, absolutely all of them, were rejected. And then we said that we would have to improve our modern strike systems to protect our security.
Despite promises made in the 1970 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that the five nuclear weapons states – US, UK, Russia, France, China – would eliminate their nuclear weapons while all the other nations of the world promised not to get them (except for India, Pakistan, and Israel, which also acquired nuclear weapons), there are still nearly 14,000 nuclear bombs on the planet. All but 1,000 of them are in the US and Russia, while the seven other countries, including North Korea, have about 1000 bombs between them. If the US and Russia can’t settle their differences and honor their promise in the NPT to eliminate their nuclear weapons, the whole world will continue to live under what President Kennedy described as a nuclear Sword of Damocles, threatened with unimaginable catastrophic humanitarian suffering and destruction.
To prevent a nuclear catastrophe, in 2016, 122 nations adopted a new Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). It calls for a ban on nuclear weapons just as the world had banned chemical and biological weapons. The ban treaty provides a pathway for nuclear weapons states to join and dismantle their arsenals under strict and effective verification. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which received the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts, is working for the treaty to enter into force by enrolling 50 nations to ratify the treaty. As of today, 70 nations have signed the treaty and 24 have ratified it, although none of them are nuclear weapons states or the US alliance states under the nuclear umbrella.
With this new opportunity to finally ban the bomb and end the nuclear terror, let us tell the truth about what happened between the US and Russia that brought us to this perilous moment and put the responsibility where it belongs to open up a path for true peace and reconciliation so that never again will anyone on our planet ever be threatened with the terrible consequences of nuclear war.
Here are some actions you can take to ban the bomb:
Support the ICAN Cities Appeal to take a stand in favor of the ban treaty
Support the Code Pink Divest From the War Machine Campaign
Distribute Warheads To Windmills, How to Pay for the Green New Deal, a new study addressing the need to prevent the two greatest dangers facing our planet: nuclear annihilation and climate destruction.
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Alice Slater, author and nuclear disarmament advocate, is a member of the Coordinating Committee of World Beyond War and UN NGO Representative of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.
When will Americans start to wake up and realize what is happening? At the end of last week, President Trump announced that the U.S. would be imposing a 10 percent tariff on 300 billion dollars worth of Chinese imports, and that marked a dramatic escalation in our trade war with China. This move by Trump came as a total shock to Chinese officials, and global financial markets were thrown into a state of turmoil. Since that announcement, we have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, because we knew that the Chinese would retaliate. But honestly, very few of the experts expected something like this. On Monday, China announced that it is going to completely stop buying U.S. agricultural products…
China confirmed reports that it was pulling out of U.S. agriculture as a weapon in the ongoing trade war.
A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said Chinese companies have stopped purchasing U.S. agricultural products in response to President Trump’s new 10% tariffs on $300 billion of Chinese goods.
This is essentially a trade war equivalent of a nuclear bomb.
If the Chinese would have slapped U.S. agricultural products with tariffs, that would have been a proportional response. But to quit buying them entirely is an unprecedented escalation in a trade war that is really starting to spiral out of control.
And it is also clearly a political attack on President Trump. The Chinese know that Trump is highly popular in rural areas, and this ban on U.S. agricultural products is going to severely hurt farmers in rural areas all across the United States.
U.S. voters tend to be more influenced by their bank accounts than by anything else, and so this is a smart strategic move by the Chinese if they would like to see a Democrat get elected in 2020.
In 2017, the Chinese bought 19.5 billion dollars worth of U.S. agricultural products, and that number dropped to just 9.1 billion dollars in 2018.
Now that number is going to zero, and according to Farm Bureau Federation President Zippy Duvall this latest move by China is going to be “a body blow to thousands of farmers and ranchers who are already struggling to get by.”
Please say a prayer for our farmers, because they really need it.
In addition to ending purchases of U.S. agricultural products, the Chinese also allowed the value of the yuan to decline dramatically on Monday. This really rattled global financial markets, and shortly thereafter U.S. Treasury officials formally designated China as a “currency manipulator”. The following comes directly from the official website of the Treasury Department…
The Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988 requires the Secretary of the Treasury to analyze the exchange rate policies of other countries. Under Section 3004 of the Act, the Secretary must “consider whether countries manipulate the rate of exchange between their currency and the United States dollar for purposes of preventing effective balance of payments adjustments or gaining unfair competitive advantage in international trade.” Secretary Mnuchin, under the auspices of President Trump, has today determined that China is a Currency Manipulator.
As a result of this determination, Secretary Mnuchin will engage with the International Monetary Fund to eliminate the unfair competitive advantage created by China’s latest actions.
This is the first time since the 1990s that the Treasury Department has used this designation on any of our trading partners, and it is the kind of move that would not be made unless all hopes for a trade deal were completely gone.
Of course the Chinese wouldn’t have made the moves that they made either if they were still holding out hope for a negotiated solution. According to one market analyst that was quoted by CNBC, the Chinese are “signalling that they have lost confidence that they can reach an agreement with Trump.”
So what this means is that in the short-term things are going to get bad for the global economy.
Really bad.
In the longer term, the structure of the entire global economic system could change dramatically, and this will especially be true if Donald Trump emerges triumphant in 2020. According to economist Neil Shearing, we could literally be looking at “the end of the world as we know it”…
Among the implications for more deterioration in the global picture that Shearing cites are the “disintegration of the rules-based system” that has governed international commerce since the end of the World War II, and a potential “Balkanization” of the world economy as the U.S. and China develop their own standards, tech platforms and payment systems.
“It’s too soon to say exactly how events will pan out, but this casts the escalation in the US-China trade war over the past year in an altogether more ominous light. We may be witnessing the end of the world as we know it,” he wrote.
It is difficult to imagine a world in which there is no trade between the United States and China, and many would argue that we would be far better off today if we had never gone down that road in the first place.
But now that our two economies are so deeply integrated, trying to decouple is going to be an exceedingly painful process.
If you are familiar with my work, than you already know that I am not a fan of the Chinese government at all. Something needed to be done about China, because they have been brazenly taking advantage of us and flouting the rules for decades.
Having said that, it is imperative that the American people understand that a messy breakup with China is going to cause an extraordinary amount of pain for us, for them and for the whole world.
It looks like this trade war could be the spark that plunges the global economy into utter chaos, and right now very few Americans seem to understand the true scope of the economic nightmare that appears to be headed our way.
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One day after China finally snapped, and demonstratively refused to intervene and keep the CNH above 7.00 vs the dollar, escalating the trade war into a currency war, stocks are tumbling and Wall Street analysts – all of whom had been bullish until now – are scrambling to adjust their narrative.
With the S&P dropping more than 2%, bringing its slide from the all time highs just two weeks ago to more than 5%, semiconductors which are most directly exposed to Chinese trade, and banks stocks, which are sensitive to interest rates, are among the hardest hit sectors.
As widely expected, President Trump himself joined the fray and on Monday morning tweeted about China and the Fed saying:
“China dropped the price of their currency to an almost a historic low. It’s called ‘currency manipulation.’ Are you listening Federal Reserve? This is a major violation which will greatly weaken China over time!”
In doing so, he once again confirmed that he is using trade war as leverage to get Powell to cut rates further, as BofA showed in the following simple schematic:
But while Trump’s reaction was expected, what was more interesting is how sellside analysts – until recently predicting that the S&P will enjoy smooth sailing well into the 3,000, are adjusting their trading recos now that the worst case scenario in the trade war with China has materialized. So, courtesy of Bloomberg, here are some samples of the latest sellside commentary:
Cowen, Chris Krueger
Krueger called China’s retaliation “massive,” adding that “on a scale of 1-10, it’s an 11.” He cited the Chinese government calling on state buyers to halt U.S. agricultural purchases, while there’s “increased anecdotal evidence that the Chinese government is tightening its overview of foreign firms.”
“While there were measures that could have been chosen with larger direct effects on supply chains, the announcements from Beijing represent a direct shot at the White House and seem designed for maximum political impact,” Krueger said. “ We expect a quick (and possibly intemperate) response from the White House, and consequently expect a more rapid escalation of trade tensions.”
“There now will be increased expectations that the Fed will cut again in September to offset the drag caused by this escalation in the trade war,” he added. “Such moves will only be a partial, lagged offset to the recessionary headwinds a cycle of retaliation would cause.”
BMO, Ian Lyngen
“The wait is over for those wondering how Beijing would respond to Trump’s recent tariff announcement. The result: the yuan was allowed to depreciate well beyond 7.0.”
Instructing state-owned Chinese firms to halt U.S. crop purchases triggered “the obligatory flight-to-quality,” which pushed 10-year yields to 1.74%, with two-year yields keeping pace. That was “an impressive move that suggests August will not experience the traditional summer doldrums. Who needs vacation anyway?”
“The most significant unknown at this moment,” Lyngen added, “is how much further the yuan will be allowed to fall given that it’s already the weakest since 2008.”
Morgan Stanley, Betsy Graseck
Bank investors’ eyes were “glued to the yield curve last week,” with Trump’s tariff tweet on Thursday, Graseck wrote in a note. They’re now asking about Morgan Stanley’s net interest margin (NIM), outlook.
Graseck didn’t change her NIM assumptions yet. “We bake one additional cut of 25 basis points in 2019 in-line with our economist, and bake in the 10-year at 1.75% by mid 2020,” she wrote. She’ll update NIM and earnings per share estimates “if it looks like these trade tariffs are going through as September approaches.”
Morgan Stanley, Michael Zezas
“The dynamics of U.S.-China negotiation and macro conditions mean the next round of tariffs will likely be enacted, and investors are likely to behave as if further escalation will follow in 2019 until markets price in impacts,” Zezas wrote. “This supports our core view of weaker growth and skews the Fed dovish.”
Zezas sees incentives for the U.S. to escalate quickly. If the administration “understands the Fed’s trade policy reaction function, then it may also perceive that a more rapid escalation could deliver one or more of three beneficial points ahead of the 2020 election: 1) A quicker, potentially more aggressive Fed stimulus response that could help the economy heading into the election; 2) More time to re-frame the potential economic downside; and 3) A major concession by China (not our base case, but it is, of course, a possibility).”
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China’s Commerce Ministry announced Tuesday that the Asian country will suspend the purchase of U.S. agricultural goods in response to the recent announcement that the President Donald Trump administration will increase tariffs to Chinese exports.
“It has been agreed that the State Council’s Customs Tariff Commission does not rule out import levies on newly acquired U.S. agricultural products after August 3, and related Chinese companies have suspended the purchase of U.S.agricultural products,” the Commerce Ministry said.
On July 1, Trump said that China had not fulfilled a promise to buy large volumes of U.S. farm products and vowed to impose a 10 percent fee on US$300 billion of Chinese imports starting September 1.
The Commerce Ministry considered that such fare increase is “a serious violation” of what was agreed between Trump and President Xi Jinping at the June G20 summit in Osaka.
The Chinese announcement is a response to a trade war unleashed by President Trump in 2018, which intensified when he announced new tariff measures last week, allegedly because trade negotiations had not progressed.
On Monday, as a result of unilateral actions by U.S., China let its currency weaken past the key 7-yuan-per-dollar level for the first time since April 2008.
A weaker yuan means that Chinese dollar-denominated products are cheaper, which would help China to curb the negative effect of the U.S. tariffs on its competitiveness, although the price to be paid is an increase in the cost of the goods imported by China from the rest of the world.
The trade war fueled by President Trump has already had adverse effects on the U.S. agriculture. China purchased about 14.3 million tonnes of last season’s soybean crop, the smallest purchase in the least in 11 years. In 2017, however, China bought 32.9 million tonnes of U.S. soybeans.
Neverthless, Trump’s first wave of measures did not halt the flow of exports to China. Between July 19 and Aug. 2, for instance, China bought 130,000 tonnes of soybeans, 120,000 tonnes of sorghum, 60,000 tonnes of wheat, 40,000 tonnes of pork and products, and 25,000 tonnes of cotton from the U.S.
In order to compensate for the trade-war related short-term losses, the U.S. farmers can start applying for the next round of trade aids this month; however, uncertainty is destroying their business expectations.
“There’s just so much volatility right now because nobody knows the rules of the game and nobody knows how to look at things going forward,” Derek Sawyer, a corn, soybean, wheat and cattle farmer from McPherson, Kansas, said.
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People from a variety of advocacy communities who tackle issues ranging from the assassinations of the 1960’s to vaccine safety are rightly upset by a recent NBC News.com op-ed authored by Lynn Parramore, a progressive journalist known for her insightful pieces for Alternet and other outlets. In the article, Parramore argues that those who espouse “conspiracy theories” might be displaying “narcissistic personality traits,” suffer from “low self-esteem,” and share a “negative view of humanity.” Various studies are cited in support of this claim.
As a filmmaker acquainted both with the author of the op-ed as well as a number of people from the communities under fire, I hope it’s possible to dispel some of the misconceptions on all sides and even find some common ground.
At the outset, it should be acknowledged that Parramore’s piece is an uncharacteristically harsh ad hominem smear, taking its place in a long line of similar attacks on people who have dared question—sometimes at great personal cost—a whole range of suspect official narratives over many years.
But Parramore and many journalists like her are neither assets of an intelligence service nor unthinking tools of big media; she is fully conscious of the ways in which power and wealth can be used collusively (one might even say conspiratorially) to deceive and abuse the public.
So what accounts for a piece like this one? Why does it rankle a progressive like Parramore so intensely when she hears someone mention that the U.S. military-industrial complex had the most to gain from the September 11th attacks, or that Big Pharma may be applying the same racketeering techniques to the ever-expanding vaccination schedule she discovered at play in the opioid crisis?
Those of us who have labored long to publicize state crimes against democracy have our own list of the psychological, political, and economic factors that may be preventing smart people from seeing evidence that we regard as overwhelming. The primary difficulty may lie in just how smart and thoroughly educated many of these writers are: no one who has spent a lifetime looking into the way the world works wants to think they might have missed something big.
And as Noam Chomsky has pointed out, the more educated we are, the more we are a target for state-corporate propaganda. Even journalists outside the mainstream may internalize establishment values and prejudices.
Which brings us to Parramore’s embrace of the term “conspiracy theory.” Once a neutral and little-used phrase, “conspiracy theory” was infamously weaponized in 1967 by a memo from the CIA to its station chiefs worldwide. Troubled by growing mass disbelief in the “lone nut” theory of President Kennedy’s assassination, and concerned that “[c]onspiracy theories have frequently thrown suspicion on our organization,” the agency directed its officers to “discuss the publicity problem with friendly and elite contacts (especially politicians and editors)” and to “employ propaganda assets to answer and refute the attacks of the critics. Book reviews and feature articles are particularly appropriate for this purpose.”
“In the 45 years before the CIA memo came out, the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times only 50 times, or about once per year. In the 45 years after the CIA memo, the phrase appeared 2,630 times, or about once per week.”
While it turns out that Parramore knows something about this hugely successful propaganda drive, she chose in her NBC piece to deploy the phrase as the government has come to define it, i.e., as “something that requires no consideration because it is obviously not true.” This embeds a fallacy in her argument which only spreads as she goes on.
Likewise, the authors of the studies she cites, who attempt to connect belief in “conspiracy theories” to “narcissistic personality traits,” are not immune to efforts to manipulate the wider culture. Studies are only as good as the assumptions from which they proceed; in this case the assumption was provided by an interested Federal agency.
And what of their suggested diagnosis? The DSM-5’s criteria for narcissism include “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity…a need for admiration and lack of empathy.” My experience in talking to writers and advocates who—to mention a few of the subjects Parramore cites—seek justice in the cases of the political murders of the Sixties, have profound concerns about vaccine safety, or reject the official conspiracy theory of 9/11, does not align with that characterization.
On the contrary, most of the people I know who hold these varied (and not always shared) views are deeply empathic, courageously humble, and resigned to a life on the margins of official discourse, even as they doggedly seek to publicize what they have learned. A number of them have arrived at their views through painful, direct experience, like the loss of a friendor the illness of a child, but far from having a “negative view of humanity,” as Parramore writes, most hold a deep and abiding faith in the power of regular people to see injustice and peacefully oppose it.
In that regard, they share a great deal in common with writers like Parramore: ultimately, we all want what’s best for our children, and none of us want a world ruled by unaccountable political-economic interests.
If we want to achieve that world, then we should work together to promote speech that is free from personal attacks on all sides. Even more importantly, we should all be troubled by efforts to shut down content and discussions labeled “false and misleading”on major social media platforms. Who will decide what is false and what is true? In the case of vaccines, there is actually no scientific consensus that they are safe—only a state-media consensus, emanating from groups like the CDC, which act as sales agents for Big Pharma. A terrible precedent is being set, and both unfettered scientific inquiry and free speech are suffering greatly. Today it is vaccines and “conspiracy theories” that are being banned and labeled “dangerous” by the FBI. What will we be prevented, scared, or shamed away from discussing tomorrow?
President Kennedy said: “a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.” Perhaps we should take a closer look at ideas that so frighten the powers-that-be. Far from inviting our ridicule, the people who insist that we look in these forbidden places may one day deserve our thanks.
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This article was originally published on OffGuardian.
John Kirby is a documentary filmmaker. His latest project, Four Died Trying, examines what John Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were doing in the last years of their lives which may have led to their deaths.
Oliver Stone is afraid. Afraid of war. That was the stark message conveyed by his latest film on the Ukraine crisis, ‘Revealing Ukraine’ which picked up the Grand Prix at the Taormina film festival in Italy last month. The documentary, directed by Igor Lopatonok, who also directed ‘Ukraine on Fire’ four years ago, takes us on a journey from the origins of the Ukraine conflict in 2014, to the more recent Kerch Strait incident last year where we witnessed a direct clash between Russian and Ukrainian vessels around Crimea.
Centred around interviews with Ukrainian politician Victor Medvedchuk (former Chief of Staff under President Kuchma) and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the film tries to piece together what happened during the Maidan revolution of 2014 but more importantly the legacy of these events and where the country is headed now after being plunged into an abyss of economic uncertainty.
It opens with a pertinent question from Medvedchuk’s wife – television presenter Oksana Marchenko who lost her job as a presenter of a hit Ukrainian TV show because of her relationship to Medvedchuk – ‘Why are you interested in Ukraine?’ It’s a fair question given all the other global conflict hotspots Stone could have chosen to document. But his answer gives an indication of the seriousness with which he regards the ongoing Ukraine crisis; he says:‘ I don’t want war.’
And despite accusations of being a propagandist for Putin, Stone makes it clear in the film, and in subsequent media interviews, that his goal remains fixed: to discover the truth about what happened in this highly politicised, ideologically-motivated conflict. His initial decision to support such a film he explained, was rooted in an instinctive feeling that the version of events that happened during Maidan 2014 and since, provided by the western mainstream media was flawed.
And one cannot question his balanced approach when quizzing the main protagonists. By juxtaposing Putin and Medvedchuk’s different perspectives he highlights that despite their consensus on Maidan, they are not in agreement on all issues. While Putin states that Ukrainians and Russians are ‘one people’, Medvedchuk is quite clear that they are two different separate nations and identities. And Stone doesn’t make any attempt to conceal the relationship Medvedchuk has with President Putin – reminding the Russian leader directly that he is the godfather to Medvedchuk’s daughter.
The interview with Medvedchuk is comprehensive and covers everything from the history of Ukraine to the role of George Soros in the Maidan movement. History is of course paramount to understanding the current crisis, and as Medvedchuk points out, were it not for the various foreign empires which have controlled Ukrainian territory over the centuries – from the Lithuanians to the Ottoman Turks – there would not be so many different cultural influences over the nation.
The more recent Russian empire and USSR had the most profound effect on the country, which remains to this day divided culturally and ethnically. The fact that the west of Ukraine is culturally closer to Poland and Germany and the East was traditionally under Russian influence, contradicted the very essence of the Maidan movement which denounced everything that was Russian.
This approach, was and is not sustainable in a nation for which Russian is the native language for around a third of its inhabitants. And yet this cultural genocide was born at the time of Maidan, a movement which on the surface was promoted as a project which would provide a positive, European future for Ukraine, but which in reality was built upon fascist, Neo-Nazi policies which have seen the blood spilt of thousands of Ukrainians.
And of course the hand of the West in the conflict is never far away. From the US’ Joe Biden – whose son sits on the board of Ukrainian energy company, Burisma holdings – to the infamous billionaire George Soros whose ‘International Renaissance Foundation’ is depicted in the film as playing a crucial role in financing and stirring up the conflict, the West was as usual meddling in a place it had no business being in, leading Ukraine on a road to perdition as it pursued its own interests.
The current quagmire the country is in as result is steeped in irony; a nation that before the conflict was the third-largest coal producer in Europe, that once produced 87% of coal for the Russian empire and 50% for the Soviet Union, is now having to import coal from the US, Russia and Canada. US imports alone (from Pennsylvania) in 2018 cost the country just over $806 million.
The deindustrialisation of a nation which was the USSR’s largest producer of automotives, has resulted in it being almost wholly reliant on western car imports. This was a nation, as the film explains, which at the break-up of the Soviet Union was included in the world’s top ten most developed nations, which had a thriving aviation and space industry unrivalled by any other post-Soviet state. Now, since the shrinking of the economy began in 2014, the nation is ranked 60th place in the world by the UN in terms of GDP, even lower than the African nations of Sudan and Angola.
Victor Medvedchuk doesn’t hesitate to agree when asked if he thinks it has been a deliberate strategy by the West to destroy Ukraine. Indeed there is no doubt that since Maidan began, Ukraine has proved incredibly useful for US geopolitical interests. Stone himself states that Ukraine is a button which can be pushed by the US to aggravate Russia. However the film goes into more detail about the role played by Ukraine in manipulating the US elections as consultant Paul Manafort, an advisor to the Trump campaign, was targeted over his work advising former Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych.
Medvedchuk asks why it was that none of the other people investigated by Ukrainian authorities over corruption charges have been prosecuted, and Manafort alone was pursued. He suggests it was a targeted, politicised campaign against Manafort, and that instead of looking for Russian interference in the US elections, we should be looking at Ukrainian interference.
The most disturbing message of the film however is not regarding what has been, but what could be, if action is not taken to restore relations between Russia and Ukraine. And despite President Zelensky’s assurances before his election that his priority was to put an end to the conflict in East Ukraine, so far we have seen nothing beyond rhetoric.
In the documentary, Putin candidly tells Stone that the Kerch strait incident last November was a provocation set up by former President Poroshenko to boost his ratings prior to the March 2019. But with reports of the seizure of a Russian vessel by Ukraine just last month, it’s clear that the potential for escalation of the conflict is extremely high. And if one thing is for sure, neither the Russians nor the Ukrainians would be the beneficiaries of such a conflict.
Watch the official teaser below.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Sergei Skripal was a former Russian double agent for Britain. After a high-profile spy swap in 2010, he lived in Salisbury, England, near his former MI6 handler, Pablo Miller, who he reportedly kept in touch with.
Late in the afternoon of March 4th, 2018, Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who had flown in from Moscow the previous afternoon to get Sergei’s blessing for a marriage, were found in distress on a Salisbury park bench. The British Army’s top nurse, Col. Alison McCourt and her 16-year old daughter, Abigail, apparently the first to notice them, promptly gave them CPR (1). The Skripals were sent to nearby Salisbury District Hospital, which had a covert relationship with Porton Down (2), the British government’s chemical warfare research laboratory. They were not expected to survive.
This quickly turned into an international story. Within hours of the news of the Skripals poisoning, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and Prime Minister Theresa May — with no evidence — claimed that Russia had attacked them with a nerve agent they called “Novichok”. Russians disputed that claim, noting that exposure to that nerve agent, better known as A-234, causes virtually immediate death.
The Skripals’ activities before they collapsed were a mystery. Security officials claimed that the GPS of their cell phones had been turned off for the four hours before they were found (3) and many of Salisbury’s CCTVs that should have captured their activities were not working (4). CCTV’s had caught Sergei’s red BMW at 9:15 am near the cemetery where Yulia’s mother and brother were buried, and at 1:35 pm when they parked near Salisbury’s popular Maltings shopping area. They were found on the Maltings Park bench less than 45 minutes after they had reportedly left Zizzi’s restaurant.
There are two widely-published photos of Sergei and Yulia “at Zizzi’s” taken in different years. This photo, which appears to be the more recent, indicates that Sergei knew the photographer, who shared their table along with a fourth person, whose glass is also visible. The photographer inadvertently took his own picture because of the mirror just behind the Skripals.
Since the photographer (and friend) appear to have been the last people who saw them before their collapse, the UK government should have identified him as a major person of interest to interview. Its lack of interest speaks for itself.
Russia went to the UN Security Council on March 13th to call for an inquiry into the poisoning. The UK not only vetoed an inquiry, but pressured countries to expel members of the Russian diplomatic corps. Despite the lack of evidence against Russia — and the many reasons why it would not have been in Russia’s interest to have done this – almost 30 countries obeyed and about 150 Russians were expelled. The Skripal poisoning also discouraged football fans from attending Russia’s hosting of the upcoming World Cup in Moscow.
In the midst of a barrage of media coverage claiming the danger to the public of this nerve agent, a mid-March letter to The London Times from Steven Davies, described as “Consultant in emergency medicine, Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust”, stated:
Sir, Further to your report “Poison exposure leaves almost 40 needing treatment”, Mar 14, may I clarify that no patients have experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have only ever been three patients with significant poisoning. (5) [emphasis added]
The third person referred to, policeman Nick Bailey, was not a “first responder” as the government had claimed, but became ill only after visiting the Skripal house on March 8th, four days after the poisoning. The actual first responders, Col. McCourt and her daughter, were unaffected despite being vomited on by the Scripals! (6)
On April 12, the UN’s OPCW (Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) published a summary that “confirmed the UK’s identification” of the agent – without specifying what that was or where it came from. One of the OPCW’s laboratories, in Spiez, Switzerland, broke ranks to imply that Britain’s A-234 sample was not only fraudulent and could not have been used on the Skripals, but contained BZ (7), a non-lethal agent possessed only by the US, UK and NATO countries.
An ominous silence
Before Yulia was released from the hospital in early April (“to a secure location”) she called her cousin Viktoria in Russia; the call was recorded and quickly broadcast. Within an hour of the Russian broadcast, there was a bizarre British broadcast in which Yulia claimed that she wanted to be left alone: “At the moment I do not wish to avail myself of [Russian embassy] services” (8). The language used was not Yulia’s.
Around the April 20th weekend when Sergei was expected to leave the hospital, Britain announced that it had identified suspects in the poisoning: two Russians who had returned home. There was no further news about the Skripals for weeks. The suggestion that the Skripals were to be given new American identities made no sense because they would be recognized anywhere. By staying, they could make money by providing media accounts of what had happened to them — accounts that might have contradicted those of the Prime Minister, the Foreign Secretary and the Director General of MI5 — and possibly brought down the government.
Russia escalated its attempt to contact Yulia to the United Nations Security Council on Monday, April 23rd, but was rebuffed by the British claim that she did not want to speak to them. In fact, given her silence, many suspected that Yulia was dead.
But on the evening of Wednesday, May 23rd, 2018, Yulia appeared on British TV and delivered a scripted speech in what appeared to have been English translated into Russian. Walking in a park-like setting that her cousin Viktoria believed was a military base, Yulia said that she had been physically and emotionally devastated by the poisoning but hoped to return to Russia after her father regained his health. At the end, she was seen signing the statement. (9) That was the last that was publicly seen of either of the Skripals.
But Novichok was soon in the news again. In early July a couple from Salisbury became ill from what was believed to be the same poison that had affected the Skripals. Dawn Sturgess sprayed her wrists with what she thought was perfume from a sealed bottle she had found in a dumpster; when her partner Charlie Rowley took it, the bottle fell apart in his hands. (10) Sturgess died and was quickly cremated by the British government.
Ominously, on Sept 1st, 2018, The Guardian reported that the ambulances used for the Skripals had been sealed in a hazardous waste landfill site near Bishop’s Cleeve in Gloucestershire. (11) Later that fall, the British government announced that it would purchase the Skripal house as well as that of Nick Bailey “to decontaminate” them. In January, 2019, a military team was sent to seal and replace the roof of the Skripal house.
Why was Sergei Skripal targeted?
Russia had nothing to gain from the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. It had not only lost diplomatic staff from 30 countries, but the poisoning occurred three months before its hosting of the World Cup in Moscow. Any country that murdered its former agents – particularly with their children — would discourage would-be agents from that employment.
Although Britain’s involvement in the poisoning and the cover-up were apparent – even senior UK civil servants refused to pretend that Russia was responsible (12) — its motive was not.
Initially, it appeared to former government whistleblowers that the motive might have been connected to Sergei Skripal’s relationship with his handler Pablo Miller, whose name had been protected by a government gag order soon after the poisoning. Miller was a colleague of Christopher Steele, author of the fabricated Russian dossier on Donald Trump: perhaps Skripal had been involved with that dossier and tried to extort money for what he knew?
In January, 2019, the hacking group Anonymous released papers that pointed to the actual motives. In December, 2018, Anonymous had revealed the existence of two powerful British intelligence “charities”, the Institute for Statecraft and its so-called Integrity Initiative program; both are led by top names in British intelligence and funded by the British government, the US government, and recently, even Facebook. (13) The “charities” coordinate government and media to implement a cold-war agenda to isolate Russia and encourage a conflict. In January, Anonymous revealed a document that suggested goals for the Integrity Initiative that included the dismissal of Russian diplomats from as many countries as possible and damaging Russia’s hosting of international events. (14) The budgets of both charities increased dramatically before the Skripal poisonings; after the poisonings, the charities carried out extensive monitoring of international media responses. (15)
It thus appeared that the inclusion of Yulia Skripal in the poisoning had not been accidental but was an intentional bonus to this media-oriented operation. The apparent murders of Sergei and Yulia Skripal demonstrate the lengths to which British military intelligence was prepared to go to demonize Russia.
The Anonymous revelations also highlight the critical importance of independent, alternative media as well as of media freedom. Despite the previous insiders’ assumptions that Sergei Skripal must have contributed to his misfortune, the war-mongering motives of the British military/intelligence community had been hidden before Anonymous’s release of the information. US President Donald Trump’s additional Russian sanctions of August 2019, based on the spurious account of the poisoning, demonstrate the failure of the mainstream media to publicize the Anonymous revelations and their implications.
Could demanding proof that the Skripals are alive – and calling for British government accountability if they are unable to demonstrate that – impose limits on future actions of British military/intelligence? If British leadership is allowed to get away with two such public murders, there will be little to stop more in the future.
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12. Murray, Craig. “Senior Civil Servants Still Deeply Sceptical of Russian Responsibility for Skripal Poisoning”. 18 April 2018. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
13. McKeigue, Paul. Miller,David. Mason, Jake. Robinson, Piers. “Briefing note on the Integrity Initiative”. Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media. December 21, 2018.
15. Murray, Craig. “British Government Covert Anti-Russian Propaganda and the Skripal Case” Craig Murray Blog. December 21, 2018. www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Images in the body of the article are from the author; featured image is from RTE
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken
We’ve been down this road many times before.
If the government is consistent about any one thing, it is this: it has an unnerving tendency to exploit crises and use them as opportunities for power grabs under the guise of national security.
As David C. Unger, a foreign affairs editorial writer for the New York Times, explains,
“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have given way to permanent crisis management: to policing the planet and fighting preventative wars of ideological containment, usually on terrain chosen by, and favorable to, our enemies. Limited government and constitutional accountability have been shouldered aside by the kind of imperial presidency our constitutional system was explicitly designed to prevent.”
Cue the Emergency State, the government’s Machiavellian version of crisis management that justifies all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security.
These tactics have been employed before, here in the U.S. and elsewhere, by other totalitarian regimes, with devastating results.
It’s a simple enough formula: first, you create fear, then you capitalize on it by seizing power.
For instance, in his remarks on the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio, President Trump promised to give the FBI “whatever they need” to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism.
Let that sink in a moment.
In a post-9/11 America, Trump’s promise bodes ill for whatever remnants of freedom we have left. With that promise, flippantly delivered without any apparent thought for the Constitution’s prohibitions on such overreach, the president has given the FBI the green light to violate Americans’ civil liberties in every which way.
So what does the government’s carefully calibrated response to this current crisis mean for freedom as we know it? Compliance and control.
For starters, consider Trump’s embrace of red flag gun laws, which allow the police to remove guns from people “suspected” of being threats, will only add to the government’s power.
As The Washington Post reports,
these laws “allow a family member, roommate, beau, law enforcement officer or any type of medical professional to file a petition [with a court] asking that a person’s home be temporarily cleared of firearms. It doesn’t require a mental-health diagnosis or an arrest.”
Be warned: these laws, growing in popularity as a legislative means by which to seize guns from individuals viewed as a danger to themselves or others, are yet another Trojan Horse, a stealth maneuver by the police state to gain greater power over an unsuspecting and largely gullible populace.
Seventeen states, plus the District of Columbia, now have red flag laws on their books. That number is growing.
In the midst of what feels like an epidemic of mass shootings, these gun confiscation laws—extreme risk protection order (ERPO) laws—may appease the fears of those who believe that fewer guns in the hands of the general populace will make our society safer.
Of course, it doesn’t always work that way.
Anything—knives, vehicles, planes, pressure cookers—can become a weapon when wielded with deadly intentions.
With these red flag gun laws, the intention is to disarm individuals who are potential threats.
However, consider what happened in Maryland after a police officer attempted to “enforce” the state’s new red flag law, which went into effect in Oct. 2018.
According to the Anne Arundel County police chief, the shooting was a sign that the red flag law is needed. What the police can’t say with any certainty is what they prevented by shooting and killing Willis.
Therein lies the danger of these red flag laws, specifically, and pre-crime laws such as these generally, especially when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police.
After all, this is the same government that uses the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.
This is the same government that, in 2009, issued a series of Department of Homeland Security reports on Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” which broadly define extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”
This is the same government that, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, tracks military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan and characterizes them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
This is the same government that keeps re-upping the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which allows the military to detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a threat.
This is the same government that has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.
For instance, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.
In other words, if you dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s, you may well be suspected of being a domestic terrorist and treated accordingly.
Where many Americans go wrong is in assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or challenging the government’s authority in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal.
That is not the case.
All you really need to do is question government authority.
With the help of artificial intelligence, a growing arsenal of high-tech software, hardware and techniques, government propaganda urging Americans to turn into spies and snitches, as well as social media and behavior sensing software, government agents are spinning a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports aimed at snaring potentialenemies of the state.
It’s the American police state’s take on the dystopian terrors foreshadowed by George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and Phillip K. Dick all rolled up into one oppressive pre-crime and pre-thought crime package.
What’s more, the technocrats who run the surveillance state don’t even have to break a sweat while monitoring what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, how much you spend, whom you support, and with whom you communicate. Computers guided by artificial intelligence now do the tedious work of trolling social media, the internet, text messages and phone calls for potentially anti-government remarks—all of which is carefully recorded, documented, and stored to be used against you someday at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
This is the world that science fiction author Philip K. Dick envisioned for Minority Report in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams will crack a few skulls in order to bring the populace under control.
In Dick’s dystopian police state, the police combine widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining and precognitive technology to capture would-be criminals before they can do any damage: precrime.
In the film Minority Report, the technology that John Anderton, Chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in Washington, DC, relies on for his predictive policing proves to be fallible, identifying him as the next would-be criminal and targeting him for preemptive measures. Consequently, Anderton finds himself not only attempting to prove his innocence but forced to take drastic measures in order to avoid capture in a surveillance state that uses biometric data and sophisticated computer networks to track its citizens.
With every passing day, the American police state moves that much closer to mirroring the fictional pre-crime prevention world of Minority Report.
In other words, the burden of proof is reversed: you are guilty before you are given any chance to prove you are innocent.
Dig beneath the surface of this kind of surveillance/police state, however, and you will find that the real purpose of pre-crime is not safety but control.
Red flag gun laws merely push us that much closer towards a suspect society where everyone is potentially guilty of some crime or another and must be preemptively rendered harmless.
Again, where many Americans go wrong is in naively assuming that you have to be doing something illegal or harmful in order to be flagged and targeted for some form of intervention or detention.
In fact, U.S. police agencies have been working to identify and manage potential extremist “threats,” violent or otherwise, before they can become actual threats for some time now.
In much the same way that the USA Patriot Act was used as a front to advance the surveillance state, allowing the government to establish a far-reaching domestic spying program that turned every American citizen into a criminal suspect, the government’s anti-extremism program renders otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.
Be warned: once you get on such a government watch list—whether it’s a terrorist watch list, a mental health watch list, a dissident watch list, or a red flag gun watch list—there’s no clear-cut way to get off, whether or not you should actually be on there.
You will be tracked wherever you go.
You will be flagged as a potential threat and dealt with accordingly.
This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.
The government has been building its pre-crime, surveillance network in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the corporate sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).
If you’re not scared yet, you should be.
Connect the dots.
Start with the powers amassed by the government under the USA Patriot Act, note the government’s ever-broadening definition of what it considers to be an “extremist,” then add in the government’s detention powers under NDAA, the National Security Agency’s far-reaching surveillance networks, and fusion centers that collect and share surveillance data between local, state and federal police agencies.
To that, add tens of thousands of armed, surveillance drones and balloons that are beginning to blanket American skies, facial recognition technology that will identify and track you wherever you go and whatever you do. And then to complete the picture, toss in the real-time crime centers being deployed in cities across the country, which will be attempting to “predict” crimes and identify so-called criminals before they happen based on widespread surveillance, complex mathematical algorithms and prognostication programs.
Hopefully you’re starting to understand how easy we’ve made it for the government to identify, label, target, defuse and detain anyone it views as a potential threat for a variety of reasons that run the gamut from mental illness to having a military background to challenging its authority to just being on the government’s list of persona non grata.
There’s always a price to pay for standing up to the powers-that-be.
All you really need to be is a citizen of the American police state.
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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.
President Donald Trump’s pre-election pledge to end America’s useless wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan just might turn out to be somewhat less than what was promised if some political allies of the president have their way. For the past year there have been rumors circulating in Washington about the possibility of using mercenaries rather than American soldiers to keep the lid on a volatile Afghanistan and to arrange for regime change in countries like Venezuela.
It perhaps should surprise no one that a country dedicated to “free markets” should at least somewhat embrace the idea of using mercenaries to fight its wars. The concept is already embedded in the federal government, increasingly so since 9/11. A majority of the workers in the intelligence community as well as in the civilian ranks of the Pentagon are already paid contractors who work for the “Beltway bandit” firms that specialize in national security. A substantial number of those hires are armed paramilitaries operating in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Mideast and Africa.
The logic for going with contractors rather than employees has been that budgets go up and down, so it is the smart thing to have a lot of people working for you who are on one-year contracts and can be let go if the money to pay them is not authorized. The downside is that the average federal employee costs roughly $125,000 per year in pay and benefits. A contractor costs three times as much, which means that the taxpayer pays the piper for something that is a convenience for the government.
The most prominent advocate for mercenary armies is Erik Prince, an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump and the founder of the controversial private security firm Blackwater. Blackwater was a major private military contractor in Iraq, where it provided security for State Department operations and facilities. Notoriously, in 2007, Blackwater employees shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians at Nisour Square in Baghdad. One of Prince’s employees was eventually convicted of murder and three others have been convicted of manslaughter. Prince subsequently renamed the Blackwater security company and then sold it in 2010.
Prince, the scion of a wealthy Midwestern family that made its money selling auto parts, is himself a former Navy SEAL. Many of his Blackwater employees were drawn from the special operations community. His sister is Betsy DeVos, the conservative secretary of education, which certainly helps make sure that his views will be conveyed to the White House.
Two years ago, Prince was lobbying heavily in Washington in support of his plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan. He claimed that mercenaries operating in the special ops mode and not requiring a huge logistical tail could be more cost and manpower effective at fighting the similarly armed Taliban. But Prince did not see that as their primary mission, which would be training Afghan national forces while at the same time running the key elements in the country’s government that would support the effort, namely the treasury and national security team. In other words, it would be the foreign mercenaries in charge with the Afghan government going along for the ride until the situation would improve. Having the paid soldiers and their administrators in charge would also eliminate the pervasive Afghan government corruption, which has to this point crippled the war and training efforts.
It was a neat and also creative package that would at a stroke end direct U.S. involvement in the Afghan war, in a manner of speaking. It would also be quite lucrative for the company providing the mercenaries and the other support. Empirically speaking, however, it was always a nonstarter. The ability of a group of mercenaries to multitask in a difficult environment like Afghanistan has never been tested at this level, and it is impossible to imagine that the Afghan government would cede its authorities to a band of Americans and Europeans.
More recently, Prince has been supporting something similar, a private mercenary army of a few thousand men that would bring down the government of Venezuela’s socialist President Nicolas Maduro. Having learned from the Afghan experience that it is necessary to come up with the money before coming up with a plan, Prince has been discussing Venezuela with conservative Republican donors as well as with Miami-based Venezuelan millionaires, the so-called “bankers and oligarchs” that ran the country before the election of Hugo Chavez in 1998 forced many of them to go into exile. He has been seeking $40 million in seed money for the operation.
In private meetings in the United States and Europe, Prince sketched out a plan to field up to 5,000 soldiers-for-hire on behalf of Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido. He has argued that a dramatic step is necessary to break through the standoff between Guaido and Maduro. Prince’s pitch detailing how he would accomplish a change in government features intelligence operations preceding deployment of those 5,000 mercenaries recruited in Latin America to conduct “combat and stabilization operations.”
The White House is cool to the plan, particularly in the wake of the poor intelligence that led to the badly bungled and embarrassing Venezuelan coup in May. It is currently more inclined to tighten sanctions to create more unrest, particularly as there are already reports of starvation in some parts of the country.
There also has been concern in Washington policy circles that the introduction of foreign soldiers in Venezuela could lead to civil war, something like a replay of what has been experienced in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, and Libya. But the most interesting aspect of the discussion is the fact that it is taking place at all. The United States of America, hostile to the ability of kings to initiate wars on their own authority, was founded in part in opposition to any permanent standing army beyond what was necessary for self-defense.
Now, the U.S. may be considering major military operations using mercenary armies to deal with undeclared and illegal wars thousands of miles away that do not even threaten the homeland. It is, unfortunately, just one more indication of how the United States has been changed beyond all recognition in the past 20 years.
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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.
Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon has hailed as ‘phenomenal’ a new poll which shows majority support for Scottish Independence. The survey, which was carried out by Lord Ashcroft in the wake of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s visit to Scotland a week ago, puts those in favour of independence at 46% with 43% against. If one removes undecided and non-voters, it indicates 52% for and 48% against Scotland being an independent country.
This poll has come at a pivotal moment in British politics, when the future of the country in relation to the European Union is hanging in the balance. And credit can only be given to Nicola Sturgeon for facing off her critics (many Nationalists among them) who impatiently derided her for not calling a second independence referendum earlier.
Sturgeon, who insisted she would only call ‘indyref2’ – as it has become known – ‘once the terms of Brexit are known’ has stuck to her guns and like the seasoned politician she is, has patiently awaited for momentum to be at its highest behind the independence movement. As any experienced politician knows, in this game, timing is everything.
Now, with the promotion of Boris Johnson to Prime Minister, Nationalists would argue that the recipe for independence is complete. The set of circumstances created by the antics of a chaotic Westminster government – years of botched Brexit deals, in-fighting and poor leadership, together with an attitude that Scotland’s interests are of no significance whatsoever to the Brexit ‘war party’, have only exacerbated what was already a problematic situation. For with a majority of Scots voting to Remain within the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum – in contrast to their neighbours south of the border – the ground was already prepared for conflict ahead.
But instead of handling Scotland with respect and giving it the due attention required, Scots were given a clear signal that their differing stance on Brexit was of no consequence. This position was only enhanced by Boris Johnson’s visit north last week where he failed even to interact with ordinary Scots and limited his one-day appearance to well-managed trips to the naval base at Faslane and the First Minister’s residence, Bute House. His announcement of giving £300 million to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, has been received more as an insult than anything else; an attempt to ‘buy off’ Scotland, which is far from welcome.
There is no doubt as well that both Johnson himself, and the elitist culture he represents, being the product of a private school, privileged background, does not go down well with the average working Scot. But put that together with his determination to force Brexit through come hell or high water, and you have Scots digging their heels in even further.
Nicola Sturgeon, in contrast to this reckless, haphazard blonde buffoon, is seen as the embodiment of common sense and rationality. In such circumstances it’s no surprise therefore that one could expect something of a swing from voters who haven’t supported independence in the past – at least they’d have a leader they weren’t embarrassed of.
Sturgeon is now expected to call a second referendum at the earliest opportunity. However, Professor John Curtice, Britain’s most famous pollster, writing in The Times on Tuesday nevertheless reminds us to exercise caution when reading such survey results. He writes:
“Individual polls that report an apparently significant change should always be treated with caution. Polls figures can go up and down purely by chance, even when no-one has changed their mind”.
Furthermore he says there would have to be many more surveys carried out before we could really gauge public opinion on independence.
But time is of the essence. In less than three months the UK could find itself crashing out of the European Union with no deal, and all the economic and political uncertainty that comes with it. Speaking on this earlier, Nicola Sturgeon commented:
‘There is a growing sense of urgency that if we don’t want to get dragged down a political path that we don’t want to go down…then we need to consider becoming independent sooner rather than later’.
All signs indicate that such a referendum is now imminent. But of course it still needs Westminster approval. Sturgeon has already ruled out a Catalonia scenario whereby an illegal referendum was called and independence announced on the basis of its result.
She seems determined to do things by the book; which, if taking into account Spain’s and the EU reaction to Catalonian independence, is the sensible option. Therefore it could be very much down to just how obstinate the Johnson government will be in relation to granting indyref2, and the extent to which they truly value the Union. Based on recent events, this remains to be seen…
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
August 6, 2019, Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) condemns the Trump Administration’s’ economic embargo as a racist assault on the people of Venezuela that will be disproportionately borne by Black working class Venezuelans and campesinos in general. BAP calls on all progressive elements in the U.S. and around the world to oppose this dangerous escalation by the Trump administration along with support from Congress to impose a right-wing counterrevolutionary government on the people of that nation through state terror.
National BAP Coordinating Committee members Netfa Freeman and Vanessa Beck just returned from Venezuela as part of the Embassy Protectors delegation that spend 10 days in the country meeting with community leaders, social organizations and government officials, including a private meeting with Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro.
Freeman and Beck are prepared to speak on behalf of BAP and report on the conditions that they observed in Venezuela. With the national conversation centered on Trump’s racist agenda encouraging white nationalist violence in the U.S., Vanessa Beck asserts that
“it is a contradictory position on the part of progressives in the U.S. and even the general public not to link Trump’s racism domestically with his foreign policies that clearly have no regard for the lives of people of color.”
BAP national organizer Ajamu Baraka, therefore, poses the question to progressive forces in the U.S. “How much more war, how much more death and destruction will you endure before you break with the capitalist duopoly of the U.S. and say no more war, no more subversion, no more killings in my name by a state that by every definition has become a rogue state and threat to global humanity?
Background on Embassy Protector Collective
For 37 days, members of the Embassy Protection Collective heroically refused to hand over the control of the Venezuelan Embassy, with the permission of the legitimate government of Venezuela, to a representative of the US-appointed, self-proclaimed “interim President” of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó.
The arrested Embassy Protectors are now facing trials on the trumped-up charge of “interfering with certain protective functions” of the Federal Government, a misdemeanor charge that carries a maximum of one-year imprisonment and $100,000 fine for each one of them.
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Featured image: Activists gather in front of the Venezuelan embassy in Washington, DC in March, 2019.
China is rising, heading toward becoming the world’s leading economy — already No. 1 ahead of the US on a purchase price basis, what a basket of goods costs in both countries.
Has the Trump regime met its match in China? Its tariffs, sanctions, and other bullying tactics haven’t worked, nor are they likely to ahead.
Trump is ignorant of Beijing’s resolve. Its ruling authorities won’t now or ahead yield their aim to become a leading industrial, economic, and technological world power to US interests.
In May, President Xi Jinping said China is “embarking on a new Long March” — referring to the protracted struggle between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai v. US supported Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalist forces, ending with the Red Army’s triumph, the forerunner of the People’s Liberation Army.
At the time, the official Xinhua News Agency said China “has been standing tall in the East for the last 70 years,” adding:
“It has never lowered its head and it has never feared anyone. History will prove again that bullying and threats by the US will not work.”
China is prepared for a longterm struggle in pursuit of its legitimate aims. Unacceptable US actions and bullying haven’t worked and won’t likely succeed ahead.
After 12 negotiating rounds of talks, things are at impasse between both countries because of unacceptable Trump regime demands no responsible leadership would accept.
On August 5, Mike Pompeo falsely accused China of “engag(ing) in trade practices which stole tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of US economic property (sic), that engaged in forced property transfer where American businesses had to give our technology to China just to open up that market (sic),” adding:
The Trump regime seeks “to restructure that set of trading rules for the United States so that they are fair and reciprocal (sic).”
Cold hard reality refutes his disinformation. China seeks cooperative relations with other nations, featuring carrots over sticks — at peace with its neighbors and all other countries.
The US is a global hegemon, using pressure, bullying, and brute force to get other nations to bend to its will, war and other hostile actions its favored tactics — seeking dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations, wanting ruler-serf societies it controls established everywhere.
Talks with China since spring 2018 have little to do with trade, everything to do with the US wanting its development aims undermined — the trade deficit greatly favoring Beijing a minor issue.
It exists because corporate America offshored much of its industrial base and many other jobs to low-wage countries, notably China — US ruling authorities going along by doing nothing to halt the practice.
Since the neoliberal 90s, the US has been incrementally thirdworldized, poverty the nation’s leading growth industry. Most households need two or more jobs to get by.
Most available are rotten part-time/temp, low-pay, few or no benefits ones. The land of opportunity I grew up in long ago no longer exists.
US ruling authorities serve privileged interests exclusively at the expense of the general welfare.
Law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels is all about serving and protecting monied interests at the expense of ordinary Americans.
On Monday, the Trump regime’s Treasury Department designated China a “Currency Manipulator,” note the caps — a hostile action not about to go down well in Beijing, a Treasury statement saying the following:
“As a result of this determination, Secretary Mnuchin will engage with the (US-controlled) International Monetary Fund to eliminate the unfair competitive advantage created by China’s latest actions (sic).”
“This pattern of actions is also a violation of China’s G20 commitments to refrain from competitive devaluation (sic).”
Here’s what happened. Over the weekend, China let its yuan slip to 7.0982, falling further on Tuesday to 7.0703 to the dollar.
Its January 1994, its all-time high was 8.73 to the dollar — the lower the yuan, the more competitive Chinese exports are in world markets unless offset by currency devaluations elsewhere.
At the same time, Beijing suspended purchases of US soybeans and other agricultural products — its actions in response to Trump’s threat to impose 10% tariffs on another $300 billion worth of Chinese imports and no relief from unacceptable demands during bilateral talks.
Falsely declaring China a currency manipulator is the latest shoe to drop.
The practice involves central banks buying or selling foreign currencies in exchange of their own to influence the exchange rate and commercial policy.
Many nations adjust their currencies to maintain competitiveness, stability, and control inflation.
The People’s Bank of China (PBOC) Governor Yi Gang said the following:
China will “not engage in competitive devaluation, and not use the exchange rate for competitive purposes and not use the exchange rate as a tool to deal with external disturbances such as trade disputes.”
US legislation directs the Treasury Secretary to “analyze on an annual basis the exchange rate policies of foreign countries…and consider whether countries manipulate the exchange rate between their currency and the United States dollar for purposes of preventing effective balance of payments adjustments or gaining unfair competitive advantage in international trade.”
It’s OK for the US to maintain a competitive advantage over other nations by currency manipulation and other practices, not the other way around.
When the dollar’s valuation rises, currencies of other nations decline, China’s in this case so calling the nation a currency manipulator is false. It’s letting the currency fall naturally by not manipulating it higher.
In response to global geopolitical and economic events, including Trump’s trade war with China and US equities at bubble levels, a flight to safety resulted in large-scale buying of US Treasuries.
It sent the 10-year US Treasury’s yield down to 1.75% on August 5 from a multi-year high of 3.14% months earlier. When yields fall, valuations rise.
The yield curve also inverted (the six-month Treasury at 1.99% on August 5), often signaling recession ahead. Rising gold prices to a six-year high also reflect a flight to safety.
Last week, the Fed began what appears to be a rate-cutting cycle, reversing the short-term hiking one, perhaps heading short rates back to zero or below as in Europe, benefitting investors at the expense of savers and individuals on fixed incomes, the vast majority of Americans.
The Trump regime’s geopolitical, economic and financial agenda is responsible for growing chaotic conditions, including in the financial markets.
The tougher Trump gets with China, the more firm its ruling authorities are likely to be in response to defend the nation’s interests.
Trump’s hostile/counterproductive agenda may push world economies into recession, perhaps a stiff protracted one.
Monetary policy won’t save him. It can prop up the stock market with easy money, not turn around economic weakness.
The massive US national debt exceeding GDP, heading higher, precludes fiscal stimulus to stimulate growth
Things may get ugly ahead — perhaps later this year or in early 2020.
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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.”
Embargoes usually occur in times of war or impending hostilities. They partially or entirely prohibit commercial trade with targeted nations.
Illegal US embargoes and sanctions were imposed on Iran, North Korea, Syria, Sudan, Cuba, and now Venezuela.
They’re acts of war by other means, harming the economies and populations of targeted countries.
Nations supporting hostile US policies by going along with them are complicit in its criminality.
Michael Hudson accused the US of breaching “rules of international law and order put in place toward the end of World War II,” adding:
“Countries that do not give the United States control of their oil and financial sectors or privatize their key sectors are being isolated by the United States…”
Its tactics include “sanctions and unilateral tariffs giving special advantages to US producers in violation of free trade agreements with European, Asian and other countries.”
Claiming its actions aim to defend US national security is a long ago discredited Big Lie, concealing its real objectives — seeking global dominance by whatever it takes to achieve its imperial goals.
International laws, norms and standards are for other nations to observe. The US operates exclusively by its own rules at the expense of world peace, equity and justice — notions it deplores.
Nations unwilling to sacrifice their sovereign rights to US interests are targeted for regime change.
In Venezuela’s case, it’s notably because of its social democracy, the hemisphere’s best, the threat of a good example bipartisan US hardliners want eliminated.
On Monday, Trump signed an executive order, imposing a total economic embargo on Venezuela. It freezes all Bolivarian Republic assets in the US not already frozen, if any still fall into this category.
It prohibits other nations from engaging in legitimate economic, financial, and trade relations with the country — a flagrant international law breach along with earlier ones, including illegally imposed sanctions on the country, its entities and officials.
Trump’s latest action is based on Big Lies like all his hardline tactics, stating it’s “in light of the continued usurpation of power by Nicolas Maduro and persons affiliated with him (sic), as well as human rights abuses (sic).”
The above accusations apply to how the US and its imperial partners operate, not democratic Venezuela.
Responding to the latest unlawful Trump regime action, Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said the Bolivarian Republic is facing “a transnational legal coup planned by the US government,” adding:
“They are liars, scammers and thieves, (aiming) to strip Venezuela of its assets abroad.”
Around three-fourths of world nations recognize Nicolas Maduro as Venezuela’s democratically elected and reelected president, its legitimate head of state.
Guaido is an imposter, a US-designated puppet/usurper in waiting, guilty of treason against the Bolivarian Republic and its people.
On Monday, neocon hardliner John Bolton warned China and Russia not to support Maduro in light of the latest Trump regime action, neither country likely to take orders from the US on this or other hostile issues.
Bolton also called talks between Bolivarian representatives and opposition elements in Barbados “not serious.”
The Trump regime wants Venezuelan capitulation to its demands, Maduro ousted, US-controlled fascist tyranny replacing the country’s social democracy. That’s what its unlawful hardline tactics are all about.
Days earlier, Trump threatened to quarantine Venezuela. Maduro responded saying:
“Venezuela as a whole, in a civil society and military forces union, repudiates and rejects the declarations of Donald Trump of an alleged quarantine, of an alleged naval blockade,” adding:
“To the imperial imperialism I say that they won’t be able to fulfill their plans with Venezuela. (Its) seas…will be free, sovereign and independent…and we will navigate them as we decide.”
Venezuela’s UN envoy Samuel Moncada denounced Trump economic blockade, calling it “theft on a worldwide scale,” adding:
“We reject the horrific perspective of perpetual war and demand the implementation of the UN Charter” — what US policymakers abandoned almost straightaway after its establishment.
Washington is waging economic terrorism and/or hot wars against Venezuela, Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, and other sovereign independent countries it doesn’t control.
Its hostile actions threaten the rights and welfare of ordinary people everywhere — at home and abroad.
A Final Comment
Reports on the Trump regime’s Venezuela embargo by the NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, and virtually all other establishment print and electronic media were silent on the illegality of what’s going on.
Hostile actions by the US against other countries flagrantly violate international and constitutional law — what independent media alone explain.
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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.”
A number of commentators have linked the killing of 20 people at a Walmart store in El Paso in the United States of America on Saturday 3rd August 2019 to the rising tide of White Supremacism.
White Supremacism is a belief that whites are superior to others and therefore have a right to dominate them. There were elements of such thinking in a “manifesto” posted online allegedly written by the suspected killer, a 21 year old white from a Dallas suburb. The suspect had justified his massacre as a response “to the Hispanic invasion of Texas” and had made references to the Christchurch (New Zealand) shootings in March this year where a white gunman killed 51 mosque worshippers.
It has been suggested that the notion of white supremacy has become more virulent in the US in the last two years mainly because of president Trump’s rhetoric against Mexicans and other Hispanics and non-white minorities in general. This is the reason why when his daughter Ivanka condemned the El Paso massacre there was an immediate torrent of criticisms against her. Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for instance advised her to
“check your dad in his tweets. 251 mass shootings in the US in 216 days. He incites violence every day with his hate agenda and racism. More people are dying because he fails to fight white supremacist terrorists.”
White supremacist ideology and practice has a long history behind it. It precedes the American civil war in the middle of the 19th century. The oppression of the African slave population and indeed the institution of slavery itself embodied the contempt and hatred that the whites bore towards the blacks. The elimination of a huge segment of the indigenous American Indian communities and the systematic marginalisation of those who survived was further proof of white supremacy. In that sense the Ku Klux Klan as the flag bearer of white racism is not alien to American history.
However, white racism and white supremacy go beyond the US. Western colonialism, whatever its economic and strategic motives, was rooted to a great extent in the ideology of white supremacy. Colonial rulers and administrators were deeply imbued with this ideology. A case in point would be Winston Churchill who stated in 1937,
“I do not admit for instance that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly-wise race to put it in that way has come in and taken their place.”
Of course, in Britain and in much of the contemporary Western world blatant white supremacist thinking has declined considerably. This is partly because of the end of formal colonial rule and the emergence of alternative centres of civilisation especially in the non-Western world. Nonetheless, because Western hegemony persists in current patterns of global political, economic and cultural power, hints of superiority continue to manifest themselves in various spheres of life. This is why the struggle to evolve more equitable global structures remains formidable.
If anything, two recent developments have exacerbated the situation. Expressions of white supremacy and racist hatred are disseminated more widely today through the social media. Analysts have observed that the vile and vicious propaganda of white supremacists for instance appears to have a greater impact because of the new avenues of communication — avenues which allow their users to adopt extreme positions without assuming responsibility for them. Add to this the flow of migrants to Europe from West Asia, North Africa and Sub- Saharan Africa which has encouraged the Right in the continent to manipulate baseless fears about the so-called threat to the white, European way of life from these newcomers whose cultures and religions are different. For the Right, the migrant sometimes escaping the chaos at home created by the politics of regime change instigated by Western powers has become a boon to their political fortunes.
In spite of these developments, there are countless groups in Europe and the US standing up to white supremacist politics and racism. They have become vocal champions of inclusivity and diversity in their societies. They eschew the politics of fear and hatred. In fact, Trump’s brazen attempt to harness the support of the white majority by frightening them of some imaginary danger posed by minorities appears to have backfired. A grassroots movement is developing rapidly in various parts of the US seeking to repudiate the politics of white supremacy as anathema to the ideals of the American Constitution and the American Republic.
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Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST), Malaysia. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
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If you have been wondering when the twenty Democratic aspirants for the presidency will begin a serious discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East, where Washington has been bogged down in both current and impending wars, you are not alone. With the honorable exception of Tulsi Gabbard, no one seems keen to touch that particular live wire.
Trump’s trying to portray himself as the Uniter-in-Chief following two devastating terrorist attacks over the weekend, but his proposal to marry firearm and immigration reforms into a single bill is a risky political gamble, though one that might ultimately pay off if the American people support him.
The latest report about kidnappings, rendition, ‘black sites’ and torture is a remarkable piece of investigative work. It provides us with nothing less than a litany of shocking evidence and testimony and at 403 pages it makes for truly grim reading. This article is made up of a very brief set of extracts from the just-released CIA Torture Unredacted report.
The extent of devastation inflicted upon Japan by the American military during World War II is not broadly known, even today. In reprisal for the attack over Pearl Harbor, which killed almost 2,500 Americans, US aircraft first began unloading bombs on Japan during the afternoon of 18 April 1942 – attacking the capital Tokyo, and also five other major cities, Yokohama, Osaka, Nagoya, Kobe and Yokosuka.
Over this weekend, China’s Yuan currency broke out of its band and devalued to more than 7 to $1. At the same time China announced it would not purchase more US agricultural goods. The Trump-US Neocon trade strategy has just imploded. As this writer has been predicting, the threshold has now been passed, from a tariff-trade war to a broader economic war between the US and China where other tactics and measures are now being implemented.
On this week’s episode of 9/11 Free Fall, host Andy Steele is joined by Franklin Square Fire Commissioner Christopher Gioia to discuss his fire district’s recent passage of a historic resolution supporting a new investigation into events of 9/11.
In the aftermath of the July debate when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hi) shined a light on her campaign and took Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Cal) to task for her misleading record on criminal justice as California Attorney General, the MSM and its Democratic flunkies have pummeled Gabbard about an unplanned meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017 just as they have done since Gabbard first announced her candidacy.
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Russia is meticulously advancing Eurasian chessboard moves that should be observed in conjunction, as Moscow proposes to the Global South an approach diametrically opposed to Western sanctions, threats and economic war. Here are three recent examples.
Ten days ago, via a document officially approved by the United Nations, the Russian Foreign Ministry advanced a new concept of collective security for the Persian Gulf.
Moscow stresses that “practical work on launching the process of creating a security system in the Persian Gulf” should start with “bilateral and multilateral consultations between interested parties, including countries both within the region and outside of it,” as well as organizations such as the UN Security Council, League of Arab States, Organization of Islamic Cooperation and Gulf Cooperation Council.
The next step should be an international conference on security and cooperation in the Persian Gulf, followed by the establishment of a dedicated organization – certainly not something resembling the incompetent Arab League.
The Russian initiative should be interpreted as a sort of counterpart of, and mostly a complement to, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is finally blossoming as a security, economic and political body. The inevitable conclusion is that major SCO stakeholders – Russia, China, India, Pakistan and, in the near future, Iran and Turkey – will be major influencers on regional stability.
The Pentagon will not be amused.
Drill, baby, drill
When the commander of the Iranian Navy, Hossein Khanzadi, recently visited St Petersburg for the celebration of Russia’s Navy Day, the General Staff of the Iranian Armed Forces and the Russian Defense Ministry signed an unprecedented memorandum of understanding.
Khanzadi was keen to stress the memorandum “may be considered a turning point in relations of Tehran and Moscow along the defense trajectory.”
A direct upshot is that Moscow and Tehran, before March 2020, will enact a joint naval exercise in – of all places – the Strait of Hormuz. As Khanzadi told the IRNA news agency:
“The exercise may be held in the northern part of the Indian Ocean, which flows into the Gulf of Oman, the Strait of Hormuz and also the Persian Gulf.”
The US Navy, which plans an “international coalition” to ensure “freedom of navigation” in the Strait of Hormuz – something Iran has always historically guaranteed – won’t be amused. Neither will Britain, which is pushing for a European-led coalition even as Brexit looms.
Khanzadi also noted that Tehran and Moscow are deeply involved in how to strengthen defense cooperation in the Caspian Sea. Joint drills already took place in the Caspian in the past, but never in the Persian Gulf.
Exercise together
Russia’s Eastern Military District will be part of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) anti-terrorist exercise in Thailand and China early next month. According to the Eastern Military District, the training is part of “preparations for a practical phase of an ASEAN anti-terrorist exercise in China.” This means, among other things, that Russian troops will be using Chinese military hardware.
Exercises include joint tactical groups attempting to free hostages from inside official buildings; search for and disposal of explosives; and indoor and outdoor radiation, chemical and biological reconnaissance.
This should be interpreted as a direct interaction between SCO practices and ASEAN, complementing the deepening trade interaction between the Eurasia Economic Union and ASEAN.
These three developments illustrate how Russia is involved in a large spectrum from the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf to Southeast Asia.
But the key element remains the Russia-Iran alliance, which must be interpreted as a key node of the massive, 21st century Eurasia integration project.
What Russian National Security Council Secretary Nikolai Patrushev said at the recent, historic trilateral alongside White House national security adviser John Bolton and Israeli National Security Council Adviser Meir Ben-Shabbat in Jerusalem should be unmistakable:
“Iran has always been and remains our ally and partner, with which we are consistently developing relations both on a bilateral basis and within multilateral formats.”
This lays to rest endless, baseless speculation that Moscow is “betraying” Tehran on multiple fronts, from the all-out economic war unleashed by the Donald Trump administration to the resolution of the Syrian tragedy.
To Nur-Sultan
And that leads to the continuation of the Astana process on Syria. Moscow, Tehran and Ankara will hold a new trilateral in Nur-Sultan, the Kazakh capital, possibly on the hugely significant date of September 11, according to diplomatic sources.
What’s really important about this new phase of the Astana process, though, is the establishment of the Syrian Constitutional Committee. This had been agreed way back in January 2018 in Sochi: a committee – including representatives of the government, opposition and civil society – capable of working out Syria’s new constitution, with each group holding one-third of the seats.
The only possible viable solution to the tragedy that is Syria’s nasty, rolling proxy war will be found by Russia, Iran and Turkey. That includes the Russia-Iran alliance. And it includes and expands Russia’s vision of Persian Gulf security, while hinting at an expanded SCO in Southwest Asia, acting as a pan-Asian peacemaking mechanism and serious counterpart to NATO.
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This article was originally published on Asia Times.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Medicare Act. Within a year, and without the aid of computers, the United States provided more than 19 million seniors with health coverage. Before the law existed, over half of the elderly in the United States did not have health insurance. Medicare, which now includes people with disabilities, celebrated its 54th birthday this week.
Momentum for National Improved Medicare for All is growing. That is being reflected in Congress and the presidential elections. As of last week, more than half the Democrats in the US House of Representatives have signed on to HR 1384, the Medicare for All Act of 2019. Medicare for All was also a major topic in the most recent Democratic Presidential Debates.
Image on the right: Rally for Medicare’s birthday in Oakland, CA, July 2015. From Happening-Here.Blogspot.com.
Medicare For All Is Central In The 2020 Elections
National improved Medicare for all (NIMA) has become a litmus test issue in the Democratic Party primary for president. While corporate Democrats funded by Wall Street, the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are trying to stop progress, Democratic Party voters are showing the momentum may not be stoppable.
The two leading Medicare for all candidates, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have received the most donations of all the other candidates. One out of three donors to the Democratic primaries donated to Sanders. This broad base of support is consistent with polls that show Democratic Party voters have reached a consensus: NIMA is essential. Democratic voters have the power to nominate candidates who support Medicare for all if they insist on it. This consensus is the result of years of work by single payer advocates. This is a movement that will not compromise in support of false solutions.
The Medicare for All Act not only expands health coverage to everyone from birth to death, but also improves Medicare for seniors by including more benefits such as dental, vision, hearing and long term care. And, it does this without requiring premiums, co-pays or deductibles, saving people more than $300 billion annually in out-of-pocket costs.
All doctors, hospitals and other providers will be in a Medicare for all system so people will have complete choice of health services. Patients will not be limited by the narrow insurance industry networks, which often exclude cancer and other specialty centers – places people go when they are ill – to avoid paying for health care. Medicare for all means complete coverage, complete choice and freedom to change jobs or quit a job without fear of losing health coverage.
Improved Medicare for all creates hundreds of billions of savings that more than offset the increased costs of covering everyone and eliminating out-of-pocket expenses. In addition to reducing administrative waste, Medicare for all allows the federal government to negotiate with pharmaceuticals and providers to bring down the prices of care.
The strategy of the industries that profit from healthcare is to confuse people with false information and false proposals that sound like Medicare for All. They create front groups to create the illusion of support for their proposals and donate to politicians who advocate for their interests. These false proposals, like the one promoted by the so-called Center for American Progress, are designed to protect the industry, not fix the healthcare crisis. The Democratic leadership is addicted to insurance, pharmaceutical, and healthcare dollars. The people must be organized to defeat the industry and put in place the system we need.
This week, Sen. Kamala Harris put forward a terrible policy proposal, which she called Medicare for all. The proposal has two major flaws. First, it requires a ten-year transition to improved Medicare for all. This is unnecessary as the Medicare system already exists and we are already spending enough on health care to cover everyone. There is no need for long delays. Second, she allows insurance industry theft of the Medicare for all system by including “Medicare Advantage” plans (these are private insurance plans). Medicare Advantage is a heavily marketedscam on the elderly that costs the government more money than traditional Medicare and has the same flaws as private insurance. This proposal is bad policy and bad politics and should result in the defeat of Sen. Harris.
The most common false proposal is some form of a ‘public option.’ Mayor Pete Buttigieg, one of Wall Street’s favorite candidates, calls this Medicare for those who want it. We call it Medicare for some, not Medicare for all. A public option does not fix the system, it makes it worse by adding another insurance plan to an already too complex system. It foregoes 84 percent of the savings that a single payer system would achieve.
Former Vice President Biden, the biggest recipient of donations from the industry, is another who refuses to advocate for what Democratic voters want. Biden continues to put forward false arguments against Medicare for all. He is stuck in the past and focused on saving the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The ACA is fundamentally flawedbecause it is based on the corrupt and expensive private insurance system. Biden is fading in the polls for a variety of reasons, but his refusal to support improved Medicare for all should result in the end of his campaign. Democrats must know that the public understands the issue and insists on improved Medicare for all.
Neither Republicans nor Libertarians are putting forward any healthcare plan, which resulted in Republicans losing in 2018. The Green Party has advocated for single payer health care since the start. Ralph Nader ran on a platform that included Medicare for All as early as 2000.
Congress Must Do More
In addition to stopping the false non-solution promoted by corporate Democrats, the movement must push to improve both the House and Senate Medicare for all bills. The Senate bill, SB 1129, sponsored by Sanders and 14 Senators, is flawed in very serious ways. It needs to expand coverage of long term care, provide global budgeting for hospitals and end the massive insurance loopholes of managed care structures like Accountable Care Organizations (ACO’s), which function like insurance plans.
The House bill is better but still needs improvement. Both the House and Senate bills need to end commodification of health care by eliminating for-profit hospitals and other facilities. The for-profits can be purchased by the healthcare system using a Treasury Bill financed over 15 years at a cost of one percent of total health spending. If the for-profits are kept in and regulated, as the House bill does, it is likely the owners will sell them or convert them to profit-making entities like condominiums as is happening in Philadelphia. The House bill needs to shrink the transition from two years to one year, and the Senate Bill needs to shrink the four-year transition currently proposed.
The movement must insist on the best possible improved Medicare for all bill so people get the healthcare they need, businesses can thrive and the economy is not drained by the cost of healthcare. The US cannot afford to continue the insurance-dominated for-profit system it has; we must put in place improved Medicare for all.
On The Precipice Of Winning Improved Medicare for All
There are many signs that we are on the verge of winning the urgent and essential policy change of national improved Medicare for all. The single payer movement has the power to win improved Medicare for all if it doesn’t back down. The closer we get to victory, the more the profiteering industries will fight us. In the Popular Resistance School for Social Transformation, we describe this push back as part of the process of winning, and we teach how movements can defeat the strategies of those who seek to maintain the status quo.
There are still hurdles before us, but if the movement continues to work to educate voters as well as to organize and mobilize, we will create a political environment where politicians across the political spectrum must support health care as a human right as embodied in an improved Medicare for all health system.
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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.
There are stories that are unrelated to the news, but can explain much better than many combat reports, why people like me are fighting against the Empire and imperialism, with such determination and vehemence. Not all stories are ‘big’ or ‘heroic’; not all include famous people or iconic struggles. Not all take place on battlefields.
But they ‘humanize’ the struggle.
Once in a while, I like to share such stories with my readers. As I will do right now.
Because without them, frankly, nothing really makes sense.
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It was a hot, humid night in Jakarta; a megapolis with the worst pollution on earth, and with some of the most monstrous contrasts on our planet. A literally sinking city, constructed against the people; fragmented, serving only the few hundred thousand extremely rich (most of them accumulating wealth through corruption and theft), while condemning millions of struggling individuals to a slow death.
For the ruthless Indonesian elites and their Western handlers, the poor of Jakarta (the great majority of city dwellers) simply do not exist. They live in crammed slums, called kampungs – literally translated as villages. Kampungs fill huge spaces between the skyscrapers, malls, and mostly empty five-star hotels. Individuals living there consume very little, and therefore matter close to nothing. Even their number is underplayed in the official statistics.
One night, my small film crew and I were driving though the Klender neighborhood in East Jakarta; a poor, religious and monotonous part of the city.
Re-editing my big film about Indonesia after the US-sponsored military coup of 1965, an event which I often describe as an “Intellectual Hiroshima”, I had to again spend a few days in Jakarta, collecting latest footage, filming contrasts between the people and feudal elites.
We were all tired. Traffic jams have brought the city to an almost permanent gridlock. The pollution is unbearable. Life has come to a standstill. As planned by the regime, no one seemed to be thinking. Nothing seemed to be working.
We were driving past Klender train station a few minutes after midnight.
There were two young women standing by the side of the road. One of them caught my eye. She was clearly a prostitute, or a ‘sex-worker’, as they would call her in the West. But in reality, no, she was not a ‘worker’; not her. Just an abused, tired women.
I liked her face. Hers was an honest, good face. And after all that nonsense I heard during the day, after all that ‘feel good’ crap, I needed to hear something real, honest.
“Stop!” I shouted at my driver. He stepped on the brakes, then backed up a few meters.
“I want to talk to her,” I explained. Then to her: “I want to talk to you.”
She did not find my request strange. She nodded. After years of moving all around the world, while documenting the state of our humanity, I have developed certain instincts. I can tell from the faces of people, whether they have a story to tell; and whether they have the desire to speak. She did, both.
We emptied the front seat for her, next to the driver. She got in. Jakarta is a dangerous city, especially for women. But she did not seem to be frightened. She trusted me, as I trusted her.
“My name is Andre,” I said. “I am a filmmaker, and this is my team”.
“My name is Risna,” she answered and smiled.
“I want to hear your story,” I said.
“OK,” she said.
“Do you mind if I film?”
“Go ahead. I don’t mind.”
I put my GH5 over my knee, turned on the little light on the ceiling of the car, and pressed the “Record” button.
Just like that. No coaching, no preparation. And then it happened. She spoke. Clearly. Bitterly. Honestly.
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“It was four of us,” she began, softly:
“Four children. Little ones. Two boys and two girls. Our father, a pious religious man, used to use all of us. He had sex with us, with males and females. By then our mother was gone. He wanted to get married for the second time. To a young woman. But he had no money. And so, he began pimping all of us, for cash, so he could save enough, to start his new family. All four of us… you know; we all failed in life. At seven, I often slept on the streets. My siblings are all dysfunctional. I got married, had children, but my husband left me. I’m thirty years old now. I do this to support my children, and my brothers and sister.”
Trains kept passing-by. Loud express trains, rushing to far away cities: Yogyakarta, Solo, Surabaya.
“I couldn’t’ talk to anybody. Here, it is always woman’s fault. No matter what happens, it is woman’s fault.”
I was frozen in my seat.
“This is my story.”
“And now?” I could not think about anything else to ask.
“Now I am speaking to you.”
I stopped the car in the middle of the night. I wanted to hear a story of a woman who was working by the side of the road. And that is precisely what I got: she described to me, briefly, her life.
She did it in a simple, touchingly naïve, pure way. There was nothing unnatural in her voice.
She spoke for herself, and for millions of Indonesian women like her, too.
I cared about her, but did not know how to express it, what to say.
We spoke for a bit, about the terrible fate of women in Indonesia. About the hypocrisy of this society. But it was well after midnight, and she had to earn her living. I had to let her go.
“You will be in my film, together with your former President Gus Dur, and the greatest writer, Pramoedya Ananta Toer.”
She nodded, in a matter of fact way.
“What do you dream about?”
And that’s when her eyes filled with tears:
“I want to raise my children as a good mother; from honest work.”
I looked at the monitor of my camera. 8 minutes and few seconds had passed since I began recording. One human life, in a summary. One complex, broken human life. I bowed to her. Shook her hand. Thanked her.
“Do you have hope?”
She looked at me, deep into my eyes. Then she nodded.
“Yes!”
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At night, I couldn’t sleep.
I knew all about what she was talking about. My friend who works for the UNDP once explained to me, that Indonesia has one of the highest child abandonment rates in the world. And also, one of the highest amounts of sexual child abuse cases, particularly inside families; committed by family members. All these topics are taboo, and no ‘official’ study can be produced, as most women are only willing to speak ‘off the record’.
In Indonesia, after 1965, everything collapsed; was destroyed. But this downfall, and almost nothing related to it, can be discussed openly. Here, the fear of truth is omnipresent, and I will soon address this shocking issue in one of my upcoming essays.
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In 1979, when the pro-US Somoza’s regime collapsed and the Sandinistas took over the devastated Nicaragua, my friend, an American poet and translator, happened to be in Managua.
He was very young and confused.
He understood, theoretically, the greatness of the revolution. But he was still lacking examples.
Then, one afternoon, he saw a bus. A beat-up public bus, slowly moving towards the center of the city, while sun was setting down, behind the hills.
He told me the story, a long time ago, in New York, as I was ready to depart for Peru, to cover the so-called Dirty War:
“It was the end of the week. The bus was full of girls; young women from slums. Some were barefoot. But they were dressed in their best. They were travelling to the center of the capital, to dance!”
The voice of my friend broke. He was overwhelmed by his memories.
“Do you understand? Before, they only went to the rich parts of the city in order to serve, to be humiliated, used; to labor for the rich. Now, they were going to those clubs that only a week ago were frequented exclusively by ‘gringos’ and local elites. They were going to dance. It was their country, suddenly. It was their city. They were free. The country belonged to them.”
“This is when I understood,” he concluded, “that the revolution was right. Not because I studied Marxism, not because of some theory. But because these girls from the poor neighborhoods of Managua had suddenly gained the right to dance. They gained their right to exist; to be alive!”
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In Cuba, they say: “Everyone dances, or no one dances!”
Covering the world, documenting wars, conflicts, but also revolutions, I often encounter women like Risna.
Whenever countries collapse, whenever they are destroyed by savage capitalism, by religious extremism, or by subservience to imperialist powers, women suffer the most. It is almost the rule.
Most of them suffer in silence, as even their voices are being muted.
The more oppressive, regressive society gets, the more subjugated are its women.
Their humiliation, repression, suffering gets glorified as virtue. While rape, molestation, and submission are hushed up, never discussed. In countries such as Indonesia, if a woman protests and speaks about her fate, she gets ridiculed, discredited, or even thrown into prison, as has happened recently, on several well-publicized occasions.
Western hypocrisy is obvious: while everyone there is obsessed with ‘political correctness’, London, Washington and Paris are glorifying, supporting and even producing regimes which treat women worse than animals.
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Risna deserves to be in one of those proverbial buses which are taking women to the once exclusive clubs, so they can dance. In a rough translation of the metaphor: ‘so they could become the owners of their own fate, of their cities, and their country’.
Women like her are the women we are fighting for.
Their stories are our stories. Be they in Managua, Jakarta, Kampala, or Mumbai.
They are as significant as those stories from the war zones near Syrian Idlib, or Afghanistan, or Libya.
Not to tell such stories would convert us, revolutionary writers, into liars.
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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.
Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Four of his latest books are China and Ecological Civilization with John B. Cobb, Jr., Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. His Patreon
In ‘off the record’ meetings last September, Liz Truss sought lessons from Donald Trump’s radical program of deregulation and tax cuts. The new international trade secretary, Liz Truss, met with hard-right pressure groups in Washington DC last year to learn about the benefits of Donald Trump’s deregulatory agenda, according to official documents obtained by Unearthed.
In “off the record” meetings with climate sceptic think tanks that have driven Trump’s radical program of deregulation and tax cuts, Truss sought to learn whether such policies could benefit the UK.
In one meeting the then chief secretary to the Treasury discussed the success of Trump’s efforts to slash regulations with the chief economist of a controversial lobby group funded by the Koch brothers.
In another, Truss planned to ask what lessons she could learn from Reaganomics “on things like regulation and red tape.”
Truss is now responsible for negotiating a trade deal with the United States and will visit Washington DC later this month to recommence talks
In January, Unearthed reported that powerful US agricultural interests have demanded that Trump make any trade deal contingent on the UK ditching EU rules governing pesticides; genetically modified crops; and imports of chlorinated chicken and hormone-reared beef.
The UK government has previously ruled out weakening standards as part of a US-UK deal but Boris Johnson has appointed a number of pro-deregulation Conservative MPs to senior cabinet positions.
Libertarian shift
Truss recently argued that the UK could learn from Trump’s approach to regulation and has recruited special advisers from libertarian think tanks that support a deregulatory trade deal with the US.
Sophie Jarvis, recently of the Adam Smith Institute, will advise Truss on policy issues; whileNerissa Chesterfield, is moving from her role as head of communications at the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and will advise on media.
Over the last two years, the IEA has run a concerted campaign for a hard Brexit that seeks to shift the UK away from the EU’s system of regulation and towards that of the US, which is widely considered to be less stringent.
Barry Gardiner, Labour’s shadow trade secretary, told Unearthed that Truss’ appointment showed that Boris Johnson “is a fan of damaging right-wing deregulatory dogma.”
“Truss has cosied up to organisations that want the UK to slash taxes and regulations… they are planning a UK-US deal that would destroy worker’s rights, our food standards and animal welfare regulations,” Gardiner said, “an agreement like that with the US would make it far harder to get a deal with the EU that protects jobs and our economy,” he continued.
Off the record
During her three day visit to Washington DC in September 2018, Truss attended an “off the record” meeting with senior representatives of the Heritage Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) to discuss “regulatory reform,” according to documents obtained by Unearthed under freedom of information rules.
A briefing note preparing Truss for the meeting on September 19 reveals that she was to ask Heritage: “What can we learn from ‘Reaganomics’ on things like regulation and red tape.”
Reaganomics involved a radical programme of tax cuts, decreased social spending, increased military spending and sweeping deregulation. The Heritage Foundation pursues a similar agenda and is widely acknowledged to be the driving force behind Trump’s deregulatory agenda.
Truss also planned to tell Heritage that she is “committed to” and “personally interested in… exploring supply-side reforms” in the UK.
Examples of supply-side reforms include making it easier for companies to fire employees and slashing environmental regulations to make businesses more profitable, both of which could fall within the scope of a US-UK trade deal.
Last year Unearthed revealed that the Heritage Foundation and CEI – together with the Cato Institute, which Truss also met with during her trip – were part of a transatlantic coalition of libertarian think tanks seeking to influence the contents of a US-UK trade deal. The IEA and the Adam Smith Institute were also part of the project.
Truss’ visit to the US directly coincided with the Washington DC launch of this coalition’s “ideal” free trade agreement, which sought to provide a “blueprint” for the US and UK government’s to follow.
A spokesperson for the department for international trade told Unearthed:
“We are committed to negotiating an ambitious free trade agreement with the US that supports good quality jobs throughout the whole of the UK.”
“Without exception, imports into the UK will meet our stringent food safety and animal welfare standards. That’s not going to change,” he continued.
Gimmicky
On September 18 Truss met with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), during which she discussed deregulation and Trump’s tax cuts with its chief economist, Jonathan Williams.
ALEC is a controversial coalition of corporate interests – including the Koch brothers – and state-level politicians, that meets regularly to draft business-friendly legislation that is then enacted by state governments across the US.
In recent years a number of blue-chip companies, including Shell, BP and ExxonMobil have quit ALEC over its opposition to efforts to tackle climate change.
Notes from the meeting reveal that Truss discussed deregulation with Williams, who praised Trump’s “1 in 2 out” policy on regulations for being “gimmicky but effective.”
According to the documents:
“ALEC said they thought the understated success of Trump has been this.”
A few months later, in January 2019, Truss wrote in The Telegraph that the UK could learn lessons from the Trump administration’s “about-turn in regulatory direction and the manufacturing revival.”
This “about-turn” has involved the elimination of the United State’s policy framework for meeting the Paris climate agreement, including Obama’s clean power plan; fuel economy standards for cars and regulations governing greenhouse gas emissions from oil operations.
Another document reveals how an official from the Foreign Office wrote to a free-market think tank called R Street on Truss’ behalf requesting a meeting to discuss “business deregulation”.
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A Marilyn has once again seduced a president. This time, though, it’s not a movie star; it’s Marillyn Hewson, the head of Lockheed Martin, the nation’s top defense contractor and the largest weapons producer in the world. In the last month, Donald Trump and Hewson have seemed inseparable. They “saved” jobs at a helicopter plant. They took the stage together at a Lockheed subsidiary in Milwaukee. The president vetoed three bills that would have blocked the arms sales of Lockheed (and other companies) to Saudi Arabia. Recently, the president’s daughter Ivanka even toured a Lockheed space facility with Hewson.
On July 15th, the official White House Twitter account tweeted a video of the Lockheed CEO extolling the virtues of the company’s THAAD missile defense system, claiming that it “supports 25,000 American workers.” Not only was Hewson promoting her company’s product, but she was making her pitch — with the weapon in the background — on the White House lawn. Twitter immediately burst with outrage over the White House posting an ad for a private company, with some calling it “unethical” and “likely unlawful.”
Not only does the @LockheedMartin THAAD missile defense system protect our citizens and allies—it also supports 25,000 American workers! 🇺🇸
None of this, however, was really out of the ordinary as the Trump administration has stopped at nothing to push the argument that job creation is justification enough for supporting weapons manufacturers to the hilt. Even before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, he was already insisting that military spending was a great jobs creator. He’s only doubled down on this assertion during his presidency. Recently, overriding congressional objections, he even declared a national “emergency” to force through part of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia that he had once claimed would create more than a million jobs. While this claim has been thoroughly debunked, the most essential part of his argument — that more money flowing to defense contractors will create significant numbers of new jobs — is considered truth personified by many in the defense industry, especially Marillyn Hewson.
The facts tell a different story.
Lockheed Locks Down Taxpayer Dollars, While Cutting American Jobs
To test Trump’s and Hewson’s argument, we asked a simple question: When contractors receive more taxpayer money, do they generally create more jobs? To answer it, we analyzed the reports of major defense contractors filed annually with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Among other things, these reveal the total number of people employed by a firm and the salary of its chief executive officer. We then compared those figures to the federal tax dollars each company received, according to the Federal Procurement Data System, which measures the “dollars obligated,” or funds, the government awards company by company.
We focused on the top five Pentagon defense contractors, the very heartland of the military-industrial complex, for the years 2012 to 2018. As it happened, 2012 was a pivotal year because the Budget Control Act (BCA) first went into effect then, establishing caps on how much money could be spent by Congress and mandating cuts to defense spending through 2021. Those caps were never fully adhered to. Ultimately, in fact, the Pentagon will receive significantly more money in the BCA decade than in the prior one, a period when the American wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were at their heights.
In 2012, concerned that those caps on defense spending would cut into their bottom lines, the five top contractors went on the political offensive, making future jobs their weapon of choice. After the Budget Control Act passed, the Aerospace Industries Association — the leading trade group of the weapons-makers — warned that more than one million jobs would be at risk if Pentagon spending were cut significantly. To emphasize the point, Lockheed sent layoff notices to 123,000 employees just before the BCA was implemented and only days before the 2012 election. Those layoffs never actually happened, but the fear of lost jobs would prove real indeed and would last.
Consider it mission accomplished, since Pentagon spending was actually higher in 2018 than in 2012 and Lockheed received a sizeable chunk of that cash infusion. From 2012 to 2018, among government contractors, that company would, in fact, be the top recipient of taxpayer dollars every single year, those funds reaching their zenith in 2017, as it raked in more than $50.6 billion federal dollars. By contrast, in 2012, when Lockheed was threatening its employees with mass layoffs, the firm received nearly $37 billion.
So what did Lockheed do with those additional $13 billion taxpayer dollars? It would be reasonable to assume that it used some of that windfall (like those of previous years) to invest in growing its workforce. If you came to that conclusion, however, you would be sorely mistaken. From 2012 to 2018, overall employment at Lockheed actually fell from 120,000 to 105,000, according to the firm’s filings with the SEC and the company itself reported a slightly larger reduction of 16,350 jobs in the U.S. In other words, in the last six years Lockheed dramatically reduced its U.S. workforce, even as it hired more employees abroad and received more taxpayer dollars.
So where is all that additional taxpayer money actually going, if not job creation? At least part of the answer is contractor profits and soaring CEO salaries. In those six years, Lockheed’s stock price rose from $82 at the beginning of 2012 to $305 at the end of 2018, a nearly four-fold increase. In 2018, the company also reported a 9% ($590 million) rise in its profits, the best in the industry. And in those same years, the salary of its CEO increased by $1.4 million, again according to its SECfilings.
In short, since 2012 the number of taxpayer dollars going to Lockheed has expanded by billions, the value of its stock has nearly quadrupled, and its CEO’s salary went up 32%, even as it cut 14% of its American work force. Yet Lockheed continues to use job creation, as well as its employees’ present jobs, as political pawns to get yet more taxpayer money. The president himself has bought into the ruse in his race to funnel ever more money to the Pentagon and promote arms deals to countries like Saudi Arabia, even overthe nearly unified objections of an otherwise incredibly divided Congress.
Lockheed Is the Norm, Not the Exception
Despite being this country’s and the world’s top weapons maker, Lockheed isn’t the exception but the norm. From 2012 to 2018, the unemployment rate in the U.S. plummeted from roughly 8% to 4%, with more than 13 million new jobs added to the economy. Yet, in those same years, three of the five top defense contractors slashed jobs. In 2018, the Pentagon committed approximately $118 billion in federal money to those firms, including Lockheed — nearly half of all the money it spent on contractors. This was almost $12 billion more than they had received in 2012. Yet, cumulatively, those companies lost jobs and now employ a total of 6,900 fewer employees than they did in 2012, according to their SEC filings.
In addition to the reductions at Lockheed, Boeing slashed 21,400 jobs and Raytheon cut 800 employees from its payroll. Only General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman added jobs — 13,400 and 16,900 employees, respectively — making that total figure look modestly better. However, even those “gains” can’t qualify as job creation in the normal sense, since they resulted almost entirely from the fact that each of those companies bought another Pentagon contractor and added its employees to its own payroll. CSRA, which General Dynamics acquired in 2018, had 18,500 employees before the merger, while Orbital ATK, which General Dynamics acquired last year, had 13,900 employees. Subtract these 32,400 jobs from the corporate totals and job losses at the firms become staggering.
In addition, those employment figures include all company employees, even those now working outside the U.S. Lockheed is the only top five Pentagon contractor that provides information on the percentage of its employees in the U.S., so if the other firms are shipping jobs overseas, as Lockheed has done and as Raytheon is planning to do, far more than 6,900 full-time jobs in the U.S. have been lost in the last six years.
Where, then, did all that job-creation money really go? Just as at Lockheed, at least part of the answer is that the money went to the bottom-line and to top executives. According to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, a consulting firm that provides annual analyses of the defense industry, “the aerospace and defense (A&D) sector scored record revenues and profits in 2018” with an “operating profit of $81 billion, surpassing the previous record set in 2017.” According to the report, Pentagon contractors were at the forefront of these profit gains. For example, Lockheed’s profit improvement was $590 million, followed closely by General Dynamics at $562 million. As employment shrank, CEO salaries at some of these firms only grew. In addition to compensation for Lockheed’s CEO jumping from $4.2 million in 2012 to $5.6 million in 2018, compensation for the CEO of General Dynamics increased from $6.9 million in 2012 to a whopping $20.7 million in 2018.
Perpetuating the Same Old Story
This is hardly the first time that these companies have extolled their ability to create jobs while cutting them. As Ben Freeman previously documented for the Project On Government Oversight, these very same firms cut almost 10% of their workforce in the six years before the BCA came into effect, even as taxpayer dollars heading their way annually jumped by nearly 25% from $91 billion to $113 billion.
Just as then, the contractors and their advocates — and there are many of them, given that the weapons-making outfits spend more than $100 million on lobbying yearly, donate tens of millions of dollars to the campaigns of members of Congress every election season, and give millions to think tanks annually — will rush to defend such job losses. They will, for instance, note that defense spending leads to job growth among the subcontractors used by the major weapons firms. Yet research has repeatedly shown that, even with this supposed “multiplier effect,” defense spending produces fewer jobs than just about anything else the government puts our money into. In fact, it’s about 50% less effective at creating jobs than if taxpayers were simply allowed to keep their money and use it as they wished.
As Brown University’s Costs of War project has reported, “$1 billion in military spending creates approximately 11,200 jobs, compared with 26,700 in education, 16,800 in clean energy, and 17,200 in health care.” Military spending actually proved to be the worst job creator of any federal government spending option those researchers analyzed. Similarly, according to a report by Heidi Garrett-Peltier of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, for every $1 million of spending on defense, 6.9 jobs are created both directly in defense industries and in the supply chain. Spending the same amount in the fields of wind or solar energy, she notes, leads to 8.4 or 9.5 jobs, respectively. As for the education sector, the same amount of money produced 19.2 jobs in primary and secondary education and 11.2 jobs in higher education. In other words, not only are the green energy and education areas vital to the future of the country, they are also genuine job-creating machines. Yet, the government gives more taxpayer dollars to the defense industry than all these other government functions combined.
You don’t, however, have to turn to critics of defense spending to make the case. Reports from the industry’s own trade association show that it has been shedding jobs. According to an Aerospace Industries Association analysis, it supported approximately 300,000 fewer jobs in 2018 than it had reported supporting just three years earlier.
If the nation’s top defense contractor and the industry as a whole have been shedding jobs, how have they been able to consistently and effectively perpetuate the myth that they are engines of job creation? To explain this, add to their army of lobbyists, their treasure trove of campaign contributions, and those think tanks on the take, the famed revolving door that sends retired government officials into the world of the weapons makers and those working for them to Washington.
While there has always been a cozy relationship between the Pentagon and the defense industry, the lines between contractors and the government have blurred far more radically in the Trump years. Mark Esper, the newly minted secretary of defense, for example, previously worked as Raytheon’s top lobbyist in Washington. Spinning the other way, the present head of the Aerospace Industries Association, Eric Fanning, had been both secretary of the Army and acting secretary of the Air Force. In fact, since 2008, as the Project On Government Oversight’s Mandy Smithberger found, “at least 380 high-ranking Department of Defense officials and military officers shifted into the private sector to become lobbyists, board members, executives, or consultants for defense contractors.”
Whatever the spin, whether of that revolving door or of the defense industry’s publicists, the bottom line couldn’t be clearer: if job creation is your metric of choice, Pentagon contractors are a bad taxpayer investment. So whenever Marillyn Hewson or any other CEO in the military-industrial complex claims that spending yet more taxpayer dollars on defense contractors will give a jobs break to Americans, just remember their track record so far: ever more dollars invested means ever fewer Americans employed.
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If you have been wondering when the twenty Democratic aspirants for the presidency will begin a serious discussion of American foreign policy in the Middle East, where Washington has been bogged down in both current and impending wars, you are not alone. With the honorable exception of Tulsi Gabbard, no one seems keen to touch that particular live wire.
Part of the problem is the journalists who are asking the questions in the debates. To be sure, the publication of “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt back in 2007 opened the door to a frank discussion of why the United States is involved in unresolvable conflicts on behalf of a tiny client state. But unfortunately, while it is now possible to find in the mainstream media some honest analysis of Israel’s ability to corrupt policy formulation in Washington, in general the Jewish state continues to get a pass from both the press and politicians on all issues that matter.
And then there is the problem of Congress itself, which is precisely the institution that has been most corrupted by Israel and Jewish money. Almost thirty years ago, American politician Pat Buchanan described Congress as “Israeli occupied territory.” As a result, he was viciously attacked by the mainstream media and the political leadership of both parties, demonstrating beyond all doubt that he was correct in his observation. Today the Israel Lobby in the United States is far more powerful than it was in 1990, so much so that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu actually boasts to his voters that he directs U.S. policy.
The hypocrisy inherent in the Israel-philia of America’s political leadership is such that it sometimes produces comic results. The whiney head of the House Intelligence Committee Congressman Adam Schiff, Democrat of California, was beside himself prior to the Robert Mueller testimony before Congress on July 24th, denouncing Russia and President Donald Trump, saying that the president’s actions amounted to “Disloyalty to country… Those are strong words… But disloyalty to country violates the very obligation of citizenship, our devotion to a core principle on which our nation was founded, that we, the people, not some foreign power that wishes us ill, we decide, who shall govern, us.”
Strong words indeed, but Adam Schiff knows perfectly well that Moscow’s alleged involvement in the 2016 election, which was relatively insignificant, had no measurable impact on the result. And both he and Mueller have been coy about presenting any real evidence that Russia is gearing up to do major damage in 2020, which is what they claim to be the case. By way of contrast, everyone in Washington knows very clearly but will never admit that Israel has seriously corrupted the United States government and its elected officials at all levels. But Schiff did not mention Israel, nor did he express concern that Israel’s clearly unsavory involvement with Trump transition team members General Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner was never thoroughly investigated or included in the final Mueller report. One might assume that a deliberate decision was made by some parties in power to avoid embarrassing Israel. Those parties almost certainly included Schiff.
Schiff, who is Jewish, frequently tells audiences about his love for Israel, sometimes complaining that it is treated unfairly. It might be suggested that if anyone in the government is partial to a foreign power it is Schiff, and that foreign power is Israel, not Russia.
Unfortunately, Schiff is far from unique. Perhaps he and a number of other Congressmen should register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as required by law. Congressmen are not exempt when they work to benefit a foreign nation, though they frequently believe themselves to be not subject to the very laws that they pass. In May a letter was sent to the White House with the signatures of 400 congressmen, purely to express America’s legislature’s solidarity with Israel and to give it a green light to do whatever it wishes vis-à-vis its neighbors. The letter cites some questionable American interests relating to Syria, but it also mentions Israel no less than 13 times.
If that does not convince one that Congress has always been and continues to be Israeli occupied territory, check out some bills that have been working their way through the legislature. The House voted overwhelmingly on July 23rd to formally oppose the Palestinian-backed nonviolent movement to boycott Israel. The measure, H.Res.246 opposes “efforts to delegitimize the State of Israel and the Global Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement [BDS] targeting Israel.” The bill had 349 co-sponsors and passed by a 398–17 vote. Sixteen Democrats and only one Republican opposed the bill. The bill is not a law but is rather intended to express the will of congress, which is perhaps the only good thing to say about it.
Other bills have not yet been voted on, presumably because friends of the Jewish state are looking for more goodies to add in. The pending legislative action includes the aid to Israel bill H.R.1837 the “United States-Israel Cooperation Enhancement and Regional Security Act”, which has 279 cosponsors. When the bill is approved, which it will be, it will increase the amount of aid given to Israel over ten years to $38 billion, though this is now regarded as a minimum figure which will be supplemented to meet the Jewish state’s expressed needs. And the aid is now unconditional, meaning that Israel will receive the money no matter how it behaves, while the Jewish state will also be able to use the U.S. taxpayer provided money to buy weapons from its own arms industry, cutting American defense contractors out of the loop and costing jobs in the United States.
Another bill to benefit Israel is also pending: H.R. 1850, the “Palestinian International Terrorism Support Prevention Act of 2019,” a law that would authorize and encourage financially sanctioning any foreign organization or individual that provides “support” to any group, organization or individual considered to be part of the Palestinian resistance. Interestingly, the bill does not even pretend to be based on U.S. national security: it is all about and for Israel. It could mean that foreign supporters of BDS, which is now considered a hostile entity by “the will of” Congress, could be subject to sanctions even though they are non-violent and threaten no one.
One final bit of bipartisan legislation best described as a pander to both Israel and the Jewish community is a bill that has appeared recently in the Senate that will prioritize and pay for health care and nutrition services for those who claim to be holocaust survivors. The bill is entitled the “Trauma-Informed Modernization of Eldercare for Holocaust Survivors Act” or “TIME for Holocaust Survivors Act.” It is intended to “increase the chances that survivors could age in their own homes” and also “to ensure that holocaust survivors have care and services tailored to their needs.”
Sponsor Senator Ben Cardin of Maryland, who is of course Jewish, elaborated:
“Holocaust survivors came to the United States seeking refuge from unimaginable horrors. They have lived their lives here and enriched our nation. With an average age of 85, we have an obligation to provide Holocaust survivors the community support and special services they need to live out their final days,”
WE have an obligation? How about you and your co-religionists Ben as you seem to have a lot of money to spend on lobbying for Israel and corrupting our government? Special services? Why do they need help? Because, the bill states, “institutionalized settings, with confined spaces or restrictions on food, can induce panic, anxiety, and re-traumatization due to their holocaust experiences.”
What about other elderly American who have problems with “institutionalized settings” or “confined spaces” or “restrictions on food?” How the Senate will justify special benefits for a small group of self-described victims drawn from the wealthiest demographic in the U.S. remains to be seen. If there is anyone who actually needs help, it is the U.S. taxpayer, who has to bear the burden of this utter nonsense, which sets up Jews as a special privileged group within our social services network. So-called holocaust survivors are identified in the bill’s “Findings” as “(2) More than 200,000 Jews fleeing from Nazi occupied territory found refuge in the United States from 1933 through 1945, and approximately 137,000 additional Jewish refugees settled in the United States from 1945 through 1952. (3) Hundreds of thousands of additional Jewish refugees continued to immigrate to the United States from Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union during the subsequent decades. (4) The number of Holocaust survivors living in the United States at the end of 2018 was approximately 80,000 individuals, down from an estimated 13 127,000 in 2010.”
Thus, holocaust survivors who will benefit from the bill are inevitably and by intention only Jews – no Christians who went through 1933-1945 in Europe need apply. That one highly privileged group should deserve special benefits from government that other retirees cannot have is a disgrace. So, is the United States Congress Israeli and also, by extension, Jewish occupied territory? I think the question answers itself.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
During the summer war of 2006, Israel managed to destroy a large number of Hezbollah’s rocket and missile stocks. Most Hezbollah missile units were destroyed and, in the suburb of the capital Beirut, over 250 buildings (mainly but not exclusively hosting Hezbollah offices, warehouses and officers’ homes) were flattened by Israeli precision bombs targeting Hezbollah (and many civilians) in the suburbs of Beirut. Hundreds of houses were completely destroyed in the south of Lebanon. However, Israel was unable to fulfil its objectives due to the defeat of its infantry which faced harsh resistance and was unable to push deep inland. Moreover, the Kornet anti-tank laser-guided missiles and the “Nour” anti-ship missiles of Hezbollah surprised the enemy, indicating a serious lack of Israeli intelligence and confirming Hezbollah’s strong fighting abilities.
Thirteen years later, the failure of US and Israeli policy in the region means it is no longer possible for Israel to contemplate a direct confrontation with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The US and Israel failed to achieve four main goals: regime change in Syria, the partition of Iraq, the defeat of the Houthis in Yemen, the Palestinian “deal of the century”. Added to this, Israeli-US rejection of any fair Palestinian state has strengthened Palestinian resolve against Israel.
Israel has increased its firepower and military capabilities, but Hezbollah also moved from being a tactical local organisation to becoming a strategic player in the Middle East. The group’s superior fighting abilities have been enhanced by new military hardware. This has had the effect of rendering war in the Middle East unlikely any time in the near (or medium-term) future.
The attempt by the US and its partners to remove Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and transform the country into a failed state governed by jihadist Takfiris (ISIS and al-Qaeda groups, who overwhelmed all other rebel and non-jihadist organisations) forced the Lebanese Hezbollah, Iran and Iraq to engage militarily in the Levant. The same scenario repeated itself in Iraq when the US looked on as ISIS grew strong and held on to robust intelligence – the accuracy of which was later confirmed – that ISIS would be migrating from Iraq to Syria after occupying a large part of Iraq. Hezbollah, Iraqi groups and Iranian forces fought in Syria and Iraq to stop the jihadists from expanding and to prevent a direct danger to Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
In Iraq-by contrast with prevailing disinformation- ISIS did not occupy the second largest city of Mesopotamia, Mosul. It was a group of organisations, along with a few hundred ISIS fighters, who stole victory from other Sunni groups (mainly the Naqshabandi). They were supported by neighbouring countries and by the Iraqi Kurdish Leader Masoud Barzani, whose aspirations would have been fulfilled by the partition of Iraq into Kurdistan, Sunnistan and Shi-istan.
Turkey’s leadership wanted to reclaim Mosul as part of its ancient Ottoman Empire; Turkey stood to benefit from the occupation of Mosul and the north of Iraq by a group like ISIS. It would not have been difficult at some time in the future to defeat such an organisation lacking any international recognition.
The Kurdish leader Barzani wanted control of oil-rich Kirkuk and aimed for a self-proclaimed state for the Iraqi Kurds- a state which he later “declared” (but failed to achieve), notwithstanding the defeat of ISIS. Indeed, Barzani praised ISIS during its occupation of Mosul, as a “Sunni revolution”- but he failed to reckon with the fact that the terror group was also aiming to control Kurdistan and Kirkuk.
The US wanted the north of Iraq divided between a Sunni state and a Kurdish state. They would have never allowed ISIS to expand beyond Baghdad, in order to keep the oil under US control. Southern Iraq would have survived as a small but hopeless Shia canton in the south, notwithstanding its oil and gas wealth, and Iraq would have been eliminated from the map of “Iranian allies”, no longer a potential threat to Saudi Arabia and Israel.
The list of benefits to the US and its allies, had Syria disintegrated and been transformed into a jihadist safe haven, was very long. A failed state would have prevented Russia from supplying its oil to Europe via Syria and Turkey. It would have removed Russia’s access to warm Mediterranean waters and dislodgedits naval base in Tartus. It would have broken up the “Axis of the Resistance” between Iran, Syria and Lebanon. It would have stopped the flow of weapons from Iran to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and thus prevented the group from re-arming itself and updating its military hardware. It would have isolated the Shia in the south of Iraq from Syria.
The US coalition could then have watched the movement of jihadist takfiri groups from Syria to Lebanon and keep Hezbollah busy with a sectarian struggle that could have lasted for years, and weakened the enemies of Israel. This would have pushed Lebanese and Syrian Christians to migrate to western countries and abandon the Middle East to future decades of sectarian struggle. The jihadists would have had no objection to the gift of the Golan to Israel. Dismantlement of the Syrian army would have left the Palestinians without any support from Hezbollah, Syria, Iran or Lebanon. With no Syrian or Iraqi armies to fear, with Hezbollah busy domestically and its supply line of weapons cut off, with jihadists providing an easy target and a pretext for war, and with Saudi Arabia on its side, Israel could have expanded and widened its territory at the expense of the Palestinians and of neighbouring countries: no country or force could have stood in its way.
But these plans failed: Hezbollah moved to Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS and al-Qaeda. It managed to secure Lebanon by defeating al-Qaeda and ISIS in Arsal and along the Lebanese-Syrian borders. It has secured the land and air passage from Syria to Lebanon for supply of weapons and renewal of its arsenal. It gained tremendous urban, guerrilla and classical fighting skills and trained itself in real combat scenarios to operate alone, with the Syrian army, and with the Russians and Syrians, using classical fighting skills together with air and artillery support. Hezbollah, used to fighting Israel within an area of less than 1,500 sq km in the south of Lebanon, now fought in Syria on over 80,000 sq km of territory.
But that is not all: During the war imposed on Syria, Hezbollah has invented a rocket with a ton of explosives in its warhead (Burkan-Vulcano) and operationalised it. It has run intensive courses in the use of its drones, used its precision missiles with accuracy, produced thousands of highly trained Special Forces and it has fought an enemy (al-Qaeda) that is much more motivated to fight to the death than any Israeli Special Forces units. Furthermore, Hezbollah established its precision long-range missiles on the well-protected Lebanese-Syrian borders to alleviate the consequences of any future war for the Lebanese cities and villages.
The failure of the regime change cemented Hezbollah’s and Iran’s position in Syria to the level of full cooperation with the state, a level never reached in the past. The Syrian government was supported economically by Iran and protected militarily by the Iranian, Lebanese, Iraqi and Russian interventions.
Today US forces occupy the territory holding most Syrian oil resources in the north-east of the country and Syria is under heavy economic sanctions. Only Iran is rushing to support Syria’s economy to prevent it from collapsing by providing oil, constructing pharmaceutical and other industries to support the local economy, and fulfil some basic needs. The US-Israeli policy to cripple the government t of Damascus is strengthening the Iran-Hezbollah-Syria relationship, particularly since the US prevented the Arab and Gulf states from returning to Damascus to re-open their embassies, leaving the road open for Iran and Russia to be exclusively represented in the Levant.
Iran is also building up Syria’s missile capability. The current Iran-US tensions have proved that missiles can face down a superior air and naval force and are capable of establishing rules of engagement with a very small investment in comparison with the price of jets and frigates. Indeed, the war in Yemen and the Iran-US crisis both showed how armed drones and missiles can hit far-off targets and fulfil targeting objectives.
This is exactly what Hezbollah picked up in Lebanon and along the Syrian-Lebanese borders. In 2006 Hezbollah’s command made the mistake of building-up strategic warehouses in Syria. Israeli air superiority made the supply of weapons hazardous, as Israel could hit anything moving from the sky. The Syrian war provided Hezbollah with a heavy presence on the borders with long-range precision missile bases; they are now ready to widen the operational theatre in case of war. There is therefore no need for the non-state actor to move its missiles around from Syria to Lebanon.
In the last years, Israel bombed hundreds of objectives in Syria, including truckloads of weapons transiting to Lebanon, but never without prior warning to the driver before the raid. Israel wanted to avoid human casualties among Hezbollah officers, fully aware of the price of retaliation. Notwithstanding the repetitive attacks, Hezbollah’s warehouses are full, according to an Israeli estimate. This means the group has the capacity to fire thousands of rockets and missiles daily over a long war. Israel acknowledges its failure to limit the group’s armament supplies and capabilities.
Lessons have been learned from the wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen. More military lessons are being drawn from the US-Iran confrontation in the Gulf. Low cost missiles directed towards oil platforms, harbours, transiting ships, airports, electricity facilities, drinking water stations and military bases are today much more effective politically and militarily than hitting civilian targets. Armed drones and precision missiles can be deadly to the most advanced and highly equipped military state. Rockets can be used to saturate Israeli interceptor defensive missile systems. Dozens of rockets can be launched simultaneously, followed by the launch of a few precision missiles against a target. The interceptor system will be saturated, unable to shoot down all the incoming rockets and missiles, thus allowing at least 30-40% of the missiles to go through and hit the desired target, enough to create a real damage and be considered as balance changer. Such saturation techniques can be extremely effective, as all parties recognise.
The new war is essentially economic; it is a war of sanctions and limiting free movement of ship movements around the globe. It is a war of tankers and oil platforms. It is a starvation war where no one can threaten the enemy with a return to the “stone age” because the firepower is now universally available. Yemen is the best example: the threat of bombing Dubai forced the Emirates to seek Iranian mediation to prevent a missile attack against them. The Houthis, despite years of Saudi bombing of Yemen, have also managed to bomb Saudi airports, military bases and oil stations in the heart of Saudi Arabia, using cruise missiles and armed drones.
Gaza, along with Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad, are all highly equipped by Tehran with sufficient missiles to inflict real damage on Israel and on US forces deployed in the Middle East. Israel is playing around by targeting various objectives tactically but with no real strategic purpose- only for Netanyahu to keep himself busy and train his Air Force, and to gain publicity in the media. Soon, when Syria recovers and Iraq is stronger, the Israeli promenade will have to cease. Hezbollah in Lebanon may also find a way in the near future to keep its irregular but organised army busy by firing anti-air missiles against Israeli jets and imposing new rules of engagement. It is, however, too early now to challenge Israel in the air because the “Axis of Resistance” alliance works according to priorities, and this stage of the Iran-US crisis is still only beginning. However, as the crisis develops, the new stabilising effect of the deadly and accurate generation of drones and missile threat will make open warfare unlikely.
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Saudi Arabia has begun implementing a “strategic plan” to confront the Turkish government, after Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman decided he was being “too patient” with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the wake of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder.
The plan is detailed in a confidential report based on open- and closed-source intelligence prepared by the kingdom’s ally, the United Arab Emirates.
The intelligence report is one of a monthly series written by the Emirates Policy Centre, a think tank with close links to the Emirati government and security services.
Entitled “Monthly Report on Saudi Arabia, Issue 24, May 2019”, the report is of limited circulation and intended for the top Emirati leadership. It does not appear on the think tank’s website. A copy has been obtained by Middle East Eye.
It reveals that in Riyadh in May, orders were given to implement the strategic plan to confront the Turkish government.
The aim of the plan was to use “all possible tools to pressure Erdogan’s government, weaken him, and keep him busy with domestic issues in the hope that he will be brought down by the opposition, or occupy him with confronting crisis after crisis, and push him to slip up and make mistakes which the media would surely pick up on”.
Middle East Eye contacted the Emirates Policy Centre for comment, with no reply by the time of publication.
Restricting influence
Riyadh’s aim is to restrict Erdogan and Turkey’s regional influence.
“The kingdom would start to target the Turkish economy and press towards the gradual termination of Saudi investment in Turkey, the gradual decrease of Saudi tourists visiting Turkey while creating alternative destinations for them, decreasing Saudi import of Turkish goods, and most importantly minimising Turkish regional role in Islamic matters,” the report says.
According to the report, Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, took the decision to confront Turkey following the assassination of Khashoggi by a team of Saudi agents in their country’s Istanbul consulate.
The murder of the Saudi journalist, a Middle East Eye and Washington Post columnist, created international outrage, in large part due to Turkey’s insistence on Riyadh providing accountability and transparency over the affair.
“President Erdogan … went too far in his campaign smearing the kingdom, especially the person of the crown prince, using in the most reprehensible manner the case of Khashoggi,” the reports says
In the document, the Emirates Policy Centre claims Turkey did not provide “specific and honest” information to assist the Saudi investigation into the killing, but instead leaked “disinformation” to the media “all aimed at distorting the image of the kingdom and attempting to destroy the reputation of the crown prince”.
Riyadh had concluded that Erdogan failed in his attempt to politicise and internationalise the case and now was the time to mount the fightback, the report says.
Both the CIA and leading members of the US Congress have accepted the Turkish intelligence assessment of Khashoggi’s murder.
The CIA also concluded that Mohammed bin Salman almost certainly signed off on the operation, an assessment based on its own intelligence as well.
“The accepted position is that there is no way this happened without him being aware or involved,” said a US official familiar with the CIA’s conclusions, the Washington Post reported.
Since then, a report by United Nations human rights investigator Agnes Callamard detailed the difficulties the Turkish authorities had in investigating the murder and gaining access to the consulate building and the home of the consul-general.
Callamard concluded independently that the crown prince ordered Khashoggi’s murder.
The pressure begins
Last week came the first public sign of the campaign detailed in the Emirati document coming to life.
Saudi authorities blocked 80 Turkish trucks transporting textile products and chemicals from entering the kingdom through its Duba port.
Three hundred containers carrying fruit and vegetables from Turkey had also been held in Jeddah’s port, according to a Turkish official who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity.
The number of Saudi tourists visiting Turkey decreased 15 percent (from 276,000 to 234,000) in the first six months of 2019, according to official data released by the Turkish tourism ministry.
Saudi Arabia has approximately $2bn worth of direct investment in Turkey, according to the Turkish foreign ministry data from 2018.
That year, Turkish exports to Saudi Arabia were valued at around $2.64bn, while imports from the kingdom stood at $2.32bn.
Behind the scenes, other signals have been sent to Ankara.
The Emirati report says “in a sign that the Saudi leadership has severed its relationship with … Erdogan and started treating him as an enemy”, King Salman approved “without hesitation” a recommendation from an advisory committee not to send an official invitation to attend a high-profile Organisation of Islamic Cooperation summit in Mecca.
The Turkish president’s name was added to the list of those excluded from the summit, alongside Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and the Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani.
Eventually, King Salman decided to allow the Qatari emir to attend the event in Mecca, though Erdogan’s invitation was not forthcoming.
The Turkish government is aware of the Saudi crown prince’s attempts to sever relations and is trying to combat them through keeping direct communications with his father, King Salman.
A senior Turkish official, speaking anonymously, said the existence of a Saudi strategy to punish Turkey over its stance on the Khashoggi case wasn’t surprising.
“We are aware of what they are doing. It is almost public, to the extent that you could see their activities on Saudi-backed social media and Saudi state media,” the official told MEE, noting that they had openly called for a boycott.
“Tourist arrivals are decreasing, while we are having problems related to Turkish exports. We are closely following the situation.”
The Turkish official said, however, that Ankara does not believe that Saudi citizens are altering their stance on Turkey, despite the government in Riyadh’s efforts.
“Istanbul, for example, is still full of Saudi tourists. Saudi officials should check the BBC’s poll on Erdogan’s popularity in the Middle East. Then they will realise that they are failing,” the official said.
Erdogan phoned the king on Thursday, raising the problem of Turkish exports being held at Saudi ports.
Another Turkish official, also speaking anonymously, said Erdogan’s phone call with the Saudi king was cordial and focused on regional developments, such as Syria and the Palestine question.
The official, who was informed about the call, said the king was lucid and supportive of Turkish concerns with regard to Syria.
In the same call, Erdogan invited King Salman and his family, including the crown prince, to Turkey.
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Trump’s trying to portray himself as the Uniter-in-Chief following two devastating terrorist attacks over the weekend, but his proposal to marry firearm and immigration reforms into a single bill is a risky political gamble, though one that might ultimately pay off if the American people support him.
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America is reeling after two devastating terrorist attacks over the weekend where mass shooters massacred over two dozen people in separate incidents on opposite sides of the country, with many people once again demanding that some sort of preemptive action finally be taken in order to hopefully stop horrifying incidents like these from ever happening again. The Democrats are predictably lobbying for gun control, while the Republicans are against any extreme measures being taken in this respect out of their devotion to the Second Amendment. Nothing ever usually changes after these sorts of killings because of partisan political impasses, but Trump has an innovative idea that involves tough compromises on both sides but might be exactly what America needs.
It’s a risky political gamble, but he proposed the marriage of firearm and immigration reforms into a single bill as part of his attempt to portray himself as the Uniter-in-Chief after these tragedies, seeking to finally push through his vision of fixing the US’ broken immigration system while also giving the Democrats some mild form of gun control in exchange for their support. To proverbially “sweeten the deal” with the Democrats, he also suggested the nationwide expansion of so-called “red-flag laws” that allow the authorities to remove guns from people whose behavior is indicative of someone who might possibly be plotting a terrorist attack like the two that transpired last weekend. Trump envisages that social media companies would also closely cooperate with law enforcement agencies in detecting people who the government should consider for forced disarmament.
Ordinarily, an idea such as this wouldn’t stand much of a chance of ever entering into law, but Americans are becoming very emotionally fatigued after all the mass shooting terrorist attacks that seem to be occurring ever more frequently and on an increasingly more lethal scale, so it’s entirely possible that they might back his unique efforts to finally get something done and resolve two long-standing problems — gun violence and illegal immigration — at the same time. That, however, would require serious compromises from both the Democrats and Republicans, which hold firm to their respective positions out of unwavering principle but might be pressured to moderate their views and meet in the middle ahead of next year’s elections that obviously played a part in influencing the timing of Trump’s proposal that he was evidently pondering for a while already.
The risk that each side would be taking is that their core base of supporters might feel like their favorite politicians sold them out by backtracking on their previously recalcitrant positions towards these two emotional issues, which could lead to voter apathy next year that reduces each party’s turnout. At the same time, though, voters on both sides of the aisle might become more energized in their support for their party of choice if they applaud their pragmatism in finally reaching a deal of some sort that results in tangible action being taken to address whichever of the two issues is the one that’s most important to them. It’s difficult to predict at this time what the average voter — whether in general, committed to a given party, or undecided — thinks about this and how they’d react, but forthcoming polls should give an indication, even if they’re somewhat skewed.
In terms of the bigger picture, it’s commendable that Trump is trying to make progress on these two issues in a way that necessitates a compromise from both parties in the interests of the “common good”, even though it’s clearly being done as part of a Machiavellian calculated risk ahead of next year’s elections. Whether one supports his initiative or not, the fact of the matter is that it’s the most pragmatic proposal at this time and should certainly be taken seriously by everyone. It’s obviously imperfect, but that’s the point, because it’s not intended to please everyone but to get them to think about the hard trade-offs that they’d have to make if they want something of tangible significance to be done. Trump’s known for taking political risks, however, and this one might ultimately pay off if the American people are behind him.
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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.
U.S. President Donald Trump has imposed sanctions on assets of the Venezuelan government, according to an executive order published on Monday.
“All property and interests in property of the Government of Venezuela that are in the United States … are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in,” the executive order says.
The Trump administration has been ramping up pressure on Caracas in a bid to illegally oust President Nicolas Maduro from power.
But China and Russia have continued to back Nicolas Maduro, prompting U.S. national security adviser John Bolton to warn the two countries on Monday against doubling down in their support for him.
Venezuela’s government has called previous sanctions unlawful while also condemning the illegal seizure of assets, such as those belonging to Citgo.
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The latest report about kidnappings, rendition, ‘black sites’ and torture is a remarkable piece of investigative work. It provides us with nothing less than a litany of shocking evidence and testimony and at 403 pages it makes for truly grim reading. This article is made up of a very brief set of extracts from the just-released CIA Torture Unredacted report. It presents the findings from a four-year joint investigation by The Rendition Project and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism into the use of rendition, secret detention and torture by the CIA and its partners in the ‘War on Terror’.
Attempts to hold UK authorities to account for their role in the rendition (kidnapping and/or movement of suspects) and torture programme have been thwarted at every turn. Successive governments have repeatedly denied any involvement of UK security service or military personnel in torture or CIDT. Even as credible evidence mounted, officials were slow to fully investigate, were reticent about holding anyone to account, and have done very little to offer meaningful redress. In 2010, the incoming UK Coalition government led by David Cameron finally launched a judge-led inquiry chaired by Peter Gibson, which was closed down before witnesses were even called, in part because of the considerable constraints placed on the Inquiry by government. Indeed, successive UK governments have gone to great lengths to suppress vital evidence, including passing legislation precisely for this purpose and continue to this day to resist repeated calls for a new inquiry.
Between 2001 and 2009, the CIA established a global network of secret prisons (‘black sites’) for the purpose of detaining terrorism suspects, in secret and indefinitely, and interrogating them through the use of torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. The abuses which took place were severe, sustained, and in clear violation of domestic and international law. The perpetrators have never been held to account. The Rendition Project’s website (www.therenditionproject.org.uk), provide the most detailed public account to date of the CIA torture programme.
Information about CIA torture programme prisoners had to be prised out of the US military’s unwilling bureaucracy. But already at that time, there were rumours of an even more secretive programme, run in parallel by the Central Intelligence Agency outside the Pentagon’s chain of command. Press stories spoke of people abducted in the middle of the night, manhandled onto planes and never heard of again.
The torture programme was a highly secret endeavour, with the CIA and its partners going out of their way to hide the existence of a secret prison network dedicated to the indefinite detention and torture of terror suspects. It has taken years of investigation, by journalists, lawyers, parliamentarians and human rights investigators, for the broad contours of the programme to be revealed.
A pioneering combination of sophisticated analysis techniques and detailed open-source research, the report unveils crucial data which the CIA tried to hide in its censorship of the torture report. This data paints an unprecedented picture of the inside details of the black site programme.
State officials have gone on to deny the impact of, or even the existence of, CIA torture, including through the use of euphemistic language. This was not a programme of ‘enhanced interrogation’; this was torture.
Many prisoners, it turned out, were there on the basis of malicious, false or inaccurate information, had been handed over by bounty hunters, or had been imprisoned because they wore a certain type of Casio watch. These were the people the Bush administration called ‘the worst of the worst’
Cable from the Thai black site, describing the fifth continuous day of a prisoner’s torture (of eight days)
Prisoners were drugged, shackled, hooded and strapped to stretchers by rendition teams dressed entirely in black and communicating only in sign language. Some were placed in coffins during the flight; others were beaten repeatedly during their transfer. This procedure was designed, in the words of one memo, to create ‘significant apprehension in the detainee because of the enormity and suddenness of the change in the environment, the uncertainty about what will happen next, and the potential dread they might have of US custody.
Some prisoners were then subjected to mock execution, electro-torture, genital mutilation, mock burials, rape, and stress positions so severe that, in one case, observers were concerned that the prisoner’s arms would dislocate from his shoulders. Suspects detained in these prisons were subjected to an interrogation regime designed, in the words of one interrogator, to take them ‘to the verge of death and back again.
One man had been waterboarded – drowned to the point of convulsions, vomiting and unconsciousness – 183 times in one month. Others had been placed for hours in boxes so small they had to crouch, or deprived of sleep for weeks at a time. One had been killed – through a combination of neglect, ill-treatment and avoidable hypothermia. This wasn’t ‘enhanced interrogation’. This was torture.
Cable from the Thai black site, describing the eighth continuous day of a prisoner’s torture
“Then, they took me to a room and hung me by my hand to an iron shackle where my toes hardly touched the ground. They removed the mask away from my face and left me hanging from one hand, naked, thirsty, and hungry. I regained my breath after they removed the mask but soon enough I began feeling tired from being hung, hungry, and thirsty. All my weight was hung from the iron shackle until my hand was about to be cut off and the blood was going down to my feet. All my body parts were shaking because of cut off blood circulation and my pulled and beaten body began hurting all over and my head, nose and mouth started bleeding. Although I was not able to see anything due to the darkness, I was able to smell and taste the blood that was falling down my throat.“ – Testimony from Ahmed Rabbani (#25)
The Rendition Project and The Bureau of Investigative Journalism moved significantly beyond the findings of past investigations, shedding new light on the inner workings of the programme and tracking in detail the operation of the CIA’s black sites, the use of private aircraft to transfer prisoners secretly between these sites, and the fate and whereabouts of those subjected to secret detention, rendition and torture. In particular, we have filled in many of the gaps in public understanding which still exist after the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) decided to withhold its full Committee Study into the programme, and – alongside the CIA and the White House – to heavily redact the Study’s Executive Summary before its publication in 2014.
Despite the fact that the programme operated within the context of significant international cooperation, the Committee Study also fails to address in any detail the role played by other governments, and by partner intelligence and security agencies. This absence is perhaps most glaring in the case of those countries which hosted the CIA’s black sites, but is also significant in cases where other countries provided material and intelligence support for capture and rendition operations, or for interrogations under torture.
In this sense, no case was more significant than UK support for the programme, and the absence of all mention of British involvement in the Committee Study is striking.
Although the CIA played the lead role, officials and personnel from a number of other states – including other powerful liberal democracies such as the United Kingdom – were deeply implicated in the abuses which took place, as were a number of private companies.
Although none of the official inquiries into Britain’s role in abuses have published full details of specific cases, documents obtained by Human Rights Watch from a government building in Tripoli in September 2011, in the immediate aftermath of the fall of the Gaddafi regime, provide compelling evidence of British involvement in a number of these operations.
Once suspects were in secret detention, British intelligence and security agencies were, in many cases, intimately involved in the torture that took place, either by participating in the interrogations, by providing the intelligence that formed the basis of the torture, or by receiving intelligence gained through torture. The ISC found that, in at least 232 cases, UK officials supplied questions or intelligence to partners after they knew, or suspected, that mistreatment of the detainees in question was taking place.
The role played by the UK in the CIA torture programme is also highlighted by the degree to which British territory was used by CIA aircraft as refuelling stops while undertaking rendition operations. Collation and analysis of flight data associated with CIA rendition aircraft, and the correlation of this with data concerning prisoner transfers, has allowed us to establish that UK involvement in the rendition programme was much more extensive than previously thought. British territory was central to the rendition of at least 28 prisoners between secret prisons, some of whom were subjected to torture. Mainland UK was used to facilitate the rendition of so-called ‘high-value detainees’ to secret detention in Poland – others were rendered to proxy detention in Egypt, Jordan or Morocco on aircraft that used UK territory as a staging post.
European partners playing key logistical roles in the rendition network included the UK, Germany, Spain, Ireland, and Cyprus.
Telegram from MI5 to the CIA, confirming the travel plans for Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil el-Banna. Both were arrested and eventually rendered to Afghanistan (Circuit 16)
Interrogations involved being severely beaten, and repeatedly slammed against walls. Others were subjected to water torture which induced vomiting, hypothermia and unconsciousness. Men were raped, mutilated, and threatened with guns, drills and being buried alive. They were strapped to chairs and to tables. They were hung upside down and beaten. They were chained to the floor in ways making it impossible to stand or sit. They were deliberately, systematically dehumanised in an attempt by interrogators to exert complete control.
Prisoners were held in complete darkness for months on end, chained to bars in the ceiling and forced to soil themselves. Continual loud music, combined with extended sleep deprivation, dietary manipulation and stress positioning were deployed to reduce men to a completely dependent state.
We investigated the role played by the United Kingdom, and in particular the British intelligence services, in providing support for the programme. It is now clear that Britain’s role was central: supplying locational intelligence for capture operations; passing questions and intelligence for use in interrogations under torture; planning, financing and facilitating rendition operations; and acting as a key logistical hub for numerous rendition operations transferring prisoners for torture.
This is not the first time we have published our findings from this investigation. We have previously outlined the ways in which we tracked CIA rendition aircraft to understand more fully the use of secret detention in Europe. We have provided expert testimony to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), which found that the involvement of European states in the torture programme led to multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights. We have assisted citizen-led efforts at accountability for CIA torture. We have published the most detailed public account of British involvement in torture in the ‘War on Terror’, and have helped to guide parliamentary, commissioner and police investigations in relation to this.
Read the full CIA Torture Unredacted report (pdf 403 pages) HERE.
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Two years ago, “Majd” wrote these words on a Facebook posting:
” I am Syrian… living in Syria in the middle of everything. We have seen horrors. It was never a revolution nor a civil war. The terrorists are sent by your goverment. They are al Qaeda Jabhat al Nusra Wahhabi Salafists Talibans etc and the extremist jihadists sent by the West, the Saudis, Qatar and Turkey. Your Obama and whoever is behind him or above him are supporting al Qaeda and leading a proxy war on my country.
We thought you are against al Qaeda and now you support them.
The majority here loves Assad. He has never committed a crime against his own people… The chemical attack was staged by the terrorists helped by the USA and the UK, etc. Everyone knows that here.
American soldiers and people should not be supporting barbarian al Qaeda terrorists who are killing Christians, Muslims in my country and everyone.
Every massacre is committed by them. We were all happy in Syria: we had free school and university education available for everyone, free healthcare, no GMO, no fluoride, no chemtrails, no Rothschild IMF- controlled bank, state owned central bank which gives 11% interest, we are self-sufficient and have no foreign debt to any country or bank.
Life before the crisis was so beautiful here. Now it is hard and horrific in some regions.
I do not understand how the good and brave American people can accept to bomb my country which has never harmed them and therefore help the barbarian al Qaeda. These animals slit throats and behead for pleasure… they behead babies and rape young kids.
They are satanic. Our military helped by the millions of civilian militias are winning the battle against al Qaeda. But now the USA wants to bomb the shit out of us so that al Qaeda can get the upper hand.
Please help us American people. They are destroying the cradle of civilization. Stop your government.
Impeach that bankster puppet you have as president… support Ron Paul or Rand or anyone the like who are true American patriots. but be sure of one.thing..if they attack and I think they will….it will be hell.
Be sure that if it were to be a world war, many many will die. Syria can and will defend itself and will sink many US ships. Iran will go to war..Russia and China eventually if it escalates… and all this for what ? For the elites who created al Qaeda through the US government and use it to conduct proxy wars and destabilize countries which do not go along with their new world order agenda !!?
American people…you gotta regain control of your once admirable country. Now everyone hates you for.the.death you bring almost everywhere.
Ask the Iraqis, the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the Palestinians, the Syrians, the Macedonians, the Serbs, the Libyans, the Somalis, the Yemenis, all the ones you [your government] kill with drones everyday. Stop your wars, Enough wars. Use diplomacy, dialogue, help, not force.”
Consistent testimonies from Syrians, as well as well-documented, open-source Western sources, and historical memory, all serve to reinforce the accuracy of the aforementioned testimony.
Syrians are living the horror brought to them by the criminal West. They can not afford the complacency of shrugging their shoulders in indecision, not when their lives and their ancient civilization is being threatened by Western-paid terrorist mercenaries of the worst kind.
“Our” proxies, slit throats, chop heads, and take no prisoners as we waffle in indecision, ignore empirical evidence, and take the comfortable easy road of believing the labyrinth of lies promulgated by Western media messaging.
The veil of comfortable confusion, nested in an unconscious belief that our government knows best or that it is patriotic to believe the lies and fabrications implicit in the hollow words of politicians (who no longer represent us) and the false pronouncements of Imperial messengers, is concealing an overseas holocaust.
Western societies are rotting from the inside out because of these lies and this barbarity. We are protecting a criminal cabal of corporate globalists who do not serve our interests and never will.
Our democracies, which we should be protecting, have long disappeared – except in the hollow words of newspaper stenographers. Instead we are supporting transnational corporate elites and their delusional projects.
Poverty and disemployment are all soaring beneath the fakery of government pronouncements, as the public domain evaporates beneath words like “efficiency” or the “economy” — all false covers that serve to enrich elites and destroy us. Internal imperialism at home is a faded replica of the foreign imperialism abroad.
As countries are destroyed, and its peoples are slaughtered — think Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and others — by abhorrent Western proxies — public institutions are contaminated, and ultimately replaced by parasitical “privatized” facsimiles. Public banking is looted and destroyed in favour of transnational banksterism, World Bank funding, and IMF usury. Food security is destroyed and replaced by biotech tentacles and engineered dependencies on cash crops and unhealthy food. Currencies are destroyed, sanctions are imposed, and the unknown, unseen hand of totalitarian control imposes itself, amidst the cloud of diversions and confusions, aided by comprador regimes, oligarch interests, and shrugging domestic populations.
Syria refuses to submit. That is why the West is taught to hate her, and the rest of the world learns to love and respect her.
Yet, Syria’s struggles are our struggles. Syria represents international law, stability, and integrity: the same values that western peoples overtly cherish but stubbornly reject, as our countries wilt beneath suffocating veils of lies and delusions.
I support Syria, because I respect what remains of international law.
I support Syria because I reject Wahhabism, Sharia law, and terrorism.
I support Syria because I reject the undemocratic, transnational oligarchies that are subverting our once flourishing, now dead, democracies.
I reject the lies of our propagandizing media, the hollow words of our politicians, and the fake “humanitarian” messaging that demonizes non-belligerent countries and their populations.
In the name of justice, humanity, and the rule of law, I support the elected government of Syria led by its President, Bashar al-Assad. Syria, an ancient cradle of civilization, is leading the way towards a better future for all of us.
All we have to do is open our eyes.
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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017. Visit the author’s website at https://www.marktaliano.net.
Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.
Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes the mainstream media narratives on Syria.
This article was originally published in March 2014. What has been the role of Monsanto in the loss of of the global honeybee population.
It is only recently that this issue has been the object of mainstream media coverage.
Scientists have recently reported that mass extinctions of marine animals may soon be occurring at alarmingly rapid rates than previously projected due to pollution, rising water temperatures and loss of habitat. Many land species also face a similar fate for the same reasons. But perhaps the biggest foreboding danger of all facing humans is the loss of the global honeybee population. The consequence of a dying bee population impacts man at the highest levels on our food chain, posing an enormously grave threat to human survival. Since no other single animal species plays a more significant role in producing the fruits and vegetables that we humans commonly take for granted yet require near daily to stay alive, the greatest modern scientist Albert Einstein once prophetically remarked, “Mankind will not survive the honeybees’ disappearance for more than five years.”
Since 2006 beekeepers have been noticing their honeybee populations have been dying off at increasingly rapid rates. Subsequently researchers have been scrambling to come up with an accurate explanation and an effective strategy to save the bees and in turn save us homo sapiens from extinction. Recent harsh winters that stay freezing cold well into spring have been instrumental in decimating the honeybee population in Iowa by up to 70% as well as the other historically high yielding honey states – the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota. The northern Plains and Midwestern states that have regionally always produced the nation’s most honey have been severely hurt by the long harsh winters in the last couple years. Florida as the third largest honey producer and especially California always among the top producers have been hit especially hard by decreasing bee colony populations. In 2006 when the problem of bee loss first was noticed, California was right up at the top with North Dakota producing nearly twice as much honey as the next state South Dakota but its bee numbers have incurred such heavy losses that in 2011, though still second, California’s honey production fell by nearly half in just six years. The recent severe drought in California has become an additional factor driving both its honey yield and bee numbers down as less rain means less flowers available to pollinate.
Honeybee Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) as this loss of bee phenomenon has been called is currently recognized as such an urgent crisis that a month ago Newsweek ran an article outlining the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announcement that it will provide a $3 million subsidy in order to help the one animal on the planet that will either make or break food prices. According to the latest USDA industry survey, this emergency plan assistance comes after nearly a third of commercial honeybees died last winter, a whopping increase of 42% from the previous year. The three million dollar giveaway program is designed to entice both Midwest dairy farmers and cattle ranchers to reseed their fields this spring with eco-friendly crops like alfalfa and clover to develop healthier habitats for increasing the national bee population. Farmers and ranchers only had until March 21st, 2014 to sign up and take advantage as eligible seedling recipients.
Last month’s Newsweek reported that honeybees in trucks migrate to various regions of the country to pollinate an estimated $40 billion worth of the nation’s agricultural produce each year. This means that every third bite of food we eat comes as the result of bees and other pollinators. USDA Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack stated that more than 130 fruits and vegetables that make up a nutritious diet are cross pollinated by honeybees. Commercial bees raised on farms and then shipped to other farms in the country used for pollination purposes along with wild bees are responsible for pollination of an estimated 80% of all food crops in the United States.
In the last half decade alone 30% of the national bee population has disappeared and nearly a third of all bee colonies in the U.S. have perished. Though the rate of bee depopulation is growing each year, 42% more last year than the year before, even at the current annual rate the estimated monetary loss is a colossal 30 billion dollars a year. With such an enormous loss in revenue, last month’s USDA announcement of just a three million dollar investment in farmer aid in comparison to the formidable challenge seems like a paltry drop in the bucket to making any real dent in the epidemic.
With so much at stake, efforts to investigate and uncover reasons for this sudden global pandemic have been robust. A new government study blames a combination of factors for the mysterious and dramatic loss of honeybees, including increased use of pesticides especially in the US, shrinking habitats, multiple viruses, poor nutrition and genetics, and even cell phone towers. However, according to last year’s joint EPA-USDA study, the biggest cause is the parasite called the Varroa destructor, a type of mite found to be highly resistant to the insecticides that US beekeepers have used in attempts to control the mites from inside the beehives. Moreover, new virus species have been found in the US and several of these have been associated with Colony Collapse Disorder.
In a vicious cycle, since 1987 when the Varroa mite was first discovered in the US, Monsanto, Dow, Bayer and other large chemical manufacturers aggressively glommed onto the bee industry selling genetically modified insecticides and herbicides as the quick and easy fix to remedy the parasitic invasion, only to weaken the bees’ natural genetic defenses to fight off the parasite. In an article from the Guardian earlier this month, Monsanto’s contribution to the vanishing bee population is detailed. From genetically altered corn, Monsanto produced an insecticide called Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which once ingested by bees, Bt binds to receptors within the bee’s stomach lining that keeps the bee from eating. Of course this weakens the bee, causing the breakdown of the inner stomach wall, which in turn makes the bee susceptible to spores and bacteria. To further compound the problem, for years the lobbying power of the chemical giant denied causing damage to the bee’s internal immune capacity for resistance to parasites, which of course only continued to kill off the bee population worldwide. Thus, continued chemical use, especially in America, only exacerbates this growing problem.
Also on Greenpeace’s Save the Bees page, a type of insecticide called neonicotinoids, is known to cause acute and chronic poisoning not just of one bee, but the entire colony. Bees take the contaminated nectar and pollen spread through the plant’s DNA back to the hive, creating a highly toxic living environment for all the bees. Toxicity builds up destroying the Central Nervous System, causing further disorientation and bees ultimately can neither fly nor make it back to the nest. Meanwhile, unlike the US, in Europe and Australia where the health of insects and humans is deemed more important than corporate profit, laws banning insecticide use have been passed, which in large part has largely saved the bee populations from being so decimated there.
A study last year found 35 pesticides and fungicides, some at lethal doses, in the pollen collected from bees that were used to pollinate food crops in five U.S. states. In another research study, bees that contacted pollen contaminated with fungicides ended up three times more likely to get infected by a parasite closely associated with Colony Collapse Disorder.
The results of a new study conducted by Mark Brown of Royal Halloway University in London released several weeks ago found that wild bumblebee populations are also disappearing at a similar rate to the domestic honeybee. In its sample one in five wild bees were afflicted by the Deformed Wing Virus believed to be caused by the parasitic Varroa mite. 88% of the honeybees at the 26 field sites were affected by this virus. The research study also concluded that while honeybees are important and obviously responsible for the multimillion dollar global honey industry, wild bees are believed to be just as important in pollination of plants throughout the world.
Another probable factor in America is the widespread use of feeding bee colonies with high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) instead of its natural self-made food honey. For maximum profit, industrialized US bee farms utilize maximum honey yields, not leaving any honey for the bees to consume during the long colder winter months. It is speculated that the natural hormonal and enzyme effects interacting with honey’s natural nutritional advantages provided bees with the increased defenses that historically have been effective in fighting off parasitic threats and viruses. In contrast, the artificially processed HFCS is believe to weaken the immune system of the honeybees’ genetic strength to ward off disease.
The largest selling company of honey in the US is the Sioux Honey brand located in Sioux City, Iowa founded in 1921. More than 35 million pounds of honey are processed at the Sioux City and Anaheim, California plants comprised of a cooperative of over 300 beekeepers from the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states. Vice president for research and development Bill Huser interviewed in the local paper last year stated, “One of the wrinkles is a focus on increased diversity in genetics, which the [USDA] report’s authors said could help improve bees’ resistance to disease. Specifically, they said, genetic variation could help keep the bees’ body temperature steady, even if the surrounding environment changes.” This would enhance the bees’ capacity to acclimate to the recent harsher winter conditions in northern climates.
Most commercial beekeepers transport their bee colonies by truck in the winter to farms in Texas and California to pollinate in early spring agricultural fields in the warmer regions of the country. However, these last couple winters with far fewer bees, less pollination occurred during the early spring at the Southern California almond orchards. Moreover, because of poor management in agricultural farming over many geographical areas growing only one cash crop, there are far less variety of plants now to pollinate. Bees will not flourish where there exists less opportunity to work their pollen magic because of a lack of diversity in plant vegetation throughout the year. Thus, the almond fields of California need more types of crops planted that will attract bees year-round. That same problem occurs in states like Iowa and Nebraska, once high producers of honey. But in recent decades the agri-industry choice to maximize profit by planting corn and soybean crops instead of the rich alfalfa and clover fields that previously offered a healthy habitat for bee pollination has caused a steady decline in bee population. Additionally, fewer wildflower fields and other natural land space in America in general limit available healthy bee habitats.
These corrections to introduce a richer diversity that enhances and expands the bee habitat are both very do-able and obviously urgently needed. Per last month’s report, federal and state partners have been encouraged to consider making prudent changes in land management in order to optimize available nutritional forage for promoting bee health and protecting bee colonies by avoiding use of pesticides. Earlier this month Eugene, Oregon became the first municipality to ban insecticides in the nation. A bill in California would push the state’s Department of Pesticide Regulation to make a decision on its reevaluation of neonicotinoids by July. Maine, New Jersey, and Vermont are also considering plans to ban the use of neonicotinoids. The USDA report strongly recommends increased collaboration and information sharing between crop growers and beekeepers to implement mutually beneficial best known practices. Finally, more research centers designed to learn effective new and innovative methods to facilitate restoration of bee populations throughout the world are sorely needed. Just this month the University of Florida announced the plan to build and develop through research grants a major addition to increase both knowledge and revenue in enhancing the honeybee population.
Another viable solution toward increasing the bee population is implementing programs teaching and training urban residents to become amateur beekeepers. Many cities are now offering startup assistance to a growing number of hobbyists of all ages interested in beekeeping. Plus educating urban populations about plant diversity in municipal gardens will enhance both bee habitats and bee health. With increasing interest and awareness in the profound importance of nurturing a much larger bee population globally, the progress dividends for both humanity and the planet will prove immeasurable.
Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former Army officer. Having written a manuscript based on his military experience, the link is below: http://www.redredsea.net/westpointhagopian/. After the military Joachim earned a masters degree in psychology and eventually became a licensed therapist working in the mental health field for more than a quarter century.
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I said that this moment would come. It has almost arrived. I warned that Britain is to become a European outpost of America (READ: The global alliance taking over Britain) and if ever proof was needed, it is the admission from the Trump administration that their latest demands must be adhered to – or else.
First, it came with threats within the impending UK/US trade deal. It was full access to the NHS or else. Then the reduction of food standards or else. Next was the UK’s position on 5G – or else, Then came the almost forced ejection of a British diplomat they didn’t like – or else. Last week, it was drop the new digital tax or else – and now it is the demand that ‘British politics must be realigned’ to create a better political and economic fit with America – or else. This is not democracy. It’s already frail flame is being snuffed out by the world’s bully boy.
At TruePublica we have reported on the arrival of US-style attack dog political operations opening in Britain. We have reported on far-right organisations setting up and the millions in American dark-money funded activities designed to overthrow British electoral laws and overturn progressive legislation. From openDemocracy comes yet another report of the Americanisation of Britain that should alarm everyone irrespective of their Brexit stance or political persuasion. This latest step, if allowed, will bring a serious escalation of corruption to British politics – it will be as I said all along – a corporate coup d’etat.
MP demands investigation into Farage’s US, dark money pro-Brexit campaign group
Stark warning of US-style Super PACs arriving in UK as Brexit Party leader launches dark-money-funded campaign group in New York. Last week Nigel Farage launched a campaign group in the US. Now an MP has written to the Electoral Commission demanding an investigation.
In the letter, seen by openDemocracy, the shadow cabinet office minister Chris Matheson says that the revelation last week that Farage has founded World4Brexit to raise funds from the US “raises serious questions”.
World4Brexit is registered in Michigan and chaired by Peggy Grande, a former executive assistant to Ronald Reagan. It is registered in the US tax code as a 501(c)(4) organisation – which means it does not have to reveal who gives money to it. Organisations like this play a controversial role in US politics. Other examples of 501(c)(4) bodies include well-known US political groups such as the National Rifle Association, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Tea Party Patriots.
In an email today, Grande responded to openDemocracy’s question about who funds World4Brexit, saying:
“The group is being privately funded by donors who are supportive of our mission. We have received online donations ranging from $1 to $1,000 and we have other supporters who are aligned with our stance on free bi-lateral trade between the US and the UK and believe that the results of a fair election should be fully implemented, the very essence of a democracy.”
According to the Financial Times, which first revealed the existence of the group, Farage said all of its donations would be “above the board and legal”. Farage met Donald Trump in the White House on Wednesday and told the FT:
“Trump wants to see a realignment of British politics. The Remain side is already having a realignment but now the right will have to realign too.”
Asked about Farage’s role in the organisation, Grande said:
“While we are supportive of Nigel Farage’s efforts with the Brexit Party and agree with his call for a complete Brexit on October 31, we have no formal affiliation with him as an organisation or with our funding.”
No names
The 501(c)(4) code allows an organisation to spend money on political activity in the US, so long as that is not the majority of its spending and the money isn’t spent promoting a specific US candidate. The freedom to keep donors anonymous gives this model an advantage over Political Action Committees (PACs) and Super PACs for those who wish to keep their funders secret.
In their letter to the Electoral Committee, Chris Matheson MP said:
“501(c)(4) organisations have for years sat at the heart of dark money scandals in US politics, and campaigners have long argued they provide a backdoor route for incredibly wealthy individuals to subvert democracy.
“It is clear that money raised anonymously in the United States, and possibly other countries, will find its way to the United Kingdom. This is in itself not illegal, but it does raise urgent questions as to what that money will be used for and what steps the Electoral Commission should take to secure reassure that public that no electoral laws are broken.”
“The American end”
The letter also notes that Farage had said US political operative Gerry Gunster was behind “the American end” of the organisation, according to the FT, and asks the Electoral Commission to investigate his role. Gunster also played a key part in the Leave.EU campaign, which was funded by Arron Banks, fronted by Nigel Farage, and found to have broken electoral law by failing to declare the cost of Gunter’s involvement.
Asked about Gunster’s role in the organisation, Grande told openDemocracy:
“Gunster Strategies is one of many professional organisations who are assisting with the advancement of our message. We have multiple advisers both domestically and internationally who have been helpful in launching World For Brexit [sic].”
World4Brexit was launched by Farage in New York last week, at an event that was attended by prominent Republican operatives, including former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, according to the FT.
After working on the Trump campaign, Lewandowski founded and then left two lobbying firms, amidst controversy around paid-for access to the president. The New York Times reported in 2017:
“as he takes on an increasingly broad role as an unofficial White House adviser, he is building a roster of clients with major interests before the Trump administration… Mr. Lewandowski appears to be positioning his new firm as an “advisory” business, part of a growing cohort of Washington influencers who advise companies on how to navigate the government but do not register as lobbyists or disclose their clients.
The business, the paper wrote, “puts Mr. Lewandowski at the center of the ethical quandaries surrounding the Trump White House, where the president has given significant access and power to friends and loyalists who are not on the government payroll but work as lobbyists or retain significant outside business interests”.
In an email to The New York Times, Lewandowski wrote:
“I don’t lobby and I don’t intend to lobby – ever”.
Asked about Lewandowski’s role in the organisation, Ms Grande said:
“Our launch events were private so we will not be confirming or disclosing any individual attendees, although I can tell you that the gentleman in question does not have any role in our organization.”
In fundraising documents linked to World4Brexit’s website, the organisation says that money will be spent on activities including “offices in London, Washington and Brussels”, lobbying and influence in the UK and elsewhere” “Ongoing US fundraising and support”, “Global events with high-profile international speakers” and “Social media and advertising”.
‘Reshaping’ public opinion
In his letter to the Electoral Commission, Matheson, who is a member of the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport select committee, which conducted the recent inquiry into fake news, writes:
“Democracy, here in the UK and in the United States and Europe, has in recent years been subverted by vast amounts of dark money and by individuals and organisations intent on disregarding electoral law to the benefit of extreme right-wing ideas. This has undermined public trust in democracy.”
“Worryingly, events of the last few years, the establishment of World4Brexit and the anonymity of its donors suggests we may be entering a new period of UK politics, in which we see the emergence and increasing influence of [US-style campaign finance organisations], which use vast amounts of dark money to reshape public opinion and win elections, as has recently happened in Spain”, the letter continues, referring to openDemocracy’s investigations of the Trump-linked Spanish ultra-conservative group CitizenGo.
The letter goes on to ask the Electoral Commission to investigate under what UK laws the group can be regulated, such as whether it ought to count as a members’ association within the Brexit Party, or whether it ought to be registered as a non-party campaign group.
Rules and regulator
World4Brexit is not currently registered with the Electoral Commission as a third-party campaigner. Asked about a future UK office and registration, Peggy Grande said:
“Our goal is to have a global presence and we plan to have a U.K entity. Similar to our legal status in America, we will register with the appropriate oversight organizations at that time.”
Responding to questions from openDemocracy about World4Brexit, a spokesperson for the Electoral Commission confirmed it was aware of the new group, saying:
“As we are not currently in a pre-election period, there are no rules relating to spending by registered or unregistered non-party campaigners.”
The spokesperson continued:
“Should there be an electoral event, such as a general election, non-party campaigners must register with the commission if they intend to spend more than £20,000 in England or £10,000 in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland on regulated campaign spending in the regulated period. If an organisation does not register, or is ineligible to register, they must not spend over these amounts on regulated campaigning.”
However, organisations registered outside the UK are not allowed to spend more than £10,000 on an electoral event.
Speaking to openDemocracy, Chris Matheson said:
“From the US to Europe, vast amounts of dark money is making its way through a web of connected organisations that share the same goal: to subvert democracy in the interest of right-wing ideas.”
“Securing free and fair elections in this context is increasingly difficult, and requires politicians and the Electoral Commission to try to shine a spotlight on the activities of those that would disregard this crucial principle.
“Even if World4Brexit operates completely above board, we need concrete assurances that this is, and will always be, the case. In the light of past transgressions by related parties, to rely solely on the word of those involved would be an abdication of responsibility.”
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At a time when the Trump administration has no problem negotiating with the secretary of the Russian national security council Nikolai Patrushev, who is technically under US sanctions since April 2018, the cut and thrust of Washington’s move to sanction Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif needs to be understood properly.
How did US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo try to explain the dispatch of Zarif to perdition? Pompeo’s statement on Wednesday attributed to Zarif a singular sin:
a) Zarif “acted on behalf of the Supreme Leader”;
b) Zarif took “direction from the Supreme Leader and his office”;
c) Zarif was “a key enabler of Ayatollah Khamenei’s policies throughout the region and around the world”;
d) and, Zarif has been “a senior regime official and apologist” of Iranian government and has “for years now been complicit in these (Iran’s) malign activities”.
Basically, Pompeo’s grouse narrows down to this: Zarif is a disciplined dutiful, loyal Iranian public servant who abided by the Iranian system of government founded in the concept of velāyat-e faqīh (‘guardianship of the Islamic jurist’.)
Does that become a sin? Any foreign minister has his job cut out for him — even Pompeo himself. Pompeo has no pretensions that he is holding the job entirely at the pleasure and discretion of his supreme leader President Trump. Trump, in fact, is an unforgiving stickler for loyalty. Ask James Mattis or Rex Tillerson.
The US establishment knows very well how the concept velāyat-e faqīh operates, how the alchemy of political power is formed in Iran, and how the decision-making process is reached. Even Trump would know it. Which is why he even tried to get through to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei (and was duly snubbed.) So, where is the beef?
Simply put, Zarif per se is the problem. The Trump administration is desperately keen to put an end to Zarif’s contacts with the American elite. Zarif lived and worked for several years in America from the age of 17 — as a high school student, university student, and career diplomat, ending up as Iran’s representative at the UN from 2002 to 2007. He also kept closely in touch with the US academia and intellectual circles in his capacity as a professor and editor of scholarly journals in Tehran who has written copiously on disarmament, human rights, international law, and regional conflicts.
Indeed, what rankles the Trump administration is that Zarif has extensively networked with American intellectuals, politicians, think tankers and media persons — figures as diverse as Joseph Biden, John Kerry, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Hagel, Nicholas Kristof, Thomas Pickering, James Dobbins and Christian Amanpour.
Zarif took his job seriously and being a fluent English speaker, he could tweet and debate and spar with any American with delectable ease. Zarif outclassed the mediocre American foreign and security policy team.
Zarif’s periodical visits to New York (ostensibly to attend the UN events) increasingly became a nightmare for the Trump administration as he cast his net wide and ably put across Iran’s narrative. Trump singled out more than once that Zarif had meetings with Kerry, former state secretary who negotiated the 2015 Iran deal.
This is the crux of the matter. By imposing sanctions on Zarif, US can deny visa to him and render unlawful (and liable to prosecution under law) any contact between him and any American national. Effectively, Trump instructed Pompeo to make sure that Zarif doesn’t come to New York between now and the 2020 November election so that his detractors and critics cannot hear from the horse’s mouth the Iranian narrative.
Trump feels exasperated that Iran is winning the information war. And he is worried that between now and November 2020, his re-election campaign may get booby-trapped. For any longtime observer of the US-Iran standoff, it is obvious that a sea change has appeared in the American discourses on Iran. There is an influential and ever growing body of opinion in the US today, which disagrees with Trump’s ‘maximum pressure’ strategy. This constituency rationally argues that Trump shouldn’t have dumped the 2015 deal.
Equally, there is a far better understanding today in the informed American opinion regarding Iran and its policies, and the zen of dealing with Persian nationalism beneath the veneer of Islamism. The surprising part is that such an awakening has happened despite the Herculean efforts by the Israeli Lobby to demonise Iran and to stymie all contrarian views in the media, think tanks and campuses — and the Hill.
Trump’s sanctions against Zarif will not set an example for any other country which has diplomatic relations with Iran. In the final analysis, Trump will have to deal with Zarif, whether he likes him or not.
The best way to counter Zarif would have been to handpick an intellectually resourceful, dynamic state secretary. A mediocrity like Pompeo stands no chance with Zarif.This is a dumb thing Trump has done. He should have known better.
In 2001, Zarif was Iran’s main representative at the Bonn Conference, which brought together regional players in the aftermath of the US invasion of Afghanistan and the ousting of the Taliban. His American counterpart at the event, James Dobbins — who was later named as the Obama Administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan — wrote a memorable essay titled Negotiating with Iran: Reflections from Personal Experience in the Washington Quarterly about Zarif’s Erudition, wit and charm — and his pragmatism, which helped the two gifted diplomats to thrash out “over morning coffee and cakes” a deal that led to the replacement of the Northern Alliance government in Kabul with a US-backed interim set-up under Hamid Karzai. (Burhanuddin Rabbani remarked bitterly at that time he hoped that would be the last time a foreign power ever dictated to Afghans.)
Washington has now sanctioned the man who played a pivotal role in that fateful transition in Kabul leading to the installation of the US’ client regime in the Hindu Kush. Some gratitude!
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On the campaign trail, Joe Biden has boasted of his role in transforming Colombia and Central America through ambitious economic and security programs. Colombians and Hondurans tell The Grayzone about the damage his plans did to their societies.
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While campaigning for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination this year, former Senator and Vice President Joseph Biden has touted the crucial role he played in designing US mega-development and drug war campaigns that transformed the socio-political landscape of large swaths of Latin America.
“I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,” Biden boasted in a July 5 interview with CNN, referring to the multi-billion dollar US effort to end Colombia’s civil war with a massive surge of support for the country’s military. According to Biden, the plan was a panacea for Colombia’s problems, from “crooked cops” to civil strife.
But Biden’s plan for Colombia has contributed directly to the country’s transformation into a hyper-militarized bastion of right-wing rule, enhancing the power and presence of the notoriously brutal armed forces while failing miserably in its anti-narcotic and reformist objectives.
This year alone, more than 50 human rights defenders were killed in Colombia in the first four months of 2019, while coca production is close to record levels. And as Colombian peace activists lamented in interviews with The Grayzone, the US is still in complete control of Bogotá’s failed anti-drug policy, thanks largely to Plan Colombia.
Biden has also pumped up his role in an initiative called the Alliance for Prosperity, which was applied to the Northern Triangle of Central America. The former vice president was so central to the program’s genesis that it was informally known as “Plan Biden.”
Marketed as an answer to the crisis of child migration, Biden’s brainchild channeled $750 million through a right-wing government installed by a US-orchestrated military coup to spur mega-development projects and privatize social services.
The Grayzone visited Honduras in July and documented, through interviews with human rights defenders, students, indigenous activists, and citizens from all walks of life, how the Alliance for Prosperity helped set the stage for a national rebellion.
In recent months, teachers, doctors, students, and rural campesinos have been in the streets protesting the privatization plans imposed on their country under the watch of Biden and his successors.
The gutting of public health services, teacher layoffs, staggering hikes in electricity prices, and environmentally destructive mega-development projects are critical factors in mass migration from Honduras. And indeed, they are immediate byproducts of the so-called “Biden plan.”
“Biden is taking credit for doing something constructive to stop the migration crisis and blaming the concentration camps [on the US-Mexico border] on Trump. But it’s Biden’s policies that are driving more people out of Central America and making human rights defenders lives more precarious by defending entities that have no interest in human rights,” explained Adrienne Pine, a professor of anthropology at American University and leading researcher of the social crisis in Honduras, in an interview with The Grayzone.
“So $750 million US taxpayer dollars that were allocated to supposedly address child migration are actually making things worse,” Pine added. “It started with unaccompanied minors and now you have children in cages. Largely thanks to Biden.”
‘I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia’
In an interview with CNN on July 5, Biden was asked if he favored decriminalizing the entry of Latin American migrants to the United States. Responding with a definitive “no,” Joe Biden stated that he would be “surging folks to the border to make those concrete decisions” about who receives asylum.
Biden argued that he had the best record of addressing the root causes of the migration crisis, recalling how he imposed a solution on Central America’s migration crisis. “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that, just like we did in Colombia,” he said.
“What did we do in Colombia? We went down and said, okay, and I was one of the architects of Plan Colombia,” Biden continued. “I said, here’s the deal. If you have all these crooked cops, all these federal police, we’re sending our FBI down, you let us put them through a lie detector test, let us tell you who you should fire and tell you the kind of people you should hire. They did and began to change. We can do so much if we’re committed.”
With the arrogance of a pith-helmeted high colonial official meting out instructions on who to hire and fire to his docile subjects, Biden presided over a plan that failed miserably in its stated goals, while transforming Colombia into a hyper-militarized bastion of US regional influence.
Plan Colombia: ‘They come and ask for bread, and you give them stones’
Plan Colombia was originally conceived by Colombian President Andrés Pastrana in 1999, as an alternative development and conflict resolution plan for his war-torn country. He considered calling it the “Plan for Colombia’s Peace.”
The proposal was quickly hijacked by the Bill Clinton administration, with Joe Biden lobbying in the Senate for an iron-fisted militarization plan.
“We have an obligation, in the interests of our children and the interests of the hemisphere, to keep the oldest democracy in place, to give them a fighting chance to keep from becoming a narcostate,” Biden said in a June 2000 floor speech.
When Plan Colombia’s first formal draft was published, it was done so in English, not Spanish. The original spirit of peace-building was completely sapped from the document by Biden, whose vigorous wheeling-and-dealing ensured that almost 80 percent of the $7.5 billion plan went to the Colombian military. 500 US military personnel were promptly dispatched to Bogota to train the country’s military.
“If you read the original Plan Colombia, not the one that was written in Washington but the original Plan Colombia, there’s no mention of military drives against the FARC rebels,” Robert White, the former number two at the US embassy in Bogota, complained in 2000. “Quite the contrary. [Pastrana] says the FARC is part of the history of Colombia and a historical phenomenon, he says, and they must be treated as Colombians.”
White lamented how Washington had abused the trust of the Colombians:
“They come and ask for bread, and you give them stones.”
Plan Colombia was largely implemented under the watch of the hardline right-wing President Álvaro Uribe. In 1991, Uribe was placed on a US Drug Enforcement Agency list of “important Colombian narco-traffickers,” in part due to his role in helping drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s obtain licenses for landing strips while Uribe was the head of Colombia’s Civil Aeronautics Department.
Under Uribe’s watch, toxic chemicals were sprayed by military forces across the Colombian countryside, poisoning the crops of impoverished farmers and displacing millions.
Six years after Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, however, even US drug czar John Walters was forced to quietly admit in a letter to the Senate that the price of cocaine in the US had declined, the flow of the drug into the US had risen, and its purity had increased.
Meanwhile, a UN Office of Drugs and Crime report found that coca cultivation reached record levels in Colombia in 2018. In other words, billions of dollars have been squandered, and a society already in turmoil has been laid to waste.
For the military and right-wing paramilitary forces that have shored up the rule of leaders like Uribe and the current ultra-conservative Colombian president, Ivan Duque, Plan Colombia offered a sense of near-total impunity.
The depravity of the country’s military was put on bold display when the so-called “false positives” scandal was exposed in 2008. The incident began when army officers lured 22 rural laborers to a far-away location, massacred them, and then dressed them in uniforms of the leftist FARC guerrillas.
It was an overt attempt to raise the FARC body count and justify the counter-insurgency aid flowing from the US under Plan Colombia. The officers who oversaw the slaughter were paid bounties and given promotions.
Colombian academics Omar Eduardo Rojas Bolaños and Fabián Leonardo Benavides demonstrated in a meticulous study that the “false positives” killings reflected “a systematic practice that implicates the commanders of brigades, battalions and tactical units” in the deaths of more than 10,000 civilians. Indeed, under Plan Colombia, the incident was far from an isolated atrocity.
Forfeiting Colombia’s national sovereignty
In an interview in Bogotá this May, The Grayzone’s Ben Norton asked Colombian social leader Santiago Salinas (image on the right, from Ben Norton) if there was any hope for progressive political transformation since the ratification of Plan Colombia.
An organizer of the peace group Congreso de los Pueblos, Salinas shrugged and exclaimed, “I wish.” He lamented that many of Colombia’s most pivotal decisions were made in Washington.
Salinas pointed to drug policy as an example. “It seems like the drug decisions about what to do with the drugs, it has nothing to do with Colombia.
“There was no sovereign decision on this issue. Colombia does not have a decision,” he continued. It was the Washington that wrote the script for Bogota. And the drug trade is in fact a key part of the global financial system, Salinas pointed out.
But Biden was not finished. After 15 years of human misery and billions of wasted dollars in Colombia, he set out on a personal mission to export his pet program to Central America’s crime and corruption-ravaged Northern Triangle.
Biden eyes Central America, selling mass privatization
In his July sit-down with CNN, Joe Biden trumpeted his Plan Colombia as the inspiration for the Alliance for Prosperity he imposed on Central America. Channeling the spirit of colonial times once again, he bragged of imposing Washington’s policies on the governments of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
“We’ll make a deal with you,” Biden recalled telling the leaders of these countries. “You do the following things to make your country better so people don’t leave, and we will help you do that.”
Biden announced his bold plan on the editorial pages of the New York Times in January 2015. He called it “a joint plan for economic and political reforms, an alliance for prosperity.” Sold by the vice president as a panacea to a worsening migration crisis, the Alliance for Prosperity was a boon for international financial institutions which promised to deepen the economic grief of the region’s poor.
The Alliance for Prosperity “treated the Honduran government as if it were a crystal-clear, pure vessel into which gold could be poured and prosperity would flow outward,” explained Dana Frank, a professor of history at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of the book, The Long Honduran Night.
“In reality, the Plan would further enrich and strengthen the political power of the very same elites whose green, deliberate subversion of the rule of law, and destruction of natural resources and of Indigenous and campesino land rights, were responsible for the dire conditions the proposal ostensibly addressed,” Frank added.
In Honduras, the government had no capacity or will to resist Biden’s plan. That is because the country’s elected president,Juan Manuel Zelaya, had been removed in 2009 in a coup orchestrated by the United States.
As Zelaya told The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil, the Obama administration was infuriated by his participation in ALBA, a regional economic development program put forward by Venezuela’s then-President Hugo Chavez that provided an alternative to neoliberal formulas like the so-called “Biden Plan.”
Following the military coup, a corporate-friendly administration was installed to advance the interests of international financial institutions, and US trainers arrived in town to hone the new regime’s mechanisms of repression.
Under the auspices of the Central American Regional Security Initiative, the FBI was dispatched to oversee the training of FUSINA, the main operational arm of the Honduran army and the base of the Military Police for Public Order (PMOP) that patrols cities like an occupation force.
In an October 2014 cable, the US embassy in Tegucigalpa acknowledged that the PMOP was riven with corruption and prone to abuse, and attempted to distance itself from the outfit, even though it operated under the umbrella of FUSINA.
US-trained troops shoot Honduran students protesting privatization@AnyaParampil reports from inside a student occupation at the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH), where protesters are being shot by military policehttps://t.co/HQHX497zPW
The creation by the US embassy in Honduras of a special forces unit known as the Tigres has added an additional layer of repressive muscle. Besides arresting activists, the Tigres reportedly helped a drug kingpin escape after he was detained during a US investigation.
While violent crime surged across Honduras, unemployment more than doubled. Extreme poverty surged, and so too did the government’s security spending.
To beef up his military, President Juan Orlando Hernández dipped into the social programs that kept a mostly poor population from tumbling into destitution.
Chart on Honduran budget priorities by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, 2017
As Alex Rubinstein reported for The Grayzone, the instability of post-coup Honduras has been particularly harsh on LGTTBI (Lesbian, Gay, Trans, Travesti, Bisexual, and Intersex) Hondurans. More than 300 of them have been killed since 2009, a dramatic spike in hate crimes reinforced by the homophobic rhetoric of the right-wing Evangelical Confraternity that represents the civil-society wing of the ultra-conservative Hernandez government.
As the social chaos enveloped Honduran society, migration to the US-Mexico border began to surge to catastrophic levels. Unable to make ends meet, some Hondurans sent their children alone to the border, hoping that they would temporary protective or refugee status.
By 2014, the blowback of the Obama administration’s coup had caused a national emergency. Thousands of Hondurans were winding up in cages in detention camps run by the US Department of Homeland Security, and many of them were not even 16 years old.
That summer, Obama went to Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to ramp up border militarization and deport as many unaccompanied Central American minors as possible.
Biden used the opportunity to rustle up an additional billion dollars, exploiting the crisis to fund a massive neoliberal project that saw Honduras as a base for international financial opportunity. His plan was quickly ratified, and the first phase of the Alliance for Prosperity began.
From the IADB’s sanitized survey of the Alliance for Prosperity
Energy industry rush dooms indigenous communities and human rights defenders
The implementation of the Alliance for Prosperity was overseen by the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), a US-dominated international financial institution based in Washington, DC that supports corporate investment in Latin America and the Caribbean.
A graphic on the IADB’s website outlined the plan’s objectives in anodyne language that concealed its aggressively neoliberal agenda.
For instance, the IADB promised the “fostering [of] regional energy integration.” This was a clear reference to Plan Pueblo Panama, a region-wide neoliberal development blueprint that was conceived as a boon to the energy industry. Under the plan, the IADB would raise money from Latin American taxpayers to pay for the expansion of power lines that would carry electricity from Mexico all the way to Panama.
Honduras, with its rivers and natural resources, provided the project with a major hub of energy production. In order for the country’s energy to be traded and transmitted to other countries, however, the International Monetary Fund mandated that its national electricity company be privatized.
Since the implementation of that component of “Plan Biden,” energy costs have begun to surge for residential Honduran consumers. In a country with a 66 percent poverty rate, electricity privatization has turned life from precarious to practically impossible.
Rather than languish in darkness for long hours with unpaid bills piling up, many desperate citizens have journeyed north towards the US border.
As intended, the Alliance for Prosperity’s regional energy integration plan has spurred an influx of multi-national energy companies to Honduras. Hydro-electric dams and power plants began rising up in the midst of the lush pine forests and winding rivers that define the Honduran biosphere, pushing many rural indigenous communities into a life-and-death struggle.
This July, The Grayzone traveled to Reitoca, a remote farming community located in the heart of the Honduran “dry sector.” The indigenous Lenca residents of this town depend on their local river for fish, recreation, and most importantly, water to irrigate the crops that provide them with a livelihood. But the rush on energy investment brought an Italian-Chilean firm called Progelsa to the area to build a massive hydro-electric dam just upstream.
Image below: Reitoca community leader Wilmer Alonso by the river threatened by a major hydro-electric project (Photo: Ben Norton)
Wilmer Alonso, a member of the Lenca Indigenous Council of Reitoca, spoke with The Grayzone, shaking with emotion as he described the consequences of the dam for his community.
“The entire village is involved in this struggle,” Alonso said. “Everyone knows the catastrophe that the construction of this hydro-electric plant would create.”
He explained that, like so many foreign multi-nationals in Honduras, Progelsa employs an army of private thugs to intimidate protesters:
“The private company uses the army and the police to repress us. They accuse us of being trespassers, but they are the ones trespassing on our land.”
US reinforces ‘factors that generate violence the most in our society’
The Alliance for Progress also provided the backdrop for the assassination of the renowned Honduran environmentalist and feminist organizer Berta Cáceres.
On March 3, 2016, Cáceres was gunned down in her home in rural Honduras. A towering figure in her community with a presence on the international stage, Cáceres had been leading the fight against a local dam project overseen by DESA, a powerful Honduran energy company backed by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and run by powerful former military officers.
The representative that DESA sent to sign its deal with USAID, Sergio Rodríguez, was later accused of masterminding Cáceres’ murder, alongside military officials and former company employees.
In March 2018, the Honduran police arrested DESA’s executive president, Roberto David Castillo Mejía, accusing him of “providing logistics and other resources to one of the material authors” of the assassination. Castillo was a West Point graduate who worked in the energy industry while serving as a Honduran intelligence officer.
This July, The Grayzone visited the family of Berta Cáceres in La Esperanza, a town nestled in the verdant mountains of Intibucá. Cáceres’ mother, Doña Berta, lives there under 24-hour police guard paid for by human rights groups.
Image on the right: Laura Zuniga Caceres of COPINH in the home where Berta Caceres was raised (Photo: Ben Norton)
The Cáceres household is bristling with security cameras, and family members get around in armored cars. In her living room, we met Laura Zúñiga Cáceres of the Civic Council of Indigenous and Popular Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), the human rights group that her mother Berta founded.
“The violence in Honduras generates migrant caravans, which tears apart society, and it all has to do with all of this extractivism, this violence,” Zúñiga Caceres told The Grayzone. “And the response from the US government is to send more soldiers to our land; it is to reinforce one of the factors that generates violence the most in our society.”
“We are receiving reports from our comrades that there is a US military presence in indigenous Lenca territory,” she added. “For what? Humanitarian aid? With weapons. It’s violence. It’s persecution.”
Gutting public healthcare, driving more migration
The Alliance for Prosperity also commissioned the privatization of health services through a deceptively named program called the Social Protection Framework Law, or la Ley Marco de Protección Social.
Promoted by Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández as a needed reform, the scheme was advanced through a classic shock doctrine-style episode: In 2015, close associates of Hernández siphoned some $300 million from the Honduran Institute for Social Services (IHSS) into private businesses, starving hospitals of supplies and causing several thousand excess deaths, mostly among the poor.
With the medical sector in shambles, Hondurans were then forced to seek healthcare from the private companies that were to provide services under Hernandez’s “Social Protection” plan.
“The money that was robbed [in the IHSS scandal] was used to justify the Ley Marco Proteccion Social,” Karen Spring, a researcher and coordinator for the Honduras Solidarity Network, told The Grayzone. “The hospitals were left in horrible conditions with no human capital and they were left to farm out to private hospitals.”
“When Hondurans go to hospitals, they will be told they need to go to a private company, and through the deductions in their jobs they will have to pay a lot out of pocket,” Spring said. “Through the old universal system you would be covered no matter what you had, from a broken arm to cancer. No more.”
In response, Hondurans poured out into the streets, launching the March of Torches – the first major wave of continuous protests against Hernandez and his corrupt administration.
In March 2015, in the middle of the crisis, Joe Biden rushed down to Guatemala City to embrace Hernández and restore confidence in the Alliance for Prosperity.
“I come from a state that, in fact, is the corporate capital of America. More corporations are headquartered there than anyplace else,” Biden boasted, with Hernández and the presidents of Guatemala and El Salvador standing by his side. “They want to come here. Corporate America wants to come.”
Joseph Biden embraces Juan Orlando Hernandez in Guatemala City, February 2016
Emphasizing the need for more anti-corruption and security measures to attract international financial investment, Biden pointed to Plan Colombia as a shining model – and to himself as its architect. “Today Colombia is a nation transformed, just as you hope to be 10 to 15 years from now,” the vice president proclaimed.
Following Biden’s visit, the privatization of the Honduran economy continued apace — and so did the corruption, the repression, and the unflinching support from Washington.
Hondurans take to the streets, wind up in US-style supermax prisons
By 2017, the movement in Honduras that had galvanized against the US-orchestrated 2009 coup saw its most immediate opportunity for political transformation at the ballot box. President Hernández was running for re-election, violating a constitutional provision on term limits. His opponent, Salvador Nasrallah, was a popular broadcast personality who provided a centrist consensus choice for the varied elements that opposed the country’s coup regime.
When voting ended on November 26, Nasrallah’s victory appeared certain, with exit polls showing him comfortably ahead by several points. But suddenly, the government announced that a power outage required the suspension of vote counting. Days later, Hernández was declared the victor by about 1 percent.
The fraud was so transparent that the Organization of American States (OAS), normally an arm of US interests in Latin America, declared in a preliminary report that “errors, irregularities and systemic problems,” as well as “extreme statistical improbability,” rendered the election invalid.
But the United States recognized the results anyway, leaving disenfranchised Hondurans with protest as their only recourse.
“Hondurans tried to change what happened in their country through the 2017 elections, not just Hernández but all the implementation of all these policies that the Biden plan had funded and implemented all these years since the coup,” explained Karen Spring, of the Honduras Solidarity Network.
“They tried to change that reality through votes and when the elections turned out to be a fraud, tons of people had no choice but to take to the streets.”
At the front lines of the protests in 2017 was Spring’s longtime partner, the Honduran activist Edwin Espinal. Following a protest in November of that year where property damage took place, Espinal was arrested at gunpoint at his home and accused of setting fire to the front door of a hotel. He fervently denied all charges, accusing the government of persecuting him for his political activism.
In fact, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had placed a protective measure on Espinal in 2010 in response to previous attempts to legally railroad him.
The government placed Espinal in pre-trial detention in La Tolva, a US-style maximum security prison normally reserved for violent criminals and narco-traffickers. Last October, Espinal and Spring were married in the jail while surrounded by masked guards.
Karen Spring and Edwin Espinal marry in La Tolva in October 2018 (Photo: Karen Spring)
“Since the Biden plan, contractors have been coming down to build these US-style maximum security prisons,” Spring said. “That’s where my husband Edwin Espinal is being held.”
“They say the company is Honduran but there’s no way Hondurans could have built that without US architects or US construction firms giving them the plans,” she added. “I’ve been in the prison and it’s like they dumped a US prison in the middle of Honduras.”
Reflecting on her husband’s persecution, Spring explained, “Edwin wanted to stay in his country to change the reality that caused mass migration. He’s one of the people who’s faced consequences because he went to the streets. And he’s faced persecution for years because he’s one of the Hondurans who wanted to change the country by staying and fighting. Berta Caceres was another.”
“Hondurans wanted to use their votes to change the country and now they’re voting with their feet,” she continued. “So if Biden’s plan really addressed the root causes of the migrant crisis, why aren’t people asking why migration is getting worse? Hondurans are voting on the Biden plan by fleeing and saying your plan didn’t work and it made our situation worse by fleeing to the border.”
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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.
All images in this article are from The Grayzone unless otherwise stated
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In an appallingly distorted and biased report by United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the shameful failure to report or even mention the atrocities committed by the Venezuelan so-called “peaceful opposition” is a sin of omission so egregious as to discredit the entire report, and disqualify the professionalism of those who compiled it.
It sounds like the Trump administration is moving towards military intervention against Venezuela after all. Ever since the failed would-be coup at the end of April, it seemed as if Trump had written off Venezuela and had turned his attention elsewhere.
The so-called Lima Group is a Trump regime cobbled together “coalition” of 12 Latin American anti-Bolivarian social democracy countries plus Canada.
They’re allied with the US plot to replace Venezuela’s legitimate government with pro-Western fascist tyranny, along with giving the US control over the country’s vast oil reserves, the world’s largest.
According to an unnamed Trump administration official, the blockade will continue until Nicolas Maduro abdicates and Juan Guaido becomes the neoliberal recognized leader.
By all accounts the SPF has been a politically successful event that followed a significant meeting of the Movement of Non-Aligned Countries (NAM) that concluded with a strong political declaration and support of 120 governments with the democratically elected Venezuelan government of Nicolas Maduro.
Never before in decades on this planet have we witnessed such a U.S.-led international, sustained, vicious and coordinated economic, political and diplomatic media disinformation/lying campaign against a government and its leader – in this case, President Maduro – as we have seen over the last six months (and ongoing).
As tensions in the Persian Gulf are taking up most of the headlines, the Trump administration is still seeking regime change in Venezuela. Since coming into office President Trump has had an aggressive policy towards Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro. The Center for Economic Policy and Research determined in April that US sanctions were responsible for 40,000 deaths in Venezuela since 2017.
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Featured image: A Hands Off Venezuela protest in London on January 28, 2018. (Socialist Appeal/Flickr).
US President Donald Trump is a master of the withdrawal method. That said, it is often forgotten that the United States remains that most fickle of creatures, joining, or abandoning international regimes that might be seen to jar with the national interest. Initial preparations for such global arrangements tend to be initially optimistic, even rosy. Eager to draft a suitable document, say, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, diligent diplomats give the work a made-in-America feel. They are then told ratification will be impossible in the Senate. Uncle Sam duly becomes a unilateralist jingo.
The difference from what has come before is that Trump is not troubled by any sense of enduring history. There are no restraints, nor caveats. Pre-Trump history had to be bad, if not altogether rotten. This sort of attitude comes with doses of good and heavy draughts of bad. Tariff wars result; states like Iran can be provoked. Allies can be mocked.
On October 20, 2018, the US president announced that his country would be withdrawing from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Since then, the INF has been confined to an aged home, given modest palliative care, and not so respectfully expired.
The agreement came about because of a tiff in the nuclear family on certain weapons, notably ground-launched intermediate missiles. The Soviet Union had moved SS-20 missiles into Europe in 1979. The US balanced it with Pershing and cruise missiles in West Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The prospect of turning Europe into a wasteland in futility presented itself with a certain glaringness. Protests were held; politicians toyed with a fragile destiny. The Kremlin and Washington stared at each other.
The result was the INF Treaty, described by President Ronald Reagan and the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev as follows:
“This treaty is historic for its objective – the complete elimination of an entire class of US and Soviet nuclear arms – and for the innovative character and scope of its verification provisions.”
It mandated that both sides destroy and not deploy ground-based ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,500 kilometres, be they conventional or nuclear.
It took some time, but disgruntlement about observing the injunctions of the treaty were to come. China, for instance, was not a member, leaving it to feed growing aspirations in deploying intermediate-range forces in East Asia. And the military industrial complex is a cheeky old thing, bound to do its Promethean mischief in due course. In 2014, the US took issue with Russia’s testing of the 9M729 ground-launched cruise missile. Three years later, it was alleged that the weapon system had been deployed. By October 2018, Russia was deemed to be in full-blown violation of the treaty and given till February 2019 to right the ledger. Not that the US never had its fair share of contingency designs in the system.
Now, Russia has also conceded to putting the 1987 document to bed. Doing so provides greater latitude of missile deployment without the sense of being under a legal cloud, though few implications will be initially visible.
“In the short term, there’s no immediate physical change after Friday,” observes former US diplomat versed on non-proliferation issues. “The United States and Russia are not going to begin on Saturday deploying hundreds of new missiles.”
Richard A. Clarkehazarded a guess on the implications. Smug yet troubled, he reminded us that he had been a bricklayer in the original agreement, sad to see it lapse into history.
“As someone who helped designed the INF Treaty, only Russia benefits from the US withdrawal. No European country will let us deploy new nukes and we don’t have any even under development.”
UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres has argued that,
“This will likely heighten, not reduce, the threat posed by ballistic missiles.”
At the heart of every arms control understanding is a studied hypocrisy. By way of example, every power which has nuclear weapons wants to keep them. Many powers without it want them but will be denied access to such technology by the family of hardnosed enforcers. But within the nuclear cabal lies a range of inconsistent and, in some cases, contradictory factors. Arms control might be seen as another form of controlled addiction, never case of abolition and true security.
Ending the INF is bound to cause some glumness, but the critics about its binary nature were growing in number, eager to see its revision or scuttling. In 2014, Trump’s current national security advisor John Bolton was already making mutterings about a treaty obsolete before its violation. It is easy to forget that the Reagan administration initially began with bellicosity, fearing that any sense of restraining the nuclear arms race was only coming at the expense of US hegemony. Such arms control was not for them. Yet it was Reagan, spurred on astrological guidance or otherwise, who finally found reassurance in the signing of the INF with his sparring counterpart.
There is bound to be an initial boost in expenditure and testing on weapons that would have otherwise been banned by the INF. A mini-arms race is in the offing: to each his degree of deserving lunacy. There will also be, if the views of NATO Secretary General Jason Stoltenberg are anything to go by, an increased emphasis on improving missile defences. Once that dash is done, the parties may well find themselves at the negotiating table again, with a new cohort of arms inspectors ready for employment. Till then, Trump is likely to set his wrecking ball to another arms control agreement. Beware, negotiators of New START.
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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]
Former lawyer for the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights, Alfred de Zayas stated:
“As a former staffer of the Office of the High Commissioner For Human Rights, I know how things work. There are people with prejudices. They have an axe to grind and they grind it and they omit information that just doesn’t fit the matrix that they want to put forward…Now this, of course, is not just a problem of methodology. This is also a problem of ethics. The professional ethics of a staff member must include a true reproduction of the information received from all sources…the information given to the High Commissioner, I have seen much of that information, which also dates back to 2017, and none of it was ever reflected by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, and is also not reflected by this new report…I think it is necessary for the credibility of the office to change the team that has been doing these reports in the past because they have proven not to be objective. They have proven not to follow what I would consider the minimum requirements of any serious research.”
“I think that not giving appropriate weight to the violence of the guarimbas, of the opposition, not going into the dislocation, the disturbance of repeated attempts at overthrowing the government, the coup d’etat, the unilateral declaration of the presidency of Guaido, followed by the so-called humanitarian aid that the United States was going to force from Colombia into Venezuela, followed by the call to the army to overthrow Maduro on the 30th of April last, etc., the attempts on the life of Maduro himself—All of these things have an impact on the functioning of any government….But back in 2017, and I’ve seen the videos, the opposition used Molotov cocktails. The opposition used real bullets. The opposition burned alive seven human beings.”
In an appallingly distorted and biased report by United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, the shameful failure to report or even mention the atrocities committed by the Venezuelan so-called “peaceful opposition” is a sin of omission so egregious as to discredit the entire report, and disqualify the professionalism of those who compiled it. It is also shocking that Michelle Bachelet affixed her own imprimatur to this report: Madame Bachelet should, at the very least, have mentioned particularly infamous atrocities perpetrated by the Venezuelan opposition, atrocities which actually exceeded in savagery some of the horrors perpetrated by the fascist dictatorship of Chile’s Pinochet, barbarism of which Chile’s Michelle Bachelet herself must be fully aware.
This report on Venezuela dates back as far as 2014, and clearly includes 2017, during which racist atrocities perpetrated by the opposition against supporters of the government are so heinous that their glaring omission from this current report constitutes a deliberate attempt to suppress and deny the truth, transforming the report into a blatant propaganda device, devoid of reliability.
On May 22, 2017 the torture-murder of an Afro-Venezuelan was committed by members of the opposition demonstrating in the wealthy community of Altamira: a young Afro-Venezuelan, Orlando Jose Figuera was beaten to the ground by a mob of over 40 members of the opposition, who knifed him six times in the stomach, doused his body with gasoline and burned him alive. Figuera, a government supporter, died ten days later. The opposition perpetrators of this heinous atrocity were never apprehended.
“What does the Organization of American States General Secretary Luis Almagro say? What does the Colombian President say? What does Donald Trump say?”
These Venezuelan racist members of the opposition subsequently burnt alive at least five other government supporters, including Danny Subero, Pedro Josue Carillo, several other youths: at least eighteen government supporters were murdered in this “peaceful” opposition demonstration, alone. Absolutely no mention of this is contained in Michelle Bachelet’s current report, which virtually demonizes the Venezuelan government.
During this orgy of sadism perpetrated by the so-called “peaceful” Venezuelan opposition, fifty four public – operated TransBolivar buses in Ciudad Guyana were set on fire with Molotov cocktails hurled by members of the opposition. This was confirmed by Bolivar state Governor Francisco Rangel Gomez. Of course, the well-to-do members of Venezuelan society do not need to use public buses. They frequently ride in chauffeured limosines. The destruction of public buses harms the poorer sectors of Venezuela, those very members of society which Presidents Chavez and Maduro were attempting to help, and raise the standard of living.
These opposition protests have caused the country $140,000,000 in damages in 2017 alone.
These crass omissions of numerous crimes and atrocities perpetrated by the Venezuelan opposition scandalously discredit this report, and reveal it to be sycophantic propaganda, both intellectually and morally bankrupt, currying favor with Western financial powers, and unworthy of Madame Bachelet, herself, who cannot, or should not have forgotten the cases in Chile of the “Quemados.” Rodrogo Rojas and Carmen Gloria Quintana, were similarly doused with gasoline and set on fire by Pinochet’s gestapo: Rojas died of his burns, and Carman Gloria underwent more than 30 plastic surgery operations to attempt repair her face and body, still disfigured with scarring. There is one difference: Pinochet’s killers omitted the six knife wounds to the stomach that Figueroa suffered. Members of the Venezuelan opposition seem to have exceeded in savagery even Pinochet’s Nazis.
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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.
Yesterday’s column referred to a “falling labor force participation rate.”
One of the main points of the article is that the number of payroll jobs are not the same thing as the number of employed Americans.Jobs have been trending toward part-time as this allows employers to avoid benefit costs.In order to make ends meet, many Americans work two or more part-time jobs.Therefore, the announcement on Friday of 148,000 new jobs does not mean 148,000 more employed Americans.
There is another problem with the payroll jobs.Although the figure is nonfarm and does not include imported agricultural labor, it does include immigrants on work visas, such as H-1B and L-1 visas.This means that job gains in information technology and software engineering, for example, might be job gains for immigrants on work visas and not for American citizens.
As the payroll jobs number reflects reported information on payroll taxes and unemployment insurance, citizens and immigrants are lumped together.The percentage of new jobs taken by immigrants on work visas is not broken out.
The household survey number, however, does estimate the numbers of foreign-born and American-born employees, but it does not specify the legal status of the foreign-born, that is, whether they are naturalized citizens, green card holders, or immigrants on work visas. The household survey numbers are interesting. There are 27.1 million foreign-born employees with jobs in the US and 131.2 million native-born American employees.That the number of foreign-born employees is as large as 20 percent of American-born employees reflects either a high rate of immigration or a large number of foreign workers issued work visas.
In response to yesterday’s column, a reader wrote that he had seen a report last Thursday that the House of Representatives has passed a bill to allow unlimited numbers of people from India and China to be granted work visas for US programming jobs.The reader concludes that his job will soon be history and he will disappear into the ranks of the uncounted American unemployed.
When it happens to them, Americans finally understand, regardless of the controlled explanations of The Matrix in which they live, that their government does not ever represent them.It represents profits—the profits of companies that produce profits by lobbying and legislating against Americans.
Assessing this information, the conclusion is that it is a waste of time and money for Americans to learn programming from a US institution.Instead, they should acquire Indian citizenship, get a degree from an Indian university, and apply for a US work visa.
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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.
The US has full escalation dominance in the Hybrid War on Venezuela, so while it would be internationally illegal and morally wrong, neither Caracas nor its partners in Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran would do anything of substance to stop Washington if it takes the fateful decision to blockade the Bolivarian Republic.
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Trump raised eyebrows last week when he answered in the affirmative after being asked whether he’s considering a “blockade” or “quarantine” of Venezuela in response to the support that Russia, China, and Iran are providing to the Bolivarian Republic. It’s clear that this policy option is only being pondered because the US’ earlier Hybrid War plots failed to dislodge the democratically elected and legitimate government of President Maduro, with the authorities proving themselves more than capable of foiling both military coups and Color Revolutions. The US is loath to acknowledge that its strategic defeat was at Venezuela’s hands alone, which is why it’s tried to blame its three aforementioned multipolar rivals instead, with the infowar narrative being that the socialist government would have fallen had it not been for their crucial support.
Interestingly, it’s not just the Mainstream Media that’s fallen for this storyline, but many in the Alt-Media Community too, albeit for different reasons. While the former’s motivations are obvious enough in the sense that they want to portray those three countries as global bogeymen, the latter are under the “wishful thinking” spell that they’re actually “global saviors” who are responsible for saving the world from American aggression. Instead of giving credit where it’s due and applauding the Venezuelan Armed Forces and the vast majority of the population who support them, they’d rather attribute everything to Russia, China, and Iran, especially after Moscow’s highly publicized and grossly decontextualized short-term dispatch of military advisors to the country earlier this year.
Russia consistently maintained that this was a preplanned deployment intended to train its counterparts in using various weapons systems that they agreed long in advance to export to Venezuela, but the Mainstream Media portrayed this as a secret military intervention. Alt-Media, for its part, believed that Moscow was “winking” at them through this move and didn’t take its vehement explanations seriously, instead imagining that the Mainstream Media might actually have been right for once and that a second Syrian-like operation was really in the making. When the US’ regime change plans came to naught, they immediately thanked Russia for its role in this outcome, even though Moscow literally had nothing to do with it at all. After accomplishing their training mission, Russia’s military advisors left the country earlier this summer, as if nothing ever happened.
Nevertheless, the US is still smarting from this strategic defeat and decided to partially blame it on Russia in order to “save face”, seeing as how recognizing the reality that this was purely a Venezuelan victory would be much too embarrassing for the Trump Administration. As such, it makes sense why the President is seriously considering blocking the South American country because he knows that this dramatic move might be enough to tilt the Hybrid War odds in his country’s favor and finally trigger the military coup and/or Color Revolution that it needs in order to overthrow the government there. It would be internationally illegal and morally wrong, but the fact of the matter is the the US wields escalation dominance over the situation, so it could very well go ahead with this dire scenario if it has the political will to accept the uncertain consequences.
Should it do so, then it’s improbable that Russia, China, or Iran would defy the blockade and trigger a 21st-century version of the Cuban Missile Crisis when neither of them did anything of tangible significance to help it during the earlier round of Hybrid War unrest when they much more easily could have. The fact of the matter is that geographic constraints make it impossible for them to sustain such an operation indefinitely as would be needed, to say nothing of the complete lack of interest in risking nuclear war just for the sake of their energy-rich but debt-laden partner, though the “wishful thinking” narrative that they would do remains pervasive in the Alt-Media Community. This is a narrative mistake of the highest magnitude, however, because it amounts to getting people’s hopes unrealistically high prior to their eventual crashing when reality inevitably sets in.
The disillusionment that would follow might be severe enough in many people to engender a radical reaction that leads to the reversal of their overall political outlook after having falsely believed that their “global saviors” would ride to Venezuela’s rescue, being unable to accept that those three are much too pragmatic to risk any direct losses of their own men just to please the Alt-Media masses. The ball is therefore entirely in the US’ court when it comes to the possibility of blockading Venezuela (most likely through a regional “coalition of the willing” if it ever comes to pass and with the authority to unleash a devastating response in case Caracas attacks their ships), but it’s unclear whether Trump’s hint is just scaremongering or something much more serious.
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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.
Over this weekend, China’s Yuan currency broke out of its band and devalued to more than 7 to $1. At the same time China announced it would not purchase more US agricultural goods. The Trump-US Neocon trade strategy has just imploded. As this writer has been predicting, the threshold has now been passed, from a tariff-trade war to a broader economic war between the US and China where other tactics and measures are now being implemented.
Trump will no doubt declare that China is manipulating its currency. A devaluation of the Yuan has the effect of negating Trump tariffs imposed on China. But China isn’t manipulating its currency. Manipulation is defined as entering global money markets to buy and/or sell one’s currency in exchange for dollars (the global trading currency) in order to influence the price (exchange rate) of one’s currency in relation to the dollar. But China is not doing that, so it’s not manipulating. What’s happening is the US dollar is rising in value (or expected to) and that rise in effect lowers the value of the Yuan. The same is happening to other currencies as well,as the dollar rises. Why is the dollar then rising? There’s a global stampede to safety and that means buying US Treasuries–which are now in freefall in terms of interest rates (and escalating in terms of price). Prices from one year or even less, to 10 and 30 year Treasuries are accelerating. But to buy Treasuries, foreign investors must sell their currencies and buy dollars before buying Treasuries. That escalating demand for dollars is what drives up the value of the dollar, which in turn drives down the value–i.e. devalues-the Yuan in relation to the dollar.
In other words, the slowing global economy which is being driven by the Trump trade wars is what is causing the flight to the dollar and to the safe haven of US Treasuries. Trump’s policies are at the heart of the global slowdown (already in progress due to fundamental forces stalling investment and growth). That slowdown is what’s driving the dollar and in turn lowering the Yuan. Trump policies are ‘manipulating’ the Yuan.
China is of course allowing the devaluation to occur. Previously, it was entering money markets to buy Yuan in order to keep it from devaluing. Now it’s just allowing the process to occur. This is China’s response to Trump’s imposing an additional 10% tariffs on $300 billion of China imports last week. It signals that the ‘trade’ war (now becoming an economic war) has moved beyond tariffs.
With Trump’s recent actions, and China’s now response, the potential for a trade agreement in 2019 looks even more unlikely than before.
What will Trump now do? If he remains true to his past behavior when bargaining partners stand up to him, he’ll try to find a way to ‘up the ante’ as they say, and take additional action. He could step up his attack on Huawei and on other China corporations’ partnerships and investments in the US. China will in turn impose restrictions on US corporations doing business in China (i.e. more licensing, more customs inspections, and imposing more non-tariff barriers). It could unleash an anti-American goods boycott in China. It could reduce the export supply of critical ‘rare earths’ it has. It could suspend its previous decision to allow US corporations doing business in China to have a 51% ownership of those operations. And then it has its ‘nuclear options’, as they say: to cut back sharply or cease purchasing US Treasuries and thus recycling US dollars back to the US. Should that happen, the US government would have to borrow more from other sources to offset its annual budget deficit. That would raise the national debt annually even faster than it has been growing–now more than $22 trillion and projected now to rise more than $1 trillion this year. Should recession occur, the deficits and debt could rise as much as $1.7 trillion, according to the US Congressional Budget Office, CBO, research arm.
But with demand for dollars to buy Treasuries surging, the US Treasury and Fed would have more difficulty selling Treasuries, equal to China’s decline of purchases, given that Treasury prices are escalating and interest rates falling.
In short, the US-China trade war, the slowing global economy (now about to spill over to the US economy), the US budget deficit, and Fed interest rates are all inter-related. Trump policies are creating economic havoc on all these fronts.
What are some of the likely responses therefore to the China responses to Trump’s hardball strategy-driven by US neocons since May?
The neocons will have attained their goal, which has always been to scuttle negotiations with China unless the latter capitulated on the technology issue. Behind the tariffs, behind the trade war, has always been the war over next generation technologies (cybersecurity, 5G, and AI). It’s now clear that China will not capitulate, so no trade deal is possible so long as the US neocons remain in control of the trade negotiations which, at this point, they still do. The neocons will now use China’s strong response to Trump’s latest tariffs to convince Trump to take an even harder line against China corporations in the US and abroad with obsequious US allies like the UK and Canada.
Trump’s campaign re-election staff will see this as an opportunity to start blaming China for the slowing US economy. Themes of ‘China the currency manipulator’ and ‘China the source of US opioids’ may become the mantra from the White House.
US big business and multinational corporations will be further motivated to put pressure on Trump to go back to the negotiating table and settle. To date, however, they’ve been largely unsuccessful with influencing Trump and the trade negotiations. The Pentagon, military industrial complex, and US war industries have Trump’s ear and they’re shouting ‘technology capitulation’ or no deal’.
The US Farm sector will be in dire straits now. It’s almost certain that within the next six months Trump will have to provide them a third bailout, costing $20 billion or more. That will mean a total of $50 billion cost in farm subsidies due to the China-US trade war.
Globally, emerging market economies are likely to be big losers from the worsening trade relations between Trump and China. Their currencies will decline like the Yuan. But they have far fewer resources than China has to weather the crisis. Declining currency values in emerging market economies (EMEs) will mean more capital flight from their economies, seeking ‘safe haven’ in US Treasuries, in other currencies (Japan’s Yen as ‘carrying trade’), or in gold. That capital flight will slow their domestic investment. Their central banks will then raise interest rates to slow the flight, but that will slow their domestic economies further. The declining currencies will also mean rising import goods inflation and drive their domestic inflation levels higher, as their economies simultaneously slow. EMEs will face both more recession amidst rising inflation.
The China-US trade deterioration will also likely exacerbate inter-capitalist conflicts, as is already beginning to appear in the current South Korea-Japan trade dispute.
The worsening US-China situation will also have a negative effect on Europe’s economy, already about to slip into recession soon. More dependent on exports, especially Germany, the deterioration of global trade will accelerate Europe’s slowdown. The growing likelihood of a ‘hard’ Brexit coming at the same time in October, will almost certainly plunge Europe into another major recession as well, even before the US.
As the global economy slows and contracts, financial markets–already declining sharply from record highs–can be expected to become increasingly unstable. High on the list of ‘fragile’ financial markets are the non-performing bank loans in Europe, Japan, and especially in India. India’s ‘shadow banks’ are especially unstable. Corporate dollar based bond markets in Latin America are another locus of fragility. And in the US, junk bond, triple B investment grade corporate bonds (also junk), and leveraged loans (i.e. junk loans) are candidates for financial instability events following the next US recession.
In short, Trump has been making a mess of US economic policy. And the Fed and monetary policy of lower interest rates cannot ‘save’ him. Recent (and future) cuts in interest rates will have virtually no effect on the real US economy in coming months as it slows. And Trump has essentially negated fiscal policy as a source of stimulus. His massive 2018 tax cuts ($4 trillion over the next decade) has played a primary role in the US annual $1 trillion budget deficits now baked into the US economy every year for another decade. US national debt will go to $34 trillion and, according to the CBO, interest on the debt alone will rise to $900 billion a year by 2027. So fiscal policy as tax policy is now painted into a corner along with central bank interest rate policy. And massive deficits and debt mitigate against political action to increase government spending as a way out of Trump’s crisis.
For the past decade or more, US policy has been to use both monetary policy and tax policy to subsidize capital incomes to the tune of trillions of dollars a year, every year. It used to be that monetary (Fed) and fiscal policy were used to ‘stabilize’ the economy in the event of recession or inflation. No longer. A decade and more of using these policies to subsidize capital incomes has led to the negation of the effectiveness of these policies for purposes of economic stabilization.
The US is now headed for a major recession, with neither ‘monetary ammunition’ nor fiscal ammunition at its disposal with which to try to stimulate the economy as it enters recession. This has never happened before. But its consequences could be enormous–for the depth and duration of any recession to come.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Jack Rasmus.
Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump’, Clarity Press, September 30, 2019. Dr. Rasmus blogs at jackrasmus.com. His website is kyklosproductions.com. His twitter handle @drjackrasmus. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
When Trump said he was considering a blockade of Venezuela yesterday, it was possible to dismiss it as a meaningless statement that would have no policy implications. Unfortunately, Trump seems to have meant what he said:
Donald Trump is serious about a possible U.S. blockade of Venezuela, a senior administration official said Friday, saying that the country’s president Nicolas Maduro has a short window to voluntarily leave power.
It sounds like the Trump administration is moving towards military intervention against Venezuela after all. Ever since the failed would-be coup at the end of April, it seemed as if Trump had written off Venezuela and had turned his attention elsewhere. Now it appears that the U.S. could begin imposing a military blockade of the country in the coming months. The humanitarian implications of a blockade alone make it completely unjustifiable. Set aside for a moment the fact that blockading Venezuela serves no U.S. interests and would have no international legitimacy or support, and just consider that it would speed up and exacerbate a likely famine that our government’s sanctions have already hastened. Blockading a country suffering from a major economic and humanitarian crisis would be criminal, and it would inflict even more misery and death on tens of millions of innocent people.
The article adds:
But the official said Trump’s statement should be taken seriously and is the direction U.S. policy is headed with regard to Venezuela. The official asked not to be identified as a condition of participation in a briefing for reporters.
It was just a little over six months ago that the U.S. recklessly took sides in Venezuela’s internal political crisis. Since the start of the regime change policy, the U.S. has imposed cruel sanctions that inflict collective punishment on the population, and it is now heading towards unjustified and illegal military action. This is where misguided meddling in the internal affairs of other countries usually leads, and this is why the U.S. should stay out of the political disputes of other countries.
Congress and the public must oppose any attempt at a blockade by the Trump administration. A blockade of Venezuela won’t make the U.S. or the region more secure, and it is a stepping stone on the path to launching attacks on the Venezuelan government and possible invasion. For the sake of the people of Venezuela, regional stability, and our own interests, we must reject a blockade of Venezuela.
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On this week’s episode of 9/11 Free Fall, host Andy Steele is joined by Franklin Square Fire Commissioner Christopher Gioia to discuss his fire district’s recent passage of a historic resolution supporting a new investigation into events of 9/11.
We invite you to listen on YouTube or to read the interview below.
“On July 24, 2019, the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which oversees a volunteer fire department that serves a hamlet of 30,000 residents, just outside of Queens, New York, made history by unanimously passing a resolution that supports a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, becoming the first legislative body in the country to do so.”
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Transcript
Andrew Steele: On July 24, 2019, the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, which oversees a volunteer fire department that serves a hamlet of 30,000 residents, just outside of Queens, New York, made history by unanimously passing a resolution that supports a new investigation into the events of September 11, 2001, becoming the first legislative body in the country to do so.
Today, we’re joined by the man who introduced that resolution, Christopher Gioia. He’s a former firefighter and chief of the Franklin Square and Munson Fire Department, and now a commissioner that oversees that department. Mr. Gioia, welcome to the show.
Christopher Gioia: Thank you very much, Mr. Steele.
Steele: Before we get into the big news that everybody is talking about in the movement, and all throughout alternative media, we want to get to know you a little bit more, so please tell us about yourself and your career.
Gioia: Well, let’s see. I am presently in the construction industry. Franklin Square Fire Department is a volunteer fire department. We’re comprised of people from all walks and all trades. I’ve been in Franklin Square, I guess, for most of my life. I grew up maybe a block away from the firehouse, so when I was growing up, I used to sit on the curb and watch the firetrucks go by. I always wanted to be a fireman.
In the meantime, I completed high school, and I had joined the Marine Corps. When I had gotten out of the Marine Corps, I came back to town, and I wanted to continue my service, because the fire department is a paramilitary organization, so I went to the fire department, and I joined the local fire department. I’ve been with the Franklin Square/Munson Fire Department now for 32 years. I rose through the ranks, lieutenant and captain. I went through the chief’s office. We have three chiefs, second assistant, first assistant, and then you become chief of department. Those are two-year terms.
Then some years went by. We also have the fire district, which is comprised of five fire commissioners, who are responsible for the buildings and the grounds, the maintenance of the equipment, uniforms, and such. Pretty much, it’s administrative, and you pay the bills, but it is an elected position, and you have to submit a petition and run for office, and there are other people out there that you have to run against, so you actually have to mount a campaign. Then whatever monies, because it’s public money, everything has to be done according to state law. Everything has to be voted on, and there’s policies and procedures, and everything has to be on the up and up and above board.
We are audited by the state. We have our own internal auditors. Every penny is accounted for, and we do run a tight ship over here. I’ve been a commissioner now for about, I guess, three years. They’re five-year terms, so I’m probably about halfway through. You lose track of time. When you get older, things have a tendency to blur a little bit.
Steele: Is it just one term that you have or are allowed, or are you allowed to run again, when the five years are up?
Gioia: You can run again for another five-year term. You could actually stay in office. The other four commissioners have been in office 10, 15, maybe 20 years, so I’m pretty much the new kid on the block. The other members… We have another ex-chief, who’s sitting on the board, as well. He was chief of the department back in the late ’80s or the early ’90s. That would actually be Commissioner Malloy. Then you have Commissioner Saltzman, who is a member of Engine Company Number Three. You have Commissioner Lyons, who is a member of Engine Company Number Two. Commissioner Joseph Torregrossa, he’s the chairman, and he’s also a member of Engine Company Number Two.
You can run again. Five-year terms is a long time, but if you’re in there, and you like what you’re doing, it’s pretty procedural after… For me, personally, after being chief and being commissioner, coming into the district, it’s actually a less hectic pace. When you’re chief, you respond to every call, and you’re out there on the front lines. Pretty much, the commissioners are the ones in the background, just paying all the bills. It’s a lot less hectic. It’s more relaxed. When you get a little older, you want to be a little bit more relaxed.
Steele: I understand that myself, as I’m getting older. Believe me. Now, please tell us about your 9/11 story. Where were you on the day of September 11th, and how did you first hear the news?
Gioia: On 9/11, I was working… As I said, I do construction for a living. I’m a construction surveyor. I work for a large construction company. I was working on new construction of a small power plant on the river, the East River in Brooklyn, just north of the Williamsburg Bridge. I was working with a gentleman, who works in Upstate New York. We were working. We’re less than two miles from the Trade Center, and you have a spectacular view of Manhattan from the Brooklyn side of the river.
We heard this explosion, me and my partner, and he remarked something like, “Is somebody blasting around here?” Because he knew what the sound was. It didn’t register, so we looked around, and somebody said, “Hey, look! The Trade Center, the Twin Towers, is on fire.” We were looking at it, and we’re like… We pretty much knew right away. We’re like, okay, a plane hit it or a helicopter hit it. It was up high, and there was enough smoke and fire that we could see.
Then somebody ran out of one of the trailers and said that a plane had hit the North Tower. It was a spectacularly beautiful day. It was just this beautiful blue sky. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and it was this perfect day. I’m thinking to myself, I’m like, this guy, whoever was flying the plane, how could you hit the building? It’s just absolutely perfect flying weather.
I have survey equipment, which is pretty much like a telescope, so we focused the instruments on the North Tower, and I could see the imprint of the plane. I could actually see everything. Just looking at it, it was registering that we all thought it was maybe a small propeller plane, like a Piper Cub or something like that, but just from looking at the damage, it was like you knew that it was something larger.
In the meantime, then, the person… People were running around, scurrying, and they didn’t know what was going on, and then all of a sudden, we were watching. Then from our vantage point, we couldn’t see the plane coming from the other side, because the second plane that hit the South Tower came from the Statue of Liberty side, which is the New Jersey side, and the building exploded, and it blew out on the side, and then all hell broke loose. We were like, we’re under attack, you know?
People just wanted to leave the job. Me and my partner, we were transfixed on what we were seeing, because we had the instruments set up, and people wanted to see what was going on. We actually could see people waving for help. I could see people waving their clothes from the windows. I actually saw the lady who was perched at the bottom of the impact hole in the North Tower. I believe she was identified, and she ultimately wound up being killed, but I saw her.
Then it got even worse, because then you saw people jumping out of the building, and then that was it. I couldn’t watch it anymore, and I had to get home to my wife and my kids. My son was just about a year old. I told my boss. I said, “Listen, I’m out of here,” so I jumped in my truck, and we’re about… From Brooklyn to my house is probably about 20 miles, and it’s about maybe five or six miles to get to the Brooklyn Queens Expressway.
When I had driven about five miles to get on the expressway, when I got up to the expressway, I looked in the rear view mirror, and the whole sky of Manhattan down by the Trade Centers was just blacked out by this cloud. I guess the North Tower had collapsed, but I didn’t know it yet. People had just stopped on the highway, and everybody was just staring. I turned on the radio, and then all kinds of reports were coming in. I just, I flew home, and I made it home in record time. It must’ve taken me 15-20 minutes, because I was literally doing 90 miles an hour down the highway to get home.
I got home, and I threw open the door. My wife looked at me, and she goes, the South Tower just collapsed. I couldn’t understand. I said to her, I go, “What do you mean the South Tower just collapsed?” I go, “What happened to the North Tower?” She said, “That one collapsed 15 minutes ago.” I just sat back down on the couch with my wife, and we just sat there, and we watched TV. We were just in shock, because it was just too much to take in. We just sat there, and we just watched, watched the TV, and we just watched everything, as it unfolded.
Steele: It was horrible enough to watch it on television from Florida, where I was at the time. I can’t imagine standing there watching what you just described through your equipment that day, and seeing that. I know for New Yorkers, it had, of course, a more profound impact, because they actually lived it, people in New York and in the surrounding areas. It happened right in front of them. I understand that you had friends that died on September 11th. Do you want to tell us about them, and the lives that they lived?
Gioia: Yes, that’s correct, Andrew. I lost three of my friends, who were city firemen. One of them, Thomas Hetzel, was in the department here in Franklin Square. The other two lived in Franklin Square, and I was friends with them. I grew up with firefighter, Robert Evans. We used to pretty much hang out, maybe down at the park. He was a friend from school. Then the other firefighter, Michael Kiefer, he was one of these kids who used to come around the firehouse on his bicycle, and he was a… We’d call him a buff. He would have his scanner, and he would follow the trucks around. He grew up, and he joined the fire department.
He went into the towers. He responded. They never found him. I think they found little bits and pieces of Bobby. I was speaking to his sister the other day. They actually recovered some more parts or bone fragments. Tom they found in a stairwell. He was on his way out of the building. I was really good friends with Tom. I pretty much grew up with him. I went to his wedding. We did things together, and he was a good friend. They were all good people.
Steele: September 11th happened. You obviously have a personal connection to the event through your friends that died, through the fire department. How did you come to be exposed to the World Trade Center evidence that AE911Truth puts forth?
Gioia: After 9/11, the town really pulled together, the town of Franklin Square. We opened up the firehouse, and people were asked to drop off donations, whatever they could donate in the way of maybe food, water, clothing, whatever supplies that they could think of, that we packed onto a truck, and we actually brought down to Ground Zero to give out to the rescue workers. One of my friends in the fire department is a retired airline pilot. He was an FAA instructor. He flew every kind of aircraft, and he was totally familiar with jet planes and everything like that.
One of the stories that struck us odd, right from the get-go, and he even said this, was that they mentioned that the hijackers had turned off the system on the plane, and that stopped the air traffic controllers from seeing them. He was like, “Well, if they turn that off, that doesn’t erase the radar signature.” That always struck me as odd, and even struck him as odd, because they were saying, well, they couldn’t track the plane, but that’s not true.
That always stuck in my brain, and then years went by, and didn’t think anything of it. Pretty much, we were trying to get our lives back on track, I’d say, for the first year, went to numerous wakes and funerals for a solid year, of just firemen and cops and civilians who were killed. It wasn’t a pleasant time. It was actually a time that I really don’t care to remember too much. I guess I’ve repressed the memories, and it’s kind of hazy, but I do remember enough.
Then we gradually built our lives back, and life pretty much got back to normal, even though you have the wars going on, and you have… All kinds of things were going on, but people accepted it, and we had to move on. We had to carry on, and we did.
Being in the construction industry, I speak with a lot of people. I was talking with some people, and we were talking about building construction, and we got onto talking about how the towers had collapsed. Then one of the guys that I was talking with said, “You know about Building 7?”
I was like, “Well, what about Building 7? What is it? What was it?” I really didn’t know too much about it. I knew that a third building had come down, but at the time you’re watching this, I guess I really started watching the news a couple of days after 9/11, when Franklin Square was called into the city, and we had to do standby duty at a city firehouse. We were all glued around the TV, and they kept showing Building 7 from uptown, like around the Empire State Building, so you could see the building come down. At the time, nobody really cared about Building 7, because everybody was more fixated on the Twin Towers.
Then this person that I was speaking with, another one of the construction workers, he’s like, “Yeah,” he goes, “that building came down. It wasn’t hit by a plane, and I have some real good photos/videos of it close up.” He started showing me that, and then on one of the videos, you could actually see the windows blowing out, and the windows blew out on multiple floors, all at the same time, and then the building buckled on both ends, and then the roof… The roof had initially caved in, but then the whole building came down symmetrically.
I just stood there, and I looked at him. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me. Where did you get that?”
He’s like, “It’s on the web. You could go online, and you could bring up pictures of all of this.”
That’s what spurred my curiosity, so I went online, and I started researching pictures of the collapses. I’m looking at the collapses, and then I’m hitting different websites. There’s a lot of crap out there, and there’s a lot of people who are off the wall with all kinds of different theories about everything, but I wasn’t interested in that. I was more interested in the dynamics of the collapse.
I looked at Building 7 in the closeup, and then somebody had stitched together, I guess, some pictures of a controlled demolition, and they put it side by side, next to Building 7. Then I was looking at… I was going through the interviews, and then I was looking at the news reports. There was a report from Dan Rather, and he said he was watching Building 7, and how it reminded him of a controlled demolition.
I’m looking at that building, and now, from a construction point of view, and then from being a fireman, and I’m like, “There’s something literally wrong with this picture, because fire doesn’t act like that.” If the building wasn’t hit by a plane… They said there were raging fires, and there were no raging fires in Building 7. There was fires on a few floors, and by the time of the collapse, they had pretty much gone out. There was damage when the North Tower collapse. Okay, I get that, but the building would’ve collapsed on the damaged side, and it would’ve been an asymmetrical collapse. It wouldn’t have been a symmetrical collapse.
Even if you look at the video of the building coming down, it doesn’t collapse from the top. You see the roof coming down, but it starts to collapse from the bottom. All the core columns, I know from construction, all the core columns had to have been severed at the same time, for a uniform, symmetrical collapse like that. There’s no two ways about it, never going to have a steel frame building collapse in that fashion without something else going on.
That spurred me on even further, and I started looking into more videos. Then I was interested in what eyewitnesses had to say, because I don’t… I’m not going on hearsay, and I’m not going on theories. I want to know what people saw. There’s a lot of testimony there from the firemen and police, first responders, as to what they saw and they heard. I believe about 200 or so mention explosions. They saw red flashes. There was a lot of popping, explosions, and everybody had pretty much… There was a common theme. They all said they thought it was… It almost looked like a controlled demolition. The people actually said that.
Then I’m like, all right, but you know, I’m going through. I’m surfing the web, and then I hit Architects and Engineers website, and this website had it all together, and it presented it in a logical fashion, yeah, all right, this is what happened. Then they back it up with professional people, and they… backed up by eyewitness testimony and how certain things are just not possible. You can’t suspend the laws of physics. Gravity only operates downward. It doesn’t operate from outward. The laws of science most certainly do apply. The laws of the building, the way the buildings were constructed, that applies. If you put theories to the test, which they have, then you prove that it’s not really a theory anymore, or you eliminate things that just are impossible to happen.
That coalesced in my mind. Then after, I would say, two or three years of doing research and digging, digging through testimony, and looking at pictures, and hitting various websites, it pretty much was obvious that the official government narrative is not really what happened that day. It’s absolutely far from the truth, and it’s not a good thing.
What was done, it was something… It was terrible, and it was perpetrated on the American public by, I’m just going to say, a rogue group, and there was an agenda. There definitely was an agenda. There was a lot going on, and a lot of good people got killed. That’s something that this country cannot tolerate, because it just goes against everything that we stand for. People were murdered for that, and that’s something that… You know what? That really disturbs me, and I know it disturbs a lot of other people, too.
Steele: Absolutely, and I think you really lay out the evidence very well, from your own research and perspective. When you woke up to this, through your slow process of deep research, like so many of us, did you speak to other people about this, other firefighters? What were their reactions? I’d also like to know, what did this do to your world view?
Gioia: When I first started talking to people about it, they just kind of laughed it off, and they were like, you’re crazy, and you don’t know what you’re talking about. They just kind of blew it off. Then I would say, “Well, wait a minute. Look at these pictures with me.” You could see, if you look at the Twin Towers exploding, and really look below the collapse, at the beginning, you could actually see floors blowing out in a pattern coming down. Then the debris from the collapsing floors covers it up, but you can actually see the floors blowing out. There’s some really good pictures of that.
I would try to tell people that maybe it’s not all as it seems, and that there’s definitely something else here that we need to look at. Initially, people didn’t want to know, and it is definitely a sensitive issues, because we’re pretty much right on top of it, but I’m persistent. I brought it up to a few people, and I showed them a few things to spur their curiosity. I don’t think it changed my world view. I think that, if anything, I always knew that the other world was a crazy place.
Steele: What first gave you the idea to pursue this resolution, and how difficult was the decision for you to go ahead and broach this subject with your colleagues?
Gioia: I have been putting it out there for a couple years now in the fire department. Being commissioner, I do go to meetings with other fire districts, and being an ex-chief, I do go to meetings for chiefs, The Chiefs Association in Nassau County. I brought it up at a fire district meeting. I actually read the petition. I saw the petition. I agreed with the need to have another investigation, because a lot of evidence has surfaced in the past 18 years that needs to look at. A lot of it has been uncovered by Architects and Engineers. It’s been uncovered by a lot of people, who have taken the time to analyze, and to render a professional opinion on what the evidence shows. That, to me, was very important.
I started telling people about the petition. I said that the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York actually has this petition to get a grand jury investigation going. I said, “That’s where we need to go.” I said, “My feelings on the matter don’t mean anything.” I said, “We’re not engaging in conspiracy theories at all. Let’s look at the evidence, and let the evidence guide us on the direction that we need to go.” That is so important. I think that the American people, I think that any rational person, would agree with that, that you discount everything else. You can’t go on hearsay. Let’s take a hard look at what’s there, and let that just guide us. We owe it to the people who were murdered on 9/11 and the countless thousands, or tens of thousands of people who were killed in these wars overseas, in the name of fighting terrorism or whatever you want to call it, and get to the heart of the matter, and get to the truth.
If the evidence takes us in that direction, and we do find out that there are other people responsible, and they’re in the government, or if they’re in the Pentagon, or they’re in the business sector, then these people need to be held to account. They need to be brought to justice. We need to get this country back on track.
Steele: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. So much was affected by September 11th. We’re still living the ramifications of it to this day. That’s why so many people are dedicated, and I can tell, probably one of the reasons why you’re so dedicated, too. I’m curious about the interactions in discussing this resolution. What was some of the feedback and discussion that took place before you guys actually met and passed this thing?
Gioia: I approached the other commissioners, and I said, “Listen, I want to sponsor a resolution in support of the petition at the U.S. Attorney’s Office.” The other commissioners were receptive. They’ve been in the fire service for many years. We’ve been intimately involved with everything with 9/11, and they know where I’m coming from. They know that I don’t get myself involved in anything unless I believe in it 100%. They looked. They listened to what I had to say. I said, “I’d like to do, introduce, a resolution.” I said, “I looked it up, and a resolution, a legal resolution is… It’s not really binding. It’s pretty much mostly symbolic, but it is a statement from a legislative group, and where elected official is a statement that we recognize certain things, and that we support the investigation. Coming from a fire department, that would lend some weight to the movement to get the U.S. Attorney’s Office to present the petition,” which I understand they’re not talking, and they’ve had it for about year.
That was the impetus on getting the resolution going. That was just to add some weight, and to add some considerable support to the movement that’s out there. I think we accomplished that.
The Franklin Square and Munson Fire District commissioners: Philip F. Malloy, Jr. (left); Dennis G. Lyons (second from left); Joseph M. Torregrossa (center); Christopher L. Gioia (second from right); Les Saltzman (right).
Steele: You absolutely did. Now, I understand from the article, that AE911Truth has posted and sent out to all of our supporters that you had family members of the fallen at this meeting. Can you talk about that?
Gioia: I invited Tommy Hetzel’s parents, his widow, his sister; and I invited my friend, Bobby Evans… His mom and his sister were there. We had them sit there up front. The family of Michael Kiefer, they really took the hit, because Mike was their shining star, and I don’t think they ever fully recovered from losing Michael. He had a couple of sisters and whatnot. I think he was the only son. His was a real big loss over there. I know that the Evans family definitely took the hit. I know his mom. His mom was devastated.
I just couldn’t say enough about the Hetzel family, because they’ve been through so much. There’s been other tragedy in the family. His mom and his dad and his brother and his sister, his remaining siblings, have been so strong throughout everything, and I just can’t imagine the strength that it takes for them to continue, but they do. Yes, they were there for the vote on the resolution.
The Franklin Square and Munson Fire District commissioners greet the families of fallen firefighters Thomas J. Hetzel and Robert Evans, both Franklin Square natives.
Steele: Obviously, you’re aware of how significant this was. Again, it’s the first legislative body in the country to put forth such a resolution. Were other commissioners in this body aware of the historic significance of this resolution?
Gioia: I don’t think they realized the full impact of what we were doing until after it was done. They knew it was significant, though, because I told them. Everything is transparent with the fire district. One commissioner doesn’t do anything without letting the other commissioners… We don’t operate independently, and we do have a district council, which oversees everything that we do, and they guide us, and they give legal advice on everything.
The resolution was drafted. The commissioners, we all, had a chance to look at it. It was run by counsel to make sure that the T’s were crossed, and the I’s were dotted, and that it was presented in a legal fashion. Whether or not they knew the full impact of what the resolution was going to do, I don’t think any of us did. I think we had a narrow focus, and that was just to support the resolution, and then to have this thing literally… It got big real fast, and I think that that took everybody, including myself, by surprise, but no. They knew it was going to have an impact, but I don’t think we all realized the tremendous impact that it was going to have.
Steele: Us veterans in the movement are fully aware that, many times, those who don’t want discussion of the evidence, who don’t want to talk about this issue, that want to stifle any questions about September 11th, will oftentimes try to invoke the firefighters and the emotional impact of that day on them, to try to shut down the discussion. What is your reaction to those kinds of methods to try to stifle discussion of the evidence?
Gioia: I think it’s a diversionary tactic. I think that the psychological implications of 9/11 were definitely discussed and implemented, that 9/11 was a very sophisticated attack and plot, that it was very well planned, and they covered all the bases. To me, it’s like psychological warfare, so if you constantly shift the focus from the facts to the dramatic effect, then you’ve been successful, because now you’ve taken the focus off where you need it to be.
I’d just tell people, listen, I’ve always said that 9/11 needs to be viewed from a clinical standpoint, where you just disassociate yourself from all emotion, and you just look at the facts, and that’s it. You don’t get involved in the drama. You don’t get involved in the emotion, the feelings, any of that. That’s a non sequitur. That just has no bearing on what we’re trying to do.
I tell people bluntly, listen. You know what? This is a crime. This was a mass murder. That’s what this was, okay? That’s all it was. It was a mass murder; 3,000 people were murdered in cold blood, on TV, or in front of your eyes, okay? Buildings collapsed, and planes crashed into this, and all kinds of things happened. We need to look at it, and we have to put literally everything under the microscope. Everything has to be looked at and analyzed. It has to be analyzed from a scientific point of view, and there’s no emotion to it. It’s this, and it’s that.
If it’s this, then we need to go there. If it’s that, we need to go there. If you look at the evidence, and you look at the testimony, any reasonable person would say there’s plenty of reasonable doubt there, and you know what? You can’t violate the laws of physics, and you can’t say that steel frame buildings just collapse for no reason at free fall. You just can’t make these statements the way the government’s throwing out these statements. They didn’t even want to entertain some of the evidence. What they didn’t want to look at, they didn’t look at.
To give you an example, in the case of Building 7, they asked the gentleman, who was giving the report… Actually, he came out and said, he goes, “Oh, there was no evidence of explosives found.” Then they asked him, “Well, did you look for explosives?” He said, “No, we didn’t look for explosives.” How disingenuous is that, that we didn’t find explosives because we didn’t look for explosives? There’s a lot of doublespeak going on.
Steele: Now, you’ve passed this resolution. You’re getting a lot of attention on the Internet from alternative media, and I think the corporate media is probably aware of this, whether or not they choose to report it. We all know the situation with them, but do you think that other firemen, who may hear about this, particularly in New York City, in the surrounding areas, do you think they’re ready to hear out this issue with an open mind, or do you think the emotion of that day still carries 18 years later?
Gioia: I think, Andrew, it cuts both ways. I think you have firemen out there, who actually are embracing this, because they know that something’s not right. I know that for a fact, because from the meetings that I’ve attended with the chiefs, the ex-chiefs, fire district commissioners from the other towns around Nassau County, that there are people out there, who do not accept the official narrative. They know that something is wrong, and they’re absolutely willing to look at the evidence, and they do want to see some movement. They want to see another investigation, because they know that things just don’t add up.
You have some people, who, they’re pretty much in denial, and they don’t want to go down that road anymore, because they’ve been affected so much that… We’ve been destroyed up here in New York. We have. We took the hit. People, they just… You mention 9/11, and they go right into the shell. They go right into a defensive posture.
Now that time has elapsed a little bit, you have a younger crowd that wasn’t really as much on top of it, and they are willing to embrace the evidence, and they’re willing to embrace people who are talking about it, because if you stick to the facts, and that’s all we need to do is just stick to the facts and say, listen, these are the facts, and this is the evidence, and we need to look at this, then nobody’s going to argue with that. All right, we need another investigation. Let’s talk about things. Let’s talk about this. We’re all adults. We all have a stake in this.
There’s no rational person out there that’s going to tell me, as a firemen, “You know what? Oh, we can’t talk about that,” because I’d be the first one to tell them, “You know what? No. You know what? I’m going to talk about it. My friends were murdered. They were murdered right in front of me. You know what? I want to get to the bottom of it, so what are you telling me? You going to tell me, no, you don’t want an investigation? What’s up with that?”
It’s beyond belief that there are people out there that would not embrace a new investigation, so we could get to the truth, and we could look at evidence that hasn’t been looked at and is mandated by Congress that they have to show this evidence, and it’s mandated by law that the U.S. Attorney has to present this to a grand jury. That’s the rule of law, and that’s what this country is all about. That’s what makes this country what it is. That’s what sets this country apart from other countries in the world, is that we have respect for law and order. There is the rule of law, and that has been violated. It’s been grossly violated, and we need to get back to that, because if we do not get back to the rule of law, then this country, the ideals, everything that this country has been built on is going to take the hit.
You know what? I don’t think you’re going to let it happen. I know damn sure I’m not going to let it happen.
Steele: Those are powerful words, and I know that there are other firemen out there, all over America, who have gotten wind of what happened in the Franklin Square and Munson Fire District, and are maybe even listening to this interview, wanting to meet the man who proposed that resolution. They may be inspired, but they may be holding back for various reasons. They may want to do the same thing in their fire districts, maybe other fire commissioners with that authority. What would you say to them, as they’re considering this? What would you say to them, in terms of why it’s so important, and why they should pursue the same action that your district did?
Gioia: Andrew, I would say this to the other firefighters, to the police officers, to anybody, any other person out there, any American, that you know what? We’re all Americans here, and we believe in ideals which make our country great. There comes a point in everyone’s life when you have to make a stand, and that’s a really tough thing to do for people. You make a decision that, you know what? You’re going to stand up for something.
Now, a lot of people talk tough, and a lot of people, they just… That’s it. They’re just talk, and they don’t really act, and back it up with actions, but it’s incumbent on especially firemen. We’ve taken the extra step. We’ve gone the extra mile. We’re out there protecting lives and saving property, and we’re on the forefront of all of this.
I would say to anybody who believes in this country that it’s time to make a stand, because 3,000 people were murdered, and you can’t let this go. You’re not going to let it go, because if they’re going to murder 3,000 people, what are they going to do next? I’m not going to have my kids jeopardized. I don’t really like how the country has been guided down this dark path. We need to get back on track, and it’s up to the people in this country, the good people.
Americans, to me, aren’t afraid to stand up for what they believe in. We’ve been so beaten down that, you know what? You’re afraid to speak, because, God forbid, they’re going to say, “Oh, you’re a hater,” or, “You’re a racist,” or, “You’re a truther,” or something like that. You know what? I’m not afraid to get out there and speak my mind. You know, you speak intelligently, and you speak armed with the facts, but you know what? You have to speak. People really need to make a stand on this one, because if we don’t, if we don’t, then something else even worse is going to happen, because it only emboldens things like this to happen.
I think there’s a quote. It says, “For evil to triumph, good people need not do anything.” That is so true, so it depends on the person. I would just encourage people out there, listen, if you feel strongly about this, then do something about it. Don’t sit there. Get up and do something about it, because there’s a lot of people out there that will help you, that’ll embrace this. Like you said, there’s a movement out there of people who just, for whatever reason, they just don’t believe what we’ve been told.
The more you look at it, you could see the truth. I tell people, listen. I’m not going to tell you how to think, okay? I’m not going to tell you one way or the other about what happened on 9/11. You do that yourself. You look at it. You research it. You come to your own conclusions, all right? Then, maybe a few months or a year down the road, we could meet up again, and we could talk about it, and see if your position has changed. We need to get behind the investigation. People need to get behind this, and get the investigation going, and let the wheels of justice do their job.
Steele: Something I always commonly mention, or I have been doing for the past year or so is we’re here 18 years after this event took place. If the post-9/11 world were a person, it would be old enough to vote at this point, or I guess it would be this September, so it’s been a long time. Some people say, why do you keep at this? It was so long ago. Maybe it was a controlled demolition. Maybe it wasn’t, but all those people, or most of them, are out of office now. Why can’t we just move forward? Why do we have to focus on the negative? I mean, this is an attitude that exists out there among the rank and file of America. I hear it often. What’s your response to that? What do you have to say to those sentiments?
Gioia: I hear the same thing, Andrew. I hear it. It’s 18 years later. Why are you bothering? I say to these people, because these people were our friends. They were our neighbors. They were sons. They were daughters. They were husbands. They were wives. They had lives. These were Americans, who went to work. They just were going about their business, and they died horrible deaths.
These were my friends, and I’m not going to forget that. I’m not satisfied with the way they’ve been treated. Like I said, reinvestigate. I get choked up. I get emotional. I would get emotional with people and just say, listen, unless you’ve lost somebody, and I always say, listen, if somebody murdered somebody in your family, and there was evidence that came about after, that pointed at somebody else, or it took you in a different direction, wouldn’t you want to pursue that? There’s no statute of limitation on murder, and these people were murdered.
That’s why, after 18 years, I’m still looking for justice for my friends, because I know that there are people out there who need to be held to account. I’m not going to let go. I’m not going to let go. If I spend the rest of my life pursuing this, pursuing justice for my friends, I’m going to do that.
Now, with regards to that, being a fireman, and being a firefighter… This is for all of the firemen out there. You know it’s a brotherhood, and we’ve been trained that when you fight the fire, you go in. You don’t go in alone. You go in with your brother or your sister. You go in together, and if something happens, you come out together. You don’t leave that person behind, so I would say this.
We’re not leaving our brothers behind. We’re not leaving these people behind. These were Americans. These were firefighters, cops, EMS, and they were just ordinary people who went about their business that day. We’re not leaving them behind. We’re not forgetting about them. They deserve justice, and we’re going to see that justice is done.
Steele: Yes, we are, through efforts like yours, through efforts like the ones being put forth by AE911Truth, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry. Nobody will be left behind, especially the victims, who we do this work in pursuit of justice for.
Christopher Gioia, I want to thank you for what you got started out there in your district and what I think you’re getting started in the rest of America and the wider world. Of course, thank you so much for coming on 9/11 Free Fall today.
Gioia: All right, thank you very much, Mr. Steele.
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No politician from either of the Two Party/One Party imbroglio will ever mention anything about this Absentee Landlord disgrace. Sadly, absentee landlords have been with us since time in memoriam. These people were even mentioned in the story of Jesus in the New Testament. It seems everybody just accepts that people have a right to own property and rent it out to others who are in need of shelter. Making a profit on someone else’s critical want of a place to live is what ‘Makes Amerika Great Again’, right? No, wrong!
This writer, before finally being able to afford my own home at the age of 45, always lived under the thumb of a landlord. For God’s sake, even the term Landlord comes straight out of Feudalism! The lord of the manor rented out parcels of his land to house the serfs who worked his property, or in some cases his coal mine (See the great 1993 Claude Berri film Germinal). In the fine 1987 John Sayles’ film Matawan, practically the whole town of Matawan WV was owned by the coal company, and the miners all lived in cheaply built rental housing owned by the company. To add insult to this economic injury, they were logistically forced to shop at company stores using company script to purchase necessities at too high prices. Such is how feudalism operated, always, in the case of Matawan, under the guise of a ‘free market’ for labor. Horseshit!
At my first marriage, we rented the ‘walk in’ apartment of a two family house owned by an absentee landlord. This was in Brooklyn N.Y. and our illustrious landlord lived in New Jersey. As shared in a previous column of mine, one day my wife told me that while she was giving a bath to our baby boy, there were giant bugs coming out of the drain. I immediately called Frank, the landlord (a fellow Italian-American, but ethnic ties mean squat to landlords) and told him of this problem. He was reassuring by telling me that he would come by over the weekend and put some Chlordane down the drain to solve the problem.
Chlordane is a chemical compound and also part of a similarly named pesticide mixture resulting from synthesis (main components- heptachlor, chlordane, and nonachlor). These highly chlorinated cyclodienes were classified as organic pollutants hazardous for human health.
After we hung up, I made a few calls to friends who knew more than me about these things. I was told that Chlordane was banned for use in the state of New York, but not yet in New Jersey. I called Frank back and told him this fact. He laughed. “Well kid, I use it here in all my properties. No big deal.” Well, to me it was a big deal. “You got kids Frank? Use it in the bathtub they use, not in my tub!”
Years later my new wife and I rented an apartment from an absentee landlord who owned 19 such properties in the New Hyde Park, Long Island area. This was an old, I mean old house that at one time was a one family home. It was made into two apartments, and we rented the larger one, which was upstairs. The rent then, in 1992, was around $1000 a month. It was an 800 square feet place, advertised as a ‘Three bedroom’. Well, my stepdaughter’s room was so tiny that the door would not close, as it banged into her bed. The bathtub had tiles chipping off the wall and into the tub. The refrigerator was so old and inadequate that I joked about it, saying it had arthritis. The stairway to our apartment had no banister, so my aging parents could not visit me. The landlord expected me to shovel snow. After the first major snowfall, I called him up. I asked him what he was going to do about the foot of snow outside. He told me it was my responsibility. I told him that I had a bad back and could not do it, and if he refused to do so, I was going to call the town’s code enforcement office and put in a complaint. His son appeared within the hour with a snow blower.
We finally left N.Y. and moved to Indianapolis, so my son could attend college and we could finally afford a home. We decided to rent for a year to see how we liked things. An ad took us to this giant rental property with hundreds of units. The model apartment looked fabulous! The buildings all looked freshly painted and clean. We signed a one year lease in late November. About two weeks later, my wife was at the kitchen sink when the faucet just exploded apart, and water was streaming out! A day later there was this really big rainstorm. We were sitting in the living room watching television and the ceiling just began to fall onto the floor, as the rain water poured down on us! The same thing happened in our bedroom, with the water soaking up the wall to wall carpet. I was really pissed! After I had the site manager come down from Chicago to check things out (Yes, the corporation that owned this and other rental properties was not even from Indiana), I told him we were ‘Out of there’ and he needed to waive the lease restriction. This is after I told him I was going to the newspapers, my city councilman, the state Attorney General, the radio stations… by then he waived the lease and asked how soon we could leave. The sad reality is that this Chicago corporation had just purchased the site, which I found out had been an old and dilapidated one. They cleaned it up with fresh paint and new but really inferior kitchen and bathroom fixtures, and Wallah!!! Of course the roofs were from the old days, and thus heavy rains and snow would do what was done to our apartment.
Today, 2019, we see a resurgence of more and more absentee landlords nationwide. With the ‘new’ rise of home prices after the abyss of the 2008 Subprime crash (of which both the government and Wall Street predators helped exacerbate) it seems everyone and his brother seem to want to be investors… on other people’s basic need for shelter. Mega corporations like the Blackstone Group have been buying up cheapened properties, many of them in foreclosure, ever since the bubble burst in 2008. They then convert them into rental properties… many times renting to the very folks who were evicted. As told in a previous column, I had a friend who got a job working for his friend’s dad. He related this to me: “His dad had investors who formed a partnership to buy up foreclosed and abandoned homes, mostly in poor areas of big cities like Detroit. They then put an ad on Craig’s List, and keep a sign in the yard saying ‘Rent to buy’. They hired me to take the phone calls. I would rattle off the conditions which were A) needing the prospective renter to have a verified job, B) putting up $ 1000 and agreeing to move in ‘As Is’. All repairs and renovations were left to the renter to choose to do… and of course pay for. The rent was usually whatever other similar home renters were paying in that area; C) There was a monthly 8% charge on top of the rent charge; D) After 20 years the renter then owned the house.”
Postscript- I called my friend a year later and he told me what his friend’s dad’s company was doing with those rented homes. “Oh, they bundled the agreements and sold them to Wall Street for investment.”
And the hits just keep on coming!
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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].
Ghassan Salame, the UN’s point man for Libya began his analysis and brief to the Security Council last week by emphasising that the armed conflict in Libya “shows no signs of abating”. He added
“The war around Tripoli has already left nearly 1100 dead, including 106 civilians. Hundreds of thousands of people have fled their homes in the capital and neighbouring districts as a result of the fighting, tens of thousands crossing the border to Tunisia seeking safety for their families.”
Salame detailed that more than 100,000 men, women and children have been immediately exposed to what amounts to ‘war frontlines’, and over 400,000 more in areas are directly impacted by clashes. Saying further that the civil war has worsened humanitarian conditions and hindered access to food, health and other life-saving services.
Both sides have ignored calls for de-escalation and have intensified air drone campaigns, with precision airstrikes. Supplying both sides in almost equal numbers of weapons is, on one side, Turkey supporting the essentially Muslim Brotherhood backed Serraj Tripoli Government while a combination of the UAE, Egypt and France appears to support (and supply defence equipment to) Field Marshall Khalifa Haftar’s LNA Army from East Libya.
The West is actually maintaining military parity for both sides which seems a deliberate policy that simply prolongs the conflict. Why one may ask? Another issue.
The geographical scope of the violence has spread. On the 26 July, Serraj’s Government of National Accord forces launched an air attack on the main rear base of Haftar’s LNA in the Jufra region. In retaliation on 27 July, Haftar’s forces launched airstrikes at a Government of National Accord airbase in Misrata.
And so it goes on.
There is increased recruitment by both sides using foreign mercenaries, alongside the use of heavy weapons and ground attacks. Forces on both sides have failed to observe their obligations under international humanitarian law.
A most tragic example of indiscriminate attacks was the airstrike that hit a migrant detention centre in Tajoura on 2 July, killing 53 and injuring at least 87, including children. What is even more appalling is that the precise coordinates of the Tajoura detention centre, and other such centres, were shared by the UN with the parties following a previous incident in May. While the vast majority of the fatalities were due to the airstrike, several victims were cruelly shot down fleeing the scene by those GNA militias guarding the centre. To make matters even worse, following UN supported efforts to move the migrants to more secure locations, authorities have in recent days deposited more than 200 migrants back into the same bombed facility.
Salame explained
“The tragedy of up to 150 migrant deaths at sea on 25 July again underlines the urgent need to address the root causes of the migrant issue and their immediate suffering.”
Haftar’s LNA maintains that they will not stop their attack until Tripoli is conquered while Serraj’s GNA forces insist they can push Haftar’s forces back to eastern Libya.
Libya’s present and future need not be taken hostage by the warring parties.
Libya has become a country of the West’s experimentation of new military technologies and recycling of old weapons. Itself a crime against humanity. Armed drones, armoured vehicles and pick-up trucks fitted with heavy armaments machine guns, recoilless rifles, mortar and rocket launchers have been recently transferred to Libya by unscrupulous foreign countries with their own selfish interests being their uppermost consideration.
Without the full cooperation of all UN Member States regarding the implementation of the measures related to the arms embargo in accordance with Security Council resolution 2473, the flow of weapons to Libya will continue to fuel this needless conflict.
The security vacuum created by the conflict in and around Tripoli continues to be exploited by Da’esh in remote areas in the country’s southern and central regions.
Even more worrisome are the indications that the arsenal of weapons being delivered by foreign supporters to one side or the other is either falling into the hands of terrorist groups or being sold to them. Some extremist elements have sought to legitimize themselves by joining the battle. This is nothing short of a recipe for disaster, not only for the safety and security of Libyans themselves, but to Libya’s neighbors and international peace and security.
That there are two parallel oil companies, one in the East and the original one in the West both called National Oil Corporations that both continue efforts to sell oil confuses the issues surrounding the sale of oil greatly. There is a serious danger of ‘the weaponization of oil’ in this conflict, the consequences of which would be disastrous to the overall Libyan economy.
There has been an unacceptable spike in enforced disappearances and arbitrary detentions since the outset of hostilities. On 17 July, elected House of Representatives member Ms. Siham Sergewa was violently abducted from her home in Benghazi by an unknown group with sympathies towards Haftar. A big PR mistake if nothing else for Haftar personally. Ms. Sergewa must be immediately released and those responsible for her abduction must be held accountable by Haftar first to avoid any possible perception that Haftar approved of the kidnapping.
According to Salami, the UN bears a particular responsibility to ensure that Libya does not fracture into weak and unstable pieces but remains the Libya that was united in 1951.
Salame and the U.N. continue to make the same erroneous conclusions about the Libyan situation.
Put simply their countless solutions over 8 years to end the civil war have not and will never work. When will they learn?
What is needed is a pragmatic realisation of the true situation in Libya not platitudes nor ‘diplomatic speak’; all amounting to meaningless and useless words from the UN.
Simply put the two sides, for reasons explained, are at an impasse which cannot be broken unless a third way is found.
To search for a consensus Libyan candidate that would be acceptable to both Haftar and Serraj.
Rumours abound in Libya that such an acceptable third ‘candidate’ to all sides in the conflict is known. Such third way is being spoken of in both Tripoli and Tobruk as well as London, Washington and Moscow.
Diplomatic etiquette and norms must be pushed to one side and all effort must be initiated to back such a man or woman if indeed he or she exists should there be support amongst the Libyan people for such an alternative …and there then will be an end to the war and peace may finally come to the Libyan people.
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In case you had not noticed, there is an existential crisis going on within both the MSM and Democratic party that has been on full display during the June and July DNC sponsored presidential debates – and today the DNC and its media sycophants are lock-step in panic mode.
In the aftermath of the July debate when Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hi) shined a light on her campaign and took Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Cal) to task for her misleading record on criminal justice as California Attorney General, the MSM and its Democratic flunkies have pummeled Gabbard about an unplanned meeting with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in 2017 just as they have done since Gabbard first announced her candidacy.
Let’s be clear: Is the MSM accusing Gabbard of treason? If they are suggesting that a Major in the US Army National Guard and a combat veteran who served in a medical unit in Iraq for one year committed a treasonous act, they need to make the facts immediately available to the Pentagon and make their factual case to the American public.
If they do not present any facts to support their allegation, then they have once again proven to be no more than vengeful ideological toadies who march to the Deep State’s agenda of sabotaging Gabbard’s campaign.
Immediately after announcing her candidacy, Gabbard and her anti-regime change war message have been systematically dismissed as a Russian/Putin/Assad apologist and delegitimized by both the DNC and MSM. Given limitations to media access that other candidates have been afforded, she has been forced to deal with hostility and disrespect rather than speak to the issue of peace. To her credit, Gabbard has learned to push back and stand her ground as the debate platform has provided a perfect setting for her to standout.
As long as Gabbard made few waves with her foreign policy pronouncements and continued to poll at 1%, she represented no threat to anyone. Now that Gabbard has rocked the debate stage a second time as the top trending candidate on Google with her challenge to Rep. Tim Ryan and now to Sen. Kamala Harris with her disputed record as a ‘progressive prosecutor,” the powers that be have sharpened their knives to question Gabbard’s patriotism and destroy her credibility.
With a growing self confidence that the American public is responding to her agenda, Gabbard, who has been overly-cautious about stepping outside her signature issue, is spreading her wings to show a depth and strength as she easily qualified for the September debate.
Immediately after the debate, Harris had no factual rebuttal to Gabbard’s points as she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper:
“This is going to sound immodest but I am obviously a top tier candidate so I did expect to take the hits tonight because a lot of them are trying to make the stage for the next debate.”
Adding his support, Cooper added “for a lot of them, it’s do or die” as Harris continued
“…coming from someone who has been an apologist for an individual Assad who has murdered the people of his country like cock-a-roaches, she who has embraced and been an apologist for him in a way that she refuses to call him a war criminal I can only take what she says and her opinion so seriously. I’m prepared to move on.”
Is Sen Harris accusing a Major in the Army National Guard of treason? If so, let’s hear her facts and if not, Harris needs to clean up her act. It is an old political trick: when you don’t have the facts, bring out the personal attack and then ‘move on’.
It was those early media kerfuffles with pro-war, pro-establishmentarians that tempered Gabbard to stay focused and maintain her cool as in her interview with former CIA intern Cooper who now masquerades as a CNN ‘journalist.’ In a post debate interview, Cooper was persistent, if not relentlessly dogged, in his pursuit by displaying a new aggressive media strategy as no other candidate is experiencing.
Tulsi: “I’ve seen the cost of war first hand. In Iraq, serving in a medical unit. I would never apologize for doing all that I can to fight counter productive regime change wars. If that means meeting with a dictator or meeting with an adversary, absolutely. I would do it.”
Cooper: Do you consider him (Assad) a torturer or a murderer?
Tulsi: That’s not what this is about. I don’t defend or apologize or have anything to do with what he has done to his people.
Cooper: But if you’re president of the United States, there’s traditionally a role for a US President to call out human abuses overseas..
Tulsi: Here’s the way I look at it, an example of the kind of leadership that I follow is one where Kennedy met with and worked with Khrushchev to forge a deal to keep the American people safe, Reagan met with Gorbachev, Roosevelt met with Stalin, worked with Stalin, Nixon met with Mao; these are the kinds of leaders who think about things that are very practical and real level about how to keep our country and people safe.
Cooper: …but Stalin killed 20 million people
Tulsi: That’s my point exactly. Roosevelt not only met with him but allied with him to bring about an end to that war.
Cooper: ..but I’m sure Roosevelt would have acknowledged Stalin murdered millions of people, but you don’t want to…
Tulsi: I don’t dispute that..
Cooper: …but you won’t say anything about Bashar Al-assad.
Tulsi: I’ve been very outspoken about this before. These are things that are being used to distract from the central issue which is that we are still waging a regime change war in Syria, we still have troops in Syria, troops who are dying, that’s why I’m running, to bring about this sea change…”
Cooper: “Just on a factual basis, Assad is a murderer and a torturer, do you not agree with that?
Tulsi: “I don’t dispute that.”
It is apparent that Cooper had his marching orders to entrap Gabbard at all cost, to use his weasel words to wear her down, drain her concentration and energy as he manipulated her into agreeing to something that could later be used against her. One wonders how Cooper might have dealt with the news that it could be claimed that the last three US presidents would qualify as murderers, torturers and war criminals.
The morning after the debate, MSNBC anchor Yasmin Vossoughian of Iranian ethnicity went on the attack in another display of the new antagonistic media strategy on how to handle Gabbard. One can assume that Vossoughian was hoping to increase her ratings and impress the higher ups at MSN with her raw aggressiveness as she consistently interrupted Gabbard (nine times) and persisted beyond the point of how a professional journalist conducts an interview. Gabbard pushed back, demanding to be heard without interruption and calling out MSNBC:
“I want to break this down to what we are talking about.. You’re talking about a meeting that took place three years ago and every time I come back here on MSNBC you have got to talk to me about these issues…every single time for three years? This is where the propaganda comes in because I have talked about this A LOT for the last three years.”
Vossoughian’s interruptions continued declaring that a meeting with Assad is ‘very controversial meeting to take’ has no understanding that there should be nothing controversial about meeting with any foreign leader: it is called diplomacy.
Was Vossoughian implying that Gabbard as an officer in the US Army National Guard has conducted treason? If so, she needs to ‘put up or shut up.’ Gabbard’s response:
“I will not apologize to you or to anyone, let me finish, let me finish, for doing all that I can to, all that I can to prevent our country from continuing to make these perpetual wrong decisions, I will continue to do all that I can to make sure that we end these wasteful regime change wars that have taken such a toll on all of us and made our country less safe.And if that means having a meeting with a dictator, if that means trying to meet with Kim Jong-un in North Korea to de-escalate tensions and remove this nuclear threat from our country and our people whatever the crisis is , we’ve got to have a leader with the courage to do the right thing for the American people, putting their interests ahead of everything else. That is what I am focused on and that is at the center of my foreign policy..:.”
With that, Vossoughian ended the interview.
Obviously, there is a distinct difference between diplomacy and treason as the MSM and its partisan rubes can be expected to continue to badger and persecute Gabbard without regard to the truth, honesty or professionalism.
It is worth noting that being a network ‘anchor’ or a television personality with a multi million dollar salary in no way implies that one has ‘felt’ the egalitarian calling to be a journalist.
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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist with Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
European food safety regulators have found there is no safe level of exposure for a brain-damaging pesticide President Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency recently refused to ban.
The European Food Safety Authority said today that chlorpyrifos, widely used on fruits and vegetables in the U.S. and worldwide, “does not meet the criteria” for approval of its use in the 28-nation European Union, citing concerns over the pesticide’s risks to children. The announcement indicates that the EU is likely to ban chlorpyrifos, whose main manufacturer is Dow Chemical Company, when its license expires in January.
“The EU is doing what the science demands: putting public health ahead of the narrow interests of the pesticide industry,” said EWG President Ken Cook. “Tragically for American kids and their parents, the Trump administration is kowtowing to chemical agribusiness and allowing a dangerous pesticide to be sprayed on foods children eat every day.”
A robust body of scientific evidence shows that even small doses of chlorpyrifos can damage parts of the brain that control language, memory, behavior and emotion. Multiple independent studies have found that exposure to chlorpyrifos impairs children’s IQs.
EPA scientists assessed those studies and concluded that the levels of the pesticide currently found on food and in drinking water are unsafe. The scientists estimate that typical exposures for babies are five times greater than the agency’s proposed “safe” intake, and 11 to 15 times higher for toddlers and older children. A typical exposure for a pregnant woman is five times higher than it ought to be to protect her developing fetus.
The EPA was poised to ban chlorpyrifos early in 2017. But after the 2016 election, Dow launched an aggressive campaign to block that decision. Dow donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration festivities, and its CEO met privately with then-EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt. Soon after, Pruitt ignored his agency’s own scientists and aborted the scheduled ban.
Last August, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Pruitt’s decision violated federal law and ordered the EPA to ban chlorpyrifos within 60 days. But Pruitt’s replacement, Andrew Wheeler, fought the ruling and refused to obey the court’s order.
The Justice Department filed a petition on behalf of the agency, calling on the court to overturn its earlier ruling and leave chlorpyrifos legal. In April, the court ordered Wheeler and the EPA to make a decision within 90 days on whether to ban the pesticide.
Last month, with the court deadline looming, Wheeler announced his decision to allow chlorpyrifos to continue to be used on conventionally grown food crops, like peaches, cherries, apples, oranges and corn.
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August 5th, 2019 by Center For Biological Diversity
The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency announced today that it will end long-running safeguards meant to protect children from harmful pesticide ingredients used in bug sprays, pet shampoos and on fruits and vegetables.
After receiving data from the pesticide industry – and ignoring contradictory evidence from peer-reviewed studies – the EPA says it will triple the amount of exposure to pyrethroids considered safe for children.
Studies have shown that repeated exposure to pyrethroid insecticides can cause learning deficiencies and neurodegenerative effects associated with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, among others.
Today’s decision will make it easier for the pesticide industry to get new uses of these pesticides approved, including those previously off limits. For example, it could result in higher levels of the pesticides being used on fruits and vegetables and for flea treatment of pets.
“Make no mistake, the Trump administration is selling out the health of America’s children in order to boost the profits of pesticide companies,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s disgusting and absolutely repugnant.”
One of the roles of the EPA is to establish what it considers to be safe levels for adult exposures to pesticides – and then it is supposed to set a more protective level for young children.
Under the Food Quality Protection Act, unless they have research supporting a less-restrictive level of protection, EPA officials must apply a standard safety factor of “10x,” meaning 10 times more protective for children than adults. The goal is to ensure that children – who are often at increased risk of harm from pesticides – are adequately protected.
For pyrethroids, the “10x” protections were replaced by “3x” protections in 2010. Under today’s EPA proposal, the 3x level of protection will be eliminated. This means that the EPA has greenlighted exposing children under the age of 6 to three times more of the toxic pesticide than is currently considered safe.
The EPA’s decision to reduce the safeguard for children is based on studies and a model developed by a group called CAPHRA, a working group of pesticide companies that sell pyrethroids. That model estimated how quickly pyrethroids would be metabolized by adults and children under the age of 6. It concluded that there were no significant differences.
The industry group finding conflicts with previous peer-reviewed studies showing that children are more sensitive to pyrethroids than adults.
Epidemiological data has also revealed higher incidences of autism spectrum disorders and developmental delay among children whose mothers were living within 1.5 kilometers of sites of pyrethroid applications during the third trimester of pregnancy.
Pyrethroids are also highly toxic to honey bees and highly to very highly toxic to fish and aquatic invertebrates.
“Just as they did with the brain-damaging pesticide chlorpyrifos, Trump’s EPA is putting pesticide industry profits ahead of children’s health,” said Lori Ann Burd, environmental health director at the Center. “The fact that they released the decision to eliminate protections for kids from these neurotoxins less than two weeks after they decided to continue allowing use of chlorpyrifos makes clear exactly who they are interested in protecting.”
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International law is clear. Blockades are undeclared acts of war.
No nation may legally use this tactic against another state unilaterally or with coalition partners.
UN Charter provisions are binding international law. Article 39 authorizes the Security Council alone to “determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression and shall make recommendations, or decide what measures shall be taken in accordance with Articles 41 and 42, to maintain or restore international peace and security.”
Under Article 41, Security Council members have exclusive authority to “decide what measures not involving the use of armed force are to be employed to give effect to its decisions, and it may call upon the Members of the United Nations to apply such measures. These may include complete or partial interruption of economic relations and of rail, sea, air, postal, telegraphic, radio, and other means of communication, and the severance of diplomatic relations.”
Member states may not legally take these actions, or attack another nation, without Security Council authorization — permitted only in self-defense, never preemptively for any reasons.
If Article 41 measures fail, the Security Council may authorize further actions, “includ(ing) demonstrations, blockade, and other operations by air, sea, or land forces of Members of the United Nations.”
If the Trump regime on its own or with coalition partners takes any of the above actions against Iran, Venezuela, or any other nations, it will constitute a flagrant breach of international and constitutional law.
It’s what the US has done time and again against nations threatening no one throughout the post-WW II era, part of its permanent war on humanity, accountability never forthcoming.
Does the Trump regime plan preemptive hostile actions against Venezuela and Iran — no matter their illegality?
The so-called Lima Group is a Trump regime cobbled together “coalition” of 12 Latin American anti-Bolivarian social democracy countries plus Canada.
They’re allied with the US plot to replace Venezuela’s legitimate government with pro-Western fascist tyranny, along with giving the US control over the country’s vast oil reserves, the world’s largest.
Months earlier, Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tweeted the following:
“What we have said since the creation of this group of governments joined against Venezuela (formed in August 2017), to which the US, in theory, does not belong: they meet to receive orders from @realDonaldTrump through @SecPompeo. What a humiliating display of subordination.”
Their ruling regimes are largely puppets controlled by puppet master Washington, opposing democratic governance they pretend to support — backing the White House coup plot against Venezuela.
On August 6, representatives of the group’s member states will meet for the 15th time in Buenos Aires, Argentina. A separate report said Lima, Peru.
A late July press statement “(r)enew(ed) their support for” Trump regime-designated puppet/usurper in waiting Guaido, a figure with no legitimacy, a traitor to his nation and population.
Bolton and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross will attend the session — to give their member states White House marching orders.
Reportedly the meeting is all about consolidating support for isolating, weakening, and blockading, or imposing a quarantine on Venezuela, stepping up efforts to topple President Maduro.
On Friday, Bolton tweeted:
“The US won’t stand by while Maduro attacks Venezuela’s last remaining democratic institution (sic).”
Months earlier, Bolton explained what the Trump regime’s power grab in Venezuela is all about, saying:
“We’re in conversation with major American companies now…It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”
Its revenues are heavily earmarked for social benefits. If controlled by Big Oil, they’ll be largely or entirely eliminated, the US and its oil giants benefitting at the expense of the Venezuelan people.
The coup attempt also aims to eliminate the hemisphere’s leading social democracy, a notion the US tolerates nowhere, especially not at home.
Last week, Trump admitted he’s considering a “blockade or quarantine” of Venezuela. Maduro denounced what’s clearly illegal, stressing that the Bolivarian Republic will remain “free and independent.”
Does the Trump regime have the same thing in mind for Iran? Is that what the Pentagon’s Operation Sentinel is all about?
The US seeks NATO, regional, and other coalition partners as part of its “maximum pressure” on Iran.
The scheme has nothing to do with “ensur(ing) safe passage, and de-escalat(ing) tensions in international waters throughout the Persian Gulf, the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb strait ,and the Gulf of Oman” — according to a CENTCOM statement.
It’s unrelated to US war secretary Esper saying
“if we think a US ship may be under some type of threat (sic) — being stopped or being seized (sic) — we would want to make sure we have the capacity to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
It has all the earmarks of seeking partners to impose a maritime blockade along Iran’s 1,200 mile Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea coastline.
No NATO countries agreed to ally with the Trump regime’s scheme so far — after weeks of pressure by Bolton, Pompeo and their henchmen.
Germany’s Foreign Ministry said
“(p)articipation in the US strategy of ‘maximum pressure’ is ruled out for us.”
Japan and India refused to be part of the scheme. So did Kuwait. Perhaps the US will be a coalition of one — with token support from Israel, the Saudis and UAE alone.
Britain intends a separate Persian Gulf operation with a minimal number of vessels.
On August 2, Politico said “so far, Donald Trump’s coalition to protect oil tankers from alleged Iranian aggression (sic) appears to have just one member — the United States,” adding:
“The British have demurred, the French are noncommittal and the Germans on Wednesday flat out said no.”
European and other nations are concerned about being dragged into a Trump regime war on nonbelligerent Iran by allying with its Operation Sentinel they apparently want no part of — nor an illegal scheme to blockade the country.
According to advisor to EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, Nathalie Tocci,
“a military operation in the Gulf would increase exponentially the potential triggers for a confrontation with Iran,” adding:
“So long as (Brussels) see(s) a chance of freedom of navigation being secured through dialogue and diplomacy with Iran, they will opt for this route.”
Middle East analyst Jon Alterman said world community nations “aren’t sure where the US is trying to take them. They think that aligning with the (White House scheme) incurs risk without providing security.”
Trump regime policy toward Venezuela and Iran is all about regime change, wanting pro-Western puppet rule replacing their sovereign independence.
It’s no coincidence that both nations are oil rich. Longstanding US policy calls for gaining control over world supplies as a way of controlling other countries.
War and other forms of brute force are the favored strategies of both right wings of its war party.
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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.”
They happen with disturbing regularity, two over the weekend. More on them below.
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Gun Violence Archive maintains a database of reported shootings in the US, information gotten from law enforcement, media, and government sources.
In 2019, it reported 33,028 gun violence incidents through August 3, causing 8,732 deaths and 17,296 injuries, around 3,000 children and teens affected.
According to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 40,000 Americans were killed by gun violence in 2017.
The Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence reported the following:
100 Americans are killed by gun violence daily, around 36,000 annually
100,000 Americans are shot and injured each year
In 2017, gun deaths reached their highest level in at least 40 years, 39,773 deaths reported
Gun deaths increased by 16% from 2014 to 2017.
The above data is from US Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
The US is a gun society, more firearms owned by civilians than in any other nations worldwide — including deadly, high-capacity, military-style semi-automatic weapons readily available to anyone able to afford them.
Guns in America can almost be be bought as easily as toothpaste. Ownership lowers the threshold between anger and homicide. Proliferation leaves everyone vulnerable.
The right to own, carry, conceal and use guns is a disturbing American tradition, unjustifiably justified by the Constitution’s Second Amendment.
It’s the most misinterpreted and abused constitutional and statute law, the influential gun lobby bearing much of the blame, politicians bought to go along.
The nation’s framers had no intention of creating a gun-toting society. In 2010, the Supreme Court, in a 5 – 4 ruling, struck down state and local laws banning concealed weapons as unconstitutional.
While people, not guns, kill, regulatory laxity makes it easier. According to a 2018 global Small Arms Survey conducted by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, there are more guns in the US than people — an estimated 120.5 guns for every 100 residents, double the rate of the next highest ownership-level nation, Yemen.
Proliferation of guns in America and ease of obtaining them correlates directly with the national homicide rate.
It’s the highest by far among developed countries and most others — public passion for gun ownership, promoted by the gun lobby, a significant part of the problem.
US culture breeds violence at home and abroad. Children are exposed to it multiple times daily in movie theaters, films shown on television, violent video games, even music with violent lyrics.
Endless gun related incidents are symptomatic of the US culture of violence ingrained into the public mind to seem natural.
Earlier studies showed the average US child watches around 200,000 acts of violence on television before age-18, including thousands of murders.
Years after television arrived in the late 1940s, US homicide rates doubled. Violent behavior multiplied. Inner city school performance declined. Illicit drug and tobacco use along with promiscuous sexual activity increased.
Studies show a consistent correlation between witnessed violence and aggressive behavior.
Committing murder with impunity in the US is as simple as becoming a cop, wearing a badge, and carrying a firearm.
US inner city minority communities are virtual war zones. Police alone kill over 1,000 victims annually, mostly Black and Latino male youths — called “justifiable homicides,” a euphemism most often for cold-blooded murder.
Two mass shooting incidents occurred in the US over the weekend.
In El Paso, Texas, at least 20 people were lethally shot, over two dozen others injured by a gunman at a Walmart store, the deadliest 2019 US gun violence incident — so far.
A reported lone gunman was apprehended by police, identified as 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, an alt-right Trump supporter, based on his social media content — an easily obtained semi-automatic assault rifle his weapon of choice.
CCTV footage showed him entering the store, likely capturing the entire incident on tape.
The shooter reportedly posted a manifesto online, declaring his racist views toward the area’s large Hispanic population, showing hatred toward non-whites.
Attributing the material to him has yet to be confirmed. It appeared online shortly before the incident. The shooter is from Allen, TX, over 650 miles east of El Paso, north of Dallas.
It’s unexplained why he was in El Paso. The published manifesto says:
“…I support the Christchurch (New Zealand) shooter and his manifesto. This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas.”
Overnight Sunday at around 1:00AM, a second mass shooting weekend incident occurred in Dayton, Ohio’s downtown Oregon Historic District.
Reportedly a lone unnamed gunman killed 10, wounding at least 16 others at the entrance of Ned Peppers bar before being lethally shot by police.
Police Lt. Col. Matt Carper said the weapon used was a “long gun,” adding:
“We’re trying to identify the motivation behind this.”
According to Montgomery County Emergency Services public information officer Deb Decker, the alleged shooter wore body armor.
Both incidents are developing stories. Many questions about them remain unanswered, including how the alleged Dayton gunman was lethally shot, protected by a bulletproof vest, likely requiring a head shot to kill.
Based on reports from both cities, at least 29 mass-shooting gun-related deaths occurred over the weekend, over 40 others wounded.
Virtually any US urban or rural community can go from normal activities to free-fire zones in moments.
US streets, shopping malls, and other locations can be hazardous to the lives and safety of nonviolent Americans.
A personal note. Weeks earlier during an early morning walk for exercise along my normal route, I entered a crime scene adjacent to a city park on one side of the street and Northwestern University Law School on the other.
Shootings occurred an hour or so before I passed the scene of the crime. Police were roping if off, Chicago CBS television there covering it.
Asked if I’d comment on what happened by a reporter on the scene, I was eager to express my views.
The taped interview lasted 3 or 4 minutes. I stressed my concern about the US culture of violence at home and abroad.
When aired later the same day, my most important remarks were edited out — unsurprisingly.
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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.”
The trade war and technological competition with China are symptomatic of a much larger issue: a dangerous gridlock in US-China relations that may become permanent, with dire consequences not just for the two countries’ economies but also for the global economy and quite possibly East Asia’s and international security. Martin Wolf, Financial Times columnist, is right to conclude: “Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.”1 The fact that this conflict has occurred at a time of trade, investment, and security disputes between the US and its major allies, US-Russia tensions, and US military interventions across the Middle East and Central Asia, heightens global instability.
In the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan charged that Japan “is stealing our future” “by counterfeiting or copying of American products.”2 Now the president’s target is China, with the anti-China chorus including not only leaders of Trump’s national security team but also his former senior adviser and arch cold warrior, Stephen Bannon, and a range of national security, economic and Asia specialists across the political spectrum.3 In 2011 Trump the businessman was decrying China’s unfair trade and technology practices, calling China an enemy, and saying that if he were president, he would be able to force China to back down because it needs us more than we need it.4 Today China looms so much larger—central to US and global trade and investment, but also a partner in critical relationships with many other countries, including major US allies such as South Korea, Japan, Australia, and the European Union.5
We argue that to make China the number-one threat to US national security, as Trump would have it,6 is not merely an exaggeration and misunderstanding of China’s ambitions and capabilities. It is a dangerous basis for US foreign policy, one that is inseparable from the Trump administration’s broader agenda that includes embrace of useful dictators, disregard for human rights and international law, diplomacy reliant on threats and sanctions, and overturning or weakening of international treaty commitments.
The Rising Tide of Anti-China Sentiment
Washington politicians in both parties are as one in talking up the China threat and how to counter it. A bipartisan consensus in Congress seems to have concluded that the era of engaging China is over. More surprising is an emerging consensus among public intellectuals, including China specialists as well as many in both the conservative and liberal media, who embrace the view of Trump’s intelligence community that China is the principal threat to US national security.7 The New York Times, for instance, editorialized on July 21 that “President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China.” And while the Washington Post has called for a return to engaging China, it nevertheless found that “Mr. Xi’s regime has shattered the hopeful vision” that China would be “a responsible global player.”8 In fact, a hard line on China seems to be the single policy on which liberals and conservatives are in general agreement with one another and with President Trump.9 American public opinion has followed, with a significant shift toward seeing rivalry as the appropriate motif of US-China relations.10
The voices so stridently attacking China typically ignore the fact that the US under Trump has torpedoed international agreements, from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) to the Paris climate accord and the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, defied international law by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear agreement and carrying out economic warfare against Tehran, and ordered that his trade representative seek to remove China’s status as a developing country in the World Trade Organization.11 These actions have undermined US leadership and cemented the Chinese conviction that it is now Beijing’s time to define regional and global responsibilities. Supplementing its position as the world’s second largest economy and leader in international trade, China has now moved with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) to lead the world’s largest aid program, one that has secured the active participation of leading nations, including US allies. Beijing now has its eyes trained not just on trade and climate change but also on economic development strategy, sustainable energy, and international aid.
Xi Jinping’s China has certainly done things that merit strong criticism, notably the incarceration and “reeducation” of roughly a million Uighurs and other Chinese Muslims, the communist party’s assault on independent lawyers, journalists, and labor rights activists, and militarizing of disputed islands in the South China Sea. Still, there are compelling reasons for seeking common ground with China—on trade, energy, missiles, and the climate crisis, for example—identifying financial and technological complementarities, and averting a breakdown in US-China relations that would undermine the international economy and could lead to war
This growing convergence of opinion between the liberal establishment and Trump and the Republican Party over the threat of China does not mean that there is an identity of views about how best to confront that threat.12 Whereas the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress view China in ideological, military, and trade terms, liberals seem more concerned with the technological and human rights elements.13 But the two camps coalesce around the urgency of halting what they see as China’s predatory commercial, industrial and technological strategy and its alleged spying at US universities and laboratories. Perhaps most importantly, they commonly see China in national security terms—threatening US hegemony. In short, they share a commitment to ensuring that the US remains the number-one power in the world.
China specialists could once be counted among China’s best friends, not as fellow travelers but as people knowledgeable enough about the country and its history to understand the difference between expansionism and defensive behavior and the importance of seeing the world through Chinese eyes. Many offered a balanced view of China’s domestic reforms while recognizing a range of complementary interestslinking the US and China and China’s critical role in stabilizing the hegemony of the US dollar through its purchase of $1.1 trillion in US treasuries, fully 27 percent of the US debt held by foreign countries.14 China specialists consistently warned against confusing China’s intentions with its capabilities. They also pointed to the need to maintain active engagement at every level with Chinese counterparts, drew a line between the repressive state and an increasingly mobile and market-oriented society, and above all emphasized the value of a realistic approach to US-China relations that served the interests of both countries.
Today, however, many former sympathizers seem disappointed in China’s failure to embrace liberal values and open its political system to democratic reforms. The 30th anniversary of the 1989 suppression of the democracy movement provided an enormous boost to critics, with an outpouring of commentaries and photographs from former student leaders and demonstrators in the United States, Europe and beyond. Nicholas Kristof, who was at Tiananmen on 6/4, writes that “those of us who witnessed Beijing Spring are confident that eventually, unpredictably, the tide of freedom will roll in again.”15 Such disappointment stems in good part from a misreading of the nature of the PRC’s reforms since 1978. What the Chinese Communist Party calls “political reform” involves personnel and procedural changes designed to facilitate economic growth—anti-corruption drives, emphasis on professionalism and technical expertise, greater separation of party and state, and above all political stability—without sacrificing (indeed, under Xi Jinping, moving to strengthen) the party’s supremacy in all walks of life.
Some liberals jumped on the anti-China bandwagon after Vice President Mike Pence delivered an in-depth indictment of that country on October 4, 2018.16 Pence described China’s interference in US politics as a “whole-of-government” threat, a point endorsed by (among others) Winston Lord, the former US ambassador to China. But Pence’s speech was full of historical inaccuracies about the US-China relationship, unwarranted braggadocio about America’s critical role in China’s rise, and dangerous rhetoric about Chinese “aggressiveness.” Above all, Pence seriously misinterpreted China’s international strategy and objectives, making it seem as if Xi Jinping is committed to promoting revolution abroad and undermining democracy worldwide.17 Actually, the latest Chinese national strategy report indicates that domestic threats, namely “separatism,” are the leadership’s primary security concern. The report also acknowledges weaknesses in the People’s Liberation Army that make it a regional rather than a global military force like that of the United States.18
Trade War: A Sign of Things to Come
The trade war, as the public face of US-China conflict, is particularly worrisome because it reflects a perception problem that might make a bad situation worse. What Trump is doing in imposing blanket tariffs on virtually all Chinese imports is entirely in keeping with his aggressive business style: threaten one’s adversary, avoid making concessions, don’t back down, and above all win. The trouble with that approach is that China has a long history of dealing with threats from powerful adversaries. By typically denouncing them as “bullying” and “humiliation,” Chinese leaders, most notably during the anti-Japanese resistance of the 1930s and 1940s, successfully mobilized popular resistance. Neither Trump nor, it seems, any of his advisers, has the slightest understanding of the history and power of Chinese nationalism as exhibited in China’s struggle against Japanese and Western imperialism, or its clash with the US in Korea and Vietnam from the 1950s, or its break with the Soviet Union in the 1960s.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo thinks the struggle with Huawei Technologies Company is ideological—either “Western values” or communist values will rule the internet, he says—while Kiron Skinner, the director of policy planning at the State Department, views the China rivalry, strangely, as a “fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology.”19 The Trump administration seems oblivious to the Xi Jinping leadership’s repeated references to a “new Long March,” alluding to the guerrilla struggles that led to the defeat of Japan invaders and the founding of the People’s Republic—that is, overcoming difficulties, and defending China’s economic development path, which it now defines as a “core interest.”20 The administration also underestimates China’s alternatives to giving in on commercial issues, notably the Regional Comprehensive Trade Partnership it initiated, which links twenty-five Asia-Pacific members,21 and Beijing’s ability to punish (according to China’s commerce ministry) “unreliable” foreign companies that “do not follow market rules, violate the spirit of contracts, blockade and stop supplying Chinese companies for noncommercial reasons, and seriously damage the legitimate rights and interests of Chinese companies.” The real cost here is not just to business, but to the US reputation, for paradoxically China can now pose as the principal defender not only of global markets but also of the multinational global order that the US had long pioneered and now scorns.
The Costs of Demonizing China
Beyond commercial ties, Americans and Chinese should recognize that we need each other when it comes to effectively confronting global problems including nuclear proliferation, climate crisis, humanitarian crises, the provision of sustainable energy sources, and bringing an end to the Korean War. Neither country is in a position to contain, much less resolve, any of these problems on its own. As Ana Swanson and Keith Bradsher argue, America First is an aggressive vision of American power that seeks to upend a rival system that has delivered prosperity for its people and has put China on course to be the world’s largest economy.22 We must rise above the “win-at-all-costs” approach and rivalry between the United States and China to recognize the two nations’ interdependence.
The list of disputed issues between the US and China includes confrontations over Taiwan, Tibet, and the South China Sea, as well as policy differences over North Korea, Russia, Korea, Iran, and Africa. US policies on many of these issues not only risk worsening them, they also threaten to drive the Chinese into closer relationships with countries that share Beijing’s opposition to those policies, especially Russia, with which China now has a “comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination.” On Iran, for example, Xi Jinping has rejected the US demand that countries stop importing Iran’s oil. He declared that “China and Russia’s views and positions on the Iran nuclear issue are highly aligned” and called on “all relevant parties to remain rational and exercise restraint, step up dialogue and consultations and lower the temperature on the present tense situation.”23
The growing US-China tension is affecting scientific and educational exchanges, including reciprocal visa denials for scholars.24 Particularly pernicious is the officially-inspired suspicion of Chinese scientists, including Americans of Chinese origin, many of whom are working at US universities and laboratories. With little evidence, these scientists and doctoral students are being cast as security risks. While a few cases of espionage have emerged, visiting Chinese scientists and technicians have been a great boon to US research.25 Chinese students comprise the largest contingent of foreign students in the US—more than 130,000 graduate students and 148,000 undergraduates enrolled in 2017-2018—and their ability to pay full freight keeps afloat many of the colleges and universities they attend. As the president of MIT laments, these days anyone of Chinese ethnicity “now feel[s] unfairly scrutinized, stigmatized and on edge” when dealing with the US government.26
Finally, we must reckon with the cost of ceding international leadership to China on globalization, multilateralism, and recognition as a “responsible great power.” Trump’s behavior has seriously undermined US leadership—to China’s advantage. While the PRC can claim to be a model of restraint on North Korea and Iran, for example, even lecturing Washington on its “unilateral sanctions” and “bullying” of Iran,27 the US president, while reveling in high-profile meetings with Xi Jinping and Kim Jong-un, keeps China under heavy threat of tariffs, leads a leaky sanctions campaign against North Korea, and seeks regime change in Iran. As a result, if “America First” comes to mean “America Alone,” China may all the more become the go-to power. The dispute over Huawei is illustrative: US pressure on its European and Asian partners to reject Huawei’s 5G technology is matched by China’s campaign on Huawei’s behalf to reject American pressure.28 Some countries will play ball with China (like Russia) while others (like Canada) apparently will bow to US pressures, as in the grudging detention of a Huawei executive at US behest, an act that has poisoned Canada’s relations with a major trade partner.
How the US-China rivalry will play out cannot be confidently predicted. To be sure, China’s BRI has gained important new footholds for Beijing in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and even southern Europe on the strength of large-scale Chinese loans. Will that enable China to establish a new international order? What seems clear is that the US retreat since 2017 has left the door open to Chinese predominance in trade and foreign aid.
What To Do About China?
At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s, liberal policy toward China called for “containment without isolation” at a time when revolution was the “main current” in China’s foreign policy, the Soviet Union ranked second to the US as a hegemonic power, and China’s role in the world economy was inconsequential. In the current era, what if US policy toward China were engagement-and-competition? It could distinguish China from Russia rather than giving Russia a pass as Trump has done. Russia, unlike China, has interfered in US and European elections, has annexed Ukraine’s Crimea, and supports an occupying force in eastern Ukraine. The US would reject the “dual enemies” approach that ensures closerPRC-Russian cooperation, especially in military affairs, which mainly involves joint exercises and (Russian) arms and military technology sales.29 Engagement-and-competition in fact was the US policy toward China from the early 1970s. Today the policy would stress the ties that bind with China as distinct from those with Russia, and the advantages to both China and the US of closer economic and geopolitical relations.
That approach, however, requires a more realistic perspective on China than the Trump administration and both political parties favor today. Ivo Daalder offers a sage observation: “There is nothing unusual with what China is doing. It’s acting like any great power would—using its economic and military prowess to extend its political influence to all corners of the globe. And quite naturally, it seeks that influence to serve its own interests and purposes.”30 Some liberals see a threat precisely there, endorsing Mike Pompeo’s view that Beijing poses “a new kind of challenge; an authoritarian regime that’s integrated economically into the West in ways that the Soviet Union never was.”31 This latter interpretation of what the administration calls China’s “economic aggression” ignores how strongly the Chinese support thecontemporary international economic status quo. It fails to recognize that China is deeply embedded in the world capitalist system, has delivered remarkable economic gains to its people, and has no interest in disrupting the basic rules of the system that are essential to its continued prosperity. If China doesn’t always play fair, Daalder argues, the best way to counter it is to rely on the one arena where China is weakest, allies: “America’s rivalry with China is inevitable. But competition need not lead to confrontation. If America works together with its allies, friends and partners, it can continue to shape the international order to the benefit of all.” Trump, Fareed Zakaria reports, rejects that approach, seeking victory in a zero-sum game that prefers “hardball” to cooperation in creating a bigger pie.32
Meanwhile, China’s American critics are so absorbed in the trade and technology war that crucial issues in US-China relations are not receiving the attention they deserve. Just to take a few examples: Massive demonstrations in Hong Kong continuing over several weeks have led to the suspension of an extradition law that Beijing supports, a defeat for Xi Jinping. China’s direct military intervention is a possibility. Yet Trump has reportedly promised Xi that the US would “tone down” its criticism of China’s actions in Hong Kong in return for progress on trade talks.33 At the same time, China’s BRI, while demonstrating the appeal of Beijing’s aid strategy, also raises the possibility of unsustainable debts. Since the aid is typically in the form of loans, recipients sometimes pay a high price—such as Sri Lanka’s transfer of ownership of a port to China when it could not pay up, Greece’s agreement to majority Chinese ownership of the historic port of Piraeus in return for loans and investments, and Cambodia’s agreement to provide China naval access to a port on the Gulf of Thailand to offset aid.34 China’s debt diplomacy may at times conflict with US and NATO interests.
On the other hand, China’s increasing reliance on nuclear energy, along with hydro and solar power, makes it the world’s leader in alternative energy, offering opportunities for cooperative projects with the United States and other countries even as it continues to produce the world’s largest output of greenhouse gas.35 Another potential issue on which to seek common ground is intermediate-range missiles, just one element of a rapidly modernizing Chinese military that worries the US Pacific Command.36 US withdrawal from the INF treaty was reportedly due in part to China’s growing arsenal, estimated at 2000 ballistic and cruise missiles, mainly deployed opposite Taiwan. Might a US-China agreement be negotiated that would (for example) cap missile numbers and types and also meet China’s objections to the THAAD missile defense system based in South Korea? Unless an agreement with China is reached, the US might test and seek land basing rights for a new cruise missile system aimed at China, which would probably ignite an arms race in East Asia.37
The Trump administration’s relentless pursuit of an America First agenda with its attack on China’s trade, technology, and aid policies may be injuring China, as Trump keeps insisting, but it is also injuring the world and US economies.38 Trump’s own constituents—farmers, miners, and industrial workers as well as leading sectors of capital and finance—are or soon will be among its main victims. The simultaneous pursuit of complementarity and competition between China and the US holds the best route forward for the American, Chinese and world economies, and for the reduction of tensions that threaten a war that nobody wants.39 For Americans, this will mean abandoning unrealistic hopes that China will change because of external pressure or the inevitable attractiveness of Western values and political models, or that the United States will solve its problems of trade and balance of payments imbalance and de-industrialization through imposing crippling tariffs on China. As the enormous outpouring of popular protest in Hong Kong suggests, change in China must come from within, just as it must in the US.
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Mel Gurtov is Professor of Political Science and International Studies emeritus in the Hatfield School of Government, Portland State University, Portland OR 97201 and an Asia-Pacific Journal Contributing editor.
Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program, Cornell University and at the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at NYU. He is the editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus.
Notes
1 Martin Wolf, “The looming 100-year US-China conflict,” Financial Times, June 7, 2019. Wolf concludes: “A blend of competition with co-operation is the right way forward.”
3 Bannon has revived the Committee on the Present Danger, which gained prominence in the Reagan era when it lobbied for nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union and high levels of military spending. In reconstituting itself in March 2019, the committee announced: “As with the Soviet Union in the past, communist China represents an existential and ideological threat to the United States and to the idea of freedom—one that requires a new American consensus regarding the policies and priorities required to defeat this threat.” Wendy Wu, “Cold War is Back: Bannon Helps Revive U.S. Committee to Target ‘Aggressive Totalitarian Foe’ China,” Politico, March 26, 2019.
5 China is the third most important US trading partner (behind Mexico and Canada), the world’s top merchandise exporter, and among the leaders in inward and outward foreign direct investment. It also plays an indispensable role in propping up the US dollar as the international currency despite its massive trade and balance of payment deficits through its purchase of $1.2 trillion in US Treasury bills.
6 The Trump administration’s 2017 national security strategy paper identifies Russia as well as China as the chief threats to the United States. “A New National Security Strategy for a New Era,” Dec. 17, 2017.
7 Ellen Nakashima, “China Specialists Who Long Supported Engagement are Now Warning of Beijing’s Efforts to Influence American Society,” Washington Post, November 28, 2018.
8 Editorial Board, “The Grave Consequences of a U.S.-China Schism,” WAPO, June 15, 2019.
9 Significant exceptions include Stephen Wertheim, “Is it Too Late to Stop a Cold War with China?” New York Times, June 8, 2019; Jessica Chen Weiss, “A World Safe for Autocracy? China’s Rise and the Future of Global Politics,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 98, no. 4 (July-August, 2019), pp. 92-102. An open letter to President Trump by China specialists M. Taylor Fravel, J. Stapleton Roy, Michael D. Swaine, Susan A. Thornton, and Ezra Vogel, “Making China a U.S. Enemy is Counterproductive,” Washington Post, July 3, 2019, signed by major figures in China scholarship, is the most significant challenge to the emerging consensus to date.
10 The Chicago Council on Global Affairs poll in February 2019 found that about 63 percent of those polled agreed that the US and China are “mostly rivals,” with little separating among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. That figure is 14 percent higher than the previous poll found in March 2018. In fact, previous polls going back to 2016 consistently reported about 50 percent agreement on US-China rivalry. Craig Kafura, “Public and Opinion Leaders’ Views on US-China Trade War,” The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, June 27, 2019“.
12 Thomas Wright of the Brookings Institution notes “Joe Biden’s off-the-cuff remark that China ‘isn’t in competition with us.’ But a few months ago, at the Munich Security Conference, Biden also said that China ‘seeks to establish itself as a hegemon and a global power player’ and that the United States finds itself in ‘an ideological struggle . . . a competition of systems [and] a competition of values’ with Beijing and other authoritarian powers. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have both highlighted the risk posed by kleptocratic and autocratic regimes in their foreign-policy speeches, with Warren singling out China in particular.” Wright, “Democrats Need to Place China at the Center of Their Foreign Policy,” Brookings, May 15, 2019.
13 “Several U.S. senators pressured the Trump administration on Thursday not to give in to China’s conditions. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said the president “cannot go soft now and accept a bad deal that falls short of reforming China’s rapacious economic policies—cyber espionage, forced technology transfers, state-sponsorship, and worst of all, denial of market access.” Rubio: “It’s not really a trade issue as much as it is first a national-security issue and second a wake-up call to the U.S. about how we need to have a counter to Chinese industrial policy.” Lingling Wei and Bob Davis, “China to Insist U.S. Lift Huawei Ban as Part of Trade Deal,” June 27, 2019.
18 People’s Republic of China, Office of Information of the State Council, China’s National Defense in the New Era (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, July 2019).
26 L. Rafael Reif, commenting on Emory University’s firing of two professors of Chinese ethnicity, one tenured and both naturalized US citizens. Nick Anderson, “Scrutiny of Chinese American Scientists Raises Fears of Ethnic Profiling,” Washington Post, July 19, 2019, online ed.
27 Geng Shuang, China’s foreign ministry spokesman, quoted in Megan Specia, “Iran Says It Has Surpassed Critical Enrichment Level in 2015 Deal,” New York Times, July 8, 2019, online ed.
31 Ana Swanson and Keith Bradsher, “U.S.-China Trade Standoff May Be Initial Skirmish in Broader Economic War,” NYT, May 11, 2019. On the liberal side, Thomas L. Friedman takes the position that China has been cheating to get to the top, and that must stop. He argues that once China decided to leap into the advanced economy category, “all China’s subsidies, protectionism, cheating on trade rules, forced technology transfers and stealing of intellectual property since the 1970s became a much greater threat. If the U.S. and Europe allowed China to continue operating by the same formula that it had used to grow from poverty to compete for all the industries of the future, we’d be crazy. Trump is right about that.” Friedman, “China Deserves Donald Trump,” New York Times, May 21, 2019.
32 Fareed Zakaria argues, “the end goal is to create more economic interdependence between the two countries. If there is a deal, China will buy more American goods, invest more in America and provide more market access to American companies. A technology war would take us in a very different direction. It would lead not to a cold war but a cold peace, in a divided and less prosperous world.” Zakaria, “The Blacklisting of Huawei Might Be China’s Sputnik Moment,” Washington Post, May 23, 2019.
33 Demestri Sevastopulo and Su-Lin Wong, “Trump Softened Stance on Hong Kong Protests to Revive Trade Talks,” Financial Times, July 10, 2019, online ed.
37 See David E. Sanger and Edward Wong, “U.S. Ends Cold War Missile Treaty, With Aim of Countering China,” New York Times, August 1, 2019, online ed.
38 In a series of tweets on July 30, Trump claimed that China had lost 5 million jobs, including 2 million in manufacturing, because of the “Trump tariffs.” “Trumps [sic] got China back on its heels, and the United States is doing great,” he wrote. But various economic forecasts show a slowdown in worldwide growth and a possible recession as the trade war continues. And Trump now does not expect a deal with China before the 2020 US elections. Taylor Telford, Damian Paletta, and David J. Lynch, “Trump Backpedals on China Threats as Trade Deal Shows Signs of Slipping Away,” Washington Post, July 30, 2019, online ed.
Financial markets around the world fell on Friday as a result of the shock wave from US President Trump’s surprise announcement Thursday that he intended to impose a 10 percent tariff from September 1 on a further $300 billion worth of Chinese goods.
The announcement has added to concerns that the escalation of the US trade war against China will exacerbate the downward trend in global economic growth. The result was a rush to security in the financial markets, lifting the price of government bonds and sending bond yields down.
This movement was most pronounced in Germany, where the yield on 30-year government bonds went into negative territory for the first time in history. For a brief period, yields across the entire market were below zero.
There was a continued sell-off on US markets, with the S&P 500 stock index recording a fall for the week of 3.1 percent. The yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury bond continued at below 2 percent.
Since the launching of the trade war more than a year ago, Trump has continued to escalate US attacks while negotiations with the Chinese have assumed an on-again, off-again character. This latest measure, however, coming after Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to a truce at the end of June and the resumption of talks, could mean a complete breakdown.
Further discussions were scheduled for next month in Washington following talks between the two sides in Shanghai this week. But there are growing doubts as to whether they will proceed.
Figures released by the Commerce Department Friday show the significant impact of the conflict so far. US imports from China fell 12 percent in the first six months of 2019 compared to a year earlier, while US exports to China dropped by 18 percent. The total bilateral trade in the first quarter of the year fell below the levels with Canada and Mexico—the first time that has happened in more than a decade.
Responding to Trump’s latest move, China’s commerce ministry said it would “have to take necessary countermeasures” if the tariffs went ahead. It added that Trump’s announcement “seriously violates” the agreement reached between the US president and Xi.
No decision has been made on whether China will attend the September talks, but the issue is clearly under active consideration. Asked about whether the current plan would go ahead, a foreign ministry spokeswoman, Hua Chunying, said,
“We believe the ball is currently in the United States’ court. At this time the United States must demonstrate sincerity.”
In its analysis of the latest turn in the trade war, the South China Morning Post said China was facing a make-or-break decision over the next month: either to walk away from the negotiations or make major concessions to the US side.
The chief economist for Citigroup Capital Markets Asia, Li-Gang Liu, cast doubt on whether the September talks would go ahead.
“When negotiations collapsed in May, [Vice-Premier] Liu He still flew to Washington to talk. It’s hard to imagine that China would do it again if Trump is determined to raise tariffs,” he told the newspaper.
Speaking yesterday, Trump gave every indication he is determined to go ahead.
“China has to do a lot of things to turn it around,” he said. “Frankly, if they don’t do it I could always increase it very substantially.”
The latest escalation against China, coming just one day after the holding of talks described by the US side as “constructive,” takes place amid indications of a broader shift in the economic agenda of the White House in the direction of currency warfare.
This was indicated by Trump’s response to the decision of the US Federal Reserve to cut interest rates by 0.25 percentage points on Wednesday. Trump had railed against the Fed for not cutting rates, claiming that Wall Street’s Dow Industrials stock index would be 10,000 points higher but for the Fed’s policies.
However, there now appears to be a shift of emphasis.
“What the market wanted to hear from [Fed Chair] Jay Powell and the Federal Reserve was that this was the beginning of a lengthy and aggressive rate-cutting cycle which would keep pace with China, the European Union and other countries around the world,” Trump said after the Fed’s latest decision.
Trump was referring to the moves towards easier monetary policies internationally—especially by the European Central Bank, which is expected to move significantly because of lower euro zone growth. Such policies tend to push up the value of the dollar. The effect of the increased valuation is to make it more difficult for the US to compete in global export markets while lessening the impact of US-imposed tariff measures.
A further sign of a turn in the direction of White House policy was provided in an interview on the business channel CNBC with Judy Shelton, a Trump nominee to fill one of two vacant positions on the board of the Federal Reserve.
Shelton said central banks in Europe. China and Japan were all devaluing their currencies through their monetary policies and the US should do the same. The official policy of the US is that it favours a strong dollar and the position of all governments and central banks is that monetary policy must not be used to target the currency. But, as with the use of tariffs, the prohibition on this form of economic warfare is being undermined.
“I don’t think that we should make it harder for our own manufacturers to compete domestically against imports from other countries where they have resorted to cheating really, through currency devaluation, to make it look like they’re offering the same thing at a better price,” she said.
In a warning of where international economic relations are heading, Shelton likened the present situation to the “beggar thy neighbour” policies of the 1930s. The outcome of that economic conflict was the eruption of the Second World War in 1939.
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Don’t get me wrong. I am not foul-mouthed or in any way vulgar, having been trained in the niceties of academic discretionary writing and research. I apologize for the title and even for using the personal pronoun “I.” As “one” knows, to write as if you are a person with values and beliefs is very crude in the academy from which so many of our finest national priorities, like perpetual war-making and economic exploitation, emanate.
In this case, however, I must use certain language that may be offensive to some sensitive folks in order to explain my thesis in the hope that it will encourage others to grasp why so many of our compatriots of every sex and gender dispensation imaginable have become such suckers. I hope you will grant the importance of such an endeavor and excuse the means used to achieve its ends.
Let me say this at the outset. To say something sucks has always confused me. I have asked many people how something – let’s say a pizza – could suck, and they have just rolled their eyes. I know a vacuum cleaner can suck and a sump pump can suck or is it pump, but after that, I’m lost. How can a movie suck? Spaghetti? You can suck it but can it suck? You see my point?
Perhaps you have heard the saying that “there is a sucker born every minute.” That seems to me to be so off statistically. Do you agree? What’s your estimate for the birth rate of suckers: a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand a minute? I don’t know, but my theory or thesis, if you will, is not statistically based. And let’s not get into that ridiculous debate about nature versus nurture. We both no doubt agree that suckers are both born and bred in the USA at a feverish rate.
I am a social theorist, not a statistician, so please just consider my theory. I can assure you that there is no conspiracy involved in it, since all the variables I note are well-known, if forgotten, by the general public.
In this article I will touch on a few, for if I went on too long you might think this article sucked, despite the incongruity of your lingo. Indeed, there is an enormous amount of academic research to support my thesis, but this is not the place for footnotes or references. Trust me, as you do CNN or The New York Times.
It was in the early 1990s when I first noticed that many people were saying things “sucked” an awful lot. I would have thought that after the great American TV victory in the Gulf War and the election of the fresh-faced, forthright young governor from Arkansas to lead the ship of state, the sucking lingo would die down. No way! The pace picked up quite dramatically throughout the nineties. Movies sucked, the party sucked, the concert sucked – so much was starting to suck it frightened me, and I’m not easily frightened, having been toughened up in the academy with its fierce in-fighting over trivia and its short vacations.
There wasn’t a “ton” of such sucking in those early days, but this way of talking struck me anyway. “Ton” wasn’t cool yet. The heaviness of our new social reality hadn’t fully sunk in yet; the massive growth in depression was just getting started. It was just “it sucks”/”that sucks” that was hot in those years. I started to wonder if this little phrase was a harbinger of things to come, the unconscious canary in the national mine shaft, the lack of breathable air shortening people’s verbal responses to a growing unreality.
One day I was in the checkout line in a supermarket when a very elderly woman got into an argument with the checkout girl. The girl had charged the old woman twice for her National Enquirer, or so the old one said. The girl denied it and showed the old woman the receipt, which failed to mollify her. She stormed away, shouting, “That sucks. You suck.” I couldn’t help laughing, so incongruous was the scene. But I took note as a good academic should, and started to collect the variables that would eventually result in my present argument, one that has involved almost thirty years of diligent thinking and research, so I hope you will appreciate its significance. I would hate to think my years of toiling in the academy were for naught.
After the loud sound of all things sucking came the fear of being dehydrated, as if everyone, even people walking through Central Park in New York City, were lost in the Sahara Desert and were afraid they might collapse into a sere heap without constant water intake. I guess you can never be too careful. Everywhere you looked, there were people sucking on those plastic water bottles that sprung up like locusts. To be without one was then akin to being without one’s cell phone today. Mr. Death seemed to be stalking the bottleless ones, those not sucking. But to be more precise, people didn’t exactly suck on the bottles until the sports tops were added. I heard there was a very creative entrepreneur who tried introducing water bottles with baby bottle rubber nipples, but that was too suggestive then, since adults were just starting to dress like kids and the kidification of adults had to be somewhat disguised in those early days.
Come on, can you imagine if you saw a forty-five-year-old man in a Yankee jersey and hat, walking around sucking on a plastic water bottle with a baby nipple. That would be too much, too fast, even if you were a Yankee fan. You could say the Red Sox sucked, but you couldn’t be seen to be so obviously sucking yourself.
Then there was that cool cat, Bill Clinton. Whenever you turned on the TV or glanced at a newspaper, there he was out jogging or walking with a huge soda or something, sucking away on the straw. Or blowing on that horn on Saturday Night Live. It almost seemed like the poor guy had an oral complex or something. On the golf course where he was often pictured, he and his pals had big cigars they sucked on, making cigar sucking very popular. The magazine, Cigar Afionado, born in the fall of 1992 when Bill and Hill so sincerely refuted those Paula Jones sexual allegations and won the White House, would soon publish covers with famous actresses fondling cigars in a not so subtle come-on. Stores everywhere had humidors hawking them. Sucking on quart sized drinks and cigars took the country by storm, and please, I am not alluding to Stormy Daniels and her lurid tales, which come later. I am just listing some of the many variables that I have spent my academic career gathering in preparation for the release of my upcoming book that I hope will be my crowning achievement: Sucking and Suckers: A Qualitative Study.
This cigar craze got so wild that one day I walked into my local liquor store and the owner showed me his new humidor. He said, “Jack, you should try one on me.” I said I didn’t smoke, to which he replied, “But you really should just try one, they make you feel powerful, like a big man.”
I told him I felt big, capacious, and enormous already, sort of like Walt Whitman, who said, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” He just rolled his eyes and lit up.
I was reminded of a quote from Wilhelm Reich’s book, Listen, Little Man, a long-forgotten book that is perfect for today:
A great man knows and in what way he is a little man. A little man does not know he is little and is afraid to know. He hides his pettiness and narrowness behind illusions of strength and greatness, someone else’s strength and greatness.
And behind his cigar and bluster.
Then came Monica and Bill. I guess the cigars weren’t enough, or the occupancy of the big White House, or eight years of continual bombing of Iraq and sanctions that killed well over 500,000 Iraqi children, or making all those sexed-up welfare queens with all their babies scream when he did away with welfare as we know it, or his sadistic bombing of Serbia and the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan. It seems as though nothing is sufficient to make war criminals feel big enough.
Excuse the politics. I’m getting carried away from my theme, which sucks. Okay, there was Monica. But I will leave it to your imagination, if you dare. Sorry for being crude.
Variable number four or five are those pacifier necklaces, as if eight years of Bill hadn’t been pacifier enough. Do you remember them? Did their wearers suck on them, or was a message being sent? Then came the oral sex craze among the young, serendipitously connected to Bill and Monica. Stuff happens.
Perhaps for me, in my academic life, my eureka moment came one day in the early 2000s when I was teaching a class on the growing cleavage between the rich and the poor. Bush Jr. had the country pacified and simultaneously whipped into a war frenzy after the attacks of 9/11. He was lying his way to the invasion of Iraq after having been “accidentally” rescued from a disastrous economy by those nineteen Arab terrorists with boxcutters. I was explaining to the students, mostly college juniors and seniors, how the percentage of the very wealthy had been increasing for years and the poor and middle-class were suffering, when I looked down to see a pretty female student in the front row. Bingo! Instant insight, or was it outsight? I was about to say something wise about the economic gap but my voice cracked. Right at my feet was an example of a different form of cleavage that had my eyes quickly popping up to look straight ahead as if I didn’t see what I saw. Right there was a culminating variable that I was able to notice for many years to come. Call it the cleavage phenomenon, but it was real, and it could be seen throughout the classrooms and byways of America ever since. I will let you take it from there.
Over the following years, I continued to collect my evidence for the phenomenon I call “suck.” But I also noticed that under Bush Jr, as under Poppi Bush and Clinton, people were increasingly being taken for suckers by the authorities with their lies about Iraq, 9/11, the anthrax attacks, the economy, the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the war on terror, etc. It’s true, I know, that the same happened under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, but he was generally considered an acting president and life in the 1980s a feel-good movie. Everyone was happy then, and suck was just a bad word that could spoil the fun of “Morning in America.”
When in 2008 Bush Jr. returned to the ranch and full-time brush cutting, in rode Obama. Slicker than Slick Willy, he really sucker-punched liberals, who were desperate for some classy speech in the White House, someone who could correctly pronounce “nuclear” while promising to spend a trillion dollars on making a new generation of them. They got conned (I guess) when he immediately bailed out the banks and the Wall St. crooks, sent more troops to Afghanistan, cracked down on whistle-blowers, launched killer drones, increased surveillance, destroyed Libya and Syria, sent special forces throughout Africa, etc., smiling as he went marauding.
The power of the Obama propaganda was overwhelming, and so many were sucked in, as they still are. I started to wonder if my years of cultural research on the significance of suck, sucking, and suckers was a waste of my life. Maybe I had missed the bigger issues, having made diversity and sexuality my focus of teaching and research, since they had become the rage in academia.
Then Trump shocked the world with his election and Stormy Daniels burst forth and the rich got richer and the poor poorer and the wars continued and the little-big man tweeted out his foul rantings about immigrants and so many others while the country further descended into a cesspool of insanity as he threatened North Korea and Iran with nuclear annihilation and his buddy Robert Kraft got his quick suck and the fascist Israeli government got his approval to continue slaughtering Palestinians and the deluded citizenry fixated on the 2020 election and the next con-artist who will promise to make things suck no longer.
But I have seen the light. While my thesis still seems valid to me, and the variables I have mentioned here (a fraction of the whole) demonstrate that there’s more to the seemingly trivial than meets the eye, I have concluded that the only thing I can conclude is that the American people are suckers and will continue to be so.
And I, too, have been a sucker for thinking that a simple, popular phrase wasn’t profoundly true from the start. I began as a hopeful young professor, thinking that I would debunk the crassness of our society and make a name for myself. I thought I was so smart.
Now, however, I have to admit that I was wrong from the beginning: things do suck. The canaries were right. Or to be more precise: the political elites who run the country suck. And the presidents suck big time.
That’s just the way it is.
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Jack Tucker is the pseudonym of a writer who claims to be a former professor of sexuality and diversity studies.
At this point, everyone on the planet with the exception of United States President Donald Trump and his own, perverse, neocon circle, must see that the U.S. withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has been an unmitigated disaster. Let us broadly review the situation:
In 2015, Iran, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and the European Union signed the JCPOA, limiting Iran’s nuclear development program in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. This agreement was praised across the globe by nearly every world leader, with the Zionist entity (also known as Israel) and Saudi Arabia being the two major objectors. The JCPOA went into effect, and trade with Iran and the world increased greatly, to the benefit of everyone.
President Barack Obama was in office when the JCPOA was agreed to and signed. In January of 2017, the erratic and unstable Trump, who harbors an irrational hatred of his predecessor, became president, and has attempted to undo all of Obama’s accomplishments. He has worked tirelessly to deprive 21,000,000 U.S. citizens of health care, which has not been easy, and is yet to be accomplished (if such a disgraceful action can be called an ‘accomplishment’). It wasn’t so difficult for him to withdraw from the JCPOA, thus voiding that agreement.
The other signatories to the JCPOA begged Trump not to withdraw; he did so anyway, reinstated sanctions against Iran, and threatened the other parties to the agreement with sanctions if they continued to trade with Iran. Bowing to U.S. pressure, each nation, except Russia and China, ceased all such trade.
Trump demands that Iran renegotiate the agreement, which Iran’s leaders have, legitimately, refused to do. Had Trump maintained the JCPOA, and expressed to Iran’s leaders that he would like to reconsider some of its provisions, his request might have been favorably received. But as Iran’s leaders have accurately pointed out, sanctions are economic terrorism and, like the U.S., Iran will not negotiate with terrorists.
Iran, demonstrating remarkably good faith, maintained its commitments to the JCPOA for over a year after the U.S. and the European nations violated it, giving the European parties sufficient time to decide how to circumvent threatened U.S. sanctions. When they were unable to do so, Iran slowly began enriching uranium at a rate higher than allowed by the agreement. The U.S., Britain, France, Germany and the UK all responded with horror. How could Iran do such a thing? They knew its leaders couldn’t be trusted! This is an internationally-approved agreement that Iran is violating!
For some bizarre reason, they were not quite so astounded and shocked when the U.S. violated the agreement, and seemed to conveniently ignore the fact that they had done so, too, long before Iran did. It is completely counter to reason and logic to expect an agreement between eight (8) parties to remain effective when five (5) of them (the U.S., Germany, France, Britain and the UE) have all violated it. Before those nations point the finger of accusation at Iran, they need to clean up their own houses of government.
As a result of U.S. actions, tensions in the Persian Gulf have been growing, and reached a dangerous level when a U.S. drone flew into Iranian airspace and was shot down. A few weeks later, Trump reported that the U.S. had shot down an Iranian drone that flew too close to a U.S. ship (which was in the Gulf where it had no legitimate business to be). However, Iranian officials reported that all of their drones had returned safely, and Trump & Co. haven’t bothered to show any evidence whatsoever that the U.S. did, in fact, shoot down an Iranian drone.
Based on what has been revealed about the Trump White House, how his closest aides discreetly remove from his desk papers that they don’t want him to see, how they brief him with the briefest of information due to his limited interest and attention span, and his own narcissistic personality, it’s likely that, enraged that Iran dared shoot out of the sky a drone of the mighty U.S., he ordered that the U.S. retaliate in like manner. Some aide with a brain in his or her head, recognizing that shooting down an Iranian drone in Iranian airspace could easily be seen as an act of war, probably invented the fairy tale that a drone had been shut down, advised Trump, thereby satisfying his lust for revenge.
The military went along with it, realizing, perhaps, that a war against Iran would be a worldwide disaster. So Trump has been told what he wanted to hear (he appears to have no ability to discern truth from fiction; he recently announced that he was a first responder on September 11!), a war has been averted at least for now, and the U.S. continues to be the laughing stock of the world, since everyone except Trump seems to know that no Iranian drone was shot down.
What will be next? Will the U.S. invade Iran? Surely, there are some people in U.S. government circles who are not willing to shove the world into that deadly abyss, and are in a position to prevent it.
Will Israel get tired of waiting for the U.S. to invade, and do so itself, knowing that the U.S. will come to its aid? One thinks Israeli officials would need some pretext for doing so, but they can certainly draw on the U.S.’s many examples of creating some false flag to start a war.
Will the European signatories to the JCPOA finally create some way to circumvent threatened U.S. sanctions, or will they simply develop some strength of character and advise the U.S. that it can’t tell them how they will run their countries?
With the U.S. democratic farce of a presidential election just over a year away, Trump may do anything, however deadly and irrational, to try to gain another four-year term. Should he not war with Iran before then, his successor (one desperately hopes the Democrats don’t do anything sufficiently stupid to ensure another four years in the White House for Trump, as they did in 2016), will, one hopes, re-embrace the JCPOA.
But the next presidential inauguration isn’t until January of 2020; seventeen months is a long time for someone as unpredictable and unhinged as Trump to have his finger on the war button. We can only hope and pray that he doesn’t decide to push it.
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