Global Research

ISIS terrorists, defeated by the Syrian Arab Army in the major battles of Der Ezzor and Albukamal east of Syria, have regrouped and launched a new wave of attacks against the SAA posts in the desert with the direct help of the USA and its illegal ‘International Coalition’ which moved its remnants from under fire to safe havens in the depth of the Syrian open desert bordering Iraq in the east and Jordan in the south.

Al-Mayadeen reporter in Damascus Mohammad Al-Khodr had this report in Arabic and we added the English subtitles to it, English transcript is below the video:

Al-Faydah desert, to the south of Al-Mayadeen, is another theater for the movement of remnants of ISIS in the Syrian desert.

Syrian army units and their allies in a fierce clash with a convoy of the (terrorist) organization resulted in a number killed and wounded in their ranks.

A growing activity which in details included attacking military points last April in the vicinity of Sokhna, an activity that followed the breaking of ISIS in Al-Baghouz and the International Coalition facilitating the moving of ISIS fighters deep into the desert to add pressure against the Syrian army.

Mohammed Abbas – Military expert: This enclave ends with the end of the war on Syria because it is covered today by fire, diplomatic, political, logistical and military through US forces, Is it a serious threat? Yes, it poses is a serious risk because it is a connected danger, a constant danger because the Americans invest in it.

No accurate figures of what remains of ISIS in the Syrian desert, estimates that the number is between1000 to 2000 armed men, Spread over a large area in the vicinity of Jabal al-Bishri southeast of Raqqa and Dafina southwest of Deir al-Zour and between the desert of Palmyra and Al-Sokhna and the vicinity of the 55th area in Al-Tanf.

Mohammed Abbas: We must remember well that the region is a strategic area and very important, and maybe the separation area in the US war on Syria, I mean the area stretching from Al-Tanf to Albuakmal and Al-Sukhna, and this desert area (Al-Badia) is the area of separation on which America bet on with its alternative armies, It’s called the US Alternative Army which wants to cut the road between Iraq and Syria, cut Iran’s way towards Syria.

The terrorist organization members benefited from the difficult terrain to hide in hills, valleys, and deep calcareous caves, and wide maneuvering areas that they know well as being from the region or due to their staying in it for years.

The solid structure of ISIS was broken during major battles fought by the Syrian army and its allies along the Syrian desert. To eliminate the remnants of ISIS requires a major military effort, in parallel with finishing the American presence in Al-Tanf, which formed a source of support for the movements of this (ISIS) organization.

End of Mohammad Al-Khodr’s report.

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Another pressure of all sorts militarily, political, financial by unprecedented sanctions, media, and diplomatic is being exerted by the USA and its barking squad against Syria with the latest decision by Trump in arming Al-Qaeda terrorists there with anti-tank missiles through his poodle Erdogan.

And when the #SAA drops Bombs on these prehistoric creatures we're shown one of the 20,000 hospitals in a 15 square kms strip blown up, the UNSC convenes and the criers flood the UN building with their fake tears:https://t.co/nuWYBBv26p#Syria #FSA #alQaeda #ISIS #Nusra #Trump https://t.co/NlIKwLqmVo

— Arabi Souriعربي سوري (@3arabiSouri) June 3, 2019

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Featured image is from Syria News

It was 4am when Masih Ur-Rahman Mubarez’s wife Amina called, an unusually early time for their daily chat. When he picked up the phone, he could hear the panic in her voice.

Amina was calling from the Afghan province of Wardak, where she brought up their children while he worked over the border in Iran to support them. She told him that soldiers were raiding their village. Some of them were speaking English. Amina was told to turn off her phone but Masih asked her not to – how would he know they were ok?

The call ended with Masih saying he would call again when things had calmed. But at 9am, when he dialled his wife’s number, her phone was off. He tried again at 9.30am. Still off. Through the whole of that day and the next, he repeatedly called. But Amina’s phone remained off.

It took another day for him to the learn the truth. Relatives avoided his calls or gave vague replies to his questions, until finally his brother broke the news. “He tried to avoid telling me the whole story, but I insisted that he tell me the truth,” Masih recalled in a wavering voice. “He told me to have patience in God – no one is left.”

Image on the right: Masih spent months working alongside journalists to prove who had killed his family

An airstrike on Masih’s house had killed his wife and all his seven children, alongside four young cousins. His youngest child was just four years old.

In the following weeks, as grief consumed Masih, so did an intense need for answers. Who had killed his family and why?

His journey to find out would last more than eight months, pit him against military and government officials, and see him face obfuscation and denials. It would lead him to work alongside the Bureau and journalists from The New York Times, putting together a puzzle piece by piece. Ultimately it would lead to one definitive conclusion – the US military had dropped the fatal bomb.

His story is one window into the struggles faced by families across Afghanistan every day. Airstrikes are raining down on the country, with US and Afghan operations now killing more civilians than the insurgency for the first time in a decade. But getting confirmation of who has carried out a fatal strike is often impossible. An apology, or any form of public accountability, is even harder to obtain.

The US denied repeatedly that it had bombed Masih’s house, or even that any airstrike in his area had taken place. But using satellite imagery, photos and open source content, we proved that denial false. Following our investigation, the military has now admitted that it did conduct a strike in that location, but it still denies it resulted in civilian deaths.

A happy life destroyed

“Prior to my house being bombed, I had a normal life. I was married, had four daughters and three sons,” Masih told our reporter in Kabul. “Our life was full of love.”

Masih was the headteacher in a local school run by a Swedish organisation before financial issues forced him to seek employment in construction in Iran in 2014. He still reminisces about his days in the village of Mullah Hafiz, where he split his time between farming, teaching and his children. “We were so happy,” he says.

Exactly what happened on the day of the strike is not clear. Villagers say that overnight on September 22 2018, bombs were dropped in Mullah Hafiz, which lies in a Taliban-controlled area. The same night, they said, soldiers carried out a raid on the village as part of an operation on a Taliban prison, which was about 200 metres away from Masih’s house. One of the villagers said Taliban fighters had fired on the soldiers from some civilian homes.

A cousin of Masih’s told us he and and other male relatives were taken away and detained, alongside some other villagers. At some point the next morning, a strike hit Masih’s house. When his relatives returned, they found the building flattened. In the rubble were the bodies of Amina, the seven children and their four cousins, they say.

Masih’s children were aged between four and 14 years old; his wife Amina was 32. The cousins, all girls, were aged from 10 to 16.

Clockwise from top left: Masih’s children Mohammad Elyas (8), Mohammad Wiqad (10), Fahim (5), Samina (7) and Mohammad Fayaz (4) all died in the strike, alongside their two elder sisters, Anisa (14), and Safia (12), and their mother Amina (32). (Fahim appears in both photos in the bottom row)Photo supplied by family. We do not have photos of the teenage girls or Masih’s wife Amina

The full list of those who died in the strike

On finding out his family had been killed, Masih returned immediately to Afghanistan. The return journey was tough – having been working illegally in construction in Iran he says he had to hand himself to the Iranian police and wait for deportation. It took him three days to get back to his village. It was then that he began hunting for the truth.

Masih claims government officials acknowledged in private that his family died. However while both the Afghan Ministry of Defence and the provincial police publicly announced in the days following the attack that an operation on a Taliban prison had killed large numbers of Taliban fighters, they did not acknowledge that any civilians died in a strike.

“I have repeatedly told them that it was my children, that it was my wife, that it was my cousins, that they were all civilians and that my house was destroyed,” Masih said. “When they say that they have bombed a [Taliban] prison, they have absolutely not done that.”

Journalists investigate

As Masih was investigating, so was the Bureau. We had independently heard of a strike that had killed multiple children in Mullah Hafiz on September 23, and were trying to establish who had carried it out.

The Bureau has been recording strikes in Afghanistan for over four years. Getting to the bottom of what has happened is often difficult. The attacks mostly take place in remote areas under Taliban control. They are often not reported by local media and neither the US nor the Afghan military is fully transparent.

We faced all these same barriers with this strike. But this time, over the course of several months, working with Afghan reporters on the ground and the Visual Investigations unit of The New York Times, we were able to prove that the US was responsible for a strike which killed multiple children.

Our first step was to contact both the Afghan and the US militaries.

Officials in the Afghan Ministry of Defence told us no one was available for comment.

When we went to the US military, we were met with contradictory statements. Its story changed repeatedly as our reporting developed and the New York Times got involved.

A US spokesperson first stated in October that there were “no connections” between their actions and the allegations of civilian casualties in Mullah Hafiz. In a later email in February, they claimed to have no record at all of a strike in the district on September 23.

In a Pentagon report released this month the strike on Masih’s house was not included in a list of confirmed civilian casualties.

Finally, as we prepared to go to press earlier this week, they admitted they had bombed Masih’s house. Days later, there was yet another statement. American soldiers had reported being fired on from the house, they said, and a strike had been carried out “in self-defence.” But they did not kill Masih’s family, they said.

The military has not told us what information it used to reach its conclusion. It is not uncommon for the US to rely, for the most part, on pre-strike and post-strike footage filmed by aircraft to investigate claims that an air attack has harmed civilians. But when a strike hits a building, as in the case of Masih’s home, it can be difficult to tell what’s under the rubble.

Crucial evidence

Masih wanted the world to know what had happened. Interviews he did with Afghan media led us to contact him, and in April we were able to meet him in Kabul. By this time, he had been knocking on doors for months in search for answers. He had carefully collected evidence he hoped would shine a light on what happened that day.

Some of this helped our investigation. First we needed to do the basics – to verify that a strike had hit his house. We had to do this without visiting the village, because it was not safe for reporters to go to the Taliban-controlled area. From metadata contained in photos supplied by Masih, we were able to obtain the coordinates of his home. We used these to get satellite images which showed the house had been attacked, with the damage consistent with a strike. A team from the Bureau and the The New York Times’ Visual Investigations unit also reviewed photos of Masih’s children’s graves and found satellite images of the burial site. Both the damage to the house and the burial site are only visible in satellite images after September 23.

Crucially, we also were given photos of weapon fragments said to be found at the site of the strike. While most were nondescript, a few pieces had distinctive markings. On one piece we could see what is known as a “CAGE code” – this is a unique identifier given to companies which supply government or defence agencies. This code linked the fragment to a US-based company called Woodward, that makes components for a missile kit known as a JDAM. These enable bombs to be guided by GPS.

Weapons experts then reviewed the photos, and saw something else – the distinctive pattern of four bolts on a tail fin that identified it as part of a JDAM.

We trawled defence and aviation news archives and found the Afghan military did not have capability to use JDAMs. The only other military carrying out strikes in Afghanistan is America’s.

We asked the weapons experts which military could have dropped the bomb and they confirmed what we had learned – only the US military has the capability to use JDAMs in Afghanistan.

The weapon fragments said to be found in the rubble from the strike on Masih’s house Via Masih

A close-up of the tail fin with distinctive arrangement of four bolts that indicated it was from a JDAM Via Masih

After four and a half years of recording civilian casualties from strikes in Afghanistan, we were finally able to say for certain who pushed the button on one.

Answering the why

While we believe our investigation answers the who, the why is less clear.

The US’s final statement – that they dropped a bomb on the house after American soldiers reported being fired on – tallies in part with one villager who said the soldiers were shot at from civilian homes. However two others say everything was quiet in the area by the time the strike happened.

Perhaps a clue lies in the location of the house, which was set apart from the rest of the village, very close to a Taliban prison. We know an operation on the prison was carried out, with villagers claiming that a number of security force members being held inside were rescued during the raid. It’s possible that Masih’s house was hit by accident.

This panorama shows how close the two buildings were:

Panorama of the outskirts of Mullah Hafiz, showing the Taliban prison on the left and Masih’s family home on the right Photo sent via Masih

Without full military transparency, these questions will remain unanswered. And whatever the reason for the attack, the US still claims it did not kill any civilians.

Soaring civilian deaths

Our investigation raises serious questions about US military accountability.

Last year, the UN found that US military operations in Afghanistan killed and injured 632 civilians – more than double the year before. The US military has admitted to just over 20 percent of that figure. The reason for the discrepancy, says the US, is that they have access to intelligence such as drone footage which shows that “what often looks like civilian harm from US actions was actually a result of other causes.”

In its first statement back in October, the US spokesperson had warned us: “It isn’t uncommon for insurgents to use these accusations to drive a wedge between the military and the population. As Secretary Mattis has said: ‘We do everything humanly possible consistent with military necessity, taking many chances to avoid civilian casualties at all costs.

“’We’re not perfect guys, but we are the good guys. And so we’re doing what we can.’”

There have been calls for change, even from the Pentagon itself. It released a report in February highlighting concerns about how the US military investigates and responds to civilian casualties. The military was sometimes seen as “restrictive” in how it assessed allegations of civilian harm received from organisations like the Bureau or NGOs, it said.

700,000 illegal settlers, economic migrants from Israel who have built temporary homes on Palestinian land, are proposed to be legitimised under a Kushner family plan dubbed the ‘confidence trick of the century’.

The son-in-law of Donald Trump, Jared Kushner is a real estate developer who has convinced his wife’s father that his idea of a Greater Israel now, would be advantageous in currying favour with AIPAC the powerful Israel Lobby in Washington, (and London), that will determine whether Trump will win a second term as President.

Kushner’s plan is to permanently weaken the Palestinian goal for an independent state by annexing huge swathes of occupied land in the West Bank and East Jerusalem in direct violation of UN Security Council Resolution 2334. In other words, he proposes a criminal act by the Israeli state.

In return, the Kushner-Trump family would persuade adjoining states with Palestinian refugees, which includes Lebanon and Jordan, to offer permanent residency, citizenship and civil rights to those affected.

Also proposed is some type of land swap plus a permanent Israeli military police presence throughout all Palestinian lands in order to permanently weaken any possibility of an independent Palestinian state. The entire proposal is a calculated nonsense by a property developer who thinks he’s an internationally recognised statesman because he married a daughter of another property man in the same town who, with significant help from a casino mogul, beat the odds and became the 45th US President, in an aberration of the democratic process that would be unlawful in Britain and most European democracies.

Let us hope that the average American citizen will see sense and elect a 46th President of the great United States who is a world-class statesman, who will work for global peace not global war. An acknowledged leader who respects life and people; has integrity as well as the ability to bring men and countries together to work, trade and live in a spirit of mutual support.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

Wilder Pérez Varona (WPV): My first question to you is about the issue of bureaucracy.

Before 1917 the issue of the socialist transition is one thing. The 1848 Revolution, the Paris Commune (which is a crucial episode, but of a momentary nature) were always limited to matters of theory, principles, projections (we know that Marx and Engels were reluctant to be very detailed about these projections). The Revolution of 1917 placed this problem of transition in another way, on to a different level; a level that involved essentially practical elements. One of them involved the issue of bureaucracy, which gradually appeared throughout the 1920s. On the issue of bureaucracy as it was being developed in those circumstances, how do you define the function of bureaucracy by according it an autonomous role of such a relevant actor at the level of the class triad: the working class / peasantry and the bourgeoisie? Why this important place? I would also like you to say something on the distinctness of “class”. You are cautious to talk about the bureaucracy as a class; however, other authors do.

Eric Toussaint (ET): Well, it is clear that the Russian experience and then that of the Soviet Union is, I would say, almost the second experience of attempting to take power to begin a transition to break away from capitalism. The first experience, the Paris Commune, lasted three months in 1871, was as such limited to the boundaries of Paris, isolated from French territory and attacked. So, it is clear that revolutionaries like Lenin, Trotsky, and other leaders of the Bolshevik Party had no other experiences as a point of reference and conceived the problem of transition, as I mentioned in my presentation,[1] in a triangular manner, that is, the need for an alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry to defeat the bourgeoisie and imperialism, and to resist imperialist aggression after the seizure of power.

And the issue of something like the subsistence and weight of the Tsarist state apparatus, which had a bureaucracy, and so the fight against bureaucracy and bureaucratism was rather conceived at the beginning as a struggle against something that was part of the past, of the Tsarist heritage. Within the framework of the development of the transition, from the first years, both Lenin and Trotsky and others were faced with a new problem that they had to start analysing and specifying, etc. Lenin did not manage to develop, I would say, a theory of bureaucracy because he died in January 1924, but what is absolutely true in the case of Lenin is that he, in several very clear and important interventions, complained about the bureaucratic deformation of the workers’ state in construction. Already in the debate on the unions in 1920-1921 he said that the workers state led by the Bolshevik Party had bureaucratic deformations and, therefore, the workers and their unions have to maintain a certain level of independence from the bureaucratically deformed workers state. That seems very important to me.

Another aspect of Lenin’s position at the end of 1922 and the beginning of 1923 is found in his criticism of an institution created by the same government, called the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (Rabkrin). Lenin said that this institution, which was supposed to serve in the fight against bureaucratism and where each citizen (proletarian or peasant) could go and complain about the bureaucratic behaviours, was itself totally bureaucratized. And that institution which had twelve thousand officials was directed by Joseph Stalin. Lenin proposed its complete reform. So, the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate which was supposed to fight against bureaucracy, actually helped bureaucratization and aggravated the problem in which the bureaucratically deformed workers’ state already found itself. It should also be mentioned, because it is little known, that Stalin did everything necessary to make it disappear publicly or even to prevent the public knowledge of Lenin’s letters saying that Stalin should be removed from the post of Party Secretary General.

That is in reference to Lenin. So, I said in my presentation that the problem of the transition to socialism was not limited to the bourgeoisie / proletariat / peasantry triangle, but there was a fourth actor which is the bureaucracy. And, the bureaucracy was not limited to being a legacy of the past – in Russia’s case of the Tsarist past – but emerged within the process of transition and consolidated itself as an actor that gradually gained confidence, in the course of the transition, of own its interests, and its interests (in the case of the Russian experience) began drifting away from the interests of both the proletariat and the peasantry and, in a way, the bourgeoisie. That is to say, the bureaucracy did not consciously aim for the restoration of capitalism and the power of the bourgeoisie. The bureaucracy was not, I would say, an aid to the capitalist restoration, but pursued its own interests and in that case its own interests were to have a monopoly of political power and use the state apparatus to direct, lead the process and, in some way, transform the party into an instrument of the bureaucracy, transform the unions into a transmission belt of bureaucratic power to the rank and file and have an economic development in which the proletariat and the peasantry can not really act in defence of their own interests, but begin to be (in the case of Russia) exploited by the bureaucracy. The bureaucracy headed by Stalin not only promoted a level of authoritarianism, but also of dictatorship over the working people of both the rural and the industrial sector or other state-controlled economic sectors.

But of course, the bureaucracy did not create a new ideology. The bureaucracy did not assert bourgeois ideology because it was officially being fought. So, the bureaucracy, in general, took the “official” socialist programme as an ideological garb and as a programme. It spoke in the name of deepening the process of building a socialist society as the bureaucracy did not create its own ideology. The latter would have implied distancing itself from the official program of the revolution. Somehow the bureaucracy operated underhandedly with its own interests. It could destroy both organizations and people who really wanted a deepening of the process. It could destroy them by officially resorting to the “defence of socialism”.

In the course of the 1920s, leaders like Christian Rakovsky, an important Bolshevik leader, revolutionary, and then Trotsky, began to understand the specificity of the bureaucracy (Christian Rakovsky,  The “Professional Dangers” of Power, August 1928, (see this). It took years to really understand what it was and in 1935 while writing the book, The Revolution Betrayed (see this), Trotsky arrives at a complete elaboration of the analysis of a bureaucratic state not only deformed, but degenerated. That is to say, the ties that those in power of the Soviet Union had with the revolution in 1935 had totally distanced themselves from those of the first years. There remained a society that was no more capitalist, there were no capitalists in the Soviet Union, but the process towards socialism, which implies democracy, workers control, forms of self-management, independent and free cultural expression, possibility of debate among revolutionaries, open debates –  all had been totally degraded and destroyed and there were no more these scopes. That is why Trotsky calling for a political revolution said that it was not so much a social revolution against property relations in the productive sector, it was not a revolution of the anti-capitalist type with social characteristics. A political revolution is necessary to allow the proletariat, the peasantry, all the workers who produce wealth, and the people in general, to regain political power. Hence the term “political revolution”. Hence the demands that are mainly political: freedom of expression, freedom of organization, worker control, self-management, pluralism of parties respecting the constitution.

Trotsky also launched a debate on extending the revolution or not. What good does it do? What is the purpose of the Communist International? Trotsky advocated the extension of the revolution to the international level and for permanent revolution. It is necessary to remember that a Communist International had been built, the 3^rd International founded in 1919, then led by Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek (Stalin at the beginning of the Communist International had no real presence, was not a leader known internationally to head the process of extending the revolution). It was only when Stalin succeeds in expelling Trotsky from the Communist Party in 1927 and expelling him from the country in 1929 that he begins to fully lead the Stalinised Third International and puts that International at the service of the interests of the very bureaucracy of the Soviet Union, and no longer to really extend the revolution internationally.

WPV: And despite the fact that the bureaucracy does not create its own ideology, nevertheless in practice (after the historical evolution of the so-called “real socialisms”), it actually managed the capitalist restoration in those countries. You also pointed out that they exploited the classes of peasants and workers, of producers in general. How do you, then, distinguish that bureaucratic management and exploitation with respect to capitalist exploitation; between the one carried out by the bureaucracy and the bourgeoisie?

ET: During that long period of bureaucratic rule, the same bureaucracy considered that the conditions were not yet ripe to shift to a process in which – as a social layer – it is transformed into a class for the private accumulation of wealth. Which is, I would say, typical of the capitalist class: a private accumulation of wealth.

But at the same time the lesson of the Soviet Union is that, after all, that bureaucracy that is not building a new type of system chooses the capitalist restoration and the bureaucrats themselves become capitalists. That is to say, in some way, they pass the frontier as a social layer and transform themselves into a capitalist class. As bureaucrats, before the capitalist restoration, they can accumulate levels of wealth, privileges, etc., but their privileges come from the management of a society in which large private property, the capitalist property, does not exists or is totally marginal and that does not have a great future. But it can last for decades till the given moment when the social layer (or a part, a fraction of the social layer) decides that it is time to restore capitalism. This is what happened in the late eighties and early nineties of the last century in the Soviet Union. Personally, I think that is what happened in China after the Deng Xiaoping reforms in the late eighties as well, and in Vietnam we also had such evolution.

Of course, the historical perspective could have been different, that is, a capacity of the producers (proletariat, peasantry or intellectual worker) to regain power through a political revolution, but that did not happen and it was not Gorbachev’s perspective. He spoke of Glasnot, in terms of freedom of political debates, but Perestroika was already introducing reforms in favour of progressive capitalist restoration. So that is the great challenge for a transitional society: how to face the problem of bureaucratisation and the consolidation of the bureaucracy as a dominant social layer in the leadership. Moreover, when the country is isolated, and has problems to really increase production, increase its endogenous development, and respond to the needs of workers.

WPV: To a large extent all the reforms of the 1980s were also made with the slogan of the democratisation of bureaucratised socialism. However, the history of the relationship between socialism and democracy has involved many conflicts, many contradictions, many misunderstandings …

ET: It is extremely complicated because (you know perfectly well in Cuba) the transition to socialism leads imperialism to a policy of aggression that can take various forms. Therefore, this aggressive attitude makes it complicated to have a total freedom of expression within the framework of the process. The same aggression produces reactions of limitation of expression, and so on; but of course, at any given moment the bureaucracy uses the external threat to keep political debates limited because it is not really interested to let people have political debates that could weaken their bureaucratic control over society.

So, the issue is very complex. I would say that it is clear that we have to face an external aggression that can take various forms, but we cannot, under this situation of aggression, limit in an exaggerated way the possibility of expression, of organisation, of protests, and so on.

In my presentation I made reference to Rosa Luxemburg, who fully supported the Bolshevik Revolution. As you know, she was murdered in January 1919 under orders of German Social Democratic ministers. In 1918 she wrote several letters to the Bolsheviks, which she made public, to tell “Comrades Lenin, Trotsky, beware of the measures that you are taking to limit the political liberties”, etc., because that can lead to a process that is going to be fatal for the Soviet revolution. I would say, what is the balance that we must find in the transition? And in that perspective we must also evaluate the attitude of Lenin, Trotsky and others …? What happened with Kronstadt, the sailors’ rebellion near Petrograd? What happened to the secret police (the Cheka), which had the possibility of extrajudicial execution processes, imprisonment of opponents? … the issue of trade unions? It is clear that we must be able to analyse this.

For us it is also important to analyse what happened in a country like Cuba. The whole libertarian issue in the 1960s in Cuba, then followed by the increase of the negative influence of the USSR bureaucracy from the economic difficulties after the 1970 harvest. We have to analyse and also draw lessons from the Cuban experience. It is also very important.

WPV: Of course we have to analyse the processes in their particular contexts, but we must also take into account certain limits in the prerogatives of the revolutionary government itself, let’s say, to assume the direction and control of the process. In this link between socialism and democracy, you are in favour of a dimensioning of democracy. In other words, it is not just democracy, it is not the democracy that has been hegemonised by capitalist perspectives, but a limited democracy (socialist or of any other kind, a workers’ democracy).

ET: For example, for me one of the lessons of the Russian experience is the need for a multi-party system saying that, within the framework of the transition, the existence of several parties should be allowed if they accept, respect, the socialist, workers’ constitution. In the transitional society towards socialism, one can not allow a pro-imperialist party calling for outside intervention, or supporting foreign intervention, or let it freely organize, recruit and prepare a pro-imperialist strategy. But there may be different parties, which have different visions of the transition, and which may coexist; and the people must be able, thanks to their political training and its development, to choose between several options. Of course, debates must be promoted and consultations convened on decisions to be taken.

I would also say that one of the lessons of the so-called societies with “real socialism” of the twentieth century is that, and it seems to me fundamental, at the economic level they must have an important sector of private economy, small private property. The small private property of land, the small private property of workshops, restaurants, shops. The Soviet experience also had an influence on Cuba, nationalising almost everything at any given moment, which damaged the process. I was here in 1993 when the freedom for self-employed to pursue their activities was announced and it seemed to me to be a good measure or the peasant free markets where peasants can come to the city and sell their products. That space should have been maintained in the Soviet Union, where the forced collectivisation imposed by Stalin from 1929 was a disaster, and had tremendous consequences on agriculture. That is to say, there is the question of political democracy, but also for me there must be a differentiation of statutes of producers and small private production, and small private property or private initiative must be guaranteed during the process.

In the case of China, Vietnam and the Soviet Union, which disappeared in 1991, followed by the Russian Federation, Ukraine, etc., there were no limits put on private property leading to a restoration of large private capitalist property. And bureaucrats or friends of the bureaucrats transformed themselves into oligarchs and accumulated tremendous wealth as new capitalists, even very aggressive towards the workers and robbing the nation of a large part of the wealth generated by the producers.

So the debate is not just about democracy, it is also about economic reforms and the social content of economic reforms.

WPV: On the question of limits to the market, the limits to private enterprise, in these socialist experiences (including Cuba) the discussion has often turned in terms of the Plan / Market relationship. In other words, to what extent the centrally planned state must intervene, must limit the expansion of the market. However, it is presupposed that there must be a central Plan; in general, it is something implicit, something that is not questioned. In relation to this, it can be assumed that the plan thus conceived is also one of the most effective instruments available to the bureaucracy, what is your opinion on the matter?

ET: I remember discussions in Cuba about the role of the market, etc., for example the debate that took place when Che was Minister of Industry.[2] In the 1990s the discussions about the role of the market came back, I remember very well, I was invited to all the events on globalisation between 1998 and 2008-2009. Fidel [Castro] participated in all the events that lasted three, four days, in the Palacio de las Convenciones with thousand or thousand two hundred Cuban and foreign guests, Fidel on several occasions asked exactly about the role of the market and the limits to be set to the market.[3]

Personally, my answer is as follows. It is fundamental to allow and support the small private initiative, the small agricultural production, which may even be a majority but small, that is, a majority of peasant families producing most of the agricultural production. It is one of the incentives to increase production and achieve food sovereignty, to also improve their standard of living thanks to increased production with the sale of more products, it is a powerful incentive to achieve a high level of production and quality because the farmer knows that if he does not produce quality products he will not be able to sell them on the market or to the state.

So, I think that at that level there were serious errors in the conduct of the agricultural policy of many countries called socialist, where they wanted to nationalise or impose cooperatives that were not really efficient. But, at the same time, for me, planning is fundamental and I would tell you that in modern economies it is even more important. Let’s imagine for a moment a socialist revolution in Europe or the United States. Planning is fundamental, how can you imagine the fight against climate change, if you are not planning to put an end to power stations with coal, oil or gas, and change it for forms of renewable energy? That has to be planned, because it is not the local communities, the families, who can make that decision, because the production of energy at this time is on a large scale. Therefore, combating climate change has a relationship with what I said about family production using organic methods of agricultural production, in order to combat climate change or to limit the effects of ecological crisis that is already underway.

So, planning is important. The issue is how to ensure that the people, the citizens, can influence decisions about planning. And for me the answer is in any way, it can happen through the internet, the media we have, television, and so on. Several options can be presented to the people to arrive at a decision, if we take such an option we can foresee that it will have such consequences on their living conditions, if we take another option, it would have these negative effects; allow the debate on these options, and at a given moment, that people pronounce on options taking into considerations the priorities of the Five-Year Plan, for the decade, and so on.

For me the lesson of the so-called socialist experiences of the last century, is that it was a planning led by bureaucratic apparatuses that decided what was the most interesting and imposed priorities. On the contrary, it would have been necessary to discuss different options. So for me it is not necessary to finish with the planning, it is necessary to democratise the planning.

We need a new socialist, self-managed, ecologist, socialist, feminist option. We have to advocate for that perspective.

WPV: Returning, finally, to the setting of the event, which has been the opportunity to interview you, what does it mean for you to hold in Cuba this international event about Trotsky? What importance do you attach to dialoguing about Trotsky today?

ET: This conference about Trotsky is a very positive initiative for me. It is an academic conference, not a forum for political organizations to recruit, but a debate on many different aspects of the writings, contribution and struggle of Leon Trotsky. During the conference the struggle of Trotsky against the bureaucracy, the struggle for the extension of the revolution, the struggle to face the external aggression was analysed. Trotsky was the head of the Red Army who managed to defeat the counter-revolution and external aggression in 1919-1920 in Soviet Russia, we must not forget it. Trotsky’s contributions on the problems of daily life, his contributions on literature, culture (it was an important subject in this conference), the reality of the Soviet society of the twenties were also analysed during the conference …

And, why is it important to do it in Cuba? Because Cuba is, I would say, the only country of what were called “socialist countries” where capitalism has not been restored. There is a fundamental debate for Cuba on how, taking into account the lessons of the last century, the internal struggles in the Soviet Union between the 1920s and 1930s, on the one hand; and the recent experiences of capitalist restoration in Russia, in China, and in other countries, how to position themselves as Cubans, in a sovereign way, and direct the way to the future. Of course it is complicated because the external aggression continues. We have Trump, who is restricting the small space that had been opened during Obama’s mandate for Cuba, which was somewhat limited but indicated an opening. Now with Trump they are closing spaces again.

As an internationalist, I have always supported the Cuban revolution, I have supported the fight against the blockade imposed on Cuba. And to see that there is a space in Cuba to rethink Trotsky’s contribution, the meaning that this contribution can have in today’s debates in Cuba, is a joy for me. There are dozens of comrades here who are revolutionaries in their countries, who may have different positions, different visions of Trotskyism, there are of course different visions of Marxism, different visions of Leninism, Fidelismo, Guevarism, there is not just one vision. There are discussions, but I can tell you that I feel the enthusiasm of comrades who have been fighting for decades and who consider this initiative in Cuba to be very positive.

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This interview was originally published on 31 May 2019 by the Cuban blog.

Eric Toussaint is a historian and political scientist who completed his Ph.D. at the universities of Paris VIII and Liège, is the spokesperson of the CADTM International, and sits on the Scientific Council of ATTAC France.  He is the author of Bankocracy (2015); The Life and Crimes of an Exemplary Man (2014); Glance in the Rear View Mirror. Neoliberal Ideology From its Origins to the Present, Haymarket books, Chicago, 2012 (see here), etc.

Wilder Pérez Varona is deputy director of the Institute of Philosophy of La Havana. 

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was a widespread sense that liberal capitalism had triumphed in the battle of ideas, and that socialism as a plausible alternative was pretty much dead. But the many crises of contemporary capitalism – obscene levels of economic inequality, looming ecological disaster, the rise of the racist and anti-democratic populist right, the new threats of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state – threaten dystopia, an unbearable future. In response, the idea of socialism has been re-discovered by a layer of activists struggling for radical change, especially young people.

But what is socialism? If we are against capitalism, what are we for? Is the socialism we have in mind a more robust version of social democracy, despite its past accommodations to a capitalist economy, or a renewal of past visions of a post-capitalist economy and society, or of utopia? These questions are being debated in recent books and left journals, which will help shape contemporary progressive politics.

As underscored in a new book by Bhaskar Sunkara, the editor of the American magazine, Jacobin, democratic socialists believe that the ultimate goal of the left is to build a post-capitalist society and economy (The Socialist Manifesto, Basic Books, 2019). But, unlike Leninists, they recognize that building a socialist society will be a protracted process, as opposed to a single revolutionary rupture. It will involve building a mass movement, including a renewed labour movement and extra-parliamentary politics. However, such a transformation will require working through the institutions of the liberal democratic state, with a strong commitment to the rule of law, civil rights, and democratic and political rights such as freedom of speech and multi-party elections. This process can be thought of as extending democracy from the political to the social and economic sphere, including through the extension of social and economic rights and expansion of public and other collective forms of ownership, as well as creating more democratic work-places. Socialism is about creating a society in which all individuals are free to develop their full potential, as opposed to a single collective goal.

The Trajectories of Democratic Socialism

Unlike many social democrats, democratic socialists think that our long-term goal is more than a market-based capitalist economy, even one with a large public sector, strong unions, and a redistributive welfare state. In the social democratic heyday of the post-War period, enormous advances were indeed made toward what the sociologist Gosta Esping-Anderson termed the “decommodification of labour,” and the lives of working people were transformed in the process. Many services, notably health, education, culture and recreation, and housing came to be delivered outside of the market on the basis of citizen entitlement rather than ability to pay. Sustained near full employment plus unemployment insurance, public pensions, child benefits, and training programs gave working people a substantial degree of security in what remained a capitalist labour market. Unions played a major (albeit junior) co-government role in the workplace. Corporate economic power was subject to effective regulation in the public interest.

In the context of the steady growth of wages and social programs and genuine economic security, it is little wonder that many social democrats said that our historic goals had been essentially achieved well short of the original goal of socialization of the means of production. In Canada, echoing debates in Britain and Germany, the Winnipeg Declaration that preceded the formation of the New Democratic Party (NDP) in 1961 replaced the avowedly anti-capitalist Regina Manifesto of the CCF, explicitly limiting the goals of the left to a mixed economy and a full-employment welfare state. Public ownership and state economic planning, which was the common understanding of the left until the age of post-War mass affluence, came to be widely seen as an anachronistic means of making social progress.

Yet this perspective neglected the dependence of the social democratic compromise upon a unique set of circumstances – the experience of the Great Depression and Fascism that had discredited the right, as well as international economic arrangements after the War that allowed states to make their own choices free of the pressures of global capital mobility. And, as emphasized by Sunkara, strong economic growth and healthy profits underpinned the post-War class compromise, securing the cooperation of capital for an extended period. At least temporarily, social democrats did not feel they paid a price for leaving investment and the levers of economic power in the hands of private corporations. This changed when profitability came to be threatened by rising real wages and slumping growth in the 1970s.

The neoliberal era that began in the early 1980s saw corporations and the right attack the post-War social democratic settlement, putting the left on the defensive, at best. Many social democrats such as Tony Blair in the UK, Gerhard Schröder in Germany and liberal democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in the United States became, in effect, slightly progressive neoliberals. They embraced global “free trade” and capital mobility as opposed to regulated national economies, celebrated the market, imposed austerity, and no longer had any interest in radical redistribution or fundamental institutional change beyond a shallow commitment to greater equality of opportunity and less poverty.

This bastard strand of social democracy has been hugely discredited by the inexorable rise of economic inequality to appalling levels, the concentration of enormous wealth and power in the hands of the uber-rich, the stagnation of wages and living standards for the vast majority of working people, increased economic insecurity, and the rise of precarious and low-paid work. To that dismal litany should be added the failure of existing governments of almost all stripes to deal at all seriously with catastrophic climate change and the wider ecological crisis. Saving the planet, it is safe to say, will involve far more comprehensive economic planning than is possible under corporate dominated capitalism. On top of the inequality and ecological crises, many fear the threat of automation and the end of work due to the rise of machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), and robots. Technological change has been used to further entrench corporate monopolies, especially over so-called intellectual property, further increasing corporate power and threatening democracy through control of big data and technologies of mass surveillance.

The Threat of Dystopia

There is a rich tradition of dystopian fiction and film that has anticipated barely liveable futures as current trends in twenty-first century capitalism inexorably unfold. Think of Blade Runner, a world in which the robots have escaped human control, the planet has been badly damaged by climate change, and huge inequalities of wealth and power are the norm. The movie Elysium describes a world in which the rich have severed themselves off from an almost unlivable and brutal world, enjoying lives of material and psychic abundance, unlike the great mass of humanity. The reality of surveillance capitalism and the all-knowing state has rekindled the dark vision of George Orwell’s 1984 in which the individual is crushed by the omniscient and all-powerful state.

Shoshana Zuboff argues that we are already well beyond Orwellian dystopia due to big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and the explosion of computing capacity to analyze huge quantities of information (The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Public Affairs, 2019). “Big Other” is made up of a handful of monopolistic and unscrupulous corporate giants such as Google and Facebook that know as much and more about us, their users, than we do ourselves. They know our interests, our attitudes, our emotions, our movements, and our purchases. These technologies were first developed to target ads more effectively to consumers based on search behaviour and social media posts, but companies have gone well beyond informed prediction to actually mould and shape behaviour. In China, the surveillance state has used facial recognition and other technologies to monitor individuals in order to give them a “social credit” score, with high marks being needed to access travel privileges. Surveillance capitalism driven by profit-seeking giants is creating a “sanitized tyranny,” relatively unconstrained by the state, which uses this knowledge base for its own national security purposes as was revealed to the world by Edward Snowden.

“Big Other” increasingly monitors us at work, as in the electronic bracelets worn by Amazon warehouse workers, and is being used to gather information on our formerly private lives. Our phones with their cameras, microphones and GPS systems track us in real time and potentially listen in on us in our homes along with our smart televisions. Apps we download and whose terms of service we approve routinely without reading them are often deeply intrusive, giving third parties access to our data. Insurance contracts are being written that give us lower premiums in return for real time monitoring of our driving behaviour, setting the stage for possible monitoring of our health-related behaviour in return for health insurance.

Employers often contract out hiring decisions to third-party companies, which then draw on vast stores of personal data to vet candidates. And work is being transformed to make us more compatible with machine intelligence. Proposals for so-called Smart Cities seek to capture the totality of our lives, supposedly in return for greater convenience. The internet of things can go so far as to deprive us of control of functions in our home environment, just as self-driving cars threaten surveillance of where we are and control of our movements. Facebook algorithms have been used to target messages that do not just predict behaviour but also shape what we think and what we do, including the ability to send us “fake news” to influence our votes. Zuboff thinks we are well on our way to a “hive machine” in which individual and human choice shrink to the margins, and machine intelligence and logic prevail.

Plausible Utopias

By contrast, we lack plausible utopias in which humanity has responded successfully to the great challenges of our time. Past socialist utopias in fiction such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward and William Morris’s News from Nowhere were best-sellers at the heyday of industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century, presenting a highly desirable post-capitalist world of material abundance, equality, and social harmony. They certainly presented socialism, in the sense of common ownership of property and equal shares for all, as both desirable and possible, and consistent with human nature, which was held to be co-operative and capable of transcending a purely individualist ethos. In truth, both novels are poor, overly didactic works of literature, and shared many Victorian beliefs on gender and other issues which ring badly today. But at least they conveyed a vision that made socialism plausible and tangible. A few contemporary “social science fiction” writers such as Cory Doctorow (for example, in his recent novel Walkaway) have suggested that new technology and automation could be used to build a much better world, but there is a well-founded sense that, in the wake of the demise of Communism and the exhaustion of mainstream social democracy, we lack a vision of socialism as a viable utopia.

Writing in 1916 amidst the horrors of the First World War, the famous German-Polish socialist Rosa Luxemburg argued that humanity faced a stark choice between socialism and barbarism. The latter, in the form of fascism, was only narrowly defeated, setting the stage for social democracy. Naomi Klein has similarly argued that the real choice we face today is between the status quo and radical change, given the scale of the ecological crisis and its deep relationship to capitalism, and given that growing economic inequality is deeply rooted in capitalist economic dynamics. Many commentators and activists have come to accept the socialist argument that deep equality is impossible if a small elite control economic, and thus political, power.

An especially provocative and succinct recent book by Peter Frase (Four Futures: Life After Capitalism, Verso 2016) argues that in a world confronted by multiple crises caused by or associated with twenty-first century capitalism – inequality, the ecological crisis and corporate-driven automation and surveillance – we must choose between a socialist future and dystopia. More specifically, he argues that massive technological and organizational change, artificial intelligence, and the rise of the robots, as well as the new connecting information technologies, open up the possibility of socialism, doing away with bad jobs, and enabling much richer lives for all through a fair sharing of the fruits of possible abundance. But, he argues, new technologies under the sway of capitalism threaten to create ever more unequal, brutal, and ecologically unsustainable societies.

Frase, who is also associated with the American left journal Jacobin, describes four possible futures based on social science and speculative “social science fiction.” These are not predictions but informative outlines of possible social trajectories which will be determined by politics – how we collectively deal with inequality, automation, and the ecological crisis.

Four Possible Futures

The first dystopia, “rentierism” is the most plausible continuation of the path on which we are now embarked. The production problem is well on its way to being solved through rapidly advancing productivity as was envisaged by Marx and also by Keynes in his famous essay on economic possibilities for our grand-children. However, the capitalist elite extract and control huge and rising economic rents or surplus profits based upon control of markets that fuel compounding wealth and income inequality, as has long been argued by economist Joseph Stiglitz. (See his new book People, Power and Profits, Norton, 2019). As Keynes also argued, mature capitalism opens up the way to the dominance of “rentiers” who extract surplus profits while making no real productive contribution to society.

The key issue is who will own the robots and the intellectual property rights that generate these rents. Meanwhile, technological and organizational innovations progressively destroy many good jobs and create cut-throat competition for the jobs that cannot be automated out of existence. Needed labour shrinks to a small creative class, guard labour, needed to control dissent, and servants pandering to the needs of the rich. This creates a chronic tendency for wages to fall, and thus, for demand to stagnate.

“Exterminism” is an even worse dystopia, marked by extreme hierarchy and scarcity. As in Elysium, a small elite live in luxury in the ultimate gated community above the Earth, while the great mass live horrible lives on a poisoned planet. One is reminded of the large estates in New Zealand and Argentina that are apparently being purchased by Silicon Valley tech billionaires as possible bolt-holes. The central problematic of exterminism is that “abundance and freedom from work are possible for a minority, but material limits make it impossible to extend the same way of life to everyone. At the same time, automation has rendered masses of workers superfluous. The result is a society of surveillance, repression, and incarceration always threatening to tip over into one of outright genocide.”

Frase’s two more utopian visions pre-suppose the political overthrow of the global elite, a project that could itself have dystopian consequences. “If the rich won’t relinquish their privileges voluntarily, they would have to be expropriated by force, and such struggles can have dire consequences for both sides.”

Under communism, based on abundance and lack of hierarchy, life would cease to be centred around wage labour, and the expansion of free time would allow for individual self-realization, which Marx thought of as the realm of freedom, while Keynes spoke of the possibility for all to lead full and meaningful lives. Non-alienated labour would still exist to manage the machines and engage in activities like “deep caring,” but there would be a radical decommodification of labour through a universal basic income that would force the desirable automation of routinized jobs and provide all with a decent and substantively equal standard of living. This is not, however, the end of history if only because class relations are not the only source of hierarchy and political debate and conflict.

Socialism based on continued scarcity with equality plus ecological sensitivity seems a more plausible trajectory for the foreseeable future. Frase argues that we can have an egalitarian solution to the ecological crisis, but this will require planning, a much more limited role for markets, and radical re-distribution to end large concentrations of wealth and income. Again, he envisages a non-residual basic income, combined with a major expansion of collective consumption through public services. “If we can tackle the inequalities that make our current market societies so brutal, we might have a chance of deploying market mechanisms to organize consumption in an ecologically limited world, allowing all of us to come through capitalism and climate change as equals.” Socialism is not utopia, but it can still be a world of freedom.

Plausible Socialism

Frase’s interest in a plausible socialism is but one example of a significant revival of interest in sketching out just what a post-capitalist society would look like starting from where we sit today. As widely noted, classical Marxism offers surprisingly little. Marx had no developed alternative model in mind. Indeed, he poured scorn on utopian socialist blueprints and “recipes for the kitchens of the future.” Writing early in the expansion of industrial capitalism, he expected socialism to arise in a distant future when capitalism had exhausted its incredible productive potential and capitalist class relations had become a fetter on the advance of humanity to a better world. He did not even theorize much about politics, though he anticipated that the struggles for socialism and political democracy would be closely intertwined and that the latter would set the ground for the former in countries such as Britain.

In the twentieth century, socialism in the sense of a post-capitalist economy came to largely mean political democracy plus national economic planning through nationalization of at least the commanding heights of the economy, as in the CCF program and the platform on which the Labour government of Britain was elected in 1945. Nationalization was partly intended to end concentrated wealth, and also to set the basis for planning the economy to meet human needs.

Alternatively, socialism came to be conflated with Stalinist central economic planning, which was not only brutal, inhumane, and profoundly anti-democratic, but also failed to deliver the goods and emerged as a serious rival to liberal democratic capitalism in terms of growth (though we should note that Communism played the major role in defeating fascism, and that it achieved some economic successes in the Khrushchev era as the Gulag was dismantled). There are many cautionary lessons to be drawn from the Soviet experience, not least that democracy is incompatible with highly centralized state planning and a fully socialized economy that concentrates power in the hands of a small elite.

Given that radical change must necessarily come through the democratic political process anchored in specific countries, it is hard to envisage a socialism that does not involve a significant expansion of the economic role of existing states, including socialization of the “commanding heights” of finance and concentrated corporate power. To be sure, the reassertion of democratic control over capital will have to take place at both the international and the national level, especially in countries like Canada, which are deeply implicated in global markets and are very far from the relative self-sufficiency that enables purely national economic planning. But the traditional emphasis of the left upon expanding the economic role of the state remains highly relevant.

Mention should also be made of visions and even blueprints of a “bottom up” socialism based upon workers’ councils. There was a minority tradition in the British Labour Party in support of greater worker control of the nationalized industries, but in the event, only ownership changed while the managers remained in place. The dominant tendency on the left has been to think of a division of labour between strong unions and/or workers’ councils at the workplace playing a subordinate role compared to a social democratic or socialist party working through the state to build a socialized economy. Some socialist intellectuals have outlined various models of participatory and democratic socialist planning and models of a pluralistic market-based socialism on a national level. In the 1970s, Tony Benn in the UK and Rudolf Meidner in Sweden belonged to a current that saw moving to collective ownership and democratic socialist planning as an alternative to the stagflation crisis. Meidner proposed that ownership and the investment process be ultimately socialized by gradually transferring ownership from private capital to pools of socially-owned pension funds, while Benn advocated some combination of worker control at the workplace and an expansion of public ownership to take over “the commanding heights.”

As Erik Olin Wright has noted, some socialists in recent times have advocated much greater civil-society and democratic control of the post-capitalist economy as opposed to, or in combination with, centralized state control.

In this broad tradition of thought, there has been interest in expanding non-state but also non-capitalist forms of ownership such as worker and consumer co-operatives, not-for-profit enterprises and credit unions, social enterprises, pools of pension funds, and community and municipally-based corporations. Also, there have been advocates of civil-society regulation as opposed to state regulation of large corporations by expanding the role of workers and other “stakeholders” through reforms to corporate governance. Wright talks of “voyages of exploration” in which these kinds of examples and experiments expand the economic role of civil society in the interstices of a capitalist economy. Encouragingly, there has recently been a significant revival of interest in thinking about new institutions and practices to move beyond capitalism and old-style centralized state socialism. Most notably, the Labour Party in the United Kingdom has debated new forms of social ownership – favouring the expansion of co-operatives and not just public enterprises, and calling for much greater worker control at the workplace through the expansion of works councils and a gradual transfer of minority equity stakes in large enterprises to workers. (See Economics for the Many, edited by John McDonnell, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer under Jeremy Corbyn.)

A recent book by Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski makes the convincing and important argument that the technological and organizational sophistication of contemporary capitalism has laid the ground for much less reliance on the so-called free market to organize production (People’s Republic of Walmart – How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism, Verso, 2019). The key imperative is to move from production for profit to production to meet human needs based on common ownership and much more equal incomes. The conventional wisdom has been that markets are needed to match demand and supply efficiently and that state planners simply could not process the vast amounts of information needed to reach optimal prices. But, as the economist Ronald Coase noted long ago in the 1930s, large firms often choose to produce goods and services in-house rather than buy on the market and exist as islands of planning to minimize transaction costs. Further, capitalist economies have been planned in times of war, and innovation has long involved large scale public investment and planning.

Phillips and Rozworski bring this story up to date, showing that our economy is planned on a massive scale but by monopolistic corporations in search of profits. For example, Walmart uses big data, advanced logistics, and long-term relationships with suppliers to ensure that stocks on the shelf are continuously replenished. Manufacturing suppliers respond to sales almost minute by minute. Amazon uses advanced logistics and robots in warehouses to achieve super fast delivery times. These firms have gained dominance not just through cut-throat pricing and brutalized working conditions, which are definitely part of the story, but also through massive investments in information technology. They actually shape demand in real time through closely targeted messages to consumers. The authors conclude that “(p)lanning is already everywhere, but rather than functioning as a building block of a rational economy based on need, it is woven into an irrational system of market forces driven by profit. Planning works. Just not yet for us.”

Sam Gindin (“Socialism for Realists,” Catalyst, Volume 2, Issue 3, Fall 2018) has provided an important sketch of what democratic economic planning might look like. To my mind, he correctly suggests that we need planning plus markets. The state must necessarily play a major role in a planned economy, perhaps including through socialization of finance and through large state-owned enterprises. But there is a role for community-based small enterprises to provide variety to consumers and to produce high quality goods and services in local communities/economies. And there will and should be a labour market in the sense that individuals choose where to work in response to incentives, even while we decommodify labour through comprehensive public services and income supports that substantially reduce reliance on wages. The scale of necessary wage differentials will have to be determined.

He argues that nationalization is not enough. Even if we own the means of production, perhaps including the information technology giants, social choices will have to be made about what to produce. We do not live in a post-scarcity world and will have to choose, for example, between increasing consumption on the one hand and expanding public services and/or reducing working-time on the other. Of necessity, these choices will be political. We must also choose how to produce, to the degree that there is some trade-off between productivity and new technologies, and healthy working conditions. We will also have to balance consumption with ecological imperatives.

Gindin argues that socialism must combine social ownership with popular/workers’ control. A more democratic economy will demand the development of new capacities and the ability to make real choices at the level of the community and the workplace and not just at the level of the state. But this involves many important tensions. Worker co-ops or other collectives must somehow fit into a broader economic plan, but they will have a tendency to promote their own specific interests. Too much decentralization of economic decision-making to even post-capitalist enterprises can generate new inequalities if we are not careful. At the same time, we have to think about democratizing political processes that are now centralized, for example, by bringing together producers and users of public services like healthcare. Could democratic social media allow for greater deliberation and decentralization of political decision-making?

The fact that the left is beginning to think about a plausible socialism is indeed welcome in a context where the status quo is leading us to dystopia. But we need much more debate and discussion about the new world we want to build. That is what utopias are for.

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Ottawa faces a dilemma. How far are Trudeau’s Liberals prepared to go in squeezing Cuba? Can Canadian corporations with interests on the island restrain the most pro-US, anti-socialist, elements of the ruling class?

Recently, the Canadian Embassy in Havana closed its Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship section. Now most Cubans wanting to visit Canada or get work/study permits will have to travel to a Canadian embassy in another country to submit their documents. In some cases Cubans will have to travel to another country at least twice to submit information to enter Canada. The draconian measure has already undercut cultural exchange and family visits, as described in a Toronto Star op-ed titled “Canada closes a door on Cuban culture”.

It’s rare for an embassy to simply eliminate visa processing, but what’s prompted this measure is the stuff of science fiction. Canada’s embassy staff was cut in half in January after diplomats became ill following a mysterious ailment that felled US diplomats sent to Cuba after Donald Trump’s election. Four months after the first US diplomats (apparently) became ill US ambassador Jeffrey DeLaurentis met his Canadian, British and French counterparts to ask if any of their staff were sick. According to a recent New York Times Magazine story, “none knew of any similar experiences afflicting their officials in Cuba. But after the Canadian ambassador notified his staff, 27 officials and family members there asked to be tested. Twelve were found to be suffering from a variety of symptoms, similar to those experienced by the Americans.”

With theories ranging from “mass hysteria” to the sounds of “Indies short-tailed crickets” to an “outbreak of functional disorders”, the medical questions remains largely unresolved. The politics of the affair are far clearer. In response, the Trump Administration withdrew most of its embassy staff in Havana and expelled Cuban diplomats from Washington. They’ve rolled back measures the Obama Administration instituted to re-engage with Cuba and recently implemented an extreme measure even the George W. Bush administration shied away from.

Ottawa has followed along partly because it’s committed to overthrowing Venezuela’s government and an important talking point of the anti-Nicolás Maduro coalition is that Havana is propping him up. On May 3 Justin Trudeau called Cuban president Miguel Díaz-Canel to pressure him to join Ottawa’s effort to oust President Maduro. The release noted,

“the Prime Minister, on behalf of the Lima Group [of countries hostile to Maduro], underscored the desire to see free and fair elections and the constitution upheld in Venezuela.”

Four days later Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland added to the diplomatic pressure on Havana. She told reporters,

“Cuba needs to not be part of the problem in Venezuela, but become part of the solution.”

A week later Freeland visited Cuba to discuss Venezuela.

On Tuesday Freeland talked with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo about Venezuela and Cuba. Afterwards the State Department tweeted,

“Secretary Pompeo spoke with Canada’s Foreign Minister Freeland to discuss ongoing efforts to restore democracy in Venezuela. The Secretary and Foreign Minister agreed to continue working together to press the Cuban regime to provide for a democratic and prosperous future for the people of Cuba.”

Ottawa supports putting pressure on Cuba in the hopes of further isolating/demonizing the Maduro government. But, the Trudeau government is simultaneously uncomfortable with how the US campaign against Cuba threatens the interests of some Canadian-owned businesses.

The other subject atop the agenda when Freeland traveled to Havana was Washington’s decision to allow lawsuits for property confiscated after the 1959 Cuban revolution. The Trump Administration recently activated a section of the Helms-Burton Act that permits Cubans and US citizens to sue foreign companies doing business in Cuba over property nationalized decades ago. The move could trigger billions of dollars in legal claims in US courts against Canadian and European businesses operating on the island.

Obviously, Canadian firms that extract Cuban minerals and deliver over a million vacationers to the Caribbean country each year don’t want to be sued in US courts. They want Ottawa’s backing, but the Trudeau government’s response to Washington’s move has been relatively muted. This speaks to Trudeau/Freeland’s commitment to overthrowing Venezuela’s government.

But, it also reflects the broader history of Canada-Cuba ties. Despite the hullabaloo around Ottawa’s seemingly cordial relations with Havana, the reality is more complicated than often presented. Similar to Venezuela today, Ottawa has previously aligned with US fear-mongering about the “Cuban menace” in Latin America and elsewhere. Even Prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who famously declared “viva Castro” during a trip to that country in 1976, denounced (highly altruistic) Cuban efforts to defend newly independent Angola from apartheid South Africa’s invasion. In response, Trudeau stated, “Canada disapproves with horror [of] participation of Cuban troops in Africa” and later terminated the Canadian International Development Agency’s small aid program in Cuba as a result.

After the 1959 Cuban revolution Ottawa never broke off diplomatic relations, even though most other countries in the hemisphere did. Three Nights in Havana explains part of why Ottawa maintained diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba: “Recently declassified State Department documents have revealed that, far from encouraging Canada to support the embargo, the United States secretly urged Diefenbaker to maintain normal relations because it was thought that Canada would be well positioned to gather intelligence on the island.” Washington was okay with Canada’s continued relations with the island. It simply wanted assurances, which were promptly given, that Canada wouldn’t take over the trade the US lost. For their part, Canadian business interests in the country, which were sizable, were generally less hostile to the revolution since they were mostly compensated when their operations were nationalized. Still, the more ideological elements of corporate Canada have always preferred the Cuban model didn’t exist.

If a Canadian company is sued in the US for operating in Cuba Ottawa will face greater pressure to push back on Washington. If simultaneously the Venezuelan government remains, Ottawa’s ability to sustain its position against Cuba and Venezuela is likely to become even more difficult.

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Featured image: Chrystia Freeland and Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez (Source: author)

As of June 5, U.S. citizens will be prohibited from making group educational and cultural trips known as “people to people” travel to Cuba, Secretary of Commerce Steve Mnuchin of the U.S. Treasury Department confirmed in a statement Tuesday.

According to the commercial director at Cuba’s tourism ministry, Michel Bernal, the island nation received about 250,000 U.S. visitors in the first four months of 2019, which represented a 93.5 percent increase from the same period in 2018.

For the time being, commercial airline flights and travel for university groups, academic research, journalism and professional meetings will continue to be allowed.

In response to the new sanctions, Cuba Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez wrote on Twitter that he “strongly rejects new sanctions announced by the U.S., which further restrict  U.S. citizens’ travels to Cuba, aimed at suffocating the economy and harming the living standards of Cubans in order to forcefully obtain political concessions. Once again they will fail.”

The “strategic decision to reverse the relation of sanctions and other restrictions” limiting Cuba-bound travellers was fueled, allegedly, by the belief that the foreign government’s principles play a “destabilizing role in the Western Hemisphere.”​​​​​​​ However, Mnuchin admitted that the decision was just one of many tied to the battle being waged against Venezuela’s government — which is supported by Cuba, Nicaragua, China, and Russia, among others. ​​​​​​​

#Cuba will not be frightened or distracted with new threats and restrictions. Work, creativity, efforts and resistance is our response. They haven't been able to suffocate us. They won't be able to stop us. #SomosCuba #SomosContinuidad pic.twitter.com/TC85FLICaQ

— Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez (@DiazCanelB) June 4, 2019

James Williams, president of Engage Cuba, an activist organization that seeks to end the 60-year old blockade, criticized the Trump administration of using Cuba as a political pawn and policing where Americans travel.

“Our core freedoms ought to no longer be held hostage by politicians for bare partisanship,” he said, adding that “Cubans should not be used as political pawns. They are human beings … As of late’s news is highly opposed for the Cuban folk, particularly the burgeoning Cuban personal sector, who rely on American vacationers to toughen their firms and families.”

This latest sanction is just one of dozens imposed against the Caribbean nation since President Donald Trump rose to office and reimposed the 1950’s economic and tourism embargo.

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In the same week that more migrant lives were lost at sea, the EU’s migration policy in the Mediterranean has been brought to the attention of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

It emerged on June 3 that the ICC had received a legal submission calling for the EU and some of its member states to face prosecution for enacting migration policies “intended to sacrifice the lives of migrants in distress at sea”.

The sharply worded submission was brought by international lawyers who have asked the ICC to open an investigation into EU migration policies and whether a prosecution could be mounted under international law.

The lawyers assessed European migration policies in the Mediterranean over recent years, paying particular attention to the end of Italy’s military-humanitarian rescue operation Mare Nostrum in 2014 and the subsequent shift to policies focused on deterrence. Their submission claims that this shift toward deterring migrants from crossing the Mediterranean to reach the EU resulted in:

(i) the deaths by drowning of thousands of migrants, ii) the refoulement of tens of thousands of migrants attempting to flee Libya, and iii) complicity in the subsequent crimes of deportation, murder, imprisonment, enslavement, torture, rape, persecution and other inhuman acts, taking place in Libyan detention camps and torture houses.

According to the ICC submission, these “crimes against humanity” were consciously perpetrated by the EU and member states in the belief that sacrificing migrant lives at sea would stop other migrants from making risky voyages across the Mediterranean.

Sending migrants back to Libya

The authors assert that European authorities have “channeled their policies” of deterrence through the so-called Libyan coastguard. Interceptions of migrant boats by the Libyan authorities have resulted in tens of thousands of people being sent back, or refouled, to Libya in recent years – and my research is showing they are increasingly being co-ordinated by Italian and EU authorities from the air.

I’ve have been told by people working for NGO search and research organisations, that a greater presence of European helicopters and aeroplanes patrolling the Mediterranean, for example those of the EU military operation Eunavfor Med, have been observed over the Mediterranean in the last few months. These aircraft have reportedly informed the Libyan coastguard about the whereabouts of migrants boats so that they can intercept them.

This increased aerial involvement of Eunavfor Med aircraft and helicopters stems from a European Council decision in late March 2019 to suspend the deployment of the operation’s ships, but strengthen surveillance by air and reinforce its support for the Libyan coastguard.

The result is that migrants are being forcibly returned to Libya, an active war-zone, where they are held in inhumane detention camps. NGOs have documented that many migrants have been exposed to systematic forms of torture, sexual violence, and extortion at these camps.

The submission to the ICC highlights clearly what migrants and their supporters continue to experience and witness on a daily basis: the violent consequences of European border and security policies that have turned the Mediterranean Sea into the deadliest border in the world.

In response to the ICC submission, an EU spokesperson highlighted the EU’s respect for human rights and international and European conventions, emphasising that its: “Priority has always been and will continue to be protecting lives and ensuring humane and dignified treatment of everyone throughout the migratory routes”. But the reality at sea is a different one – European non-assistance has become routine in the Mediterranean.

Spotted from the air

On June 2, a shipwreck occurred off the coast of Libya leaving dozens of people presumed dead. This will further raise the Mediterranean death toll that has surpassed 500 fatalities in 2019 already, despite a dramatic decrease in migrant crossings. On the same day, the survivors of another Mediterranean voyage testified after disembarking in Genoa, that they had lost travel companions at sea – despite the fact that Italian and other authorities had been alerted to their odyssey and were monitoring it.

After spotting the migrant boat with about 100 people on board on May 29 and relaying their distress, the civil reconnaissance aircraft Moonbird, run by the NGO Sea-Watch, observed that the Italian navy vessel P490 didn’t carry out a rescue operation despite being in the vicinity of the boat in distress. In the evening that day, the Alarm Phone, an activist hotline supporting migrants in distress at sea, of which I am a member, was also alerted to this boat.

Despite raising awareness about the emergency situation in public and directly with European coastguards, it took nearly a day until a rescue operation was launched. Because of this delay, the migrants, including many children, had to endure a second night at sea.

The daily dramas in the Mediterranean are not the result of a lack of European engagement at sea. As the submission to the ICC highlights, they are the consequence of European migration policies that have actively “turned the central Mediterranean to the world’s deadliest migration route.”

Decades of research has shown that the unabated criminalisation of migration has led to an increase in migrant fatalities around the world as those seeking to escape by crossing borders have had to revert to longer, more expensive, and more dangerous migration routes. Those dying in the Mediterranean today are the inevitable result of Europe “protecting” its borders.

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Maurice Stierl is a Leverhulme Research Fellow, University of Warwick

Featured image: Migrant boat spotted by Moonbird aircraft on May 29 in the Mediterranean. Moonbird/Sea-Watch

Tensions continue to grow in the Persian Gulf.

In early May, the US deployed the USS Abraham Lincoln strike group as well as the USS Arlington amphibious transport dock, additional marines, amphibious vehicles, rotary aircraft, Patriot missiles and a bomber strike force to the region claiming that this is a needed measure to deter Iran, which allegedly prepares to attack US troops and infrastructure.

On May 21, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan claimed that the US had succeeded in putting the potential of Iranian attacks “on hold.” The declared victory over the mythical “Iranian threats” did not stop the US from a further military buildup.

On May 25, President Donald Trump declared that the US is sending 1,500 troops, 12 fighter jets, manned and unmanned surveillance aircraft, and a number of military engineers to counter Iran.

Trump also approved an $8 billion sale of precision guided missiles and other military support to Saudi Arabia, using a legal loophole. The Trump administration declared an emergency to bypass Congress, citing the need to deter what it called “the malign influence” of Iran.

The forces deployment was accompanied with a new round of fear-mongering propaganda.

On May 24, Adm. Michael Gilday, director of the Joint Staff, issued a statement saying  that “the leadership of Iran at the highest level” ordered a spate of disruptive attacks including those targeting an Aramco Saudi oil pipeline, pumping facilities, the recent sabotage of four tankers near the Strait of Hormuz, as well as a May 19 lone rocket attack on the area near the US embassy in Baghdad. Besides this, he repeated speculations about “credible reports that Iranian proxy groups intend to attack U.S. personnel in the Middle East”. Nonetheless, Adm. Gilday offered nothing that may look like hard proof to confirm these claims.

On May 28, National Security Adviser John Bolton blamed “naval mines almost certainly from Iran” for the incident with oil tankers off the UAE.

On May 30, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman went on an anti-Iran tirade during an emergency meeting of Arab leaders hosted in Mecca. He described the Islamic Republic as the greatest threat to global security for the past four decades, repeated US-Israeli accusations regarding the alleged Iranian missile and nuclear activities and urged the US-led bloc to use “all means to stop the Iranian regime” from its regional “interference”.

Despite the war-like rhetoric of the US and its allies and the recent deployment of additional forces in the region, Washington seems to be not ready for a direct confrontation with Iran right now. The USS Abraham Lincoln strike group remains outside the Persian Gulf, in the Arabian Sea, demonstrating that the Washington establishment respects the Iranian military capabilities and understands that the US Navy might lose face if the carrier were to make an attempt at demonstrating US naval power too close to Iranian shores.

Iran, in its own turn, stressed that it is not going to step back under these kinds of threats. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said that his country would not be coerced into new negotiations under economic sanctions and threat of military action.

“I favor talks and diplomacy but under current conditions, I do not accept it, as today’s situation is not suitable for talks and our choice is resistance only,” Rouhani said.

In the coming months, the US-Iranian confrontation in the diplomatic, economic and military spheres will continue to develop. Threats and aggressive actions towards Iran will not go without response. Nonetheless, it is unlikely that Teheran would move to instigate a hot conflict by its own accord, if no red lines, such as a direct attack on Iranian vital infrastructure or oil shipping lines, are crossed.

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Featured image is from Veterans Today

Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason has just written to the Editor-in-Chief of the British Medical Journal and the British Medical Association Council Chairman, Chaand Nagpaul.

Her purpose is to not only draw attention to the impact of biocides, not least that of glyphosate, on health and the environment but also to bring attention to the corruption that allows this to continue.

Along with her letter, she enclosed a 13-page document. Readers can access the fully referenced document here: European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage. It is worth reading in full to appreciate the conflicts of interest and the corruption that has led to the rise in certain illnesses and the destruction of the natural environment.

By way of a brief summary, the key points raised by Dr Mason and her claims include the following:

• The European Chemicals Agency classifies glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage. There has been a massive increase in the use of glyphosate in recent years. An increase in cataracts has been verified by epidemiological studies in England and by a 2016 WHO report.
• There are shockingly high levels of weed killer in UK breakfast cereals. After testing these cereals at the Health Research Institute in Iowa, Dr Fagan, director of the centre, said: “These results are consistently concerning. The levels consumed in a single daily helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is sufficient to put the person’s glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver disease in rats (and likely in people).”
• The amount of glyphosate in tap water in South Wales has increased tenfold in a very short period.
• Glyphosate is largely responsible for the destruction of biodiversity and an increase in the prevalence of many serious health conditions.
• There are massive conflicts of interest throughout various agencies in the EU that ensure harmful agrochemicals like glyphosate come to market and remain there.
• In fact, a global industry has emerged to give ‘advice’ on biocides regulation. This results in regulatory bodies effectively working to further the commercial interests of the pesticide industry.
• The European Food Safety Authority sanctioned increased maximum pesticide residue levels (MRL) at the request of industry (Monsanto in this case, to 100 times the previously authorised MRL).
• The Washington-based International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) is used by corporate backers to counter public health policies. Its members have occupied key positions on EU and UN regulatory panels. It is, however, an industry lobby group that masquerades as a scientific health charity. The ILSI describes its mission as “pursuing objectivity, clarity and reproducibility” to “benefit the public good”. But researchers from the University of Cambridge, Bocconi University in Milan, and the US Right to Know campaign assessed over 17,000 pages of documents under US freedom of information laws to present evidence of influence peddling.
• ILSI Vice-President, Prof Alan Boobis, is currently the Chairman of the UK Committee on Toxicity of Chemicals in Food, Consumer Products and the Environment (CoT) (2015-2021). He was directly responsible for authorising chemicals such as glyphosate, chlorothalonil, clothianidin and chlorpyrifos that are destroying human health and creating a crisis in biodiversity. His group and others have authorised glyphosate repeatedly. He and David Coggon, the previous Chairman of CoT (2008-2015), were appointed as experts on Science Advice for Policy by European Academies (SAPEA), a group allied with the agrochemical industry and is fighting for higher pesticide exposure.
• Jean-Claude Juncker the President of the European Commission who, against a petition from more than 1.5 million European citizens, re-authorised glyphosate in December 2017 for a further five years. He set up the Science Advisory Mechanism, aiming to put industry-friendly personnel on various committees.

There are many more claims presented by Rosemary Mason in her report. But the take-home point is that the reality of the agrochemical industry is masked by well-funded public relations machinery (which includes bodies like the UK’s Science Media Centre). The industry also subverts official agencies and regulatory bodies and supports prolific lobby organisations and (‘public scientists’) which masquerade as objective institutions.

When such organisations or figures are exposed, they frequently cry foul and attempt to portray any exposure of their lack of integrity as constituting an attack on science itself; no doubt many readers will be familiar with the ‘anti-science’ epithet.

The industry resorts to such measures as it knows its products are harmful and cannot stand up to proper public scrutiny. And under a system of sustainable agroecology that can produce plentiful, nutritious food, it also knows its markets would disappear.

Motivated by fraud and fear of the truth emerging, it therefore tries to persuade politicians and the public that the world would starve without it and its products. It co-opts agencies and officials by various means and embeds itself within the policy agenda, both nationally and internationally.

And now, with increasingly saturated markets in the West, from Africa to India the industry seeks to colonise new regions and countries where it attempts to roll out its business model. Whether, say, through trade agreements, the WTO or strings-attached loans, this again involves capturing the policy ground and then trapping farmers on a financially lucrative chemical (-GMO)-treadmill, regardless of the consequences for farmers’ livelihoods, food, public health and the environment.

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

Três italianos foram convidados este ano para a reunião do grupo Bilderberg, realizada em Montreux, na Suíça, de 30 de Maio a 2 de Junho. Ao lado de Lilli Gruber, a apresentadora televisiva do La7, agora  convidada permanente do Bilderberg, foi convidado outro jornalista: Stefano Feltri, Vice-Director do ‘Fatto Quotidiano’, dirigido por Marco Travaglio. O “terceiro homem” escolhido pelo Bilderberg é Matteo Renzi, senador do Partido Democrata, antigo Presidente do Conselho.

O grupo Bilderberg, constituído formalmente em 1954, por iniciativa de “cidadãos eminentes” europeus e americanos, foi na verdade criado pela CIA e pelo serviço secreto britânico MI6 para apoiar a NATO contra a URSS. Após a Guerra Fria, manteve a mesma função de apoio à estratégia USA/NATO.

Às suas reuniões são convidados a participar todos os anos, quase exclusivamente da Europa Ocidental e dos Estados Unidos, cerca de 130 representantes do mundo político, económico e militar, dos meios de comunicação mediática de destaque e dos serviços secretos, que participam formalmente a título pessoal. Reúnem-se à porta fechada, cada ano num país diferente, em hotéis de luxo blindados por sólidos sistemas de segurança militar. Não é admitido nenhum jornalista ou observador, nem é publicado qualquer comunicado. Os participantes estão sujeitos à regra do silêncio: não podem sequer revelar a identidade dos oradores que lhes forneceram certas informações (perante a proclamada “transparência”). Só sabemos que este ano falaram principalmente da Rússia e da China, de sistemas espaciais, de uma ordem estratégica estável, do futuro do capitalismo. As presenças mais destacadas eram, como de costume, as dos Estados Unidos:

Henry Kissinger, “figura histórica” do grupo ao lado do banqueiro David Rockfeller (fundador de Bilderberg e da Trilateral, falecido em 2017); Mike Pompeo, antigo Director da CIA e actual Secretário de Estado; David Petraeus, Antigo General da CIA [3]; Jared Kushner, Conselheiro (e genro) do Presidente Trump para o Médio Oriente e amigo íntimo do Primeiro Ministro israelita Netanyahu.  A estes segue-se Jens Stoltenberg, Secretário Geral da NATO, que recebeu um segundo mandato pelos serviços aos EUA.

Durante quatro dias, em reuniões secretas multilaterais e bilaterais, esses e outros representantes das grandes potências (abertas e ocultas) do Ocidente, fortaleceram e expandiram a rede de contactos que lhes permite influenciar as políticas governamentais e a opinião pública.

Os resultados são visíveis. No “Fatto Quotidiano”, Stefano Feltri defende o grupo Bilderberg explicando que as suas reuniões são realizadas à porta fechada “para criar um contexto de debate franco e aberto, precisamente porque não é institucional”, e expõe “os múltiplos teóricos da conspiração” que espalham “lendas” sobre o grupo Bilderberg e também sobre a Comissão Trilateral.

Não diz que, entre “os múltiplos teóricos da conspiração”, está o Magistrado Ferdinando Imposimato, Presidente Honorário do Supremo Tribunal de Cassação (falecido em 2018), que resumiu, assim, o resultado das investigações realizadas: “O grupo Bilderberg é um dos responsáveis da estratégia de tensão e, portanto, também dos massacres” a partir do sucedido na Piazza Fontana, em concerto com a CIA e com os serviços secretos italianos, com a Gladio e com os grupos neofascistas, com a P2 e com as lojas maçónicas USA, nas bases da NATO.”

Neste prestigiado clube também foi admitido Matteo Renzi. Excluindo que o convidaram pelos seus dotes de analista, resta a hipótese de que os poderosos de Bilderberg estão a preparar, de maneira oculta, algumas operações políticas em Itália. Pedimos desculpa a Feltri de nos juntarmos também aos “múltiplos teóricos da conspiração”.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

Le lunghe mani del gruppo Bildenberg

ilmanifesto.it

Tradutora: Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

BILDERBERG MEETING 2019

Montreux, 30 May – 2 June 2019

BOARD

Castries, Henri de (FRA), Chairman, Steering Committee; Chairman, Institut Montaigne
Kravis, Marie-Josée (USA), President, American Friends of Bilderberg Inc.; Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
Halberstadt, Victor (NLD), Chairman Foundation Bilderberg Meetings; Professor of Economics, Leiden University
Achleitner, Paul M. (DEU), Treasurer Foundation Bilderberg Meetings; Chairman Supervisory Board, Deutsche Bank AG

PARTICIPANTS

Abrams, Stacey (USA), Founder and Chair, Fair Fight
Adonis, Andrew (GBR), Member, House of Lords
Albers, Isabel (BEL), Editorial Director, De Tijd / L’Echo
Altman, Roger C. (USA), Founder and Senior Chairman, Evercore
Arbour, Louise (CAN), Senior Counsel, Borden Ladner Gervais LLP
Arrimadas, Inés (ESP), Party Leader, Ciudadanos
Azoulay, Audrey (INT), Director-General, UNESCO
Baker, James H. (USA), Director, Office of Net Assessment, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Balta, Evren (TUR), Associate Professor of Political Science, Özyegin University
Barbizet, Patricia (FRA), Chairwoman and CEO, Temaris & Associés
Barbot, Estela (PRT), Member of the Board and Audit Committee, REN (Redes Energéticas Nacionais)
Barroso, José Manuel (PRT), Chairman, Goldman Sachs International; Former President, European Commission

Barton, Dominic (CAN), Senior Partner and former Global Managing Partner, McKinsey & Company
Beaune, Clément (FRA), Adviser Europe and G20, Office of the President of the Republic of France
Boos, Hans-Christian (DEU), CEO and Founder, Arago GmbH
Bostrom, Nick (UK), Director, Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University
Botín, Ana P. (ESP), Group Executive Chair, Banco Santander
Brandtzæg, Svein Richard (NOR), Chairman, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Brende, Børge (NOR), President, World Economic Forum
Buberl, Thomas (FRA), CEO, AXA
Buitenweg, Kathalijne (NLD), MP, Green Party
Caine, Patrice (FRA), Chairman and CEO, Thales Group
Carney, Mark J. (GBR), Governor, Bank of England
Casado, Pablo (ESP), President, Partido Popular
Ceviköz, Ahmet Ünal (TUR), MP, Republican People’s Party (CHP)
Champagne, François Philippe (CAN), Minister of Infrastructure and Communities
Cohen, Jared (USA), Founder and CEO, Jigsaw, Alphabet Inc.
Croiset van Uchelen, Arnold (NLD), Partner, Allen & Overy LLP
Daniels, Matthew (USA), New space and technology projects, Office of the Secretary of Defense
Davignon, Etienne (BEL), Minister of State
Demiralp, Selva (TUR), Professor of Economics, Koç University
Donohoe, Paschal (IRL), Minister for Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform
Döpfner, Mathias (DEU), Chairman and CEO, Axel Springer SE
Ellis, James O. (USA), Chairman, Users’ Advisory Group, National Space Council
Feltri, Stefano (ITA), Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Il Fatto Quotidiano
Ferguson, Niall (USA), Milbank Family Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Findsen, Lars (DNK), Director, Danish Defence Intelligence Service
Fleming, Jeremy (GBR), Director, British Government Communications Headquarters
Garton Ash, Timothy (GBR), Professor of European Studies, Oxford University
Gnodde, Richard J. (IRL), CEO, Goldman Sachs International
Godement, François (FRA), Senior Adviser for Asia, Institut Montaigne
Grant, Adam M. (USA), Saul P. Steinberg Professor of Management, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
Gruber, Lilli (ITA), Editor-in-Chief and Anchor «Otto e mezzo», La7 TV
Hanappi-Egger, Edeltraud (AUT), Rector, Vienna University of Economics and Business
Hedegaard, Connie (DNK), Chair, KR Foundation; Former European Commissioner
Henry, Mary Kay (USA), International President, Service Employees International Union
Hirayama, Martina (CHE), State Secretary for Education, Research and Innovation
Hobson, Mellody (USA), President, Ariel Investments LLC
Hoffman, Reid (USA), Co-Founder, LinkedIn; Partner, Greylock Partners
Hoffmann, André (CHE), Vice-Chairman, Roche Holding Ltd.
Jordan, Jr., Vernon E. (USA), Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC
Jost, Sonja (DEU), CEO, DexLeChem
Kaag, Sigrid (NLD), Minister for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation
Karp, Alex (USA), CEO, Palantir Technologies
Kerameus, Niki K. (GRC), MP; Partner, Kerameus & Partners
Kissinger, Henry A. (USA), Chairman, Kissinger Associates Inc.
Koç, Ömer (TUR), Chairman, Koç Holding A.S.
Kotkin, Stephen (USA), Professor in History and International Affairs, Princeton University
Kramp-Karrenbauer, Annegret (DEU), Leader, CDU
Krastev, Ivan (BUL), Chairman, Centre for Liberal Strategies
Kravis, Henry R. (USA), Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
Kristersson, Ulf (SWE), Leader of the Moderate Party
Kudelski, André (CHE), Chairman and CEO, Kudelski Group
Kushner, Jared (USA), Senior Advisor to the President, The White House
Le Maire, Bruno (FRA), Minister of Finance
Leyen, Ursula von der (DEU), Federal Minister of Defence
Leysen, Thomas (BEL), Chairman, KBC Group and Umicore
Liikanen, Erkki (FIN), Chairman, IFRS Trustees; Helsinki Graduate School of Economics
Lund, Helge (GBR), Chairman, BP plc; Chairman, Novo Nordisk AS
Maurer, Ueli (CHE), President of the Swiss Federation and Federal Councillor of Finance
Mazur, Sara (SWE), Director, Investor AB
McArdle, Megan (USA), Columnist, The Washington Post
McCaskill, Claire (USA), Former Senator; Analyst, NBC News
Medina, Fernando (PRT), Mayor of Lisbon
Micklethwait, John (USA), Editor-in-Chief, Bloomberg LP
Minton Beddoes, Zanny (GBR), Editor-in-Chief, The Economist
Monzón, Javier (ESP), Chairman, PRISA
Mundie, Craig J. (USA), President, Mundie & Associates
Nadella, Satya (USA), CEO, Microsoft
Netherlands, His Majesty the King of the (NLD)
Nora, Dominique (FRA), Managing Editor, L’Obs
O’Leary, Michael (IRL), CEO, Ryanair D.A.C.
Pagoulatos, George (GRC), Vice-President of ELIAMEP, Professor; Athens University of Economics
Papalexopoulos, Dimitri (GRC), CEO, TITAN Cement Company S.A.
Petraeus, David H. (USA), Chairman, KKR Global Institute
Pienkowska, Jolanta (POL), Anchor woman, journalist
Pottinger, Matthew (USA), Senior Director, National Security Council
Pouyanné, Patrick (FRA), Chairman and CEO, Total S.A.
Ratas, Jüri (EST), Prime Minister
Renzi, Matteo (ITA), Former Prime Minister; Senator, Senate of the Italian Republic
Rockström, Johan (SWE), Director, Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
Rubin, Robert E. (USA), Co-Chairman Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations; Former Treasury Secretary
Rutte, Mark (NLD), Prime Minister
Sabia, Michael (CAN), President and CEO, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec
Sanger, David E. (USA), National Security Correspondent, The New York Times
Sarts, Janis (INT), Director, NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence
Sawers, John (GBR), Executive Chairman, Newbridge Advisory
Schadlow, Nadia (USA), Senior Fellow, Hudson Institute
Schmidt, Eric E. (USA), Technical Advisor, Alphabet Inc.
Scholten, Rudolf (AUT), President, Bruno Kreisky Forum for International Dialogue
Seres, Silvija (NOR), Independent Investor
Shafik, Minouche (GBR), Director, The London School of Economics and Political Science
Sikorski, Radoslaw (POL), MP, European Parliament
Singer, Peter Warren (USA), Strategist, New America
Sitti, Metin (TUR), Professor, Koç University; Director, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems
Snyder, Timothy (USA), Richard C. Levin Professor of History, Yale University
Solhjell, Bård Vegar (NOR), CEO, WWF – Norway
Stoltenberg, Jens (INT), Secretary General, NATO
Suleyman, Mustafa (GBR), Co-Founder, Deepmind
Supino, Pietro (CHE), Publisher and Chairman, Tamedia Group
Teuteberg, Linda (DEU), General Secretary, Free Democratic Party
Thiam, Tidjane (CHE), CEO, Credit Suisse Group AG
Thiel, Peter (USA), President, Thiel Capital
Trzaskowski, Rafal (POL), Mayor of Warsaw
Tucker, Mark (GBR), Group Chairman, HSBC Holding plc
Tugendhat, Tom (GBR), MP, Conservative Party
Turpin, Matthew (USA), Director for China, National Security Council
Uhl, Jessica (NLD), CFO and Exectuive Director, Royal Dutch Shell plc
Vestergaard Knudsen, Ulrik (DNK), Deputy Secretary-General, OECD
Walker, Darren (USA), President, Ford Foundation
Wallenberg, Marcus (SWE), Chairman, Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken AB
Wolf, Martin H. (GBR), Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times
Zeiler, Gerhard (AUT), Chief Revenue Officer, WarnerMedia
Zetsche, Dieter (DEU), Former Chairman, Daimler AG

Temas abordados:

1  – A ordem estratégica estável.

2  – O que se segue na Europa?

3  – Mudança Climática e Sustentabilidade.

4  – China.

5  – Rússia.

6  – O futuro do capitalismo.

7  – O Brexit.

8  – A ética da Inteligência Artificial.

9  – O armamento (weaponization) dos meios de comunicação mediática.

10 – A importância do Espaço.

11 – Ameaças cibernéticas.

This month’s SCO and G20 Summits will see Eurasia first make a pretense of unity in Bishkek prior to Trump exploiting its preexisting fault lines in Osaka, with the US attempting to play Russia, India, and China off against one another in order to divide and rule the supercontinent.

The month of June will see two very important summits taking place in Eurasia, the first of which is the SCO one in Bishkek from 13-14 while the second is the G20 in Osaka from 28-29. The SCO Summit will see Russia, India, and China make a pretense of unity in spite of their many preexisting fault lines — practically all of which have to do with Russia and China’s concerns with India’s “Indo–Pacific” alliance with the US — while the G20 Summit will see Trump attempt to exploit these points of contention in a bold bid to divide and rule the supercontinent. It’s noteworthy that US Defense Secretary Shanahan just spoke exuberantly about his country’s military alliance with India at the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore, specifically remarking that the two Great Powers are “increasing the scope, complexity, and frequency of [their] military engagements” while sharing the summary of the US’ newly released “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” with his audience. This can’t help but deepen the distrust that Russia and China feel towards their notional BRICS and SCO “partner” India ahead of the SCO Summit, which might have also been one of the reasons why he did that.

During the upcoming gathering in the Kyrgyz capital, it can be expected that India will try to emphasize economic cooperation with its counterparts (apart from the global pivot state of Pakistan) in order to improve its hand for negotiating with the US on trade after Washington global pivot state New Delhi’s participation in the duty-free “Generalized System of Preferences”, which is part of Trump’s coercive measures to squeeze more concessions out of Modi. In the interests of having at least some positive outcome of their summit, all three leaders might agree to put aside the issue of India’s alliance with the America in order to talk trade. Whatever superficial progress is made on this front, however, would just be a bluff that the US is already well aware of since it’s highly doubtful that New Delhi would abandon its trade talks with Washington at the same time as it’s strengthening its military alliance with it. Trump, being the successful billionaire businessman that he is, would obviously see through this charade even if Presidents Putin and Xi might temporarily be fooled by Modi if he plays to their wishful thinking expectations of “balancing” between the unipolar and multipolar blocs.

The positive photo-ops that will expectedly emerge from the SCO Summit will probably soon be forgotten two weeks later once the G20 Summit begins. The overarching theme will inevitably be the US-Chinese “trade war“, and Trump — being the masterful perception manager that he is — will likely try to stage his own positive photo-ops with Putin and Modi in order to strongly contrast with the negative one that he might have with Xi, therefore causing China to “lose face” on none other than the soil of its historic Japanese rival, to say nothing of the visible wedge that he’ll try to drive between the People’s Republic and Russia & India after their superficially “successful” SCO Summit. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Russia is negotiating a “New Detente” with the US at the same time as India is unprecedentedly allying with it, so China is left as the “odd man out” of the three in being the only one that’s refusing to cede any strategic ground to their shared interlocutor. This doesn’t mean that the US will automatically turn all three of these Eurasian Great Powers against one another, but just that it’s obvious that this is its grand strategic intent and could pave the way for more power plays in the future.

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This article was originally published on Oriental Review.

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.

With attribution to Mark Twain’s remark about false reports of his death, a Wall Street Journal report on Russia withdrawing defense support to Venezuela is greatly exaggerated. See below.

Trump is Exhibit A proof that all politicians lie, and nothing they say can be believed. Once a serial liar, always one. On Monday, he tweeted the following fake news:

“Russia has informed us that they have removed most of their people from Venezuela.”

No such report exists. See below.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

According to a June 2 Journal report, Russia “withdr(ew) key defense advisors from Venezuela,” adding:

“Russian state defense contractor Rostec,” working with Venezuela’s military, “cut its staff in (the country) to just a few dozen from about 1,000 (for) lack of new contracts (and claim that Maduro) no longer has…cash” to pay Rostec — citing an unnamed source allegedly “close” to Russia’s Defense Ministry.

Another unnamed source allegedly “close” to the Kremlin claimed Rostec “believe(s) the fight is being lost,” adding:

“Since the Venezuelans aren’t paying, why should Rostec stay there and foot the bill on its own.”

A Rostec statement refutes the Journal’s report, saying  “(t)he composition of (its presence in Venezuela) has not changed for many years.”

“Technical specialists periodically come to the country to carry out repairs and maintenance of previously supplied machines.”

“The figures (reported by the WSJ) have been exaggerated tens of times.” According to Russian arms producer Rosoboronexport, Moscow and Maduro’s government intend to increase cooperation, adding:

Russian companies “remain committed to deepening cooperation with the Ministry of Defense and other departments of the Venezuelan government.”

Hundreds of Russian military and security personnel remain in Venezuela. Nothing suggests Vladimir Putin is drawing down Kremlin support for the Bolivarian Republic and Maduro as its legitimate president.

Responding to the Journal’s Sunday report, Moscow’s envoy to the Bolivarian Republic Vladimir Zaemsky refuted the claim on Monday, saying:

“This is another piece of (fake) ‘news’ which has absolutely nothing to do with reality. Work is being carried out in accordance with existing obligations, and there is no talk of any cuts.”

Based on a bilateral 2001 agreement, Russia is involved with Venezuela cooperatively, a mutually beneficial alliance unacceptable US demands to leave the country won’t change.

Weeks earlier, the Kremlin rejected the Trump regime’s demand that Russian personnel leave. In recent months, Russian and Venezuelan officials discussed deepening bilateral ties, including ways to counter and circumvent illegal US sanctions Moscow rejects.

Both countries have been working on ways to increase Venezuelan oil exports, imports of food and medicines, along with protecting the nation’s electrical grid and other infrastructure from further US orchestrated sabotage.

Their ruling authorities have been deepening cooperation on science and technology, aerospace, defense, agriculture, electricity, oil, industrial development, and other areas of Venezuela’s economy.

Weeks earlier, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said

“(w)e are concerned over the continuing actions by the United States toward the countries of the Latin American region. We see the sanctions as absolutely unlawful and illegitimate.”

“We will oppose them. Venezuela and Cuba are our allies and strategic partners in the region. We will do everything we can to let them feel our support.”

Around the same time, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said Moscow will defend its interests in Venezuela with “all mechanisms available to us.”

Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak and his Venezuelan counterpart Manuel Quevedo have been working on ways to increase state oil company PDVSA’s exports.

Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez said the Bolivarian Republic “continue(s) strengthening our relations with Russia” politically, economically, financially, on trade, and militarily.

Earlier, Rosoboronexport said the company and other Russian enterprises are “partaking in the Russian-Venezuelan military-technical cooperation, remain committed to deepening partnership with the defense ministry and other government bodies of Venezuela.”

Russian minister counselor at its embassy in Caracas, Alexey Seredin, said relations “between (both countries) are excellent. At the moment, we are working to strengthen cooperation.”

The record of Russian Federation relations with allied countries shows Kremlin support, cooperation, and good faith are firm.

The Journal’s report claiming otherwise about Russia’s military involvement in Venezuela lacks credibility.

Establishment media are militantly hostile to Bolivarian social democracy and Maduro’s legitimacy as president.

Since imposter Guaido illegally self-declared himself interim president in January, they’ve waged intense propaganda war on Venezuela, vilifying Maduro, ignoring his legitimacy, supporting unlawful regime change.

They’re virtual imperial press agents for the diabolical plot to remove him and transform the Bolivarian Republic into a US client state — supporting what demands denunciation.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from Moscow Times

Virtually every major Western corporate media outlet and a who’s who of pundits circulated a blatantly false report that North Korean nuclear negotiators were killed and imprisoned, exposing their non-existent editorial standards on Official Enemies.

***

The corporate media’s editorial standards for reporting on Official Enemies of the US government, especially North Korea, are as low as ever. Blatantly false stories are regularly circulated by leading news outlets without any kind of accountability.

In the latest example of fake news disseminated without any hint of skepticism by America’s top journalists, virtually every major media outlet reported that a senior North Korean official named Kim Yong-chol was supposedly forced into a “labor camp,” as part of a larger deadly “purge.”

Two days later, that same official turned up alive at a public art performance, seated next to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Bloomberg kicked off the fake news frenzy on May 30 by publishing a report claiming, “North Korea executed its former top nuclear envoy to the U.S. and four other foreign ministry officials in March after a failed summit between Kim and Donald Trump.”

Bloomberg’s source for this false story was South Korea’s far-right newspaper Chosun Ilbo, which has a long history of fabricating stories about North Korea. In turn, Chosun Ilbo’s story was based on a single unidentified source.

That is to say, the fake report obediently echoed by the Western press corps was based entirely on the claims of one unnamed person.

This obvious lack of evidence did not stop credulous reporters from jumping on the sensationalist propaganda. The false story was circulated by The New York Times, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, The Daily Beast, Fox News, CNBC, TIME, ABC News, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, VICE, Rolling Stone, The Independent, The Washington Times, The New York Post, HuffPost, France 24, The Japan Times, Haaretz, The Times of Israel, the US government’s Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, and many more.

North Korea has executed its former top nuclear envoy Kim Hyok Chol as part of a deadly purge after the collapse of the #TrumpKimSummit in Vietnam, Chosun reports #북한

More @business: https://t.co/gTEgsDoJq2 pic.twitter.com/ttWYx77aU1

— TicToc by Bloomberg (@tictoc) May 31, 2019

Twitter even went out of its way to create a shareable Moment based on the fake news.

North Korea charged and executed multiple government officials involved in February’s Trump-Kim summit, South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reports. https://t.co/61QbQL0nk0

— Twitter Moments (@TwitterMoments) May 30, 2019

Careful readers (only a small percentage of total readers) might have noticed that Bloomberg quietly admitted in its original report, “Previous South Korean media reports about senior North Korean officials being executed following the talks have proven false.” But this concession didn’t stop the rest of the corporate media from running with this fake story.

On June 2, the commentariat’s favorite fable fell apart: North Korea’s nuclear negotiator Kim Yong-chol showed up on state media, sitting a few seats away from Kim Jong-un at a musical performance.

The Associated Press, Reuters, The New York Times, and CNN quickly published new reports making light of the news  — but none of these contained mea culpas or official retractions.

As of June 3, the vast majority of blatantly false reports published in dozens of outlets remain uncorrected.

The Grayzone has documented the long history of the US corporate media printing cartoonish lies about North Korea(officially known as the DPRK), especially in the form of execution stories that are quickly debunked. (The New York Times once even cited an obvious parody Twitter account as if it were the DPRK’s real state media.)

A few actual experts on Korea did raise concerns about the latest hoax. Among them was veteran reporter Tim Shorrock, who has spent decades reporting on Korea, and who joined prominent peace activists Christine Ahn and Simone Chun in questioning the bogus story.

Incredible that Bloomberg would run this story based on one source quoted by the completely irresponsible and rarely accurate Chosun Ilbo. I don't care if it is South Korea's largest newspaper, as the Post constantly refers to it. It has a history of false stories. https://t.co/EU2BKYXiOa

— Tim Shorrock (@TimothyS) May 31, 2019

Shorrock cautioned on May 31,

“It’s important to keep tabs on this one, which if uncorroborated could turn out to be one of the biggest fiascos in journalism history.”

As usual, Shorrock was right — but he was an outlier whose critical thinking was drowned out by a mob of mainstream pundits.

Below is a list of some of the top journalists in the US corporate media and political class, including ostensible “progressives,” who spread this blatantly false story. Many of these self-styled progressives promoted the hoax in hopes of embarrassing Donald Trump for embarking on a historic peace process with the DPRK.

Journalists and activists who spread the fake news

Chris Hayes, a media celebrity and MSNBC host who used the fake news to get in a cheap joke about Trump

Good God. https://t.co/BF1LIZwLXu

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 30, 2019

Anxiously hoping the President doesn't tweet something about how the DPRK's envoy deserved what he got and Kim Jong Un is great.

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) May 30, 2019

Julia Ioffe, a prominent journalist, GQ Magazine correspondent, and so-called “Russia expert”

"He speaks and his people sit up at attention. I want my people to do the same." Trump on Kim Jong Unhttps://t.co/PUDNn8GveP

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) May 31, 2019

Yashar Ali, a contributor to New York Magazine and the Huffington Post and liberal mini-celebrity

2. Remember this moment?

Well the North Korean official standing next to POTUS, Kim Yong Chol, is now in a North Korean labor camp on the orders of Kim Jong-Un pic.twitter.com/siV3HKUbOj

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) May 30, 2019

Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times and an analyst for MSNBC

North Korea executed its special envoy to the US by firing squad in March and put four other Foreign Ministry officials to death as part of a purge following the failure of Kim Jong-un’s summit with Trump in Hanoi, South Korean paper reports. @choesanghun https://t.co/eZalCusUo6

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) May 31, 2019

Jon Cooper, the chairman of the Democratic Coalition Against Trump, which proudly boasts, “We help run #TheResistance”

OUCH: North Korea has reportedly executed its special envoy to the U.S. and four other Foreign Ministry officials after the February U.S.-North Korea summit in Hanoi didn’t work out. https://t.co/kzppQNkzKC

— Jon Cooper (@joncoopertweets) May 31, 2019

Katie Phang, a legal contributor for NBC and MSNBC

🚨 Trump’s bestie, Kim Jong Un, has “executed [his] former top nuclear envoy with the U.S. along with four other foreign ministry officials in March after a failed summit” with Donald Trump in Vietnam.
https://t.co/30e95ZUpkr

— Katie Phang (@KatiePhang) May 31, 2019

David Roberts, a reporter for Vox

"North Korea executed its former top nuclear envoy to the U.S. and four other foreign ministry officials in March after a failed summit between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump, South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper reported." https://t.co/bjUBz7AmDt

— David Roberts (@drvox) June 2, 2019

Caroline Orr, a neoliberal “Resistance” influencer who rose to prominence by pumping up the Russiagate narrative

Holy crap. North Korean envoy Kim Hyok Chol was reportedly executed over the failed summit between Kim Jong Un & Trump. Four other NK foreign ministry officials were reportedly executed, too, and a top aide for Kim Jong Un was punished with hard labor. https://t.co/4r8Xfu1RSf

— Caroline Orr (@RVAwonk) May 30, 2019

Oz Katerji, a rabid pro-military intervention regime-change activist dedicated to harassing anti-imperialists online

A North Korea official was executed in March over the Trump-Kim summit, Chosun Ibo newspaper reports https://t.co/SFuTIKnBfL via @bpolitics

— Oz Katerji (@OzKaterji) May 30, 2019

Josh Smith, a Reuters senior correspondent covering North and South Korea

South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reports that North Korea has executed several officials involved in working level talks before the Hanoi Trump-Kim summit, including Kim Hyok Chol the former ambassador to Spain who (briefly now it seems) served as Steve Biegun’s counterpart

— Josh Smith (@joshjonsmith) May 30, 2019

Vivian Salama, a White House reporter for the Wall Street Journal, who previously worked as AP’s Baghdad bureau chief

😳😳😳😳 North Korea executed Kim Hyok Chol, its special envoy to the United States, and foreign ministry officials who carried out working-level negotiations for the second US-North Korea summit in February, holding them responsible for its collapse. https://t.co/4LAaQDJuME

— Vivian Salama (@vmsalama) May 30, 2019

Matt Bevan, the host and writer of ABC News Australia’s “Russia, If You’re Listening” podcast

Kim Jong-in executed the officials who organised his failed summit with Trump in Hanoi.

Interested to see what Trump says about his good friend Kim after this. https://t.co/zTm74Jwdn6

— Matt Bevan 🎙 (@MatthewBevan) May 30, 2019

Kaitlan Collins, a CNN White House reporter

"North Korea executed Kim Hyok Chol, its special envoy to the United States, and foreign ministry officials who carried out working-level negotiations for the second U.S.-North Korea summit, a South Korean newspaper reported on Friday." https://t.co/NgsQaMnRyv

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) May 30, 2019

Geoff Bennett, a White House correspondent for NBC News

Bloomberg: North Korean envoy executed over failed Trump-Kim summithttps://t.co/ifXP2bFbk6

— Geoff Bennett (@GeoffRBennett) May 30, 2019

Andrew Desiderio, a political reporter at Politico

New reporting tonight — that North Korea’s top US envoy was executed after the Hanoi summit & Kim’s top aide is undergoing hard labor — comes as Trump continues to heap praise on Kim and excuse his recent sanctions violations. https://t.co/f86bMiMfvf

— Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) May 31, 2019

David Nakamura, a Washington Post reporter

South Korean paper reports Kim Jong Un has executed top envoy in wake of Hanoi summit collapse. If true, another stark reminder of brutality of the North Korean leader Trump has sided with over Biden, US intel agencies, Bolton, Shinzo Abe and Warmbier. https://t.co/ImcDC20khL

— David Nakamura (@DavidNakamura) May 30, 2019

Amy Siskind, a prominent liberal anti-Trump activist and former Wall Street executive

Trump buddy – and we knew this, Pompeo was asked about it weeks ago:
“Kim Hyok Chol, North Korea's special envoy to the U.S., was executed in March along with four other North Korean foreign ministry officials involved in the Hanoi, Vietnam, summit.” https://t.co/GMUaJoJ3yU

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) May 30, 2019

Steve Silberman, a longtime writer for Wired Magazine

This is the monster whose ass Trump kisses to mock Joe Biden. If a Democratic president did this to mock a GOP opponent, @FoxNews pundits would be invoking the 2nd Amendment. https://t.co/A7xjqhHWgV

— Steve Silberman (@stevesilberman) May 30, 2019

Rare exceptions

There were a few exceptions to the norm. Some reporters who specialize on Korea did raise concerns, pointing out South Korean media outlets have a long history of publishing false stories about the DPRK.

If you’ve read South Korean newspaper reports that Kim Hyok Chol and other North Korean officials involved in the US – DPRK talks in Hanoi have been executed – it’s also worth reading this. https://t.co/4BnkxUQXxD

— Laura Bicker (@BBCLBicker) May 31, 2019

These warnings, however, were ignored.

We need better sourcing for this @Chosun report saying #NorthKorea’s lead US negotiator was executed. I remember the time South Korean media reported in 2010 that a #NorthKorea soccer coach had been executed. And then I ran into him at #Pyongyang airport. https://t.co/gCy2av9gCE

— Jean H. Lee (@newsjean) May 31, 2019

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Ben Norton is a journalist and writer. He is a reporter for The Grayzone, and the producer of the Moderate Rebels podcast, which he co-hosts with Max Blumenthal. His website is BenNorton.com, and he tweets at @BenjaminNorton.

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Video: “Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire”. Capitalism and the Historical Trampling of the Working Class

By Kim Petersen, June 04, 2019

The film provides the historical context that allows the viewer to understand why inequality reigns while social justice and peace lag today.

President Lopez Obrador of Mexico’s Letter to Donald Trump. “I Don’t Want Confrontation…”

By President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, June 04, 2019

I am aware of your latest position in regard to Mexico. In advance, I express to you that I don’t want confrontation. The peoples and nations that we represent deserve that we resort to dialogue and act with prudence and responsibility, in the face of any conflict in our relations, serious as it may be.

A Second Israeli Election Proves Netanyahu’s Grip on Power Is Slipping

By Jonathan Cook, June 04, 2019

Netanyahu was forced to dissolve the 120-member parliament to block his chief rival, Benny Gantz, from getting a chance to assemble an alternative governing coalition.

The Murdering of Julian Assange

By Peter Koenig, June 04, 2019

Julian Assange is being slowly murdered by “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” at Belmarsh prison in the south-east of London. The prison is notorious for holding people who have never been charged with a crime indefinitely. It is also called the British version of Guantanamo, and, typically used to detain so-called terrorists, thus called by the British police and secret service and aped by the British MSM and establishment.

Pompeo’s Phony Outreach to Iran

By Stephen Lendman, June 03, 2019

Since its 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US-installed fascist dictatorship, Washington has been militantly hostile toward Iran — especially since Trump took office.

5G Wireless Technology Is War against Humanity

By Claire Edwards, June 03, 2019

This phoney war is also silent, but this time shots are being fired – in the form of laser-like beams of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) from banks of thousands of tiny antennas^[1] – and almost no one in the firing line knows that they are being silently, seriously and irreparably injured.

US-Iran: Inverted Reality, Real War. America’s Al Qaeda Mercenaries. Iran is Fighting the Largest State Sponsor of Terror

By Tony Cartalucci, June 03, 2019

In its march toward yet another war, the United States accuses Iran of using military force to establish itself as a “regional hegemon.” It accuses Iran of being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. It accuses Iran of aiding rebels in Yemen, the government in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

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When the “Islamic State” (ISIS) occupied large territories in Iraq and Syria, it shifted Middle East and world attention to it, moving the focus away from the Palestinian cause. The countries affected by the ISIS horror concentrated on recovering their occupied territories in the Levant and Mesopotamia, eliminating the infrastructure of the terrorist group, and stopping its recruitment of national and foreign fighters. The goal was to freeze the expansion of ISIS and to prevent it from spilling over into other countries in the Middle East.

Many militant members of Palestinian groups such as Hamas took up arms in support of either al-Qaeda or ISIS, mainly in Syria and but also to some extent in Iraq. Between 2012 and 2018 the political leadership of Hamas even supported NATO’s war for regime-change in Syria, earning the enmity of President Bashar al-Assad, whose government had defended Hamas and the Palestinian cause for decades. For years Assad resisted US demands to expel Hamas from Syria, and was rewarded with treachery. 

But in the last two years President Donald Trump and his team have given a huge boost to the Palestinian cause and restored its lustre despite the betrayals and distractions of the last decade. Today, all those supporting the Palestinian cause are not only united against one enemy (the US-Israeli coalition) but ready to fight as one body on multiple fronts.

Trump’s gifts to the Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu of the Syrian Golan occupied by Israel and of the whole of Israeli-occupied Jerusalem gave an enormous boost of adrenaline to all non-state actors and resistance movements in the Middle East. These groups, who enjoy financial and military support from Iran, are united not only against US hegemony but have also effectively linked themselves and their struggle to form a united front against the US and Israel. This new unity is evident from Yemen, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon to Palestine.

During the month of May, the sabotage attack on the United Arab Emirates harbour of al-Fujairah followed by the armed drone attack on Aramco in Saudi Arabia by Yemen’s Houthis were clear and strong messages. Both the Emirates and Saudi hubs make it possible to export millions of barrels of Middle Eastern oil while bypassing the Straits of Hormuz; these hubs will become more important in coming years. Thus the importance of the message: the sabotage and the drone attack are a foretaste of what could happen next, even if alternatives are found to shipping global supplies through the Strait. No country in the Middle East will be allowed to export its oil if Iran is prevented from doing so.

Moreover, the Israeli policy of strangling Gaza has united the various Palestinian groups operating in the city into one military operational room against the Israeli army. Twelve Palestinian military groups have joined forces in Gaza and have coordinated the bombing of Israeli cities and other targets to stand against Netanyahu’s strangulation of Gaza and its inhabitants.

The conclusion is simple: the more blatantly the US establishment and Israel disregard the rights of Middle Eastern countries and populations to live in peace among each other and recover their occupied territories from Israel, the stronger non-state actor groups will become among the populations where they operate.

Iran benefits tremendously from the consequences of the US-Israeli policies. It thereby increases its influence in various parts of the Middle East. It can ask its partners to defend its interests and stand with it in case of danger to its national security.

The US no doubt is financially profiting from maintaining instability among Middle Eastern countries, which reinforces US hegemony over oil-rich countries. Keeping Iran as a model enemy has helped promote US weapon sales to an unprecedented level. Tribal and ethnic struggles in the Middle East serve to keep the countries in this party of the world divided. Regional strife also prevents coordination of policies among oil-rich countries, ensuring that no commercial market exchange or monetary unification is possible in the medium or long term.

During this latest crisis between Tehran and Washington, the US administration has failed to protect the Gulf countries from the Emirates sabotage and the Aramco attack. Nevertheless, its show of force and verbal threats – sending jet carrier and B-52 bombers to face the alleged threat from Iran – helped sell more US made military equipment, including $8 billion of Patriot interception missiles to oppose the threat of Iranian missiles being launched against Gulf countries.

Of course, no war took place and both Iran and the US have shown their willingness to avoid it at all costs. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo seems now to be disregarding his earlier 12-point ultimatum and now says that his country is willing to negotiate without pre-conditions with Iran. Pompeo’s willingness for unconditional negotiations means very little because Iran has clearly stated its pre-conditions for talks with the US establishment: honour the JCPOA nuclear deal and lift the sanctions. On this basis Iran would open discussions, but would be unlikely to make any concessions until the end of Trump’s mandate in 2020. Iran looks much stronger today and the US much weaker.

Hezbollah is said to be ready to go to war for Iran and to bomb Israel. Yemen is already serving Iran’s objectives with its use of drones against Saudi oil facilities. The Iraqi non-state actors showed their capacities and the US got the message: US forces will be targeted in Iraq. In Gaza, the Palestinian groups deployed their new weapons and showed their readiness to join the common front in case of war against Israel. This general mobilisation has twisted the arms of the US and Israel, imposing a no-war situation in the Middle East for the foreseeable future. Today, the US and Israel have advanced weapons and the latest military technology, but their adversaries in the Middle East are also well-equipped, even if not at the same level. Their precision missiles and armed drones may be enough to maintain “the necessary” balance of power.

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On June 2, the Syrian Arab News Agency reported on Israeli aggression on the T4 airbase, located in the eastern countryside of Homs province. It’s recognized that the Syrian Air Defense System managed to destroy two missiles. The remaining rockets hit targets on the territory of the base, resulting in one death, two injured servicemen, and damage to an arms depot and other equipment.

For the past several days the Israeli aviation repeatedly attacked the Syrian territory. Tel-Aviv struck artillery and two anti-missile batteries not far from Damascus, on the night of June 2. Three Syrian soldiers were killed, and seven others were severely wounded.

The Israeli forces hasted to declare that the strikes were retaliation for the launches of the Syrian missiles towards Mount Hermon in the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

The Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said he had ordered the strike.

“We won’t tolerate fire at our territory and will respond forcefully to any aggression against us,” he said.

The Prime Minister also held a meeting on security issues after the Syrian attacks on the Golan Heights.

However, the actual reasons for the Israeli attacks are entirely different. Currently, the country is preparing for the parliamentary elections, so Netanyahu needs good public relations to demonstrate his determination. He does his best to score points in the domestic arena, including the acts of aggression against the sovereign state. Thus, he proves the intention not to retrieve the occupied territories to Damascus. Notably, in the lead-up to the Knesset elections in April, the same provocation was seen.

Since the beginning of 2019, the Israeli side more than ten times has carried out massive strikes on various objects in Syria that allegedly belonged to Iran.

Apart from open aggression against Damascus Tel-Aviv often use another method of influence, namely accusing the Syrian government of preparing chemical weapons provocation. The Israeli Foreign Ministry has repeatedly stated without a shred of evidence that Bashar Assad possesses vast reserves of chemical weapons, and even is capable of producing a new shipment of arms, violating the international rules and restrictions.

Last month it became known that the Israeli government had been responsible for staging several White Helmets’ videos on the alleged use of the chemical weapons against civilians in Idlib province by the Syrian Arab Army.

It’s reported that the Israeli personnel has written scripts, trained the representatives of Civil Defense in the territory of the Golan Heights, then transferred them to Idlib province, and also looked for volunteers for staging fake videos. Later the footages were submitted to the mainstream media for further replication.

The actions of Israel in Syria are illegal. Tel-Aviv is not interested in the early resolution of the Syrian crisis. Hiding behind the fight against the presence of Iranian forces, supporting the White Helmets, Israel continues to violate the sovereignty of Syria, as well as provisions of UN Security Council resolutions. The UN is an international organization designed to watch the peacekeeping process all around the World. When is it going to pay precious attention at the Israeli aggression towards Syria?

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Featured image is from Times of Israel

President Donald Trump,

I am aware of your latest position in regard to Mexico. In advance, I express to you that I don’t want confrontation. The peoples and nations that we represent deserve that we resort to dialogue and act with prudence and responsibility, in the face of any conflict in our relations, serious as it may be.

The greatest President of Mexico, Benito Juárez, maintained excellent relations with the Republican hero, Abraham Lincoln. Later, when Mexico nationalized its oil resources and industry, Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt understood the profound reasons that led our patriotic President Lázaro Cárdenas to act in favor of our sovereignty. By the way, President Roosevelt was a titan of freedom who proclaimed the four fundamental rights of man: the right to freedom of speech; the right to freedom of religion; the right to live free from fear; and the right to live free from misery.

With this in mind, we frame our policy on immigration. Human beings do not leave their villages for pleasure but out of necessity. That’s why, from the beginning of my government, I proposed opting for cooperation in development and aid for the Central American countries with productive investments to create jobs and resolve this painful situation.

You also know that we are fulfilling our responsibility to prevent, as much as possible and without violating human rights, any passage of the persons concerned through our country. It is worth remembering that – in a short time, Mexicans will not need to go to the United States and that migration will be optional, not forced. This is because we are fighting, like never before, the main problem in Mexico, corruption. And, in this way, our country will attain a powerful social dimension. Our countrymen will be able to work and be happy where they were born, where their families, their customs and their cultures are.

President Trump, social problems are not resolved by tariffs or coercive measures like turning a neighboring country overnight into a ghetto, an enclosed place for the migrants of the world, where they’re stigmatized, abused, persecuted, and excluded and the right to justice is denied to those who seek to work and to live free from want. The Statue of Liberty is not an empty symbol.

With all due respect, although you have the sovereign right to say it, the slogan “United States First” is a fallacy because universal justice and fraternity will prevail until the end of time, even over national borders.

Specifically, citizen President, I propose to deepen our dialogue, and seek alternatives to the immigration problem. And, please remember that I do not lack courage, that I am not cowardly or timorous, but that I act on principles. I believe that politics was invented to avoid confrontation and war, among other things.  I do not believe in the Law of Talon, in a ‘tooth for a tooth’ or an ‘eye for an eye’ because, if we practiced it, we would all be toothless and one-eyed. I believe that as statesmen and even more so as patriots, we are obliged to seek peaceful solutions to controversies and to practice the beautiful ideal of non-violence, forever.

Finally, I suggest that you instruct your officials, if it doesn’t cause any inconvenience. that they attend to representatives of our government, headed by the Secretary of Foreign Relations, who will be in Washington tomorrow to reach an agreement for the benefit of our two nations.

Nothing by force. Everything by reason and human rights.

Your friend,

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

President of México

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This was translated from Spanish by The Mazatlan Post

Featured image is from the government of Mexico.

According to Speaker Pelosi’s aides, impeachment proceedings against Trump may be coming though nothing is certain at this point. 

Third-ranking House Dem Jim Clyborn said the groundwork is being laid. “I think we’ve already begun,” he said on Sunday, dubiously claiming grounds exist to impeach related to the Mueller report. More below on this below.

According to the NYT, 54 House Dems support impeachment, 58 against, 123 uncommitted so far. A majority of the 435 House members is needed to launch proceedings, support for taking this step nowhere near the number needed if the above tally is right.

According to the anti-Trump CNN, an SSRS poll conducted for the cable channel found 76% of Dem supporters favoring impeachment compared to 41% of voters overall for it.

Anti-Trump media are pushing for impeachment. On Tuesday, the NYT headlined “Democratic Voters Want Impeachment. The House Dawdles,” saying:

“(O)rdinary people care about Trump’s lawbreaking…Across the country, Democratic voters have begun demanding that their representatives take a position on impeachment.”

“Opening a formal impeachment inquiry would put the question of Trump’s lawbreaking at the center of national life…The moment demands (impeachment), so do the people who put Democrats in charge.”

A late May Times opinion piece headlined “Democrats, Do Your Damned Duty,” calling for Trump’s impeachment, adding: “What the hell is it going to take, Democrats?!”

The  Washington Post opinion piece called for impeaching Trump for the following dubious reasons:

• attempting to fire Mueller — false; see below;

• trying to curb his investigation — false;

• ordering White House counsel “Donald McGahn to falsify the record to conceal his attempts to fire Mueller;” no evidence suggests Trump tried to fire him, just the oppose; see below;

• firing former FBI director James Comey (the president’s prerogative, not an impeachable offense);

• obstructing the Mueller probe by urging “Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, and other witnesses” not to cooperate with it, along with obstructing congressional inquiries relating to the probe, his taxes and business records;

No obstruction of justice evidence exists. See below.

• violating his oath of office to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution and fully execute the laws of the land;

The above applies to virtually all US presidents since the beginning of the republic.

• wanting his relationship with porn star Stormy Daniels concealed;

• misusing his emergency powers to spend funds for his border wall; and

• retaining ownership of his businesses — a likely unethical, not illegal act.

Most of the above accusations are false or dubious. Should Trump be impeached for spending funds for border wall construction and not wanting information about his extramarital affair disclosed?

Federal law requires candidates for federal office, as well as current office holders and their senior staff — including congressional members, the president and vice president, their cabinet members, senior administration staff, as well as Supreme Court Justices — to file annual disclosures of their personal finances.

Most likely, the above requirements include full disclosure of federal income tax returns as requested by Congress which Trump refused to comply with.

Should he be impeached for nondisclosure while appealing a federal judge’s order to release his personal tax returns for the 2013-18 period, along with other returns for several of his businesses?

Speaker Pelosi accused him of “engag(ing) in a coverup” with little or no elaboration. Are she and other Dems claiming improper or illegal DJT ties to Russia despite Mueller finding no evidence of either behavior?

Do they want him impeached for AG Barr only releasing around 98% of the Mueller report to congressional leaders, not all 535  House and Senate members? The portion they got omitted redacted material.

In May, the Dem controlled House Judiciary Committee reached a deal with the White House and DOJ to release less than the full Mueller report and related documents.

The special counsel found no evidence of Trump team collusion with Russia or obstruction of justice. There’s no case for impeaching him on these grounds.

The Mueller report includes 11 instances of possible obstruction of justice by Trump and his campaign staff – short of accusing anyone of this crime, because no proof beyond a reasonable doubt exists.

According to Law Professor Jonathan Turley, “obstruction theories against (Trump) far outstrip the available evidence of the crime…Trump appears more guilty of obsessive rather than obstructive conduct” – the former a personality trait, not a crime.

Following release of the Mueller report, Turley explained that Trump “did not fire anyone involved in the investigation. He did not destroy any evidence. He did not end the investigation prematurely.”

“He took no actual obstructive acts. To charge him would have amounted to a virtual thought crime.”

“…Trump not only ordered senior staff to cooperate with Mueller, but he did not withhold evidence. Most important, he waived executive privilege over the entirety of the report in an unprecedented degree of transparency.”

There’s plenty about Trump to criticize and hold him accountable for, including high crimes of war and against humanity, along with serving monied interests at the expense of the general welfare, and much more.

Dems and establishment media for impeachment want him held accountable for the wrong reasons, not the right ones.

No president in US history was removed from office by impeachment.

Under the Constitution’s Article II, Section 4, impeachment and conviction require proving “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

The Constitution’s Article I, Section 2 empowers House members to impeach a sitting president. Senate members alone are empowered to try them.

If impeachment occurs, the GOP controlled Senate is highly unlikely to convict Trump. The move could backfire on Dems, perhaps increasing his 2020 reelection chances.

After 1998-99 impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton, his approval rating reached 73%, the highest point of his presidency.

Trump could benefit the same way if impeached and acquitted by the Senate, perhaps elevating his approval rating to its highest level ahead of the November 2020 presidential election, boosting his chance for another term.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The Pentagon has announced the abrupt firing of the commander of the infamous US prison camp at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba.

In a statement released Sunday, the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), which oversees the extra-legal detention center, claimed that Rear Adm. John C. Ring (image below), the camp commandant, had been relieved of his command because of a “loss of confidence in his ability” to lead. The facility has a staff of 1,800 troops and civilian personnel deployed to continue the imprisonment of 40 remaining detainees.

The dismissal comes just weeks before Ring was to complete his tour as the 18th commander of the prison camp, which was opened in 2002 as part of the “war on terror” launched under the administration of George W. Bush. The timing suggests retaliation by the top brass over what it sees as the rear admiral’s overly frank statements to the media.

Last December, he gave an interview at one of Guantanamo’s detention centers to NBC News in which he complained about the deterioration of the camp facilities and the failure of Congress to appropriate funds for their replacement or repair. He also warned that the aging of the prisoners could soon turn the notorious site of torture, rendition and illegal detention into something resembling a nursing home.

Ring had estimated last year that $69 million was needed to replace the most dilapidated of the camp’s facilities, which houses the 15 so-called “high-value detainees” who were transferred to Guantanamo in 2006–2007 after being imprisoned and tortured at CIA “black sites” around the world.

His firing came on the same day that the New York Times published a lengthy article titled “Guantánamo Bay as Nursing Home: Military Envisions Hospice Care as Terrorism Suspects Age.” Written by Carol Rosenberg, who has reported from Guantanamo since 2002, previously for the Miami Herald, the article included extensive statements made by Ring during a recent press trip to the prison camp.

“Unless America’s policy changes, at some point we’ll be doing some sort of end of life care here,” the Times quoted the commander as saying. “A lot of my guys are pre-diabetic… Am I going to need dialysis down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that. Are we going to do complex cancer care down here? I don’t know. Someone’s got to tell me that.”

The oldest prisoner at Guantanamo is now 71, while the average age is 46. Many have been held since the facility opened in 2002, and the majority of them, 26 in all, have never been charged, much less tried for any crime.

Defense One quoted Ring as stating:

“I’m sort of caught between a rock and a hard place. The Geneva Conventions’ Article III, that says that I have to give the detainees equivalent medical care that I would give to a trooper. But if a trooper got sick, I’d send him home to the United States. And so I’m stuck. Whatever I’m going to do, I have to do here.”

Any US military personnel with serious health problems are airlifted to the US Naval Hospital in Jacksonville, Florida. Laws passed by Congress, however, bar any Guantanamo detainees from being brought onto US soil for any purpose whatsoever. As a result, detainees who suffer serious medical conditions, in many cases the result of systematic torture, receive either inadequate care or none whatsoever.

The Times article cited the case of Abd al Hadi al Iraqi, accused of leading resistance to US troops who invaded Afghanistan. He was left untreated for degenerative disc disease and back injuries exacerbated by torture until he lost the use of his legs and became incontinent. What followed was a series of botched spinal surgeries performed in the prison camp that has left Hadi, 58, in a wheelchair and dependent upon painkillers. While medical personnel concluded that he needed complex surgery that could not be performed at the camp, the law bars his being transferred to a US military hospital.

The Times article also cited the case of Mustafa al Hawsawi, a Saudi man alleged to have provided assistance with travel and expenses to the 9/11 hijackers. He “has for years suffered such chronic rectal pain from being sodomized in the CIA prisons that he sits gingerly on a pillow in court, returns to his cell to recline at the first opportunity and fasts frequently to try to limit bowel movements.”

Another prisoner, an Indonesian man known as Hambali, who is accused of being a leader of the Southeast Asian Islamist group Jemaah Islamiyah, requires a knee replacement as a result of injuries suffered during torture at CIA black sites, including being continuously shackled by his ankles.

No doubt Ring’s statements to the media rankled both the Trump administration and the Pentagon’s senior command on two scores. First, they gave the lie to the continuous claims made that Guantanamo is needed to house the “worst of the worst,” rather than an aging and infirm population, and, second, they exposed the fact that Washington is continuing to carry out war crimes against those it subjected to torture, denying them the level of medical treatment required under the Geneva Conventions.

Opened during the Bush administration, Guantanamo was kept in operation under the presidency of Barack Obama, despite his vow to shut it down. Obama codified into law the system of drumhead trials by “military commissions,” which deny the accused every fundamental right a genuine court affords to a defendant under the US Constitution.

These tribunals are caught in a web of contradictions that have kept the rigged trials from moving forward. Earlier this month, the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit threw out more than two years of decisions by Col. Vance Spath, a military commission judge who presided over the case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, accused in connection with the 2000 bombing of the warship USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen. The court found that Spath had a conflict of interest that he should have disclosed. During the proceedings, he had applied for and obtained a job as an immigration judge in the US Justice Department, whose officials were prosecuting the case.

Spath’s rulings included the denial of a motion by al-Nashiri’s defense attorneys that they be allowed to notify their client that their discussions were being bugged by the military. When the civilian lawyers withdrew from the case because of these conditions, Spath convicted the tribunal’s chief defense counsel, a Marine brigadier general, of contempt for allowing them to do so, ordering him to be fined and confined to quarters, a ruling that was subsequently overturned.

Obama handed over this barbaric legacy to Trump, who vowed during his campaign to fill up the prison with “bad dudes” and reintroduce waterboarding and “worse.” In January of 2018, Trump signed an order to keep Guantanamo open and vowed to continue treating captured “terrorists” as “unlawful enemy combatants” and send more of them to the Cuban prison camp.

While as yet no new detainees have been transferred to Guantanamo, the Pentagon has been ordered to draw up plans to continue the detention facility’s operations for another 25 years.

It was reported this month that the Department of Homeland Security was reviewing the feasibility of sending immigrant children captured on the US southwestern border to be imprisoned at Guantanamo.

This would not be the first time that Guantanamo has been used for such a criminal purpose. In 1991, some 12,500 Haitians fleeing the repression that followed the 1991 coup that overthrew the elected government of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were imprisoned there. The island’s refugee prison camps swelled to 50,000 by 1994 under the Clinton administration. The policy was introduced by then-Attorney General William Barr, who now holds the same post under Trump.

Among the early investigative exposures carried out by WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange in 2007 was the publication of the “Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta,” outlining official US policy at the Guantanamo Bay prison. The document exposed the fact that Washington was preventing the Red Cross from accessing some of the prisoners, a claim Washington had previously denied.

Assange is now being held in Belmarsh prison, dubbed “the UK’s Guantanamo,” facing extradition to the US and into the clutches of the war criminals he has done so much to expose. Chelsea Manning, the courageous US Army whistleblower who provided a trove of evidence to WikiLeaks in 2010 exposing US war crimes, is being subjected to punitive imprisonment for refusing to testify before a grand jury created to fabricate criminal charges against Assange.

Right-wing politicians and government officials have described Assange as a “terrorist” and an “enemy combatant,” and WikiLeaks as a “hostile non-state intelligence agency.”

The order to keep Guantanamo open for another quarter of a century is directed not merely at preparing space for Al Qaeda-connected fighters captured overseas. It is also intended to maintain a prison beyond the reach of any constitutional rights for those–both at home and abroad–accused of exposing the crimes of the US government and opposing the interests of the ruling capitalist oligarchy.

In a sign of how politically vulnerable he has rapidly become, prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu plunged Israel into new elections last week – less than two months after his far-right bloc appeared to win at the ballot box.

Netanyahu was forced to dissolve the 120-member parliament to block his chief rival, Benny Gantz, from getting a chance to assemble an alternative governing coalition.

Gantz, a former army general who heads the Blue and White party, won 35 seats, the same number as Netanyahu’s Likud party, in the April election, but had fewer potential allies to form a majority. So in September, Israelis will cast their votes afresh.

The ostensible reason for the parliament’s dissolution is a stand-off between Netanyahu and Avigdor Lieberman, his former defence minister. They clashed over Lieberman’s insistence that ultra-orthodox Jews be drafted into the army.

But Lieberman, it seems, chose to turn a relatively marginal issue into a full-blown crisis as a way to unseat the prime minister.

To win a far-right majority, Netanyahu needed not only Lieberman’s small Yisrael Beiteinu party but also the ultra-Orthodox parties, which vehemently oppose conscription.

Netanyahu grew so desperate that at the last moment he tried – unsuccessfully – to woo Avi Gabbay, leader of the centrist Labour party. Labour was crushed in April, receiving just six seats, its lowest-ever result.

Netanyahu’s panic was fully justified. He is due to face a hearing in October, when it is widely expected he will be indicted on multiple corruption charges.

With parliament’s dissolution, he no longer has time to pass two pieces of legislation that could have absolved him of charges before the October deadline. First, he needed an immunity law exempting him from trial, and then a so-called “override law” to prevent Israel’s supreme court from using its powers of judicial review to rule the immunity law unconstitutional.

Gabbay objected to Netanyahu insisting on support for the immunity law as the price for Labour’s inclusion in the coalition.

Ayman Odeh, leader of the biggest party representing Israel’s Palestinian minority, one-fifth of the population, mocked Netanyahu’s frantic bargaining.

He provoked much mirth from other legislators by joking that Netanyahu had offered an “end to the occupation” and a promise to “recognise the historic wrongs of the Nakba”, the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948, in return for Palestinian parties supporting the immunity law.

Lieberman also humiliated Netanyahu, albeit without the humour. He understood that the prime minister was in no position to haggle.

The gain for Lieberman is that by proposing a bill to draft ultra-orthodox Jews into the army, he appealed to secular Jews. That, he hopes, will win him new supporters in the September election, setting him up again to be kingmaker.

Netanyahu will not be able to count on Lieberman’s support and that in turn puts pressure on Likud to drop its leader.

But there is another, less obvious, way that Lieberman can strengthen his own hand.

The battle lines in the new election, like the last, are between the far-right parties, led by Netanyahu, and the centre-right parties, led by Gantz.

Lieberman can now hedge his bets. The far-right has become more overtly religious, with the rise of ideological settlers to prominence and the rapid growth of the ultra-orthodox electorate.

Lieberman’s appeal, meanwhile, has been restricted to a declining constituency of disgruntled immigrants from the former Soviet Union, whose politics is ultra-nationalist but implacably secular.

And this gives him reason to want to influence Gantz’s Blue and White party, which is largely secular too.

In recent weeks, a political “resistance” movement has emerged in Israel against Netanyahu, echoing the one against Donald Trump in the US. With Gantz as its figurehead, it has mobilised over the threat Netanyahu poses to Israel’s system of checks and balances.

The chief concern has been the far-right’s intensifying assault on the supreme court, the last relatively liberal institution. The override law, which would neuter the court, has epitomised, for the centre-right, the intensifying erosion of even the most superficial of democratic norms.

Tens of thousands of Israelis attended a protest last month against Netanyahu and his legal manoeuvres.

But Odeh, the most prominent of the Palestinian minority’s leaders, was not invited – not until Gantz had a last-minute change of heart.

Without the Palestinian parties’ 10 or more seats in the parliament behind him, Gantz currently has little hope of tipping the balance in his favour against Netanyahu at the forthcoming election.

Lieberman, a settler, has a special loathing for Palestinian legislators. He has even called for them to be executed. One option is for him to lure Gantz away from Odeh, promising that his Yisrael Beinteinu party can serve up the the keys to the castle after September’s election.

What does all this jostling mean for the Palestinians?

If he can win again, Netanyahu will doubtless scheme to avert a trial and hope to carry on as before.

If he is felled, a successor from his Likud party is unlikely to prove either more moderate or more amenable to Palestinian ambitions for statehood. Likud has lurched significantly to the far-right over the past decade.

But Gantz, the only plausible alternative, is no peacenik either. He oversaw the terrible destruction of Gaza in 2014, supports keeping most of the settlements in place and seems unlikely to pay more than lip service to a peace process.

Should he find himself reliant on Lieberman to build a government, Gantz will have to emphasise the more right-wing elements of his party’s already hawkish programme.

Faced with the current political turmoil, however, the Trump administration might prefer to abandon efforts to press ahead with its “deal of the century” peace plan – at least beyond an initial investment conference scheduled for late June.

That is a reprieve of kinds. All indications were that the plan would prove catastrophically bad for the Palestinians and might have included annexing parts of the West Bank.

But even if that specific threat is lifted, the next Israeli government – whether led by Netanyahu, his successor or Gantz – is not likely to depart from Israel’s long-term consensus, one that the Trump plan was simply set to accelerate.

The settlements will continue their relentless expansion and more Palestinian land will be stolen, eroding any prospect of a viable state for Palestinians emerging.

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A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Canadian Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has announced the “temporary” closure of her country’s embassy and the withdrawal of diplomatic personnel from Venezuela, claiming Ottawa had “no choice.”

In a Sunday press statement, Freeland accused the Maduro government of having “taken steps to limit the ability of foreign embassies to function” by failing to renew visas for diplomatic personnel. No evidence was provided to support the claim. She additionally claimed that that the Caribbean country is “slid[ing] deeper into dictatorship.”

The measure is to take immediate effect, with diplomatic visas reportedly due to expire at the end of June. All embassy and consular services are to be transferred to the Colombian capital of Bogota over 1,500 kilometers away.

Freeland also indicated that Ottawa will “evaluate” the status of Venezuelan diplomats in Canada “appointed by Maduro.”

Canada was the second country to recognise Juan Guaido after he swore himself in as “interim president” on January 23. It has since continued to back Guaido’s attempts to oust the Maduro government and has begun to forge diplomatic relations with the opposition leader’s representative in Canada, Orlando Viera Blanco, who has held a number of meetings with government representatives and members of parliament in Ottawa and Vancouver. The Trudeau administration has also followed US President Donald Trump in imposing several rounds of sanctions on Venezuela.

It is unknown how many Canadian citizens in Venezuela this measure will affect, but recent opposition-led estimates suggest that there are up to 50,000 Venezuelans living in Canada.

The latest diplomatic spat follows a similar confrontation in March, when the United States and Venezuela both withdrew their diplomatic teams, severed diplomatic relations and vacated the embassies. The United States had likewise recognised Guaido envoy Carlos Vecchio as Venezuela’s representative in the country.

The diplomatic standoff came to a head in Washington when US government forces violated the Vienna Convention and breached the Venezuelan embassy building to evict a group of US citizens safeguarding it with the backing of the Caracas government, leading to a number of arrests.

Brazil snubs Guaido representative

The diplomatic scuffle comes as Guaido’s team faces a setback in its efforts to replace Maduro’s diplomatic representation in Brazil.

The far-right Bolsonaro government, which similarly recognises Guaido as the legitimate Venezuelan president, had previously invited his envoy, Maria Teresa Belandria, to present her credentials at the Presidential Palace last Tuesday, only to later inform that the invitation had been withdrawn.

“I was uninvited,” she told Reuters, downplaying the political impact of the news.

Oliver Stuenkel, a professor of foreign relations at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, suggests, however, that the move may suggest Brasilia is losing faith in Guaido’s efforts to oust Maduro.

“[The government] realize[s] Brazil has to deal with the reality that Maduro is not going anywhere right now,” he explained.

Brazilian diplomat Paulo Roberto de Almeida also shares this idea, claiming that the snub shows increasing friction between Brazil’s civilian and military leaders.

“Recognition of Guaido’s envoy was never agreed to by the military,” he said.

Guaido promises Maduro will go this year

Guaido, for his part, told supporters in Venezuela that he will achieve his objective to seize power by the end of the year.

Speaking at a small gathering in Barinas State, Guaido proclaimed,

“We are in times of definitions, of advances, of actions (…) This didn’t start in 2019, but I’ll tell you something, it will end in 2019.”

Guaido talks to a small number of supporters in the western state of Barinas. (Courtesy / Twitter)

Guaido has previously promised supporters that he would force humanitarian “aid” into Venezuela, convince the armed forces to join his cause, and call new presidential elections. He also led a failed putsch in April.

Taking to Twitter Monday, Guaido further reiterated his pledge to do “what is needed” to oust Maduro, echoing Washington’s statements that “all options are on the table” regarding Venezuela.

Guaido has openly called for a foreign intervention into Venezuela, and is currently calling for Venezuela’s reincorporation into the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (TIAR), a mutual defense pact involving sixteen countries in the hemisphere which has been cited as a possible legal justification for US military action.

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Featured image by Chris Wattie/Reuters

Last week in an episode of my daily Ron Paul Liberty Report we discussed whether the US and British government were actually trying to kill jailed Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. More than seven years ago Assange was granted asylum from the government of Ecuador over fears that espionage charges were being prepared against him by Washington. He spent those years in a small room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London without sunlight. Without fresh air. Without exercise. Without medical treatment.

Assange’s critics mocked him for entering the embassy, saying his fear that the US government would indict him was paranoia. Then the US-controlled International Monetary Fund dangled a four billion dollar loan in front of Ecuadorian president Lenin Moreno (elected in 2017, replacing the president who granted him asylum), and Moreno eagerly handed Assange over to British authorities who the same day hauled him before the court to answer for skipping bail. No medical examination after what was seven years of house arrest. Straight to court. He was sentenced to 50 weeks – the maximum sentence.

And what happened while he was serving time in the notorious Belmarsh prison? The Trump Administration decided to go where the Obama Administration before him did not dare to tread: he was indicted on 17 counts under the US Espionage Act and now faces 170 years in prison – or worse – once the formality of his extradition hearing is over. He faces life in prison for acting as a journalist – publishing information about the US government that is clearly in the public interest.

But do they really want to put him up on trial?

When US citizen Otto Warmbier died in a wretched North Korean prison cell after being denied proper medical treatment, the western world was disgusted by Pyongyang’s disregard for basic human rights. Now we have Julian Assange reportedly too sick to even appear by video at his own court hearings. UN Special Rapporteur on torture Nils Melzer has investigated the treatment of Assange over the past nine years and has determined that the journalist has been the “victim of brutal psychological torture.”

UN investigator Melzer concluded,

“In 20 years of work with victims of war, violence and political persecution I have never seen a group of democratic States ganging up to deliberately isolate, demonize, and abuse a single individual for such a long time and with so little regard for human dignity and the rule of law.”

Governments hate it when the truth is told about them. They prefer to kill the messenger than face the message.

Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote last week that,

“the whole purpose of the First Amendment…is to promote and provoke open, wide, robust political debate about the policies of the government.”

We need to understand that it is our First Amendment that is on trial right there along with Assange. The Obama Administration – no defenders of civil liberties – wanted to prosecute Assange but determined that his “crime” was the same kind of journalism that the US mainstream media engages in every day.

Let’s hope President Trump recovers from his amnesia – on the campaign trail he praised Wikileaks more than 100 times but now claims to know nothing about them – and orders his Attorney General to stand down. Assange deserves our gratitude, not a lifetime in prison.

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Featured image is from Silent Crow News

I always like my beer on the bitter side. Recently, I discovered the wild variety of plant behind the delicate taste. 

On the afternoon of our 79th (combined average) birthday, my wife and I took a lengthy hike in the Galilee mountains that frame Arrabeh. We used to walk the same mountain paths, carrying our two children on our backs, to visit our friends, the two monks who chose the highest peak in our range to recreate early monastic life in Palestine. 

This was before the Ariel Sharon-led assault on the Galilee, with all the Jewish-only, mountain-top settlements justified as being needed to protect our land from us.

My wife and I gingerly supported our sagging frames with a pair of walking sticks each. We met our minimum of 10,000 steps on the Fitbit my wife wears. She is a stickler for precision on matters that I usually guess at.

That also was the case when it came to identifying the native greenery on the side of the dirt path: trees, bushes, flowers and grasses, both edible and poisonous.

At one point, she called my attention to a thin, wheat-like stalk with a pretty, dangling, heavy head, which she identified as wild hops. I picked one and carefully wrapped it in a paper towel to show to my jeweller grandnephew, so that he could recreate it in gold or silver as an earring or pendant.

The next day, I recalled our hike while reading a news item stating that a centuries-old mosque in Safed, the birthplace of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, had been converted into a bar and wedding hall. According to al-Quds al-Arabi, the al-Ahmar Mosque has been repurposed several times since 1948 – first into a Jewish school, then an election campaigns centre, then a clothing shop and now a bar and events hall.

This was not as shocking to me as it might have been to other readers. For years, when friends have visited from abroad, I’ve often taken them to one of my favourite sites: Ein Hod’s old mosque. On the way there, I usually explained the sociocultural miracle that the Romanian new immigrant Dadaist artist, Marcel Janco, and his followers had wrought.

Parched palate

In the 1950s, they had saved the stone homes of the centuries-old Palestinian village of Ein Hawd from demolition in order to form an art colony. In the process, the name of the village was changed from the Arabic Ein Hawd (meaning “Spring of the Trough”) to the Hebrew Ein Hod (meaning “Spring of Grace”).

They offered some of the village’s original Palestinian residents – descendants of the Abu al-Hija clan who had moved to their olive fields and would eventually establish the new Ein Hawd there – a level of sustenance as guards, gardeners and housekeepers in their own original homes, repurposed as art galleries.

I usually alluded to the majority of the Abu al-Hijas, who became refugees in Jenin, and who provided the plot for Mornings in Jenin, the novel that launched my friend Susan Abulhawa as a leading Palestinian fiction writer.

By this point in my tour-guiding, I usually suffer from a parched palate because of the emotional impact of the narrative – and, even more, because, as a writer, I have for years been scrabbling after Abulhawa’s level of literary achievement.

You can imagine how thirst-quenching an ice-cold beer is. After that, we usually rush back to our bus at the adjoining parking plot, the asphalt-topped former village cemetery, and head up to the alternative Ein Hawd that led the struggle for scores of unrecognised Palestinian villages in Israel. Like a dozen or so other such villages, this one has finally gained recognition.

Jewish nation’s deed

Others have not been as lucky. Witness the unrecognised Bedouin village of al-Araqib, which has been demolished and rebuilt close to 150 times. When the court prohibits its chief, Sheikh Sayyah al-Turi, from entering the village, he seeks shelter in its cemetery.

No wonder his wife and their son served jail terms as well. They lack the necessary empathy with Holocaust descendants to move out of the way, enabling Jewish settlers to build a residential paradise in their place and make the desert bloom. The logic of involved government officials, including Supreme Court judges, is impeccable: the focus must be on Jewish settlers reclaiming their homeland.

God, my throat is parched again. Think of all the bars that would have studded the country, had Israel been more careful. In the aftermath of the Nakba, in the 1950s alone, the state demolished 1,200 mosques, with their adjacent cemeteries, no doubt.

Israel’s representative at the UN has shown the Security Council the Jewish nation’s “deed” to the entire Promised Land.

The same deed promised the Jewish nation enough Palestinians to serve as “choppers of wood and drawers of water”. But now we have imported Chinese, Thai and Sri Lankan manual labourers, obviating the need for Bedouin servants in this or the next life.

That is why their cemetery will likely go with them to who-knows-where. To hell, if need be.

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Hatim Kanaaneh is a retired doctor, the first Western-trained physician in his village in Galilee, who has spent decades serving and advocating for his community.

Nearly 400 hospitals and medical facilities in Yemen were destroyed during the four-year war period as a result of the Saudi-led coalition air strikes, Health Ministry spokesman Youssef Hadiri said in an interview with Sputnik News, on Thursday.

“More than 375 hospitals and medical facilities were destroyed because they were hit directly or indirectly by bombs and missiles launched by the coalition,” Hadiri said.

The spokesman added that the Yemeni medical sector is in critical condition due to the war that is exacerbated by Saudi-led aggression.

Hadiri also said that more than 5,000 people in Yemen need to undergo dialysis or kidney transplants and that in the war period at least 1,200 people died from not receiving the treatment or medication needed for kidney disease. In addition, the spokesman said that the humanitarian crisis in Yemen has led to the death of more than 700,000 people.

“Diseases and epidemics such as cholera, diphtheria, various flu viruses and hunger, caused by the blockade to Yemen, affected to some degree 16 million people, as a result more than 700,000 people died,” he said.

Hadiri told Sputnik News last week that six people, including four children, were killed in a coalition airstrike in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa. Meanwhile, 56 people, including two Russian women, were injured.

Yemen has for years been involved in a clash between the illegitimate “government” forces led by President Abdul Rahman Mansour Hadi, and between the Yemeni Army and Popular Militias. The Saudi-led coalition has been carrying out attacks against Yemeni forces at Hadi’s request since March 2015.

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In recent days, in response to the Trump administration’s issuance on May 23 of a 17-charge indictment against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, a number of prominent liberal columnists and Democratic politicians have come out with highly critical comments. Understandably, many long-time supporters of Julian Assange have seized on these condemnations as a chink of light in the darkness of the U.S. Government’s decade-long pursuit of the trailblazing publisher, as a hopeful sign that, finally, it might be possible to move defense of Julian Assange into the mainstream.

However, such rejoicing may be misplaced, at best, and dangerously deluded, at worst. Who are these liberal icons taking a stand on behalf of Assange? They included Sens. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), Elizabeth Warren, (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). They also included journalists such as Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian; Masha Gessen of the New Yorker; MSNBC host Rachel Maddow; and the editorial boards of the New York Times and the Washington Post. So, let’s take each of them, one by one.

First, there’s tribune of the people Bernie Sanders. Sanders had said nothing about the first indictment, issued on April 11, but came out with a strange tweet 24 hours after the issuance of the May 23 indictment:

“Let me be clear: it is a disturbing attack on the First Amendment for the Trump administration to decide who is or is not a reporter for the purposes of a criminal prosecution. Donald Trump must obey the Constitution, which protects the publication of news about our government.”

Let me be clear: it is a disturbing attack on the First Amendment for the Trump administration to decide who is or is not a reporter for the purposes of a criminal prosecution. Donald Trump must obey the Constitution, which protects the publication of news about our government. https://t.co/5JtHNHH2BE

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) May 24, 2019

Sanders’s comments appeared in a re-tweet of an American Civil Liberties Union tweet:

For the first time in the history of our country, the government has brought criminal charges under the Espionage Act against a publisher for the publication of truthful information. This is a direct assault on the First Amendment.

The ACLU tweet was forthright and unambiguous. Not so Sanders’s tweet, which failed to name either Assange or WikiLeaks. Moreover, the issue Sanders that disturbs Sanders, namely, who is or is not a reporter, isn’t one raised by the ACLU, which states that the target of prosecution is a publisher of truthful information. However, without a mention of either Assange’s name or the recent indictment, Sanders’s intervention is unlikely to have much of an impact.

Then there’s Elizabeth Warren. She was quoted as saying,

“Assange is a bad actor who has harmed U.S. national security—and he should be held accountable. But Trump should not be using the case as a pretext to wage war on the First Amendment and go after the free press who hold the powerful accountable everyday.”

Source: The Washington Times

It’s hard to decide which is more objectionable: her characterization of Assange as “a bad actor,” without explaining why and what she means by the term; her insistence that he “be held accountable,” without explaining for what or in what way (lethal injection, perhaps?); or her transparent attempts to ingratiate herself with the press, who are supposedly holding “the powerful accountable everyday.”

Warren’s statement, like that of Sanders, oozes insincerity. The two presidential aspirants know perfectly well that the Democratic Party national leadership blames Assange for the 2016 electoral debacle, and would like to see him executed or, at the very least, chained to a wall in a Supermax prison for the rest of his life. Any statement from them that smacks even vaguely of a defense of WikiLeaks would mean instant excommunication. However, some of Sanders and Warren’s supporters do undoubtedly feel that Assange and WikiLeaks have been unjustly persecuted; hence the convoluted, and largely worthless, nonsense.

And that’s it. Not one presidential candidate, other than Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) and Sen. Mike Gravel (both of whom having spoken out in defense of Julian Assange long before the release of the superseding indictment) has said anything about Assange. So, not exactly a tidal wave of support. To his credit, Ron Wyden did issue a statement on the day of the new indictment, one that was mercifully free of the Sanders/Warren contrivances:

This is not about Julian Assange. This is about the use of the Espionage Act to charge a recipient and publisher of classified information. I am extremely concerned about the precedent this may set and potential dangers to the work of journalists and the First Amendment.

Source: US Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon

Wyden’s relative boldness is probably not unrelated to his not running for president, and hence to his not needing the help of Democratic Party.

Let us consider the journalists, who are supposedly now moving to Julian Assange’s side. Take the New York Times. On April 11, the day of Julian Assange’s arrest and the unsealing of the first indictment, the Times ran a classic smear job in its news pages. The story was packed with familiar allegations and insinuations, none supported by any evidence. As usual, the Times’s assertions went even beyond those of the zealous prosecutors.

“Throughout the 2016 campaign,” the Times reporters claimed, “Mr. Assange played down accusations of Russian interference, and misled the public on his source for the damaging documents WikiLeaks released.”

The slippery use of the word “misled” is based on at least two unsupported assumptions: the Russians were the source of the DNC/Podesta e-mails and that Assange knew that they were the source. (Neither President Obama nor the Mueller team has ever made the latter claim; Mueller implied it, but didn’t say so explicitly.)

In its editorial, published the same day, the Times, after first charmingly noting that “British police officers unceremoniously bundled the scraggly-bearded refugee off in a van,” explained why the indictment was heartening: “The administration has begun well by charging Mr. Assange with an indisputable crime.” A legal proceeding against Julian Assange would be useful, moreover, in that it “could help draw a sharp line between legitimate journalism and dangerous cybercrime. Once he’s in the United States, moreover, Assange could prove to be a useful source on how Russia orchestrated its attacks on the Clinton campaign.” No one could come away from reading this editorial without concluding that the Times was delighted that the U.S. Government was finally going after Assange.

So, did the Times change its position on Assange on May 23? Let’s first look at how the Trump Justice Department unrolled its indictment. Let’s look at the statement of Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, in particular to the assertion that Assange is no journalist:

Some say that Assange is a journalist and that he should be immune from prosecution for these actions. The Department takes seriously the role of journalists in our democracy and we thank you for it. It is not and has never been the Department’s policy to target them for their reporting. Julian Assange is no journalist. This made plain by the totality of his conduct as alleged in the indictment—i.e., his conspiring with and assisting a security clearance holder to acquire classified information, and his publishing the names of human sources. Indeed, no responsible actor—journalist or otherwise—would purposely publish the names of individuals he or she knew to be confidential human sources in war zones, exposing them to the gravest of dangers.

U.S. Attorney G. Zachary Terwilliger for the Eastern District of Virginia then chimed in:

Assange is charged for his alleged complicity in illegal acts to obtain or receive voluminous databases of classified information and for agreeing and attempting to obtain classified information through computer hacking. The United States has not charged Assange for passively obtaining or receiving classified information. The indictment alleges that Assange published in bulk hundreds of thousands of these stolen classified documents. But the United States has not charged Assange for that. Instead, the United States has only charged Assange for publishing a narrow set of classified documents in which Assange also allegedly published the un-redacted names of innocent people who risked their safety and freedom to provide information to the United States and its allies. These sources included local Afghans and Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents from repressive regimes.

In other words, the U.S. wasn’t charging Assange for publishing “stolen classified documents”; it was charging him for publishing classified documents in which he published the “un-redacted names of innocent people.” So, no reason for anyone to panic; no one’s going after “real” journalists.

The measure of the sincerity of media complaints about the new indictment would be the extent to which they echo or distance themselves from the words of the U.S. Government officials bringing it forward. Sure enough, the New York Times repeated the officials’ claims almost word-for-word. The editorial started off by asserting that Assange

released numerous documents without removing names of confidential sources, putting their lives in jeopardy. The government notes in its charging document that those put at risk included “journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents” living in repressive regimes who provided information to the United States.

The government’s claim that WikiLeaks’s disclosures put “in jeopardy” the lives of “confidential sources” is belied by the fact that during the 2013 court martial of Chelsea Manning, it failed to name even one “source” who had lost his life. The use of the word “sources” suggests foreigners risking their lives to help Americans. In reality, the “sources” named in the WikiLeaks documents refer to anyone to whom U.S. diplomats have talked. There is no reason why the tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of such people should enjoy anonymity in perpetuity.

The Times admits that it had worked with Assange in the past when the paper published WikiLeaks material. Those documents “shed important light on the American war effort in Iraq, revealing how the United States turned a blind eye to the torture of prisoners by Iraqi forces and how extensively Iran had meddled in the conflict.” What a relief then that the Times was able to expose malfeasance on the part of Iraqis and Iranians—the bad guys! Perhaps if it had been Iranians who had shot up the two Reuters war correspondents, the Timesmight have got around to mentioning the Collateral Murder video.

Be that as it may, the Times goes on, while WikiLeaks may have done some useful work in the past, the paper had always treated WikiLeaks as “a source,” never as “a partner.” Moreover, unlike WikiLeaks, the Times “does not condone breaking into government computers or irresponsibly publishing the identities of sources.” Nevertheless, the paper concludes, the Trump administration “has chosen to go well beyond the question of hacking to directly challenge the boundaries of the First Amendment.”

The editorial was a head-scratcher: If WikiLeaks is a “source” and not a publisher worthy of partnership with the Times, it’s hard to see why respectable media outlets should have anything to fear from a prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act. According to the First Amendment doctrine continually espoused by U.S. media, sources are fair game for prosecutors, while the media are untouchable. This was precisely the point the Trump DOJ officials were making.

Let’s take a look at the Washington Post. Its editorial page purred with satisfaction on the day of Julian Assange’s arrest. His arrest was “a victory for the rule of law, not the defeat for civil liberties of which his defenders mistakenly warn.” The editorial accepted without question the prosecutors’ allegation against him. Assange, the Post said, obtained his documents “unethically…including… by trying to help now-former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning hack into a classified U.S. computer system. Also unlike real journalists, WikiLeaks dumped material into the public domain without any effort independently to verify its factuality or give named individuals an opportunity to comment.”

This last statement is truly the height of insolence. WikiLeaks has never been shown to have published anything false. The same cannot be said about the Post. A few recent examples: Its blockbuster story about Russians’ supposedly hacking the U.S. electricity grid through a utility in Vermont; its smear of a story alleging that innumerable independent media were advertent or inadvertent tools of Russian propaganda; its exultant discovery of an e-mail sent by former Trump attorney Michael Cohen to Kremlin press secretary Dimitry Peskov—“the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.” As Matt Taibbi wrote,

the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.

As for unethical conduct, nothing WikiLeaks did surpasses for lack of ethics the Post’s disclosure of the contents of a telephone call between incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak that was listened in on by the National Security Agency. The unmasking of an American who is not the subject of surveillance is a crime, and without question morally dubious.

So, on April 11, the Post was extremely enthusiastic about Assange’s indictment. The sooner the U.S. Government could get its hands on him the better:

Britain should not fear that sending him for trial on that hacking count would endanger freedom of the press. To the contrary, Mr. Assange’s transfer to U.S. custody, followed possibly by additional Russia-related charges or his conversion into a cooperating witness, could be the key to learning more about Russian intelligence’s efforts to undermine democracy in the West. Certainly he is long overdue for personal accountability.

So, the British should transfer Assange into the custody of the U.S., which should then issue “additional Russia-related charges,” presumably additional to what’s stated in the extradition request. It’s not in accord with international law or domestic law, but who cares? There’s bigger fish to fry: “Russian intelligence’s efforts to undermine democracy in the West”!

In its May 24 editorial, the Post lamented that Assange could slip through U.S. hands. If only the Trump administration had kept to the original charge, “the federal government could have locked up Mr. Assange for years without challenging the First Amendment, chilling reporters’ activities or discouraging the British government, which is holding Mr. Assange, from extraditing him to the United States rather than to Sweden, where he faces a rape investigation.”

Instead, the Trump administration is going after Assange under a legal theory that “could easily be applied to journalists,” though of course Assange is no journalist.

The same theme—let’s nail Assange, but let’s leave the Espionage Act out of it—informed the column of Alan Rusbridger, former editor of the Guardian. He too starts with the obligatory personal attack: Assange is “mercurial, untrustworthy and dislikable.” He expressed disapproval of Assange’s “releasing unredacted material from the Manning trove in September 2011,” omitting naturally the Guardian’s role in the disclosure of the “unredacted material.”

The unredacted material, including names of sources, became publicly available because two Guardian writers, David Leigh and Luke Harding, published in 2011 a cash-in book, WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, in which they, for reasons never explained, disclosed the password to all of the WikiLeaks files. Assange published the unredacted files in response to the Guardian’s disclosure of the password, in order to provide the named sources a measure of protection.

Nonetheless, Rusbridger argues, though Assange is a terrible and irresponsible person, “the attempt to lock him up under the Espionage Act is a deeply troubling move that should serve as a wake-up call to all journalists.” Rusbridger’s call of course leaves open the possibility that he would look on with favor an attempt to lock up Assange under something other than the Espionage Act. This is indeed the editorial position of the Guardian, which, following the release of the May 23 indictment, called on the U.K. Home Secretary to pack Assange off to Sweden to face “a rape charge process” there: “This is serious and deserves a proper trial.” The peculiar term “rape process” was a later addition. The editorial had originally said “rape charges.” In response to readers’ pointing out that no “rape charges” have ever been filed against Assange, the Guardian inserted that suggestive yet meaningless term.

Conveniently, the Guardian doesn’t insist on the Home Secretary’s imposing on any extradition of Assange to Sweden the condition that he not be transferred to the United States. Nor, significantly, does the paper express any readiness to see Assange walk free in the event that Sweden’s courts fail to press charges against him, that they acquit him or that they convict but release him within a couple of years.

The same odd combination of furious disavowal of Assange and apparent alarm over the new indictment informed the views of a number of liberal commentators. Consider the New Yorker’s Masha Gessen. Her article kicks off with the standard attacks on Assange: He “keeps terrible political company,” he is “power crazed and manipulative,” “he shared information that exposed people to danger.” Such attacks are of course a rhetorical device, introduced in order to show us what a fine, principled person the author is. Yes, X is the scummiest person to have walked this earth since Adolf Hitler, but I will fight to the death X’s right to say or do…whatever. This kind of stuff does wonders for the writer but very little for the purported object of the so-called principled defense. All a reader comes away with is that “X is the scummiest person since Adolf Hitler” and thus hardly merits time or attention.

Source: The New Yorker

Sure enough, Gessen’s anti-Assange vituperations segue into the predictable “One has to hold one’s nose while defending Assange—and yet one must defend Assange.”

Of course, what comes next is not any kind of a defense of Assange. There is no defense of the publication of critical material such as the Guantanamo Files, Afghan War Diary, Iraq War Logs, Cablegate. None of that is mentioned, not even Collateral Murder. So, what’s her defense of Julian Assange? Apparently, it’s that if the government goes after Julian Assange under the Espionage Act one day, it might go after an august publication such as the New Yorker or the New York Times under the same act the next. However, Gessen immediately undercuts her own argument by happily repeating, as the Times did, the Trump DOJ assertion that Assange is no journalist:

The government has argued that Assange is not a journalist. Most journalists would probably agree: the indiscriminate publication of classified information (or any other information, for that matter), with neither a narrative nor regard for people’s safety, is not journalism in any conventional understanding of the word.

So, if the U.S. Government says Assange isn’t a real journalist, and is only going after him for doing things that Gessen and others say real journalists don’t do, then why the anguish? Well, she says, “The last thing we want the U.S. government, or any government, to do is to start deciding who is and who is not a journalist.”

So, once again, Assange is a terrible person and not even a real journalist at that, yet we must defend him because one day the Trump administration might go after a real journalist. OK, but what if it doesn’t? What if the government is telling the truth and intends only to go after Assange? (That may be true. As the Nixon administration found, going after the New York Times isn’t worth the hassle.) Would that make the prosecution of Assange acceptable? If your answer is yes, then you aren’t really interested in the freedom to publish. In any case, whether the government goes after “real” journalists is scarcely the issue. The First Amendment protects everybody who thinks, writes, expresses an opinion or argues with his neighbor. There is no special carve-out for journalists. For Gessen and the New York Times to get into this semantic debate over who is and who isn’t a journalist means they have already accepted the terms of the debate as the U.S. government has set them.

Then, there is also the interesting case of Rachel Maddow, the prime exhibit in the case that the tide is shifting in favor of Julian Assange. On the evening of May 23, rumors began to swirl that Maddow had come out fiercely against the new indictment and embraced the cause of press freedom. Caitlin Johnstone wrote excitedly:

Rachel Maddow has aired a segment condemning the new indictment for 17 alleged violations of the Espionage Act. Yes, that Rachel Maddow. Wow. Make no mistake, this is a hugely significant development….Now that she’s recognized that this could actually hurt her and her network directly, she’s finally feeding her audience a different narrative out of sheer enlightened self-interest….Maddow’s credulous audience would eat live kittens if she told them to, so the way she’s pushing back against a dangerous legal precedent in language they can understand will make a difference in the way American liberals think about Assange’s predicament….She actually chose to do the right thing. I’m gobsmacked, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that my hope for humanity sparked up a little today.

Wow! Gobsmacked! Let’s take a look at what Maddow actually said. On April 11, she did a long segment about Assange’s arrest, focusing exclusively on the question of whether Assange would be put on trial for his “major role in the Russian military intelligence operation that monkey wrenched the 2016 election.” She was of course alarmed that he wouldn’t be:

I think if they are going to charge anything about Assange and his role in that attack, if they are going to charge anything against Assange other than what they`ve already put in this initial indictment, the way I read this, I think, they`re going to have to do so really, really quickly like imminently, like this isn`t going to linger….After you`re extradited, no more charges.  The extraditing country has to know exactly what you`re facing before they make the decision to send you over here, the Rule of Specialty….As far as I understand this, if U.S. prosecutors do intend to file any more charges against Julian Assange, they really won`t have much more time to get that done because the U.K. will extradite him in short order and that`s a full stop on anything else being added to the charges against Assange

So, what mattered to her wasn’t the issue of press freedom; what mattered, as always, was Russia. She was concerned that the Trump administration was dawdling, avoiding charging Assange with Russia stuff. On May 23, she returned to this theme, making clear that she did not believe the Trump administration was serious about extraditing Assange:

Now today, apparently, the United States government has decided maybe they don`t want the U.K. to extradite Julian Assange here to ever face trial. Or at least that would appear to be the intriguing, fascinating and very worrying bottom line of this remarkable thing that the Justice Department did today when they unsealed a new superseding indictment, so an additional indictment against Assange.

Pay close attention to what she is saying here. What’s “fascinating” and “very worrying” is not that Assange will be prosecuted. It’s that he won’t be prosecuted. She then continues her lament by pointing out that a successful prosecution of Assange under the Espionage Act is virtually impossible:

These new charges are trying to prosecute Assange for publishing that stolen secret material, which was obtained by somebody else. And that is a whole different kettle of fish than what he was initially charged with.  There has never in this country been a successful prosecution under the Espionage Act of some third party for publishing something that somebody else stole or something that otherwise made its way out of the government while the government was trying to keep it secret. We`ve never in this country successfully charged somebody for publishing secret material.

Her point is that the DOJ knows full well that the U.K. courts will almost certainly not grant its extradition request, and that’s precisely the reason why Trump made it. He wants the extradition process to fail because he doesn’t want to bring Assange to the United States. That’s why Trump’s new charges are not about what they should be about: They are not about Assange’s

working with Russian intelligence material in 2016 to try to help Trump win the election and to try to hurt Hillary Clinton.  This is not about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange personally strategizing with Trump campaign staffers about how to beat Hillary Clinton as they were releasing all of that information stolen by the Russians.

In other words, Trump doesn’t want Assange over here to disclose all of the grimy details of their collusion with Russia. Hence, the issuance of an indictment guaranteed to be rejected by the U.K. There is nothing whatsoever here about the right to publish.

The first thing to take note about this alleged tidal wave of support for Julian Assange among liberals is that no one is actually expressing any support for Julian Assange or WikiLeaks. There were no criticisms of the first indictment of Assange that the U.S. unsealed on April 11, despite the none-too-subtle hints in it that an Espionage Act prosecution was in the works. There have been no condemnations of the indefinite detention of Chelsea Manning on no ground other than that she refuses to testify against Assange. The media as usual dismiss any concern about her fate, adopting the smug attitude that, as a “source,” she’s not really entitled to the legal protections afforded to journalists by the First Amendment. Using that logic, it would have been perfectly fine to imprison Daniel Ellsberg for decades even as the New York Times was collecting its Pulitzers.

There is something wildly implausible about the idea that liberal commentators will now be manning the barricades on behalf of Julian Assange and Wikileaks, that as a result of the issuance of the superseding indictment, the scales have fallen from their eyes. It is hard to believe that during all of those years that Assange was holed up in the Ecuador embassy, warning that the Swedish extradition request was simply a ruse to ship him to the United States, it never occurred to liberal commentators that issues of the freedom of the press and the First Amendment were at stake.

Now, it is possible that these liberal commentators did not believe that Julian Assange would ever be prosecuted. Maybe they really did think that he was confined for years in the tiny Ecuador embassy because he was afraid of going on trial in Sweden or serving a few months for bail jumping. Maybe so, but if that is the case, then their silence during the years when key figures in the U.S. political establishment were calling for his execution and/or imprisonment was deafening. There were no calls for his release or for a clarifying statement from either the Obama or the Trump administration as to whether it intends to prosecute Assange.

The truth is that for most liberal commentators the only problem they have with any indictment and obviously lengthy imprisonment of Assange is the use of the Espionage Act to get there. If the Trump administration were to come up with some other mechanism, if it could charge him with something other than violation of the Espionage Act, everything would be fine.

There is every likelihood that this will happen. The grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia is still sitting. Chelsea Manning is still in prison for refusing to testify against Assange. That the grand jury has not been dissolved and that Manning has not been released, even after the release of the indictments, indicate strongly that additional indictments against Assange are pending.

Then there is RussiaGate. So far, the Eastern District of Virginia has focused on 2010 stuff. It could well shift its attention to 2016. Recall that in July 2018, Mueller charged 12 alleged members of the GRU with “conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States.” These GRU officers

knowingly and intentionally conspired with each other, and with persons known and unknown to the Grand Jury (collectively the “Conspirators”), to gain unauthorized access (to “hack”) into the computers of U.S. persons and entities involved in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, steal documents from those computers, and stage releases of the stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Well, Julian Assange was part of that conspiracy, says Mueller. It is surely only a matter of time before Assange is formally charged with involvement in this conspiracy with the GRU to sabotage the U.S. election. Also significant is the transfer of Assange’s personal belongings by Ecuador to the U.S. The U.S., at this very moment, is doubtless sifting through Assange’s hard drives and flash drives and probably fabricating discoveries (“new evidence”) that will find their way into any new indictment.

Should the Eastern District of Virginia prosecutors will now issue an indictment of Assange charging him with interference in the U.S. election on behalf of the GRU, there will be cries of glee and rejoicing, not only in the studios of MSNBC but in the offices of the DNC, the Democratic caucus on Capitol Hill, the editorial offices of the New York Times and Washington Post, and on the Twitter feed of every single liberal commentator in the country. This will indeed be a tidal wave of support.

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The US’ recently released “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” envisages India playing a key role in this vast transregional space in order to “contain” China, while Pakistan is conspicuously absent from the text despite being one of the few nuclear weapons states, among the most populous countries in the world, and the transit route for China’s overland access to the Afro-Asian Ocean via CPEC.

“Containing” China

The US officially unveiled its “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” over the weekend and tasked Defense Secretary Shanahan with sharing a summary of it during the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore. The gist of the document is that the US is committed to “containing” China through the crucial support of its many regional partners per what can be described as the “Lead From Behind” stratagem. South Asia, and especially aspiring hegemon India, naturally figures prominently in this vision, though the conspicuous absence of the global pivot state of Pakistan from the text — one of the few nuclear weapons states, among the most populous countries in the world, and the transit route for China’s overland access to the Afro-Asian Ocean via CPEC — hints that the US wants to “isolate” it from this seemingly inclusive geostrategic concept. Interestingly, even landlocked and mountainous Nepal has a part to play in this paradigm, but that’s probably because the US regards it as a zone of Indo-Chinese competition unlike Pakistan which is solidly in the Chinese camp, hence why the US sees no need to touch upon it at all because it likely regards the country as a “lost cause”.

The Integral Role Of India

There are only several pages that specifically deal with South Asia (33-36), though India is also briefly  mentioned in other parts as well. The US emphasizes the “common outlook” that it shares with India and how New Delhi’s “Act East” policy of ASEAN engagement supposedly proves its commitment to the “free and open Indo-Pacific” concept, Washington’s new euphemism for “containing” China. The “convergence of strategic interests” between these two Great Powers manifests itself through India’s unique designation as the US’ only “Major Defense Partner” and the 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue that was commenced last year between their Defense and Foreign Ministers. The document also lauds the effect that COMCASA will have in improving “interoperability” between their armed forces, though it noticeably omits any mentioning of the LEMOA pact that allows them to use some of the other’s military facilities on a case-by-case “logistical” basis. Even so, the Pentagon praises the increased “scope, complexity, and frequency” of military exercises with India and the upcoming tri-service exercises later this year, on top of their rapidly expanding arms trade.

South Asian Satellite States

As for the other countries of South Asia (apart from Pakistan and Bhutan), the US speaks highly about the “increased cooperation on mutual logistics arrangements” that it agreed to with Sri Lanka earlier this year, as well as the “avenues to expand security cooperation” with the Maldives after its “democratic transition” late last year. Concerning Bangladesh, it’s described as having a “strong defense relationship” with the US and being an “important partner for regional stability and security”. The “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” also applauds the “annual Bilateral Defense Dialogue” between the two for “setting the strategic direction of their relationship”. Lastly, landlocked and mountainous Nepal is curiously included in the text despite not being a country that ordinarily comes to mind when one thinks of the Afro-Pacific (“Indo-Pacific”) region. The document talks about the opportunity for expanding defense ties in light of last year’s “Land Forces Talks” and several landmark visits by high-ranking US defense officials, including the head of USINDOPACOM.

Network-Centric Proxy Warfare

While the aforementioned South Asian states are implicitly conceived of as Indian satellites whose overall role in the larger paradigm is very limited, the aspiring hegemon itself is expected to fulfill a transregional one as regards the Pacific part of the Afro-Pacific (“Indo-Pacific”) concept. Later on in the document the Pentagon talks about how India is contributing to the formation of a “networked region” by being one of several trilateral partnerships that the US and Japan are forming. It also points out the “emerging intra-Asian security relationships” that India is bilaterally involved in with Japan and Vietnam, as well as the trilateral one between itself, Japan, and Australia. Furthermore, the Quad of the US, India, Japan, and Australia is mentioned once, but it doesn’t play a major role in policy formation, probably because Washington considers it better to expand its “Chinese Containment Coalition” beyond those three major states to include medium and smaller ones too, thus allowing it to incorporate the entire Afro-Pacific region into this concept.

Concluding Thoughts

In sum, the US’ “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” envisages India playing a leading role in “containing” China in the Afro-Asian (“Indian”) Ocean region and then using its strategic partnerships with Japan, Australia, and Vietnam to expand its influence into the Pacific portion of this transregional space. Likewise, its very presence in its eponymous ocean serves as the gateway for more robust Japanese military involvement on the other side of ASEAN, with these South and East Asian Great Powers strategically uniting in the ASEAN middle ground between them. For all intents and purposes and apart from the exceptional involvement of landlocked Nepal (Laos, and Mongolia), the “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” deals entirely with maritime nations and therefore naturally has a naval focus, though it’s still strange that nothing is mentioned about Pakistan when considering that S-CPEC+ is China’s multimodal connectivity shortcut to Africa. In any case, Islamabad’s lack of inclusion in this policy planning document doesn’t take away from its global pivot significance, it just means that an entirely separate strategy report will likely need to be written for countering it.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Overnight on June 2, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) carried out a missile strike on Syrian Arab Army (SAA) targets in the  southern part of the country. According to the IDF, the missiles hit 2 artillery batteries, observation and intelligence posts and an SA-2 (S-75 Dvina) aerial defense battery.

The IDF says that the strike was conducted in response to the launch of 2 rockets at Mount Hermon from the area controlled by the Syrian government. Pro-Israeli media outlets immediately speculated that the rockets were Iranian-made Fadjr-5.

The Syrian state media confirmed the Israeli strike saying that air defense forces had intercepted several Israeli missiles coming from the Golan Heights. 3 Syrian soldiers were killed and 7 others were injured.

This was the second Israeli strike on Syria during the week. On May 27, Israeli jets destroyed a Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft gun killing one service member and injuring another one at Tal Sha’ar.

Israel seems to be increasing its military against Syria once again after the decision of the Trump administration to recognize the occupied Golan Heights as a part of Israel. At the same time, the Syrian military is avoiding to employ a S-300 air defense system received from Russia, most likely to avoid a further military escalation in the region.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Turkish-backed militant groups carried out a failed attack on al-Hwaiz in northwestern Hama. At least one vehicle and 19 militants were eliminated in clashes with the SAA.

ISIS fighters have destroyed two SAA vehicles east of the town of al-Sukhnah with an anti-tank mine and an improvised-explosive device (IED), the terrorist groups’ news agency, Amaq, reported on June 1. According to Amaq, several Syrian service members were killed and injured in the attacks.

The terrorist group went on to claim that its fighters captured a third vehicle in an ambush west of al-Sukhnah. Four SAA soldiers were reportedly killed there.

Earlier, ISIS cells in the Homs desert launched a large attack on the area of al-Faydah in southwestern Deir Ezzor. The army repelled the attack after more than six hours of heavy clashes. Several soldiers were killed.

Amaq said that these attacks were a part of a new military campaign called Ghazwat Al-Aistinzaf [the Battle of Attrition], which began on May 31. The campaign appears to be aimed against both the SAA and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).

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Julian Assange is being slowly murdered by “Her Majesty’s Prison Service” at Belmarsh prison in the south-east of London. The prison is notorious for holding people who have never been charged with a crime indefinitely. It is also called the British version of Guantanamo, and, typically used to detain so-called terrorists, thus called by the British police and secret service and aped by the British MSM and establishment. Terrorists that become terrorists by continuous and repeated accusations, by media propaganda, but not necessarily by fact.

Remember, if a lie is repeated often enough it becomes the truth in the minds of the braindead listeners. Its indoctrination of the public to demonize somebody or a group of people, or a country, who could become dangerous for the empire’s vicious and criminal endeavors. That’s what they are doing with Julian Assange. Exactly the same principle is applied, though on a different scale, against President Putin and against Russia and China. And it seems to work in a brainwashed-to-the-core, western society, ran by their spineless European US-vassalic leadership.

Yes, what is happening to Julian Assange could happen to any journalist who reveals the inconvenient truth about the empire and its minions’ criminal machinations, any journalist – or non-journalist, whistleblower, for that matter – anyone who dares standing up to the AngloZionist atrocities may end up in Guantanamo or Belmarsh which is considered a Type A prison for adult men, meaning, a “serious” prison, where “dangerous” detainees are held for as long as Her Majesty’s Prison Service considers necessary, and prisoners treatments are held secret and include torture.

Julian Assange’s case goes even farther than breaking all the rules of “democratic” free speech. The way he is treated is a serious infraction on Human Rights. The US and British governments intend to silence and punish a champion of free speech, torturing him for the world to see, and especially as a deterrent for would-be whistleblowers and other free-speech advocates.

Julian Assange has been condemned to a ‘temporary’ prison sentence of 50 weeks for jumping bail, when he sought and was granted refuge in 2012 in the Ecuadorian Embassy. And why did he jump bail? Because he was about to be extradited to neofascist Sweden, who acting in the name of Washington, accused him with phony rape and sexual misconduct charges, from where he would have most likely been extradited to the US – where he might have faced a kangaroo court and a fake trial with possible death sentence, or indefinite incarceration at Guantanamo.

That’s why he jumped bail and why he escaped to the Ecuadorian Embassy, because western injustice was already then played out with false propaganda, for everyone, but the blind and indoctrinated, to see. Rafael Correa, then President of Ecuador, saw the truth behind it all and granted Julian asylum, and later gave him Ecuadorian citizenship – which in 2018 was revoked by Correa’s traitor and fascist successor, US-implant, Lenin Moreno, who, as a reward, it is said, got an IMF loan of US$ 4.2 billion to help the government carry out its neoliberal economic reform program, meaning undoing much of the social programs of improving economic equality for the Ecuadorian population, implemented during the Correa presidency.

Well, how sick can that be? – Unfortunately, acting pathologically or even psychopathically in today’s world is fully accepted. It’s the new normal. This means, we are living in an almost-terminally ill, corrupt and utterly brainwashed society – to be precise, western society. “Almost-terminally” means that there is only dim hope of healing for the utter lack of conscientiousness of western society. Hope of western people’s awakening is fading, as it is sliding ever deeper into a bottomless abyss.

Julian Assange was first accused by Washington of fake charges of computer hacking and conspiring to defraud the United States. In fact, what this is all about is the 2010 publication by Wikileaks of the infamous video that circulated the world a million times, depicting the purposeful, malicious ‘collateral killing’ of harmless civilians by the crew of a US Army helicopter – and of other data of atrocious acts of the US military revealed by Chelsea Manning, and published by Wikileaks. Chelsea Manning has been and is herself serving prison sentences.

Despite the fact that this little video has been seen around the world probably by more than a billion people, nobody went on the barricades – on an endless mass-demonstration – to stop the rogue-state and killing machine United States of America from committing its daily and deadly crimes. Nobody. And the killing goes on. And Washington is doing its utmost to silence every future revealing of their atrocities, by silencing Julian Assange, and intimidating any potential future truth-revealer.

They have now 50 weeks, while he is hidden away in a British Guantanamo-like prison, to slowly kill him on behalf of and as a little favor to Washington, so he doesn’t have to be extradited and the US is spared being exposed to the kangaroo trial that Julian would otherwise receive. If he dies a “natural” death in a British prison, Trump may wash his bloody hands in innocence, and those in Congress who want to send a CIA squadron to murder Assange – I kid you not they are not ashamed to openly say so – will also be able to whitewash their criminal and bloody minds. Nobody will ever know what really happened behind Her Majesty’s prison walls.  – There will be some flareups in the media – and then all quiets down. As usual. The Wikileaks founder will be gone – and all potential whistleblowers and truth-seeking journalists will be on their guard. Objective achieved.

In the meantime and to reach that objective, Julian is most likely being tortured, possibly physically and psychologically.  Julian Assange has suffered “prolonged exposure to psychological torture”, the UN’s torture expert, Nils Melzer, said in a BBC interview, and urged Britain not to extradite Assange to Washington. According to retired USAF lieutenant colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, he may have been doped with psychotropic drugs, like 3-quinuclidinyl benzilate, known as BZ that produces hallucinations, mental confusion and memory loss. This may have been the reason, why he was unable to speak clearly, and to participate in a Swedish Court hearing – and had to be transferred to the hospital wing of Her Majesty’s Belmarsh prison. One of the few pictures that emerged at the time of his transfer to the hospital was one of a zombie.

Let’s just hope that I‘m totally wrong with this scenario – and that people’s pressure (at this point it would be a miracle) will prey Julian loose from the lethal fangs of the empire and its minions.

The Western world keeps looking on – worse, they even support Her Majesty’s Prison Service, to which Julian Assange is subjected. They largely applauded the brutal British arrest of Julian Assange, when the police dragged him out of the Ecuadorian Embassy into a van and off to preventive custody, and hours later he was convicted to 50 weeks on a phony charge for jumping bail.

What can be said – is not better said than by Paul Craig Roberts,

“If the world stands for the US / UK / Swedish judicial murder of an innocent man, the world does not deserve to exist another second.” – Amen.

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

Featured image is from Medium

Since its 1979 revolution, ending a generation of US-installed fascist dictatorship, Washington has been militantly hostile toward Iran — especially since Trump took office.

His regime continues all out war by other means to topple its government, wanting the Islamic Republic returned to US client state status, its vast oil and gas reserves looted, its people ruthlessly exploited, the way things were from 1953 – 1979 under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

That’s what Pompeo has in mind by saying the Trump regime is “prepared to engage in a conversation with no preconditions (sic). We are ready to sit down with” Iranian officials, adding:

“The American effort to fundamentally reverse the malign activity (sic) of this Islamic Republic, this revolutionary force, is going to continue.”

Pompeo’s notion of “no preconditions” is subterfuge. US harshness toward Iran shows its real objectives.

The US under Republicans and Dems oppose all sovereign independent governments they don’t control.

They’re especially hostile to ruling authorities against Washington’s imperial agenda, its wars of aggression, its hostility toward peace, equity, and justice, its rage to dominate other nations, control their resources, and exploit their people as serfs.

Pompeo also failed to explain that Israel’s top geopolitical aim is eliminating Islamic Republic rule, for years urging the US to terror-bomb the country into submission, one of John Bolton’s longtime positions.

There’s no softening whatever of Trump regime policy toward Iran. Harsh rhetoric, Big Lies about the country, mean-spirited toughness, and longstanding US plans for wanting its government toppled drown out remarks like Pompeo’s on Sunday.

Last July, two months after he illegally abandoned the JCPOA nuclear deal, Trump said he’d meet with his Iranian counterpart without preconditions.

“If they want to meet, we’ll meet,” he added, saying as well his only concern is over not wanting Iran to develop a nuclear weapon it abhors, doesn’t seek, never has, and wants eliminated everywhere — Israel the only regional nuclear armed and dangerous state, a reality he ignores, supporting the Jewish state’s high crimes, mainly against defenseless Palestinians.

Trump’s public remarks show he’s a geopolitical know-nothing, an embarrassment to the office he holds, an unindicted war criminal multiple times over for endless aggression in multiple theaters on his watch, along with war by other means on Iran and Venezuela.

His comments last year on willingness to talk to Iran came ahead of US weaponized sanctions — aiming to drive its oil and gas exports to zero, along with disconnecting its banks from the SWIFT international financial transactions system, and other steps to crush its economy and inflict enormous hardships on its people.

In mid-May, Trump again said he’s willing to talk to Iran — around the same time a US carrier strike force and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers were deployed to the Middle East over fake intelligence claiming an Iranian threat that doesn’t exist, not now or at any time in Islamic Republic history.

John Bolton’s claims about Iranian responsibility for sabotaging Saudi and UAE tankers are Big Lies, aimed at heightening tensions further, risking possible war if things are pushed too far.

Preconditions define US relations with other countries, demanding they bend to its will, cooperative relations and compromise in international relations ruled out — especially with nations on the US target list for regime change like Russia, China, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran.

On Saturday, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said

his government “support(s) logic and negotiation if (the Trump regime) sits at the negotiating table and fully respects and follows international regulations, not if it issues a decree to negotiate.”

On Sunday he said

“(t)he party (meaning the US) who left the negotiating table and upended an agreement must come back to normal conditions,” adding:

Otherwise “I declare as the representative of the Iranian nation that in this period, and for as long as the enemy does not regret its measures in the past, we have no way but to show resistance.”

As long as the Trump regime remains a JCPOA scofflaw, breaching international law by abandoning the nuclear deal, along with maintaining illegal sanctions on Iran, aiming to crush its economy and harm its people, there’s no basis for talks.

There’s reason to engage with the US only if it fully complies with its international obligations and the rule of law — clearly what it has no intention of doing.

In late May, Iranian leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei ruled out talks with the Trump regime, calling them “fruitless, harmful, (and) a total loss,” adding:

US talks are all about applying pressure, he stressed, unrelated to evenhanded negotiations and mutual respect.

North Korean officials can explain the futility of talks with the US, accomplishing nothing but unacceptable demands and empty promises, what Iran knows well from 40 years of hostile US actions against the country.

Separately on Saturday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif slammed EU countries for breaching their JCPOA obligations, saying the following:

“Europe has not complied with any of the terms of the agreement in practice. Ostensibly, it has, but not in practice. What Europe has to do is to implement the deal” — what it refuses to do, adding:

“The UN Security Council issued a resolution on the JCPOA. The resolution follows two objectives: guarantee the peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear program and guarantee the normalization of Iran’s economic relations with the world.”

The Islamic Republic is in full compliance with JCPOA provisions. So are Russia and China. The US illegally pull out. Britain, France, and Germany, the other signatories, failed to fulfill their obligations. The same goes for other EU countries, yielding to US pressure instead of observing the rule of law.

Zarif asked EU governments “how many European companies are currently operating in Iran? How many European banks are working with Iran?”

How many EU countries are maintaining normal political, economic, financial, and trade relations with the Islamic Republic?

The answer is none, bowing to unacceptable US interests instead, showing their ruling authorities can never be trusted, the same, of course, true for the US.

As for negotiating with Trump regime hardliners, Iran wants no part of dealing with rogue actors bent on destroying the country and enslaving its people.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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“Oh, sono contrario all’intervento militare!” Recita un racconto “pacifista” ascoltato nel Nord che funge da pretesto per una dichiarazione sul Venezuela.

Questo preludio consola l’anima, libera la coscienza liberale e s’impegna a mantenere le credenziali accademiche, giornalistiche e politiche desiderate, ma sempre più elusive. Tuttavia, il “pacifismo” trattato qui non ha niente a che fare col recente gesto della Norvegia di cercare una soluzione pacifica. Il governo del Presidente Nicolás Maduro è ovviamente pienamente coinvolto in questo ultimo tentativo di negoziato.

In effetti, il governo venezuelano lo proposte per tutta la crisi. Ad esempio, il primo maggio, il segretario di Stato Mike Pompeo, tra i principali artefici di tale narrativa “pacifista” insieme a John Bolton e al presidente Trump, dichiarò: “L’azione militare è possibile. Se questo è ciò che è richiesto, è quello che faranno gli Stati Uniti… cerchiamo di fare tutto il possibile per evitare la violenza… Preferiremmo una transizione pacifica del governo…”

C’è solo una ragione per cui finora gli Stati Uniti non potevano togliere l’opzione militare dal tavolo e attuarla. Non è perché ha qualche scrupolo sull’invasione di altri Paesi, ma piuttosto perché falliva miseramente nell’ambizioso tentativo di spezzare l’alleanza civile-militare, una precondizione esplicita all’opzione militare, almeno per il momento. Tuttavia, a Washington l’opzione della guerra economica non solo è sempre stata sul tavolo, ma veniva applicata ferocemente. Dopo le elezioni del 2013 del Presidente Nicolás Maduro in seguito la morte di Hugo Chávez, gli Stati Uniti sostennero le violente proteste dell’opposizione contro le elezioni legali, con conseguente pretesto per la legislazione sul Venezuela del presidente Obama nel 2014, volta a sanzionare il personale della Repubblica Bolivariana quale leva della punizione economica coll’obiettivo di ostacolare i funzionari politici chavisti e lo Stato.

Nel marzo 2015, Obama estese tale politica dichiarando il Venezuela “minaccia alla sicurezza nazionale degli Stati Uniti”, aprendo la porta a ulteriori sanzioni individuali. Trump le ampliava ulteriormente in sanzioni economiche collettive e piena guerra economica. Come notava il noto scrittore e accademico internazionale Vijay Prashad, influente nella sinistra statunitense, “Obama forgiò la lancia; Trump l’ha lanciata al cuore del Venezuela”. La guerra economica guidata da Trump contro il Venezuela colpisce soprattutto l’industria petrolifera. Secondo uno studio dell’aprile 2019 pubblicato negli Stati Uniti dai noti economisti statunitensi Mark Weisbrot e Jeffrey Sachs, queste e altre sanzioni economiche “riducevano l’apporto calorico della popolazione, aumentavano malattie e mortalità (sia tra gli adulti che i bambini) e milioni di venezuelani che lasciavano il Paese a causa del peggioramento della depressione economica e dell’iperinflazione. Esacerbarono la crisi economica del Venezuela e reso quasi impossibile stabilizzare l’economia, contribuendo ulteriormente ad altri morti”.

Continuano a sostenere che “Tali impatti danneggiarono in modo sproporzionato i venezuelani più poveri e vulnerabili… Si scoprivano che le sanzioni hanno inflitto e infliggono sempre più danni a vita e salute umana, tra cui si stima oltre 40000 morti nel 2017-2018; e che tali sanzioni corrisponderebbero alla definizione di punizione collettiva della popolazione civile descritta nelle convenzioni internazionali di Ginevra e dell’Aja, di cui gli Stati Uniti sono firmatari”.

Il governo venezuelano affermava che la guerra include anche non meno di tre sabotaggi elettrici nel marzo 2019 (7-14 marzo, 29 marzo e 30 marzo). Accompagnati da tre tentativi di colpo di Stato, il 23 gennaio, il 23 febbraio e il 30 aprile. Tutti incontrarono un’opposizione multipla e diffusa nelle strade da parte del Chavismo per difendere la rivoluzione. Tuttavia, si può immaginare come questa mobilitazione di massa influisca sull’economia già malconcia e sulla rotta “normale” di quella che è diventata una vita molto difficile. Inoltre, la guerra dei media degli USA contro Maduro e il Chavismo è una delle più feroci contro qualsiasi leader rivoluzionario della storia recente.

Il 16 maggio, dopo un mese di stallo, l’amministrazione Trump ordinò l’invasione della polizia nell’ambasciata venezuelana a Washington, arrestando quattro membri del collettivo di protezione dell’ambasciata presenti su invito del governo del Venezuela, mentre i “pacifisti” mantenevano il loro silenzio sulla guerra nella stessa città in cui molti di loro vivono e lavorano.

Cosa rimane di tale narrativa “pacifista” in opposizione a un eventuale intervento militare e in favore di una “transizione pacifica”, pur restando in silenzio sull’attuale guerra multiforme? I “pacifisti” sono complici apologetici della retorica di Washington sulla “transizione pacifica”, inquadrando l’opposizione alla politica USA sul Venezuela unicamente su come evitare l’intervento militare mentre non denunciano i tentativi di golpe e la guerra economica sostenuti dagli USA.

Tale politica sembra essere volta a provocare un’implosione sociale in Venezuela in modo che gli Stati Uniti possano istituire un governo cliente senza mai occupare militarmente il terreno. Questa è la nuova guerra? Se lo è, allora tale tipo di guerra non è così nuovo. Non era questo l’obiettivo degli Stati Uniti nel 1960 nel blocco contro Cuba, cioè creare “disincanto e disaffezione basati su insoddisfazione economica e difficoltà” come indicato dal dipartimento di Stato nel 1960, in modo che la gente si ribellasse al governo? E non era questo lo scenario che si dispiegò per rovesciare il governo democraticamente eletto di Salvador Allende nel 1973? Questo nuovo regime, che cambia il vino in bottiglie vecchie, è altrettanto letale oggi come lo era ieri. Gli Stati Uniti non imparano dalla storia.

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This article was originally published on Aurora. Traduzione di Alessandro Lattanzio.

Arnold August è giornalista e docente canadese, autore di Democrazia a Cuba e le elezioni del 1997-98, Cuba e i suoi vicini: Democrazia in movimento e Cuba – Relazioni con gli Stati Uniti: Obama e oltre. Collabora con molti siti, trasmissioni televisive e radiofoniche in America Latina, Cuba, Europa, Nord America e Medio Oriente. Sito web: Arnoldaugust.com.

Notes

1) “La trama per uccidere il Venezuela”, di Vijay Prashad, in Salon.com
2) Le sanzioni economiche come punizione collettiva: il caso del Venezuela di Mark Weisbrot e Jeffrey Sachs. Aprile 2019.
3) Memorandum Dal vicesegretario di Stato per gli affari inter-americani (Mallory) al sottosegretario di Stato per gli affari inter-americani (Rubottom). Washington DC, 6 aprile 1960.

Featured image is from Aurora

US President Donald Trump’s “the deal of the century” wants Palestinian refugees to be naturalized and settled in several countries, including Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Iraq, Israeli daily Haaretz reports. 

As the world marked the International Quds Day on Friday, political leaders warned of mysterious aspects of the much-touted US plan and its ramifications for the future of Palestinians.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said one definite prospect is that the plan seeks to do away with the issue of returning 6 million refugees to their homeland.

“To realize this goal, America is about to arrange an economic deal and get its money from the miserable Persian Gulf countries,” he said in Tehran.

Haaretz said Washington is thought to be pressing Lebanon to grant citizenship to Palestinian refugees living in the country.

“In the process, this is seen as defusing the issue of a right of return of refugees to Israel, which has been a major obstacle to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” the paper said.

According to UNRWA, the UN’s Palestinian refugee agency, about 450,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon.

Other reports have put the figure lower, prompting Lebanese groups to say that the census had been conducted under US pressure designed to underreport the real numbers because that way Lebanon could absorb a modest-sized population.

The Lebanese constitution, however, provides that the country’s territory is indivisible and that refugees living there are not to receive citizenship.

The official reason for this is that the absorption of Palestinian refugees would impair their claim to a right of return.

However, the US has sugarcoated the plan with a lifeline to extract Lebanon from its economic crisis, where the country’s debt is estimated at more than $85 billion (about 155 percent of GDP), Haaretz said.

According to the Israeli paper, giving Palestinians citizenship is likely to prompt the roughly 1 million Syrian refugees in the country to demand similar status.

However, Lebanon isn’t the only country concerned about Washington dictating a solution to the refugee problem.

Jordan is horrified over the prospect that the United States will demand it absorb hundreds of thousands or even a million Palestinian refugees in the country, Haaretz added.

The paper cited investigative journalist Vicky Ward recounting in her new book “Kushner Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption” that the Trump administration’s plan sees Jordan providing territory to the Palestinians and receiving Saudi territory in return.

The Saudis, for their part, would get the islands of Sanafir and Tiran from Egypt, it said.

“Land swaps appear to be the magic formula that the Trump administration has adopted, and not just for Jordan,” Haaretz said.

According to Ward, it has been suggested that Egypt give up territory along the Sinai coast between Gaza and el-Arish, to which some of the Gaza population would be transferred. In return, Israel would give Egypt territory of equivalent size in the western Negev.

Haaretz, meanwhile, revealed lucrative projects to be funded by European countries, the US and wealthy Arab states, including an underwater tunnel which Israel would allow to be dug between Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Egypt, the paper said, has been promised a whopping $65 billion to help boost its economy which is currently in shambles.

The plan also says Palestinian refugees in Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries would receive citizenship in exchange for generous assistance to the host countries.

The Israeli paper, however, cast doubt on the viability of the “plan of generous financial compensation and empty tracts of land for new housing”.

“The problem is that the Palestinian refugees are the supreme symbols of Palestinian nationhood,” it said.

“An American deal that blatantly relies on buying up that symbol for cash, even lots of it, can’t be acceptable to the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza,” it added.

The Trump administration is set to unveil the economic portion of the so-called “deal of the century” during a conference in Manama, Bahrain, on June 25-26.

All Palestinian factions have boycotted the event, accusing Washington of offering financial rewards for accepting the Israeli occupation.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE have said they will send delegations to the Manama forum and Israel’s Finance Minister Moshe Kahlon has said he intends to attend.

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In its march toward yet another war, the United States accuses Iran of using military force to establish itself as a “regional hegemon.” It accuses Iran of being the largest state sponsor of terrorism in the world. It accuses Iran of aiding rebels in Yemen, the government in Syria, and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

There is an unfortunate tendency in the United States to throw money at a problem, particularly when the problem is related to powerful constituencies. The recent attacks on synagogues, churches, and mosques have included two attacks on synagogues in Pittsburgh and San Diego that killed 12 and a shooting at a Texas church in 2017 that killed 26. The recent massacre of 51 Muslims in New Zealand also resonated in the United States.

Attacks on religious sites are increasingly being seen as a national problem in the U.S., even though they are statistically speaking extremely rare, far less frequent than attacks on or inside public schools. The characteristic government response to the incidents has been to authorize and granting money to provide surveillance cameras, bulletproof glass and armed guards for those sites that are considered to be particularly vulnerable.

It also is happening at state and local levels. The New York city council is considering including funding for security at houses of worship in the next year’s budget, while Connecticut is proposing a grant of $5 million to pay for specific physical security upgrades.  Not to be left behind, a bipartisan bill has been introduced in the Senate by Senators Rob Portman and Gary Peters to authorize $75 million in grants to protect religious sites as well as select nonprofit organizations. The nonprofits would include facilities that are considered vulnerable to violence, including abortion clinics.

As usual, however, the devil is in the details and, most particularly, in the process used to determine who gets the cash. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) already doles out considerable money, $1.7 billion in 2019, in grants to various organizations and both governmental and non-governmental entities. Included are grants to “nonprofit” groups that are considered to be particularly targeted by terrorists. This process is not particularly objective and it was reported in 2014 that fully 94% of all grants issued by DHS to enhance security had gone to Jewish groups and their associated facilities. Jewish groups also received nearly all of the grants since the inception of the program in 2005, totaling $151 million. This disparity, which was the case even before the two recent armed attacks on synagogues, is a tribute to the political power of Jewish organizations versus the lack of the same relating to small and relatively impecunious congregations of Christians and Muslims.

Indeed, many religious groups have taken steps on their own, without a government handout, to enhance their own security. They are to be commended for doing so. It is to be presumed that some other houses of worship have been hesitant about upgrading security, even if they can afford it, because they are waiting for the government to cover the costs. Other religious entities have eschewed overt security because it sends the wrong message about their accessibility to the public.

In theory, community policing means that law enforcement officers, paid for by the entire community, will be deployed at locations where their presence contributes to public safety. This is already the case in most towns and cities, where policemen are present and highly visible at the times of religious services to handle traffic and other security problems. This is all accomplished without any particular fuss and without any special federal government grants.

There is also the question of how the grants would be awarded. As noted above, the politically powerful who have access to the bureaucrats will inevitably be the principal beneficiaries. Sarah Levin, director of governmental affairs for the Secular Coalition for America, has observed that there is no particular reason why grants for security enhancement at religious sites should not be made available to anyone who believes him or herself targeted for any particular reason or even for no reason at all. She cites the example of non-religious nonprofits, to include abortion clinics, explaining that “Favoring the security of houses of worship over the security of other communities is not only violation of separation of church and state, it’s wrong.”

Levin is right but she is wrong about the broader acceptability of government issuing grants to specific communities or constituencies that are considered to be threatened. Government should be neutral, leaving it up to local police and the resources of the communities themselves to assess the security situation and provide appropriate protection against potential criminals.

The desire on the part of some in government to pander to some constituencies that are most vocal is understandable, but it is not acceptable to do so because that ultimately means that the state is enabling the activities of one group over another based on a subjective grant-giving process. And doing so also raises moral issues. Why should I as a Roman Catholic who does not believe acceptable some forms of abortion be required to pay taxes to protect the activity of abortion clinics?

The mentality of those in government that compels some legislators to seek to favor certain groups derives from the unfortunate tendency to regard some actions as more heinous than others. Is it really worse to shoot people in a synagogue rather than in an elementary school, requiring national level remedial action consisting of grants to upgrade security in the former rather than the latter?

The willingness of some in government to use taxpayer money to support constituencies near to their hearts rather than based on objective standards that apply to everyone all began with the popularization of the concept of the “hate crime.” For the first time killing, robbing or maiming someone was considered somehow to be worse if hatred for that individual or the group he or she represented was involved. Now we Americans will have religious groups and abortion clinics alike lining up for assistance to protect themselves against maniacs and the ones who shout the loudest will, as ever, get the lion’s share of the money.

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

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

Featured image: Bipartisan Plan to Secure State Bonding for Synagogue, Mosque, and Church Security. Credit: CT Senate Democrats/ flickr

Monsanto paid a shadowy chemical industry front group to help push back against the mounting scientific evidence that the company’s signature Roundup weedkiller causes cancer, court documents reveal. 

“If a company like [Monsanto] won’t support us, then who will?” the head of the American Council on Science and Health wrote to a Monsanto scientist in 2015. A day later came the reply: “[T]he answer is yes…. [D]efinitely count us in!!”

Emails between Monsanto and the American Council on Science and Health, or ACSH, and related internal Monsanto emails were first made public during the trial last July of a lawsuit by a former California school groundskeeper who was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after using Roundup. The jury awarded Dewayne “Lee” Johnson $289 million in punitive and compensatory damages, later reduced by the judge to $78 million.

The internal Monsanto/ACSH emails reappeared as evidence in the most recent lawsuit to go before a court, brought by a California couple who were both diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma after decades of using the herbicide. In May, the jury ordered Bayer-Monsanto to pay Alva and Alberta Pilliod more than $2 billion in damages.

It was the third verdict in less than a year in which juries found that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, causes cancer and that Monsanto covered up evidence of its health risk for decades. Last year, Bayer bought Monsanto for $63 billion and is now facing tens of thousands of similar lawsuits.

The emails – here and here – show that in February 2015, Monsanto was working with ACSH to prepare for the expected fallout from a pending report on the safety of glyphosate by the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC. The following month the IARC, part of the World Health Organization, would release a report that classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Anticipating the report, Gilbert Ross, then the acting head of ACSH, asked Monsanto for support, “particularly if ACSH’s commentary is needed to critique an adverse outcome.”

On Feb. 26, Dr. Daniel Goldstein, the head of medical sciences and outreach at Monsanto, wrote to several colleagues, urging them to support continued payment to ACSH for its work.

Later that day, after his colleagues expressed reservations, Goldstein wrote:

But on March 16, just days before the IARC’s report, the ACSH’s Ross wrote to Goldstein complaining the group has still not received payment for its work on glyphosate:

Goldstein replied “count us in!!,” and Ross wrote back: “Great news, thanks Dan.”

From the emails, it is unclear how much Monsanto paid ACSH to defend the company and its weedkiller. But since the IARC report, ACSH has posted dozens of blogs or releases attacking scientists or organizations that have raised concerns about the health risks of glyphosate exposure. ACSH officials have also been quoted in news media reports, accusing EWG – “an alarmist group” – and other glyphosate critics of scare tactics.

According to ACSH’s website, the group is a “consumer advocacy organization” that does “not represent any industry.” But in 2013 Mother Jones reported that an internal ACSH document showed the organization received more than $390,000 in that year from corporations and large private foundations, including $30,000 from Bayer Cropscience, $22,5000 from the Chinese-owned pesticide and seed company Syngenta, and $30,000 from chemical giant 3M, among many others.

The ACSH document also lists Monsanto among “potential sources of support from previous donors.” As the recently released emails show, that potential was soon realized.

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Bill Walker is Vice President and Editor-in-Chief of EWG.

All images in this article are from EWG

The next UK Prime Minister has their work cut out to unite a divided nation, but also to improve Britain’s standing on the world stage, after one of the worst periods in UK-Russian relations

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UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s political career officially ended in tears on Friday, as the woman who declared that she would provide ‘strong and stable’ leadership when she came to power back three years ago, proved in the end to be not quite so strong or stable as she broke down in front of press outside 10 Downing Street.

She had in fact, arguably one of the most disastrous records of a UK PM to date. A total of 50 cabinet resignations since she took office, far more than any of her recent predecessors; together with scandals such as the Grenfell Tower disaster, Windrush scandal, hostile environment policy and record levels of homelessness and poverty which have all tainted her legacy.  And that’s not to mention her inability to deliver Brexit, which effectively led to her demise.

Indeed however tempting it may be to feel sorry for Mrs May – she has been surrounded by political vultures all vying for her position for months now – one is minded of the words of British political commentator Owen Jones,who when asked recently if he felt sorry for the Prime Minister, noted that May’s tears were simply those of self-pity and were absent at times when they would have been appropriate, such as in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives.

One may be inclined to think that if she was so unsuccessful on the domestic front, then perhaps in the area of foreign policy Mrs May could have had a better record. But alas, no such luck. We only have to look at the considerable deterioration in relations with Russia to understand that under her leadership, Britain’s standing in the world has diminished. Prominent British journalist Patrick Cockburn has even gone as far to say that Britain is now ‘entering a period of permanent crisis not seen since the 17th century’.

But arguably back in the 17th century the UK was more competent in the art of diplomacy than it is now.  May’s Defence Minister, Gavin Williamson, with his comment that Russia should ‘go away and shut up’ epitomised the extraordinary lack of finesse and savoir-faire the May government had when dealing with Russia.

His bellicose tone unfortunately went hand-in-hand with a completely misplaced notion of Russia presenting to the UK some kind of genuine threat, as he argued earlier this year that the UK had to ‘enhance its lethality’ against such well-resourced states, as opposed to concentrating its energies on Islamic terror groups. He was then accused by fellow politicians of ‘sabre-rattling’ in what were widely seen as misguided and provocative statements.

However, the Defence Minister was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under the May leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative programme really began to flourish; designed to ‘counteract Russian propaganda’ but instead deceptively engaged itself in spreading disinformation about Russia and even about the UK Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when it came to discourse about Russia in the press.

What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent ‘Russian threat’ and are prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this.

Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged in order to heighten the UK population’s awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by British secret services 

Staged or not, the handling of the Skripal incident by Prime Minister May left much to be desired. Even her experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as Home Secretary hadn’t taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, Mrs May was already issuing ultimatums to the Russian President. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was ‘highly likely’ Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and became something of a household joke in Russia as the UK Prime Minister herself became nothing more than a laughing stock.

The decision to publicly accuse another state of attempting murder on UK soil with evidence which only amounted to ‘a nerve agent of a type produced by Russia’, was utterly reckless, not only deeply harming relations with Russia, but undermining the credibility of the UK as a whole. And despite it being an attempt to bolster the PM’s position at a time when desperately needed to generate support for her upcoming Brexit white paper – this itself, given a delayed Brexit and divided country, proved fruitless.

So what can we expect from the next Prime Minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In terms of improving relations with Russia, as long as the Tories remain in power, and the ‘deep-state’ or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda, we are unlikely to see any significant change in policy.

One could hope that a certain Boris Johnson, himself named after a Russian émigré, and the leading candidate to replace May, could seek to build bridges in this regard, but his record on the Skripal case leaves room for doubt. The PM is after all a figurehead, and the UK civil service remains a driving force of policy-making.

As former Labour PM Tony Blair once said:

“You cannot underestimate how much they [the civil service] believe it’s their job to actually run the country and to resist the changes put forward by people they dismiss as ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ politicians. They genuinely see themselves as the true guardians of the national interest, and think that their job is simply to wear you down and wait you out.”

Says it all really.

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The corporate media is concealing a leaked UN agency report that shows Syrian government innocence in an alleged chemical attack.

“Americans have been fed a steady diet of ‘Assad the butcher’ and any counter narrative is disappeared.”

The corporate media march in lock step with the United States and its allies around the world. They have a tacit agreement to exclude any information which might inconvenience pro-war, pro-interventionist narratives.

Claims of chemical weapons use by the Syrian government are but one example of this tactic. These improbable stories have been repeated with regularity ever since the United States and its allies began using jihadist proxies to overthrow the Syrian government in 2011. In 2013 we were told that president Assad waged a chemical weapons attack on the same day that United Nations weapons inspectors arrived in the country. It is an understatement to say that this scenario is unlikely to be true.

In 2018 the U.S. and its European allies repeated that they would take military action against Syria if there were any reports of chemical weapons use. Like clockwork, such an event was reported and a bombing campaign took place in April of that year.

Anyone with common sense should doubt these reports. Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country. Furthermore, persons with credibility and expertise had already provided evidence that these claims are nothing but false flags meant to get public buy-in for aggression.

“Assad had no reason to do anything which guaranteed military attacks on his country.”

The claims and counter claims always merited serious scrutiny. But a leaked document from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) makes the case that even supposedly disinterested parties take the side of the U.S. and its allies if enough pressure is applied.

The leaked report makes clear that there were serious questions about the 2018 reports, even among OPCW staff. The New York Times and the rest of their partners in propaganda wanted to make the case for the once and future war and accused the Syrian government of dropping chlorine gas devices onto an apartment building. But the leaked document  shows that there were serious doubts expressed by the some of the expert investigators. “…there is a higher probability that both cylinders were manually placed at both locations rather than being delivered by aircraft.”

There are many dots to connect here and they point away from the “Assad is gassing his own people” tale. The OPCW was pressured into taking on the role of judge and jury and assigning blame, rather than merely reporting on its technical findings. The politicization of its work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives. As the old saying goes, there is no such thing as coincidence.

“The politicization of the OPCW’s work dove tailed nicely with charges of Syrian gas and Russian poisonings against former KGB operatives.”

The recently leaked documents ought to make for headlines around the world. Instead the story has been ignored by corporate media. Only those who are already interested in the topic or who are familiar with organizations such as the Working Group  on Syria, Propaganda and Media know anything about this news. It has been deliberately kept hidden so that the next call for an armed response will receive little or no opposition.

The U.S. Congress came very close to calling for a Syrian war in a May 20, 2019 letter signed by 70% of its members . The AIPAC inspired massive calls for president Trump to “stabilize” Syria, protect Israel and stop Russian and Iranian influence. The call was bipartisan and bicameral with 79 senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism. Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker are among those calling for the dangerous slippery slope. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) chairwoman Karen Bass signed too as did Hakeem Jeffries, James Clyburn, and Elijah Cummings among others.

Americans have been fed a steady diet of “Assad the butcher” and any counter narrative is disappeared, just like the OPCW leak. It is a useful ploy to have around. Let us not forget that last year’s bombing resulted in praise from the so-called resistance crowd who think they are supporting a humanitarian action. When he next decides to protect the U.S. jihadist proxies the gas attack story will suddenly reappear. Revealing any doubts about its veracity will undermine the U.S. hegemonic project.

“Seventy-nine senators and 303 members of the house signing on to the call for imperialism.”

There is plenty of collusion in the United States and it isn’t between Trump and Russia. The love triangle involves the corporate media, both sides of the war party, and foreign ally puppet states. They all play nicely together in the sandbox when there is an evil deed to carry out. The public are mostly hapless dupes who give approval for destruction and carnage just like the state want them to.

We have been through this often enough to know when lies are being told. It wasn’t that long ago that Colin Powell went to the United Nations with a vial and a tall tale about WMD. The cast of characters changes but the story is the same. It is time to grow up and end useful idiocy.

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

Featured image is from BAR

The Congressional Black Caucus sides with its party’s war mongers and in fear of the Israel lobby, while large Black majorities believe Israel is neither an ally nor a friend.

“The Black Caucus’ tolerance of apartheid Israel’s barbarism is infinite.”

Nearly 400 members of the U.S. House and Senate signed a letter urging President Trump to keep U.S. troops in Syria – against the wishes of the sovereign government of that country and therefore, in gross violation of international law — and to increase sanctions against Russia for assisting the Syrian government in its battle against Islamic jihadists. Among the signers  were 26 of the 51 Black voting members of the House and the two Black U.S. senators that are running for president, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.

Nobody except the Israel lobby gets that kind of immediate obeisance from the Congress. Tel Aviv’s interests top the letter’s list of bullet-points: “Underscore Israel’s right to self-defense.” The letter baldly lobbies to increase the annual billions in U.S. subsidies to Israel’s bloated and hyper-aggressive, nuclear-armed military. “We must also look for ways to augment our support in the context of the current 10-year Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Israel,” the letter reads, “ and to ensure that Israel has access to the resources and materiel it needs to defend itself against the threats it faces on its northern border.”

“Tel Aviv’s interests top the letter’s list of bullet-points.”

The massive sign-on was organized to pressure Trump into even more aggressive actions against Iran, and to prevent the president from fulfilling his oft-repeated wish to withdraw from Syria, now that the ISIS “caliphate” has been shattered and al-Qaida’s legions are bottled up in Idlib province, under siege by the Syrian Army. Israel has provided arms and assistance to both terrorist factions, as have Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Turkey, Britain, France — and the United States, the imperial grandmaster of the jihadist offensive that began in 2011 against Libya (see “U.S. Protects Jihadists in Syria,” BAR). Libya was plunged into barbarism and Syria is in ruins, with half a million dead and a third of the country displaced. Iraq, still reeling from Washington’s 2003 “Shock and Awe” and occupation, has been savaged yet again by the West’s jihadist proxies, with its second largest city, Mosul, flattened by U.S. bombs and artillery. Yet, three-quarters of the U.S. Congress last week signed on to the insane statement that the region has “been destabilized by Iranian regime’s threatening behavior.”

“The United States was the imperial grandmaster of the jihadist offensive that began in 2011.”

Were it not for Iranian and Lebanese Shiite militias and Russia’s 2015 intervention, Syria’s secular government would have fallen to the U.S.-sponsored jihadist legions, at which point the U.S. and allied governments, including Israel, would have occupied the region, ostensibly to restore order and control the head-chopping Islamic warriors. Even in the current circumstances, Israel recently seized the opportunity to formally claim sovereignty over the Syrian Golan Heights , occupied by the Zionists in the 1967 war, and the U.S. got the chance to move 5,000 troops back into Iran to aid in the fight against ISIS, the “rogue” faction of al-Qaida that rejected the West’s instructions to blend in with other Islamist fighters and stick to the mission of regime change in  Syria.

Had President Obama’s 2011 war plan been successful, Syria would have been balkanized into mini-states ruled by warlords beholden to the U.S. and its regional allies, and Lebanon would be wracked by renewed civil war, or under the discipline of constant Israeli air strikes, or both. Iraqi Kurdistan, with its huge oil reserves and deep ties to Israel, would have seceded, and U.S. troops would be back in multi-divisional force in Iraq at the request of a terrified central government. Iran would be surrounded. The stage would then be set to empower the U.S. to cut off China’s access to Middle Eastern (and even central Asian) energy supplies – which was the larger purpose of Obama’s “smart war” of “humanitarian” intervention plus jihadist proxies, his slickly demonic contribution to the Great Imperial Game.

“Three-quarters of the U.S. Congress signed on to the insane statement that the region has “been destabilized by Iranian regime’s threatening behavior.” 

If the Congressional Black Caucus had properly understood that last week’s letter was asking them to help rescue the remnants of the First Black President’s grand plan, they might have signed on in even greater numbers. Even so, the 26 signatories included John Lewis, the “soul” of the Caucus (or “de Lawd,” as he is derisively referred to in Atlanta), who is usually part of the ten or twelve Black Caucus members that can still be counted on to vote against some of the most blatantly warlike measures. Lewis sensed that the letter was an Israeli lobby priority, as did his Black Caucus colleagues, who are listed below in order of their signing .

James Clyburn (SC)
Hakeem Jeffries (NY)
Gregory Meeks (NY)
Karen Bass (CA)
Colin Allred (TX)
Yvette Clarke (NY)
Elijah Cummings (MD)
Donald Payne (NJ)
Val Demings (FL)
David Scott (GA)
John Lewis (GA)
Donald McEachin (VA)
Sheila Jackson Le (TX)
G.K. Butterfield (NC)
Danny Davis (IL)
Joyce Beatty (OH)
Sanford Bishop (GA)
Alma Adams (NC)
Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ)
Marc Veasey (TX)
Alcee Hastings (FL)
Emanuel Cleaver (MO)
Frederica Wilson (FL)
Steven Horsford (NV)
Robin Kelly (IL)
Antonio Delgado (NY)

Poll Shows Black People Don’t Think of Israel as a Friend or Ally

The 26 lawmakers make up just over half of the 51 Black voting members of the House. (The delegates from Washington, DC, and the U.S. Virgin Islands cannot vote on the House floor.) On the Senate side, presidential candidates Cory Booker and Kamala Harris have always been in the Israel lobby’s pocket. In their haste to make a splash with headlines around the world proclaiming “Nearly 400 Lawmakers Call on Trump to Address Threats in Syria ,” the letter’s handlers may have simply quit pressing for signatures once they reached three-quarters of the House and Senate. Back in the summer of 2014, while Israel was slaughtering over 2,000 Palestinian men, women and children in Gaza, the combined chambers of Congress voted unanimously in favor of a resolution affirming Israel’s “right to defend itself.” Not one member of the Black Caucus dissented or abstained. Thus, their tolerance of apartheid Israel’s barbarism is infinite.

But, where do their Black constituents stand on the unholy U.S. alliance with the Zionist state? A poll taken last October by The Economis/YouGov  showed only 19 percent of Black Americans thought of Israel as an “ally,” compared to 43 percent of whites and 22 percent of Hispanics. Only 17 percent of Blacks think Israel is a “friendly” country, and just 27 percent of whites and 21 percent of Hispanics see Israel as friendly. Among all races in the U.S,, support for Israel is described as “plummeting” – which is cause for the Israel lobby to organize a letter-signing publicity campaign among the folks whose cowardice or bought-and-paid-for allegiance they can count on: the elected officials of both corporate parties.

“Only 17 percent of Blacks think Israel is a ‘friendly’ country.”

The electoral arrangement in the United States, where half of the duopoly is the White Man’s Party, has created a one-party system for Black America. With nowhere else to go, Black voters can think or feel however they want, but their elected representatives vote according to the wishes of their party’s funders – rich white people, virtually all of them in league with apartheid Israel. The Democratic Party is thus the mechanism for rich white people’s political domination of Black America, the nation’s most left-leaning constituency, including on issues of war and peace, and especially on Israeli apartheid. Black Democrats, with the exception of a handful of dissidents like New York lawmakers Charles and Inez Barron , are agents of forces hostile to the Black community, and enemies of peace. Last year, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a protected class, and in 2014, shortly before the unanimous vote in favor of Israel, 80 percent of the Black Caucus voted to continue the multi-billion dollar militarization of local police, through the Pentagon’s infamous 1033 program.

Every member of the Black Caucus should be ousted on grounds of misrepresentation. But the authentic Black political conversation doesn’t travel much beyond the barbershops, beauty parlors and activist circles before it is smothered by the octopus of Black America’s one party Democratic state. That’s why the best thing that can happen this primary election season is for the Democratic Party to implode — and set its Black and left constituencies free from the agents of rich man’s rule.

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BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].

Europe, an “old” colonialist continent, is decaying, and in some places even collapsing. It senses how bad things are going. But it never thinks that it is its own fault.

North America is decaying as well, but there, people are not even used to comparing. They only “feel that things are not going well”. If everything else fails, they simply try to get some second or third job, and just survive, somehow.

On both sides of the Atlantic, the establishment is in panic. Their world is in crises, and the ‘crises’ arrived mainly because several great countries, including China, Russia, Iran, but also South Africa, Turkey, Venezuela, DPRK and the Philippines, are openly refusing to play in accordance with the script drawn in Washington, London and Paris. In these nations, there is suddenly no appetite for sacrificing their own people on the altar of well-being of Western citizens. Several countries, including Venezuela and Syria, are even willing to fight for their independence.

Despite insane and sadistic embargos and sanctions imposed on them by the West; China, Russia and Iran are now flourishing, in many fields doing much better than Europe and North America.

If they are really pushed any further, China, Russia and their allies combined, could easily collapse the economy of the United States; an economy which is built on clay and unserviceable debt. It is also becoming clear that militarily, the Pentagon could never defeat Beijing, Moscow, even Teheran.

After terrorizing the world for ages, the West is now almost finished: morally, economically, socially, and even militarily. It still plunders, but it has no plan to improve the state of the world. It cannot even think in such terms.

It hates China, and every other country that does have progressive, internationalist plans. It smears President Xi Jinping and his brainchild, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), but there is nothing new and exciting that the West is able to offer to the world. Yes, of course, those regime changes, coups, military interventions and theft of natural resources, but anything else? No, silence!

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Image on the right: In Pilsen, Czechia, people raiding garbage in order to eat

During my two weeks long working visit to Europe, in the Czech Republic (now renamed to Czechia), a country that enjoys a higher HDI (Human Development Index defined by UNDP) than Italy or Spain, I saw several young, decently dressed men, picking through garbage bins, right in front of my hotel, looking for food.

I saw young Europeans kneeling and begging in Stuttgart, the second richest city in Germany (where both Mercedes and Porsche car are produced).

What I observed in all seven countries of the EU that I visited, was confusion, but also indifference, extreme selfishness and almost grotesque idleness. In great contrast to Asia, everybody in Europe was obsessed with their ‘rights’ and privileges, while no one gave a slightest damn about responsibilities.

When my plane from Copenhagen landed in Stuttgart, it began to rain. It was not heavy rain; just rain. The Canadair jet operated by SAS is a small aircraft, and it did not get a gate. It parked a few meters from the terminal and the captain announced that ground staff refused to bring a bus, due to lightning and the downpour. And so, we stayed inside the plane, for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour. The lightning ended. The drizzle continued. 40 minutes, no bus. One hour later, a bus appeared. A man from the ground staff emerged leisurely, totally wrapped in plastic, protected hermetically from rain. Passengers, on the other hand, were not even offered umbrellas.

“I love myself”, I later read graffiti in the center of the city.

The graffiti was not far from the central train station, which is being refurbished at the cost of several billion euros, and against the will of the citizens. The monstrous project is marching on at an insanely lazy pace, with only 5-6 construction workers detectable at a time, down in the tremendous excavations.

Stuttgart is unbelievably filthy. Escalators often do not work, drunkards are all over, and so are beggars. It is as if for decades, no one did any face-lift to the city. Once free museums are charging hefty entrance fees, and most of the public benches have disappeared from parks and avenues.

The decay is omnipresent. The German rail system (DB) has virtually collapsed. Almost all trains are late, from the ‘regional’; to the once glorified ICE (these German ‘bullet trains’ are actually moving slower, on average, even in comparison to some Indonesian inter-city expresses).

Image below: Author with great Marxist Italian professor Luciano Vasapollo

The services provided everywhere in Europe, from Finland to Italy, are grotesquely bad. Convenience stores, cafes, hotels – all are understaffed, badly run and mostly arrogant. Humans are often replaced by dysfunctional machines. Tension is everywhere, the bad mood omnipresent. Demanding anything is unthinkable; one risks being snapped at, insulted, sent to hell.

I still remember how Western propaganda used to glorify services in the capitalist countries, when we were growing up in the Communist East: “The customer is always treated like a god”. Yes, right! How laughable.

For centuries, “European workers” were ‘subsidized’ by colonialist and neo-colonialist plunder, perpetrated in all non-white corners of the world. They ended up being spoiled, showered with benefits, and unproductive. That was fine for the elites: as long as the masses kept voting for the imperialist regime of the West.

“The Proletariat” eventually became right-wing, imperialist, even hedonistic.

I saw a lot this time, and soon I will write much more about it.

What I did not witness, was hope, or enthusiasm. There was no optimism. No healthy and productive exchange of ideas, or profound debate; something I am so used to in China, Russia or Venezuela, just confusion, apathy and decay everywhere.

And hate for those countries that are better, more human, more advanced, and full of socialist enthusiasm.

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Image on the right: At Sapienza University in Rome

Italy felt slightly different. Again, I met great left-wing thinkers there; philosophers, professors, filmmakers, journalists. I spoke at Sapienza University, the biggest university in Europe. I lectured about Venezuela and Western imperialism. I worked with the Venezuelan embassy in Rome. All of that was fantastic and enlightening, but was this really Italy?

A day after I left Rome for Beirut, Italians went to the polls. And they withdrew their supports from my friends of the 5-Star-Movement, leaving them with just over 17%, while doubling the backing for the extreme right-wing Northern League.

This virtually happened all over Europe. UK Labor lost, while right-wing Brexit forces gained significantly. Extreme right-wing, even near-fascist parties, reached unexpected heights.

It was all “me, me, me” politics. An orgy of “political selfies”. Me had enough of immigrants. Mewants better benefits.Mewants better medical care, shorter working hours. And so on.

Who pays for it, no one in Europe seems to care. Not once did I hear any European politicians lamenting about the plundering of West Papua or Borneo, about Amazonia or the Middle East, let alone Africa.

And immigration? Did we hear anything about that nuisance of European refugees, millions of them, many illegal, that have descended in the last decades on Southeast Asia, East Africa, Latin America, and even Sub Continent? They are escaping, in hordes, from meaninglessness, depressions, existential emptiness. In the process, they are stripping the locals of land, real estate, beaches, everything.

“Immigrants out”? Fine; then European immigrants out from the rest of the world, too! Enough of the one-sidedness!

The recent EU elections clearly showed that Europe has not evolved. For countless dark centuries, it used to live only for its pleasure, murdering millions in order to support its high life.

Right now, it is trying to reshuffle its political and administrative system, so it can continue doing the same. More efficiently!

On top of it, absurdly, the world is expected to pity that overpaid and badly performing, mainly right-wing and lethargic European proletariat, and sacrifice further tens of millions of people, just in order to further increase its standard of living.

All this should not be allowed to happen. Never again! It has to be stopped.

What Europe has achieved so far, at the expense of billions of lives of “the others”, is definitely not worthy of dying for.

Beware of Europe and its people! Study its history. Study imperialism, colonialism and the genocides it has been spreading all over the world.

Let them vote in their fascists. But keep them away. Prevent them from spreading their poison all over the world.

They want to put the interests of their countries first? Wonderful! Let us do exactly the same: The people of Russia first, too! China first! And, Asia, Africa, Latin America first!

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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.

All images in this article are from the author

Seven years ago Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick wrote a book (and Stone followed with a 10 part series on The Showtime Channel) The Untold History of the United States. This is a ‘must read’ or ‘should view’ for anyone who wishes to understand more about the true history of this great nation from The New Deal on. Although this writer has read countless books on the subjects covered by Stone and Kuznick, I found information that I never knew before.

If only all our high school history students could have the opportunity to read and discuss the book in class, and balance it with what the mainstream educational system tosses their way. So, for those of you out there who will nod affirmatively as to what  Stone & Kuznick report, you have clean hands. Simply put, you were against the acts of aggression that our leaders have orchestrated in our name. The most heinous of all being the hidden truth of 9/11 and what followed in  the illegal and immoral invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. O f course, just having clean hands is only half of it all. The real challenge is to use those clean hands to show others who may be not so aware that truth is paramount. Speaking up and speaking out for a better way for us all to live is part of the cleansing process.

Too many of our former leaders and their handlers have had dirty hands.

This Military Industrial Empire, AKA The Deep State, has been responsible for most of the mess this world finds itself in.

By manipulating countless countries and strangling their voices for democracy, and then placing into power murderous and greedy puppets, the blowback has been tremendous.

As the Stone & Kuznick book explains, it has always been about control of resources, cheap labor and markets abroad. It has never been about freedom for others… many our own citizens have seen that Big Lie right here at home.

Sadly, the dirty hands of our 21^st Century leaders have equaled or outdone the dirty hands of their predecessors. What the Bush/Cheney gang had done is unconscionable! To weave a campaign of half truths and outright lies so as to justify an act of aggression against a sovereign nation like Iraq is almost as low as one can ever get… unless of course if one focuses on the 9/11 con job. Hitler and Goebbels could not have spun a greater excuse for preemptive war. Sixteen years later many working stiffs still struggle on, as military spending sucks up more than half of our federal tax revenues.

The dirty hands who control what Eisenhower (he of his own dirty hands) called the Military Industrial Complex are the selfish men and women who profited from 9/11 and the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions and occupations… to the tune of hundreds of billions of your tax dollars each and every year! Thus, that diverted money could have gone for Medicare for All, infrastructure repairs and upgrades (which would have softened the effects of Hurricanes Katrina , Sandy, Mathew, Harvey, Maria and Irma), schools and libraries… and so many other safety nets and needs.

The real sadness is those who, by their own choices, have no hands. They being unfortunately the majority of Americans, the overwhelming majority, who buy into the lies and fabrications, never once exhibiting what made America so great: skepticism.  Either through apathy (“Hey, it ain’t my kids who are being Shock and Awed or killed in uniform“) or foolish jingoism (“USA USA…build the wall and Make America Great Again”) they rally round a flag that has been hijacked and abused by those with dirty hands. These lemmings are more concerned about some famous celebrity’s scandalous acts than the truth as to why 99% of us are confined to this financial treadmill. As long as they walk past we with clean hands and never listen or read what we are offering… Karma can be a bitch!

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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].

As if trade war wasn’t enough for traders to worry about with futures reopening sharply lower after China’s government blamed the U.S. for the latest collapse in trade talks, it appears that Boeing is about to resume the position as yet another very popular 737 model suddenly finds itself in hot water.

Accord to Bloomberg, the wing components on as many as 312 Boeing 737s, including some of the grounded 737 Max, are prone to cracking and must be repaired within 10 days, aviation regulators said late Sunday.

With Boeing already under scrutiny for the 737 MAX fiasco, Boeing – which is suddenly finding a lot of faults that never existed before the company found itself under congressional scrutiny – informed the FAA that so-called “leading edge slat tracks” may not have been properly manufactured and pose a safety risk, the agency said. The parts allow the wing to expand to create more lift during takeoff and landing.

In response, the FAA plans to issue an order calling for operators of the planes worldwide to identify whether the deficient parts were installed and to replace them. A complete failure wouldn’t lead to a loss of the aircraft, the FAA – which was humiliated for siding with Boeing and was initially against the grounding of the 737 MAX only to flip flop when the rest of the world boycotted the troubled airliner – said, but “could cause damage during flight.”

Because “damage during flight” of a key component rarely if ever leads to a “loss of the aircraft”?

As Boeing noted in the statement, it has notified operators of the planes about the needed repairs and is sending replacement parts to help minimize the time aircraft are out of service, the company said in a statement.

Boeing identified 148 parts made by a subcontractor that are affected. The parts may be on a total of 179 737 Max aircraft and 133 737 NG planes worldwide, including 33 Max and 32 NG aircraft in the U.S., the FAA said. The NG, or Next Generation, 737s are a predecessor to the Max family (which by that logic must be the next, next generation).

So many 737MAX… pic.twitter.com/uG5OMusg8l

— Jeremy Dwyer-Lindgren (@photoJDL) June 2, 2019

This latest quality control fiasco piles on even more problems for Boeing, whose 737 Max has been grounded worldwide since March 13 after two fatal crashes tied to a malfunction that caused a flight control system to repeatedly drive down the plane’s nose. Boeing is finalizing a “software fix” along with proposed new training that will be required before the planes fly again. One only hopes that Boeing’s software “fix” isn’t in some way connected to the Google cloud…

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Mass public resistance awaits him during his three-day visit, including photo-op meetings with Queen Elizabeth and UK officials.

Reportedly, millions of pounds were spent for security, largely for deploying thousands of police and other security forces.

Scotland Yard estimates that around 250,000 Brits will demonstrate publicly against his presence, activists from the Stop Trump Coalition involved.

Its website headlined: “Trump is coming back to the UK. Let’s get ready — 4 June! Together Against Trump national demonstration” planned for 11:00 Tuesday in Trafalgar Square,” instructions for demonstrators saying: “Be ready to follow Trump wherever he goes!”

Show him he’s not welcome, urging “a diverse Carnival of Resistance” to reject his “policies of bigotry, hate and greed.”

Reportedly 18 separate anti-Trump related events are scheduled throughout his stay — other groups involved, including “Together Against Trump” and “Stand Up to Trump.”

During his visit last year, hundreds of thousands protested against his presence. A baby blimp depicted him as a bloated snarling orange infant.

It’ll greet him again this time, or something similar, along with a robotic version of him sitting on a golden toilet — to be displayed throughout his stay.

Some royal family members are reportedly displeased about his visit because of his criticism of princess Diana and Megan Markle, calling her “nasty.”

On Monday, a ceremonial welcome awaits him at Buckingham Palace, a state banquet to be held in the evening.

Telegraph, June 3, 2019

The Hill, June 3, 2019

Before departing on Sunday, he said Britain should “walk away” from a Brexit deal with the EU if British demands aren’t met. He criticized what Britain pays for EU membership, saying:

“If I were them, I wouldn’t pay $50 billion. That is a tremendous number.” Like most often, he’s got his facts wrong. Britain pays around $21 billion annually to the EU budget.

He suggested Britain sue the EU for “ammunition” to pursue Brexit, urging its government send Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage to Brussels to renegotiate exit terms.

In late May European Parliament elections, his party topped other UK ones, winning 29 seats. Following Theresa May’s resignation as UK prime minister, effective when her replacement is chosen, Trump again meddled improperly in British affairs, expressing support for Boris Johnson to replace her.

The Guardian, June 3, 2019

Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn slammed his remark, calling it “unacceptable interference in our country’s” internal affairs, adding:

“The next prime minister should be chosen not by the US president, nor by 100,000 unrepresentative Conservative party members, but by the British people in a general election.”

Newly appointed Commons leader Mel Stride also said Trump shouldn’t be picking the next UK prime minister.

Lib Dem deputy leader Jo Swinson said

“(i)t shouldn’t come as a surprise that Donald Trump backs Boris. They’re cut from the same cloth.”

DJT reportedly wants Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) included in US/UK trade talks, wanting it privatized for exploitation by Big Pharma and other US business interests.

UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock ruled out the idea, saying

“I have a clear message: the NHS is not for sale, and it will not be on the table in any future trade talks.”

Before landing in London, Trump derided Mayor Sadiq Khan, calling him “a stone cold loser… “dumb (and) nasty,” accusing him of doing a “terrible job.”

Trump’s remarks followed Khan slamming DJT as “one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat,” comparing him to “fascists of the 20th century.”

Trump notoriously praises some of the world’s most oppressive leaders, saying they’re doing a “terrific job” — notably ruling authorities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Israel.

Parliament snubbed Trump by not inviting him to address the body during his stay, unwilling to grant him the honor.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image is from TruePublica

A vote for Boris Johnson as Britain’s Prime Minister would effectively be a vote for US President Donald Trump and his sidekick, Binyamin Netanyahu of Israel.  They have ‘form’ in working closely together to violate UN Security Council Resolutions.

To date, against the specific will of the international community of over 190 nation states worldwide they have ignored UNSCR 2334; have moved the US embassy to Jerusalem against world protest and have unilaterally approved the illegal annexation of the Golan Heights by Israel.  All these actions are a violation of international law and a complete contempt for the authority of the UN.

If Johnson joins Trump and Netanyahu it would bring the UK into a war in the Middle East against Iran that would almost certainly use nuclear weapons and be the cause of tens of thousands of deaths.  Is this what we want for Britain?

Is this what we fought for in two world wars?  To be associated with warmongers who are intent only on self-image and family assets?

Virtually any candidate other than Boris Johnson would be in Britain’s best interests.  We do not want British troops fighting a war for Trump and Netanyahu in the Middle East.  There are currently already a number of ministers and ex ministers who have been recruited as lobbyists for foreign interests, including a former Defence Minister and a former International Development Secretary, both of whom were eventually obliged to resign. Britain needs no more.

Jeremy Hunt, Dominic Raab or Angela Leadsom etc., are all experienced politicians any one of whom would be a leader of integrity in keeping Britain safe militarily, secure politically and economically whilst commanding respect throughout the world. On the other hand, any associate of Trump and Netanyahu would cause irreparable damage to Britain’s global standing and to world peace. The choice is plain.

We are a proud nation that has been an exemplar of democracy and human rights for over 100 years. Let us not now be associated with power-hungry, warring politicians, international corruption, trade wars and global instability.

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

Just at the time of Britain’s most needy moment since the last world war, the Tories have decided the best thing to do is not face up to the very serious challenges of our time but to have their own beauty contest to find out just how ugly the participants can get – other than competing for the stupidness of the Grayling cup.

Boris Johnson, the bookies favourite is in court for lying over the whole Brexit saga. One can only fret at the thought of this man becoming PM of Britain and turning what is left of the international laughing stock into something a lot less funny.

Raab has just announced his vision of Britain is a race to the bottom by stating unequivocally that taxes should fall to 15 and 35 per cent, whilst having no idea how to fund the revenue crash other than shut government departments down.

Hunt, McVey and Gove speak volumes. Serial liars, extreme neoliberal capitalists, bigots and backstabbers or a combination thereof.

Matt Hancock’s couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say about his leadership bid other than to say – “I just think we need a new face.”

There are others too – Rory Stewart, James Cleverly, Sajid Javid and Andrea Leadsom along with Mordant and Baker to name just a few. Not one springs to mind as having the intelligence and presence to lead a gang of drug crazed psycho’s at a snow and blow banquet let alone lead the sixth largest economy in the world.

But the latest contender is Mark Harper, and his bid to become PM demonstrates just how detached from society the party has become. Someone sane should have told him to be quiet and hide in a corner. He’s the ex-immigration minister who resigned back in 2014 after admitting he employed an illegal immigrant as his cleaner. He was unable to find any documentation papers for the cleaner he’d employed for seven years. He was praised as a man of integrity by Cameron who lied when he said Harper has significantly reduced immigration into the UK when he didn’t. His cleaner was arrested at her own daughter’s wedding.

It was Harper who oversaw the vans driving around the capital with messages to immigrants saying ‘go home or face arrest’ – all part of the building hostile environment built by Theresa May and her non-stop catastrophic failures at the Home Office, demonstrated by the Windrush scandal and destroying the police’s ability to fight crime, whilst illegally surveilling everyone else for no reason.

Other than Harper’s ability to reject any sense of morality and toe the line like a mindless puppet, he has no accomplishments whatsoever – like none. And yet, he sees himself as having the qualities of Prime Minister of Britain – and obviously others in the party do as well.

These deluded aspirants demonstrate one thing and one thing only – Britain will soon be rid of a party that plunged the country into darkness and set the nation back decades. The party is so self-absorbed and detached from reality that it is currently taking selfies and admiring their own phoney qualities. It’s like watching a bunch of school kids in a playground – only worse.

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One cannot and should not turn away from the disastrous results of the recent European Parliament elections, especially considering that Leftist parties across the European Union (EU) expected to gain 38 Members of the European Parliament (MEP), achieving around 5% of the vote.

The leadership and organizers of European Left needs to think thoroughly over its failure to mobilize and address working people. Even if failure is specific to the concrete context we can abstract a few very important reasons for such weak results.

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Lack of a Cohesive Radical Vision Across Borders: “Just a bit more social.”

Firstly, and most obviously, there is an absence of an integral European program for radical social change that combines viable short-term reformist policies with a utopian transformative vision of the future. The Yanis Varoufakis DiEM25 movement attempted to make one step in this direction, but fell behind two steps in its too reformist demands and a weak organizational support. Even if a few parties on the Left openly promote ecosocialism – one has difficulty understanding why this is not on the agenda of a majority of those parties – most parties find themselves in the trenches defending against the ongoing assault of neoliberal capitalism.

In short, the message of the Left has been boiled down to a mere defence of just a bit more open and a bit more social Europe. There is no radical criticism of the Eurozone and the asymmetrical relationship between the core and the periphery, and there is no call for or practice of international solidarity of working people across all the regions. The absence of a more integral and transformative program that would also be politically effective is coupled by limited media channels, and at times, out-dated use of that media, which restricts the ability to mobilize voters European-wide. Browsing through some slogans and banners in the country I live in, Germany, one perceives very minimal differentiation between the Left and the Social Democrats when they both hold the banner “Für soziale Europa” (For social Europe) – which is an inadequate and too moderate slogan. For an ordinary voter the Left has become just a somewhat better version of what Social Democrats used to be, which is treated as old fashioned in the mainstream parties’ discourse. The electoral campaign for EU elections reflected this: no enthusiasm, no provocation, no sparkle to inspire the desire/dream/community of people. It seems that the goal of European Left is a vote horizon of 5-10% of the electorate rather a radical transformation of Europe.

Secondly, despite some good work on the ground – for example, many members of the Left party (Linke) in Germany have been very active on anti-fascist (anti-AfD) issues, in the environmental movement connected to Fridays for Future and in the movement against rising rents that calls for expropriation of major real estate – the political enthusiasm for the alternative future has been increasingly associated and channelled to the Greens. The climate issue, at least at the present time, overdetermines other social issues, and functions as a fear of climate change (nature) that is juxtaposed with anti-social fears promoted by AfD (fear of foreigners, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism).

Divisions Among the Left and the Failure of Tsipras

Thirdly, the European Union elections clearly testify to further splits on the Left: for example, between autonomous campaigns on a national scale and the Yanis Varoufakis led DiEM project for democratizing the EU; or between movements and citizens’/city initiatives and entrenched, parliamentary-centred Left parties. The spectre of a future in Europe dealing with splits over the legacy of the failed Grexit and lurking Brexit weigh heavily in the discussions on the Left and have substantially weakened its thinking of different, non-capitalist future.

Fourthly, and most symptomatically, the current Left has not yet come to terms with the defeat of the once-messianic figure of Alexis Tsipras. If the sequence of 2014/15 promised an open confrontation with the Troika (the European Central Bank, European Commission, International Monetary Fund), that was catalysed by the OXI referendum in Greece, the social movements, the strikes and the electoral victory of Syriza, the latter has largely neutralized its social base and transformed the Left party into a dull disciple that conducts what the master of austerity says. Despite the IMF openly admitting the failures and injustices connected to the assault on the Greek economy and welfare, the austerity measures penetrate into the deepest pores of society, bringing together a wave of resignation, resentment and internalization/normalization of the crisis. The traumatic conversion from left hero to neoliberal Tsipras has had deep consequences for the Left and points to the weakness of the leadership of Syriza and the uncompromising stance of the EU ruling class, as well as extremely feeble international solidarity in the historic moment. The latest election results in Greece returned the conservative New Democracy party to a powerful position in governing and are thus not at all surprising.

Low Voter Turn-out and the Rise of the Right

Fifthly, even if the reasons for the decline of the Left are dependent on the specific circumstances of each region/country, I should mention that throughout the periphery there has been, as always, low voter turnouts. For example, in my home country of Slovenia, only 28% of people voted. Rather than speaking about lazy and passive voters, I would argue that their choice not to vote is a clear political choice. Many voters do not see any possibility for real change: how on earth should eight MEPs in a 751-member Parliament, only 1% of all the MEPs, exert any kind of influence? If those eight MEPs are so powerless, and everything is decided by lobbies, and in times of crisis, by the Troika, then it becomes extremely difficult to mobilize voters. Also, let’s remember that the Left was beaten not only on the periphery but also in the central countries. In Germany, Linke scored only 5%, while in France, La France Insoumise achieved only 6.5% (Melenchon). Specific to Linke’s decline in support is clearly its plummeting numbers in the East, which is connected to the rise of AfD, the fall of Sahra Wagenknecht within Linke and also the failure to address the issue of the core-periphery within Germany itself.

If the Left lost dramatically, the far Right, in contrast, has been profiting from the disenchantment of voters with the ‘extreme centre’ parties, by the failure of left anti-austerity policies and the defeat of Tsipras, the growing militarization of our societies and the fear of being left behind and losing even more of an already low level of prosperity. The far Right has pioneered a very aggressive use of social media – aided by mainstream media playing along with the game of spectacularizing the far Right – that spread hate speech (Islamophobia) and scapegoat migrants and refugees. This xenophobia has been repeatedly identified by CSU interior minister Horst Seehofer: Migration is mother of all problems. It is no surprise that the xenophobic attitudes and the defence of national workers have been present in other parties, including those on the left spectrum. What is more surprising is that there has been no political will to address the causes of the far Right’s ascendance, especially the brutality of neoliberal austerity that was all along unchallenged by the ‘extreme centre’ parties.

In terms of concrete results, two major far-right-wing groups in the European Parliament will now have around 112 MEPs (EFD + ENF more than 15% of the vote). This makes them three times more powerful than the Left, and also, in fact, on the way to becoming the third largest party. Even more worrisome is the trend toward increasing strength of the far Right in the core countries. Let us not forget that they won in major countries: in the UK – Farage’s Brexit party, in France – the National Front of Le Pen and in Italy – Salvini’s Liga Nord. The far-Right parties in the European Parliament are still quite small, but they have made major gains in the last five years while also succeeding in shifting discourse – forcing their agenda within the extreme centre – which is reflected in a tough anti-migrant stance and support of the ‘war against terror’. The far Right is now organized in the streets and in the parliaments, nationally and EU-wide, and poses a major threat to the future.

Green Parties and their Ethical-Management Lifestyle

Let me now turn to what was, for many, the surprise story of the elections: the rising tide of Green parties. They brought in 69 MEPs, which is a bit more than 9% of the electoral body. In Germany, they won more than 20% of the seats, the second largest number, and in France, with 13%, they are now the third largest party. Let me posit a disclaimer and say I am happy for Green Party comrades, activists and sympathisers for their strong results across Europe and in Germany. To think and act on the viable alternative against neoliberal destructionist capitalism can be built only through ecological socialism. What I would like to, nevertheless, argue here is that one major danger can be seen on the horizon of the apocalypse and environmental catastrophe, the thought of which can elicit only nausea and a sense of helplessness.

The Green Party and those that think and act green have been successful in their branding of an alternative life style. To simplify, this primarily individualistic life style oscillates between smart consumerism – it is your choice to live more ecologically – and self-righteous moralization of politics that demands a deeper change in our lives. The latter often feels like a new secularized religion, which insists on a micro-approach to address and finally ‘resolve’ our bad conscience. A notion of a pure green life is presented as the utopian future. Simultaneously, this utopian vision has already been worked on and realised by a whole army of smart green corporations, using green energy and infrastructure to offer us the option to go to bio-shops instead of big supermarkets and to support local farmers and cooperatives, and drive only electric cars. One comes across very diversified styles of green management of our moral guilt. The more the climate crisis becomes a reality – weather changes, lack of resources, climate migrants – the more strongly people feel called upon to understand what is happening and organize themselves.

Green Just Means “a bit better and a bit cleaner” (technology)

By now, many are very aware that human activity and the capitalist mode of production and consumption are the cause of these major climate changes. If we add that the large majority of extractive and exploitative corporations are located in the West and are responsible for pollution worldwide, we can expect to accumulate an even greater sense of guilt. In this context, the top priority becomes the desire to make at least some small changes in our micro everyday life and follow moral imperatives that help to improve and make our environment a bit cleaner. The formula for Green success then falls from the melting ice and sky. If going to a bio-shop simply means buying a commodity on the (economic) market and feeling good by buying and consuming it, then voting for the Greens performs the same function in the political market. I buy and vote to feel a bit better and believe I, individually, can make a small difference. Voting Green is thus a moral supplement to economic consumerism for concerned and more wealthy citizens who are here not concernedabout migration, but, rather, worried about their general helplessness in the face of the apocalypse.

What is, furthermore, very disturbing is when green moral righteousness becomes linked to the new messiah, as if the Green Party can somehow miraculously, along with our individual green choices, save us all from the capitalist path to social and ecological disaster. Given that the major representatives of the established Green Parties call for merely soft reformism and more green capitalism, this messianic expectation is very naïve. In fact, what we need are changes that are radical and more than superficial. Even if an ever-increasing number of individuals are organized ‘bio’ cleaner activities, this is still a small and atomised bubble within the larger frame of capitalism. When one hears that better and cleaner technology can save the planet, one wonders if we have learned anything from the ‘productivism’ of the 20th century. The belief that micro change and green capitalism shall save us is part of a dangerous illusion that can, at best, only stall the climate crisis. Those that vote now for Greens and hope that Green program and leadership can execute transformative changes will be as disappointed as all the Left voters across Europe who saw Tsipras as a champion of anti-austerity and the rising tide of the Left’s answer to neoliberalism. Many of the young voters might also be oblivious to the fact that more than a decade ago, in Germany, the Greens were a part of the most neoliberal achievements in recent German history under the rule of SPD’s Schröder; this government was neither particularly environmentally friendly, nor was it particularly peaceful, for the first time since WWII Schröder sent German troops outside of Germany in order to intervene in the Balkans.

Is There Any Hope for a Radical Utopian Vision?

Might the new Green tide enjoy the temptation to rule in coalition with the ruling extreme centre parties, or might it – by an increasingly radicalized movement and Fridays for Future – turn toward the Left? The future is unwritten, but what is clear at the moment is that in the European Union not much will change. Most likely, the neoliberal party ALDE, which won some 14% of votes, will join those that have run the show for a long time: EPP (conservatives, 24%) and S&D social democrats (19%). The people – with a voter turnout of only around 50% – gave a clear mandate to continue the trend of neoliberal austerity, anti-immigrant wall building and cemeteries in the Mediterranean sea, and further destruction of the environment by adjusting to corporative/capital’s interests.

Future progressive strategy demands not only that we give up the naïve expectation that green technology, micro changes and the Green tide can prevent climate catastrophe without radically intervening or breaking with capitalism. Progressive strategy should also give up on the unspoken ‘productivism’ (of endless economic growth) of the majority of the Left and its weakening defence of the already weakened welfare state. Both Green and Left entertain an array of contradictory positions about downplaying the capitalist growth as if it can be reformed and channeled into a bit cleaner technology and better wage relations? What one could, nevertheless, hope for is that the activism of Fridays for Future will spread from children to parents, from the ecologically engaged to other social sectors, from Friday to Thursday, and so on.

The call for a global climate strike has already been made for this autumn; will that be the first truly global strike? What is certain, however, is that only through the radicalization of leaderships of the Left, the Greens, and the trade unions can we strive for a viable future again, and with it, for a much different world that is not indebted, sold, consumed, and predicated on (capitalist) growth. To do that we need to think and act beyond the limits of welfare and green capitalism distilled in a Green New Deal. It is a good departing point for rethinking and organizing internationally, but should not become a biblical story, we should beware it becomes successful in merely regulating neoliberal beastiality, and in this way, even save capitalism. However, it might not be enough to save humanity, not to mention major portions of animal and plant species. If the Greens and the Left do not push for a radical utopian vision that goes beyond capitalism, the radical Left and Green parties will remain at the margin – dominated by the extreme centre and attacked by extreme right in crisis – and content with 15% of the electoral body and ineffective in determining the future. Their future might look grim, our future can start again, every Friday.

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Gal Kirn currently lives in Berlin, works at TU Dresden, while in his hometown of Ljubljana he is a member of the Left Party (Levica). His book Partisan Ruptures and Contradictions of Market Socialism in Yugoslaviais forthcoming later this year (Pluto Press), he co-edited the book Beyond Neoliberalism (Palgrave, 2017), Encountering Althusser (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Surfing the Black, Transgressive Moments in Yugoslav Cinema (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), and edited the publication Post-Fordism and its Discontents (JvE Academie, 2010).

All images in this article are from The Bullet

On June 1, 2019, American vice president Mike Pence gave the commencement address at West Point. He told the graduates that it was a certainty that they will “be on a battlefield for America” and “will move to the sound of guns.” See this.

Pence did not say for whose agenda they would be fighting, whether it would be the oil companies’ agenda, or Israel’s, or the New York Banks’, or for the neoconservative ideology of US world hegemony, or for the CIA’s drug business.  Indeed, the West Point graduates will die without ever knowing for whose interest they are fighting.  

Pence’s address is a perfect illustration of The Matrix at work.  The innocent and ignorant graduates are sitting ducks for recruitment into what US Marine General Smedley Butler described as the hit men for American corporate interests. See this. 

War and the preparation for war has been the hallmark of America since the Clinton regime. In American history, the wars have always been for empire and the economic and financial interests that benefit from empire. There are very few years in American history when the government has not been at war with someone.  

On June 10, 1963, 56 years ago, a much greater man than Pence, President John F. Kennedy, gave the commencement address at American University in Washington, D.C.  His speech stunned the military/security complex.  It revealed a president who was committed to establishing a peaceful relationship with the Soviet Union.  This would be a peace that would threaten their budget, power, and importance.  Kennedy’s brave speech was a nail in his coffin. Five months later President Kennedy was murdered by the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff in Dallas Texas.  Their deed was blamed on Oswall, who was promptly shot dead inside the Dallas jail by a private citizen given admittance for that purpose. Thus, the set-up fall man was murdered before he could deny his involvement.

President Eisenhower had rattled the cage of the military/security complex when he said in his last public address in 1961 that they were a threat to American democracy.  But at American University President Kennedy went further and said his intention was to make peace and to remove the threat of war:

“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived–yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.

“What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” See this. 

Kennedy also had  confidence in America that no president since, except Ronald Reagan, had: 

“We can seek a relaxation of tension without relaxing our guard. And, for our part, we do not need to use threats to prove that we are resolute. We do not need to jam foreign broadcasts out of fear our faith will be eroded. We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.”

Contrast Washington today with President Kennedy, and you can see the total collapse of America.  Today we seek to stamp out all news except from those presstitutes that repeat the official explanations. We jam foreign broadcasts by requiring Russian news services to register as “foreign agents.” We close down websites and ban free speech from Facebook and Twitter. We have zero diplomacy, only threats.  Indeed threats are America’s hallmark.  Threats of war.  Threats of sanctions. The President of the United States gives away other countries’ territories and decides who is to be the president of Venezuela.  Today’s America is scared to death of peaceful competition and imposes tariffs on everyone from Mexico to China. 

When John Kennedy was president, America was a proud country.  Today it is a shameful place in freefall, a grave danger to its own citizens and to the rest of the world.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Spare a thought for all the governments wanting to cash in on the multi-trillion-dollar bonanza of the fifth generation of wireless technology or 5G while pacifying the half of their population who are anxious about its dire health and environmental consequences and keeping in ignorance the other half of the population who do not yet oppose its introduction because they are uninformed about its dangers.

Various governments have adopted different strategies to tackle this challenge, any of which may serve as a template for other governments to use. Let us take some instructive examples from Austria, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Governments that have been dilatory in availing themselves of the surveillance and control potential of 5G to quash dissent may wish to choose a strategy from the following list that they feel is most compatible with the national character and situation of their country and therefore most likely to meet their need for a smooth and rapid 5G rollout.

Austria: brute force and public ignorance

The most advisable strategy for any cautious government is to ensure that the population remains uninformed of the dangers of 5G. This is relatively simple to achieve by using brute force to rapidly sign into law legislation forcing the entire population to accept “smart” meters with no possibility of refusal, as the Austrian government did in 2018, and issuing a Gesteznovelle or amendment to a law allowing 5G antennas to be installed on all public buildings, including nurseries, kindergartens and schools. This results in a quick 5G rollout, which can then be portrayed as a triumph in the race to digitalization and its claimed benefits of more jobs, faster downloads, low latency, fourth industrial revolution, core cloud, cutting edge technology, or any other similarly hyperbolic promotional rhetoric designed to con the public (or, in PR language, “capture the public imagination”).

Complicity with the media conveniently ensures that no whisper of the dangers inherent in a new and untested technology penetrates the public sphere. The population remains in ignorance, is not given the option to refuse 5G infrastructure and is propagandized to believe that their country is at the forefront of the modern age. This strategy has much to recommend it and avoids all controversy, long-winded debate, troublesome negotiations, annoying delays and unnecessary costs.  Well done, Austria, for demonstrating how easy the 5G rollout can be when such a simple and highly effective strategy is adopted!

France: trickery and opportunism

France offers two possible strategies for rolling out 5G, each of which has great potential. France’s majority state-owned ENEDIS is steamrolling the French public with “smart” meters (called “Linky”) for the 5G Internet of Things, despite opposition from 71% of the population. Since 1884, electric meters belong to the municipalities of France, 906 of which, out of a total of 35,498 (2.5%) are refusing “smart” meters, a number that is constantly rising. The French population recognizes that “smart” meters are being imposed without their consent, with many complaints of trickery used by ENEDIS subcontractors, including some where the gendarmerie had to intervene to protect the citizenry.

If stealth and trickery should fail, another possibility is to take advantage of a national tragedy to impose 5G surreptitiously. While the nation is preoccupied mourning the loss of a much-loved historical monument, oligarchs – including those with close ties to telecommunications companies – have a whip round involving hundreds of millions of euros each to reconstruct rather than restore, your lawmakers announce the suspension of regulations regarding the protection of a national and world heritage site, and declare the legitimacy of rebuilding according to “the techniques and challenges of our era”. Any dissent expressed by historical experts or architects about the origins of the fire or the manner of rebuilding the monument is suppressed.

The public discovers only later that the ground on which the monument stood had already been subject to advance privatization plans before the terrible tragedyof its destruction and hey presto!, it can be rebuilt complete with modern technology suitable for the 5G rollout, especially appropriate and convenient given its central location as the “point zero” of France, from which all distances in the country are calculated.

Since France´s 5G rollout strategy is not yet complete, the above scenario remains at the level of speculation; only time will tell if indeed this strategy turns out to be the one employed. Whatever the case, it would have been a strong contender for most inventive strategy had it not been a longstanding and now rather tired strategy of disaster capitalism, these days greatly facilitated by the advent of directed energy weapons.

Switzerland: intricacies of the exclusion clause and amended subparagraph

Switzerland´s public servants are to be commended for demonstrating a mental dexterity that has enabled them to solve the conundrum of introducing 5G while facing an educated and informed citizenry. It has provided a useful template for the benefit of similarly unfortunate governments. Switzerland´s approach involves the devious use of exclusion clauses and innocent-looking subparagraphs.

Switzerland follows the exposure levels set out in the so-called safety guidelines of the so-called International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection (more about these “guidelines” and ICNIRP later).  The problem for the Swiss government is that Switzerland has precautionary exposure levels for single transmitters (base stations) that are 10 times lower than the ICNIRP levels.

Having gone ahead and auctioned the available spectrum in the 700 MHz and 3.5 GHz bands in February 2019, netting US$380 million, the Swiss government was faced with the challenge of enabling the use of the spectrum it had sold by raising limits without alerting the public.

As the public and cantonal lawmakers gradually started to grasp the scale of the threat from the completely untested 5G, the federal government’s dilemma grew. First came a people´s petition to force a parliamentary debate on 5G signed by 56,000 Swiss, then the cantons of Vaud, Jura and Geneva adopted moratoria on the 5G rollout. These were closely followed by Neuchâtel, which posed a series of questions to the federal government regarding the safety of 5G technology.

Cantonal lawmakers and Swiss citizens were outraged when the majority state-owned Swisscom defied the opposition to 5G by using existing antennas installed for previous generations of wireless technology to impose 5G on 102 locations in Switzerland. They will doubtless be further outraged when they learn that Swisscom has known about the non-thermal effects of electromagnetic radiation since at least 2004, when it filed a patent on a method and system for reducing electro smog in wireless local networks. This reveals that Swisscom has rolled out 5G on the Swiss population in full knowledge of its ability to cause damage to DNA and increase cancer risk.

On 17 April, the federal government made its move to stymie the public opposition while enabling the 5G rollout. This constitutes a veritable primer on conning the public. It published a document modifying its 1999/2016 ordinance on protection against non-ionizing radiation (NIR), with effect from 1 June 2019. The beauty of this is that an ordinance cannot be challenged by a people´s referendum. The accompanying report helpfully explains the purpose and operation of the modifications.

Given that more than half the Swiss population considers the radiation emitted by mobile phone antennas to be dangerous or rather dangerous (Office fédéral de la statistique (OFS), Omnibus 2011, 2015), the modifications to the ordinance have two significant purposes: (1) to establish a system of monitoring public exposure to NIR (sect. 4.1.1) in accordance with the Aarhus Convention, which obliges ratifying states to inform the public about pollutants and their effects on people and the environment, and (2) to fill the gaps in regulation that impede the deployment of 5G (sect. 2).

Point 1, the monitoring system, sounds promising until we are told later on in the report that the Federal Office for the Environment (OFEV) would be tasked with informing the public periodically of the extent of their exposure to NIR and the state of the science on the effects of NIR, but that no coordination with the Federal Office of Public Safety would be required since “no biological marker or modification of a biological marker presenting a link with NIR or its effects on health has been identified to date [sic]” (sect. 4.1.1).

The great advantage of this strategy, we are told, is that the public would thereby be informed “in an objective manner about its exposure to NIR and its origin, and the current margin as compared to the limits set out in the ordinance, which would contribute to taking the passion out of the debate and the perception of risk”. And most satisfyingly, OFEV would always be in a position to justify to the public why the current exposure limits were in line with science and testing (sect. 4.1.2).  In other words, it would be a closed circle and no examination of the real health and environmental dangers of NIR would be possible.

Point 2 is equally a master-stroke, for filling in the gaps in regulations that impede the deployment of 5G turns out to mean that the modified ordinance should include a principle of evaluation of “beam-forming” antennas and that “mobile phone antennas that emit during less than 800 hours per annum” should be exempted from the requirement to “respect the preventative exposure limits” (sect. 2).

This sleight of hand enables the federal government to exclude all 5G antennas from regulation, since they are all beam-forming and, if their emissions are calculated on the basis of their “directionality”, as implied by the chap. 62, additional subpara. 6, which states that “[The term] beam-forming antennas is intended to mean the radiating direction or the antenna pattern is adjusted automatically at short intervals”, it appears that it could be not the entirety of the emissions that would be subject to calculation, but solely each direction of emission. 800 hours would permit two months of emissions per annum per stationary antenna, but if each degree of emission of, for example, 180 degrees of movement of a directional antenna were to be permitted 800 hours, then no 5G antenna, all of which are directional, could exceed 800 hours of emissions and therefore none would come within the ambit of the modified ordinance.

Et voilà!  As if by magic, the Swiss federal government checkmates the Swiss people and their cantonal governments to enable 5G!

It is to be noted here that, thanks to the diligence of Swiss NGO Gigaherz, Swiss telephone companies have already been caught in the act of illegally irradiating the Swiss people, when antennas hidden under manhole covers were found in 2018 to be transmitting way in excess of their permitted limits.

Who would know if the millions of beam-forming antennas throughout Switzerland were exceeding the permitted exposure limits or transmitting in excess of 800 hours? Would anyone want to risk exposure by taking up position within their vicinity, given that the new beam-forming antennas are “especially used with the high frequencies auctioned in early 2019” (sect. 4.3)?

No wonder Switzerland is famous for its high-class and high-tech products! Its skill and meticulousness in drafting such a Byzantine 5G rollout strategy trumps all!

United Kingdom: strict legalism and authoritative assertions

The United Kingdom can always be relied upon for its professed adherence to the rule of law. Thus enquirers as to the safety of 5G, both members of the public and parliamentarians, are treated to lengthy disquisitions on the reliability of the so-called science produced by the various official bodies responsible for assuring the public that they are duly protected from electromagnetic radiation (EMR). As in the popular British children´s party-game, this may be termed a “pass-the-parcel” strategy and is greatly facilitated by the existence of a large number of organizations with acronyms that may be conveniently juggled as needed.

Answers to questions in parliament or from the public are drafted along the following lines: Public Health England relies on AGNIR [if this body has unfortunately been disbanded due to allegations of conflict of interest, incompetence, lack of qualified experts, falsified science or any other reason, the name of another body such as ICNIRP or SCENIHR may be substituted here] to supply the scientific evidence showing the safety of wireless telecommunications technologies since [add appropriate date]. The World Health Organization endorses the safety guidelines set forth by [name of body] in setting its EMR safety guidelines. Should Public Health England be made aware of any changes in the science, it will amend its policies accordingly. 

It may easily be seen that the UK strategy is an astute one since it serves simultaneously to impress and mystify, for no one has any clue as to the meaning of the various acronyms or the tainted reputations of the various bodies named, especially when they hail from another country. Such is the case, for example, with the International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection or ICNIRP, which is in reality just a little club of male scientists in Germany that appoints its own members without supervision or consultation with anyone and mysteriously receives funding from, and is housed by, the German government, conveniently in the same building with the German Federal Office for Radiation Protection. Nor would any UK citizen be likely to wonder how it came to be that the little club´s guidelines were adopted and endorsed not only by the UN´s World Health Organization, but also by its International Telecommunication Union.

Great work, United Kingdom! Deceiving the public while sounding sincere and trustworthy is quite an achievement. A note of caution, though, for other governments considering employing a similar strategy: it does necessitate a certain level of gullibility among the general public and is therefore unlikely to be effective in the case of populations already skeptical about government pronouncements.

United States: big spending by lobbyists to enable capture of government agencies

As may be expected of the United States, the preferred 5G rollout strategy involves money and muscle. The imposition of 5G without public consent or consultation was made possible long in advance by regulatory capture by industry, which ensured that laws were changed to prohibit injury to health and environmental damage being taken into account to prevent or hinder the rollout of 5G.

President Clinton signed into law the 1996 Telecommunications Act, section 704 of which states that no health or environmental concern can interfere with the placement of telecom equipment such as cell towers and antennas. Wireless facilities have been made a permitted use in all public rights-of-way, with the intention of locating them directly in front of homes and businesses and close above the heads of pedestrians, including mothers with babies. Public notice requirements and public hearings have been eliminated. Local authorities are prohibited from taking into consideration testimony from scientific experts. For example, local governments are prohibited from regulating wireless technology “on the basis of the environmental effects of radio frequency radiation”, and courts have reversed regulatory decisions about cell tower placement simply because most of the public testimony was about health.

Combined with corporate control of the media, preferably by telecommunications companies, and manipulation of lawmakers by armies of highly paid lobbyists, the strategy of regulatory capture is much to be admired, since – barring the appearance of a lawmaker with integrity and the existence of alternative media – it becomes almost impossible for the public to learn that 5G was never tested for health or safety and poses an existential threat to the entire planet.

In a country such as the US that believes itself a bastion of freedom, the public are unlikely to find plausible the idea that they are being hoodwinked in this way over such a dangerous technology and the 5G rollout may therefore be expected to proceed relatively unhindered. Should any information on the adverse effects of 5G leak out, recourse may be made to the oft-used and handy “blame-it-on-the-Russians” narrative. It should be noted, however, that this strategy requires considerable advance planning and the easy availability of funds sufficient to make your point of view the only one visible to lawmakers. It will therefore not be within the means of all countries. Nevertheless, this one has to qualify for the prize in the “heavy-handed but effective” category.

International aid and assistance 

Implementation of the above strategies is likely to be facilitated by recourse to the assistance of international organizations. If the aim is to impose a global telecommunications technology capable of “blanketing” the Earth, as stated in the literature on 5G, especially one involving transmissions by satellites, it would be indispensable to enlist the aid of the United Nations. An appropriate Secretary-General would have to be appointed, preferably someone benefitting from a professional background as an electrical engineer and physicist. Timing here is all, for such an opportunity arises only once every eight years.

Should 5G proponents be successful in this, they would have struck gold, for a UN Secretary-General can guide all of the organization´s activities in the desired direction, ensuring that 5G deployment feeds into the implementation of all treaties and conventions and thus becomes seen as a sine qua non in all resulting policy-making activities.

The UN Secretary-General also has the prerogative of “spontaneously” appointing, for example, an international Panel on Digital Cooperation, which could include all the international proponents of 5G in one go, while conveniently excluding any difficult people such as scientists or physicians knowledgeable about the deleterious biological effects of EMR. The Panel´s terms of reference would want to ensure its separation from the usual work of the UN, again obviating time-wasting questions that might be posed by UN officials or other concerned experts. The members of the Panel would automatically gain access to all UN member states, thereby profiting from the opportunity of one-sidedly convincing them of the benefits of 5G while conveniently failing to mention any possible downsides to the technology.

Should anyone have the temerity to raise objections to the UN’s failure to even mention the word “health” in the context of its rush to embrace 5G in all its programs and to assist in its imposition on every inch of the planet as well as in space, the cooperation agreement between Interpol and the UN’s  International Telecommunication Union may be usefully invoked to intimidate such a person as a potential cybercriminal.

The generally favorable worldwide public view of UN activities combined with universal ignorance about those activities and their purposes makes seeking such international assistance distinctly advantageous.

A smorgasbord of opportunities for rolling out 5G

I hope it is clear by now to all the governments reading this primer on the world´s most effective 5G rollout strategies that they have a smorgasbord of opportunities and support available to them for implementing 5G. Excuses regarding opposition from namby-pamby scientists and physicians across the world complaining about the lack of health and safety testing of 5G, citing the tens of thousands of studies that demonstrate the biological effects of EMR, or calling 5G the stupidest idea in the history of the world will not be tolerated.

Nor will excuses regarding pockets of opposition from nationals of your countries who cite phenomenal rises in all the major diseases of civilization since the advent of wireless technology and smartphones, plus ADHD, autism, suicides, depression, neurological diseases, and catastrophic decreases in fertility across the planet, as well as major declines in insect populations.

5G IS A GOOD THING BECAUSE WE SAY SO AND YOU WILL DO AS YOU HAVE BEEN INSTRUCTED OR LIVE TO REGRET IT WHEN WE CONTROL EVERYTHING

Signed:

Sophia

pp. A.I.

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Claire Edwards, BA Hons, MA, worked for the United Nations as Editor and Trainer in Intercultural Writing from 1999 to 2017. Claire warned the Secretary-General about the dangers of 5G during a meeting with UN staff in May 2018, calling for a halt to its rollout at UN duty stations.  She part-authored, designed, administered the 30 language versions, and edited the entirety of the International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space (www.5gspaceappeal.org) and vigorously campaigned to promote it throughout 2019. In January 2020, she severed connection with the Appeal when its administrator, Arthur Firstenberg, joined forces with a third-party group, stop5ginternational, which brought itself into disrepute at its foundation by associating with the Club of Rome/Club of Budapest eugenicist movement. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Chinese President Xi will attend this week’s Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) and likely broker some Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) deals with his Russian counterpart.

Thousands of people from across the world will be descending on Russia’s “second capital” of Saint Petersburg later this week to attend the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF) that will be held from 6-8, with the most important of them being Chinese President Xi. His presence at this yearly event is extremely significant because it’s the first out of three times that President Putin plans to meet him this month. As luck would have it, June this year is the month of summits, with the SCO one (13-14) in Bishkek coming one week after SPIEF and then the G20 one (28-29) following two weeks later. Presidents Putin and Xi will attend all three events of ever-expanding geopolitical and economic importance, which is why their first meeting later this week in Saint Petersburg is especially noteworthy as an opportunity to coordinate their approaches to these forthcoming multilateral political functions.

The ongoing “trade war” between the US and China sets the contextual backdrop for this week’s meeting, as does President Putin’s wholehearted commitment to Beijing’s Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) that he made during the eponymous summit in late April during his last meeting with his Chinese counterpart. It can thus be expected that some landmark agreements in this respect might be agreed to by both parties during the upcoming summit that would aim to improve Russia’s integration with BRI, which has thus far remained rhetorical at best seeing as how the country’s “Pivot to Asia” of the past half-decade has only thus far resulted in a gas pipeline and two bridges. It’s of the highest importance that Russia intensifies its real-sector economic ties with China through trade and infrastructure cooperation in order to bring some international substance to President Putin’s “Great Society” socio-economic development program and enable the country to fulfill its destiny as the “Eurasian Land Bridge”.

Looking ahead to the next two events later this month, Presidents Putin and Xi need to decide how best to handle the very sensitive issue of India’s military-strategic alliance with the US before they meet Prime Minister Modi in Bishkek during the upcoming SCO Summit. The US is trying to use India to “contain” China through the so-called “Indo–Pacific” concept that both Moscow and Beijing are very suspicious of, yet at the same time, New Delhi insists that it’s still abiding by its much-touted policy of “multi-alignment” and that its intensification of military ties with Washington isn’t aimed against any third parties. Moreover, Trump’s unexpected termination of India’s membership in the tariff-free “Generalized System of Preferences” has created the optics of an opportunity for Russia and China to more vigorously re-engage their nominal BRICS partner on the economic front, which could in turn possibly put the brakes on its pro-American pivot in the unlikely event that they’re successful.

As for the last main function of the month, the G20, Russia and China need to know that they can count on one another to jointly oppose Trump’s trade plans that he’s sure to talk about during the summit. They also need to reinforce their trust in one another ahead of what seems to be the US’ tacit attempts to drive a Kissinger-like wedge between them in the New Cold War throughout course of its negotiations with Russia for a “New Detente” just as it successfully did during the Old Cold War when it clinched such a deal with China at the time. It’s extremely unlikely at this point that this grand geopolitical plot will succeed, but both leaders should expect the US to ramp up its psychological operations against both them and their people in the coming future as it attempts to bring its ambitious plan to fruition. Seeing as how Presidents Putin and Xi will be meeting three times this month alone, however, it can safely be assumed that they’ll take the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership to new heights and will collectively commit to thwarting the US plans.

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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.

Featured image is from Strategic Culture Foundation

The Judaization of Jerusalem. It used to work under cover of darkness, at least in the mainstream media, but now it’s out in the open with official recognition of Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem from the United States.

Israel implements its judaization of Jerusalem by directly undermining the sanctity of both Muslim (the Haram al Sharif) and Christian (the Via Dolorosa) holy sites in al-Quds and by continuing to establish irreversible and exclusive control over the holy city as an Israeli-Jewish city.

Israel implements strategies that ensure its physical domination of the city. Since it illegally annexed East Jerusalem after the 1967 war, it has devised numerous policies to create geographic integrity and demographic superiority in favor of a Jewish Jerusalem.

But this strategy did not begin in 1967. In the wake of the 1948 war, the newly-minted Israeli government quickly rejected all calls for internationalizing the city and declared that “Arab aggression” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement the partition plan, and specifically the UN sanctioned corpus separatum of Jerusalem — Resolution 181 recommended the creation of independent Palestinian and Jewish States and a Special International Regime for the city of Jerusalem.

Today Israel’s hasbara machine falsely declares that Palestinian “terrorism” invalidated Israel’s obligation to implement final status negotiations for an independent Palestinian state in the Oslo process, when, in fact, it has been busy leaving nothing for the negotiators to decide upon.

Ironically, on 2 Feb 1949, Ben Gurion magnanimously expressed willingness to establish corpus separatum over the Old City, primarily in order to delegitimize Jordan’s hold over the Old City while removing Israel’s own territorial gains from the equation.

Today, unsurprisingly, we hear that Israel’s exclusive control of the Old City is part of the “New Palestine” Deal. At the same time, on June 01, 2019 the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) released a report that documented 130 violations by Israel against Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem during April.

It was the Labor government of Levi Eshkol which set the precedents for complete Israeli sovereignty over a “united” Jerusalem in 1967, with a flurry of Israeli legislative maneuvering that echoed the 1949 frenzy, immediately according Jerusalem a status different than that of the rest of the occupied territories.

Jewish colonization efforts were to emphasize security in the Jordan Valley and in “Greater Jerusalem” as well as the high ground along the western portion of the West Bank. In other words, preserve the Jewish demographic majority won as a result of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 in the Palestinian lands already grabbed.

Likud’s obsession, an obsession which today has the political upper hand, was/is on creating a Jewish demographic majority in the occupied Palestinian territories with the purpose of acquiring more Palestinian territory for the Jewish state.

Israel’s strategies re Jerusalem implemented at the municipal level (with full backing of the Israeli government) have been the most devastating for Palestinian Jerusalemites. The architect of the Israeli master plan for Jerusalem, as many know, was former mayor Teddy Kollek, who pursued plans to cut “Greater Jerusalem” from the rest of the West Bank and facilitated its annexation with the stated objective of ensuring Jewish demographic superiority as well as geographic integrity. Here are a few of his words from 1984 regarding what he considered to be the premature establishment of the now vast Jewish colony of Ma’aleh Adumim ringing the city:

“I think it is a mistake to establish it before we have filled Jerusalem. In aother five years, we will fill Jerusalem and then we will go there [Ma’aleh Adumim]. In Jerusalem, we took upon ourselves, as Jews, a very difficult urban task, in that we received distant neighborhoods, and we had to connect them …”

Note: Jerusalem was not empty and did not need to be “filled”!

The Jewish colonization of Jerusalem is in direct contravention of UN Security Council Resolution 465 Concerning the Application of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Prohibition to Establish Settlements in the Territories, including Jerusalem, 1 March 1980.

Israel has forced a Jewish majority in all parts of Jerusalem and in the process brutally suffocated the legitimate rights and aspirations of Palestinian Jerusalemites, who, nevertheless, cling to their rights and identity in the holy city as Muslims, as Christians and as Palestinians.

Since 1967, successive Israeli governments have systematically eradicated all other visions of the holy city of Jerusalem except for the vision of Jerusalem as the “eternal, undivided capital of the Jewish State.”

Without question, Israel has always viewed the final status of Jerusalem as already settled. With Trump’s “Deal of the Century”, Israel believes it will finally secure unquestionable legitimacy for its exclusive rule over the holy city.

It’s up to the international community to stop it. In its report mentioned above, the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (Euro-Med) “urged the United Nations and its concerned bodies as well as the European Union to closely monitor the situation in Jerusalem and to condemn the harsh acts to which Palestinians are subjected and to shoulder their responsibilities towards the Palestinians under occupation.”

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Rima Najjar is a former professor (now retired) at Al-Quds University, Palestine. She comes from Lifta, Jerusalem and Ijzim, Haifa and currently lives in the United States. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Shanahan summarized the main points of the Pentagon’s newly released “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” during the Shangri-La Dialogue forum in Singapore over the weekend, but the document itself contains many other important details that he failed to mention, all of which pertain to the United States’ implicit goal of containing China.

The document directly accuses China of being a so-called “revisionist power” that’s supposedly opposed to the U.S. vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific” even though it is Beijing that stands to lose the most from any disruption of its majority-maritime trade routes, which suggests that the U.S. is projecting its own aggressive intentions onto China in order to justify its forthcoming containment measures against it.

Before going any further, it should be understood that the following analysis is what the U.S. intends to do and doesn’t automatically mean that the countries that it plans to cooperate with will willingly agree to contain China.

Nevertheless, drawing attention to the U.S.’ designs could help these governments and their people to realize what America is up to and avoid falling into the trap of being exploited as pawns in this plot.

To begin with, the strategy report emphasizes that this is a whole-of-government effort that aims to sustain U.S. influence in this vast space through preparedness, partnerships, and promoting a networked region.

Image on the right: Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan speaks at the IISS Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore, June 1, 2019. /VCG Photo

The first part entails a forward-operating posture such as the deployment of missile defense systems in Japan and Australia and the opening of a joint American-Australian military facility in the Papua New Guinean island of Manus to complement the recently opened U.S. Marine base in Darwin.

As for its partnerships, these are divided into alliances (Japan, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand) and different degrees of other partnerships such as the one-of-its-kind “Major Defense Partnership” that it clinched with India in 2016.

A lot of emphases is placed on the concept of interoperability between American forces and their counterparts, and the U.S. importantly committed to supporting the vision of its strategic Indonesian partner to become a “global maritime fulcrum” between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Apart from its Asian-based partners, the U.S. wants to closely cooperate with the UK, France, and Canada in the Indo-Pacific as well, with the end result being that a multitude of bilateral relationships is being leveraged by America to its grand strategic ends.

Naturally, it makes sense for the U.S. to “weave together these partnerships with a purpose” in creating what it describes as a “networked security architecture” that amounts to the multilateralism of these separate relationships.

Prior importance is placed on the trilateral partnerships that the U.S.-Japan Alliance (described in the text as “the cornerstone of peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific”) has with South Korea, Australia, and India, while a lot of attention is also paid to ASEAN’s “centrality in the regional security architecture.”

About the latter, the document lists off about half a dozen platforms and mechanisms such as the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) and the ASEAN-U.S. Maritime Exercise (AUMX) through which the U.S. plans to more intensely cooperate with the region.

Wrapping up the strategy document,  the U.S.’ observations about the emerging intra-Asian security relationships such as the ones between Japan and India, India and Vietnam, and the Indian-Japanese-Australian trilateral dialogue all share its vision of a “free and open Indo-Pacific.”

Altogether, the “Indo-Pacific Strategy Report” is a comprehensive look at what the U.S. intends to achieve in this vast space across the coming decades, but once again, the reader should be reminded that it doesn’t automatically mean that it’ll succeed.

Acting U.S. Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan (L) shakes hands with Chinese Defense Minister General Wei Fenghe at the Shangri-La Dialogue summit in Singapore, June 1, 2019. /VCG Photo

International Relations are moving away from the zero-sum mindset of the past toward the win-win paradigm of the future, meaning that it’ll be an uphill battle for the U.S. to convince its regional partners to cooperate with it in containing China.

The more closely countries integrate with the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the less likely they are to go against their own national interests by burning bridges with China.

Therefore, the most pragmatic peacemaking solution is for all countries to focus more on economic connectivity with one another and less on the military competition that the U.S. wants to provoke.

Only through trade, investment, and shared social development can the Indo-Pacific become a centerpiece of global stability, but that requires the U.S. to abandon its aggressive aims to contain China and return to cooperation instead.

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This article was originally published on CGTN.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from CGTN

On May 30th, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times wrote: “Mueller Delivered a Message. Washington Couldn’t Agree on What It Was.”  In this article, he argues that the statement by “Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel proved as polarizing and unsatisfying as almost everything else”; “what President Trump heard” was “Case closed” and what “his adversaries heard” was “Time to impeach.” Historically, this is a classic case of a standoff between the irreconcilable sections of ruling elites; however, the public display of this conflict at this level is unprecedented in the history of the United States.

The Democratic Party establishment through its loyal “pundits” in the media and of course their 2020 candidates are propagating that “impeachment” is the solution to solve the current problems in the U.S. They proudly are advising Madam Speaker, that it is their “Congressional oversight duty” to investigate obstruction of justice by President Trump and his advisers and the time is now. On the other hand, the White House and Republican Party are playing their own counter “investigation” game and have made it crystal clear that no longer they would comply with any subpoena to testify about Robert Mueller’s Russia report. Politically, both parties have reached the end of a dead-end ally. Is the 2020 presidential election a way out of this quagmire? The short answer is no. Based on the deep animosity that has been displayed by the two dominant parties since the last presidential election; expecting a normal, democratic and civilized election process would be unrealistic.

However both parties regardless of their differences share two common challenges.

First, they are the fearful of the frustrated American people who have no interest in their family feud and are struggling with the day to day challenges of having a decent life with dignity.

Second, on the global scale, both parties understand that the U.S. weaken economy has undermined their imperialist power significantly. Therefore, in order to project a strong state of union and also gaining back the “glorious” era of the post WWII, the ruling elite have a mutual understanding that a confrontation on a national and international scale is unavoidable.

We already are witnessing that the democratic rights of the average working people in the U.S. are under attack. Even the elected representatives are chastised when they freely express their opinion on certain political issues.

The courageous Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange unlawfully are confined in harsh conditions under psychological torture for uncovering the truth. Their punishment is a clear message to all whistleblowers and independent journalists who dare to question or expose the corruptions and criminal operations which are conducted within the U.S. government or through big companies with the approval of the government authorities.

Today, in day light, the rightwing lawmakers are limiting the women’s rights as much as they can in hope to turn back time to the dark ages. Under these circumstances, one can imagine how these official hangmen would treat the defenseless immigrant women and children who have reached the U.S. and seek asylum.

On the international level, the U.S. government plays an even more dreadful role. According to the current U.S. foreign policy; China, Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Iran and the major European countries are considered as adversary regimes that needs to be dealt with in one way or another. Both Democrats and Republicans believe that a major war gives them a chance to rally their national and international forces. Both parties see a major military conflict as a catalyzing factor to tilt the power for a fundamental change in their benefit. President Trump plays a unique role in flaming the trade and military wars. Since 2016, Mr. Trump’s contradictory positions on many issues have discredited his Administration and the role of the U.S. in the world.

As a conman, Mr. Trump promises a lot which cannot deliver, but he is relentless in delivering his fascistic polices in undermining the democratic foundation in the United States. His constant surprises throw the entire U.S. economy into chaos and his illogical warmongering and peace offering talks at the same time on Iran or North Korea makes the U.S. foreign policy look rather strange. His behavior against his political opponents violates all the norms which were sacred once to U.S. Presidents. When it comes to the question of war and peace, no one can take President Trump’s tweets too seriously. Maybe the best description so far was given by one of the President’s staunch supporter who enthusiastically commented on the Fox News – in regard to Mr. Trump recent press conference in Japan that “Sometime President Trump plays good cop and sometime he plays bad cop, but he is the top cop all the time!”

True peace activists know very well that imperialists’ wars do not happen by accident or by an ambitious leader of a country. On the contrary, igniting a major war is a calculated plan with considerable in advance military preparation. Prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, upon President Bush request in 2002, his Administration received the Congressional authorization to use of force against Iraq. At the same time, the Bush Administration worked hard propagating fake news and unsubstantiated lies/accusations, put pressure on the European allies and also the U.N. Security Council to get the UN approval for invasion of Iraq. Today, once again the U.S. government is preparing for another major war. However, time has changed. The Trump Administration does not think a Congressional authorization or U.N. approval is needed. This time the target is Iran and tactics have not changed. Mr. Trump advisors have been busy to propagate the similar unsubstantiated lies and accusations to justify a duplication of the same failed and dangerous military action in that region again. However, the next U.S. military “shock and awe” campaign would not be confined to a single country, rather it would ignite a global war. Certainly, Russia as one of the military powers involved in the Middle East affairs and close neighbor and ally of Iranian government which has “good military cooperation” with Iran -as Mr. Putin pointed out in Tehran – cannot afford to be neutral, when the U.S. military operation begins. That war would not look anything like U.S./Saudi war against Yemen, it certainly drags many countries to theater of war many of which have the nuclear power capabilities.

Regardless of the grim future of any armed conflict in the Persian Gulf, U.S. military preparation is underway. The U.S. has already sent an aircraft carrier and B-52 bombers to the region and is determined and projects to be victorious in this war with the last drop of her young Americans. This unfortunate fact was reflected best in the Vice President Pence speech to the 2019 Graduates Class of the West Point Military Academy, when he promised: “It is a virtual certainty that you will fight on a battlefield for America at some point in your life.”

Regarding the political preparation for war, Mr. Pompeo and Bolton are all over places. Mr. Pompeo with the carrot and stick diplomacy is trying to convince the European countries that “Maximum Pressure” on Iran via sanctions is working and there is no need for a military war, at the same time Mr. Pompeo warns that the U.S. would punish those who still looking to trade with Iran in any form and shape. According to the Associated Press; in Germany: the “U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brought the Trump Administration’s campaign against Iran to Europe for the third time this month amid heightened Mideast tensions and a risk of open conflict that has unnerved American allies.” Meanwhile Mr. Bolton after profound statement that “Iran was almost certainly responsible for the recent attacks on oil tankers and pipelines in the Gulf” is encouraging Saudi Arabia and the UAE to stay strong since he will show the world the “evidence” soon.

The madness of warmongers is beyond belief. An international unity for peace by the working people around the world (independent of their governments) is the last chance to prevent another Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A nuclear war has no victor!

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Massoud Nayeri is a graphic designer and an independent peace activist based in the United States. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from the author

“Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
–Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

India’s general elections were the most wide-ranging and possibly most expensive election campaign in the nation’s history. More than 2,000 parties and over 8,000 candidates contested 543 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of Parliament, and some 900 million registered voters cast their votes. Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged victorious to seal his re-election with a majority of 303 seats.

However, Modi’s return to power has brought distress for some minorities, including India’s 200 million Muslims. With an increase in hate crimes against Indian Muslims, “some fear the world’s largest democracy is becoming dangerously intolerant” under the Hindu nationalist government, reports the BBC’s Rajini Vaidyanathan.

Religion Is Poisoning Indian Politics

Using religion as a way to win is a global phenomenon. For instance, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Republicans in the US all use religion in politics. Politicians appeal to religious emotions to gain support. Indeed, Modi is a great example of that practice and he has dramatically reshaped the politics of India.

Ever since he was first elected in 2014, Modi has tried to appease his party’s hard-line Hindu base while pursuing his goals of development and economic growth. He has humored Hindu extremists like the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) organization that created his party. Modi himself was an RSS preacher before he became an active BJP politician. While the prime minister has not condoned violence against Indian Muslims, he has not publicly criticized anti-Muslim actions by Hindu extremists.

Hindutva, a form of Hindu nationalism, is where the problem lies. As a term and ideology, it was popularized by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar first in 1923. It forms the basis of the RSS, as well as the Vishva Hindu Parishad and Hindu Sena groups. As a far-right, ethno-nationalist ideology, Hindutva uses religion as a way to justify violence “against Dalits, Muslims, Christians, Sikhs, Ravidassias and Buddhists.”

Over the past five years, the Hindutva movement has gained momentum under the Modi government. According to Human Rights Watch, vigilante groups calling for the protection of cows have killed dozens of people. Most of them are Muslims who were murdered for allegedly slaughtering cows. Many Hindus believe cows are sacred and killing them is a sin. Therefore, some extremists have targeted those who kill the animal.

These attacks are a symptom of the rise of violent Hindu nationalism under Modi. With a BJP government in office, some have seen this as encouragement to embark on vigilantism against cattle traders. Even “lower-caste Hindus previously known as ‘untouchables’ have faced violence from hard-line Hindu nationalists,” reports Swati Gupta.

Hindu Extremism Must be Reined in

Paul Marshal, a senior fellow at the Center for Religious Freedom, says that while international focus has been  on Islamic terrorism, it has largely ignored Hindu extremism and its record of violence. Saffron terror is a real phenomenon and is supported by members of the BJP. It is rarely scrutinized in the West because Hinduism is stereotyped as a gentle and non-violent faith. It is personified by the image of Mahatma Gandhi.

This allows the RSS and the BJP to take advantage of the attention that the West gives to Islamist violence, enabling Hindu extremism to slip under the radar. In fact, the actions of Hindu extremists are perturbing and nerve-wracking. In India, religious extremism and hatred are now deeply entrenched.

Under Modi, anti-Muslim “bigotry has been normalised in the democratic process,” says journalist Neyaz Farooquee. After re-election, the BJP might double down on its policies, making life more difficult for Indian Muslims and other groups. Therefore, the international community must take urgent measures to ensure the ruling party does not persecute minorities.

The United Nations, along with other major powers, should put pressure on India to protect minority rights as per its constitution. India must curb the RSS and other extremist Hindu groups. It must prevent communal riots and human rights violations.

In 2018, the BJP government “harassed and at times prosecuted activists, lawyers, human rights defenders and journalists for criticizing authorities,” according to Human Rights Watch. This must stop. Instead, Prime Minister Modi must work to create a balanced, peaceful and tolerant environment for all minorities in India.

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This article was originally published on Fair Observer, US.

Azaz Zaman is a columnist and a university lecturer. He currently teaches at the Bangladesh Army International University of Science and Technology. He has also worked as a researcher in several national and international research firms, including IPAG (Bangladesh) and EPSCoR (US). He regularly publishes articles in both national and international journals and daily newspapers. He was selected as one of the outstanding young researchers by the South-Central Climate Science Center, US, in 2014. He completed his BBA at North South University, Bangladesh and MSc in Applied Economics at Oklahoma State University, US.

Featured image is from the author

It is a giddy intoxicant, and making all who partake fall over in puddling nonsense.  The Mueller Report is not turning out to be the cleansing agent any of its readers were hoping for.  Originally encouraged to identify the cause behind Trumpland and its dark side, the agent of disaffection, the root of madness, it has done as much to disrupt as any Donald Trump show.  The Democrats continue to fret about what to do, and find themselves squabbling.

The Mueller Report, supposedly a document of deliverance, threatens to fracture the anti-Trump camp.  A hard line on impeachment is being pushed by the snarlers, those of the Ocasio-Cortez camp, a reminder that youth and enthusiasm can lag behind wisdom and application.  The centrists seem more uneasy about the whole thing, worried that such enthusiasm may serve to harden electoral resolve against them.

Robert Mueller’s statement last Wednesday, announcing a closing of the Special Counsel’s Office and an overview of the report’s findings, was a brief recapitulation of furrowed ground.  But, as ever, he left a few crumbs of excitement for those overly exercised about implications.

As Mueller explained, indictments touching on Russian cyber intervention in the US elections of 2016 and a “social media operation where Russian citizens posed as Americans in order to interfere in the election” did not entitle him to comment on guilt or innocence. Further investigation, he suggested, was required, leaving enough for Democrats keen on process to salivate.

Mueller affirmed that there was “insufficient evidence to charge a broader conspiracy” regarding Trump-Russia collusion. But he also threw both sides of the Trump divide a bone.  For the Democrats, he claimed that, “if we had confidence that the President clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that.” For the Trump cheer squad, he also noted that the investigation “did not […] make a determination as to whether the President did commit a crime.”  This had as much to do with operating protocol as anything else: the Department of Justice does not charge Presidents with federal crimes while in office.  “That is unconstitutional.”

What is left is the need for another avenue to get to the President, one “other than the criminal justice” route.  This point sent a good number among the cult of the impeachers into a flutter.  But as with President Bill Clinton, an impeachment process can see a rise rather than fall in the popularity of the incumbent.  Transforming a mechanical and for the most part prosaic 448-page report into a narrative of obstruction and corruption for US voters will drive advocates to distraction.  Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is at least aware that impeachment remains a political act – “you cannot impeach a president if the American people will not support it.”

That message and warning from history is not evidently making it to the progressive wing.  Voices such as those of Ezra Levin, co-founder of the liberal activist group Indivisible, claims “a real danger if Democrats fail to have message clarity and moral clarity when it comes to this.  There will be a real question of how they’ll ever motivate people to vote for them.”

Markos Moulitsas, the force behind progressive blog DailyKos, is equally adamant.  “This notion that Democrats are going to catch [Trump’s] voters sleeping if they just tip-toe around this utterly ignores the reality that Trump’s old, white, male base of support is the most reliable voting constituency in this country.” The Democrats’ best focus is on their constituency base – and so, a return to polarising form is guaranteed.

At the California Democratic Party convention on Saturday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi attempted to keep a middling approach.  “This isn’t about politics, it isn’t about partisanship, Democrats versus Republicans, no.  It’s about patriotism, it’s about the sanctity of the Constitution and it’s about the future of our nation.”

For all that, Pelosi seems incapable of convincing the wobblers.  Senators Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) have pivoted away from their previously cautious positions on impeachment in light of the Mueller Report findings.  “History is going to look back at this moment and what we choose to do,” Booker explained to MSNBC.  “I think the right thing now is to hold this president accountable for his actions.”  Representative Karen Bass of California of the Black Caucus suggests that there might be “no alternative but to move to impeachment” though resists pinning her colours to the mast just yet.  

Representative Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), on the other hand, senses a dangerous distraction.  Her own special contribution about the Mueller Report is one of continuing Russian influence.  (The Kremlin remains oppressively spectral for such figures.)  “There is a theme that is throughout this report about how Russia is trying to divide this country.  I don’t want to play into Russia’s hands and divide this country more with a partisan impeachment.”  Dingell supplies us the perfect psychological portrait of current Democratic thinking, admitting to being “totally schizophrenic right now about all the different things that are in there.”  Democrat strategists are bound to confuse this state of mind for constructive debate.  

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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]

Venezuela is under attack. An alliance led by the United States and supported by most states of the European Union, including Germany, has set itself the goal to oust the government of President Nicolás Maduro, which was democratically elected one year ago. This policy relies on politicians within the reactionary opposition in Venezuela, who created this aggression, as willing marionettes.

Part of this aggression is that the German Federal Government has recognized a politician of the opposition, elected by no one as Venezuelan „transitional president“ and has broken off all official contacts with the legitimate government of the South American country. The representative of Venezuela was therefore not invited to a conference of Latin American and Caribbean foreign ministers held in Berlin today (28.05.19, jW) at the invitation of the German Foreign Office.

While German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas meets with his guests for dinner, we met at the Berlin conference center »Urania« to demonstrate our solidarity with Bolivarian Venezuela. We want to do our part to ensure that the coup attempt in Venezuela, which has been going on since January, fails. Our solidarity goes to the popular movement of Venezuela, which resolutely defends itself against imperialist aggression.

We note:

• The only legitimate government of the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela is that led by President Nicolás Maduro.
• The recognition of an opposition politician who has proclaimed himself a „transitional president“ is an interference in Venezuela’s internal affairs contrary to international law, as even the scientific services of the Bundestag have stated. The occupation of diplomatic missions of the Bolivarian Republic in the USA and other countries in order to provide them with representatives of this „self-proclaimed president“ is a grave violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations and in violation of the sovereignty of Venezuela.
• The economic and financial blockade imposed by the United States, the EU and other forces against Venezuela constitutes an illegal collective punishment of the people of this South American country. Such a crime is a war crime under the Geneva Convention.
• The repeated threat of military intervention in Venezuela by the US is a grave violation of all basic rules of international law, in particular the Charter of the United Nations.

Source: Jens Schulze

We demand:

• Immediate lifting of all punitive measures imposed on Venezuela and its representatives! Release all assets blocked by international banks and financial institutions!
• Immediate normalization of diplomatic relations with Venezuela! The German Government must withdraw the recognition of the self-styled „transitional president“ and end the diplomatic exclusion of the legitimate representatives of Venezuela!
• Steer clear of Venezuela!

The event was supported by:

Daily newspaper junge Welt, Cultural magazine Melodie & Rhythmus, Granma Internacional – German edition, Alexander-von-Humboldt-Gesellschaft, Anti-NATO-Gruppe Berlin-Brandenburg, Berliner Bündnis »Hände weg von Venezuela«, Bloque Latinoamericano Berlin, Chile-Freundschaftsgesellschaft »Salvador Allende« e. V., Coop Antikriegscafé Berlin, Cuba Sí, Deutscher Freidenker-Verband Berlin, DIDF, Die Linke Tempelhof-Schöneberg, DKP-Parteivorstand, DKP Berlin, Freundschaftsgesellschaft BRD-Kuba, Gruppe Tendenzen Berlin, Mondos Arts, Netzwerk Cuba – Informationsbüro e. V., North East Antifa Berlin, Ostdeutsches Kuratorium von Verbänden (OKV), Red Patria Grande, Red Venezuela-Berlin, RedGlobe, Re:volt Magazine, R-mediabase, SDAJ, Unidos por la Paz – Alemania, Venezuela Avanza, World Beyond War

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The Trump administration and its allies are slow-walking the United States into war with Iran, and, with a few notable exceptions, mainstream U.S. media is helping them.

Much of this assistance has been overt. Just like during the run-up to the Iraq war, outlets like CNN, NBC, and the New York Times have in recent weeks simply parroted without scrutiny claims from Bolton and other administration officials of a dire Iranian threat based on intelligence no one has seen (these claims would in turn compel officials within the U.S. intelligence community to tell reporters that the intelligence in question shows nothing new or that it was being blown out of proportion).

But the media is also failing us in other, less overt ways, namely by quoting and promoting those pushing for regime change and/or war and presenting them as, at best, neutral “experts,” or at worst, proponents of a “strong” or “tough” U.S. policy vis-a-vis Iran.

In a story earlier this week about how President Trump is showing signs of souring on Bolton, particularly because of Bolton’s quest for war with Iran, the Times gave Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) CEO Mark Dubowitz prominent billing to praise Bolton as the one giving Trump the “diplomatic space for him to go back and forth between a very hard-line position and holding talks.”

Except the reality is that Dubowitz has no interest in the U.S. holding talks with Iran. In fact, over the past decade or so, he’s essentially been the titular head of the pro-regime change/Iran war movement that worked to prevent President Obama from reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran, and subsequently pushed to destroy it.

Dubowitz himself has called for regime change in Iran and the organization he runs, FDD, has been underwritten by right-wing billionaire funders Bernie “I think Iran is the devil” Marcus, and Sheldon Adelson, who’s on record calling for the U.S. to nuke Iran. FDD has also been the leader in promoting the false narrative that Iran is in league with al-Qaeda, and its staffers regularly publish op-eds and papers pushing a militaristic approach or outright calling for war with Iran. Indeed, Bolton recruited one of his most hawkish staffers, Richard Goldberg, from FDD. Months before joining the administration, Goldberg wrote a piece urging Trump to attack Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

The Times story mentioned none of this. It actually portrayed FDD somewhat positively, identifying it only as a “group that advocates a tough approach to Iran.”

USA Today made a similar mistake this week in a piece about Bolton’s relationship with Trump on Iran. The story identified Dubowitz as an “expert” and quoted him praising Bolton’s aggressive push toward conflict with Iran as “a well-orchestrated campaign,” and downplaying any worries that Bolton has outsize influence over Trump and his Iran policy.

Of course Dubowitz would want to downplay any public perception that Bolton is controlling Trump’s Iran policy, not only to calm concerns about a potential war with Iran, but also to placate Trump himself, who has a penchant for firing aides after conventional wisdom emerges that they have more power than he does.

Again, USA Today made no mention that Dubowitz is a regime change proponent or that employees of his organization have called for war. Instead, the piece identified FDD favorably as “a Washington-based foreign policy research institute that supports strong pressure on Iran.”

And if “strong pressure on Iran” and a “tough approach to Iran,” as the Times put it, are euphemisms for FDD’s militaristic positions, why are USA Today and the New York Times portraying a hawkish Iran policy as “strong” and “tough”? Is pushing for regime change in Tehran or war with Iran—one that would likely dwarf the catastrophe that was the invasion of Iraq—a “tough” position? Do we look back on the Iraq war and say George W. Bush’s policy was “strong?” Or rather, is it strong and tough to organize and unite a broad international coalition—including U.S. adversaries China and Russia—to pressure Iran into an agreement that boxed in its nuclear program so that it could not build a nuclear weapon?

Unfortunately, reporters quote Dubowitz all the time without providing the proper context as to what he’s up to. And it’s somewhat understandable. He’s the CEO of an influential and well-funded “think tank,” a position that gives it, and Dubowitz, a fairly thick veneer of credibility. Moreover, oftentimes reporters don’t have time to dig deep into the details of their sourcing, particularly if the source in question is one many of their colleagues turn to, and has seemingly already been vetted.

But the reality is that FDD oozes with bad faith to cover for its subtle push for regime change in Iran. Dubowitz himself famously called for a “nix and fix” strategy with regard to the Iran nuclear deal—in that, he said Trump should withdraw from the agreement and negotiate a better one. While those who closely follow these issues were aware of Dubowitz’s disingenuousness at that time, the fact that he’s now promoting an astroturfed hashtag on Twitter—likely engineered with the help of FDD—calling for no deal at all should put to rest any notion that he, or FDD, has any interest in diplomacy with Iran.

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Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as National Security Editor at ThinkProgress.

Featured image: Foundation for Defense of Democracies CEO Mark Dubowitz (Source: LobeLog)

Na presença do Chefe de Estado, Sergio Mattarella, da Ministra da Defesa, Elisabetta Trenta, do Ministro do Desenvolvimento Económico, Luigi di Maio e das mais altas autoridades militares, o navio Trieste, construído pela Fincantieri, foi lançado ao mar, em 25 de Maio, no Cantieri di Castellammare di Stabia (Nápoles). É uma unidade anfíbia multi-usos e multi-funções da Marinha Militar Italiana, definida por Trenta, como “uma síntese perfeita da capacidade de inovação tecnológica do país”.

Com 214 metros de comprimento e velocidade de 25 nós (46 km/h), possui um convés de vôo de 230 metros para descolagem de helicópteros, descolagem curta e aterragem vertical dos caça bombardeiros F-35B e para aviões convertíveis V-22 Osprey. Pode transportar veículos blindados no convés garagem de 1200 metros lineares. Tem uma zona inundável, com 50 metros de comprimento e 15 de largura, o que permite ao navio funcionar com os mais modernos meios anfíbios da NATO.

Em termos técnicos, é um navio destinado a “lançar e apoiar, em áreas de crise, a força de desembarque da Marinha Militar e a capacidade nacional de projecção da Defesa, a partir do mar”. Em termos práticos, é um navio de assalto anfíbio que, ao aproximar-se das costas de um país, ataca com caças e helicópteros armados com bombas e mísseis e, em seguida, invade esse mesmo país, com um batalhão de 600 homens transportados, juntamente com armamento pesado, em helicópteros e outros meios de desembarque.

Por outras palavras, é um sistema de armas projectado, não para a defesa, mas para o ataque, em operações de guerra realizadas no âmbito da “projecção de forças” USA/NATO a grande distância.

A decisão de construir o Trieste foi tomada em 2014, pelo governo Renzi, apresentando-o como um navio militar usado, principalmente, em “actividades de ajuda humanitária”.

O custo do navio, a cargo não do Ministério da Defesa, mas do Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico, foi quantificado em 844 milhões de euros, no âmbito de uma atribuição de 5.427 milhões para a construção, além do Trieste, de mais 9 navios de guerra. Entre estes, duas unidades navais de alta velocidade para incursões das forças especiais em “contextos operacionais que exigem discrição”, isto é, em operações bélicas secretas.

No momento do lançamento, o custo de Trieste foi estabelecido em 1.100 milhões de euros, com um acréscimo de 250 acima da despesa prevista. O custo final será muito maior, pois que devemos acrescentar o custo dos caças F-35B e dos helicópteros a bordo, além de outros armamentos e sistemas electrónicos que serão instalados no navio, nos próximos anos.

A inovação tecnológica no campo militar – salientou a Ministro da Defesa – “deve ser apoiada pela estabilidade dos financiamentos”.Ou seja, pelo financiamento contínuo e crescente com dinheiro público também da parte do Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico, agora liderado por Luigi Di Maio. Na cerimónia de lançamento, ele prometeu aos trabalhadores outros investimentos: na verdade, existem outros navios de guerra a serem construídos. A cerimónia de lançamento teve um significado adicional quando o Arcebispo Militar Ordinário, Monsenhor Santo Marcianò, enalteceu o facto de que os operários haviam colocado uma grande cruz na proa do navio, composta de imagens sagradas das quais eles são devotos, incluindo as do papa Wojtyla e do Padre Pio.

Monsenhor Marcianò elogiou a “força da fé” demonstrada pelos operários e abençoou e agradeceu “este sinal maravilhoso que vocês colocaram no navio”.

Foi assim, lançado o grande navio de guerra, como exemplo da capacidade de inovação do nosso país, paga pelo Ministério do Desenvolvimento Económico, com o nosso dinheiro roubado aos investimentos produtivos e despesas sociais, abençoado com o sinal da Cruz como na época das Cruzadas e das conquistas coloniais.

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

La nave d’assalto dei nuovi crociati

il manifesto, 28 de Maio de 2019

Tradutora : Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos