Global Research

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and his government committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, aided and abetted by U.S. President Donald Trump and his administration, according to a recent ruling from the International Peoples’ Tribunal on the Philippines.

The tribunal, which was held in Brussels, Belgium, on September 18 and 19, 2018, rendered its 84-page decision on these crimes on March 8. Conveners of the tribunal included the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, European Association of Lawyers for Democracy and World Human Rights, Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, IBON International, and the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines. A panel of eight jurors from Egypt, France, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands and the United States heard testimony from 31 witnesses, including me.

These jurors ordered the defendants to make reparations; to provide compensation or indemnification, restitution and rehabilitation; and to be subjected to possible prosecution and sanctions for their crimes. Although the tribunal does not have the power to enforce those measures, its findings of facts and conclusions of law could be used to bolster the preliminary examination of crimes by the Duterte regime currently pending in the International Criminal Court (ICC).

“The Tribunal has finally rendered its historical and comprehensive decision,” Edre Olalia, president of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers (NUPL) in the Philippines, who also served as clerk of the tribunal, told Truthout in an email.

“It is extensive in its presentation of the facts and evidence” and contains “an incisive elaboration of the nexus between the acts and omissions of Defendants and their accountability under a plethora of international instruments.”

Olalia added that the decision “sends out a message loud and clear: a people continually victimized by authoritarian and repressive governments and exploitative entities will seek justice wherever they can before those who are willing to give them a fighting chance.” Finally, Olalia said,

“the decision remains ever more relevant to this day and time when the Filipinos are still struggling to ride out the storm of tyranny, brutality, corruption, misogyny and repression.”

Much of this tyranny, brutality and corruption has been endorsed, whether implicitly or explicitly, by the United States. The unholy alliance between the Philippine and U.S. governments is long-standing. For the past 18 years, under Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump, the United States has continued to provide assistance to the Philippine government, which enables it to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity against its own people and deny them their legal right to self-determination.

After the 9/11 attacks, Bush declared the Philippines a second front in the war on terror, calling it “Operation Enduring Freedom-Philippines.” The Philippine government used Bush’s campaign as an opportunity to escalate its vicious counterinsurgency program against Muslims and individuals and organizations that oppose its policies.

The Philippine government labels specific people and groups as “terrorists,” which makes them targets of the regime. The government also engages in “red tagging” — political vilification. These labels can lead to harassment, assault, detention, torture and even murder. Targets are frequently human rights activists and advocates, political opponents, community organizers or groups struggling for national liberation.

Indeed, attorney Benjamin Ramos, secretary general of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, was assassinated on November 6, 2018, two months after the tribunal proceedings.

“Atty. Ramos was a leading human rights lawyer in Negros, who passionately advocated for genuine agrarian reform and peasant rights,” the NUPL said in a statement.

Ramos was the 34th lawyer killed by the Duterte regime. Two more have been killed since.

The tribunal found Defendants Rodrigo Duterte and his regime, and Donald Trump and his administration guilty of gross and systematic violations of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights; and the rights of the people to national self-determination and development.

Duterte is responsible for the crimes of his administration under the doctrine of Command Responsibility. Commanders are criminally liable for murders and other crimes committed by their subordinates if they knew or should have known they would be committed and they did nothing to stop or prevent it.

Liability for the Trump administration was based on its role as accomplice to Duterte’s crimes. The Rome Statute of the ICC includes aiding and abetting liability for war crimes. An individual can be convicted of a war crime in the ICC if he or she “aids, abets or otherwise assists” in the commission or attempted commission of the crime. This includes “providing the means for its commission.” The U.S. government supplied the Duterte regime with $175 million in foreign military financing in 2017 and 2018, and $111 million in 2019.

Violations of Civil and Political Rights

The tribunal found the Duterte regime responsible for “mass murder, gross violations of the right to due process, unabated killings, attacks, terrorist-tagging and criminalisation of human rights defenders and political dissenters, muzzling of the right to free expression, impunity to the hilt, general situation of unpeace, and the utter contempt for human rights.”

Duterte is perpetrating a ruthless “war on drugs,” which has taken the form of a violent war on suspected drug users. Most victims of the drug war are poor people from the slums. A police memo ordered that suspected drug users be “neutralized” or killed. The government admits to killing at least 4,410 people suspected of drug use as of July 31, 2018. Independent sources put the number at 23,000. The police claim that they acted in self-defense.

But, tribunal prosecutor Neri Colmenares, the chairperson of the National Union of Peoples’ Lawyers, argued,

“direct evidence including eyewitness’s accounts, CCTV and others show that the police, themselves, killed the victims [who were] not fighting back. They have been killing the victims while the victims were kneeling and pleading for their lives.”

Colmenares noted the brazenness of these killings, saying,

“They were committed in broad daylight, in public places, in front of many witnesses … even near police stations showing that the perpetrators were never afraid at all at being accosted by the authorities.”

There is a culture of impunity for officials in the Philippines. Police officers who carry out illegal killings are not brought to justice. They are promoted to higher posts.

Many lawyers are afraid to defend drug suspects for fear they might be killed. Since Duterte took office on July 1, 2016, the regime has illegally killed 10 prosecutors, 21 lawyers, three judges, and 13 journalists.

“The extra-judicial killings have also intensified against human rights defenders and the progressive sections of Philippine civil society who have criticized the current undemocratic and anti-people policies and systems,” the tribunal wrote. “As of June 2018, 169 leaders of the progressive movement have been victims of extrajudicial-killings (EJKs) and an additional 509 political prisoners are illegally jailed, subjected to trumped-up criminal charges and planted evidence.”

Duterte is unapologetic. On September 27, 2018, he publicly admitted,

“My only sin is the extrajudicial killings.”

Extrajudicial means outside the law.

Fatou Bensouda, chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court wrote in an October 2016 statement about the situation in the Philippines that extra-judicial killings may fall under the jurisdiction of the ICC “if they are committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population pursuant to a State policy to commit such an attack.” That is the definition of a crime against humanity.

Witnesses testified at the tribunal that suspects and prisoners endure physical and psychological torture. Janry Mensis, a miner in Mindanao, testified via video. He described how he and his brother were arrested, detained and tortured. They were tied and detained inside an ambulance for nine days. Then they were hogtied and their mouths covered with packing tape. The soldiers then strangled them. When the brothers pretended to be unconscious, they were thrown into a pit with wood and oil and set afire. They dragged themselves out of the pit after the soldiers left them for dead. They both suffered third-degree burns and other injuries from the torture.

Duterte declared Martial Law in Mindanao on May 23, 2017, purportedly in response to an invasion in one city by an alleged ISIS-inspired group (ISIS is also known as Daesh). His government has used the Martial Law to conduct illegal arrests and detentions, enforced disappearances, forced displacement and arbitrary deprivation of property, destruction of mosques and schools, and arbitrary denial of humanitarian aid to civilians caught in the crossfire.

After considering this evidence, the tribunal found violations of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Geneva Conventions; Nuremberg Tribunal; International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination; Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment; and UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders.

Murder, torture and cruel treatment constitute war crimes under the Rome Statute and the Geneva Conventions.

Murder or torture committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack, constitute crimes against humanity under the Rome Statute.

Violations of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights

The Philippine and U.S. governments were not the only entities on trial at the tribunal. Other defendants included the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and transnational corporations and foreign banks doing business in the Philippines.

“Duterte’s economic policies result in the deprivation of genuine government service as they divert public funds to corruption and big ticket projects demanded by Defendants World Bank, IMF, WTO and transnational corporations,” the tribunal wrote.

The tribunal determined that Duterte “has perpetrated anti-democratic and exclusionary economics and governance as he dramatically perpetuates neoliberal policies imposed or influenced by Defendant actors and transnational entities doing business in the Philippines by the systematic violation of fundamental human rights as exemplified in the mining exploitation.” Moreover, the tribunal concluded,

“This aggravates even more systemic violations of the people’s social, economic and cultural rights.”

Witnesses testified to “the impact of an exploitative system that has deprived millions of Filipinos of their livelihood, demolished the shanties of the marginalized poor, grabbed lands of the peasants and condemned workers to eternal poverty through perpetual contractualization and the exportation of labor, many of whom are victimized abroad,” Colmenares summarized.

The evidence revealed the imposition of “an exploitative system which has reduced the Philippines into a producer of raw material for industries; reduced the Philippines into a mere source of cheap labor and a lucrative and pliant market for their goods.” This is called neoliberalism.

The tribunal concluded that the Duterte regime “has consistently failed to provide the basic rights to work; to living wages and regular employment; to land; to an adequate standard of living; and to health, housing and education.” The tribunal also faulted the regime for imposing “new taxes that hit primarily the poor; and forced displacement of poor families to install tourism projects on their lands.”

“Farmers are deprived of the lands they have tilled for ages and are attacked; workers are exploited and their strikes violently dispersed; the urban poor remain homeless and threatened when they assert their rights; education is commercialized and inaccessible to the great majority,” the tribunal noted. In addition, “thousands are forced to migrate daily, including nurses, under a labor export policy; the right to livelihood is curtailed; and distressed overseas workers are neglected and abandoned.”

The tribunal found violations of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights; Universal Declaration of Human Rights; Convention Concerning Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organize; Convention on the Right to Organize and Bargain Collectively; Algiers Declaration; Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women; and International Convention on Protections of Rights of All Migrant Workers and their Families.

Violations of the Rights to National Self-Determination and Development

“Duterte has essentially demonstrated his allegiance to US imperialist goals in Asia-Pacific region,” the tribunal concluded. His government “also overturned anew the victory of the people in removing US military bases.”

The tribunal explained how the U.S. bases in the Philippines facilitate Duterte’s counterinsurgency program:

“US presence and the permanent and expanded basing of US troops are further emboldening the Defendant Duterte government in implementing the counterinsurgency program Oplan Kapayapaan patterned after the 2009 US Counterinsurgency Guide and financed by Defendant US government.”

U.S. government assistance to the Duterte government includes the provision of “intelligence, funding, orientation, training and arms to promote and pursue its economic and geopolitical interests in the region.”

The tribunal adopted my testimony as follows:

“US military aid to the Philippine government facilitates its commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity against its own people. Like Philippine leaders, US political and military leaders could be liable in the International Criminal Court as aiders and abettors of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”

The Filipino people have the right to self-determination, which includes the right to development. As stated in the Declaration on the Right to Development, it is “by virtue of” self-determination that peoples “have the right freely to determine their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” The people have the “inalienable right to full sovereignty over all their national wealth and resources.”

Witnesses documented widespread and systematic attacks on indigenous peoples and national minorities, and the use of white phosphorous gas and enforced disappearances, which amount to crimes against humanity.

“Philippine and US political and military leaders do not enjoy impunity for their crimes. Achieving justice for the Filipino people is not just a matter for people in the Philippines. Americans and other people throughout the world have a responsibility to bring the criminals to justice,” the tribunal wrote, adopting my testimony. “The Filipino people continue their valiant struggle for national liberation and self-determination. Providing legal accountability for the crimes of Philippine and US officials will help to deter them from committing additional crimes.”

In February 2018, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into possible crimes committed since at least 1 July, 2016, in the context of the “war on drugs” campaign launched by the Philippine government. A preliminary examination is an initial step to determine whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with a full investigation.

The following month, in March 2018, the Philippine government submitted a withdrawal from the Rome Statute. It takes effect one year later. Bensouda responded,

“A withdrawal has no impact on on-going proceedings or any matter which was already under consideration by the Court prior to the date on which the withdrawal became effective.”

Even if the ICC does not ultimately investigate and prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by military and police officials of the Philippine government, other countries could bring the offenders to justice under the well-established principle of universal jurisdiction.

Any country can try a foreign national for war crimes and crimes against humanity when the suspect’s home country is unable or unwilling to prosecute, and Duterte has proved unwilling to prosecute those responsible for the heinous crimes against the Filipino people.

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Copyright Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

For the international community to turn a blind eye to the atrocities carried out by the Israeli government on the premise that its military technology is far too valuable to condemn the human rights abuse of the IDF, is a grave error of judgment that encourages Right-wing extremism around the world.

1. The legal designation of 21% of the Israeli population, who are Palestinian Arabs, as second-class citizens with restricted civil rights who are subject to harassment and humiliation on a daily basis.

2. The state-imposed military blockade against a 1.8 million civilian population in the Palestinian enclave of Gaza that prohibits delivery of essential goods including medical supplies, building materials, power and electricity etc. with the specific objective to try to force a regime change. This illegal blockade against the Palestinian people has been implemented for over 10 years to the point that it has forced a now weakened majority into unemployment and starvation. This, of course, is the intended objective of the Netanyahu government to dehumanise nearly 2 million people and to starve them into submission by using the pretext of ‘arms control’.

3. Freedom of movement is heavily restricted and border posts are manned by Israeli police and military who deliberately harass and humiliate any non-Israeli civilians passing through the check points.  Sick people and pregnant women can and do die as a result of the actions of an illegal occupation that has been condemned as a violation of human rights by the United Nations Security Council (UNSCR 2334).

4. Thousands of political protestors are imprisoned without trial including hundreds of Palestinian children.

5. White phosphorus has been used as a chemical weapon against unarmed civilians.

6. Electricity generator stations in Gaza have been deliberately destroyed by the IDF.

7. Water supplies from the River Jordon to the indigenous people of Palestine i.e. their own water – have been redirected to Israeli cities.

8. Schools and hospitals in Gaza have been bombed and destroyed by IDF.

9. So called ‘price tag’ terrorists continue to burn down and destroy Palestinian olive groves in the Occupied Territories.

10. Arab villagers in the West Bank are daily harassed and their movement brutally restricted on their own land by troops of the illegal occupation; the intended objective of the Likud administration being the eventual annexation of the Golan Heights, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

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

Reporting from Kabul: The US is spearheading a “peace negotiation” campaign with Taliban since weeks in Qatar’s capital city, Doha. The US special representative on Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, has been spelling out the details of conclave through his twitter account. There is no Afghan or international journalist or correspondent allowed on the scene to report on actual minutes of the meeting that allegedly took place.  

This “peace project” has been dragging on for weeks. There is no guarantee that the US-Taliban talks will end in a desired result for people of Afghanistan. It is possible that months-long talks will land in trouble due to fundamental disagreements. .

History tells us that such symbolic talks have tricked us by deceitful rhetoric into another war or crisis. We have only heard in media that several rounds of negotiations have been staged so far, but we haven’t witnessed any practical development or actual scenes, as did US warplanes strike bare deserts for years in its war on ISIS in Syria while media would report conversely. The talks are tantamount to private meetings attended by US and Taliban, none of which belongs in Afghanistan, nor any of them represent the true concerns of the Afghan people.

On March 12, the bilateral talks finished without any breakthrough for an Afghan peace deal. The minutiae development in the agreement included Taliban’s severing of ties with Al Qaeda and ISIS, which is not a big deal for observers. The other items of the agenda are the withdrawal of US forces as well as preventing Afghan soil from being used against others.

For now, these developments could be seen as a last resort option for US policymakers to take an urgent turn in relation to their foreign policy war stance formulated in the immediate wake of 9/11, leading to the illegal invasion of Afghanistan on October 7, 2001.

Taking account of this fact, peace is will not be easy to achieve. We are now entering into the third week of the bogus peace dialogue between the US and Taliban without any substantive achievements. It is more like a US propaganda machine that has raised “unfounded hopes” among Afghans. It is a display of efforts to the people of America that we haven’t lost the war to the Taliban.

Amid peace talks, as a close observer, I can notice a rise of optimism and favoritism in relation to the US among many Afghans who have been misled and who fail to understand the unspoken facts regarding the US-NATO war. In this  regard,  propaganda is paying off. It’s bringing “a new life” to the US occupation of Afghanistan.

What the weary people of Afghanistan want as an outcome of the overhyped Doha talks is a meaningful and permanent truce as well as the establishment of peace to bring an end to daily casualties occurring across the country.

The Western media tend to focus on selected issues pertaining to the US-Taliban meetings, e.g. The US proposal of  a five-year troop withdrawal schedule; whereas the Taliban negotiators insist upon a total withdrawal within a one year period.

Even if the US troop withdrawal takes effect, it will never be an all-out plan. The Trump Administration believes, that more US forces on the ground means a larger military budget that needs to be slashed, as it did with reversal of many domestic plans to cut huge costs. The US will possibly bring down the number of soldiers from 15,000 to 8,000 that would be enough to maintain operations in nine mega bases throughout Afghanistan and serve as mouth-shutting response to critics.

In the same way, President Trump has ordered to slash the number of US security forces at the US Embassy in Kabul that amounts to 1,400 and replace them with trained and loyal Afghan forces, according to the Afghan media. This scheme will apply in other areas including military bases that will help cut millions of dollars for Washington.

This so-called cost reduction policy was dictated during the Trump Administration, and it doesn’t necessarily mean the withdrawal of US forces, nor the abandonment of US military presence. When addressing US servicemen in Iraq, Trump said that we can’t serve as International Police and “defend these countries”, unless they pay for the costs. He pointed out:

“Our troops are deployed in countries that you might not know their names, isn’t it ridiculous”

The Doha-based negotiations was highlighted when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that he hopes there is sufficient progress in deliberations for him to travel in the next couple of weeks to so to speak “move it further”. Of course, his comments were meant to throw weight behind it. His comments contradict his early remarks that called the Taliban a “terrorist group”. In his speech to Future Farmers of America, he said:

“I have a team on the ground right now trying to negotiate with the Taliban terrorists in Afghanistan, trying to find a way to achieve an Afghanistan that’s not at war, that’s not engaged in violence, that doesn’t present a threat to the United States of America”

This US-led campaign is also aimed at confusing both the international and national leaders involved in some way in Afghanistan’s war. The US has to work in such a way as to retain EU support for the war in Afghanistan, because they have too grown fed up with the issue of the Taliban, with regard to underlying costs of deploying their troops in Afghanistan.

The US-Europe tensions, China and US competition, India-Pakistan rivalry, Iran-US hostility, Israel-Iran enmity, Saudi-led promotion of Wahhabism, US-Russia arms race, and many more conflicts have a concrete bearing on  Afghanistan which constitutes a geopolitical hub in central Asia.

Afghanistan’s death toll has reached a record level as media reports 100 to 200 dead every week. Former Afghan security advisor Hanif Atmar who is running for president in 2019 said in a gathering held on “8 March” in Kabul that almost 51,000 Afghans have been killed and 98,000 injured only in the last five years, according to Voice of America Dari. This figure stands in sharp contrast to UNAMA’s biannual report on Afghan casualities that usually release manipulated statistics on death toll.

Iran and Russia have also armed their own brand of militants inside Afghanistan in the border regions with Central Asian countries.

Washington is now working to dissolve the Taliban group into the power base of Afghanistan, on the one hand, to demonstrate that it has won the Afghan war not by military means but through diplomatic channels, and on the other hand, it seeks to integrate the militant group into its puppet government in Afghanistan to protect its strategic interests and jointly call for another war against ISIS or Al-Qaeda.

The Taliban’s project has long been outdated as the group’s size and strength, by comparison, has questioned the US power in the face of Americans and rest of the world.

In 2007, United States Geological Service (USGS) survey discovered nearly $1 trillion in mineral deposits in Afghanistan, according to mining.com. Five years ago, it was found that this poor country has $3 trillion worth of underground deposits including oil and gas, iron ore, gold, copper and lithium. The USGS used high-tech radiation in mapping and collecting information about exact sites of reserves. It used hyper-spectral imaging technology and shared the gathered data with mine firms.

Evidence reveals that the UK was cognizant of these reserves and their value ten years ago, according to the Afghan media (Afghan Paper), but refrained from disclosing any information to the public, which came to surface some years ago when the UK was at odds with the US over these minerals situated mainly in southern Afghan province of Helmand, where US later stationed thousands of its troops in addition to nearly 10,000 British troops already deployed in only one province that was not wholly in war.

According to recent data, there are almost 1,400 registered mines in Afghanistan, while the US has discovered more than twice that number. Despite this wealth of mineral resources, the impoverished people of Afghanistan have not seen the potential proceeds of billions of dollars worth of minerals, which could contribute the economic development of key sectors of the economy, resulting in tangible changes in the country’s living standards.

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Featured image is from Fabius Maximus website

Scientists announced today that only 10 vaquita porpoises likely remain in the world and that the animal’s extinction is virtually assured without bold and immediate action.

The vaquita, the world’s smallest and most endangered cetacean, is found only in Mexico’s northern Gulf of California. The release of the new vaquita estimate comes just two days after reports of the possible first vaquita mortality of 2019. More details are expected in the coming days.

Today’s announcement from the International Committee for the Recovery of the Vaquita also calls on Mexico President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador to end all gillnet fishing and adopt a “zero tolerance” policy of enforcement in the vaquita’s small remaining habitat. The committee is an international team of scientific experts assembled in 1996 to assist in vaquita recovery efforts.

“One of Earth’s most incredible creatures is about to be wiped off the planet forever,” said Sarah Uhlemann, international program director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Yet Mexico has only made paper promises to protect these porpoises from deadly nets, without enforcement on the water. Time is running out for President Lopez Obrador to stop all gillnet fishing and save the vaquita.”

The vaquita faces a single threat: entanglement in illegal gillnets set for shrimp and various fish species, including endangered totoaba. Totoaba swim bladders are illegally exported by organized criminal syndicates from Mexico to China, where they are highly valued for their perceived medicinal properties.

Despite efforts in Mexico to curb gillnet fishing of shrimp and other fish and efforts in China to reduce demand for totoaba, the vaquita’s population dropped 50 percent in 2018, leaving an estimate of around 10 remaining vaquita, with no more than 22 and perhaps as few as six.

“There is only the tiniest sliver of hope remaining for the vaquita,” said Kate O’Connell, a marine wildlife consultant with the Animal Welfare Institute. “Mexico must act decisively to ensure that all gillnet fishing is brought to an end throughout the Upper Gulf. If the vaquita is not immediately protected from this deadly fishing gear, it will go extinct on President Lopez Obrador’s watch.”

In 2017, in the face of international pressure, Mexico banned the use of most gillnets within the vaquita’s range, but enforcement has been lacking. For example, during the 2018 illegal totoaba fishing season, nearly 400 active totoaba gillnets were documented in a small portion of the vaquita’s range, and gillnets continue to be found within the vaquita refuge. Recent violence against conservationists in the region has limited critically important net removal efforts.

“If Mexico doesn’t want to be guilty of wiping out a species, it needs to secure 100 percent gillnet-free habitat now,” said Zak Smith, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Marine Mammal Protection Project. “What’s happening to the vaquita is a disgrace and entirely preventable, yet the Obrador administration has not committed to a robust vaquita recovery plan and has already missed deadlines on vaquita conservation commitments.”

“The organized criminal networks trafficking totoaba swim bladders from Mexico to China are responsible for the illegal fishing nets driving the vaquita to extinction,” said Clare Perry, ocean campaign leader for the Environmental Investigation Agency. “Unless Mexico gets serious about enforcement and works with China and key transit countries to dismantle those networks, there is no hope for the remaining vaquita.”

Despite the marine mammal’s alarming decline, the international committee emphasized that the vaquita is not extinct and that recovery remains possible. They are still producing offspring, and the remaining animals are healthy, showing no signs of disease or malnutrition. The international community plays a critical role in vaquita conservation.

In 2018 a U.S. court temporarily banned the import of seafood caught with dangerous gillnets in vaquita habitat. This year parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the World Heritage Convention are considering additional conservation measures for the vaquita and totoaba.

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Featured image is from Center for Biological Diversity

Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc. is on the verge of launching what the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) says will be the world’s first commercial drone delivery service in Australia. 

Wing, a subsidiary of Alphabet has been testing its drone delivery service over Bonython, a suburb of Tuggeranong, a township in southern Canberra. The year-long trial, called Project Wing, wrapped up last week; now the company is planning for a commercial launch in June.

Wing says its drones will be able to deliver small items, such as food and medication, but residents of Canberra, where the program was tested and will soon be ready for commercial flight, are furious about drones buzzing above.

Here is how Wing’s drone works 

Alphabet and Wing are expected to face a fierce fight before the delivery program takes off, according to ABC.

In response to the public backlash, Wing recently tested a quieter version of its delivery drone.

“We’re trying to be as transparent and as open as we can,” Project Wing CEO James Burgess told the Canberra Times.

Many Bonython residents told local Government officials the invasive drones had brought people to madness, and residents told police if the government did not intervene, they would shoot the drones out of the sky.

“It is not inevitable, if the Government can be convinced that the great majority of Canberrans don’t want it,” local Neville Sheather said.

Sheather leads Bonython Against Drones, a group that is trying to stop the progress of Alphabet and Wing from commercializing the delivery service.

Even some advocates of drones, like Professor Roger Clarke, have said Project Wing had developed too quickly.

“We’ve got to get the different segments of the public represented in these discussions, and they haven’t been,” Professor Clarke said.

Clarke said Project Wing had been rushed through testing and is not following the traditional process of assessing new technologies.

“Things fall out of the sky, it’s quite hard to get drones to work properly, it’s quite hard to deal with drones when they lose communications … we should be treating it that way and applying the precautionary principle and getting out ahead of the problem.”

Australian Capital Territory Minister Andrew Barr denied claims the government was allowing Project Wing to be expedited during the testing phase.

Instead, he warned that if Canberra and its residents did not accept the drone delivery service, it would fall behind the technological curve.

“Our choice is are we involved, are we trialing, are we engaging, are we finding ways to make this technology work in a way that benefits people, or are we just going to sit back and let it happen?” he said.

Wing and Google are currently waiting for government approval to begin their next test in Gungahlin, limited to five suburbs: Crace, Palmerston, Franklin, Gungahlin, and Mitchell.

The company expects to start drone deliveries midway this year.

Just wait until drone delivery services come to the US. The public backlash will be much worse.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is devasted and deeply upset by today’s horrific attack on two New Zealand mosques, where 49 people were senselessly killed and dozens more injured. In the wake of this terrible tragedy, CJPME renews its call for the Canadian government to stand up for Muslims in all communities by designating January 29th as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia.

Early this morning, news broke that gunmen had opened fire at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. Police have taken four people into custody who they believe to be responsible for this massacre. In a now-deleted Twitter account, one of the alleged gunmen posted a racist 87-page manifesto citing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim motivations for the attack. He also posted a picture suggesting he was horribly inspired by Alexandre Bissonnette – the man who murdered six Muslim men while they were praying in the 2017 Quebec City Mosque Massacre.

CJPME President Thomas Woodley responded,

“Canadians are sadly familiar with the lethal consequences of Islamophobia in Canada. We extend our deepest sympathy and solidarity with Muslims in Christchurch and around the world on this dark day.”

CJPME points out that this latest attack highlights the fact that Islamophobia is an increasingly alarming worldwide scourge that must be addressed by all governments. As a response to growing Islamophobia in Canada, last fall, CJPME and the Canadian Muslim Forum (FMC-CMF) launched the “I Remember January 29th” campaign. This campaign calls on the Canadian government to designate January 29th – the anniversary of the Quebec City Mosque Massacre – as a National Day of Remembrance and Action on Islamophobia and other forms of religious discrimination, as per the February 2018 report from Parliament’s Heritage Committee. In the aftermath of yet another tragic massacre, CJPME renews this urgent call for the Canadian government to stand up and support our Muslim co-citizens.

Like New Zealand, Canada has seen a growing trend of Islamophobia over the past several years. Statistics Canada’s recent police-reported hate crimes report showed that, of all targeted groups, Muslim-Canadians have experienced the highest increase in hate crimes, with the number more than doubling over the 2016-2017 period. Last year, an EKOS Research survey confirmed that Islamophobia is a persistent challenge to Canada’s multicultural society. Nonetheless, the survey also made clear that many Canadians recognize the problem of religious discrimination and Islamophobia in Canada, stand firmly opposed to it, and expect the government to take measures to address it. The Canadian government now more than ever must provide support for Muslim Canadians.

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A number of recent speeches by US President Donald Trump have featured Cold War Era rhetoric, including the claim that in ‘the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country’. This statement was made in the State of the Union Address, in which Trump also claimed that socialist policies have failed in Venezuela, transforming it from ‘the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair.’[i]In a subsequent speech, delivered in Miami on February 18, 2019, Trump called Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro a ‘Cuban puppet’ and stated that ‘the Venezuelan military are risking their lives, and Venezuela’s future, for a man controlled by the Cuban military and protected by a private army of Cuban soldiers.’ He went on to proclaim that ‘The twilight hour of socialism has arrived in our hemisphere, and frankly in many, many places around the world. The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela but in Nicaragua and in Cuba as well.’

Many key members of the Trump administration promote the view that ‘Cuba is the true imperialist power in Venezuela.’ Among the leading players in the current anti-communist and neo-imperialist crusade being perpetrated by the US government include: current US vice-president Mike Pence; Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State since April 26, 2018; Florida Senator Marco Rubio[ii]; John Bolton[iii], National Security Advisor since April 9, 2018; Mauricio Claver-Carone[iv], senior director of the National Security Council’s Western Hemisphere affairs division since fall 2018; Elliot Abrams[v], Special Representative for Venezuela since January 25, 2019; and, Mark Andrew Green, Administrator of USAID since August 7, 2017. All of them are well-known for holding strong anti-Castro views, opposing the Obama administration’s engagement with Cuba, and being proponents of aggressive regime change strategies in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua.

US hostility towards Cuba has been ramped up during the Trump Presidency, as travel and trade restrictions previously lifted by the Obama administration have been reinstated based on the premise that these policies only benefited Cuba’s despotic and oppressive regime while ignoring the needs of ordinary Cubans. Under the Obama agreement, diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba were officially normalized on December 17, 2014. Additionally, a number of trade and travel agreements were signed between the two countries, including contracts for business deals between Havana and 60 American companies. These measures contributed a 60% increase in American tourism to the island between 2014 and 2016. However, actions taken by the Trump administration have reversed much of this progress by making it more difficult for Americans to visit Cuba and prohibiting commerce with Cuban businesses. In November 2017, the US Department of State webpage listed 180 ‘entities’ in Cuba with whom financial business would be immediately forbidden[vi]. Approximately twelve months later, on November 14 2018, 26 new entities in Cuba were added to the list[vii].

On November 1, 2018, National Security Adviser John Bolton[viii]announced Washington’s intention to activate Title III of the Helms-Burton Act[ix](also known as the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Libertad) Act of 1996), which was passed in 1996 with the intent of strengthening the embargo against the Castro government. The Helms-Burton Act consists of four specific titles designed to extend the original commercial, economic, and financial embargo against Cuba in an effort to discourage non-US companies from investing in the country. Title I is a clause permitting the ‘enforcement of the economic embargo of Cuba’ through a variety of means including: ‘prohibition against indirect financing of Cuba’, ‘opposition to Cuban membership in international financial institutions’, and ‘opposition to termination of the suspension of the Cuban Government from participation in the Organization of American States’[x].  Title II calls for the provision of ‘assistance to a free and independent Cuba’, and advocates ‘policy toward a transition government and a democratically elected government in Cuba.’[xi]Meanwhile, Title IV allows for the ‘exclusion from the United States of aliens who have confiscated property of United States nationals or who traffic in such property.’[xii]

The most controversial provision of the Helms-Burton Act is Title III, which allows for the ‘protection of property rights of United States nationals.’ More specifically, it permits American citizens, including naturalized Cuban-Americans, to sue any foreign company conducting business that involves properties that were owned by American citizens before being confiscated by the Cuban socialist government after the 1959 Revolution. Shortly after its passage, the Helms-Burton Act was condemned by several countries with business interests on the island, as well as allies of Cuba, including Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, the UK, and the European Union, which actually fileda complaint against the US with the World Trade Organization in 1996. ‘The WTO complaint against the U.S. raises a list of possible inconsistencies with various parts of the WTO treaty texts.’[xiii]Furthermore, officials from many countries declared that ‘the United States was unlawfully exercising its jurisdiction extraterritorially, in that it was threatening to punish lawful activity – trade, investment, and tourism – carried out by residents of, say, Canada or Great Britain with an independent country, Cuba.’[xiv]

Title III has never been enacted up to this point over concerns that it might alienate US allies with investments in Cuba. President Bill Clinton initially suspended Title III after the Helms-Burton Act was passed in 1996, and this suspension was renewed on a six month basis by every sitting President ever since, including President Trump during his first two years in office. However, it appears that long-standing tradition is about to change as, in November 2018, National Security Adviser John Bolton announced the Trump administration’s intention to activate Title III, stating: ‘This time, we’ll give it a very serious review.’ Subsequently, in mid-January 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo indicated that Washington would only suspend Title III for a period 45 days instead of the usual six months, meaning it could be enacted at the end of February 2019.

Then, on March 4,^,2019, the Trump Administration announced that the full application of Title III would be suspended until April 17, but that lawsuits could be brought against approximately 200 Cuban state-owned businesses on Washington’s ‘black list’, beginning on March 19. Many of the entities included on the ‘black list’ have been operating as joint ventures with prominent foreign companies like British tobacco giant Imperial Brands, French beverage-maker Pernod-Ricard, and many Spanish-owned hotel and resort companies like Meliá Hotels International, Memories Resorts & Spa, Ocean by H10 Hotels, and Iberostar Hotels & Resorts.

In addition to activating Title III of the Helms-Burton Act, National Security Adviser Bolton also recently announced that further sanctions would be placed against Cuba, and that the island nation would once again be added to the US list of state sponsors of international terrorism[xv], having been removed in 2015 as part of the deal to re-establish diplomatic relations with the US. These efforts on the part of the Trump administration represent a continuation of the long-standing US foreign policy stance towards Cuba, which aims to destabilize and directly impact the island’s struggling economy and create desperation and hardship among ordinary Cubans to encourage them to overthrow their socialist government.

In response to the aggressive and provocative statements and actions of the Trump administration, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, stated that Cubans ‘vigorously reject this new provocation, meddling, threatening and bullying, in violation of international law.’ Cuban Foreign Minister, Bruno Rodriguez, also characterized the Trump policies towards Cuba as a provocation and describing the US stance as ‘irresponsible hostility aimed at hardening the blockade on Cuba.’

The application of Title III will likely engender tensions between Washington and some of its allies in Canada, Europe, Latin American and the Caribbean. However, while this course of action will reverse the recent progress in Cuba-US relations, harm Cuba’s economy, and exacerbate hardships faced by ordinary Cubans, it will not facilitate the destruction of the socialist government. Washington has been trying to destroy Cuba’s socialist regime for six decades through a variety of tactics including the funding Cuban exiles to organize terrorist attacks and sabotage the island’s economy, and through CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. However, Cuban socialism has withstood these efforts while achieving a number of impressive accomplishments, including ‘attaining full employment, providing universal health care services and universal access to free education, and achieving higher life expectancy, lower child mortality, lower child malnutrition, and lower poverty rates compared to any other Latin American country… In addition to its success in areas of human development, Cuba has also been active in providing practical foreign aid in the form of sending highly-trained specialists, such as teachers, doctors, and engineers, to developing countries where they are needed.’[xvi]There is no reason to believe that the Trump administration’s newly rediscovered anti-communism and anti-Cuba vision will produce a different result.

Why have American presidents have been so aggressive in targeting Cuba for the last sixty years? According to Fidel Castro (1995), its ‘Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents.’

Perhaps Washington is threatened by the possibility that the success of socialism in Cuba might lead to the popularization of the idea that workable alternatives to free-market capitalism actually exist. This could explain why the US has been actively sabotaging efforts on the part of countries like Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, among many others, to achieve more egalitarian societies, limit the power of corporations, and prioritize the common good and well-being of their people.

Despite their lofty rhetoric, the neo-imperialist ambitions of American leaders are not concerned with the well-being, freedom, or human rights of Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, ‘What they want is to exploit the natural resources of…countries and exploit the peoples’ (Castro, Fidel 2007). However, ‘Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals’ (Parenti, Michael 1995).

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Global Research contributor Dr. Birsen Filip holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Ottawa.

Notes

[i]https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-state-union-address-2/

[ii]Rubio often states that his family escaped communism ‘even though his parents actually immigrated to the U.S. during the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.’ He has been actively encouraging president Trump to take a stronger stance on Cuba.

http://en.granma.cu/cuba-us-diplomatic-relations/2018-01-12/marco-rubio-is-deaf-to-cuba

[iii]In 2002, Bolton advocated for tightening the embargo against Cuba based on unfounded allegation that the island was developing biological weapons.

[iv]Prior to entering president Trump’s administration, Mauricio Claver-Carone did not have any experience in domestic and international politics, aside from lobbying for an aggressive American policy towards Venezuela’s socialist government, on the basis of accusations that the Chavez and Maduro’s administrations had strong ties to the Castro regime. He was also executive director of the US Cuba Democracy PAC (one of the most important political organizations supporting the embargo).

[v]On January 25, 2019, Pompeo appointed Elliott Abrams as the United States’ Special Representative for Venezuela. Abrams was Assistant Secretary of State during the Reagan years. In 1984, he was accused of ‘covering up atrocities committed by the military forces of U.S.-backed governments, including those in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the rebel Contras in Nicaragua’ by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. He was also convicted of committing crimes related to the Iran-contra scandal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_Abrams

[vi]https://www.state.gov/e/eb/tfs/spi/cuba/cubarestrictedlist/275331.htm

[vii]https://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2018/11/287357.htm

[viii]John Bolton is a neo-imperialist and anti-communist, who has previously advocated for regime change in Syria, Libya, Iran and North Korea. He also encouraged policies against Cuba during the George W. Bush administration, claiming that the island was developing biological weapons.

[ix]The Hems-Burton Act was introduced because Americans were frustrated that Cuban socialism was able to survive the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was designed to demolish economic life in Cuba, and bring hunger and desperation to the island in order to facilitate the overthrow of the socialist government and remake Cuba into a playground for Americans.

[x]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Documents/libertad.pdf

[xi]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Documents/libertad.pdf

[xii]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Documents/libertad.pdf

[xiii]https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/2/issue/1/helms-burton-us-and-wto

[xiv]https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/2/issue/1/helms-burton-us-and-wto

[xv]Cuba was originally placed on the US list of state sponsors of international terrorism by the Reagan Administration in 1982.

[xvi]https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-cuban-revolution-the-u-s-imposed-economic-blockade-and-us-cuba-relations/5433797

Does it pay ‘to be good’? Is it still possible to play by the rules in this mad world, governed by brigands?

What if the rules are defined and ratified by all countries of the world, but a small group of the strongest (militarily) nations totally ignores them, while using its professional propagandists to reinterpret them in the most bizarre ways?

Describing the world, I often feel that I am back in my primary school.

When I was a child, I had the misfortune of growing up in a racist Czechoslovakia. Being born in the Soviet Union, and having an half Russian and half Asian mother, I was brutally beaten up between classes, from the age of seven. I was systematically attacked by a gang of boys, and humiliated and hit for having ‘Asian ears’, for having an ‘Asian mother’, for being Russian. During winters, my shoes were taken out into the bitter cold and pissed into. The urine turned into ice. The only consolation was that ‘at least’ I was Russian and Chinese. If I was a Gypsy (Roma) boy, I would most likely not have made it, at least without losing an eye, or without having my hands broken.

I tried to be polite. I did my best to ‘play by the rules’. I fought back, first only half-heartedly.

Until one day, when a kid who lived next door, fired his air gun and barely missed my eye. Just like that, simply because I was Russian… and Asian, just because he had nothing better to do, at that particular moment. And because he felt so proud to be Czech and European. Also, because I refused to eat their shit, to accept their ‘superiority’, and humiliate myself in front of them. Both mother and I were miserable in Czechoslovakia, both of us dreamt about our Leningrad. But she made a personal mistake and we were stuck in a hostile, provincial and bombastic society which wanted to “go back to Europe”, and once again be part of the bloc of countries, which has been ruling and oppressing the world, for centuries.

The air gun and almost losing my eye turned out to be the last straw. I teamed up with my friend, Karel, whose only ‘guilt’ was that at 10, he weighed almost 100 kilograms. It was not his fault, it was a genetic issue, but the kids also ridiculed him, eventually turning him into a punching bag. He was a gentle, good-natured kid who loved music and science-fiction novels. We were friends. We used to plan our space travels towards the distant galaxies, together. But at that point, we said ‘enough’! We hit back, terribly. After two or three years of suffering, we began fighting the gang, with the same force and brutality that they had applied towards us and in fact towards all those around us who were ‘different’, or at least weak and defenseless.

And we won. Not by reason, but by courage and strength. I wish we did not have to fight, but we had no choice. We soon discovered, how strong we were. And once we began, the only way to survive was to win the battle. And we did win. The kids, who used to torment us, were actually cowards. Once we won and secured some respect, we also began sheltering and protecting the ‘others’, mainly weak boys and girls from our school, who were also suffering attacks from the gang of those ‘normal’, white, and mainstream Czechs.

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There are self-proclaimed rulers of the world: Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and Israel. And there are two other groups: the nations which are fully cooperating with the West (such as Indonesia, Thailand, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, South Korea, Colombia or Uganda), and those that are decisively refusing to accept Western dictates, such as Russia, China, DPRK, Syria, Eritrea, Iran, South Africa, Venezuela, Cuba, and Bolivia.

The first group does almost nothing to change the world. It goes with the flow. It accepts the rule of the bullies. It collaborates, and while it is at it, tries to at least gain some privileges, most of the time unsuccessfully.

The second group is well aware of the dismal state of the world. It maneuvers, resists, and sometimes fights for its survival, or for the survival of others. It tries to stick to its principles, or to what used to be called ‘universal values’.

But can it really survive without confrontation?

The West does not tolerate any dissent. Its culture has been, for centuries, exceedingly aggressive, bellicose, and extremist: “You are with us, that is ‘under us’, or you are against us. If against us, you will be crushed and shackled, robbed, raped, beaten and in the end, forced to do what we order, anyway.”

Russia is perhaps the only nation which has survived, unconquered and for centuries, but at the unimaginable price of tens of millions of its people. It has been invaded, again and again, by the Scandinavians, French, Brits, Germans, and even Czechs. The attacks occurred regularly, justified by bizarre rhetoric: ‘Russia was strong’, or ‘it was weak’. It was attacked ‘because of its Great October Socialist Revolution’, or simply because it was Communist. Any grotesque ‘justification’ was just fine, as far as the West was concerned. Russia had to be invaded, plundered and terribly injured just because it was resisting, because it stood on its feet, and free.

Even the great China could not withstand Western assaults. It was broken, divided, humiliated; its capital city ransacked by the French and Brits.

Nothing and no one could survive the Western assaults: in the end, not even the proud and determined Afghanistan.

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A Chinese scholar Li Gang wrote in his “The Way We Think: Chinese View of Life Philosophy”:

“Harmony” is an important category of thought in traditional Chinese culture. Although the concept initially comes from philosophy, it stands for a stable and integrated social life. It directly influences Chinese people’s way of thinking and dealing with the world… In the ancient classic works of China, “harmony” can, in essence, be understood as being harmonious. Ancient people stressed the harmony of the universe and the natural environment, the harmony between humans and nature, and what is more, the harmony between people…  Traditional Chinese people take the principle as a way of life and they try their best to have friendly and harmonious relations. In order to reach “harmony”, people treat each other with sincerity, tolerance and love, and do not interfere in other people’s business. As the saying goes, “Well water does not intrude into river water”

Could anything be further from the philosophy of Western culture, which is based on the constant need to interfere, conquer and control?

Can countries like China, or Iran, or Russia, really survive in a world that is being controlled by aggressive European and North American dogmas?

Or more precisely: could they survive peacefully, without being dragged into bloodstained confrontations?

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The onset of the 21^st Century is clearly indicating that ‘peaceful resistance’ to brutal Western attacks is counter-productive.

Begging for peace, at forums such as the United Nations, has been leading absolutely nowhere. One country after another has collapsed, and had no chance to be treated justly and to be protected by international law: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya.

The West and its allies like Saudi Arabia or Israel are always above the law. Or more precisely, they are the law. They twist and modify the law however it suits them; their political or business interests.

Harmony?  No, they are absolutely not interested in things like harmony. And even if a huge country like China is, then it is seen as weak, and immediately taken advantage of.

Can the world survive if a group of countries plays totally against all the rules, while most of the planet tries to stick, meticulously, to international laws and regulations?

It can, but it would create a totally twisted, totally perverse world, as ours actually already is. It would be a world of impunity on one end, and of fear, slavery and servility at the other.

And it is not going to be a ‘peaceful world’, anyway, because the oppressor will always want more and more; it will not be satisfied until it is in total, absolute control of the planet.

Accepting tyranny is not an option.

So then, what is? Are we too scared to pronounce it?

If a country is attacked, it should defend itself, and fight.

As Russia did on so many occasions. As Syria is doing, at great sacrifice, but proudly. As Venezuela will and should do, if assaulted.

China and Russia are two great cultures, which were to some extent influenced by the West. When I say ‘influenced’, I mean forcefully ‘penetrated’, broken into, brutally violated. During that violent interaction, some positive elements of Western culture assimilated in the brains of its victims: music, food, even city planning. But the overall impact was extremely negative, and both China and Russia suffered, and have been suffering, greatly.

For decades, the West has been unleashing its propaganda and destructive forces, to ‘contain’ and devastate both countries at their core. The Soviet Union was tricked into Afghanistan and into a financially unsustainable arms race, and literally broken into pieces. For several dark years, Russia was facing confusion, intellectual, moral and social chaos, as well as humiliation. China got penetrated with extreme ‘market forces’, its academic institutions were infiltrated by armies of anti-Communist ‘intellectual’ warriors from Europe and North America.

The results were devastating. Both countries – China and Russia – were practically under attack, and forced to fight for their survival.

Both countries managed to identify the threat. They fought back, regrouped, and endured. Their cultures and their identities survived.

China is now a confident and powerful nation, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping. Present-day Russia under the presidency of Vladimir Putin is one of the mightiest nations on earth, not only militarily, but also morally, intellectually and scientifically.

This is precisely what the West cannot ‘forgive’. With each new brilliant electric vehicle China produces, with each village embracing the so-called “Ecological Civilization”, the West panics, smears China, portrays it as an evil state. The more internationalist Russia becomes, the more it protects nations ruined by the West – be it Syria or Venezuela – more relentless are West’s attacks against its President, and its people.

Both China and Russia are using diplomacy for as long as it is constructive, but this time, when confronted with force, they indicate their willingness to use strength to defend themselves.

They are well aware of the fact that this is the only way to survive.

For China, harmony is essential. Russia also has developed its own concept of global harmony based on internationalist principles. There is hardly any doubt that under the leadership of China and Russia, our world would be able to tackle the most profound problems that it has been facing.

But harmony can only be implemented when there is global concept of goodwill, or at least a decisive dedication to save the world.

If a group of powerful nations is only obsessed with profits, control and plunder, and if it behaves like a thug for several long centuries, one has to act, and to defend the world; if there is no alternative, by force!

Only after victory, can true harmony be aimed at.

At the beginning of this essay, I told a story from my childhood, which I find symbolic.

One can compromise, one can be diplomatic, but never if one’s dignity and freedom was at risk. One can never negotiate indefinitely with those who are starving and enslaving billions of human beings, all over the world.

Venezuela, Syria, Afghanistan and so many countries are now bleeding. Soon, Iran could be confronted. And Nicaragua. And DPRK. And perhaps China and Russia themselves could face yet another Western invasion.

A ‘harmonious world’ may have to be built later; definitely one day, but a little bit later.

First, we have to make sure that our humanity survives and that Western fascism cannot consume further millions of innocent human lives.

Like me and my big childhood friend Karel at an elementary school in former Czechoslovakia; Russia and China may have to once again stand up and confront ‘unharmonious barbarity’; they may have to fight, in order to prevent an even greater disaster.

They do not want to; they will do everything possible to prevent war. But the war is already raging. Western colonialism is back. The brutal gang of North American and European countries is blocking the road, clenching fists, shooting at everyone who dares to look up, and to meet their gaze: “Would you dare?” their eyes are saying.

“Yes, we would!” is the only correct answer.

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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.

Going into the third year of President Trump’s presidency, it is necessary to draw a balance sheet on who is winning and/or losing.

We will proceed by first analyzing domestic outcomes and then turn to foreign policy.

Power Bases of the Parties

The Democrats secured a majority in Congress, but the Republican retained their majority in the Senate; Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court secured a majority.

The Democrats received the support of four major television propaganda outlets (ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR), to one for the Republicans (FOX).  The news print media reflected a similar advantage for the Democrats – the NY Times, the Washington Post, The Financial Times backed the Democrats while the Wall Street Journalleaned to President Trump with notable exceptions on trade policy.

Party Successes and Failures

The Democrats succeeded in diverting President Trump from most of his political agenda via prolonged ‘hearings’ on Russia, and charges of  Trump collusion ; the Mueller investigation; the funding of the US-Mexico border; and other peripheral issues.

President Trump succeeded in major tax cuts for the wealthy – with the support of the Congressional Democrats – a major win.

The principal programmatic issues proposed by both parties were never raised.

The Democrats ecological agenda and international accords were defeated by Trump; on the other hand the Republicans failed to reverse most of the existing environmental agreements.

Trump succeeded in reversing or revising US trade agreements especially the Trans Pacific Partnership, the US-Iran Nuclear (and sanctions) Agreement, and revision of NAFTA.  The Democrats were divided and ineffective critics.

While both the President and Congress claimed to support a massive multi-billion-dollar federal infrastructure program to rebuild the crumbling structures, nothing was done.

The Trump administration promise to ‘re-industrialize’ the US was a failure, as several major manufacturers left, and a few returned to the US.

Growth was largely in the ‘service sector’ especially at the high end of finance and the low end – in nursing homes, restaurants and cleaners.

Democrats promoted the elite in Silicon Valley and billionaire retailers like Amazon.

In a word the economic policies of both the President and Congress failed to promote ‘structural changes’; their major tax reforms were regressive; severe income inequalities remained in place.

Trump increased gender, racial and sexual discrimination, while the Democrats opposed his policies with mixed results.

Trump encouraged the far-right to mobilize against abortion and in support of police violence against Afro-Americans; the Democratic Party provided verbal opposition to Trump’s rollback; most of their energy was directed to peripheral issues —Trump’s sexual escapades and other personality issues.

Foreign Policy

President Trump’s electoral agenda promised to end US military intervention in Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.  The Democrats were opposed and condemned his ‘appeasement’. The Democratic Congress joined forces with Trump’s neo-conservative cabinet and Senate hawks in reversing Trump’s agenda – he retained troop everywhere; and extended sanctions against Russia, Iran, Venezuela and China.

The Democrats joined with US multi-national corporations in defense of ‘globalization or free trade, defeating Trump’s initial protectionist “America First” policies.  In the end Trump combined the worst trade policies of the Democrats in Congress with the war policies of key senior Cabinet members (Pompeo, Bolton, Abrams et al.).

Trump followed and deepened the Congressional Democrats war policies. Under Democratic pressure Trump retained US troops in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan; supported Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen; backed Israel’s conquest of Palestine; recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and increased military aid to Netanyahu.

Led by the Democrats, Trump’s administration equated criticism of Israeli war crimes with ‘anti-Semitism’ and sought to make it a criminal offense.

Trump’s original overtures to improving relations with Russia were reversed.  Under Democratic pressure via the Mueller ‘show trials’ the Trump Administration joined the anti-Russia chorus.

Likewise with China, Democrats demanded a ‘turn to Asia’ which included trade sanctions and restrictions; Trump went one step further by promoting a trade war.

Trump recognized North Korea as a trading partner, the Democrats condemned his opening.  Trump capitulated and embraced non-reciprocal negotiations.

Trump’s adoption of the Democrats hardline foreign policy served only as a propaganda tool for the Democrats to condemn his failure to implement it through a coalition with allies

Trump sanctions and coup policies directed against Venezuela’s elected government followed in the footsteps of the Obama regime – with greater force.  The majority of both parties –with the exception of a   handful of junior Democratic Congresspeople–support US intervention including a pending US military invasion.

While Trump broke the Iran nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, many if not most of the Democrats did not object because of their close ties to Israel.

Conclusion

Neither President Trump nor the Democratic Congress has secured clear and decisive victory in their ongoing political conflicts and spats.

Trump has failed to reduce the trade deficit – in fact it has risen over the past two years.

Democrats have trumpeted the result but cannot claim that they have an alternative.  Trump succeeded in raising the military budget with the backing of the Democrats, ignoring social needs.  Trump succeeded in reducing taxes for the rich.  Despite critics on the left of the Democratic Party, most of its leaders joined the Republicans, simply mouthing verbal criticism of Trump’s tax giveaway as ‘one-sided’.

Trump has been defeated on the issues of abortion, gay and minority rights but the Democrats have failed to advance the struggles, especially the issues of police violence against racial minorities.

Trump has blocked any attempt to introduce a national public health program for all.  But a majority of Democratic legislators have sided with Trump, despite the fact that the voters from both parties support it.

The biggest victory for the Democrats has been to divertTrump from his political and economic agendathrough public hearings and Congressional investigations into his hush money payoffs, private real estate deals,   dubious tax payments and his supposed meetings and chats with “the Russians”.

Trumpinitiallypromised to reduce the US military presence but under pressure from his own Cabinet and advisors, recommitted US troops to all the losing war zones – including the US originated wars in Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia and Libya.

Likewise, Trump opened the door to negotiations with Russia and North Korea but retracted under attack from his Cabinet and the Democratic majority.

In a perverse manner, the Democratic Congress has defeated Trump on his initial peace initiatives and scored wins in lowering funding for the President’s Mexican border wall.

In sum, the Democrats ‘victories’ have exacerbated the state’s global war agenda.

The Democrats domestic victories have led to the blocking of parts of Trump’s reactionary domestic program.

The ‘victories’ of both parties have had a regressive effect on the vast majority of workers and employees.

At most, political diversion has prevented further regression.

Clearly, the so-called ‘division of powers’, ‘competitive parties’ and ‘bipartisan’ politics have not led to ‘representative government’ or democratic results.

Regardless of whether one party or the other wins, the people lose.  In the best of current circumstances, the best outcome is when both parties prevent each other from imposing their policies.

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Addendum

Trump’s 2020 Budget

The score card on Trump’s 2020 budget is designed to secure the support of (1) the military industrial complex by adding over $208 billion to war spending, (2) upper class plutocrats through tax reductions, and (3) satisfied bankers by reducing the fiscal deficit savaging essential popular programs including cutting $1.5 trillion from Medicaid and $845 million from Medicare over the next decade.

Trump proposes to slash $25 billion from Social Security and disability spending (SSI) over the same deadly decade.

Trump plans to cut $448 billion from food stamps, temporary assistance for needy families, student loans, housing assistance etc.

His payola for the corporate oil and gas oligarchs includes a 70% reduction of research and development of renewable energy.

Trump’s budget is a ‘poverty program’ against wage and salaried workers.

Trump wants $8.6 billion for the Mexican border wall, which the Democrats will resist up to a point.

Trump scores highfor the elite, but lowfor the working class.  But the Democrats have yet to challenge Trump’s war budget; they are deeply divided over whether to reverse his priorities and reallocate the military budget to social expenditures and increase taxes to balance the budget.

It is likely that Trump’s political losses may be shared by the Democrat’s ‘status quo’ policies.  As the Democrats seek to secure corporate funding they too will seek compromises and bipartisan deals – corporate approval may carry the vote in the face of the Democrats failure to mobilize the social base for a progressive social agenda.  Trump has embraced a radical corporate class struggle from above.  Will the Democrats in Washington seek to accommodate the President, as his class collaborators, or take the unusual path of backing class struggle from below?

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Award winning author Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Loyal readers of New Matilda should remember One Path Network, a Muslim video production studio and media company in Sydney. They produced the first devastating report exposing Channel Seven’s favourite purported Muslim leader and sheikh, Mohammed Tawhidi.

Their calm and factual retort to Tawhidi’s lurid claims about Muslim conspiracies in Australia left his credibility in shreds.

The OPN team has come up with a new report on Islamophobia in Australian media. Disappointingly, I don’t think it has received any media coverage. Thus, New Matilda is proud to bring you a brief summary of its findings, and a few accompanying comments.

A quick summary of the report, complete with flashy graphs and images, and an accompanying short video, can be seen at this link. There’s also a longer PDF version, which can be downloaded at the site, and runs to 44 pages, though about 20 pages are devoted to front pages about Muslims. More on that shortly.

Image on the right: Mohammed Tawhidi, a self-proclaimed Imam from South Australia.

The report investigates how five newspapers covered Islam in 2017. Their primary metrics were a numerical count of certain types of stories, number of front pages, a few case studies, and a brief look at a handful of columnists reporting on Islam.

The newspapers were all Murdoch’s: the Australian, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier Mail, and Adelaide Advertiser.

Articles were regarded as “negative articles written about Islam”, if they “referred to Islam or Muslims alongside words like violence, extremism, terrorism or radical”. It should be noted – this is a pretty expansive definition. A story that accurately reported a noteworthy incident of Muslim violence, without being inflammatory or misrepresenting material facts, and which had the respectful cooperation of Muslims, would still be caught up under this definition.

Indeed, the definition could go further. A report that noted Muslim women in a non-government organisation helping victims of domestic violence might also be caught up under this definition. It should also be noted – there is an implicit slippage, in the sense that a negative story about Muslims isn’t necessarily a story about Islam. Thus, I would argue that the definition may be overbroad.

With that proviso, it’s not much of a secret that the Murdoch press constantly attacks Islam and Muslims. So, given this definition, how frequent were stories featuring Muslims or Islam in a negative sense?

There were 2,891 of them. That’s almost 3,000 negative stories relating to Islam in one year. Which is an incredible amount. That’s almost eight stories a day, every day, for the whole year, somehow relating Muslims to terrorism or violence or whatever.

It’s a shame that the study didn’t investigate other media more fully. It would be interesting to know how they compare. The website guide to the report features an interesting comparison of Fairfax and Murdoch articles about Islam (in the sense explained above). Interestingly, though Fairfax has considerably less coverage of Muslims than the Murdoch press, it’s still pretty substantial, at over 100 every month. That is, over three negative stories every day at the less Islam-obsessed Fairfax. And even this gives an unfair disproportionate advantage to Fairfax – it is not clear which Fairfax publications were taken into consideration in this count.

The next metric is front pages. Here, the numbers are pretty stark. 152 front pages relating to Islam or Muslims in a negative way. The graph gives an idea of how regular that is, though it seems likely on some days multiple papers had Islam related stories on the front page.

The front pages blur out the non-Islam related stuff, and make the content of interest in focus. This is an idea of what those front pages looked like:

Again, a weakness in this study is the overly broad definition. One interesting case is a Daily Telegraphstory headlined “A KICK IN THE ASSAD”, about the Trump administration bombing Syria. To my mind, that story doesn’t relate to Islam in any serious sense. Yet funnily enough, the bottom of the page says: “NSW TERROR: ISIS LINK TO SERVO STABBING MURDER”. The Tele was determined to claim its space in this report.

The report turns to case studies, what is calls “ridiculous highlights” from the year. The first example is the coverage of terrorism. They observe that “a casual observer would not be faulted for thinking that Australia was actively engaged in daily combat on its streets. In fact, it would hardly be surprising if that was the perception in the offices of the Daily Telegraph and The Australian.”

The section on Yassmin Abdel-Magied reaches a staggering count of over 200 articles about her. This obsession is utterly deranged. I fear that this year too, we’ll continue to see Murdoch hacks trolling her social media to find new anodyne liberal tweets to feign outrage over.

Possibly the most revealing part of the study relates to opinion writers at the Murdoch press. We all know their positions. Yet it is striking to see their obsession with Islam quantified. All of them write about Islam a lot. Miranda Devine, one of the least devoted Islam bashers, made 16 per cent of her 185 op eds about Islam. Janet Albrechtsen weighed in at 27 per cent, a bit less than Greg Sheridan at 29 per cent. Andrew Bolt and Rita Panahi came in at 38 per cent and 37 per cent – particularly impressive for Bolt, who produced 473 opinion pieces in the year (I suspect this counts blog items). Jennifer Oriel wrote 48 op eds, and over half were about Islam.

What is striking about this to me is that this is like a kind of one-sided cultural war. When the Australiandecided to promote Keith Windschuttle, progressive academics rallied to defend historical truth. When they trash climate change science, other media covers the actual record of what’s happening to the world. When the Murdoch press run anti-feminist claptrap, there are plenty of feminists at Fairfax and the Guardian to strike back.

But there is no serious mainstream contestation of this constant drumbeat of anti-Muslim and anti-Islam stories and op eds. These are hundreds of op eds demonising Islam, without any real response. There are apparently no Muslims working at (say) ABC or Fairfax to give a different take on these issues, or complain about what the Murdoch press is doing.

The report concludes with some brief analysis and statistics, which are kind of incredible when paired. One is the finding from an Australian National University study that 71 per cent of Australians were concerned about the rise of Islamic extremism. A reasonable finding, one might think, given the nature of media coverage of Muslims (I really wish One Path would do a follow-up study on other media outlets).

Yet Griffith University researchers found the second statistic: 70 per cent of Australians think they know “little to nothing” about Islam and Muslims. Which raises an obvious question about what public opinion might be like if the media in Australia did its job differently.

My major reservation about the study is the broad definition of negative stories about Islam. If we simply regard these as stories about Islam or Muslims connected to violence, terrorism, and extremism, then the findings remain shocking. This is a constant, endless deluge of stories about Islam and Muslims. The vast majority receive no counter-argument or response, whether in the Murdoch press or elsewhere.

There are no ensconced media platforms for Muslims to write about Islamophobia in Australia with the kind of relentlessness of a Bolt or Oriel. The study shows a vast media empire endlessly picking on a small Australian minority before a huge audience, without offering the victims any way of defending their names and religion before that audience.

And the study that documented this is being ignored.

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Michael Brull writes twice a week for New Matilda. He has written for a range of other publications, including Overland, Crikey, ABC’s Drum, the Guardian and elsewhere. His writings can be followed at his public Facebook page (click on the icon below right).

All images in this article are from New Matilda unless otherwise stated

Five weapons were said to have been used, all inscribed with symbols, numbers and insignia.  The individual charged with the shootings at two Christchurch mosques that left 49 dead was an Australian with, it is alleged, a simple purpose: inflict death, and on specific communities in worship.  Even as the carnage became clear, Christchurch was already the epicentre of twenty-four hour news television, supplying a ghoulish spectacle.  Saturation coverage followed, and continues to do so, a point that will warm the attacker’s blood (his entire effort was streamed on live video on Facebook).

The alleged perpetrator, one Brenton Harrison Tarrant, left an unstirring piece – to call it a manifesto would be far-fetched – for those interested before the attack. It is a document of banality and off target assumptions. “Who are you?” he asks himself, suggesting an inner voice in need of reassurance and clarity.  “Just an ordinary White man, 28 years old.  Born in Australia to a working class, low income family.”  Stock: “Scottish, Irish and English”; a “regular childhood without any great issues”.

He did not like education, “barely achieving a passing grade.”  Universities did not offer anything of interest.  He invested money in Bitconnect, then travelled.  A sense of cognitive dissonance follows; Tarrant had recently worked part time “as a kebab removalist”. 

No criminal record, no watch list, no registry.  Nothing to suggest a tendency towards mass murder, disrespect or mania.  What Tarrant did have was a desire to avenge individuals he felt a kinship for, suggesting that the dull witted are just as capable of killing as the charismatically ideological.  The “radical”, rooted nature of violence lies dormant in many; all that is required is a match. 

The simple language of the note resembled that of various European populist platforms, albeit trimmed of deep historical flourishes: fear the Islamic invader; take to the barricades to repel the forces of Allah.  Interestingly enough, Tarrant leaves the detail of the invaders unclear, given that European lands have received all manner of invasions over its existence, of which the Ottoman and Islamic is but one stream.  The broad statement strikes a note of nonsense:

“To take revenge on the invaders for the hundreds of thousands of deaths caused by foreign invaders in European lands throughout history.” 

Other statements of motivation follow: the “enslavement of millions of Europeans from their lands by the Islamic slavers”; “the thousands of European lives lost to terror attacks throughout European lands”.  Rather conveniently, and in manipulative fashion, the spirit of young Ebba Åkerlund, who died in 2017 in a terror attack in Sweden, is also channelled.  It was not sufficient to merely mention her; the eleven-year old inspired the shooter to name rifles after her.  “How the hell,” expressed stunned father Stefan Åkerlund, “can we ever get to mourn in peace?”

The problem with any such event is the risk of immoderate response.  Sensible comments have been noted: the risks posed by non-Islamic terrorists have tended to be neglected in budgets and rhetoric, though US President Donald Trump is, unsurprisingly, insisting that militant white nationalism is fringe worthy rather than common. Under the John Key government, the overwhelming focus of funding intelligence and security efforts was directed at the phantom menace of Islam, burrowing deep into the suburbs.  Watch lists of suspects were constantly noted; the fear of returned “radicalised” fighters was constantly iterated.  To add a greater sense of purpose to the mission, New Zealand troops were deployed to Iraq to fight the troops of Islamic State.  “Get some guts!” exclaimed Key to his opposition counterpart, Andrew Little, who seemed somewhat half-hearted in committing to the effort.

Other policy recommendations, still embryonic and possibly never to fly, are making their errands.  There are suggestions of deploying around the clock security personnel to mosques in various countries, something that risks militarising places of worship.      

Vengeful rebuke can also find room in legislative and executive action.  In New Zealand, reforms to gun laws are being promised.  (These are already strict, and it is by no means clear if safety would be improved by such changes.)  In Australia, Tony Burke of the Labor Party suggests punishing hate speech and denying visas to certain right wing advocates of the white supremacist persuasion.  Australia’s immigration system is sufficiently intolerant and erratic enough to deny visas to those who might interfere with the false tranquillity of its society but a suspicious paternalism remains the enemy of free speech. Debate, in short, cannot be trusted.

The move to further push tech companies to reign in violent content will also receive a mighty boost.  The response from such companies as Facebook thus far is one of optimism: last year, some 99 percent of content linked with terrorism content promoted by Islamic State and al-Qaeda was successfully purged by artificial intelligence. Calls to do the same for other sources of inspiration are bound to follow.

There is also a stark, uncomfortable reality: no one is safe.  The entire field of terrorist and anti-terrorist studies is replete with charlatan impulses and the promise of placebo styled security.  There are fictional projections and assessments about whether an attack is “imminent” or “probable”.  There are calls to be vigilant and report the suspicious.  Political leaders give firm reassurances that all will be safe, a point that, quite frankly, can never be guaranteed. 

The actions of Friday demonstrate the ease with which an act of mass killing can take place, the damage than can arise from attacking freely open spaces where people commune.  Extremism is said to lack a face or an ideology, but on Friday, it manifested in an all too human form.       

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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]

Featured image is from Hollywood Life

US Afghan aggression and occupation of parts of the country remain largely unchanged after over 17 years.

Afghanistan reflects what CIA officials once called Vietnam – “the grand illusion of the American cause,” a conflict impossible to win. Yet it persists with no prospect for meaningful resolution.

US Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis earlier assessed conditions in the country after touring occupied areas for weeks, speaking to commanders, lower-ranking soldiers, Afghan security officials, civilians, and village elders.

He minced no words saying

“(h)ow many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding,” adding:

“Senior ranking US military leaders have so distorted the truth when communicating with the US Congress and American people in regards to conditions on the ground in Afghanistan that the truth has become unrecognizable.”

“This deception has damaged America’s credibility among both our allies and enemies, severely limiting our ability to reach a political solution to the war in Afghanistan.”

Wherever he went,

“the tactical situation was bad to abysmal…witness(ing) the absence of success on virtually every level” – things perhaps worse now than earlier, the nation and its people devastated by endless US war.

The US came to stay, not leave, permanent occupation planned, wanting the country’s resources plundered.

They include barite, chromite, coal, cobalt, copper, gold, iron ore, lead, enormous amounts of highly-valued lithium and other rare earth metals vital for high tech products, natural gas, oil, precious and semi-precious stones, potash, salt, sulfur, talc, zinc, among other minerals.

They represent potentially trillions of dollars of economic value, a treasure Washington has no intention of relinquishing. US policymakers also aim to traverse the country with oil and gas pipelines.

Its territory is used as part of a greater plan to encircle Russia and China. Taliban forces control half or more of the country. US-controlled puppet rule was installed in Kabul – figures Taliban officials won’t talk to because of their illegitimacy.

Afghanistan is the world’s largest opium producer, used for heroin production. What the Taliban eradicated pre-9/11, the US restored.

It’s a bonanza for money-laundering Western banks, the CIA relying on drugs trafficking as a revenue source, and other organized crime, tens of billions of dollars annually at stake – why the US is complicit in what’s going on at the highest official levels.

Trump regime envoy for talks with Taliban officials Zalmay Khalilzad formerly was Bush/Cheney’s ambassador to occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, later their UN envoy, a hardcore neocon extremist, supporting Washington’s imperial agenda, hostile to peace, equity and justice.

On February 25, so-called peace talks between Taliban officials and Khalilzad began in Qatar. There’s virtually no chance of anything from them benefitting long-suffering Afghans if any agreement if struck.

Nor is there any prospect for Washington admitting defeat and exiting the country altogether – similar to its humiliating April 1975 Vietnam withdrawal.

It was the longest US war in modern times until naked aggression in Afghanistan was launched in October 2017, weeks post-9/11, plans for attacking the nation prepared months in advance. All wars require extensive planning.

Whatever the US may agree on in the days and weeks ahead with the Taliban won’t be worth the paper it’s written on, a nation repeatedly breaching deals – most recently the JCPOA Iran nuclear agreement.

Two summits with North Korea failed over unacceptable demands made in return for hollow promises.

That said, here’s where things stand on Wednesday, according to Khalilzad and the Taliban. Via Twitter, the Trump regime envoy said the following:

“Peace requires agreement on four issues: counter-terrorism assurances, troop withdrawal, intra-Afghan dialogue, and a comprehensive ceasefire.

We “agreed in principle on…four elements. We’re now agreed in draft (form) on the first two.”

A Taliban spokesman said progress was made on withdrawing all foreign forces from Afghanistan, short of setting a timeline, as well as agreeing on  US-sought assurances on the future of security in the country if Pentagon and allied troops pull out.

The NYT published a Reuters report, saying the US wants assurances from the Taliban “not (to) allow militant groups (ISIS, al-Qaeda, etc.) to use Afghanistan to stage attacks.”

The Washington Post published an AP News report, saying both “sides have reached a draft agreement on the withdrawal of US troops,” along with the Taliban agreeing not to let territory it controls become “a haven for terrorists (ISIS, al-Qaeda, etc.).

NBC News said the US got a commitment from the Taliban “to cut all ties (sic) with al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups” its leadership opposes.

The US supports these jihadists, using them a proxy forces in its war theaters, including in Afghanistan against the Taliban. Its leadership wants them eliminated from the country.

Notably, no breakthroughs were achieved on any issues – nor is it likely in further talks whatever possible accommodations both sides may agree on in principle.

Republicans and undemocratic Dems intend permanent occupation of Afghanistan. Anything agreed to otherwise on paper is virtually certain to be breached by US officials.

Taliban authorities are savvy, knowing the hazards of dealing with imperial Washington. They likely hope for anything positive from talks – well aware that US officials can never be trusted.

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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 Syrian conflict influences not only the balance of power in the Middle East, but also strategies and military programs of the powers involved.

There is no secret that over the past years the Russian Armed Forces have used Syria as a test ground for some of its newest weapons and equipment, from cruise missiles to modern aircraft, and then have employed the gained experience for an extensive modernization of its forces.

In turn, Israel seems to have found a way to exploit the “Russian threat” narrative and a complicated situation on the Syrian battle ground as a tool to promote its own weapons and equipment.

Israel Aerospace Industrie (IAI), Israel’s prime aerospace and aviation manufacturer, which designs and builds civil aircraft, drones, fighter aircraft, missile, avionics, and space-based systems, released two promo videos, which could be considered as a clear example of this approach.

One of the videos is dedicated to the Mini Harpy tactical loitering munition. The weapon is said to be combining capabilities from IAI’s two previous flagship loitering munitions, the Harop and Harpy that have both the ability to lock on to radiation-emitting threats like radar with man-in-the-loop electro-optical guidance. According to IAI, the weapon is electrically powered, weights 45 kg and carries a shaped charge weighing about 8 kg. However, one of the most interesting things is that the Mini Harpy promo includes an animation showing how the weapon destroys an apparent Russian all-altitude surveillance radar 96L6, which can be used in both S-300 and S-400 air defense systems, something what has never happened in reality.

In another video, this time promoting the Barak-8 air defense system, the Israeli defense contractor demonstrated animated versions of Ka-50 attack helicopters and Su-27 fighter jets as enemy targets, which then were destroyed. The Ka-50 Black Shark serial production was halted in 2009 and the attack helicopter is now more in service with the Russian Armed Forces. The Su-27 is still in service with the Russian military.

These videos go in the course of the Israeli government narrative, which has repeatedly threatened to destroy S-300 air defense systems, if they are being employed against its aircraft attacking Syria. The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) also released two videos showing destruction of Russian-made Pantsir-S short- to medium- range system operated by the Syrian military.

The IDF shunned delicately a shot down of its modernized F-16I jet by a Syrian S-200 missile in February 2018. Probably, this is bad for business. Despite this, all the aforementioned Israeli actions are mainly designed to display the alleged Israeli military superiority and advantages of its weapons and equipment.

To achieve this goal, Tel Aviv is openly exploiting a relatively soft position of Russia towards Israeli actions in Syria and Moscow’s readiness to cooperate with all sides to defeat terrorists and put an end or at least de-escalate the conflict. It is also apparent that a part of the Israeli leadership works to show that this Russian approach is a sign of weakness.

The problem of this behavior is that it seems that the Israeli military occasionally falls in the trap of its own propaganda. This leads to IL-20-like incidents when hostile Israeli actions led to the shot down of the Russian intelligence plane and Moscow responded by a series of public steps to ensure safety of its troops and the most important opted to deliver the S-300 to the Syrian military and establish a united air defense network in the war-torn country.

The further Israeli actions of this kind may eventually lead to the another round of escalation in Syria and once again put the region on the edge of a hot regional war.

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Blatant disinformation spews from the western media. And law is never mentioned. Sen.Mark Rubio can threaten a most cruel assassination of Nicolas Maduro, whilst Trump, Bolton (1) and Pence promise that ‘everything is on the table’. Psychopaths join together very easily and according to Hare (2) they make up about 4% of all populations worldwide. 

What the voters in all those ‘democratic’ nations fail to realise is that the characteristics of the psychopath make for an easy ascent of the greasy pole. Charm, lying and an able tongue are a few.

But how are they sustained? How do they escape preventive detention?

Of course, the ‘media’ is key. It works on the in-built prejudices of the subject populations, which it helps to generate. It makes sure they are not informed and that the big lies sink in with ease. I recall reading that the Third Reich found value in the polished, cunning British propaganda.

The reporting of the Syrian ‘civil war’ by the BBC is a prime example. In these islands the BBC/State Propagandist is ace.

To respond to it one needs to listen to the audio or watch the television so one can laboriously record the words. At one time the flagship programme, Today, produced a transcript of the whole three hours. With word recognition technology that would be easy to revive but that will not happen. The fact is that in every hour of its national and World Service Broadcasts there is cardinal omission, usually of the victim nation’s voice, distortion or frank lies. There is much more, and the BBC is skilled at inserting important nuances. As a lonely individual in an ocean of lies, it is impossible to keep up.

Here are a few fragments of its recent output.

a.

Dear Mr Landale, 8-02-19

I saw you speak on the BBC1 evening news about 4 days ago. Venezuela, in spite of its vast mineral wealth, has been destabilized. Corruption by the rich and perhaps poor governance are two factors, but another are the sanctions installed in 2015 by the USA against international law. We know the latter is worse than hollow.  I do not know whether other countries have been strong armed in collaborating with these sanctions as with Iran.

I believe you did not mention sanctions in your piece.  BBC coverage of this country in these last few weeks has been unbalanced.  Will Grant in Cuba does better. (Ed. He does not it seems)

yours sincerely David Halpin FRCS

No reply

b.

Malaysia’s Minister of Youth and Sports, Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman, said the country stood by its decision to bar Israeli athletes.

“If hosting an international sporting event is more important than standing up for our Palestinian brothers and sisters who get murdered, maimed and tortured by the Netanyahu regime, that means Malaysia has truly lost its moral compass,” he said in a statement. (3)

The British State Broadcaster could not say these truths to the millions. No coverage by the BBC.

c.

Chris Mason (image on the right, from his twitter account), a BBC Westminster correspondent is engaging. He was speaking of the critical reaction to the loss of Shamima Begum’s third baby in a refugee camp in Syria. She had gone to live with the ‘jihadis’ at age 15 with two girlfriends. Home Secretary Sajid Javid had stripped British citizenship from her. (It emerged he had done the same to two other women previously.)

He failed to say that the UK had supported some of these super-terrorists who came from outside Syria. The PM and the then Foreign Secretary had both stated their intention of ‘toppling Assad’. The aim of this proxy destruction of an ancient country was clear. So their shunning of this young woman and her three dead babies was a montrous hypocrisy. The BBC did its duty and joined in. And massaged it further by speaking of the UK giving £170 million ‘to Syria’.

At another time it reported that a UK government spokesman said the death of any child was “tragic and deeply distressing for the family”. As it was to the hundreds of dear children and their mothers who fleeing from the manufactured war drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. Or those that were blown apart or maimed by the ‘jihadis’ as ordered by Saudi Arabia and its slaves to money.

Image below is a screenshot from a BBC report (by the author)

The BBC pumped out massive black propaganda to justify the illegal wars on Iraq and Libya, and continues to distort completely the maelstrom of suffering and destruction brought by plan to Syria. The journalist, Robert Stuart, ‘contended that sequences filmed by BBC personnel and others at Atareb Hospital, Aleppo on 26 August 2013 purporting to show the aftermath of an incendiary bomb attack on a nearby school are largely, if not entirely, staged.’ His evidence is here. (4)

The BBC distracts with much ‘entertainment’, including sport, and now has trailers with fast changing mindless images. It appears to be attempting to further shrink thought and morality. The other night at a Comic Relief show in a theatre with a largely female audience, three naked men were on the stage. They kept swapping balloons from their chests to genitalia, and turned to present their ugly backsides to a largely embarassed audience.

There are peerless BBC programmes. Among them are Countryfile, which centres on farming and the beauty of the British Isles, and Call the Midwife. This recalled the caring spirit and the energy of the young NHS. Within its ranks there are moral, imaginative and very talented people. But they cannot have much influence on the output.

The ether is dominated by the psychopath with talk of endless aggressive war including sanctions, as with the collective, long and increasing punishment of two million people in Gaza.

Please someone, take Bolton and show him a tight flower bud in midwinter and later as it emerges in all its beauty and intricacy. Take Trump, alone, and see the mother suckling her tiny baby. An ultimate symbol of peace.

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David Halpin FRCS is a retired orthopaedic and trauma surgeon who yearns for peace and especially in Palestine. He has also spent much time, with a few others, pleading for an inquest on Dr David Kelly, which uniquely has never happened. The NHS is his other major concern. His woodlands that he planted give some peace.

Notes

1. http://members5.boardhost.com/xxxxx/msg/1552205009.html Bolton given “Defender of Israel” award from Zionist lobby that helped elect him

2. http://www.minddisorders.com/Flu-Inv/Hare-Psychopathy-Checklist.html

3. https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/sport/paralympics-malaysia-stripped-of-right-to-host-world-11172762

4. https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/2016/03/28/bbc-trust-no-evidence-that-presenters-facebook-images-brought-bbc-into-disrepute/

Featured image is from Media Lens

In the 1961 Hollywood film Splendor in the Grass, the protagonist’s oil-wealthy father got his academically unqualified son admitted to Yale.

Though unexplained in the film, he likely bought his admission, his influence not enough to prevent his son’s expulsion for failing grades.

Nor did the film explain if the father was a Yale alum, wanting his son given preferential legacy treatment, commonplace in the US.

According to Inside Higher Ed, 42% of private colleges and universities, as well as 6% of public ones consider legacy status a factor in admissions.

At the same time, MIT, Caltech, the University of California, and other US schools say legacy isn’t an admissions practice. At many other schools, it’s somewhat advantageous.

Overall, legacy freshmen have lower GPAs and SAT scores than others admitted. Their academic performance is poorer. Wealthy parents use money and influence to assure admittance of children to preferred higher education destinations.

Harvard is one of many examples of how the system works, 29% of its incoming class of 2021 comprised of legacy students. Applicants of university alums are three times more likely to be admitted than others.

At most of the nation’s elite schools, applicants of alumni have a significant leg up on others. Most often, they’re white with wealthy parents, able and willing to donate substantially to fundraising drives.

Money can’t buy everything, but all too often it’s a way to buy entrance to elite US colleges and universities.

Author Chad Coffman called the system “Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions” in his book by this title.

It discusses the origin and history of legacy preferences, including their impact on alumni fundraising, philosophical issues of the practice, and their civil rights implications.

A personal note: In 1952, I was admitted to the Harvard class of 1956 with no preferential legacy help. To this day, I consider it the luck of the draw.

Though my good grades and extracurricular activities qualified me for admittance, many others turned down were equally or more qualified.

Neither of my parents attended college. I had nothing special going for me – other than growing up in Boston across the river from Harvard in Cambridge.

Proximity helped. Many of my classmates were from greater Boston, Massachusetts, New England, and the northeast overall.

My mother later earned a Harvard degree, attending evening classes for $5 a course. She and I took some of the same courses with the same professors, I during daytime hours.

My freshman tuition was $600, $1,000 my senior year. Anyone could attend evening classes. My mother yearned for the degree she never had, graduating with me in the same class – the total cost of her degree around $175.

To this day, I believe we were the only mother and son to be members of the same Harvard graduating class – a routine achievement for me, an extraordinary one for her with everything on her plate at the time, a master juggler giving proper attention to all her obligations.

On March 12, federal prosecutors disclosed indictments and complaints against 50 individuals. They followed an investigation into alleged bribery and mail fraud by wealthy parents to secure admission for their children to at least eight universities.

The most extensive case of its kind indicted prominent individuals – allegedly paying universities over $25 million between 2011 and 2018 – the investigation nicknamed Operation Varsity Blues, taken from the 1999 Hollywood film of the same name.

Allegations include bribing college entrance exam administrators to facilitate cheating on exams.

Other charges include bribing varsity coaches to choose unqualified applicants, aiding their admission to schools, and using charitable organizations to conceal to the source and nature of money laundered bribes.

FBI special agent Joseph Bonavolonta called the scheme as “a sham that strikes at the core of the college admissions process.”

Preferential treatment given legacy applicants, along with the power of money in the US made the scheme possible – what level playing field admissions practices could have prevented.

Affirmative action isn’t the same thing – US colleges and universities giving special consideration to racial minorities, women, and other discriminated against groups to counter generations of unfair practices.

The landmark 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education held that “separate educational facilities (are) inherently unequal” and unconstitutional.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination against students and college applicants on the basis of race or gender.

In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Supreme Court upheld the University of Michigan’s Law School affirmative action admissions policy.

In Fisher v. University of Texas (2016), the High Court preserved the constitutionality of race-based admissions.

Writing for the majority, conservative Justice Kennedy highlighted the importance of “student body diversity,” calling it “central to its identity and educational mission.”

Yet in July 2018, the Trump regime ordered the practice abandoned, falsely calling it “beyond the requirements of the Constitution.”

The US Commission on Civil Rights accused Trump’s Justice Department and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos with “repeated refusal” to enforce federal civil rights, calling their actions “particularly troubling.”

Regardless of US constitutional and statute laws, preferential treatment is the American way.

In dozens of elite US colleges and universities, more students from the top 1% of families by income comprise their student bodies than all others from households earning $65,000 or less annually, according to an Opportunity Insights report.

Money may not buy happiness, but it can buy admittance to top US colleges and universities, even for unqualified students.

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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 harvard.edu

Electromagnetic Press has produced a new book by Bruce Clark, scholarly expert and ‘hands-on’ activist in the matter of North American indigenous peoples’ history, philosophy, and – especially – the reality of their present legal being, their rights, and their status in the activity of the higher courts.

Central to his argument, Bruce Clark makes clear that the constitutional and (therefore) luminously obvious thread of law (and precedent) leading from the eighteenth century (especially from the Royal Proclamation of 1763) defines the independent and autonomous legal being of today’s indigenous people living on “unceded” land – land not having been subjected to voluntary sale or other voluntary alienation.

In the very simplest terms, it may be said, Clark observes, that all the courts of Canada [the USA presents another jurisdiction – equally malevolent] – all the legal and judicial Establishments of Canada magisterially choose to violate the Constitutionally constructed law and the precedents developing from it … and so  violate the rights and persons of indigenous peoples in Canada. Apart from the Constitution and precedents growing from the eighteenth century, the government of John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, created the Indian Act and the Residential Schools structure – seen by many as (whatever may have been intended) genocidal actions continuing into the present.  And the Province of B.C. passed (ultra vires) a law alienating indigenous land from indigenous control. Thus – we have the title of Bruce Clark’s most recent book: Ongoing Genocide caused by Judicial Suppression of the “Existing” Aboriginal Rights. (www.electromagneticprint.com)

That primary fact is worth repeating: Bruce Clark alleges the Courts, the Legal, and the Judicial Establishments in Canada act, concerning the indigenous people, in open contempt of the Constitutionally constructed Rule of Law in the country we designate by the name Canada – of which those Establishments are a part.

Bruce Clark’s book is made up largely of essays published in Dissident Voices over the past ten years or so. As a result, certain key arguments and presentations of historical and “legal” fact are repeated in a way that gives them exceptional force.  The historical structure of both the undeniable independence of North America’s indigenous population and the unbroken violation of that status by the “settler populations” is presented in a way that throws light upon the real functioning of the whole of Canadian society. Bruce Clark tends to see indigenous legal fact and history as unique, and – in important ways – it is.

But it may be wrong to suggest that the ‘habit of mind’ employed to produce a complete reshaping of law and the ‘judge-making’ of a false reality into which all indigenous matters are placed is unique to what would have been called a few decades ago “Indian Affairs”.

One is sorely tempted to make comparisons – which are visibly there – between the treatment of Canada’s indigenous people under a ‘mangled Rule of Law’ and the attempts (which have already been successful in other “democracies”) to vacate gigantic corporations (SNC-Lavalin, and its kind) from criminal prosecution and deliver them to a gray area of what Roman Catholics might call “Penance and Absolution”. Indigenous people are mangled in a Corporate-inspired expression of greed and larceny, Clark suggests, transmuted into judge-and-Legal-Establishment-made law.  Corporations like SNC-Lavalin have ‘special’ legislation created for them alone, so that no individual in their ranks will face adjudication under a common Rule of Law  … ever … because “deferred prosecution” agreements will remove them from any universal Rule of Law… and its meaningful punishments.

What the Justin Trudeau Liberals passed (semi-secretively) in a budget package of legislation (one of the famous “Omnibus” bills: 2018) is, I suggest, an attempt to legitimize a special “approach”, a special jurisdictional and juridical handling of alleged violations of the Rule of Law in Canada which will place large private corporations in a special category subjected to special treatment.  That – according to Bruce Clark – is what has been done, negatively, (without any visible legislation) to the indigenous people of Canada by judge and court-made illegitimate precedent. And instead of lightening the load pressing upon the indigenous people, the “dimension” of the law which they are forced to inhabit assures that, for instance, a fake (powerless) “right of consultation” usurps their right of full, independent being. When they appear in a Canadian court, they are subjected to a regime that is unique … and nowhere ratified Constitutionally.

Bruce Clark reports his own dramatic confrontation with Established Power (as distinct from ‘legitimate power’) during which time he was declared in criminal contempt, was jailed for a time, and was disbarred permanently from the elegant and prestigious practice of law in Canada.

His book confronts us with reality. Canadian judicial and legal structures deliver injustice frequently and institutionally often enough to cause major concern to Canadians because of persistent and determined [improper] legal and judicial action undertaken to disallow the clear, independent status and power of the indigenous people and to saddle them with a “right of [dependent] consultation”.  As a result no action taken by indigenous people can (in the Canadian courts) be adjudicated with respect to their real, historically founded status, Clark argues.  And so they are cheated of justice in every case.

Moving from indigenous reality … to provide a comparison … in the Nuttall/Korody case (concerning an RCMP faked Islamic Terrorist Event at the B.C. Legislature grounds on July 1, 2013) years of injustice were forced upon the two falsely accused innocents, but both Defence lawyers and B.C. Supreme Court judge, Justice Catherine Bruce, extracted the two from the false accusations by a highly organized RCMP Force.  Justice Bruce wrote a superb judgement exposing the RCMP’s alleged criminal behaviour.  Her judgement was upheld by three B.C. Appellate Division justices in late 2018.

And then: nothing. Nothing. The Crown, the federal Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General of British Columbia, members of the British Columbia legislature in all Parties, members of the Mainstream Press and Media have maintained stoney silence, failing to demand that criminal charges be laid against every RCMP officer and any other Canadian involved in the entrapment, the preparation of a false criminal case, the incarceration, and the trial of the innocent two …  and demanding full and complete restitution and compensation to the two victims for what is almost certainly a criminal conspiracy by RCMP officers and unnamed others….

What is plain in the matter is that the extraordinary work of Defence Counsel and Justice Catherine Bruce – to prevent the success of major, highly organized criminal activity by the RCMP – is something that Mainstream Power in Canada wishes to mask, to ignore. I would suggest that parallel to the false judicial and legal actions in Canada that create a completely contained corrupt world of “law” for indigenous people that Bruce Clark argues exists … there also exists – in matters involving what may be called the instruments (and the people) possessing real power in Canada  (outside of indigenous issues) – a consistently corrupt legal/judicial administration is at work to prevent action taken to assure that The Rule of Law in Canada prevails. The falsely staged Islamic Terrorist Event at B.C.’s Legislature grounds which viciously victimized two innocent Canadians – and which ALL of the responsible authorities in Canada are trying to ignore … is only one lamentable example.

Though many, many instances might be brought forward to underscore that truth, no case can be more instructive, perhaps, than the huge, multi-million dollar, nearly ten-year history involving the corrupt transfer of BC Rail to the CNR and a more than three year trial (2007-2010) of what I choose to call victims chosen to mask the major wrong-doing and the major actors undertaking the wrong-doing who should have been the accused in the case.

The imperfect Wikipedia entry (avoiding the major archived independent website on the issue) about the BC Rail Scandal, employing only ‘acceptable’ Mainstream Press and Media sources, fails to report the absolutely primary fact. Much, much about the scandal can be argued about … but not the finding late in the trial – when Madam Justice Elizabeth Bennett had been promoted off the trial to Appeals Court; and the choice was made by Associate Chief Justice Patrick Dohm (he announced that he had made his choice in my presence) of Justice Anne MacKenzie to complete the Supreme Court trial.

In late 2009 it was revealed that the Special Crown Prosecutor – appointed in 2003 and (therefore, normally) associated with RCMP investigations, with the preparation of charges against Dave Basi, Bobby Virk, and Aneal Basi, and then with fulfilling the role as primary Crown actor in the trial of the three accused – that he was named Special Crown Prosecutor in clear violation of the legislation creating and declaring the terms of such an appointment.

Stated simply … such an appointed person must be free of any possible bias – and the legislation says in addition … must be free of the possibility of even the perception of bias.  The Special Crown Prosecutor in the case against Dave Basi, Bobby Virk, and Aneal Basi was for eleven years partner and colleague of the Deputy Attorney General and for seven years partner and colleague of the Attorney General from whose office his appointment was made as Special Crown Prosecutor under the premiership of Liberal Gordon Campbell at whose feet was laid the whole impetus for the so-called “sale” of BC Rail to the CNR: and, therefore, also, at whose feet were laid many of the allegations of impropriety in the case. (The Attorney General was, of course, a member of the B.C. Cabinet headed by the premier, Gordon Campbell.)

The revealed fact of the illegitimate appointment of the Special Crown Prosecutor in the Basi, Virk, and Basi case rendered, in my judgement, everything about the case null and void, without legitimacy – erasing every action in the process.  I wrote to the Chief Justice of the British Columbia Supreme Court and the Associate Chief Justice as responsibles in the matter.  In two correspondence attempts to have them assume their responsibilities in the matter – they refused.  I wrote to the judge on the case … and she refused to act in any fashion in relation to the improper appointment and the improper presence in her courtroom of an illegitimately appointed Special Crown Prosecutor.  I wrote to the Canadian Judicial Council – the top appeal body concerning the behaviour of the judiciary in Canada. (The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada is ‘nominal’ head of the CJC.) I asked them to name the judge on the case as acting improperly in the matter of an illegitimate Special Crown Prosecutor acting in her Court.  The Canadian Judicial Council refused to acknowledge any improper behaviour on the part of the judge on the case.

The picture that appears of the legal and (especially) the judicial Establishments in that short accounting leaves little more to be said.

The brutal findings by Bruce Clark… and, indeed, the brutal treatment he, himself, has been subjected to … point to a Rule of Law relating to the Indigenous Peoples that needs complete overhaul… in fact – complete restructuring. But, alas, in its shadow world – the world in which the Legal and Judicial Establishments act in areas other than those concerning indigenous persons and the rights of their communities – the actions of what must be called the Legal Establishment and the Judicial Establishment – mirror, I suggest, with depressing regularity, the same dismissal of Constitutional reality.

And they replace it, I believe, with ‘assumptions of purity’ that are used to protect the political and corporate powers enriching themselves and increasing their power at the cost of fundamental justice. The Rule of Law, and the will of the people are blind-sided by the unanimity of evil-doers and their supporters in the Mainstream Press and Media.  That fact suggests the so-called “Criminal Justice System” – meaning the operation of the Legal and the Judicial Establishments in Canada (including the treatment of indigenous people) must be swept aside. The structure must be trashed. The whole fabric of law and justice – especially as it is practised within ‘the system’ in Canada – must be completely reconstructed.

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The hypocrisy is head spinning. As Justin Trudeau lectures audiences on the need to uphold Venezuela’s constitution the Liberals have recognized a completely illegitimate president in Honduras. What’s more, they’ve formally allied with that government in demanding Venezuela’s president follow their  (incorrect) reading of that country’s constitution.

In November 2017 Ottawa’s anti-Venezuela “Lima Group” ally Juan Orlando Hernandez (JOH) defied  the Honduran constitution to run for a second term. At Hernandez’ request the four Supreme Court members appointed by his National Party overruled an article in the constitution explicitly prohibiting re-election.

JOH then ‘won’ a highly questionable  poll. With 60 per cent of votes counted opposition candidate Salvador Nasralla lead by five-points. The electoral council then went silent for 36 hours and when reporting resumed JOH had a small lead.

In the three weeks between the election and JOH’s official proclamation as president, government forces killed at least 30  pro-democracy demonstrators in the Central American country of nine million. More than a thousand were detained under a post-election state of emergency. Many of those jailed for protesting the electoral fraud, including prominent activist Edwin Espinal,  who is married to Canadian human rights campaigner Karen Spring, remain in jail.

Ottawa immediately endorsed the electoral farce in Honduras. Following Washington, Global Affairs tweeted that Canada “acknowledges confirmation of Juan Orlando Hernandez as President of Honduras.” Tyler Shipley, author of Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras, responded:

“Wow, Canada sinks to new lows with this. The entire world knows that the Honduran dictatorship has stolen an election, even the OAS (an organization which skews right) has demanded that new elections be held because of the level of sketchiness here. And — as it has for over eight years — Canada is at the forefront of protecting and legitimizing this regime built on fraud and violence. Even after all my years of research on this, I’m stunned that [foreign minister Chrystia] Freeland would go this far; I expected Canada to stay quiet until JOH had fully consolidated his power. Instead Canada is doing the heavy lifting of that consolidation.”

In 2009 Ottawa backed the Honduran military’s removal of elected president Manuel Zelaya, which was justified on the grounds he was seeking to defy the constitution by running for a second term. (In fact, Zelaya simply put forward a plan to hold a non-binding public poll on whether to hold consultations to reopen the constitution.) After the coup Ottawa failed to suspend aid to the military government or exclude the Honduran military from its Military Training Assistance Programme.

A number of major Canadian corporations, notably Gildan and Goldcorp, were unhappy with some modest social democratic reforms implemented by Zelaya. Additionally, a year before the coup Honduras joined the Hugo Chavez led Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our Americas (ALBA), which was a response to North American capitalist domination of the region.

JOH’s National Party won the presidency and he took charge of the national assembly in the post-coup elections, which were boycotted by the UN, Organization of American States and most Hondurans.

Since JOH stole an election that he shouldn’t have been able to participate in the Trudeau government has continued to work with his government. I found no indication that Canadian aid has been reduced and Canadian diplomats in central America have repeatedly met  Honduran representatives. JOH’s Foreign Minister, Maria Dolores Aguero, attended  a Women Foreign Ministers’ Meeting Canada organized in Montreal four months ago. Recently Canadian diplomats have lauded the “bonds of friendship  between the governments of Canada and Honduras” and “excellent relations  that exist between both countries.” Canada’s ambassador James K. Hill retweeted a US Embassy statement noting, “we congratulate President Juan Orlando Hernandez for taking the initiative to reaffirm the commitment of his administration to fight against corruption and impunity” through an OAS initiative.

Con la finalidad de fortalecer los lazos de amistad entre los gobiernos de Canadá y Honduras, la cónsul del país del norte Chloé Maltais Boiswert, se reunió con el subcomisionado nacional de #Copeco @CarlosACordero2, con el objetivo de conocer el funcionamiento de la institución. pic.twitter.com/Isf84HsoKM

— COPECOHONDURAS (@COPECO_HONDURAS) December 11, 2018

While they praise JOH’s fight against impunity, Canadian officials have refused repeated requests by Canadian activists and relatives to help secure Edwin Espinal’s release from prison. In response to their indifference to Espinal’s plight, Rights Action director Grahame Russell recently wrote,

“have the Canadian and U.S. governments simply agreed not to criticize the Honduran regime’s appalling human rights record … in exchange for Honduras agreeing to be a ‘democratic ally’ in the U.S. and Canadian-led efforts at forced government change in Venezuela?”

Honduras is a member of the “Lima Group” of countries pushing to oust Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela. Last month Trudeau was photographed  with the Honduran foreign minister at the “Lima Group” meeting in Ottawa.

To justify recognizing the head of Venezuela’s national assembly, Juan Guaidó, as president the “Lima Group” and Trudeau personally have cited “the need to respect the Venezuelan Constitution.” The Prime Minister even responded to someone who yelled “hands off Venezuela” at a town hall by lecturing the audience on article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution, which he (incorrectly) claims grants Guaidó the presidency.

Why the great concern for Venezuela’s constitution and indifference to Honduras’? Why didn’t Trudeau recognize Salvador Nasralla as president of Honduras? Nasralla’s claim to his country’s presidency is far more legitimate than Guaidó’s.

The hypocrisy in Trudeau allying with the illegitimate president of Honduras to demand Venezuela succumb to their interpretation of that country’s constitution would be absurdly funny if it didn’t put so many lives at risk.

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Featured image: Honduras Foreign Minister Maria Dolores Agüero with Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland discussing Venezuela.

The rapidly declining living conditions in the Gaza Strip and occupied territories has endangered the most basic of internationally recognised of human rights, as children continue to be collateral damage in what can be boiled down to a political standoff. The difference to almost all modern countries is that Israel uses extreme force to break the deadlock.

It is now sadly a fact that more children than Palestinian fighters are being killed in the offensive on Gaza by the state of Israel. This in itself should be shocking until you see the numbers.  28 per cent killed are five years and under, 92 per cent are sixteen and under with 8 per cent aged 17 and 18 – but still classed as minors. More babies aged under 24 months die than those aged over 16 years.

Then there are the incarcerations. The Isreali Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories records them. It shows that in the ten years from 2008 to 2018 – a staggering 2,370 children have been sent to Israeli prisons. At the end of January 2019, 209 Palestinian children were held in Israeli prisons as security detainees and prisoners.

In January this year, the General Federation of Palestinian Trade Unions (PGFTU) warned that the poverty rate in the Gaza Strip has exceeded 80 per cent for the wider population. The numbers for mental health problems, access to health care or the basics such as access to clean water, electricity and sanitation are dire.

It shames Britain, that a country, ranked by the World Justice Project as the 8th most law-abiding country in the world actively supports a regime with weapons of death and destruction, described by organisations such as War on Want and the United Nations as an apartheid state. Others, including Human Rights Watch, accuse Israel of war crimes against defenceless Palestinians.

To enable that support, a media blackout is required in Britain. Here, Mark Curtis unravels the grizzly truth of Britain’s involvement in this ghastly and illegal aggression and what is really going on behind the scenes.

Image on the right: International Trade Secretary Liam Fox meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. (Source: gov.uk)

By Mark Curtis:

Britain’s international trade secretary, Liam Fox, recently visited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, pledging to increase trade and investment between the two countries, which already stands at a record $9bn.

While more than 230 Palestinians have been killed and thousands more injured by Israeli forces since March, London’s ties with Tel Aviv are growing ever stronger.

Yet, I cannot find a single article in the British “mainstream” media noting the depth of supportive UK policies towards Israel. This media blackout is allowing Britain to continue backing Israeli aggression in the occupied territories with impunity.

Arms as usual

But many services are unavailable in Gaza as the healthcare system grapples with the massive influx of casualties. By the end of October, only 74 of 335 exit-permit applications had been approved by Israeli authorities for injured Palestinians needing attention outside of Gaza.

Documents revealed by Edward Snowden in 2014 showed that the US National Security Agency was providing to its Israeli counterpart, the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU, also known as Unit 8200) data used to monitor and target Palestinians.

A key partner of the NSA and ISNU was shown to be Britain’s spy centre, GCHQ, which was feeding the Israelis selected communications data it collected. In 2009, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza that left nearly 1,400 people dead, included 344 children, this involved sharing information on Palestinians.

A ‘strong partnership’

Is the UK doing this now? Last year, Robert Hannigan, the outgoing director of GCHQ, said that his organisation had a “strong partnership with our Israeli counterparts in signals intelligence” and that “we are building on an excellent cyber relationship with a range of Israeli bodies”.

Earlier this year, Hannigan became chair of BlueVoyant Europe, a global cybersecurity firm whose operations are managed by, among others, a former deputy commander of Unit 8200, and a former division head in the Israeli security agency Shin Bet. Another key player in the firm is former British minister Lord Mandelson, who chairs BlueVoyant’s European Advisory Group.

Cybersecurity has become a key area of UK-Israeli cooperation. A recent report by the British Israeli lobby group, Bicom, notes that “government-to-government cooperation between the UK and Israel in cybersecurity is strong and has been described by a senior UK official as a ‘first-order partnership’”.

It added that “there are close working relationships between the countries’ national cybersecurity agencies and acknowledged cross-fertilisation in the development of their national security strategies”.

Indeed, the report notes that “it is perhaps no coincidence” that the former UK ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, returned from his posting in Tel Aviv in 2015 to become director of cybersecurity at the UK Cabinet Office.

In striking evidence of Britain’s reliance on Israel’s cybersecurity sector is the report’s claim that since major British banks are clients of many Israeli cyber companies, “the vast majority of digital transactions and credit card e-commerce in the UK is essentially protected by Israeli technologies”.

Deepening military relations

As I documented in an article for Middle East Eye in June, the UK’s military relationship with Israel is extensive, covering areas such as naval cooperation and the provision of components for Israeli nuclear-armed submarines. But the lack of journalistic investigations means that few details have emerged on many programmes.

In September, the government revealed that it was providing military training to Israel. This followed news in 2016 that British military pilots were due to be trained by a company owned by Israeli arms firm Elbit Systems.

Training is longstanding: in 2011, it was revealed that British soldiers were being trained in Israel in the use of drones that had been “field-tested on Palestinians” during the 2009 war in Gaza.

The contracts keep coming. Earlier this year, the UK’s Ministry of Defence agreed to a contract worth up to $52m to purchase a battlefield management application from Elbit Systems UK, while Israel’s armour specialist, Plasan, was selected by the UK Ministry of Defence to design and produce armour protection for Britain’s new Type 26 frigates being built by BAE Systems in Glasgow.

At the Conservative Party conference in October, senior government figures queued up at an event hosted by Conservative Friends of Israel to defend Israeli actions in the occupied territories. Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson stated: “In terms of defence, Britain and Israel are working increasingly closely together. There’s a real bond.”

Facilitating Israeli violence

Similarly, Liam Fox told Netanyahu last week:

“I am looking forward to an enhanced and even more ambitious trade and investment relationship with Israel as we work closer together going forward into the future.”

Netanyahu replied:

“Britain is in fact our largest trade partner in Europe … we value the friendship, we value the prospects for the future.”

Fox and Williamson are continuing the strategy of their boss, Theresa May, who has said of Israel:

“I want to build the strongest and deepest possible relationship between our two countries.”

Yet, the reality of what this means in practice – especially in terms of British military and intelligence support for Israel, and how this facilitates Israeli aggression – is simply not being reported in the British media. The longer that continues, the easier it will be for Israel to continue to act with impunity for its crimes.

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Featured image is from TruePublica

House Democrats, indigenous tribal leaders, and public land protection advocates all rebuked the Trump administration’s downsizing of two national monuments Wednesday, arguing that President Donald Trump and former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke acted illegally by conducting what at least one critic called a “sham” review process.

The administration acted in the interest of pro-fossil fuel lawmakers, the oil and gas industry, and other monument opponents when they conducted a hasty review of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments in 2017, critics argued.

The House Natural Resources Committee invited several witnesses to testify at a hearing entitled “Forgotten Voices,” including three representatives from native tribes which had vocally opposed President Donald Trump’s decision to shrink the two monuments by about two million acres in 2017, citing their sacred connection to the lands.

“To Hopi people, the Bears Ears National Monument is a spiritually occupied landscape,” said Clark Tenakhongva, vice chairman of the Hopi tribe, at the hearing. “This land is a testament of Hopi stewardship through thousands of years, manifested by the ‘footprints’ of ancient villages, sacred springs, migration routes, pilgrimage trails, [and] artifacts.”

Clark W. Tenakhongva, Vice Chair, Hopi Tribe: “Bears Ears National Monument is spiritually occupied landscape … a testament of Hopi stewardship through thousands of years, manifested by the footprints” of ancient villages and cultural sites. #StandWithBearsEars #MonumentsForAll pic.twitter.com/AEPeeGTKMj

— Wilderness Society 🌳 (@Wilderness) March 13, 2019

Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), one of two Native American women who made history when they were elected to Congress last year, expressed solidarity with the Hopi and other tribes.

“I can say the bones of my ancestors are buried in Bears Ears,” Haaland said. “It’s easy to get emotional about tribal land when your ancestors have lived there for generations and it’s only because of them that you’re able to sit here today…I appreciate local tribes for coming so far to explain why this land is important.”

"I can say the bones of my ancestors are buried in Bears Ears … I have a strong say in it also." We all have a shared interest in protecting the land – @RepDebHaaland #MonumentsForAll pic.twitter.com/CpKtr54qU0

— Wilderness Society 🌳 (@Wilderness) March 13, 2019

Committee Chairman Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) noted in his opening remarks that the Interior Department’s own inspector general had found the review conducted by Zinke to be unsatisfactory, and Zinke himself to be apparently unconcerned with whether the process was “legal, whether it was improperly influenced, or whether it best protected public lands.”

“When my colleagues read the full report they will say administration’s process was hollow and improper,” Grijalva said. “Industry was given special consideration in this process…and the voice of the American people was ignored.”

In 2017 Trump & former Sec Zinke perpetrated the largest public lands protection rollback in modern American history. They ignored sovereign tribes, local communities & public opinion. Today this illegal action by the Trump admin gets the scrutiny it deserves. #MonumentsForAll pic.twitter.com/7VdDVIPFCd

— Natural Resources (@NRDems) March 13, 2019

In addition to Tenakhongva, two other witnesses at the hearing—Tony Small, vice chairman of the Ute Tribe, and Carleton Bowekaty, lieutenant governor of the Pueblo of Zuni—described how they were given just an hour of Zinke’s time during the review process, while monument opponents were able to join the secretary on his four-day tour of the lands. The inequity amounted to a violation of the Antiquities Act, they argued.

“The current administration,” Bowekaty said, “conducted a National Monument review that largely ignored tribal interests and concerns. It appears that this so-called review was conducted with a pre-determined objective of justifying executive action—action which we are now challenging in federal court—to greatly reduce the area protected by the Bears Ears National Monument so that excluded lands can be available for mineral exploration and development.”

“President Trump’s unprecedented proclamation revoking Bears Ears and replacing it with two small monument units violates the Antiquities Act and exceeds the power delegated to the president by Congress,” testified Small.

“The Antiquities Act does not authorize a president to rescind or modify national monuments created by their predecessors, and certainly does not authorize them to revoke and replace existing monuments with smaller ones as has been attempted here,” he added.

As the hearing was underway, the Western Values Project released an analysis of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by the Utah Bureau of Land Management, which showed that the Interior Department misrepresented findings regarding the monuments’ effects on Utah’s economy.

“The Trump Administration steamrolled expertise on the ground in Utah in order to push a narrow political agenda from Washington, D.C.,” said the group’s executive director, Chris Saeger, in a statement.

“It is my firm belief that this was a pre-destined outcome and everything since has been to justify that outcome,” Grijalva concluded at the hearing.

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Featured image: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s boundaries were reduced by about 47 percent after the Interior Department’s review last year. (Photo: Bureau of Land Managment/Flickr/cc)

The federal government spends a disproportionate amount of its budget for outside contractors in the final month of the fiscal year, as agencies rush to blow through cash before it’s too late. Among the more noteworthy expenditures in 2018, according to the watchdog group Open the Books, was $4.6 million for lobster tail and crab.

Such use-it-or-lose-it spending stems from the fact that each federal agency is given a certain amount of money it can spend on outside contractors for the fiscal year. If the agency comes in under budget, Congress might decide to appropriate less money the following year.

Or as The Office‘s Oscar Martinez explains to Michael Scott in “The Surplus”:

“Your mommy and daddy give you $10 to open up a lemonade stand, so you go out and you buy cups and you buy lemons and you buy sugar. And now you find out that it only cost you $9, so you have an extra dollar,” he explains. “So you can give that dollar back to mommy and daddy. But guess what: Next summer, and you ask them for money, they’re going to give you $9 because that’s what they think it cost to run the stand. So what you want to do is spend that dollar on something now, so that your parents think that it cost $10 to run the lemonade stand.”

It works the same way at the federal level. Just replace that $10 with $544.1 billion—the amount federal agencies spent on contracts in the last fiscal year.

Of that $544.1 billion, almost $97 billion was spent in September 2018, the final month of the fiscal year, including $53.3 billion in the final seven days of the month. That’s compared to $47 billion spent in the entire month of August. As the fiscal year came crashing to an end, bureaucrats apparently did their best to spend as much money as quickly as possible.

The Department of Defense led the pack, spending $61.2 billion in September. The Pentagon was followed not-so-closely by the Department of Health and Human Services ($5.7 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($5.4 billion), and the Department of Homeland Security ($4.2 billion).

Federal agencies spent $402.2 million on food that month, with the Pentagon shelling out $2.3 million on crab and $2.3 million on lobster tail.

Also, “agencies spent $2.1 million on games, toys, and wheeled goods,” Open the Books notes, as well as “$412,008 on paint and artist’s brushes.”

A whopping $490 million went to furniture, including a baffling $9,341 for a Wexford office chair. Agencies also spent $49,515 for skis and ski poles, $11,816 for a foosball table, and $258,901 on pianos.

The biggest recipients of the contracts were a trio of military companies: Lockheed Martin ($8.3 billion), Boeing ($5.3 billion), and Raytheon ($3.4 billion).

That $97 billion last September represents a 16 percent increase from the $83.7 billion federal agencies spent on contracts in September 2017. The figure was nearly $73.6 billion in 2016 and $69.6 billion in 2015.

In August, a bipartisan group of senators that included Kentucky Republican Rand Paul wrote letters to 13 federal agencies expressing their concerns about wasteful end-of-year spending. Their efforts appear to have failed.

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This law is more interventionist that the Platt Amendment of 1901 and the Reciprocity Treaty Cuba was forced to sign to be granted fictitious independence, at the beginning of the 20th century.

It is an attack on the independence and dignity of Cuba, with openly annexationist, colonialist intentions.

The Helms-Burton Act was approved to provoke a change in Cuba’s political and economic system.

Its Titles I and II include a series of requirements defining a transition government, and what constitutes a democratically elected government, according to the U.S.

It constitutes intervention in the internal affairs of a sovereign country, in violation of international law.

It is also an affront to the sovereignty of other countries of the world, given its intention to enforce U.S. jurisdiction extraterritorially.

This law expresses, in all its amplitude, the Monroe Doctrine, proclaimed more than a century and a half ago.

Given the fears the law creates in some businesspeople, it harms both Cuba and U.S. citizens, preventing or delaying investment and further complicating economic relations.

The law rules out the possibility of the two countries resolving claims on nationalized properties in a rational way; setting a serious precedent for international standards on the resolution of these types of disputes, which may turn against the United States itself when facing property claims in other countries.

It seeks to resurrect the issue of U.S. property confiscated in Cuba, the owners of which did not negotiate compensation, and which are being offered to foreign investors by the Cuban government.

The arguments put forth are false, in fact the United States was never willing to negotiate the issue of nationalized properties, nor did they allow affected companies to negotiate, which, therefore, have not been able to receive compensation.

The Claims Commission, at the time, accepted 5,911 compensation requests. But no conciliation was conducted to verify the validity of requests and their value, to determine if they were inflated or duplicated, or if falsified documents were used.

The law grants the right to submit claims to individuals who were not citizens of the United States at the time their properties were nationalized or abandoned.

It is absurd that a law allows citizens of another country to file claims in U.S. courts against companies from third countries, for alleged properties whose value, in addition, can be calculated at the convenience of the plaintiff.

The U.S. government has adopted the position of supporting claims on properties of certain U.S. citizens of Cuban origin, who accumulated wealth before 1959 using fraudulent methods and under the protection of corrupt governments.

Nationalization and Indemnification Process

On May 17, 1959, the Agrarian Reform Law was enacted, which set the maximum amount of land per proprietor to 30 caballerias (402.6 hectares), which was to be under cultivation. If not, within two years, the land was to be expropriated. This provision was actually implemented when the second Agrarian Reform Law was established, reducing the limit to 5 caballerias (67.1 hectares).

This Law was applicable to both Cubans and foreign landowners, although exceptions to the limit were allowed in some cases. Sugar cane plantations, cattle ranches, and high yield rice farms, for example, were allowed up to 100 caballerias.

Article 29 of the Agrarian Reform Law recognized the constitutional of right of expropriated owners to compensation. The amount awarded was based on the owner’s previous declarations in municipal assessment records, and buildings, animals, etc, were evaluated by appraisal.

The issuance of government bonds, called “Agrarian Reform Bonds” that would earn an annual interest of no more than 4.5%, was established. These would be redeemed within 20 years and each year funds would be included in the budget, set aside for this purpose. Also granted was a ten years exemption from taxes on personal income and other benefits.

Sharecroppers, squatters, and other campesinos who worked land owned by others, were granted, free of charge, the so called “vital minimum” of two caballerias of land.

July 6, 1960, Law 851 was approved, complementary to Article 24 of the Fundamental Law of 1959, reaffirming the principle of expropriation for reasons of public utility.

Law 851 authorized the President of the Republic and the Prime Minister (the government structure at that time) to nationalize U.S. property in Cuba through a Joint Resolution.

Article 24: The confiscation of property is prohibited, but that of property held by the dictator deposed on December 31, 1958, and his collaborators is authorized, including that of individuals and legal bodies responsible for crimes committed against the national economy or public finances, illicitly attained under the protection of public authority, and that of persons who were sanctioned for committing crimes categorized by law as counterrevolutionary, or who, in order to evade the justice of Revolutionary Courts, left the country by any means, or who, having left, carried out conspiratorial activities abroad against the Revolutionary Government.

No other individual or legal body may be deprived of property, except by competent authorities, for reasons of public or social utility, or national interest. The law will establish expropriation procedures, along with the ways and means of payment, as well as the competent authority to declare the public utility, social, or national interest in a given property, and the need for expropriation.

Law 851 established the ways and means to award compensation for nationalized property through government bonds issued for that purpose, and the appointment of experts to assess the value of property to be paid through bonds, which would be redeemed at maturity via the National Bank of Cuba where established was a “Fund for the payment of expropriated assets and companies owned by nationals of the United States of North America.”

The aforementioned fund would be financed annually with 25% of the foreign currency obtained from U.S. purchases of sugar over three million Spanish long tons at 5.75 cents, the British pound FAS.

The bonds would earn 2% annual interest and begin to be paid within a period of no less than 30 years.

If the blockade had not existed, beginning in 1990, U.S. citizens would have begun to collect their due compensation.

On August 6, 1960, Joint Resolution No. 1 was issued, in accordance with Law 851, and nationalization was ordered through the expropriation procedure and consequent compensation for the 26 most important U.S. companies. The Cuban electric and telephone companies, which had exploited the people with high rates and poor service, were the first to be nationalized, followed by three refineries – which had mounted a slow-down, leaving the population without fuel – and 21 sugar companies.

On September 17, 1960, Joint Resolution No. 2 was issued, through which three U.S. banks operating in Cuba were nationalized: First National City Bank of New York, First National Bank of Boston, and Chase Manhattan, in accordance with Law 851.

On October 24, 1960, Joint Resolution No. 3 was issued, which ordered the nationalization of remaining U.S. assets, just over 160 companies.

After the First Law of Agrarian Reform, the Cuban government reaffirmed its willingness to discuss, without reservation and on the basis of mutual respect, the differences arising with the government of the United States, regarding compensation for assets and the damage their nationalization may have meant for individuals and legal persons.

In a note dated February 22, 1960, the Cuban government, with a view toward resuming talks with the United States, insisted that, during the negotiations, no action be taken to prejudge the outcome of the talks.

It is not true that the Cuban government refused to negotiate its differences with the United States.

Aware that the form of payment was tied to U.S. purchases of Cuban sugar, the U.S. government cut Cuba’s quota of sugar imports, thus harming its own citizens, since it made Law 851 impractical. The full blockade would come later, in February of 1962, continuing by Presidential edict until the arrival of the Helms-Burton Act.

Nationalization Laws

Law 891, dated October 13, 1960, declared banking public and provided in Article 5 the right to compensation of partners or shareholders of dissolved and extinguished banking entities, an issue that would be made effective through subsequent payments after the closing of operations of the Cuban National Bank, December 31, 1960. This Act nationalized the country’s banking system and established a compensatory procedure through bonds redeemable within 15 years. Canadian banking entities established in Cuba were exempted, and a procedure for the purchase of their assets was carried out.

Law of Urban Reform, October 14, 1960, awarded houses to tenants and paid compensation to the former owners – Cuban or foreign – including life annuities after having recovered the value of the affected property.

Law No. 1076, December 5, 1962, nationalized certain types of retail or small businesses, also regardless of the nationality of their former owners.

Characteristics of Cuban Nationalizations

They were not discriminatory; Cubans and foreign proprietors were treated the same.

All were for public purposes, not private gain.

Appropriate compensation was provided for affected.

Nationalizations were conducted in accordance with provisions of a constitutional nature, through legal procedures established for expropriation for reasons of public utility and national interest.

Cuba, respectful of international law and its obligations, has signed among others, the following agreements:

• Agreement between the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba and the government of the French Republic, concerning the compensation of French property, rights, and interests affected by the laws and measures adopted by the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba as of January 1, 1959, signed on March 16, 1967.
• Agreement between the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba and the government of the Swiss Confederation, concerning compensation for the effects of laws enacted by the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba as of the January 1, 1959, signed on March 2, 1967.
• Exchange of Notes, dated October 18, 1978, between the government of the Republic of Cuba and the government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, on compensation to British nationals as a result of the application of nationalizations, expropriations, and other similar laws and measures adopted by the Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba since January 1, 1959.
• Agreement between the government of the Republic of Cuba and the government of Canada, regarding the liquidation of Canadian claims, signed on November 7, 1980.
• Agreement between the Republic of Cuba and the Kingdom of Spain, on compensation for Spanish property affected by the laws, provisions, and measures adopted by the government of the Republic of Cuba as of January 1, 1959, signed on January 26, 1988.

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It doesn’t matter what corporate alphabet propaganda network you watch, you’re going to get the same line on Venezuela. 

Here we have Trish Regan, a fixture at Fox News, telling numerous lies about Venezuela, lies put out by neocons and their captured president. 

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We MUST stay committed to the end of #Maduro’s BRUTAL socialist regime. He MUST step aside so that #Democracy can be restored in #Venezuela. And for countries like #China that want to STICK IT to the U.S. by supporting a dictator?! SHAME ON YOU! pic.twitter.com/5SXPwQgPQJ

— Trish Regan (@trish_regan) March 14, 2019

Ms. Regan’s rehearsed outrage centers on China for announcing it will help Venezuela get its power back in working order.

China, of course, is interested in Venezuela’s oil, same as the United States, or I should say the transnational corporations and banks that own the US government.

Regan says the latter is a conspiracy theory. Because Venezuela is in our “backyard,” it should be told in no uncertain terms selling oil to China is forbidden. “It matters that the others (China) don’t get it,” declared Ms. Regan.

Fox likes to pretend it is “conservative” and in favor of tree trade, but this is belied by its willingness to spread neocon falsehoods. 

Regan claims Maduro stole the election. This is an integral part of the neocon Big Lie. 

The Latin American Council of Electoral Experts (CEELA) said in 2017 “Venezuela’s voting system remains one of the most reliable in the world” and the “country’s electronic voting system boasts some of the world’s best checks and balances, and is both ‘safe and reliable.’” 

Former president Jimmy Carter said Venezuela’s electoral system is “the best in the world” and  added “of the 92 elections that we’ve monitored, I would say the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” 

Ms. Regan, of course, ignores this and demands Maduro be thrown out while the neocons—in this instance, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida—fantasize Maduro as Libyan leader Gaddafi, who was sodomized with a bayonet and then assassinated by US-backed “rebels,” polite speak for fanatical Salafists who have turned Libya into a third world, failed state hellhole. 

If you want to see the flip side of the corporate propaganda media’s propaganda on Venezuela, you have to read alternative news sources.

The establishment media, including no shortage of liberals—now humanitarian interventionists—tell us ad nauseam Maduro is a brutal dictator and Juan Guaidó is the legitimate leader of Venezuela. This is also the case with many leftist and progressive websites that claim to be alternative. 

“The coup that is unfolding in Venezuela is not an American backed coup: it is an American coup,” writes Ted Snider. “Mainstream media coverage paints the events only as American recognition of a legitimate constitutional correction of government. Even in the left wing and alternative media, where writers condemn the American intervention, many of them feel the need to establish their credibility by conceding that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is an authoritarian leader, or even a dictator, who won a second term in office in elections that were illegitimate.” 

Near the end of her theatrical presentation, Regan says the people of Venezuela are suffering under a “95% poverty rate,” which is clearly untrue, although the rate has increased since the US began its sanctions and not-so-covert coup attempt. 

History demonstrates socialism is a largely failed system, but that is not the crux of Venezuela’s problems—US-imposed sanctions are. 

“Over the past five years, American sanctions have cut Venezuela off from most financial markets, which have caused local oil production to plummet,” writes Garikai Chengu. “Consequently, Venezuela has experienced the largest decline in living standards of any country in recorded Latin American history.” 

Again, the corporate media, both “conservative” and “liberal,” will not tell you this and will instead push the Big Lie on Venezuela. 

“America’s media is unquestionably the most corrupt institution in America,” Chengu continues. “The nation’s media may quibble about Trump’s domestic policies but when it comes to starting wars for oil abroad they sing in remarkable unison. Fox News, CNN and the New York Times all cheered the nation into war in Iraq over fictitious weapons of mass destruction, whilst America was actually using sanctions of mass destruction on the Iraqi people. They did it in Libya and now they are doing it again in Venezuela.” 

Regan, Fox, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the corporate media talking heads reading from the Big Lie script are serving the state and its decades-long effort to force by bullet and bomb a wealth and natural resource strip mining operation on those who have said “no thank you” to neoliberalism. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

New evidence shows that the Boeing Co. 737 MAX which crashed in Ethiopia on Sunday may have experienced similar technical difficulties as the 737 MAX that crashed off Indonesia last year. The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) cited similarities with in-flight data of both planes when it spoke to global regulators about grounding the jet. With the company facing a pr disaster and loss of confidence with global airline carriers, there could be more than $600 billion in orders at risk of cancellation, reported Bloomberg.

VietJet Aviation JSC doubled its 737 MAX order last month to $25 billion, now the Vietnamese low-cost airliner is having second thoughts. Kenya Airways Plc is reviewing its contracts to purchase billions of dollars of the MAX and could even switch to Airbus SE’s rival A320. Russia’s Utair Aviation PJSC is expected to take delivery of 30 MAXs but wants to seek guarantees the planes are not defective.

Indonesia’s Lion Air has informed Boeing that they plan to cut a $22 billion order and will instead buy Airbus jets. Garuda Indonesia, the national airline of Indonesia, will reduce most MAX orders.

Flyadeal, a unit of Saudi Arabian Airlines, said in December, it would purchase 50 MAX jets, but the company is now waiting on results of the investigation before taking the order.

“We’re closely monitoring the situation and are in constant contact with Boeing,” the company said in an email. “There are no conclusions to be drawn at this time.”

Bloomberg said the MAX version of the 737 MAX has more than 5,000 orders outstanding, worth more than $600 billion. To put that number in perspective, it is more than the GDP of Switzerland.

From Christmas to early March, Boeing’s stock advanced 53% in 44 trading sessions due to billions of dollars in stock buybacks. News of the second crash collapsed the stock, tumbling more than 18% and is now on the cusp of a bear market. The stock ended up slightly higher Wednseday after the FAA grounded all MAX planes over the US.

The deadly crash in Ethiopia comes five months after the Oct. 29 crash of another MAX plane, operated by Indonesia’s Lion Air. Boeing pointed to maintenance issues and human error at Lion, even though the plane’s pilots had reported computer issues before the crash.

Boeing is in a crisis as most of the world have grounded the MAX planes. The FAA Wednseday grounded the aircraft, citing evidence showing the Ethiopian Airlines flight may have experienced the same problem as the plane that went down five months ago off Indonesia.

“With extensive grounding of the 737 Max, near term news could get worse for Boeing before it improves,” Cai von Rumohr, an analyst with Cowen & Co., said in a note.

With $600 billion in orders at risk, the loss of two MAX airplanes has severely damaged Boeing’s credibility. It has even caused jitters at the White House, as two people familiar with the Trump admin told the Washington Post that President Trump did not want to ground the planes because it would damage the stock market.

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On March 13, warplanes of the Russian Aerospace Forces delivered a series of airstrikes on infrastructure of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the city of Idlib and in its southeastern countryisde. According to reports, at least 16 strikes hit weapon depots, HQs and a jail belonging to the terrorist group.

Opposition sources said that hundreds of prisoners, including dozens persons allegedly linked with the Syrian and Russian intelligence managed to escape the prison after the airstrike. Hayat Tahir al-Sham responded with a wide-scale security operation to trace and capture these people. This operation is still ongoing with varying results.

The Russian Defense Ministry confirmed the strikes in Idlib and said that they were coordinated with Turkey. According to the Russian side, the strikes hit depots in which the terrorist group was storing armed unnamed aerial vehicles. The eliminated UAVs were reportedly prepared for an attack on Russia’s Hmeimim airbase.

Despite comments about the coordination with Turkey, in the following days Turkish pro-government and state media released multiple reports accusing the Russians and the Assad government of causing casualties in Idlib.

On March 13, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that they had uncovered an alleged Hezbollah network in the Golan Heights. The network named by the IDF as “the Golan File” was reportedly led by Hezbollah operative Ali Musa Daqduq on the Syrian side of the contact line in order to prepare attacks on Israel.

The IDF stressed that Daqduq has been a Hezbollah member since 1983. During this period, he reportedly occupied various important posts and was even involved in an attack on a US military base in Iraq’s Karbala in 2007.

The IDF described the alleged Hezbollah network as a serious threat and threatened both Damascus and the Lebanese party with consequences.

On the same day, Israel’s ImageSat International released satellite images showing an alleged Iranian missile compound in Syria. The missiles manufacturing site is reportedly located in Safita.

Regardless of real facts besides these claims, this series of reports looks as a coordinated media campaign. According to experts, its main goal is to justify further Israeli military actions against supposed Iranian targets in Syria and to continue the militarization of the occupied Golan Heights.

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The European Parliament passed a recommendation calling  Russia “the main source of disinformation in Europe” and appealing for increased funding for the EU’s East StratCom Task Force, which already got 1.1 million euros in 2018.

HINT: The East StratCom Task Force is a EU body focused on so-called proactive communication of EU policies and activities in the Eastern neighbourhood (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine) and beyond (Russia and further).

The passed document says that East StratCom Task Force as well as its two task-force subdivisions dealing with the southern neighborhood and Western Balkans, should get

“adequate financial and personnel resources which are still required, aimed at the significant increase of their potential, effectiveness, professionalism, institutional continuity and quality of work, as well as safeguarding them against political meddling by officials and countries that back Russian disinformation.”

click to access document

Furthermore, it called on EU member states “to ensure that electoral laws take into account possible threats stemming from disinformation campaigns” and urged them to “adapt their electoral rules on online campaigning and to monitor and evaluate the transparency features in relation to political advertising introduced by the online platforms.”

The suggestions also include support for “independent and diverse Russian-language media in the countries of the Eastern Partnership and beyond” and “to focus on the EU accession countries and partners in the EU neighborhood by assisting them in their efforts to counteract hostile propaganda and disinformation activities.”

The formal justification of the moves suggested in the document is based on the mainstream media narrative that Russia every day carries out disinformation campaigns and cyber attacks, aimed at increasing tensions within the EU and its member states.

The proposal passed by the European Parliament is another indication that the EU bureaucracy is steadily pushing the bloc towards media and political totalitarism. The principle of freedom of speech is becoming abandoned. Most critical positions and reports are labeled Russian propaganda and disinformation while grassroots initiatives not loyal to the European establishment or non-mainstream media outlets are described as Russian agents.

An important factor behind the decision to adapt ‘electoral laws and rules’ and exploit the Russian threat is the upcoming election in the European Parliament as well as concers of the European bureaucracy and financial circles ahead of them.

It should be noted  that most of EU, US and NATO documents and declarations don’t bother themselves with providing examples of disinformation. Likely, the reason is that most of these ‘examples’ are reports revealing data hiding by the Western mainstream media or providing Russian or Chinese or Iranian arguments on some topics.

Topics described by the mainstream propaganda as ‘fake news’ are varrying from independent coverage of the 2015–16 New Year’s Eve sexual assaults in Cologne to facts provided by the Assad government and Russia regarding the Douma ‘chemical attack’ in 2018. The official Western propaganda and mainstream media outlets are hiding facts, which do not contribute to the ‘official’ point of view, and push the establishment narrative.

The recent hysteria over the so-called Russian threat will strenthen the alreadty exisiting censorship further. The EU body created to combat ‘propaganda’ can and likely will be turned into the 1984-style Ministry Of Truth. The establishment does not care about the freedom, democracy, human rights and other ‘universal values’ if they go in contrary with its goals.

An interesting fact is that the similar tendencies could be also observed in Russia. Authorities are limiting freedom of speech and civic rights of the citizens and fueling internal state propaganda under pretext of countering the ‘Western threat’. The only and the key difference is that the scale of these Russian efforts has so far been much lower than those observed in the EU. Moscow just has much less resources for this.

One of the reasons behind this situation is the ill structure of the modern society intentionally or not intentionally created by the US, European states and Russia. They all exploit the foreign threat concept to justify actions of their governments, which in most cases are mainly designed to defend interests of the ruling elites only. The societies are divided and narrow elite groups and their close circles are exploiting most of the resources.

Socialists of 19^th and 20^th centuries used the term ‘class struggle’ to describe division of the society. While this term is no more widely used, modern societies (European, American, Russian etc) are divided even deeply. This division between ‘capitalists’ and ‘working class’ was trensofrmed into another field. Now, this division lies between two “new classes”:

I. ‘ordinary’ representatives of the society (small, medium and even big business oriented on the real creation of added value, real sector and office workers (blue collars), and a part of the clerisy, which aims at the headway creation of a new science, engineering, IT, art or culture);

II. the high and speculative financial capital, ‘new bureaucracy’, and self-proclaimed intellectuals, variuos kitschy and hyped artists defending interests of the previous two groups, as well as various groups of persons living on welfare despite having opportunities to get a job.

Therefore, the ongoing shift to a new technological paradigm has led to the creation of new “exploiters” and “exploited” distributed along the entire social hierarchy. This situation is one more factor contributing to the further increase of state propaganda around the world. It is expected that rights and freedoms of the working part of the society. This trend will likely continue to get momentum further until it reaches its expected result predetermined by the logic of social process.

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President Donald Trump is frequently seen through the prism of an American media that despises him and wants to discredit him so that he can either be impeached soon or defeated in 2020. To a certain extent the foreign media has picked up on that depiction of Trump, emphasizing his boorish qualities and narcissism while neglecting what he has or has not accomplished while in office. To be sure there have been major missteps which have driven the Europeans and others crazy, including the withdrawal from the international climate treaty and the nuclear agreement with Iran, but Trump, to his credit, has also recognized the futility of Washington’s Asian wars and is serious in his intent to reduce the American footprint in places like Syria and Afghanistan. He is also an enemy of what is seen as the Establishment in global policymaking, choosing instead to promote national interests rather than international treaties and obligations.

My wife and I recently spent a week in Venice for the Carnival that precedes the beginning of Lent. It was quite an experience as the event attracted literally tens of thousands of visitors from all over the world. On the Sunday preceding Ash Wednesday there were so many tourists crammed into the vast Piazza San Marco that it was impossible to move, but everyone was having fun and both my wife and I remarked on how polite and well behaved the crowds were. And the food was wonderful!

In the course of the week we managed to speak to many of the co-celebrants, primarily those from Italy, Germany and Britain and the conversations inevitably turned to the subject of Donald Trump and what he is doing. I fully expected that I would receive an earful, but what actually developed was quite a surprise. Nearly everyone had good things to say about the American president, though there were suggestions that he might be more than just a little bit pazzo, verrückt, or bonkers.

Their arguments went something like this: world government has proven to be a disaster for most of the ordinary people in most developed countries. Wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the few who constitute the Establishment in each country and benefit primarily from globalism. Examples cited by the Europeans included the Clintons, who have become de facto billionaires, and Tony Blair, who is well on his way to doing the same. In Europe, the Common Market, which started out as a free trade and labor zone, has now morphed into a European Union and become a government that is far more heavy-handed and intrusive than the national governments that it has to a large extent replaced. The disastrous creation of a unified currency has crushed weaker national economies, but somehow the elites in each country seem to continue to thrive amidst all the damage being done to ordinary people.

As a response, an increasing number of Europeans are entertaining following the Brexit model of either leaving the European Union altogether or abandoning the currency union while also reducing the power of the European Parliament. Nationalism is on the rise as Europeans realize that any aspiration to create something like a United States of Europe was from the start an illusion. Today, the Europeans continue to be betrayed by their elected leadership and the time has come to put a stop to it, which is why they admire Trump as they see him serving as a wrecking ball demolishing the entrenched Establishment and the globalism that it has promoted. People are demanding change and the last election in Italy, the repudiation of the policies of Angela Merkel in Germany, and the unrest in France demonstrate that the problem is not going to go away.

There were some other lessons learned from Carnival. Post-Christian Europe is continuing to hang on to some vestiges of the Ancient Faith. I was amazed when the speaker at the final ceremony on Martedi Grasso introduced the finalists for Carnival Queen as being young women exemplary for their “Christian virtues and beauty.” I turned to my wife and commented how much I would like to hear similar words once in a while in the United States at a public gathering.

We also encountered many recent refugees from South Asia and the Middle East, working in shops and restaurants. Most of them spoke excellent Italian and were clearly fully accepted by their Italian colleagues. As Venice has a huge tourism economy, it was not exactly a model for dealing with the waves of immigrants in parts of Europe where there is no work, but it was refreshing to see how people will come together if they are just allowed to cooperate without a whole lot of interference from the government and the loud agenda driven groups that proliferate on the political left of center.

Finally, it was difficult being in Venice and not noticing that the largest group of foreigners in the city was Chinese, numbering certainly in the thousands, possibly as many as ten thousand. While Washington wastes its money on weapons and endless wars the Chinese are making deals and expanding both their personal and economic presence. Many shops in Venice and elsewhere in Italy are now owned by the Chinese. In Venice they sell their own cheap glass products to compete with the high-quality local Murano glass and they find plenty of buyers. As long as the Chinese glass is labeled “Made in China” it is perfectly legal, as much as the Venetians themselves hate it. We went into one shop that had an Italian salesperson. He told us not to buy anything as it was all Chinese junk.

The Chinese, to their credit, have been promoting the so-called Belt and Road Initiative or BRI plan, which aims to establish a trade link connecting China by sea and land with southeast and central Asia, the Middle East, Europe and Africa using a network of roads and both rail and sea connections. It is not unlike the ancient Silk Road which spanned Asia and penetrated into Europe by way of the Italian merchant republics, most notably Venice. Northern Italy is seen as a key component or even the European hub for the new venture and Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte is prepared to sign an agreement with Beijing to develop the initiative further. Conte is doing so over objections from Washington, of course.

As Mark Twain put it,

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”

Indeed.

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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Boeing’s 737 Max 8: Lobbies and Belated Groundings

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, March 14, 2019

Concern seemed to centre on the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), deemed vital to prevent the aircraft from stalling.  Sensors within the MCAS might, according to accident investigator Geoffrey Dell, have sent “spurious signals to the flight management computers and resulting in the autopilot automatically pushing the nose of the aircraft down”.

Video: CIA Is Turning Refugee Camps in Eastern Syria into ISIS Hotbeds

By South Front, March 14, 2019

The CIA is conspiring with ISIS commanders in northeastern Syria supplying them with fake documents and then transferring them to Iraq, according to reports in Turkish pro-government media.

Wealth Concentration Drives a New Global Imperialism

By Peter Phillips, March 14, 2019

The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, employ their excess capital with investment management firms like BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017.

Trump’s $34 Trillion Deficit and Debt Bomb

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, March 14, 2019

This week Trump released his latest budget for 2019-20 fiscal year. It calls for $2.7 trillion in various social spending cuts over the decade, including $872 billion in reductions in Medicare, Social Security, Disability spending; another $327 billion in food stamps, housing support, and Medicaid; a further $200 billion in student loan cuts; and hundreds of billions more in cuts to education, government workers’ pensions, and funds to operate the EPA and other government agencies.

Video: The Price of US “Protection” Is Skyrocketing. Donald Trump’s “Ransom Money” Exacted from America’s Allies

By Manlio Dinucci, March 13, 2019

President Trump – reveals Bloomberg — is going to present the plan “Cost Plus 50” which includes the following criteria – the allied countries which shelter US forces on their territory will have to cover their total cost, and pay the USA a supplement of 50 % in exchange for the “privilege” of housing them and therefore enjoying their “protection”.

The People’s Climate Movement. No Mention of War

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, March 13, 2019

While millions of people across the World will be protesting on March 15 under the banner of “Global Warming”, today’s wars including Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela are not mentioned.

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The announcement that Algerian President Bouteflika won’t run for re-election but will instead postpone the upcoming vote until the conclusion of his recently decreed comprehensive constitutional reform process represented the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years, making one wonder whether the world has been ignoring an almost decade-long “African Spring” or if something else entirely is going on across the continent.

Inaccurate Assumptions About Algeria

Algerian President Bouteflika’s surprise about-face in going back on his previous decision to run for a fifth consecutive term in office has been the talk of Africa the entire week, with this announcement taking many off guard but nonetheless largely being met with universal applause as the most responsible recourse to avoid an outbreak of violence in this strategically positioned North African state. The country had been experiencing an unprecedented wave of peaceful protests in reaction to his originally declared candidacy fed by the majority-youthful population’s indignation at high unemployment and a stagnant economy, to say nothing of how insulted they felt that an elderly leader who is speculated to be physically and perhaps even mentally incapacitated after suffering a 2013 stroke would be put forth once more as the face of the nation by what are thought to be his powerful military-intelligence “deep state” handlers.

A lot has already been written about what might come next in Algeria, but most observers are either analyzing events in a vacuum or are making predictable comparisons to the 2011 “Arab Spring” theater-wide Color Revolutions, neither of which are entirely accurate because they both miss the fact that Algeria represents the eighth non-electoral regime change in Africa in as many years and is therefore just the latest manifestation of a larger trend that has hitherto not yet been brought to the public’s attention. It’s true that there are shades of the “Arab Spring” in what’s presently taking place in Algeria, but simply stopping there doesn’t do the country justice because it misleadingly implies that foreign powers had a predominant hand in guiding the course of events there. It also overlooks everything else of regime change relevance that took place in the continent over the past eight years and therefore inaccurately assumes that this is a one-off event unrelated to anything prior.

Rolling Regime Changes

For simplicity’s sake, here’s a breakdown of the most pertinent events apart from the Algerian one that was just described, including the two non-electoral regime change attempts that failed, two electoral ones that deserve mention for reasons that will be explained below, and a short international intervention in support of a mostly forgotten regime change operation:

2011-2012 “Arab Spring” Events In Tunisia, Egypt, And Libya:

The whole world is aware of what happened during that time so there isn’t much need to rehash it other than to point out the author’s interpretation of those events as an externally provoked theater-wide regime change campaign that was originally intended to replace long-serving secular governments with Turkish-aligned Muslim Brotherhood ones prior to the inevitable leadership transition that would eventually take place after their elderly leaders pass away.

The whole point in preempting this process and artificially accelerating it was to ensure that their successors would remain geopolitically loyal to the US, which couldn’t be guaranteed if this “changing of the guard” was “allowed” to occur “naturally”. Moreover, the US thought that it could weaponize the semi-populist appeal of political Islam in those countries in order to portray its proxies as having the “genuine” support of the public. This nevertheless backfired in Egypt but was ultimately manageable.

2014 Burkina Faso:

The sudden onset of progressively violent protests in response to long-serving President Blaise Compaoré’s attempts to change the constitution to run for yet another term quickly resulted in a regime change that was briefly challenged a year later by loyalist special forces in a failed coup. Some observers predicted that the “Burkinabe Revolution” would trigger an “African Spring” against other rulers who had been in office for decades and also were speculated to soon announce their intent to follow in Compaoré’s footsteps and change their own constitutions as well, though this forecast didn’t unfold as expected.

Still, the 2014 Burkina Faso regime change could in hindsight be seen as evidence that genuine (as in, not externally provoked, guided, and/or hijacked) protests are capable of unseating entrenched governments and the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucratic structures (“deep state”) behind them. It should also be noted that the international community recognized Compaoré’s resignation and subsequent decision to go into self-imposed exile (thought to be motivated by his desire to evade justice for his alleged corruption and other crimes by the post-coup authorities) whereas they were against the military coup attempt by his loyalists a year later.

2017 The Gambia:

Most of the world has forgotten about it and barely anyone paid much attention to it at the time anyhow, but a Senegalese-led ECOWAS military intervention toppled Gambian President Jammeh at the beginning of the year after he refused to step down from office following his electoral loss a month prior in December 2016. The leader of this tiny sliver of an African state was also becoming internationally reviled by the West even before the 2016 election because of his decision to withdraw from the Commonwealth of Nations and begin the process of doing the same when it came to the International Criminal Court. In addition, his 2015 declaration of an Islamic Republic also earned him the West’s consternation, not that they needed any other excuses given the aforementioned.

The Gambian case study somewhat mirrors the controversial French-led UN intervention that took place in the Ivory Coast in 2011 following a similarly disputed election a few months prior, though the Ivorian leader wasn’t as lucky as his Gambian counterpart in that he was captured by French-backed forces and extradited to The Hague, where he was charged with war crimes but eventually acquitted earlier this year. The lesson to be had from both the Ivory Coast and The Gambia is that international coalitions can be assembled to remove recalcitrant leaders from office who refuse to accept electoral results, though this is less of a “rule” and more of a trend, though one that might gain support at home and/or abroad if it follows highly publicized protests that give the intervention the pretense of legitimacy (whether genuine or not).

2017 Angola:

This rising power in Southern Africa experienced a democratic transfer of power that summer from revolutionary leader Jose Eduardo dos Santos to fellow MPLA member and designated successor João Lourenço in what was initially thought by many to be a carefully coordinated “shuffling of the cards” by the Angolan “deep state” but which eventually proved to be a “deep state” coup after Lourenço quickly went to work eradicating the power structure that his predecessor implemented and even going after the former “royal family” (in particular, his daughter [who’s also Africa’s richest woman and its first female billionaire] and son on corruption charges). Suffice to say, this was a shock for many, though generally a pleasant one for most.

The abovementioned events prove that sometimes the “deep state” is the most influential force driving regime change in certain countries, namely those with post-war revolutionary parties that still remain in power. It’ll turn out that Angola might have been an inspiration for what later took place in Ethiopia and just occurred in Algeria, albeit with both unfolding under slightly different circumstances and in varying ways, but the point is that the so-called “powers that be” might either be engaged in serious infighting among themselves and/or decide that the most responsible course of action in the name of national stability is either “shuffle the cards” or carry out a genuine regime change behind the scenes to preemptively or reactively quell (potentially) destabilizing (anti-corruption-driven or election-related) unrest.

2017 Zimbabwe:

The tail end of 2017 saw the Zimbabwean military carry out a de-facto coup against nonagenarian revolutionary leader Robert Mugabe during a period of rising civil society unrest in this economically destitute country. Barely anyone disputes that this was indeed a military coup, and one that was possibly partially inspired by Mugabe’s controversial grooming of his wife as his successor at the expense of the ZANU-PF political and military elite, but it wasn’t legally recognized as such abroad because otherwise the African Union and other actors would have been compelled to impose varying degrees of sanctions against the country in response.

This interestingly shows that some military coups are supported by the so-called “international community” while others such as the soon-to-be-described Gabonese attempt earlier this year aren’t, suggesting  that there might be certain criteria involved in determining whether such seizures of power (or attempts thereof) will be (even begrudgingly) accepted abroad or not. The 2005 and 2008 Mauritanian military ones and the 2010 Nigerien one weren’t endorsed by the world but serious actions weren’t taken to isolate them both because they uncontestably succeeded and also out of concern for destabilizing the security situation in the terrorist-afflicted West African region.

2018 South Africa:

Jacob Zuma was pressured to resign in early 2018 due to what many have interpreted as being a “deep state” coup against him carried out by a rival faction of the ruling ANC led by his eventual successor Ramaphosa. Party infighting heated up after the BRICS leader found himself ensnared in corruption scandals that may or may not have been tacitly facilitated by his rivals, with all of this occurring against the backdrop of rising anti-government unrest and the increasing appeal of opposition parties. Whether out of the pursuit of pure power and/or sensing that the party needed to change both its external branding and internal policies in order to remain in power, Ramaphosa eventually deposed Zuma and took the reins of this rising African Great Power despite the electorate never voting him into office.

The 2018 situation in South Africa showed that even the most outwardly stable of the continent’s countries and the one most highly regarded by the “international community” (both Western and non-Western alike, the latter in regards to BRICS) can experience a non-electoral regime change, albeit one that was mostly executed behind the scenes following an intertwined pressure campaign by the public and the ruling party’s rival faction that aspired to enter into power. In a sense, South Africa – which is generally considered to be one of Africa’s most vibrant democracies – set the tone for the rest of the continent because the message that it sent was that all of its peers could potentially do the same without any external criticism being levelled against them whatsoever so long as they pulled it off smoothly and labelled it an “internal affair”.

2018 Ethiopia:

Ethiopia captivated the world’s imagination after its post-war ruling party decided upon the relatively young 41-year-old former military intelligence officer Abiy Ahmed to be its new leader following the outbreak of violent unrest in 2016 that threatened to return Africa’s second most populous country to civil war. To make a long story short, Abiy is of the Oromo ethnicity that represents the country’s largest plurality but which has traditionally been underrepresented in its ruling class, especially following the rise to power of the Tigray-led EPRDF, but he swiftly got to work dismantling the party’s “old guard” in what can only be described as a “deep state” coup with overwhelming public support. Importantly, he also made peace with neighboring Eritrea and put the two fraternal people’s lingering tensions behind them as they jointly embarked on crafting a new regional future for the Horn of Africa.

Ethiopia set the precedent whereby large-scale unrest might serve as an incentive for responsible factions of the “deep state” to carry out a coup against their ruling rivals, building upon the Angolan antecedent in that the Southern African case didn’t occur in response to any significant protests or outbreak of violence like the one in the Horn of Africa did.  The events in Ethiopia are also evidence that even the most entrenched and militarily powerful “deep states” are comprised of diverse factions, some of which have radically different ideas than the ruling ones, as might turn out to be the case in Algeria too depending on how the situation there unfolds. The main point, however, is that “deep state” factions might use naturally occurring or externally provoked unrest as their pretext for rising to power behind the scenes and ultimately in public.

2018 Comoros:

It’s difficult to categorize what exactly took place last year in the island nation, but it can most objectively be summed up as a semi-popular and possibly externally influenced attempt to actively challenge the country’s regional center by a peripheral unit that felt disenfranchised by democratically instituted constitutional reforms that removed the coup-prone state’s rotating presidency clause. There was briefly fear that Anjouan would attempt to secede from the union once more and that this scenario might provoke another international intervention to restore national unity like what took place in 2008, but these were abated after the military quickly restored law and order after dislodging the couple dozen fighters who attempted to take over that part of the country.

What’s important to pay attention to is that intra-state regional disputes could dangerously create the pretext for nationwide or provincial regime changes depending on how the course of escalating political events develops. The Comorian President in this case is thought to have taken advantage of his home region’s demographic (and consequently, electoral) dominance to legitimize his bid to remain in power, demonstrating a variant of other reform methods that have been attempted elsewhere in Africa but custom-tailored to his country’s specific situation. Even though some members of the international community criticized last summer’s referendum, they still accepted it because his initiative did in fact democratically win, even if the odds were stacked in his favor per the demographic factor that was just described.

2018-2019 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC):

There was global trepidation for the past year after former President Kabila delayed his country’s first-ever democratic transfer of power for logistical reasons that he would try to change the constitution to remain in power indefinitely, something that his traditional Western  backers pressured him not to do while his new Chinese patron remained silent about on the basis that its political process is an internal affair (though its strategic cobalt interests there might have played a role in its position to stay on the good side of the government). The country gradually slid into an undeclared state of low-level civil war that could more accurately be described as a hybrid one and which could have exploded on command into a much larger conflict had he not unexpectedly reached a speculated deal with one of the opposition leaders to supposedly allow Tshisekedi to replace Kabila while the former strongman would remain the “grey cardinal” after his party came out on top in the parliamentary elections.

International media and local activists decried this stunt as a blatant undermining of what should have been a democratic transfer of power that some observers said would have rightly resulted in Fayulu winning had the vote truly been free and fair, but that candidate posed the greatest threat to the Congolese “deep state” that owes its lucrative existence to Kabila and was – as the narrative goes – sidelined in favor of Tshsekedi, the son of a well-known opposition leader. This can be seen as a hybrid form of both an “internationally recognized” election and a “deep state” coup, the former of which was universally recognized probably because of the multilateral interests involved in retaining stability in the mineral-rich country (at least for the time being) while the latter was suppressed in order not to sully the optics of the DRC’s “first-ever democratic transfer of power” (and consequently the soft power of those who endorsed Kabila’s cunning plan).

2019 Gabon:

As was touched upon earlier, there was a failed attempt to stage a military coup in the economically stratified and politically polarized country of Gabon where an ageing and ailing leader continues to rule as part of a political dynasty that’s been in power for over half a century. The regime change operation was quickly put down by the rest of the military forces that didn’t join in the coup, though the event succeeded in shedding global light on the underlying tensions prevalent in this OPEC member country. It also temporarily raised concerns about whether the French would use their in-country military forces to aid the embattled government and “restore democracy” if the rebels succeeded in seizing power from their proxy.

Because of its sudden onset and abrupt end, the international community had no choice but to reactively condemn it like they always usually do whenever something of the sort happens, but it might have been begrudgingly accepted just like the Mauritanian and Nigerien ones that preceded it earlier along this timeline if it succeeded without any serious resistance. That wasn’t the case in Gabon because it seemed like the military faction of the “deep state” is satisfied with President Bongo, possibly due to some behind-the-scenes patronage relationship, and therefore wouldn’t want to sacrifice their own self-interests even in the name of settling a still-lingering electoral dispute that sharply divided the nation a few years prior.

Key Variables

In view of the insight that can be gleaned from the abovementioned ten examples, it’s possible to identify the key variables that pertain to each targeted leader, the trigger event for the non-electoral regime change operation, and the determining factors behind its success or lack thereof:

Targets:

The typical target seems to be a long-serving elderly leader with speculative health concerns who represents a power structure (whether his own or inherited) that increasingly large segments of the population and/or a faction of his “deep state” has come to believe (whether on their own or with foreign infowar and NGO “nudging”) doesn’t support their interests. They’re also usually plagued by accusations of corruption (whether real, exaggerated, or false) that serve to incite unrest during periods of nationwide economic hardship caused by either systemic mismanagement, Hybrid War, and/or a drop in the price of primary exports (oil, commodities, etc.).

Triggers:

It’s usually the case that something directly or indirectly related to an impending “changing of the guard” or political transition triggers the non-electoral regime change movement, be it efforts by the incumbent to change the constitution in order to run for another term, declaring their candidacy for the x-consecutive time after already serving for many years, fears by a “deep state” faction that the incumbent will lose the next election and therefore lead to their successor possibly dismantling the power structure they inherit (usually on “anti-corruption” grounds for populist appeal), a disputed election, or in the case of the “Arab Spring”, the perception of so-called “regional momentum”.

Determinants:

Most non-electoral regime changes succeed because of factors beyond the public’s view, namely the state of affairs within the “deep state” and in particular the loyalty of the military forces that enjoy a legal monopoly on violence by virtue of their being. It’s important, however, that there’s some “plausible” public pretext for the regime change, be it protests, a corruption scandal, or a disputed election, and the unity of the “deep state” is also another important determinant because rival factions might abuse the aforesaid for their own purposes. Sometimes the threat of sanctions against the incumbent and their clique for using force to quell unrest could widen “deep state” divisions and facilitate regime change.

Who’s Next On The Chopping Block?

All of this begs the question of which countries might be next to experience their own non-electoral regime changes, with the following ones most closely aligning with the author’s model elaborated on above and being presented in alphabetical order:

Cameroon:

President Biya won his sixth term in office late last year following a serious breakdown of law and order in the separatist Anglophone region abutting the Nigerian border, which came on the heels of Cameroon finally seeming to surmount the challenge posed by Boko Haram in the northern part of the country. The primary geostrategic consequence of his ouster under the possible scenario of a nascent Color Revolution in the cities merging with the Unconventional War in the rural periphery might be the destabilization of what the author described as China’s plans to create a “West-Central African CPEC”, though if managed properly by the “deep state”, it might contrarily stabilize this megaproject’s viability if the choreography succeeds in placating the population.

Republic of the Congo:

The other less-discussed Congo located between the DRC and Gabon, this one is presided over by one of Africa’s longest-serving leaders who recently joined OPEC and also put an end to a simmering insurgency in the Pool region surrounding the capital. Unlike Cameroon, it’s less clear what the geostrategic consequences of a non-electoral regime change here could be, but it might potentially be a factor in whether the country continues to remain within the joint orbit of France and China or decisively pivots to one or the other. In this sense, it could change the “balance of power” in Central Africa and contribute to the gradual retreat of Françafrique in the face of overall Chinese gains in France’s historic “sphere of influence” and Russia’s recent ones in the Central African Republic.

Chad:

Occupying the pivot space between Saharan and Equatorial Africa, President Idriss Deby came to power on the back of a coup in 1990 and has remained in office ever since, mostly relying on the fact that his country’s military is regarded as one of the strongest in all of the continent and has an operational reach as far west as Mali. He’s not without his domestic detractors, however, some of whom have led large rebel formations towards the capital in several unsuccessful coup attempts that were at times thwarted through the intervention of his French ally, such as last month when Paris bombed an anti-government convoy that crossed into northern Chad from Libya. For all of its faults, Chad seems to be “too big to fail” for France and it’s unlikely that the former colonizer will ever let this prized piece of real estate slip from its grasp.

Equatorial Guinea:

President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has reigned for nearly four decades and survived numerous coup attempts, some of which were planned by mercenaries in this tiny but oil-rich island-coastal nation in the strategic Gulf of Guinea.  Being located where it is and with the resource wealth that it has, it’s an important piece of the African chessboard that France might want to pry away from its American ally in order to reinforce its policy of Françafrique that’s facing its greatest threat ever from China and Russia in Central Africa. Apart from the “friendly competition” between those two Great Powers, there isn’t really much else that can be said at this time about the possible outcome of any non-electoral regime change in Equatorial Guinea.

Mozambique:

The incumbent leader has only been in power for a few years, but he represents the corrupt and increasingly reviled FRELIMO party that’s been ruling Mozambique since independence, though to their credit, the authorities have been progressively implementing what appears to be a “phased leadership transition” to incorporate the former RENAMO rebel opposition into the country’s “deep state” as part of a peace deal. That said, this responsible arrangement could always collapse at any time, and the country is nowadays threatened by mysterious jihadists who’ve been wreaking havoc along the northern borderland with Tanzania, so “black swan” developments that might trigger a non-electoral regime change are more likely here than in most of the other predicted targets, which could have an impact on global LNG geopolitics given its sizeable offshore reserves (coincidentally located in close proximity to where the new terrorist threat emerged) and regional security.

Sudan:

Sudan is undoubtedly in the throes of a multifaceted Hybrid War that the author elaborated upon at length in a previous piece late last year and which should be skimmed for reference if one’s interested in the strategic nuances involved, but the latest update is that its “deep state” might be preparing for a “phased leadership transition” in a manner which seemed to have influenced the Algerian one that suddenly followed soon thereafter. Simply put, Sudan is indispensable to China’s Silk Road vision for Africa and is also Russia’s gateway to the continent, so its destabilization and possible “Balkanization” like President al-Bashir warned about a year and a half ago would inflict very serious damage to multipolar integration processes all across the continent.

Uganda:

Finally, the country that most closely fits the criteria of the author’s non-electoral regime change model is Uganda, the military heavyweight in the transregional East and Central African space that’s been ruled by President Museveni for the last one-third of a century. During the last few years, however, his mostly-youthful population (which is also one of the fastest growing in Africa, notwithstanding the large amounts of migration [sometimes illegal] that it receives) has become restive and most recently (and one can argue, quite naively) placed their hopes in the singer-turned-politician Bobi Wine because they see in him a comparatively younger face of anti-systemic change. However a non-electoral regime change might unfold in Uganda, its consequences would change the entire “balance of power” in this strategic part of the world at the height of the New Great Game and modern-day “Scramble for Africa” in the New Cold War.

Concluding Thoughts

Using the latest events in Algeria as the lead-in to discussing the other non-electoral regime changes and attempts thereof that took place in Africa since the “Arab Spring”, it’s clear to see that three separate – but sometimes interconnected scenarios – have unfolded, be they Color Revolutions like in the aforementioned 2011 events, genuine non-externally-influenced people’s movements like 2014 Burkina Faso, or “deep state” coups such as what took place in 2017 Angola and which later structurally inspired the subsequent ones in Ethiopia and Algeria (both of which were driven in part by the first two scenarios). All countries have power structures (“deep states”), but some are more flexible than others when confronting bottom-up pressure (which may or may not be externally influenced – and in the future, possibly weaponized against China’s geostrategic interests), which usually makes or breaks the regime change operation and will determine whether the forecasted targets will survive if they end up on the chopping block too.

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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.

This article was originally published on December 23, 2017.

A threat to national security?

Imagine this scenario: A nation and its people are deemed by our U.S. government to be an existential threat to the United States of America.  Massive propaganda campaigns are pushed upon a fearful American public by politicians and through all forms of the Mainstream Media (MSM).  Little to no actual evidence is provided as justification for proposed “just” or “humanitarian” wars and that “evidence” which is hastily provided will eventually be shown to be based upon lies, false intelligence and false flag events.  Large populations of peoples of foreign lands and their leaders will be stereotyped and demonized.  Sound familiar? 

Am I referring to North Korea?  Syria?  Russia and Eastern Ukraine?  Venezuela?  Iran?  Iraq?  Afghanistan?  Libya?  It could be any of these but not this time. How about Mexico 170 years ago? The United States had perfected its methods of drumming up support for and instigating pre-emptive wars of aggression by at least the time of the Mexican-American War.

After founding a nation upon the murder, genocide, enslavement and stolen land of millions of Africans and Native Americans, Uncle Sam turned his eyes toward his neighbor to the south, Mexico.

One vote – your vote counts!

If you first play the video below with your eyes closed you will hear what I and fellow Hoosiers heard in radio commercials that encouraged voter registration and election day participation beginning in 2014.  When first I heard the commercial my mind tried to recall the land acquisition it referred to.  Surely this cheery, positive commercial was not about the illegal war of aggression, the land grab of Mexican territory known as the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848.

The happy little message that “your vote counts” fails to find anything wrong with fabricating reasons for war and carrying it out against a nation that posed no threat to it.  Quite the contrary, this ethos of Manifest Destiny is still promoted today.  The video was released by the office of the Indiana Secretary of State and filed under “Education” when our governor was Mike Pence, the conservative neoconservative and current Vice President of the United States.  Fortunately it has few views.  But the story is still prominently and proudly displayed on the Secretary of State of the state of Indiana website.[2]

These are the values high-ranking politicians hope to brainwash future generations into embracing without question, without thinking critically about the assumed rightness and legitimacy of American foreign policy actions.  We doubled our country’s size because of one vote.  Your vote counts!  That’s the important message and it still applies today because you are encouraged to get behind all of our many war efforts and “support our troops” because if you question the military’s actions or demonstrate against them, you are being unpatriotic, un-American (which of course is completely illogical and see Michael Parenti’s Superpatriotism). [3] And do not bother thinking critically and asking questions like what are the real motivations for acts of military aggression?  Who will really benefit from the next war, and WWIII?  Has it not been proven as indisputable fact that our politicians and the Corporate-owned media have repeatedly lied to us to get the public’s approval for illegal wars of aggression?  Don’t worry.  You can trust them this time.  But be afraid.  Because terrorists, ISIS, Russians, North Koreans, Chinese, Syrians, etc., are over there and dangerous and we must fight them over there so they don’t come here because that’s what they want because they hate our (evaporating and illusory) freedoms.

It is conceivable that millions of Americans voted for Trump under the logic that, based upon his campaign rhetoric, he would promote isolationism, make friends with Putin and Russia and stop escalating extant wars and starting new ones.  NATO would be marginalized and no matter how disgusting and reprehensible his views and policy proposals are that will affect immigrants, women, homosexuals, Muslims, etc., at least WWIII would be temporarily averted.

Because a vote for neoliberal neoconservative super-hawk Hillary Clinton would be a vote for WWIII.  It does not seem like much of a choice in our “democracy” but it would be possibly, the lesser of two evils.

Whatever you may think of Trump’s policies, it is clear that he has been under an all-out assault from politicians, the intelligence community and led by the MSM, a slow-motion but relentless coup with the aim of getting him out of office.  The only brief reprieve came when he ordered that Tomahawk missiles be lobbed upon a Syrian airfield in “retaliation” for a “chemical attack” the Syrian military and President Bashar al-Assad never committed.

At that time politicians overwhelmingly praised this aggression and the press gushed over how presidential Trump was acting.  Empire cheerleader for CNN Fareed Zakaria summed up the MSM consensus view nicely, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.” [4]

Saint Patrick’s Battalion

Praise be to tenacious historians who resurrect true events and real people from our past.  If you believed the official story long promoted by the U.S. Army, St. Patrick’s Battalion and one of its leaders, John Riley (also John O’Riley, Reilly, O’Reilly, Juan Riley, Sean O’Raghallaigh) never existed.  This despite the extensive and venomous coverage they received from American newspapers of the day.

Hoosier author James Alexander Thom is a former Marine and taught journalism at Indiana University.  A friend of the late peoples’ historian Howard Zinn and The Slaughterhouse Five author and Indianapolis native Kurt Vonnegut, he has written and continues to write historical fiction that describes the lives and expresses the views of all sides of historical events.  Many of his great novels accurately portray the suffering brought upon Native Americans at the hands of European invaders such as Panther In The Sky (about the great shaman and warrior Tecumseh and the Shawnee struggle)[5]

Saint Patrick’s Battalion[6] tells the truth in his fictional account about one of the “great accomplishments” of our new nation.  Here is a short synopsis:

John Riley reluctantly left his sick wife and young son in Famine-stricken Galway, Ireland and took the only available work that would feed them, as a soldier in the hated British Army, but he soon grew disgusted about killing poor dark-skinned peoples in faraway lands.  After completing his service, he mustered out in Canada and joined the American Army with the hope that the causes they may fight for would be noble.  But he soon learned that Irish and other Catholic immigrants were brutally persecuted and tortured by West Point officers and native-born soldiers in the American Army.  Regardless of their skill, hard work and bravery, there was no hope for advancement into the officer ranks.  The mostly Irish Catholics endured constant ridicule and abuse and they were not even U.S. citizens.

A young Army camp boy, Padraic Quinn, found a friend and father-figure in John Riley and faithfully recorded his experiences and skillfully illustrated the Mexican-American War and its affected people in his journal.

Riley and his friends found they were being forced into an expansionist invasion of a nation of poor fellow Catholics.  The American Army amassed over a disputed border with Mexico.  Across the Rio Grande from Texas was the beautiful town of Matamoros.  Another young boy, Agustin Juvero, lived with his mother, Gloria Estrella, in a house across the river in Mexico with a view of the growing American Army presence.  The Mexican General  Ampudia used Estrella’s house as headquarters and recruited Agustin for a dangerous mission.  Young Agustin sneaked across the river at night and delivered pamphlets that enticed the Catholic immigrant soldiers to abandontheir imperialistic aggression against fellow Catholics to join the Mexican Army and receive officerships, Mexican citizenship and land.

To the suffering immigrants from many nations of the American Army, the allure of Mexico’s music, food, dancing and women across the Rio Grande was strong.  Padraic recognized that the church bells may have been the clincher as nearly all of the immigrants were Catholic for which they were persecuted and prevented from freely practicing.

Despite the abuse Riley endured from officers, he kept his cool and professionalism and the admiration of his comrades.  Then one day, John Riley was on a pass to visit a Church, and never returned.  He was welcomed into the Mexican Army, made an officer who trained and led a “flying battery” of cannoneers.

And so began an exodus of Irish Catholic and other immigrant soldiers and former slaves to the Mexican Army and under the guidance of John Riley the San Patricios were born.  The defection of men into Saint Patrick’s Battalion and its success in wreaking havoc on the battlefield would be a constant scourge to the American Army for the duration of the Mexican War.  The skill and fury with which the San Patricios fought exacted a heavy toll of casualties, especially officers.

An American colonel went missing and soldiers found his remains but were then attacked and killed by Mexican ranchers.  The incident was used as justification to start the war of aggression against Mexico.  The fictional boys, Padraic and Agustin represent the millions of civilians who have suffered at the hands of American aggression in the Mexican-American and countless other wars.  They were eyewitnesses to the horrors of war, the wounded and killed, the refugees who always suffer in great numbers though the veterans too on all sides were killed, maimed, abused and neglected upon return home.

St. Patrick’s Battalion and the story of John Riley was not a white savior epic but a true instance of collaboration against a common enemy.  Riley had superiors in the Mexican Army and he respected them.  Mexicans, Irish, German, Polish, Italian, African Americans, and more all fought bravely and effectively.

Below is a short video from the BBC Radio documentary on the San Patricios arranged by YouTube channel MrOscarBueno:

And in 2010 The Chieftains and Ry Cooder teamed up with Mexican music artists to produce an album of beautifully blended traditional Irish and Mexican music that celebrates the efforts of Mexico and the San Patricios to prevent the U.S. landgrab; Linda Rondstadt and even Liam Neeson contributed, who has said if a movie was ever made that he would like to play the part of John Riley. [10]

In fact, when the history of Riley and the San Patricios was re-discovered by Americans, a film was made with Tom Berenger starring as John Riley.  But this version of the story was largely whitewashed, with John Riley portrayed as being kidnapped by Mexican soldiers and forced to serve in their army.

Parallels between the Mexican-American War and American Imperialism today are clear:  While Representative Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii tries to warn the public about and restrain the Executive and Legislative branches of our government from continuing its support for the very terrorists we are ostensibly fighting in Syria.  She knows what she is talking about having fought in Iraq, twice.  She has been one of the lone sane voices in Congress who has challenged the nearly unanimous bipartisan support for “regime change” in Syria.

Though she deserves much more support and praise for her courage, Gabbard was largely lambasted by politicians, public and press for having the audacity to try to bring peace by embarking on a fact-finding mission to Syria and when presented with the opportunity, meeting with democratically-elected and popular President Bashar al-Assad.  In contrast, Senator John McCain’s illegal trip to Syria (Gabbard was invited) saw him yukking it up with the terrorist opposition and was roundly approved by the MSM.

Gabbard’s efforts are reminiscent of another young Congress member who was rewarded for his outspoken opposition to President Polk’s looming war against Mexico with a nickname.  Abraham Lincoln was called “Spotty” for having the nerve to insist that the location of Mexico’s supposed aggressions be precisely pointed out on a map, the question being was blood first shed on American soil?[11]

Just the facts, man! Who? What? When? Where? But not Why? or How? 

As an undergraduate journalism major I learned that every good story should, at minimum, answer or at least address and attempt to answer the following questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? and How? A cursory examination of MSM coverage of the gas “attack” in Syria and subsequent “retaliatory” bombing of a Syrian airfield by the U.S. reveals that MSM journalists are not doing their jobs or the jobs they are doing are not in anyone’s interests but those who profit from war.

They continually repeat what is a big lie: that Assad’s “regime” has used chemical weapons before “on its own people” most recently April 4 and 2013;  it states this lie as if it is factand what is the source of its intelligence? [12]

Seymour Hersh’s investigation and article that refutes these claims is difficult to find as the MSM refused to publish it (Hersh’s New Syria Revelations Buried From View By Jonathan Cook  Global Research, June 28, 2017  Counter Punch  27 June 2017). [13]

The reality is that if the U.S. and its allies had not supported Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, ISIS and other terrorists in their illegal war on Syria that is led by the popular Bashar al Assad, the bombing would not have occurred and the terrorists’ own chemicals would not have caused the tragic civilian deaths.  The 2013 chemical attack, was concluded to be the work of “rebels” (terrorists) and could not have been done by Syrian forces according to the UN team that carried out investigations.

This is yet another example of what Dr. John McMurtry describes as “reverse projection”. [14]  Our ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley was telegraphing her pass in basketball parlance, telling us what is likely to happen:  someone will launch a gas attack again and she was clear that Syria would pay a price for it.That someone is the U.S. but through our proxies.

So if there is no proof and it is reported as irrefutably fact, by everyone from CNN to Fox, from Sean Hannity to Diane Rehm, is that not “fake news”?

Nancy Pelosi supported the strikes, saying they were “proportional”.

Tulsi Gabbard condemned it.

The possibility that “rebels” are housing chemicals is carefully ignored by the Trump Administration, the vast majority of Congress and the MSM.

Wake up!  The American Dream is the world’s nightmare

“Our way of life” should be carefully examined and adjusted when it infringes upon the ways of life for billions of fellow global citizens.  While a large sector of the American population remains oblivious to, unaware there are reasons the “official” explanation for the tragic events of 9/11 cannot possibly be true, another sector is growing that has awakened to reality.  What is required is a willingness to practice a degree of non-conformity, break with the mainstream and examine our own culture as anthropologists encourage and inspire us to do.

It is vital that we teach new generations that history has become a subjective practice, one in which elite actors dictate “official” explanations for events.  We should recognize that just repeating the same lies over and over does not make them more true.  History is ours.  Despite having an unprecedented access to information in the history of the planet, the true history is often hidden in plain sight, or buried under misinformation and Google search engine algorithms.

Major General Smedley Butler who received a congressional medal of honor for the “capture of Vera Cruz, Mexico,” in 1914 and another for the “capture of Ft. Riviere, Haiti” in 1917, wrote a short book called War Is A Racket. [15]  From Chapter 1:

“War is a racket.  It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious.  It is the only one international in scope.  It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people.  Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about.  It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many.  Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

…Out of war nations acquire additional territory, if they are victorious.  They just take it.  This newly acquired territory promptly is exploited by the few- the selfsame few who wrung dollars out of blood in the war.  The general public shoulders the bill.

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile military force (the Marine Corps) and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers.  In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.  I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914.  I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.” [16]

And on and on he went about what he did in China, Central America, the Dominican Republic…  Smedley Butler described the ways that war could be ended and one way would be to end its profitability. [17]  The famous anthropologist Margaret Mead rightly pointed out that war was just another invention and not a biological necessity; it would reach obsolescence like dueling but importantly, something must replace it for it to end. [18]

The U.S. military and government is well aware of the vast mineral, energy, timber, water and other resources in the vast territories it has invaded and occupied or bullied into submission through threats of war, crippling economic sanctions, and a host of other weapons.  We should all be aware of it.  Wherever the U.S., its allies and proxies like the UN and NATO are advocating for peace, human rights, democracy, we are sure to find people in poverty and vast riches in resources:  Haiti, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Iraq…  Why does the U.S. military now have a presence in 53/54 African nations?

The MSM never mentions that Kim Jong Un always to my knowledge, qualifies his “threats” with “if attacked by the U.S., under attempted regime change, or imminent threat of attack”.  The commemoration of the San Patricios demonstrates that it is possible to remember the truth when we are not bombarded by billion dollar propaganda campaigns.  The people in North Korea remember how nearly every town and city was leveled by American bombs in the Korean War and about 30% of its population killed, likely more than 4 million people.  Having seen what happened when Iraq and Libya gave up their WMD programs and shook hands with our devils, North Korea’s leaders have decided they will not be Corporate Capitalism’s puppets, its people miserable like those in Japan and South Korea.

North Korea is neither a threat to its neighbors or to the United States.  It has reached out for peace for decades while the U.S. and South Korea conduct annual invasion drills and lately, nuclear bomb drop drills directed at North Korea.  The idea that they are planning a first strike on America whether it be nuclear, cyber, or electromagnetic is ludicrous; it would be an act of suicide, if they even have the capability.

But the U.S. government continues to ratchet up hysterical claims and fabrications about North Korea, Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela.  All want peace save for the U.S. who wants submission and world domination.  Attempts to “neutralize” nuclear programs in North Korea and Iran would end disastrously with thousands if not millions dying in the Koreas and Japan and worst case scenario are the various mistakes, miscalculations and alliances that could unleash all-out WWIII, nuclear apocalypse.

How different might things have turned out if the Americans had lost or if the Mexican-American War had never happened!  Dreamers and DACA… How strange that immigrants to American states that used to be Mexico are now “illegal”.  And after all, they are fleeing the crushing poverty brought by neoliberal policies, NAFTA, drug cartels and gangs that help feed American’s addictions.

Our consent is still mandatory 

The American government continues to tout its goodness despite the evidence.  The MSM is owned by Corporations, some defense contractors and others those who benefit from military adventures so it is up to us all to find out what is really happening and why.  This is not to advocate that we all take up arms and take on the U.S. military like John Riley and the San Patricios but that we arm ourselves with knowledge, truth, wisdom and action to change the paradigm.  It is a difficult path and even the Dalai Lama (however compromised he may be) has said that one should be peaceful but defend oneself if under attack.  So where does one draw the line?  It is clear that violence and war will begat more of the same.

It is also clear that the U.S. government uses the MSM to achieve our consent.  They try extremely hard to make it look like they are justified in military actions.  For some reason they still need our approval.  If enough of us wake up, their machinations will fail.

Right now the U.S. and its allies are setting up more military bases all over the African continent, in Syria, Afghanistan…  It has Iran and North Korea nearly completely surrounded.  The buildup of military personnel, drills and armaments amassing across the border with North Korea in particular is particularly alarming and unprecedented.  As James Alexander Thom’s character Paddy Quinn said in Saint Patrick’s Battalion when he witnessed the loading and shipment of equipment and arms on ships in port in New Orleans that was bound for Texas:  “You don’t do this much getting ready if you don’t really mean to do something.” [19]

Let us remember the San Patricios and after careful consideration, let our consciences guide us.

Philip Linder has an M.A. in international relations and has taught anthropology in universities since 2012. He also worked with resettling refugees for 5 years and met in person the people most affected by wars. He is adapting James Alexander Thom’s Saint Patrick’s Battalion into a screenplay and is hopeful that The Chieftains and Liam Neeson will take part and that producers and a director will have the courage to make the motion picture.

Notes

[1] Indiana Secretary of State  “Your Vote Counts This Election Day 2015”  September 29, 2015  YouTube  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqJK42quBOg

[2] Indiana Secretary of State  “Don’t Think Your Vote Counts?  Think Again”  2017  IN.gov  website  http://www.in.gov/sos/civics/2527.htm

[3] Parenti, Michael  Superpatriotism  City Lights Publishers, later printing edition September 1, 2004.

[4] Naureckas, Jim  The Essential Pundit Take:  ‘Trump Became President’ by Bombing Syria Common Dreams  April 8, 2017  https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/04/08/essential-pundit-take-trump-became-president-bombing-syria

[5] Thom, James Alexander  Panther In The Sky  New York:  Ballantine Books, 1990, first published 1989.

[6] Thom, James Alexander  Saint Patrick’s Battalion Indianapolis:  Blue River Publishing, 2005.

[7] Saint Patrick’s Battalion, Erin Go Braghflag, as described by John Patrick O’Riley, WikiMedia Commons, public domain, 1846. 

[8] MrOscarBueno “The San Patricos on BBC Radio” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Ldi7cCzHU November 16, 2011.

[10] The Chieftains featuring Ry Cooder San Patricio  Audio CD, Hear Music, 2010. 

[11] Mueller, Jean West and Wynell B. Schamel  Lincoln’s Spot Resolutions  Social Education Volume 52, Number 6, October, 1988, pgs. 455-457, 466. 

[12] Bender, Bryan, Karni, Annie, with contributions from Michael Crowley, Tara Palmeri, Nahal Toosi and Rebecca Morin  White House threatens Syria over possible chemical attack Politico Magazine  June, 26, 2017. 

[13] Cook, Jonathan  Hersh’s New Syria Revelations Buried From View Global Research, June 28, 2017  Counter Punch  27 June 2017.  

[14] McMurtry, Prof. John  The Moral Decoding of 9-11:  Beyond the U.S. Criminal State Journal of 9/11 Studies, Volume 35, February, 2013. 

[15] Buter, Smedley  War Is A Racket  Warwick New York:  Round Table Press, 1935.

[16] Ibid 

[17] Ibid 

[18] Mead, Margaret  Warfare is Only an Invention – Not a Biological Necessity  In Dolphin Reader, 2^nd Edition, Edited by Douglas Hunt, Boston:  Houghton Mifflin Company, 1990, pgs. 415-421.

[19] Thom, James Alexander  Saint Patrick’s Battalion  Indianapolis:  Blue River Publishing, 2005.

In his 1978 book ‘India Mortgaged’, T.N. Reddy predicted the country would one day open all sectors to foreign direct investment and surrender economic sovereignty to imperialist powers.

Today, the US and Europe cling to a moribund form of capitalism and have used various mechanisms to bolster the system in the face of economic stagnation and massive inequalities: the raiding of public budgets, the expansion of credit to consumers and governments to sustain spending and consumption, financial speculation and increased militarism. Via ‘globalisation’, Western powers have also been on an unrelenting drive to plunder what they regard as ‘untapped markets’ in other areas of the globe.

Agricapital has been moving in on Indian food and agriculture for some time. But India is an agrarian-based country underpinned by smallholder agriculture and decentralised food processing. Foreign capital therefore first needs to displace the current model before bringing India’s food and agriculture sector under its control. And this is precisely what is happening.

Western agribusiness is shaping the ‘development’ agenda in India. Over 300,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and many more are experiencing economic distress or have left farming as a result of debt, a shift to (GMO) cash crops and economic liberalisation.

Other sectors have not been immune to this bogus notion of development. Millions of people have been displaced to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, land grabs for Special Economic Zones, nuclear plants and other large-scale projects. And the full military backing of the state has been on hand to forcibly evict people, place them in camps and inflict human rights abuses on them.

To help open the nation to foreign capital, proponents of economic neoliberalism are fond of stating that ‘regulatory blockages’ must be removed. If particular ‘blockages’ stemming from legitimate protest, rights to land and dissent cannot be dealt with by peaceful means, other methods are used. And when increasing mass surveillance or widespread ideological attempts to discredit and smear does not secure compliance or dilute the power of protest, brute force is on hand.

India’s agrarian crisis

India is currently witnessing a headlong rush to facilitate (foreign) agricapital and the running down of the existing system of agriculture. Millions of small-scale and marginal farmers are suffering economic distress as the sector is deliberately made financially non-viable for them.

At the same time, the country’s spurt of GDP growth – the holy grail of ‘development’ – has largely been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population has widened enormously to the point where rural India consumes less calories per head of population than it did 40 years ago. Meanwhile, unlike farmers, corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans but have failed to spur job creation.

The plan is to displace the existing system of livelihood-sustaining smallholder agriculture with one dominated from seed to plate by transnational agribusiness and retail concerns. To facilitate this, independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land is to be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and remaining farmers will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.

US agribusiness corporations are spearheading the process, the very companies that fuel and thrive on a five-year US taxpayer-funded farm bill subsidy of around $500 billion. Their industrial model in the US is based on the overproduction of certain commodities often sold at prices below the cost of production and dumped on the rest of the world, thereby undermining farmers’ livelihoods and agriculture in other countries.

It is a model designed to facilitate the needs and profits of these corporations which belong to the agritech, agrichemicals, commodity trading, food processing and retail sectors. A model that can only survive thanks to taxpayer handouts and by subsidising the farmer who is squeezed at one end by seed and agrochemical manufacturers and at the other, by powerful retail interests. A model that can only function by externalising its massive health, environmental and social costs. And a model that only leads to the destruction of rural communities and jobs, degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water, water shortages and poor health.

If we look at the US model, it serves the needs of agribusiness corporations and large-scale retailers, not farmers, the public nor the environment. So by bowing to their needs via World Bank directives and the US-Indo Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, what is the future to be for India?

A mainly urbanised country reliant on an industrial agriculture and all it entails, including denutrified food, increasingly monolithic diets, the massive use of agrochemicals and food contaminated by hormones, steroids, antibiotics and a range of chemical additives. A country with spiralling rates of ill health, degraded soil, a collapse in the insect population, contaminated and depleted water supplies and a cartel of seed, chemical and food processing companies with ever-greater control over the global food production and supply chain.

But we don’t need a crystal ball to look into the future. Much of the above is already taking place, not least the destruction of rural communities, the impoverishment of the countryside and continuing urbanisation, which is itself causing problems for India’s crowded cities and eating up valuable agricultural land.

So why would India want to let the foxes guard the hen house? Why mimic the model of intensive, chemical-dependent agriculture of the US and be further incorporated into a corrupt US-dominated global food regime that undermines food security and food sovereignty? After all, numerous high-level reports have concluded that policies need to support more resilient, diverse, sustainable (smallholder) agroecological methods of farming and develop decentralised, locally-based food economies.

Yet the trend in India continues to move in the opposite direction towards industrial-scale agriculture and centralised chains for the benefit of Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and other transnational players.

The plan is to shift hundreds of millions from the countryside into the cities to serve as a cheap army of labour for offshored foreign companies, mirroring what China has become: a US colonial outpost for manufacturing that has boosted corporate profits at the expense of US jobs. In India, rural migrants are to become the new ‘serfs’ of the informal services and construction sectors or to be trained for low-level industrial jobs. Even here, however, India might have missed the boat as jobless ‘growth’ seems to have arrived as the effects of automation and artificial intelligence are eradicating the need for human labour across many sectors.

If we look at the various Western powers, to whom many of India’s top politicians look to in order to ‘modernise’ the country’s food and agriculture, their paths to economic prosperity occurred on the back of colonialism and imperialism. Do India’s politicians think this mindset has disappeared?

Fuelled by capitalism’s compulsion to overproduce and then seek out new markets, the same mentality now lurks behind the neoliberal globalisation agenda: terms and policies like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ embody little more than the tenets of neoliberal fundamentalism wrapped in benign-sounding words. It boils down to one thing: Monsanto-Bayer, Cargill and other transnational corporations will decide on what is to be eaten and how it is to be produced and processed.

Alternatives to development

Current policies seek to tie agriculture to an environmentally destructive, moribund system of capitalism. Practical solutions to the agrarian crisis must be based on sustainable agriculture which places the small farmer at the centre of policies: far-sighted and sustained policy initiatives centred on self-sufficiency, localisation, food sovereignty, regenerative agriculture and agroecology.

The scaling up of agroecological approaches should be a lynchpin of genuine rural development. Other measures involve implementing land reforms, correcting rigged trade, delinking from capitalist globalisation (capital controls) and managing foreign trade to suit smallholder farmers’ interests not those of foreign agricapital.

More generally, there is the need to recognise that genuine sustainable agriculture can only be achieved by challenging power relations, especially resisting the industrial model of agriculture being rolled out by powerful agribusiness corporations and the neoliberal policies that serve their interests.

What is required is an ‘alternative to development’ as post-development theorist Arturo Escobar explains:

“Because seven decades after World War II, certain fundamentals have not changed. Global inequality remains severe, both between and within nations. Environmental devastation and human dislocation, driven by political as well as ecological factors, continues to worsen. These are symptoms of the failure of “development,” indicators that the intellectual and political post-development project remains an urgent task.”

Looking at the situation in Latin America, Escobar says development strategies have centred on large-scale interventions, such as the expansion of oil palm plantations, mining, and large port development.

And it is similar in India: commodity monocropping; immiseration in the countryside; the appropriation of biodiversity, the means of subsistence for millions of rural dwellers; unnecessary and inappropriate environment-destroying, people-displacing infrastructure projects; and state-backed violence against the poorest and most marginalised sections of society.

These problems, says Escobar, are not the result of a lack of development but of ‘excessive development’. Escobar looks towards the worldviews of indigenous peoples and the inseparability and interdependence of humans and nature for solutions.

He is not alone. Writers Felix Padel and Malvika Gupta argue that adivasi (India’s indigenous peoples) economics may be the only hope for the future because India’s tribal cultures remain the antithesis of capitalism and industrialisation. Their age-old knowledge and value systems promote long-term sustainability through restraint in what is taken from nature. Their societies also emphasise equality and sharing rather than hierarchy and competition.

These principles must guide our actions regardless of where we live on the planet because what’s the alternative? A system driven by narcissism, domination, ego, anthropocentrism, speciesism and plunder. A system that is using up oil, water and other resources much faster than they can ever be regenerated. We have poisoned the rivers and oceans, destroyed natural habitats, driven wildlife species to (the edge of) extinction and have altered the chemical composition of the atmosphere to the point that runaway climate change seems more and more likely.

And, as we see all around us, the outcome is endless conflicts over fewer and fewer resources, while nuclear missiles hand over humanity’s head like a sword of Damocles.

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

There is something strange going on in the French senate. Ideological disorientation has taken hold. The centre-right Les Républicains, and the Parti Socialiste, of the centre-left, have somehow found themselves on the same side, contending with a cabinet-backed business and privatisation draft law. For the socialists, this is business as usual. However, for the former-UMP party Republicans, headed in the senate by Bruno Retailleau, this position seems to demand answers. Is there not a conflict between their traditional core values and the inexplicable course they now find themselves on?

The item in question is the Loi PACTE, proffered by Macron’s minister for the economy, Bruno Le Maire. The draft law aims to smooth the financial and bureaucratic burden for small and medium businesses. Along with a number of other shake-ups relating to employee-company involvement and bureaucratic processes, there is the promotion of a new enterprise ethos requirement for companies.

The aim is “to have companies that have the kidneys strong enough to innovate and export,” and to have employees “more involved in the march of companies,” Le Maire has said.

The most contentious aspect of the draft law, however, has been the article pertaining to free up €10 billion to fund an expansive business innovation project. This requires the privatisation, among others, of Aéroport de Paris (ADP), the company responsible for the commercial operation of Roissy and Orly airports. In order to make this sale of shares, the law which prevents the state from falling below 50% control in such companies must be changed.

“It is essential to redefine the place of the state in our economy. Do we wish for a State that contents itself with receiving dividends, or a state-strategist who prepares for the future?” Le Maire explained. “We will make these operations of disposals of assets as soon as the law is passed and the market conditions are met.”

Macron’s En Marche party dominate the national assembly, the lower house. As such the draft passed there on first reading in October, with 361 votes for, and only 84 against. It is the national assembly which will have the last word. In spite of this, in the Republican controlled senate, Bruno Retailleau, leader of the centre-right party, has baffled many by joining his forces with those of his traditional socialist adversaries in order to decry the Loi PACTE.

“I am a liberal, (but) I consider that to privatize a monopoly is to unduly give a financial income to the private sector.” Painting comparisons with the privatisation of highways, he said “We sold the family jewels, we made a coup, and then nothing (…) the privatisation of highways has not been a good thing.”

Currently, ADP generates about €160 million a year in revenue for the state. His argument circles around the idea that relinquishing this would apparently not be in the public interest, in spite of the large cash injection it would provide at a time when the country needs it most.

Le Maire responded that he believed the comparison to be a hasty false equivalency, and that they would not make “the same mistakes” as with the highways in 2006. He continued by saying that the government plans to maintain a higher degree of control over the situation by ensuring that “the regulatory framework will be stricter after this operation.” However, he said that it was not the role of the state “to manage hotels and luxury shops of the ADP group. This is not my conception of the state.”

It might seem bewildering that Bruno Retailleau and his party are opposed to such privatisation when one considers the historical actions of their political ancestors.

From 1981, the government of Jacques Chirac, father of the UMP, launched several actions of privatisation. These included the partial privatisation of Saint-Gobain, CGE, Havas, TF1 and Suez, as well as the Paribas banks, BTP, BIMP, CCF, and Société Générale. Additionally, his government sold the national telecom company (CGCT) and the Mutuelle Général Francais health insurance provider. Ultimately, this brought the state the equivalent of about 13 billion euros.

It was Chirac’s successor, leader of the UMP between 2004 to 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy who brought about the removal of the inheritance tax as well as the privatisation of the universities through the Law LRU. During his sitting presidency in 2007 the controversial politician gave financial autonomy to universities so that the government could set aside the heavy cost of supporting them. In spite of the unrest caused by this move, it was likely only the financial crisis that prevented the viability of further privatisation under the then centre-right government.

Yet more recently, candidate François Fillon of the 2016 presidential race ran as the economic liberal nominee. A man who throughout his career has openly pushed for the relaxation of corporate taxation in order to stimulate commercial investment. A Republican who sought the shrinking of the state and the opening up of the private sector.

When Mr Retailleau says “We will oppose the privatisation of the ADP,” it is almost as if he and his deputies oppose their own political vision and that of their predecessors. The centre-right in French politics has for a long time been understood by its adherence to economic liberalism. This ideology has arguably underpinned the centre-right’s identity since the founding of the fifth republic. The fact that Bruno Retailleau and his supporters seem to be abandoning this fundamental component of their party doctrine is an indication of how deeply their uncertainty runs, and it must, in part, be ascribed to the disruptive emergence of En Marche itself.

Without a clear sense of the position of Macron’s centre line government, the Republicans, seemingly startled, have dived left when they should have perhaps dived right. That is to say, if one assumes that maintaining authentic principles has already been abandoned altogether. At this stage, it would probably surprise very few people if Mr Retailleau were to come out and admit publicly that he too was confused by the disembodied socialist’s voice now producing itself from his throat.

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William Harrison is currently a doctoral student in global economics and international relations. His main fields of interest are new technologies, globalization, security and the environment.

Featured image: Bruno Le Maire (Source: Ambassade de France aux Emirats Arabes Unis)

Russia’s Nord Stream pipeline project is the most impressive of its kind – when completed to be the world’s longest underwater pipeline.

It’ll be able to deliver 55 billion cubic meters of natural gas from beneath the Baltic Sea, its capacity to be doubled by an additional line.

The project is scheduled for completion by late 2019, construction cost an estimated 9.5 billion euros.

The pipeline will traverse the territorial waters of Russia, Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Germany.

Russia’s Gazprom’s European partners include France’s Engie, Austria’s OMV AG, Germany’s Uniper and Wintershall, along with Royal Dutch Shell. These companies are financing half the cost, Gazprom the remainder.

According to Gazprom’s CEO Alexey Miller, January 1, 2020 is the project’s expected startup date – Russian natural gas to flow to European buyers at 30% less cost than US liquefied natural gas (LNG).

The savings and proximity to European countries makes Russia their natural supplier. The Trump regime wants the project undermined, falsely claiming it jeopardizes European energy security and stability.

Polar opposite is true. It’ll be an economic and energy boon for countries benefitting from the pipeline.

Last year, the State Department threatened possible sanctions on companies involved in the project. At the time, German Vice Chancellor/former Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel called the threat “hostile to Berlin’s interests,” adding:

It “aggressively bind(s) US economic interests with issues of external policy.” Germany rejects US attempts to “push Russian gas from the European market” to sell its own. EU nations often talk tough, then yield to US dominance, harming their own interests.

On Monday, the White House threatened to impose sanctions on European companies involved in Nord Stream 2 construction through Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) amendments.

The measure imposed sanctions on Russia, Iran and North Korea – overwhelmingly adopted by House and Senate members, three representatives and two senators alone opposing it in 2017.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Brussels and economic powerhouse Germany have strongly supported the project all along, intending to assure its successful completion – defying the Trump regime if hold firm.

Separately, the European Parliament adopted a non-binding resolution, expressing opposition to Nord Stream by a vote of 402 MEPs for stoppage, 163 supporting it, another 83 abstaining.

The measure came weeks after EU officials endorsed compromise amendments, extending EU pipeline regulations to and from bloc countries to non-member-states, including for Russian natural gas to European markets through Nord Stream.

Commenting on possible US sanctions on companies involved in its construction, Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov slammed the Trump regime as follows, saying:

“The hostile and un-competitive attitude of the US to this exclusively economic project is well-known. This is not news, “ adding:

“We are aware that we’re dealing with attempts at unprincipled competition, and sometimes using actions that amount to racketeering or asset-grabbing (in) the international arena.”

A Uniper statement expressed concern about continued project financing based on the threat of US sanctions, adding:

“We are currently operating under the specific guidance of the OFAC (the US Office of Foreign Assets Control). The financing of the project (was contractually agreed on) before any sanctions legislation (was enacted) in the US.”

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee chairwoman Lisa Murkowski said no legislation is currently being considered to sanction companies involved in Nord Stream construction.

The US seeks a competitive advantage over all other countries – notably Russia and China, its main adversaries, wanting them marginalized.

That’s what the Sino/US trade war and Trump regime efforts to undermine Nord Stream 2 are all about.

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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.

What newcomer to the US House of Representatives, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Mn) may not have fully realized  is that her critique of Israel influence on American politics would open a door that has previously been hermetically sealed as the third rail of American politics.  

With its influence carefully concealed behind decades of deceptions, lies and ruthless intimidation and representing a mere 2.1% of the population spread across nine states, AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and its supporters are like any school yard bully when confronted with a higher ethical authority.  They throw down the race card, an archaic accusation of anti-semitism intended to play on a misguided empathy that is no longer effective when confronted with words that speak truth to power.

Rep. Omar first came to our attention during a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting with an elegant takedown of convicted felon and neo-con purveyor of brutal atrocities Elliot Abrams. Abrams is currently President Trump’s point man on plotting future military action in Venezuela.

From there, the controversies around Rep. Omar have whirled with comments purported to be anti-Semitic such as:

“It’s all about the Benjamins Baby.”

“Israel has hypnotized the world; may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel”

Before that uproar had died down, she added

“I want to talk about political influence in this country that says it is ok for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.  Why is it ok for me to talk about the influence of the NRA, the fossil fuel industry or Big Pharma and not talk about a powerful lobbying group that is influencing policy?”

Bullies in American politics since 1948, the outrage, the denials and the hypocrisy came fast and furious with the usual anti-Semitic card being played and the ‘dual loyalty’ defense as if any one ethnicity or organization is entitled to special accommodating consideration by virtue of ….what exactly?

Rep. Ted Deutch (D-Fl) responded with a question to Omar that

“Jews have dual loyalty and can’t be patriotic members in the country in which they live?”

As an elected Member of the US House of Representatives, Rep. Deutch has an official, legal Constitutional responsibility that his sole and unquestionable loyalty is to the United States.    Mr. Deutch’s  ‘..in the country in which they live’ is dismissive and a less than overwhelming commitment to the land of one’s birth which happens to be his employer.

Of special concern is whether any AIPAC Congressional supporters possess a security clearance.   If so, that clearance, where appropriate, needs to be revoked immediately and if those supporters cannot solely represent the United States with the utmost devotion and independence, they should resign.

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathon Greenblatt explained on March 4^th that

“Sometimes referred to as the dual loyalty charge, it alleges that Jews should be suspected of being disloyal neighbors or citizens because their true allegiance is to their co-religionists around the world or to a secret and immoral jewish agenda.”

Mr. Greenblatt takes it even further by contradicting himself in eschewing the dual loyalty meme and then confessing that ‘their true allegiance’ is to another country.

Meanwhile, on March 3^rd, Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY) tweeted that

“No member of Congress is asked to swear allegiance to another country. Throughout history, Jews have been accused of dual loyalty, leading to discrimination and violence.”    

It is alleged that to raise the issue of dual loyalty is anti-semitic yet both Rep. Deutch and Mr. Greenblatt admit it as all three raised the dual loyalty issue independently as if believing there is an entitlement right to dual loyalty to another country.   They do not have that right any more than I have a right to claim dual loyalty to Scotland.

As a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and its Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, Rep. Omar is not only correct but, in fact, is obliged to act as an elected Member of the House to question the double standard of exactly who is a loyal, true blue American for discussion and debate especially in the context of Article 6of the United States Constitution known as the Oath Clause:

“The Senators and Representatives and the members of several state legislatures  and all executive and judicial officers, both of the US and of the several states  shall be bound by oath or affirmation to support this Constitution…”

While the Founding Fathers did not specify in Article VI that any elected member of Congress should not ‘be bound…’ to another country, any Court in the land will validate that Constitutional intent was that loyalty ‘be bound by oath or affirmation’ solely to the United States.

According to Supreme Court Associate Justice Joseph Story (1812-1845) that those sworn in were  “conscientiously bound to refrain from all acts inconsistent”.  During the American Revolution, General George Washington required all officers to subscribe to an oath renouncing any allegiance to King George III and pledging their fidelity to the United States.

In other words, under Article 6 there is no allowance for dual loyalty which would have been considered treasonous in the country’s earliest days and some would consider it treasonous today.

Thankfully, not a shrinking violet when it comes to politics, Rep. Omar responded with “I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress.”

In other words, Rep. Omar is confirming that she has been approached to pledge support since AIPAC’s demand that every single Member of Congress sign a loyalty statement to Israel has been privately reported and is common knowledge although the MSM pretend to be unaware.

In addition, former Representative Cynthia McKinney who served twelve years in the House of Representatives related her experience with the pro Israel lobby when she supported the Palestinian people, refused to support military policy as it would benefit Israel or sign the AIPAC loyalty pledge.   Instead, her Congressional District boundaries were realigned and she earned a primary opponent who ultimately defeated her.

AIPAC’s stated purpose is to lobby Congress on issues and legislation related to Israel but that they ‘do not rate or endorse candidates for election or appointed office or directly contribute’ to a campaign.  Who do they think they are kidding?   AIPAC dodges registering with the FEC by the use of shell organizations and by requiring its members to join its Congressional Club and donate to the campaigns of certain members of Congress in order to receive exclusive membership benefits.  They also annually sponsor free round trip visits to Israel for Members of Congress otherwise known as junkets.

It is a curiosity that AIPAC, the American Israel Political Affairs Committee alleges that it is not a political action committee even as it provided $3.5 million in campaign contributions in 2018.  According to the Center for Responsive Politics, AIPAC has not registered its financial activities with the Federal Election Commission as if they have special entitlement.

The backstory is that in 1990, unanimous FEC decision cleared AIPAC from charges of coordinating campaign contributions with 27 other pro Israel PACs since acting in collusion is barred by Federal law.  Despite ‘similarities in campaign contributions’ and an overlap of membership and shared officers,  FEC General Counsel Lawrence Noble reached a finding of ‘insufficient evidence’ to require AIPAC to adhere to US election law.

To date, AIPAC is not registered with the FEC as a Political Action Committee nor is it registered with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent representing the interests of a foreign country.

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Renee Parsons has been a member of the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist at Friends of the Earth and staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31.   

Lobbies, powerful interests and financial matters are usually the first things that come to mind when the aircraft industry is considered.  Safety, while deemed of foremost importance, is a superficial formality, sometimes observed in the breach.  To see the camera footage of the wreckage from the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 was to be shocked by a certain irony: cameras was found lingering over an inflight safety cards on what to do in the event of an emergency.  For those on board that doomed flight, it was irrelevant.

The deaths of all 157 individuals on board the flight en route to Nairobi from Addis Ababa on Sunday might have caused a flurry of panicked responses.  There had been a similar disaster in Indonesia last year when Lion Air’s flight JT610 crashed killing 189 people.  Two is too many, but the response to the disasters was initially lethargic.   

Concern seemed to centre on the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), deemed vital to prevent the aircraft from stalling.  Sensors within the MCAS might, according to accident investigator Geoffrey Dell, have sent “spurious signals to the flight management computers and resulting in the autopilot automatically pushing the nose of the aircraft down”.  If so, then the ability to manually counter those actions, a safety design feature of previous aircraft autopilots, would have to be questioned.  Troubling Dell was another question: why did the pilots fail to disconnect the autopilot when it played up?  Ditto the auto throttle system itself. 

When it comes to safety in the aviation industry, powerful players tend to monetise rather than humanise their passengers.  A company like Boeing is seen as much as a patriot of the US defence industry as a producer of passenger aircraft. The company’s presence in Washington is multiple and vast, characterised by the buzzing activity of some two dozen in-house lobbyists and twenty lobbying firms. Lobbyists such as John Keast, a former principal at Cornerstone Government Affairs, have links with lawmakers such as Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi nurtured since the days he was chief of staff.  Wicker spokeswoman Brianna Manzelli was, however, keen to narrow that influence supposedly wielded by Keast in a statement made to CNN. 

“While at Cornerstone Government Affairs, John Keast lobbied for a variety of clients including Boeing on defence issues only.”

Such combined lobbying efforts cost $15 million last year alone, which makes Boeing’s contribution relatively small to trade groups, but significant in terms of outdoing such competitors as Lockheed Martin.  Added to the fact that CEO Dennis Muilenburg has an open channel to the White House, the campaign favouring the Max 8’s continued, and unmolested operation, was hitting gear.  A Tuesday call made by the executive to Trump after the president’s tweet on the dangers posed by complex systems suggested some serious pull.

For a time, it seemed that the lobby was doing its customary black magic, and winning, attempting to douse fires being made by the likes of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA Union calling for a temporary grounding of the Max 8.  Certain pilots had noticed control issues while operating the Max 8 over US airspace. 

Boeing initially convinced the Federal Aviation Administration, which failed to note in a surly statement from Acting FAA administrator Daniel K. Elwell any “systematic performance issues” worthy of grounding the model.

  “Nor have other civil aviation authorities provided data to us that would warrant action.  In the course of our urgent review of data on the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash, if any issues affecting the continued airworthiness of the aircraft are identified, the FAA will take immediate and appropriate action.”

This statement stood in stark contrast to that of the Civil Aviation Authority of Thailand.

“Currently, there is no clear indication for the actual cause of accidents in Indonesia & Ethiopia, and no evident risk management measures or any mechanism to ensure the safety of 737 Max 9 aircraft from the aircraft manufacturer.” 

The lobby’s traction has gradually slowed on the Hill, and its tittering has, at least for the moment, started to lose conviction.  Calls started to come from lawmakers that the 737 model needed to be looked at.  Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) suggested grounding the aircraft as a “prudent” measure. “Further investigation may reveal that mechanical issues were not the cause, but until that time, our first priority must be the safety of the flying public.” Democratic senators Edward Markey (D-MA) and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) were also itching to convince the FAA to ground the Max 8 “until the agency can conclusively determine that the aircraft be operated safely.”

Other lawmakers, ever mindful of Boeing’s influence in their states, preferred to leave the regulators to their task.  Till then, the planes would be permitted to continue taking to the skies.  “Right now,” cautioned Rep. Rick Larsen (D-Wash.), chair of the subcommittee overseeing aviation and a political voice for a state hosting an important Boeing facility, “the important thing is that relevant agencies are allowed to conduct a thorough and careful investigation.”  

It was President Donald Trump who ultimately decided to reverse the earlier decision by regulators permitting the aircraft to continue flying.  The emergency order put the US in step with safety regulators in 42 other countries.

“I didn’t want to take any chances,” explained Trump.  But ever mindful of Boeing’s shadowy hold, the president added a qualifying note. “We could have delayed it.  We maybe didn’t have to make it at all.  But I felt it was important both psychologically and in a lot of other ways.”

The FAA’s continued “data gathering”, previously deemed insufficient to warrant a grounding despite the quick response in other countries, had led to the opposite conclusion.  This included “newly refined satellite data available to the FAA”.  But Elwell was unwilling to eat anything resembling humble pie. “Since this accident occurred we were resolute that we would not take action until we had data.  That data coalesced today.”  A coalescence demonstrating, in more concrete terms, how safety, while important, tends to lag in the broader considerations of profit and operation in the aviation industry. 

Watch the video below, preview of the investigation where Al Jazeera interviewed the manager of the Boeing 787 programme, Larry Loftis.

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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]

The armed conflict between the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and Serbian forces started in 1992 with the KLA attacks on Serbian police officers, non-Albanians that lived in Kosovo and Albanians loyal to Serbia (Johnstone, 2002; Kozyris, 1999).  This low level conflict escalated in 1996 with the KLA attacking refugee camps as well as other civilians and policemen resulting in dozens of innocent deaths (Johnstone, 2002; Kozyris, 1999).  At this point of time and all up to late 1998, the KLA was regarded as a terrorist organisation (Gelbard, cited in Parenti, 2000:99; Jatras, 2002; Johnstone, 2002; Kepruner, 2003; Rubin, cited in BBC, -). 

Following the collapse of communism in Albania and this country falling into anarchy, many army storage facilities were ransacked and truckloads of weapons were smuggled into neighbouring Kosovo.  Increased criminal activities such as drugs and people trafficking as well as compulsory taxing of Albanians working abroad also provided funding for the KLA (Antic, 1999; Jatras, 2002). 

Increased KLA terrorist activities were met with a harsh response by the Serbian police and army resulting in some civilian deaths and displacement.  Consequent UN resolutions 1160, 1199 and 1203 as well as the Holbrook-Milosevic agreement in 1998 (Littman, 1999) demanded Serbian forces reduce in numbers and withdrawal to pre-conflict positions.  Serbian government complied with most of these demands, but the demands were not met fully because of several reasons. The KLA was not disarmed and did not comply with resolutions and increased their terrorist activities. The KLA was constantly provoking Serbian forces, purposely endangering civilians (Thaci, cited in BBC, -) as they knew that “the more civilians were killed, the chances of international interventions were bigger…” (Gorani, cited in BBC, -). 

Albright and KLA leader Hashim Thaci

They also re-occupied positions Serbian forces were previously holding and at some points of time controlled up to 40 % of Kosovo territory.  The KLA was re-enforced by hundreds of mercenaries and mujahideens, and started receiving support from the CIA, DIA, MI6 and German Intelligence BND (Bowman, 1999: 8; Marsden, 1999; Chossudovsky, 2001; GN TV, 2005: 1; WSWS 1999). 

Hashim Thaci and Madeleine Albright, 1998

The KLA was also supported by Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (Chossudovsky, 2001; Deliso, 2001; GN TV, 2005: 1; Johnstone, 2002:11).  Even though the KLA did not comply with UN resolutions and the Holbrook-Milosevic agreement, and it was responsible for most breaches of ceasefire (Robertson, cited in Chomsky, 2004: 56) there was a significant reduction in hostilities and almost all refugees returned to their places of living (Bowman, 1999; Littman, 1999).   

The most significant event occurred on January 15, 1999 with the alleged Racak massacre which was wrongly but consciously attributed to Serbian forces by William Walker, the head of the Kosovo Verification Mission who was previously involved in the cover up of atrocities in El Salvador (Bowman, 1999; Berliner Zeitung, cited in Free Republic, 2000; Chomsky, 2004: 56; Fleming, 1999; Gowans, 2001; Johnstone, 2002:239; Parenti, 2000:104; Wilcoxson, 2006). 

Allegations that Serbian forces massacred 45 innocent men, women and children were dismissed by Serbian, Belarus and Finnish forensic experts who found that these people have not been massacred or killed from close range as well as that most of them had traces of gunpowder residue on their hands, confirming that they actually were KLA fighters. 

The reports also state there was only one woman and one adolescent boy among the dead as well as that only one person was possibly but not explicitly shot from a close range (Berliner Zeitung, cited in Free Republic, 2000; Fleming, 1999; Johnstone, 2002).  Even though this was a crucial document, the report was not made public immediately (Berliner Zeitung, cited in Free Republic, 2000; Johnson, 2002). 

This was followed by Rambouillet negotiations, which was actually an ultimatum, that the Yugoslav government, or any other government, could not accept (Bennis, 2004: 240-241; Fraser, cited in SBS, 2000; Johnson, 2002: 245-247; Littman, 1999; Miller, 2003: 243; Muller, 1999; Parenti, 2000: 108-114; Pugh, 2001; Trifkovic, 1999).  After this the Kosovo Verification Mission was withdrawn and NATO humanitarian intervention or rather aggression began and lasted 78 days.

Numerous scholars (Mertus, 1999; Muenzel, 1999; Power, 2003; Stephen 2004; Urquhart, 2002; Williams, 2003; Young, 2003 and others), International Commission on Kosovo (cited in Neier, 2001:34) and politicians, especially those coming from the NATO countries, who advocate that NATO intervention is justified on the grounds of preventing ethnic cleansing, genocide and even new holocaust as well as securing peace and stability in the region.  They base their arguments on the United Nations Chapter VII, the humanitarian international law and the Universal Declaration of Human rights.  Falk (cited in Chossudovsky, 2003:1) states that:

 The Kosovo War was a just war because it was undertaken to avoid likely instance of “ethnic cleansing” undertaken by the Serb leadership of former Yugoslavia… It was a just war despite being illegally undertaken without authorization by the United Nations, and despite being waged in a manner that unduly caused Kosovar and Serbian civilian casualties while minimizing the risk of death or injury on the NATO side.

However, many other scholars advocate and demonstrate NATO intervention was illegal and unnecessary.  According to William Rockler (cited in Chossudovsky, 2003:1), former prosecutor of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal: 

The [1999] bombing war violates and shreds the basic provisions of the United Nations Charter and other conventions and treaties; the attack on Yugoslavia constitutes the most brazen international aggression since the Nazis attacked Poland to prevent “Polish atrocities” against Germans. The United States has discarded pretensions to international legality and decency, and embarked on a course of raw imperialism run amok.

The NATO intervention was illegal as NATO action was unilateral, avoided Security Council and therefore it was in violation of several provisions of the UN Charter, specifically Article 2 (3), Article 2 (4) and Article 53 as well as it breached NATO Charter First Article (Bisset, 2002).  The Rambouillet negotiations also breached Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969) Section 2: Invalidity of Treaties Article 51 and Article 51 (Hatchett, 1999).

NATO officials insisted that this is a humanitarian intervention, but Lt. Gen. Mike Short, Commander of Allied Forces, admitted that NATO intervention was actually a war against Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (BBC, -):

 I certainly acknowledge that there were people within Allied that felt we weren’t at war, but as commander … in my mind I was at war and people under my control were, and that’s how we had to do our business…

As this was an undeclared war, it also breached Constitutions of NATO countries involved and Geneva Convention Article 52.2.  NATO breached this Article numerous times and committed war crimes by bombing schools, hospitals, TV and radio installations, bridges, factories, civilian suburbs of many cities, water treatment and electricity facilities, and deliberately targeting civilians such as in the case of Grdelica train and convoy of Albanian refugees near Djakovica when 75-100 refugees were killed (Bennis, 2004; Savich, 2007; Shen, 1999). Additionally, Captain Adolfo Luis Martin de la Hoz (cited in Morales, 1999), Spanish pilot engaged in NATO aggression, admitted that NATO was deliberately targeting the civilian population. According to the BBC (-) this was decided by Havier Solana and Gen. Klaus Nauman without consulting other NATO countries.  Hayden (1999) states that this was a deliberate act:

The Wall Street Journal reported on April 27 that NATO had decided to attack “political, rather than just military, targets in Serbia.” On April 25, the Washington Times reported that NATO planned to hit “power generation plants and water systems, taking the war directly to civilians.”

NATO also breached the Geneva Convention trying to assassinate President Milosevic by bombing his private residence (Guardian, 1999; Malic, 2003) as well as bombing the Chinese embassy.

Moreover, Littman (1999: 8) states

“It cannot be said that the use of force is necessary unless it can be clearly demonstrated that all measures short of force (and in particular measures of diplomacy) have been exhausted.” 

The Rambouillet negotiations fall very short of Littman’s statement.  The Yugoslav government accepted all political provisions of the agreement and was ready to negotiate on the military part of the agreement.  However, NATO’s ‘Appendix B’ of the agreement was presented to the Yugoslav delegation one day before the final date as a non-negotiable agreement.  This meant NATO de-facto occupation of Yugoslavia and therefore could not be accepted, however the Yugoslav government was ready to further negotiate military proposals.  To prove this, Yugoslav officials (23 February 1999) as well as the Serbian Assembly resolution (23 March 1999) declared that Yugoslavia would accept international force under the UN command (Littman, 1999).  However, NATO demanded full compliance with the military part of the Rambouillet agreement and according to senior US State Department official (Kenney, cited in Hatchett, 1999:1) “the United States ‘deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.’ The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason.”  Dr Kissinger (cited in Littman, 2004:5) clearly states that:

 The Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.  Rambouillet is not a document that an angelic Serb could have accepted.  It was a terrible diplomatic document that should never have been presented in that form.

Furthermore, many scholars and politicians regarded Serbs as perpetrators engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide.  Certainly, there were atrocities including murder, looting and taking revenge on innocent civilians committed by Serbian paratroops and petty criminals. However, these atrocities were not supported by the Yugoslav government and were nothing even close to what NATO and media were reporting (Johnstone, 2002; Mitchell, 1999; Parenti, 2000).  The UN Secretary General reported to the UN on 17 March 1999 that situation in Kosovo is characterised by constant and persistent KLA attacks and disproportionate use of force by Yugoslav authorities (Littman, 2004).  Kosovo Verification Mission report also states that during the period (Littman, 2004:5) …

22 January and 22 March 1999, passed on by NATO to the UN, show that in this period the total fatalities were 27 for the Serbs and 30 for the Kosovo Albanians. Another estimate puts the total Albanian fatalities over five months from 16 October 1998 to 20 March 1999) at 46; an average of 2 a week. By contrast, in 11 weeks of the NATO war from 25 March 1999 to 10 June 1999 NATO killed 1500 civilians and wounded 8000.  This is an average of 136 deaths a week and 30 times as many deaths as the total prior to the war.

Prior to the NATO intervention there were approximately 100,000 refugees on all sides, however after the bombing started this number very quickly escalated to more than 800,000 with 100,000 Serbians, Albanians and others moving into Central Serbia. The question here is did Serbs ethnically ‘cleanse’ their own people from Kosovo?  The simple truth is most of the refugees left because of the NATO bombing and increased fighting between the KLA and Serb forces.  Lt. Gen. Satish Nambier (1999:2), the Force Commander and Head of Mission of the United Nations Forces in the former Yugoslavia, also acknowledges that there was no intention by Yugoslavs to ethnically cleanse Kosovo.  Similarly, Lord Carrington (cited in Littman, 2004:8) declared that:

I think what NATO did by bombing Serbia actually precipitated the exodus of the Kosovo Albanians into Macedonia and Montenegro.  I think the bombing did cause the ethnic cleansing… NATO’s action in Kosovo was mistaken… what we did made things much worse.

The testimony of Jacques Prod’homme (cited in Rouleau, 1999), a French member of the OSCE observer mission about period before NATO intervention “during which he moved freely throughout the Pec region, neither he nor his colleagues observed anything that could be described as systematic persecution, either collective or individual murders, burning of houses or deportations.”

Also, there were reports that Serbian forces had plans to clear entire Kosovo of Albanian population by engaging in ‘Operation Horseshoe’ which later proved to be German Intelligence propaganda (Littman, 2004; WSWS, 1999).  Other allegations of mass murder of Kosovo Albanians include the US State Department Ambassador Scheffer’s claims (cited in Parenti, 2000) that up to 225,000 Kosovo Albanians aged 14 to 59 were not unaccounted as well as British Foreign Office Minister Hoon claim that in more than 100 massacres more than 10,000 people were killed by Serbian forces.  Also, there were allegations that Serbian forces used Trepca mineshafts to dispose bodies of killed Albanians as well burning Albanian bodies in furnaces. 

All these allegations were later dismissed as nonsense and NATO propaganda by FBI, French and Spanish forensic experts (Parenti, 2000).  The Wall Street journal (cited in Parenti, 2000) reported that by November 1999 about 2,100 bodies were found and these include those killed by Serbian forces, the KLA, NATO bombs and those who died of natural causes.  In fact one of the largest mass graves, found near town of Malisevo, contained 24 Serb and non-Albanian bodies mutilated by the KLA (BBC, CNN, Reuters, cited in ERP KIM, 2005)

Finally, the human, economic and environmental costs of NATO aggression were enormous.  The total estimate of human losses in FR Yugoslavia, excluding Kosovo, is 2500 with 557 civilians killed and 12,500 wounded (Dedeic, 2007).  The total economic costs include £2.5bn direct NATO costs (BBC, 1999) and somewhere between $30 billion and $100 billion costs to Yugoslav devastated economy and infrastructure (Dedeic, 2007). 

Environmental costs are not possible to estimate.  For instance, NATO planes deliberately targeted chemical complexes in Pancevo causing approximately 100,000 tonnes of highly toxic and cancerogenic chemicals and 8 tonnes of mercury contaminating the air, soil, underground waters as well as the largest river Danube (Djuric, 2005).  In Novi Sad, NATO destroyed 150 oil tanks causing more than 120,000 tonnes of oil derivates burning for days and spilling into underground waters and Danube.  In Kragujevac and Bor NATO destroyed electricity sub-stations causing more than 50 tonnes of highly toxic dioxin contaminate large areas (Djuric, 2005).  In Kosovo and Southern Serbia several areas were repeatedly bombarded with ammunitions containing depleted uranium.  Some estimates suggest that more than 10 tonnes of depleted uranium was dumped onto Yugoslavia.  Srbljak reported in early 2005 (cited in Djuric, 2005:4) that the rate of people suffering from cancers of lung, bones, liver and other organs were in some parts of Kosovo up 120 times higher than in the same period in 2004.

Overall, NATO ‘humanitarian’ intervention was not at all about humanitarian issues.  This was an illegal aggression and an undeclared war against sovereign state of Yugoslavia and violation of the UN Charter and Geneva Convention.  NATO intervention caused much greater suffering of all civilians, it devastated environment of Yugoslavia and surrounding countries as well as Yugoslav economy and infrastructure.  It also increased antagonism between Kosovo Albanians and Serbs and other non-Albanians minimising chances of coexistence.  This was proved by the exodus of 250,000 refugees after NATO occupied Kosovo and Albanian refugees and the KLA returned to Kosovo.  It also caused radical Muslim ideas spreading into other parts of former Yugoslavia and further destabilising Sandzak, Southern Serbia and Macedonia.  Russia also became concerned with NATO’s action and it increased their military spending thus re-starting arm race.

The actual reasons for NATO aggression are hard to establish.  Many authors believe that this intervention was about establishing a new role and the credibility of NATO in the post-Cold War era.  Others see this as the result of US imperialism and hegemony as well as economic expansion as Fleming (1999) states “one way to open the market is to concur it”.  Some authors also believe that this is a part of the US strategic expansionism towards the East, which involved decade’s long fight against communism and attempts to minimise Russian influence in the world.  Yugoslavia was the only country in Europe that was at the time still under communist rule and therefore under Russian influence. 

There are certainly those who genuinely believe that NATO intervention was done because of a just cause, thus attempting to prevent humanitarian catastrophe in the middle of Europe.  However, their understanding of the whole situation was distorted by the KLA/NATO sophisticated propaganda, media frenzy and the lack of full understanding of the situation on the ground.     

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Sources

Antic, O.  1999.  “Kosovar Independence”: Muenzel’s Biased Pro-Greater Albania Approach.  Retrieved on 30.03.2007 from: http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/antic.htm 

BBC.  – .  Exact date and tittle of the TV documentary unknown. (TV documentary about Rambouillet negotiations and NATO intervention in Kosovo) 

BBC News.  1999. World: Europe Kosovo war cost £30bn.  Retrieved on 02.04.2007 from:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/europewide_debate/329370.stm 

Beloni, R.  2002.  Kosovo and beyond: Is humanitarian intervention transforming international society?  Retrieved on 25.03.2007 from: http://www.du.edu/gsis/hrhw/volumes/2002/2-1/belloni2-1.pdf 

Bennis, P.  2004.  Calling the shots: How Washington dominates today’s UN.  Arriss Books, Gloucestershire. 

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Hatchett, R.L.  1999.  Serbs had little choice: Kosovo peace accord not what we think.  Retrieved on 01.04.2007 from:http://www.srpska-mreza.com/Kosovo/NATO-attack/Rambouillet.html 

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Largely by voice vote on Tuesday, House members passed four anti-Russia measures, continuing US war on the country by other means.

One bill targeted Vladimir Putin over the February 2015 killing of opposition figure Boris Nemtsov – lethally shot multiple times in central Moscow, an incident Russia’s leader had nothing to do with, nor any other Kremlin official.

The killing was strategically timed – ahead of a Vesna (Russian Spring anti-government) opposition march, used as a Nemtsov memorial march, falsely portraying him as a martyr.

At the time, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said

“Putin has stressed that this brutal murder has all (the) signs of a contract murder and is extremely provocative.”

“The president has expressed his deep condolences to the family of tragically deceased Nemtsov.”

He was a Western financed self-serving opportunist. His killing had all the earmarks of a US-staged false flag. Cui bono is most important.

Clearly Putin had nothing to gain. Rogue US elements had lots to benefit from trying to destabilize Russia.

If Putin wanted Nemtsov dead, it’s inconceivable he’d order a Mafia-style contract killing. Lethally shooting him in central Moscow clearly ruled out Kremlin involvement. No evidence suggested a state-sponsored assassination.

Nemtsov’s death was and remains more valuable to Washington than using him alive as an impotent opposition figure with less than 5% public support when killed.

Ahead of Tuesday’s House vote, Russophobic House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engel turned truth on its head saying the following:

“It’s been four years since his death, but there’s been no proper investigation of his assassination (sic) and the cover-up and zero accountability for those responsible (sic). That’s certainly an outrage,” adding:

“This resolution condemns the Kremlin’s systematic targeting of its political opponents (sic) and calls on the administration to impose sanctions on those responsible for Nemtsov’s murder and cover-up (sic).”

Following an investigation by authorities, five Russian nationals were charged with Nemtzov’s murder.

Three other measures passed on Tuesday, largely by voice vote, showing near-unanimous anti-Russia hostility on Capitol Hill.

The Crimea Annexation (sic) Non-Recognition Act bans US recognition of Crimea as Russian territory.

The Vladimir Putin Transparency Act calls for the US intelligence community to determine and expose so-called “key networks” used by Russia’s president to strengthen political control (sic) and weaken democratic states (sic).

The Keeping Russian Entrapments Minimal and Limiting Intelligence Networks (Kremlin) Act requires the US director of national intelligence (DNI) to inform Congress of Moscow’s malign intent (sic) against the US and other NATO countries.

It also calls for determining potential Russian responses to expanded US/NATO involvement in Eastern Europe, along with identifying areas of Kremlin weakness to use against its ruling authorities.

Senate members will likely adopt similar anti-Russia measures. They follow multiple rounds of US sanctions on the country and July 2017 Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act.

Targeting Russia, Iran and North Korea, it passed both houses with only five of 535 members casting dissenting votes, signed into law by Trump.

It called for expanding unilateral sanctions on these countries, imposed illegally for political reasons, unrelated to so-called “malign activities” – part of Washington’s hostile imperial agenda.

Responding to the House measures, Dmitry Peskov said the following:

“Such bills can only have an adverse effect (on bilateral relations). This very unfriendly, rampant anti-Russian sentiment line continues,” adding:

“This is a continuation of this emotional exaltation. Therefore, we do not expect any kind of sober-minded assessment from US legislators now.”

Congress is “strongly influenced by these emotions, which prevent them from assessing the situation soberly and show at least some kind of political will to take actions, which we believe would meet the two countries’ interests best of all.”

He expects anti-Russia sentiment to intensify ahead of US November 2020 presidential, congressional, and state elections.

A Final Comment

On Wednesday, five Republican and undemocratic Dem senators introduced the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression (DASKA)” Act.

Called the “sanctions bill from hell,” it targets Russia’s banking and energy sectors, along with its foreign debt and more, aiming to weaken its economy.

It falsely calls the Russian Federation a “state sponsor of terrorism” – the designation applicable to the US, NATO, Israel, and their imperial partners, not Moscow.

A statement by co-sponsors Bob Menendez, Lindsey Graham, Cory Gardner, Ben Cardin, and Jeanne Shaheen said the following in part:

The measure “seeks to increase economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on the Russian Federation in response to Russia’s interference in democratic processes abroad (sic), malign influence in Syria (sic), and aggression against Ukraine (sic), including in the Kerch Strait (sic).

It calls for sanctions on Russian banks, its energy and cyber sectors, investments in its foreign LNG projects (targeting Nord Stream 2 pipeline construction investors), its foreign debt, shipbuilding sector, as well as key political and private figures.

Its other provisions call for intensified hostile actions against Russia. A similar measure failed to pass last year.

This one is more likely to be adopted by both houses overwhelmingly and signed into law by Trump.

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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: Russian President Vladimir Putin By Harold Escalona/shutterstock And President Trump By Drop of Light/Shutterstock

Various studies done within Indian prisons have concluded that a majority of prisoners are Adivasis, Dalits or from other marginalised communities that are being criminalised. Their social and economic situation makes them vulnerable, being unable to defend themselves legally and financially. This compilation aims to highlight the general issues related to Women Prisoners, the Structural Exclusions within the Prison, Analysing the Monitoring Process, Legal Aid, and Accountability of Jail Staff to procedures laid down in Jail manuals.

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Terms of Reference

• Conduct countrywide Public Hearings on Women Prisoners
• Analyse the conditions of Women Prisoners in different states of the Country when measured against National and International Standards
• Analyse the efficacy of monitoring mechanisms of jail conditions of Women in Prison

Status Report: Women Prisoners in India

In the year 2016, over three lakh women were arrested for crimes under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and Special and Local Laws (SLL). A large number of these women were reportedly arrested for crimes under the Prohibition Act, for cruelty by relatives of husband and rioting etc. The overall number of crimes by women has been relatively consistent over the past decade or so.[1] In Maharashtra, 1336 women occupied prisons in 2015[2].

Some relevant Facts and Figures

As per the most recent data available from the report Women in Prisons published by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Government of India, there are 4,19,623 persons in jails in India. Women constitute 4.3% of this figure, numbering a total of 17,834 women. These are the official figures. Of these, 66.8% (11,916) are under-trial prisoners.

In India, an analysis of prison statistics at five-year intervals reveals an increasing trend in the number of women prisoners – 3.3% of all prisoners in 2000, 3.9% in 2005, 4.1% in 2010 and 4.3% of prisoners in 2015 were women.

A majority of female inmates are in the age group of 30-50 years (50.5%), followed by 18-30 years (31.3%).Of the total 1,401 prisons in India, only 18 are exclusively for women, housing 2,985 female prisoners. Thus, a majority of women inmates are housed in women’s enclosures of general prisons.

Maharashtra

According to latest report from the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Maharashtra has a total 9 central jails with an authorised capacity of 452 women prisoners. However, they accommodate 722 prisoners. There are also 28 District jails with a capacity of 334 prisoners, but that actually accommodate 356 prisoners. The 100 sub-jails have an authorized capacity of 568 prisoners and house 8 prisoners, while one Special jail with an authorized capacity of 3 prisoners actually accommodates 6 prisoners.

There is one women’s jail with an authorized capacity of 262 prisoners, but houses 200 prisoners. There are also 13 open jails with an authorized capacity of 100 prisoners but house 44 prisoners. In all, Maharashtra has 154 jails with an authorized capacity of 1,719 women prisoners, but the actual number of inmates is 1,336.

International Rules and Standards governing the Rights of Prisoners

There are various International Rules and Standards governing the Rights of Prisoners. Following are the International Treaties, Rules and Standards directing the model prison conditions.

1. International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
2. Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
3. Standard Minimum Rules for treatment of Prisoners (Standard Minimum Rules)
4. Nelson Mandela Rules
5. Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons Under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment
6. Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners

• Both, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhumane or Degrading Treatment or Punishment prohibit torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment, without exception or derogation.
• The Standard Minimum Rules adopted by U.N. Economic and Social Council in 1957 are one of the most comprehensive sets of guidelines determining the rights of prisoners. They prescribe that the religious beliefs of the prisoner should be respected, prisoners should be provided with wholesome and well-prepared food at usual timings, that at least one qualified medical officer who also has knowledge of psychiatry should be present at every institution etc. There are some special provisions for women prisons like there should be special accommodation for all necessary pre-natal and post-natal care and treatment and where nursing infants are allowed to remain in the institution with their mothers, provision should be made for a nursery staffed by qualified persons.
• The Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any form of Detention or Imprisonment and the Basic Principles for the Treatment of Prisoners, both lay down general standards to treat prisoners with inherent dignity and value as human beings.

National Rules and Standards governing the Rights of Prisoners in India

The rules of incarceration in India are determined by following laws:

1. Indian Penal Code, 1860.
2. Prison Act, 1894.
3. Prisoners Act, 1900.
4. Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920.
5. Exchange of Prisoners Act, 1948.
6. Transfer of Prisoners Act, 1950.
7. Prisoner (Attendance in Court) Act, 1955.
8. Probation of Offenders Act, 1958.
9. Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
10.  Repatriation of Prisoners Act, 2003.
11. Model Prison Manual, 2003.
12. Model Prison Manual, 2016.

Earlier, because of the plethora of laws in the country, there was no uniformity in laws, or standards relating to prisons. Hence, the Ministry of Home Affairs brought in the Model Prison Manual aimed at ensuring some uniformity in laws relating to prisons. The Union Ministry of Home Affairs advised the State Governments/UT Administrations that in order to ensure basic uniformity in prison rules and regulations, all States and UTs should revise their existing Prison Manuals by adopting the provisions of the National Model Prison Manual, 2016.

Some of the important guidelines mentioned in Model Prison Manual 2016 published by Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India are:

1.  To ensure safety of woman prisoners there should be at least one women’s jail in each and every state.
2. Enclosures for women prisoners should have all the requisite facilities with reference to their special needs, such as pregnancy, child birth and family care, health care and rehabilitation etc.
3. Female prisoners should be granted equal access to work, vocational training and education as male prisoners.
4. A register shall/should be maintained in every place of imprisonment where the details regarding a woman prisoner’s identity, their reason for imprisonment, day, and hour of their admission and release and details of children of women prisoners shall be entered.
5. No male prisoner shall be permitted to enter the female ward of any prison at any time unless he has legitimate duty to attend therein. No male shall enter it at all by night except in an emergency, and even then only along with a female officer.
6. All staff assigned to work with women prisoners shall receive training relating to the gender specific needs and human rights of women including on sexual misconduct and discrimination.
7. Photographs, footprints, fingerprints, and measurements of women prisoners shall be done in the presence and with the assistance of women prison officers.
8. Daily visits and night inspection rounds shall be made by women prison officers.
9. Women prisoners shall be searched by women wardens and such searches shall not be conducted in the presence of any male.
10. On admission to prison, women prisoners shall be medically examined by a lady medical officer.
11. When a woman prisoner is found or suspected to be pregnant at the time of admission or later, the lady Medical Officer shall report the fact to the superintendent and send for gynaecological examination.
12. As far as possible, arrangements for temporary release will be made to enable a prisoner to deliver her child in hospital outside the prison. Births in prison shall be registered at the local birth registration office.
13. Children up to six years of age shall be admitted to prison with their mother if no other arrangements for keeping them with relatives or otherwise can be made. The children of women prisoners living in the prison shall be given proper education and recreational opportunities.
14. Adequate health facilities shall be provided to children of women prisoners. Pregnant women prisoners should be prescribed a special diet.
15. Every prisoner should receive food everyday at prescribed times, and according to the scale laid down.
16. Adequate clothing should be provided to women prisoners and their children.
17. Proper accommodation should be provided to women prisoners that shall meet basic requirements of health.
18. Every woman prisoner should be provided with the opportunity to access education, and recreational, cultural programmes, and vocational training should be organised for them.
19. To ensure access to justice for all, timely legal aid services should be provided to needy prisoners at State expenses as prescribed by the State government.
20. In a prison for convicted women prisoners, there shall be one post of a lady Superintendent.

Challenges faced by Women in Prisons

As discussed above, there are numerous clearly defined Rights of Prisoners. However, the implementation of most of the conditions is found missing in prisons today. The following are the major problems faced by women in prisons in the country, with special focus on Maharashtra.

Prison Staff

• There is a lack of female staff in prisons in the country. In Maharashtra the sanctioned number of jail staff was 5,064 in 2015, whereas only 3,976 people were employed in the jails, of which 713 were women.
• The lack of female staff in women prisons often leads to male staff becoming responsible for female inmates. This is highly undesirable since women inmates need gender-specific services that should be provided by female staff.

Sanitation and Hygiene

• Most jails are lacking in basic facilities of sanitation and hygiene. While the prescription in the Prison Manual is to ensure one toilet and one bathing cubicle for every 10 prisoners, this is rarely seen on the ground.
• There is a lack of sufficient water, which exacerbates the low levels of sanitation and hygiene, as against the minimum standard estimate of 135 liters per inmate by the Manual.
• In Byculla jail, 81 women inmates were hospitalized last year due to alleged food poisoning caused by the unhygienic environment in the prison. The women complained of nausea, vomiting and diarrhea.

Accommodation

• National and International Guidelines prescribe decent human living standards for prisoners. A specified size for cells and barracks in prison is prescribed in the National Prison Manual. Barracks are meant to ideally only house 20 prisoners and dormitories to house only four to six prisoners each.
• The Minimum Standards Rules further direct that dormitories should be carefully provided to people suitable to live with each other and windows where prisoners live or work shall be large enough to enable the prisoners to read or work by natural light.
• Over-crowding is one of the key problems plaguing the prisons in the country. The national average occupancy was reported at 114.4% in 2015. The effects of overcrowding often become even more pronounced in the case of women, as they are usually restricted to a smaller enclosure of the jail due to lack of proper infrastructure for them.
• In Maharashtra, however, over-crowding is not a problem, with the total capacity being 1719, occupied by 1336 women.

Health

• The right to health includes providing healthcare that is available, accessible, acceptable and of good quality. In many cases, female wards in hospitals and lady Medical Officers, especially gynecologists, are not available. Concerns of mental health are often not given adequate importance, and women suffering from mental illnesses are often housed in prisons due to lack of other appropriate facilities.
• A total of 51 deaths of women prisoners were reported in 2015, of which 48 deaths were considered to be of natural causes and three deaths occurred due to committing suicide. In Maharashtra, 4 deaths were due to natural causes.

Legal Aid

• As per the new National Prison Manual, State governments are to appoint jail-visiting advocates, set up legal aid clinics in every prison, and provide legal literacy classes in all prisons to ensure that prisoners have access to legal aid.
• Visits by members of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to various prisons have revealed that many prisons do not have a legal aid cell, and very few prisoners have accessed legal aid. States should ensure that District and State Legal Service Authorities are linked to prisons to provide free legal aid, and all prisoners should be made aware of their rights.

Violence

• Incidents of violence, including sexual violence by inmates and authorities, have been reported from across the country. However, official reports underestimate the prevalence of violence, because prisoners fear retaliation, as they are forced to stay in the same place as their perpetrators.
• In 2017, Manjula Shetye was allegedly beaten to death in Byculla jail by prison staff.[3]

Children

• Children up to the age of six are allowed to live with their mothers in prisons if no other arrangements for their care can be made. In Maharashtra, the total number of women with children is 82, and the total number of children is 88.
• As per a 2009 BPR&D report, proper facilities for biological, psychological and social growth of the child, crèche, and recreational facilities are not available in every prison. NHRC jail visits reveal that in many cases, other than a glass of milk, an adequate special diet for children is not always provided.

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Notes

[1] Women in Prisons Report published by Ministry of Women and Child Development, India in June 2018.

[2] NCRB’s Crime in India Statistics, 2015

Featured image is from CJP

A young woman picks up and compares juices in a store aisle. She’s 29. She spends 40 minutes on average shopping and likes orange juice. That’s not all: She usually spends 2,500 yen per visit to the store.

The Japanese startup Vaak’s software knows a lot about the woman in a white shirt.

Most importantly, it knows that there is only a 4 percent chance of her doing something such as shoplifting.

Vaak is one of a growing number of companies across the globe developing AI-powered surveillance technology that analyzes body language to judge whether someone is behaving in a suspicious manner. (The technology also has important applications for autonomous cars; those systems need to know, for instance, what the intent of someone standing on a street corner is.)

But many companies envision the products as a security tool. While nary a month goes by without some press account on a troubling aspect of facial recognition technology, there’s been far less attention paid to the type of artificial intelligence that Vaak is developing.

Vaak’s software works by analyzing in-store security camera footage. In a promotional video, the software can not only identify the 29-year-old juice lover, but zero in on a shifty character in a hoodie who may be contemplating shoplifting. A floating tag next to the suspicious man’s face identifies him as a 30-year-old who usually only spends 500 yen (about $5) in the store. A high-tech looking array of dots and lines shimmers across his frame as he peeks down an aisle; presumably it is measuring the man’s movements and looking for signs of nefarious intent: fidgeting, restlessness, and suspicious body behavior. After a quick glance to make sure the coast is clear, hoodie guy pockets a can of beer. Vaak clocks him as having an “86-percent” suspicious rate.

According to the Bloomberg article “These cameras can spot shoplifters even before they steal,” Vaak is testing its software in several locations in the Tokyo region. After a real-life theft during a practice run of the technology at a test store in nearby Yokohama, Vaak reportedly helped authorities arrest a shoplifter. The company’s founder, Ryo Tanaka, told Bloomberg about the breakthrough moment for the company:

“We took an important step closer to a society where crime can be prevented with AI.”

And Vaak is not the only one pursuing this type of body language profiling approach. Wrnch, a Canadian company, uses “synthetic” humans, similar to those that a videogame designer might create, to train the company’s system to recognize behaviors. In addition to Vaak and wrnch, companies in England and Israel, at least, are also working on similar technology.

At first glance, this approach appears different from the AI-based surveillance technology taken by facial recognition developers, who rely on massive data sets of photos of actual people, and which has received a torrent of criticism in recent months. (The American Civil Liberties Union found that Amazon’s Rekognition facial software disproportionately labeled minority members of the US Congress as being in a mug-shot database.)

But behavior recognition software may be no better in this regard. Just as a potentially racially biased facial recognition system could flag a person for police attention, could biased software deem someone moving in a “fidgety” manner as suspicious on dubious grounds?

Kind of all makes one want to go “Vaak.”

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Matt Field is an associate editor at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Before joining the Bulletin, he covered the White House, Congress, and presidential campaigns as a news producer for Japanese public television. He has also reported for print outlets in the Midwest and on the East Coast. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Featured image: A screenshot from a video on Vaak’s website. Credit: Vaak.

Advocates from public-health and environmental groups delivered more than 45,000 petition signatures to the Environmental Protection Agency today asking the agency to deny a proposal that would expand spraying antibiotics on citrus fields.

If that proposal is approved, citrus growers could spray more than 650,000 pounds of the antibiotic streptomycin on citrus fields every year to treat the bacteria that causes citrus greening disease. Streptomycin belongs to a class of antibiotics considered critically important to human health by the World Health Organization. By contrast, people in America only use 14,000 pounds of that antibiotic class each year.

“The more you use antibiotics, the greater the risk that bacteria resistant to the drugs will flourish and spread. The bottom line is that the potential problems created by spraying massive amounts of streptomycin on citrus fields could outweigh the original problem the EPA wants to solve,” said Matt Wellington, U.S. PIRG’s Stop the Overuse of Antibiotics campaign director.

Spraying antibiotics on citrus fields does not cure citrus greening disease or prevent its spread. If allowed, this would be the largest-ever use of a medically important antibiotic in plant agriculture in the United States. The EPA has not fully considered the consequences of this unprecedented antibiotic use, especially given its limited potential for success, as laid out in comments by the Center for Biological Diversity, Natural Resources Defense Council, Sierra Club and U.S. PIRG.

“Spraying orange and grapefruit trees with an antibiotic we use to treat human disease is a dangerously shortsighted idea,” said Emily Knobbe, EPA policy specialist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “In addition to increasing the risk of antibiotic resistance, the EPA’s own analysis indicates streptomycin could harm foraging mammals like rabbits and chipmunks.”

Recent research suggests that up to 162,000 Americans die each year from antibiotic-resistant infections. The World Health Organization ranked antibiotic resistance among the top 10 health threats in 2019. Overusing antibiotics in any setting fuels the spread of drug-resistant bacteria.

Antibiotics should be used as sparingly as possible and only when absolutely necessary. Spraying massive quantities of a medically important antibiotic on citrus fields doesn’t fit those requirements.

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While online audiences know YouTube comedian Joanna Hausmann from her videos making the case for regime change, her economist father has flown below the radar. His record holds the key to understanding what the U.S. wants in Venezuela.

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If you’ve followed Venezuela-related news on social media, you’ve undoubtedly stumbled across a video (below) released by comedian Joanna Hausmann in which she promises to tell you, “What’s Happening in Venezuela: Just the Facts.” Despite a title designed to instill confidence in the uninformed viewer, upon closer examination the “facts” presented in Hausman’s video hardly stand the test of reality.

Hausmann, for example, attempted to pass off dubious assertions that Venezuelan opposition leader “Juan Guaidó is not right wing,” and that he “did not just declare himself president” of the country. She also claimed that President Nicolas Maduro “made up” the National Constituent Assembly, neglecting to mention that that governing body was clearly defined in the country’s 1999 Constitution, and was ratified by 71.8 percent of the country through a democratic vote.

Hausmann’s performance ended with a teary-eyed appeal for sympathy: “On a personal level… my father is exiled from going back home.” For a video dedicated to “just the facts,” Hausmann’s rant omitted an especially pertinent piece of information: her exiled father and the rest of her family are no ordinary Venezuelans, and are, in fact, key players in the bid to bring down the elected government.

Much of Hausmann’s script echoed talking points outlined by her father, Ricardo Hausmann, in a 2018 article ominously entitled “D-Day Venezuela.” The piece amounted to a plea for the U.S. to depose Maduro by force, with Hausman arguing that “military intervention by a coalition of regional forces may be the only way to end a man-made famine threatening millions of lives.”

But Ricardo Hausmann is much more than a prominent pundit. He is one of the West’s leading neoliberal economists, who played an unsavory role during the 1980s and ’90s in devising policies that enabled the looting of Venezuela’s economy by international capital and provoked devastating social turmoil.

Hausmann emerged among a group of neoliberal economists gathered around the Instituto de Estudios Superiores de Administración (IESA), a private university in Caracas. They came to be known in Venezuela as “the IESA Boys,” a not-so-affectionate reference to the Chicago Boys who had been “imported” into Chile from the Economics Department of the University of Chicago and who in 1973 played a role in devising shock-therapy economic policies for Augusto Pinochet and his military junta.

The popular rejection of the IESA Boys’ agenda began with the Caracazo of 1989, a massive revolt that consumed the capital of Caracas when poor and working-class Venezuelans rioted in protest of an IMF package that mandated harsh austerity. Thousands of dead civilians and three years later, Hausman entered government to impose more shock therapy on the most vulnerable Venezuelans, making the rise of Hugo Chávez as president in 1998 practically inevitable.

While unknown to most Venezuelans, Hausmann remains a key player in his country’s tumultuous politics. During a talk at the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston in November 2018, he eerily predicted Guaidó’s self-proclaimed presidency, telling the crowd “the international community is now focused on the idea that… January 10th is the end of the presidential period of Nicolás Maduro.”

“On January 11th, Nicolás Maduro will not be recognized as… the legitimate president of Venezuela,” Hausmann anticipated. “I think that’s an important date.”

On January 11th, when Juan Guaidó declared his preparedness to become president of Venezuela, the Harvard professor’s prophecy was fulfilled.

Almost two months later, Guaidó appointed Hausman to serve as his representative at the Inter-American Development Bank. This was perhaps the best signal of what lies in store for Venezuela if Guaidó and his benefactors in the Trump administration achieve their goal of regime change. Hausmann’s return to power spells the restoration of the IESA Boys’ agenda, bringing neoliberal austerity back with a vengeance. A detailed look at his history is a preview of what lurks on the horizon for the poor and working-class Venezuelans whose lives improved the most throughout the era of Chavismo.

The wreckage of the IESA Boys

The neoliberal Venezuelan economist Juan Cristóbal Nagel described the neoliberal economics plan he favored for his country during the late 1980’s as “your basic Washington Consensus recipe.” Nagel said the plan consisted of the following ingredients: an end to price controls on basic goods and subsidies for gasoline; the privatization of state utilities; a decision to float the country’s exchange rate; and the lowering of tariffs. The recipe was popularly known as “El Gran Viraje,” or the Great Turn, to radical free-market capitalism.

While campaigning for Venezuela’s 1988 presidential elections, Carlos Andrés Pérez of the social-democratic Acción Democrática Party (AD) slammed the International Monetary Fund as a “neutron bomb that killed people but left buildings standing.” Immediately upon taking office, however, Pérez filled the IMF’s toxic economic prescription for Venezuela’s ailing economy, accepting a massive loan that completed the “Gran Viraje.”

The reforms led to a 30 percent hike in bus fares, announced in February 1989, prompting masses of workers to flood the streets in cities nationwide to publicly reject the bitter pill Pérez was forcing down their throats. Pérez opted to violently suppress the uprising, known as the “Caracazo,” declaring a national emergency and deploying the military to extinguish the revolt. By the time the it was over, anywhere between 300 to 3,000 people were dead, with piles of bodies discovered in mass graves outside of Caracas, the casualties of execution-style killings.

Ricardo Hausmann entered Venezuela’s government under Pérez, serving as his Planning and Finance Minister from 1992 to 1993 while sitting on the board of the country’s Central Bank. Hausman has claimed that he was at Oxford University when the Caracazo erupted, though he had already made his mark on the government’s economic policies.

“Hausmann will tell you that he was abroad at Oxford during the Caracazo rebellion,” says George Ciccariello-Maher, author of We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution.

“While this may be true” explained Ciccariello-Maher, “[Hausmann] had already spent years in a number of government positions going back to the mid-1980s, and as a key ‘IESA boy,’ spreading neoliberal doctrine from his professorship at the Institute.”

Indeed, before Pérez tapped Hausmann to serve as planning minister, the economist had worked also as a professor at the IESA.

“It was a classic bait-and-switch,” said Ciccariello-Maher. “Pérez had just been elected using anti-neoliberal rhetoric, but he immediately appointed an IESA-dominated cabinet and did the opposite.”

In his book Windfall to Curse: Oil and Industrialization in Venezuela, economist Jonathan Di John wrote that “Pérez was greatly influenced” by IESA academics, characterizing them as “an elite group… who had no party affiliation and were champions of radical, neoliberal reform.”

According to Di John, this group initiated “rapid liberalization reforms,” specifically in trade policy, including reducing the maximum tariff “from 135 percent, one of the highest in the region, to 20 percent by 1992.” A year later, that rate would fall to 10 percent. In other words, Pérez, Hausmann, and the “ISEA Boys” had opened up Venezuela for a free run by multinational corporations while gutting whatever was left of the welfare state.

In 1994, Hausmann received his golden parachute with a post as chief economist for the Inter-American Development Bank in Washington. This institution, which claims to “improve lives in Latin America and the Caribbean” by providing “financial and technical support to reduce poverty and inequality,” is just another mechanism for imposing the Washington consensus. The U.S. controls 30 percent of the bank’s voting power over financial decisions even though it is not situated in Latin America, where the bank is supposed to do its work. Meanwhile, all 26 Caribbean and Latin American member states carry only a 50 percent sway over the bank’s decisions.

While Hausmann perpetuated his brand of neoliberalism from Washington, a movement was building in the barracks and barrios of Venezuela to exert popular control over the economy. It was led by a charismatic military man named Hugo Chávez.

Revolt against the austerity agenda

During the late 1980s, as Lt. Col. Chávez watched the wholesale ravaging of his country’s economy by foreign capital, he formed a cadre of populist officers called the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement 200. In 1992, Chávez led the officers in an attempted military coup against the government of Pérez, hoping to ride the wave of popular resentment for the neoliberal policies enforced by Hausmann and his fellow IESA boys. Though he initially failed, Chávez captured the mood of the Venezuelan public, including sectors of the middle class, and emerged as a national folk hero.

Even mainstream U.S. media conceded that Chávez had a point. At the time, the Washington Post identified him as the leader of a popular movement challenging Perez “for not instituting a viable democracy and stewarding an economic program that has not served the country’s poor.”

In contrast to the Post’s contemporary coverage of Venezuela, which reads like an information-warfare campaign on behalf of the anti-Chávez opposition, the Post at that time freely conceded public dissatisfaction with the IESA reforms: “Many people around Caracas banged on pots and pans today and shouted out of their windows in support of the rebels,” the paper noted.

It added:

Venezuela, the third-largest producer in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel, has been wracked by unrest. Critics accuse the government of not distributing oil riches to the public, citing corruption as a cause.”

For its part, the New York Times reported:

The coup attempt followed violent protests and labor unrest arising from a growing disparity between rich and poor in Venezuela. The Government has admitted that only 57 percent of Venezuelans are able to afford more than one meal a day.”

The Guardian also described the military insurrection as a popular insurgency against the ruthless austerity program of Pérez’s IESA Boys:

The underlying cause of the military unrest is undoubtedly the widespread social discontent. When he came back to power three years ago, President Pérez was expected to repeat the expansionist policies of his first term of office in the late 1970s when Venezuela was one of the richest countries in the developing world, enjoying the easy wealth brought by its huge oil reserves.

But Mr. Pérez overnight adopted the liberal economic policies dominant in most of the Western world. He cut back heavily on government spending, opening up the economy to market forces and international competition.”

Across the board, mainstream media identified the economic program imposed under the watch of Hausmann and his colleagues as the force driving Pérez’s unpopularity. Though Chávez failed to take control of the state in 1992, calling for his comrades to lay down arms following his failed revolt, he declared that “now is the time to reflect,” promising “new situations will come.”

“The same month that Chávez led a failed coup against the Pérez government, Hausmann officially joined the government as planning minister,” recalled Ciccariello-Maher, adding:

It’s not clear to me whether it’s better to have been in charge when the government instituted a brutal neoliberal reform package, or to willingly join that same government after it had massacred hundreds, if not thousands, who resisted the reforms.”

Six years later, Chávez won democratic elections for president, convening a national assembly and referendum to rewrite the country’s constitution and alter the character of the Venezuelan state in a dramatic fashion.

By this time, Hausmann and his wife, Ana Julia Jatar, who also served in the Pérez administration, had left for high-flying careers Washington, where Hausmann took over as Chief Economist at the Inter-American Development Bank. While her husband worked at the bank, Jatar was a Senior Fellow at the Inter-American Dialogue, a think-tank primarily funded by Chevron, the Ford Foundation, USAID, and her husband’s employer.

In 2000, Hausman took a professorial job at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, watching and waiting for an opportunity to return to power in his home country.

“Neoliberalism is the path to hell”

Back in Venezuela, the Bolivarian Revolution ushered in by Chávez provided an antidote to the IESA method that had produced so much social damage to Venezuela’s majority.

“The Bolivarian Revolution was an indirect response to neoliberalism, born of mass resistance in the streets,” claims Ciccariello-Maher, observing that while “in power, it remained largely faithful to that mission.”

Ciccariello-Maher added that “it would be difficult to exaggerate the impact Chavismo has had on Venezuelan society,” because for the first time in its history “oil was put at the service of the people. …Most important, however, the poor – so long excluded – became ‘protagonists’ in the political life of Venezuela, and active participants in local direct democracy.”

Chávez moved to nationalize not only the country’s prosperous oil resources, booting ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips from the field, but also centers of agricultural production, telecommunications, and mineral mining. Considering Venezuela sits atop the largest oil reserves in the world, as well as sizeable gold stocks, this achievement was no small feat.

In his 1998 inaugural address, Chávez cited Pope John Paul II as having described capitalism as “savage,” using the words of His Holiness to highlight the social damage left behind by Hausmann and his colleagues. Chavez declared:

It is savage that in a country like ours more than half of preschoolers are not going to preschool. It is savage to know that only one out of every five children who enter preschool, only one in five finishes elementary school. That is savage because that is the future of this country.”

In 2002, just one month after facing down a U.S.-backed coup attempt, Chávez addressed a conference in Madrid declaring “neoliberalism is the path to hell.” Unlike Pérez, Venezuela’s new leader would not sell out his promise to reject the IMF’s austerity agenda.

The Hausmann clan versus Chavismo

During the Chávez era, the Hausmann family was not content to sit on the sidelines and watch him build a “21st-century socialism.”

Joanna’s mother, Ana Julia Jatar, assumed a position as executive director of Súmate, a U.S.-backed “civil society group” formed by right-wing darling María Corina Machado in order to “build democracy” in Venezuela.

In 2003, Súmate received $53,400 from the National Endowment for Democracy “to work on referendum and general electoral activities,” accordingto a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks.

The initiative represented Jatar and Machado’s attempt to remove Chávez from power through popular recall. Yet the public rejected the referendum by a whopping 59 percent margin, in results certified by the Carter Center and Organization of American States.

Seeking to defend his wife’s failed project, Ricardo Hausmann co-authored a paper that he insisted “open[ed] the door to… hypotheses of fraud” marring the vote. His argument was thoroughly rebuked in an extensive study issued by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which determined Hausmann and his co-author, M.I.T’s Roberto Rigobon, “provide no evidence of fraud.”

Súmate’s subsequent efforts to label the vote as fraudulent were also rebuffed in a comprehensive report released by the Carter Center, which concluded: “the Aug. 15 vote clearly expressed the will of the Venezuelan electorate.” The Carter Center concluded that it “did not observe, and has not received, credible evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the vote.”

Despite Súmate’s failures, President George W. Bush welcomed Machado to the White House in 2005. In the Oval Office, Bush heralded her efforts “to defend the electoral and constitutional rights of all Venezuelan citizens” and monitor the country’s elections.

Sociologist William I. Robinson told Venezuelanalysis that Súmate was part of “a full-blown operation, a massive foreign-policy operation to undermine the Venezuelan revolution, to overthrow the government of Hugo Chávez, and to reinstall the elite back in power in Venezuela.”

Such elites include multiple members of Joanna Hausmann’s clan.

“My extended family, they go out on these protests,” the YouTube comedian declared in her video. “My uncle is in jail for simply being a journalist.”

Image on the right: Ana Julia Jatar and her father, Braulio Jatar Dotti. Photo | NotiEspartano

That uncle is Ana Julia’s brother, Braulio Jatar, and he was not “simply” a journalist, but also a lawyer and businessman jailed not for “journalism,” but rather for extortion, fraud, and other financial crimes.

Ana Julia and Braulio were the children of Braulio Jatar Dotti, who served as Secretary for Parliamentary and Municipal Affairs in the ruling Democratic Action party while it was engaged in a violent battle against the armed Revolutionary Left Movement.

The independent Chilean news site El Desconcierto described Braulio Sr. as having been “in charge of eliminating the leftist groups” in Venezuela at the time. In 1963, he literally wrote the book on how to disable the “extreme left” and guerillas. It was called, “Disabling the Extreme Left and the Corian Guerillas.”

Hausmann’s power play for “opening up the oil industry”

Fast forward to 2019, and Joanna Hausmann sits comfortably in her New York City apartment, complaining that “the Venezuelan economy is a disaster in a country that sits on the world’s largest oil reserves.”

Meanwhile, Joanna’s father, Ricardo, has been barnstorming the U.S. to drum up support at elite think tanks for a coup he clearly saw on the horizon. During his November 2018 address to the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston, which functions as a roundtable for U.S. oil executives, Hausman laid out his agenda for “the morning after” regime change.

The economist called for an end to the Bolivarian government’s policy of investing oil wealth into Venezuelan society, stating his support for “private investment in the oil industry without PDVSA participation.” In fact, Hausmann imagined “the opening up of the oil industry” as a top item on the new government’s agenda.

The selection of Ricardo Hausmann to serve at the Inter-American Development Bank by Guaidó’s U.S. handlers demonstrates how central neoliberal economics are to his own administration.

“This is about people,” Joanna Hausmann insisted at the end of her YouTube performance; “this is about people wanting to take their country back.”

Those people include her family, and they are not your average Venezuelans.

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Anya Parampil is a Washington, DC-based journalist. She previously hosted a daily progressive afternoon news program called In Question on RT America. She has produced and reported several documentaries, including on the ground reports from the Korean peninsula and Palestine.

Featured image: Ricardo Hausmann speaks at the “Us and prosperity” conference organized by the Rafael del Pino Foundation on June 7, 2017. in Madrid, Spain. Photo | Rafael del Pino Foundation | Creative Commons

Give Chagos back to the Chagossians! That’s a slogan I first heard in 2000. It was a demonstration in London, outside a courthouse, a small group of people with handmade signs appealing to the British legal system to return their islands to them. Few people paid them any attention. The courts sided with the islanders (whose case is unimpeachable) and then did nothing to enforce their verdict.

The Chagos Archipelago is a group of 60 islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands are claimed by Mauritius, a country that won its independence from the United Kingdom in 1968. Three years before the independence of Mauritius, the British separated the Chagos Archipelago and converted it into the British Indian Ocean Territory. To cement its control over the islands, the British expelled over 2,000 Chagossians. Some of these Chagossians stood in London, fighting for their lost islands.

At the end of February, the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that the UK must give the islands back to Mauritius. In 2017, the UN General Assembly had heard the case of the islanders and referred it to the ICJ. Now, the ICJ—with a 13 to 1 ruling (the U.S. voting against)—has sided with the Chagossians. But this is not a binding ruling, and the British government has said it would ignore the International Court of Justice.

Diego Garcia

Why would the United Kingdom need these islands? By the 1960s, the United States had begun to take over many of the British imperial bases for its own massive military base system. There are now over 800 U.S. military bases in more than 70 countries (for comparison, the Russians have about eight overseas military bases, most of them in the territory of the former USSR—such as in Moldova and in Belarus—with only the bases in Syria and Vietnam outside that zone). No country can match the U.S. military footprint.

The biggest island on the Chagos Archipelago is Diego Garcia. The United States leases this island from the United Kingdom. The UK gave the United States the lease in exchange for a discount on the sale of the Polaris nuclear submarine system. That lease ends in 2036. Diego Garcia has been one of the most important U.S. overseas bases—used in the U.S. war on Vietnam, the U.S. war on Afghanistan and the U.S. war on Iraq. It was used by the CIA as a black site in the War on Terror (150 Sri Lankan fishermen were held there in its prisons).

Zone of Peace

The United States has faced legal threats to its base for the past five decades. The bereft Chagossians have taken their case to British courts, hoping to exert pressure to return the islands to them. When the British broke off the islands from Mauritius in 1965, the UK violated UN Resolution 1514 (XV) on Decolonization that argued against the breakup of colonies. Britain strong-armed the Mauritius independence movement, telling them that they could have their freedom without Chagos or have no freedom at all.

More difficult for the U.S. military operations was the attempt by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the United Nations to constitute the Indian Ocean as a “zone of peace.” As early as 1964, at the Cairo, Egypt, Non-Aligned summit, the member states recommended that the oceans of the world be “denuclearized zones” (the NAM was inspired by the 1959 Antarctic Treaty and the 1963 Treaty of Tlatelolco—to keep Latin America free of nuclear weapons). In 1970, the Non-Aligned summit in Lusaka, Zambia, declared that the Indian Ocean must be a “zone of peace from which Great Power rivalries and competition, as well as bases,” must be excluded.

The United States attacked this idea. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt told the U.S. Congress in 1974 that the USSR stood atop the “central part of the West’s energy jugular down to the Persian Gulf.” For that reason, the Indian Ocean—and Diego Garcia—has “become a focal point of U.S. foreign and economic policies and has a growing impact on our security.”

Marine Reserve

Every attempt was made to deny the people of Chagos their homeland. In April 2010, the British Foreign Office said that 640,000 square kilometers of the archipelago would now be a “marine reserve,” which should remain uninhabited. The British government told the U.S. government—in a secret cable—that the “former inhabitants would find it difficult, if not impossible, to pursue their claim for resettlement on the islands if the entire Chagos were a marine reserve.” This was environmental conservation for military purposes. No statement was made to remove the U.S. base from Diego Garcia, which would be at the heart of the marine reserve.

In 2015, Mauritius went to the court of arbitration at the Hague, where they won a ruling that the British declaration of the marine reserve was illegal. The UK had not consulted either Mauritius or the Chagossians. Britain eventually said that the Chagossians would not be able to exercise their right to return because of the objections of the U.S. military. So be it.

After this ruling, a spokeswoman for the British foreign office said that the ICJ’s ruling “was an advisory opinion, not a judgment.” It is unlikely that the UK—or the United States—will honor the opinion. The United States voted against it. The UK now says that the military base “helps to protect people here in Britain and around the world from terrorist threats, organized crime and piracy.” The door closes once more on the hopes of the Chagossians.

Those hopes, eternal and persistent, are captured in the poet Saradha Soobrayen’s prize-winning work:

“On the main island of Diego Garcia, the U.S. base, Camp Justice squats.

The Chagossians are still chanting, ‘Rann nu Diego’

thirty, forty years later, fighting for the right to return.

Their loss is unimaginable, these guardians of the Chagos archipelago

Their homecoming is not yet out of reach, not yet out of sight.”

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Vijay Prashad is the Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Chief Editor of LeftWord Books. He is a Writing Fellow and Chief Correspondent at Globetrotter, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He writes regularly for The Hindu, Frontline, Newsclick, and BirGün.

The US-funded CANVAS organization that trained Juan Guaido and his allies produced a 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages and urged the opposition “to take advantage of the situation…towards their needs”

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A September 2010 memo by a US-funded soft power organization that helped train Venezuelan coup leader Juan Guaido and his allies identifies the potential collapse of the country’s electrical sector as “a watershed event” that “would likely have the impact of galvanizing public unrest in a way that no opposition group could ever hope to generate.”

The memo has special relevance today as Guaido moves to exploit nationwide blackouts caused by a major failure at the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant at Guri dam – a crisis that Venezuela’s government blames on US sabotage.

It was authored by Srdja Popovic of the Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies (CANVAS), a Belgrade-based “democracy promotion” organization funded by the US government that has trained thousands of US-aligned youth activists in countries where the West seeks regime change.

This group reportedly hosted Guaido and the key leaders of his Popular Will party for a series of training sessions, fashioning them into a “Generation 2007” determined to foment resistance to then-President Hugo Chavez and sabotage his plans to implement “21st century socialism” in Venezuela.

In the 2010 memo, CANVAS’s Popovic declared, “A key to Chavez’s current weakness is the decline in the electricity sector.” Popovic explicitly identified the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant as a friction point, emphasizing that “water levels at the Guri dam are dropping, and Chavez has been unable to reduce consumption sufficiently to compensate for the deteriorating industry.”

Speculating on a “grave possibility that some 70 percent of the country’s electricity grid could go dark as soon as April 2010,” the CANVAS leader stated that “an opposition group would be best served to take advantage of the situation and spin it against Chavez and towards their needs.”

Flash forward to March 2019, and the scenario outlined by Popovic is playing out almost exactly as he had imagined.

On March 7, just days after Guaido’s return from Colombia, where he participated in the failed and demonstrably violent February 23 attempt to ram a shipment of US aid across the Venezuelan border, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a major and still unexplained collapse.

Days later, electricity remains sporadic across the country. Meanwhile, Guaido has done everything he can “to take advantage of the situation and spin it” against President Nicolas Maduro – just as his allies were urged to do over eight years before by CANVAS.

Rubio vows “a period of suffering” for Venezuela hours before the blackout

The Venezuelan government has placed the blame squarely on Washington, accusing it of sabotage through a cyber-attack on its electrical infrastructure. Key players in the US-directed coup attempt have done little to dispel the accusation.

In a tweet on March 8, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo framed the electricity outage as a pivotal stage in US plans for regime change:

No food. No medicine. Now, no power. Next, no Maduro.

— Secretary Pompeo (@SecPompeo) March 8, 2019

At noon on March 7, during a hearing on Venezuela at the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, Sen. Marco Rubio explicitly called for the US to stir “widespread unrest,” declaring that it “needs to happen” in order to achieve regime change.

“Venezuela is going to enter a period of suffering no nation in our hemisphere has confronted in modern history,” Rubio proclaimed.

Around 5 PM, the Simon Bolivar Hydroelectric Plant experienced a total and still unexplained collapse. Residents of Caracas and throughout Venezuela were immediately plunged into darkness.

At 5:18 PM, a clearly excited Rubio took to Twitter to announce the blackout and claim that “backup generators have failed.” It was unclear how Rubio had obtained such specific information so soon after the outage occurred. According to Jorge Rodriguez, the communications minister of Venezuela, local authorities did not know if backup generators had failed at the time of Rubio’s tweet.

Back in Caracas, Guaido immediately set out to exploit the situation, just as his CANVAS trainers had advised over eight years before. Taking to Twitter just over an hour after Rubio, Guaido declared, “the light will return when the usurpation [of Maduro] ends.” Like Pompeo, the self-declared president framed the blackouts as part of a regime change strategy, not an accident or error.

Two days later, Guaido was at the center of opposition rally he convened in affluent eastern Caracas, bellowing into a megaphone: “Article 187 when the time comes. We need to be in the streets, mobilized. It depends on us, not on anybody else.”

Article 187 establishes the right of the National Assembly “to authorize the use of Venezuelan military missions abroad or foreign in the country.”

Upon his mention of the constitutional article, Guaido’s supporters responded, “Intervention! Intervention!”

Exploiting crisis to “get back into a position of power”

As Dan Cohen and I reported here at the Grayzone, Guaido’s rise to prominence – and the coup plot that he has been appointed to oversee – is the product of a decade-long project overseen by the Belgrade-based CANVAS outfit.

CANVAS is a spinoff of Otpor, a Serbian protest group founded by Srdja Popovic in 1998 at the University of Belgrade. Otpor, which means “resistance” in Serbian, was the student group that worked alongside US soft power organizations to mobilize the protests that eventually toppled the late Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic.

CANVAS has been funded largely through the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA cut-out that functions as the US government’s main arm of promoting regime change.  According to leaked internal emails from Stratfor, an intelligence firm known as the “shadow CIA,” CANVAS “may have also received CIA funding and training during the 1999/2000 anti-Milosevic struggle.”

A leaked email from a Stratfor staffer noted that after they ousted Milosevic,

“the kids who ran OTPOR grew up, got suits and designed CANVAS… or in other words a ‘export-a-revolution’ group that sowed the seeds for a NUMBER of color revolutions. They are still hooked into U.S. funding and basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like ;).”

Stratfor subsequently revealed that CANVAS “turned its attention to Venezuela” in 2005, after training opposition movements that led pro-NATO regime change operations across Eastern Europe.

In September 2010, as Venezuela headed for a parliamentary election, CANVAS produced a series of memos outlining the plans they had hatched with “non-formal actors” like Guaido and his cadre of student activists to bring down Chavez.

“This is the first opportunity for the opposition to get back into a position of power,” Popovic wrote at the time.

In his memo on electricity outages, Popovic highlighted the importance of the Venezuelan military in achieving regime change.

“Alliances with the military could be critical because in such a situation of massive public unrest and rejection of the presidency,” the CANVAS founder wrote, “malcontent sectors of the military will likely decide to intervene, but only if they believe they have sufficient support.”

While the scenario Popovic envisioned failed to materialize in 2010, it perfectly describes the situation gripping Venezuela today as an opposition leader cultivated by CANVAS seeks to spin the crisis against Maduro while calling on the military to break ranks.

Since the Grayzone exposed the deep ties between CANVAS and Guaido’s Popular Will party, Popovic has attempted to publicly distance himself from his record of training Venezuela’s opposition.

Today, however, Popovic’s 2010 memo on exploiting electricity outages reads like a blueprint for the strategy that Guaido and his patrons in Washington have actively implemented. Whether or not the blackout is the result of external sabotage, it represents the “watershed event” that CANVAS has prepared its Venezuelan cadres for.

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Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books, including best-selling Republican Gomorrah, Goliath, The Fifty One Day War, and The Management of Savagery. He has produced print articles for an array of publications, many video reports, and several documentaries, including Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded The Grayzone in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

Featured image is from The Grayzone 

The Arctic railway would have opened up the Arctic trade routes and allowed Finland to have a direct connection to central Europe for transport of raw materials. However, a recent report has brought the project’s commercial and ethical viability into question.  

The report concluded that:

“A railway project this size is so complex and involves so many stakeholders and factors that in the time and resources given it has not been possible to properly assess all of the issues regarding the Arctic railway project.”

The report argues that more planning is needed regarding funding and respecting the rights of the Indigenous people (the Sami) whose land the railway would have to traverse across.

Environmental impact 

The projected railway was planned to cross from Rovaniemi, Finland to Kirkenes Norway. This railway would open up the Arctic circle to Europe and secure a more direct trade route for Baltic Nations, Russia, Japan and China to transport raw materials to Central Europe.

The project was initially announced in October 2015 by former Prime Minister of Finland Paavo Lipponen, in a memorandum to Former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. 

This project has since been met with vehement criticism from the Sami People, environmental activists and artists supporting the Sami people and ordinary Finnish citizens.

Johanna Kronqvist, a student at Abo Akademy in Finland, said: 

“At first, I thought [the railway project] sounded quite exciting, but as soon as I realised the effects on the Sami people, the reindeer husbandry and the environment in general, I got upset”. 

Indeed, though the Norwegian and Finish governments explored five different route options, all would have had to cross Sami Lapland, and thus cause damage to the habitat of the reindeer and the fishing traditions of the Sami people.

Final frontier

The construction of the line was projected by Minister Anna Berner to cost €2.9 billion, with Norway paying €0.9 and Finland paying the rest. Te Rovaniemi-Kirkenes line would cut through lake Inari and a large portion of forest and herding territories.

Dr Humrich from the University of Groningen describes the Arctic as “the final frontier”. The Arctic region is a goldmine for those seeking to exploit its natural resources, with its untapped liquid oil and gas reserves, and the Arctic ocean serving as an expedient sea route that helps transport raw goods.

Dr Humrich said:

 “Concerning the transport of raw materials, the railway would be transferring copper, iron ore, phosphate or raw wood. They are not transportable by plane. The goods are currently being transported by boat but that is a very slow process.

“Finally, the goods could be transferred by street but they have less capacity than trains, who are in the eyes of the Finnish government, the most economically feasible option.”

As it stands, goods from Russia enter the northernmost part of Norway and still have to be transferred to other modes of transportations. The Rovaniemi-Kirkenes line would have effectively cut out the middle man and set up a direct line connecting Europe to the Arctic sea and create new transport hubs and ports. 

In Dr Humrich’s opinion, despite looking at all five proposal routes for this line, there was no way for construction to avoid Sami Lapland. However, he did agree that the Rovaniemi-Kirkenes was the option, though most direct, that would cause the greatest amount of damage to the Lapland flora and fauna.

Indigenous livelihoods

The Sami people are the only Indigenous peoples living within the European Union. They are present in Norway, Sweden, Russia and Finland.

Part of their heritage is Reindeer Husbandry and Fishing.  The projected railway line would cut through one third of Lapland forest region and would cause significant damage to an already fragile Arctic Environment.

As Dr. Cepinskyte of the Finnish Intstitute of International Affairs, specialist on the protection of national minorities and indigenous peoples and Arctic Security explained: 

“The Sami people fear the railway would disrupt reindeer pastures and migration patterns, while trains could also kill a lot of reindeers.

“In addition, the railway would likely attract large scale industrial activities, such as mining, which would pose a threat to the environment and nature.

“Reindeer herding and the traditional use of lands is fundamental for the survival of the Sami culture and languages, thus any harm to the environment and nature would put the preservation of the Sami identity at risk.”

Activist interventions

This view is further supported by Former head of YLE Sami-language news, Pirita Näkkäläjärvi, who wrote an article citing that the projected line would plough through Sami remains, thus disrespecting culturally significant traditions and bring about significant damage to Sami culture.

Näkkäläjärvi wrote:

 “The grazing lands for the reindeer have already been cut by competing land use such as logging, roads and construction. Building a railway through the reindeer herding cooperatives would further fragment, narrow and decrease the land needed by the reindeer.”

Activist groups such as Suohpanterror and Greenpeace joined the Sami people in September 2018 as the Sami formed a ‘red line’ along the projected railway route to protest the construction that was planned without the ‘Free, Prior, Informed Consent’ right given to the Indigenous people to protect their rights.

Furthermore, Sami Parliament have issued a statement claiming that the Sami were not consulted adequately by Norwegian and Finnish governments to discuss the implications this project would have for the Sami.

This is not the first time Nordic governments have ignored indigenous people’s rights, but the cancellation of the project is a step closer to protecting the environment and indigenous rights.

Viable solutions

The Sami and the environment can breathe a little easier as the controversy seems to be settled peacefully, unlike those affected by the Dakota Access Pipeline in the United States.

The future of this project remains unclear. What is clear however, is that if Norwegian and Finnish authorities wish to continue with this railway, they must include the Indigenous peoples on their territories in all stages of planning and discussion, in order to come up with a viable solution for all parties.

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Clemence Waller is a journalism Masters student at the University of Groningen. Growing up in the Middle East, she has always been interested in international reporting and politics. She is currently a freelance journalist.

Featured image is from The Ecologist

The CIA is conspiring with ISIS commanders in northeastern Syria supplying them with fake documents and then transferring them to Iraq, according to reports in Turkish pro-government media.

About 2,000 ISIS members were questioned in the areas of Kesra, Buseira, al-Omar and Suwayr in Deir Ezzor province and at least 140 of them then received fake documents. Some of the questioned terrorists were then moved to the camps of al-Hol, Hasakah and Rukban, which are controlled by US-backed forces. The CIA also reportedly created a special facility near Abu Khashab with the same purpose.

Israeli, French and British special services are reportedly involved.

An interesting observation is that the media of the country, which in the previous years of war, used to conspire with ISIS allowing its foreign recruits to enter Syria and buying smuggled oil from the terrorists, has now become one of the most active exposers of the alleged US ties with ISIS elements.

Another issue often raised in Turkish media is the poor humanitarian situation in the refugee camps controlled by US-backed forces. These reports come in the course of other revelations. According to the International Rescue Committee, about 100 people, mostly children, died in combat zones or in the al-Hol camp controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces just recently.

In its turn, the Russian Defense Ministry released a series of satellite images revealing the horrifying conditions in the al-Rukban camp. The imagery released on March 12 shows at least 670 graves, many of them fresh, close to the camp’s living area. The tents and light constructions used to settle refugees are also located in a close proximity to large waste deposits.

A joint statement by the Russian and Syrian Joint Coordination Committees for Repatriation of Syrian Refugees said that refugees in al-Rukban are suffering from a lack of water, food, medication and warm clothing, which is especially important during winter. According to the statement, members of the US-backed armed group Maghawir al-Thawra disrupt water deliveries to the camp, using this as a bargaining chip for blackmailing and profiteering purposes.

Tensions are once again growing between Syria and Israel. Earlier in March, Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mekdad submitted an official letter to the head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) Kristin Lund that Damascus ”will not hesitate to confront Israel” if it continues refusing  to withdraw from the Golan Heights.

Israeli media and officials responded with a new round of allegations that Hezbollah is entrenching in southern Syria therefore justifying a further militarization of the Golan Heights.

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Now that Israel is getting a lot of heat for its decision to put finishing touches on the wholesale theft of Syria’s Golan Heights, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has launched a new PR campaign. 

Netanyahu claims arch-enemy Hezbollah is preparing to use the Golan to attack Israel. In order to get the attention of the American people—it already has the full attention of the US government—and make excuses ahead of the plan to make annexation final, Netanyahu said the leader of the Hezbollah group has killed Americans and now is set on killing Israelis. 

Prime Minister Netanyahu on the exposure of the Hezbollah Golan terror network:
"I have a clear message for Iran and for Hezbollah: Israel knows what you're doing; Israel knows where you're doing it. What we've uncovered today is just the tip of the iceberg. We know a lot more." pic.twitter.com/cYFU0eSLiU

— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) March 13, 2019

Reuters reports:

Israel on Wednesday accused a suspected Lebanese Hezbollah operative [Ali Mussa Daqduq] who was previously held in Iraq over the killing of five U.S. military personnel of now setting up a Syrian guerrilla network for cross-border attacks on Israeli targets.

Previously classified intelligence now cleared for publication: Ali Musa Daqduq, a senior operative in the Lebanon-based terrorist organization Hezbollah, has been operating a new terror cell in… Syria.@LTCJonathan pic.twitter.com/peErasDPOa

— Israel Defense Forces (@IDF) March 13, 2019

The Israeli foreign minister connected this alleged plot by Iran and Hezbollah directly to the push to have the US officially recognize the annexation. He said it would be “an appropriate” response to what he described as increased Hezbollah activity on the Golan.

Israel’s IDF said Daqduq is the “mastermind” behind the plan. The allegation is “based on what it described as previously classified intelligence,” according to the Reuters report. 

The claim Daqduq is linked to Hezbollah comes from US intelligence sources. British forces captured Daqduq in Iraq where he was assisting the resistance to occupation. In 2008 The New York Times, a dependable source for government narratives, reported Iran had trained Hezbollah operatives to kill US troops. 

Militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran, according to American interrogation reports that the United States has supplied to the Iraqi government.

Hezbollah operative reportedly establishing a terror network in Golan Heights. Ali Mussa Daqduq was charged with orchestrating the 2007 kidnapping and murder of five American soldiers in Iraq. https://t.co/2oJLW8plsi

— CEP (@FightExtremism) March 13, 2019

This claim was extracted from Shia detainees during “enhanced interrogation”—doublespeak for torture—by the US military, thus the validity of the accusations remain in question, not that we should expect The New York Times to make note of it. 

The United States had handed Daqduq over to Baghdad in 2011 after failing to secure a custody deal ahead of the U.S. military’s [phantom] withdrawal from Iraq. Washington said it had received Baghdad’s assurances Daqduq would be prosecuted, but he was later cleared by an Iraqi court and repatriated to Lebanon. 

The US produced a long laundry list of crimes he was said to have committed and this was used to persaude the Iraqi government to turn him over to the US and face a military tribunal.

Iraq had found there wasn’t sufficient evidence to convict Daqduq and he was released “despite the entreaties of the Obama administration,” the Times reported in November 2012. 

As pressure mounts in Congress to have the United States officially recognize and condone the theft of Syrian territory, Israel has decided to resurrect the specter of Ali Mussa Daqduq and his connection to Hezbollah. 

Bibi’s Twitter performance will further distract from corruption charges leveled against him. It will also bolster the arguments of neocons that Iran and Hezbollah are not only a threat to Israel, but also to the national security of the United States. Both are intricately entwined. 

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Another Day in the Empire.

Kurt Nimmo is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Guggenheim’s strange and wonderful exhibition of Hilma af Klint’s groundbreaking, yet largely unknown body of abstract art is an important event – one that challenges us to not only rethink the early history of twentieth century abstract art, but to recognize her vision of art and reality as unique, authentic, and deliciously puzzling.

Af Klint was a formally trained and respected portrait and landscape painter in Stockholm, who as a young woman became involved in spiritualism, theosophy, as well as Rosicrucianism. By 1906, af Klint was creating abstract paintings, many years before Vasily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian – however she kept them private, maintaining that the world was not yet ready to see her work; and in fact she requested that they not be seen for twenty years following her death. We can see the Rosicrucian influence in this decision: a guiding principle of the spiritual movement was its anticipation of a “universal reformation of mankind,” when a long hidden, secret science will finally be received by humanity.

In 1906, af Klint’s art moves away from conventional representation and toward a different kind of subject matter, with an entirely new spiritual intention. The origin of this project is also quite unlike anything else – according to af Klint, spirits who she channeled in the course of regular séances spoke and commissioned these paintings. The project was driven by a metaphysical conviction and motivation – that is, to represent the numerous stages of a transcendent reality beyond the observable world.

Rosicrucian thinking is informed by Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism) and hermeticism. One of the fundamental doctrines that both of these teachings share is the notion of ‘as above, so below’ – in other words, whatever happens on one level of reality, also happens on every other. According to this way thinking, each human being is a microcosm of the universe into which all the potencies of creation have been placed, so that an activity below, stimulates a corresponding activity on high. This doctrine is essential for understanding what af Klint was up to: her work is not simply trying to express this teaching, but is itself meant to be seen as an embodiment of it.

When she was seventeen, af Klint’s interest in spiritualism began. Her sister died around this time, and initially her curiosity grew out of her desire to be in contact with the dead. It was not long before the desire evolved: through contact with higher spiritual entities, af Klint began seeking metaphysical insight and understanding.

During séances in 1904, spiritual guides proposed the construction of a temple that would house spiritually derived works of art. The commission for such a series of works – works created specifically for a future temple – fell to af Klint. She agreed to carry out the “Great Commission” when other members of her spiritualist group, The Five (De Fem), declined due to a concern that such a project – demanding close and sustained contact with the spirit realm – could lead to madness.

Between November and December 1907, The Ten Largest were created. They constitute nothing less than a wholly new approach to painting – something unprecedented and unique, unlike anything else that has come before. They are breathtaking in their enormous vitality: they are alive, bursting with energy and color. While they are abstract paintings, they are also doubtlessly drawing on the world for content – whether it be the forms of Swedish folk art, the kinds of representation found in scientific diagrams, or the symbols associated with various spiritual movements. All these elements and visual modes are combined and transformed in new and remarkable ways.

In af Klint’s symbolic vocabulary, blue represents the female and yellow the male. The notion that these two colors constitute an essential dichotomy was likely derived from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Theory of Colours (1810), which she was known to have kept in her library. Goethe’s book has been widely rejected and dismissed as ‘worthless still-born dilettantism’, especially for his polemic against Isaac Newton, whose Opticks demonstrated that colorless rays of light contained the power to provoke sensations of color. Goethe did not object to Newton’s view that color could be measured in terms of wavelength; rather, his error was to adopt an approach ‘that banished the spirit of living contemplation.’ Newton did not give the complete story: his theory was a part masquerading as a whole. Why does blue have the quality of blue and yellow the quality of yellow? Newton’s reductionist theory did not make colors intelligible in themselves – but instead reduced them to measurable wavelengths of colorless light.

Goethe can help us to appreciate af Klint: she takes much more from Goethe than the simple dichotomy between blue and yellow. Her work is no less a rebuke of that Newtonian universe of meaningless fragmentation; like Goethe, she proposes a sensuous and colorful world shaped by principles of order and patterning.

The Paintings for the Temple are presented in a number of groups; and just as the groups were meant to be viewed in a particular order, so too in each series the paintings were likewise to be seen in a certain progression. Few symbols are as important for af Klint as that of the spiral – which represents physical and spiritual evolution, a concept which was central not only to Darwinian thought, but to theosophy, which views evolution as a process that goes beyond biology and ultimately pervades the cosmos. The Paintings for the Temple were to be housed in a spiraling structure, not unlike the Guggenheim itself – which makes the current exhibition all more extraordinary.

In 1915, af Klint completed the Painting for the Temple, a project which by the end included 193 paintings and drawings. These works break with the language of representation, they epitomize a shift away from figuration and realism (at least in any conventional sense). Looking at af Klint’s work, it is hard to escape the feeling that this artist has secrets to tell – secrets that are worth the hearing and that she is ready to share. Part of the immense pleasure is that, at the same time, she also refuses to simply give them over. She makes us work for them – she delays, sustains and prolongs.

The truth is that, as with any genuine art, these are works that exceed any rational reiteration. At times her great project – the otherworldly “commission” that she undertook – seems almost like a metaphysical treasure map, a kind of guide to navigating ever higher realms of reality, finally culminating in a vision of transcendent unity. But the true greatness of the work is that it eludes any such straightforward presumptions; that her paintings are finally irreducible to a diagram – though often the imagery appears to be precisely that. Even at her most metaphysical, she remains a painter through and through – and as every great painter knows, to give is to withhold, and there is no pleasure where there is nothing risked.

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Sam Ben-Meir is a professor of philosophy and world religions at Mercy College in New York City. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from Guggenheim

Many myself among them have pointed to the vast hydrocarbon reserves of Venezuela as a possible driving motive behind the otherwise bizarre Washington intervention in Venezuela. The more I look into the situation, the more I suspect a quite other explanation for the intervention from a President who campaigned on a call to end US regime change interventions into other countries. The President’s NSC advisor, John Bolton openly stated it was about the oil. Could there be another reason as well? What then could it be?

Bolton also declared recently,

“In this administration, we’re not afraid to use the word Monroe Doctrine. This is a country in our hemisphere.“ 

The last President to invoke the Monroe Doctrine, something going back to 1823, was Ronald Reagan. Before Reagan, JFK did so to justify US measures against the growing influence of the Soviet Union in the region after the Bay of Pigs fiasco.

The Monroe Doctrine was drafted by US Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and proclaimed in the State of the Union address by President James Monroe at a point most all South American colonial nations had achieved independence from Spain or Portugal. It declared that any attempts by European powers to try to establish new colonies there would be considered by Washington as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.” In effect it declared that the New World would be a separate sphere of influence from that of the colonial Old World of Europe. Notably, the immediate trigger for the 1823 declaration was a Russian Ukase of 1821 asserting rights to the Pacific Northwest and forbidding non-Russian ships from approaching the coast.

Historically the original Monroe Doctrine was largely a bluff, as the US at the time had no serious navy and relied on the British Royal Navy informally to keep other powers out. What then could be the basis of invoking the Monroe Doctrine in 2019, nearly 200 years later?

Target China?

Given the track record in brutal regime change of US operators such as Elliott Abrams and others in the present effort to oust President Maduro in favor of Assembly President Juan Guaidó as interim president, it seems something other than supporting free and fair elections is involved to put it mildly. If we look at the role of foreign governments not only in Venezuela but in the broader region as a possible US motive, what comes into focus is the potential and very significant presence of China and its economic stake in Venezuela and the entire region, one receiving little attention to date.

It’s widely known that China wants security of supplies for its oil and draws from a wide variety of countries for that from Iran to Russia, from Saudi Arabia to Angola. And from Venezuela.

China is a, in fact the major creditor to the Venezuela Maduro regime, perhaps as much as $61 billion worth of loans by some estimates. Since the Washington declarations in support of Guaido, China has been unusually outspoken in defense of Maduro, unusual for a state that claims never to involve in local politics. What is not public is what detailed agreements China has from Maduro in return for being Venezuela’s main financial supporter. Are there concessions to Venezuela’s rich untapped deposits of gold or of rare earth minerals such as Coltan?

Coltan, sometimes called “blue gold,” has been confirmed in the Amazon region of Venezuela near the border to Brazil and Guyana, of an estimated $100 billion worth. Coltan is the source for tantalum which sometimes is priced higher than gold.

Tantalum is a metal used in capacitors that store energy in modern electronics like smart phones and tablets. Tantalum capacitors are also essential in powering modern military weaponry because the metal resists corrosion and can withstand the extreme temperatures generated by the new military applications. Without it, weapons systems would overheat.

The US relies on tantalum to build the basic circuitry in guidance control systems in smart bombs, the on-board navigational systems in drones, anti-tank systems, robots and most weapons systems.

The metal is vital to US defense. Yet, it has no domestic mines to mine coltan. According to the US Geological Survey most of world tantalum from coltan today comes from Rwanda and Congo in Africa followed by Brazil, Nigeria and China. In terms of tantalum reserves, Australia is world largest and its major tantalum-coltan mine, the Bald Hill lithium-tantalum mine in Western Australia, opened in 2018 with its total output pledged to a Hong Kong company.

Gold is another huge untapped resource in Venezuela estimated at some 15,500 tons. But this alone does not explain the US intervention.

Guyana Infrastructure

If we add to China’s major Venezuela presence the fact that China also signed neighbor Guyana to its Belt, Road Initiative in 2018, it begins to take on a larger dimension than mere oil supply lines or tantalum sources. Chinese companies and money are presently building a highway link from Manaus in Northern Brazil through Guyana, giving Brazil far more efficient access to the Panama Canal, cutting thousands of miles off the shipping route. Talks are reportedly also underway for China to build a deep-water port in Guyana’s northern coast to link to China’s highway to the Brazil Amazon region bordering Venezuela, with its vast untapped mineral riches. People in Guyana say the road-port will benefit China far more than Guyana. It would enable efficient ship transport from the Amazon through the Panama Canal to China.

A recent report from the Washington CSIS think tank describes what larger design China seems to be engaged in around its Venezuela presence. Author Evan Ellis states, “In South America, a transcontinental infrastructure that includes a network of highways, train, and river routes will connect Brazil to the Atlantic, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. Such connections will probably include train linkages across the Amazon to Peru’s northern cost, and a more southerly train route through Bolivia to southern Peru and northern Chile.”

Notable also are Chinese efforts in Panama, the central shipping crossing between Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In 2016 China’s Landbridge Group bought Panama’s Margarita Island Port, the largest port, on the canal’s Atlantic side, giving the Chinese company intimate access to one of the most important goods distribution centers in the world.

With China deeply engaged in Venezuela, Guyana, and Brazil as well as owning Panama’s largest port, it can well be that Washington believes that by forcing China to dramatically scale back its presence in Maduro’s Venezuela, pressure on China to scale back her global strategic agenda could markedly increase. That would add to the pressure that is coming over US sanctions on Iran, another major oil source for China. A Washington policy, undeclared, of strategic denial to China in Venezuela would fit with the remarks of John Bolton in citing the Monroe Doctrine. If so the target is not so much Maduro and his alleged dictatorship, but its growing dependence on China and China’s growing geopolitical ambitions in South America.

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

Featured image is from NEO

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

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

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

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

Regime changes in Iraq and Libya, Syria’s war, Venezuela’s crisis, sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Russia, and North Korea are reflections of a new global imperialism imposed by a core of capitalist nations in support of trillions of dollars of concentrated investment wealth. This new world order of mass capital has become a totalitarian empire of inequality and repression.

The global 1%, comprised of over 36-million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires, employ their excess capital with investment management firms like BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase. The top seventeen of these trillion-dollar investment management firms controlled $41.1 trillion dollars in 2017. These firms are all directly invested in each other and managed by only 199 people who decide how and where global capital will be invested. Their biggest problem is they have more capital than there are safe investment opportunities, which leads to risky speculative investments, increased war spending, privatization of the public domain, and pressures to open new capital investment opportunities through political regime changes.

Power elites in support of capital investment are collectively embedded in a system of mandatory growth. Failure for capital to achieve continuing expansion leads to economic stagnation, which can result in depression, bank failures, currency collapses, and mass unemployment.  Capitalism is an economic system that inevitably adjusts itself via contractions, recessions, and depressions.

Professor Peter Phillips (right)

Power elites are  entrapped in a web of enforced growth that requires ongoing global management and the formation of new and ever expanding capital investment opportunities. This forced expansion becomes a worldwide manifest destiny that seeks total capital domination in all regions of the earth and beyond.

Sixty percent of the core 199 global power elite managers are from the US, with people from twenty capitalist nations rounding out the balance. These power elite managers and associated one percenters take active part in global policy groups and governments. They serve as advisors to the IMF, World Trade Organization, World Bank, International Bank of Settlements, Federal Reserve Board, G-7 and the G-20. Most attend the World Economic Forum. Global power elites engage actively on private international policy councils such as the Council of Thirty, Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council. Many of the US global elites are members of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Business Roundtable in the US. The most important issue for these power elites is protecting capital investment, insuring debt collection, and building opportunities for further returns.

The global power elite are aware of their existence as a numerical minority in the vast sea of impoverished humanity. Roughly 80% of the world’s population lives on less than ten dollars a day and half live on less than three dollars a day. Concentrated global capital becomes the binding institutional alignment that brings transnational capitalists into a centralized global imperialism facilitated by world economic/trade institutions and protected by the US/NATO military empire. This concentration of wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation have reached levels that threaten humanity’s future.

The idea of independent self-ruling nation-states has long been held sacrosanct in traditional liberal capitalist economies. However, globalization has placed a new set of demands on capitalism that requires transnational mechanisms to support continued capital growth that is increasingly beyond the boundaries of individual states. The financial crisis of 2008 was an acknowledgement of the global system of capital under threat. These threats encourage the abandonment of nation-state rights altogether and the formation of a global imperialism that reflects new world order requirements for protecting transnational capital.

Institutions within capitalist countries including government ministries, defense forces, intelligence agencies, judiciary, universities and representative bodies, recognize to varying degrees that the overriding demands of transnational capital spill beyond the boundaries of nation-states.  The resulting worldwide reach motivates a new form of global imperialism that is evident by coalitions of core capitalist nations engaged in past and present regime change efforts via sanctions, covert actions, co-options, and war with non-cooperating nations—Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea and Russia.

The attempted coup in Venezuela shows the alignment of transnational capital-supporting states in recognizing the elite forces that oppose Maduro’s socialist presidency. A new global imperialism is at work here, whereby Venezuela’s sovereignty is openly undermined by a capital imperial world order that seeks not just control of Venezuela’s oil, but a full opportunity for widespread investments through a new regime.

The widespread corporate media negation of the democratically elected president of Venezuela demonstrates that thesemedia are owned and controlled by ideologists for the global power elite. Corporate media today is highly concentrated and fully international. Their primary goal is the promotion of product sales and pro-capitalist propaganda through the psychological control of human desires, emotions, beliefs, fears, and values. Corporate media does this by manipulating feelings and cognitions of human beings worldwide, and by promoting entertainment as a distraction to global inequality.

Recognizing global imperialism as a manifestation of concentrated wealth, managed by a few hundred people, is of utmost importance for democratic humanitarian activists.  We must stand on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and challenge global imperialism and its fascist governments, media propaganda, and empire armies.

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Peter Phillips is a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University. Giants: The Global Power Elite, 2018,  is his 18^th book from Seven Stories Press.He teaches courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociology of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies and Investigative Sociology. He served as director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010 and as president of Media Freedom Foundation from 2003 to 2017.

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

Featured image is from Images.com/Corbis

Giants: The Global Power Elite

Author: Peter Phillips

Publisher: Seven Stories Press (August 21, 2018)

ISBN-10: 1609808711

ISBN-13: 978-1609808716

Click here to order.

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“With the possible exception of the Civil War, no event in U.S. history has demanded more soul-searching than the war in Vietnam. The false pre-texts used to justify our intervention, the indiscriminate brutality of our warfare, the stubborn refusal of elected leaders to withdraw despite public opposition, and the stunning failure to achieve our stated objectives – these harrowing realities provoked a profound national identity crisis, an American reckoning.”  – Christian Appy [1]

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

A conflict with its roots in efforts to assist France in reclaiming a former colony, U.S. Forces had been providing financial and military assistance to South Vietnam in the temporarily partitioned country since the early ‘50s. [2]

The war saw a major turning point however when in the summer of 1964, news spread of an attack by North Vietnamese torpedo boats against two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. The incident, now known to have never happened, was used to justify the so-called Gulf of Tonkin Resolution which authorized a major escalation of the war. [3]

That escalation included the dispatching of 3500 U.S. Marines to South Vietnam on March 8, 1965. The Global Research News Hour marks the anniversary of this start to America’s ground war in Vietnam with four informative interviews.

In the first half hour, analyst Peter Dale Scott introduces the motivations of the U.S. Security State and the U.S. Deep State in promoting the war, the connections between the escalation and President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, and the motivation on the part of his successor Lyndon Johnson in launching the land assault. Later we hear from Abayomi Azikiwe about the solidarity between Black liberation and Vietnamese resistance groups and its importance in fostering U.S. opposition to the war.

Barrie Zwicker discusses the media establishment’s treatment of the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the war generally. Finally Professor Michel Chossudovsky elaborates on the theme of a 1995 article he wrote which explains the impoverishment of Vietanam and it integration of Vietnam into the capitalist cheap labour economy in recent decades in spite of the anti-U.S. resistance emerging victorious in 1975.

Professor Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a poet, writer, and researcher. He is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11, The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War, and The American Deep State: Big Money, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S. Democracy. His website is www.peterdalescott.net.

Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire, and has made guest appearances on Press TV, RT, Al Jazeera, China Global Television Network, BBC, NPR, and Radio Netherlands among others. He is also a frequent contributor to globalresearch.

Barrie Zwicker is a journalist and media critic whose work spans 7 decades, including a seven year stint as staff writer for the Globe and Mail during the 1960s. He also wrote for the Toronto Star, Vancouver Province, Sudbury Star, Detroit News, and Lansing State Journal. He taught the Media and Society course at Ryerson Polytechnic University in Toronto as a part-time professor for seven years, and worked as a media critic for the national broadcaster VisionTV from 1998 to 2003. He is the author of the 2006 book, Towers of deception: The Media Coverup of 9/11.

Professor Michel Chossudovsky is Professor(emeritus) of Economics at the University of Ottawa. He is the Founder and Director of the Centre for Research On Globalization, and Editor of Global Research. He has authored numerous scholarly articles and eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), and The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015).

(Global Research News Hour Episode 251)

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time. 

Notes:

1. Christian Appy (2015), American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity (p. x), published by Viking Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC.
2. https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/vietnam-war-timeline
3. https://www.britannica.com/event/Gulf-of-Tonkin-Resolution

 Nine peace activists will be speaking at the ‘Imperialism on Trial’ events in Belfast and Derry, later this month.

The State: Government, Foreign Office, Intelligence Agencies, Military, and Propaganda

Tuesday, March 19

Balmoral Hotel

Belfast

7:30-11:00pm

(Doors open at 7pm)

 b

The issue of US sanctions, and imperialist wars and regime changes, from the former Yugoslavia to the Middle-east to now, Venezuela, will feature in depth throughout the night.

b

The speakers are:

b 

Danny Morrison, Former Sinn Fein Director of Publicity

Craig Murray, Former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan

Peter Ford, Former UK Ambassador to Syria and Bahrain

Ray McGovern, Former CIA Analyst

Michael Pike, Former British Soldier, Veterans For Peace (VFP)

Patrick Henningsen, 21st Century Wire

Fake News:

Establishment Media & War On Journalism

Thursday March 21.

Guildhall

Derry

7:30-11:00pm

(Doors open at 7pm)

bbb

 

The speakers are:

b

Craig Murray, Former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan

Ray McGovern, Former CIA Analyst

Patrick Henningsen, 21st Century Wire

Catherine Shakdam, Writer & Commentator

John Wight, Journalist

Plus another speaker TBC

b 

While millions of people across the World will be protesting on March 15 under the banner of “Global Warming”, today’s wars including Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Venezuela are not mentioned.

Nor are the dangers of a Third World War which threatens the future of humanity.

Global warming overshadows the dangers of nuclear war. According to media reports, Trump’s $1.2 trillion nuclear weapons program “Makes the World safer”. 

On March 15, tens of thousands of children in 71 countries will skip school in support of what is described as “one of the biggest environmental protests in history.”

While Jobs and Justice are part of the campaign alongside climate, the issue of poverty and Worldwide unemployment resulting from the imposition of neoliberal reforms is sidetracked.

Mid-March 2019: There are ongoing military threats against Venezuela and Iran.

Is a US sponsored war contemplated for March 2019?

Is this a matter of concern which should be the object of a Worldwide protest movement?

The cyber-attack on Venezuela’s Electric grid affecting up to 80% of the country constitutes a de facto act of war.

On March 10, Washington confirmed its intent to carry out regime change in Venezuela. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo asked the US Congress to appropriate half a billion dollars “to restore the economy of the Venezuelan nation (sic) (and) help Juan Guaido.” This statement should be interpreted as a de facto “declaration of war”.

National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had previously confirmed their intent to wage war on Iran.

Unfortunately, these war plans seem to have been overshadowed by a highly publicized campaign against global warming.

While Climate, Jobs and Justice are mentioned, the Word “Peace” is casually omitted.

It is not too late to rectify: SAY NO TO WAR on March 15

Our proposal is that on March 15, this Worldwide environmental campaign embody alongside the issues of climate, a firm commitment against US-led wars and neoliberal policies which contribute to impoverishing people Worldwide.

Also, the People’s Climate Movement should take a stance against the deployment of the police apparatus against those who demand jobs and justice including the Yellow Vest movement.

Needless to say, the environmental impacts of US-NATO led wars should also be addressed.

While Climate Change is a legitimate concern, why are these protest movements limited to global warming?  The answer is that many of the key organizations involved are generously funded by Wall Street foundations and corporate charities, including the Rockefellers, Tides, Soros., et al.

When will the leadership at social media platform Facebook get it? When will they understand the scale of damage being done with its insidious and pernicious system of systematically promoting division, distrust and disharmony through the slow-burn destruction of democratic principles?

It is simply not a good enough defence to say that as a private company they can do anything they like as long as they don’t break the law.

Just last week, Facebook was exposed yet again accepting political ‘dark money’ to promote a hard Brexit. An Observer investigation found that the single biggest known British political advertiser on Facebook is a mysterious pro-Brexit campaign group pushing for a no-deal exit from the EU. Two weeks before, the same happened – more dark money poured into political campaigning for a hard-Brexit. Again, more being spent than all known campaigning groups combined.

The influence of “dark money” in British politics has been unearthed through relentless and tenacious investigative journalism, not by the police or other state agencies. No-one has yet been arrested, even after the evidence has mounted. The police, National Crime Agency and Electoral Commission are all forcibly involved and other than a few paltry fines have dragged their feet. By the time anything happens, a terrible Brexit deal will be done or Britain will go over its self-imposed cliff.

In last week’s exposure, a little-known campaign group, with almost no public exposure, no public following to speak of and publishes no information about itself, has spent more than £340,000 on Facebook adverts backing a hard Brexit – making it a bigger spender than every UK political party and the government combined. For clarity, this type of money gets you tens of millions of adverts pushed to specific groups of people.

As editor of TruePublica, I published a story about Brexit and added a paragraph about a book we are promoting – Brexit – A Corporate Coup D’Etat. That paragraph included a link to the publishers. That was enough for Facebook to email me and demand A) payment to promote the article and B) that I provide passport and proof of address – because this was clearly a “political advert sensitive to the national interest.”

And yet – SCL Elections/Cambridge Analytica had the full force of Facebook’s database to pump billions of targeted micro-ads to swing voters during the EU referendum and during a period where it was illegal to do so. That acceptance of ‘dark money’ and the organisations and individuals involved was exposed and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg summoned to appear before the British political system. He simply refused to answer any questions.

In the Observer’s article of last week, it was obvious what is going on.

“The sophisticated campaign includes thousands of individual pro-Brexit adverts, targeted at voters in the constituencies of selected MPs. The adverts urge voters to email their local representative and create the impression of a grassroots uprising for a no-deal Brexit. The MPs then receive emails, signed by a “concerned constituent”, demanding a hard Brexit. The emails do not mention the involvement of an organised campaign group.”

In the meantime, Sky News has just published its own investigative findings on the same subject. Its headline is: “Fake, foreign and far-right: Dodgy accounts uncovered pushing Brexit agenda on social media.” The entire article is about research that confirms how political extremists outside of the UK have been amplifying online pro-Leave views on Brexit. Unsurprisingly, it mentions America a few times.

Tell me if this deception is right and proper given Britain’s delicate situation?

The problem is that no law is being broken by this type of campaigning. It is quite legal for any individual or campaign group to promote political material without declaring where the funds come from as long as it is outside a defined election period.

However, this moment, the Brexit moment, is Britain’s biggest political moment – and much of what is happening is due to perception. This must be true or no-one would bother spending vast sums of money on it in such a way – and then going to great lengths disguising where it comes from. It can’t be ethical, professional or moral can it and probably not legal – not if you’re hiding in the shadows.

And who is funding this campaign? Don’t we have a right to know? Doesn’t the government want to know if it might be arch nemesis Putin and his white cat, mad missile Kim Wrong’Un or even worse, the most bigly orange estate agent sat in the roundest of rooms in Washington DC?

Does anyone really believe that our misguided, out of control, domestic surveillance agency, MI5 knows nothing of this attack against Britain’s democracy? Is that not what they are for in the first place – to ensure that the dark forces operating under the radar are not usurping the establishment?

Does this look right to you?

Theresa May is part of the establishment. She headed up the Home Office. She has twice been accused of serious Brexit cover-ups. That’s the Prime Minister of Britain – accused of cover-ups. In any previous government in British history, May would have resigned by now. Even Cameron, the worst PM since god decided seven days was enough work to create an entire world full of wonderful and equally rubbish things resigned.

One coverup was the accusation that she blocked an investigation into Brexit bankroller Arron Banks in the run-up to the 2016 referendum. He’s since under investigation by the National Crime Agency. This only happened because of journalism, not the government or police action.

In the aforementioned book, you know the one that’s been censored by FB, there is a chapter dedicated to another coverup by Theresa May.

“However, it was not until after the EU referendum, that the Home Office under Theresa May was found to have held back a number of other government generated reports that detailed the positive impacts immigration has had upon Britain in recent decades. Vince Cable commented on what can only be described as vitally important information suppression (censorship) by the government stating that:

“When I was Business Secretary there were up to nine studies that we looked at that took in all the academic evidence. It showed that immigration had very little impact on wages or employment. But this was suppressed by the Home Office under Theresa May because the results were inconvenient. I remember it vividly.”

The book (that unearths some amazing facts) quoted another report that said:

“Theresa May faced accusations from within the government that she tried to remove evidence. Correspondence seen by the Guardian laid bare a six-month tussle between Conservative and Liberal Democrat advisers, which was part of a government-wide exercise into the pros and cons of EU membership. Emails dating back to 2014 show Lib Dem advisers, who were then in government as part of the coalition, complaining repeatedly about Theresa May’s deliberate interventions.”

In the book (you should buy one, it’s only £2.99), another little fact is unearthed. It is a fact, that almost everyone would not just understand but would support.

“The report also detailed numerous ways in which Britain could easily reduce the overall number of EU nationals coming to work in the UK if it had wanted, including implementing a two-year residency restriction for unskilled workers and further restrictions on bringing family members over.

“A lot of the pro-free-movement evidence has been removed,” complained one adviser, citing a UCL report This was, if anything, a disgraceful cover-up by the government.”

Actually, it was yet another report stifled and shoved under the carpet during the EU referendum debate by none other than – Theresa May.

At what point do we really think she campaigned to Remain – because let’s be fair – other than the odd low profile speech, she didn’t.

Interestingly, pro-EU campaigners believe Theresa May made it harder for David Cameron to argue for Britain’s continued membership in the EU as a direct result. David Cameron’s former director of communications, Craig Oliver, also accused the Home Secretary of repeatedly failing to throw her weight behind the campaign to keep Britain in the EU. I wonder why?

Last November, Theresa May was again accused of being at the heart of another coverup by blocking publication of the full legal advice behind her Brexit deal. That is hardly democracy is it? May has persistently proceeded to Brexit failure at every stage – even though she has been warned with specific legal counsel.

Theresa May’s government has been found to be in contempt of parliament – a first. And she was handed the most overwhelming defeat in British political history – another first. All this alongside the coverups, the lying and threats.

In the meantime, why has the ultra-hard-right ERG group of Brexiteers, described as one of the most ‘powerful forces in British politics‘, funded by British taxpayers been given anonymity for so long?

That additional dodgy cash it gets from dodgy foreign donors called ‘dark money’ might have something to do with it, is nothing less than a scandal. Think about that for a minute. The ERG are hiding their member’s identities and where the money comes from whilst being at the very heart of not just government but Brexit. That doesn’t just smell a bit does it – it wreaks.

As Ian Dunt at politics.co.uk put it last week when commenting about Theresa May and her government –

“The shame is gone. And that permeates all the way down the system, from the ceaseless lies told by MPs to the limitless cash ministers waste. Organisations take on the character of those at the top. We have Theresa May, so shamelessness, ignorance and inadequacy have now tricked down to every part of the governing structure.”

You’d think May had some sort of undercover protection team ensuring that no matter how bad the defeat, no matter how much she breaks ethical, moral or parliamentary rules, no matter how many lies or threats she issues – she will stand until the deal is done and then, just like David Cameron, disappear into the night.

If it doesn’t look, feel or sound right – guess what.

Frankly, It stinks.

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The US will most likely misportray Russia as an “aggressor” in order to intentionally destabilize the EU and thus make it more compliant to America’s hegemonic demands

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There shouldn’t be any doubt that Russia will respond in a tit-for-tat fashion to the US’ possible deployment of previously banned short- and -intermediate missiles anywhere in the world and especially in Europe after President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Chairman of the Duma Defense Committee Vladimir Shamanov all literally said as in several statements over the past couple of weeks.

Russia reserves its legitimate right to do so in order to maintain strategic parity between it and the US and therefore reinforce global stability in an increasingly chaotic world, but it’s also walking into an unavoidable infowar trap by doing this. There isn’t any alternative to Russia’s tit-for-tat response otherwise it risks undermining its own national security interests, though its defensive reaction will almost certainly be reframed by the US as an “aggressive” one as Washington incessantly continues its anti-Russian fearmongering campaign in the EU.

It’s not Russia that wants to return Europe to being conceptualized as a conventional battleground in the New Cold War just like it was in the old one, but the US, though it’s unlikely that America actually intends to make it one but is instead seeking to exploit this sentiment for its own self-interested hegemonic reasons.

Pushing the narrative of “Russian aggression” and pointing to “proof” of Moscow’s deployment of short- and -intermediate range missiles (conveniently leaving out the tit-for-tat part) could allow Trump to squeeze his country’s NATO allies for even more funding than ever before, as well as advance his administration’s “cost plus 50” plan to have every country hosting American troops pay the base cost of doing so plus an additional 50% premium. In parallel, the US’ military-industrial complex can also pressure its partners to purchase more American weapons on this pretext, which could create jobs that Trump could promote as part of his re-election campaign.

Nevertheless, the end effect would be the same, and that’s to accelerate the militarization of the Eurasian Rimland with a specific emphasis on the European part that most directly concerns Russia’s strategic security. The point in doing so is to compel Russia to compete in a new interconnected arms and space race and spend the requisite funds to “keep pace” with American-led developments in this sphere, which could combine with the existing and proposed sanctions regimes against the country to deprive the government of some of the financial resources that it allocated to President Putin’s “Great Society” socio-economic development program.

The end goal is to shape the perceptions of average Russian citizens and influence their electoral behavior ahead of the country’s inevitable political transition at the end of President Putin’s fourth and final term in office in 2024, hoping that this can eventually be weaponized to strategically advantageous ends for America.

That’s the plan, at least, but it’s far from foolproof and has a credible chance of failing to accomplish all of what it sets out to do. For starters, Russian decision makers are confident in the knowledge that their world-class hypersonic missiles are more than adequate to ensure the long-term security of the country and that there’s no need to redirect funds away from the “Great Society” and back into the military-industrial complex. This makes a new arms and space race between it and the US more of a political fantasy than anything, albeit one that unaware civilians could easily be convinced into believing.

As such, it’s absolutely integral that the Russian state harnesses its domestic and international information capabilities to convey this truth to their intended audiences, doing what must be needed to debunk the false notion that Russia would be responding “aggressively” through its tit-for-tat policy and reassuring everyone that it doesn’t intend to participate in an arms and space race.

To be sure, Russia is already trying to do that and has succeeded on the home front, but the odds of success are stacked against it abroad. The EU is increasingly suppressing Russia’s publicly funded international media platforms and private Alt-Media ones alike that share statements by Russian representatives to the aforementioned effect, leading to a situation where the European public is unlikely to directly hear Russia’s position on these important issues without it being manipulatively distorted by their anti-Russian Mainstream Medias.

As for the decision-making element of Russia’s targeted audience, most European leaders are unable to resist the US’ Hybrid War pressure upon them and will probably go along with America’s plans whether they want to or not, especially if Trump weaponizes economic instruments against them such as unrelated secondary sanctions pertaining to Iran and Venezuela for instance in order to get them to strategically submit.

Having said that, it can’t be discounted that the US’ hegemonic demands will partially backfire if some independently minded leaders like Germany’s publicly speak out against this in defense of their own objective national interests, basing their opposition on the need to avoid a costly and dangerous return to the Old Cold War’s conventional threats in Europe and not risk worsening already strained relations with Russia that could otherwise be improved to the economic advantage of average citizens.

Given its hefty economic sway, bloc-wide leadership, and hosting of so many US troops, Germany is the only country that can conceivably set the precedent for this to happen and encourage others to follow in its path, but it’ll probably have no effect on Three Seas leader Poland who will try to position itself as the “New Germany” vis-à-vis its rising military-strategic importance to the US. Even so, as long as Russia avoids being dragged into a new arms and space race, then America will be deprived of its sought-after “victory”.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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 InfoRos

What happened to Congresswoman Ilhan Omar was troubling. On the one hand, because she dared to challenge the way supporters of Israel have worked to silence debate on US policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, she became a victim of incitement, and the target of legislation meant to shame her. At the same time, however, the heavy-handed tactics employed against her by some pro-Israel members of Congress backfired, exposing new fault lines in the US-Israel relationship.

The weapon of choice utilized by Omar’s opponents was to demonize her as an anti-Semite. Her “sin,” it appears, was her continued umbrage over the double-standard that exists in American policy toward Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

During Israel’s assault on Gaza, for example, she criticized the failure of the US media to pierce through Israeli propaganda and see what was actually happening to Palestinians in that impoverished strip of land. Once in Congress, she was deemed to have “sinned” again when she challenged the power of AIPAC to intimidate politicians and silence debate on Israel/Palestine.

New to Washington and the “acceptable language” one should use to discuss these issues, she admitted that her word choices had been unfortunate and apologized for the pain she may have caused.

Despite her apology, she remained a target. Because she is a hijab-wearing Muslim, who was critical of Israel, the GOP sought to exploit her in their continuing effort to drive a wedge between the Jewish community and Democrats. For their part, some Democrats reacted with hyperventilated outrage. Extreme language was used to denounce Omar. Her words were described as “bigoted,” “vile,” and, of course, “anti-Semitic slurs.”

Never, in all this time, was there a critical examination of what she actually said. In fact, she never accused the Jewish community of controlling the media (unless one assumes that Israel’s ability to dominate media coverage of events occurring in the occupation can be attributed to the Jewish community). Nor did she accuse the Jewish community of using money to buy influence in Washington (unless one suggests that AIPAC speaks for and acts on behalf of the entire Jewish community). It didn’t matter, her opponents continued to call her an “anti-Semite,” and did so with such frequency that the term stuck, putting her at risk to threats of violence from bigots.

The entire affair came to a head when, at a town hall last week, Omar attempted to explain herself. Asked to address the controversy that had erupted over her advocacy of Palestinian rights, Omar’s colleague, Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib, spoke first noting that to her the question of Palestine is personal – her grandmother still lives in the West Bank and Congresswoman Tlaib desires that she receive equal justice and recognition of her rights to live in dignity. Reacting to what she had just heard, Omar said that she couldn’t agree with those who fight for human rights and dignity for others and yet exclude Palestinian rights and dignity. For her part, she said, the focus should be universal – leaving no one out. She then chided those in Congress who have pressed her to reject her commitment to call out Israeli abuses and ignore Palestinians rights. Because she is a Muslim, Omar said, her criticism of Israel has been automatically seen as anti-Semitic in order to silence her. Even more troubling she noted was that, as a result of the manufactured controversy over her words, the discussion became whether or not she was an anti-Semite, while ignoring “the broader debate about what is happening in Palestine.”

At that point, Omar said that she resented those who are pushing her to demonstrate allegiance to Israel. She concluded by saying that she wanted to have this conversation about “the political influence in this country that says it’s okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.”

The reaction to this newest “sin” was near hysteria. Without ever listening to what she actually said, some members of Congress accused her of saying that the Jews had dual-loyalty – despite the fact that she had said no such thing. They demanded that Omar be censured or removed from her committee posts. And the chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee proposed a resolution that would have denounced anti-Semitism in a way that was clearly directed at the congresswoman.

What was disturbing about this proposed resolution was that none of “Whereas” clauses included had anything to do with what Omar actually said. She never accused Jews of “dual loyalty because they support Israel”; nor did she display “prejudicial attitudes” towards Jews; nor did she ever make “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews”.

What she did do was: challenge official American, and in particular, Congressional silence on the suffering of the Palestinians; the efforts by pro-Israel groups to silence debate on this issue; and the way that some have sought to create a virtual identity being pro-Israel and American interests.

Despite the obvious falseness of their claims, Omar’s opponents in Congress plowed ahead with their proposed bill in order “to teach her a lesson.” In their remarks rebuking Omar, they unwittingly made her point. One congressman said, “Questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable.” Another said, “there are many reasons to support Israel, but there is no reason to oppose Israel.” While still another said that Democrats and Republicans, alike, are committed to insuring that the “United States and Israel stand as one.”

It is exactly this attitude to which Omar objected when she wrote,

“I am told everyday that I am anti-American if I am not pro-Israel…I know what it means to be an American and no one will ever tell me otherwise…I have not said anything about the loyalty of others, but spoke about the loyalty expected of me.”

Because Omar has touched what some have come to say is “the third rail of American politics” she was being exploited by some Republicans and hung out to dry by some Democrats. They put a target on her back. And haters were quick to respond with frightening death threats and shameful bigoted assaults on her as a Muslim woman. There is no question that these threats against Omar were the byproduct of the sustained campaign of incitement.

It’s important to note, however, that outside of the halls of Congress a different reality was unfolding. The attacks on Congresswoman Omar were rejected by many Democrats, including progressive Jewish groups, and a debate was sparked by the issues she raised and the over-reaction to them by Congress.

By week’s end, the entire effort appeared to backfire. Instead of being the “slam dunk” they expected, the proposed resolution ran into blocks. Some members objected to singling out of anti-Semitism, without also denouncing racism, sexism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, etc. Others protested that Omar was being singled out and put at risk.  And a few of the more prominent Democratic presidential hopefuls (Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris) insisted that charges of anti-Semitism should not be used to silence debate on Israeli policy.

By week’s end, Congress passed a resolution denouncing all forms of hate or intolerance against any religious, ethnic, or religious community. Since it made no mention of Ilhan, it was clearly a loss for those who began the push to shame or punish her

Two final points must be made:

Firstly, Representative Omar is owed an apology. False charges and a manufactured crisis have sullied her name and put her at risk.

And secondly, it is clear that Omar’s courage has helped to open a door enabling a discussion of Israeli policy and the US-Israel relationship. While her opponents attempted to slam it shut, it seems that their behavior and incitement against her backfired stirring a debate that has helped to pry the door even further open.

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The Solons on Capitol Hill are terrified of the expression “dual loyalty.” They are afraid because dual loyalty means that one is not completely a loyal citizen of the country where one was born, raised and, presumably, prospered. It also suggests something more perverse, and that is dual citizenship, which in its present historic and social context particularly refers to the Jewish congressmen and women who just might be citizens of both the United States and Israel. There is particular concern over the issue at the moment because a freshman congresswoman Ilhan Omar has let the proverbial cat out of the bag by alluding to American-Jewish money buying uncritical support for a foreign country which is Israel without any regard to broader U.S. interests, something that everyone in Washington knows is true and has been the case for decades but is afraid to discuss due to inevitable punishment by the Israel Lobby.

Certainly, the voting record in Congress would suggest that there are a lot of congress critters who embrace dual loyalty, with evidence that the loyalty is not so much dual as skewed in favor of Israel. Any bill relating to Israel or to Jewish collective interests, like the currently fashionable topic of anti-Semitism, is guaranteed a 90% plus approval rating no matter what it says or how much it damages actual U.S. interests. Thursday’s 407 to 23 vote in the House of Representatives on a meaningless and almost unreadable “anti-hate” resolution was primarily intended to punish Ilhan Omar and to demonstrate that the Democratic Party is indeed fully committed to sustaining the exclusive prerogatives of the domestic Jewish community and the Jewish state.

The voting on the resolution was far from unusual and would have been unanimous but for the fact that twenty-three Republicans voted “no” because they wanted a document that was only focused on anti-Semitism, without any references to Muslims or other groups that might be encountering hatred in America. That the congress should be wasting its time with such nonsense is little more than a manifestation of Jewish power in the United States, part of a long-sought goal of making any criticism of Israel a “hate” crime punishable by fining and imprisonment. And congress is always willing to play its part. Famously, American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) official Steven Rosen (image on the right) once boasted that he could take a napkin and within 24 hours have the signatures of 70 Senators on it, reflective of the ability of the leading pro-Israel organization to impel the U.S. legislature to respond uncritically to its concerns.

Ilhan Omar has certainly been forced to apologize and explain her position as she is under sustained attack from the left, right and center as well as from the White House. One congressman told her that “Questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable.” Another said “there are many reasons to support Israel, but there is no reason to oppose Israel” while yet another one declared that all in Congress are committed to insuring that the “United States and Israel stand as one.”

But Omar has defended herself without abandoning her core arguments and she has further established her bona fides as a credible critic of what passes for U.S. foreign policy by virtue of an astonishing attack on former President Barack Obama, whom she criticized obliquely in an interview Friday, saying

“We can’t be only upset with Trump. His policies are bad, but many of the people who came before him also had really bad policies. They just were more polished than he was. That’s not what we should be looking for anymore. We don’t want anybody to get away with murder because they are polished. We want to recognize the actual policies that are behind the pretty face and the smile.”

Presumably Omar was referring to Obama’s death by drone program and his destruction of Libya, among his other crimes. Everything she said about the smooth talking but feckless Obama is true and could be cast in even worse terms, but to hear the truth from out of the mouth of a liberal Democrat is something like a revelation that all progressives are not ideologically fossilized and fundamentally brain dead. One wonders what she thinks of the Clintons?

The Democrats are in a tricky situation that will only wind up hurting relationships with some of their core constituencies. If they come down too hard on Omar – a Muslim woman of color who wears a head covering – it will not look good to some key minority voters they have long courted. If they do not, the considerable Jewish political donations to the Democratic Party will certainly be diminished if not slowed to a trickle and much of the media will turn hostile. So they are trying to bluff their way through by uttering the usual bromides. Senator Kristin Gillibrand of New York characteristically tried to cover both ends by saying

“Those with critical views of Israel, such as Congresswoman Omar, should be able to express their views without employing anti-Semitic tropes about money or influence.”

Well, of course, it is all about Jews, money buying access and obtaining political power, with the additional element of supporting a foreign government that has few actual interests in common with the United States, isn’t it?

As Omar put it,

“I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is OK for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country…”

She also tweeted to a congressional critic that

“I should not be expected to have allegiance/pledge support to a foreign country in order to serve my country in Congress or serve on committee.”

Gilad Atzmon, a well known Jewish critic of Israel, observed drily that

“How reassuring is it that the only American who upholds the core values of liberty, patriotism and freedom is a black Muslim and an immigrant…”

But such explicatory language about the values that Americans used to embrace before Israel-worship rendered irrelevant the Constitution clearly made some lightweights from the GOP side nervous. Megan McCain, daughter of thankfully deceased “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” Senator John McCain appears on a mind numbing talk-television program called The View where she cried as she described her great love for fellow Israel-firster warmonger former U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman as “like family,” before launching into her own “informed” analysis:

“I take the hate crimes rising in this country incredibly seriously and I think what’s happening in Europe is really scary. On both sides it should be called out. And just because I don’t technically have Jewish family that are blood-related to me doesn’t mean that I don’t take this seriously and it is very dangerous, very dangerous… what Ilhan Omar is saying is very scary to me.”

The New York Times also had a lot to say, covering the story on both its news and op-eds pages daily. Columnist Michelle Goldberg, who is usually sensible, criticizes Omar because of her “minimizing the legacy of the holocaust” and blames her because “she’s committed what might be called, in another context, a series of microaggressions — inadvertent slights that are painful because they echo whole histories of trauma.” In other words, if some Jews are indeed deliberately corrupting American politics on behalf of Israel and against actual U.S. interests using money to do so it is not a good idea to say anything about it because it might revive bad historical – or not so historical – memories. It is perpetual victimhood employed as an excuse for malfeasance on the part of Jewish groups and the Jewish state.

Another Times columnist Bret Stephens also takes up the task of defenestrating Omar with some relish, denying that “claims that Israel…uses money to bend others to its will, or that its American supporters ‘push for allegiance to a foreign country’” are nothing more than the “repackage[ing] falsehoods commonly used against Jews for centuries.” He attributes to her “insidious cunning” and “anti-Jewish bigotry” observing how “she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress “Israeli-occupied” territory.” And it’s all “…how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It’s why anti-Semitism is just outside the frame, bidding to get in.” He concludes by asking why the Democratic Party “has so much trouble calling out a naked anti-Semite in its own ranks.”

Stephens clearly does not accept that what Omar claims just might actually be true. Perhaps he is so irritated by her because he himself is a perfect example of someone who suffers from dual loyalty syndrome, or perhaps it would be better described as single loyalty to his tribe and to Israel. Review some of his recent columns in The Times if you do not believe that to be true. He has an obsession with rooting out people that he believes to be anti-Semites and believes all the nonsense about Israel as the “only democracy in the Middle East.” In his op-ed he claims that “Israel is the only country in its region that embraces the sorts of values the Democratic Party claims to champion.” Yes, a theocratic state’s summary execution of unarmed protesters and starving civilians while simultaneously carrying out ethnic cleansing are traditional Democratic Party programs, at least as Bret sees it.

People like Stephens are unfortunately possessors of a bully pulpit and are influential. As they are public figures, they should be called out regarding where their actual loyalties lie, but no one in power is prepared to do that. Stephens wears his Jewishness on his sleeve and is pro-Israel far beyond anyone else writing at The Times. He and other dual loyalists, to be generous in describing them, should be exposed for what they are, which is the epitome of the promoters of the too “passionate attachment” with a foreign state that President George Washington once warned against. If the United States of America is not their homeland by every measure, they should perhaps consider doing Aliyah and moving to Israel. We genuine Americans would be well rid of them.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from The Unz Review

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Venezuela: Suspend Debt Repayments and Create an Emergency Humanitarian Fund

By Eric Toussaint, March 13, 2019

Faced with the aggressive measures taken by foreign powers who have not hesitated to confiscate assets of the Republic of Venezuela deposited abroad and which are necessary for maintaining commercial exchanges, the government must declare a suspension of repayment of foreign debt.

Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Affair: The Site C Dam Project and Bulk Water Export

By Joyce Nelson, March 13, 2019

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

Buying Back the “Iron Dome” from Israel

By Philip Giraldi, March 13, 2019

In early February, the U.S. Army announced that it would be buying Israel’s Iron Dome antimissile system to protect American troops against incoming rockets, artillery shells, and mortar rounds.

Distorting American History: Jefferson Exhibit Generates Racial Controversy in Detroit

By Abayomi Azikiwe, March 13, 2019

On March 12, approximately 100 people picketed the Wright Museum demanding that the Jefferson exhibit be reconsidered. Participants carried a banner challenging the official narrative and characterization of Jefferson.

UK Parliament Rejects No-Brexit/Brexit Deal for Second Time

By Stephen Lendman, March 13, 2019

The deal calls for the UK remaining in the EU customs union, Brussels and Berlin retaining control. A number of May’s ministers resigned over her deal, refusing to support capitulation to EU authorities.

US Congressmen Introduce Bill to Prohibit US Courts from Recognizing Cuban Trademarks

By Telesur, March 13, 2019

Senators Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Bob Menendez (D-NJ) presented a bill on Tuesday before the US Congress in which they seek to prohibit the official recognition and rights of Cuban trademarks in the United States.

Pity the Nation: War Spending Is Bankrupting America

By John W. Whitehead, March 13, 2019

According to an investigative report by Open the Government, among the items purchased during the last month of the fiscal year when government agencies go all out to get rid of these “use it or lose it” funds: Wexford Leather club chair ($9,241), china tableware ($53,004), alcohol ($308,994), golf carts ($673,471), musical equipment including pianos, tubas, and trombones ($1.7 million), lobster tail and crab ($4.6 million), iPhones and iPads ($7.7 million), and workout and recreation equipment ($9.8 million).

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It’s not only the mafia that demands ransom money in exchange for its “protection”. “The rich countries that we protect” – warned President Donald Trump in a menacing speech at the Pentagon – Our allies “are all notified. They will have to pay for our protection”.

President Trump – reveals Bloomberg — is going to present the plan “Cost Plus 50” which includes the following criteria – the allied countries which shelter US forces on their territory will have to cover their total cost, and pay the USA a supplement of 50 % in exchange for the “privilege” of housing them and therefore enjoying their “protection”.

The plan also requires that the shelter countries pay the salaries of US military personnel and the costs of the management of the aircraft and warships that the United States keep in that country. Italy must therefore pay not only the salaries of approximately 12,000 US military employees based on their territory, but also the management costs for the F-16 fighters and other aircraft deployed by the USA at Aviano and Sigonella. To this must be added the costs of the Sixth Fleet based at Gaeta. According to this same requirement, we will also have to pay for the management of Camp Darby, the biggest US arsenal outside of the homeland, and for the upkeep of the US nuclear weapons stored at Aviano and Ghedi.

We do not know how much the United States intend to charge Italy and the other European countries which shelter their military forces, since we do not even know how much they are currently paying. These data are covered by Secret-Defense. According to a study by the Rand Corporation, the European members of NATO assume the average charge of 34 % of the cost of the US forces and bases present on their territories. But we do not know how much of the annual cost they currently pay to the USA. The only estimation – 2,5 billion dollars – was made 17 years ago.

The sum paid by Italy is therefore also secret. We only have information on certain posts – for example the tens of millions of Euros spent to adapt the airports of Aviano and Ghedi to the needs of the US F-35 fighters and the new B61-12 nuclear bombs that the USA will begin to deploy in Italy in 2020, plus approximately 100 million Euros for the work on the aeronaval base at Sigonella, which is also to be paid for by Italy. At Sigonella, only the Nas I, the administrative and leisure area, is exclusively financed by the USA, while Nas II, the operational departments – the most expensive – are financed by NATO, and therefore also by Italy.

In any case, it is certain – warns a researcher from the Rand Corp – that with the “Cost Plus 50” plan, the costs for the allies “will skyrocket”. There is talk of an increase of 600 %. This will be added to the usual military spending, which in Italy reaches approximately 70 million Euros per day, soon to climb to about 100 million Euros according to the engagements taken by consecutive Italian governments at NATO headquarters.

This is public money drawn from our pockets, subtracted from productive investments and social spending. But it is possible that Italy could pay less for the US forces and bases deployed on its territory. The “Cost Plus 50” in fact plans for a “good behaviour bonus” in the favour of those “allies which closely align themselves with the United States, by doing what they are asked”.

We are sure that Italy will profit from a strong reduction because, from government to government, it has always followed close behind the United States, most recently, by sending troops and warplanes to Eastern Europe on the pretext of containing the “Russian menace” and by favouring the US plan to bury the INF Treaty in order to deploy in Europe, including Italy, sites for nuclear missiles pointed at Russia.

Since these are the targets of possible reprisals, we will need the “protection” of other US forces and bases. Which we will have to pay for, but still with the reduction bonus.

Source: PandoraTV

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This article was originally published on Il Manifesto. Translated by Pete Kimberley.

Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Featured image is from the author

While the Justin Trudeau government’s interference in the prosecution of SNC Lavalin highlights corporate influence over politics, it is also a story about a firm at the centre of Canadian foreign policy.

In a recent story titled “Canada’s Corrupt Foreign Policy Comes Home to Roost” I detailed some of SNC’s controversial international undertakings, corruption and government support. But, there’s a great deal more to say about the global behemoth.

“With offices and operations in over 160 countries”, the company has long been the corporate face of this country’s foreign policy. In fact, it is not much of an exaggeration to describe some Canadian diplomatic posts as PR arms for the Montréal-based firm. What’s good for SNC has been defined as good for Canada.

Even as evidence of its extensive bribery began seeping out six years ago, SNC continued to receive diplomatic support and rich government contracts. Since then the Crown Corporation Export Development Canada issued SNC or its international customers at least $800-million  in loans; SNC and a partner were awarded part of a contract worth  up to $400 million to manage Canadian Forces bases abroad; Canada’s aid agency profiled  a venture SNC co-led to curb pollution in Vietnam; Canada’s High  Commissioner Gérard Latulippe and Canadian Commercial Corporation vice president Mariette Fyfe-Fortin sought “to arrange  an untendered, closed-door” contract for SNC to build a $163-million hospital complex in Trinidad and Tobago.

Ottawa’s support for SNC despite corruption allegations in 15 countries is not altogether surprising since the company has proven to be a loyal foot soldier fighting for controversial foreign policy decisions under both Liberal and Conservative governments.

SNC’s nuclear division participated  in a delegation to India led by International Trade Minister Stockwell Day a few months after Ottawa signed a 2008 agreement to export nuclear reactors to India, even though New Delhi refused to sign the Nuclear non-Proliferation Treaty (India developed atomic weapons with Canadian technology). Describing it as the “biggest  private contractor to [the] Canadian mission” in Afghanistan, the Ottawa Citizen referred to SNC in 2007 as “an indispensable part of Canada’s war effort.” In Haiti SNC participated  in a Francophonie Business Forum trip seven months after the US, Canada and France overthrew the country’s elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Amidst the coup government’s vast political repression, the Montreal firm met foreign installed prime minister Gérard Latortue and the company received a series of Canadian government funded contracts in Haiti.

SNC certainly does not shy away from ethically dubious business. For years it manufactured grenades for the Canadian military and others at its plant in Le Gardeur, Quebec. According to its website, SNC opened an office  in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1982 amidst the international campaign to boycott the apartheid regime. Later that decade SNC worked on the Canadian government funded Manantali Dam, which led to “economic ruin, malnutrition and disease to hundreds of thousands of West African farmers.”

More recently, SNC has been part of numerous controversial mining projects in Africa. It had a major stake in a Sherritt-led consortium that initiated one of the world’s largest nickel and cobalt mines in Ambatovy Madagascar. Backed by Canadian diplomats  and Export Development  Canada, the gigantic open pit mine tore up more than 1,300 acres of biologically rich  rain forest home to a thousand species of flowering plants, fourteen species of lemurs and a hundred types of frogs.

According to West Africa Leaks, SNC dodged its tax obligations in Senegal. With no construction equipment or office of its own, SNC created a shell company in Mauritius to avoid paying tax. Senegal missed out on $8.9 million the Montréal firm should have paid the country because its ‘office’ was listed in tax free Mauritius. SNC has subsidiaries in low tax jurisdictions Jersey and Panama and the company was cited in the “Panama Papers” leak of offshore accounts for making a $22 million payment to a British Virgin Islands-based firm to secure contracts in Algeria. (In a case of the tax-avoiding fox protecting the public’s hen house, former SNC president and chairman of the board, Guy Saint-Pierre, was appointed to Conservative Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s 2007 advisory panel  on Canada’s System of International Taxation.)

SNC has benefited from Ottawa’s international push for neoliberal reforms and Canada’s power within the World Bank. A strong proponent of neoliberalism, the Montréal firm has worked  on and promoted  privatizing water services in a number of countries. Alongside Global Affairs Canada, SNC promotes the idea that the public cannot build, operate or manage services and that the way forward is through Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs), which often go beyond a standard design-and-build-construction contract to include private sector participation in service operation, financing and decision making. SNC is represented on the Canadian Council for Public-Private Partnerships, which promotes PPPs globally. The Montréal firm has also sponsored many pro-privatization forums.With Rio Tinto, Alcan, Teck Resources and the Canadian International Development Agency, SNC funded  and presented at a 2012 conference at McGill University on Public-Private Partnerships for Sustainable Development: Towards a Framework for Resource Extraction Industries.

In an embarrassing comment on the PPP lobby, the year before SNC was charged with paying $22.5 million  in bribes to gain the contract to build the McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) the Canadian Council  for Public-Private Partnerships and Thomson Reuters  both awarded the MUHC project a prize for best PPP.

Further proof that in the corporate world what is good for SNC is seen as good for Canada, the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants gave SNC its award for excellence in corporate governance in seven of the ten  years before the company’s corruption received widespread attention.

In an indication of the impunity that reigns in the corporate world, the directors that oversaw SNC’s global corruption have faced little sanction. After the corruption scandal was revealed board chairman Gwyn Morgan, founder of EnCana, continued to write a regular column for the Globe and Mail Report on Business (currently Financial Post) and continues his membership in the Order of Canada. Ditto for another long serving SNC director who is also a member of the Order of Canada. In fact, Conservative Senator Hugh Segal was subsequently made a member of the Order of Ontario. Another Order of Canada and Order of Ontario member on SNC’s board, Lorna Marsden, also maintained her awards. Other long serving board members — Claude Mongeau, Pierre Lessard, Dee Marcoux, Lawrence Stevenson and David Goldman – received corporate positions and awards after overseeing SNC’s corruption.

The corporate face of this country’s foreign policy is not pretty. While Trudeau’s SNC scandal highlights corporate influence over politics, it’s also the story of the Ugly Canadian abroad.

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