Sábado, 26/Janeiro/2019, Emmanuel Macron, Pedro Sánchez, Angela Merkel, seguidos de There-sa May, deram 8 dias ao Governo da Venezuela para convocar eleições. No fim deste prazo, se o Governo venezuelano não ceder a esta intimação, Macron, Sanchez, Merkel e May anunciaram que reconhecerão Juan Guaidó, que se autoproclamou presidente da Venezuela a 23 de Janeiro de 2019.
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Israel, lizenziert zum Töten

January 28th, 2019 by Manlio Dinucci

„Mit seiner völlig unerwarteten Aktion hat Israel Angriffe auf militärische Ziele in Syrien offiziallisiert und die syrischen Behörden davor gewarnt, Rache an Israel zu üben“ – so berichteten die italienischen Medien über den gestrigen Angriff Israels in Syrien mit Marschflugkörpern und intelligenten Bomben. „Dies ist eine Botschaft an die Russen, die zusammen mit dem Iran das Überleben der Machtstruktur Assads ermöglichen“, kommentierte der Corriere della Sera.

Niemand stellt das „Recht“ Israels in Frage, einen souveränen Staat anzugreifen, um die Regierung durchzusetzen, die dieser haben soll, nach acht Jahren, während deren die USA, die NATO und die Golfmonarchien versuchten, ihn mit Israel zu zerstören, wie sie es 2011 mit dem Staat Libyen taten.

Niemand ist empört darüber, dass diese israelischen Luftangriffe am Samstag und Montag Dutzende von Menschenleben forderten, darunter mindestens vier Kinder, sowie schwere Schäden am internationalen Flughafen Damaskus verursacht haben. Andererseits wurde viel darüber gesprochen, dass das Skigebiet des Mount Hermon (das vollständig von Israel mit den Golanhöhen besetzt war) einen Tag lang wohlweislich geschlossen geblieben war, was den Feriengästen großen Unmut bereitete.

Niemand scheint über die Tatsache besorgt zu sein, dass die Intensivierung der israelischen Angriffe in Syrien unter dem Vorwand, dass sie als Startrampe für iranische Raketen genutzt werden, mit den Vorbereitungen für einen groß angelegten Krieg gegen den Iran begonnen hat, der mit dem Pentagon geplant ist und dessen Auswirkungen katastrophal wären.

Die Entscheidung der USA, sich aus dem iranischen Atomabkommen zurückzuziehen – ein Abkommen, das von Israel als „Kapitulation des Westens an die vom Iran angeführte Achse des Bösen“ definiert wurde – hat eine äußerst gefährliche Situation ausgelöst, nicht nur für den Großraum Nah-Ost. Israel, die einzige Atommacht im Nahen Osten – und Nicht-Unterzeichner des Atomwaffensperrvertrags, der jedoch vom Iran validiert wurde – verfügt derzeit über 200 Atomwaffen, die auf den Iran gerichtet sind (wie vom ehemaligen US-Außenminister Colin Powell im März 2015 angegeben). Unter den verschiedenen Vektoren für Atomwaffen verfügt Israel über eine erstklassige Staffel von F-35A-Kampfflugzeugen, die im Dezember 2017 in Betrieb genommen wurde.

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Israel ist nicht nur das erste Land, das das neue Jagdflugzeug der fünften Generation vom US-Unternehmen Lockheed Martin kauft, sondern spielt mit seiner eigenen Militärindustrie auch eine wichtige Rolle bei der Entwicklung von Jagdflugzeugen. Im vergangenen Dezember begann Israel Aerospace Industries mit der Produktion von Tragflächenteilen, die die F-35 für Radar unsichtbar machen. Dank dieser Technologie, die auch auf italienische F-35 angewendet wird, stärkt Israel die Angriffskapazitäten seiner Atomstreitkräfte, die durch das „Programm der individuellen Zusammenarbeit mit Israel“” in das elektronische System der NATO integriert sind.

Aber wir finden nichts davon in unseren Medien, ebenso wie wir nichts darüber finden können, dass es neben den Opfern des israelischen Angriffs in Syrien weitere gibt, die viel zahlreicher sind und von dem israelischen Embargo im Gazastreifen gegen die Palästinenser heimgesucht wurden. Dort mussten aufgrund der von der israelischen Regierung verhängten Blockade internationaler Gelder für Gesundheitseinrichtungen im Gazastreifen sechs von dreizehn Krankenhäusern, darunter die beiden Kinderkrankenhäuser Nasser und Rantissi, wegen des Mangels an Brennstoff, die für die Erzeugung von elektrischer Energie notwendig sind, am 20. Januar schließen. Im Gazastreifen ist die Stromverteilung im Netz äußerst sporadisch.

Wir können nicht sagen, wie viele Opfer das bewusste Schließen der Krankenhäuser in Gaza fordern wird. Auf jeden Fall werden wir keine sachdienlichen Informationen in unseren Medien finden, die jedoch die Erklärung von Vizepremier Matteo Salvini anlässlich seines jüngsten Besuchs in Israel großflächig ausstrahlen: „Ich sichere mein ganzes Engagement zu, um das Recht auf Sicherheit für Israel, eine Bastion der Demokratie im Nahen Osten, zu unterstützen“.

Manlio Dinucci

 

Quelle
Il Manifesto (Italien) :

VIDEO – Israele, licenza di uccidere

Übersetzung
K. R.

 

 

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Drone manufacturer, General Atomics, hosted an event in London on 24 January in order – as its press release put it – “to recognize UK companies that are contributing to operational systems such as MQ-9 Reaper and MQ-1C Gray Eagle, and the new MQ-9B SkyGuardian RPA program” (which the UK MoD is calling ‘Protector’).

As part of the day, the US company signed agreements with three major UK defence companies: Raytheon, MBDA and BAE Systems.  Raytheon will supply and integrate Paveway IV bombs onto the new British drone while MBDA will integrate and supply it with the new Brimstone missile. BAE Systems, however, will play a wider role, helping to enable the new drone to be flown within the UK airspace.

Currently, large remotely controlled drones are not allowed to fly in unsegregated airspace within the UK due to safety concerns. We have previously detailed the difficulties that the MoD and General Atomics have had in convincing airspace regulators that ‘Protector’ can be flown safely in UK airspace. In July 2018, the company remotely piloted a SkyGuardian cross the Atlantic and landed it at the Fairford airbase.  Severe restrictions were put in place for the flight into UK airspace with all other aircraft directed away for the period of time the drone was in the air.  The aircraft was then disassembled and put into crates for its return journey to the US.  Defence News reports today that ‘Detect and Avoid’ technology (still largely unproven), may be added to Protector in an effort to persuade regulators.

General Atomics reports that BAE Systems will now collaborate with them on enabling the integration of the new military drone into UK national airspace. In a graphic shared on social media, BAE said that it will support General Atomics through its experience of testing unmanned systems and “shaping the regulatory environment through participation, dialogue and strong relationships with UK and European regulatory authorities.”

BAE Systems says it will aid integration of the Protector drone into UK airspace

General Atomics is banking on gaining the support of UK regulators for its new large drone to fly in civil airspace as this will then likely open up the airspace of other countries – particularly in Europe – to its drones. CEO of General Atomics, Linden Blue stated “Protector will be an example for other allied nations to follow” adding  “thereby creating more opportunities for UK aerospace industry.”

The Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) is now likely to come under real pressure from BAE Systems and its political connections to approve changes which will allow the drone to fly within UK airspace. This at the same time regulators are working hard to prevent the disruption and threat of small drones in the wake of the chaos caused at Gatwick.

There has been no public or parliamentary debate about the implications and impact of large military drones flying in UK airspace even though CAA representatives express clear reservations about whether technological solutions will provide the right level of safety for the public.  It should be noted that large military drones regularly crash on training flights in the US as well as on operations overseas.

Aside from the obvious safety issues, once ‘Protector’ drones are allowed to fly within the UK, as well as for training flights it is certainly possible that they will be used by what is discreetly referred to as ‘Other Government Departments‘ for security operations within the UK.  It is surely right that the implication of this – and what the limitations are – should be openly discussed and debated.

The growing use of armed military drones is a real danger to global peace and security. Their integration within UK airspace will further normalise their use. This attempt by a US military drone manufacturer in collaboration with BAE Systems to put pressure on UK airspace regulators needs to be watched carefully.

Meanwhile, while the MoD has always been very coy about which UK companies are supporting US Predator and Reaper drone operations. General Atomics, however, has no such qualms and detailed in its press release which UK companies are involved with Reaper and the new ‘Protector’ drone

  • Abaco Systems – Provides a DO-178 and DO-254 compliant computer that processes flight critical functions for the MQ-9B Ground Control Station (GCS)
  • BAE Systems – Will support development of Concepts of Operations (CONOPS) for Protector operations in UK national airspace
  • CAE – Will develop a comprehensive synthetic training system for Protector RG Mk1 flight crews
  • Cobham Aviation Services, UK – Provides ongoing logistics and maintenance services for the RAF Reaper fleet
  • Cosworth – Provides engine development and manufacturing services for GA-ASI’s MQ-1C Gray Eagle Unmanned Aircraft System, operated by the US Army
  • Daco Hand Controllers – Supplies pilot Stick and Throttle hand-controllers for the GCS, as well as a specially designed hand controller that aids in target tracking
  • Defence Electronics & Component Agency (DECA) – This UK MOD Agency provides MRO, upgrade and managed services in support of Defence
  • GKN Aerospace – Supplies MQ-9 landing gear and fuel bladders, and is an approved supplier of carbon-composite tail structures
  • Leonardo – Supports integration of its Seaspray maritime, surface-search radar and SAGE electronic support measures (ESM) sensor on MQ-9B
  • MBDA – Supplies Brimstone missile for Protector
  • Raytheon UK – Supplies Paveway IV precision-guided munition for Protector
  • Ultra Electronics Command & Sonar Systems – Provides miniaturized sonobuoys suitable for MQ-9B

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Featured image: SkyGuardian MQ-9B, dubbed ‘Protector’ by UK MoD

Britain rejected Venezuela’s request to withdraw $1.2bn in gold stored in the UK, according to reports. It was enough for the self-declared and US-backed ‘president’, Juan Guaido, to support the alleged move.

The Bank of England blocked Venezuela’s attempts to retrieve $1.2 billion worth of gold stored as the nation’s foreign reserves in Britain, sources told Bloomberg on Friday.

According to the media outlet, officials in Caracas have for weeks been trying to withdraw the gold, with Calixto Ortega, the head of Venezuela’s central bank, traveling to London in mid-December to seek access to the nation’s assets.

The talks were “unsuccessful,” as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and the national security advisor to President Donald Trump, John Bolton, pressured their British counterparts to freeze the Venezuelan assets, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

By some estimates, Venezuela holds more than $8 billion in foreign reserves. According to earlier reports, the amount of Venezuelan gold kept in the Bank of England doubled in recent months, growing from 14 to 31 tons.

The South American nation has reportedly experienced problems in extracting its own gold from the Bank of England in the past. Bankers in Britain were allegedly concerned that Venezuelan officials would sell the state-owned gold “for personal gain.”

The Bank of England, along with press officials for Pompeo and Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro, declined to comment.

Despite the fact that the story was not confirmed, the alleged move of the British bank was swiftly praised by the self-proclaimed ‘interim president’ of Venezuela.

“The process of protecting the assets of Venezuela has begun,” Juan Guaido tweeted.

“We will not allow more abuse and theft of money intended for food, medicine and the future of our children.”

Guaido, the speaker of the national parliament, declared himself ‘interim president’ of the state earlier with week in opposition to Maduro. He was subsequently recognized as the “legitimate” leader of Venezuela by the US, Canada, and the majority of South American nations.

Maduro was backed by states like Mexico, Russia, China, and Turkey. He slammed the US for endorsing Guaido, ordering its diplomats to leave the county.

Moscow said it will continue to recognize Maduro as the sole democratically-elected leader of the country and called on others to not allow “destructive foreign interference” in Venezuelan affairs.

Venezuela has seen a series of large-scale anti-government protests in recent years. Some of them spiraled into riots and clashes with police. Nicolas Maduro blasted “foreign interference” as a source behind the unrest, while in particular accusing US officials of endorsing the rallies and Washington of planning to overthrow him. The anti-government protests were met with counter-demonstrations by Maduro supporters.

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Families split; travellers stranded; students unable to attend their universities; people being forced to be away from their loved ones.

Two years after President Donald Trump signed an executive order severely restricting travel from several Muslim-majority countries, the effects of the executive order that came to be known as the Muslim ban, are still happening.

“We’ve seen families torn apart, individuals not being able to visit loved ones, weddings that were missed, healthcare they haven’t been able to receive, students not being able to come to school – there is a real life daily impact that it has, and that’s ongoing,” Abed Ayoub, the legal director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said.

After Trump signed his ban on 27 January 2017, demonstrators flooded airports, 1,000 State Department officials lodged a rare dissent cable, and lawyers filed a rush of lawsuits all in protest against the executive order, which put a 90-day block on citizens from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Libya and Somalia.

The protests and early court decisions suspending the ban restored hope of a united front against the executive order and underlying bigotry behind it.

Last year, however, the Supreme Court upheld the ban after a lengthy legal battle, ruling in favour of executive power to control immigration, although Trump had professed to his discriminatory intent as a candidate in late 2015, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims” coming to the US.

Now advocates say they are turning to politicians and presidential candidates to undo the ban.

Total chaos

The order left the lives of people like Syrian doctor Khaled Almilaji, who was waiting to get a visa to continue his masters programme at Brown University and return to his wife who was pregnant with their first child, in limbo.

“You can go to the website – you see your number and there is ‘pending’. This pending can take years,” he told MEE at the time, stuck in Turkey and continuing his studies remotely while his wife’s due date grew closer.

It also threw the country’s airports into an instant tailspin, as protesters and lawyers, like Sharifa Abbasi who works for the Virginia-based HMA law firm, gathered to help new arrivals, and untangle a knot of bureaucracy, so freshly spun, no one knew exactly what was going on.

“There were lawyers on the phone with the local elected official’s offices, people trying to reach Customs and Border Protection and airlines, people writing different memos, teams doing legal research, conference calls going on every day,” said Abbasi, who was volunteering at Dulles Airport.

“It was beautiful because everybody just wanted to come together and offer their support.”

As the pack of at least 50 lawyers, fed by other volunteers and surrounded by chanting demonstrators and journalists, continued to advise people, Abbasi said she felt certain that the order would be “blown out by the courts”.

“I didn’t think it was going to go on for this long, that it even stood a chance,” she said. “But unfortunately, given the political climate we are in now, anything can fly.”

Ban 3.0

In fact, the ban had gone through several incarnations before making its way to the Supreme Court last June.

It originally applied to permanent residents, before the Department of Homeland Security issued a directive exempting Green Card holders from the executive order, following some 24 hours of mass confusion at airports.

In March 2017, Trump signed what would become known as the “second Muslim ban”. The new decree excluded Iraq from the list. Baghdad had agreed to start accepting deportees from the US in exchange for the move.

The deal allowed the administration to round up dozens of Iraqi Christians who had outstanding deportation orders, even as they argued that sending them back to Iraq could amount to a “death sentence“.

In yet another amendment to the ban in September 2017, the White House removed Sudan from the list and added travel restrictions on the citizens of Chad, North Korea and Venezuela.

Robert McCaw, director of the government affairs department at Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said each version of the ban aimed to “cover up the discrimination, bigotry and unlawfulness” of the previous one.

“It’s CAIR’s position that the Muslim ban continues, not only to be discriminatory but is unconstitutional,” McCaw said.

The way forward

The Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold the ban was a “travesty of justice”, McCaw said, citing other historical missteps by the high court, including the Korematsu case that allowed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

However, he noted that the Supreme Court’s decision is not subject for appeal.

“So now it is up to Congress to use its lawful authority to de-fund or repeal this Muslim ban executive order,” McCaw continued.

Late in 2017, Congresswoman Judy Chu and Senator Chris Murphy introduced a bill that would “prohibit the use of any funds or fees to implement” the order.

Another “legislative fix”, according to McCaw, would be to reform the Immigration and Nationality Act, on which Trump based his executive order.

McCaw acknowledged that such efforts have minimal chances of passing through Congress, as Trump’s Republican Party is still in control of the US Senate. A legislative push, however, is still important, he said.

“It is to communicate to the American public that this order can be overturned by Congress, if there is enough votes,” he said.

If Trump loses his re-election bid in 2020, his successor could overturn the ban by executive order.

A handful of Democratic politicians and activists have announced their candidacy for the upcoming presidential elections; McCaw said he is still waiting to see who will be the first candidate who will pledge to repeal the ban.

Beyond the ban

The ban has had a chilling effect on the number of people from the targeted countries coming into the US.

US State Department data shows that in the fiscal year 2018 only 819 Yemenis were granted “immediate relative visas” to join their families in the US, a stark drop from the 8,447 in 2016, President Barack Obama’s last year in office.

The fiscal year ends on 30 September, meaning the ban was fully in effect for three months in the last reporting cycle.

Beyond the direct impact of the ban on potential travellers and family members who may await them here, advocates say the executive order has created an atmosphere of fear that has contributed to the rise of Islamophobia.

“The Muslim ban itself – being discriminatory – marginalises American Muslims and paints them as being a threat to their fellow citizens and neighbours,” McCaw said.

“Since President Trump was elected and he issued the Muslim ban executive order, there has been a stark increase in hate crimes and acts of discrimination targeting American Muslims, and vandalism targeting their houses of worship and community centres.”

Ayoub echoed McCaw’s statement, adding that the ban had a “psychological impact” on Arab, Muslim and immigrant communities in the US.

“Mistrust in the government, worrying about their immigration status, worrying about loved ones, the stress – that really took a toll,” he said.

According to Ayoub, that anxiety was not limited to people from countries listed in the executive order, as people from all communities, including US citizens, started questioning if they would be targeted next.

And their concerns are warranted: Abbasi said she has noticed that the processing time for visas for people from countries with large Muslim populations not on the list – like Tunisia, Afghanistan and Pakistan – have slowed down.

“If you are already outside the country, there are a lot of people that are hopeless,” she said. “Imagine all of the talent in these past two years that really could have done something for the country.”

‘Put each other together’

One of those people was Khaled Almilaji, the Syrian doctor who was stranded in Turkey when the ban came down, hoping to return to his masters programme and to his pregnant wife, Jihan, who is also a doctor.

Almilaji, 37, was working for a pharmaceutical company and finishing up a medical residency when the war started. In September 2011, he was imprisoned for six months in Damascus. He was tortured for two weeks, including by electrocution, and one of his fingers and a rib was broken.

Yet prison authorities relied on him to treat other prisoners which he did blindfolded so he couldn’t identify anyone later on.

After he was released from prison, he spent the next five years making a major impact on healthcare services for Syrians, including his role on a task force that vaccinated 1.4 million Syrian children against polio and stopped the virus from spreading as it had in Iraq.

Two years after the ban altered their lives, Almilaji’s now 17-month-old daughter, Daria, Jihan and he are now settled in Toronto, where Khaled and Jihan were reunited in June 2017.

He is nearly done with a masters in health informatics at the University of Toronto and said he has already used what he has been learning to improve health services in northern Syria.

“I’m finishing my masters in April. It’s amazing, right?” he said on Saturday. “I was lucky that I didn’t waste more time in this.”

Jihan, who is preparing for exams to continue her medical studies, has been able to travel to visit her family in Germany. Meanwhile, Khaled has returned frequently to Turkey to work on initiatives including an underground hospital for women and children, and projects providing care for Syrians in Idlib, Aleppo and Hama.

“We were lucky that we were still able to get degrees, look for medical training jobs and, at the same time, continue doing this work. Not a lot of people had the same chance,” he said.

One day, he said, he hopes history books will detangle the chaotic political moment, and provide lessons for the world.

“It’s a mess, but it’s needed because it’s not a matter of the results of one election or another, it’s a matter of our collective behaviour. Our communities are divided, but these things showed that division,” he said.

“This is good because as a doctor you cannot fix something unless you diagnose it. It was there and now it is on the surface. We have to put each other together.”

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Military option on the table — that’s what Axios reporter Jonathan Swan was told when discussing the Venezuela crisis with Sen. Lindsey Graham. In a breaking exclusive Sunday evening, Axios has revealed key explosive contents of a recent meeting between President Trump and Sen. Graham wherein the president “mused to him about the possibility of using military force in Venezuela, where the U.S. government is currently pushing for regime change using diplomatic and economic pressures.” According to Axios

Graham, recalling his conversation with Trump a couple weeks ago, said: “He [Trump] said, ‘What do you think about using military force?’ and I said, ‘Well, you need to go slow on that, that could be problematic.’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m surprised, you want to invade everybody.’

Graham laughed. “And I said, ‘I don’t want to invade everybody, I only want to use the military when our national security interests are threatened.'”

Sen. Graham explained further to Swan in a phone call that “Trump’s really hawkish” on Venezuela, and added the president’s willingness to use military force against the Maduro regime actually surpasses Graham’s.

Graham summarized the unusual and unexpected takeaway from the contents of his discussions with president with the conclusion that “Trump was even more hawkish than he [Graham] was on Venezuela.”

This follows a week of unrest and mass protests, along with some very limited military defections, inside the socialist country and after about a dozen countries have joined the United States in recognizing opposition held National Assembly head Juan Guaido as the “Interim President of Venezuela” possessing sole legitimacy. After Trump’s controversial declaration of Maduro’s illegitimacy as president last week, a senior administration official followed by saying that “all options are on the table”.

And now it appears the “military option” is perhaps more prominent on that table in Trump’s mind than many believed, which Axios muses is related to being “stymied at home” after the wall/government shutdown crisis, thus “Trump is now moving faster than ever on foreign policy.”

While this doesn’t mean Trump will invade Venezuela anytime soon, it increasingly appears escalating diplomatic and economic pressures could fast put Washington on such a path toward overt regime change in Caracas. Toward this end, Axios notes: “We expect the Trump administration will target Nicolás Maduro’s oil and offshore wealth in the coming weeks and try to divert that wealth to the opposition leader, Juan Guaidó…”.

The worry over potential military confrontation or civil war inside the country is increasingly looking very real as over the weekend reports surfaced online of a build-up of Venezuelan military assets along the borders, specifically near Columbia — a key US ally in Latin America.

Since taking office, and prior to the current crisis as recently as 2017, Trump has spoken of a “military option” when Venezuela policy arises; however, his aides have reportedly attempted to dissuade him from taking any hasty action.

Meanwhile, according to Bloomberg, opposition leader Juan Guaido has called for consecutive days of nationwide protests to continue this week to put pressure on Maduro to hold a new election, in accord with EU demands that he announces fresh elections within eight days. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, issued the following ultimatum Saturday alongside France, Germany and Britain:

 “If within eight days there are no fair, free and transparent elections called in Venezuela, Spain will recognize Juan Guaido as Venezuelan president.” 

Guaido last week specifically appealed to the military to switch sides following a local and short-lived attempt of 27 officers to lead a revolt on Monday (1/21). To encourage more such defections, which so far hasn’t appeared to penetrate the top layers of military leadership, Guaido has offered amnesty protection to any officer previously accused of corruption or human rights abuses should they defect.

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Featured image is from ZH

Citizen Scientists and Bee Populations

January 28th, 2019 by Julian Vigo

Imidacloprid – a type of neonicotinoid – changes the way that worker bees interact with the colony’s larvae: they become less social, stop nursing larvae, experience altered social and spatial dynamics within nests, and cease hive insulation construction.

A research team led by James Crall of Harvard University investigated the effects of imidacloprid using a robotic platform for continuous, multicolony monitoring of uniquely identified workers. Their research showed that the behaviours induced by imidacloprid lead to colony collapse.

The team concluded:

“Our results show that neonicotinoids induce widespread disruption of worker behavior within the nest that may contribute to impaired growth, highlighting the potential of automated techniques for characterizing the multifaceted, dynamic impacts of stressors on behavior in bee colonies.”

Neurological and social

Many media reports characterised the bees in the study as “antisocial and lazy,” but it is crucial that we understand the larger paradigm afoot here.

While there are many studies which speak to the links between neonics and colony collapse, there are many others that decry this science as a “myth.”  There will be yet another onslaught of those who say that that correlation is not causation, in response to the proposition that neonics – or imidacloprid at the very least – have a direct effect upon social behaviours that result in the loss of larvae.

This is logically true, but there is enough science on the links between colony collapse and neonics that it is time to stop reacting in bad faith to the science.  Many researchers in Europe are interested to learn more about this link between bees and neonics, following  a near-total ban on neonics in the EU last year.

Dr Richard Gill, a researcher from the Department of Life Sciences at Imperial College London, and his team have explored the relationship between bumble bees and neonicotinoid-treated food. Their study shows that while at first the bumble bee bees avoided this food, they eventually come to develop a preference for neonicotinoid-treated foods.

Gill, who has worked in this field for some time, has demonstrated how neonics bind to synapses in the brains of bees, which in turn causes these bees to have seizures which he likens to an epileptic seizure. The neonics target the nicotinic acetylcholinesterase receptors in the brain. Hence, there is both a neurological reaction from the neonics as well as a social reaction in relation to them which impacts the propagation of the species.

Citizen science

The end result is the decline of bee populations but also – since bombus play key roles in the food chain acting as pollinators in temperate ecosystems – many other species have declined across Europe and North America.

The lack of quantitative data has further prevented the collation of data to make more robust conclusions about the contributing factors of colony collapse and the declining bee population.

That is until November of last year when researchers and more than fifty citizen scientists conducted surveys to determine the status of bumble bees throughout Vermont, in the northeastern United States.

From 2012 through 2014 these scientists identified and digitized bumble bee specimens from thirteen public and private collections. Having examined more than 100 years of bumble bee records, these scientists found that almost half of Vermont’s bumble bee species have either completely vanished or are in serious decline.

“Our dataset contained 12,319 records, which we separated into historic (1915–1999; n = 1669) and modern (2000–2014; n = 10,650) periods, with our survey contributing 94 percent of modern data. Of 17 species, four were not detected and four showed significant declines.”

Collaborative engineering 

These findings are tragic for the ecology and the economy alike, as these bees are the primary pollinators on Vermont’s farms.

While the researchers could not state with certainty the cause for this decline, recent studies have reinforced the conclusion that it is a combination of habitat loss, disease, mite infections, parasites, pesticides, urbanisation, and climate change.

The dystopian results of recent studies do not give hope for turning around the damage done to bees, but some scientific projects are afoot which seek to understand — if not remedy — the disaster thus far.

In line with some of last fall’s scientific revelations, citizen scientists are coming to the rescue, developing apps to record bumble bee sightings and upload pertinent information such as  habitat type, location of sighting, and  weather. This information will then be shared with researchers who can analyze the submissions and chart out migration patterns.

Designed by Dinah Shi, John Salaveria and Luisa San Martin, in collaboration with environmental non-profit Friends of the Earth Canada, these software engineering students developed this bumble bee tracking app to enlist Canadians to contribute to helping the bee populations as citizen scientists. The mobile app also teaches users how to get involved in creating a sustainable environment for bees.

Nanotechnology 

More and more research projects focussing on bee populations are enlisting the help of citizen scientists from across the United States.

One project in Idaho houses the volunteer efforts of anyone with a camera and a computer to record the various species throughout the region. In Washington, researchers are turning bees into cyborg drones, attaching chips onto their bodies tracking their movements in order to gain more insight into their decline.

In fact, with the uptick of nanotechnology in recent years and the increase of free website builders,  scientists today are able to construct research projects extending far beyond their grant limits, involving local and international citizenry in crucial research needed to end the demise of bumble bee populations around the world.

The Xerces Society, for instance, is actively engaged in the Bumble Bee Watch and is entirely composed of citizen scientists.

We need to consider the risks to our planet in the eventuality that bee populations continue to decline, especially those populations that are responsible for one-third of our food pollination. Why not consider contributing your time and efforts any number of bee studies that are in need of more citizen scientists to help track the declining bee populations across North America and Europe?

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Julian Vigo is an independent scholar, filmmaker and activist who specialises in anthropology, technology, and political philosophy. Her latest book is Earthquake in Haiti: The Pornography of Poverty and the Politics of Development (2015). You can follow her on Twitter at @lubelluledotcom

Featured image is from Wikimedia

This article was originally published in 2016.

Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that ‘socialism means poverty.’ But in the case of Venezuela and other states not governed by the free market, this cliche simply doesn’t ring true.

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The political and economic crisis facing Venezuela is being endlessly pointed to as proof of the superiority of the free market.

Images and portrayals of Venezuelans rioting in the streets over high food costs, empty grocery stores, medicine shortages, and overflowing garbage bins are the headlines, and the reporting points to socialism as the cause.

The Chicago Tribune published a Commentary piece titled: “A socialist revolution can ruin almost any country.” A headline on Reason’s Hit and Run blog proclaims: “Venezuelan socialism still a complete disaster.” The Week’s U.S. edition says: “Authoritarian socialism caused Venezuela’s collapse.”

Indeed, corporate-owned, mainstream media advises Americans to look at the inflation and food lines in Venezuela, and then repeat to themselves clichés they heard in elementary school about how “Communism just doesn’t work.”

In reality, millions of Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved through the Bolivarian process. The problems plaguing the Venezuelan economy are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to the revolution.

Starting in 2014, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil. This is not a mere business decision, but a calculated move coordinated with U.S. and Israeli foreign policy goals. Despite not just losing money, but even falling deep into debt, the Saudi monarchy continues to expand its oil production apparatus. The result has been driving the price of oil down from $110 per barrel, to $28 in the early months of this year. The goal is to weaken these opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around oil and natural gas exports.

And Venezuela is one of those countries. Saudi efforts to drive down oil prices have drastically reduced Venezuela’s state budget and led to enormous consequences for the Venezuelan economy.

At the same time, private food processing and importing corporations have launched a coordinated campaign of sabotage. This, coupled with the weakening of a vitally important state sector of the economy, has resulted in inflation and food shortages. The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.

Corruption is a big problem in Venezuela and many third-world countries. This was true prior to the Bolivarian process, as well as after Hugo Chavez launched his massive economic reforms. In situations of extreme poverty, people learn to take care of each other. People who work in government are almost expected to use their position to take care of their friends and family. Corruption is a big problem under any system, but it is much easier to tolerate in conditions of greater abundance. The problem has been magnified in Venezuela due to the drop in state revenue caused by the low oil prices and sabotage from food importers.

The Bolivarian experience in Venezuela

Americans have been trained by decades of Cold War propaganda to look for any confirmation that “socialism means poverty.” A quick, simplistic portrait of the problems currently facing Venezuela, coupled with the fact that President Nicolas Maduro describes himself as a Marxist, can certainly give them such a confirmation. However, the actual, undisputed history of socialist construction around the world, including recent decades in Venezuela, tells a completely different story.

Hugo Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His election was viewed as a referendum on the extreme free market policies enacted in Venezuela during the 1990s. In December, when I walked through the neighborhoods of central Caracas, Venezuelans spoke of these times with horror.

Venezuelans told of how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wouldn’t be collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said:

“Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment.”

Chavez took office on a platform advocating a path between capitalism and socialism. He restructured the government-owned oil company so that the profits would go into the Venezuelan state, not the pockets of Wall Street corporations. With the proceeds of Venezuela’s oil exports, Chavez funded a huge apparatus of social programs.

After defeating an attempted coup against him in 2002, Chavez announced the goal of bringing Venezuela toward “21st Century Socialism.” Chavez quoted Marx and Lenin in his many TV addresses to the country, and mobilized the country around the goal of creating a prosperous, non-capitalist society.

In 1998, Venezuela had only 12 public universities, today it has 32. Cuban doctors were brought to Venezuela to provide free health care in community clinics. The government provides cooking and heating gas to low-income neighborhoods, and it’s launched a literacy campaign for uneducated adults.

During the George W. Bush administration, oil prices were the highest they had ever been. The destruction of Iraq, sanctions on Iran and Russia, strikes and turmoil in Nigeria — these events created a shortage on the international markets, driving prices up.

Big oil revenues enabled Chavez and the United Socialist Party to bring millions of Venezuelans out of poverty. Between 1995 and 2009, poverty and unemployment in Venezuela were both cut in half.

After the death of Chavez, Nicolas Maduro has continued the Bolivarian program. “Housing Missions” have been built across the country, providing low-income families in Venezuela with places to live. The Venezuelan government reports that over 1 million modern apartment buildings had been constructed by the end of 2015.

The problems currently facing Venezuela started in 2014. The already growing abundance of oil due to hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, was compounded by Saudi Arabia flooding the markets with cheap oil. The result: massive price drops. Despite facing a domestic fiscal crisis, Saudi Arabia continues to expand its oil production apparatus.

The price of oil remains low, as negotiations among OPEC states are taking place in the hopes that prices can be driven back up. While American media insists the low oil prices are just the natural cycle of the market at work, it’s rather convenient for U.S. foreign policy. Russia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and the Islamic Republic of Iran all have economies centered around state-owned oil companies and oil exports, and each of these countries has suffered the sting of low oil prices.

The leftist president of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, has already been deposed due to scandal surrounding Petrobras, the state-owned oil company which is experiencing economic problems due to the falling price of oil. Although much of Brazil’s oil is for domestic consumption, it has been revealed that those who deposed her coordinated with the CIA and other forces in Washington and Wall Street, utilizing the economic fallout of low oil prices to bring down the Brazilian president.

The son of President Ronald Reagan has argued that Obama is intentionally driving down oil prices not just to weaken the Venezuelan economy, but also to tamper the influence of Russia and Iran. Writing for Townhall in 2014, Michael Reagan bragged that his father did the same thing to hurt the Soviet Union during the 1980s:

“Since selling oil was the source of the Kremlin’s wealth, my father got the Saudis to flood the market with cheap oil.

Lower oil prices devalued the ruble, causing the USSR to go bankrupt, which led to perestroika and Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet Empire.”

The history of socialist construction

Prior to the 1917 revolution, Russia was a primitive, agrarian country. By 1936, after the completion of the Five-Year Plan, it was a world industrial power, surpassing every other country on the globe in terms of steel and tractor production. The barren Soviet countryside was lit up with electricity. The children of illiterate peasants across the Soviet Union grew up to be the scientists and engineers who first conquered outer space. The planned economy of the Soviet Union drastically improved the living standards of millions of people, bringing them running water, modern housing, guaranteed employment, and free education.

There is no contradiction between central planning and economic growth. In 1949, China had no steel industry. Today, more than half of all the world’s steel is produced in China’s government-controlled steel industry.

Cuba has wiped out illiteracy, and Cubans enjoy one of the highest life expectancies in Latin America.

When the Marxist-Leninist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed in the early 1990s, economists like Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University, who can be counted among capitalism’s “true believers,” predicted rapid economic growth. Since the 1990s, conditions in what George W. Bush called the “New Europe” have become far worse than under socialism. The life expectancy has decreased and infant mortality has risen. Human and drug traffickers have set up shop. In endless polls, the people of Eastern Europe repeatedly say life was better before the defeat of Communism.

Russia’s recovery from the disaster of the 1990s has come about with the reorientation of the economy to one centered around public control of its oil and natural gas resources — much like Venezuela. The Putin government has also waged a crackdown on the small number of “oligarchs” who became wealthy after the demise of the Soviet Union. Once strong state to control the economy was re-established, Russia’s gross domestic product increased by 70 percent during the first eight years of Putin’s administration. From 2000 to 2008, poverty was cut in half, and incomes doubled.

Neoliberal capitalism has failed

It is only because these facts are simply off-limits in the American media and its discussions of socialism and capitalism that the distorted narrative about Venezuela’s current hardships are believed.

When discussing the merits of capitalism and socialism, American media usually restricts the conversation to pointing out that socialist countries in the third world have lower living standards than the United States, a country widely identified with capitalism. Without any context or fair comparison, this alone is supposed to prove the inherent superiority of U.S.-style capitalism.

If the kind of neoliberal “free trade” advocated by U.S. corporations was the solution to global poverty, Mexico, a country long ago penetrated with the North American Free Trade Agreement, would be a shining example of development, not a mess of drug cartels and poverty. The same can be said for oil-rich countries like Nigeria, where exports are massive but the population remains in dire conditions.

The governments of Bangladesh, Honduras, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Philippines have done everything they can to deregulate the market and accommodate Western ”investment.” Despite the promises of neoliberal theoreticians, their populations have not seen their lives substantially improve.

If one compares the more market-oriented economy of the U.S., not to countries in the global south attempting to develop with a planned economy, but to other Western countries with more social-democratic governments, the inferiority of the “free market” can also be revealed.

The U.S. is rated 43 in the world in terms of life expectancy, according to the CIA World Factbook. People live longer in Germany, Britain, Spain, France, Sweden, Australia, Italy, Iceland — basically, almost every other Western country. Statistics on the rate of infant mortality say approximately the same thing. National health care services along with greater job security and economic protections render much healthier populations.

Even as the social-democratic welfare states of Europe drift closer to the U.S. economic model with “austerity cuts,” the U.S. still lags behind them in terms of basic societal health. Western European countries with powerful unions, strong socialist and labor parties, and less punitive criminal justice systems tend to have healthier societies.

The American perception that socialism or government intervention automatically create poverty, while a laissez faire approach unleashes limitless prosperity, is simply incorrect. Despite the current hardships, this reality is reflected in the last two decades of Venezuela’s history.

A punishment vote, not a vote for capitalism

The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the United Socialist Party.

It is odd that the mainstream press blames “socialism” for the food problems in Venezuela, when the food distributors remain in the hands of private corporations. As Venezuelan political analyst Jesus Silva told me recently: “Most food in Venezuela is imported by private companies, they ask for dollars subsidized by the government oil sales to do that; they rarely produce anything or invest their own money.”

According to Silva, the economic sanctions imposed on Venezuela by the U.S., in addition to the oil crisis, have made it more difficult for the Venezuelan government to pay the private food importing companies in U.S. dollars. In response, the food companies are “running general sabotage.”

“Venezuela’s economy depends on oil sales. Now that oil prices are dropping down, the challenge is to get other sources of economic income,” he explained. “Meanwhile, the opposition is garnering electoral support due to the current economic crisis.”

When the United Socialist Party and its aligned Patriotic Pole lost control of Parliament in December, many predicted the imminent collapse of the Bolivarian government. However, months have passed and this clearly has not taken place.

While a clear majority cast a voto castigo (“punishment vote”) in December, punishing the government for mismanaging the crisis, the Maduro administration has a solid core of socialist activists who remain loyal to the Bolivarian project. Across Venezuela, communes have been established. Leftist activists live together and work in cooperatives. Many of them are armed and organized in “Bolivarian Militias” to defend the revolution.

Even some of the loudest critics of the Venezuelan government admit that it has greatly improved the situation in the country, despite the current hardships.

In December, I spoke to Glen Martinez, a radio host in Caracas who voted for the opposition. He dismissed the notion that free market capitalism would ever return to Venezuela. As he explained, most of the people who voted against the United Socialist Party — himself included — are frustrated with the way the current crisis is being handled, but do not want a return to the neoliberal economic model of the 1999s.

He said the economic reforms established during the Chavez administration would never be reversed. “We are not the same people we were before 1999,” Martinez insisted.

The United Socialist Party is currently engaging in a massive re-orientation, hoping to sharpen its response to economic sabotage and strengthen the socialist direction of the revolution. There is also talk of massive reform in the way the government operates, in order to prevent the extreme examples of corruption and mismanagement that are causing frustration among the population.

The climate is being intensified by a number of recent political assassinations. Tensions continue to exist on Venezuela’s border with the U.S.-aligned government of Colombia. The solid base of socialist activists is not going to let revolution be overturned, and tensions continue to rise. The Maduro and the United Socialist Party’s main task is to hold Venezuela together, and not let the country escalate into a state of civil war.

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With April’s elections looming, Benjamin Netanyahu has good reason to fear Benny Gantz, his former army chief. Gantz has launched a new party, named Israeli Resilience, just as the net of corruption indictments is closing around the prime minister.

Already, at this early stage of campaigning, some 31 per cent of the Israeli public prefer Gantz to head the next government over Netanyahu, who is only months away from becoming the longest-serving leader in Israel’s history. 
Gantz is being feted as the new hope, a chance to change direction after a series of governments under Netanyahu’s leadership have over the past decade shifted Israel ever further to the right.

Like Israel’s former politician generals, from Yitzhak Rabin to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon, Gantz is being portrayed – and portraying himself – as a battle-hardened warrior, able to make peace from a position of strength.

Before he had issued a single policy statement, polls showed him winning 15 of the 120 parliamentary seats, a welcome sign for those hoping that a centre-left coalition can triumph this time.

But the reality of what Gantz stands for – revealed this week in his first election videos – is far from reassuring.

In 2014, he led Israel into its longest and most savage military operation in living memory: 50 days in which the tiny coastal enclave of Gaza was bombarded relentlessly.

By the end, one of the most densely populated areas on earth – its two million inhabitants already trapped by a lengthy Israeli blockade – lay in ruins. More than 2,200 Palestinians were killed in the onslaught, a quarter of them children, while tens of thousands were left homeless.

The world watched, appalled. Investigations by human rights groups such as Amnesty International concluded that Israel had committed war crimes.

One might have assumed that during the election campaign Gantz would wish to draw a veil over this troubling period in his military career. Not a bit of it.

Source: Haaretz

One of his campaign videos soars over the rubble of Gaza, proudly declaring that Gantz was responsible for destroying many thousands of buildings. “Parts of Gaza have been returned to the Stone Age,” the video boasts.

This is a reference to the Dahiya doctrine, a strategy devised by the Israeli military command of which Gantz was a core member. The aim is to lay waste to the modern infrastructure of Israel’s neighbours, forcing survivors to eke out a bare existence rather than resist Israel.

The collective punishment inherent in the apocalyptic Dahiya doctrine is an undoubted war crime.

More particularly, the video exults in the destruction of Rafah, a city in Gaza that suffered the most intense bout of bombing after an Israeli soldier was seized by Hamas. In minutes, Israel’s indiscriminate bombardment killed at least 135 Palestinian civilians and wrecked a hospital.

According to investigations, Israel had invoked the Hannibal Procedure, the code name for an order allowing the army to use any means to stop one of its soldiers being taken. That includes killing civilians as “collateral damage” and, more controversially for Israelis, the soldier himself.

Gantz’s video flashes up a grand total of “1,364 terrorists killed”, in return for “three-and-a-half years of quiet”. As Israel’s liberal Haaretz daily observed, the video “celebrates a body count as if this were just some computer game”.

But the casualty figure cited by Gantz exceeds even the Israel army’s self-serving assessment – as well, of course, as dehumanising those “terrorists” fighting for their freedom.

A more impartial observer, Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, estimates that the Palestinian fighters killed by Israel amounted to 765. By their reckoning, and that of other bodies such as the United Nations, almost two-thirds of Gazans killed in Israel’s 2014 operation were civilians.

Further, the “quiet” Gantz credits himself with was enjoyed chiefly by Israel.

In Gaza, Palestinians faced regular military attacks, a continuing siege choking off essential supplies and destroying their export industries, and a policy of executions by Israeli snipers firing on unarmed demonstrators at the perimeter fence imprisoning the enclave.

Gantz’s campaign slogans “Only the Strong Wins” and “Israel Before Everything” are telling. Everything, for Gantz, clearly includes human rights.

It is shameful enough that he believes his track record of war crimes will win over voters. But the same approach has been voiced by Israel’s new military chief of staff.

Aviv Kochavi, nicknamed the Philosopher Officer for his university studies, was inaugurated this month as the army’s latest head. In a major speech, he promised to reinvent the fabled “most moral army in the world” into a “deadly, efficient” one.

In Kochavi’s view, the rampaging military once overseen by Gantz needs to step up its game. And he is a proven expert in destruction.

In the early stages of the Palestinian uprising that erupted in 2000, the Israeli army struggled to find a way to crush Palestinian fighters concealed in densely crowded cities under occupation.

Kochavi came up with an ingenious solution in Nablus, where he was brigade commander. The army would invade a Palestinian home, then smash through its walls, moving from house to house, burrowing through the city unseen. Palestinian space was not only usurped, but destroyed inside-out.

Gantz, the former general hoping to lead the government, and Kochavi, the general leading its army, are symptoms of just how complete the militaristic logic that has overtaken Israel really is. An Israel determined to become a modern-day Sparta.

Should he bring about Netanyahu’s downfall, Gantz, like his predecessor politician-generals, will turn out to be a hollow peace-maker. He was trained to understand only strength, zero-sum strategies, conquest and destruction, not compassion or compromise.

More dangerously, Gantz’s glorification of his military past is likely to reinforce in Israelis’ minds the need not for peace but for more of the same: support for an ultranationalist right that bathes itself in an ethnic supremacist philosophy and dismisses any recognition of the Palestinians as human beings with rights.

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

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

Featured image is from The Jerusalem Post

This article was originally published in 2014.

Anti-government protests in Venezuela that seek regime change have been led by several individuals and organizations with close ties to the US government. Leopoldo Lopez and Maria Corina Machado– two of the public leaders behind the violent protests that started in February – have long histories as collaborators, grantees and agents of Washington. The National Endowment for Democracy “NED” and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) have channeled multi-million dollar funding to Lopez’s political parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and Machado’s NGO Sumate and her electoral campaigns.

These Washington agencies have also filtered more than $14 million to opposition groups in Venezuela between 2013 and 2014, including funding for their political campaigns in 2013 and for the current anti-government protests in 2014. This continues the pattern of financing from the US government to anti-Chavez groups in Venezuela since 2001, when millions of dollars were given to organizations from so-called “civil society” to execute a coup d’etat against President Chavez in April 2002. After their failure days later, USAID opened an Office of Transition Initiatives (OTI) in Caracas to, together with the NED, inject more than $100 million in efforts to undermine the Chavez government and reinforce the opposition during the following 8 years.

At the beginning of 2011, after being publically exposed for its grave violations of Venezuelan law and sovereignty, the OTI closed its doors inVenezuela and USAID operations were transferred to its offices in the US. The flow of money to anti-government groups didn’t stop, despite the enactment by Venezuela’s National Assembly of the Law of Political Sovereignty and NationalSelf-Determination at the end of 2010, which outright prohibits foreign funding of political groups in the country. US agencies and the Venezuelan groups that receive their money continue to violate the law with impunity. In the Obama Administration’s Foreign Operations Budgets, between $5-6 million have been included to fund opposition groups in Venezuela through USAID since 2012.

The NED, a “foundation” created by Congress in 1983 to essentially do the CIA’s work overtly, has been one of the principal financiers of destabilization in Venezuela throughout the Chavez administration and now against President Maduro. According to NED’s 2013 annual report, the agency channeled more than $2.3 million to Venezuelan opposition groups and projects. Within that figure,  $1,787,300 went directly to anti-government groups within Venezuela, while another $590,000 was distributed to regional organizations that work with and fund the Venezuelan opposition.  More than $300,000 was directed towards efforts to develop a new generation of youth leaders to oppose Maduro’s government politically.

One of the groups funded by NED to specifically work with youth is FORMA (see this), an organization led by Cesar Briceño and tied to Venezuelan banker Oscar Garcia Mendoza. Garcia Mendoza runs the Banco Venezolano de Credito, a Venezuelan bank that has served as the filter for the flow of dollars from NED and USAID to opposition groups in Venezuela, including Sumate, CEDICE, Sin Mordaza, Observatorio Venezolano de Prisiones and FORMA, amongst others.

Another significant part of NED funds in Venezuela from 2013-2014 was given to groups and initiatives that work in media and run the campaign to discredit the government of President Maduro. Some of the more active media organizations outwardly opposed to Maduro and receiving NED funds include Espacio Publico, Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), Sin Mordaza and GALI. Throughout the past year, an unprecedented media war has been waged against the Venezuelan government and President Maduro directly, which has intensified during the past few months of protests.

In direct violation of Venezuelan law, NED also funded the opposition coalition, the Democratic Unity Table (MUD), via the US International Republican Institute (IRI), with $100,000 to “share lessons learned with [anti-government groups] in Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia…and allow for the adaption of the Venezuelan experience in these countries”.  Regarding this initiative, the NED 2013 annual report specifically states its aim: “To develop the ability of political and civil society actors from Nicaragua, Argentina and Bolivia to work on national, issue-based agendas for their respective countries using lessons learned and best practices from successful Venezuelan counterparts.  The Institute will facilitate an exchange of experiences between the Venezuelan Democratic Unity Roundtable and counterparts in Bolivia, Nicaragua and Argentina. IRI will bring these actors together through a series of tailored activities that will allow for the adaptation of the Venezuelan experience in these countries.”

IRI has helped to build right-wing opposition parties Primero Justicia and Voluntad Popular, and has worked with the anti-government coaltion in Venezuela since before the 2002 coup d’etat against Chavez. In fact, IRI’s president at that time, George Folsom, outwardly applauded the coup and celebrated IRI’s role in a press release claiming,

“The Institute has served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…”

Detailed in a report published by the Spanish institute FRIDE in 2010, international agencies that fund the Venezuelan opposition violate currency control laws in order to get their dollars to the recipients. Also confirmed in the FRIDE report was the fact that the majority of international agencies, with the exception of the European Commission, are bringing in foreign money and changing it on the black market, in clear violation of Venezuelan law. In some cases, as the FRIDE analysis reports, the agencies open bank accounts abroad for the Venezuelan groups or they bring them the money in hard cash. The US Embassy in Caracas could also use the diplomatic pouch to bring large quantities of unaccounted dollars and euros into the country that are later handed over illegally to anti-government groups in Venezuela.

What is clear is that the US government continues to feed efforts to destabilize Venezuela in clear violation of law. Stronger legal measures  and enforcement may be necessary to ensure the sovereignty and defense of Venezuela’s democracy.

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Featured image is from Postcards from the Revolution

Indian-Australian connections are particularly noteworthy now with the Indian cricket team finally beating Australia in a Test series in Australia, and vastly more importantly, increasing Indian trade with Australia and substantial Indian immigration to Australia. 26 January is Indian Republic Day that commemorates replacement of colonial British rules by the adoption of the Indian Constitution on 26 January 1950, and a formal End to Britain’s 2-century Indian Holocaust and Indian Genocide. Conversely, 26 January is also  Australia Day  but commemorates the British invasion of Australia on 26 January 1788 and the Start of the ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide.

While  Indian Independence Day (15 August) marks the anniversary of Indian Independence from the British on 15 August 1947,  India’s Republic Day commemorates the adoption of the Constitution of an independent Indian republic  on 26 January 1950. Thus according to Wikipedia:

“Republic Day honours the date on which the Constitution of India came into effect on 26 January 1950 replacing the Government of India Act (1935) as the governing document of India.  The Constitution was adopted by the Indian Constituent Assembly on 26 November 1949, and came into effect on 26 January 1950 with a democratic government system, completing the country’s transition towards becoming an independent republic. 26 January was chosen as the Republic day because it was on this day in 1930 when Declaration of Indian Independence (Purna Swaraj) was proclaimed by the Indian National Congress as opposed to the Dominion status offered by British Regime” [1].

Thus Indian Republic Day marks the formal rules-based  independence of India from the brutal and genocidally racist  rule of its former colonial master, Britain. Whereas  Australia Day marks the Start of over 2 centuries of Anglo-imposed Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide, Indian Republic Day marks the formal, constitutional End to over 2 centuries of genocidally racist British rule in India.

Britain’s 2-century Indian Holocaust and Indian Genocide

Before British invasion in the mid-18th century,  India was  responsible for about a quarter of world GDP. However under the genocidally racist British, India’s share of the world economy declined from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India’s share of global industrial output declined from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900 [2]. From available data on India’s GDP and India’s share of world GDP since 1700 [3, 4], one can crudely estimate that if India had remained free with  24% of world GDP  as in 1700 then its cumulative GDP would have been $232 trillion greater (1700-2003) and $44 trillion greater (1700-1950) [5]. Eminent Indian economist Professor Utsa Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has estimated that Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938 [6-8].

The massive larceny of the British in India was massively deadly because tens of million British were only able to rule several hundred million Indians by keeping them close to the edge of starvation and employing millions of well-fed Indian soldiers (sepoys) to keep control [9]. Addressing the House of Commons in 1935, racist, imperialist and mass murderer Winston Churchill made an extraordinary confession in stating of the subjugated Indians:

“In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power” [9, 10, 11].

7 years later in the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine) atrocity Churchill commenced  the deliberate starving to death over 4 years of 6-7 million Indians in Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and Assam as the British exported grain from India and slashed grain imports [9, 11-22]. Australia was complicit in the WW2 Bengali Holocaust by keeping grain from it huge wartime wheat stores from starving India [14]

Imposed poverty kills. Poverty-derived  avoidable mortality (avoidable death, excess mortality, excess death, premature death, untimely death, deaths that should not have happened) can be estimated as the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with same demographics (birth rate and percentage of children) [22]. Using Indian census data 1870-1950,  assuming an Indian population of  about 200 million in the period 1760-1870,  and estimating by interpolation from available data an Indian avoidable death rate in (deaths per 1,000 of population) of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950), one can estimate Indian excess deaths of 592  million (1757-1837), 497 million (1837-1901) and 418 million (1901-1947), roughly 1.5 billion in total or 1.8 billion including the Native States [21, 22]. This atrocity is a holocaust (a huge number of people killed) and a genocide (acts committed with intent to destroy a group  in whole or in part).

Despite a very high birth rate, the Indian population did not increase between 1860 (292 million) and 1934 (292 million) [23]. This is indicative of massive avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation that can be estimated as 745 million (1860-1934) or an average of about 10 million Indian avoidable deaths from deprivation per year [24]. Shashi Tharoor in his book “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India” states that “The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line” ([24], page 215 [25]). The life expectancy of 27 years thus corresponded to about 10 million Indian avoidable deaths from deprivation per year.

Today after nearly  72 years after Indian Independence and 69 years after the End of British rules through the adoption of the Constitution of India, things have improved considerably in India. The life expectancy in India is now  69 years (27 years in 1947) and avoidable deaths as a percentage of population is now 0.4% (as compared to a genocidal  2.4% in 1940-1950) [14].  India has a lot to celebrate on Indian Republic Day 2019. However despite immense progress since the End of genocidal British rule,  India still has a long way to go. Thus in present day India (population 1.3 billion) about 4 million people die avoidably from deprivation each year as compared to zero (0) in China, a pluralist one-party state that has abolished endemic poverty [22].

At this point it is useful to again consider  the terms “holocaust” and “genocide” used here. “Holocausts” involve the deaths of huge numbers of people and indeed this term was first applied to a WW2 atrocity by N. G. Jog in 1944 [11] in relation to the WW2 Bengali Holocaust in which 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death by the British with Australian complicity [9, 11-22]. The term “Holocaust” has become synonymous with the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (5-6 million Jews killed through violence or imposed deprivation) that was part of a wider WW2 European Holocaust (30 million Slavs, Jews and Gypsies killed) [22].  While denial of the WW2 Jewish Holocaust is criminalized in Apartheid Israel and some European countries, the WW2 Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine), the wider WW2 European Holocaust, and the WW2 Chinese Holocaust (35 million Chinese killed under the Japanese, 1937-1945) [22, 26] are overwhelmingly ignored in the West.  Holocaust ignoring and genocide ignoring are far, far worse than repugnant holocaust denial and genocide denial because the latter can at least invite public refutation and public debate.

“Genocide” is defined by Article 2 of the UN Genocide Convention thus:

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such: a) Killing members of the group; b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” [27].

Clearly the passive mass murder of 1.8 billion Indians by the British is both an Indian Holocaust and an Indian Genocide.   One notes that violent mass murder of Indians  also occurred under the British. Thus Amaresh Misra has estimated that 10 million Indians may have been killed by the British in reprisals  for 2,000 British deaths in the Indian Rebellion (Indian Mutiny) of 1857 [28, 29] . In relation to “intent to destroy”, in 1857 British popular writer  Charles Dickens advocated the total extermination of the Indian people: “It is my intention, with all possible avoidance of unnecessary cruelty and with all merciful swiftness of execution, to exterminate the Race from the face of the earth, which disfigured the earth with the late abominable atrocities” [30, 31].

2-century Anglo-imposed  Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide

While on 26 January  all Indians celebrate the End of British-imposed genocide, on the same day most  Australians are celebrating  the arrival of the British “First Fleet” i.e. the British invasion of Australia on 26 January  1788 that was the Start of an ongoing Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide.

Indigenous Australians object strongly to Australia’s National Day celebrations being held on the anniversary of the Start of the Aboriginal Genocide. Just imagine the outrage if Germany’s  National Day were held on the anniversary of Kristallnacht (November 9 to November 10, 1938) when Nazi gangs in Germany  burned synagogues, smashed windows in  attacking Jewish homes, schools and businesses, and killed about 100 Jews [32]. In the subsequent  WW2 Jewish Holocaust 5-6 million Jews were killed through violence or imposed deprivation [22, 32].  In the Australian Aboriginal Genocide (1788 to the present)  about 0.1 million Indigenous Australians were killed violently and about 2 million died from deprivation and introduced disease [33, 34].

The Indigenous population dropped from about 1 million to 0.1 million in the first century after the invasion in 1788, mainly through violence, dispossession, deprivation and introduced disease. The last massacres of Aborigines occurred in the late 1920s in Central Australia in the Coniston Massacre  [33-46]. Throughout much of the 20th century there was a policy of forcibly removing Aboriginal children (especially mixed race children) from their mothers, a systematic genocidal policy involving the removal of perhaps 0.1 million children (the Stolen Generations). This practice ended in the 1970s, and in 2008 Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd offered a formal apology,  but removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers continues (albeit for ostensibly different reasons) at a record rate [47-49], leading Kevin Rudd to warn of a “second stolen generation”) [48].

Before the British invasion in 1788 there were 350-750 different Indigenous Australian (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander) tribes and a similar number of languages and dialects, of which only 150 survive today and of these all but about 20 are endangered in a process of continuing Australian Aboriginal Ethnocide and Cultural Genocide of remaining Indigenous Australian societies [33]. Removal of Aboriginal children from their mothers and communities, removal of Federal and State government support for remote Aboriginal communities, and substantial removal of instruction of Aboriginal children in their own language are all ultra-conservative measures that threaten destruction of most of the surviving Aboriginal languages and dialects. According to a recent study (2009): “At the end of 2008 the Northern Territory Government, supported by the Commonwealth Government, all but closed bilingual education in remote Indigenous schools by determining that the language of instruction for the first four hours of school must be English. This decision could spell the death of the remaining endangered Indigenous languages in Australia” [50].

Indigenous Australian avoidable deaths from deprivation as a percentage of Indigenous population on a global comparative scale was recently estimated at 0.6% , noting that Indigenous Australia has a much  higher proportion of children than non-Indigenous Australia [34]. With an Indigenous population of about 800,000,  this means that about 5,000 Indigenous  Australians die from deprivation each year. [33].  An alternative  recent assessment of avoidable Indigenous Australian death rate  comes from “Closing the Gap. Prime Minister’s Report 2018” (Figure 28, page 105 [51]) – the Indigenous death rate is 1,000 per 100,000 of population pa whereas the non-Indigenous death rate is 540 per 100,000 pa, with the difference, 460 per 100,000 pa being the Indigenous avoidable death rate. On this basis the Indigenous avoidable death rate is 0.46% pa or about 0.5% per year. By way of comparison, the avoidable death rate from deprivation as a percentage of population in impoverished India is 0.4% pa and 1.0% pa in deeply  impoverished non-Arab Africa  [22]. The life expectancy for Indigenous Australians is about 10 years less than for non-Indigenous Australians.

Indigenous Australians were excluded from citizenship and subject to gross human rights violation until a Referendum in 1967 (that allowed the Federal Government to make laws about Indigenous Australians and allowed them to be counted whereas formerly they were counted under a  Fauna and Flora Act), the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act (that was subsequently flouted by the 2008  military invasion of Northern Territory Indigenous communities ) and the 1992 Mabo Decision of the High Court that overturned the notion of “terra nullius” (Australia as an empty land to be colonized), recognized native title for the first time,  and ultimately  resulted in qualified land rights, mainly  in arid and remote areas. Effective slavery of surviving Indigenous people on huge rural estates on stolen land involved “wages” of sugar, tea and tobacco and exposure to the core White Australian alcohol abuse culture with present day consequences  of a type 2 diabetes epidemic (with attendant obesity, cardiovascular, kidney and eye problems), alcohol-fuelled domestic violence, and huge preventable deaths and morbidity associated with smoking and drinking [34]. There are appalling differences between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Health. Thus Australia is the only advanced country with trachoma (an eye disease that is endemic in remote communities). Macular degeneration in the eyes is rare among Indigenous  Australians because they mostly do not live long enough to acquire it [51, 52]. Compared to non-Indigenous Australians , Indigenous Australians  suffer from overcrowded and substandard  housing, have much higher   unemployment, and have a disproportionately 10-fold higher representation in prisons.

Poverty kills and the estimated per capita income for Indigenous Australians is US $22,000  as compared to US$54,000 for Australia as a whole (0.8 million Indigenous Australians represent about 3% of the Australian population of 25 million) [34]. About 5,000 Indigenous Australians  die avoidably from deprivation each year in a continuing Aboriginal Genocide.

Final comments

There is furious debate in Australia about celebrating Australia Day on the Start date for the continuing Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide. Indigenous Australians and a large body of decent Green, Socialist and Labor  Left sympathizers object to the present highly offensive celebration on 26 January and cry “Change the date!”. Australian citizenship ceremonies have been held on Australia Day for 2 decades by local government,  but several decent local government councils around Australia have consulted with their Indigenous inhabitants  and resolved to hold these ceremonies on a non-offending day. However the extreme right wing  and jingoistic Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Government led by populist PM Scott “Scomo” Morrison has responded  by removing the right to hold  such ceremonies from the decent councils. The Greens have responded by offering to hold such ceremonies on behalf of such “banned” councils on the basis of advice from the Parliamentary Library that MPs and senators can do this under present regulations [54]. However Rightwing Labor Opposition leader Bill Shorten (and extremely  likely new Australian PM after the May 2019 Federal election)  favours retention of Australia Day on 26 January,  while rejecting the Coalition Government’s ban on informal dress for such ceremonies: “It will remain on the 26th of January. Having a national day is a good idea… People want to be left alone on Australia Day. I don’t want to be the fashion police telling people what they can wear at citizenship ceremonies” [55].

Meanwhile the Indigenous Australians will continue to hold Invasion Day rallies around Australia on 26 January in the face of intransigent, ignorant, offensive, look-the-other-way, and just plain stupid   Mainstream Australian insensitivity to the horrible reality of over 2 centuries of Anglo Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide regardless of how offensive, racist and absurd this intransigence  appears to decent folk around the world. While on 26 January India celebrates Republic Day and the formal End of British-imposed genocide,  look-the-other-way White Australia offensively and shamelessly continues to celebrate Australia Day on the anniversary of the Start of the ongoing Australian Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide that represents the worst ever genocidal atrocity in human history from a qualitative perspective. Poor fellow my country.

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This article was originally published on Countercurrents.org.

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at a major Australian university for 4 decades. He published some 130 works in a 5 decade scientific career, most recently a huge pharmacological reference text “Biochemical Targets of Plant Bioactive Compounds” (CRC Press/Taylor & Francis, New York & London , 2003).

Notes

[1]. “Republic Day (India)”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_Day_(India).

[2]. “Economic history of India”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India.

[3]. “Angus Maddison statistics of the ten largest economies by GDP (PPP)”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angus_Maddison_statistics_of_the_ten_largest_economies_by_GDP_(PPP).

[4]. Angus Maddison, “Contours of the World Economy 1-2030AD”, Oxford University Press, 2007.

[5]. Gideon Polya, “Britain robbed India of $45 trillion & thence 1.8 billion Indians died from deprivation”, Countercurrents, 18 December 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/12/18/britain-robbed-india-of-45-trillion-thence-1-8-billion-indians-died-from-deprivation/.

[6]. Utsa Patnaik in Arindam Banerjee and C. P. Chandrasekhar, editors, “Dispossession, Deprivation, and Development. Essays for Utsa Patnaik, Columbia University Press,  2018.

[7]. “How much money did Britain take away from India? About $45 trillion in 173 years, says top economist”, Business Today, 19 November 2018: https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/this-economist-says-britain-took-away-usd-45-trillion-from-india-in-173-years/story/292352.html.

[8]. Jason Hickel, “How Britain stole $45 trillion from India and lied about it”, Al Jazeera, 18 December 2018: https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/britain-stole-45-trillion-india-181206124830851.html.

[9]. Gideon Polya, “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History. Colonial rapacity, holocaust denial and the crisis in biological sustainability”, G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 1998, 2008 that  is now available for free perusal on the web: http://janeaustenand.blogspot.com/.

[10]. Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons about Indians (1935); 1. Hansard of the House of Commons, Winston Churchill speech, Hansard Vol. 302, cols. 1920-21, 1935.

[11]. N. G. Jog, “Churchill’s Blind-Spot: India”, New Book Company, Bombay, 1944 (Winston Churchill quoted on p195).

[12]. K.C. Ghosh, “Famines in Bengal 1770-1943” (National Council of Education, Calcutta, 2nd edition 1987).

[13]. T. Das, T. (1949), “Bengal Famine (1943) as Revealed in a Survey of Destitutes of Calcutta”,  University of Calcutta, Calcutta, 1949.

[14]. Gideon Polya, “Australia And Britain Killed 6-7 Million Indians In WW2 Bengal Famine”,  Countercurrents, 29 September, 2011: https://countercurrents.org/polya290911.htm.

[15]. “Bengali Holocaust (WW2 Bengal Famine) writings of Gideon Polya”, Gideon Polya: https://sites.google.com/site/drgideonpolya/bengali-holocaust.

[16]. Amartya Sen,  “Famine Mortality: A Study of the Bengal Famine of 1943” in Hobshawn, E. (1981) (editor), Peasants In History. Essays in Honour of David Thorner (Oxford University Press, New Delhi).

[17]. Cormac O Grada (2009) “Famine a short history” (Princeton University Press, 2009).

[18]. Madhusree Muckerjee (2010), “Churchill’s Secret War. The British Empire and the ravaging of India during World War II” (Basic Books, New York, 2010).

[19]. Thomas Keneally (2011), “Three Famines” (Vintage House, Australia, 2011).

[20]. Paul Greenough (1982),“Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal: the Famine of 1943-1944” (Oxford University Press, 1982).

[21]. Gideon Polya, “Economist Mahima Khanna,   Cambridge Stevenson Prize And Dire Indian Poverty”,  Countercurrents, 20 November, 2011: https://countercurrents.org/polya201111.htm.

[22]. “Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, including an avoidable mortality-related history of every country from Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the web : http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/.

[23]. Populstat, “India. Historical demographical data of the whole country”: http://www.populstat.info/Asia/indiac.htm.

[24]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India” by Shashi Tharoor”, Countercurrents, 8 September 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/09/08/review-inglorious-empire-what-the-british-did-to-india-by-shashi-tharoor/.

[25]. Shashi Tharoor, “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India”, Scribe, 2017.

[26]. “Backgrounder: China ’s WWII contributions in figures”, New China, 3 September 2015: http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-09/03/c_134582291.htm.

[27]. “UN Genocide Convention” : http://www.edwebproject.org/sideshow/genocide/convention.html.

[28]. Amaresh Misra, “War of Civilisations: India AD 1857”.

[29].  Randeep Ramesh, “India’s secret history: :A holocaust, one where millions disappeared”, Guardian, 24 August 2007: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/24/india.randeepramesh.

[30]. Gideon Polya, “Genocidal Racist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), Indian Holocaust And UK – US Muslim Genocide”,  Countercurrents, 10 February, 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya100212.htm

[31]. Grace Moore (2004), “Dickens and the Empire. Discourses of class, race, and colonialism in the works of Charles Dickens” , Ashgate Publishing, Aldershot , UK ): http://www.amazon.com/Dickens-Empire-Discourses-Colonialism-Nineteenth/dp/glanceands=books/0754634124.

[32]. Kristallnacht”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht.

[33]. “Aboriginal Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/aboriginalgenocide/home.

[34]. Gideon Polya, “Apartheid Israel’s Palestinian Genocide & Australia’s Aboriginal  Genocide compared”, Countercurrents, 20 February 2018: https://countercurrents.org/2018/02/20/apartheid-israels-palestinian-genocide-australias-aboriginal-genocide-compared/.

[35]. Colin Tatz, “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide”, Verso, London, 2003, pages 67-68.

[36]. Colin Tatz, “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide”, Verso, London, 2003, pages 74-94.

[37]. Colin Tatz, “With Intent to Destroy. Reflecting on Genocide”, Verso, London, 2003, pages 122 -123.

[38]. Colin Tatz, “Genocide in Australia”, AIATSIS Discussion Paper, Number 8, 1999: http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/research/docs/dp/DP08.pdf.

[39]. Gary Foley, “Australia and the Holocaust: A Koori perspective”, The Koori History website, 1997: http://www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_8.html.

[40]. Chalk, F. and Jonassohn, K. (1990), “The History and Sociology of Genocide. Analyses and Case Studies” (Yale University Press, New Haven & London), “The Tasmanians”, pp204-222.

[41]. Gideon Polya, “Ongoing Aboriginal Genocide In Apartheid Australia”, Countercurrents, 3 April, 2010: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya030410.htm.

[42]. Gideon Polya, “Review: “The Cambridge History Of Australia” Ignores  Australian Involvement In 30 Genocides”,  Countercurrents, 14 October, 2013: https://www.countercurrents.org/polya141013.htm.

[43]. Gideon Polya, “Australian Day is Invasion Day: will Australia join a Trump US War on China?:, Countercurrents, 27 January 2017: https://countercurrents.org/2017/01/27/australia-day-is-invasion-day-will-australia-join-a-trump-us-war-on-china/

[44]. Gideon Polya, “Film Review: “Utopia” By John Pilger Exposes Genocidal Maltreatment Of Indigenous Australians By Apartheid Australia”,  Countercurrents, 14 March, 2014: https://countercurrents.org/polya140314.htm.

[45]. “Coniston massacre”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coniston_massacre.

[46]. “Australian frontier wars”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_frontier_wars

[47]. Paddy Gibson, “Stolen futures”, Overland , Spring 2013: http://overland.org.au/previous-issues/issue-212/feature-paddy-gibson/.

[48]. Katharine Murphy, “Indigenous child removal rate risks “second stolen generation”, Kevin Rudd warns”, Guardian, 13 February 2017: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/feb/13/indigenous-child-removal-rate-risks-second-stolen-generation-kevin-rudd-warns.

[49]. David Shoebridge, “Stolen Generation continues – time to break the silence”, 13 February 2014: http://davidshoebridge.org.au/2014/02/13/stolen-generation-continues-time-to-break-the-silence/.                        ”

[50]. Jo Caffery, Patrick McConvell, and Jane Simpson, “Gaps in Australia’s Indigenous language  policy”, AIATSIS, December 2009: https://aiatsis.gov.au/publications/products/gaps-australias-indigenous-language-policy-dismantling-bilingual-education-northern-territory.

[51]. “Closing the Gap. Prime Minister’s Report 2018”: https://closingthegap.pmc.gov.au/sites/default/files/ctg-report-2018.pdf?a=1.

[52]. “Selected health conditions”, Australian Indigenous Health InfoNet: http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/health-facts/overviews/selected-health-conditions.

[53]. “Introduction”, Australian Indigenous Health InfoNet: http://www.healthinfonet.ecu.edu.au/health-facts/overviews/introduction.

[54]. Paul Karp, “Greens “won’t let” Morrison force councils to hold Australia Day citizenship  ceremonies”, Guardian, 16 January 2019: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/16/greens-wont-let-morrison-force-councils-to-hold-australia-day-citizenship-ceremonies.

[55].  Max Koslowski, “”It will remain on the 26th”: Bill Shorten rules out changing Australia Day date”, Sydeny Morning Herals, 16 January 2019: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/it-will-remain-on-the-26th-bill-shorten-rules-out-changing-australia-day-date-20190116-p50rm8.html.

For the approximately 200 Canadian military trainers currently deployed to Ukraine, it is likely that on the first of January they would have witnessed a torch lit procession. Throughout Kiev and numerous other towns in Western Ukraine, thousands of civilians took to the streets – not to usher in the New Year – but to celebrate the 110th anniversary of the birth of a man named Stepan Bandera.

This was not the first time Ukrainian nationalists marched with torches to celebrate Bandera’s birthday, but it was the first time such a spectacle was an officially sanctioned affair.

On December 28, 2018, Ukrainian Parliament passed Resolution 9234, which, among several other notable dates, made January 1 a formal holiday in Ukraine.

The city of Lviv, which was Bandera’s birthplace, went one step further by declaring 2019 to be the ‘Year of Stepan Bandera’.

Ukrainian Independent News Agency (UNIAN) described Bandera as “a Ukrainian politician, one of the ideologists and theorists of the Ukrainian nationalists movement in the 20th Century.”

Missing from this abbreviated resume is the fact that during World War II, Bandera was not only a Nazi collaborator, but also a direct participant in Hitler’s Holocaust.

Israel’s ambassador to Ukraine, Joel Lion published a statement announcing that he was “shocked” by this official honouring of a notorious Nazi. “I cannot understand how the glorification of those directly involved in horrible anti-Semitic crimes help fight anti-Semitism and xenophobia,” wrote Lion.

In June 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, Bandera was the Chairman of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). The Nazis saw Bandera and his fellow Ukrainian nationalists as natural allies in defeating the Soviets. In advance of the invasion, these ex-patriots were armed and equipped by the Germans and formed into a special unit called the Nachtigall battalion.

Roman Shukhevych was the commander of Nachtigall and he, like Bandera is currently revered as a Ukrainian nationalist hero. Unfortunately for their thousands of victims both Shukhevych and Bandera were bloodthirsty anti-Semites.

For several days at the end of June 1941, when Nachtigall had captured Lviv from the Soviets, a brutal extermination of Jews took place in the city. An estimated 4,000 – 6,000 Jews were slain in an orgy of bloodletting that shocked even the Nazi Germans.

Ambassador Lion noted that Bandera and Shukhevych are currently seen by many Ukrainians as “heroes who fought for Ukraine’s independence; whereas they were both historically a horror for the Jews.”

When the fortunes of war turned against Hitler, both Bandera and Shukevych turned against the Germans, and then in turn resisted the Soviets.

After Ukraine gained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, their initial collaboration with the Nazis and participation in the slaughter of Ukrainian Jews prevented Bandera and Shukevych from being considered national role models. However, much to the consternation of the Jews, and the Poles – whom Bandera’s OUN also massacred in the thousands – over the past three decades history in Ukraine has been revised.

At the time of the Maidan uprising in 2014, the spirit of Bandera was revived by the right wing, ultra-nationalists, and, just five years later, his past crimes have been whitewashed to the point where his date of birth is a national holiday.

In Canada, we have been joining in exactly the opposite direction with regard to re-assessing our historical figures. Only last year, the City of Halifax removed a statue of Lord Cornwallis from a central park.

He is still recognized as the founder of Halifax, but his policy of putting a bounty on the Mi’kmaq tribe was deemed contemptible in retrospect. Therefore, his likeness is no longer afforded public reverence.

Canada is committing military resources to the government in Kiev. Surely this does not amount to a blank cheque wherein Canada’s Global Affairs refrain from criticizing such a questionable policy as that of glorifying a Nazi with an official holiday? A good friendship often requires a good dose of plain talk and bad manners.

In this case, Canada would be wise to side with the Israelis and the Poles in condemning torch-lit parades to commemorate the birthday of a man responsible for slaughtering Jews.

One of the justifications for our military trainers being in Ukraine is to defend and support Canadian values. Last time I checked, Canadians still reviled Nazis.

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Donald Trump is no different than his predecessors. During the campaign, he said whatever he had to in order to get elected. He promised to close down the neocon foreign wars and also fight the “deep state” by draining the swamp. 

Obama also promised to end the neocon wars, but that was said with the same insincerity as his predecessor, George W. Bush, who said in 2000 he wasn’t into nation building and foreign entanglements. 

It is now obvious, with the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s appointment of convicted criminal Elliott Abrams as his “point person” on Venezuela, that the neocons have taken full control of Trump’s foreign policy. 

“This crisis in Venezuela is deep and difficult and dangerous and I can’t wait to get to work on it,” said Abrams after Pompeo made the announcement.

Recall the role Mr. Abrams played during the Reagan years. He helped fund the Contras in Nicaragua and is linked to the 1982 El Mozote massacre of hundreds of civilians in El Salvador. It was later estimated by a UN truth commission that 85 percent of the abuses during the civil war in El Salvador were committed by military death squads assisted by the Reagan administration. 

Abrams has experience overthrowing government’s not following the neoliberal master plan. In 2002, during the Bush neocon regime, Abrams worked on a failed Venezuelan coup. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was jailed. Supporters and a loyal military freed Chávez and likely saved him from what would later be known as the Gaddafi method of deposing disfavored leaders refusing to follow neoliberal strictures as pushed by the Council on Foreign Relations where Abrams is a senior fellow. 

Rex Tillerson wanted to bring Abrams on board at the State Department, but Trump wouldn’t go for it because Abrams opposed his election and was a prominent fixture of the Never Trump movement. Now that Tillerson is gone—after characterizing Trump as a moron, but for the wrong reason—and neocons Pompeo and Bolton are in place, we can conclude that the neocon takeover of the Trump administration is all but complete. The final act is impeaching or forcing Trump’s resignation so the more amenable (for neocons) Christian Zionist Mike Pence can sit on the ceremonial throne. 

“Next time, in 2020, we’ll have had 12 years of Obama and Clinton, Hillary will be in her mid-seventies, Trump will be gone, and a new generation of Republican leaders like Rubio and Cruz and Ryan and Cotton and Haley and Sasse will still be in their forties,” Abrams said in 2016. 

Trump will be left to fight off endless attacks by Democrats trying to unseat him. His major campaign promise—to build the wall—will go unrealized and he will go down as one of the more ineffective presidents in US history. 

Meanwhile, US foreign policy continues uninterrupted, never mind the minor turbulence of Trump declaring (again) that he will get US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan. 

Bolton, Pompeo, and Abrams are in control. The wars will continue, expand—adding Iran and Venezuela to the forever war roster—and the people will be left to stand on the sidelines, ill-informed and distracted by lesser staged events. 

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors… and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do,” said Karl Rove, the Bush administration fixer and former Nixon dirty trickster. 

It is unknown at this point what the neocon triumvirate—Bolton, Pompeo, Abrams—will do in regard to Venezuela. For now, the US has declared the “military option” (of murder and mayhem) is “on the table” in response to re-election of Nicholás Maduro. The heavy lifting will be left to the Lima Group—Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru—and these countries may be used to inflict a “humanitarian intervention” on the people of Venezuela. 

The Organization of American States has not backed the neocon and Lima Group effort to evict Maduro and return the oil-rich nation to the neoliberal orbit. It cites the OAS Charter of 1948. Article 19, Chapter IV states:

“No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.”

For a large number of Trump supporters, making America Great Again means continuing the imperial objectives of the empire—installing preferred satraps (Juan Guaidó in Venezuela) or those tolerable to Wall Street and the Chicago School version of neoliberalism. 

The hypocrisy is palatable. Trump and his diehard supporters stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the Democrat “Resistance” and the “liberal” media in regard to Venezuela.

“It is revealing how the supposedly anti-Trump media have closed ranks and are marching in lockstep with the administration when it comes to overthrowing Washington’s official enemies. The media are not opposing Trump or tyranny; they are enabling it,” writes Alan MacLeod. 

There is very little pushback inside the United States over these grossly illegal and immoral interventions. The Trump faithful has demonstrated repeatedly there are few differences between them and the “libtards” when the issue is supporting the financial elite and their crimes. 

War becomes “humanitarian” when you put the right face on it. That’s why Obama got away with killing Gaddafi in Libya and destroying Syria while maintaining the empire’s footprint in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like Reagan, he excelled at manipulating the American public.

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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.

Despite Trump’s attempt to paint the Texas-Mexico border as a war zone, border counties are safer than the president’s own backyard. And local lawmen don’t believe a wall will do any good.

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President Trump visited McAllen earlier this month to drum up support for spending $5.7 billion to build more border wall segments on the U.S.-Mexico border. He staged a press conference surrounded by piles of confiscated drugs, guns and cash, describing the situation at the border as “a national emergency.” With the government partially shut down over Trump’s funding dispute with Congress, the president is trying to prove that there’s a new, growing “crisis” on the border to pressure Democrats to cave. But law enforcement leaders in at least two border counties, including the sheriff who patrols McAllen, say the picture Trump is painting of the Texas borderlands is inaccurate.

Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. “Eddie” Guerra, who is in charge of policing the largest and most populous county in the Rio Grande Valley, said that crime rates in his county are at record lows, and that illegal immigration has very little effect on the safety of residents. Meanwhile, Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson, who is responsible for policing the largest county in Texas, said he doesn’t support the construction of a wall along any part of the 192-mile stretch of border in Brewster County, which includes Big Bend National Park.

“Because we’re on the border, the perception is that there’s murders every day and there’s shootings every day. Yet here in our county, we don’t have that going on. It’s very, very safe,” Guerra told the Observer.

In Hidalgo County, about 20 miles of wall already exist.  GUS BOVA

But don’t take the sheriffs’ word for it. In 2017 (the latest year for which data is available), there were 4.4 murders per 100,000 people in Hidalgo County — about half the rate of other metro areas in Texas and a quarter of the murder rate in Washington, D.C. It’s also lower than the 6.3 murders per 100,000 people in 2017 in Palm Beach County, Florida, where Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort is located.

In addition to fewer murders, the violent crime and property crime rates in Hidalgo County are less than half of what they were in 1999. Guerra, a Democrat who has lived in the RGV his entire life, said the majority of immigrants entering the county without papers are Central American asylum-seekers fleeing violence and poverty who turn themselves over to Border Patrol agents as soon as they can.

“They’re averaging, here in the Rio Grande Valley sector, about 600 apprehensions a day. Most are family units. These family units and unaccompanied children pose exactly zero security threat in the county,” Guerra said.

Guerra’s observations are reflected in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) data: Since September, families and unaccompanied children have made up more than half of Border Patrol apprehensions. And apprehensions across the entire U.S.-Mexico border are down significantly over the last 20 years, with the number of migrants apprehended in the Rio Grande Valley falling by 44 percent from 1997 to 2017.

Since September 2018, families and unaccompanied children have made up more than half of all border apprehensions.  U.S. CUSTOMS AND BORDER PROTECTION

“This is what’s been going on for years. I’m not going to argue that we have a secure border, because we don’t, but to say that all of the sudden we have a crisis going on is wrong,” Guerra said.

Five hundred miles northwest, Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson says he’s seeing a similar trend. Dodson, a Democrat who has been in the post since 2001, said the migrants apprehended in his county tend to be asylum-seekers from Central America fleeing some of the most dangerous countries in the world. In 2017, the number of apprehensions in the Big Bend sector, which includes Brewster County, was less than half of what it was in 2000.

“The Guatemalans and Hondurans are not carrying drugs,” Dodson said. “For the most part, they just go on through.”

Trump has claimed in speeches and tweets that a wall would “have a huge impact on the inflow of drugs coming across” the border. But data shows this is unlikely. The majority of hard drugs, like cocaine, fentanyl and heroin, are smuggled through the mail or through ports of entry, not by individuals crossing the border illegally. The amount of marijuana seized along the U.S.-Mexico border has dropped in recent years, especially in California, where voters legalized the sale of cannabis in 2016. In other words, a wall wouldn’t do much to stem the trafficking of drugs into the United States; however, it would require the federal government to seize land along the border, a move Dodson vehemently opposes.

“We have a river, and we don’t want to cut ourselves off from that river. I know there’s a better way,” said Dodson, who told the Observer in 2014 he wished politicians like Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick would “shut up” about the border.

In Hidalgo County, about 20 miles of wall already exist. Funding for 33 more miles of border wall (25 of which will be in Hidalgo County) was approved by Congress in March, and construction is slated to start as early as next month. Guerra said that spending billions to build more border wall in his county would be a waste, partially because migrants would still find a way across.

“First of all, we already have one physical barrier, that’s the Rio Grande. To cross it, [migrants] use a raft. To cross a 22-foot-high fence, they’ll use a ladder,” Guerra said, adding that federal money would be better spent on improving technology at ports and hiring more Border Patrol agents.

Both Guerra and Dodson believe that hiring additional qualified Border Patrol agents, who work with local law enforcement, is the best way to bolster border security. The number of Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border nearly doubled between 2000 and 2017, turning the area into one of the most surveilled and policed parts of the nation.

But recruiting new Border Patrol agents has been a challenge for CBP in recent years. Trump signed an executive order in January 2017 requiring the agency to increase its numbers by 5,000 agents. Despite “aggressive” recruiting, thousands of positions still remain open. In fact, CPB is now losing more agents than it can hire annually, thanks to competition from other Department of Homeland Security agencies, like Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which pays agents more and places them in more desirable locations.

Ironically, with the government shut down over Trump’s border wall beef with Congress, at least 200 Border Patrol agents have been furloughed in the RGV, where Guerra says they are desperately needed. Nationwide, more than 54,000 CBP employees are working without pay.

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Kate Groetzinger is a legislative fellow at the Texas Observer. She is also a second-year master’s candidate in the journalism program at The University of Texas at Austin, where she is focusing on audio reporting and podcasting. A native Texan, Kate hails from Waco and has lived in Houston, San Antonio and Austin.

Featured image: Hidalgo County Sheriff J.E. “Eddie” Guerra (left), Brewster County Sheriff Ronny Dodson (Photos courtesy of Facebook, CC, Illustration by Sonny Sone)

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro accuses the United States of trying to orchestrate a coup against him, and that allegation has resonance among many in a region where Washington has a long history of interventions—military and otherwise.

Ever since the early 19th century, the United States has involved itself in the daily affairs of nations across Latin America, often on behalf of North American capitalist interests or to support right-leaning forces against left-wing and popular democratic leaders.

In recent years, the U.S. has been accused of granting at least tacit backing to coups in Venezuela in 2002 and Honduras in 2009. The Trump administration’s leading role in recognizing Juan Guaidó as the “interim president” of Venezuela returns the U.S. once more to an assertive role in Latin American countries’ internal affairs.

Some of the most notable U.S. interventions in Latin America:

1846: The United States invades Mexico and captures Mexico City in 1847. A forced peace treaty the following year gives the U.S. more than half of Mexico’s territory—what is now most of the western United States.

1903: The U.S. engineers Panamanian independence from Colombia and gains sovereign rights over the zone where the Panama Canal would connect Atlantic and Pacific shipping routes.

1903: After the Spanish-American War, Cuba and the U.S. sign a “treaty” allowing near-total U.S. control of Cuban affairs. U.S. establishes a naval base at Guantanamo Bay.

U.S. Marines repeatedly intervene in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the first quarter of the 20th century, often to protect U.S. business interests.

1914: U.S. troops occupy the Mexican port of Veracruz for seven months in an attempt to sway developments in the Mexican Revolution.

1954: Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz is overthrown in a CIA-backed coup.

1961: The U.S.-backed Bay of Pigs invasion fails to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro but Washington continues to launch attempts to assassinate Castro and dislodge his government for decades.

Attack near Playa Giron. April 19, 1961. - panoramio.jpg

Attack near Playa Giron. April 19, 1961. (CC BY 3.0)

1964: Leftist President Joao Goulart of Brazil is overthrown in a U.S.-backed coup that installs a military dictatorship lasting until the 1980s.

1965: U.S. forces land in the Dominican Republic to intervene in a civil war.

1973: A U.S.-supported military coup overthrows the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende. He is replaced by General Augusto Pinochet, who imposes a brutal military regime and embarks on a U.S.-guided program of extreme economic privatization and de-regulation. It is later seen as the laboratory of what became known as neoliberalism.

1970s: Argentina, Chile, and allied South American nations launch a brutal campaign of repression and assassination aimed at perceived leftist threats, known as Operation Condor, often with U.S. support.

1980s: Reagan administration backs anti-Communist Contra forces against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government and backs the Salvadoran government against leftist FMLN rebels.

1983: U.S. forces invade the Caribbean island of Grenada after accusing the government of allying itself with Cuba.

1989: U.S. invades Panama to oust strongman (and rogue CIA agent) Manuel Noriega.

1994: A U.S.-led invasion of Haiti is launched to remove the government installed by a 1991 coup that had ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The invasion restores Aristide, who was later overthrown (again) by a U.S.-backed coup in 2004.

2002: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is ousted for two days in a U.S.-backed coup before retaking power following a massive outpouring of popular support.

2009: Honduran President Manuel Zelaya overthrown by the military in a U.S.-supported coup.

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This list was compiled by the Associated Press and added to by People’s World.

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This article was first published in January 2018.

What is the position of the West’s “Progressives” with regard to regime change in Venezuela?

Several prominent intellectuals are calling for a “negotiated settlement” between the Maduro government and “the opposition” led by the self proclaimed interim president Juan Guaido . It should be obvious that this proposal is redundant and contradictory. The leader of the National Assembly Juan Guaido is a US proxy (instrument of a foreign government) who will be “negotiating” on behalf of Washington.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, January 28, 2019

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What is now unfolding in both North America and Western Europe is fake social activism, controlled and funded by the corporate establishment. This manipulated process precludes the formation of a real mass movement against war, racism and social injustice.  

The anti-war movement is dead. The war on Syria is tagged as “a civil war”.

The war on Yemen is also portrayed as a civil war.  While the bombing is by Saudi Arabia, the insidious role of the US is downplayed or casually ignored. “The US is not directly involved so there is no need for us to wage an anti-war campaign”. (paraphrase)

War and neoliberalism are no longer at the forefront of civil society activism. Funded by corporate charities, via a network of non-governmental organizations, social activism tends to be piecemeal. There is no integrated anti-globalization anti-war movement. The economic crisis is not seen as having a relationship to US led wars.

In turn, dissent has become compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, LGBT) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement against global capitalism.

This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits and People’s Summits of the 1990s and also from the inception of the World Social Forum in 2000, which rarely adopted a meaningful anti-war stance.

Through staged protest events sponsored by NGOs and generously funded by corporate foundations, the unspoken objective is to create profound divisions within Western society, which serve to uphold the existing social order as well as the military agenda.

Syria

It is worth underscoring the role of so-called “progressive” intellectuals in paying lip service to the US-NATO military agenda. This is nothing new.

Segments of the anti-war movement which opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq are tacitly supportive of  Trump’s punitive airstrikes directed against Syria’s “Assad regime” allegedly involved in “killing their own people”, gassing them to death in a premeditated chemical weapons attack. According to Trump “Assad choked out the lives of helpless men women and children”.

America’s Noam Chomsky in an April 5 2017 interview with “Democracy Now” (aired two days before Trump’s April 2017 punitive airstrikes against Syria) favors “regime change”, intimating that a negotiated “removal” of Bashar al Assad could lead to a peaceful settlement.

According to Chomsky: “The Assad regime is a moral disgrace. They’re carrying out horrendous acts, the Russians with them.” (emphasis added) Strong statement with no supporting evidence and documentation provided. Apology for Trump’s war crimes? The victims of imperialism are casually blamed for the crimes of imperialism:

…You know, you can’t tell them, “We’re going to murder you. Please negotiate.”That’s not going to work. But some system in which, in the course of negotiations …[with the Russians], … he [Bashar al-Assad] would be removed, and some kind of settlement would be made. The West would not accept it, …  At the time, they believed they could overthrow Assad, so they didn’t want to do this, so the war went on. Could it have worked? You never know for sure. But it could have been pursued. Meanwhile, Qatar and Saudi Arabia are supporting jihadi groups, which are not all that different from ISIS. So you have a horror story on all sides. The Syrian people are being decimated.

(Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now, April 5, 2017, See the video of the Democracy Now interview with Chomsky here

Update, Scan of Chomsky Interview Democracy Now, April 26, 2017

Similarly in Britain, Tariq Ali,  tagged by the U.K. media as the Left’s  prime leader of Britain’s anti-war movement going back to the Vietnam war,  has also called for the removal of president Bashar al Assad. While adopting a progressive stanceon a number of issues, his discourse regarding Syria is not dissimilar from that of  the Washington war hawks:

“He [Assad] has to be pushed out,… [ for which] the Syrian people are doing their best… The fact is that the overwhelming majority of people in Syria want the Assad family out – and that is the key thing that we have to understand and he [Assad] should understand…

Syria needs a non-sectarian national government to prepare a new constitution… If the Assad clan refuses to relinquish their stronghold on the country, sooner or later something disastrous will happen…That is the future that stares them in the face, there is no other future,” ” RT 2012 interview 

Tariq Ali, who is a spokesperson for Britain’s Stop the War Coalition, fails to mention that US-NATO and their allies are actively involved in the recruitment, training and arming of a (largely foreign) terrorist mercenary army.

Under the “progressive” mantle of Britain’s anti-war movement, Ali tacitly provides legitimacy to Western military intervention on humanitarian grounds under the banner of the “War on Terrorism” and the so-called “Responsibilty to Protect”(R2P). The fact that both Al Qaeda and ISIS-Daesh are supported (covertly) by US-NATO is not mentioned.

According to British author William Bowles, Tariq Ali is one among many of the Empire’s Lefty intellectuals who has served to distort anti-war activism in both North America and Western Europe:

It exemplifies the contradiction of being an alleged socialist at home and enjoying the privilege of being part of the Empire’s intellectual elite, … whilst dictating to Syria what it should and shouldn’t do. I fail to see the distinction between Ali’s arrogance and that of the West, that called for exactly the same thing! Assad has to go!

The Existing Anti-War movement

Global capitalism finances anti-capitalism: an absurd and contradictory relationship.

There can be no meaningful anti-war movement when dissent is generously funded by those same corporate interests which are the target of the protest movement. In the words of McGeorge Bundy, president of the Ford Foundation (1966-1979),Everything the [Ford] Foundation did could be regarded as ‘making the World safe for capitalism’”. And several “Lefty intellectuals” serve the role of “making the World safe” for the warmongers.

Today’s antiwar protest does not question the legitimacy of those to whom the protest is addressed. At this juncture, “progressives” –funded by major foundations and endorsed by the mainstream media– are an obstacle to the formation of a meaningful and articulate grassroots antiwar movement acting both nationally and internationally.

A consistent antiwar movement must also confront various forms of cooption within its ranks, namely the fact that a significant sector of so-called “progressive” opinion tacitly supports US foreign policy including “humanitarian interventions” under UN/NATO auspices.

An antiwar movement funded by major corporate foundations is the cause rather than the solution. A coherent antiwar movement cannot be funded by warmongers.

The Road Ahead

What is required is the development of a broad based grassroots network which seeks to disable patterns of authority and decision making pertaining to war.

This network would be established at all levels in society, towns and villages, work places, parishes. Trade unions, farmers organizations, professional associations, business associations, student unions, veterans associations, church groups would be called upon to integrate the antiwar organizational structure. Of crucial importance, this movement should extend into the Armed Forces as a means to breaking the legitimacy of war among service men and women.

The first task would be to disable war propaganda through an effective campaign against media disinformation.

The corporate media would be directly challenged, leading to boycotts of major news outlets, which are responsible for channelling disinformation into the news chain.  This endeavor would require a parallel process at the grass roots level, of sensitizing and educating fellow citizens on the nature of  the war and the global crisis, as well as effectively “spreading the word” through advanced networking, through alternative media outlets on the internet, etc. In recent developments, the independent online media has been the target of manipulation and censorship, precisely with a view to undermining anti-war activism on the internet.

The creation of such a movement, which forcefully challenges the legitimacy of the structures of political authority, is no easy task. It would require a degree of solidarity, unity and commitment unparalleled in World history. It would require breaking down political and ideological barriers within society and acting with a single voice. It would also require eventually unseating the war criminals, and indicting them for war crimes.


Order Directly from Global Research Publishers

Michel Chossudovsky

original

America’s hegemonic project in the post 9/11 era is the “Globalization of War” whereby the U.S.-NATO military machine —coupled with covert intelligence operations, economic sanctions and the thrust of “regime change”— is deployed in all major regions of the world. The threat of pre-emptive nuclear war is also used to black-mail countries into submission.

This “Long War against Humanity” is carried out at the height of the most serious economic crisis in modern history.

It is intimately related to a process of global financial restructuring, which has resulted in the collapse of national economies and the impoverishment of large sectors of the World population.

The ultimate objective is World conquest under the cloak of “human rights” and “Western democracy”.

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Special counsel Mueller indicted political strategist/former Trump advisor Roger Stone on seven counts – see below. 

In a politicized show of force, Stone was dramatically arrested pre-dawn on Friday at his south Florida home by around two dozen heavily armed FBI agents in bullet-proof vests and tactical gear despite facing no threat.

The scene resembled a Hollywood sound stage production, CNN notified in advance to capture the politicized arrest on video for maximum effect – an agent banging on Stone’s door, shouting “FBI! Open the door! FBI! Warrant!”

After his arrest, Stone appeared in federal court later on Friday morning. Charges are connected to Robert Mueller’s politicized Russiagate witch hunt probe, ongoing since May 2017, finding no improper or illegal connection between Trump, his team and Russia – because there’s nothing to find.

Indictments, including against Stone, have nothing to do with the special counsel’s stated purpose, nothing justifying what’s going on, no Russian US election meddling, no evidence suggesting it – no reason to continue a probe that never should have been begun in the first place.

Like Watergate to remove Richard Nixon from office on trumped up charges, targeting him for political reasons related to his social, environmental and geopolitical agenda, a similar scenario is playing out against Trump to delegitimize and undermine him for the wrong reasons.

Nixon threatened entrenched military/industrial/security and other interests, why he was marked for removal.

Trump favors improved relations with Russia and surprisingly North Korea as well – fire and fury evolving to friendship with Kim Jong-un, DLT saying “(h)e wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love.” Who could have imagined the unimaginable – and there’s more.

While going along with endless US wars of aggression, escalating them, allowing himself to be co-opted, Trump called for scaling back in Syria and Afghanistan in favor of other priorities – polar opposite the military, industrial, military, media complex’s agenda, supporting endless wars and more of them.

Undemocratic Dems and media scoundrels never forgave him for triumphing over Hillary, a race he was supposed to lose, not win.

All of the above reasons are why he’s a marked man – justifiable reasons ignored, unjustifiable ones why dark forces want him delegitimized, removed from office, or weakened enough to be defeated for reelection in 2020.

Stone was indicted on one count of obstruction of justice, five counts of false statements, and one count of witness tampering.

Charges are unrelated to nonexistent Russian US election meddling or leaked information to WikiLeaks it revealed. No DNC hacking occurred, no evidence suggesting it. Claims otherwise were fabricated.

According to Stone’s attorney Grant Smith, “(t)here was no Russian collusion,” so what’s going on is “a clear attempt at silencing Roger,” adding:

“This was an investigation they started as about Russian collusion, and now they’re charging Roger Stone with lying to Congress about something he honestly forgot about, and as Roger has stated publicly before, he will fight the charges.”

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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.

Politics Behind the Sunni-Shia Conflict in Middle East

January 27th, 2019 by Nauman Sadiq

Lately, it has become a habit of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region in order to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have ignited the flames of internecine conflict in the Islamic world.

Some self-anointed “Arabists” of the mainstream media posit that the division goes all the way back to the founding of Islam, 1400 years ago, and contend that the conflict emerged during the reign of the fourth caliph, Ali bin Abi Talib, in the seventh century A.D.

One wonders what would be the American-led war on terror’s explanation of such “erudite” historians of Islam – that the cause of “the clash of civilizations” between Christians and Muslims can be found in the Crusades when Richard the Lionheart and Saladin were skirmishing in the Levant and exchanging courtesies at the same time.

Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region is essentially a political conflict between the Gulf Arab autocrats and Iran for regional dominance which is being presented to lay Muslims in the veneer of religiosity.

Saudi Arabia, which has been vying for power as the leader of Sunni bloc against the Shi’a-led Iran in the regional geopolitics, was staunchly against the invasion of Iraq by the Bush Administration in 2003.

The Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein constituted a Sunni Arab bulwark against Iran’s meddling in the Arab world. But after Saddam was ousted from power in 2003 and subsequently when elections were held in Iraq which were swept by Shi’a-dominated parties, Iraq has now been led by a Shi’a-majority government that has become a steadfast regional ally of Iran. Consequently, Iran’s sphere of influence now extends all the way from territorially-contiguous Iraq and Syria to Lebanon and the Mediterranean coast.

Moreover, during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Bush Administration took advantage of the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq and used the Kurds and Shi’as against the Sunni-led Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein. And during the occupation years from 2003 to 2011, the once dominant Sunni minority was politically marginalized which further exacerbated the ethnic and sectarian divisions in Iraq.

The Saudi royal family was resentful of Iran’s encroachment on the traditional Arab heartland. Therefore, when protests broke out against the Shi’a-led Syrian government in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011, the Gulf states along with their regional Sunni allies, Turkey and Jordan, and the Western patrons gradually militarized the protests to dismantle the Iranian resistance axis.

A full-scale Sunni-Shi’a war has been going on in Syria, Iraq and Yemen for the last several years which will obviously have its repercussions all over the Islamic world where Sunni and Shi’a Muslims have coexisted in relative peace for centuries.

Notwithstanding, in order to create a semblance of objectivity and fairness, the American policymakers and analysts are always willing to accept the blame for the mistakes of the distant past that have no bearing on their present policy, however, any fact that impinges on their present policy is conveniently brushed aside.

In the case of the creation of the Islamic State, for instance, the US policy analysts are willing to concede that invading Iraq back in 2003 was a mistake that radicalized the Iraqi society, exacerbated sectarian divisions and gave birth to an unrelenting Sunni insurgency against the heavy-handed and discriminatory policies of the Shi’a-led Iraqi government.

Similarly, the war on terror era political commentators also “generously” accept the fact that the Cold War-era policy of nurturing al-Qaeda and myriads of Afghan so-called “freedom fighters” against the erstwhile Soviet Union was a mistake, because all those fait accompli have no bearing on their present policy.

The mainstream media’s spin-doctors conveniently forget, however, that the creation of the Islamic State and myriads of other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq has as much to do with the unilateral invasion of Iraq back in 2003 under the Republican Bush administration as it has been the legacy of the Democratic Obama administration that funded, armed, trained and internationally legitimized the Sunni militants against the Shi’a-led Syrian government since 2011-onward in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa region.

In fact, the proximate cause behind the rise of the Islamic State, al-Nusra Front, Ahrar al-Sham, Jaysh al-Islam and numerous other Sunni Arab jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq was the Obama administration’s policy of intervention through proxies in Syria.

The border between Syria and Iraq is highly porous and poorly guarded. The Obama administration’s policy of nurturing militants against the Syrian government was bound to have its blowback in Iraq sooner or later. Therefore, as soon as the Islamic State consolidated its gains in Syria, it overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in early 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

Apart from Syria and Iraq, two other flashpoints of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region are Bahrain and Yemen. When peaceful protests broke out against the Sunni monarchy in Bahrain by the Shi’a majority population in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011, Saudi Arabia sent thousands of troops across the border to quell the uprising.

Similarly, when the Iran-backed Houthis, which is also an offshoot of Shi’a Islam, overran Sana’a in September 2014, Saudi Arabia and UAE mounted another ill-conceived Sunni-led offensive against the Houthi militia in Yemen in March 2015.

The nature of the conflict in Yemen is sectarian to an extent that last year, the Yemeni branch of al-Qaeda’s leader Qasim al-Raymi claimed that al-Qaeda had been fighting hand in hand with the Saudi-led alliance against the Iran-backed rebels for the last three years.

The revelation hardly comes as a surprise, though, because after all al-Qaeda’s official franchise in Syria, al-Nusra Front, has also been fighting hand in glove with the so-called “moderate” Syrian opposition against the Syrian government for the last eight years of the Syrian proxy war.

Furthermore, according to Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights, 509 Shi’a Muslims belonging to the Hazara ethnic group had been killed in Pakistan’s western city of Quetta since 2013. Although a southern Punjab-based sectarian militant outfit Lashkar-e-Jhangvi frequently claims responsibility for the massacre of Hazaras in Quetta, such claims are often misleading.

The hub of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi’s power mostly lies in Punjab whereas the Balochistan province’s provincial metropolis Quetta, which is almost three-hour drive from the Af-Pak border at Chaman, is regarded as the center of Taliban’s activities.

After the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001 with the help of the Northern Alliance, the top leadership of the Taliban has mostly settled in Quetta and its adjoining rural areas and Afghan refugee camps, hence it is called the Quetta Shura Taliban.

In order to understand the casus belli of the Taliban-Hazara conflict, it’s worth noting that the leadership of the Hazara ethnic group has always taken the side of the Tajik and Uzbek-led Northern Alliance against the Pashtun-led Taliban.

The Taliban has committed several massacres of the Hazara people in Afghanistan, particularly following the 1997 massacre of 3,000 Taliban prisoners by the Uzbek warlord Abdul Malik Pahlawan in Mazar-i-Sharif thousands of Hazaras were massacred by the Taliban in the same city in August 1998 for betraying the Taliban.

The Hazara people are an ethnically Uzbek, Dari (Afghan Persian)-speaking ethnic group native to the Hazarajat region in central Afghanistan but roughly 600,000 Hazaras also live in Quetta, Pakistan. Although the conflict between the Taliban and Hazaras might appear religious and sectarian, the real reasons of the conflict are political in nature, as I have already described.

Now, when the fire of inter-sectarian strife is burning on several different fronts in the Middle East and the Sunni and Shi’a communities are witnessing a merciless slaughter of their brethren in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Bahrain Afghanistan and Pakistan, then it would be preposterous to look for the causes of the conflict in theology and medieval history. If the Sunni and Shi’a Muslims were so thirsty for each other’s blood since the founding of Islam, then how come they managed to survive as distinct sectarian groups for 1400 years?

Fact of the matter is that in modern times, the phenomena of Islamic radicalism, jihadism and consequent Sunni-Shi’a conflict are only as old as the Soviet-Afghan jihad during the 1980s when the Western powers with the help of their regional allies trained and armed Afghan jihadists to battle the Soviet troops in Afghanistan.

More significantly, however, the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988 between the Sunni and Baathist-led Iraq and the Shi’a-led Iran after the 1979 Khomeini revolution engendered acrimony and hostility between the Sunni and Shi’a communities of the region for the first time in modern history.

And finally, the conflict has been further exacerbated in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 when the Western powers and their regional client states once again took advantage of the opportunity and nurtured militants against the Arab nationalist Gaddafi government in Libya and the Baathist-led Assad administration in Syria.

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

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Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “Naya Pakistan” (“New Pakistan”) just passed legislation loosening the country’s previously difficult visa procedure to allow for most of the world’s nationalities to either receive one on arrival or electronically, which will not only boost tourism and facilitate business dealings but impressively show the international community that Azad Kashmir is truly free and not “Pakistan-occupied” like India falsely alleges.

Pakistan just unprecedentedly passed legislation loosening its previously difficult visa procedure to allow for most of the world’s nationalities to either receive one on arrival or electronically as part of Prime Minister Imran Khan’s “Naya Pakistan” (“New Pakistan”) vision of revolutionizing his country’s domestic and foreign affairs, with it being expected that this will immensely boost its tourism industry and facilitate the clinching of international business deals along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC).

The future influx of tourists to Pakistan’s world-renowned mountains and beaches will help to dispel the country’s negative reputation that was manipulatively cultivated by the US and India as part of their years-long infowar on it, powerfully proving that Pakistan has been deliberately misportrayed this entire time and prompting people to question what else the Western Mainstream Media is lying about when it comes to the South Asian state.

As for the business angle of this decision, Pakistan can greatly speed up the time that it takes for it to actualize its geopolitical destiny as the “Zipper of Eurasia” in utilizing CPEC as a platform for supercontinental integration, which can ultimately culminate in it becoming the “Convergence of Civilizations” by bringing together the diverse interests of China, Central Asia, Russia, Turkey, Iran, the Arabs, and Africa and counteracting the US’ “Clash of Civilizations” stratagem.

The most immediate impact of PM Khan’s move, however, is that people will be able to see that Azad Kashmir (“Free Kashmir”) is truly free and not “Pakistan-occupied” like India falsely alleges, which can importantly help the country contradict one of the most malicious myths spread about it since independence because the rest of the world will be able to see with their own eyes that the population there doesn’t behave like their counterparts across the Line of Control.

The part of Kashmir under India’s control can legitimately be described as Indian-occupied because of how much the population is fiercely resisting New Delhi’s “authority” in response to the rampant abuses that the state regularly carries out against them, which it actually goes to great lengths to suppress by shutting down the internet and assassinating activists in cold blood, to say nothing of barring most foreigners (and especially journalists) from the region for “security purposes”.

Altogether, the grand strategic impact of “Naya Pakistan’s” visa liberalization law is that the country is confidently opening up to the outside world in order to bring regular folks, businesspeople, and ultimately even entire civilizations together on its territory, which will showcase its recent socio-economic and security successes while simultaneously having a powerful effect in reshaping international perceptions, especially when it comes to Kashmir because of how much Pakistan’s transparency contrasts with India’s secrecy.

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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.

Building the Information Control Highway

January 27th, 2019 by Michael S. Rozeff

With the rise of internet social media, patronized by multi-millions of receptive people and supplied by a small number of companies that have achieved dominance, a path way to information control was cleared.

To complete the highway, all that was required was its extension to and from Washington elites, neocon types, intelligence agencies and establishment types. These connections are being built now. They picked up speed in the last two years with the resistance to Trump and his agenda.

Microsoft now uses NewsGuard to rate news sites via an optional browser add-on; but NewsGuard’s ratings are biased, it being dominated by establishment types. Its blacklisting of the Drudge Report is an example. This is only one step in an ongoing process in which big-tech social media eliminate accounts and news sources. Facebook allied with the Atlantic Council, which houses the Digital Forensic Research Lab. Its aim is to “analyze open-source material to provide proof against false narratives”.

When the censors decide what’s false, they necessarily have beliefs about what is true. What if they are wrong? What if they are biased? What if the truth is more complex than they think it is? What if new facts come to light that tarnish or render obsolete their views? What if the censors act on behalf of interests in or close to government who want to maintain secrecy for their own purposes? What if the censors stand against Wikileaks, as NewsGuard does? What if truth-tellers sometimes get it wrong? Will they be entirely censored and cut off from certain internet avenues as is now being done?

Who will provide protection against the information protectors? Who will provide protection against false narratives that the censors believe in, which they use as benchmarks and claim are true?

There is no substitute for people thinking for themselves, and that requires handling conflicting and incomplete information. The notion of news-raters dividing the news sources into trusted and untrusted sites simply alters the problem. The problem doesn’t go away. People then have to decide which news-raters are trustworthy or not. Meanwhile, people who do not actively think about political and other issues are putty in the hands of those who control the information flows and shape the narratives.

The information control highway is in its infancy. It can go to unimaginable lengths to control speech and the distribution of speech, especially the latter. Sufficient control over distribution makes control of actual content less important to the information-controllers.

This disturbing development is going to be countered by the rise of the independents. Independent news sources and interpreters are going to find a market and build out counter-networks. The forces of censorship are going to lose this war.

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Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan’s security agencies which nurtured the Afghan so-called “mujahideen” (freedom fighters) on the behest of Washington.

Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile ‘freedom fighters’ to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.

Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then American envoy to Kabul, Adolph “Spike” Dubs, was assassinated on 14 Feb 1979, the same day that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.

According to recently declassified documents [1] of the White House, CIA and State Department as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the Soviets invaded in 1979. The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year.

That the CIA was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been proven by the State Department’s declassified documents and admitted by The Washington Post, which is owned by Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon. The Washington Post has a history of working in close collaboration with the CIA as Bezos won a $600 million contract [2] in 2013 to host the CIA’s database on the Amazon’s web-hosting service.

Fact of the matter, however, is that the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan’s security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years earlier.

During the late 1970s, Pakistan’s then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud’s government, who had toppled his first cousin King Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of Afghanistan.

Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan’s northwestern Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan’s security establishment was wary of his irredentist claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.

Pakistan’s support to the Islamists with the Saudi petro-dollars and Washington’s blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Soviet Central Asian States.

The former Soviet Union was wary that its 40 million Muslims were susceptible to radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.

Even the American President Donald Trump recently admitted [3]:

“The reason Russia invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia; they were right to be there.”

Incidentally, Trump also implied the reason why Soviet Union collapsed was due to the economic burden of the Soviet-Afghan War, as he was making a point about the withdrawal of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan.

Notwithstanding, in the Soviet-Afghan War between the global capitalist and global communist blocs, Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf’s petro-monarchies took the side of the global capitalist bloc because the former Soviet Union and Central Asian states produce more energy and consume less. Thus, the Soviet-led bloc was a net exporter of energy whereas the Western capitalist bloc was a net importer.

It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Western capitalist bloc. Now, the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East’s energy, but it’s a recent development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized Western nations suited the economic interests of the Gulf countries.

Why did Pakistan choose to join this unholy alliance against the global Left? In order to understand this, we need to take a cursory look at the history of Pakistan. During the British colonial rule before the independence of the subcontinent in 1947, Pakistan’s leadership used to have a patron-client relationship with the British imperialists.

The Indian leadership also used to have that relationship with the British imperialists, but in the case of Pakistan, there was an additional aggravating factor involved: the numerical weakness of the Indian Muslims and their consequent dependence on the British imperialists against the permanent numerical majority of the Hindus.

It’s not that the Hindu leaders were not afflicted with the colonial mentality, but in the case of Pakistani leaders, the myth of invincibility and infallibility of the West was cherished even more. That’s why Pakistan’s first Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan declined the request of a state visit from the former Soviet Union and went on a state visit to Washington instead.

It wasn’t just the colonial mentality of Pakistan’s leaders but certain geopolitical considerations also played into their thinking for forming a strategic alliance with the Western bloc. Immediately after the independence, India annexed the Muslim-majority state of Kashmir in violation of the agreed-upon Partition Principle that allocated the Muslim-majority provinces of the British India to Pakistan and the Hindu-majority regions to India.

Then in the 1950s, India took advantage of the Kashmiri territory, as the riverheads of Pakistani rivers are located in Kashmir, and diverted the waters of Pakistani rivers to irrigate India’s western provinces. The whole of Bahawalpur region in southern Punjab turned barren overnight and the agricultural economy of the nascent state of Pakistan suffered a tremendous blow.

With the involvement of the World Bank and the Tennessee Valley Authority of the US, Pakistan and India signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960, which allocated exclusive rights for the use of three eastern rivers to India, and some rights such as the right to build hydroelectric projects over the western Pakistani rivers, Jhelum and Chenab, as well.

All these incidents and Pakistan’s relative weakness vis-à-vis India made it even more dependent on the Western military and developmental aid. That’s why it joined the Washington-led, anti-communist SEATO and CENTO alliances in the region during the 1950s.

So much so that when an American U-2 spy plane was shot down in May 1960 by the Soviet Air Defense Forces while performing photographic aerial reconnaissance deep into Soviet territory, Pakistan’s then-President Ayub Khan openly acknowledged that the spy plane had flown from the American airbase in Pakistan’s northwestern metropolis, Peshawar.

When Pakistan had forged such a close alliance with Washington, it became impossible for it to stay neutral when the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Regarding the motives of the belligerents involved, the Americans wanted to take revenge for their defeat at the hands of communists in Vietnam, the Gulf countries had forged close economic ties with the Western bloc and Pakistan was dependent on the Western military aid, hence it didn’t have a choice but to toe Washington’s policy in Afghanistan.

In the end, the Soviet-Afghan War proved to be a “bear trap” and the former Soviet Union was eventually defeated and was subsequently dissolved in December 1991. It did not collapse because of the Afghan Jihad but that was an important factor contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Regardless, more than twenty years before the declassification of the State Department documents as mentioned in the aforementioned Washington Post report, in the 1998 interview [4] to the alternative news outlet The Counter Punch Magazine, former National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.

Osama bin Laden and Brzezinki, 1979?

Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview: The interviewer puts the question:

“And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?”

Brzezinski replies:

“What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?”

Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It’s worth noting, however, that the aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.

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Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.

Notes

[1] CIA was aiding Afghan rebels before the Soviets invaded in 1979:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/07/history-trump-cia-was-arming-afghan-rebels-before-soviets-invaded/

[2] Jeff Bezos Is Doing Huge Business with the CIA:

http://www.alternet.org/media/owner-washington-post-doing-business-cia-while-keeping-his-readers-dark

[3] Trump’s history lesson on the Soviet Union:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/02/trumps-bizarre-history-lesson-soviet-union-russia-afghanistan/

[4] Brzezinski Interview: How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen:

https://www.counterpunch.org/1998/01/15/how-jimmy-carter-and-i-started-the-mujahideen/

Featured image: President Reagan and Mujahideen leaders from Afghanistan, 1980s

Israel has attacked Syria many times during the last seven years of war imposed on Syria. It has run red-lights and broken taboos in order to provoke the “Axis of the Resistance” inside Syria, but has refrained from infuriating Hezbollah in Lebanon. Nevertheless, the most recent Israeli attack has pushed Syria and its allies beyond tolerable limits. Thus, President Assad prepared himself for a battle against Israel between the wars, knowing that such a battle could last weeks. But the president of Syria won’t be alone: Assad and Hezbollah’s Secretary general Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah will both be running any future battle against any Israeli aggression when the decision to engage will be taken.

Most recently Israel bombed the Syrian army and destroyed the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) offices and bases in Syria without inflicting any human casualties. At the same time, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put himself on the level of IRGC-Quds brigade General Qassem Soleimani, by challenging him on social media.  In fact, Netanyahu fell right into the trap the Iranian general set for President Donald Trump.

Soleimani asked President Hassan Rouhani “to avoid answering this thug (Trump) who is beneath your level” and to allow him (Soleimani) to respond to Trump’s provocations of Iran. Thus Soleimani, a mere officer in the Iranian security forces, engages leaders of countries and even an arrogant Prime Minister who commands what he considers the best army in the Middle East and among the strongest in the world. But Soleimani’s style is different from Netanyahu’s. He doesn’t have a twitter account; he spends his time in the battlefield and in meetings with group leaders, officials, and sometime presidents and prime ministers. Soleimani is patient but he can be expected to respond to provocations sooner or later.

Well-informed sources say that Iran is unwilling to abide the repetitive Israeli aggressions against Syria and IRGC positions. The Axis of Resistance is aware that Netanyahu is trying to pull it into a confrontation while US forces are deployed in Northeast Syria and before the Warsaw meeting organised by Trump against Iran. It is a difficult moment for Iran to react, but that doesn’t mean its allies can’t respond.

As noted in a previous article about the decision of the central government in Damascus to establish a new rule of engagement against continuous Israeli attacks, Syria was planning retaliation against any future Israeli attacks. This Syrian decision came just before Trump’s announcement of his intention to withdraw from Syria. This statement gave pause to Syria and its allies, as they reflected upon the best way to respond.

Tel Aviv is aware of the limitation of Iran in this critical moment and understands that the Resistance Axis would rather see a US withdrawal than to retaliate against Israel continuous attacks. Nevertheless, the most recent Israeli attack has pushed Syria and its allies beyond tolerable limits. Netanyahu announced his responsibility for the multiple bombardments of Syria–an unprecedented break with Israel’s protocol of silence. He used the army as an advertising tool for his forthcoming election.

The Israeli Prime Minister perhaps doesn’t realize that Soleimani won’t reply to his provocation in Syria because Iranian targets were not bombed in Iran. Damascus, a close and strategic Syrian ally, responded to the attack by launching missiles against Israel which has driven it out of control bombarding tens of targets to avoid a larger escalation. Nevertheless, the Syrian Ambassador to the UN Bashar al-Jaafari warned that Tel Aviv airport could be bombed if Israel repeats its aggression on Syria. What al-Jaafari didn’t reveal is the fact that President Assad prepared himself for a battle against Israel between the wars, knowing that such a battle could last weeks.

Indeed, a long battle between Syria and Israel would put an end to Netanyahu’s chances to be re-elected. No Israeli Prime Minister has been elected who has exposed his country to danger and triggered the death of citizens.

But how can Syria retaliate if, as Israel claims, all Syrian and Iranian warehouses have been bombarded and destroyed with their thousands of missiles? How can Hezbollah support Syria if, as Israel claims, it has crippled all convoys transiting from Syria to Lebanon? How is it possible to re-supply Lebanon if the US is occupying the al-Tanf crossing between Syria and Iraq, allegedly to stop the flow of weapons from Tehran to Beirut?

In 2006, Israel paid the price when it believed that it had undermined Hezbollah’s arsenal and discovered, through the massacre of the Merkava at Wadi al-Hujeir and the bombing of the Saar-5 vessel, that its intelligence about Hezbollah missiles and Syrian support was poor and that the US and Israeli intelligence failed. Tel Aviv wrongly believed it could easily fulfil the US dream of establishing a “new Middle East” announced by its Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. No one in Israel expected Hezbollah to stand with its Kornet anti-tank guided missiles and its Chinese anti-ship missiles.

Today, the Resistance Axis, i.e. Syria and Hezbollah in the Levant, have not only greater experience of warfare, but they also have more modern anti-ship missiles (Yakhont) and other lethal surprises like precision missiles capable of hitting any target anywhere in Israel.

Moreover, Hezbollah has several bases for its strategic missiles on the Lebanese-Syrian borders. The group will not hesitate to generously use them against Israel if Israel attacks its ally Syria. But Hezbollah is not expected to limit its support to weaponry. Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah is not only a master orator and a skilled psychologist of warfare, but also a meticulous military planner and commander. He was present in the military operational room in every single battle against Israel and participated in every single move his men took against Israel in the 2006 war and since. Logistic-technical-military planning and command and control between Hezbollah and Syria is today united. Nasrallah knows how to fight Israel, how much fire power to use and when. Assad and Nasrallah will both be running any future battle against any Israeli aggression when the decision to engage will be taken.

Russia is aware of determination of the Resistance Axis to respond and the danger this could pose for everyone in the Levant.  The Russians tipped the IRGC to evacuate their command and control bases less than an hour before they were attacked by Israel. Russian military command asked the IRGC about their new command and control bases and were told that “their bases, from today onward, will be spread over the entire Syrian geography alongside the Syrian army, in every single barracks”.

This answer pushed Russia to ask Israel, more directly and overtly, to stop bombing Syria. Russia would hate to find itself in the middle of an exchange of missiles between Syria and Israel flying above its head in the Levant.

Netanyahu’s arrogance pushed  him to abandon Israel’s policy of refusing to admit responsibility for its aggression, confusing the military command. The Prime Minister transmitted his electoral gossip inside the military establishment; he prefers to become a social media star rather than to follow the discreet example of his predecessors.

If Netanyahu wants to be re-elected, he needs to avoid a battle with Syria whose outcome he cannot control; his best strategy would be to keep silent until the polls.

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Did Trump blink? Did undemocratic Dems win the 35-day standoff?

On Friday, DLT announced a deal to reopen government for three weeks without having gotten congressional border wall funding.

He vowed to build a “wall or steel barrier (in) predetermined high-risk locations” with or without congressional funding, saying if Dems don’t approve it by February 15, he’ll use executive power to address a (non-emergency) emergency.

The Trump/Dem battle over whether to build or not to build a border wall has nothing to do with national security, nothing to do with stopping criminal gangs from entering the country, a DLT perpetuated myth, nothing to do with stopping the flow of illicit drugs into the country.

They pore in through all its borders, by land, sea, and air – supported by the CIA and Wall Street, profiting hugely from what’s gone on for decades, what politicians and major media never explain.

Late Friday, Trump signed congressional legislation to reopen government, effective immediately, saying if Dems don’t approve border wall funding by mid-February, “the government will either shut down” again or he’ll act on his own to authorize funding by executive power.

Battle lines remain drawn. Things came to a head for Trump over polls showing popular sentiment against him, his approval rating dropping below 40%, along with major US airport delays because many unpaid personnel called in sick and aren’t working, an untenable situation for travelers.

A bipartisan conference committee will reportedly be established to debate the politicized issue – Trump demanding border wall funding, Dems opposing him for political advantage.

A late Friday White House statement said DLT “signed into law: HJ Res. 28, the ‘Further Additional Continuing Appropriations Act, 2019,’ which includes a short-term continuing resolution that provides fiscal year 2019 appropriations through February 15, 2019, for continuing projects and activities of the Federal Government included in the remaining seven appropriations bills.”

“Also included in the enrolled bill are provisions regarding retroactive pay and reimbursement, and extensions of certain authorities.”

The White House is preparing a draft proclamation, declaring an invented national emergency along the southern border with Mexico, earmarking $7 billion in potential funds from existing programs, draft language saying:

“The massive amount of aliens who unlawfully enter the United States each day is a direct threat to the safety and security of our nation and constitutes a national emergency” – even though it’s invented, not real, adding:

“Now, therefore, I, Donald J. Trump, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the National Emergencies Act (50 USC 1601, et seq.), hereby declare that a national emergency exists at the southern border of the United States.”

An unnamed US official said Trump may authorize use of $681 million from Treasury forfeiture funds, $3.6 billion for military construction, $3 billion for Pentagon civil works, and $200 million of Department of Homeland Security funds for border wall construction.

Dems will surely challenge him for political advantage if he moves this way – along with its continuing agenda to delegitimize, undermine, and weaken him overall, wanting him removed from office or defeated for reelection in 2020.

With Dems controlling the House, the period ahead will likely be more tumultuous than what’s gone on since Trump’s election – a process he was supposed to lose, not win, the price for defeating media darling Hillary.

For now, partial government shutdown since December 22 is over at least until mid-February. What then remains to unfold – Dems so far ahead in the battle for political advantage, Trump weakened as planned.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Juan Guaido: Designated US Puppet in Venezuela

January 27th, 2019 by Stephen Lendman

Nicolas Marduro is Venezuela’s legitimate democratically elected and reelected president.

The country’s process is scrupulously open, free, and fair, the world’s best, a model for other nations. Polar opposite to America’s fantasy democracy, the best money can buy.

Coup d’etats reflect longstanding US policy since the 19th century, numerous Latin American countries (among many others) targeted successfully and unsuccessfully.

They include Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, British Guiana, Chile, Costa Rica, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Ecuador, Guatemala, Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Puerto Rico, Suriname, along with Venezuela earlier and in progress.

The late William Blum explained why there will never be a coup in Washington – because there’s no US embassy there, infested with CIA operatives.

It’s not a pretty picture, “enough to give imperialism a bad name,” Blum stressed. The US interferes in the internal affairs of virtually all other countries, including their elections, independent ones like Venezuela targeted for regime change – by naked aggression, color revolutions, or old-fashioned coups.

US attempts to topple sitting governments are planned well in advance, on the shelf, updated as needed, ready to be implemented when ordered.

Juan Guaido is Washington’s latest designated puppet to serve its interests in Venezuela, a little known National Assembly head outside of the country, catapulted from obscurity to international prominence.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

“(t)he night before (he illegitimately) declared himself interim president of Venezuela, (he) received a phone call from Vice President Mike Pence” – pledging to back his illegal power grab.

“That late-night call set in motion a plan that had been developed in secret” earlier by Trump regime hardliners, “culminat(ing) in Guaido’s” unconstitutional self-declaration as Venezuela’s (US designed illegitimate) interim president.

Pence reportedly told Guaido if the National Assembly invoked Article 233 of Venezuela’s Constitution (to usurp interim power), the Trump regime would back him. The article states the following:

“The President of the Republic shall become permanently unavailable to serve by reason of any of the following events: death; resignation; removal from office by decision of the Supreme Tribunal of Justice; permanent physical or mental disability certified by a medical board designated by the Supreme Tribunal of Justice with the approval of the National Assembly; abandonment of his position, duly declared by the National Assembly; and recall by popular vote.”

“When an elected President becomes permanently unavailable to serve prior to his inauguration, a new election by universal suffrage and direct ballot shall be held within 30 consecutive days. Pending election and inauguration of the new President, the President of the National Assembly shall take charge of the Presidency of the Republic.”

Nothing stated above applies to Maduro – democratically elected and reelected by a process independent monitors called open, free, and fair – his legitimacy affirmed judicially, an attempt by a foreign power to replace him a flagrant breach of international law.

Trump straightaway recognized Guaido, planned and orchestrated in advance of his announcement, most Latin and Central American countries, Canada, Britain, France, Germany, and other nations going along with the attempted coup.

Russia, China, and other states expressed opposition the attempted coup. Putin phoned Maduro, offering support, a Kremlin statement saying:

“The President of Russia expressed support for the legitimate Venezuelan authorities amid the worsening of the internal political crisis provoked from outside the country.”

“He emphasized that destructive external interference is a gross violation of the fundamental norms of international law.”

“He spoke in favor of searching for solutions within the constitutional framework and overcoming differences in Venezuelan society through peaceful dialogue.”

The statement failed to name the US or condemn the Trump regime’s coup d’etat attempt against a sovereign government and its leadership.

Nothing was said about how Putin intends supporting Maduro’s legitimacy. Rhetorically alone is meaningless when toughness against imperial lawlessness is needed – in Venezuela, Syria and elsewhere.

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev incorrectly called an old-fashioned US coup d’etat attempt in Venezuela a “quasi” one. There’s nothing remotely “quasi” about it.

So far it’s an attempt short of succeeding. Washington has lots of ways to push its agenda with toughness, military force an option, implemented many times before.

On Friday, Maduro showed weakness, not strength, saying he’s willing to meet with Guaido to try resolving differences through dialogue.

“If I have to go to talk with him I am willing because I believe in the truth. I am a democrat. I am a man of my word. Hopefully sooner rather than later the opposition will get out of the way of extremism and open a sincere dialogue,” he said.

Note: If a US official or other citizen colluded with a foreign power, declaring himself or herself interim US president, they’d likely be arrested and charged with sedition or treason.

An individual charged and convicted of seditious conspiracy to topple a sitting US president or government would face up to 20 years imprisonment.

The Constitution’s Article III, Section 3 calls treason “giving aid and comfort” to the nation’s enemies, a crime more serious than sedition. The punishment for treason in America is life imprisonment, parole possible only after incarceration for 40 years.

What’s going on in Venezuela was and remains orchestrated and controlled by Washington, Guaido following orders, Trump regime hardliners calling the shots.

Convicted neocon Iran/Contra co-conspirator, death squad supporter, Elliot Abrams was appointed DLT’s point man for regime change in Venezuela. Pompeo turned truth on its head, saying he’ll “help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy and prosperity to their country.”

Abrams never met a tinpot despot, allied with US interests, he didn’t fully embrace and support. Convicted of lying to Congress, GHW Bush shamefully pardoned him.

He was a founding Project for a New American Century (PNAC) member – its “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” a scheme promoting US global hegemony by endless wars and other means.

Abrams was involved in Bush/Cheney’s aborted April 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela, and the regime’s 2003 war on Iraq – based on Big Lies like all wars of aggression.

He expressed eagerness “to get to work on” transforming Venezuela into another US vassal state. Controlling the country’s oil reserves, the world’s largest, is a key objective behind what’s going on – so Big Oil can exploit them.

On Friday, Trump’s Treasury Department said it won’t freeze whatever Venezuelan assets the US controls.

Instead, it’ll assure that  “commercial transactions by the Venezuelan government, including those involving its state-owned enterprises and international reserves, are consistent” with Washington’s recognition of Guaido as (illegitimate) interim (puppet) president.

At stake going forward is preserving and protecting the hemisphere’s most vibrant social democracy – governance of, by, and for all Venezuelans equitably, a system Republicans and Dems abhor at home and abroad.

Venezuela’s military supports Maduro’s legitimacy as president, opposing Trump coup attempt.

Keeping its support is key, the best chance of defeating the latest US regime change attempt – preventing Washington from gaining another imperial trophy.

A Final Comment

On Friday, Reuters headlined “Exclusive: Kremlin-linked contractors help guard Venezuela’s Maduro – (unnamed) sources,” saying:

“Private military contractors who do secret missions for Russia flew into Venezuela in the past few days to beef up security for President Nicolas Maduro in the face of US-backed opposition protests, according to two (unnamed) people close to them” – and a “third (unnamed) source,” saying:

“The contractors are associated with the so-called Wagner group whose members (are) mostly ex-service personnel…”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov debunked the claim, saying “(w)e have no such information.”

Russia’s envoy to Venezuela Vladimir Zaemsky slammed the report, saying

“I don’t know about the presence of any Russian private military companies in Venezuela. This is another hoax.”

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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.

Pompeo named Elliott Abrams as special envoy for Venezuela Friday. The Guardian reminds us of Abrams’ awful career serving in previous Republican administrations:

Abrams is widely remembered in Central America, but particularly from his time in the Reagan administration, when he tried to whitewash a massacre of a thousand men, women and children by US-funded death squads in El Salvador, when he was assistant secretary of state for human rights.
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He shrugged off the reports as communist propaganda, and insisted: “The administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.”

Abrams also helped organise the covert financing of Contra rebels in Nicaragua behind the back of Congress, which had cut off funding. He then lied to Congress about his role, twice. He pleaded guilty to both counts in 1991 but was pardoned by George HW Bush.

More than a decade later, working as special Middle East adviser to former president George W Bush, Abrams was an enthusiastic advocate of the Iraq invasion. He was in the White House at the time of the abortive coup in 2002 against Hugo Chavez. The Observer reported that Abrams gave the green light to the putsch, another an inspector general enquiry found no “wrongdoing” by US officials.

That was not enough to erase his reputation as the assistant secretary of dirty wars. The message sent by his return to the front rank of US diplomacy will not missed in Caracas.

Putting Abrams in charge of any aspect of U.S. foreign policy is a horrible mistake. Putting someone with such a well-known, appalling record in charge of a regime change effort in Latin America confirms critics’ worst suspicions about this intervention in another country’s internal political dispute. It is a measure of how completely hard-liners now dominate Trump administration foreign policy that a vocal Trump critic can be brought on to lead a high-profile foreign policy initiative. Venezuela policy has been designed by Rubio and Pompeo, both of whom are notoriously hawkish, and it is going to be carried out by a neoconservative with one of the bloodiest and ugliest foreign policy records of anyone that has served in government over the last forty years. All the while, Bolton couldn’t be happier with what has been happening. Trump is letting his foreign policy be conducted by some of the very worst people in the Republican Party, and it is just a matter of time before it blows up in his face at great cost to the U.S.

The message that the Abrams appointment sends is the worst imaginable that the U.S. could send right now. Here is an official with a long record of supporting violent abuses, civil wars, and coups in Latin American countries and a backer of forcible regime change in other parts of the world, and he is being put in charge of an effort to “restore democracy” to Venezuela. That should be setting off every alarm bell there is. Pompeo could scarcely have chosen a person with a worse, more sullied reputation in the region, and by putting him charge of Venezuela policy he has all but announced that our policy is the cynical and destructive one that its opponents have feared it will be.

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The Vultures of Caracas

January 27th, 2019 by Craig Murray

We are frequently told that people in Venezuela have no food, clothing or toilet paper, and that popular discontent with the left wing government is driven by real hunger. There are elements of truth in this story, though the causes of economic dislocation are far more complex than the media would have us believe.

But I ask you to look at this photo of supporters of CIA poster-boy, the West’s puppet unelected “President” Juan Guaido, taken at a Guaido rally in Caracas two days ago and published yesterday in security services house journal The Guardian. Please take a really close look at the photo. Blow it up as big as you can. Scan individual people in the crowd, one by one.

Source: Craig Murray

These are not the poor and most certainly not the starving. As it chances I have a great deal of life experience working amongst seriously deprived, hungry and despairing people. I know the gaunt face of want and the desperate glance of need. Look at these Guaido supporters, one by one by one. This designer spectacled, well-coiffed, elegantly dressed, sleekly jowled group does not know hunger. This group does not know want. This is a proper right wing gathering, a gathering of the nicely off section of society. This is a group of those who have corruptly been siphoning Venezuela’s great wealth for decades and who want to make sure the gravy train flows properly in their direction again. It is, in short, a group of exactly the kind of people you would expect to support a CIA coup.

Those manicured hands raised in the air will never throw rocks, or get involved in violence unless against a peasant strapped to a chair for them. It is not this crowd which will suffer as public disorder is manipulated and directed by the CIA. These wealthy ones are immune, just as Davos serves as nothing but an annual reminder of how very poorly God aims avalanches.

There is real suffering in Venezuela. The CIA is working hard to stoke violence, and the genuine poor will soon start to die, both in those egged on to riot and in the security services. But do not get taken in by the complete nonsense that this is a popular, democratic revolution. It is not. It is yet another barefaced CIA regime change coup.

UPDATE Such wisdom as this blog finds is often crowd-source, and with thanks to a commenter below here is some useful information from Jill Stein.

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How Globalisation Killed Our Mother

January 27th, 2019 by Matthew Caruana Galizia

The worldwide network that facilitates transnational organised crime and corruption is, tragically, one of globalisation’s most enduring success stories. It is also, therefore, one of its deadliest flaws. While the produce and proceeds of crime flow seamlessly across borders, justice and law enforcement remain largely trapped within national boundaries, and are being steadily undermined and captured. Meanwhile, journalists attempting to document this are intimidated, locked up and murdered.

As the forces of globalised crime and corruption continue to chisel away at our freedom and security, the murdered journalists left in their wake have taught us powerful lessons about how to respond. These lessons concern not only journalism, but also law enforcement and the kind of society we want to live in.

One of these journalists was our mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia. She was assassinated in Malta on October 16, 2017, when a bomb placed under the driver’s seat of her car exploded as she rushed to the bank to unblock her account, which had been frozen by the country’s economy minister. It was the last in a string of attacks she endured for her reporting, but not the last violation Malta would suffer for what she had revealed.

A trained archaeologist, our mother uncovered a web of corruption linking major multinational deals, passport sales and a sophisticated global money-laundering operation, and tugged on the threads until they led her to the heart of Malta’s government.

The result was not what she expected. Instead of resignations came reprisals. Pockets of institutional independence in Malta that had survived four years of populism were quashed. And our mother, a beacon of hope and courage for hundreds of thousands, including judges and law-enforcement officials, was executed in broad daylight.

The people she exposed remain in public office, while those who campaign for justice for her murder are assaulted in public. By exposing the venality of the powerful in a place where institutions are little more than facades, our mother’s work triggered a backlash that killed her, and is currently throttling the country’s public life.

Little wonder, then, that in 2018 Malta fell the furthest in press-freedom rankings in Europe, a region that itself experienced the fastest decline globally. The country also slipped in democracy rankings and rule of law indicators, and leads the field in hate speech.

The impact of globalised crime and corruption is not limited to Malta and Europe, of course. In response, investigative journalists have banded together in global networks such as the Daphne Project. And the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers show just how effective investigative journalism can be in forcing greater transparency, undermining criminal networks and driving up the cost of political corruption for its perpetrators.

But while journalists increasingly cooperate across borders, national law-enforcement authorities are still playing catch-up in combating crime and corruption. As a result, the impact of investigative journalism varies widely by country and over time. In countries where law-enforcement authorities are independent from the central government and private interests, and where the public can channel grievances effectively through responsive political institutions, investigative reporting can have an immediate impact on preventing corruption and state capture.

But in countries lacking the will or capacity to root out organised crime and corruption, and with a public too polarised to unite against its enemies, compelling transparency and accountability can have perverse results. In such places, journalists continue to be targeted, with dangerous consequences both for local communities and the global economy.

When journalists come under attack, it usually means that the societies within which they operate are so corrupt that their principal law-enforcement institutions and democratic checks have already been fundamentally compromised. This makes investigative reporters the last people left standing between the rule of law and those who seek to violate it, and it makes their work both more dangerous and less effective.

The most recent phase of globalisation gave us Moneyland, a vast playground for organised criminals and kleptocrats that hoovered up weaker jurisdictions like Malta into the service of dark money. The right response to this is not to retreat behind national borders, but to create a new global entity designed to address the transnational nature of organised crime and corruption. For a start, law-enforcement bodies could learn from journalism and work more urgently to develop the trusted-network approach that organised crime has perfected.

As the world seemingly enters a new phase of globalisation, we must not allow new opportunities to be extended to global crime and corruption. Otherwise, our collective future will belong to an alliance of dark money, disinformation and the sort of division that robbed our country of its most prominent journalist.

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Matthew Caruana Galizia is a journalist and software engineer who has worked on investigations into international corruption for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.

Andrew Caruana Galizia is a global leadership fellow and strategic intelligence lead at the World Economic Forum.

Paul Caruana Galizia is the finance editor at Tortoise and a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics. 

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The Criminalization of Filipino Children

January 27th, 2019 by Prof. Phoebe Zoe Maria Sanchez

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Everybody Else’s Business: Coup Fever in Venezuela

January 27th, 2019 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

This could have been seen as audacious.  Instead, it had the smell of a not so well concealed sponsorship, the backing of a meaty foreign hand.  Venezuelan opposition leader and President of the National Assembly Juan Guaidó decided to take a quick step in the direction of the presidency.  His own counterfeit theory is simple: he is not being a usurper, so much as a panacea for the usurpation by the current president, Nicolás Maduro

“I swear to assume all the powers of the presidency to secure and end to the usurpation.”   

Such language is not that of a principled revolutionary figure so much as a hired hand intent on returning the country to conservative tedium.  The power doing that hiring has had friendly press outlets for Guaidó to express his opinions. On January 15, the president of the National Assembly was permitted space in The Washington Post to claim that his country was witnessing something without precedent. (Be wary of the message claiming the exceptional.)  “We have a government that has dismantled the state and kidnapped all institutions and manipulate them at will.” 

But even Guaidó had to explain, despite deeming Maduro an unrecognised figure, that Venezuela was not your vanilla, crackpot dictatorship wedded to the use of police powers.

“The regime may have ties to drug trafficking and guerrilla groups, but we also have a functioning, democratically elected parliament, the National Assembly.” 

Pity, then, that Guaidó needs so much outside help to make his call.

Maduro, understandably, fumed at the challenge. 

“We’ve had enough interventionism, here we have dignity damn it.”

But dignity is a hard matter to retain in broader geopolitical dramas.  Shame, compromise, and a general muddying of credibility tend to follow in such foreign incursions. 

The official Venezuelan president cannot be said to have been a friend of state institutions.  He is holding power under a form of sufferance.  His interpretation of the democratic mandate can be said to be sketchy at best, a feature not uncommon in the history of the Americas.  Authoritarianism breeds revolt, which breeds authoritarianism, a default revenge mechanism.  But Maduro has good reasons to sneer at his opponent and the warm embrace by US officials of the movement seeking to remove the Chávista. The memory of 2002 and the failure on the part of Washington to remove Hugo Chávez remains strong and, in some ways poisonous; the failed coup resulted in attempts on the part of Chávez to neutralise the power of his opponents, be they in the Supreme Court or the corporate media.  Mass round-ups and executions were resisted, but authoritarian counter measures were used.  Maduro has merely been one of Chávez’s keener students in that regard.

To this dysfunctional mess can be added the pervasive, consistent and persistent molestation of US foreign policy.  Gardens in Latin America have been trampled upon by US thuggery since the Republic was founded, and the tendency is instinctive and genetic.  That thuggery also shares a neurotic relationship with democracy, the product Washington finds hard to export while scuttling the democratic projects of others.  Hustlers and gamblers are not, by their dispositions, democratic: they believe in the doomed nature of change, and, to that end, identify the steady horse they would wish to back in any political race.  If that horse is sympathetic to capital interests, despite kicking in the teeth of liberal democracy, all the better.

While apoplectic hysteria governs the US security heavies from the Hill to the public talk circuit about Russian electoral interference, dispensation will always be given to meddling in the affairs of others. Trump, for one, has acknowledged Guaidó’s declaration as legitimising an interim presidency, one that will arm an opponent of Maduro and ensure a transition of loyalty to the United States.

“The people of Venezuela have courageously spoken out against Maduro and his regime and demanded freedom and the rule of law.”  (Richly inconsistent, is The Donald, on matters regarding freedom and the law.)

The international reaction has been illustrative of the broader issues at stake, making it far more than a matter of pure bullying from Washington.  Other countries have decided to make Venezuela their business, some by suggesting that it should not be the business of others.  Mexico remains an observer of the status quo.  China and Russia have taken the view that non-interference should be the policy while Turkey insists that Maduro dig in.  Cuba and Bolivia had defended the incumbent, but Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru and Argentina have gone the whole hog in accepting Guaidó.  

Liberal democratic states have shown themselves presumptuous enough to violate the UN Charter in directly stating their willingness to back Maduro’s opponents.  Even timelines have been advanced and demands issued that directly impair the Venezuelan political process. 

“Unless elections are announced within eight days,” suggested France’s unpopular President Emmanuel Macron, “we will be ready to recognise @jguaido as ‘President in charge’ of Venezuela in order to trigger a political process.” 

Given Macron’s own tarnished legitimacy as leader, harangued as a charlatan intent on market and labour reform, this came across as rich posturing. 

The same with Spanish Prime Minster Pedro Sanchez, yet another figure who has decided to make Venezuelan politics a matter of personal interest. 

“The government of Spain gives [President] Nicolas Maduro eight days to call free, transparent and democratic elections.  If that doesn’t happen, Spain will recognise Juan Guaidó as interim president in charge of calling these elections.” 

And to think that Sanchez can hardly be said to have a standing vote in those elections.

As in other countries, the fate of the incumbent government may be decided by the loyalty of the army.  The position, as stated by the country’s defence minister Vladimir Padrino, is that the armed forces do not, at this point, recognise the usurping antics of the opposition leader “imposed by shadowy interests… outside the law”.  Such stances, as history shows, change.

From this whole mess, one conclusion may be drawn.  Venezuela has ceased being a midget to be pushed over by the obese villain and its allies, though it still risks succumbing to the dictating wishes of others.  Maduro has severed relations with Washington, issuing marching orders to US diplomats. But the schismatic spectacle of two governments seeking to pull the strings has become an absurdly disruptive prospect.  Any state that has suggested this as feasible should be wary of what they wish for. 

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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]

This morning Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza presented a brilliant defense of President Maduro’s government, against the attempted coup d’etat engineered by the United States and its proxies in Europe and newly right-wing Latin American countries Peru, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia and Ecuador.  The United States called this “emergency” meeting, seeking the authorization of the United Nations Security Council for intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs, and the infamous regime change similar to that which  spread chaos in Libya after the UN Security Council authorized military intervention to overthrow the government of  Muammar Gadaffi (2011 No Fly Zone)

South Africa, Equatorial Guinea, the Russian Federation, China, Caricom, Bolivia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Cuba were among the countries which opposed what has now become transparent violation of international law, and the usurpation of the independence of the United Nations to conceal geopolitical engineering, otherwise known as capitalist imperialism.

US Secretary of State Michael K. Pompeo denounced Russia and China for opposing a Presidential Statement condemning Maduro’s government, and Pompeo singled out Cuba as the arch-villain propping up the government of Maduro, which could be understood as a backhanded compliment to Cuba’s power.  In fact, Cuba has helped build the medical and educational system of Venezuela from the earliest days of the late Hugo Chavez’s Presidency.

Venezuela’s Arreaza began citing an almost endless list of  U.S. military interventions and invasions of sovereign Latin American countries,  and the reimposition of the Monroe Doctrine, recalling the 1912 US marine invasion of Mexico, the destabilization and overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan President Arbenz, Brazil’s Goulart, Chile’s Allende, and the replacement of these democratically elected governments with fascist dictatorships whose human rights violations and barbarity rivaled some of the worst savagery of nazi Germany.  The Venezuelan Foreign Minister denounced the coercive blockade denying the Venezuelan people  many billions of dollars, in addition to the 1.2 billion dollars frozen in Belgium, and other US European proxies etc. etc., which has led to the widespread hunger and collapse in the living standards of the Venezuelan people, many of whom are migrating to other countries.

When France and Germany called for regime change in Venezuela, citing massive demonstration against Maduro as undercutting his legitimacy, in an almost comic rebuttal to France, Russian Ambassador Nebenzia mentioned the massive demonstrations of the “Yellow Jackets” opposing French President Macron’s policies, and the question was raised regarding the possibility of demand for regime change in France. Ambassador Nebenzia quickly reassured the French delegation that he did not intend to call a Security Council meeting for that purpose, but his point was well taken, and had its effect.

Perhaps most incriminating among the charges of imperial designs against Venezuela’s sovereignty was Arreaza’s statement that last year President Maduro had invited the UN Secretary-General, and European High Commissioner Federica Mogherini to monitor the forthcoming Presidential elections in Venezuela, to determine  their legitimacy or otherwise.  In a breathtaking disclosure, Arreaza revealed that both the UN Secretary-General and the EU’s Federica Mogherini refused to be present to monitor the Venezuelan Presidential elections, stating many months prior to the elections that the election outcome would be a fraud.

This indicated collusion, and a deliberate premeditated intent to discredit the outcome of the Venezuelan elections, whether or not they were in fact legitimate; and this collusion in demonizing Venezuela’s election is an indictment of gross prejudice and corruption within the very organizations charged with impartially evaluating the quality of those elections.

Russian Ambassador Nebenzia stated that Germany’s attempt to invoke “preventive diplomacy,” as an excuse for intervening in Venezuela’s internal affairs was, in fact, a deliberate incitement to civil war in Venezuela, and had nothing to do with prevention.

It is difficult to know what will ensue, but the stark division within the Security Council, and additional fierce opposition to Security Council or unilateral intervention voiced by neighboring countries in the region near Venezuela, indicates that the threat of U.S. military intervention will have difficulty influencing the outcome of events, especially since Russia has warned the U.S.:  “Hands Off Venezuela”!!!

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Carla Stea is Global Research’s correspondent at the United Nations Headquarters, New York, N.Y.

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Michelle Alexander Is Right About Israel-Palestine

January 27th, 2019 by Prof. Marjorie Cohn

As a progressive Jew, I find that many of my family members and friends are still what we call “PEP” — progressive except Palestine. Amid ever-worsening injustices created by the Israeli system of apartheid and Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian lands, it is past time for this to change.

I am hopeful that the firestorm sparked by Michelle Alexander’s recent New York Times column, “Time to Break the Silence on Palestine,” will finally generate the heat necessary to force more people and groups on the left to overcome the fundamental hypocrisy of the “progressive except Palestine” approach.

Screengrab from The New York Times

I was deeply inspired by Alexander’s column and her decision to speak so honestly about the difficulty of overcoming the fear of backlash over taking a public stand against the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Striking a comparison between the risk taken by prominent critics of Israel and the risk Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took by publicly criticizing the Vietnam War, Alexander observes,

“Those who speak publicly in support of the liberation of the Palestinian people still risk condemnation and backlash.”

Invoking Dr. King’s exhortation that “a time comes when silence is betrayal,” Alexander reflects on “the excuses and rationalizations that have kept me largely silent on one of the great moral challenges of our time: the crisis in Israel-Palestine.”

Alexander’s words resonated with me, a Jew who uncritically supported Israel for many years until I saw the parallels between US policy in Vietnam and Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. My activism and critical writings have followed a trajectory from Vietnam to South Africa to Israel to Iraq to Afghanistan and other countries where the United States continues its imperial military actions.

My Own Path Toward Speaking Out Against the Israeli Occupation of Palestine

I was born in 1948, the year Israel was created out of whole Palestinian cloth. When tasked with finding a destination for Jews displaced by the Holocaust, the United Nations chose Palestine. Thus began a brutal and illegal occupation that continues to this day.

In his book, Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five, Israeli-American Miko Peled describes the 1948 “ethnic cleansing campaign that was sweeping through Palestine like wildfire, destroying everything in its path.” Palestinians call it the “Nakba,” Arabic for “catastrophe.”

My family was not religious but we were proud of our Jewish heritage. My father fought the Nazis in World War II and relatives perished in the Holocaust. My paternal grandmother was an activist against the Tsar during the Russian pogroms. On her way to a Siberian prison, she escaped and, at the age of 18, boarded a ship bound for the United States.

We revered Israel as the homeland of the Jews. At the Passover Seder, we would raise our glasses and intone, “Next year in Jerusalem!” At Sunday School, we gathered coins to plant trees in the Holy Land. It wasn’t until I left home that I learned the truth about Israel and became an outspoken critic of its policies.

In 1967, during my freshman year at Stanford, I came to oppose the war in Vietnam and joined The Resistance, a group of draft resisters and their allies. The following year, I signed up for Students for a Democratic Society, where I learned the war was not an isolated event, but rather part of a long history of US imperialism. But I was still unaware that the war Israel launched in 1967 “completed its occupation of Palestine,” in the words of Peled.

The anti-Vietnam War movement at Stanford challenged my long-held assumptions about US foreign policy. My commitment to ending an unjust war against a people fighting for liberation eventually opened my eyes to the plight of the Palestinian people and Israel’s role in repressing them.

After college, I went to law school and became a peoples’ lawyer. I joined the National Lawyers Guild (NLG), a progressive political-legal organization which I later served as president. The NLG’s guiding motto is, “Human rights are more sacred than property interests.” In the NLG, I met many people who criticized Israel’s illegal policies and US complicity in them.

In 1977, the NLG sent a delegation to Israel and Palestine. The report they issued was the first comprehensive analysis of Israel’s practices published by a non-governmental organization dedicated to the protection of human rights. It documented violations of the 1949 Geneva Conventions by Israel as a belligerent occupant of the West Bank and Gaza.

The allegations in the report disturbed me greatly. They described Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians, including house demolitions, administrative detention and torture. The report documented beatings, burning with cigarettes, forced standing while naked for long periods exposed to heat or cold, dousing with hot or cold water, cutting the body with razor blades, biting by dogs, sensory deprivation, sodomizing with bottles or sticks, inserting wires into the penis, electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body, and suspension from the floor with hands or feet tied to a pulley device. Reading the case studies made me physically ill.

Apartheid – From South Africa to Palestine

Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration the Age of Colorblindness, wrote that some of Israel’s practices are “reminiscent of apartheid in South Africa and Jim Crow segregation in the United States.”

After the Palestinians launched the second intifada, or uprising, NLG members went to the region and published a report in 2001. It documented a system of apartheid in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, as well as the United States’ uncritical support of Israel.

That report describes illegal settlements and bypass roads, restricted movement of Palestinians, discriminatory land policies, differential treatment of Jews and Palestinian non-Jews, and Israeli policing of Palestinian political expression. It also analyzed indiscriminate and excessive use of lethal force against Palestinians, indiscriminate and excessive use of force against Palestinian property, delay and prevention of medical treatment, and collective punishment against the Palestinians.

South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, pointed to similarities between apartheid in his country and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.

“My voice will always be raised in support of Christian-Jewish ties and against the anti-Semitism that all sensible people fear and detest. But this cannot be an excuse for doing nothing and for standing aside as successive Israeli governments colonize the West Bank and advance racist laws,” Tutu wrote in a Tampa Bay Times article. He noted “Israel’s theft of Palestinian land,” and “Jewish-only colonies built on Palestinian land in violation of international law.”

Tutu cited a 2010 Human Rights Watch report that “describes the two-tier system of laws, rules, and services that Israel operates for the two populations in areas in the West Bank under its exclusive control, which provide preferential services, development, and benefits for Jewish settlers while imposing harsh conditions on Palestinians.” Tutu wrote, “This, in my book, is apartheid. It is untenable.”

On July 19, 2018, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that illegally enshrines a system of apartheid. The legislation, which has the force of a constitutional amendment, says,

“The State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historical right to self-determination.” It continues, “The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people.”

There is no guarantee of self-determination for the 1.8 million Arabs who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population.

Tutu called on “people and organizations of conscience to divest from . . . Caterpillar, Motorola Solutions and Hewlett Packard,” which profit “from the occupation and subjugation of Palestinians.” He was advocating participation in the non-violent Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS), which Alexander also mentions in her column.

When representatives of Palestinian civil society launched BDS in 2005, they called upon “international civil society organizations and people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era … [including] embargoes and sanctions against Israel.”

Israel continues to attack Gaza, described as the world’s largest “open air prison” as Israel maintains a tight blockade, restricting all ingress and egress. Headlines in the mainstream media falsely portray an equivalence of firepower between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza. But Israel’s use of force greatly exceeds that of the Palestinians, and the asymmetric warfare continues to escalate.

In 2014, Israel mounted an offensive called “Operation Protective Edge,” relentlessly bombing Gaza for nearly two months, killing 2,251 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians. The number of Palestinians wounded was 11,231, including 3,540 women and 3,436 children. On the Israeli side, six civilians and 67 soldiers were killed and 1,600 were injured. Tens of thousands of Palestinians lost their homes and the infrastructure was severely damaged. Israel targeted numerous schools, UN-sanctioned places of refuge, hospitals, ambulances and mosques.

As Operation Protective Edge was winding down, the NLG and other legal organizations sent a letter to the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, urging her to investigate war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity in Gaza committed by Israel and aided and abetted by US leaders. The letter was based on an article I wrote documenting those crimes.

Criticism of Israel Is Not Anti-Semitic

I have become sharply critical of Israel. An active member of the NLG’s Palestine Subcommittee, I write frequent articles and do media commentary about Israel’s violations of international law. I am also a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and I work in support of BDS.

Years after I first read the 1977 NLG delegation report, I visited Ellis Island, where my grandparents arrived in the United States. It is now a museum. As I walked the route they traveled, I felt very emotional about what they endured. But my deep feelings about the suffering of my ancestors during the Holocaust are not inconsistent with my criticisms of Israel for subjecting the Palestinians to a different kind of oppression.

As stories continue to emerge about Israel’s killing of unarmed protesters at the Gaza border during the Great March of Return, it is increasingly difficult to ignore the facts. Yet even those who see the truth about Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians worry about reprisals for speaking out.

Alexander describes the silence of many civil rights activists and groups, “not because they lack concern or sympathy for the Palestinian people, but because they fear loss of funding from foundations, and false charges of anti-Semitism.” She mentioned the case of Bahia Amawi, a US citizen of Palestinian descent, who lost her Texas elementary school job last year after refusing to pledge in writing that she would not participate in the BDS movement. Glenn Greenwald pointed out the grave danger anti-BDS laws pose to freedom of speech, tweeting,

“The proliferation of these laws – where US citizens are barred from work or contracts unless they vow not to boycott Israel – is the single greatest free speech threat in the US.”

There is a false equivalency between criticizing Israel and being anti-Semitic. Any criticism of Israeli policy is labeled anti-Semitism, even though many Jews—including members of Jewish Voice for Peace, Jewish Center for Nonviolence and IfNotNow—oppose the occupation.

The BDS movement is not anti-Israeli, as it targets the policies, not the people, of Israel. And actions against Israel’s policies, including BDS, do not equate to anti-Semitism. Rafeef Ziadah, a spokesperson for the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee, says,

“As a matter of principle, the BDS movement has consistently and categorically opposed all forms of racism, including anti-semitism and Islamophobia.”

Palestinian human rights activist Omar Barghouti wrote in The New York Times in 2014,

“Arguing that boycotting Israel is intrinsically anti-Semitic is not only false, but it also presumes that Israel and ‘the Jews’ are one and the same. This is as absurd and bigoted as claiming that a boycott of a self-defined Islamic state like Saudi Arabia, say, because of its horrific human rights record, would of necessity be Islamophobic.”

Even though many persist in equating condemnation of Israel with anti-Semitism, groups like Jewish Voice for Peace continue to gain traction. Jews are increasingly willing to examine the facts on the ground in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

And although Congress, dominated by the powerful Israel lobby, continues to give more money to Israel than any other country, two new members of Congress — Representatives Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) — support BDS.

Alexander is optimistic: “There seems to be increased understanding that criticism of the policies and practices of the Israeli government is not, in itself, anti-Semitic.”

We in the Jewish community have a special responsibility to fight against the Israeli system of apartheid and its illegal occupation of Palestinian lands. The BDS movement is an effective weapon in this struggle. I urge my fellow Jews to join BDS and oppose Israel’s illegal and inhumane policies in whatever way they can.

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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 Jewish Voice for Peace. Her most recent book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, contains a chapter analyzing Israel’s targeted killing case. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Video: Israel, “Licensed to Kill”

January 27th, 2019 by Manlio Dinucci

“With its totally unexpected action, Israel has officialised attacks against military targets in Syria, and has warned Syrian authorities not to exact vengeance on Israel” – this was how the Italian medias reported yesterday’s Israeli attack in Syria with cruise missiles and smart bombs. “This is a message to the Russians, who, together with Iran, are enabling the survival of Assad’s power structure”, commented the Corriere della Sera.

Nobody questions the “right” of Israel to attack a sovereign state in order to impose the  government it ought to have, after eight years during which the USA, NATO and the Gulf monarchies tried  to demolish it with Israël, as they did in 2011 with the State of Libya.

No-one is scandalised by the fact that these Israeli aerial attacks, on Saturday and Monday, caused dozens of deaths, including at least four children, and serious damage to Damascus international airport. On the other hand, there was much talk about the fact that the ski resort of Mount Hermon (entirely occupied by Israël with the Golan heights) had prudently stayed closed for a day, causing great displeasure to the holiday crowds.

Nobody seems to be worried by the fact that the intensification of Israëli attacks in Syria, on the pretext that it is being used as a launch pad for Iranian missiles, has begun the preparations for a major-scale war against Iran, planned with the Pentagon, whose effects would be catastrophic.

The US decision to withdraw from the Iranian nuclear deal – an agreement defined by Israel as “the surrender of the West to the Axis of Evil led by Iran” – has provoked an extremely dangerous  situation, and not only for the Greater Middle East. Israël, the only nuclear power in the Greater Middle East – and non-signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which however has been validated by Iran – currently has 200 nuclear weapons pointed at Iran (as specified by US ex-Secretary of State Colin Powell in March 2015). Among the various vectors for nuclear weapons, Israël possesses a primary squadron of F-35A fighters, which was declared operational in December 2017.

Israël is not only the first country to buy the new fifth-generation fighter from the US company Lockheed Martin, but with its own military industries it plays an important rôle in the development of fighter aircraft. Last December, Israël Aerospace Industries began the production of wing components which make the F-35 invisible to radar. Thanks to this technology, which will also be  applied to Italian F-35’s, Israël is potentiating the attack capacities of its nuclear forces, integrated into NATO’s electronic system via the “Programme of individual cooptation with Israël”.

But we find nothing of this in our medias, just as we can find nothing about the fact that, as well as the victims caused by the Israëli attack in Syria, there are those, much more numerous, visited on the Palestinians by the Israëli embargo in the Gaza Strip. There, due to the blockade decreed by the Israëli government on international funds destined for health facilities in the Strip, six hospitals out of thirteen, including the two paediatric hospitals Nasser and Rantissi, were obliged to close down on 20 January because of the lack of fuel necessary for the production of electrical energy.  In the Gaza Strip, network distribution of electricity is extremely sporadic).

We can not tell how many victims will be caused by the deliberate closing of the hospitals in Gaza. In any case, we will find no pertinent information in our medias, which however widely broadcast the declaration by Vice-Prime Minister Matteo Salvini on the occasion of his recent visit to Israël – “I pledge all my commitment to support the right to security for Israël, a bastion of democracy in the Middle East”.

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.


Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War” 

by Michel Chossudovsky

Available to order from Global Research! 

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
Pages: 102
Print Edition: $10.25 (+ shipping and handling)
PDF Edition:  $6.50 (sent directly to your email account!)

Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Reviews

“This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of US wars since ‘9-11’ against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of ‘freedom and democracy’.”
John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.”
-Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction.
Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute   

WWIII Scenario

The Green New Deal endorsed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and more than 40 other US Representatives has been criticized as imposing a too-heavy burden on the rich and upper-middle-class taxpayers who will have to pay for it, but taxing the rich is not what the Green New Deal resolution proposes. It says funding will come primarily from certain public agencies, including the Federal Reserve and “a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks.”

Funding through the Federal Reserve may be controversial, but establishing a national public infrastructure and development bank should be a no-brainer. The real question is why we don’t already have one, like China, Germany, and other countries that are running circles around us in infrastructure development. Many European, Asian and Latin American countries have their own national development banks, as well as belonging to bilateral or multinational development institutions that are jointly owned by multiple governments. Unlike the US Federal Reserve, which considers itself “independent” of government, national development banks are wholly owned by their governments and carry out public development policies.

China not only has its own China Infrastructure Bank but has established the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which counts many Asian and Middle Eastern countries in its membership, including Australia, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia. Both banks are helping to fund China’s trillion-dollar “One Belt One Road” infrastructure initiative. China is so far ahead of the United States in building infrastructure that Dan Slane, a former advisor on President Trump’s transition team, has warned,

“If we don’t get our act together very soon, we should all be brushing up on our Mandarin.”

The leader in renewable energy, however, is Germany, called “the world’s first major renewable energy economy.” Germany has a public sector development bank called KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau or “Reconstruction Credit Institute”), which is even larger than the World Bank. Along with Germany’s non-profit Sparkassen banks, KfW has largely funded the country’s green energy revolution.

Unlike private commercial banks, KfW does not have to focus on maximizing short-term profits for its shareholders while turning a blind eye to external costs, including those imposed on the environment. The bank has been free to support the energy revolution by funding major investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Its fossil fuel investments are close to zero. One of the key features of KFW, as with other development banks, is that much of its lending is driven in a strategic direction determined by the national government. Its key role in the green energy revolution has been played within a public policy framework under Germany’s renewable energy legislation, including policy measures that have made investment in renewables commercially attractive.

KfW is one of the world’s largest development banks, with assets as of December 2017 of $566.5 billion. Ironically, the initial funding for its capitalization came from the United States, through the Marshall Plan in 1948. Why didn’t we fund a similar bank for ourselves? Apparently because powerful Wall Street interests did not want the competition from a government-owned bank that could make below-market loans for infrastructure and development. Major US investors today prefer funding infrastructure through public-private partnerships, in which private partners can reap the profits while losses are imposed on local governments.

KfW and Germany’s Energy Revolution

Renewable energy in Germany is mainly based on wind, solar and biomass. Renewables generated 41% of the country’s electricity in 2017, up from just 6% in 2000; and public banks provided over 72% of the financing for this transition. In 2007-09, KfW funded all of Germany’s investment in Solar Photovoltaic. After that, Solar PV was introduced nationwide on a major scale. This is the sort of catalytic role that development banks can play, kickstarting a major structural transformation by funding and showcasing new technologies and sectors.

KfW is not only one of the biggest but has been ranked one of the two safest banks in the world. (The other is also a publicly-owned bank, the Zurich Cantonal Bank in Switzerland.) KfW sports triple-A ratings from all three major rating agencies, Fitch, Standard and Poor’s, and Moody’s. The bank benefits from these top ratings and from the statutory guarantee of the German government, which allow it to issue bonds on very favorable terms and therefore to lend on favorable terms, backing its loans with the bonds.

KfW does not work through public-private partnerships, and it does not trade in derivatives and other complex financial products. It relies on traditional lending and grants. The borrower is responsible for loan repayment. Private investors can participate, but not as shareholders or public-private partners. Rather, they can invest in “Green Bonds,” which are as safe and liquid as other government bonds and are prized for their green earmarking. The first “Green Bond – Made by KfW” was issued in 2014 with a volume of $1.7 billion and a maturity of five years. It was the largest Green Bond ever at the time of issuance and generated so much interest that the order book rapidly grew to $3.02 billion, although the bonds paid an annual coupon of only 0.375%. By 2017, the issue volume of KfW Green Bonds was $4.21 billion.

Investors benefit from the high credit and sustainability ratings of KfW, the liquidity of its bonds, and the opportunity to support climate and environmental protection. For large institutional investors with funds that exceed the government deposit insurance limit, Green Bonds are the equivalent of savings accounts, a safe place to park their money that provides a modest interest. Green Bonds also appeal to “socially responsible” investors, who have the assurance with these simple and transparent bonds that their money is going where they want it to. The bonds are financed by KfW from the proceeds of its loans, which are also in high demand due to their low interest rates; and the bank can offer these low rates because its triple-A ratings allow it to cheaply mobilize funds from capital markets, and because its public policy-oriented loans qualify it for targeted subsidies.

Roosevelt’s Development Bank: The Reconstruction Finance Corporation

KfW’s role in implementing government policy parallels that of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) in funding the New Deal in the 1930s. At that time US banks were bankrupt and incapable of financing the country’s recovery. Roosevelt attempted to set up a system of 12 public “industrial banks” through the Federal Reserve, but the measure failed; so he made an end run around his opponents by using the RFC that had been set up earlier by President Hoover, expanding it to address the nation’s financing needs.

The RFC Act of 1932 provided the RFC with capital stock of $500 million and the authority to extend credit up to $1.5 billion (subsequently increased several times). With those resources, from 1932 to 1957 the RFC loaned or invested more than $40 billion. As with KfW’s loans, its funding source was the sale of bonds, mostly to the Treasury itself. Proceeds from the loans repaid the bonds, leaving the RFC with a net profit. The RFC financed roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power, mortgages, farms, and much more; and it funded all this while generating income for the government.

The RFC was so successful that it became America’s largest corporation and the world’s largest banking organization. Its success may have been its nemesis. Without the emergencies of depression and war, it was a too-powerful competitor of the private banking establishment; and in 1957, it was disbanded under President Eisenhower. The United States was left without a development bank, while Germany and other countries were hitting the ground running with theirs.

Today some US states have infrastructure and development banks, including California; but their reach is very small. One way they could be expanded to meet state infrastructure needs would be to turn them into depositories for state and municipal revenues. Rather than lending their capital directly in a revolving fund, this would allow them to leverage their capital into 10 times that sum in loans, as all depository banks are able to do. (See my earlier article here.)

The most profitable and efficient way for national and local governments to finance public infrastructure and development is with their own banks, as the impressive track records of KfW and other national development banks have shown. The RFC showed what could be done even by a country that was technically bankrupt, simply by mobilizing its own resources through a publicly-owned financial institution. We need to resurrect that public funding engine today, not only to address the national and global crises we are facing now but for the ongoing development the country needs in order to manifest its true potential.

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This article was first published on Truthdig.com.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. A 13th book titled Banking on the People: Democratizing Finance in the Digital Age is due out soon. She also co-hosts a radio program on PRN.FM called “It’s Our Money.” Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from LifeGate

Argentina – Is the IMF Intervention Helped by HAARP?

January 27th, 2019 by Peter Koenig

HAARP – the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program – was initiated as an ionospheric research program, established in 1993 in Gakona, Alaska and operated by the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. It was and is funded by the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, the University of Alaska Fairbanks and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Its alleged purpose “was to analyze the ionosphere and investigate the potential for developing ionospheric enhancement technology for radio communications and surveillance. HAARP is a high-power, high-frequency transmitter used for study of the ionosphere.” 

That is the official version. HAARP was supposed to be shut down in May 2014, but then it was decided that the facility would be transferred to the University of Alaska. In reality, this sophisticated research project, owned by the military, and most probably with CIA hands in it, is continuing in some secret location, working on “ionospheric enhancement technologies”, to be used to influence weather patterns – in fact, to weaponize weather.

The first known occasion when the US air force used high power, high frequency transmitters, was to influence the intensity and duration of the monsoon during the Vietnam war in the 1960s. The idea was to render the transition of the Vietcong from North to South Vietnam on their jungle paths more difficult or impossible through extended heavy rains. To what extent this attempt was successful is not known.

However, since then, research has evolved and it is now possible to influence weather patterns throughout the world. In other words, to create droughts, floods, storm, hurricanes – wherever such weather phenomena are convenient for the purposes of empire and its vassals. Talk about man-made climate change. Imagine the amount of money that can be generated by such unsuspicious weather modifications – let alone the amount of human suffering, famine, despair – chaos, economic collapse – eventually entire segments of populations can be wiped out. And all will be attributed to ‘climate change’, which are claimed to be man-made due to our civilization’s excessive CO2 emissions. Man-made – indeed!

Extensive and prolonged changes in weather patterns can have devastating economic impacts. The Pampas, stretching over some 750,000 km2, is one of South America’s most fertile region, covering Argentina’s norther tier from the Atlantic to the Andes and also all of Uruguay and part of southern Brazil. The area was struck in 2017 / 2018 by one of the harshest droughts in the last 10 years, severely curtailing Argentina’s main staple – wheat, corn, soybean and beef. Argentina is the world’s third largest exporter of soybean and corn.

Argentina was counting on record agricultural yields that would contribute significantly to the expected 3.5% GDP growth in 2018. Instead, 2018 agricultural exports are expected to be reduced by some US$ 3.5 billion. This is expected to result in a cut of GDP growth by at least 1% to 1.5%, not counting agriculture related industries that will suffer losses, many of which may have to close and thereby also increasing unemployment – and human misery.

The neoliberal Mauricio Macri, who came to power in December 2015 as an implant by Washington, has already devastated the country by drastic austerity programs, combined with severe tariff increases for public and social services, i.e. transportation, electricity fuel, water supply, as well as health and education. The country is in shambles with an unemployment rate, officially hovering around 10%, but in reality, it is more like 20% to 25%. The poverty rate increased under Macri’s dictatorship to about 35%, from about 15% in November 2015, before Macri came to power. Strikes and social protests abound. There is not one week without social unrest – which drives the country further into the ground. Like the Yellow Vest in France who want to oust President Macron, Argentinians want to get rid of Macri.

In comes the IMF which has recently published a devastating report about Argentina’s state of the economy. It predicts a grim scenario with rising interest rates on Argentina’s mostly dollar denominated debt, triggering local money production and a predicted inflation of 40% – a continuous loss of purchasing power, hurting especially the poor and average income earners, prompting more social unrest – a vicious downward spiral.

In June 2018, the IMF, invited by Macri to the rescue, followed its usual recipe of more debt and more austerity. The scenario looks pretty similar to what happened in 2010 / 2011 and forward in Greece, just on a much larger scale, at least by a factor of 5 over a 3-year period. In Argentina, the IMF “agreed” to a standby credit of US$ 50 billion – the largest in the IMF’s history – with a tranche of US$ 15 billion to be drawn immediately. However, in September 2018, the peso crashed under the burden of debt and inflation and Argentina faced insolvency. No problem. The IMF came to the rescue with an additional US$ 13.4 billion bringing the total for 2018 to US$ 28.3 billion (Greece’s first ‘bailout’ tranche in 2010 which was €20 billion (US$22.6 billion at today’s exchange rate).

That the IMF repeats Greek “mistake” in Argentina, is, of course, a joke. This is not a mistake. This is calculated greed, administered to the people of Argentina, usurpation at its worst. Argentina is a much larger and richer country. Much more, almost infinitely more, can be extracted from her economy than from Greece’s. And Argentina has been primed by a complacent president, put in place by those financial oligarchs, intent to milk Argentina to the bones.

Would it therefore be surprising, if the Argentine economic disaster, and consequently the IMF “rescue action” was helped a bit by “climate change” à la HAARP?

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

This new year will likely mark another milestone in science and medicine. Again, Americans will spend more money on diagnostic tests, surgeries and other medical procedures, and patients will consume more drugs and receive more treatments than any other time in US history. We will continue to be inundated with television drug advertisements with the reassuring message, “you don’t have to fight this battle alone. We are with you.” There will be images of laboratories, medical research and happy patients to strengthen viewers’ faith that medical science is progressing and working on our behalf. We will be promised that new cures for life-threatening diseases are on the horizon.  

The US will also spend a minimum of $3.5 trillion on healthcare, in addition to a $1.5 trillion loss in work and wages due to illness. Five trillion dollars total. Approximately 18 percent of the US GDP. And tens of millions of additional dollars will be spent advertise Big Pharma’s message.

And herein lies the fundamental problem. There are more doctors, more hospitals, more pharmaceutical drugs and medical procedures than ever before and yet we have not conquered nor made any significant progress in curing any major disease. Instead of making efforts to fund disease prevention and educate the public, prevention has been abandoned altogether. There are volumes of excellent peer-reviewed studies documenting research and clinical experience showing a healthy diet, physical exercise and stress management regimens can either completely prevent or be incorporated into medical treatment protocols successfully. However, there is no profit to be made in prevention. Modern medicine is solely devoted to disease management. 

How did we reach this threshold where trillions of dollars have been tossed into an abyss?  One reason is that few voices have been able to reach the public to address the widespread corruption in corporate science, especially medicine, agriculture, and environmental issues. Honest, independent science is ignored in favor of proprietary pharmaceutical drugs and genetically modified foods. Fraudulent research has been used to justify nuclear power as a clean green energy. Political officials working on behalf of fossil fuel interests convince us with junk science that hydro-fracking poses no health risks and is environmentally-friendly. 

A single Big Pharma corporation with thousands of employees and billions of dollars in sales and profits is deeply connected to investors, public relations firms, federal health officials and the media. All of these external invested parties are in turn dependent upon the corporation’s revenue stream. Money that is trickled down is spent to dominate medical schools to push the conventional drug agenda’s regime, or to front groups and foundations to buy off so-called experts to debunk critics. Revenues received by the mainstream media networks for drug advertisements are payoffs assure that no reporting appears that might put the company and its medical products into a bad public light. 

The benefit Big Pharma receives from hijacking the federal regulators and legislators is protection from the nation’s judiciary. So when a drug like Merck’s anti-arthritic Vioxx conservatively kills over 60,000 patients and injures an additional 130,000, there is no immediate FDA recall and deaths are permitted until the crisis reaches a tipping point and health officials are forced to step in. However, never is a drug executive prosecuted. Vioxx sales earned $18 billion and Merck only had to pay a $5 billion settlement. Everyone who knew Vioxx was a defective product had engaged in malice of forethought with no deleterious consequences. The company merely paid a fine and returned to business as usual. And the media simply whitewashed the seriousness of Merck’s crimes about Vioxx. 

Science creates artificial intelligence, geoengineering, and 5G wireless technology. These are held as great achievements. On the other hand, we never hear from mainstream media anything about their downsides; and certainly private corporations will never leak evidence for their risks and dangers.  If a scientific invention appears in the peer-reviewed literature, it has already reached a gold standard. Any controversy has been settled.  However, now we find that the entire peer-reviewed journal system is utterly corrupt. In fact, as we will recount, it is all a fraud, and it will worsen without any efforts made to reform it. Quite simply there is no concerted will nor ethical standard to improve the peer-reviewed system because too much profit is generated. 

Now drugs are being pushed upon healthy people not because it will treat a disease, but because we are told it will prevent a disease. Such is the case for new HIV prevention drugs, such as Truvada and PrEp, and statins. There is no definitive science that these drugs are effective enough for anyone to take them.  Imagine being healthy and told that starting chemotherapy will prevent cancer. That would be insane.  

And now we discover that the world’s largest open source site for medical information is Wikipedia.  Content about medical products and therapeutic regimes are penned by completely unqualified editors with no medical background, many who prefer to remain anonymous. Yet Wikipedia editors state with authority that there are no proven health benefits for non-conventional and natural medical therapies. Reading any Wikipedia entry about chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathy, Chinese medicine, naturopathy or energy medicine, the reader will walk away believing it is all pseudoscience or fraud.  However, collectively there are hundreds of thousands of studies to support these therapies’ efficacy and safety. Legitimate scientific inqury has already shown their efficacy. Independent board-certified physicians have been using complementary and alternative medicine for a long time with excellent results. But you will not find any of these qualified physicians being invited to lead a committee at the FDA, CDC or any other national health agency or department. Nor do we find special reports about successful advances in natural health regimens appearing on Dateline, Sixty Minutes, CNN, nor in the New York Times and Washington Post.   

So where excactly in the cesspool of modern medicine, food science, and the agro-chemical industry are we to find truth. No one in the scientific and federal health agencies can be trusted anymore. They are all compromised. No mainstream journalist is trustworthy, and no one can be certain whether a paper appearing in a peer-reviewed science journal is reliable or not. Even the clinical physicians on the front lines of healthcare work in the dark. It is only after large numbers of deaths and injuries, such as with Agent Orange, DDT, aspartame, mammography, etc, that a light goes on. But only for a short time before returning to the dark. 

Our research shows that the majority of pharmceutical corporations have settled laws suits, some are described in this article.

Reports suggest that 440,000 people in the US died as a result of medical errors.(see below). Our analysis suggests that  death from iatrogenic related causes is significantly higher.

How is it that the pharmaceutical industry and medical establishment has killed more Americans than those who died in Vietnam without any serious consequences?  Now wrap your mind around this. If we take a conservative figure of preventable deaths from medicine, 500,000 per year during the last four decades, that would account for approximately 20 million deaths. That is more than all those killed in wars throughout America’s history.  

The reason for American medicine turning into the nation’s largest and deadliest battlefield is because for scientific corruption succeed without impunity, everything must be interconnected. The Surgeon General, the heads of federal health agencies, drug makers, the insurance industry, medical schools and professional associations, and the media operate as a single army waging a war on health against Americans. Corporate interests control everything. Modern medicine has morphed into a religious cult. which does not contemplate the potential of its own vulnerabilities. And numerous patients have been played for fools.  As we will see, medicine profits from keeping patients sick. 

We understand that you may be confused about this message because it goes directly against everything the medical establishment tells us. The fact is that science is completely vulnerable to corruption, and this has more often than not always been the case. Private industry and government know this perfectly. The checks and balances between private and public interests have collapsed. Today, a sincere person who whistleblows on government and corporate malfeasance and crimes can find him or herself going to jail.  The medical regime is now a single entity. All of its parts are consolidated and entwined into a monolithic behemoth to prevent injury to its bottom line. 

Is it not time we said “enough.” 

When we consider Marx’s statement that “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce,” it requires little effort to look back upon history and witness a long legacy of scientific horrors and tragedies. Yet today, matters have worsened. Ever since the Rockefellers privatized American healthcare back in the 1930s, science in the hands of powerful private interest groups and corrupt government agencies has spiraled downward to its current state today: a sad and virulent spectacle of burlesque. 

If medical corruption had been conducted with the results of vastly improved health in the nation, we might close our eyes. However, as corruption throughout the medical establishment and federal health agencies increases, so has the health of the nation substantially decreased. The monster the Carnegie Foundation unleashed in its Flexner Report to set the standard for medical education back in 1910 has since opened its jaws wider to swallow the little integrity that might remain in American medicine. The nation’s health statistics and annual rise in preventable diseases proves the case. 

The US is the world’s most medicated country and yet ranks at the bottom of the pack of developed nations for quality of health. It is also the only nation in the developed world with the average lifespan in decline. A Consumer Report survey estimates that 55 percent of Americans regularly take a prescription drug, and among those most take four drugs on average. In 2016, over 4.5 billion prescriptions were filled, earning the pharmaceutical industry over $200 billion.[1] An earlier estimate conducted and published by the Mayo Clinic found that 70 percent of Americans are on at least one prescription drug and over 50 percent are on two. Twenty percent of patients are on five or more.[2] Over 17 percent of citizens 45 years and older take antidepressants, including one in four women.[3] A multi-year population-based survey conducted by the University of Illinois at Chicago found that 32 percent of adults diagnosed with depression were taking medications with depression listed as an adverse effect! These drugs include proton pump inhibitors, analgesics, beta blockers and synthetic hormone contraceptives.[4] 

For anyone who cares to take a broad, objective and panoramic view of the illnesses plaguing the American landscape, the situation will be found shocking. Clearly it needn’t be this way. Most people enter the sciences for noble reasons and because of a passion for discovery. So then why do they so often emerge out of the end of the institutionalized treadmill as proponents of products that create more harm than good?

The Dismal State of Modern Science

There have been prophetic voices in the past who have warned about the travesty modern scientific advancement is headed. In his 1924 essay “Icarus or the Future of Science,” the British mathematician and moral philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote,

“I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy. Icarus, having been taught to fly by his father Daedalus, was destroyed in his rashness. I fear that the same fate may overtake the populations whom modern men of science have taught to fly.”

Later in his essay Bertrand continues,

“whether, in the end, science will prove to have been a blessing or a curse to mankind, is to my mind still a doubtful question.” 

For Russell, those who can sincerely call themselves scientists pursue their discipline out of a love for knowledge. Science is supposed to improve conditions necessary to foster our well-being and happiness, and to preserve the planet’s environment in an ethical manner. A scientist who truly pursues knowledge out of love, Russell argues, will desire the fruits of his work and craft to be expressions of kindness for the greater good. On the other hand, science is perverted when knowledge is pursued solely for power and domination over others. He warned about the trends of his day increasing whereby the holders of scientific knowledge become “evil” and science solely serves the ambitions of the powerful and those who control scientific inventions’ utility. “Scientific knowledge,” Russell wrote, “does not make men more sensible in their aims, and administrators in the future will be presumably no less stupid and no less prejudiced than they are at present.”[5]

Since the days when science broke free from religion during the European Renaissance, the blind faith in perpetual scientific progress as humanity’s best of fortunes has been incanted to our present day. In fact, in the 21st century, scientific materialism has now generally replaced religious beliefs and morals altogether. This is especially evident in the contemporary regressive movements of Skepticism, the New Atheism, Science- and Evidence-based Medicine, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, Randian Objectivism, and scientific positivism, which have all been chained to corporate capital and science’s bureaucracies. This perpetual myth in scientific progress, says Russell, “is one of the comfortable nineteenth-century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard.”  In the end, Russell foresaw that science may be the ultimate cause behind “the destruction of our civilization.” From our own perspective, given our governments’ and corporations’ utter disregard towards climate change, insensitive destruction of the natural world and other species, medical abuse of prescription drugs, and brushing off the lives of those in economic and social straits, we have to agree. 

Modern Medicine: The Exemplar of Scientific Nepotism

Throughout its history the practice of medicine has been associated with humanitarian and compassionate efforts to relieve the suffering of others. In modern times, we assume that medical science is serving us to find new miracles to save our lives. In ancient systems, medicine was perceived as a divine art and knowledge brought down to humans by the gods on high. A healer who lived by the ethical codes of his craft was held in high esteem by rulers and peasants alike. Although there have always been medical pretenders who took advantage of the ignorant, the medical arts themselves retained their integrity…. until our modern era.  Before outlining the many ways that conventional corporate medicine has become the paragon of a science turned enemy against its essential moral code and the people it is supposed to serve, we might begin with a recent example depicting just how low the medical discipline has sunk into Hades. The state of modern American medicine was accurately summarized in April 2018 when Goldman Sachs released its financial projection report, “The Genome Revolution,” to biotechnology companies. The report doesn’t hesitate to state clearly that for future investment, corporate profits far outweigh the curing of disease. 

Goldman Sachs is one of Wall Street’s largest investors in high growth technologies, particularly pharmaceuticals, medical devices and healthcare services. The report presents the frightening question, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”

Even for the most hardened proponents of natural medicine and opponents of Big Pharma, there are times when a drug developer hits the nail correctly. Such is the case with Gilead Sciences’ drugs Harvoni and Epclusa, which have achieved over a 90 percent cure rate for hepatitis C. This is an extraordinary cure rate.  But for Goldman, this is a bad sign for investors and shareholders. The drugs’ success has steadily drained the pool of patients requiring treatment. At their peak in 2015, these drugs earned $12.5 billion. Three years later it is expected to earn under $4 billion, and revenues will continue to decline.  Goldman writes,

“In the case of infectious diseases such as hepatitis C, curing existing patients also decreases the number of carriers able to transmit the virus to new patients, thus the incident pool also declines … Where an incident pool remains stable (eg, in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”[6]

Goldman’s report confirms an observation that we have been voicing for many years. That is, modern medicine is no longer about treating disease; rather, it is all about disease management to keep patients on drugs for life. How did this trend of an amoral medical philosophy and a betrayal of Hippocratic principles come about since billions of dollars are spent annually to discover cures for disease?  

Before the arrival of the Reagan era, most scientific pursuits remained relatively free of commercial efforts to deceive and corrupt. Although federal health agencies have in the past funded witch hunts to squash non-conventional medical theories and practices, such as Chiropractic and more recent homeopathy, overall ethical standards were upheld to approve drugs’ efficacy and safety to the best of their capabilities. Certainly there were serious oversights and failures costing many lives such as Quaalude-300, PTZ for convulsive therapy, thalidomide and the acellular pertussis vaccine. There were also cases of gross conspiracy and scandal that destroyed numerous lives, such as the 1932-1972 Tuskegee experiment to secretly withhold penicillin from untreated African American males with syphilis. However, it was only during the past three decades that private corporations’ blitzkrieg to subdue the nation’s health agencies to control their executive functions and administrations were succeeding at a rapid pace. 

Before the collapse of the Soviet Union on Christmas day in 1991, governance was dictated in a bipolar world between two military giants. The governments of the US and the Soviets, and their respective allies, were the sole stakeholders moving the pawns on the world’s chessboard.  On the global scene, private industry and civil society would have to wait to grab a seat at the table of governance until American global hegemony was established. Therefore the collapse of the Soviet bloc opened the floodgates for commercial interests. Large corporations serving primarily domestic interests went international. New markets increased exponentially and private corporations and investment banks took advantage of the openings in these markets. Exploitation of these opportunities commenced unimpeded. Otherwise national corporations morphed overnight into transnational behemoths, with values competing with national economies, which has resulted in widespread commercial influence over practically all of our institutions in government, higher education, professional associations and the media.  In addition, science became embedded in private economic interests and the governments of the developed nations, notably the US and Britain, were eager to throw in their support to assure unlimited corporate growth would freely increase. The emerging corporate aristocracy were not perceived so much as uncontrollable rogue entrepreneurs who necessitated strict government oversight and regulation to be kept in tow. Rather they became partners as their agendas melted into being one and same. 

Ronald Reagan, the first Deregulator-in-Chief, opened a pathway for private interests to gain greater control over the sciences. According to Leslie Janka, a former White House deputy press secretary under Reagan, his entire presidency “was PR.”

“This was a PR outfit,” stated Janka, “that became president and took over the country. And to the degree then which the Constitution forced them to do things like make a budget, run a foreign policy and all that, they sort of did. But their first, last and overarching activity was public relations.”[7]

Reagan, who consulted astrologers for decision-making, was a science illiterate who favored private economic growth over altruism and consumer safety by any means. This meant gutting the Environmental Protection Agency of its scientific oversight on industries’ propensity to evade regulatory hurdles and pollute the environment. 

It was also during the Reagan era that pharmaceutical firms infiltrated the halls of the federal government. Through concerted lobbying and persuasion, Reagan signed the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act to protect vaccine makers from financial liability due to vaccines’ adverse effects. Before this bill, only a few firms continued to manufacture vaccines; the financial risks and compensation burden from vaccine injuries were too high for most drug companies. Reagan is therefore credited for launching the current vaccine boom, estimated to be worth $60 billion by 2020, with no legal liability placed upon companies for pushing unsafe and minimally effective vaccines. This trend entered hyper drive disorder under President Clinton, who perceived himself as the first “biotech president” and invited more corporate executives with conflicts-of-interest into his administration than any previous president. If the proliferation of GMOs is regarded as a contagion and curse on human and environmental health, then Clinton is ultimately to be blamed. 

There are three primary avenues by which science becomes corrupted and thereby damages the public’s health and the environment. These include: 1) corporate influence over scientific discoveries that are developed into products for public consumption; 2) corruption within the scientific community itself; and 3) the emergence of a positive philosophy towards science that adheres to all of the dogmatic trimmings of fundamentalist religious faith and that seeks full protection from government to become the reigning ideology of the state. 

This latter trend has been termed “scientism,” an incoherent ideology that identifies rationality and reason with science itself.  Scientism embraces the premise that science can explain everything. One of the more common criticisms against scientism is its “claims that science has already resolved questions that are inherently beyond its ability to answer.”[8] This scientific hubris particularly plagues the biological disciplines such as mental health, immunology, drug-based conventional medical therapies, neurobiology, the genetic etiology of disease, nanomedicine and genetic modification of plants for industrial agriculture.

One unrecognized consequence of scientism is that it plays directly into corporate hands to advance its’ financial interests and commercial control over a population. By tossing aside philosophical and ethical considerations over natural scientific discoveries and findings, scientific truths stand alone as sterile and amoral tools that can be used as economic weapons of destruction. This is most evident in the pharmaceutical industry that pushes questionably ineffective and unsafe drugs to treat physical and mental disorders, or the agro-chemical corporations’ poisoning the public with carcinogenic pesticides and environment-damaging genetically modified crops.

According to a report released by the Union of Concerned Scientists,

“Corporations attempt to exert influence at every step of the scientific and policy making process, often to shape decisions in their favor or avoid regulation and monitoring of their products and by-products at the public expense.”[9]

In order to achieve their goals, private interests make every attempt to win over the White House, Congressional legislators, senior federal agency officials and even the judicial courts. One of science-generated industries’ greatest threats is independent evaluation of the scientific research supporting their products. Therefore, winning over or buying the allegiance of the legislative heads of Congressional committees and the executive tiers of federal agency regulators is a prime directive to grease the bureaucracy in order to make the licensing channels for product approval slide through smoothly and to lessen regulatory due diligence and scientific scrutiny. 

There are several ways that private corporations succeed in influencing the government and enslave it to do their bidding. One is the prerequisite to assure that the judicial terrain is safe for corporations to conduct scientific malfeasance and fraud. This includes manipulating and fudging scientific data, preserving and exerting control over scientists, and taking control of peer-reviewed scientific literature. Although these tactics are found throughout many industries, it is the medical and food professions that are today the most corrupt and acting with blatant criminality.  

Charles Seife and his students at New York University undertook the task to determine to what extent the FDA covers up evidence of fraud and corruption in medical drug trials. They reviewed FDA documents for about 600 clinical trials. How often do federal health officials discover flagrant and intentional misconduct and subsequently decide to bury the evidence and prevent it from becoming public to the medical community?  Seife discovered such actions to be an official pattern within the agency. Given the high rate of content deleted or blacked out from the documents the FDA provided, the investigators could only determine which pharmaceutical company or drug was involved in 1 of 6 of the reviewed trials. For one trial alone, where FDA inspectors found significant fraud and misconduct, 78 different medical publications printed articles based upon that single study.  In an article for Slate, Seife writes, 

“Nobody ever finds out which data is bogus, which experiments are tainted, and which drugs might be on the market under false pretenses. The FDA has repeatedly hidden evidence of scientific fraud not just from the public, but also from its most trusted scientific advisers, even as they were deciding whether or not a new drug should be allowed on the market. Even a congressional panel investigating a case of fraud regarding a dangerous drug couldn’t get forthright answers.”[10] 

In one case, a new anti-blood clotting drug, rivaroxaban, involved four large trials recruiting thousands of patients in clinical sites in over a dozen countries. According to Seife, one of the trials “was a fiasco.”  In half of the sixteen clinical sites, the FDA discovered “misconduct, fraud, fishy behavior or other practices so objectionable that the data had to be thrown out.” One Colorado site falsified data. In the Mexican site, there was “systematic discarding of medical records.” Despite these overwhelming problems, the drug trial was published favorably in the prestigious British journal The Lancet. The FDA found similar problems in the three other trials; in one the data was ruled “worthless.” The FDA advisory committee of “expert” reviewers were only informed that inspectors discovered only “significant issues” at two sites in one of the trials. Rivaroxaban was nevertheless approved in 2011. Since then lawsuits for wrongful death from rivaroxaban continue to increase.[11] 

In another case from 2010, Cetero, a private research company that contracts to Big Pharma, faked data for over 1,400 drug safety and effectiveness trials conducted for roughly 100 drugs, mostly generic knock offs, that were being targeted for the US market. Although the FDA had uncovered this fraud, it has refused to make these 100 drugs known to the professional medical community and public.[12] 

A possible reason for some federal health agencies becoming compromised in an administrative strait jacket being pulled ever tighter by private industry is due to excessive downsizing and withdrawal of funds during the current and past two presidencies. A decade ago, an article by Jessica Washburn appearing in Discover Magazine reported about the dire situation at the NIH’s Center for the Evaluation of Risks to Human Reproduction.

The Center is responsible for the evaluation of chemicals and their impact on reproductive health. With continual deregulation following the Koch Brother agenda to permit private industries to flood the environment with toxic substances to their hearts’ desire, this is an enormously important department carrying the mandate to assure the health of pregnant women and to protect their fetuses. Yet the Center only employed three people, one who was part-time. The vast majority of the workload was outsourced to a private consulting firm, Sciences International. For almost ten years, this firm, which had been receiving funding from over forty chemical companies, was the primary evaluator of the environmental toxins mothers-to-be were being exposed to.[13]

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Richard Gale is the Executive Producer of the Progressive Radio Network and a former Senior Research Analyst in the biotechnology and genomic industries.

Dr. Gary Null is the host of the nation’s longest running public radio program on alternative and nutritional health and a multi-award-winning documentary film director, including Poverty Inc and Deadly Deception.

Notes

1  https://www.webmd.com/drug-medication/news/20170803/americans-taking-more-prescription-drugs-than-ever-survey  

2  https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/nearly-7-in-10-americans-take-prescription-drugs-mayo-clinic-olmsted-medical-center-find/  

3 https://psychnews.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.pn.2017.pp9b2

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2684607

4  https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2684607  

5  Russell, Bertrand.  “Icarus or the Future of Science,”  

6  https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html  

7 Mark Hersgaard  On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency

8 Hughes, Austin.  “The Folly of Scientism,” The New Atlantis.   

9  https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/legacy/assets/documents/scientific_integrity/how-corporations-corrupt-science.pdf

10  https://slate.com/technology/2015/02/fda-inspections-fraud-fabrication-and-scientific-misconduct-are-hidden-from-the-public-and-doctors.html  

11  Ibid. 

12  https://www.propublica.org/article/fda-let-drugs-approved-on-fraudulent-research-stay-on-the-market  

13 http://discovermagazine.com/2007/oct/sciences-worst-enemy-private-funding  

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Here is the first part of this interview:

Brazil and the Illusion of the Rich: An Island of Prosperity Surrounded by Misery and Suffering

By Frei Betto and Dr. T. P. Wilkinson, January 13, 2019

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Part II

Fighting Corruption in Latin America. Politics and Religion

In the wake of the Brazilian presidential election where reserve army captain Jair Bolsonaro was inaugurated in January to lead the largest country in South America back to the far right, returning it to the narrower US imperial orbit while strengthening ties to the global bullies in Washington and Tel Aviv.

Frei Betto (Carlos Alberto Libânio Christo) served for a short period as an advisor to the PT government. He resigned his office because he could not accept responsibility for some of the decisions taken where he was engaged.[i] It is often said in Brazil that the PT lost the elections by their own actions—grossly disappointing their supporters—and turning the election this year into a protest vote, which the party governing since 2002 was bound to lose. Of course elections themselves do not change the power structures of a state. And the manipulation of elections even to the point of usurping the lawfully elected candidates (e.g. Honduras) has a long tradition in the “backyard” of the United States. Nevertheless the demand for integrity and fairness in government is not restricted to those “white glove” regimes of the North.

Frei Betto discussed the issues made central to the election hysteria: corruption and religion.

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Dr Wilkinson: One explanation given for corruption is the presence of dishonest people in the institution.

The other explanation is that there is incoherence between the institution’s structures and procedures and the needs of those working with the institution.

The Reformation that began nearly 500 years ago was partly motivated by the corruption of the Church. Some argued that it was sufficient to purge the dishonest clergy while others argued that the rule of the Church itself was corrupt. They wanted another church or to completely reorganise the existing one.

The last elections have focused attention on corruption. The most publicised response was to put former president Lula in jail. What kind of corruption does Brazil have and what options are there for remedying it? Does Church history offer any lessons?

Frei Betto: Corruption has always existed in human history, including in the group of Jesus (Judas). To combat it, good intentions do not suffice nor the encouragement of the practice of virtues. It is necessary to create a political institution that inhibits and severely punishes corruption. This is the case in Cuba. The construction company Odebrecht[ii], responsible for corruption in almost all the Latin American countries in which it maintained works, confessed to corruption in of all of them, except Cuba. Does that mean there are no corrupt people in Cuba? Is there no corruption? There is, and I was invited to give a lecture at an important event of the General Comptroller of Cuba in May 2018. However, Cuban officials have to think long before accepting corruption. And in the work of the Port of Mariel, Odebrecht could not corrupt anyone.

Without this institutional mechanism that inhibits and punishes corruption, it tends to spread.

TW: Fidel and religion:

Not only did Castro give you the opportunity to explain the relationship between him, the Cuban revolution and religion (especially Catholicism). The book also shows your own relationship. At least this is what I saw after reading your prison memoir.

The presidents of the largest countries in the Western hemisphere, the US and Brazil, both claim their policies have a religious foundation. Does that make the present conflict in Brazil (and the US) a religious conflict too? If yes, what are the religious issues? And how might they be resolved? If no, what does the religious rhetoric mean—for those who are religious and those who are not?

FB: Religion, like politics, serves to liberate or to oppress. That of Jesus was liberating; that of the Pharisees and Sadducees, oppressing. In the medieval period religion was used to expand the power of the Church. Dictators like Franco, in Spain; Salazar, in Portugal; and Pinochet, in Chile, used religion to justify the atrocities they practiced.[iii]

Today, oligarchic governments, such as those of Trump, and neo-fascists, such as Bolsonaro’s, use religion to manipulate the conscience of the people.[iv] This is the “opium of the people” religion denounced by Marx. The religion of the gospel, liberating, is that of Pope Francisco, that of Saint Oscar Romero[v], that of Dom Pedro Casaldáliga.

However, the state must be secular. Confessional politics is to yield to religious fundamentalism. As most people in the West are religious, many opportunists take advantage of this to distort the purpose of religion and make money. They announce that “Jesus is the Way” but they are there to collect the toll…

TW: The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages was probably the great “mass media” of that epoch. Today the Mass Media- mainly owned by private corporations—plays an important role in shaping the perceptions of reality and at the same time creating reality when people act according to their perceptions.

An outside observer, following Brazilian history, cannot avoid seeing that there has always been a complaint about corruption in Brazil, in political and economic life. Yet for the past several years now the PT has been portrayed as the “most corrupt” political party in all Brazilian history. Much of the PT support seems to have been lost because people believe the PT was completely corrupt.

Is this a “perception” of corruption or a “reality”? Can you place the accusations of corruption in Brazil in historical context? The statements of many supporters of military government are based on the idea that the military is not corrupt. However the regime that the current president supported was also accused of corruption before 1986. Is it possible that the corruption that lost the PT the election is a corruption in the Mass Media, too?

FB: Corruption has always existed in Brazilian politics. The failure of the PT was not to react vigorously when some of its leaders got into corruption. And I must stress that there is no proof that Lula has been corrupted. He is an unjustly imprisoned political prisoner.[vi] But other PT leaders have become corrupt. A minority that greatly damaged the Party’s image in general. And this was well exploited by PT opponents in the election campaign.

The new Brazilian government, headed by Bolsonaro, has ministers accused of corruption and under investigation.[vii] The president’s own son, currently Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, will have to explain how one of his assistants, named Queiroz, handled so much money when Flávio served as a state deputy in Rio de Janeiro.

Operation Lava Jato,[viii] which investigates corruption in Brazil, is a very important initiative, but assumed a partisan character. It sends to jail the PT politicians accused of corruption and leaves in freedom politicians of other parties evidently involved in the corruption.

TW: When the CEBs began to proliferate in Brazil, one explanation given was that they filled the gaps left because the Catholic Church never had enough priests for the Brazilian masses.

The CEBs were both potentially democratic and potentially competition for the growing Protestant churches. For this reason even conservative clergy were willing to work with these new forms of church.

An analogy could be drawn in secular life. The size of Brazil has always been a problem for those who want to govern it. The country’s administration was concentrated in the coastal cities and the interior was left to the control of the private sector (latifundistas). This has also meant that even though Brazil is a rich country—with much natural and human potential—there has been great difficulty creating and implementing national policies that balance the great differences between the peoples and regions of Brazil.

In the 1950s and 1960s there were movements to develop the Brazil as a whole. In Europe there was a “redevelopment” after the destruction of WWII, which culminated in the European Union. Yet the difference between Germany and Portugal show that even the rich European countries are not able to balance the distribution of wealth between rich and poor regions. And now there are movements to break-up the EU. Do you think it is even realistic to make, let alone expect, successful and sustained socio-economic policies for the entirety of a country as big as Brazil—at a time when, at least in the rich parts of the West, large highly differentiated political entities appear incapable of such policies? Does this mean that all social-economic policy will be surrendered to the private sector?

FB: The economic policy of a country always derives from an ethical option. And in Brazil, except the two terms of President Lula and the first of President Dilma, economic policy was never aimed at reducing social inequality. The goal now, under the Bolsonaro administration, is to make the rich richer and preserve this huge inequality.

By 2018, Brazil was the 9th most unequal country in the world and the most unequal in Latin America. The richest 1% of the population appropriated more than 25% of the national income. And the sum of the wealth of the richest 5% was equal to the sum of the wealth of the remaining 95% of the population. 80% of the Brazilian population – 165 million people – survived with an income of less than two minimum wages per month (R $1,908). And 0.1% of the richest portion concentrates in its hands 48% of all the national wealth. And the richest 10% get 74% of the national wealth. And 50% of the population –104 million Brazilians– share 3% of the country’s wealth.

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Notes

[i] Frei Betto published his reflections on this period in A Mosca Azul: Reflexão sobre o poder, São Paulo 2006

[ii] Organização Odebrecht, is one of the largest engineering and construction companies in the Americas. It was founded in Salvador, Bahia, by Norberto Odebrecht in 1944. In 2016, the group admitted to illegal payments to politicians in such countries as the US, Switzerland and Brazil, settling in one of the largest consent decrees in the world.

[iii] For a discussion of this topic see Karlheinz Deschner, God and the Fascists, 2013.

[iv] For a detailed history of Rockefeller overt and covert promotion of right-wing “Pentecostal” religious groups throughout Latin America, esp. in Brazil, see Gerald Colby and Charlotte Dennett, Thy Will Be Done, 1995.

[v] Roman Catholic Monsignor Oscar Romero was murdered by a US-funded death squad, while saying mass in San Salvador on 24 March 1980. He was canonised in October 2018 under Pope Francis. Romero was probably the most notorious victim of the US “Phoenix” political warfare operations throughout Central America. His elevation to sainthood has been seen as at least partial vindication of liberation theology in Latin America—persecuted both politically and ecclesiastically during the previous papacies.

[vi] Lula was committed to prison prior to the presidential elections (thus disqualifying him) by a judge who flagrantly disregarded the law whereby an accused is entitled to exhaust the course of appeal before a sentence is enforced.

[vii] The Folha de S. Pauloreported in the third week January that the investigation of Flavio Bolsonaro was suspended last week due to his immunity as a deputy and his election to the Brazilian senate. However new accusations have been made.

[viii] “Operação Lava Jato”. This is a kind of designation for police investigations into suspicions of large-scale criminal activity, esp. corruption, common to Brazil and Portugal (e.g. Operação Marquês, ongoing). Lavo Jatois a combination of investigations conducted by Brazil’s federal police into corruption, obstruction of justice, etc. that began in 2014.

Featured image is from Antonio Scorza / Shutterstock

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Towards Another US-North Korea Summit?

January 27th, 2019 by Stuart Smallwood

News of another summit between the US and North Korean heads of state is surely encouraging for advocates of Korean peace. Hopes are high that North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un has an inkling the Trump administration will budge from its commitment to “maximum pressure” – the threat of invading North Korea and economic sanctions causing widespread starvation among its citizens – to have even agreed to a second summit in the first place.

Yet President Trump already confirmed during his press conference announcing the summit on January 19th that he intends to maintain the full catalogue of sanctions until North Korea’s complete denuclearization. So it appears an end-of-war declaration is the most that can be expected of these talks. At a minimum the two leaders must produce a concrete framework and timeline for peace that is not contingent on North Korea’s denuclearization for their meeting to be a development on the initial summit in Singapore last June.

Still, much skepticism is in order. After all, it took just a month for the Trump administration to flip the script of the Singapore agreement and begin demanding North Korea initiate denuclearization prior to a peace deal – a nonstarter for Kim Jong-un’s government and the reason US-NK diplomacy has been stalled ever since.

Even with a peace deal in place, the Trump administration will still want the North Korean government to go out on a very precarious limb to achieve the initials steps of nuclear disarmament. Washington has requested a complete declaration of North Korea’s nuclear arsenal – including the location of these weapons and intrusive inspections – to confirm nothing is being hidden. This will expose North Korea’s nuclear weapons to a possible preemptive attack by the US.

While such an attack may seem unlikely, it is not so outlandish from the perspective of a country completely destroyed by the US during the Korean War and subject to decades of invasion drills just off their coast by the American and South Korean militaries (sometimes to seize nuclear weapons). Not only a declaration of peace, but an ironclad security guarantee backed by other stakeholders in the region will be necessary for North Korea to take that risk. This is something China, Russia and South Korea could take part in.

Still, peace and security is one thing; the purpose of nuclear weapons as a trade chip is another. Pyongyang has always sought a give-and-take approach – gradual removal of sanctions for each denuclearization step. North Korea will never commit to a lengthy (years-long) process of disarmament that is destined to remain incomplete prior to the next US presidential election (and likely transition to an even more hostile Democratic administration) without any reciprocal sanctions relief along the way.

Kim said so himself during his national address on New Year’s Day when he warned that his government would have “…no option but to explore a new path in order to protect our sovereignty [if the US] continues to break its promises and misjudges our patience by unilaterally demanding certain things and pushes ahead with sanctions and pressure.”

If some form of a peace deal is born of the next summit, it will be a huge success. But the prospects of denuclearization will remain remote if the US does not eventually relent on gradual sanctions relief. Given the ideological commitment to sanctions pervading imperial Washington, it will take nothing more than a complete come-to-Jesus moment by the Trump administration, including longtimeNorth Korean regime change advocate National Security Advisor John Bolton (he of undue influence in the White House), to overcome this unbridgeable gap.

While observers can be allowed some measure of optimism based on the summit announcement, South Korean President Moon Jae-inthe prime mover of the peace process from the beginning – cannot afford to wait much longer for the Trump administration to see the light on sanctions.

At stake for South Korea is the unfettered inter-Korean economic exchange needed for lasting peace on the peninsula and to pump life into its stagnating economy. The South Korean president has explicitly stated what he believes must happen to get to this point.

“North Korea knows it needs (to take) clear denuclearization steps to see international sanctions lifted and the United States also realizes that reciprocal measures are needed to match these North Korean denuclearization steps,” he said during a televised news conference on January 10th.

Yet President Moon is also aware that North Korea will never take the initiative on denuclearization without a security guarantee, which is why he has been calling on the US to agree to formally end the Korean War – so far to no avail. If the upcoming summit can produce the latter, perhaps Moon can move on to convincing Washington about sanctions relief.

This may require a lot more than lobbying. Despite the initial positivity that came out of Singapore, US sanctions have actually increased since, President Moon’s efforts notwithstanding. This stands in stark contrast to the great strides the two Koreas have made toward diplomatic and military reconciliation over that time, sometimes to the chagrin of Trump administration officials.

The path of least resistance for Moon to achieve peace has always been through the participation of Washington given the barrier of US-led sanctions and the fact he is president of a country that has been deeply linked to America politically, economically and militarily since the era of the US occupational government following World War II. However, the deadline for South Korean patience is drawing near. As a single term president with three years remaining in his tenure, Moon cannot afford to waste another six months waiting for an unlikely epiphany among policymakers in Washington. If the Trump administration fails to produce anything positive from the next summit in the short term or if it later becomes evident the US will never relent on gradual sanctions relief, the time for Moon to contemplate violating sanctions will be at hand.

An Alternative Path for Kim’s Economic Modernization

For his part, Kim Jong-un made it clear in his aforementioned address on January 1st that North Korea will not wait on the US forever. While the majority of his speech detailed his mission for reforming the North Korean economy, Kim also addressed the peace process and denuclearization – two issues that are fundamentally linked to attracting direct foreign investment for this economic reform.

Kim called for Koreans alone to be the masters of the peace process, stating that inter-Korean diplomacy, dissolution of military tensions, and economic cooperation should move forward regardless of outside influence (a clear reference to the United States). He also reiterated his commitment to denuclearization, as long as Washington accedes to reciprocity in the process, and reaffirmed his moratorium on the use and testing of nuclear weapons.

His much-publicized warning that his country would take an alternative approach if the US maintains maximum pressure was largely received by Western media as a threat to rekindle the tensions of yesteryear by refocusing on nuclear development. This only makes sense when taken completely out of the context of a speech devoted chiefly to economic reforms. North Korea’s standing in the world, in particular with China, Russia and South Korea, has improved as a direct result of Kim’s diplomatic initiatives and moratorium on nuclear testing. Going backward would mean alienating the very countries he is courting for investment.

A more likely explanation is that the North Korean leader was alluding to the existence of other partners in the region that can still support his economic ambitions if his diplomacy with Washington breaks down through no fault of his own. Indeed, he followed up his speech with a visit to Beijing just seven days later, another reminder to Washington that it’s not all about the US.

China and Russia have been vocal in their support for Kim Jong-un during this peace process and have openly called for sanctions to be relaxed in return for North Korean steps toward denuclearization. There is plenty of evidence that China is already ignoring sanctions outright, though not on the massive scale that Kim no doubt hopes for one day. This means the sanctions element of maximum pressure already exists in name only and China has the advantage of first access to North Korea’s economy.

At the same time, Washington has inadvertently created a scaffold for an alternative global economic system through its trade war with China and aggressive use of sanctions against Russia and Iran, one that North Korea may be able to integrate with whether the US government likes it or not. China has dramatically reduced investment in the US (down more than eighty percent this year alone) while its economic and military ties with Russia strengthen. It is also being disincentivized from further financial integration with American satellite states after the arrest of representatives from telecom giant Huawei in Canada and Poland for violating arbitrary Iranian sanctions (that were supposed to have been removed after President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran).

China will no doubt avoid flagrantly advertising deepening economic relations with North Korea, but with each passing day it has less reason to avoid doing so as it searches for alternative markets to park its investment capital. At the same time, Russia and Iran have already been heavily sanctioned – perhaps beyond further meaningful sanctioning – and may not be reliably penalized for trading with North Korea. Both countries could serve as crucial fuel sources as Kim pursues economic development.

While Kim is clearly staking his own domestic reputation and legacy on economic modernization rather than the past focus on shows of military prowess, it is still uncertain what denuclearization requirements the Chinese and Russian governments will have before deepening economic ties with North Korea. Also yet to be determined is whether South Korea, barred by sanctions, will stand by and watch as China takes advantage of North Korea’s attempted economic opening.

South Korea’s Choice: Settling for Reduced Military Tensions or Pursuing Lasting Peace

Imagine two countries (of the same nationality, no less) that have built railways right up to their respective borders yet cannot properly link them – despite obvious mutual economic interest and dramatic steps toward peaceful coexistence in the last year – because another country on the opposite side of the world disapproves.

The railway linking South Korea to the North – and to China, Russia and the rest of the Asian continent – is not only a symbol for the entire peace process, but a major economic incentive for all stakeholders in the region. Though technically connected, its state of disrepair is a metaphor for a divided nation and a stalled peace process.

South Korea was in essence made an artificial island off the mainland of Northeast Asia with the division of the peninsula after World War II. Simply by upgrading the North Korean railway system and resuming regular passage between the two Koreas, the South could suddenly – as if by magic – reconnect to the Eurasian landmass. The boon this would represent for trade should not be underestimated and President Moon clearly views the potential economic benefits of peace as the stimulus needed to revive South Korea’s flagging economy. None of this is possible as long as South Korea respects the sanctions regime.

During his January 10th press conference, Moon spoke of the need to act quickly once sanctions are removed.

“Investors from China and around the world may end up scrambling to enter North Korea to gain the advantage there. It is crucially important that South Korea not miss its window of opportunity.” He added, “At a time when the South Korean economy is facing structural difficulties and cannot achieve the kind of high-speed growth it experienced in the past, I believe that inter-Korean economic cooperation will become a new and historic growth driver contributing new vitality to our economy.”

But what if sanctions are never lifted by the United States? South Korea will run the serious risk of being left behind if it continues to wait for the Trump administration to first accept the need for gradual sanctions relief and then deliver on that promise. Sanctions were never meaningfully lifted for Iran despite being a condition of Obama’s nuclear agreement and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – the same man in charge of North Korean diplomacy all this time – recently admitted the aim of Iran sanctions is in fact regime change. President Moon must seriously consider the possibility that “maximum pressure” is not really meant to induce denuclearization at all (it’s not as if most North Korean sanctions were designed to engineer the isolation and eventual collapse of North Korea, or anything).

No matter what comes out of this second Trump-Kim summit, it is hard to be optimistic Washington will voluntarily deliver sanctions relief given the US Empire’s history of duplicity, the ideological bent of significant members of Trump’s own administration, and the fundamental opposition to peace in the US media and among the Democratic opposition. South Korea must force Washington’s hand by putting the US in a position to lose something – finally making them a stakeholder in the peace process.

People Power Can Make the Difference in Korea

The roots of Korean peace extend to the people of South Korea, who – through a nonviolent mass movement known as the Candlelight Revolution – rose up and ousted the corrupt right-wing and pro-war government of Park Geun-hye to elect a peace-oriented president willing to push inter-Korean diplomacy regardless of the mood in Washington. The North and South Korean governments’ commitment to the peace process then forced a reluctant Trump administration to the table.

This is the model President Moon will have to employ once again when President Trump – a man with a notoriously undisciplined mind who is beset by domestic controversy and myriad other foreign policy concerns – proves unwilling or incapable of doing what needs to be done to convince North Korea to denuclearize.

By violating sanctions (and what would be more impactful and symbolic than upgrading the railway connecting the two Koreas?) the South Korean president can force Washington to make a choice: whether to completely alienate its ally and host to 23,000-plus American military personnel by punishing it economically, or stand down, permit reciprocal sanctions relief for denuclearization progress and thereby allow the Korean peace process to carry forward to its ultimate conclusion.

If the US government chooses punishment and continued obstruction, a surprise may be in store. The South Korean people have already shown what they are capable of achieving through the Candlelight Revolution. The moment the US begins to penalize South Korea for sanctions violations will be the point it becomes starkly clear to Koreans and the rest of the world that America is the single obstacle preventing their reconciliation and the economic benefits true peace will bring. This could spur the South Korean people to demand an end to the military alliance and eventually force the US to withdraw troops from the country.

So let us applaud the news of an upcoming summit between the US and North Korea, but do so with an understanding that the empire may never honestly approach denuclearization negotiations until it has something to lose if the process fails. Korean peace must be founded on unbound economic exchange, and President Moon must let it be known that this peace – not perpetual war – is the only way the US can retain its alliance with South Korea.

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This article was originally published on Antiwar.com.

Stu Smallwood is a Korean-English translator currently based in Montreal, Canada. He lived in South Korea for eight years from 2008-2016 and has a (useless) MA in Asian Studies from Sejong University in Seoul. In addition to Antiwar.com, his writing has appeared at Global Research and the Hankyoreh. He can be reached by email at stuartsmallwood[at]gmail.com or through his Twitter handle @stu-smallwood.

Featured image: South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un embrace each other after releasing a joint statement at the truce village of Panmunjeom, Friday. / Korea Summit Press Pool

Power Play: The U.S. and Canada back a Coup in Venezuela

January 27th, 2019 by Michael Welch

 “Never before has a high-level official said that the opposition should overthrow the government… this has no historic comparison in the 200 years of US-Venezuela relations.”

– President Nicolás Maduro, January 23, 2019 [1]

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America’s long sought goal of regime change in Venezuela may be on the verge of being realized.

Thanks in large part to low oil commodity prices and U.S. economic sanctions imposed in 2017, an economic crisis has devastated the country. [2] Accusations of fraudulent elections have helped generate a rhetorical case that President Maduro is a “dictator” and a “usurper.” [3]

Boosted by distorted and biased press coverage, and hostile language from the U.S. and Organization of American States’ hawkish Secretary-General Luis Almagro, the Venezuelan opposition made their move on January 11, 2019. One day after Nicolás Maduro had been sworn in to his second term of office as president, the opposition controlled National Assembly declared Maduro to be illegitimate and appointed a relative unknown, opposition legislator Juan Gerardo Guaidó Márquez, to be their interim president, until fair elections could be conducted. [4]

January 23rd, on a day when Venezuelans commemorate the historic overthrow of military dictator Marcos Evangelista Pérez Jiménez, national demonstrations rose up across Venezuela, both in support of and in opposition to Maduro’s reign. At an opposition protest in Caracas, Juan Guaidó announced that he was assuming the role of Head of State. [5]

Shortly afterward, as if on cue, U.S. President Trump officially recognized Juan Guaidó as interim President of Venezuela. A number of countries including Canada, Brazil, Columbia, and other members of the so-called Lima Group would quickly follow suit. [6]

A certain threshold has been crossed. Following a short-lived mutiny by National Guardsmen in the Venezuelan capital, high ranking military officials have pledged their fealty to Maduro. Outbreaks of violence have erupted in Venezuela with estimates of between 14 and 26  casualties. Maduro has ended diplomatic relations with the U.S. and has ordered all U.S. diplomats out of the country by Sunday January 27th. Russia, China, Turkey, Cuba, and Iran have all expressed their support for Maduro as the country’s rightful leader. On Saturday January 26th, during tense deliberations at the United Nations, Russia outright accused the U.S. of engineering the Venezuelan coup d’etat. [7][8]

With so much at stake for the country’s population, the region and potentially the world, it is essential to get an honest picture of the events as they unfold, and the historical and geopolitical context in which they take place. Venezuela wouldn’t be the first and likely won’t be the last nation to suffer a tremendous toll from an intervention that is prettied up as a “humanitarian” mission of mercy.

On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we got hold of guests who can help fill in the blanks left by mainstream media coverage of the Venezuelan crisis, put some facts on the table, and try to project where this crisis is headed.

In our first half hour, Caracas-based journalist Lucas Koerner brings an on-the-ground perspective on the lead up to last week’s events, provides some background on Juan Guaidó, shares his take on the unity of the Venezuelan military behind Maduro, and makes an educated guess as to where events are leading in coming days.

In our second half hour we hear from Professor Radhika Desai and Venezuela-Canadian writer and activist Nino Pagliccia. In a round table conversation with host Michael Welch, these observers discuss the inauguration of Maduro, which Desai attended in person, the cracks in the National Assembly’s claims of Maduro’s unconstitutional assumption of power, the motives behind America’s and Canada’s advocacy for the Venezuelan opposition, the prospects for Russia and other powers to block U.S. hegemony, and how the situation is likely to evolve in coming months.

Lucas Koerner is a journalist and staff-writer with Venezuelanalysis.com. He is based in Caracas, Venezuela.

Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies at the University of Manitoba and a Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group based at that university. She has authored a number of books including  Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013) published by Fernwood. She is also a member of the Winnipeg based Venezuela Peace Committee.

Nino Pagliccia is an activist and freelance writer based in Vancouver. He is a retired researcher from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who follows and writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is the editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” (2014). He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note: In Winnipeg, a solidarity action is scheduled to take place Saturday January 26th in front of the U.S. Consulate in Winnipeg at 201 Portage Avenue (North-west corner of Portage and Main). Organized by Peace Alliance Winnipeg and the Venezuela Peace Committee.

For solidarity actions around the globe, visit the site for the Alliance for Global Justice (afgj.org)

(Global Research News Hour Episode 246)

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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:

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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.

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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. https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14243
  2. https://www.globalresearch.ca/venezuela-under-siege-the-wests-ongoing-campaign-against-president-maduro/5657804
  3. Juan Guaido (January 15, 2019), ‘Juan Guaido: Maduro is a Usurper. It’s time to Restore Democracy in Venezuela’, Washington Post; https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/15/maduro-is-usurper-its-time-restore-democracy-venezuela/?utm_term=.6a849fe7ec8c 
  4. Tom Phillips (January 11, 2019), ‘Venezuela: opposition leader declares himself ready to assume presidency’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/11/venezuela-maduro-juan-guaido-assume-presidency
  5. Richard Vaz (January 23, 2019), ‘Venezuelan Opposition Leader Guaido Declares Himself President, Recognized by US and Allies’; https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14244
  6. ibid
  7. Richard Vaz (January 24, 2019), ‘Venezuela: Several Casualties as Violence Erupts’; https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14250
  8. Andrew Roth, Lily Kuo, David Agren, Ed Augustin, Peter Walker and agencies (January 24, 2019), ‘Russia and key allies vow to stand by Maduro in Venezuela crisis’, The Guardian; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/24/juan-guaido-venezuelas-opposition-leader-declares-himself-interim-president

The prevailing Alt-Media narrative that Washington wants to impose a pro-US puppet regime on Venezuela in order to control all of the country’s oil doesn’t make much sense when considering that it already buys 41% of the Bolivarian Republic’s total exports, meaning that another more nuanced explanation needs to be offered in order to account for this narrative double-think.

The Alt-Media Community is full of commentary about how the US wants to impose a puppet regime on Venezuela in order to control the country’s oil, but that doesn’t make much sense because it already buys 41% of the Bolivarian Republic’s total exports as evidenced by the Energy Information Agency’s executive summary of the energy trade between the two as of 7 January, 2019. The US is Venezuela’s top customer whereas Venezuela is the US’ third-largest supplier of crude oil imports according to the report, so Washington is already getting all that it needs from Caracas as it is. Given this ironic dynamic between the two geopolitical and ideological foes, it could be expected that the US would also obtain access to the resources of the world’s largest oil reserves in the Orinoco Belt one day too, once again contradicting the simplistic narrative that Washington is only waging this Hybrid War for the oil.

Nevertheless, the truth of the matter is that control over Venezuela’s oil is indeed one of the motivations behind this conflict, though not in the way that it’s being portrayed. Alongside ensuring full geopolitical control over the Caribbean Basin and ideologically confronting socialism, the US wants to obtain predominant influence over Venezuela in order to incorporate it into a parallel OPEC-like structure for challenging the joint Russian-Saudi OPEC+ arrangement per the author’s late-2016 prediction about the formation of a “North American-South American Petroleum Exporting Countries” (NASAPEC) cartel. This entity would function as “Fortress America’s” energy component and have the potential to exert powerful long-term pressure on the international oil market at Russia and Saudi Arabia’s expense. When coupled with the US and Qatar’s joint LNG investment plans, it’s clear to see that the US is making a global power play for control over the world’s energy industry, which could very adversely affect Russia.

The multipolar Eurasian Great Power relies on its energy exports to advance its financial and geopolitical interests, though that might be more difficult to do despite its oil and gas partnerships with Saudi Arabia and Iran respectively (which are part of the country’s “balancing” strategy) in the event that the US’ Western Hemispheric-wide NASAPEC and its LNG alliance with Qatar are able to potently compete with it across this domain. The potential risk is that Russia could stand to lose out on a lot of long-term revenue if the US is able to manipulatively keep oil and gas prices low, which could combine with the increased costs associated with the New Arms Race brought about by Washington’s withdrawal from the INF Treaty to put immense pressure on Moscow to “compromise” with its chief geopolitical rival per the stratagem described by the author in his April 2018 piece about “What The US Really Wants From Russia”.

President Putin’s ultimate legacy rests on his ability to deliver on the many socio-economic promises that he made to his compatriots during his re-election campaign last year, though these were all predicated on the assumption that the future oil and LNG markets would remain stable and largely under Russia’s controlling influence, as well as the expectation that the country’s hypersonic missile advancements could deter the onset of a costly New Arms Race. The US’ aforementioned energy and military moves shattered those presumptions and could throw the Russian leader’s carefully crafted plans to improve the overall livelihood of all of his countrymen (especially the majority of the population that lives outside of its most developed cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg) into jeopardy, though right now this worst-case scenario is still far from certain pending the outcome of the Venezuelan Crisis, thus explaining why Russia is so eager to “mediate” between the government and “opposition”.

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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.

For a few days now, tension has been rising high in Venezuela. On 23 January, the President of Parliament proclaimed himself president. He was immediately recognized by the US, Brazil and a number of other countries. There are fears that this is the beginning of a long period of confrontation and destabilisation.

Cycles of violence

The attempt to dethrone President Maduro does not come out of the blue. Since Maduro became president after the death of Chávez in 2013, the US has resolutely aimed at a regime change. The US tries to persuade parts of the army to turn against Maduro, but without any result so far. That is why Washington relies first and foremost on the internal opposition and on diplomatic pressure.

The US gives assistance to the political opposition and tries to unite it as much as possible. According to the color revolution handbook, NGOs, student organizations and local organizations are funded, trained and coached to organize street riots as effectively as possible. The street violence must destabilize the country to such an extent that the government is forced to resign, or that the army intervenes and deposes the government.

Since 2013, the opposition twice unleashed a cycle of large-scale violence. In 2014, 43 people were killed and 800 injured. In 2017, 131 people died.

In the meantime the economic situation deteriorated very much. This was mainly the result of an economic model that is extremely dependent on oil prices, but also of an outright economic warfare against the government.

A new offensive

In May 2018, Maduro won the presidential elections with 68% of the votes. That was a blow to the opposition, from which it had to recover. But when Nicolas Maduro was sworn in for a second six-year term on 10 January, it saw its chance for a new offensive. The US-controlled Organization of American States promptly declared that it would not recognize Maduro as president. Five days later Trump announced that he was considering recognizing [to recognize] Juan Guaidó as president.

Guaidó is the thirty-five-year-old president of Parliament. He is very close to Leopoldo López, with whom he is in daily contact, despite his house arrest. Together they founded the right-wing party Voluntad Popular. In the past, this party organised armed pickets that killed people, set fire to public buildings and hospitals, led to attacks on ministries, etc.

Strengthened by Trump’s backing, the opposition took to the streets the same day with the aim of ousting President Maduro and forming a provisional government. Amnesty was promised to the military who would defect. Six days later, on 21 January, some rebellious soldiers posted a video message online in which they declared themselves loyal to the opposition leader.

Tensions increased. On 22 January, Michael Pence, vice president of the US, posted a video message calling on Venezuelans to take to the streets and get rid of Maduro. One day later, the opposition did what Pence asked, they massively took to the streets. There were also large counter-demonstrations by supporters of the government. Guaidó proclaimed himself the new president. He was immediately recognized by the governments of the US, Brazil and Canada, among others. Russia, China, Turkey and Mexico, a large and important country in the region, continue to recognize Maduro. Europe was initially cautious, but now also unambiguously opts for a regime change.

How to proceed?

It is unlikely that the recognition of Guaidó by the US and some other countries will bring down President Maduro. But it may lead to further destabilisation of the country. The White House has opted for the strategy of chaos, as it has already done in so many other places.

The recognition of Guaidó will give the opposition a boost. If Guaidó is not allowed to hold the presidency, this may lead to more economic sanctions. The US is currently considering a ban on oil imports. This would have serious consequences for Venezuela’s financial position and would further reduce oil production.

An increasing number of recognitions of Guiadó as president will make it more likely that more countries will adopt economic sanctions against Venezuela. Threatening sanctions, stronger opposition and increasing violence will intensify the pressure on military officers and the PSUV top, in the hope that they will eventually change camps.

At the moment a foreign military intervention is unlikely, even with escalating violence. But in the past Trump has not ruled out such an intervention. With the recent election of the belligerent Bolsonaro, such an intervention could possibly be outsourced by the US to Brazil, together with Colombia, Peru and other countries in the region.

In any case, the interference in the domestic affairs of a sovereign country that the US is exhibiting today is unashamed and unprecedented. It violates the most elementary principles of the United Nations.

The deadlock in Venezuela can only be resolved through national dialogue. Maduro, for his part, is in favor of calling for a dialogue, directed to the country as a whole by the governments of Uruguay and Mexico. Any foreign interference or pressure will only add fuel to the flames.

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Featured image is from Black Agenda Report

Rule of Law – Canada Style.

January 26th, 2019 by Jim Miles

Well, that didn’t last long.  Yesterday Canada’s ambassador to China, John McCallum, presented three arguments concerning Meng Wanzhou, one of the leading executives for Huawei, who was arrested in December in Vancouver airport, at the request of U.S. authorities.  Today he recanted, saying he created confusion, misspoke, that his comments are not accurate – yet at the same time he did not outright deny the truth of his comments.

“I regret that my comments with respect to the legal proceedings of Ms. Meng have created confusion. I misspoke. These comments do not accurately represent my position on this issue. As the government has consistently made clear, there has been no political involvement in this process… .Canada respects its international legal commitments, including by honouring its extradition treaty with the United States. The rule of law is fundamental to all free societies, and we will continue to defend and uphold this principle.” (John McCallum, Canada’s ambassador to China. Thursday, January 24, 2019).

His three points from yesterday were,

  • Political influence/interference from the U.S.
  • U.S. laws were being applied extraterritorially, in other words out of their jurisdiction.
  • the supposed criminal action occurred because Huawei executive Meng had dealt with a country under U.S. sanctions – sanctions not supported by Canada as they result from the U.S. abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, signed along with Russia, France, Germany, China, and the U.K.

All three points are still valid today so while he misspoke and created confusion, perhaps that stems from the truth of his statements. PM Justin Trudeau stuck to his usual rule of law platitude but also did not negate the statements, allowing a degree of wondering if the comments were vetted, or if they were being allowed to pass for concerns about foreign policy political relationships with China.

And then we come to the “rule of law” so beloved of political leaders attempting to side step an issue.  McCallum repeated the mantra, perhaps to save his own skin, but also to allow domestic politics to play out as Trudeau wants to manage them.

There is much that can be presented about Canada’s real “rule of law” both domestically and internationally, ranging from the bombing of Serbia and the bombing and overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya to the denial of indigenous rights across Canada.  But the real example of operating outside the law is Canada’s response to another hotspot – Venezuela.

Rule of law for Venezuela

Ben Rowswell, former Canadian ambassador to Venezuela (2014-2017) was a guest on CBC’s Power and Politics today.  He supported Canada’s proclamation that the Maduro government was not the real government of Venezuela and that Juan Gaido was the acting president.  His reasoning revealed either ignorance (not likely) or complicity with U.S. interests (most likely) – his main argument was that this was neither a Canadian nor a U.S. issue but a Venezuela issue.  It is absolutely a U.S. issue as the U.S. has interfered in Venezuela at least for the past two decades, using covert operations and sanctions against the government.

The main issue is not dictatorship versus democracy as the U.S. is quite willing to be friends with dictatorships (see Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, Egypt).  The problem is about oil and U.S. global hegemony (see also Syria, Iraq, Libya, Sudan).  Without being able to control oil and its pricing in U.S. petrodollars the U.S. economy would sink rapidly into recession/depression.

Canada has long supported U.S. hegemony, indeed is an important pawn in the whole situation, and it is in that sense that Canada’s declaration on the Venezuelan opposition leader comes into play.  Therefore it is very much in line with Canada’s foreign policy to abrogate international law, international customary law, and declare Maduro’s government to be invalid.

Venezuela looks like Chile

Another red-herring argument presented by those supporting Trudeau’s position is one of Canada’s support being in synch with the Lima group of countries.  If the latter are looked at closely they are all countries in which the government has at one time or another been overthrown by U.S. interests, covertly or overtly, and are all now right wing sycophants of the Washington consensus.  Columbia in particular for decades has been essentially a U.S. operations base for the so called “war on drugs”.  Most of these governments use militaries and  paramilitaries who have received their training at WHINSEC, the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, where a good schooling in subversion, torture, interrogation and extra judicial ‘rules’ can be obtained.  Venezuela is looking a lot like Chile during the Allende-Pinochet coup.

The main rule of law throughout this whole scenario are the rules of law as established by CIA/NSA cronies supporting the ability of U.S. corporations to extract whatever they want from the countries, using U.S. dollars for trade, and sourcing cheap unprotected labour.

Clear, disciplined and principled?

Returning to the China fiasco (at least it is in Canada’s position), the CBC also had the former ambassador to China, David Mulroney on as a guest.  He described McCallum’s action and words as a “bad idea that went badly wrong,” a judgement that is at best premature and not very nuanced as to what might have occurred behind the scenes before and after the comments.  He further thought that the comments might raise “questions over our integrity”, and that Canada operates in a “clear, disciplined, and  principled manner.”  All his talking points sound academically fine and well spoken, but are only the usual cover for Canada’s attempts at creating the global perception that we are the good guys.

Are we clear?  Clearly between a rock and a hard place – the U.S. and China, and clearly on the U.S. hegemonic side when it comes to cases such as Venezuela.  Clearly not wanting to offend the U.S. government – not Trump himself as such, but the deeper state.

Are we disciplined?  For sure:  disciplined by our status as a pawn within the U.S. global empire, tied to them economically and increasingly politically.  To be sure, we are self-disciplined when it comes to imperial projects around the world, a large part of our British inheritance.

Principled – Oxford definition a “personal code of right conduct.”?  Not at all.  Canada survives on the support of the US$, in terms of its overall economic ties, in terms of its oil exports priced in US$.  Canada supports U.S. foreign policy which at its base is a militarized economy supporting corporate adventures anywhere in the world that it can – and in those areas that it cannot, it will do its best to subvert the government and place their ‘owned’ cronies in place.

In all areas of foreign policy and in many areas of domestic policy, Canada remains servile to U.S. interests, mostly willingly as those in power very much wish to stay there.  Much of the world surely recognizes this, while the “western” world continues to play out its myths.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The Old Lady in the Window

January 26th, 2019 by Philip A Farruggio

There are so many diverse memories to a mind that has traveled through the decades like an endless wind. Being a ‘baby boomer’ who just cannot accept the utter surreal bad aftertaste of our current comic book empire, one desires to retreat into the distant past. This past of course had its own times of despair, but for a youth of those days it sure seemed better. Such is the nature of this nostalgic ‘look back’.

The autumn of ’65 found this writer living in what was then most likely the greatest place to be a youth. That would be Brooklyn, NYC, in the fabulous neighborhood called Sheepshead Bay. We didn’t actually live by Sheepshead Bay, where the fishing boats and great seafood restaurants were. Yet, close enough to ride one’s bicycle to it. Avenue U was my ‘stomping grounds’, filled with a slew of Mom and Pop shops of all kinds. My neighborhood consisted of a mix of Italian American families (my own), Irish American families, Jewish families and other ethnic groups of no great number. Looking back, segregation was in practice in those days (as still is the case now in most urban areas) and seeing a black face meant you saw either a cleaning lady, janitor or store helper. Sad but true.

When I got home from school each afternoon, I rushed around the corner to the World Telegram and Sun home delivery office to pick up my papers. I had secured one of the best routes, because I was now older than most of the other kids, being already 15 and soon to be 16. My route began right there, at the office, which was Bedford Ave and Avenue U, and strolled right down the alphabetical ladder to Quentin Road, which would have been Ave Q. Proudly, I rode a used but still in great condition Schwinn Black Phantom, which was big and powerful, replete with its own shock absorber. It did not travel as fast as the new 3 Speed English or Italian racers as they called them, but it was reliable and rode smooth as hell.

This one November afternoon the gray skies and chilly weather seemed to go right through you. I had my heavy jacket on, and my head was warmed by the old reliable woolen beanie cap, as they called them in those days. I had folded my papers at the office, so as to more easily toss them from my bike at the stoops of the one and two family homes on Bedford Ave. The quicker I finished the better to get home and start my homework, which usually took two hours each day. As I went up Bedford, really making good time, I came to this one family home near the corner of Ave S. In the front window sat this old lady by a desk, in full view from the street. She seemed to be lost in some deep concentration, with a pencil in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Figuring to get a better tip, I parked my Black Phantom and brought the paper to her doorway. She looked up and, waving her hand, invited me in. The door was open. Inside now, I handed her the paper. Man, it sure felt warm inside. “Why don’t you sit down for a minute young man and warm yourself?” I did. I asked her what she was doing, a really stupid question as I could see she had a crossword puzzle in front of her. “The only reason I get the Sunday Times is for their crossword puzzle”, she answered while still locked into it while slowly dragging on her Chesterfield plain tip. The manner in which she was apparently enjoying her smoke caused me to take the risk and ask for one. Now, I really did not even like cigarettes, but at 15 my parents would go crazy if they saw me smoking, so why not give it a shot? I asked if I could have one and she said “Help yourself, but it is a nasty habit for someone as young as you.” I lit up and sat there with her for what seemed an eternity to a young man like me. She liked it when I helped her with the puzzle and remarked at how clever I was.

“You must be good in school, I imagine.” I nodded in the affirmative. When the phrase ‘Taft Hartley’ came up as a correct answer, the old lady turned to me. “Do you know what that means?” she asked. I did not. “Well Philip, the crazy conservative Congress, with that hat salesman Truman going along, made damn sure that striking workers got another roadblock in their efforts.” Then she took a minute or two and gave me a quick education on labor matters. I jumped in by telling her about my dad, a longshoreman, and now that she mentioned it, he did use that phrase ‘Taft Hartley’ to explain to my Mom and Grandmother why his strike was delayed last year. Now it all made sense.

Well, the 10 minutes I had planned on staying there ran into a half hour as I noticed the skies getting a bit darker. My paper route was only half completed. I left most of the cigarette in her ashtray, thanked her as she thanked me again for bringing her paper in for her, and hustled out. As I rode on I was so thrilled that this old lady, much older than my parents, had treated me like an equal, even for but 10 minutes. From that first encounter with the lady in the window, we became friends. Each day I would park my bike and bring the paper in for her. We would sit and chat about whatever, share a smoke (which I never could inhale) and I would be on my way. As November moved into December, she and I would share information on our lives.

She had a great deal of anger for what was going on in Vietnam. “We just have no business being in some rice paddy and killing and being killed for what? Nothing!” Being 15, I honestly never really even noticed what was happening in Vietnam. That revelation would come about two or three years later. The old lady would also tell me about her son and what he was doing now, and I would do the same as to my parents etc.  On most afternoons she would have a plate filled with cookies for me. On bitter cold days she would make a cup of tea as well. Interestingly, I never asked her first name, only knowing her last name from my route sheet. She called me Philip and that was that.

After the Christmas vacation I decided to find a part time job that would pay me better, and besides, paper delivery was for kids. I was now at the ripe old age of 16. I did miss my visits with the old lady, but sometimes ‘out of sight, out of mind’. It must have been the following winter, January of ’66, that I did find myself going by her house. We had a humongous snow storm, at least 15 inches, and there was money to be made shoveling snow. My pal Big Frank and I took to the streets (you had trouble anyhow walking the sidewalk) to make some money shoveling. I remember that day so well. It was a blue sky, sunny freezing cold Thursday that felt like a Saturday, and everybody was home. Not much work and schools closed as well. Big Frank and I figured we’d hit Bedford Ave, with those bigger homes and lots more driveway and stoop. When we got across from the old lady’s house, I decided to go across and say hello. There was no one in her window, and a guy next door was shoveling his walk. I called out to him if he knew if the old lady next door was around. “Oh, Mrs. Nelson, no kid, she passed away nearly a year ago.” I asked him how. “Well, if you knew her then you knew she practically went to bed with a ciggie hanging from her mouth. That’s what did her in. Too bad. Nice old lady.” As I crossed back to catch up with Big Frank, the wet from my eyes was beginning to crystalize.

As I grew up more, went to college and began to learn about things that they don’t tell you on the TV or newspapers, I always thought of the old lady in the window. She was more than just cool, as we referred to people who were ‘above the crowd’. That old lady smoking a Chesterfield plain tip with me was outright exceptional!

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected]

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Venezuela Political Crisis: Russia Offers to “Mediate”

January 26th, 2019 by Andrew Korybko

Contrary to the Alt-Media Community’s “wishful thinking” expectations that Russia would “pull a Syria” in Venezuela by commencing a full-on military intervention in support of the country’s democratically elected and legitimate government, Moscow instead decided to channel the diplomatic dimension of that Mideast campaign by offering to “mediate” between the authorities and “responsible” members of the “opposition”.

The Hybrid War on Venezuela unprecedentedly escalated earlier this week when Juan Guaidó proclaimed himself “president” and was recognized by the US and many of its allies as such, pushing the Bolivarian Republic to the brink of civil war and raising fears that a multilateral military invasion might be imminent. Amidst this uncertain situation, Russia spoke out very strongly against the US’ violation of international law and meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs, raising hopes among many in the Alt-Media Community that Moscow might be mulling a repeat of the Syrian scenario by commencing a full-on military intervention in support of the country’s democratically elected and legitimate government.

Much to their surprise, however, what Russia seems to have had in mind in that respect was only the diplomatic dimension of that Mideast campaign after it swiftly suggested that it could “mediate” between the authorities and “responsible” members of the “opposition” just like it’s been doing between Damascus and the Arab Republic’s so-called “moderate opposition”. In fact, when President Putin spoke to his Venezuelan counterpart, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed that they didn’t even discuss the possibility of Russia extending financial or military assistance to its partner. This follow’s President Putin and Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov’s earlier call for a “peaceful dialogue” to end the crisis.

Moving beyond Russia’s principled stance in publicly defending international law and condemning the US’ violation thereof, the country’s real interests in Venezuela lay in ensuring that its partner repays its billions of dollars in loans and respects the energy and military deals that it previously agreed to. Seeing as how the US-backed “opposition” would probably render those deals null and void if they successfully seizes power and consequently inflict a serious financial blow to sanctions-beleaguered Russia, Moscow has a natural interest in trying to “get on their good side” and “peacefully facilitate” a possible “leadership transition” per its “balancing” strategy if it’s concluded that such a scenario is “inevitable”.

It does indeed seem as though Russia might be countenancing such an outcome considering that President Putin somewhat surprisingly didn’t think it appropriate to discuss dispatching emergency financial and military aid to Maduro, possibly believing that it might be all for naught if Moscow received intelligence about the US’ next planned moves in the Hybrid War and didn’t want to risk deepening its potential loss if the “opposition” was about to make a major move that might successfully lead to the government’s overthrow.  That possibly being the case, it makes sense why Russia would want to “mediate” between Maduro and the “opposition” as soon as possible to hopefully “hedge its losses”.

To clarify for anyone who might be confused by this sudden turn of events and unexpected application of the Syrian scenario, Russia is a capitalist country that’s focused first and foremost on protecting its own interests before anyone else’s, and it’s not going to sacrifice its soldiers’ lives to uphold Venezuela’s socialist system. It appreciates the country’s multipolar orientation but couldn’t protect its partner (and most importantly, its assets) even if it wanted to because it can’t secure the trans-Atlantic supply lines necessary to do so. There’s also no geopolitical incentive of becoming the regional kingmaker like it did in the Mideast with Syria to justify such a risky operation anyhow.

Simply put, Russia’s billions of dollars’ worth of assets and contracts are indefensible if the country succumbs to the rolling US-backed coup attempt, which is why Moscow is so motivated to “mediate” between the two domestic parties of the conflict just two days after the latest Hybrid War escalation. Venezuela’s located half a world away from Russia whereas Syria is within comparatively closer proximity and not as difficult to sustain with emergency arms shipments and Moscow’s ultimate military intervention, though as can be seen, the Syrian scenario is nevertheless still being applied in Venezuela through Russia’s efforts to “balance” between the democratically elected and legitimate government & the “moderate opposition”.

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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.

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Video: Israeli Patrol Came Under Fire in Golan Heights

January 26th, 2019 by South Front

A firefight broke out on the contact line between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement on January 24.

According to the statement, forces from the Syrian side of the contact line opened fired on an IDF patrol. Israeli soldiers returned fire. The IDF reported no casualties, but did not specify where the incident took place.

The IDF also revealed that it had deployed an additional battery of the Iron Dome air defense system in the area of Gush Dan.

These developments came just a few days after extensive Israeli airstrikes on Syrian military and alleged Iranian targets in the countryside of Damascus, which took place on January 20-21. On January 23, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated that Israel’s “policy is clear and it will not change” promising more actions against Iranian in Syria. With no doubt the Israeli-Iranian as well as Israeli-Syrian conflicts continue to escalate.

ISIS cells in the Homs-Deir Ezzor desert remain a threat to the Syrian Army. On January 22, ISIS fighters killed 4 Syrian soldiers and officers in the desert west to the US-controlled area of al-Tanf. The killed people were reportedly members of the Sixth Regiment of the army’s Border Guards. Last weekend, government forces eliminated 2 ISIS members in the al-Hublah area, also close to al-Tanf.

According to local sources, hundreds ISIS members still hide in the desert area, including the US-declared security zone near al-Tanf. This threat cannot be neutralized without a large-scale security operation in the area.

Government troops discovered a 600-meter long underground tunnel in the district of Darayya southwest of the capital of Damascus. 14 mines and 20 IEDs were found in the tunnel.

The Syrian Army shelled positions of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the towns of al-Janabirah and Tell Bazzam and positions of Jaysh al-Izza in the towns of al-Lataminah and Hissraiyah in the Idlib de-escalation zone. Pro-government sources claimed that several militants were killed in the shelling.

Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and Jaysh al-Izza are the main militant groups responsible for violations of the ceasefire regime in the area. However, limited strikes on their positions are far from being enough to neutralize them.

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After two days of intense pressure and a concerted campaign by the US and Canada to install Juan Guaidó as the new “self-declared” interim President of Venezuela, it is clear that they have failed in this objective. It is also clear that their illegal and undemocratic attempts to destabilize the country and overthrow the democratically elected President Nicolás Maduro will continue – with incessantly harmful consequences. Despite this, the people of Venezuela have risen once again to defend their country and democracy against hostile foreign intervention. It is essential that we support them in this fight.

The mainstream media is full of “Who is Juan Guaidó?” articles, which is fair given that the President of the National Assembly has never been an important leader in Venezuela until the US and Canada tried to make him one. Indeed, he was elected to the National Assembly in 2015 with only 26% of the votes. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have also already published details of the months of meetings and planning between U.S. officials and Guaidó before his January 23 self-declaration as interim President.

It was not accidental that the night before planned opposition protests and Guaido’s announcement on January 23 that US Vice President Mike Pence put out a video message encouraging Venezuelan’s to overthrow their government,

“We are with you. We stand with you, and we will stay with you until Democracy is restored and you reclaim your birthright of Libertad.”

The next day, the US and Canada recognized Juan Guaidó as President of Venezuela almost immediately following his self declaration at a rally. The day after that US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo frantically failed to get a meeting of the Organization of American States to recognize his new “President”. Speaking with the hypocrisy and aggression which comes only from the mouths of imperialist politicians, he also called for the overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro,

“His regime is morally bankrupt, it’s economically incompetent and it is profoundly corrupt.”

Pretty rich words coming from a leading official of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s administration, for which the terms “morally bankrupt”, “economically incompetent” and “profoundly corrupt” would be much better applied.

Following not far behind, Canada’s Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland quickly issued a statement recognizing Guaidó as President. Details also emerged of discussions between Freeland and Guaidó in the weeks leading up to his announcement.

We have already seen the Middle East raided and ravaged for the last twenty yeas by the “democracy” imposed by the U.S and Canada.  Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen are all still suffering its horrifying outcomes. We cannot now allow them to sink their bloody claws further into Latin-America!

One final undeniable truth: If Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro did not have the support of millions upon millions of Venezuelans, he would not still be in power. This support for the Bolivarian Revolution has been decisive time and time again in thwarting decades of coup attempts and foreign aggression. Living as we do in the “belly of the beast”, peace-loving people in the U.S. and Canada have a special responsibility to mobilize against these government’s illegal and undemocratic “regime change” programs. Especially in tense, decisive times such as these we need to speak loud and clear to emphasize that Trump, Pence, Pompeo, Trudeau and Freeland do not speak in our names. We demand the governments of the US and Canada immediately halt their aggression against Venezuela and accept the Venezuelan people’s democratic election of Nicolás Maduro as their President.

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Alison Bodine is Coordinator of Fire This Time Venezuela Solidarity Campaign.

Featured image is from France 24

The Exceptional Nation Asserts Its Exceptionalism

January 26th, 2019 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

Washington has chosen a president for Venezuela.  I wonder if Trump saw the black humor in doing to Maduro what the Democrats and presstitutes are doing to him.

Few Latin American governments have ever had a government that represents the majority indigenous people or a president who was not of Spanish descent.  Chavez in Venezuela perhaps was the longest lasting indigenous leader.  His successor Maduro is also indigenous.

Indigenous Latin American leaders are unacceptable to Washington, because they tend to be reformers who represent their country’s people instead of American business and financial interests.  Consequently, when a Latin electorate elects a leader who will put them first, Washington overthrows the leader.  This is the history of US/Latin American relations.

In the 21st century alone Washington has overthrown the elected presidents of Honduras, Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela and overturned the independence of Ecuador that had provided asylum protection for Julian Assange.  Washington’s coup with the Spanish elite against Chavez in Venezuela initially succeeded.  Chavez was in captivity, but before he could be murdered the Venezuelan people and military forced his release.  

Chavez, either because he lacked the power to move against the traitorous Spanish elite or because he chose to display magnanimity, did not hold those responsible who participated in the coup against his life and Venezuelan sovereignty.  Washington’s agents, the Spanish elite,  were not arrested and retained their control over the media and the economy. Venezuela has substantial oil revenues, but they do not reach the government’s budget or protect the value of the currency.  I do not know who controls the Venezuelan oil, but it appears the revenues are being stolen.  As it seems unlikely the Spanish elites would permit the indigenous people to control the oil business, possibly the oil revenues are what funds, along with Washington,  the anti-Maduro opposition. If the Maduro government is stealing the revenues, then the government is committing suicide.

Consequently, Washington and its Venezuelan vassals have had a free hand against Maduro. The whores who comprise the Western media have served Washington’s demonization of Maduro, an elected president that Washington calls a dictator.  In the election that re-elected Maduro, Washington instructed the traditional Venezuelan oligarchy to boycott the election.  That allowed Washington to claim that Maduro was not legitimately elected.

Of course, if there had been any chance of Washington and its Spanish vassals winning the election, they most certainly would not have boycotted it.  But the whores who constitute the American media have no integrity and thereby no problem in overlooking the fact that Venezuelans prefer Maduro to Washington’s Spanish vassals.

Washington using sanctions and economic punishments has been trying for years to destabilize Venezuela in order to bring down the government and install Washington’s agent as president. This policy has cruelly punished the Venezuelan people, but nevertheless they have clung to their indigenous leadership.  The other day Washington organized a military coup, but few participated and it was easily put down. 

Defeated on these fronts, Washington had Trump and Pence declare that Maduro was not the president of Venezuela and that Washington recognized its agent in the legislature as president.  Pence called for the newly annointed president to overthrow the Maduro government and threatened Maduro with invasion if he acted against Washington’s designated president.

Maduro’s response, a numbrer of years late, was to order all US diplomats out of Venezuela.  Washington replied that as Washington does not recognize Maduro’s government as legitimate, Maduro lacks the authority to throw them out. The US diplomats will remain and continue the conspiracy against Maduro.

Here we have a situation in which Washington, not the Venezuelan people, has chosen the president of Venezuela and refuses to accept the Venezuelan government’s break of diplomatic relations.

As I write, indications are that Washington’s vassals in Canada and Europe are also withdrawing recognition from the legally elected government of Venezuela, conferring recognition instead on the unelected agent of American business and financial interests selected by Washington.

What does this say about the West?  The West regards itself as the home of integrity, human rights, democracy, truth, and goodness.  But in fact the West is committed to supporting Washington’s suppression of Venezuelan self-determination.

What Washington is doing to Venezuela is a good lesson for the gullible Russian Atlanticist Integrationists and the gullible pro-western Chinese youth.  As China’s Global Times put it: “For a long time, the US has been eager to replace international law with its geopolitical interests and values so as to legalize its interference” and hegemony over the world. (See this)

Putin expressed his support for the legitimacy of Maduro’s government and said that the Venezuelan internal political crisis was “provoked from outside the country.” (See this)

Will Washington announce tomorrow that the US has decided that Alexei Navalny, not Vladimir Putin, is president of Russia?  Will Washington announce that the US no longer considers Xi Jinping to be China’s president, as his one party regime makes him illegitimate, and has replaced him with Tsai Lng-Wen?

How long will other powers tolerate Washington’s illegality and aggression?

How long will Americans tolerate the shame that Washington heaps upon their shoulders?

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The White Helmets, “volunteers” who reportedly “rescue Syrians from rubble.” Never in history has such a group been so feted by the elite, or received so many awards from institutions acting as extensions of US and UK hegemony.

A recent panel at the UN Security Council in New York revealed the shocking evidence of White Helmet involvement in organ trafficking in Syria. The lucrative trade of human body parts, bones, blood and organs is one of the most protected and hidden harvests of war.

The potential of White Helmet involvement in these nefarious activities raises questions that must be answered. Why were the shocking revelations met by a wall of silence from corporate media present at the panel in New York?

Not one media outlet pursued the subject, preferring to divert onto more comfortable issues that did not challenge the iconization of the White Helmets that has been the default position for virtually all state-aligned media since the establishment of the group in 2013 in Jordan and Turkey.

© Screenshot from the presentation of Maxim Grigoriev

Above is one of the slides from the presentation of Maxim Grigoriev, director of the Foundation for the Study of Democracy, given to the panel and audience at the UNSC in New York, December 2018.

In July 2017, I had interviewed residents of the East Aleppo districts that had been under occupation of the various extremist armed groups and the White Helmets. Salaheddin Azazi was a resident of the Jib Al Qubbeh area (also mentioned in Grigoriev’s presentation).

Azazi went through the details of the November 2016 Nusra Front attack on civilians trying to flee via the Syrian and Russian-established humanitarian corridors which had been spun by the White Helmets into a “regime” bombing raid that resulted in a civilian massacre. It was a complete misrepresentation of reality which was seized upon by corporate media with no fact checking. My full report on that incident and the White Helmet involvement in the massacre and subsequent theft of civilian belongings from the dead and dying is here.

“The bodies of the dead and dying were left unattended for ten hours in the street after the Nusra Front rocket attack that killed 15 civilians. The White Helmets did not help them, they stole their belongings,” Salaheddin Azazi, resident of Jib Al Qubbeh and eyewitness to events on 30.11.2016, said.

Azazi and another resident, Ammar Al Bakr (on the right, in above photo) described how the White Helmets were the “runners” for the organ traffickers.

“The White Helmet drivers would take the injured or dead bodies to the Turkish border. Many of the injured had light wounds, nothing that needed hospitalization but the bodies would come back without organs,” said Ammar Al Bakr.

“The bodies, dead and alive, would be inspected in the towns on the borders with Turkey before being taken by Turkish vehicles to the hospitals but if the injured civilian was a child or young and strong they would be taken directly to the hospital in Turkey because their organs had greater value,” Azazi told me.

According to both of these witnesses, the bodies were worth $2000 dead and $3000 if alive and this market was dominated by the White Helmet operatives who profited from cross-border organ trafficking.

Other civilians I met in July/August 2017 confirmed the threat of organ theft which hung over them during the almost five-year occupation of East Aleppo districts by the armed groups and their White Helmet auxiliaries. Families spoke to me of hiding their children if they were lightly injured to prevent the risk of them being abducted and taken to one of three hospitals – Omar Abdulaziz, Al Quds and Zarzour – that allegedly specialized in organ theft in East Aleppo, all of which had been taken over by militant gangs early on in the conflict. I was told that “foreign doctors” were operating in these three hospitals and were in charge of organ extraction. In post-liberation Eastern Ghouta, similar stories abounded.

In January 2019, I visited survivors from the Jaysh Al Islam controlled Tawbah Prison in Douma, Eastern Ghouta (known as Repentance Prison). I met with former prisoners in Adra Al Balad who spoke of the torture and violent abuse they had received after being kidnapped from Adra Al Ummaliya in 2013 by Jaysh Al Islam and Nusra Front. Familiar descriptions of the White Helmets were forthcoming:

“Regarding the White Helmets, they are terrorists and Takfiris […] they have nothing to do with Humanity […] when they used to see an injured civilian, they used to finish them off. If you come to “rescue” a man would you slaughter them? The White Helmets and the terrorists are one and the same, they are hand in hand,” said Hassan Al Mahmoud Al Othman, one of the survivors I spoke to about their experiences as captives of Jaysh Al Islam and Nusra Front during the six years that Eastern Ghouta was occupied.

The evidence against the White Helmets is mounting on a daily basis and will only increase as Idlib is liberated or a political resolution is achieved in the last Syrian province effectively controlled by Hayat Tahrir Al Sham (HTS) a rebrand of Al Qaeda.

Despite this, Western corporate media and NATO-aligned think tanks, policy influencers and NGOs are stubbornly sticking to the “volunteer hero” script. The Observer recently collaborated with Reader’s Digest to produce a slick homage to the White Helmets “rescued” from Syria by Israel in July 2018, entitled ‘The inside story of Canada’s dramatic rescue of the White Helmets out of Syria.’ It depicts the volunteer “bankers and barbers” as heroes and downtrodden saints fleeing for their lives. A far cry from the image portrayed of organ thieves, child abductors and bone peddlers by the Syrian people who lived under the White Helmet regime of sectarian violence and exploitative abuse.

A network of global carpetbaggers enabling the criminal obfuscation of White Helmet crimes against Humanity and denial of justice to the Syrian people whose accusations against the pseudo humanitarian group are systematically silenced and marginalized by the White Helmet acolytes.

The White Helmets have received an unprecedented number of awards and peace prizes, including the Right LivelihoodAward 2016 (RLA), the Atlantic Council Freedom Award 2016, Tipperary Peace Prize 2017, Hollywood Oscar 2017 (one win, one nomination in 2018) and they have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for three years running.

According to the RLA website, they “honour and support courageous people and organisations that have found practical solutions to the root causes of global problems”. There is nothing honourable or courageous about the White Helmet crimes against the Syrian people.

The White Helmets have enabled and participated in organ trafficking, one of the deepest root causes of our global problems but the RLA has made no move to retract their award from this group of criminals, thieves and terrorists. They have ignored petitions and statements from groups of peace activists and academics. Instead, in 2018, they published a counter petition signed by 29 former RLA Laureates calling upon all parties to “stop targeting the White Helmets […] in Syria”.

While blaming Russia for the smear campaign against the White Helmets, the petition informs us that “(White Helmet) work is guided by the inherent dignity of human life.” The RLA claims that the evidence against the White Helmets is “unsubstantiated and does not stand up to scrutiny”. One cannot help but wonder; when did they scrutinize the evidence or listen to the huge number of Syrian civilian testimonies that detail the crimes committed by the White Helmets that are most definitely not guided by the inherent dignity of human life?

What all these US Coalition-aligned organizations fail to understand is that Russian media and UN missions do indeed give a voice to the Syrians who are ignored by media in the West. Russia is not the originator of the claims against the White Helmets.

While these organizations, claiming to support peace in Syria and an end to hostility, continue protecting the White Helmets who are responsible for so much of the misery endured by the Syrian people, they forfeit any credibility and become nothing more than a corrupt extension of US supremacism in the region.

Child exploitation, abuse, human trafficking and organ trafficking – which often goes hand in hand with the former – should never be tacitly condoned or covered up and must always be investigated or we have fallen into a moral vacuum from which there is no escape.

I invite all Western media outlets and “peace” promoting institutions to retract their White Helmet accolades and laurels, and to “scrutinize” the evidence before they too are implicated in one of the most heinous crimes ever committed against victims of war.

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This article was originally published on RT News.

Vanessa Beeley is an independent investigative journalist and photographer. She is associate editor at 21st Century Wire. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image: A member of the White Helmets, Idlib Province © Anas Alkharboutli

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The song “Bella ciao” became famous worldwide through the “Resistenca”, the Italian resistance movement against fascism during the Second World War. It’s about a partisan in northern Italy who flees to the mountains and says goodbye to his lover (Oh Beauty, Ciao!): “And if I die as a partisan, (…) bury me up there on the mountain.” It was translated into many languages as a song of the labour movement. In left circles it belongs to the best known battle songs. Isn’t it time for us today – inspired by the protest song “Bella ciao” – to oppose the power-hungry and violent authorities that legitimize worldwide wars and establish a New World Order with more decisive resistance and with civil disobedience or other non-violent actions “to fall into the wheel’s spokes” (Bonhoeffer)?

The occidental decadence

What changes in our society and culture can be interpreted and criticized as decay, decline or depravity in order to legitimize a more decisive resistance against the authorities? Again and again we have to mention the problem of violence, which has not been solved by humanity. The excessive brutality makes its mark on our age too. Striving for power in economy and politics drives us again and again into catastrophes. Wars are no longer justifiable, they have become obsolete!

“If a nuclear war supported by the USA is declared an ‘instrument of peace’ and is tacitly tolerated and accepted by the international institutions and highest authorities, including the United Nations, there is no turning back: human society has been irreversibly forced onto the path to self-destruction. Now there is a need for a mass movement of people that will powerfully criticize the legitimacy of wars and the New World Order – a worldwide popular movement that declares war as a crime.” This is what Michel Chossudovsky, the renowned economist as well as founder and director of the “Centre for Research on Globalisation (CRG)”in Montreal, called for as early as 2012 in his book“Towards a World War III Scenario“. (1)

Two more analyses make you sit up and take notice: Alexander Demandt, Professor of Ancient History at the Freie Universität in Berlin, wrote on 20.01.2016 in the “Frankfurter Allgemeinen (FAZ)”, a longer, very readable article on the topic “The Fall of the Roman Empire. The End of the Old Order”:

“The Roman Empire was friendly to foreigners. But immigrants could only be integrated in manageable numbers. The power structure shifted. The empire remained alien to the foreigners – yet they took the power ower.”Following the article, an FAZ journalist asked the author what we can learn from the fall of Rome. He replied: “That we must pursue a far-sighted policy with a sense of proportion and pay attention to the long-term consequences of immigration. The tension between rich and poor peoples is ancient. The Europeans’ fear of the poor peoples of the South is also old. For a culture to end, however, it takes some time – in the case of Rome about 500 years.”(2)

Finally, the FAZ-journalist wanted to know what advice would Demandt as a historian give the German Chancellor (in January 2016). The answer:

“We must limit the influx. Basically everyone knows that, too. To do this, you have to accept hardship. Word has to get  around first that it is not worth coming to Germany. We must not give up our sovereignty. Mrs Merkel must not act for the benefit of foreign governments and at the expense of the German people. Her oath of office provides for the opposite. A moral sense of arrogance resonates here. One must stand up for one’s own people – and not run away.”(3)

The second analysis comes from the US economist Dennis J. Snower and is completely new. Snower is regarded as one of the best known and most renowned experts on the world economy. In addition to his professorship in economics at the University of Kiel, he heads the Kiel Institute for World Economy. In a “WELT”-interview on 3.01.2019 entitled “There will be major social conflicts in Germany”, he recklessly settles accounts with politics that fails to recognize people’s needs. (4)

In an introductory statement, the editor of Welt asks a question about the fears of many Germans:

“The year 2018 was marked by conflicts and uncertainty. Trump, Brexit, the AfD-driven federal government; most recently the yellow vests on the streets in France. Many people have the feeling that our Western societies are falling apart. Is this fear justified?

Snower replies:

“The world is in a bad state and nothing needs to be glossed over. It could come to this because the politics and all of us do not understand the problems we see all over the world and are fighting them wrong.

Snower predicts:

“I expect that there will be great social conflicts because of this; greater than the Federal Republic has seen so far.”

He further believes that the increasing mechanisation of society and the threat of job loss through automation would put Germany to the test. One problem also lies in the attempt to solve all social problems economically:

“Those affected are mainly concerned with completely different things, and that is why it can only go wrong if politics tries to settle dissatisfaction only with financial benefits.”

A further reason for the drifting apart of society is also a lack of community. Due to the increasing isolation of society through mechanisation, the strengthening of the community is all the more important. (5) (S. a. NRhZ No. 689 of 02.01.2019: “Common sense as a guiding idea”)

Today we are facing the collapse of our environment and an omnicide.

Many other decadent developments in our society and culture should also be mentioned, such as the screaming injustice in the world, the destruction of Mother Earth, the radioactive contamination of the earth or the deliberate depopulation.

“The ruling elite,” writes the independent US geoscientist and international expert on radiation and public health, Leuren Moret, on her website www.leurenmoret.info, “has been conducting secret nuclear wars for the purpose of depopulation since the Second World War. They do this under the guise of atmospheric tests for the purpose of ‘national security’, nuclear power ‘so cheap that it can hardly be measured’ and ‘kinetic energy projectiles’ with depleted uranium.” (6)

Rosalie Bertell, US doctor, biometrician and environmental activist, who received the Alternative Nobel Prize for her book on the dangers of radioactive contamination of the Earth in 1986, speaks of an omnicide:

“The concept of species erasure aims at a relatively rapid, deliberate, radiation-induced end of history, culture, science, biological reproduction and memory. It is the ultimate human rejection of the gift of life, an act that requires a new word to describe it: Omnicide.”(7)

We are talking here about the destruction of Mother Earth by uranium weapons. The levels of new warfare cannot be ignored. Bertell summarizes them as plasma weapons, weather wars and geo-engineering.

In an interview on “Radioactivity and the extinction of life – Are we the last generations?” Rosalie Bertell calls for our voice to be raised:

“What we are doing right now is to reduce the number of viable generations on our planet by introducing errors into DNA or the gene pool. (…) We have reduced the survivability of living systems on the planet, whether our planet recovers from these interventions or not. We do not have an alien source that can provide us with new DNA. (…) We are responsible for what we leave to the next generation. (…) It seems that our generation does not care about the future. That is not our heritage. Our heritage is to leave our children something better than we have received. But that doesn’t seem to bother us. (…) We will surely have to raise our voices, (…).”(8)

The World Health Organization (WHO) confirms the forecasts of the two scientists. According to these forecasts, the incidence of cancer is rising drastically worldwide. The WHO expects that by 2030 more than 21 million people develop tumors every year. Deaths from cancer will also rise from 8.2 million to 13 million. At World Cancer Day 2017, she reported:

The burden of cancer in the WHO European Region continues to rise, placing an enormous physical, emotional and financial burden on those affected, their families and communities as well as the health systems. Despite efforts in the areas of prevention, early detection and treatment, cancer mortalityincreased between 2000 and 2015 in all parts of the European Region by 6.6 per cent.”(9)

Time for a more decisive resistance against the authorities!

As a reminder, the oath of the German Federal President, the Federal Chancellor and the Federal Ministers according to Article 56 (and Article 64) of the Basic Law:

“I swear that I will devote my strength to the welfare of the German people, increase their benefit, turn harm away from them, uphold and defend the Basic Law and the laws of the Federation, fulfil my duties conscientiously and exercise justice against everyone.”(10)

It is pointless to enumerate when and how politicians have not been and will not be able to live up to this oath. Each of us cannot give just one example. More than 100 years ago, the great Russian writer Leo N. Tolstoy put his assessment also on record about those in power – admittedly at a different time. (May every sincere politician gladly dissociate himself from it.):

“One could still justify the subordination of an entire nation to a few people if the rulers were the best people; but that is not the case, has never been the case, and never can be. Often rule the worst, the least important, the cruelest, the most immoral, and especially the most dishonest people. And that this is so is no coincidence.”(11)

Since cheap speeches or excellent analyses have, in my opinion, little or no effect because our politicians are not interested in people’s opinions and only pursue their own interests and those of their “whisperers”. Therefore, I agree with the words of the Swiss poet and politician Gottfried Keller (1819-1890), who had the opinion:

“No government and no battalions are able to protect justice and freedom, where the citizen is not able to step outside the door himself and see what there is.”(12)

One way to offer more decisive resistance to the authorities is through civil disobedience. But the highest authority is warning against this. The German political scientist and sociologist Theodor Ebert wrote in an article for the “FrankfurterRundschau” on the subject of “Civil Disobedience“:

“While civil courage ranks at the top among the democratic virtues, the willingness to disobey civil law is not only suspected among public prosecutors of disturbing legal peace and undermining the foundations of liberal democracy. (…)

When Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference protested in Birmingham in 1964 against the discrimination of blacks by the violation of the rules by  the white Sheriff Connor, in  his opinion disturbed the legal peace, and King was imprisoned for it, he legitimized his behavior towards critical colleagues (…), in the meanwhile famous ‘Letter from a Birmingham City Jail’: He had resorted to civil disobedience in order to dramatize his ‘concern in such a way that it can no longer be ignored‘. This is now considered the classic justification for civil disobedience.” (13)

The intrepid theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who fought against National Socialism and was executed in 1945, demanded already in April 1933 publicly of a Christian “not only to connect the victims under the wheel, but to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself”.(14) And the world-renowned left-wing intellectual and emeritus professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT, Avram Noam Chomsky, titled his new book: “Fight or Fall! Why we must rise up against the masters of mankind!“

Finally, I would like to repeat Chossudovsky’s request from his book “Towards a World War III Scenario“:

“Now a mass movement of people is necessary, which with all its power criticizes the legitimacy of wars and the New World Order – a  worldwide popular movement which declares war a crime.”

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Dr. Rudolf Hänsel is an educationalist and psychologist.

Notes

(1) Chossudovsky, M. (2012). Das Szenario eines Dritten Weltkriegs. Die geheimen Pläne des Pentagon zur Errichtung einer Neuen Weltordnung. Rottenburg, S. 126

(2) https://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/staat-und-recht/untergang-des-…-das-ende-der-alten-ordnung-14024912-p3html

(3) A.a.O.

(4) https:/www.welt.de/wirtschaft/plus186481972/Dennis-Snower-Es-wird-grosse-soziale-Konflikte-geben.html

(5) A.a.O.

(6) NRhZ Nr. 680 vom 31.10.2018: “Das Danaergeschenk des ‚barmherzigen Engels‘“

(7) NRhZ Nr. 633 vom 18.10.2017: „Trägheit des Herzens“

(8) A.a.O.

(9) A.a.O.

(10) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidesformel

(11) Urban, P. (Hrsg.) (1983). Leon N. Tolstoi. Rede gegen den Krieg. Frankfurt am Main, S. 47 

(12) https://www.gutzitiert.de/zitat_autor_gottfried_keller_716.html

(13) „Frankfurter Rundschau“ vom 18.01.1984

(14) https://sciencev1.orf.at/koertner/142961.html

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Mobilize and Defend Venezuela!

By Andre Vltchek, January 25, 2019

In the past, the US tried to overthrow Chavez, it attempted to starve Venezuela, to make its medical system collapse, then to assassinate Maduro. It produced a ‘deficit’ of food, even toilet paper. It ordered its lapdogs in Latin America to antagonize the Bolivarian revolution.

US Regime Change in Venezuela: The Documented Evidence

By Tony Cartalucci, January 25, 2019

According to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – the impetus for Washington’s sudden interest in Venezuela is the suffering of the Venezuelan people.

Regime Change and Speakers of the Legislature: Nancy Pelosi vs. Juan Guaido, Self-Proclaimed President of Venezuela

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky, January 25, 2019

Trump’s endorsement of Venezuela’s speaker of the National Assembly Juan Guaido (which repeals the presidential succession procedures under the constitution) is tantamount to stating that Nancy Pelosi could legitimately from one day to the next replace Trump as interim president of the US. A pretty grim prospect for the Donald.

Venezuela – An Appeal to Russia, China and All Unaligned Countries for Support of Sovereign Venezuela

By Peter Koenig, January 25, 2019

Ongoing unrest in the streets of Caracas and major Venezuelan cities, all inspired and fueled on by the United States, and also the OAS (Organization of American States), the Club of Lima (except for Mexico), its European puppet allies, is confusing and dividing the people and has already killed at least 16.

Venezuela: Preplanned Provocation by Washington,”The Indirect Adaptive Approach” to Regime Change

By Andrew Korybko, January 24, 2019

The Hybrid War on Venezuela is reaching its climax following the preplanned and coordinated provocation of the US and its “Lima Group” allies to recognize Juan Guaidó as the country’s “interim president” after he swore himself into office on the day that the Bolivarian Republic celebrated the 1958 ouster of a former strongman.

The Coup in Venezuela Must be Resisted

By Craig Murray, January 24, 2019

Venezuela has elections. Juan Guaido has never even been a Presidential candidate. Despite massive CIA opposition funding and interference over years as Big Oil tries to regain control of the World’s largest oil reserves, Nicolas Maduro was democratically re-elected in 2018 as President of Venezuela.

Mike Pence Calls for Coup d’Etat in Venezuela

By Stephen Lendman, January 24, 2019

Since Hugo Chavez established Bolivarian social democracy in Venezuela, a vibrant system, a model for other nations, the US plotted to replace it with fascist tyranny.

Regime Change in Venezuela: Trump, Almagro and Guaidó – The Troika of Insanity

By Nino Pagliccia, January 24, 2019

As the government supporters march in some areas of Caracas, opposition groups are not only marching, they are actually committing the most outrageous, albeit expected, action: they observe as Juan Guaidó, recently declared president of the in-contempt National Assembly, declares himself interim president of Venezuela!

Washington Has Appointed a President for Venezuela

By Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, January 24, 2019

Washington routinely meddles but now has gone far beyond mere meddling. Washington has this day (January 23, 2019) declared that the elected president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, is no longer the Venezuelan president. Washington, not the Venezulan people, has decided who is Venezuela’s president.

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Washington’s reckless push for regime change in Venezuela, where the US actively supports a person who “ignores all laws,” might set a dangerous precedent, former president of Ecuador, Rafael Correa told RT.

A situation, in which a man “declares himself an ‘interim’ president” and immediately gets recognition from 11 Latin American countries and the US, is “unseen,” Correa said, commenting on the latest developments in the crisis-ridden Venezuela and referring to the opposition head Juan Guaido.

Guaido, who is currently the President of the National Assembly, swore an oath and declared himself interim president on Wednesday as thousands took to the streets calling for Maduro to leave office. Minutes later, US President Donald Trump announced his decision to recognize the man as Venezuela’s interim leader.

Elsewhere in the Americas, Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Chile, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru all followed suit within two hours of the US move.

The countries, which supported the development, called for a coup against Venezuela’s elected president, Nicolas Maduro, even before Guaido made his move, Correa said, adding that it was nothing but a push for a regime change. He also said that the opposition head “ignored the constriction, laws, election … procedures” in his self-manifestation as “nothing of this sort is in the constitution.”

However, those pushing for the coup were apparently not very much concerned about the legal formalities but were instead focused on their own interests, according to Correa, who said the development set a dangerous precedent for such an approach to be extended on any other country, whose “government the US does not like,” regardless of whether it is democratic or not.

“One can talk about a new Operation Condor now,” Correa said, referring to the infamous campaign of state terror and purges of alleged Communists conducted by US-backed South American dictatorships beginning in 1975.

“This is an impressive blow,” the ex-president said, referring to the development in Venezuela. “They avoid resorting to the military [action], assassinations or kidnappings for now because they do not need it. One cannot rule out that they could still resort to such methods” in the future, Correa warned.

Venezuela has been hit by a prolonged period of severe economic crisis. Its hardships are further exacerbated by pressure from Washington that seeks to depose the current government led by Maduro.

The Venezuelan president’s opponents blame his socialist government for the economic instability. Maduro says the nation’s woes are a result of US sanctions against the oil-rich state as well as deliberate attempts to sow discord among its people from abroad.

Meanwhile, pressure on Venezuela is still mounting. On Thursday, London and Paris followed Washington’s suit and declared that they do not see Maduro as a legitimate leader.

Venezuela’s elected leader, however, also received some international support. Russia’s President Vladimir Putin called Maduro and expressed his support to Venezuela’s legitimate government while condemning “external interference” of the US and its allies over “gross” violation of international law.

China, Mexico, Cuba as well as a NATO member, Turkey, are among the nations which have also rejected the attempted coup.

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Sixty Years of the Cuban Revolution

January 25th, 2019 by Prof Susan Babbitt

We are urged to resist Trump’s lies: the lies of US capitalism. But there are lies about those lies that are not resisted. They are not recognized.

You see this in an intriguing new book about US interrogation during the Korean War.[i] The “untold story” it tells is not untold. It is about “a complex eco-system of violence, intimacy and bureaucracy” aimed at solidifying US global power. We learn the self-proclaimed guardian of the world lied about its methods, claiming “our traditional lack of imperialistic ambition”.

The empire denied being an empire. The war in June 1950, Monica Kim argues, was about violation of the 38th parallel; by 1952 it was violation of human subjects. The US made the “stunning” claim that a simple “yes” or “no”, recorded by an interrogator, was the “free individual choice” of Koreans and Chinese prisoners. US policy of voluntary repatriation was psychological warfare.

It is not an “untold story”, not even, or especially the subject-violating part. Only the details change. US subject fashioning was known more than a century before the Korean War. A group of non-radical priests in Cuba began a remarkable debate (1836-8), influencing neighboring countries, about precisely this question.[ii]  They knew imperialism erases people. It erases them to themselves.

It deadens moral imagination so there is no “free choice” to be human. You can’t meaningfully choose what you can’t imagine. This is the part of the “new liberal paradigm” Kim misses: Truth is useless if we can’t imagine, or don’t want to accept, what that truth explains. If, in daily life, I accept the liberal lie about “free individual choice”, I won’t believe what contradicts it, no matter the evidence.

It is how understanding works and it is well-known in North American philosophy of science. The independistas in Cuba, two centuries ago, knew this. Moreover, they wrote about it: a lot. They exposed the “stunning” lie long ago. They refused to participate in it and their ideas survived. They still do.

Raúl Castro said on January 1, 2019, the sixtieth anniversary of the Cuban Revolution:

“Only thus can we understand the feat of having withstood the tough years of the Special Period, when we were left alone in the middle of the West, 90 miles from the United States. Then, nobody in the world would have bet a penny on the survival of the Revolution.”

It’s an understatement. Not only would no one in 1990 have bet on Cuba’s survival, no one in 2019 believes it happened (in the North, at least). If they did, they’d ask how it happened and they’d investigate the “decolonizing subject” that explains it.

The “decolonizing subject”, Kim writes, claimed a voice. Sure, and it is ignored. It is not in English. Trendy jargon like “decolonizing subject” describes the “new liberal paradigm” without understanding what that paradigm does. It lies about freedom, true. But it lies about lies. They are not refuted by truth.

Lies of the empire, sustained by power, “fashioning subjects” through fear, are only fully grasped by rejecting them in daily life, by refusing to participate.

We can learn from Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin. The protagonists, Otto and Anna Quangel, leave postcards around Berlin, criticizing Hitler. The postcards are useless. They achieve nothing, materially. But Otto and Anna die “without moaning and whimpering”.

That’s huge. They suffer, of course. But their examples sow seeds for a future (better) Germany.  Or so Fallada suggests. Otto says to his Nazi tormentors, “at least I stayed decent. I didn’t participate”. And the judge at the trial “could see recognition [of Otto’s dignity] in the faces of the spectators in the courtroom”. He wanted at all costs “to strip the accused of that recognition”.

He can’t do it. Otto laughs in the courtroom and Anna’s eyes are “as serene and merry as [Otto] had ever seen them”. The empire lies about Venezuela as it lies about Cuba, and it will continue to do so. But the truth will survive and will motivate because it will be lived by some. And it will be recognized.

It will be lived for the same reason Otto and Anna keep handing out their postcards. As Otto says to Anna:

“Who wants to die. Everyone wants to live, everyone – Even the most miserable worm is screaming for life! I want to live too. … [But I want] to die properly, without moaning and whimpering. That would be disgusting to me…”

It is not the lies that matter most. It is whether they are lived. This was known once in the US. During the anti-war movement of the 70s, there was a slogan: There are no innocents. It meant a comfortable life, promoting values sustaining the empire’s lies, was collusion in the slaughter such lies justified.

It is a hard truth for the “new liberal paradigm”.  Kim says the empire used the “power of ideas”. The independistas knew it was the nature of ideas they had to discuss. They must be lived. It will eventually be called an “untold story” by some academic in North America.  But it has been told and still is being told in Venezuela and elsewhere. It is because it matters, as Otto noticed, that “at least I stayed decent”.

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Notes

[i] Monica Kim The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History(Princeton University Press ,Feb 5 2019). See forthcoming review at https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/

[ii] https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/09/30/cubas-quiet-wealth-why-it-is-needed/

The U.S. Department of Defense produces more hazardous waste than the five biggest U.S.-based chemical companies combined and is the biggest contributor to global pollution in the world.

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This week, the Department of Defense released a report to Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Jim Inhofe (R-OK) detailing the threat climate change poses to U.S. national security. Not only does the report fail to mention U.S. bases that have been destroyed or evacuated recently due to natural disasters, it completely omits the outsized role the Pentagon plays in furthering climate change, as the number one polluter in the world.

Inhofe is perhaps most famous for throwing a snowball on the Senate floor in an attempt to disprove climate change, which might be the most spectacular instance of a Republican official invoking cold or snowy weather to delegitimize science to date.

But the meme itself runs contrary to science. The warming of the atmosphere causes the temperature of surface water to get hotter, thereby releasing more moisture in the air, thereby creating more snowfall.

The reports were delivered to Inhofe and President Donald Trump, who also denies the existence of climate change. Two months ago, Trump said that he didn’t believe a study on climate change involving 13 federal agencies.

Congress had compelled the Pentagon to conduct the assessment on managing “effects of a changing climate” in the National Defense Authorization Act of 2018.

Report ignores billions in damage

The report studied 79 military complexes, finding that most are, or will be, at risk of becoming severely vulnerable to climate change manifest as flood, wildfires, thawing permafrost, desertification, drought and more.

The report does mention two wildfires in Colorado in March 2018 that hampered training exercises, and discusses flood at the Joint Base Langley-Eustis in Virginia. There, the sea level has risen 14 inches since 1930 and flooding has become “more frequent and severe.”

But the report doesn’t rank the 10 most vulnerable military bases, as it was ordered to do, and doesn’t include any Marine Corps bases. In September, the Corps’ biggest base on the East Coast, Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, was damaged to the tune of $3.6 billion by Hurricane Florence. As a result of the damage, 84,000 gallons of sewage was released on the base.

The following month, Hurricane Michael ripped through Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, with up to 17 F-22 fighter jets damaged or destroyed. Those fighter jets come at a price of around $339 million apiece, or $5.7 billion for the lot of them. Nonetheless, the appendix to the Pentagon’s report did not mention Tyndall as one of the Air Forces’ most vulnerable sites.

In November, the Naval Base Ventura County in California was evacuated as wildfires approached it, but the base was not listed as an installation where wildfires pose a “current” threat — nor were any other bases, for that matter.

“While this climate report acknowledges that nearly all the military installations it studied are vulnerable to major climate change impacts,” House Armed Services Committee Chair Adam Smith (D-WA) said in a statement on Friday, “it fails to even minimally discuss a mitigation plan to address the vulnerabilities.”

Jack Reed (D-RI), the ranking Democrat on the Committee, accused the Pentagon of “treating climate change as a back burner issue.”

The report says that the Department of Defense is updating infrastructure “to better adapt to climate impacts,” citing a separate assessment that “provided a database with regionalized sea level scenarios… for 1,774 [Department of Defense] sites worldwide.”

The globe as Pentagon’s trashcan

As MintPress News previously reported, the Department of Defense produces more hazardous waste than the five biggest U.S.-based chemical companies combined and is the biggest contributor to global pollution in the world.

Hundreds of U.S. military bases are listed as “superfund sites” by the Environmental Protection Agency. Of the roughly 1,200 Superfund sites in the U.S., nearly 900 (close to 75 percent) are either abandoned military sites or related to the military. The 900 figure does not include current military installations. Camp Lejeune is one such base.

The U.S. has polluted the earth immeasurably through its testing of nuclear bombs. On the Marshall Islands alone, the U.S. dropped more than 60 nukes in the 1940’s and 1950’s. In Iraq, U.S. policies have created severe desertification of 90 percent of the land, turning a country that used to export large quantities of food into a country that imports 80 percent of its food.

The U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium and Agent Orange, among other chemicals, has also contributed to climate change and environmental destruction. Its 19 aircraft carriers and ships that function as such also consume huge amounts of fuel — as do the jets, tanks, and other machinery at the Department of Defense’s 1,774 military sites.

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Mobilize and Defend Venezuela!

January 25th, 2019 by Andre Vltchek

It is new and it is not new, but it is tremendously wicked and deadly – the latest type of coup the US invented and is now applying against Venezuela.

Of course, coups and attempted coups are what could be described as the ‘West’s specialties’, and have been utilized by the U.S., U.K. and other imperialist countries against innumerable unfortunate nations on all continents. In Latin America, basically each and every country has suffered from them, from the Dominican Republic to Chile and Argentina; in Asia, from Indonesia to Thailand, and in the Middle East from Iran to Egypt and Syria. Whenever people of some country dared to vote in the socialists, Communists, anti-colonialists or simply some decent bunch of people who were determined to serve their own population, the West corrupted and deployed local elites and military, overthrew elected or revolutionary governments and installed brutal servile regimes. Thousands died, sometimes millions, but the Empire couldn’t care less; as long as it got its way.

There has been a clear pattern to how the West constructed its terror acts against almost all truly freedom-loving nations.

But what the West is now doing to Venezuela is something else, and totally extreme; the hostile acts against President Maduro and his comrades are stripped of all the scruples and cosmetic “refinements” of the past. They supposed to demonstrate in the cruelest terms who the real ruler of the world is, and who is ‘in charge’. This is ‘Western democracy at its best’!

In the past, the US tried to overthrow Chavez, it attempted to starve Venezuela, to make its medical system collapse, then to assassinate Maduro. It produced a ‘deficit’ of food, even toilet paper. It ordered its lapdogs in Latin America to antagonize the Bolivarian revolution.

Now, in the latest development, the regime in Washington has simply hand-picked its favorite traitor inside the socialist republic of Venezuela – a treasonous cadre named Juan Guaido, (who served, briefly, as President of the National Assembly of Venezuela), “recognizing him” as the “interim President of the country”.

Of course, before Guaido first declared himself, pompously, President of Venezuela, he was almost immediately put into his place by the Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which disavowed him as the chief of the National Assembly. So, let us call him former chief.

But the Western mass media propaganda campaign kicked into top gear, and overnight became utterly unscrupulous. As a result, it is now becoming almost impossible to read any information about the Supreme Court ruling, unless one goes to non-Western sources.

So, let’s go ‘there’. As reported by Iranian Tasnim, on January 22, 2019: 

“Venezuela’s Supreme Court head Maikel Moreno announced on Monday that the judges had disavowed Juan Guaido as the chief of the opposition-controlled National Assembly.”

And the RT, just one day earlier:

“Venezuela’s Supreme Court has declared all acts of the country’s National Assembly null and void, days after the opposition-held assembly declared President Nicolas Maduro’s election illegitimate.”

Also, the Venezuelan foreign minister, Jorge Arreaza, snapped at Guaido on 21st January, 2019:

“You see this man, who nobody knows in Venezuela—you ask in the streets, “Who is Juan Guaidó?” and nobody knows him—but he’s being pushed to say that he is the new president, by the U.S.”

And he did say that! On the 23rdof January 2019, in front of his mob of supporters in Caracas.

And then, a day later, President Trump ‘recognized him’ as the country’s interim president. Canada did the same. The same did France, now a second-rate but increasingly rejuvenated imperialist and neo-colonialist power. Followed by that U.S. puppet – the Organization of American States (OAS), with such fascist countries on board, like Brazil, and Colombia now leading the pack.

Today, the world is clearly divided, as China, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Syria, South Africa, Bolivia, Cuba, Mexico, Uruguay and many others are firmly on the side of the legitimate revolutionary government of President Maduro.

Confrontation is inevitable.

Venezuela ordered all US diplomats to leave and it cut off all diplomatic ties with Washington. US refused to make its embassy staff depart from Caracas, declaring that the Venezuelan government is ‘illegitimate’.

This amounts to a declaration of war. The US refuses to recognize the sovereignty of Venezuela. It reserves the right to tell the Venezuelan people who their realpresident is! It only recognizes its own, supreme control over the hemisphere and the Planet, showing spite for international law.

It is childish, arrogant, outrageous, and surreal. But it is really happening. And unless it is stopped, right there, in Caracas, this new form of ‘spreading coups’, and enforcing global dictatorship, may spread to all other parts of the world.

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Although there are many ‘new elements’ at play, the situation, to a great extent, resembles the ‘Syrian scenario’, as was conveyed to TASS, on January 24, 2019, by Venezuela’s Ambassador to Russia Carlos Rafael Faria Tortosa:

“The Venezuelan authorities know that the US is trying to stage a Syrian scenario with “government in exile” in Caracas… After US Vice President Michael Pence called for overthrowing our government, our president decided to sever diplomatic relations with the US authorities and asked US diplomats to leave Caracas in the next 72 hours. This is an adequate response which our brave president provided to flagrant interference… No country can allow any other country to state their opinions about the internal affairs of the state, especially when it comes to calls for overthrowing [the authorities].”

“We know what the next steps will be. The US will now have a justification [for their actions] that there are two governments in the country, like they did in our fraternal Syria with President Bashar Assad and its people. They created a government in exile, which led to great losses, to casualties, to demolition of the country’s infrastructure.”

Will Caracas ask Moscow directly for help, as Syria did years ago, while fighting for its survival? It is not certain, yet, although this possibility certainly exists. Venezuela is counting on increasing support from Russia, Iran, China, Cuba and other socialist or independent countries.

For Venezuela, the only way to survive, is to cut off all its dependency on the West, immediately. Washington is threatening Caracas with further sanctions and even with an oil embargo.

There is no reason to panic. But Maduro’s government has to rapidly and fully realign itself. There are many countries outside the NATO realm which are willing to buy Venezuelan oil, and/or fairly invest in its infrastructure and industry. Russia, Iran, China and Turkey are the most important ones, but there are many others.

There has to be new strategy on how to alleviate the pain of the ordinary Venezuelans. This, too, has to come from ‘outside the Western sphere of control’, even outside Latin America; a continent known for its brutal European-descendent elites, consistent lack of solidarity, courage, and acceptance of the West’s rule (the greatest modern-day hero of South America, Hugo Chavez, died attempting to build an united, proud, socialist Latin America, just to be stabbed in his back and spat at by many of the servile Latin American nations. Cuba was fully abandoned after the destruction of the Soviet Union, and had to be saved by China).

The country has to mobilize; it has to fight. Fight for its survival. With all its allies united, ready to defend Venezuela, the same as it has been happening in Syria.

Venezuela suffers and struggles for humanity, not just for itself. With the name of Chavez and socialism on its lips.

Russia is standing by its ally, Venezuela. On 24 January, 2019, Sputnik reported:

Russia warns the United States against military interference in Venezuela’s affairs, it would be a disaster, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Thursday:

“As we see how the situation in Venezuela develops, we note the willingness of a certain group of countries, including the United States, to use different platforms such as the Organization of American States, to increase pressure on our ally Venezuela under different pretexts… But we have always supported and will support friendly Venezuela that is our strategic partner.”

From the country devastated by a similar destabilization campaign as the one that is taking place in Venezuela, the Syrian official press agency SANA carried a message of support for the legitimate Venezuelan government:

“The Syrian Arab Republic condemns in strongest terms going to extremes by the US and its blatant interference in the affairs of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela which constitutes a flagrant violation of all international norms and laws and a brazen attack against the Venezuelan sovereignty,” a source at the Foreign and Expatriates Ministry said on Thursday.

The source added that the destructive policies adopted by the US in different parts of the world and its disregard of the international legitimacy represents the main reason behind the tensions and the state of instability in our world…

The Syrian Arab Republic affirms its categorical rejection of the blatant US interferences, and it renews full solidarity with the Venezuelan leadership and people in preserving the sovereignty of the country and foiling the hostile schemes of the US administration…”

In the past, countries accepted the Western terror unleashed against them as something inevitable. But now, the situation is changing. Russia, Cuba and Syria, Iran and China, and now Venezuela, are refusing to surrender, or even to “negotiate with the terrorists”.

Aleppo, which I described as “the Middle Eastern Stalingrad”, stood tall, fought, resisted and defeated vicious enemies. Now Caracas, the Latin American Leningrad, is under siege, starving, but determined to fight against foreign invasion and treasonous cadres.

All over the world, people have to mobilize and fight, by all means, against fascism and for Venezuela!

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Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are 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.

Featured image is from Prensa Presidencial

Canada’s Diversity Imperialism

January 25th, 2019 by Keith Jones

Canada’s trade union-backed, ostensibly “progressive” Liberal government is playing a key role in the regime-change coup that Washington has launched against Venezuela’s elected president, Nicolás Maduro.

Canada quickly seconded US President Donald Trump’s announcement Wednesday recognizing Juan Guaidó, Venezuela’s self-proclaimed “interim president,” as the country’s head of state.

The cabinet Trudeau named after winning office in October 2015 was hailed as an exemplar of diversity and inclusiveness. With an equal number of women and men, newspaper columnists lauded the “gender-balanced cabinet.” It boasted an indigenous Justice Minister, an Indian-born Sikh defence minister, a former Somali refugee as immigration minister, a gay Treasury Board president, and a quadriplegic Veteran Affairs Minister.

Particular acclimations were given for the selection of a female minister of foreign affairs, Chrystia Freeland. In an article in September on Canada’s “feminist foreign policy,” Foreign Policy magazine wrote that last year Canada hosted “the first-ever meeting of female foreign ministers, as part of a package of commitments it made to prioritize women’s issues under its G-7 presidency this year.”

The meeting, Foreign Policy wrote, was “unprecedented in its display of female power on the world stage.”

“It is important—and historic—that we have a prime minister and a government proud to proclaim themselves as feminists,” declared Freeland. “Women’s rights are human rights.”

In reality, as underscored by Canada’s role in aiding and abetting the US-orchestrated regime-change operation in Venezuela, the only “identity” that matters is that all the members of the Trudeau cabinet are defenders of imperialism.

Trudeau has been enthusiastically promoted by the New York Times and Guardian as a poster boy of contemporary liberalism. That is a liberalism that has renounced all social reform, is pro-austerity and pro-war, and which privileges issues of racial, ethnic and gender identity, as a means of rallying the support of sections of the affluent middle class.

Trudeau and Freeland are recycling and amplifying the foul propaganda emanating from the CIA and the likes of Brazil’s new ultra-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, that Guaidó—a representative of the country’s traditional US-aligned oligarchy—is the incarnation of the democratic aspirations of the Venezuelan people.

Ottawa’s role, however, goes far beyond trying to provide a smokescreen for yet another “made in USA” coup and obscuring the inexorable connection between Washington’s current intrigues in Venezuela and the succession of invasions, occupations and coups it has orchestrated in Latin America since 1898.

Ottawa, according to news reports, will soon host a meeting of the Lima Group, a coalition of US allies in the Americas, to plot the next steps in the “regime-change” operation against Maduro and the bourgeois nationalist regime he heads.

Since its establishment in August 2017, Canada has acted as Washington’s principal agent inside the Lima Group. Last September, Canada was conspicuous in leading opposition to a Lima Group “pledge” to oppose any foreign military intervention in Venezuela—i.e. a US invasion.

Wednesday’s US-fomented coup has pushed the impoverished South American country to the brink of civil war and, with Trump demonstratively declaring “all options on the table,” brought the US to the brink of a military assault on Venezuela.

There is every reason to believe that Canada will participate in any US military action against Venezuela, reprising, albeit almost certainly on a larger and bloodier scale, its 2004 role in assisting the US in overthrowing Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Washington has spearheaded the resurgence of imperialism, waging a never-ending series of wars since 1991 in an increasingly desperate attempt to offset the decline in its global economic position. But all the imperialist and aspiring great powers, big and small, are rearming and reviving war as a vital instrument of state policy.

A major belligerent and, from an economic and strategic vantage point, beneficiary of the two imperialist world wars of the last century, Canadian imperialism is no exception. Long gone are the days when Canada’s ruling elite, with a view to politically and ideologically harnessing the working class to its rule, promoted the myth that Canada and its military have a special “peacekeeping” vocation.

Since 1991, Canada, under Liberal and Conservative governments alike, has played a leading role in one US-led war after another, including the first Gulf War, the 1999 NATO war on Yugoslavia, the Afghan War, the 2011 regime-change war in Libya, and the ongoing US war in the Middle East.

As in Venezuela today, Canada’s government and military have, in the course of these wars and interventions, repeatedly aligned with extreme right-wing and outright fascist forces. Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) personnel involved in the bombing of Libya described themselves as “al Qaeda’s air force.” Similarly, in the Ukraine in 2014, Canada helped orchestrate, in concert with Washington, a fascist-spearheaded coup against the country’s elected president.

Canada’s longstanding and rapidly expanding military-security alliance with Washington and Wall Street enjoys all but unanimous support with the Canadian ruling class, as the best means to assert its own predatory imperialist interests and aims on the world stage.

Canada’s banks and resource companies are important players in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Canadian ruling elite shares Washington’s determination to roll back Chinese and Russian economic and geopolitical influence in the Americas.

Under Trudeau and his purported “feminist foreign policy,” Canada is playing an even more rapacious and reactionary role in world affairs than under the neoconservative and onetime Iraq war enthusiast, Stephen Harper.

Declaring that Canada must prepare for the wars of the 21st Century and play a larger role in sustaining a US-led world order, the Trudeau government announced in June 2016 plans to hike military spending by more than 70 percent to almost $33 billion by 2026.

Already Canada is playing a leading role in US imperialism’s three main military-strategic offensives, any one of which could rapidly spiral into a war between nuclear-armed powers: in the Middle East, against Russia and against China.

Canada is leading one of NATO’s four new “forward deployed” battalion-sized battlegroups on Russia’s borders; routinely deploys warplanes and battleships to patrol the Black Sea, Baltic States and Eastern Europe; and is training Ukrainian Army and National Guard personnel to, in Trudeau’s words, “liberate” Eastern Ukraine.

And long before Ottawa ordered, at Washington’s behest, the December 1 arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on trumped-up charges, Canada was closely aligned with Washington in its escalating confrontation with China. Building on a secret 2013 US-Canadian military agreement on coordinating operations in the Asia-Pacific, the CAF has greatly expanded deployments in Asia. CAF head Jonathan Vance now routinely describes the South China Sea and Malacca Straits, key chokepoints in US war planning against China, as of vital strategic importance to Canada.

There are vital lessons to be learned from Trudeau’s role in Trump’s coup attempt in Venezuela, applicable in every country all over the world. Replacing one set of representatives of the financial oligarchy with another, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual preference, will not lead to a more “humane” outcome. The struggle against imperialism and social inequality must base itself on the social force capable of opposing capitalism and imperialist war: the working class.

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With the end of the unipolar moment, which saw Washington dominate international relations, the richest and most powerful Eurasian countries are beginning to organize themselves into alliance structures and agreements that aim to facilitate trade, development and cooperation.

At the height of the US unipolar moment, Bill Clinton was leading a country in full economic recovery and the strategists at the Pentagon were drawing up plans to shape the world in their own image and likeness. The undeclared goal was regime change in all countries with unapproved political systems, which would allow for the proliferation of US-made “democracy” to the four corners of the earth. Clearly Eurasian countries like Russia, India, China and Iran were on top of the to-do list, as were countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

The bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia was the final step in the assault on the Russian Federation following the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact. Yeltsin represented the means by which Western high finance decided to suck all Russia’s wealth, privatizing companies and plundering strategic resources.

China, on the other hand, saw a rebirth as a result of American and European manufacturing companies relocating to the country to take advantage of the cheap labor it offered. India, historically close to the USSR, and Iran, historically averse to Washington, were struggling to find a new balance in a world dominated by Washington.

Tehran was clearly in an open conflict with the United States because of the 1979 Islamic revolution that liberated the country from Western submission under the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. India understood the new reality, laying the foundations for a close cooperation with Washington. Previously, the use of jihadism in Afghanistan, through the coordination between Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States, had severely undermined relations between India and the United States, remembering that New Delhi was an important ally of Moscow during the Cold War.

Following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the commencement of the unipolar era, India, Russia, China and Iran started down their paths of historical rebirth, though starting from very different positions and following different paths. India understood that Washington had immense economic and military power at its disposal. Despite the early embraces between Clinton and Indian prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, relations between New Delhi and Washington reached unexpected heights during the Bush era. A series of factors helped to weld the bond. There was, firstly, the reality of India’s great economic growth. Secondly, India offered the opportunity of counterbalancing and containing China, a classic geopolitical scenario.

During this delicate unipolar period, there were two highly significant events for Russia and China that represented the beginning of the end for Washington’s plans to dominate the planet. First of all, Putin became president of the Russian Federation on December 31, 1999. Secondly, Beijing was accepted into the World Trade Organization (WTO). Today’s Chinese economic power took flight thanks to the Western industrial companies relocating their manufacturing to China so as to see their dividends triplicate and costs more than halve. It was a winning model for the capitalist, and a loser for the Western factory worker, as we would come to see 20 years later. The strategic thinking of the newly elected Putin was geopolitically visionary and had at its base a complete revamp of Russia’s military doctrine.

China and Russia both initially sought to follow the Indian path of cooperation and development with Washington. Moscow attempted a frank dialogue with Washington and NATO, but the decision by the US in 2002 to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) marked the beginning of the end of the Western dream of integrating the Russian Federation into NATO. For Beijing, the path was more downhill, thanks to a vicious circle whereby the West relocated to China to increase profits, which were then invested into the US stock market, multiplying the gains several times. It seemed like the Americans were onto something until, 20 years later, the entire middle and working classes found themselves being reduced to penury.

In this period following September 11, 2001, Washington’s focus shifted rapidly away from confronting rival powers to the so called “fight” against terrorism. It was an expedient way of occupying tactically important countries in strategically important regions of the planet. In Eurasia, US forces settled in Afghanistan on the pretext of fighting al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In the Middle East, they occupy Iraq for the second time and have made it an operational base from which to destabilize the rest of the region in the decades since.

While India and China mainly pursued peaceful growth as a means of economically empowering the Asian region, Russia and Iran early understood that Washington’s attention would eventually fall on them. Moscow was still considered the deadly enemy by the neoconservative Cold War warriors, while the Islamic revolution of 1979 was neither forgotten nor forgiven. In the decade following 9/11, the foundations for the creation of a multipolar order were laid, generating in the process the huge transitional chaos we are currently experiencing.

India and China continued on their path to becoming economic giants, even as there is a latent but constant rivalry, while Iran and Russia continued on their path of military rejuvenation in order to ensure a deterrent sufficient to discourage any attacks by Israel or the US respectively.

The breaking point for this delicate geopolitical balance came in the form of the “Arab Spring” of 2011. While India and China continued their economic growth, and Russia and Iran grew to become regional powers that were difficult to push around, the US continued its unipolar rampage, bombing Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq after having earlier bombed Yugoslavia, as the Pentagon devising light-footprint operations in the Middle East with the help of the Saudis, Israelis, Brits and French, who aided and armed local jihadis to wreak havoc. First Tunisia, then Egypt, and finally Libya. More dead, more bombs, more chaos. The warning signs were apparent to all regional powers, from China and Russia to India and Iran. Even if the synergies were still not in place, it was clear to everyone what had to be done. US destabilization around the world had to be contained, with particular focus on Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Slowly, and not without problems, these four countries began a military, economic, political and diplomatic cooperation that, almost a decade later, allowed for the ending of the US unipolar moment and the creation of a multipolar reality with different centers of power.

The first confirmation of this new phase in international relations, favoured by historical ties, was the increasingly multifaceted cooperation between India and Russia. Another factor was China and Russia being drawn to the Middle East and North Africa as a result of the Obama administration’s actions in the Middle East with its Arab Springs, bombing of Libya and destabilization of Syria. They feared that prolonged chaos in the region would eventually have a negative effect on their own economies and social stability.

The final straw was the coup d’état in Ukraine, as well as the escalation of provocations in the South China Sea following the launch by the US of its so-called “Pivot to Asia”. Russia and China were thus forced into a situation neither had thought impossible for the previous 40 years: the joining of hands to change the world order by removing Washington from its superpower dais. Initially there were amazing economic agreements that left the Western planners stumped. Then came the military synergies, and finally the diplomatic ones, expressed by coordinated voting in the United Nations Security Council. From 2014 onwards, Russia and China signed important agreements that laid the foundations for a long-running Eurasian duopoly.

Obama’s legacy did not stop, with more than 100,000 jihadists unleashed on the country, financed by US and her allies. This led Moscow to intervene in Syria to protect its borders and obviate the jihadists’ eventual advance on the Caucasus, historically Russia’s soft underbelly. This move was hailed by the Pentagon as a new “Vietnam” for Russia. But these calculations were completely wrong, and Moscow, in addition to saving Syria and frustrating the plans of Washington and her confederates, greatly strengthened its relationship with Iran (not always a simple relationship, especially during the Soviet period), elevating it to the high level of regional cooperation.

Obama’s legacy was to inadvertently create a strategic triangle involving Iran, China and Russia and their development of high-level projects and programs for the region and beyond. It represents a disaster for US foreign policy as well as the unquestionable end of the unipolar dream.

Jumping forward a few years, we find Trump in the driving seat of the United States, repeating just one mantra: America First. From the Indian point of view, this has further aggravated the relations between the two countries, with sanctions and duties placed on India for what was a Western decision in the first place to shift manufacturing to low-wage India in order to further fatten the paychecks of the CEOs of Euro-American companies.

Modi’s India is forced to significantly increase its ties to Iran to guarantee its strategic autonomy in terms of energy supply, without forgetting the geographic proximity of the two countries. In this context, Russia and Iran’s victory against terrorism in the Middle East pacifies the region and stabilizes Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, thereby allowing for the development of such new projects as the mega Silk Road 2.0 investment on which Beijing places considerable importance.

We could go on in this vein, detailing how even China and India have overcome their historical mistrust, well aware that divide and rule only benefits those who are on the other side of the ocean, certainly not two countries experiencing great economic growth with a common border spanning thousands of miles. The meetings between Modi and Xi Jinping, as well as those between Putin and Xi Jinping or Putin with Modi, show how the intention of these three leaders is to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for their citizens, and this cannot be separated from a stronger union together with an abandonment of disputes and differences.

The synergies in recent years have shifted from the military and diplomatic arenas to the economic one, especially thanks to Donald Trump and his aggressive policy of wielding the dollar like a club with which to strike political opponents. One last step that these countries need to take is that of de-dollarization, which plays an important role in how the the US is able to exercise economic influence. Even if the US dollar were to remain central for several years, the process of de-dollarization is irreversible.

Right now Iran plays a vital role in how countries like India, Russia and China are able to respond asymmetrically to the US. Russia uses military power in Syria, China seeks economic integration in the Silk Road 2.0, and India bypasses the dollar by selling oil in exchange for goods or other currency.

India, China and Russia use the Middle East as a stepping stone to advance energy, economic and military integration, pushing out the plans of the neocons in the region, thereby indirectly sending a signal to Israel and Saudi Arabia. On the other hand, conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan are occasions for peacemaking, advancing the integration of dozens of countries by incorporating them into a major project that includes Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa instead of the US and her proxy states.

Soon there will be a breaking point, not so much militarily (as the nuclear MAD doctrine is still valid) but rather economically. Of course the spark will come from changing the denomination in which oil is sold, namely the US dollar. This process will still take time, but it is an indispensable condition for Iran becoming a regional hegemon. China is increasingly clashing with Washington; Russia is increasingly influential in OPEC; and India may finally decide to embrace the Eurasian revolution by forming an impenetrable strategic square against Washington, which will shift the balance of global power to the East after more than 500 years of domination by the West.

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Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from SCF

The Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Cuba condemns and energetically rejects the attempt to impose a coup d’etat, a puppet government at the service of the United States, in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and expresses its unwavering solidarity with the government of Constitutional President Nicolás Maduro Moros.

The true objectives of actions against Venezuela are to control the vast resources of this sister nation and destroy the value of its example, as an emancipatory process defending the dignity and independence of Our America.

As President Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez said:

“The sovereignty of our peoples is expressed today in one’s attitude toward Venezuela. To support the legitimate right of the sister nation to define its own destiny is to defend the dignity of all.”

Other coup attempts should not be forgotten, such as the military coup of 2002 and the 2003 oil lockout; the aggressive U.S. Executive Order describing Venezuela as “an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security and foreign policy” of the superpower; unilateral coercive measures; the call for a military coup against the constitutional government of Venezuela; the President of the United States’ threat to use “a possible military option” and the August 4 assassination attempt against President Maduro.

The acts of a group of countries and the shameful role of the OAS constitute a new, desperate attempt to implement an unsuccessful policy of regime change, which has not been imposed due to the unwavering resistance of the Venezuelan people and their determination to defend national sovereignty.

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The President (Speaker) of the Venezuelan National Assembly and leader of the majority party (Democratic Unity Roundtable)  Juan Guaido has been endorsed as (self-proclaimed) interim president of Venezuela by President Trump in the name of democracy:

Today, I [Donald Trump] am officially recognizing the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the Interim President of Venezuela.  In its role as the only legitimate branch of government duly elected by the Venezuelan people, the National Assembly invoked the country’s constitution to declare Nicolas Maduro illegitimate, and the office of the presidency therefore vacant. (Trump Statement, White House, January 23, 2019)

Trump’s decision –coupled with threats of military intervention and the freeze of Venezuelan assets in the US — confirms the criminal nature of US foreign policy not to mention the complicity of the Western media, which has upheld the legitimacy of Trump’s decision.

A dangerous precedent. Don’t like a president of a sovereign country, replace him/her by “appointing” the Speaker of the House as interim president.

But there is something else which sofar has not been addressed:

The position of speaker of the National Assembly held by Juan Guaido (from a constitutional standpoint) is  in some regards comparable to that of the Speaker of the US House of Representatives and the leader of the majority party which is currently held by Democrat Nancy Pelosi.

Nancy Pelosi is second in line to the US presidential line of succession, after Vice President Mike Pence.(25th Amendment of Constitution and 3 USC 19, a section of the U.S. Code, established as part of the Presidential Succession Act of 1947).

In contrast, Juan Guaido, president of Venezuela’s National assembly (with regard to presidential succession) would assume the office of the presidency of Venezuela during a short interim period, pending the holding of new presidential elections within thirty days, as stated in Article 233 of the Venezuelan constitution.

By endorsing a procedure which proclaims Juan Guaido as president of Venezuela, Trump has opened up a Pandora’s box, which could potentially backlash on his own presidency:

Trump’s endorsement of Venezuela’s speaker of the National Assembly Juan Guaido  is tantamount to stating that Nancy Pelosi could legitimately from one day to the next replace Trump as interim president of the US. A pretty grim prospect for the Donald.

Juan Guaido is to Venezuela what Nancy Pelosi is  to the United States. The opposition to president Maduro controls the National Assembly. The opposition to president Trump controls the House of Representatives.

Theater of the Absurd? Imagine for a moment what would happen if a US politician or the president of a foreign country were to demand that Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House of Representatives and majority leader of the House were to be confirmed as interim President of the US, to the detriment of President Trump. Not an impossibility?

Sofar the US Congress including Nancy Pelosi have refrained from taking a position on Trump’s endorsement of Juan Guaido as interim president.

Author’s note: a correction applying to the Constitutional procedure in Venezuela, January 26, 2019

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Saudi Arabia’s Nuclear and Ballistic Missile Program

January 25th, 2019 by Nauman Sadiq

The Washington Post broke the story [1] on Wednesday, January 23, that satellite images suggested Saudi Arabia had constructed its first-known ballistic missile factory. Paul Sonne, reporting for The Washington Post, notes: “If operational, the suspected factory at a missile base in al-Watah, southwest of Riyadh, would allow Saudi Arabia to manufacture its own ballistic missiles.”

The report adds:

“The ballistic missile manufacturing complex — which satellite images suggest broke ground in 2013 when King Salman was defense minister — highlights the nation’s intention to make its own advanced missiles after years of seeking to purchase them abroad.”

How the Saudis obtained the technological expertise necessary to build the facility is unclear, according to the report, though one potential supplier could be China, which has sold ballistic missiles to Saudi Arabia in the past and has helped supply ballistic missile production capabilities to other nations, particularly to Pakistan, whose military has forged deep institutional ties with the Saudi royal family since the 1980s.

Regarding Saudi Arabia’s fervid desire to acquire nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities to match Iran’s military superiority in the Middle East region, the Washington Post report is not the only instance of its kind. David Sanger and William Broad reported in The New York Times [2] in November that before Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was implicated in the killing of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, American intelligence agencies were trying to solve a separate mystery: was the prince laying the groundwork for building an atomic bomb?

Screengrab from The New York Times

According to the New York Times report, the Saudi heir apparent had been overseeing negotiations with the US Energy Department to get Washington to sell designs for nuclear power plants to the kingdom. The deal was worth upward of $80 billion, depending on how many plants Saudi Arabia decided to build.

But there was a hitch: Saudi Arabia insisted on producing its own nuclear fuel. Such fuel can be used for benign or military purposes: if uranium is enriched to 4 percent purity, it can fuel a power plant; at 90 percent, it can be used for a bomb. Saudi Arabia has vast uranium reserves and there are currently five nuclear research centers operating in the kingdom.

The report further noted that the Crown Prince set off alarms when he declared in a CBS News interview in March last year,

“Saudi Arabia does not want to acquire any nuclear bomb, but without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

Regarding Saudi Arabia’s clandestine nuclear activities, in November 2013, BBC’s defense correspondent, Mark Urban, published a report [3] that Pakistan’s military had made a secret deal with Saudi Arabia that in the event of Iran developing a nuclear weapon, Pakistan would provide ready-made nuclear warheads along with delivery systems to Saudi Arabia.

Similarly, in 2004, it emerged during the investigation of Pakistan’s top nuclear scientist, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, dubbed as “the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program,” that he had sold centrifuge designs to Iran, Libya and North Korea.

Additionally, in recent years, Pakistan’s defense production industry, with Chinese assistance, has emerged as one of the most sophisticated military-industrial complex in the region. Not only does it provide state-of-the-art conventional weapons to the oil-rich Gulf states, but according to a May 2014 AFP report [4], Pakistan-made weapons were used in large quantities in Sri Lanka’s Northern Offensive of 2008-09 against the Tamil Tiger rebels.

Moreover, in May last year, Pakistan’s former army chief, General Raheel Sharif, was appointed to lead a 40-member military alliance of Muslim nations dubbed as “The Muslim NATO.” Although the ostensible purpose of the alliance is to combat terrorism, in fact the alliance of Sunni Muslim nations was cobbled together by Saudi Arabia as a counterweight to Iran’s meddling in the Arab World, which Saudi Arabia regards as its own sphere of influence.

Furthermore, it’s worth noting that Pakistan’s military and Saudi Arabia have forged very deep and institutionalized ties. Thousands of Pakistani retired and serving army officers work on deputations in the Gulf Arab States. And during the 1980s, when Saudi Arabia lacked an efficient intelligence set-up, Pakistan’s Inter-services Intelligence (ISI) virtually played the role of Saudi Arabia’s foreign intelligence service.

Notwithstanding, the Trump administration recently announced the most stringent set of sanctions against Iran to appease Benjamin Netanyahu. Donald Trump has repeatedly said during the last two years that the Iran nuclear deal signed by the Obama administration in 2015 was an “unfair deal” that gave concessions to Iran without giving anything in return to the US.

Unfortunately, there is a grain of truth in Trump’s statements because the Obama administration signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in July 2015 under pressure, as Washington had bungled in its Middle East policy and it wanted Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to get a face-saving.

In order to understand how the Obama administration bungled in Syria and Iraq, we should bear the background of Washington’s Middle East policy during the recent years in mind. The eight-year-long conflict in Syria that gave birth to scores of militant groups, including the Islamic State, and after the conflict spilled across the border into neighboring Iraq in early 2014 was directly responsible for the spate of Islamic State-inspired terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Since the beginning of the Syrian conflict in August 2011 to June 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq, an informal pact existed between the Western powers, their regional Sunni allies and jihadists of the Middle East against the Shi’a Iranian axis. In accordance with the pact, militants were trained and armed in the training camps located in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan to battle the Syrian government.

This arrangement of an informal pact between the Western powers and the jihadists of the Middle East against the Iranian axis worked well up to August 2014, when the Obama Administration made a volte-face on its previous regime change policy in Syria and began conducting air strikes against one group of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, after the latter overstepped its mandate in Syria and overran Mosul and Anbar in Iraq from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011.

After this reversal of policy in Syria by the Western powers and the subsequent Russian military intervention on the side of the Syrian government in September 2015, the momentum of jihadists’ expansion in Syria and Iraq stalled, and they felt that their Western patrons had committed a treachery against the Sunni jihadists’ cause, that’s why they were infuriated and rose up in arms to exact revenge for this betrayal.

If we look at the chain of events, the timing of the spate of terror attacks against the West was critical: the Islamic State overran Mosul in June 2014, the Obama Administration began conducting air strikes against the Islamic State’s targets in Iraq and Syria in August 2014, and after a lull of almost a decade since the Madrid and London bombings in 2004 and 2005, respectively, the first such incident of terrorism occurred on the Western soil at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in January 2015, and then the Islamic State carried out the audacious November 2015 Paris attacks, the March 2016 Brussels bombings, the June 2016 truck-ramming incident in Nice, and three horrific terror attacks took place in the United Kingdom within a span of less than three months in 2017, and after that the Islamic State carried out the Barcelona attack in August 2017, and then another truck-ramming atrocity occurred in Lower Manhattan in October 2017 that was also claimed by the Islamic State.

Keeping this background of the quagmire created by the Obama administration in Syria and Iraq in mind, it becomes amply clear that the Obama administration desperately needed Iran’s cooperation in Syria and Iraq to salvage its botched policy of training and arming jihadists to topple the government in Syria that backfired and gave birth to the Islamic State that carried out some of the most audacious terror attacks in Europe from 2015 to 2017.

Thus, Washington signed JCPOA in July 2015 that gave some concessions to Iran, and in return, the then hardliner Prime Minister of Iraq Nouri al-Maliki was forced out of power in September 2014 with Iran’s tacit approval and the moderate former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi was appointed in his stead who gave permission to the US Air Force and ground troops to assist the Iraqi Armed Forces and allied militias to beat back the Islamic State from Mosul and Anbar.

The Trump administration, however, is not hampered by the legacy of Obama administration and since the objective of defeating the Islamic State has already been achieved and Donald Trump gave indications of withdrawing American troops from Syria as early as April last year, though the long-awaited decision was finally announced on December 19, therefore Washington felt safe to annul the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018 and the crippling “third-party sanctions” have once again been put in place on Iran at Benjamin Netanyahu’s behest.

Although the European Union is resisting the Trump administration’s pressure to cancel the Iran nuclear deal for now, the neocolonial world order is led by the United States; Europe will find no choice but to toe Washington’s line sooner or later.

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

Notes

[1] Can Saudi Arabia produce ballistic missiles?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/can-saudi-arabia-produce-ballistic-missiles-satellite-imagery-raises-suspicions/2019/01/23/49e46d8c-1852-11e9-a804-c35766b9f234_story.html

[2] Saudis Want a U.S. Nuclear Deal. Can They Be Trusted Not to Build a Bomb?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/22/world/middleeast/saudi-arabia-nuclear.html 

[3] Saudi nuclear weapons ‘on order’ from Pakistan: BBC’s defense correspondent, Mark Urban.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24823846

[4] Pakistan-made arms were used against Tamils in Sri Lanka:

http://newsweekpakistan.com/the-war-that-wasnt-live/

Every once in a while, one of those stories comes along that makes the mainstream corporate media look like a bunch of middle-school kids filming their “news show” on an iPhone with their neck ties crooked. Recently, one of those stories splashed down into the middle of our cultural zeitgeist like a small meteor landing in the middle of an elite dinner party.

It made our mass media pundits look like hardened fools. But they have kept spouting their nonsense anyway, hoping no one notices the soup dripping down their faces.

But to talk about that, I have to talk about this: Last month we finally got to see the Senate report spelling out the Russian meddling in our last election. And it was a bombshell. It rocked the heart of our country. It shredded the inflamed mucousy core of our palpitating democracy.

As Dan Cohen reported for the Grayzone Project, the report said that

“…everything from the Green Party’s Jill Stein to Instagram to Pokemon Go to the African American population had been used and confused by the deceptive Facebook pages of a private Russian troll farm called the Internet Research Agency.”

That’s right. Russia even used Pokémon Go to pulverize the previously pristine 2016 election. That’s ever so frightening, since Pokémon Go is CIA-backed. (I guess it’s high time we just accept that the CIA has been taken over by those ruthless vodka drinkers.)

Back to the point—we learned from the report last month that the Russian Internet Research Agency manipulated every one of us with Facebook ads. If you don’t mind though, the Senate and the corporate media (and anybody else who knows the secret oligarchy handshake) would really prefer you just ignore the fact that Facebook clearly stated: “…56% [of the Russian ads] were after the election” and “…roughly 25% of the ads were never shown to anyone.”

But like an overweight man dressed like Wolverine at a Comic-Con, our brave congressmen and -women are not about to be dissuaded by reality. After the reports came out, Sen. Mark Warner tweeted,

“Incredible. These bombshell reports demonstrate just how far Russia went to exploit the fault lines of our society and divide Americans, in an attempt to undermine and manipulate our democracy.”

Just after posting that, Warner patriotically pissed his red, white and blue Underoos.

So who are these amazing nonpartisan unbiased sleuths who put together this legitimate and nonpartisan unbiased Senate report? The New York Times found out they are a group called New Knowledge (which sounds like a terrible boy band). New Knowledge was founded by two veterans of the Obama administration, Jonathon Morgan and Ryan Fox. …So, I guess we’re, um, doing away with the “nonpartisan unbiased” thing.

Well, in that case—I say go hard or go home. I want MORE bias!

The Grayzone Project pointed out that besides working for Obama and the State Department,

“… Morgan also developed technology for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the arm of the Department of Defense created for basic, applied technological research, and futuristic war toys.”

All right, all right, not bad. But I know what you’re thinking. “Lee, that might be a great bias appetizer, but we want the full bias entree!”

OK, how about this?

Ryan Fox is a 15-year veteran of the NSA and was a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) military unit. JSOC is notorious for its spree of atrocities across the Middle East. …

Hell yeah! You can feel that bias in my toes, can’t ya? But, the truth is, we’re still only at a 45 percent bias rating. I say we get it up to at least 65 percent. Back to Dan Cohen:

The report … was overseen by Renee DiResta, a former Wall Street trader and tech specialist who was recruited by Obama’s State Department to devise strategies for combating online ISIS propaganda.

So now we’ve got former Wall Street, former State Department, former Obama White House, former NSA, former DARPA, and former JSOC writing this completely legitimate completely factual report for the Senate about the powerful Russian impact of Facebook ads that no one ever saw.

I love it. This is like a report written by a hungry virus telling you not to wash your hands.

But hold on, it’s not only this Senate report that showed nefarious Russian meddling. It’s also all of those evil Russian bots. How do we know there are evil Russian bots? Well, most outlets quote Hamilton 68, which tracked Russian influence operations on Twitter.

Outlets like MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Mother Jones and Tiger Beat. They’re all quoting Hamilton 68 or people who are referencing work done by Hamilton 68. Well, who the hell made Hamilton 68, and why does it sound like a ’90s alt-rock band that opened for Blink 182?

Oh, what do you know! Our old friend “[Jonathon] Morgan is also one the developers of Hamilton 68. … Funded by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy—which is itself backed by NATO and USAID.”

Well OK, that sounds pretty serious. Clearly these people have found a special device that locates Russian bots on the interwebs, and it most likely resembles the thing Egon used in the “Ghostbusters” movies. So, shouldn’t we just congratulate Morgan on helping to develop the holy grail for spotting Russian bots and then call it a day? Well, there’s one itsy bitsy problem:

 … one of Hamilton 68’s founders, Clint Watts, admitted that the Twitter accounts it follows may actually be real people who are not Russian at all.

Real people? Who aren’t Russian? Call me crazy, but what I personally look for in a Russian bot is something that is at least Russian. And if not that, then a bot. And if neither, then you don’t have much of a goddamn Russian bot, do ya? Claiming these are Russian bots is like saying, “I just met the Queen of England, except she may have been a small Icelandic goat.”

Then, a few weeks ago The New York Times revealed that New Knowledge carried out an elaborate false flag operation to hurt the election chances of Judge Roy Moore in Alabama. You might recall that Roy Moore is an accused pedophile and a proven dipshit. And I don’t believe he should be elected to pick the bedbugs out of Rush Limbaugh’s armpits. But that doesn’t mean I think these New Knowledge charlatans shouldn’t be revealed for what they are.

So here’s how New Knowledge’s game worked, according to the Times. New Knowledge created a fake Facebook page in order to get conservatives in Alabama to support patio supply salesman Mac Watson instead of Roy Moore.

New Knowledge then tried to make everyone think that Moore’s campaign was working with the Kremlin by showing that he had thousands of Russian bots following his Twitter account. Many in the mainstream media ran with this outlandish idea. Mother Jones’s well-researched (sarcasm) article on the topic was titled “Russian Propagandists Are Pushing for Roy Moore to Win!” In the article they sourced (Can you guess?) Hamilton 68.

So to rehash: Hamilton 68, using their “Ghostbusters” device (patent pending), found that Russian bots (which may not be Russian and may not be bots and may not be Russian bots) were simply in love with alleged pedophiliac Alabama judges. So much so, that a majority of their tweets (meaning at least 51 percent) were in support of Roy Moore.

But as The New York Times has revealed, New Knowledge’s own internal report said,

“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet.”

After these revelations came out a few weeks ago, Facebook suspended some of the accounts. So now The New York Times found itself in a quandary. They must have been thinking,

“We need to report on this huge development in which the core authors of the Senate report on Russian meddling and the co-founder of Hamilton 68 were involved in lying, bullshitting, and false-flagging in order to help the Democratic party. But that completely undermines the Russiagate hysteria we have anchored our ship to. What do we do?”

Well, kids, take notes. This is how you do it. This is how you have your yellowcake uranium story and eat it too.

The New York Times headline was “Facebook Closes 5 Accounts Tied to Russia-Like Tactics in Alabama Senate Race”

Russia-like tactics?! This is literally an article about how Russia was NOT involved in the Alabama senate race false flag. In fact, it’s an article on how the guy who helped write the Senate report on the so-called Russian tactics is also one of the top people at New Knowledge, which either created or pushed pretend Russian bots to support Roy Moore so that they could leak to the press, “Russian bots are supporting Roy Moore!”

Sometimes the ability of the legacy media to believe (or at least regurgitate) their own bullshit is truly breathtaking.

To sum up this fuck de cluster:

1) The Senate report is laughable.

2) Any journalist who quotes Hamilton 68 should have their face sewn to the carpet.

3) If you want ridiculous pathetic reporting on nonsense that seduces us all to the edge of nuclear annihilation, turn to your mainstream corporate media.

4) If you want someone to actually put together the truth about these issues, you’ll have to turn to alternative outlets like Truthdig or the Grayzone Project.

5) Bill Murray and the Ghostbusters were ahead of their time.

*

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Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight With Lee Camp” on RT America. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

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On January 7, 2019, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police trespassed on the land of the Wet’suwet’en people and arrested 14 land defenders in heavily militarized fashion, following the orders of fossil fuel behemoth TransCanada.

The militarized police were enforcing an injunction from the British Columbia Supreme Court to clear a road on which members of two clans of the Wet’suwet’en Nation — the Gilseyhu (Unist’ot’en) and Gitdumden — were peacefully occupying their land. This land is unceded, as the Canadian Supreme Court recognized in the landmark 1997 Delamuukgw decision.

TransCanada was granted an interim injunction to start pre-construction on the Coastal GasLink fracked gas pipeline, even though the company does not have the free, prior, and informed consent of the Wet’suwet’en people to build it. Five hereditary chiefs whose traditional territory is on the proposed route oppose the project.

All five hereditary chiefs of Wet’suwet’en Nation stand in opposition to the project. Photo credit: Kathleen Martens/APTN.

As RAN said in a statement condemning the police raid,

“This trampling on Indigenous rights in favor of private oil and gas interests and the criminalization of land defenders is not only unacceptable, it’s unlawful, and cannot take place on Indigenous unceded lands.”

The banks supporting the Coastal GasLink pipeline are contributing to this clear abuse of Indigenous rights, even though many of them have stated policies acknowledging the right to free, prior, and informed consent of Indigenous communities.

Who’s banking the pipeline?

Coastal GasLink is a project of TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., the same subsidiary of TransCanada behind the controversial Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The 420-mile Coastal GasLink pipeline would carry fracked gas from northeast British Columbia to LNG Canada, a massive proposed liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal that exemplifies the sector’s climate and human rights impacts.

Coastal GasLink is estimated to cost about US$4.5 billion, so how is TransCanada funding the project? Currently, the pipeline has no project-specific finance. Instead, it is being supported by the banks that have extended general corporate loans to TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. (including two loans signed as recently as December 2018), underwritten bonds issued by the company, and facilitated the sale of company assets.

Here are the key banks behind the project, in order of importance:

1) JPMorgan Chase

JPMorgan Chase is the #1 backer of TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., and therefore of the Coastal GasLink pipeline.

JPMorgan Chase is the lead agent on the majority of the company’s loans. TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. currently has four loans worth a total of about $9.8 billion. Two of those, totaling $5.5 billion, were signed in December 2018 and increased the subsidiary’s available credit by two thirds. (We recently wrote up the details of those transactions.) JPMorgan Chase was the lead agent — the bank responsible for arranging the deal and coordinating between TransCanada and its lenders — on both of those new loans. That makes it the lead agent on more than half of TransCanada Pipeline Ltd.’s current credit. It’s also a lender to the company’s other two lines of credit.

JPMorgan Chase is one of two key bond underwriters. TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. issued nine bonds, totaling $9.3 billion, in 2018. JPMorgan Chase was a lead manager — one of two banks directing the bond sale — on eight of those nine transactions.

This makes JPMorgan Chase the #1 banker of TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., and therefore of Coastal GasLink pipeline, despite an Environmental and Social Policy (see p. 17) that expects clients to obtain free, prior and informed consent of Indigenous Peoples.

2) Bank of Montreal

Bank of Montreal is the lead agent on two older loans to TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. that add up to about $4.3 billion. It’s also a lender to the two new loans and participated in one 2018 bond sale.

3) Deutsche Bank

Deutsche Bank was the other lead manager, alongside JPMorgan Chase, on eight bonds (worth approximately $8.7 billion) that TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. issued in 2018. The German bank was also a lender to all four current loans.

4) Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce

The Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce was the sole manager on one of the nine bonds issued by TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. in 2018, as well as a lender to all four current loans.

The Canadian bank also advised TransCanada on a November 2018 deal that sums up TransCanada’s backwards direction: the sale of its stake in wind energy facilities in Quebec, to the tune of $630 million, in order to fund Coastal GasLink pre-development costs.

5) 17 other banks

At least 17 other global banks are also supporting TransCanada Pipelines Ltd. in a range of roles on its current lines of credit and recent bond sales. These include: Alberta Treasury Branches, Bank of America, Barclays, Citi, Crédit Agricole, Credit Suisse, Desjardins, Export Development Canada, HSBC, Mizuho, MUFG, National Bank of Canada, Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, SMBC, TD, and Wells Fargo.*

The Wet’suwet’en have made it clear that the fight is not over. We demand that these banks cut their ties with TransCanada, as the company tramples on Indigenous rights in order to ram through the dangerous pipeline. The world is watching — hundreds of solidarity actions are taking place across Canada and around the world — and RAN and allies will continue to pressure these banks to stop supporting Indigenous rights abuses.

Rainforest Action Network shuts down a Chase Bank branch in San Francisco. Photo credit: Laurel Sutherlin/Rainforest Action Network.

Data source: Bloomberg Finance L.P. All monetary values in USD.

Author’s note: This list may not include every bank that is a lender to TransCanada Pipelines Ltd., as the full lender lists are not disclosed on all four active loans.

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Featured image: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police raided the Wet’suwet’en access checkpoint set up on Gidumt’en territory on January 7. Photo credit: Jesse Winter/StarMetro Vancouver