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When independent news outlets focus on 9/11, they are immediately branded by the mainstream media and so-called ‘fact-checkers’ as conspiracy theorists. The BBC makes this point precisely in a 2018 article that starts like this –

“On 11 September 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked by radical Islamist terrorists – almost 3,000 people were killed as the aircraft were flown into the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. Just hours after the collapse of New York’s Twin Towers, a conspiracy theory surfaced online which persists more than 16 years later.”

The entire article is dedicated to all the ‘conspiracy theories’ involved in 9/11 and makes a mockery of anyone or anything that questions the official government line. They even heavily mock the brother of one man killed in 9/11 and frankly, true or not, the BBC’s report itself is rather sickening to read.

And yet, here we are, all these years later and it’s hardly surprising the theories of a conspiracy continue.

A 2016 study from Chapman University in California, found more than half of the American people believe the government is concealing information about the 9/11 attacks. This is in part because, large sections of the official US government report were redacted for years – and is still missing to this day.

The big problem is that the government is withholding crucial evidence. And then there’s other evidence the state and mainstream media refuse to even consider.

Paul Craig Roberts is an American economist and former United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under President Reagan. Roberts was an associate editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and has received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists in the United States.

Roberts wrote this really interesting piece of information just a few days ago that the mainstream media has been completely silent about:

“Although the United States is allegedly a democracy with a rule of law, it has taken 17 years for public pressure to bring about the first grand jury investigation of 9/11. Based on the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth led by Richard Gage, first responder and pilots organizations, books by David Ray Griffin and others, and eyewitness testimony, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has presented enough hard facts to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York to force his compliance with the provisions of federal law that require the convening of a federal grand jury to investigate for the first time the attacks of September 11, 2001. https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org

This puts the US Justice (sic) Department in an extraordinary position. There will be tremendous pressures on the US Attorney’s office to have the grand jury dismiss the evidence as an unpatriotic conspiracy theory or otherwise maneuver to discredit the evidence presented by the Lawyers’ Committee, or modify the official account without totally discrediting it.

“What the 9/11 truthers and the Lawyers’ Committee have achieved is the destruction of the designation of 9/11 skeptics as “conspiracy theorists.” No US Attorney would convene a grand jury on the basis of a conspiracy theory. Clearly, the evidence is compelling that has put the US Attorney in an unenviable position.”

If the Lawyers’ Committee and the 9/11 truthers trust the US Attorney to go entirely by the facts, little will come of the grand jury. If the United States had a rule of law, something as serious as 9/11 could not have gone for 17 years without investigation.”

Three weeks before Roberts’ made this statement a letter was published by Off-Guardian about a Huffington Post hit piece about an academic teaching journalism. Its first paragraph explains entirely its own position.

An academic teaching journalism students at one of the UK’s top universities has publicly supported long-discredited conspiracy theories about the 9/11 terror attack, HuffPost UK can reveal.

This entire article, like that of the BBC’s, vigorously attacks any individual or organisation that has the temerity to question the ‘official’ narrative on any major incident as offered up by the state, such as the Skripal poisonings, Syria’s chemical weapons, Iraq and Chilcot Report.

HuffPost even uses an unnamed former head of MI6 and an unnamed former Supreme Commander of Nato to dispel such challenges to this narrative and then attacks other sources of news such as RT as nothing more than Russian propaganda irrespective of the source. As a rule, TruePublica does not publish news sourced by RT but that does not make all of its content propaganda.

David Ray Griffin, a retired American professor and political writer who founded the Center for Process Studies which seeks to promote the common good by means of the relational approach found in process thought was the co-author of the book ‘9/11 Unmasked’ – part of the attack piece was centred on by the HuffPost hit piece.

The head of the 9/11 Consensus Panel, the other co-author, responded to the HuffPost.  For information, the goal of the Consensus Panel is to “provide a ready source of evidence-based research to any investigation that may be undertaken by the public, the media, academia, or any other investigative body or institution.”

That letter is as follows:

Jess Brammer, UK Huffington Post
Chris York, UK Huffington Post

Dear Ms. Brammar and Mr. York:

I was the head information specialist serving the Medical Health Officers of British Columbia, Canada, for 25 years.

Your attack piece on Professor Piers Robinson and on the scholarly work of Dr. David Ray Griffin is the least accurate and the lowest quality published article I have ever seen.

I have assisted Dr. Griffin with 10 of his investigative books into the events of 9/11. In 2011 we decided to create the international 9/11 Consensus Panel to review and evaluate the official claims relating to September 11, 2001. The Panel we formed has 23 members, including people from the fields of physics, chemistry, structural engineering, aeronautical engineering, piloting, airplane crash investigation, medicine, journalism, psychology, and religion (For the full list, see here).

In seeking a consensus methodology, I was advised by the former provincial epidemiologist of British Columbia to employ a leading model that is used in medicine to establish the best diagnostic and treatment evidence to guide the world’s doctors using medical consensus statements.

The Panel methodology has produced, seven years later, 51 refutations of the official claims, which were published as 911 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation in September, 2018.

Each Consensus Point, now a chapter in this book, was given three rounds of review and feedback by the Panel members. The panelists were blind to one another throughout the process, providing strictly uninfluenced individual feedback. Any Points that did not receive 85% approval by the third round were set aside.

The Honorary Members of the Panel include the late British (and longest-serving) parliamentarian Michael Meacher, the late evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, and the late Honorary President of the Italian Supreme Court, Ferdinando Imposimato.

The Huffington Post drastically lowered its standards to publish this hit piece, and what influenced it to do so is a question worth pursuing.

Yours truly

Elizabeth Woodworth, Co-author with Dr. David Ray Griffin
9/11 Unmasked

It is over 18 years now since the world-changing event of 9/11. One wonders when the information held by the American government, that continues to anger so many people affected by it will ever emerge.

However, one reason why such questions persist is precisely that of the actions of the US government itself. One should not forget those so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ that actually came true that continues to pour petrol on the flames of doubt.

For example, the American government killed thousands by poisoning alcohol to prove its point that alcohol was bad for the general public during prohibition. This was a ‘conspiracy theory’ that went on for decades – until it was proven to be true.

Then, you can take your pick of the lies government tells when it comes to starting wars – how about the lie the Saddam Hussain and Iraq had WMD ready to fire at Western targets. Total deaths exceeded 1 million. Yet another classic American lie was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, as a pretext for escalating the country’s involvement in the Vietnam War that killed 60,000 American soldiers. Total deaths racked up 1.35 million, all based on a lie. That incident only came about because of an unintentional declassification of an NSA file in 2005.

Edward Snowden proved with his revelations in 2013 that the government was spying on everyone when the government had denied they had ever done so. It took a whistleblower to let us all know. The UK government has been found by the highest courts in the land to have broken numerous privacy and surveillance laws as a result of mass civilian surveillance systems.

Operation Mockingbird was a US government operation where journalists were paid to publish CIA propaganda, only uncovered by the Watergate scandal. It took a thief to unknowingly capture secret documents and recordings for the public to find out.

The list goes on and on – just as 9/11 will, so it will be interesting to see how the US Attorney, presented with evidence from so many prominent professionals will bury yet more 9/11 evidence. Don’t hold your breath though, the same questions will, no doubt, still be being asked in another 18 years time.

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Featured image is from TP

Bolivia and Uruguay have rejected interventionist declarations made by the Lima Group against the democratically elected government of President Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela.

Bolivian President Evo Morales posted on Twitter on Saturday:

“Democracy is based upon peace, dialogue and self-determination of peoples.

“We praise the democratic government of Mexico for defending the principle of non-interventionism and declining to back the diplomatic conspiracy led by the United States through the ‘Lima Group’ against Venezuela.

“We regret resurgence of the ideology of racist supremacy (KKK), as a replica of xenophobia of the government of the United States.

“In the face of intolerance and discrimination, Indigenous peoples promote respect and integration.”

We praise the democratic government of Mexico for defending the principle of non-interventionism and declining to back the diplomatic conspiracy led by the US through the "Lima Group" against Venezuela. Democracy is based upon peace, dialogue and self-determination of peoples

— Evo Morales Ayma (@evoespueblo) January 5, 2019

Uruguay’s Foreign Affairs Ministry also rejected the Lima Group‘s position.  President Tabare Vazquez said he would advocate for a “peaceful solution” based on “dialogue.”

On Friday, the Mexican government, led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO), refused to sign the joint declaration by the Lima Group, opting to maintain good diplomatic relations with Venezuela.

“Mexico firmly promotes dialogue with all involved parties to find peace and reconciliation, for which we reiterate our rejection of any initiative that includes measures that obstruct a dialogue to face the crisis in Venezuela,” an official statement issued by Mexico’s foreign ministry reads.

The Venezuelan government, through a statement of his Foreign Affairs Minister Jorge Arreaza, warned against interventionism. Arreaza said he regrets that the members of the Lima Group “agreed to foster a coup in Venezuela” by “not recognizing the democratically elected government” after “receiving instructions from the U.S. government through a video conference.”

#Venezuela's Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza has released a statement warning against interventionism after several member countries of the so-called Lima Group declared the Venezuelan government of #NicolasMaduro "illegitimate." pic.twitter.com/51pqsTUjG6

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) January 5, 2019

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On September 30, 2018, a month after the U.S. and Mexico moved toward replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Canada joined to produce a new continental trade agreement. The new pact, as highlighted in the article below (written just after Canada signed on) focused especially on securing automotive jobs in the U.S. and Canada. The two governments celebrated the agreement, joined especially by the leadership of Unifor, representing Canadian autoworkers. The American autoworker’s union, the UAW, was more cautious and the Mexican government was relieved that the pressures to limit production in Mexico were restrained. Within weeks, General Motors (GM) dramatically confirmed the limits of the agreement, announcing the closure of four plants in the U.S. and the remaining GM facility in Oshawa.

Autoworkers in Canada and U.S. were furious with GM, yet the solutions proposed focused on identifying Mexico, with its low wages, as the problem. When NAFTA was being negotiated in the mid-1990s, the great promise to Mexico was that it would bring pervasive economic development, with rising wages and incomes that brought workers and farmers into the ‘middle class’. Mexico did receive a great deal of U.S. investment in certain sectors as a result of NAFTA, but as in the U.S. and Canada, the promises of free trade were overwhelmingly not fulfilled. Like working people to the North, neither the investments of private corporations, nor free trade pacts (which have been more about corporate freedoms and guarantees), nor the cynical policies and assurances of governments, brought Mexican workers richer lives and hopeful futures for their children.

The point for workers in all three countries is to escape the repeated false promises of recent  decades and keep our eye on the failures of our own economic and political elites. The challenge is to learn from the experience  of worsening insecurity and class inequality and – finally – to start addressing the larger, radical changes we will need to make at home and in our relationship to international capital if we want better lives.

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When Donald Trump declared the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to be “the worst deal” in American history (and the worst deal ever signed “by any country”), those who had themselves long opposed NAFTA found themselves in a bind. They could hardly side with Trump and be identified with the imperial nationalism of “America First” and Trump’s thinly disguised racism.

Concerns in Canada and Mexico that any new deal would surely be worse than NAFTA for their countries didn’t justify defending the trade deal they had earlier so roundly condemned. The position that any free-trade agreement should be opposed had some appeal, as resistance always does. But that in itself would still leave untouched the twin realities shaping our lives: the dominance of corporate economic and financial power within Canada and Canada’s extreme economic dependence on the USA.

Stymied by the limited options, the broad left – unions, social movements, those concerned with social justice, equality, and a substantive democracy – ended up being sidelined in this crucial debate. This stood in sharp contrast to the impressive mobilizations that had occurred in the lead-up to the 1989 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, the precursor to NAFTA. Yet even then, the response of the left was too modest to deal with the new aggressiveness they faced. The ideological and organizational weakening of unions and social movements since then, and the lowering of expectations that followed, makes it all the harder to build an effective counter-movement today.

How to make sense of the present moment? Was the push to renegotiate NAFTA only about Trump playing to his base? Was Trump reacting to an alleged decline in the American empire? Was it about moving away from multilateral to bilateral agreements where U.S. strength weighs heavier? Is the narrowing of options that the renegotiation of NAFTA exposed just about free-trade agreements, or does it point to a more general characteristic of capitalism today?

It’s useful to begin by briefly reviewing what the renegotiation of NAFTA did and didn’t change. We then step back to consider some of the larger issues that any oppositional movement will have to address. We conclude with some observations on what an alternative orientation might entail.

Trumping NAFTA, Trumpeting the USMCA

After trashing NAFTA, Trump predictably proclaimed that its replacement, the USMCA (U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement), was a “wonderful new deal … a historic transaction.” Trudeau chimed in that it would “create jobs and grow the middle class.” What did the USMCA actually change?

The focus on renegotiating NAFTA emerged out of Trump’s obsession with trade deficits. When NAFTA was first negotiated, Mexico had a small overall trade deficit with the U.S. This was transformed into the largest trade surplus with the U.S. of any country other than China. That surplus is almost entirely driven by Mexico’s emergence as a major global site of automotive production: of Mexico’s $71-billion surplus with the U.S. in 2017, $63-billion was in auto. Over and above automotive parts, Mexico has, since the start of NAFTA, received some 90% of new automotive capacity (Canada has actually seen its capacity decrease).

The flow of automotive products was consequently central to the renegotiation of NAFTA. The USMCA led to the following changes in automotive-sector trade.

1. The rules of origin (how much of an automobile’s content must be manufactured within North America to qualify for duty-free flow of vehicles and parts between the three countries) were increased from 62.5% to 75%.

The U.S. had called for 85%, but settled on 75%. Most of the assembly plants that operate under NAFTA (now USMCA) are close to the 75% target, and, though this may increase parts purchases in North America somewhat, it will not dramatically change industry employment numbers. Moreover, the additional content under this rule doesn’t have to be in the U.S.; it can locate in Mexico or Canada. The U.S. wanted, but did not get, a special provision that it alone should have a specific national content rule.

2. To qualify for USMCA, at least 40–45% of the content (varying for assembly and parts) must originate in facilities with average wages of over $16 per hour.

Intriguing as this is, it too will have minimal impact. In general, the vehicles Mexico ships to the U.S. already comply with 40% of the content being sourced in the U.S. and Canada, and thus already paying wages above that average. Moreover, no company is going to triple (or more) the wages they pay in Mexico when the penalty on cars coming into the U.S. is only 2.5%; they’ll just accept the penalty instead. And if they’re paying the penalty anyway, they may even reduce overall content in North America. The penalty on trucks (25%) is another matter. But by far, most of Mexico’s vehicle exports are cars, and the amount of U.S.-Canadian content in Mexican truck exports is generally significantly higher than cars and exceeds the 40% condition.

All this leaves aside the hypocrisy of the U.S. calling for stronger Mexican labour standards, even as it oversees the profound weakening of its own working class, and while, on the Canadian side, the new Ontario premier seems about to roll back even the minimal gains workers were about to get after decades of shameful mistreatment.

3. If the U.S. imposes restrictions on exports on grounds of national security, $2.6-million in annual car exports from Canada, as well as Mexico, would be excluded, and so would certain levels of parts exports from each country.

For Canada, this ceiling will not be biting. Trucks are excluded from any limit, and Canadian car exports could increase by some 45% relative to 2017 before the ceiling is reached – i.e., it is unlikely ever to happen. The ceiling on parts imports is also far above what Canada currently ships to the U.S. That ceiling is, however, relevant for Mexico, and may encourage a cap on new assembly plants there. The point is that after Mexico’s great auto boom, its main fear was that some of the past gains would be rolled back, so escaping that fate is considered by Mexico as a clear win.

Note that this clause legitimates the right of the U.S. to use the reason of “national security” to impose any trade restrictions it desires. This was also reinforced by the agreement not doing away with the “national security” tariffs imposed on steel and aluminum. (Trump had earlier indicated that if a replacement to NAFTA was reached, those tariffs could end, but this went the way of other Trump declarations.)

While auto was the defining issue, there were other noteworthy changes:

Chapter 19: This called for independent adjudicators to deal with conflicts of interpretation. The U.S. wanted to do away with this and leave adjudication to domestic laws. For Canada to accept a continuing vulnerability to American law would plainly mock the very idea of a supposedly “international” agreement. The U.S. eventually dropped this demand. Nevertheless, Trump’s arbitrariness with regard to trade serves as a warning that the U.S. always can, when it deems it necessary, “renegotiate” the rules. This suggests that corporations, particularly in the tightly integrated auto sector, may have a future defensive bias toward locating new investments in the U.S. rather than with its “partners.”

Chapter 11: This chapter applied an expanded version of the U.S. ‘regulatory takings’ doctrine to all of North America. It essentially allowed corporations the authority to sue states that introduced measures which not only directly but indirectly impacted on corporate property rights, including intangible property rights such as future profits (identifying this as a form of ‘taking’ or ‘expropriation’). This crass placing of private interests against the policies of elected governments was, surprisingly, removed from the new agreement in the U.S.-Canada talks. This was, however, not so much at the initiative of Canada but of the U.S. which, though very much concerned with the needs of capital in general did not itself want to be beholden to any particular corporation. Notably, for Mexico, Chapter 11 remains in force in energy and telecommunications, constraining Mexican policy in those sectors.

Dairy Market: The U.S. administration was adamant about opening up Canada’s dairy market. Canada had already made concessions on this through the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which the U.S. ended up stepping away from, and it was largely a foregone conclusion that Canada would make the same or, as it turned out, very slightly higher concessions in the USMCA. (Trudeau has promised to find ways to compensate farmers for this.)

Drug Patents: NAFTA had protected pharmaceutical patents for eight years. This was increased to ten years, meaning that generic drug makers can’t step in as early as before. This adds significant additional costs to individuals and puts greater pressure on negotiated drug plans and the healthcare system. In spite of the characterization of free-trade agreements as opening up competition, this change demonstrates the extent to which a higher priority has been protecting property rights.

New Side Agreements on Labour and the Environment: Free-trade agreements are based on minimizing the impact of “non-trade” social issues like labour and environmental standards. The erosion, since the NAFTA side agreements, of labour rights and environmental conditions should give us proof enough of how empty such clauses are.

The “China Clause”: Article 32.10 of the agreement provides that if a party to the agreement intends to negotiate a free-trade agreement with a “non-market” country (a designation any of the partners can make) it must first notify and gain the approval of the other parties. This clause is clearly intended to reference China, and highlights what may seem obvious: the U.S. right to veto any such discussions. (NAFTA had contingencies for such cases, so this article wasn’t technically necessary, but its imperial attitude toward both China and Canada carries important symbolic significance.)

Energy Proportionality: NAFTA and its precursor had put limits on Canada’s right, during an energy crisis, to divert oil exports normally going to the U.S. to other parts of Canada. This scandalous clause was removed. But in light of Canada’s strong desire for U.S. markets for its oil, and its political sensitivities to U.S. counter-reactions, this may not mean anything in practical terms. Even the petroleum industry, which had earlier been instrumental in bringing this clause into existence, now declared that the clause had “no impact” – that it “was never invoked and was never really needed.”

The USMCA added some other bells and whistles, but is far from being a game-changer in terms of dramatically shifting trade benefits to the U.S. This is not surprising; to truly “fix” the problem with Mexico would have meant radical steps that could overflow into undermining globalization, something Trump was loath to do. The U.S. deficit will persist, and there will not be a significant upsurge in the manufacturing jobs that Trump promised the American Midwest.

In short, the Canadian and Mexican governments are basically relieved that Trump didn’t carry through with his more extreme protectionist threats. The continental auto industry is pleased that its supply chains and assembly plants in Mexico will not be interrupted. Canadian autoworkers considered the agreement a “victory,” because the most threatening U.S. proposals faded away. U.S. workers saw some positives, but hardly a solution to their job concerns. Mexican workers had virtually no voice in the process. U.S. dairy farmers are marginally happier at the expense of their Canadian counterparts, and the drug companies are smiling. The wall to keep Mexican immigrants out of the U.S. was not mentioned.

The Bigger Context: Ten Observations

There are a number of broader issues that must be taken on board in thinking about and responding to free-trade agreements. We can’t elaborate on them here, but may present some summary observations. First, The main issue in these misnamed “trade agreements” has become the free flow of capital and the protection of business property rights. These agreements essentially give corporations internationally sanctioned constitutional guarantees against the possible actions of future elected governments. This, of course, includes access to supplies and markets for their investments, but as for tariffs, these have already fallen dramatically over the years: the trade-weighted average of U.S. tariffs is now in the order of 2%, a level dwarfed by shifts in exchange rates (the Canadian dollar, for example, has fallen by 12% from where it was a decade ago).

Second, repeated “discoveries” that the U.S. economy and U.S. empire are in decline are simply wrong. Working people may be suffering, but that is distinct from how American capitalism is doing. It’s not just that the U.S. economy is outperforming other developed countries and that U.S. corporations are doing incredibly well in terms of profits and continuing to extend their reach globally. Though the U.S. economy has certainly seen a great many jobs and sometimes entire economic sectors and regions laid waste, it has demonstrated a capacity to move upstream to dominate strategic high-tech manufacturing (aerospace, health sciences, pharma, nanotechnology, computer and communication systems), as well as the services so critical to the global economy (finance, engineering, accounting, legal, consulting, computer software, communication, and culture). Moreover, the U.S. remains, in spite of very significant setbacks, by far the prime military power in the world, while the U.S. state continues to act as the world’s central bank and the dollar remains the world’s principal currency.

Third, supporters of the thesis of inter-imperial rivalry have, since the 1960s, looked to Japan as the new rival of the American empire, later turning to Germany and Europe, and now identify China as the new challenger of American dominance. But both the profound global integration of capitalism and the resilience of the U.S. economy and state suggest powerfully that the contradictions in capitalism are not to be found in inter-imperial rivalry.

Fourth, China has neither the interest nor capacity to replace the role the U.S. plays in superintending global capitalism; its concern is rather with renegotiating its status within the hierarchy of global capitalism. Like other states, it is anxious that the U.S. act as a “responsible” global leader. Yet the Trump administration seems to have shifted American geopolitical concerns from Russia toward a new economic cold war with China. It will be interesting to see whether Trump’s aggressive imposition of high tariffs against China are a negotiating tactic to leverage China to open up its financial and high tech-sectors, thereby strengthening globalization, or part of a longer drive to push key U.S. companies out of China and thereby limit China’s technological expansion (in any case, those U.S. subsidiaries would in large part more likely move elsewhere in Asia rather than return those supply chains to the USA).

Fifth, the most relevant contradictions lie within the U.S. itself. Though the U.S., of course, derives great benefit from its international position, it also comes with burdens. Those burdens range from diverting critical resources from welfare-state expenditures to the military, to absorbing a disproportionate share of world exports when markets abroad falter, to losing jobs to Asia as corporations restructure globally, and include workers facing competitive pressures from low-wage competitors abroad. It is such burdens, particularly in periods of domestic austerity, that create the frustrations that were so instrumental to the rise of Trump and a committed far-right base. These internal contradictions have international repercussions, some of which may be unintended.

Sixth, there is a degree of relative independence behind the actions of the American president. Trump has given corporations massive tax breaks and delivered on deregulation, but is not necessarily following their bidding on trade. On the other hand, there are also limits on what an American president can do (his/her power is “relative”). As a columnist for the Wall Street Journal noted: “The new deal shows the limits to Mr. Trump’s ‘America First’ agenda and an underlying resilience to the existing order…. The resistance Mr. Trump encountered from Congress, business, his own advisers and U.S. trading partners circumscribed his leverage.”

Seventh, we need a more nuanced understanding of notions such as “neoliberalism,” “nationalism,” and “protectionism.” Neoliberalism is not about reducing the role of the state, but rather of the state deepening capitalist discipline and strengthening the weight of markets by shifting the balance of class forces toward increasing corporate profits – think of the state’s leading role in free trade, privatization, weakening unions. Adolph Reed has succinctly captured this notion by characterizing neoliberalism as capitalism without an effective working-class opposition.

As for nationalism, there is the nationalism of reproducing U.S. economic dominance, but there is also a left nationalism that challenges U.S. penetration and the restrictions on the capacity to pursue national goals of economic development and solidarity. The same goes for protectionism. Somehow, protecting the rights and property of corporations is called “free trade,” while protecting workers from the compulsion to compete for their jobs with lower-wage jurisdictions brings accusations of an unjustified and anti-social “protectionism.”

Eighth, we must be careful in supporting “sovereignty” in the abstract. It has, after all, been states themselves, as Leo Panitch has argued, that have been the main authors (rather than victims) of trade agreements like NAFTA. The loss of sovereignty we need to be worried about is not that of states per se, but of the popular ability to democratically improve our lives in the face of the introduction of “unchallengeable” rules.

Ninth, globalization also involves the movement of people. In this case, some argue that the free borders offered to corporations should be extended to “free borders” for people. This is not necessarily a good thing. For one, immigration is increasingly biased toward those with high education and assets (more than half of Canadian immigration is now directed to bringing in high-tech talent from Asia as opposed to desperate workers from Latin America). This means that immigration may involve a brain drain and resource shift from the global south to the richer countries; that is, it may aggravate inequalities between countries. Second, U.S. foreign policy, in which our own government is often complicit, has contributed to people being pushed out of their home communities rather than simply wanting to move abroad. Shouldn’t we therefore put as much energy into challenging those foreign policies as dealing with their consequences?

Can we ignore concerns about the impact of immigration on our social services without questioning why, even as the wealth of our country increases, social programs like health and education are cut independent of immigration? Can we really win the battle for completely open immigration, which tends to cause a backlash even from sympathetic Canadians, as opposed to regulating immigration in a way that is sympathetic to desperate refugees and supports a higher but planned level of immigration, as well as providing the services they need?

Tenth, justice is international, as must also be – for strategic reasons – the struggle. This, demands having the base at home to make “international solidarity” more than a well-meaning slogan. The painful truth is that we haven’t even built solidarity in our own countries between autoworkers and steelworkers, public- and private-sector workers, low-wage workers and those still lucky enough to have relatively decent, full-time jobs.

Conclusion

The outcome of the “Trump moment” is likely, for all its protectionist rhetoric, to end up further legitimatingfree trade. Already, many of those opposed to Trump have jumped on the bandwagon of free trade as the progressive alternative. This perversion has a lot to do with the inability of the left to place free trade into a larger context.

That larger framework involves twin constraints emphasized earlier as barriers to a fuller life and greater solidarity: our domestic dependence on the undemocratic decisions of private corporations and financial institutions, and our deep integration into the American empire. The latest free-trade agreement, like the earlier ones, consolidates both those dependencies. We can’t simply reject free-trade agreements unless it is also part of a larger strategy. What we confront and what must shape how we respond is both capitalism and Canada’s place within capitalism. Taking this on is certainly pie-in-the-sky as an imminent goal. But if we see it as a long-term necessity – one that we must start building toward now – it can give us new political life.

This requires speaking confidently about an orientation that sees our collective needs, especially but not only those linked to the fundamental threat to the environment, as only achievable through democratic planning, not markets. It means thinking in terms of production for use, not profits, and in terms of a society based on solidarity, not competition. And it involves replacing the fetish of exporting as much as we can with a bias, as Greg Albo has emphasized, for inward development, but with a place for planned international economic relations.

We live in an era of polarized options. The sober truth is that anything short of a truly radical agenda condemns us to floundering through defeats. The radical, in this sense, is not something beyond the realm, but something that has in fact become the only approach that is now practical.

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This article was originally published in Canadian Dimension Volume 52, Issue 3, Fall 2018.

“Your heart
is too small to hold
this many people”
— lyrics to a song of the Yellow Vests addressed to Macron

“I am not a seed of Chance
I, the moulder of the new life
I am a child of Need
and a mature child of Wrath…
…Listen to the voice of the winds
For thousands of years!
Inside my word
all humanity hurts…”
Kostas Varnalis (1884-1974), The Guide (Ο Οδηγητής) (*)

On the evening of 14 July 1789, the Duke de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt woke King Louis XVI to inform him about the storming of the Bastille.

“Why, is this a rebellion?” the King wondered.

“No Sir. It’s a revolution”, replied the Duke.

What is happening today in France is one of the most significant political developments on the European continent after the collapse of the Soviet Union almost thirty years ago.

It is one of the most radical, deepest and dynamic challenges to modern European capitalism in decades, both in terms of method – the direct, mass mobilisation of people, of the “masses”, their dramatic entry on to the stage of history – as well as in terms of the depth of the movement, as in its demands, which directly question the political and, implicitly but clearly, the social regime.(**). In particular, it is evenly spread throughout France, rather than being restricted to the capital.

If we wanted to find a revolutionary movement in Europe reassembling that of the Yellow Vests in terms of massiveness and depth we would probably have to look back to the period 1965-75 or, as a maximum, to 1985.

That is, we would look back to the general revolutionary strikes in France and Italy (1968-1969), the ‘Prague Spring’ (1968), the Carnation Revolution in Portugal (1974-1975), the Solidarity revolution in Poland (1979-1981) and, perhaps to a lesser extent, to the long, militant strike of British miners (1984-85).

These are all movements which, each one in its own way and despite the differences between them, have profoundly changed how we perceive the world. All were characterised by the same direct form of action, with millions of simple people directly participating, and by the fact that they all questioned the foundations of economic and social organisation and the power system in the countries in which they broke out. All these movements, without exception, were, in one way or another, accompanied by demands for the democratisation of society, self-management and direct participation of people.

The momentum of these movements was later halted by the capitulation of Mitterrand’s Socialists, the triumphs of Neo-liberalism in capitalist Europe (the Thatcher-Reagan-Friedman factor),the collapse of the Soviet regime and the “counter-revolutions” in Eastern Europe: “counter-revolutions” which, although advanced through “democratic” slogans, did not lead anywhere, but merely to the economic and political power changing hands from “socialist bureaucracies” to  quite authoritarian, oligarchic and sometimes clearly Mafiosi elites, masquerading as democratic governments – “social Darwinists” in the service of International Capital and the US.

The Yellow Vests now seem to be picking up in their own way from where the European movements of 1965-85 left off their core fundamental demands, and they are doing so in their attempt to respond to a policy of systematic destruction of French society and, even more so, of its lower and poorer strata.

They are doing it within the context of today’s European and global conditions, which differ substantially from those of that period, both in “subjective” and “objective” terms.

French and European crises and global economic crisis

The French revolution – the term ‘revolution’, we think, being more appropriate, because what is happening in France does not constitute simply a rebellion, as we will attempt to show later – is the direct product of the multifaceted, complex “European” crisis; a crisis which, in its turn, is the product and consequence of two factors: the deep economic crisis into which world capitalism entered in 2008, and the very way in which the European Union has been built and operates.

It is important to properly diagnose the root cause of the crisis,and the factors which provoked it, the global and the European one. Because if we assume that the whole problem is due to the Euro and the EU, ignoring the structural crisis of modern world capitalism, then we would come to the conclusion that all a country needs to do is to leave the EU, thereby solving all the problems. Of course, this does not mean that a given country should not attempt to leave the EU, if this is what is required for saving itself. But it means, however, that it must be aware that even by leaving, it will still be confronted by all the problems thrown up by the tremendous power that globalised capitalism and international finance have acquired.

Most criticisms of the EU, from various side, are correct. But this is not the main strategic problem. The main question is what is to be the European order of tomorrow and how to ensure that the order which shall be established after the EU will be better and not worse; what is the policy and strategy that, as of now, within the context of the existing EU, can serve better the purpose of creating a radically different and radically better European order tomorrow.

This is because a European country, in particular a medium-sized country such as France, may initiate a course of liberation from the bonds of globalised capitalism. But it will not beeasy for any country, even the strongest in Europe, to achieve this on its own in the long-term.

The international impact of the French revolutionary movement will be of crucial, vital significance, not only in the long-term, but also in short run, for both the movement itself and for the situation in all of Europe.

Any victory or defeat of the Yellow Vests movement depends heavily on its ability to expand and find immediate support in the rest of Europe.

On the other hand, the entire European situation will be directly and decisively affected by what will happen in the coming weeks and months in France.

However, we have not yet seen any of the forces which wish to self-identify as “radical leftist” in Europe -from the left-wing of Die Linke to the left-wing of the Labour Party-realising fully the significance of what is happening in France; adjusting their activity accordingly, giving absolute priority to the organisation of support to the French people, explaining to their people what is happening in France or even imitating the French movement through the initiation of campaigns in their countries, appropriate and adapted of course to the respective conditions they are facing in every country. We have not seen them attempting to create programmatically, politically and organisationally a united European front, not only of the radical left but also of all the forces that would be willing to commit sincerely to fighting the totalitarian dictatorship of financial capital in Europe.

What we mostly see are various groups, parties, and aspiring leaders ,the usual strangers to modesty, narcissist stars of “international radicalism and progress”, prominent “intellectuals of the Self-evident”, who, at a moment when one of the most significant revolutions in Europe in the last fifty years is unfolding, are making micro-political electoral calculations in view of the European elections; calculations which too shall prove to be irrelevant within the context of a Europe that continues to be shaken to its very foundations by its crisis.

A direct result itself of the 2008 global economic crisis, the European crisis has so far generated, before the current developments in France, the destruction and “betrayed revolt” of Greece, the Indignados and the Podemos in Spain, the left government in Portugal, the BREXIT vote, the surge of the radical right in Italy, the rise of AfD in Germany, the “clinical death” of the German Social Democratic and the French Socialist Party, the rise of Le Pen and Mélenchon in France.

However, the developments in France are now taking us to another level, because of twofactors of fundamental significance. The French people, having spent a number of decades hoping in vain for some improvement through the processes of elections and referenda, has now moved to the phase of direct, dynamic and mass mobilisation of the people. Secondly, the French movement is for the first time directly questioning the political and, indirectly but clearly, the social regime.

The financial oligarchy which is currently governing Europe together with its employees – the European politicians and bureaucrats – has no answer to the issues raised by the Greeks,  Spanish, British, Italians and, even more so, by the French now.

For this and for other reasons that we will explain, the French crisis is only the beginning of a course of events, which, of course, we cannot predict and prescribe; nor can we foresee where it will lead; however, we can say with certainty already from now that they will radically change Europe and the world.

The developments in France not only coincide with and partly reflect the continuing deep crisis of the EU, a crisis threatening its very existence. The developments are taking place, most probably, on the eve of a new exacerbation of the economic crisis of 2008,against which states now have much fewer means to use for defending themselves than in 2008.

And as if all this were not enough, at the international level we also note a rapid deterioration of all the significant global concerns, including the re-emergence of the risk of nuclear war and, most importantly, the near certainty over the end of human life through climatic change and environmental destruction; such defining issues require immediate radical measures that go far beyond the limitations and capabilities of the existing economic, social and international system.

Realism and Romanticism

The other day a friend, albeit in a well-meant and tactful way, accused me of a sort of “revolutionary romanticism”, referring to my most recent article about the developments in France. I will leave aside the fact that, as it soon transpired from our conversation, he was not aware of the most elementary information such as what are the main demands of the Yellow Vest movement; instead he perceived as real not what is really happening in France – of course for this the media is more to blame for not giving out all the information – but what he himself thought is likely to be happening!

Living in Greece he thought that in France, too, politicians could throw some “revolutionary buzzwords” just to gather votes, as it so often is the case with Greek politicians. So he was trying to interpret the French movement from the point of view of our current moral and intellectual misery, which is the result of our overwhelming defeat of 2015 and the way it has come about. It may also be that deep inside, he could find difficult, and even be annoyed by the comparison between the current grandeur of a revolting people with our own, now humiliated and defeated, miserable and servile, individual, social and national existence.

However, the important point is something different, and I told him so.  Romanticism is not to hope for the advancement of humans and people at the forefront of the historical process. They did it in the past and hence they can do it again in the future. Romanticism, even a potentially deadly illusion, is to bestow upon those who today govern the world, the ability to prevent the destruction of humanity!

Realistically speaking, the only chance that humanity has to save itself is to consciously take its own action to this effect and, indeed, to do so very quickly.

The May 1968 slogan “Imagination to the Power” is today the only viable realism. The “revolution”, in the meaning of a radical transformation of the dominant system, regardless of the way in which it may happen, is a precondition for the survival of humanity. This sort of thing is no longer taught by social and philosophical theories or by our morality; it is rather determined by the merciless clarity and accuracy of the mathematical and physics equations of climate science.

Besides, great revolutions often happen when no one expects them. And no one expects them, because when they happen a system is “completed”; it is, in a way, “closed”, having left no room for any “reform” or “self-correction”. The same factor that makes Revolutions seem impossible and even inconceivable is rendering them also unavoidable!

The global human consciousness owns this knowledge, despite the constant efforts of the dominant and possessors to erase it. This is the reason why we honour the memory of those who were “defeated” in history, of those who “lost”, such as Jesus Christ and Spartacus, and we pay no tribute to those who crucified them to protect and preserve the public order and the power of their time.

It is precisely at this moment, when the system has “closed”, does not allow any progress and is threatening with destruction, that the god of Necessity unearths from the depths of the souls of ordinary people, from the soul of the great “anonymous” crowd, the moral superior human qualities, namely the drive towards freedom and dignity, the expression of the mortal being’s need for meaning in his life.  It is then, at those privileged moments of history, that simple people, free from the usual burdens and hypocrisies of professional politicians and intellectuals, employ the superior brain functions of humans, reason and the imagination, in order to find solutions to the problems they encounter, as the French have been doing for nearly two months now.

All revolutions may look similar to each other, but each one is different. This one, the revolution that is now struggling to force its way out of its mother’s belly – the European crisis- has an incomparable advantage over the Great French Revolution of 1789 and over the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917.The people who revolted now have significantly higher intellectual weapons, more knowledge to rely upon than what was available to the sans-culottes and the Russian workers of the past revolutions. Moreover, they have the experience of the achievements, but also of the degeneration and tragedies that accompanied all the great revolutionary movements of history.

But it is impossible to cover such a subject in one article. In our next article, we will examine the way the French people were led to take the course they have, and the structure of their demands, at the centre of which is the question of popular sovereignty, the possibility of the people to exercise power or, at least, to be able to control in an effective way how state power is exercised.

The same fundamental question remains, albeit in a new form, presented, but not solved in a satisfactory way, by the Great French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and many other popular uprisings in Europe and the world.

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Notes

(*) This is an improvised translation by the author of a portion of a poem by Kostas Varnalis (1984-1974), one of the greatest poets and writers of modern Greece. A communist, a Marxist and a member of the resistance during the Nazi occupation of Greece, he was persecuted for his ideas.

(**) It is quite difficult to write an article about France addressed to people who are not living in France. The reason lies with the fact that Western Media doall that they can, indeed with a certain degree of success, in order to play down, distort and conceal the events in France and, most importantly, their significance. Their aim is to present them as some sort of the usual “social upheavals”, without highlighting the underlying causes which have driven the people of one of the most important countries in Europe to revolt against the political system in power.

During the military dictatorship in Greece, I was a schoolboy. I remember that the press at that time was full of propaganda, but, at the same time, it was publishing all the basic facts necessary to form an opinion. Through this censored press, controlled by the “black colonels”, Greeks nevertheless knew better what was happening in France during the May ’68 Revolution or with the Vietnam War, than they know now about social and political problems in other EU countries or about the reality of a dozen wars in the Middle East!

The “Empire of Finance” which controls the media and most “intellectuals”, the “Space of Ideas” in our societies, in a way that is unprecedented in the history of capitalism, has a vital interest in doing so, as it trembles at the prospect of the “French virus” spreading outside France, as happened in 1789, 1848 and 1968.

Besides, even if they wanted to transmit the real meaning of these processes, they wouldn’t be able to do it. Journalism follows democracy on the path to demise. In their efforts to control all information, they have isolated almost all journalists with the knowledge and critical thinking skills that are required to analyse and describe the meaning of a revolution such, as the one that now seems to be unfolding in France. Nowadays, it is often the case that the media do not even choose journalists of their own liking, asking instead political parties and financial lobbies to “accolade” these and appoint “journalists”.

The suffocating and total control of the sphere of ideas have led to the creation of a class of “political professionals”, intellectuals, scientists, advertisers and pollsters who have ended up believing their own propaganda and are now unable, to a large extent,to analyse what is happening in the real world, even if this is needed by the class of interests they serve. George Orwell has been proven right.

Perhaps this is why the French Le Monde decided to send 70 scientists across France on a quest to understand what’s going on in the country – probably the largest “press expedition” in history!

Featured image: Fuel tax protestors in France (Source: WSWS)

France’s yellow vests, coming together in informally organised groups, took just one month to challenge policies on taxation, education, transport and environment, and make the Macron government back down.

***

December 15, place de l’Opéra, Paris. Three yellow vests read out an address ‘to the French people and the president of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron’ saying:

‘This movement belongs to no one and to everyone. It gives voice to a people who for 40 years have been dispossessed of everything that enabled them to believe in their future and their greatness.’

The anger provoked by a fuel tax produced, within a month, a wider diagnosis of what ails society and democracy. Mass movements that bring together people with minimal organisation encourage rapid politicisation, which explains why ‘the people’ have discovered that they are ‘dispossessed of their future’ a year after electing as president a man who boasts he swept aside the two parties that alternated in power for 40 years.

Macron has come unstuck. As did previous wunderkinder just as young, smiling and modern: Laurent Fabius, Tony Blair, Matteo Renzi. The liberal bourgeoisie are hugely disappointed. His French presidential election win in 2017 — whether it was a miracle or a divine surprise — had given them hope that France had become a haven of tranquillity in a troubled West. When Macron was crowned (to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy), The Economist, that standard-bearer for the views of the international ruling class, put him on its front cover, grinning as he walked on water.

But the sea has swallowed up Macron, too sure of his own instincts and too contemptuous of other people’s economic plight. Social distress is generally only a backdrop to an election campaign, used to explain the choice of those who vote the wrong way. But when old angers build and new ones are stirred up without consideration for those enduring them, then, as the new interior minister Christophe Castaner put it (1), the ‘monster’ can spring out of its box. And then, anything becomes possible.

France’s amnesia about the history of the left explains why there have been so few comparisons between the yellow vest movement and the strikes of 1936, during the Popular Front, which prompted similar elite surprise at the workers’ living conditions and their demand to be treated with dignity. Philosopher and campaigner Simone Weil wrote: ‘All those who are strangers to this life of slavery are incapable of understanding what has proved decisive in this situation. In this movement it is not about this or that particular demand, however important … After always having submitted, endured everything, accepted everything in silence for months and years, it is about daring to straighten up, to stand up. To take your turn to speak’ (2).

Click here to read full article.

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Mike Pompeo removes any doubt about the purpose of the administration’s Iran policy of regime change in all but name:

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that “the sanctions on Iran have an ultimate goal” of “creating an outcome where the Iranian people could have better lives than they have today under this tyrannical regime”.

In other words, the sanctions are intended to create so much misery and upheaval that they cause the regime to collapse. That means there is nothing that the Iranian government could do short of abolishing its current political system that would satisfy the administration so that they would agree to lift the sanctions that they illegitimately reimposed last year. We know Iran’s government isn’t going to do that. Contrary to what Pompeo claims here, this wouldn’t lead to “an outcome where the Iranian people could have better lives.” It threatens to plunge their country into disorder if it “works,” and it promises economic ruin for tens of millions of people no matter what happens to the government. There is no realistic scenario where the Iranian people aren’t left worse off at the end than they were before the sanctions were reimposed.

We also know that the sanctions primarily harm the civilian population by ravaging their economy, impeding their ability to import basic goods, destroying their savings, driving up their cost of living, bankrupting their businesses, and taking away their jobs. Were it not for the reimposed sanctions, many Iranians would already be enjoying somewhat better lives as a result of foreign investment and trade following the successful negotiation of the JCPOA. Because of the sanctions, that prospect of a moderately better future has been cut off for many years to come. The idea that the people responsible for the Iran sanctions actually desire “better lives” for the population that they are strangling is a sick joke, and news outlets that don’t acknowledge the obvious contradiction between administration rhetoric and the effect that administration policies are having on the civilian population in Iran are failing in their reporting.

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Daniel Larison is a senior editor at The American Conservative, where he also keeps a solo blog. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and is a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Dallas. Follow him on Twitter.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

The Globalization of War: America’s “Long War” against Humanity

Michel Chossudovsky

The “globalization of war” is a hegemonic project. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The U.S. military agenda combines both major theater operations as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-6-0

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo met with allies in a tour of Latin America this week, in which he talked about stepping up US-led efforts against Venezuela.

The Trump administration has been increasingly hostile towards the Caribbean nation, escalating sanctions and even threatening a military “option.”

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is due to start his second term on January 10, having won re-election on May 20, but Washington and several right-wing regional governments have refused to recognize the election and may look to further isolate Caracas in coming days. For its part, Venezuela has repeatedly denounced what it terms US-led destabilization efforts.

Tensions have likewise heightened with some of Venezuela’s Latin American neighbors, especially Brazil and Colombia, with flashpoints surrounding Venezuelan migration and an increased military presence along the shared borders.

Pompeo’s tour, which was also meant to address concerns about China’s growing presence in the region, started in Peru. Following a meeting with Peruvian Foreign Minister Nestor Bardales, the former CIA director stressed the need to “increase pressure” on the Venezuelan government.

Pompeo then flew to Brasilia for the inauguration of Jair Bolsonaro. In meetings with Brazil’s new president and Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo, he discussed joint efforts against the governments of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.

Pompeo later told the press that he and his Brazilian allies shared a “deep desire to return democracy” to Venezuela.

A former army captain during Brazil’s military dictatorship, ultra-right Bolsonaro took office on January 1 following his election victory in October. In his first speech as president, he vowed to “value Judeo-Christian traditions” and that Brazil would be free from “socialism, a giant state and political correctness.”

Venezuela featured prominently in Bolsonaro’s electoral campaign, in which the politician repeatedly accused the center-left Workers Party of seeking to bring “Venezuela-style socialism” to Brazil. Most recently, Bolsonaro’s vice-president, retired general Hamilton Mourao, commented in December that a coup would take place in Venezuela and that Brazil would lead a “force for peace.”

Pompeo’s latest stop was the Colombian city of Cartagena, where he held a meeting and joint press conference with Colombian President Ivan Duque.

The US official stated that the discussions had centered on how to collaborate in order to help Venezuelans “recover their democratic heritage,” while adding that Colombia was a “natural leader” in these efforts.

Kurt Tidd, head of U.S. Southern Command meets with Colombian President-elect Ivan Duque in Doral, Fla., July 14. 2018. Photo | SOUTHCOM

For his part, Duque stated that “all countries that defend democracy should unite to reject Venezuela’s dictatorship,” adding that humanitarian assistance was required to deal with Venezuelans arriving in Colombia. According to UN figures, 2.6 million Venezuelans have left the country since 2015, with over 1 million heading to Colombia.

A protegé of former president Alvaro Uribe, Duque has repeatedly met with US officials to discuss efforts to increase pressure on Venezuela. Venezuela and Colombia do not have diplomatic relations since Duque refused to appoint an ambassador to Caracas after being elected in June 2018.

In addition, Bolsonaro and Duque reportedly held a phone conversation in which one of the topics was the need to cooperate in search of “solutions” to the Venezuela crisis.

In response, the Venezuelan government blasted Pompeo’s tour as another instance of US meddling in its internal affairs. In a Foreign Ministry communiqué released on Wednesday, the Venezuelan executive “categorically rejected Secretary Pompeo’s interventionist attitude.”

Caracas likewise slammed Pompeo’s meeting with Duque, denouncing US efforts to“subjugate the sovereignty and self-determination of the Venezuelan people” and warning against the possible use of Colombian territory to launch an aggression against Venezuela.

Venezuelan authorities also took aim at Duque’s controversial statement thanking the US for their “crucial” support for Colombia’s independence 200 years ago, despite historians having yet to corroborate this alleged historical detail.

President Maduro commented on the current state of Latin American relations during a recent interview with Ignacio Ramonet on state broadcaster VTV. Maduro claimed that right-wing projects in the region are “not viable,” and lamented that Bolsonaro was “handing Brazil over to US transnationals on a silver platter.”

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Ricardo Vaz is a writer and editor at Venezuelanalysis. His articles have appeared on Investig’Action, Monthly Review, Truthout, Counterpunch, and other alternative media.

Featured image: Colombian President Ivan Duque hosted US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Cartagena this week. (Colombian Presidency)

An explosive CBC expose Friday on the Jewish National Fund should be the beginning of the end for this powerful organization’s charitable status. But, unless the NDP differentiates itself from the Liberals and Conservatives by standing up for Canadian and international law while simultaneously opposing explicit racism, the JNF may simply ride out this short bout of bad publicity.

According to a story headlined “Canadian charity  used donations to fund projects linked to Israeli military”, the JNF has financed multiple projects for the Israeli military in direct contravention of Canada Revenue Agency rules for registered charities. The organization has also funded a number of projects supporting West Bank settlements, which Global Affairs Canada considers in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The story also revealed that the Canada Revenue Agency, under pressure from Independent Jewish Voices and other Palestine solidarity activists, began an audit of the state-subsidized charity last year.

After detailing the above, (which provoked hundreds of mostly angry comments from readers) the story notes that the “JNF has had strong relations with successive Conservative and Liberal governments.” The CBC published a picture of politicians congregated at the Prime Minister’s residence above the caption “Laureen Harper poses with JNF Gala honorees during a group visit to 24 Sussex Drive in 2015.”

But the JNF, like all good lobbyists, has hedged it political bets and the story could have noted that the social democratic opposition party was represented at this JNF gala as well and has dutifully supported the dubious “charity”. NDP MP Pat Martin spoke at the JNF event Harper organized to “recognize and thank the people that have helped to make JNF Canada what it is today.” In 2016 NDP foreign critic Hélène Laverdière participated in a JNF tree planting ceremony in Jerusalem with JNF World Chairman Danny Atar and a number of its other top officials. The president of the Windsor-Tecumseh Federal NDP riding association, Noah Tepperman, has been a director of JNF Windsor since 2004 and has funded the organization’s events in London, Ontario.

In 2015 Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath published an ad in a JNF Hamilton handbook and offered words of encouragement to its fundraiser while Nova Scotia Premier Darrell Dexter planted a tree at a JNF garden in 2011. Manitoba NDP Premier Gary Doer was honoured at a 2006 JNF Negev Dinner in Winnipeg and cabinet minister Christine Melnick received the same honour in 2011. During a 2010 trip to Israel subsequent Manitoba NDP Premier Greg Selinger signed an accord with the JNF to jointly develop two bird conservation sites while water stewardship minister Melnick spoke at the opening ceremony for a park built in Jaffa by the JNF, Tel Aviv Foundation and Manitoba-Israel Shared Values Roundtable. (In 2017 Melnick won a B’nai Brith Zionist action figures prize for writing an article about a friend who helped conquer East Jerusalem and then later joined the JNF).

Besides NDP support for this dubious “charity”, the story ignored the JNF’s racist land-use policies. The JNF owns 13 per cent of Israel’s land, which was mostly taken from Palestinians forced from their homes by Zionist forces in 1947-1948. It discriminates against Palestinian citizens of Israel (Arab Israelis) who make up a fifth of the population. According to a UN report, JNF lands are “chartered to benefit Jews exclusively,” which has led to an “institutionalized form of discrimination.” Echoing the UN, a 2012 US State Department report detailing “institutional and societal discrimination” in Israel says JNF “statutes prohibit sale or lease of land to non-Jews.”

Indicative of its discrimination against the 20% of Israelis who aren’t Jewish, JNF Canada’s Twitter tag says it “is the caretaker of the land of Israel, on behalf of its owners — Jewish people everywhere.” Its parent organization in Israel — the Keren Kayemet LeYisrael — is even more open about its racism. Its website notes that “a survey  commissioned by KKL-JNF reveals that over 70% of the Jewish population in Israel opposes allocating KKL-JNF land to non-Jews, while over 80% prefer the definition of Israel as a Jewish state, rather than as the state of all its citizens.” While such exclusionary land-use policies were made illegal in Canada seven decades ago, that’s the JNF’s raison d’être.

An organization that recently raised $25 million  for a Stephen Harper Bird Sanctuary, JNF Canada has been directly complicit in at least three important instances of Palestinian dispossession. In the late 1920s JNF Canada spearheaded a highly controversial land acquisition that drove a 1,000 person Bedouin community from land it had tilled for centuries and in the 1980s JNF–Canada helped finance an Israeli government campaign to “Judaize” the Galilee, the largely Arab northern region of Israel. Additionally, as the CBC mentioned, JNF-Canada build Canada Park on the remnants of three Palestinian villages Israel conquered in 1967.

A map the JNF shows to nine and ten-year-olds at Jewish day schools in Toronto encompasses the illegally occupied West Bank and Gaza, effectively denying Palestinians the right to a state on even 22 percent of their historic homeland. Similarly, the maps  on JNF Blue Boxes, which are used by kids to raise funds, distributed in recent years include the occupied West Bank. The first map on the Blue Box, designed in 1934, depicted  an area reaching from the Mediterranean into present-day Lebanon and Jordan.

The JNF is an openly racist organization that supports illegal settlements and the Israeli military. Many NDP activists understand this. The party’s MPs now have a choice: If they stand for justice and against all forms of racism, for the rule of international law and fairness in the Canadian tax system, they will speak up in Parliament to keep this story alive. The NDP needs to set itself apart from the Liberals and Conservatives by following up on the CBC’s revelations to demand the Canada Revenue Agency rescind the JNF’s charitable status.

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Featured image is from Middle East Monitor

RT: Kosovo wants to establish an army and has received several Humvee armoured vehicles from the USA. Although there was official NATO restraint, how much is the establishment of a Kosovo Army a fixed development?

Rio de Janeiro’s state governor Wilson Witzel – an ally of Brazil’s new President Jair Bolsonaro – is reported to have said that Brazil “needs its own Guantanamo”:

Brazil “needs its own Guantanamo” to lock up criminals, Rio de Janeiro’s state governor Wilson Witzel, an ally of new far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, said Thursday, referring to the US military base in Cuba used as an extraterritorial prison.

“We need to put terrorists in places where society is completely free of them,” Witzel said in a speech to police in the city of Rio.

The new governor, who took office this week as part of an electoral wave favoring far-right politicians that elevated Bolsonaro to the presidency, is given to making controversial statements.

For instance, just after being elected in October last year, he suggested police snipers could kill armed “criminals” — including anybody spotted carrying weapons, even if no-one was being threatened.

He and Bolsonaro have pledged to crack down on crime that is plaguing Brazil. The country in 2017 recorded nearly 64,000 murders.

With his Guantanamo comment, Witzel was referring to a US military base leased from Cuba where suspects from America’s “war on terror” launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001 are kept in a sort of detention limbo, without access to the US legal system.” (AFP)

Commenting, Maya Foa, Director of Reprieve, which represents men held in Guantanamo, said:

“Since it opened in 2002, Guantanamo has become a byword for injustice and gross violations of human rights. Nearly 17 years on, the US is still detaining forty men at the prison, having subjected them to prolonged torture. 31 of the men do not face charges and have no chance of a trial. The world is certainly not safer as a result of these injustices. It is shocking that President Bolsonaro’s allies are calling for Brazil to open its own version of this hell hole, and shows what toxic influence Guantanamo continues to have in the world. President Trump must close the prison at once.”

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Featured image is from Folha PE

A wide-scale Washington-driven aggression against Venezuela is underway, imperialist and anti-democratic at its core, and it has the full backing of the British government.  British meddling in Venezuela is packaged in human rights and democracy rhetoric, the same way it was in aggressions against Iraq, Libya and Syria, but behind it the real agenda is not hard to spot.

The British Foreign Office funds the Westminster Foundation for Democracy (WFD), a British government think tank, ‘dedicated to supporting democracy around the world’to work inside the Venezuelan parliament. The WFD claims it works to support the National Assembly’s ‘Modernisation Committee,’ and paints a picture of being unbiased, democratic and disinterested in party ideology

 “…Westminster Foundation for Democracy works with all political parties on the National Modernisation Committee in the National Assembly of Venezuela and the parliamentary staff that support it.”

However, the Modernisation Committee, is made up of members from the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), a coalition of members from right-wing opposition parties.  The MUD was created to challenge the Chavez government and the Bolivarian revolution.   It consists of First Justice, whose leader, Julio Borges, is living in self-exile in Colombia under the protection of the right-wing government of Ivan Duque, and is accused of authoring the assassination attempt on President Maduro in August last year.  It consists also of the far-right Popular Will party that has seen various members of its leadership arrested or self-exiled, accused of acts of terrorism carried out during violent protests against the government.  These are the parties assisted by the UK Foreign Office in Venezuela, deliberately engaged because they aim not just to undermine, but overthrow the Venezuelan government.  To explain its operations in the Venezuelan parliament, the Westminster Foundation for Democracy insinuates it is there to help mend the rift between the Venezuelan government and the people

“Following the 2015 Parliamentary elections in Venezuela, political polarisation increased and led to a deadlock that has eroded the public’s trust in politics during a time of deep economic crisis, hyperinflation and episodes of violence against the civil population.”

It then encourages the notion that it is working in collaboration with the government by claiming to work with all sides of the ‘political divide’

WFD works on a cross-party basis, seeking to engage all sides of the political divide while supporting democratic institutions in the country.

The WFD claims to do this in a number of ways

“…legislation, inclusion, representation, public budget, oversight and parliamentary administration. Implementation of recommendations for each area is currently underway.”

This would suggest that the elected government, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV), accused by the Foreign Office of violent repressive activity against its own people, and a target of UK sanctions, has invited the Foreign Office into its heart to help produce its own legislation.

A look through the legislation by the National Assembly shows how unlikely this is. The National Assembly systematically and methodically produces documentation to attack the Maduro government almost on a weekly basis. This is because the National Assembly is in most part, made up of opposition seats won in the 2015 parliamentary elections.  Since 2016 it has had little power as it has been held in contempt of court for swearing in legislators under investigation for voter fraud.  A political gridlock followed, which resulted in Maduro invoking a Constituent Assembly in 2017 to produce a functioning legislative body, and a new constitution.  He did this in accordance with the 1999 Constitution,  announcing it would resolve violent anti-government protests by unifying all sections of society.  The opposition then boycotted the elections, claiming the invoking of a Constituent Assembly was illegal, despite advocating for one in 2014.  The opposition incited violent protests at polls during which a number of people died, including an election candidate.   Delegates were voted in and the Constituent Assembly was formed in what has been described by some as the mobilising of the population against rising fascism.

Therefore, the narrative that the British Foreign Office is supporting the Venezuelan government in mending rifts with its own people through legislation, or any other activity within the Venezuelan National Assembly, does not hold water.  It is more likely that the Foreign Office is working to enable right-wing parties and fascists to overthrow the Venezuelan government.  It is not known to what extent National Assembly documentation content is influenced by the Foreign Office, but a collaboration with such authors of anti-Maduro publications is a useful tool.

The Westminster Foundation for Democracy’s credibility that it is helping to re-establish the trust between the Venezuelan government and its people, is dependent on the narrative that Venezuela has a failing democracy with corrupt elections.  To this end, the UK government has continued to discredit elections in Venezuela, backed by British mainstream media to drive the ‘rigged’ narrative, despite recognition by international inspecting bodies of fair and proper electoral practice. It has used this narrative as a pretext to further destabilise the country through sanctions, in alliance with the EU and the Trump administration, all stakeholders in a regime change in Venezuela.

To validate its role, Westminster Foundation for Democracy uses academic ‘experts on democracy’ to produce strategy frameworks for ‘fragile countries’ such as Venezuela. Rubber-stamping with Oxbridge insignia continues to be a practice for manufacturing approval for government intervention, whether it is through the self-promoting antics of theorists selling strategy for commercial reasons or the co-opting of the impressionable and idealistic young onto the fake human rights platforms of the British government and its US ally as they deliver democracy overseas. Such was the purpose of the visit by Luis Almagro, head of the Organisation of American States (OAS), to Oxford University last year.

President Nicolás Maduro is rigging an election in Venezuela. The BBC headline tells us that he “won”. Find out how to pull of this neat trick here, curtesy of @ForeignPolicy and our new book #howtoriganelection pic.twitter.com/4PJusDlf8Q

— Prof Nic Cheeseman (@Fromagehomme) May 21, 2018

Grateful for the invitation to @UniofOxford. Yesterday I had an insightful and engaging conversation with the faculty and students of the LatAm and Caribbean on the role of the @OAS_official in the ongoing political crises in the region. pic.twitter.com/ktTWVoLohG

— Luis Almagro (@Almagro_OEA2015) October 9, 2018

The OAS is heavily funded by the USand is considered by the Venezuelan government to be a mouthpiece for Washington.  The head of the OAS, Luis Almagro, is vehemently opposed to the Maduro government, and has supported US and EU sanctions. He has also given his support for a military coup in Venezuela.

But theWestminster Foundation for Democracy and establishment academic strategists are just a small part of the multimillion-pound military, business and intelligence machine that ‘innovates’ for democracy in Venezuela, much of which is connected through Chatham House.

It is theSister institute to the influential US foreign policy think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where America’s imperialists and militarists network, and many US foreign policies are grown.  Chatham House has its own imperialists  and receives funds from the British Foreign Office, the Home Office, the Department of International Development, the Cabinet Office and the Ministry of Defence, demonstrating its value as a think tank tool for policymaking and intelligence matters.

Chatham House and the CFR attract the same calibre of imperialist.  While Richard Haass was advising Colin Powell going to war on Iraq in 2003, British chief advisor David Manning was doing the same for Tony Blair. Haass went on to become director of CFR while Manning is a senior advisor at Chatham House.  But as well as being a natural home for regime change strategists, these think thanks are where the oil, gas and weapons industries network, as  David Manning’s comments to Condoleeza Rice three months before the invasion of Iraq show

“It would be inappropriate for HMG [Her Majesty’s government] to enter into discussions about any future carve-up of the Iraqi oil industry. Nonetheless it is essential that our [British] companies are given access to a level playing field in this and other sectors.”

Manning went on to become a director of the weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin, that profited from the Iraq war. He also became the director of BG oil, taken over by Shell in 2016 in a multibillion-pound deal.

Ever better relations with Argentina and spoke today at Chatham House along with their Foreign Minister @jorgefaurie. Also Venezuela is collapsing, regional action desperately needed. https://t.co/iLCX4WgiZ8

— Sir Alan Duncan MP (@AlanDuncanMP) October 25, 2018

Tory MP Alan Duncan, who spoke at a closed meeting at Chatham House on Venezuela in October 2018, is another regime change tactician.  For years Duncan worked as a consultant in oil, with links to Vitol, a corporate member of Chatham House.  In 2011 Duncan’s oil contacts became useful in the overthrow of Libyan leader, Muammar Gaddafi, when Duncan was Minister for the Department of International Development (DfID). The Guardian reported

“The government has admitted that the international development minister, Alan Duncan, took part in meetings between officials operating a Whitehall cell to control the Libyan oil market and Vitol – a company for which Duncan has previously acted as a consultant.”

“The “Libyan oil cell” involved a group of officials working in the Foreign Office since May waging a quiet campaign against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime by controlling the flow of oil in the country.”

Interviewed in 2016 at a House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee inquiry on how the UK invasion led to a failed Libyan state, Duncan distanced himself from the operations in Libya and diminished his role. There was no mention of his involvement with a cell engineering passage of oil to jihadists, and the misery inflicted by the UK government on Libya was put down to staffing issues at the  Home Office and tribal wars, NATO’s military adventurism and funding of Islamist groups vying for power forgotten.  However, in 2011 the Telegraph described the transport of oil to jihadist ‘rebels’ as ‘vital’

“Supplies of diesel, petrol and fuel kept creaking power stations under rebel control from grinding to a halt and ultimately proved vital to efforts to overthrow Gadaffi. The trade was even more audacious because the rebels had no means of paying up front so Vitol agreed to provide it on credit.”

This suggests that Duncan’s role in regime change in Libya was more significant than suggested in the inquiry.  Now, as Minister for the Americas, Duncan has turned his attention to Venezuela.   Vitol,  meanwhile, under the chairmanship of Ian Taylor, Duncan’s friend and Tory sponsor, has been named in corruption cases in Venezuela and Brazil.

Through his Chatham House speech, Duncan has indicated his allegiances to oil networks remain firm,  music to the ears of Shell Oil,  looking to resolve its current problems in Venezuela

“We cannot talk about Venezuela without understanding the central role played by oil since the early 20th Century, I speak as a former oil trader myself.”

“The revival of the oil industry will be an essential element in any recovery, and I can imagine that British companies like Shell and BP, will want to be part of it.”

His comments take us back to the rape of Libya, but also to the planned carving up of Iraq. It is clear that Duncan would reprise his role; he has the connections, the resources, the knowledge and the experience in how to use oil networks to overthrow governments.  He has the British mainstream press behind him, as it was behind Cameron for the NATO bombing of Libya, providing fake human rights abuse narratives as shown in the Parliamentary inquiry report.

Duncan’s comments on sanctions against Venezuela make it clear that the UK will stick to this same strategy, as used in Iraq and Syria, where the catastrophic effects from sanctions have been seen.  No end of suffering through sanctions will deter the British government from its geopolitical goals. It has shown its commitment to back Washington’s goal to overthrow Maduro and destroy the Bolivarian revolution.  The UK’s refusal to return Venezuela’s gold, held at the Bank of England, a much-needed resource for the struggling Venezuelan economy, is further proof.

Meanwhile, unlike most concerned that a far-right president has come to power in Brazil, Duncan, so concerned about democracy in Venezuela, has welcomed Bolsonaro. In a recent meeting at the House of Commons, Duncan, in his role as Minister for the Americas, was asked

“What assessment he has made of potential risks to (a) democratic institutions, (b) the rule of law, (c) freedom of the press and (d) human rights in Brazil as a result of the election of Jair Bolsonaro as that country’s President.”

In answer, Duncan had seen no reason to make assessments

“Brazil is Latin America’s largest democracy. It has strong institutions to guarantee the rule of law, freedom of the press and human rights with the clear separation of powers protected by the constitution. This has not been changed by the election of Jair Bolsonaro. We will continue to monitor the situation closely.”

Met this morning with Latin American Ambassadors and Canadian High Commissioner. Followed by meeting with new Brazilian Ambassador. Broadly like-minded on the unfolding political and economic disaster in Venezuela. pic.twitter.com/5pvI28Uva0

— Sir Alan Duncan MP (@AlanDuncanMP) October 18, 2018

Duncan is likely to be engineering an alliance with Bolsonaro’s government, far-right ideology overlooked, with the aim of regime change in Venezuela.

As well as pushing sanctions, and pursuing diplomatic alliances, Duncan has also promoted the Lima Group as a mechanism for regional intervention. The Lima Group was created with the sole purpose of attacking the Venezuelan Constituent Assembly and is made up of a coalition of Washington’s Latin American allies.  It is a US asset with no legitimacy for interfering in the internal politics of an individual sovereign nation

“We are fully behind the Lima Group of countries in their efforts to seek a regional solution to the crisis.”

This is a strategy also promoted by Washinton via the CFR

“…there are some efforts the United States could make in a supporting role to the Lima Group. Colombia has called for a reconstruction plan for Venezuela; the United States should encourage a Latin American conference to develop that plan with clear U.S. commitments.”

Ironically, the recent spotlight on Duncan over FO funding of the Integrity Initiative designed to ‘counter Russian disinformation’ reveals the hypocrisy and fake agenda of the British government, that works to overthrow democratically elected governments while claiming it will not tolerate political interference on its own territory. Were the Venezuelan government to fund activities inside Westminster aimed at overthrowing Theresa May’s government, it would be viewed with outrage.  Yet the Foreign Office appears entitled in its plotting against Venezuela’s elected government.  This same culture of entitlement is apparent in the Integrity Initiative operations, where the discrediting of the democratically elected leader of British government opposition, is designed to undermine his threat to the British establishment.  These growing and more frequent attacks on democracy by Britain’s elite, expose a self-serving class and network who think they can carve up and profit from whatever group, land, or resource they feel entitled to, whatever the cost to any population, whether at home or in Venezuela.

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Sources

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Venezuela-In-Exclusive-Interview-Expert-Explains-Constituent-Assembly-Process-20170917-0014.html

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-44187838 rigged elections

https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/Venezuela-Borges-Opposition-Leader-Behind-Failed-Assasination-Attempt-20181017-0035.html

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13491 popular will far right party

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13487 popular will violence

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/12881 more pw violence

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13487 freddie guevara self-exiled

https://venezuelanalysis.com/files/attachments/%5Bsite-date-yyyy%5D/%5Bsite-date-mm%5D/general_electoral_accompaniment_report_may_2018.pdf

https://www.voanews.com/a/maduro-wins-venezuela-election/4402735.htmlus sanctions

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/wrans/?id=2018-11-09.189833.h&p=10179  Alan Duncan Venezuela sanctions

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13276 voting centers attacked national constituent assembly elections

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/14118 rising fascism

https://www.rt.com/news/446809-integrity-initiative-third-leak-uk/

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13322 AN claim setting up ANC was a coup

https://www.telesurenglish.net/opinion/Why-Does-Venezuela-Have-a-National-Constituent-Assembly–20170820-0021.html contempt of court

http://misionverdad.com/MV-IN-ENGLISH/why-does-venezuela-have-a-national-constituent-assemblycontempt of court

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/venezuelas-pro-government-assembly-moves-to-take-power-from-elected-congress/2017/08/18/9c6cd0a2-8416-11e7-9e7a-20fa8d7a0db6_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.53b91adb259e

http://www.oas.org/en/media_center/press_release.asp?sCodigo=S-020/17 almagro on venezuela

https://www.rt.com/uk/446695-labour-mp-statecraft-institute/

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/70 1999 Constitution

https://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/13280 following the constituent assembly elections – what happened during elections and press reaction,

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/foreign-secretary-statement-on-venezuela condemned by uk foreign office despite being constitutionally legal and sovereign decision

https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/13096 announcement of constituent assembly

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‘The Decision Is Taken’: Brazil to Move Its Embassy to Jerusalem, Says Bolsonaro

By Middle East Eye, January 06, 2019

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has confirmed that the South American country will move its embassy to Jerusalem, following an earlier statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Brazil this week to attend the new Brazilian leader’s swearing-in.

Within Hours of Taking Office, “Trump of the Tropics” Starts Assault on the Amazon

By Andy Rowell, January 06, 2019

Within hours of taking office, the Trump of the Tropics, aka the new President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, launched an all-out assault against the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities yesterday, potentially paving the way for large scale deforestion by agricultural, mining and oil companies.

Japan to Push for WWII-Era Peace Treaty with Russia

By Telesur, January 06, 2019

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday he intends to move towards a World War II peace treaty with Russia during a summit in Russia later this month. The treaty has been hindered for decades by a territorial dispute.

Global Research New Hour: Global Economy, Geo-Politics, Militarization. The Most Significant Stories of 2018, Projections for 2019

By Michael Welch, Rick Rozoff, Andy Lee Roth, Dr. Jack Rasmus, and Dmitry Orlov, January 05, 2019

At the start of the year, we witnessed nuclear sabre-rattling between U.S. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. There was the poisoning (and recovery) of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury UK, in which the Russian government was implicated.

Iraq Rejects Iran Sanctions and US Troop Presence

By Jim Carey, January 05, 2019

Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali al-Hakim laid out the latest step on the path to independence for Baghdad from the US concerning sanctions on Iran by Washington.

Nicaragua and the Corruption, Co-optation of Human Rights

By Stephen Sefton, January 05, 2019

Like Venezuela previously, Nicaragua has been targeted by the US dominated Organization of American States using local US and European funded non-profit proxies inside Nicaragua and Western corporate dominated non-governmental organizations.

Has Trump Been Outmaneuvered on Syria Troop Withdrawal?

By Richard H. Black, January 04, 2019

Following the outcry after President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was pulling U.S. troops from Syria, it appears that Trump may be succumbing to political pressure.

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This writer just loves it when our USA mainstream (embedded in empire) media, and of course our Two Party/One Party politicians, rant and rave about dictators. They lash out at the preposterous comical assertions by the leaders of many countries, who win re-elections with 90% to 100% of the vote, that those nations are democracies. Shame on them! Shame on our nation’s corporate and political entities who keep trading (and financially aiding) those countries. These men (not too often women) who are quite honestly dictators, always make sure that there is little or no opposition to them. What cracks this writer up is when (so called) Socialist Bernie Sanders said “Hugo Chavez is just a dead Communist dictator.” Yet, Chavez won election and two re-elections as Venezuela’s president against formidable candidates. The last time being in 2012 when he won 55% to 45%. Is that what our empire’s lemmings would call a dictatorship?

Here’s the skinny on our so called democracy and ‘free elections’ in Amerika. The Fat Cats who are the wizards behind the OZ sure are shrewd. For close to a century they have made sure that their concoction AKA Two Party System stayed intact. Folks, anyone else just could not get through the door. The powerful money behind both of the empire’s parties just keeps on splashing out of the spigot! Any semblance of a third party movement is squashed before it can get legs! Or… one of the two parties (usually today’s Democrats) just co opts the new movement, and places it under its Big Tent. Finally, most elections, for president especially, sees a majority of the voting public (which is usually around 50% of eligible voters… why is that?) not voting for one candidate, but in reality voting against the other! Trump, to this writer’s way of thinking and logic, won because of the powerful backlash against Hillary Clinton. My joke has been that if the Democrats ran Donald Duck against Donald Trump they would have won!

So, bottom line is that we do have a dictatorship right here in good ole Amerika. It is a much more sophisticated one whereupon the suckers (we who actually vote) get to choose from as Ralph Nader labeled it: Twiddle Dum and Twiddle Dee! The Two Party/One Party con job will differ on certain issues like abortion, gay rights, Medicaid funding… gee I’m having difficulty finding more key issues… but never on what really matters to our survival as a republic: obscene military spending, overseas wars and occupations, Big Banks controlling everything, Amerikan corporations running roughshod on workers at home and abroad… and the piece de resistance: The notion that this corporate capitalist ‘free enterprise’ system really works for all. Mr. Trump may think of himself as a semi- dictator, but he is not! The powerful forces who even allowed someone with his ‘closet filled with skeletons’ to achieve our highest office, they call the shots. The last time someone stood up to them, or thought he surely had the ‘will of the masses’ behind him, wound up in a deadly ‘triangular crossfire’ in Dallas Texas.

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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, 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].

Featured image is from NEO

Increasing gasoline taxes drove the now aggrieved French Yellow Vest movement into the streets to protest the Macron government responding to climate change at the expense of the already economically struggling. Instead, we need to shape climate solutions to improve the lives and livelihoods of citizens. The good news is there are market fixes that are not carbon taxes to quickly and painlessly affect the supply and demand for fossil fuels.

Poorly thought out and imposed plans have negative consequences. You can screw anything up, both markets and planning—markets that do not include the cost of externalities become ecosphere destroying machines; planning that shifts the costs on those less able to pay without plans for countervailing payments or credits.

Far better is to approach stopping and reversing climate change within the context of social and economic justice. When you add yet another tax on already sky high European gasoline prices, this is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Market means that are not just another imposition placed by the rich upon the poor, but are part of comprehensive pursuit of ecological and social justice must be our guide for the conduct of global ecological economic growth.

Ecological and social justice is not, in spirit or in fact, reduced to a redistribution of resources from rich to poor. It is much more an expression of a common local and global pursuit of both freedom and community as the interdependent basis for an ecological civilization. Ecological civilization as an expression of freedom and community, of democratic equality, not simply of markets, capitalist or otherwise. The economic and market means we consider here are meant to be viewed through the lens of freedom and community, of social and ecological justice.

Markets are supposed to be all about supply and demand determining price. Ideally, we would seamlessly decrease both the supply and demand for fossil fuels with efficient renewables replacing fossil fuels at lower prices. Thus, carbon emissions decline and prices decline.

The Magic Formula

The magic formula in this case is to mandate the 15 year phase out of all gasoline powered cars and phase in electric vehicles and hydrogen powered vehicles with an equivalent fuel cost of around $1.00 a gallon savings a typical driver $1,500 a year in fuel costs.

A fifteen thousand mile a year driver of a 30 mile per gallon gas car using four dollar a gallon gasoline would spend $2,000 a year for 500 gallons of gas. The electric vehicle would cost $500. An annual savings of $1500 plus additional savings from no oil changes and savings on gas engine repairs since electric motors are more reliable and suffer much less wear and tear than internal combustion engines.

Government and regulatory policy is not just to set the rules and stand back. Government also needs to:

• Support infrastructure development for EVs and Hydrogen fuel cells cars;
• Green bank low interest long term loans for charging infrastructure. Charging is an extremely lucrative local business to replace gas stations once a significant percentage of cars are electric. Making sure charging infrastructure is available is key.
• Training and retraining workers for jobs in electric/hydrogen vehicle/solar/ wind/charging industry.
• Government auctions off local charging infrastructure franchises for street charging just as it auctions off electro-magnetic spectrum with 50% guaranteed for local and cooperative ownership.
• Implement building codes and zoning that require ability to plug in electric vehicles to homes and businesses to both provide energy allowed by battery charge levels, and serve as storage grid back up for the grid;
• Tax credits on EVs and hydrogen cars focused on lower cost vehicles
• Requirements phased quickly in that classes of commercial vehicles such as taxis, zip cars, rental cars, self-driving cars must be EVs or hydrogen, tax credit for ride hailing service driver like Uber and Lyft to use EVs or hydrogen.
• Cap and escalating annual reduction in production of fossil fuels
• Import duties on fossil fuels by producers who have not implemented gasoline replacement ;
• Support of renewably powered public and mass transit to reduce need for and use of private cars including buses, mass transit, national high speed rail network as major infrastructure priority.

What’s needed is to accelerate the phase out of gasoline power vehicles with meeting 2030 carbon reduction targets in mind and government support of electric and hydrogen powered vehicle charging and fueling infrastructure. Electric charging will be a highly profitable activity. Its installation could be speeded up by auctioning of limited but non-exclusive franchises by government similar to the way cell phone spectrum is marketed. What makes sense to me is that charging be considered a semi-utility with government contracting on a bid basis to install and then to operate an electric car charging network. The batteries of EVs would also prove to be a crucial part of electric system storage.

Increasing the price at the pump from a carbon tax on gasoline drove Yellow Vest protestors into the streets against one more burden imposed upon economically struggling workers. Carbon taxes without a tax and dividend scheme, which I believe is unnecessary, is not the best way to pursue carbon reductions and social and ecological justice.

The carbon tax is an economically signaling means beloved by many economists that by raising prices of carbon impacted goods you will help the development of non-carbon replacements. In general when there are replacements for carbon impacted goods and services that are cheaper non-polluting replacements cap and replace rules, like those for electric vehicles are far superior,

Supply and demand measures can help lead the way toward an ecological transformation that emphasizes reducing consumer costs and putting money in people’s pockets. After all, if saving civilization from ecological collapse makes you money, what’s the problem of departing from fossil fuels beyond the desire of the fossil fuel empire to sell their global reserve to the last drop or at least until the moment of collapse in an overheated world.

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Roy Morrison builds solar farms. His next book is Global Ecological Economic Growth: How to Stop and Reverse Climate Change forthcoming in 2019.

President Donald Trump declared his right as president to unilaterally build a border wall on “national security” grounds during a press conference in the White House Rose Garden Friday. He spoke after a meeting with congressional leadership on the ongoing deadlock that has led to the partial government shutdown, now entering its third week.

“I may do it,” Trump told reporters. “We could call a national emergency and build it very quickly. That’s another way to do it. But if we can do it through a negotiated process, we’re giving that a shot.” He glibly declared that this wasn’t a “threat hanging over the Democrats,” insisting, “I’m allowed to do it.”

Such an action would be a flagrant violation of the Constitution. Article I, Section 9, Paragraph 7 reads in part: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law…” Spending money appropriated to the Pentagon to build a wall on the US-Mexico border would be an impeachable offense, although whether the congressional Democrats would take such an action is doubtful.

Trump’s threat to take the action is effectively a threat of presidential dictatorship, since the Pentagon budget, already appropriated, would become a slush fund to pay for any repressive action demanded by his fascistic base, such as mass roundups of immigrants, the establishment of concentration camps to imprison them, and the deportation of millions of working people.

Trump also confirmed at the press briefing that he told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer earlier in the day that he was prepared to keep the government closed indefinitely until his demands of $5 billion in wall funds were met by the Democrats, who now hold a majority in the House of Representatives.

While Trump declared that the shutdown could last “months or even years” without a deal on congressional funding for a wall along the southern border, ABC News reported that sources in the administration confirmed that options are being considered to circumvent the legislative branch, including redirecting funds already appropriated to the Department of Defense.

A Department of Defense spokesman told ABC that the Pentagon is already “reviewing available authorities and funding mechanisms to identify options to enable border barrier construction.”

NBC News also reported that while options for building the wall without congressional approval have been raised within the administration previously, they are now being seriously considered.

“Depending on the severity of crisis, it’s always been an option. Now that things are getting worse, we are looking at how that could be operationalized and used to confront the crisis,” an anonymous official told NBC.

In an indication that the Trump’s threat to declare a state of emergency was not just an off-the-cuff remark, the White House sent each member of Congress a copy of a presentation on the supposed “invasion” of US borders by asylum seekers that DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen tried to deliver to congressional leaders on Wednesday. Schumer and Pelosi declined to sit through the propaganda pitch, but Trump decided to bypass the congressional leaders and send it directly to the entire membership of Congress.

Last month Trump threatened to deploy the military to build the wall without congressional approval, tweeting,

“If the Democrats do not give us the votes to secure our Country, the Military will build the remaining sections of the Wall.”

Trump has already deployed thousands of active-duty soldiers to the southern border to erect barriers, string razor wire and assist border patrol agents in the detention of immigrants. NPR reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has requested thousands more troops to militarize 160 miles of the border in California and Arizona, a project which is expected to last through September. Trump’s initial deployment announced in October had been scheduled to expire this month.

Pelosi and Schumer made the trek to the White House Friday to press Trump to accept a deal that would fully reopen the government, provide funding for federal agencies not including the DHS through September, and then allow for a separate debate over funding for the wall. The Democrats have been seeking a climbdown by Trump, offering him $1.6 billion for “border security” but not a wall.

While Pelosi described the meeting as “contentious,” Trump claimed it had been “very productive,” though, when pressed by reporters, he refused to discuss if the Democrats had moved toward his position on the wall.

“I don’t want to get into that. I don’t want to put them [Pelosi and Schumer] in a position where they have to justify things to a lot of people they have to make happy,” Trump remarked.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell confirmed that staff-level talks over a resolution to the shutdown would continue through the weekend.

“The president agreed to designate his top people to sit down with all the leaders’ staffs this weekend to see if we could come up with an agreement to recommend back to us, to him and to the various leaders,” he told reporters.

During his Friday press conference, Trump absurdly claimed that most federal employees support the shutdown and the construction of a border wall because it would provide them with economic security:

“The safety net is having a strong border, because we’re going to be safe. I’m not talking economically but ultimately economically.”

Some 800,000 employees who have been furloughed or forced to work without pay will miss their first full paycheck January 11 if an agreement between Trump and the Democrats is not reached soon.

The Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Housing and Urban Development, Interior and Transportation have been shut down and most employees forced to stay home. The Departments of Homeland Security, Justice and State have also been affected.

While the National Parks remain open, some 21,000 employees have been furloughed, meaning that trash has begun to pile up and that road and trail maintenance has been put off at parks across the country. Without any rangers on the job, local funding and volunteers have tried to keep popular spots such as the Statue of Liberty in New York and Joshua Tree National Park in California clean.

Meanwhile, those employees deemed “essential,” including Transportation Security Administration security officers, federal prison guards and border patrol agents, are being compelled to work without pay. Meteorologists employed by the National Weather Service as well as air traffic controllers are also required to report to work without pay. Late Friday, the TSA acknowledged that an increasing number of passenger screening workers were calling in sick rather than report to work without pay, but the agency said no flights had yet been disrupted.

The shutdown has resulted in the closure this week of the Smithsonian Institute’s 19 museums and the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell monument in Philadelphia have also been closed to the public. The closures have severely slowed business for small shops and restaurants around these areas, which cater to tourists and federal employees.

Native Americans who reside on one of the country’s many reservations have seen services funded by federal money guaranteed in treaties threatened or entirely cut off. Approximately 1.9 million American Indians and Alaskan Natives are affected. The New York Times reported that the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is spending $100,000 of its own funds to keep clinics and food pantries open. Without federal funding, roads have gone unplowed after snow storms across New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, trapping residents in their homes.

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Featured image: Border wall stretches for miles into the rolling landscape on the outskirts of Nogales, Arizona. This kind of fencing is impassable to most wingless wildlife. Photo by Rebecca Kessler for Mongabay.

Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro has confirmed that the South American country will move its embassy to Jerusalem, following an earlier statement by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was in Brazil this week to attend the new Brazilian leader’s swearing-in.

“The decision is taken,” Bolsonaro said late on Thursday in an interview on Brazil’s SBT television, as reported by AFP.

“It’s only a matter of when it will be implemented,” he said.

The comment confirmed an earlier statement by Netanyahu, who said on Sunday that Bolsonaro said it was a matter of “when, not if” the Brazilian embassy would move to Jerusalem.

Brazil is following in the footsteps of the United States, which moved its embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv last year, a move that caused a surge of anger among Palestinians.

Bolsonaro, a far-right former paratrooper intent on forging close ties with the US and Israel, said in early November he intended to go through with the embassy move.

He quickly reversed course, however, saying “it is not yet decided”, apparently responding to fears from Brazil’s powerful farming businesses that an embassy move could put at risk $1bn in meat exports to Arab markets.

But in his SBT interview, Bolsonaro minimised that risk, saying:

“A large part of the Arab world is aligned or aligning itself with the United States. The Palestinian issue is already overloading people in the Arab world for the most part.”

He said that “the only weighty voice speaking out against me is Iran”.

Some of the “more radical” Arab nations “might adopt some sort of sanction – I hope only economic ones – against us,” he added, without specifying which countries he was referring to.

Bolsonaro’s plans to move the embassy to Jerusalem would be a shift in Brazilian foreign policy, which has traditionally backed a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Arab League had told Bolsonaro that moving the embassy would be a setback for relations with Arab countries, according to a letter seen by Reuters in December.

The decision is controversial because Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital while Palestinians view East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.

Most countries agree that Jerusalem’s status can only be defined through Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.

So far, only the US and Guatemala have broken with that consensus by opening embassies in Jerusalem.

Paraguay backtracked on a decision last year to move its embassy, while Israel and the US have talked with Honduras about its embassy moving to Jerusalem.

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Featured image: Jair Bolsonaro holds an Israeli flag during the 26th March for Jesus in São Paulo, Brazil. Photo | Alexssandro Loyola

Within hours of taking office, the Trump of the Tropics, aka the new President of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, launched an all-out assault against the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous communities yesterday, potentially paving the way for large scale deforestion by agricultural, mining and oil companies.

Startling many commentators by the speed of his action after his inauguration, Bolsonaro signed an executive order or decree, which immediately shifted responsibility for indigenous land demarcation from FUNAI, the Brazilian government’s Indigenous Affairs office, to the pro-agribusiness Ministry of Agriculture.

More worryingly, it could eventually pave the way for the dismantling of the indigenous reserve system, which would allow mining and oil interests to move in unchallenged.

Indigenous communities were rightly outraged at the move. Sônia Gujajajara, president of the Articulation of the Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), one of Brazil’s leading indigenous groups, tweeted:

“The unravelling has begun … Does anyone still doubt that he [Bolsonaro] will carry out his electoral promises to exclude us [indigenous people from our constitutional rights]?”

Another indigenous leader, speaking with NGO Survival International, asked:

“Is this President Jair Bolsonaro a real human being? I think not. The first thing he’s done is to mess with indigenous rights. I ask: who were the first inhabitants of this country?”

Dinaman Tuxá, the executive coordinator of the Articulation of Indigenous People of Brazil (Apib) added:

“There will be an increase in deforestation and violence against indigenous people. Indigenous people are defenders and protectors of the environment. We will go through another colonisation process, this is what they want.”

We need to call out the threat to Brazil’s indigenous community for what it is: genocide.

As Fiona Watson, from Survival International states:

“Indigenous peoples are frequently regarded as obstacles to the advance of agribusiness, extractive industries, roads and dams. As more rainforest is invaded and destroyed in the name of economic ‘progress’ and personal profit, uncontacted tribes become targets – massacred over resources because greedy outsiders know they can literally get away with murder. These are silent, invisible genocides, with few if any witnesses.”

We must all bear witness to what is happening in the Amazon. For the sake of its people, for the sake of the forest as well as for the sake of the climate.

According to the Mongabay website

“The potentially resulting wholesale deforestation could be a disaster to indigenous peoples, biodiversity, and even the regional and global climate.”

It adds:

“Bolsonaro’s proposed Amazon policies, if carried out, could ultimately help dash the world’s hopes of achieving the global climate goals agreed to in Paris, a failure that could lead to climate chaos.”

Leading Brazilian researchers, from the National Institute of Space Research (INPE), have calculated that Bolsonaro’s policies could triple deforestation in the Amazon from present levels of 6,900 square kilometers (2,664 square miles) annually, to 25,600 square kilometres (9,884 square miles) per year by 2020.

And if that happens, the so-called lungs of the world, will collapse. And that will affect us all.

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Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Newly inaugurated Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro lives up to the label “Trump of the tropics” in many ways, including his misogynistic comments and a racist streak that surfaces in his disparaging treatment of minorities. But the similarity that is likely to have the broadest and most destructive effects is his disregard of the danger of planetary catastrophe through climate change. The presidency of Brazil is an especially important office in this regard because of its power over the fate of most of the Amazon rainforest.

Bolsonaro has long made clear his intention to destroy more of the forest, supposedly in the name of economic development and with visions of ever more cattle ranches and soybean farms. He has wasted no time in using his powers to that end. On his first full day in office, he issued an executive order giving the agriculture ministry authority to dispose of lands claimed by indigenous peoples. This measure clearly is a first step toward greater exploitation of the Amazon region by agribusiness. Besides reflecting Bolsonaro’s lack of concern for the environment, it also reflected his disdain for the native peoples of the region. He sees no value in protecting their cultures and way of life.

The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest. It is an enormous carbon sink that breathes in carbon dioxide and breathes out twenty percent of the world’s oxygen. There is no other single ecosystem that is as important in preventing a runaway planetary greenhouse effect. Although parts of the rainforest are in other South American countries, sixty percent of it is in Brazil.

Much destruction preceded Bolsonaro. Earlier deforestation has meant that the great carbon sink already is absorbing significantly less carbon than it did as recently as a decade ago. Some previous Brazilian administrations gave serious attention to the problem and slowed the pace of deforestation. But in more recent years enforcement against deforestation has lapsed amid political turmoil that included the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff.

The current precariousness of the Amazon rainforest stems not only from the cutting and burning that already has taken place but also from feedback loops in which reduction of the forest sets in train natural processes that lead to further reduction. As the term “rainforest” might suggest, the jungle makes much of its own weather. Less rainforest means less rain. Further deforestation is likely to lead to dry savanna, not to something that is as green and wet as the existing jungle.

The lushness of the rainforest disguises how fragile the ecosystem is in other respects. The biological richness is confined to a thin layer, and the soil underneath is mostly poor and infertile. Would-be growers of crops and of grass for livestock come to realize that. But by the time such realization is great enough to have political impact, it may be too late to save the rainforest.

Earlier experience has provided some lessons in this regard that should have been heeded, including lessons involving North Americans. In the 1920s the industrialist Henry Ford established an operation in the Brazilian rainforest intended to produce rubber for the tires on automobiles the Fort Motor Company manufactured. The company cleared jungle to construct an entire town, known as Fordlandia. Among the problems the company encountered was the difficulty in industrializing the relevant botanical process. Rubber trees in the wild do well when widely scattered among other species; when put close together on Ford’s plantation they were easy prey for pests and disease. Ford abandoned the project after just a few years, without producing any rubber for those tires back in the United States.

Trumps of both the tropics and temperate zones have assaulted in various ways what is often called the international order, and the assault has been destructive. But that order, important as it is, does not offer an effective means of global governance when it comes to planetary patrimony such as the Brazilian rainforest, which history and line-drawing have placed under the control of a single government. Unfortunately, Bolsonaro answers politically not to the planet or to all its current and future inhabitants, but rather to a far smaller political base that his populist rhetoric sufficiently swayed to win him the presidency.

The “butterfly in Brazil” concept comes from the branch of mathematics known as chaos theory and concerns how small changes in initial conditions can lead to much larger systemic effects. The idea is that a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil could be part of what leads to a tornado in Texas. Bolsonaro in Brazil threatens to have climatic effects far worse than one tornado in Texas.

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Paul R. Pillar is Non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University and an Associate Fellow of the Geneva Center for Security Policy.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said Friday he intends to move towards a World War II peace treaty with Russia during a summit in Russia later this month. The treaty has been hindered for decades by a territorial dispute.

Abe is due to meet Russian President Vladimir Putin in the 25th summit where they are expected to end a disagreement over a collection of islands seized by Soviet troops in the final days of the war.

“I’ll visit Russia later this month and intend to push forward with discussions towards a peace treaty,” he said, adding that there had been “absolutely no progress” on the issue for more than 70 years.

Abe said that, while there were no guarantees of an agreement, the two nations had been cooperating over issues concerning the islands, as well as economic issues, over the past two years “as never before.”

Putin caught Abe off guard in September when, on stage with the Japanese leader at a conference in Vladivostok, he suggested signing a peace treaty by year-end “without any pre-conditions.”

Abe later rejected the proposal, repeating Japan’s stance that the countries must resolve a question of sovereignty.

After the two met again in Singapore in November, the Japanese prime minister said they had agreed to advance negotiations based on a 1956 joint statement in which Moscow agreed to transfer the two smaller islands to Japan after a peace treaty was established.

Putin may be open to a deal now with the expectation that better ties will act as a counter-balance to China and draw more Japanese investment and technology, some experts say.

However, others doubt whether Putin really wants an agreement, partly because many Russian citizens are opposed to returning any of the islands, known in Japan as the Northern Territories and in Russia as the Southern Kurils.

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Featured image: Shinzo Abe and Vladimir Putin. September 10, 2018 © Sergey Mamontov © Sputnik

“When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no turning backwards” (Michel Chossudovsky) 

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Also please consider a tax-deductible donation to host radio station CKUW during our February 2019 Fundrive.

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The year 2018 was one dominated with several dramatic twists and turns on the international stage.

At the start of the year, we witnessed nuclear sabre-rattling between U.S. President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. There was the poisoning (and recovery) of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury UK, in which the Russian government was implicated. Israeli Defense Forces’ violent attacks against demonstrators at the Gaza-Israel border wall. The May 8 withdrawal by the United States from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and subsequent re-imposition of sanctions against Iran. The turbulent Mid-Term U.S. elections. The Khashoggi killing. The Central American migrant caravan. The election of Jair Bolsanaro, considered by many to be a full-blown fascist, to the leadership of one of the world’s largest economies: Brazil. A new North American trade deal to replace NAFTA. An apparent assassination attempt on the life of the Venezuelan President, and massive migration of people fleeing the country in the wake of a humanitarian crisis. And a Christmas present for many anti-war Americans in the form of a promised withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria.

Of course, there is also the never-ending melodrama surrounding allegations of Russian collusion with Trump in the lead up to the 2016 presidential election.

The focus of this week’s instalment of the Global Research News Hour, and a general theme of this radio show, is to look at the big stories behind the attention-grabbing headlines. The hope is that a look at bigger picture issues can provide some platform for meaningful political discussion and action, rather than leave members of the global community distracted and spell-bound.

A regular annual feature since the show’s inception, Andy Lee Roth of Project Censored, elaborates on some of the 25 most significant stories of the year that got little to no attention from the corporate press. These include:

• Big Pharma’s Biostitutes: Corporate Media Ignore Root Cause of Opioid Crisis (22)
• People Bussed across US to Cut Cities’ Homeless Populations (19)
• Digital Justice: Internet Co-ops Resist Net Neutrality Rollbacks (15)
• FBI Paid Geek Squad Employees as “Confidential Human Source” Informants (14)
• The Limits of Negative News and Importance of Constructive Media (13)
• ICE Intends to Destroy Records of Inhumane Treatment of Immigrants (12)
• FBI Racially Profiling “Black Identity Extremists” (10)
• Congress Passes Intrusive Data Sharing Law under Cover of Spending Bill (8)
• “Open-Source” Intelligence Secrets Sold to Highest Bidders (2)

Roth also briefly discusses Project Censored’s latest publication of censored stories and media analysis. (Find the complete list for 2019 at this link.)

In the final half hour, we hear from three analysts who provide their takes on the most significant stories and developments from the past year.

Jack Rasmus outlines some of the fundamentals plaguing the U.S. and global economy, and looks at how signature events from the past year, including Trump’s tax cuts, is likely to affecta fiscal landscape of expanding financial bubbles.

Rick Rozoff takes a look at international geo-strategy and the growing tensions between NATO and rivals like Russia. Rozoff also examines the prospects for pressures within and outside NATO to contain the threat of full-blown conflict.

Dmitry Orlov believes that as a result of events over the past year, “the U.S. military-industrial complex has been neutralized.” He justifies this position, while also detailing how the global energy picture and the prospect of climate change is likely to impact the various players on the world stage.

One further note: one of the most important stories of 2018 has been Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council, resulting in the purging of several pages and sites promoting anti-war and anti-establishment narratives, as well as the general suppression of political thought in a new McCarthyesque era. This is an important story which will be given much more thorough treatment in the weeks ahead.

Andy Lee Roth, is the Associate Director of Project Censored, a media research program which fosters student development of media literacy and critical thinking skills as applied to news media censorship in the United States.

Dr. Jack Rasmus, Ph.D Political Economy, teaches economics and politics at St. Mary’s College in California. He hosts the program ‘Alternative Visions’ every Friday at 2pm on the Progressive Radio Network, and blogs at jackrasmus.com. His books include ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Rope? Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, as well as the upcoming ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: U.S. Policy from Reagan to Trump.’

Rick Rozoff is a journalist and anti-war activist. He also manages the STOP NATO list-serve. Many of his articles have been published at Global Research.

Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American writer, blogger and geopolitical analyst based in Moscow. He has degrees in Computer Engineering and Linguistics and has worked in the fields of high energy physics, internet commerce, advertising and network security. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects and Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on the Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-sufficiency and Freedom. His blog site is cluborlov.com.

(Global Research News Hour Episode 243)

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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.

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Speaking to journalists on Wednesday, Iraqi Foreign Minister Mohammed Ali al-Hakim laid out the latest step on the path to independence for Baghdad from the US concerning sanctions on Iran by Washington. Although Iraq currently has a 90-day waiver to trade with Iran issued on December 20th, Hakim let reporters know Iraq would be pursuing their own policy on Iran should the waiver not be renewed.

Hakim explained to reporters that

“These sanctions, the siege, or what is called the embargo,” imposed by the US is “unilateral, not international,” and Iraq is “not obliged [to follow] them.”

This is a big step for Baghdad to take in the face of pressure from Washington for Iraq to become “energy independent” with the help of US corporations exploiting their oil and gas resources. Instead, as explained by Hakim, Iraq would rather choose their own options for energy, even if that includes continuing the annual $12 billion in trade between Iraq and Iran flowing over US objections.

There are also discussions ongoing concerning increasing the amount of trade between Baghdad and Tehran despite US pressure. Iraqi President Barham Salih and his Iranian President Hassan Rouhani even doubled down on this during a recent meeting where Rouhani said that Tehran was willing to increase trade with Baghdad from the $12 billion a year mark to $20 billion.

Hakim assured reporters Iraq is already thinking of “solutions” to counteract any US threats to increased trade with Iran. According to Hakim, there are multiple options open to Baghdad “including dealing in Iraqi dinars in bilateral trade” as opposed to US dollars.

Iraqi Sovereignty: From Sanctions to Bases

This defiance to US sanctions is only the latest step in Iraq declaring independence from Washington. Another sign that the US is losing their grip on Baghdad was also made apparent last week when, after Trump made a surprise visit to US troops in Iraq, fueling outrage among Iraqi politicians.

Many Iraqi leaders called Trump’s surprise visit to their country a violation of their nation’s sovereignty. This has ended up leading to a wider backlash and resulted in multiple Iraqi politicians demanding a complete end to the US military presence in the country.

This all comes as the Trump regime is attempting to cement new positions in the Middle East by way of new bases on the Iraq-Syria border. According to some Iraqi MPs such as Badr al-Zaidi who has said that the new bases violate “agreements between Iraq and the US were on the pullout of foreign forces from Iraq after 2013.”

Even US-ally and supporter of the NATO occupation, former Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi rejected the “method of Trump’s visit,” saying “it was not appropriate to diplomatic mores and to relations with sovereign states.”

These insults to Iraq have led to a wave of Iraqi lawmakers demanding more than an apology and saying the Iraqi government would move to make a “parliamentary decision to expel (Trump’s) military forces” in the words of Qais Khazali, an Iraqi politician. Much like with the rejection of the Iran sanctions, Khazali also promised his faction of the government (backed by Shia militias) also had creative “solutions” to dealing with US pressure on Iraq including “experience and ability to get them out in another way that is well known to your forces, which were forced to withdraw in humiliation in 2011.”

All of these events paint a picture of a growing movement in Iraq to reject US control of the government there that has been in place since the fall of the government of Saddam Hussein in 2003. All the parties that opposed both Saddam and the US occupation are moving closer to the levers of power in Iraq and Baghdad is no longer under Washington’s thumb. The question now for Donald Trump is, will he leave Iraq like he is Syria or will this case take more convincing by the forces of resistance in Iraq?

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Featured image is from Geopolitics Alert

Although the United States is allegedly a democracy with a rule of law, it has taken 17 years for public pressure to bring about the first grand jury investigation of 9/11. Based on the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth led by Richard Gage, first responder and pilots organizations, books by David Ray Griffin and others, and eyewitness testimony, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has presented enough hard facts to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York to force his compliance with the provisions of federal law that require the convening of a federal grand jury to investigate for the first time the attacks of September 11, 2001. (See this)

This puts the US Justice (sic) Department in an extraordinary position. Every informed person is aware that elements of the US government were involved either in the perpetration of the 9/11 attacks or in a coverup of the attacks. There will be tremendous pressures on the US Attorney’s office to have the grand jury dismiss the evidence as an unpatriotic conspiracy theory or otherwise maneuver to discredit the evidence presented by the Lawyers’ Committee, or modify the official account without totally discrediting it.

We can have hopes that the United States can establish the true story of its own Reichstag Fire, but I am not holding my breath that the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York can stand up to the powerful elements in the Deep State that perpetuated or covered up the 9/11 false flag attacks or that he is inclined to try.

What the 9/11 truthers and the Lawyers’ Committee have achieved is the destruction of the designation of 9/11 skeptics as “conspiracy theorists.” No US Attorney would convene a grand jury on the basis of a conspiracy theory. Clearly, the evidence is compelling that has put the US Attorney in an unenviable position.

The likely result will be comparable to the US Congress’ belated investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. No expert or informed person believed the obviously false story that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy. All evidence pointed to a plot by the Joint Chiefs, CIA, and Secret Service whose right-wing leaders had concluded that President Kennedy was too “soft on communism” to do what was necessary for the US to prevail in the contest with the Soviet Union. Expert and public disbelief of the official story was so great that in 1976, 13 years after Kennedy’s assassination, Congress investigated. The real culprits were, of course, not identified, but two important results were forthcoming. One was the conclusion by the Select Committee on Assassinations that President Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy and not of a lone gunman. The other was the release of the top secret Project Northwoods, which revealed the Joint Chiefs’ plan presented to President Kennedy for the US government to kill US citizens and shoot down US airliners and place the blame on Castro in order to gain public acceptance for an invasion of Cuba.

The conclusion that a conspiracy, although unidentified, was involved in Kennedy’s assassination was the sop thrown to those who disputed the official lone gunman account. The revelation of Project Northwoods created awareness of a previously unknown US government plot that drew attention away from Kennedy’s assassination.

If the Lawyers’ Committee and the 9/11 truthers trust the US Attorney to go entirely by the facts, little will come of the grand jury. If the United States had a rule of law, something as serious as 9/11 could not have gone for 17 years without investigation.

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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.

Since the demise of the Soviet Union, almost 30 years ago, abuse and debasement of human rights concerns have served increasingly to create pretexts promoting Western dominance around the world. From former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, to Iraq and Sudan, to Ivory Coast, Libya and Syria, to Myanmar and Ukraine, Western governments have used non governmental human rights organizations and abuse of the United Nations system to attack countries resisting the demands of US and allied elites and the governments they control. In Latin America, that dynamic has long targeted Cuba, more recently Venezuela, now Nicaragua and will soon attack Bolivia and probably Mexico too, if the new progressive government there shows too much independence. The US and European elites have stepped up their efforts at regime change in Latin America and the Caribbean so as to guarantee access to and control of the region’s abundant natural resources, because Chinese and Russian influence is blocking their accustomed control of the majority world in Eurasia and Africa.

Like Venezuela previously, Nicaragua has been targeted by the US dominated Organization of American States using local US and European funded non-profit proxies inside Nicaragua and Western corporate dominated non-governmental organizations. They have manipulated international and regional human rights institutions so as to violate fundamental precepts of international law like self-determination and non-intervention. Just as in the 1980s in Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique and elsewhere, and now both Venezuela and Nicaragua again, violent armed non-governmental actors have been used to destabilize the country and create a context allowing false reporting of human rights concerns so as to discredit revolutionary governments.

As independent US writer Max Blumenthal pointed out in an interview in July last year,

“… how I know that there was a regime change operation afoot – and when I say “regime change operation,” I mean an attack not just on a government but on the nation-state, a plan to reduce a country to a failed state like Libya – is that Ken Roth surfaced after the Nicaraguan government had essentially won and removed the roadblocks, allowing the economy which had bled $500 million to start functioning again, allowing citizens to start moving around. Ken Roth, the dictator of Human Rights Watch, who has been in the same position for 25 years, catering to a small cadre of billionaires and elite foundations with almost no constituency base, blamed the government for every single death.  Meaning that zero Sandinistas died according to Ken Roth.”

Blumenthal’s insight into the inextricable relationship between human rights NGOs and Western corporate elites suggests a series of points which categorically undermine glib acceptance of false human rights accusations against Nicaragua. The Inter-American Commission for Human Rights, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and NGOs like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are all guilty of extreme bad faith, non-compliance with basic norms and adherence to long discredited theoretical nostrums. In effect they are themselves all accomplices to very serious human rights violations by Nicaragua’s US supported armed oppposition. Four main considerations apply.

Firstly, on technical grounds none of these organizations have adhered even to the Huridocs guidelines, a tool created by and for Western government and corporate funded human rights organizations. The guidelines propose concepts and good practice in relation to fact-finding, documentation and monitoring of human rights violations. The IACHR, the UNOHCHR. Amnesty International and other human rights organizations have categorically failed to comply with  the HURIDOCS guidelines. In terms of fact finding they systematically omit sources and facts that contradict or exclude their preferred finding. In terms of documentation they systematically exclude abundant documentation from Nicaraguan government ministries, from the public prosecutor’s office, from the legislature’s Truth and Justice Commission, from the Institute of Legal Medicine and from the Office of the Procurator for Human Rights.

All that information to a greater or lesser extent contradicts the bogus fact finding of the OAS, the UN and foreign NGOs. In terms of monitoring the situation in Nicaragua, all those institutions and organizations depend exclusively on virulently politically biased local media, NGOs and opposition activists. So even on their own terms, their methodology does not comply with basic concepts and standards and, thus, the kinds of cases they have built to justify their findings would never stand up to impartial legal scrutiny. One farcical aspect of their approach has been to accuse the Nicaraguan government of repressing local media when their main sources by far are abundant citations of false reports from those same local media relayed via dishonest local human rights NGOs.

Secondly, in theoretical terms, the approach of the IACHR, the UNOHCHR and foreign NGOs like Amnesty International has been to exclude violations by non-State actors, exactly the same faithless alibi they all used during the Cold War. But that theoretical framework has been outdated since 1993 when the UN Human Rights Convention in Vienna explicitly recognized the role of non-State actors in human rights abuses (thus recognizing how the US government and its allies used irregular forces, like the Contra in Nicaragua, RENAMO in Mozambique and UNITA in Angola, to apply systematic terrorism against civilian populations). As Carlos Emilio Lopez a leading Nicaraguan human rights activist and legislator has pointed out:

“In 1993, with the approval of the Vienna Declaration of Human Rights, the subject of respect for human rights was re-conceptualized. For many years it was considered that only States should respect human, rights but that understanding is already out of date. The reconceptualization of human rights is that States must respect human rights but companies, churches, organizations must also do so, social organizations, oligopolies, the media, people as individuals. In other words, we are all obliged to respect human rights, not only State institutions.”

Thus, every time Amnesty International or the IACHR claim their remit excludes non-State actors they are appealing to a theoretical framework 30 years out of date deliberately so as to wash their hands of abuses by political actors with whom they sympathize.

Thirdly, specifically with regard to Amnesty International, their organization has been corrupted and co-opted over many years now by corporate influence via links through their senior personnel with corporate globalization advocates whose explicit aim is to undermine and diminish the role of sovereign national states. Amnesty International’s Secretary General and senior directors, their International Board and its Secretary General’s Global Council freely advertise their background working either directly with multinational corporations, or with corporate funders  or with other heavily corporate funded non profits. In this Amnesty International, like Human Rights Watch, is very similar to the Purpose/AVAAZ corporate human rights conglomerate. Their human rights activities are guided by emphatic neoliberal hostility to nation-State governments, such that their reporting deliberately sets out to exclude or discredit information from government or other official sources.

More broadly in Latin American and Caribbean, accompanying the encroaching cooptation of NGOs by corporate predators like Purpose, the overtly political Atlas network supports NGOs promoting extreme right wing policies across the region, thus facilitating the ascent to power of fascists like Jair Bolsonaro.

Fourthly, that corporate corruption and cooptation of Sean MacBride‘s original vision of the role and work of Amnesty International and similar organizations, is clearly manifest in their demonstrable bias in favor of US and allied coutnries foriegn policy priorities. In that regard, Professor Francis Boyle, among many others, has been an authoritative and trenchant critic of Amnesty International’s role in Palestine and elsewhere, whereby it downplays or minimizes violations by States allied to NATO countries. On the other hand, institutions like the IACHR and the UNOCHR and organizations like Amnesty international systematically exaggerate and even invent violations in countries targeted by NATO member country governments. Thus in Latin America, the current horrific record of human rights violations in Colombia and, until AMLO, in Mexico was played down and minimized, while events in Cuba, Venezuela and now Nicaragua have been systematically misrepresented.

All these concerns about the practical bad faith, theoretical dishonesty, corporate co-optation and outright political bias of human rights institutions and organizations should give any intellectually honest person of progressive views pause. People genuinely concerned about human rights should reassess what they think they know about Nicaragua and about Venezuela too. The US and allied elites are determined to use the governments, institutions and NGOs they have bought to destroy resistance to their domination in Latin America and the Caribbean. However, the 60th anniversary this year of Cuba’s revolution, together with the 40th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua and the 20th anniversary of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution suggest they will not have things all their own way.

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Disproportionate numbers of First Peoples are in Canadian prisons. The society arranges this fact to not seem that extraordinary. It could be argued that aboriginal peoples are political prisoners in North America, in or out of prison. Or that this is true for all minorities. Or that as the war on terror proceeds all Canadians may find themselves in a political prison.

Privilege and prejudice are clarified when we note that aboriginal men and women damaged in government (police) custody are not often plaintiffs in trials for damages. And properly, this account would run to several thousand pages listing the individual cases of First Peoples’ imprisonment, rising out of a society which feels compelled to treat the education of, the medical care of, the social services for, the nourishment of, the housing of, the remuneration for, First Peoples unjustly.

Unlike the U.S. Canada hasn’t used extreme long term incarceration of Indigenous leaders to discourage Indigenous movements’ protest actions. In the U.S. Leonard Peltier was sentenced to two life imprisonment terms for a crime he likely didn’t commit. Non-Indigenous U.S. leaders of the people such as the Kennedy’s, Dr. King and Malcolm X, were simply shot, as Canada’s historical icon of revolt Louis Riel was simply hung. The many indigenous leaders in Canada maintain relatively low profiles and are more diffusely represented in these vast spaces of the land.

Image on the right: Omar Khadr

The only group of Canadian political prisoners which approaches the length of sentences of U.S. political prisoners is currently Canadians who are Muslim and who have been treated poorly in domestic prisons or left to the dogs in the custody of foreign agencies. In some cases Canada’s security agencies seemed to be outsourcing torture for information. Of Canadian Muslims damaged in custody, Maher Arar was awarded 11.5 million dollars in an out of court settlement concerning the Canadian government’s responsibility for his torture in Syria. Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin settled for about half of what each asked, 31.25 million apiece because of Canada’s assistance to the Syrian government in having them falsely arrested and tortured. Omar Khadr was to receive 10.5 million for Canada’s cooperation with the U.S. at Khadr’s incarceration and torture as minor child at Guantanamo.

One of the suits by Abousfian Abdelrazik whom the Canadian government left in the hands of Syrian torturers was settled out of court in 2017. In 2015 the Canadian government settled out of court a suit by Benamar Benatta whom it turned over to the FBI as a terrorist suspect: he was imprisoned 5 years before they decided he wasn’t a terrorist. Daniel Ameziane who sought political asylum in Canada from Algeria is suing Canada for 40 million dollars, after his torture in U.S. Guantanamo which he alleges was reliant on Canadian supplied information. and yielded the Canadians in turn information obtained by his torture (Ameziane, denied asylum in Canada was subsequently arrested in Pakistan by a bounty hunter and sent to Guantanamo). The five Muslim men detained (arrested without charge) for varying lengths of time in extreme conditions, under the mechanism of Canadian Security Certificates, were not found guilty of any crime and have not as far as I know initiated suits to compensate them for their arbitrary loss of rights, their suffering and the government’s attempts to ruin their lives.

What is unusual about the Canadian persecution of Canadian Muslims is that they have some chance for redress in Canadian courts for severe violations of their human rights. Here I’ll try to update several cases Night’s Lantern has encountered in the past, and these of Muslims, targeted under the U.S./ NATO programs of the wars on terror and Muslim countries. The cases suggest a domestic application of an aggressive foreign policy which has the intention of corporate resource acquisition by force.

Entirely ignored by the media is the case of Said Namouh who was arrested in 2007 and is serving a sentence of life imprisonment with parole possible after ten years (yet facing deportation if paroled). The charges against him were for participating in terrorist activities. But he committed no crime of violence against anyone. There was no evidence linking him to alleged bomb-making or making real the prosecution’s suppositions of active terrorism. The star witness against him was an Israeli CEO of a U.S. defense industry intelligence provider who analyzed Namouh’s computer hard drive. Namouh’s “crimes” were primarily of internet communication, personal declarations, extremist associations, in other words – his beliefs, convictions. This case puzzles innocents because it is entirely legal to have beliefs and convictions and it is legal to share them. In 2018 Namouh was denied his first application for parole; the parole board noted his record in prison wasn’t exemplary, and it wasn’t but he didn’t try to kill anyone and he didn’t steal anyone’s dessert. The parole board (“La Commission des libérations conditionnelles”) isn’t likely to hear his case again until 2023. Yet there is a forfeit of the prisoner’s human rights and civil rights here, not because Namouh’s beliefs are unwise, unsafe, in some instances illegal, or against Canadian security interests, but because the punishment is the same as a mass murderer’s. He was in no way proven guilty of mass murder or any act of violence. His was a propaganda trial with a propaganda punishment.

Another level of shame is reached in the more obvious injustices of Canadian Security Certificates. One recognizes Stasi or Gestapo tactics which aren’t Canadian practices, and the government has restrained itself from using the certificates since early in the new millennium. All five of the Muslim men arrested under Canadian Security Certificates back in 2000 to 2003 have been released from prison through the efforts of their lawyers in one trial after another. Despite government challenges Canada’s judicial system has safeguarded some of humanity’s progress since the dark ages. The government’s attempts to justify in court application of Canadian Security Certificates has cost Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars. Mohamed Harkat, former Canadian Security Certificate detainee, imprisoned without a charge against him in 2002, now lives at home protected from prison by judicial decisions, with his Quebec born Canadian wife of nearly twenty years. Their lives are under threat every day with complete disruption by the government’s continuing intention to deport him to Algeria, where it’s believed he is in danger of torture or death.

Aside from the label of suspected terrorist assigned him by Canada’s security agencies, any refugee returned to Algeria is known to be at risk. In June 2018 Al-Jazeera reported 13,000 migrants left by Algeria in the Sahara desert within the last 14 months, subject to forced marches without water and food. The ordeal of Mohamed Harkat’s arrest without charges or public evidence against him has lasted year after year, placing him in prison, in solitary, on hunger strike, in house arrest with court ordered regimens, has subjected his wife to suffering and police abuse, subjected the family to legal expenses debts and charity without compensation. (Summary). If one wanted to inflict the conditions of a lasting torture on a family, either to obtain information or as one more threat to encourage the Muslim community to cooperate with government policies bordering on genocide in several Muslim countries, one might imagine inflicting on them the lives of Mohamed and Sophie Harkat. In a report to the UN Human Rights Council last Spring, Nils Melzer (the UN Special Rapporteur on torture) noted:

“Whenever States failed to exercise due diligence to protect migrants, punish perpetrators or provide remedies, they risk to become complicit in torture or ill-treatment.”

The injustices inherent in the government’s prosecution of a group branded the “Toronto 18” in 2006 by the press are less clearly defined and are difficult to explain. People are afraid to ask obvious questions about the group of minors and young men who were quite possibly guided into a horrible conspiracy by the several police agents among them to plan and organize a series of terrorist acts beyond the abilities of any in the group who weren’t police agents, to execute.

As soon as early reporting of the arrests entered court, the judge placed a gag order on reporting details of the trial or revealing the defendants’ names. Portions of the ban protecting minors seem to remain in force. The mechanism has also provided a means to keep out of public scrutiny any low-profile informants and the role they played in a “conspiracy” which some of the defendants were unwilling to recognize. The alleged crimes the “conspiracy” was charged with were horrific and frightening, particularly to a population with misgivings about U.S. and Canadian wars against Islamic countries, crimes against international law, guilt from Canada’s role in “Operation Desert Storm,” the initial US and Coalition bombing of Iraq, the destruction of Iraq’s civilian infrastructure, depriving the country’s children of a future. By the time the US and its coalition invaded Iraq in 2003 Canada refused full participation. Canada’s commitment to fighting in Afghanistan may also be considered complicity in a war of aggression and a number of the “Toronto 18” expressed anger at Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. So the script for the “Toronto 18” was noticeably muzzy, vague except in the allegations of dastardly plots and plans, and the curiousness that young Canadian citizens who were in other respects bright students and entrepreneurs could be manipulated into over-expressing their imaginations and feelings about injustice.

In court eleven Canadian citizens accused were sentenced to prison. Charges against others were dropped or withdrawn. Of the accused, most just pleaded guilty. Four claimed their innocence but were convicted. Interestingly each case was different which one would not expect of a conspiracy. Charges relied heavily on the actions and testimony of a police informant (one is featured in official narratives) considered by some to have been a causative agent. The convicted did not have the knowledge or means to execute the terrorist actions they were found guilty of, and their actions required the professional help of the police informant(s). This troubled my own understanding of the case as it was revealed in the press, and the presence of this basic injustice may explain why post sentencing information about members of the “Toronto 18” remains scarce.

The justice of their trials in 2009-2010 may be further questioned after a recent ruling in Vancouver BC which found the RCMP basically responsible for the terrorist acts committed by John Nuttall and Amanda Korody. The couple were recent converts to Islam and recovering drug addicts, guided into a terrorist plot and supplied the knowledge and materials to commit terrorist crimes by RCMP undercover. A three judge appeals court affirmed the decision of the lower court that the RCMP had basically entrapped the defendants, who were then freed. The RCMP’s case was found to be “a travesty of justice.”. To begin to gather then this disparate group of the “Toronto 18” I mention eight of the eleven who were found guilty and sentenced:

Arrested when he was 18, Saad Gaya pleaded guilty in court in 2010 and was sentenced to 12 years in prison with pre-sentencing imprisonment of 3.5 years credited double. Gaya was to serve a remaining 4.5 years but was parole eligible in 18 months.

However the Crown was able to increase his sentence to 18 years. In 2016 the National Post reported he was granted day parole to attend graduate school.

Mohamed Dirie convicted for weapons smuggling in the “Toronto 18” plot he was sentenced to seven years including pre-sentencing time served. He was released in 2011, and is reported to have died fighting for “an extremist group” in Syria, 2013. Unconfirmed.

Zakaria Amara pleaded guilty in 2009 to charges in the “camp plot” conspiracy and to charges in the “bomb plot” conspiracy. In 2010 he was sentenced to 21 months in addition to time served for the first, and for the second, life imprisonment. He was incarcerated in Quebec and eligible for parole in ten years. In 2013 the Supreme Court of Canada refused to review his sentence.

Fahim Ahmad, sentenced to 16 years with double credit for pre-sentencing time served, was previously denied parole but will have completed his sentence and should be freed in 2018, according to The Toronto Star, and released early in 2018 according to the National Post. By 2019, I’ve found no notice of his release.

Shareef Abdelhaleem who maintained that he “had no intention of causing injury or bodily harm” and asked the judge to sentence him as the judge would a white Catholic…, was sentenced to life in prison, and with pre-sentencing time included, was parole eligible in ten years. His father was an engineer with Atomic Energy of Canada who had posted bail for Mohammad Mahjoub, the Security Certificate detainee. The father’s implication in the “conspiracy” was attempted. Of his son, the prisoner, Wikipedia quotes him: “I am the last person to be a threat…this whole thing was staged to impress the public, to give them fear.”

Steven Vikash Chand, a former Canadian forces reservist and new convert to Islam was found guilty of participation and advising a financial fraud to assist a terrorist group. He was sentenced to 10 years including time served, yielding a release in 2011.

Despite a recognized lack of serious involvement with the conspiracy group, Asad Ansari was sentenced in 2010 to six years five months for participating/contributing to a terrorist group, which amounted to time served. Like several others in the “Toronto 18” group, the government’s threat to withdraw his Canadian citizenship was canceled under a change in government and Royal Assent granted to Bill C-6 June 19, 2017.

Saad Khalid pled guilty in 2009 to intending to cause an explosion and was sentenced to 14 years in prison including 7 years served. He was said to be radicalized in prison and the Crown increased his sentence from 14 to 20 years.

These are long sentences in mens’ lives. This listing leaves three of the accused and found guilty prisoners uncounted, as well as the seven of those arrested and one way or another released. We can guess that most of those found guilty have by now served their time or reaching their parole date were quietly released. No one asks why children and young adults who were so normal in other respects leading the lives of innocents, imagined such horrific responses to their country’s crimes against innocent men women and children abroad.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Night’s Lantern.

Sources

“Canadian terrorist handed life sentence,” Les Perreaux, Feb. 17, 2017 / May 2, 2018, The Globe and Mail;

“Pas de libération conditionnelle pour Saïd Namouh,” Louis Cloutier, Feb. 7, 2018, TVA Nouvelles / MédiaQMI;

“B.C. Court of Appeal: Couple convicted in Victoria terror case entrapped by RCMP,” Amy Smart, Canadian Press, Dec. 19, 2018, Vancouver Sun;

“Bomb plotter sentenced to 12 years,” Michael Friscolanti, Jan. 18, 2010, Macleans;

“Toronto 18 member released on day payrole in middle of 18-year sentence,” The Canadian Press, Jan. 2, 2016, CBC News;

“‘Toronto 18’ convict granted day parole so he can go to graduate school,” Jan 1, 2016, National Post;

“Man convicted as part of Toronto 18 plot reportedly killed in Syria,” The Canadian Press Sep 26, 2013, Macleans;

“Canada revokes citizenship of Toronto 18 ringleader using new anti-terror law,” Sept. 26, 2015, National Post;

“Toronto 18 plotter reflects on a decade in prison,” Michelle Shephard, May 29, 2016, Toronto Star;

“Toronto 18 terror leader denied parole after telling psychologist he wants to fight ISIL,” Stewart Bell, May 30, 2017, National Post;

“Deported by Algeria, migrants abandoned in the Sahara Desert,” Victoria Gatenby, June 25, 2018, Al-Jazeera;

“Migration policies can amount to ill-treatment and torture, UN rights expert warns,” UN Human Rights Council, March 1, 2018, Reliefweb;

“Justice for Mohamed Harkat: stop his deportation to torture,” current [access:< http://www.justiceforharkat.com/news.php >;

“Guantanamo: Ex-inmate sues Canada for alleged torture,” Jillia n Kestler-D’Amours,” Nov. 10, 2017, Al-Jazeera;

“Canada and the politics of Islamophobia,” J. B. Gerald, Feb. 5, 2017, nightslantern.ca.

In early January 2019, the military situation in Syria continued to develop in the framework of the existing trend with the terrorist threat in the Idlib de-escalation zone and the Turkish-Kurdish conflict as two main sources of tensions.

Over the past week, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham has made a fresh push to expand its influence over Turkish-backed groups in western Aleppo, southern Idlib and northwestern Hama. After accusing the Nour al-Din al-Zenki Movement of assassinating 4 HTS members, HTS launched an attack on Darat Izza along with several nearby settlements. Then, Hayat Tahir al-Sham expanded its activity into southern Idlib and northwestern Hama, where it captured the settlements of Faqie, Tramla, Arnaba, Shahranaz and Shir Mughar from Turkish-backed militant groups.

According to reports, the so-called National Front for Liberation (NFL), which is the main alliance of Turkish-backed militant groups in the area, was able to repel a HTS attack in southern Idlib, to recapture Tremla and Al-Ghadfah but has not been able to push back HTS near Ma’arat Al-Nu’man.

According to the Lebanese TV channel al-Mayadeen, over 180 militants have been killed in the fighting. Furthermore, both sides actively use mortars and other heavy weapons thus causing civilian casualties.

Even if the NFL with help from Ankara solves the current round of tensions within the militant-held area in northwestern Syria, the issue will remain while Hayat Tahrir al-Sham operates in the area. HTS is officially excluded from the de-escalation zone agreement, but Turkey and its proxies either unable or unwilling to neutralize it because it remains the most capable military force of the so-called opposition.

In its own turn, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham seeks to expand its influence in the area further in order to limit chances that it would become a non-useful tool of the Turkish foreign policy whereby it would become more profitable to eliminate it than to tolerate its existence.

A group of internally displaced persons left the al-Rukban refugee camp and returned to the government-held town of Mahin in southern Homs, the Sham FM radio station reported on January 3 citing Syrian officials. According to the report, the first group of IDPs consisted of 209 civilians, mainly women, children and elders. More people are expected to return from the camp in the upcoming few weeks. The al-Rukban refugee camp is located within the 55km de-escalation zone around the US-led coalition base in al-Tanaf. After the formal announcement of US troops withdrawal, a panic appeared among US-backed militant groups there. This allowed to facilitate the return of civilians from the refugee camp where a humanitarian crisis has been developing.

Another point of tensions is the area of Manbij. A large force of Turkish proxies is still deployed near the area despite reports about their alleged withdrawal. The further development of the situation will depend on the schedule of the expected withdrawal of US troops and the result of ongoing negotiations between Damascus and the YPG.

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The worm has gotten into Apple, and is feasting with some consistency.  Revenue has fallen. Chief executive Tim Cook is cranky.  The celebrated front of Apple’s wealth – the iPhone with its range of glittering models – has not done as well as he would have hoped.  Dreams of conquering Cathay (or, in modern terms, the Chinese market) have not quite materialised.

In a letter to Apple’s investors, Cook explained that “our revenue will be lower than our original guidance for the quarter, with other items remaining broadly in line with our guidance.”  This somewhat optimistic assessment came with the heavily stressed caveat:

“While it will be a number of weeks before we complete and report our final results, we wanted to get some preliminary information to you now.  Our final results may differ somewhat from these preliminary estimates.”

The reasons outlined were various, but Cook, in language designed to obfuscate with concealing woods for self-evident trees, suggested that the launches of various iPhone types would “affect our year-to-year compares.” That said, it “played out broadly in line with our expectations.”  While Cook gives the impression of omniscience, he is far from convincing.  Why go for the “unprecedented number of new products to ramp”, resulting in “supply constraints” which led to limiting “our sales of certain products during Q1 [the first quarter]”?  Such is the nature of the credo.

Screengrab from Apple

Where matters were not so smooth to predict were those “macroeconomic” matters that do tend to drive CEOs potty with concern.  While there was an expectation that the company would struggle for sales in “emerging markets”, the impact was “significantly greater… than we had projected.”  China, in fact, remained the hair-tearing problem, singled out as the single biggest factor in revenue fall.

“In fact,” goes Cook’s letter of breezy blame, “most of our revenue shortfall to our guidance, and over 100 percent of our year-over-year worldwide revenue decline, occurred in Greater China across iPhone, Mac and iPhone.”

The slowing of China’s economy in the second half of 2018, with a slump in the September quarter being the second lowest in the last 25 years, deemed a significant factor.

The irritating tangle of world politics also features; as ever, Apple can hardly be responsible for errors or misjudgements, and prefers, when convenient, to point the finger to the appropriate catalyst.  The United States has not made matters easy for the Apple bottom line in its trade war spat with Beijing.

“We believe that the economic environment in China has been further impacted by rising trade tensions with the United States.”

While it is never wise to consult the view of economists without caution (their oracular skills leave much to be desired), the feeling among the analysts is that a further contraction is nigh.

“We expect a much worse slowdown in the first half, followed by a more serious and aggressive government easing/stimulus centred on regulating the property market in big cities,” claims chief China economist at Nomura, Ting Lu.  But chin up – a rebound is bound to happen in the latter part of 2019.

The Apple vision is, however, dogmatically optimistic, an indispensable quality to any cult.  China remains customary dream and object, a frontier to conquer.  It is stacked with Apple friendly innovators (“The iOS developer community in China is among the most innovative, creative, and vibrant in the world.”) and loyal customers who have “a very high level of engagement and satisfaction.”

Product fetishism only carries you so far.  The iPhone models are not exactly blazing a trail of enthusiasm in other countries either.  Users in Brazil, India, Russia and Turkey can count themselves as being more reluctant.

Some of this dampening is due, in no small part, to a certain cheek on the part of the tech giant, one nurtured by years of enthusiastic, entitled arrogance.  In late 2017, for instance, the company revealed that it was slowing down iPhones with old batteries in an attempt to prevent undesired shutdowns.  But the company did not feel any great desire to inform users of this fiddling, and it took the published findings of an iPhone user to replace his iPhone 6’s battery, thereby restoring performance to accepted levels, to kick the hornets’ nest.

As Chris Smith explains,

“The fix was implemented via an update last January [2017], but Apple didn’t accurately inform users of what was going to happen to chemically aged batteries.”

Class action suits followed in the United States; Brazilian authorities insisted that the company inform iPhone users on how to have their batteries replaced within 10 days.

The bite on Apple has had its predictable shudder on the markets.  Investors ran off some $75 billion on the company’s stocks.  The Nasdaq fell by 3 percent; the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 2.8 percent.  An environment of chaos has greeted us in 2019, and fittingly, Apple remains at the centre of it, a company as responsible for modern technological worship as any.  As with any central dogma, disappointments are bound to happen, an irrepressible function of misplaced belief.

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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]

Many years ago, I came across a pre-Islamic Arabic poem describing a camel running across the desert. Suddenly, the camel freezes in mid-stride. First, it looks backward in fear of what it was running from, and then it turns its glance forward – also in fear – toward the unknown that is its destination. It was this image that came to mind as 2018 came to an end and I sat down to write about the year that was and what we expect might unfold in the new year.

By any measure, 2018 was a tumultuous year, in no small way owing to President Trump’s unpredictable behavior. He has been, in a word, exhausting.

We began and ended 2018 with a short government shutdown owing to Trump’s insistence that Congress agree to fund the wall on the Mexican border, despite opposition from Democrats and some leaders in his own party. When Democrats offered the White House partial funding of the wall in an effort to secure a compromise on immigration reform, Trump balked and upped the ante demanding, in addition to his wall, an end to the diversity lottery and family unification – making disparaging remarks about immigrants from the African continent in the process. He also dramatically reduced the number of refugees admitted to the US and imposed new hardships on those seeking asylum. Added to this has been the Administration’s “family separation” policy which produced the nightmarish result of thousands of little children being taken from their parents at the border and sent to far-away locations. At year’s end, we once again have a government shutdown, no wall, and no indication that the White House is willing to compromise.

Image on the right: President Trump and North Korean President Kim Jong Un shake hands in summit room, June 12, 2018. (Office of the President of the United States/Public Domain)

In 2018, Trump also repeatedly upset international relations alienating allies both East and West. He frustrated Europe by unilaterally walking away from the Iran nuclear deal; outraged Arabs by moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem; imposed stiff new tariffs on imported steel and aluminum; once again acted unilaterally with a bizarre “love fests” with North Korean leader, Kim Jong-un and Russian President Vladimir Putin causing unease with NATO and South Korea and Japan; and then, at year’s end, surprised everyone by announcing that he was pulling all US forces out of Syria and drawing down US forces in Afghanistan.

2018 also witnessed upheaval within the Administration, itself. Trump lost or fired his Secretaries of State, Defense, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, and Interior, the Attorney General, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Security Advisor, the United Nations Ambassador, the White House Chief of Staff, Legal Counsel, and Director of Communications, and a dozen other senior White House officials.

During all this time, Trump spent the year besieged by the growing threat to his presidency posed by the investigation being conducted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The Mueller probe and ancillary investigations have thus far taken a hefty toll. Five individuals who worked with the Trump campaign have been found guilty of crimes ranging from conspiracy to making false statements under oath. Add to this, Trump’s long-time personal attorney pleaded guilty to a number of financial crimes in which he implicated Trump. And the investigation is still underway.

If this were not enough, the President has compounded the exhaustion with his incessant tweeting. Each morning a wary public awakens to see what outrageous charges, defamatory rants or insults Trump has to offer. The news networks have unfortunately been accommodating since they spend the better part of each day amplifying his tweets discussing them as if they were “Breaking News.”

In the midst of this chaos, Trump has been successful in pursuing his agenda of undoing much of President Obama’s accomplishments. There was: a tax cut that resulted in a massive upward redistribution of wealth; a dismantling of regulations that protected consumers, the environment, natural resources, air and water, health and safety; an end to Obama-era education-related policies; and the gutting of Obama’s signature legislation reforming health insurance – which is now in danger of completely unraveling.

Not everything has been bad news. Trump did lend his support to a significant criminal justice reform bill that passed with bipartisan support. And he did renegotiate a new trade agreement with Mexico and Canada.

Despite these accomplishments, some good, mostly bad, it is the chaos that has dominated the news – and for this, the President can only blame himself. I am reminded of a line in T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” where he describes the faces of passengers on the London Underground being “distracted from distractions, by distractions.” This has been our fate in 2018. We are almost unable to focus on one crisis before our attention is diverted by yet another: a mass shooting (once again in 2018, there has been almost one a day); upheaval in the White House; new Mueller indictments; or an incendiary Trump tweet. The result has been a near perpetual state of nervous anxiety.

So much for looking backward at the year we are leaving behind. The problem, of course, is that, like that camel in the poem, we can only feel apprehension as we now run head-long into the year that awaits us – 2019.

I learned a long time ago, that the true test we face in life is not how we accomplish the goals we set for ourselves, but how we confront the unexpected challenges that lay before us. We can only predict some of what 2019 will bring.

Democrats will be in control of the House of Representatives and they will not give Trump an easy time. They will begin the year with an inherited government shutdown and a president still insisting that they find $5 billion in the budget to build his wall (the one he had insisted would be paid for by Mexico). Any compromise they may reach with the White House will still need to be approved by the Republican-controlled Senate.

The New Year will also bring forward the results of Mueller’s investigation into Trump campaign collusion with the Russians during the 2016 election and whether or not Trump attempted to obstruct justice by impeding the investigation. Whether or not Democrats want to hold hearings on White House activities related to these or other matters, the Congress will, of necessity, have to react to the Mueller findings or to the Administration’s reactions to it (for example, by firing Mueller or attempting to bury his report).

The immigration crisis on our southern border will not let up, nor will the challenges to health care reform resulting from a number of court decisions which have put the stability of the current system in limbo.

Then there are crises in the world with which we’ll have contend. These we can’t predict. Will Turkey take advantage of the US departure to attack Kurdish forces in Syria? Will Israel attack Lebanon? Will the unconscionable behavior of the Iranian-backed militias in recently “liberated” areas of Iraq provoke a resurgence of Daesh2.0? Will the Taliban see the US draw-down as an opportunity and launch a Spring offensive? Will Netanyahu win again, will he be indicted, and will Palestinians react to the unbearable pressure they face at the hands of the Israeli occupation? Will the “Deal of the Century” ever see the light of day? And will Congress, as expected, continue to apply pressure Saudi Arabia, and what impact will that have on the continuing devastating war in Yemen? And then there’s China’s expansionist moves, Iran’s regional meddling, Russia’s continuing aggression in Ukraine, and what about Brexit?

The list of challenges is by no means complete, but it’s enough to cause us to know that we are hurtling into an uncertain future with good reason to be filled with apprehension.

Along the way, there will be distractions aplently. We’ll have the expected announcements of what may as many as three dozen Democratic presidential aspirants – each announcement will provide “Breaking News” for the networks. And, yes, there will be the endless stream of Trumpian tweets.

I understand the camel and I’m nervous and not a little exhausted.

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The US will withdraw her troops from Syria. Will they really? – Let’s take Trump at his word, just for argument’s sake. Though in the meantime, RT reports that the withdrawal may be slower than anticipated, to allow Erdogan making his own “strategic arrangements”, while US troops depart. During his flash visit to the US troops in Iraq on Christmas Day, Mr. Trump already indicated that any US intervention – if necessary– would be launched from Iraq. Of course.

The US will not let go of such a strategic country with access to Four Seas, as promoted by President Bashar al-Assad, linking the Mediterranean, the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea and the Persian Gulf into an energy network. Washington had the full dominion of Syria in mind as the pivotal country in the Middle East, already when Washington first attempted to “negotiate” with Bashar’s dad, Háfez al-Ásad, in the late 1990s, and then after his death in 2000, the secret gnomes of Washington continued the process of coercion with Háfez’s son and heir, Bashar. To no avail, as we know.

Therefore, the question, “Will Syria ever Become a “Normal” Country Again?” – sounds almost rhetorical. Syria is one of those predestined countries to “fall”, decided by the empire, long before the ascension to the throne by Mr. Trump. Others include and are well outlined in the PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) – Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon – and Iran. As we see, the plan is progressing nicely – and letting go of any of the ‘milestones’ within this plan – is simply not in the cards.

Deviations are not tolerated. That’s presumably why James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense upon Trump’s announcement to withdraw from Syria. The Pentagon has its mandate, given by the Military Industrial Complex.

So, war or peace (and war it is) has become full spectrum Pentagon territory, not to be meddled with. It has nothing to do with terrorism, or saving the world from terrorism – it is pure and simple ´calcule’for profit from the war machine, from stolen and confiscated oil and gas and, ultimately but not lastly, for full power dominance of the world. The Middle East is one of those focal points of the empire that needs to be plunged into eternal chaos.

Peace is never an option. Unless empire falls. But until then, the Middle East is a multi-purpose ‘gold mine’, in terms of resources, a test ground for the East-West arms race, a terrain for almost endless destruction – and reconstruction – and a bottomless source of a continuous and destabilizing flow of refugees to Europe. It’s all planned. No human suffering is able to halt this project – and we can but hope that Russia and China see clear on this, that they won’t fall for promises of peace, for make-believe withdrawals, for lies and deceit.

Will Syria ever become a ‘normal’ country again? – I opt for yes. But empire must fall. And fall it will. It’s a question of time and maybe strategy? – For hundreds of years, the Kurds are an ethnicity of between 25 and 35 million people. They inhabit a mountainous region straddling the borders of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran and a tiny bit of Armenia. They make up the fourth-largest ethnic group in the Middle East, but they have never obtained a permanent nation state.Wouldn’t this rearrangement of power in Syria due to the apparent US troop withdrawals be an opportunity to find a solution for the century old Kurdish “problem”?

President Assad might seize the opportunity to accept the Kurds ‘invitation’ to enter the city of Manbij, the current Kurdish stronghold in Syria. And this despite the fact that the Kurds have often fought against the Syrian military, either alongside the US/NATO forces or alongside ISIS. It’s time to rethink geopolitics in the Middle East, beginning with Syria. After all, Manbij is Syrian territory, and Turkey has no legitimate claim on any land within Syria. Except in the case of a possible land swap.

On these grounds Syria might want to initiate negotiations with Turkey, Iraq and Iran to finally establish within the borders of Syria and Iraq (and Iran, as it were), some kind of a Kurdish territory which might over time become a fully autonomous Kurdish Homeland, what today is already called, Kurdistan. Much like Israel was carved out of Palestine, except that Israel was an artificial creation, commanded by outside forces, with the specific purpose already 70 years ago to destabilize the region. Whereas Kurdistan would be a stabilizing factor, a natural process facilitated by the countries within the region.

There are, of course, other players with high stakes in this peace process, like Russia, Turkey and Iraq – and the two rogue nations, paradoxically bound together, Israel and Saudia Arabia. Two nations that have no right whatsoever to even come close to Syria. But they continue having US support, even with the apparent US withdrawal from Syria, or because of it, as they will now play the role of US proxies in fighting Mr. Assad’s legitimate regime.

Russia would most likely prefer no Turkish interference in Syria, for example the occupation of Manbij, but would rather see Syrian control of Syrian territory with negotiated land swap deals with neighboring countries, especially Turkey and Iraq, to bring eventually the Kurdish question to a solution. That is of course just the beginning. The easy part.

The current semi-offical Kurdistan is one of the oil richest territories of the region. At present these oil resources are divided more or less along the border divisions of Kurdistan, i.e. Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. For these countries hydrocarbon is a key factor in their economy. Therefore, the creation of an autonomous region within Syria, Iraq and Iran, called Kurdistan, might require not only an honest process and equitable division of the Black Gold, but also a withdrawal of Trukey from Kurdistan, i.e. through a land swap. The development towards a sovereign Kurdistan – no time frame might at this point be suggested – would require Kurdish concessions. In other words, peace and homeland have a price. However, this price will never even come close to the benefits of independence and peace.

At present, Kurdistan’s oil reserves are estimated at 45 billion gallon, almost a third of Iraq’s total untapped 150 billion gallons of petrol. The Kurdish Regional Government (KRG), with her capital, Erbil in Iraq (pop. about 900,000), would of course prefer becoming an independent state. But that is just not going to happen out of the blue. Therefore, peace in the region and a Kurdish Homeland is worth a negotiated land and petrol concession. And when would be a better moment for such thoughts and negotiations than NOW?

There are other signs that Syria is in the process of becoming a “normal” country again. The re-opening of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) embassy in Syria, may be considered a major public step to welcoming Bashar al-Assad back into the fold of the Arab League, from which Syria was banned at the beginning of the 2011 CIA induced war on Mr. Assad’s government. Bahrain has also announced it will reopen shortly diplomatic relations with Damascus. Is this move by the UAE and Bahrain the first step of a new “Arab solidarity”? – In any case, it signals a new recognition of Syria under President Assad.

With Syria becoming a fully autonomous and sovereign country again, where diplomatic missions are being re-established and where refugees return to help rebuild their nation, and where a new Kurdistan, may just be the dot bringing peace and stability to the region. Though that may succeed only without any Atlantist interference – being handled only as a regional project.

A last thought for those who are shaking their heads in disbelief, because of the political and economic volatility of Kurdistan, due to her exorbitant oil riches which are currently spread among four countries – listen! – peak oil is a thing of the past.

Hydrocarbons are rather rapidly being replaced as the key energy provider by alternative sources of energy, of which the Middle East also has plenty, but which cannot be stolen – solar energy. The East, foremost China, is rapidly developing new and more efficient ways of transferring sun light into electricity, with the appropriate storage technology that may make it possible to largely phase out hydrocarbons within the next generation.

Hence, the momentum is NOW – US troop withdrawals – to create a stabilizing Kurdistan and make Syria a “normal country again.

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

Peter Koenig is an economist and geopolitical analyst. He is also a water resources and environmental specialist. He worked for over 30 years with the World Bank and the World Health Organization around the world in the fields of environment and water. He lectures at universities in the US, Europe and South America. He writes regularly for Global Research; ICH; RT; Sputnik; PressTV; The 21^stCentury; 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.

The year 2019 begins with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 2.0 already standing exposed as another corporate trade agreement with no one, including union leaders, having paid attention to what has just happened with respect to it. Specifically, the highly praised Labour chapter to the new trade agreement (United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) that was formally signed in Buenos Aires on November 30 concluded with the following declaration. “It is the expectation of the Parties that Mexico shall adopt legislation described above before January 1, 2019. It is further understood that entry into force of the agreement may be delayed until such legislation becomes effective.”

The legislation described above in the Labour chapter would make sweeping improvements to Mexico’s labour laws and practices. It would give all Mexican workers meaningful free collective bargaining rights and the right to belong to labour organizations truly of their own and which would negotiate transparent collective bargaining agreements subject to their ratification. These anticipated improvements would end the prevalent ‘yellow’ unionism in Mexico in which fake unions legally exist in workplaces but do the bidding of their employers via protection contracts imposed on the workers they illegitimately claim to represent.

Promises made. Promises unkept.

No new labour legislation has been passed into law as of January 1, 2019 in Mexico let alone legislation making such sweeping, positive changes. Worse still, there are no indications whatsoever that Mexico’s new, ostensibly leftist government has any plans to enact such new legislation at any time in the foreseeable future. The implications of this are quite revealing and far reaching.

That this has not occurred nor is about to occur anytime soon is in fact wholly in line with the entirety of the provisions set out in NAFTA 2.0’s Labour chapter. This is readily apparent precisely because the Labour chapter is effectively meaningless and in practice represents a continuation of what was in the original NAFTA which came into force at the beginning of 1994. This destroys Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s facile claim that NAFTA 2.0 has some of the strongest labour provisions of any trade agreement Canada has ever signed.

The 1994 NAFTA had both labour and environmental side agreements. These agreements were mere window dressing. They only committed the parties to the agreement to live up to the requirements of their respective labour laws and they failed to do that. Those, like members of the San Antonio, Texas based Coalition for Justice in the Maquiladoras, who filed complaints under these NAFTA side agreements learned that filing a complaint was a worthless exercise in futility.

Window Dressing

The same can be expected with respect to the provisions of the Labour chapter in NAFTA 2.0. This is the case because the provisions set out in it are effectively no more than guidelines. No mechanism has been put in place for ongoing monitoring of the chapter’s guidelines and if these guidelines are violated there is no mechanism in place to meaningfully enforce them let alone swiftly enforce them. In effect, the provisions are again window dressing for a trade agreement which does what the same corporations whose interests were so well served by the 1994 NAFTA really want. It guarantees these corporations their highly desired access to a North American market subject to rules that generally serve them well. Accordingly, it is no wonder that NAFTA 2.0 has earned the praise of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, according to the Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland.

The provisions of the Labour chapter provide for the creation of a Labour Council. This misnamed Labour Council will be comprised of senior representatives of the three governments which are signatories to NAFTA 2.0. The council is formally tasked with ostensibly overseeing and administering the provisions of the Labour chapter. But it is telling indeed that this body given these tasks is only expected to meet every two years unless the Parties decide otherwise.

Most significantly, the Labour chapter stipulates that all of its decisions and reports “shall be made by consensus.” This could not be more revealing. This effectively means that any dispute that might go before it can only be resolved by consensus among the parties including whichever party or government the dispute is made against. If there ever was a procedural formula for contentious issues to quietly go away and die on the vine this is it.

As was the case with the 1994 NAFTA this assurance, in practical terms, of non-enforcement goes hand in hand with each party again only being expected to comply with and enforce its own labour laws. The prohibition of anything beyond that is explicit. The Labour chapter states in no uncertain terms, “Nothing in this Chapter shall be construed to empower a Party’s authorities to undertake labour law enforcement activities in the territory of another Party.” Consequently, if Mexico’s labour laws are not overhauled, as the Labour chapter anticipated they would be, and continue, as they have since 1994, to be widely unenforced thereby benefiting employers, nothing really can or will be done about it. Simply stated, this is a prescription for more of the same of what workers across North America have experienced since NAFTA went into effect in 1994.

Auto Sector Provisions

These pronounced shortcomings of NAFTA 2.0 cast a long, dark shadow over the auto provisions of the trade agreement which some have naively claimed comprise great progress for autoworkers. Canadian autoworkers should find it particularly hard to take NAFTA 2.0’s auto provisions seriously given that the Canadian government has also signed onto the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) which contains a weak 45% automotive content provision. Indeed, no one has yet clarified either how this 45% automotive content provision can be reconciled with the higher automotive content provisions of NAFTA 2.0 or if they cannot be reconciled which of the two agreements provisions will take precedence. These are critically important questions that demand answers. To date they have been met with deafening silence by all concerned.

More specifically, quite unlike the TPP, NAFTA 2.0 provides for a 75% North American content requirement as opposed to the 62.5% content requirement in the NAFTA of 1994 with North America including Mexico. Even if this increase is adhered to, it is quite modest. For example, had NAFTA 2.0 already been in place the new, higher North American content requirement would have not been an obstacle to GM’s current plans to close auto assembly plants (four in the USA and one in Canada) while not affecting any of their Mexican facilities. In the face of this hard reality Chrystia Freeland’s declaration that NAFTA 2.0 assures Canadian auto producers “preferential access to the U.S. market” must ring rather hollow for the workers at GM of Canada who are about to lose their jobs.

Then there is the claim that by 2024 40% of cars and 45% of trucks must be sourced from high wage facilities in North America meaning facilities where workers are paid $16.00 (U.S.) an hour. Assuming this is done it is worth pointing out that $16.00 (U.S.) an hour will be worth substantially less by 2024 given certain increases in the cost of living over the next five years. Even then who is to say that Mexican auto employers will not be inclined to pay the nominal 2.5% tariffs on cars entering the U.S. rather than sharply increasing the wages of their workers. Furthermore, in the absence of the anticipated labour law changes necessary to truly empower Mexican workers and end yellow unionism how will Mexican auto and auto parts workers ever be able to strive for wages equivalent to $16.00 (U.S.) an hour? They simply will not be able to.

A Better Deal for Who?

Arguably this can be said to be a better deal for some, like American dairy producers, who are gaining substantially more access to Canadian markets and to pharmaceutical corporations who will reap more profits from the extension of drug patents. But it does nothing for workers. To the contrary, it perpetuates the trade regime which has so adversely affected workers in all three countries over the last 25 years.

In view of these things, and measures like the indefinite continuation of U.S. President Donald Trump’s steel and aluminum tariffs, there is no reason for workers to support NAFTA 2.0. Accordingly, a failure to seriously resist NAFTA 2.0’s passage into law in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico will amount to capitulation and the acceptance of an agreement that by design, like the original NAFTA, intrinsically serves the interests of Capital. There must be nothing less than coordinated and protracted resistance to NAFTA 2.0 across North America to stop it.

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Bruce Allen is a former Vice-President of CAW Local 199 (now Unifor).

Featured image is from The Bullet

Wednesday night, as he went to Paris’s Concord Square to light candles to commemorate “yellow vest” protesters who have died during the movement, police arrested Eric Drouet. The pretext for this arrest, which tramples underfoot the constitutionally protected right to protest, was that this gathering had not been declared previously at the police prefecture. Drouet had called for a gathering on Concord Square in a Facebook video.

Surrounded by sympathizers, Drouet was first trapped and then grabbed by the police and finally carted off amid cries of “Shame!”, “Dictatorship!” and “Bastards!” from the crowd. He was placed in preventive detention, while other protesters were arrested for identity checks.

Drouet’s lawyer Khéops Lara denounced “a completely unjustified and arbitrary arrest,” which leaves Drouet facing up to six months in jail and a €7,500 fine. Lara explained:

“His ‘crime’ was to place candles (…) on Concord Square in Paris to commemorate the fallen ‘yellow vests’ who died from various causes during protests and blockades of highway intersections. Then he wanted to come together with a few friends and loved ones in a private area, a restaurant, to discuss and share viewpoints.”

The Paris prosecutor’s office alleges that Drouet organized “a demonstration without prior notification.” Junior Minister Olivier Dussopt told BFMTV:

“When you don’t play by the rules, it’s normal to pay the price.”

These accusations are absurd and point to the malignant growth of the police state in France. Drouet was not organizing a mass demonstration, which are often declared in police prefectures, but a meeting of a few individuals—which the state now is asserting it can ban.

Lara demanded an end to Drouet’s preventive detention, which the prosecutor’s office refused, and added:

“With the propaganda campaign against Eric Drouet vomited up by the police, the media and the politicians, the men and women of France’s lower classes are being insulted.”

The ruling class is indeed launching a signal: it intends to persecute all acts of genuine political opposition, even those protected by law, with its police machine. Faced with rising social anger among workers in France and internationally, who also oppose the union bureaucracies that have traditionally controlled and strangled working-class protests and strikes, the ruling class is reacting with repression. Beyond hordes of riot police and armored vehicles, it is using the pseudo-judicial lynching of prominent opposition figures.

Drouet has served as a spokesman for sections of the “yellow vest” movement opposed to French President Emmanuel Macron’s attempts to strangle the movement with sterile offers of talks. With Priscilla Ludosky, Drouet met Ecology Minister François de Rugy on November 28 to represent the “yellow vests” in talks with the government. Drouet brought down on him the hatred of the government and the media by turning down de Rugy’s offer, saying it did not satisfy the demands of the “yellow vests.”

Since then, Drouet has been the target of escalating police repression that is aimed ultimately at crushing and sidelining all members of the movement who emerge as obstacles to the state’s attempts to break up and demoralize the protests with offers of fruitless talks.

Drouet’s latest arrest provoked broad anger among the “yellow vests.” Already they have organized crowd-funding campaigns to finance Drouet’s legal expenses in the various cases concocted against him by the security forces.

In early December, as the growing movement faced ferocious repression of the Saturday protests, Drouet was placed in preventive detention and his home was targeted for a police search. He was accused of “provocation of the commission of a crime or misdemeanor” and “organizing an illicit protest.” The sole basis for these charges was that he had declared, during an interview with journalists on BFMTV, that he would like to go into the Elysée presidential palace.

On December 8, Drouet was arrested during the fourth weekend of protests in Paris, supposedly for “bearing a banned weapon of category D,” that is, a piece of wood, according to press reports, and for “participation in a grouping formed to commit violence or damages.” Drouet is to be tried for these charges on June 5.

This relentless targeting of Drouet underscores yet again that Macron and the European Union have no intention of responding to the demands of the “yellow vests” or of workers in struggle across Europe. The Macron government, isolated and hated by masses of workers, is terrified by the “yellow vest” movement. Yet in response, it is proposing only to step up the policies of austerity and militarism that intensify social inequality and provoked the opposition of the “yellow vests.”

In his New Year’s wishes on December 31, Macron insisted he would continue his social cuts targeting pensions, unemployment insurance and public sector wage levels. He also denounced the criticisms of his presidency formulated by the “yellow vests,” lecturing the French people: “Dignity, my dear fellow citizens, is also respecting everyone. And I must say, I have seen unimaginable things in recent times and heard the unacceptable.”

This is the dictatorial language of a banker-president who claimed at the time of his election that France lacks a king, and who now seems to want to apply for that position, despite the opposition of an overwhelming majority of the French population to his policies.

The task of defeating the persecution of Drouet falls to the working class. More than 70 percent of French people support the “yellow vests,” who have evoked broad sympathy from workers around the world. But the established political parties and the union bureaucracies, totally integrated into the state and already furious that the “yellow vests” have outflanked them, are violently hostile. They aim to nip in the bud the struggles in the working class that break out against Macron.

The way forward is to take the struggle out of their hands, mobilizing ever-larger sections of workers independently of, and against, the union bureaucracies in France and across Europe, in defense of democratic and social rights.

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Featured image is from WSWS

This week I published a column on how the Democratic Party seems to have jettisoned many of its defining values to simply become the anti-Trump party. The best example of that transformation is the automatic opposition to Trump’s decision to pull troops out of Syria and other countries. At the same time, liberal media outlets like CNN and MSNBC have been airing continual experts denouncing the “hasty” withdrawal.

Now veteran NBC award-winning journalist William Arkin has resigned in protest of what he says is the unrelenting support of the network for endless wars. He notes that the anti-Trump agenda at the network has overwhelmed what used to be critical coverage of “the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness.” Now the reflective anti-Trump response at the network has overwhelmed all such considerations, according to Arkin. While Arkin calls Trump “an ignorant and incompetent impostor,” he cites the transformation of NBC into an opposition network as the main reason for his departure.

In my recent speech at the Newseum, I raised the same issue over the change in national media coverage. While praising the investigative reporting of various outlets, I objected to the raw advocacy that you now see from hosts in being live and immediate opposition talking points against new developments in the Administration.

Arkin objected to the same pattern at NBC. In his email, Arkin states that he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years” as a military analyst and became “an often lone voice that was anti-nuclear and even anti-military, anti-military for me meaning opinionated but also highly knowledgeable, somewhat akin to a movie critic, loving my subject but also not shy about making judgements regarding the flops and the losers.” He added;

He specifically notes the reflective opposition to Trump as pushing NBC into the role of an advocate for endless war:

I do not know Arkin but his email again raises a rarely acknowledged concern in the mainstream media over the change in the tenor and balance of our coverage. Trump has changed not just the Democratic Party but the media — untethering both from core defining values.

Click here for William M Arkin’s full email.

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Trump’s possible backtracking on withdrawal from Syria means he may have been once again outmaneuvered by the Deep State, says Virginia State Senator Dick Black. 

Following the outcry after President Donald Trump’s announcement that he was pulling U.S. troops from Syria, it appears that Trump may be succumbing to political pressure. U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) visited the White House on Dec. 30 and afterward told reporters:  

“We talked about Syria. He told me some things I didn’t know that made me feel a lot better about where we’re headed in Syria,” Graham said.  Trump’s withdrawal plans are “slowing down in a smart way,” Graham said, according to NBC News.

The Washington Post added:

”‘Graham described Trump’s decision as ‘a pause situation’ rather than a withdrawal, telling reporters, “I think the president’s taking this really seriously.”  

Graham said:

“He promised to destroy ISIS. He’s going to keep that promise. We’re not there yet. But as I said today, we’re inside the 10-yard line, and the president understands the need to finish the job.”

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The mainstream media refuses to acknowledge that the hardest fighting against ISIS and al Qaeda has been done by Syria and its allies.  Indeed, we label Iran’s fight against Syrian terrorists as “malign activity,” ignoring the fact that al Qaeda in Syria [al Nusra] is the progeny of the al Qaeda force that highjacked jets and flew them into the Twin Towers and Pentagon, killing 3,000 Americans on 9-11.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Seymour Hersh, wrote that a Defense Intelligence Agency review of Syrian policy in 2013 revealed that clandestine CIA Program Timber Sycamore, had degenerated into a program that armed all terrorists indiscriminately, specifically including ISIS and al Qaeda.  I seriously doubt that this was merely a program failure.  There is strong evidence that the U.S. planned to overthrow Syria in 2001; the U.S. Embassy in Damascus issued a detailed strategy to destabilize Syria in 2006–long before the so-called “Arab Spring;” and that our focus has consistently been on toppling the duly elected, constitutional and UN-recognized government of Syria.

It’s sickening to hear these clowns repeatedly claim that “Assad murdered 500,000 of his people,” as though the U.S.-backed terrorists have played no role in the killings.  I’ve viewed hundreds of beheadings and crucifixions online but none committed by Syria troops–all were proudly posted by the hellish filth that we’ve recruited, armed and trained for the past eight years.  Major war crimes, like beheading 250 Syrian soldiers after running them across the desert in their underpants, were scarcely mentioned by the MSM.

During a five-hour drive across liberated Syria this September, I spoke with many people, from desert shepherds, to nuns and Muslim religious.  There were palpable expressions of joy that the Syrian armed forces had liberated them from the terrorists.  That was coupled with broad-based, unequivocal support for President Bashar al Assad and the Syrian Armed Forces.

This disastrous war would never have occurred without American planning and execution.  And it would have ended years and hundreds of thousands of casualties ago had we closed our training and logistics bases in Jordan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.  The Syrian War had little to do with the “Arab Spring” and much to do with clandestine actions of CIA, MI-6, Mossad, Turkish MIT, French DGSE, Saudi GID and others, working with the savage Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.  We trained and recruited far more terrorists than we killed, and we will encounter those survivors again, at other times and places.

It is instructive that, despite President Donald Trump’s strong directive on a rapid Syrian pull-out, apparently not one soldier or Marine has departed Syria.  And the argument that they’re tied up with fighting ISIS doesn’t hold water.  On Syria’s southern border, across from Jordan, lies the U.S. base at al Tanf.  ISIS is nowhere around.  Al Tanf’s sole purpose is to hold and defend the sovereign territory of Syria (using a 55 km no-fly zone).  It denies Syria the right to restore order and provide aid to starving Syrians trapped in the American zone.

Al Tanf is the canary in the Syrian coal mine.  If Trump’s pullout has any credibility, the 800 or so troops and equipment assigned there could be withdrawn across the Jordanian border within 24 hours.  Their failure to do so suggests duplicity by our foreign policy shadow government.  The Pentagon seems unresponsive to the Commander-in-Chief, and he has surrounded himself with advisors whose allegiance does not lie with him–or with the American people.

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Republican Senator Richard H. Black represents the 13th district of Virginia, encompassing parts of both Loudoun and Prince Williams Counties in northern Virginia.

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It is customary to speak of Western countries as democracies. In actual fact, the countries are oligarchies in which voting, which conveys the semblance that government is accountable to the people, seldom changes anything as elected officials are constrained by the power of organized interest groups. President Trump is the latest example. He has been blocked in his goal of reducing tensions with Russia.

The European Union has been an anti-democratic undertaking from the beginning. Deception was the method. At first it was a free trade zone. Then a common currency. Then unified fiscal policies which means centralization and political union with formerly sovereign countries becoming provinces in a European government. Countries that voted down joining were subjected to threats and browbeating and forced to vote again by which time the media had convinced the people that they had no alternative to joining or they would be “left behind” in a backwater existence.

Despite the facts, politicians maintained the fiction that EU member countries remained democratic and responsive to the will of their citizens. German Chancellor Merkel, who ended her career by her unilateral decision to impose a million or more illegal Third World immigrants on Germans and Germans’ resources, destroyed this fiction.

Merkel clearly does not care what the German people think. She revealed again her total distain for democracy at a recent event of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin where she condemned those who think political leaders should listen to the will of the people. The German people, she said, are just “individuals who are living in a country; they do not define the German people.” The German people are whoever migrates to Germany as a result of the UN Migration Pact that she signed despite its rejection by the German citizens of Germany. “Nation states,” Merkel declared, “must today be prepared to give up their sovereignty.” Politicians must not listen, she said, to the will of their citizens when it comes to questions of immigration, borders, and sovereignty.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, backed her up. Macron declared that French “nationalism is treason.” In other words, it is treason to think that France is French. Patriotism, Macron said, is inclusion of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into France. The way for the French to gain sovereignty is to surrender their sovereignty to the EU in Belgium and give up all control, not that any currently exists, over foreign affairs, migration, and budetary and fiscal policy.

Merkel and Macron speak of the submission of Germany and France to the New World Order, but they do not say what they understand the New World Order to be. Their words indicate that one of its features is the replacement of the German and French populations and cultures with those of the Third World, as in The Camp of the Saints.

In the US the New World Order means US hegemony over the world. The neoconservatives, who have controlled US foreign policy since the Clinton regime, believe that the US is “the indispensable nation” with the right and the responsibility to impose its ways on the world.

The globalist corporations understand the New World Order to be their immunity to laws of sovereign countries.

Others see the New World Order to be a Rothschild or other Jewish conspiracy to control the world economy and bleed it for their profits.

With so many different meanings, it is difficult to see which conspiracy against national existence is the threat. Or is it all of them?

Nevertheless, in the Western world, nationalism, the traditional basis of patriotism, now means, thanks to Identity Politics, “white supremacy.” According to Identity Politics, the ruling ideology in the US, white people must be disempowered and subjected to punishments for the assortment of crimes attributed to them.

Therefore, the views in the US, France, and Germany come to the same conclusion: white people are guilty and must give up their country to others. Any protests of this outlandish requirement is proof that whites should be strung up, and they likely will be with the support of their own governments. Do we see the first signs of it here? Will this, and this, and this, lead to this?

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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.

Sources

https://www.kas.de/veranstaltungsberichte/detail/-/content/-das-herz-der-demokratie-

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-27/angela-merkel-nation-states-must-give-sovereignty-new-world-order

https://voiceofeurope.com/2018/11/merkel-nation-states-must-today-be-prepared-to-give-up-their-sovereignty/

Featured image is from Vox

Two terrible wars, two mighty destructions, but two absolutely opposite outcomes.

In Syria, it may be autumn now, but almost the entire country is blossoming again, literally rising from ashes. Two thousand miles east from there, Afghanistan is smashed against its ancient rocks, bleeding and broken. There, it does not really matter what season it is; life is simply dreadful and hope appears to be in permanent exile.

Damascus, the ancient and splendid capital of Syria, now the Syrian Arab Republic, is back to life again. People go out until late at night, there are events; there is music and vibrant social life. Not all, but many are smiling again. Checkpoints are diminishing, and now one does not even have to go through metal detectors in order to enter museums, cafes and some of the international hotels.

The people of Damascus are optimistic, some of them are ecstatic. They fought hard, they lost hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, but they won! They finally won, against all odds, supported by their true friends and comrades. They are proud of what they have achieved, and rightly so!

Humiliated on so many occasions, for so long, the Arab people suddenly rose and demonstrated to the world and to themselves that they can defeat invaders, no matter how powerful they are; no matter how canny and revolting their tactics are. As I wrote on several previous occasions, Aleppo is the ‘Stalingrad of the Middle East’. It is a mighty symbol. There, fascism and imperialism were stopped. Unsurprisingly, because of its stamina, courage and aptitude, the center of Pan-Arabism – Syria – has become, once again, the most important country for the freedom-loving people of the region.

Syria has many friends, among them China, Iran, Cuba and Venezuela. But the most determined of them, the most reliable, remains Russia.

The Russians stood by its historical ally, even when things looked bad, almost hopeless; even when the terrorists trained and implanted into Syria by the West, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, were flattening entire ancient cities, and millions of refugees flowing out of the country, through the all seven gates of Damascus, and from all major cities, as well as towns and villages.

The Russians worked hard, often ‘behind the scenes’; on the diplomatic front, but also on the frontlines, providing essential air support, de-mining entire neighborhoods, helping with food supplies, logistics, strategy. Russians died in Syria, we do not know the precise numbers, but there definitely were casualties; some even say, ‘substantial’. However, Russia never waved its flag, never beat its chest in self-congratulatory gestures. What had to be done, was done, as an internationalist duty; quietly, proudly and with great courage and determination.

The Syrian people know all this; they understand, and they are grateful. For both nations, words are not necessary; at least not now. Their deep fraternal alliance is sealed. They fought together against darkness, terror and neo-colonialism, and they won.

When Russian military convoys pass through Syrian roads, there is no security. They stop at local eateries to refresh themselves, they talk to locals. When Russian people walk through Syrian cities, they feel no fear. They are not seen or treated as a ‘foreign military force’. They are now part of Syria. They are part of the family. Syrians make them feel at home.

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In Kabul, I always face walls. Walls are all around me; concrete walls, as well as barbed wire.

Some walls are as tall as 4-5 storey buildings, with watchtowers on every corner, outfitted with bulletproof glass.

Local people, pedestrians, look like sleep-walkers. They are resigned. They are used to those hollow barrels of guns pointed at their heads, chests, feet, even at their children.

Almost everyone here is outraged by the occupation, but no one knows what to do; how to resist. The NATO invasion force is both brutal and overwhelming; its commanders and soldiers are cold, calculating, and merciless, obsessed with protecting themselves and only themselves.

Heavily armored British and US military convoys are ready to shoot at ‘anything that moves’ even in a vaguely hostile fashion.

Afghan people get killed, almost all of them‘surgically’ or ‘remotely’. Western lives are ‘too precious’ for engaging in honest man-to-man combat. Slaughtering is done by drones, by ‘smart bombs’, or by shooting from those monstrous vehicles that crisscross Afghan cities and the countryside.

During this outrageous occupation, it matters nil how many Afghan civilians get killed, as long as the US or European lives get spared. Most of the Western soldiers deployed in Afghanistan are professionals. They are not defending their country. They are paid to do ‘their job’, efficiently, at any price. And of course, “Safety First”. Safety for themselves.

After the West occupied Afghanistan in 2001, between 100,000 and 170,000 Afghan civilians have been killed. Millions were forced to leave their country as refugees. Afghanistan now ranks second from the bottom (after Yemen) in Asia, on the HDI list (Human Development Index, compiled by UNDP). Its life expectancy is the lowest in Asia (WHO).

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I work in both Syria and Afghanistan, and consider it my duty to point at the differences between two countries, and these two wars.

Both Syria and Afghanistan were attacked by the West. One resisted and won, the other one was occupied by mainly North American and European forces, and consequently destroyed.

After working in some 160 countries on this planet, and after covering and witnessing countless wars and conflicts (most of them ignited or provoked by the West and its allies), I can clearly see the pattern: almost all the countries that fell into the ‘Western sphere of influence’are now ruined, plundered and destroyed; they are experiencing great disparities between the tiny number of ‘elites’ (individuals who collaborate with the West) and the great majority of those who live in poverty. Most of the countries with close ties to Russia or China (or both), are prospering and developing, enjoying self-governance and respect for their cultures, political systems, and economic structures.

It is only because of the corporate mass media and biased education system, as well as the almost fully pro-Western orientation of the ‘social media’, that these shocking contrasts between two blocs (yes, we have two major blocs of countries, again) are not constantly highlighted and discussed.

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During my recent visit to Syria, I spoke to many people living in Damascus, Homs, and Ein Tarma.

What I witnessed could be often described as“joy through tears”. The price of victory has been steep. But joy it is, nevertheless. The unity of the Syrian people and their government is obvious and remarkable.

Anger towards the ‘rebels’ and towards the West is ubiquitous. I will soon describe the situation in my upcoming reports. But this time, I only wanted to compare the situation in two cities, two countries and two wars.

In Damascus, I feel like writing poetry, again. In Kabul, I am only inspired to write a long and depressing obituary.

I love both of these ancient cities, but of course, I love them differently.

Frankly speaking, in the 18 years of Western occupation, Kabul has been converted into a militarized, fragmented and colonized hell on earth. Everybody knows it: the poor know it, and even the government is aware of it.

In Kabul, entire neighborhoods already ‘gave up’. They are inhabited by individuals who are forced to live in gutters, or under bridges. Many of those people are stoned, hooked on locally made narcotics, the production of which is supported by the Western occupation armies. I saw and photographed a US military base openly surrounded by poppy plantations. I heard testimonies of local people, about the British military engaging in negotiations, and cooperating with the local narco-mafias.

Now the Western embassies, NGO’s and ‘international organizations’ operating in Afghanistan, have managed to intellectually and morally corrupt and indoctrinate a substantial group of local people, who are receiving scholarship, getting ‘trained’ in Europe, and are tugging the official line of the occupiers.

They are working day and night to legitimize the nightmare into which their country has been tossed.

But older people who still remember both the Soviet era and socialist Afghanistan, are predominantly ‘pro-Russian’, mourning in frustration those days of Afghan liberation, progress, and determined building of the nation. ‘Soviet’ bread factories, water channels, pipelines, electric high-voltage towers, and schools are still used to this day, all over the country. While, gender equality, secularism, and the anti-feudalist struggle of those days are now, during the Western occupation, de facto illegal.

Afghans are known to be proud and determined people. But now their pride has been broken, while determination has been drowned in the sea of pessimism and depression. The Western occupation did not bring peace, it did not bring prosperity, independence of democracy (if democracy is understood as the ‘rule of the people’).

These days, the biggest dream of a young man or woman in Kabul is to serve the occupiers – to get ‘educated’ in a Western-style school, and to get a job at a US embassy or at one of the UN agencies.

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In Damascus, everyone is now talking about the rebuilding of the nation.

‘How and when will the damaged neighborhoods be rebuilt? Is the pre-war construction of the metro going to resume anytime soon? Is life going to be better than before?’

People cannot wait. I witnessed families, communities, restoring their own buildings, houses and streets.

Yes, in Damascus I saw true revolutionary optimism in action, optimism which I described in my recent book Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism”. Because the Syrian state itself is now, once again, increasingly revolutionary. The so-called ‘opposition’ has been mostly nothing else other than a Western-sponsored subversion; an attempt to take Syria back to the dark days of colonialism.

Damascus and the Syrian government do not need tremendous walls, enormous spy blimps levitating in the sky; they do not need armored vehicles at every corner and the omnipresent SUV’s with deadly machine guns.

On the other hand, the occupiers of Kabul need all those deadly symbols of power in order to maintain control. Still they cannot scare people into supporting or loving them.

In Damascus, I simply walked into the office of my fellow novelist, who happened to be the Syrian Minister of Education. In Kabul, I often have to pass through metal detectors even when I just want to visit a toilet.

In Damascus, there is hope, and life, at every corner. Cafes are packed, people talk, argue, laugh together, and smoke waterpipes. Museums and libraries are full of people too. The Opera House is performing; the zoo is flourishing, all despite the war, despite all the difficulties.

In Kabul, life stopped. Except for the traffic, and for traditional markets. Even the National Museum is now a fortress, and as a result, almost no one can be found inside.

People in Damascus are not too familiar with what goes on in Kabul. But they know plenty about Baghdad, Tripoli and Gaza. And they would rather die than allow themselves to be occupied by the West or its implants.

Two wars, two fates, two totally distinct cities.

The seven gates of Damascus are wide open. Refugees are returning from all directions, from all corners of the world. It is time for reconciliation, for rebuilding the nation, for making Syria even greater than it was before the conflict.

Kabul, often rocked by explosions, is fragmented by horrid walls. Engines of helicopters are roaring above. Blimps with their deadly eyes monitoring everything on the ground. Drones, tanks, huge armored vehicles. Beggars, homeless people, slums. Huge Afghan flag flying above Kabul. A ‘modified flag’, not the same as in the socialist past.

In Syria, finally the united nation has managed to defeat imperialism, fanaticism and sectarianism.

In Afghanistan, the nation got divided, then humiliated, then stripped of its former glory.

Damascus belongs to its people. In Kabul, people are dwarfed by concrete walls and military bases erected by foreign invaders.

In Damascus, people were fighting, even dying for their country and their city.

In Kabul, people are scared to even speak about fighting for freedom.

Damascus won. It is free again.

Kabul will win, too. Perhaps not today, not this year, but it will. I believe it will.

I love both cities. But one is now celebrating, while the other one is still suffering, in unimaginable pain.

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Andre Vltchek is philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He’s a creator of Vltchek’s World in Word and Images, and a writer that penned a number of books, including Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism. He writes especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from NEO

It did not take long for the market to flush today, when after a tentative drop following last night’s AAPL revenue guidance cut and the FX multi-flash crash, stocks took lows with the Dow plunging over 650 points this morning following the abysmal ISM Manufacturing report which showed that US mfg sentiment in December tumbled the most since October 2008.

Today’s drop has pushed the Dow to below the Dec 26 closing level, which preceded the historic 1000 point Dow move on December 27. Come to think of it, we are about 350 points from another 4-digit move in the Dow Jones, only this time to the downside.

While the S&P 500 fell more than 2%, today’s broad-based drop is being led by the Nasdaq, which is down over 3%, largely due to the Apple fiasco, which dragged the stock more than 10% lower, its biggest drop in over 5 years.

Other notable decliners include (per Bloomberg):

• All 30 chipmakers in the Philadelphia Semi index fell, with Qorvo, Skyworks and Broadcom off at least 4.5 percent.
• 3M, Caterpillar and DowDuPont dropped at least 3 percent.
• Bristol-Myers plunged 12 percent, while Celgene jumped 28 percent.
• Carmakers reported monthly sales; GM and Ford both retreated.
• Airlines tumbled after Delta cut its revenue forecast. American was off 9.5 percent.

“That Tim Cook and his company mentioned China as the reason behind the downturn in the company’s outlook seemed to hit exactly the pressure point traders and investors were already alarmed over,” Greg McKenna, markets strategist at McKenna Macro wrote in a client note. “That is, the China and global slowdown which seems to have been confirmed by Wednesday’s global manufacturing PMI data” and Thursday’s US ISm report.

A modest boost to stocks from Bristol-Myers’ bid to buy Celgene and a strong ADP print quickly faded after the dismal ISM report hit at 10am.

Stocks weren’t the only thing in freefall: so are Treasury yields led by the belly, with the 10Y tumbling below 2.60%, and down the 2.57% last, the lowest level since January 2018. In fact, today’s sharp move can best be compared to a car crash, if only for the TSY shorts.

Meanwhile, the 1Y yield is just 2bps away from surpassing the yield on the 10Y in today’s curve inversion watch.

Finally, with US recession fears front and center, the US Dollar is also tumbling while gold is surging.

And with everything going to hell in a hand basket, gold is just waiting for the right moment to pounce.

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge

Macron terms yellow vest leaders ‘hateful mob’ in combative New Year’s address

Emmanuel Macron last night delivered a combative New Year’s address, vowing to push forward with economic reforms despite two-month long protests from what he termed a “hateful mob”.

The French President, whose televised address was broadcast from the Elysee Palace, acknowledged that “anger over injustices” lay behind the yellow vest movement that has scarred his second-year in office.

He said: “Ultraliberal and financial capitalism, too often guided by short term interests, is heading towards its demise.”

Read more here.

France: ‘Yellow Vests’ call protest on New Year’s Eve

]

Source: Ruptly

Les Gilets Jaunes fêtent le nouvel an 2019 sur les Champs Élysées.

Source: TV Patriotes

Yellow Vests and Police Share New Year’s Hugs in Paris

Source: Storyful Rights Management

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Our thanks to Defend Democracy Press which brought these reports to our attention

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Dear Readers,

More than ever, Global Research needs your support. Our task as an independent media is to “Battle the Lie”.

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While “Truth” is a powerful instrument, “the Lie” is generously funded by the lobby groups and corporate charities. And that is why we need the support of our readers.

Search engines and social media categorization highlight the corporate media narrative at the expense of critical analysis, which means that our content in their search results and news feeds is being pushed down.

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Syria: The Western Rogue States Must Confess Their Crimes Against Humanity and be Held Accountable

By Vanessa Beeley, January 03, 2019

The West and its allies in the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel have waged an eight year war against the Syrian people. The West has besieged, starved and deprived the Syrian people of humanitarian aid while pouring “aid” into the areas controlled by their extremist sectarian proxy armies.

More Reckless Behavior by Israel: Netanyahu Plays by His Own Rules. Christmas Day Air Raids against Syria

By Philip Giraldi, January 03, 2019

As has become the normal practice, Christmas Day’s air raid by Israel directed against targets near Damascus was largely ignored by the US media. Given the fact that Israel has bombed Syria more than two hundred times, the attack itself, which wounded three soldiers at a warehouse, was not particularly notable.

Liberté, Égalité, Impérialisme! Vive la France in Black Africa!

By Ann Garrison, January 03, 2019

Geopolitics trumped international justice again—just in time for Christmas. On December 21, a French court closed the long-running case against Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his inner circle for assassinating Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994, when a surface-to-air missile downed their plane over Rwanda’s capital Kigali.

The Atomic Bombing of Japan, Reconsidered

By Alan Mosley, January 03, 2019

Harry Truman never expressed regret publicly over his decision to use the atomic bombs. However, he did order an independent study on the state of the war effort leading up to August of 1945, and the strategic value of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

Trump Bows to Domestic Pressure by Delaying His Withdrawal from Syria; A Storm Is Gathering in the Levant

By Elijah J. Magnier, January 03, 2019

In response to domestic pressure, Trump agreed to extend the deadline for withdrawal of thousands of US troops from the northeaster Syrian province of al-Hasaka from the initial 30 days previously announced until April this year.

Why France’s Yellow Vest Protests Have Been Ignored by “The Resistance” in the U.S.

By Max Parry, January 03, 2019

In less than two months, the yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowing President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands.

The Hidden Structure of US Empire

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, January 03, 2019

The flags flying over the guard gate of the prison in Lukavica were those of Bosnia and the European Union, and the US was officially involved in the imprisonment of the men there only through diplomatic channels, generous funding and the assistance of American trainers and advisers.

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The West and its allies in the Gulf States, Turkey and Israel have waged an eight year war against the Syrian people. The West has besieged, starved and deprived the Syrian people of humanitarian aid while pouring “aid” into the areas controlled by their extremist sectarian proxy armies.

The West has violated international law and it has enabled the destruction of Syria’s history, heritage and cultural footprint. The West has behaved as a collective rogue state without conscience and without pity for a people its media has systematically dehumanised to enable such a crime to take place.

Christmas 2018 in Damascus, Old City, without mortars from Eastern Ghouta since its liberation in April 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

Despite this war of attrition and despite battling disproportionate force, the Syrian people have refused to capitulate or to abandon their secularism in favour of an extremist tyranny that would destroy their society and persecute the minority communities into extinction. Christmas 2018 has demonstrated the victory of Syrian unity over the regime change project incubated in the West which is now a failed campaign lying in tatters at the feet of the self determination of the Syrian people, the valiant defence by the Syrian Arab Army and the steadfastness of the Syrian Government and its President, Bashar Al Assad.

In Aleppo I spoke with Pastor Ibrahim Nseir of Aleppo’s Presbyterian Church, whom I had also interviewed in 2017.  The following is a mixture of quotes and paraphrase from our conversation on New Year’s Eve 2018/19.

Image on the right: Reverend Ibrahim Nseir, Presbyterian Church, Aleppo. December 31st 2018. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

The Presbyterian Church in the Old City of Aleppo was destroyed by the Western-backed terrorist groups in November 2012. An article in the Mennonite World Review in July 2018 described the destruction of the church – “In the old city of Aleppo, Syria, Ibrahim Nseir stands on the pile of rubble that used to be his church. The building where his congregation worshiped is now broken stones and dust. It’s a sunny day, the bright sky a stark contrast to the destruction on the ground.”

After eight years of resistance against the threat of persecution and mass exodus of Christians from Aleppo, Nseir remains defiant and upbeat about the future of Aleppo and Syria. Of the 300,000 Syrian Christians in Aleppo, only 30,000 remain. This is the legacy of sectarian oppression that has been imprinted upon Syria by Western hegemony and it will take generations for it to be turned around.

Nseir described the rebuilding process for the Presbyterian Church as difficult but he insisted that it would be rebuilt from its original stones to preserve its historical identity. For Nseir the priorities for Aleppo and Syria are to address the economic situation which has clearly taken a hit on many levels and is suffering in a typical post-war slump. Education is another top priority for this intelligent and enthusiastic Reverend. The intention is to create a center for retreats and conferences at the current Presbyterian Church offices in the center of Aleppo, including a student dormitory.

“We will increase educational capacity by 1000 in the very near future and continue to build upon this progress” Nseir told me.

Education, according to Nseir, is the greatest weapon against extremism and is the only way to re-habilitate children who spent seven of their formative years under occupation of extremist and sectarian factions who worked hard to brainwash almost an entire generation of Syria’s children.

“Ethically the West and the East are responsible for Syria’s destruction. This is not a “Christian” issue, it is a World issue.” Nseir insisted.

The role of the Western media in manufacturing consent for the collective punishment of the Syrian people was clearly a primary cause of the devastation that Nseir and other faith leaders across Syria are now dealing with:

“Western media played more than a negative role, they literally urged the terrorists to take action against the Syrian people by providing false information and blinding people in the West to what was really happening in Syria for eight years. This should never be forgotten.”

Nseir stressed that the healing process for children traumatised by the war would not be easy.

“How do you erase the hatred and horror planted in the brains of 7-10-year-old children by these fanatics? What do you expect from children who have played football with the head of a Syrian Araby Army soldier or who have witnessed the violent abuse of their mother by these terrorists or have seen their father executed by the armed groups? This is the greatest challenge for Humanity and for Syria to put right these terrible wrongs.”

Nseir spoke of the shocking estimated figures of 82,000 children whose father is unknown, referring to the huge number of young women raped or forced into multiple marriages by the terrorist groups and their fighters. How do these children regain their identity and re-integrate into Syrian society? The rebuilding of schools and hospitals must be a priority. The terrorists destroyed “the most developed hospital in the Middle East, Al Kindi” in 2013 and since then, and the destruction of more hospitals across Syria by the terrorist groups, Nseir told me Syria has seen an increase in Cancer and new diseases. Nseir also suggested that this may be attributed to the weapons used by the US Coalition proxies and the U.S itself, which include depleted uranium.

Another important challenge, according to Nseir, is the environnmental one. Syria needs to rebuild its natural environment which has also been hugely affected by the conflict. 100,000 trees have been destroyed in Aleppo alone which could lead eventually to desertification of the province if not dealt with. The Governor of Aleppo has recently planted 2,000 new trees but this is an issue that must be addressed with urgency for Nseir.

Nseir strongly believes that Western people should come to Syria independently to see the truth for themselves and report the truth as they see it without any agenda. The Church and the media in the West have maintained a sectarian, divisve narrative which is confusing for people in the West and far from reality.

Nseir addressed the position and status of Syria in the Middle East and described how it has not changed, all that has changed is the perception of Syria portrayed by the media and world leaders who have aligned themselves with the West’s criminal project to partition Syria into sectarian statelets and to remove the elected Syrian government from power by force:

“What has changed since 2011 in reality? Nothing. Syria has always been the protector of the Middle East before 2011, during the conflict and now. The only thing that has changed is the positions of those who turned against Syria, betrayed Syria and who now wish to come back to Syria for protection. We see the Gulf States now change their stance and the UAE has re-opened its embassy in Damascus. The Arab League will welcome Syria back into its fold. Nothing has changed, Syria has remained the same while others have been opportunists and traitors.”

The fact that Syria will forgive its betrayers is testament to what has given Syria victory over its enemies throughout history. With regards to the West, Nseir is not so forgiving:

“The West must go beyond simply stopping its financing of terrorism and the supply of weapons. The West must confess to its crimes against the Syrian people in order to be forgiven. The West must lift the economic sanctions which are a siege upon the Syrian people and it must allow the Syrian people to rebuild in peace without meddling in their affairs. The Syrian people will rebuild according to what the Syrian people want not what the East or the West want. The West has sold the idea that this war was against President Assad but in reality it was against the will of a nation and the people of that nation must be respected”.

Nseir confirmed that the western NGOs are nothing more than political instruments and devices who further the cause of war but he insisted that the West must effectively pay reparations to Syria and expect nothing in return. This is the only way the West can be forgiven by Syria.

Nseir told me that his church will be establishing a medical and health center in the coming months which will be open to everyone in Aleppo to offer medical check-ups and treatment for free. Staff will be trained to deal with the children afflicted by the effects of the war and the terrorist occupation and the plan is to eventually set up special schools to continue the work of rehabilitation for these children. This will enable the coming generations to stand against radicalism and terrorism in the future.

“The West has a duty to respect our dignity and territorial integrity. The Syrian Arab Army has saved the image of our God of Peace, Love and Unity – this has been a spiritual war in Syria not only a military war. The God of love has been embodied by the SAA and our allies and has been victorious over the God of terrorism and hatred. The whole world will change after this war and after Syria’s victory. Syria will be a transformational catalyst for all of Humanity. Syria was never going to be defeated, you only have to study our history to know this. Our society has always embraced diversity and this is the essence of our country. Fanaticism was never going to survive breathing the pure oxygen of our humanity. Actually this demonstrates the stupidity of leaders in the West – to even imagine that extremism has a place in our culture”.  Nseir told me.

Nseir ended our talk by stating that the crisis in Syria must be an alarm bell for the country and for its leaders.

“We must re-prioritise our schedule, our agenda and make sure it is not only political but that we address all issues – religious, educational, health care. We must rethink our priorities to ensure a future of peace and stability. At the end I believe strongly that all the negative consequences of this terrible war will be transformed into positive consequences if we address them in the right way. Out of adversity are born the greatest opportunities for the future of Syria and Humanity.”

Horse rides on offer at the foot of the Citadel in the Old City of Aleppo. (Photo: Vanessa Beeley)

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This article was originally published on 21st Century Wire.

Vanessa Beeley is an independent journalist, peace activist, photographer and associate editor at 21st Century Wire. Vanessa was a finalist for one of the most prestigious journalism awards – the 2017 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism – whose winners have included the likes of Robert Parry in 2017, Patrick Cockburn, Robert Fisk, Nick Davies and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism team. Please support her work at her Patreon account. 

As has become the normal practice, Christmas Day’s air raid by Israel directed against targets near Damascus was largely ignored by the US media. Given the fact that Israel has bombed Syria more than two hundred times, the attack itself, which wounded three soldiers at a warehouse, was not particularly notable. But what was significant was the fact that it was the second time that Israel has used other planes to mask the approach of its own warplanes to the target. On this occasion, the masks consisted of two civilian airliners making their approaches to the airports in Beirut and Damascus. Fortunately, the Syrian Arab Air Defense Forces made the decision to delay the deployment of surface-to-air missiles and electronic jamming “to prevent a tragedy” and air traffic control was able to divert one of the passenger jets landing at Damascus to the reserve military airport in Khmeimim in southern Latakia.

Syrian anti-aircraft crews did manage to intercept and shoot down fourteen of the sixteen incoming missiles that were launched by six Israeli F-16 warplanes using US-made GPS-guided GBU-39 Small Diameter Bombs (SDBs). If the Syrian air defenses had been more reckless and gone after the F-16s themselves, they might have hit an airliner by mistake and hundreds of lives could have been lost.

The Russian Ministry of Defense, which was able to reconstruct the attack from radar imaging, condemned the incident, stating that “Provocative acts by the Israeli Air Force endangered two passenger jets when six of their F-16s carried out airstrikes on Syria from Lebanese airspace.” The terse Russian announcement reveals that beyond endangering hundreds of civilians, Israel had committed several war crimes in its action, which the Israeli government claimed was intended to destroy a shipment of Iranian-made Fajir-5 rockets, which was allegedly on its way to Hezbollah.

As Israel is not at war with Iran or Syria or Lebanon and it persists in attacking targets in Syria based on its own perception of threats, it meets the United Nations definition of an aggressor. And its violation of Lebanese air space to stage the attack on Syria was also an act of aggression. Both would normally be condemned in the UN Security Council but for the American veto protecting Israel.

Analysts have confirmed that the Israelis carried out the strikes in Syria by deliberately using scheduled airline departures and arrivals as cover to foil the improved and upgraded Syrian air defenses. Security sources in the region now believe that any civilian flights entering or leaving Damascus or Beirut are potentially in danger due to the Israeli tactics, which clearly accept endangering civilians to mask the movements of the warplanes.

The Israelis also used a Russian intelligence plane as a mask off the coast of Syria back in September, with fatal results for the crew after Syrian air defenses responded to the attack. Israel, of course, claimed innocence, insisting that it was the Syrians who shot down the Russian aircraft while the Israeli jets were legitimately targeting a Syrian army facility “from which weapons-manufacturing systems were supposed to be transferred to Iran and Hezbollah.”

The Russian aircraft was returning to base after a mission over the Mediterranean off the Syrian coast monitoring the activities of a French warship and at least one British RAF plane. As a large and relatively slow propeller driven aircraft on a routine intelligence gathering mission, the Ilyushin-20 had no reason to conceal its presence. It was apparently preparing to land at its airbase at Khmeimim when the incident took place.

Syrian air defenses were on high alert because Israel had attacked targets near Damascus on the previous day, including a Boeing 747 on the ground that Israel claimed to be transporting weapons.

The Israelis used four F-16 fighter bombers to stage the surprise night attack targeting sites near Latakia, close to the airbase being used by the Russians. They came in from the Mediterranean Sea using the Russian plane to mask their approach as the Ilyushin 20 would have presented a much larger radar profile for the air defenses.

The Israelis might have been expecting that the Syrians would not fire at all at the incoming planes knowing that one of them at least was being flown by their Russian allies. If that was the expectation, it proved wrong and it was indeed a Syrian S-200 ground to air missile directed by its guidance system to the larger target that brought down the plane and killed its fourteen crew members.

There was also a back story. The Israelis and Russian military had established a hotline precisely intended to avoid accidents. Israel reportedly used the line but only one minute before the incident took place, leaving no time for the Russian plane to take evasive action.

The Russian Ministry of Defense was irate. It saw the exploitation of the intelligence plane by the Israelis as a deliberate high-risk initiative. It warned “We consider these provocative actions by Israel as hostile. Fifteen Russian military service members have died because of the irresponsible actions of the Israeli military. This is absolutely contrary to the spirit of the Russian-Israeli partnership. We reserve the right for an adequate response.”

It’s the same old story. Israel does risky things like attacking its neighbors because it knows it will pay no price due to Washington’s support. The downing of the Russian plane and the current endangering civil aviation has created a situation that could easily escalate. What Israel is really thinking when it seeks to create anarchy all around its borders is anyone’s guess, but it is, to be sure, in no one’s interest to allow the process to continue.

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

Featured image is from SCF

Geopolitics trumped international justice again—just in time for Christmas. On December 21, a French court closed the long-running case against Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his inner circle for assassinating Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian President Cyprien Ntaryamira on April 6, 1994, when a surface-to-air missile downed their plane over Rwanda’s capital Kigali.

Nearly twenty-five years later, there are still no convictions for the assassinations that turned first Rwanda, then the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), into a vast killing ground. Not in the International Criminal Tribunal on Rwanda (ICTR), where two investigations of Kagame were shut down, and where a judge told defense attorney Tiphaine Dickson, “We don’t investigate plane crashes [or Tutsis, only Hutus].” And not in the French or Spanish courts, where French and Spanish citizens claimed jurisdiction because their relatives died in the plane shot down or in the ensuing massacres.

The subtext of the Rwandan War and the Congo Wars was competition between the US/UK and France. France, which was then the dominant power in the region, had been the patron of Habyarimana’s Hutu government; the US and UK backed Kagame’s invading Tutsi army, which emerged victorious in 1994, declared that English would from thereon be Rwanda’s international business language, then invaded and occupied French-speaking Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) two years later.

France and Rwanda have engaged in a bitter argument off and on for all these years about who was responsible for the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. Their embassies have often been closed in one another’s capitals, and France pulled out of the 20th anniversary commemoration in Kigali after President Kagame once again accused France of participating in the killing.

One of the recurring points of contention is Opération Turquoise, France’s emergency relief response, which began on June 23, 1994, several weeks before General Paul Kagame (now President Paul Kagame) seized power in Kigali. Some French officials who were in office at the time, most notably former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, have maintained that Opération Turquoise created a humanitarian corridor for Rwandan Hutus fleeing into Zaire, for fear of being massacred by General Kagame’s advancing Tutsi army. Kagame’s government has claimed that France instead provided an escape route for Hutus guilty of genocide, although the vast majority flooding into Zaire were civilians, including women, children, and the elderly. According to the 2010 UN Mapping Report on Human Rights Abuse in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003, Kagame’s troops followed the refugees into Zaire and massacred as many as 250,000.

In “Dying to Live: A Rwandan Family’s Five-Year Flight Across the Congo,” Pierre-Claver Ndacyayisenga describes how he and his family and 300,000 more Rwandan Hutus fled Kagame’s advancing army all the way through the Congolese jungle, from east to west, as many more died of hardship or were massacred by Kagame’s troops along the way.

The authors of the UN Mapping Report said that the massacres in Congo would most likely be ruled a genocide if a case were brought to court, but none has been and none ever will be without a major geopolitical shift in power. In 2013, in one of his many cynical moments, Bill Clinton told BBC journalist Komla Dumor that he would not condemn his friend Paul Kagame for murdering the refugees because “it hasn’t been adjudicated.” (And because it happened on his watch, with his support, as did the 1998 Rwandan and Ugandan invasions of DRC, during which Kagame and Uganda’s Museveni became what another UN report called “the godfathers of the illegal exploitation of natural resources and the continuation of the conflict in the DRC.”)

France of course wants its share, and French officials now in power have decided to close the case against Kagame in order to secure access to Congo’s riches, which he significantly controls. The court’s ruling came shortly after Rwandan Foreign Minister Louise Mushikiwabo became Secretary-General of La Francophonie, an international organization similar to the British Commonwealth, in what was widely perceived to be another concession to smooth French-Rwandan relations and ease France’s access to Congo’s riches.

Kayumba Nyamwasa, former Rwandan General, Chief of Army Staff, and Chief of Military Intelligence, was also named as a defendant in the French indictment. Speaking to Jane Corbin in the BBC video “Rwanda’s Untold Story,” he said that Kagame most definitely ordered his troops to shoot down the plane carrying the Rwandan and Burundian presidents:

Jane Corbin:  Who do you believe was behind the shooting down of the plane?

Kayumba Nyamwasa:  Paul Kagame undoubtedly.

JC:  Paul Kagame?

KN:  Oh yes, oh yes.

JC:  You know that?

KN:  One hundred percent.

JC:  Were you at meetings where it was discussed?

KN:  Well, I know. I was in a position to know, and he knows I was in a position to know. And he knows that.

BBC interjection: General Nyamwasa has offered to cut a deal with the French judge totestify.

JC:  If you discuss these matters with the judge and it implicates you yourself, are you willing to do that?

KN:  Obviously. If it implicated me? Why not? Because I think that truth is what matters.

Closing the case is not acquitting

The French court said they were closing the case for lack of “credible” and “significant” evidence despite abundant such evidence. That does not mean, however, that they acquitted Kagame, Nyamwasa, or anyone else who was in Kagame’s inner circle at the time Habyarimana and Ntaryamira were assassinated. As Rwandan American legal scholar Charles Kambanda said, “This is a political decision which could well be superseded by another political decision to reopen the file when there is additional ‘credible’ and ‘significant’ evidence.” In other words, France has mollified Kagame for now, but it’s kept a knife behind its back.

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Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at [email protected]. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

As the new Congress is sworn in, the clock has run out for sitting lawmakers to sign on to the Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to reverse the FCC’s resoundingly unpopular repeal of net neutrality. But the fight to restore the free and open Internet is far from over.

You can see which members of Congress stood up for the open Internet, and which ones sold out their constituents, at the BattleForTheNet.com congressional scoreboard. 

Fight for the Future, one of the nation’s leading digital rights organizations that has spearheaded the fight for net neutrality, issued the following statement, which can be attributed to Deputy Director, Evan Greer (pronouns: she/her):

“We just shined a giant spotlight on corruption in Congress. Every single lawmaker who voted against the CRA in the Senate or failed to sign on to the discharge petition in the House has exposed themselves as industry puppets. They put the interests of telecom giants like Comcast and AT&T over the basic rights of their constituents.

We used the CRA as a powerful tool to get lawmakers on the record. Pundits claimed it would never pass the Senate –– but we channeled Internet outrage into real political power and got more than enough votes. If House leadership had allowed a vote on the CRA, we likely would have won that too. Instead, we used a discharge petition to get a record number of lawmakers publicly in support of strong net neutrality protections.

The CRA was a simple up or down vote on the free and open Internet. Now that the clock has run out, every single American knows exactly where their representatives stand.

Ajit Pai’s feeble attempt to celebrate the passing of the CRA deadline is laughable. His claim that broadband speeds are up is the tech policy equivalent of “it’s snowing outside, therefore climate change is a hoax.”

Dozens of anti-net neutrality members of Congress have already lost their jobs, and supporters of the open Internet will soon chair the key committees that provide oversight for the FCC. Ajit Pai won’t be laughing long when he has finally has to answer questions like why his agency lied to the media about a DDoS attack that never happened.

It’s an uphill battle, but we are winning the fight to restore net neutrality. The Internet freedom movement is stronger than it’s ever been as we head into 2019. We’ll keep fighting in the states, in the courts, and in Congress. It’s only a matter of time before net neutrality is the law of the land again.”

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Kari Polanyi Levitt is Emeritus Professor of Economics from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She was born in Vienna in 1923 to the well‐known intellectual Karl Polanyi, and grew up there during the famous years of Red Vienna. She was educated in England before and during World War II, obtaining her BSc in Economics and the Farr Medal in Statistics from the London School of Economics in 1947. Following 10 years of engagement in trade union research in Toronto, she obtained her MA in Economics from the University of Toronto in 1959 and an appointment in the Department of Economics at McGill University in 1961, where her particular teaching interests were in Techniques of Development Planning and Development Economics. She has inspired generations of students with the vision she has continued to advance for six decades.

Kari has been involved in the field of development economics since its origins, as a student of several of the pioneers of the field and later as one of its pioneers herself, within the more radical tangents of structuralist development economics. Her important contributions to the field include her groundbreaking work with Lloyd Best in the late 1960s on developing the Plantation Economy paradigm, republished as Essays on the Theory of Plantation Economy (Best and Polanyi Levitt, 2009) and her seminal book, Silent Surrender: The Multinational Corporation in Canada (Polanyi Levitt, 1970), which galvanized the political Left in Canada, her adopted country.

She has maintained a continuous relationship with the University of the West Indies (UWI) since her first contact there in 1960, including collaboration with Alister McIntyre and Lloyd Best. She has also served as Visiting Professor at UWI on several occasions and was appointed the first George Beckford Professor of Caribbean Political Economy from 1995 to 1997, where she compiled The George Beckford Papers (Beckford and Polanyi Levitt, 2000). A collection of her writings on Caribbean issues was published as Reclaiming Development: Independent Thought and Caribbean Community (2005), and a collection of her writings on her father and on contemporary economic development as From the Great Transformation to the Great Financialization (2013).

Kari is a founding member of the Canadian Association for the Study of International Development (CASID), which has awarded an annual essay prize in her honour since 2000. Together with Mel Watkins, she was the first recipient of the John Kenneth Galbraith Prize from the Progressive Economics Forum of Canada in 2008 and was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the West Indies in the same year. She is the Honorary President of the Karl Polanyi Institute of Political Economy, established in 1988 and based at Concordia University in Montreal. She was also inducted into the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2004 as an honorary member.

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Andrew Fischer: How did you get into development economics? As a young student during the war years, were you initially interested in development economics?

Kari Polanyi Levitt: No. During the war, the London School of Economics campus was relocated to Cambridge. All of the senior LSE staff were in London running the war effort — Lionel Robins, Professor Paich, Professor R.G.D. Allen — they were not in Cambridge. So we had enemy aliens and colonials as lecturers. The enemy aliens were people like Hayek and Mannheim, and Nicky Kaldor of course, Europeans with heavy accents. They had British passports, but they were not really British, so they were not in the inner circles of the Establishment running the war. Arthur Lewis was actually the only colonial. He was the first black person ever to be employed by London University. So the School was fascinating; it was really wonderful for us as students. We had the freedom of the city of Cambridge: we could live anywhere we wanted, and we could attend Cambridge University lectures; I could listen to Joan Robinson, Maurice Dobbs … Keynes was not there — he was in London running the war, so I never heard Keynes lecture.

Arthur Lewis gave the introductory lectures on economics at LSE. He drew this graph showing the marginal product of labour and the wage rate. He showed employment would be increased by reducing the wage rate. I gathered up all of my courage and decided to talk to him after the lecture. I said, ‘Sir, excuse me, but I don’t believe that. Before the war, we had 3 million unemployed and they couldn’t get employment at any wage’. So he asked my name and he said, ‘Miss Polanyi, I assume that you have come here to study the science of economics. When you have mastered it, you may return and we will discuss the matter’. [Kari laughs.] You know, he had quite a high pitched voice, he was quite thin at that time, and he looked hungry. Later he became quite portly.

In the second year he gave a class that made an important impression on me. He was obviously writing a textbook and he was giving us the chapters as he was writing it. It was an economic survey from 1919–39, and that is where I first learned about the declining terms of trade of the countries producing agricultural products, Latin America and the Caribbean. But he also presented an account of Hitler’s Germany — and of Russia, England, and the colonies.

But I myself was not at all interested in developing countries, or colonies. I was going to be a labour economist. I wanted to service the labour movement. I worked during two summer vacations in factories and during another summer we made a famous survey on the nutritional state of the British working population, for the Ministry of Food. This survey was done over several years. The result, if nutrition is measured by weight according to height, was that nutrition improved during the war. I also used to offer my help to the Labour Research Department, an independent labour research unit. When I was called up for National Service, I got my first real job, with the Amalgamated Engineering Unit in the research department, on recommendation from the Labour Research Department.

When the war was over, I went back to the LSE to finish my undergraduate degree. In 1947, I found myself in Canada. Joe [Levitt], my fiancé, had arranged for me to enrol in the Master’s programme at the University of Toronto and to be a teaching assistant. I was very disappointed with the University of Toronto. I found it a dull and depressing place, although I enjoyed teaching a course on English economic history.

I left the university and presented myself at a factory called Acme Screw and Gear Company in Toronto. Of course I lied about my qualifications, never told them I had been to university or anything, and I got a job there. I was there for a year and thoroughly enjoyed the life. So, okay, I am now in the labour movement … but when colleagues discovered I was ‘wasting my time’ in a factory, they offered me employment with the United Electrical Union Labour Research Department. Later I worked for the Mine, Mills and Smelter Workers Union, as a journalist. There I had to produce a 16‐page tabloid every month. I enjoyed the work. Eventually I decided I would enrol in graduate studies at the University of Toronto and that is when I became interested in development economics.

AF: How did you become interested?

KPL: The first time I came across that literature was in the 1950s. Because I had a strong mathematics background, I became interested in making input‐output tables for inter‐industry modelling. Professor Keirstead at the University of Toronto came from the Maritimes [in Canada] and had connections with Atlantic Provinces Economic Council, and he got me jobs in the summer working for them. I did one study for them on migration. Then I got interested in doing work for them on regional economic planning, for the so‐called underdeveloped provinces of Canada, the maritime region — regional underdevelopment. That got me interested in starting to do regional input‐output tables and I developed that when I came to McGill [in Montreal]. So, I came to development economics also through my interest in planning and applying that to regional economic underdevelopment.

AF: Was that around the time that you first started going to Jamaica?

KPL: I started at McGill in 1961, right after Jamaica. Professor Keirstead was a friend of Arthur Lewis. He spent a sabbatical in Jamaica with his wife and undertook to do some studies for what was then the Federal Government of the West Indies. So he sent for a student, which ended up being me. I arrived in Jamaica in 1960. I arrived right in the middle of the Federal Government of the West Indies: it started in 1958 and collapsed in 1962.

Alistair McIntyre was teaching in Jamaica at that time. The campus of the University of West Indies [UWI] was dominated by expatriate British. In economics, Alistair McIntyre was one of the few West Indians and Lloyd Best had just been hired, as a junior fellow, at the Institute of Social Economic Research. He was supposed to be making estimates of national income for the small islands, but that did not match his interests, and being Mr Best, he decided he would follow his interests. I do not blame him, but his interest was in West Indian history.

AF: So then you started working with him around that time?

KPL: Well, that is when I met him … but I was interested in planning techniques. I knew more about techniques than about the substance, of course. So we thought we would do something together. He had gone to Guyana and then, when he came back in 1964, we started what became the Plantation Model.

At McGill, I couldn’t teach development because another professor was teaching that, so I taught a course in planning techniques. I managed to supply Statistics Canada with quite a few students. McIntyre, in particular, kept sending me students, to supervise their graduate work at McGill.

AF: You were also writing Silent Surrender during that time?

KPL: I was approached by Charles Taylor,¹ who was a colleague, to write a position paper for the NDP [New Democratic Party]² on the issue of foreign ownership. We are talking about the early 1960s. Charles Taylor was a possible candidate for the leadership of the NDP and his candidature was being pushed by David Lewis, who was the leader of the party. (David Lewis was the father of Stephen Lewis and grandfather of Avy Lewis, who is married to Naomi Klein.) That brought me to an NDP convention. The NDP was not interested in getting involved with anything that was too radical sounding — the NDP was quite conservative.

I said, yes, I was interested because the majority opinion in the NDP was that foreign ownership was not a problem. If it was good for economic growth then whatever was done with the economic growth was another issue. The first thing I did was to distinguish between portfolio and direct investment. The argument had been simply about foreign investment, but we got onto this thing about the effect of the branch plant, and of the sale of so many Canadian companies to American companies. This had a dynamic effect because I was then asked to meet, for a whole weekend, with the national executive of the NDP. The book Silent Surrender really came out of that.

But then when I met Lloyd, I became interested in the plantation economy. There was a relationship, in a sense, between Canada, as a country that was increasingly dominated by the whole subsidiaries and branch plants of foreign companies, and the Caribbean, which was a typical case of islands involved in multinational mining and extractive activity in oil and bauxite. We wrote some interesting things together. It was Lloyd who persuaded me to publish what I had by 1968, in the New World Quarterly,³ under the title of ‘Economic Dependence and Political Disintegration: The Case of Canada’. And that began a kind of new existence. It was reprinted by Cy Gonick and at the time it became a minor sensation in Canada, until I was approached by Macmillan of Canada.

Then I got help, both from the NDP but particularly from Eric Keirens. Eric was a remarkable fellow, very independent minded. He was a capitalist, he was a former president of the Montreal stock exchange, and at McGill he was a professor of commerce. He became a close friend and he gave me a lot of good material for Silent Surrender because he really believed in the independence of Canada. He did not like the Americans buying up all of these companies, or the Canadians who were sending out everything to the Americans. Eventually, I had a book. Silent Surrender was finished in 1969, published in 1970. The publisher sent a copy to be evaluated by an economist at University of Toronto, who rejected it; he said this was political and not economics, it was ideological, it was whatever. But the publisher liked it and so the publisher asked if I knew someone else who I could send it to, and I said, send it to Mel Watkins. So they sent it to Mel and the rest is history. He just loved it and wrote the introduction for it.

Meanwhile, Lloyd had been at McGill from 1966 to 1968. We got some money from UNIDO for a project called ‘Export‐propelled growth and industrialization in the Caribbean’. He left to go back home in 1968 and in 1969 there was a possibility I could go to Trinidad to continue work with him on the completion of this plantation economy model. Actually, CIDA [the Canadian International Development Agency, which was going to fund her] tried to block me, by getting UWI to say that they no longer wanted someone working in social sciences. However, by that time, my good friend William Demas, who had been long‐time economic advisor to Dr William [Eric William, the first prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago and author of Capitalism and Slavery (1944)], knowing that I had wanted to come to Trinidad and was preparing to do so, said, well, would you consider coming to develop the data base for the next 5‐year plan? So, I agreed. For that he got support from the IMF. I finally went there in 1969 with money from the IMF, technical assistance. The IMF didn’t have any problem with me — all of the problems I had originated in Ottawa. I guess they went back to the issues of Sir George Williams,⁴ the black writers’ conference, and a whole lot of West Indian politics here in Montreal.

From 1969 to 1973 I was going back and forth and we really did amazing work. We worked with a team of young graduates from UWI and with statisticians from the Central Statistical Office. We developed a very innovative Trinidad and Tobago system of national accounts, based on what was then the new UN system of national accounts, but modified to make it conform to the structure of a petroleum economy. In 1973 that was terminated abruptly, because of the political situation there.

AF: Can you elaborate on the Plantation Economy?

KPL: I think it is important because most of my work has been done with regard to the Caribbean or with regard to world history. The Caribbean has been so important in terms of what we call the international framework, within which the plantation economy existed and continues to exist. There are four aspects of the world, of the external environment, in which the plantations were organized. To my mind, the four points continue to be very useful for understanding the structure of international trade and investment, and the shifting political spheres of influence.

The four aspects are: the division of the world by the Pope between Spain and Portugal, one east, one west; the navigation acts, the lines of communication; of course, the division of labour between primary commodities and manufactures; and finally the importance of what we call the metropolitan exchange standard. The fourth in particular remains important to this day, with the whole debate about the continuing importance of the American dollar as reserve currency in spite of the relative decline of the United States.

You know, it was a dramatic way of emphasizing that what we have in the English‐speaking Caribbean — well, in all of the islands, even in the small ones — does not approximate an economy as described in textbooks of economics. The representative firm, as [Alfred] Marshall called it, is not the family‐owned enterprise, but the subsidiary of a foreign company with extractive activity. We had in mind the petroleum industry of Trinidad, the bauxite of Jamaica, for example. So then, in looking at this and the historical path, it led to the plantation, which was set up by foreign capital with the express purpose of utilizing African labour to produce a commodity of high value for international markets. Then we explored the internal organizations of the plantations, the relation between planter and merchant. That is, the relationship between the organization of the production and the organization of the distribution, the finance, the access to markets, etc. — what in Marxist language would be the sphere of circulation, and the predominance of the sphere of circulation over the process of production.

AF: Which is the inverse of the basic Marxist understanding of capitalist development.

KPL: It is also the inverse of economics in general, because very much of classical economics is about the real economy. In fact, Keynes’s principal quarrel with what he called the classics was because they ignored money. So they ignored the sphere of circulation.

AF: Much of modern economics continues to ignore money in that sense.

KPL: Indeed. I mean, this nonsense about the microeconomic foundations of macroeconomics is an effort to ignore money. Of course, people have to be confronted with the fact that, in historic terms, the great divide — between North and South, or between West and East, or however you wish to put it — really began with the industrial revolution in Britain and did not begin to take off until the early 19^th century. However, this was not only due to huge spurts of growth in Europe and its offshoots, as [Angus] Maddison calls them, being the United States, Canada, Australia. It was also due to the negative reduction in growth in India, and particularly in China in the 19^th century, which the Chinese now regard as their great humiliation.

Moreover, the three centuries that preceded the industrial revolution were enormously important because the really existing capitalism happened in the relatively small nations on the Atlantic periphery of the Eurasian continent: Spain, Portugal, France, The Netherlands and England. It did not happen in the more ancient civilization of China, or of India, or of the whole Hellenic Mediterranean region. It’s a big historical question. It could have, but it did not happen in the great empires. It happened in these rather small and rather recent nation states. This really existing capitalism from Western Europe came together with the voyages of discovery, the conquest of the Americas. If we consider these three centuries, 1500 to 1800, that mercantilist era was characterized by what I call commerce and conquest, trade and war. The war was almost entirely maritime. Historians talk about perpetual trade and war in the Caribbean.

What happened with the Renaissance — with the voyages of Vasco da Gama and then Columbus — is that these European states extended their territory to embrace all of the Americas. If Western Europe had not been able to expand to embrace all of the Americas, they would not have been the power that they became. An interesting example is The Netherlands. The Dutch were so successful, they built the first great commercial empire that went from the Baltic to the spice islands of Indonesia, and they established Amsterdam as the premier financial centre of Europe, but with the small population they had, they couldn’t carry it any further.

Trade and war were there in the traditions of these countries of Western Europe that became the predominant metropolitan powers, from the beginning. From the beginning, there was expansion and conquest. And so, the relationship of trade and warfare, commerce and conquest, and the element of centres and peripheries, were all there from the get‐go in the Western capitalist countries, before industrial capitalism. One could talk not about two globalizations but about three, to think of the expansion from the beginning.

It then continued with the better‐known free trade imperialism, and the empires, in the latter part of the 19^th century, the conquest of Africa and Asia, etc. As our friend Eric Hobsbawm writes, quite correctly, without the previous mercantile colonial system, the revolution in the spinning industry in Britain, British textiles, would not have had markets to sell their rather poor cotton products. They could be sold only in the colonial trade, they could not be sold otherwise. So the old mercantilist order that was dissolved somewhat with the coming of free trade in England and in Europe had served the purpose of providing the original markets, including India of course, where British cotton goods were sold by the East India company, and Britain put enormous tariffs against the importation of Indian cotton — a well‐known story.

AF: And you derived these insights from your work on the Plantation Economy?

KPL: I think there is also something to be learnt from the structure of the early chartered companies, in terms of what I call the symbiotic relationship between the political authority, the monarch, and the merchant in the accumulation of territory and wealth, and the way the chartered companies were made into almost autonomous entities. The sovereign granted monopoly rights to merchant companies to establish exclusivist relations with foreign rulers in Asia and Africa. They were given the power to build ports and forts, dispense justice, and so forth. I make the comparison with the multinational corporations, which I call the new mercantilism.

That line of thinking leads us to another important similarity, and that is the emphasis on the importance of who controls communication. In the work that we did on the Plantation Economy, the merchant had superior power over the planter. The chartered companies were large and powerful business enterprises compared with the multitude of producers whose access to metropolitan markets they controlled. The merchant had control of the market overseas, in the metropole, the source of much of the capital, the actual control over the means of transportation. The producers — the planters — were in a subsidiary position. The merchant sold the goods and also supplied the inputs and could take his cut.

Today, with the information revolution, we are seeing enormous structures of power accrue to those who control channels of communication. But even before we had the phenomenon of the Amazons, the Googles, etc., in the production chains, which we are very familiar with, it was very very clear that the control and the profit accrue principally to the platform that organizes the chain. The producers, the capitalists as much as the workers who produce the various inputs that are assembled, etc., are in a subordinate position to those who are controlling this whole process. The deindustrialization that has happened in the Western countries has created big problems but it has not impoverished these countries in terms of GDP (for lack of a better measure). They have gained in various kinds of fees and profits and interest, and other kinds of incomes, and have moved towards the top of the income distribution. We know about the unfavourable distribution. But the control of channels of communication, what used to be the navigation acts in the mercantilist system, is something that has carried right through to the present: communication gives control. Information technology today has been greeted positively, obviously with some good reason, but it has some very big issues regarding power.

Hence, from the very origins of European hegemony, we see the predominance of metropolitan finance over production in the peripheries, in contrast with the predominance of production over finance in the centre. Viewed from the periphery, merchants remained central. They distributed and sold the products of the emerging English industrial system in colonial markets, and the sugar and other commodities of the slave plantations in international markets. Merchants controlled the channels of international commerce, including finance, insurance and shipping.

These aspects supported the establishment of European hegemony throughout these centuries. The evolution of capitalism needs to be understood in light of these 300 years of mercantilist conquest and unequal trade, which transformed the peripheries and integrated them into the production networks of the centre in various differentiated ways before the advent of industrial capitalism. There was no radical break between mercantilism and English capitalism from the perspective of the periphery. US capitalism also shows a similar continuity, although the major innovation of US corporations was to merge production with distribution.

AF: So the Plantation Economy helped you understand economic development more generally?

KPL: Yes, but you see, the Plantation Economy was also something special, in a sense unique to the Caribbean. Of course, plantations have been set up in other countries. Interestingly, a colleague of mine has been doing research on the fact that when the planters were compensated for the loss of their slaves, at the time of emancipation, many of them, with connections within the British empire, established plantations in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and so forth. But those were not based on slave labour.

When we developed this idea, in the 1960s, those were very different times, they were times of radical social political movements. We had in Trinidad, in 1970, what was called a black power revolution, an uprising. So the political idea that in some ways not very much has changed since the days of the slave plantation was something that people could sense.

AF: You have argued that modern capitalism is returning to its mercantilist origins and you have drawn parallels to the Plantation Economy. Can you explain?

KPL: This is what some people have called extractive imperialism. In my book Silent Surrender, there is a chapter called ‘From the Old Mercantilism to the New’. In the old mercantilism, again, the representative firm was a joint stock corporation, the chartered companies; they received their monopolies from the sovereign; there were many shareholders; they were adventurers, etc. I saw similarities with the gigantic multinational corporations, also similarities in the sense that the centre, the head office, is in control of a variety of locations, and again how control over communication is so central to the organization of both of the old chartered companies and the modern multinational corporations.

AF: And you were writing this already in the late 1960s …

KPL: Yes. And it is still relevant today — more so than ever I think. I was working on Silent Surrender, which was on the effects of the multinational corporations on host countries in the developed world, the US–Canada relationship, at the same time as I was working on plantation economies with Lloyd Best, so I have always seen the connections. People have found it strange that I would see any similarities between American companies buying up Canadian industries and what is going on in the islands of the Caribbean.

And we are now seeing a certain regression of capitalism to these mercantilist origins in the capitalist heartlands in the US, the UK and even in continental Europe. This regression is commonly referred to as ‘financialization’, meaning the growing dominance of finance and commerce over production. This is best seen in terms of the concentration of power in multinational corporations, which increasingly do not directly produce anything but, instead, organize production and distribution. Hence, production has become increasingly subservient and subordinated to commerce through subcontracting and outsourcing in various ways, and through proprietary arrangements and monopsonistic structures of buyers vis‐à‐vis producers. This is a very different reality from that of industrial capitalism in its heyday and from the descriptions of firms in typical microeconomics textbooks. It can be seen as a certain type of degeneration of capitalism in comparison to the age when industrial capitalism was based on innovation in production rather than innovation in financial and proprietary arrangements, which is why we call it a predatory form of capitalism.

However, the mercantilist origins of this predatory capitalism are best viewed from the peripheries. This is in contrast to the common approach that views such predatory capitalism as somehow a perversion from the idealized classical forms of capitalism that emerged in Europe on the basis of the primacy of productive innovation over commerce. The early mercantilist origin of capitalism in the peripheries sheds light on the continuity of commerce over production, especially but not only in these peripheries, from slavery to the emergence of transnational corporations as a form of ‘new mercantilism’ controlling commerce in the peripheries. At both ends of the historical spectrum, the imbalance of power relations in international trade is rooted in this imbalance of commerce over production, whereby production in peripheries is subservient to commerce controlled by mercantilist or new mercantilist corporations. It is for this reason that Marxist models of capitalists exploiting labour are not very appropriate for understanding the economic dependency and exploitation of countries that are incorporated as peripheries into the international capitalist system.

Rather, it is quite tenable to suggest that the future of the capitalist centres can be seen in the history of the peripheries. For instance, those of us working on the Caribbean used to think that the short view was a peculiarity of the Plantation Economy, whereas now a similar short view has become generalized to the economies of the centres, such as in the US and the UK. This short view is the view of commerce: when prospects look good for your export crop, you borrow and expand; when times turn bad, you have no resources to diversify, so you stay in the same staple crop and you borrow to try to maintain your standard of living; when borrowing is no longer possible, you mortgage your land; when that is no longer possible, you consume capital. In the days of slavery, consuming capital meant overworking and starving your slaves. In contemporary times, it means laying off public servants and reducing public expenditures on education and health, which is equivalent to consuming the human capital of a population.

AF: If I recall correctly, you have said that the first application of scientific methods of organizing labour was on the slave plantations. Do you think this influenced Adam Smith?

KPL: What I said is that a plantation with 3,000 slaves implied an industrial organization that makes Adam Smith’s pin factory look miniscule in terms of the division of labour. It was mind blowing, when I was taken in Jamaica, somewhere not too far from Antigua Bay, to the Good Hope Plantation, which had 3,000 slaves. I mean, how do you organize something like that? You are going to have people who will be rebellious, run away to the hills, and the organization and the accounting, and all the different aspects of that operation … We are talking about the late 18^th century, and what you had in Britain at the time was largely artisanal industry, nothing was organized on a big scale. Possibly on a physical scale, such as the sheep pasture, but not in terms of labour.

What I said, which my colleague Lloyd Best did not like to hear, did not agree with, is that I thought that the production of sugar on slave plantations was in every sense a capitalist operation, organized with European capital, with the exception of the labour regime, which was not wage labour but slave labour. But the labour power embodied in these human machines was valued, the amount of work that could be extracted from them, according to their size and age and health, was estimated, and so on. So it seems to me to be obvious that this preceded the more scientific management of production in English agriculture.

Marxist definitions tend to define capitalism as private ownership of property and wage labour. But if you look at capitalism in terms of the production of something for the sheer purpose of selling it at a profit, then the plantations have major attributes of tropical agrarian‐style capitalism. They also constituted the first major investment of capital in an overseas location for this purpose.

In the case of the English colonies, as I have noted, there are also remarkable similarities between these particular characteristics and the English agricultural revolution and the role played by English oligarchic landed classes, the same landed classes whose younger sons were sent to the colonies and became part of the planter classes. The plantocracy and the English landed oligarchy are largely the same families, the same people.

This long view highlights how the Caribbean slave plantations were, in many respects, at the genesis of capitalism and the plantations were entirely capitalist enterprises; the sole difference with the modern factory system lay in the fact that the labour was unfree. Indeed, the slave trade only derived its profitability from the profitability of the slave plantations. Sugar was the largest single import of Britain, constituting close to one‐quarter of the value of all British imports in the 18^th century. At the same time, the capitalist agriculture that was evolving in Britain was often developed by the same families that were involved in the Caribbean slave plantations. This synergy of mercantilism remains a hugely underemphasized, if not ignored, aspect in the Eurocentric debates on the origins of capitalism in Northwest Europe, which usually focus on internal causes such as agrarian transformations in the English countryside rather than the more global commercial origins of these transformations.

AF: How does this relate to a similar emphasis of production in early development economics?

KPL: The fact that really existing capitalism happened in the relatively small nations on the Atlantic periphery of the Eurasian continent accounts for the fact that GDP per capita in Western Europe — in all the statistics, the Maddison estimates — was significantly higher than in Eastern Europe, and remains so to this day. Now, what is Western Europe? It borders the Atlantic, it has special relationships with different areas of the world.

So, when we come to the [early] development economists and the importance of people like Gerschenkron, Rosenstein Rodan, they were living in regions of the world that were backward in relation to Western Europe. Gerschenkron was of course Russian (born in the Ukraine) and much of his work was done on the rise of Tsarist Russia.

AF: ‘Backward’ is not a very popular term these days … can you clarify?

KPL: Well, backward, absolutely, backward. Economically underdeveloped. Economically backward. At the time of the Russian revolution in 1917, this is a country hugely dominated by a peasantry, with some cities, with some industrial establishments, actually mostly with foreign capital, and some modern technology. This is part of the story of the Russian revolution and the Soviet Communist Party, which considered itself to be a vanguard party based on the working class, but the working class was extremely small, in relationship to a vast peasantry, and they came into conflict, of course. The whole history of the early decades of the Soviet revolution was really about conflicts between the peasantry and the prevailing regime that was based on urban and industrial regions.

Gerschenkron and others understood the problems of economic underdevelopment because they could understand it in terms of their own countries in relation to Western Europe. Thinkers like Arthur Lewis came from the colonies and so also had this perspective, but what is not so obvious and perhaps not so well understood is the relationship within Europe, of East Europe to the West. Europe is deeply divided in that way.

AF: Eric Reinert also gives a lot of emphasis to the Eastern European experience and to the early development economists who came out of that experience. Is your view somewhat different?

KPL: It is very different. I have a real problem with Reinert, in particular with his book on why poor countries remain poor (Reinert, 2007). It has a very strong bias against agriculture. Okay, understood, economic development does proceed from agricultural to industrial civilizations, yes, but his book is so negative with regard to agriculture, whereas in our world, if we wish to save this planet from the way in which humanity is moving to destroy it, it is the physical environment that we have to be concerned with, it is the way we produce the food that we require without destroying the basis of the whole ecosystem.

Reinert’s book tends towards a streamlined interpretation of development economics along the dominant theme of increasing returns to scale, which appears to be his way of dealing with industrialization. He draws exclusively from the European continental experiences and economists such as Ragnar Nurkse, whereas the driving force of capitalist expansion into the non‐European peripheries, and the way that capitalism shaped the rest of the world through trade, war, commerce and conquest, originally emanated from countries of the Atlantic seaboard such as The Netherlands, the UK and France. Similarly, the origins of classical political economy also came from these countries, particularly the UK. Hence, his narrow focus and emphasis on increasing returns not only dismisses the role of agriculture (and Adam Smith, for whom the quintessential capitalist was a farmer), but it also dismisses the origins of the European expansion into the non‐European world, the origins of classical political economy, and the effects of both on Latin America and other regions of the non‐European periphery. My own analysis places these themes centre stage.

Again, what I am saying is that the really existing capitalist system was born in England and in some neighbouring states, and had within it, as far as I am concerned, commerce and conquest, trade and war, from the beginning. That does not play the same role in the development of the Hapsburg Empire, or for that matter in the Tsarist Empire, or the unification of Germany. But I think it carries over into the era of American hegemony.

Gerschenkron is the classic in terms of the development of the latecomers. I take all of that. That is certainly part of the doctrine of the development economists. But, in terms of the significance for developing countries that are, by and large, more rural and agricultural, or at least were until not very long ago, the dismissal of agriculture and the way in which Reinert sees agriculture only as backwardness is not helpful, I think. So much of Arthur Lewis, for instance, is an argument for the need to increase productivity in the food‐producing sector in order to raise the supply price of labour to industry.

Then you have in Adam Smith a very strong line of argument favouring domestic investment, particularly in farming actually, over the activities of the big merchant adventurer companies. He called this the natural path. Now, what did Adam Smith mean by the natural path? I think he meant the progression from agricultural production into the processing of food, the processing of hides, the processing of tissue, fabric, etc., from the ground up, so to speak, as distinct from that dismissal of agriculture. So, in a way, the natural path would be one that would be obviously followed by the great empires, such as China, which of course Adam Smith admired very much. This is distinct from a kind of development that sees maybe the cities as the source of modernization and development, and the countryside as backward. That would be more Reinert.

AF: But as you yourself point out, the actual path of development of North Atlantic capitalism was the unnatural path through mercantilism, not the natural path.

KPL: Yes and no, because there was also the agricultural revolution. Remember, that is something missing from the stories of European bourgeois capitalism — the fact that capitalist principles, of investment of money to make profit, were first applied in England to agriculture, between the sheep raising, which was an export activity, and the wheat cultivation, which was for the domestic market. Arthur Lewis took that with him into his theory, because he was trained in England and owed so much to his English education, and he talked about the need to modernize and raise productivity in agriculture. I think he learnt that, really, from the application of the English model.

AF: But as you just noted, much of this investment in the land in England was itself partly financed by wealth coming from the plantations.

KPL: Absolutely. The roots of the Anglo Saxon model, if you wish, differ from China, for example, as a country which had all the other attributes for developing capitalism, but didn’t. It differs in two ways. One was a particularly English thing, the role played by the rural oligarchy; it was called the improvement, or the agricultural revolution. The tenant farmers were not peasants anymore, they were farmers, meaning they were farming for profits, on land owned by landowners, and they were paying rents. Both of these classes were engaged in agriculture. That is one. And the other difference of course is what we have been saying — their expansionism, commerce and conquest. They were facing the sea and all the expansion was maritime. This aspect was very different from what might be the more natural path, not depending on foreign conquest. The city states of the Mediterranean that came before The Netherlands and England — Venice and Genoa — were also engaged in trade and in war, but there was no agriculture. So, with the early Italian economists that Reinert cites, it was all about the benefits of trade and the division of labour, but not agriculture.

You see, at the centre of the Italian city‐states is a city. A town, a bourgeois town, burgers. I mean, the word bourgeois comes from burger, which means citizen of a town with a wall around it, which is a burg. European continental development is so much to do with the role of the towns with regard to the countryside. Feudalism was principally concerned with the relationship of feudal authorities, princes, who have to contend with controlling the food supply surrounding them. This was so different from the English story.

To my mind Celso Furtado was one of the few people who understood that the English oligarchs, the landowners, were entrepreneurially minded, unlike the Europeans. The French were the opposite. The French landowners resisted and all progress was within the cities. In England in the 18^th century, it was the landed estates where the aristocracy carried on their social life. The Jamaican great houses replicated the English country estates, which they were familiar with because a lot of those families came from the landed gentry of England. But that landed gentry of England was improving. I have always found that fascinating because they talk about a bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie derives from the European concept of the town people, as distinct from the gentry and the landowners. But the English bourgeoisie was rurally based.

AF: There is no example of modern growth based on industrialization that followed the natural path, is there?

KPL: Well, no, because once the industrial revolution started where it started, which was in Western Europe, it then spread through Europe and then in many ways industrialization came from imitation, from import substitution. So it was something coming from abroad in trade, as manufactured goods, and countries figured out they wanted to produce that themselves. On that I think we are back to Latin American structuralists, particularly Furtado, who points out that modernization, the modern lifestyle and industrialization, came to the commodity‐exporting peripheries through consumption, not production. It came because the classes that had more disposable income purchased the imports, which eventually these countries undertook to produce domestically. But access to industrial civilization was not through the imitation of production but through replacing the imports directly. So that is already a different path.

It is also really important to remember that Adam Smith did not see the industrial revolution himself. Even Ricardo, who wrote a generation later, added on a famous chapter at the end of his book called ‘On machinery’. So if machinery is just a final note you put on there, you are obviously not talking about industrial capitalism, in which the machine plays a critical role.

AF: If I dare to paraphrase, we might say that while mercantilism was an ‘unnatural path’, it nonetheless supported capitalist development in the metropole, whereas it undermined such development in the peripheries. This is an argument that falls clearly into the dependency tradition. Do you locate your arguments within this tradition? Or do you prefer to stay away from such labels?

KPL: Well, first of all, I think that this designation of dependency is actually a metropolitan term, along with world systems, which has been superimposed on a lot of other work. I guess the brief answer to your question would be yes, but I don’t think labelling is particularly helpful.

I think what is helpful — and what I think is a definition of development — is the recognition that there are economies that have been shaped by the domination of metropolitan structures of power. And they are not underdeveloped. I do not believe in some sort of natural stages of progression, that they are underdeveloped because they are agricultural, but rather that these structures — social, economic and political structures — have been created not by following a natural path, to use that idea, but by their encounter with the dominant powers of the metropolitan. I still think that Celso Furtado explains this the best.

Now the emphasis that some people make, say Andre Gunder Frank, or [Arghiri] Emmanuel, that there is an unequal exchange, is so obvious that it is not even interesting. What is really at issue is the way these economies have been shaped by the historical reality. And that is very different in different parts of the world. I always say that the language of centre and periphery comes from Prebisch and Latin America. The phenomenon is particularly clear in the case of the Americas.

As Lloyd Best and I described it, there were three different kinds of colonization. There were colonies of conquest, principally those of Latin America, where they got the gold and the silver. Silver was enormously important. It demonstrated that Europe did not have the quality of industrial goods that were made in China and in the East. Europeans did not have commodities to balance what they wanted from the East — the trade of spices, of porcelain, of silk, etc. — so they had to be balanced by silver. The silver assisted enormously in that trade.

Then there were colonies of settlement, which between them largely destroyed the indigenous populations, marginalized them, enslaved them, dispossessed them. And then there were what we call the colonies of exploitation, sheer exploitation, the plantation economies. These brought African slave labour to achieve what was really the first large‐scale production of trade goods, organized by the Europeans in Brazil, in the Caribbean, and then in the southern United States, to produce sugar, cotton, tobacco, whatever.

In all of the Americas, the states that have arisen, that were created, all speak a European language, all have some variant or another of a Christian religion, many of them are settled, in both the North and the South Americas, by Europeans. Because of the richness and resources of the Americas, they were destined to become industrial sources of food and raw materials, and later minerals. So they were peripheries, but peripheries in the purer sense of the term as commodity‐supplying regions. Africa was also involved in that.

The extension of Europe eastwards — the trading companies from the Levant to the Indian ocean, to India, and the China Seas and the Spice Islands — was initially of lesser importance and also of lesser value than the kind of primitive accumulation or transfer of resources that was organized from the Americas. It was also fundamentally different given that it was based on exploration and trade. In the early mercantilist period, wherever Europeans traded in the East, they were just one more trader among many others. They did not uproot the social structure of the villages in the countryside in this earlier period. Even later, their colonies in Asia were not colonies of settlement. As a result, the elites in these eastern peripheries were not of European origin because there was little or no European settlement. In most of Asia, Christianity was not or could not be imposed on any significant scale, in contrast to Latin America where Christianization became all‐pervasive, even among indigenous peoples. In this sense, the western regions were truly peripheries, in the classic understanding of the word, whereas the eastern regions were much less so.

AF: But for you, the fundamental expression of structuralism is how these countries encounter the dominant structures of power. So, couldn’t you apply that to, say, Southeast Asia, where the encounter with the dominant power had an impact on the structure of the economy and society?

KPL: Of course you can, but you also have to take into account the previous civilizations and societies that were in Southeast Asia, and it was those that fed the independence movements there. I mean, there was a big struggle. When I was a student in England, I knew young students from Malaysia who went back and were fighting the British in the jungle. But they were fighting the British in the jungle to reclaim what they considered to be their country. That is a different story from Latin America.

You had huge famines in India and China. That was British imperialism, but it was superimposed on an existing society. You see, we did not have that in the Americas; the existing societies were destroyed. They were not incorporated, they were really eliminated.

This basic difference between the western and eastern regions of the periphery is profound. It arguably carries right through to the present and is a crucial determining factor in the differential developments of these two broadly defined peripheral regions of global capitalism. It highlights what has become known as the two great divergences, which we started to notice only after the 1970s. One divergence has been between North and South, while the other has been between the industrializing eastern and the primary‐commodity export‐dependent western parts of the periphery. Notably, the latter — Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa — all underwent structural adjustment programmes in the 1980s. From the short perspective of an otherwise long lifetime, it is interesting to note that there was no clue of these divergences in 1950.

AF: How do you position these ideas with those of World Systems theory, such as the work of Immanuel Wallerstein?

KPL: Wallerstein has been a successful and useful academic entrepreneur, who has turned out very little work of any originality, but has that capacity for seeing what others have done and marketing it with words like this, ‘world systems’. I think the greatest of the scholars, on whose work he has drawn, is [Giovanni] Arrighi. In Arrighi’s work, you can really see the path he has taken, from being a leftist Trotskyist, Maoist Italian leftist, to the first book, The Geometry of Imperialism (Arrighi, 1983), to the rest.

Gunder Frank (the early Gunder Frank) really saw this world system as beginning with the voyages of Columbus. But Gunder Frank again was very different: he was the opposite of the successful entrepreneur. He was, I think, quite a genius, who had a lot of problems of organizing his life and of dealing with depression, for instance, but he had the insight to say: ‘Whoa! Hold on! The Third World did not begin in Latin America. You really need to go back a few thousand years’. That is the ReOrient book (Frank, 1998). I find it a very courageous book. Gunder Frank established his reputation on the concept of the development of underdevelopment, and then in ReOrient he basically dismissed all the greats — Marx, Polanyi, Braudel, even his younger self — as Eurocentric. Interestingly, the only one who escaped this dismissal was Adam Smith.

As for Immanuel Wallerstein, I have known him for a long time. He first came to our attention in a newsletter that he circulated. In those days it was a way of drawing attention to yourself. It is perfectly legitimate. Nowadays we would call it a blog, but in those days it was a newsletter, and among the persons who received it was my father [Karl Polanyi]. My father was living in Canada already and Wallerstein tried very hard to make himself known to Karl Polanyi, who really was not terribly interested, except that Wallerstein was very close friends with Terence Hopkins. Terry Hopkins was a student of my father, and my father loved him, I mean, he loved all his students.

Then I knew Wallerstein when he was here at McGill teaching sociology in the late 1960s, but his creation of this World Systems theory came later. It is a powerful idea on which he has built his career. When he presented it at the first Karl Polanyi conference [Hungary 1986], people thought he got this from Polanyi. Other people thought he had gotten it from the work of Lloyd Best and myself, you know, the four characteristics that I was telling you about, because Terry Hopkins would share our working drafts with him. His book also has a massive amount of copying of quotations of Braudel. There is nothing original. You see, Wallerstein invented ‘world systems’, the concept. He has been a very successful and systematic entrepreneur in organizing this concept.

AF: It is interesting that Wallerstein has become one of the central lineage references of the post‐development and decoloniality scholarship.

KPL: What does this mean, this coloniality? I don’t know what they are talking about. I mean, Canada has many traces of its colonial origins, that is a fact, but is that coloniality? Or does it mean that the relations that Canada has developed with indigenous people are of a colonial kind?

AF: The arguments are also often related to a critique of a Eurocentric vision of development as industrialization and so on.

KPL: Well, industrialization, we have to defend that. Industrialization was key. As Deepak Nayyar wrote (Nayyar, 2013), it was catch‐up. It was the idea that if we are going to be independent, we must be as good as or better than those old colonial powers. People who then criticize industrialization because it is dirty, because it uses carbon fuels, for whatever reason — I think one has to resist those arguments.

AF: These views have also tended to encourage a sort of anti‐statism, feeding into the neoliberal critique of the state.

KPL: This is where the anti‐statism from the left and the right meet. The whole attack on the idea of government as innately corrupt is where left meets right. It is a big problem for the left, because it is very appealing. This is the point I have been making: the hostility to the state is a commonality between left‐wing anarchism and libertarian liberalism. And that, I think, is really a problem because I insist that we cannot dismiss the importance of the modern state.

Also, people keep talking to me about civil society, but I say why do we need this idea of civil society? What is wrong with society? The origin of this notion of civil society goes back to the Cold War, to critiques of the Soviet Union on the basis of the authoritarian nature of the state and the support given by the Western powers to anyone agitating against the state, and they call that civil society. And then with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the term was taken over to label all of these bottom‐up things as civil society. To my mind, this is a very confusing concept. And it is very compatible with neoliberalism. That’s a big problem.

AF: Human rights have also been co‐opted in a similar manner.

KPL: This is also unfortunate, because if you remember the words of the famous ‘Internationale’ in German [Kari starts singing in German, until she gets to menschenrechte] — that’s human rights. These were revolutionary concepts, of human rights, menschenrechte. Funnily enough, the English translation gets away from this. The English translation of the chorus of the ‘Internationale’ is ‘the human race’. But the German is menschenrechte, which is human rights. It is very interesting.

With the right to development, for instance, it is only the state that can realize the right to development of the individuals that compose the society. That actually is the case with all of the social and economic rights. They are rights of individuals, but only individuals who are in a society that has a state that can move to realize those rights. The right to development is similar.

AF: Can you elaborate on the right to development? You have written about this.

KPL: Well, the right to development was the last gasp of the United Nations, in terms of their very important role in assisting developing countries to undertake structural transformation towards development. It was very clear at the end of the 1970s, and after the various United Nations initiatives for the New International Economic Order, that the countries of Europe, the capitalist centres, were going to dig in. There was going to be no negotiation. The project at that time was something called the Common Fund. It was an UNCTAD initiative, in the first development decade of the 1960s, with Prebisch in charge, but then it came up again in the 1970s and the 1980s. The proposal was that there should be a common fund of several billion dollars, but it really never happened. There were some individuals associated with the UN who wrote a very interesting mea culpa. They acknowledged that they did not counter the thrust towards what we now call neoliberalism in the 1980s, the dismantling of policies that were supported by the UN in earlier times.

So, in the mid‐1980s there was a resolution in the UN General Assembly on the Right to Development. I suppose it was in the spirit of the economic and social rights that go all the way back to the original UN declaration. But the right to development is like all human rights. It is an individual right, but it is the kind of individual right that cannot be achieved except by collective action. No individual can individually cause economic development to happen because it is something that requires, as far as I am concerned, a role for the state.

Later — when we come to the human development story at the end of the 1980s — it was importantly influenced by Amartya Sen. The person behind it was Ul Haq, but he used the authority of Sen, particularly with regard to the treatment of income — the idea that there is a diminishing utility of income. But increasingly there was a tendency to individualize these rights. You know, in some ways Amartya Sen contributed to the neoliberal ideology, in terms of the interpretation of development as a human right of each and every individual.

AF: He is very clearly and unabashedly a liberal theorist.

KPL: And we then come to the human rights agenda. Now, human rights — I mean, who can quarrel with human rights? You can’t. But on the other hand, global human rights is a complement to the neoliberal ideology. It is very effective in justifying the various policies of neoliberalism. Moreover, by eliminating the nation, by removing the nation from the vocabulary, by removing the word international and substituting this word global, you put the nation out of sight, out of mind, and you are substituting a global view, and global human rights, for what used to be international solidarity. International solidarity is the recognition of solidarity between peoples in different nations and contexts, fighting for whatever. That has been, I think, appropriated by the change of language to global. We talk about the global economy but I question just what this global economy is. I don’t say it doesn’t exist, but it is not a global version of a national economy.

I also read it in what my father was writing about the 19^th century world market. He said really there was no such thing as the world market. For any one nation, the world market is the markets in all the other countries. Each of them is under the jurisdiction of a national government and each of them, at that time, had a national currency. The only way that becomes a world market is by tying the value of these currencies, for instance by making them equivalent to a certain amount of gold. That then creates what can be considered a world market. But each of these currencies is nevertheless based within nation states, where the laws and whatever goes on there are according to the institutions of that nation.

I think that what we have seen with globalization is the creation of truly global power structures, but they are private. They are either multinational corporations, where the corporation is organized as an entity that operates in very many different parts of the world, but it has a centre. Or you have financial funds or whatever that are directed in a certain way, buy and sell all over the place. But these are not equivalent to a national economy which operates within national institutions and a national political framework. There is no global framework, there are no global institutions that replicate on a big scale what goes on within a nation.

AF: So what do you think of the argument that we need to shift our terminology from international to global development?

KPL: I absolutely object. I object to every elimination of the word national or international. This word global has been co‐opted to substitute for international — international — solidarity. International has been wiped out by this word global. As I have said before, language matters. When you have global, what disappears is the nation. International disappears, and now we are supposed to have global human rights, this global economy, this global civil society. It doesn’t exist, actually.

We should really just talk about the trajectory and evolution of capitalism. That is why I appreciate Furtado so much, because he was so strong on the importance of the nation: the importance of national development, the importance of self‐reliance, of strengthening domestic savings and investment, of strengthening internal links, and basically of controlling and limiting the international, the involvement in the whole export model, we know the story.

AF: Was there a ‘golden age’ of capitalism?

KPL: It was a golden age really only in Europe and the well‐to‐do countries. Particularly in Western Europe, these 30 so‐called golden years were probably the best that capitalism could offer, given the fact that you had very strong socialist parties and a strong socialist tradition in Europe, and the capitalist business, which was profitable in that period of 30 years, was underpinned by a very powerful system of social security. But on the whole, these 30 golden years were also very advantageous for development. The role for the state that really comes through so clearly in Keynes was also an advantage, for supporting developmentalism.

The Bretton Woods era was also advantageous — although I think that we tend to look back and glorify the Bretton Woods arrangements and ascribe to them benefits which should really be attributed to the capacity of the United States to have so generously financed a lot of things in that period. The Marshall Plan was the obvious example, and similar kinds of expenditures that assisted in the recovery of Japan. The US was very powerful. This was the glorious period of US hegemony; it has been ascribed to the Bretton Woods financial order, but behind that order was the presence of the US as a world power that was in a strong enough position to extend external finance.

AF: To South Korea and Taiwan as well.

KPL: Yes, very much so — something it is no longer able to do. The US has become a massive debtor country. But those 30 years — what the United Nations calls the golden years of capitalism — were really the prime of the hegemony of the United States. Think of the way in which they folded Europe into their security concerns, the way in which, particularly in Germany of course, they extended, if you wish, the market. The Marshall Plan was remarkable, something like 2 per cent of GDP. Compared to so‐called foreign aid now, which is very much less than 1 per cent of anyone’s GDP, apart perhaps from the Scandinavian countries … I think the whole importance of overseas development assistance is enormously diminished.

AF: One of the criticisms of developmentalism in the 1960s and 1970s was that it became associated with authoritarian governments, corruption and so on.

KPL: Whether we are looking at the early industrial revolution in England or at catch‐up industrialization — Bismarck’s Germany, Tsarist Russia at the end of the 19^th century, as Gerschenkron has described, Japan of course, which became an authoritarian imperialist power, the Soviet Union — in every one of these cases, industrialization, the catch‐up to modern technology, was characterized by a political regime that was authoritarian. That includes England — certainly the masses of people had no vote at that time. You really cannot call that a democracy. So, that process of achieving a very high rate of savings, of suppressing consumption, of transformation from an agricultural into a modern industrial society, is really a very difficult one. The one exception was the United States, on account of the vastness of the land settled — land stolen from the indigenous populations that were largely destroyed and certainly marginalized.

So, the association of capitalism with democracy is a very questionable one, particularly in the ascent, in the catch‐up period, in the difficult periods of high rates of savings, suppressed consumption, and movements of peoples. I would say that one has to look at the historical process and where it has happened. Similarly in the four little tigers [South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore], they call themselves democracies now, but they were not democracies. You have China, it is a one‐party state. Thank god for that. I could not imagine the dangers and chaos that would ensue if they introduce party politics in China. Really, I think the world would not be safe.

AF: Some scholars, such as Thandika Mkandawire, argue for democratic developmental states.

KPL: Yes, I would argue for that too, because of technological progress. So much of what we used to find difficult to produce and therefore very valuable is now very common, very cheap. We have benefited from the technology that has been developed … Yes, I am seeing what has happened in history, but this is not necessarily what must continue to happen.

That being said, what we are seeing now is a trend of authoritarian governments, with popular support. We see it in Turkey, in the Philippines, in India, in Hungary, Poland … These are rising powers. And these regimes, whatever they are, they are not Western liberal democracies, that is for sure. It is not clear how many Western liberal democracies are going to survive anywhere. It is hard not to recognize the rise of authoritarian regimes — and they are not on the left.

AF: Many argue, even often from the left, that globalization has reduced the effectiveness of nation states and made them powerless to do the types of things they used to be able to do in terms of regulating capital, taxation, and so on, because it is so easy for corporations to bypass governments.

KPL: That is a very real phenomenon. The reduction of the capacities of nation states to govern is a reality. It is very well illustrated by the way that corporations escape taxation. But the critique or the comments usually claim that this is not only a reality, but also desirable, in the sense that national boundaries are passé, irrelevant, and an efficient modern organization requires global governance, an international financial order. I don’t know. As far as I am concerned, this is not anything that is within sight. If it were within sight, it would be extremely repressive and authoritarian, because I believe the further you move away from where people can influence in some way the outcome, the political outcome, the further you move from any form of democracy, toward a totalitarian authoritarian control. So the supranational organizations that we have — the Bank of International Settlements, the G7, or whatever — those are centres of political decision making that are furthest removed from popular influence of any kind.

AF: Given the nature of very powerful multinational corporations that wield so much power and wealth in the global economy, don’t we need forms of international governance that can regulate them? That’s the argument for the European Union. If you do not have a regional level of government that is able to regulate…

KPL: You see, the European Union is a very good example of what can happen, what has happened. A union is preferable, it can achieve many good things, such as the movement of people, which has been the greatest single achievement. But it is precisely where the union is strong, which is acting in the common interest of all of the banks, that has impacted most negatively on the policy space and, if you wish, the democratic process of the constituent nations. What has been constructed in the European Union, what comes out of Brussels, represents the interests of finance and banks.

AF: But still, how do democratic forces negotiate with and attempt to regulate these very powerful transnational economic organizations, international banks, large corporations, large global mining companies that have thousands of subsidiaries and armies of accountants and lawyers working for them?

KPL: The answer of course is that I do not know. However, I would say the danger with any kind of regulation is that these powerful organizations take charge to self‐regulate. I really believe that we have to strengthen the regional dimensions of the world order. The individual nations are not powerful enough — they can be taken advantage of in international regulations, so that instead of regulating the multinationals, the multinationals write the rules and enforce them. The problem then is representation at the regional level, as with the European Union. But it is more likely to be able to assert the political leverage of the populations of the constituent nations at the regional level than it is at the global level.

AF: Even at the national level — if you look at the US for instance, political power is captured by very powerful economic interests.

KPL: Yes, but whatever progress has been made in modern times toward what might be called some form of democracy has been made at the national level. What we had previously — and it was accepted — was a large number of countries with very solid, nationally owned enterprises, including national banks, banks that were not privately owned. In that sense, there has been a huge regression in the last 40 years, in the neoliberal counter‐revolution that rolled back so much of the public control over investment and capital.

AF: Are you pessimistic about the future?

KPL: I guess we have to come back to that old quote by Gramsci, pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I do not know any other way to live except to see some possibilities of a good future, because if you were really totally convinced that the world is going to perdition, then there is no point in anything …

But I think a more meaningful question is how I see current developments, because I really do see a crisis of liberal capitalism. I see capitalism as an economic and social order having reached a stage that I describe as financialized rentier capital, which is no longer able to sustain the kind of social and political order that we have had and that has served us well. It is no longer able to sustain a certain level of societal coherence — let’s call it democratic representational government and all of these things. These systems seem to have deteriorated to the point where 70 per cent of Americans don’t believe in either political party; young people increasingly do not believe in politics of the representational liberal variety; and we are seeing the rise of authoritarian governments that have popular support. Let’s face it, whether it is Erdogan in Turkey, or Putin in Russia, there is support.

AF: Just to be provocative, since I’ve known you, you have always seen the system as on the verge of crisis [Kari laughs], and wisely so, but one of the things that is so striking over the last 30 or more years is the resilience of the neoliberal capitalist system. Even though analytically, intellectually, we see it converging towards crisis, it somehow manages to sustain itself. It is resilient.

KPL: I would argue that the demise of the Soviet Union in 1990 put new wind into the neoliberal sails — the TINA effect — ‘there is no alternative’. Since that time, it has sustained itself by progressive financialization, by creating structures of debt that have served to balloon and sustain real progress, yes, and increasingly the creation of rents. That is, the extension of private ownership into areas of knowledge which really are social, which should not be private, and the creation of scarcities and rents which yield income, but only for those who own. We have seen the progressive deterioration of income distribution, internally, within almost all countries. The increase in internal differentiation is, I think, universal, even if at a global scale there might have been a reduction in inequality because so many people have been raised from abject poverty, particularly but not exclusively in China.

As I keep saying, we still live in nations, we live in countries, the only governments we have are national, by and large. We might move from one place to another, but we still do so in the framework of national societies, and they have all become more unequal, and therefore they have all become more contentious in some ways.

AF: Do you see this as a dangerous development?

KPL: I don’t think the world has been as dangerously disordered as it is now, since the outbreak of World War I, although we did not know it at the time.

AF: And in your mind this is due to neoliberalism?

KPL: Together with the neoliberalist ideology of human rights. But the human rights that are singled out as the most important to the West are rights (or so‐called rights, or apparent rights, or claimed‐to‐be rights) which are basically not acceptable to the majority of people in this world. Like gay marriage, which is really contrary to prevailing belief systems in very many different societies in this world, including our own. But the fact is that the West — particularly the Americans, I must say — have championed some of these liberal causes at a time when people have reason to be fearful of what is going on in the world. They are fearful because of wars, because of the displacement of people — and it is not only the refugees who are displaced, and who have cause to be fearful, but also people in the countries into which these refugees have been pouring in large numbers, who are fearful of receiving them — and because of this perpetual ‘war on terror’ that the West has created and that makes people fearful. I don’t even know what it is that they are fearful about, but it gives people the wish to find some strong personality or government that will protect them from these perceived dangers. It seems to me to be kind of obvious. Also, of course, those who are more comfortable with this liberal discourse are the privileged of our society. So that leaves others in the society who are the disadvantaged, who know that they are or feel that they are, whether it is the result of disappearing employment or disappearing community.

AF: Isn’t that a common explanation for the rise of Trump in terms of locating it in the support of working classes and those disenfranchised by globalization? A lot of studies have in fact shown that that is not necessarily the case: it might have been a marginal factor, but there are also a lot of strong and powerful interests behind people like Trump.

KPL: Yes, but what Trump can do is to use the democratic system to get people behind him and build a popular movement, to capture the leadership over people who are going to validate him and his crowd in political terms. The fact that Trump and those around him are there to make themselves richer than before — and many of them are already very rich — is neither here nor there. It is the fact that he has the ability to capture the discontent, to express it. But what is new about that? That is the fascist appeal: it happened in the 1930s too.

AF: So, are you worried about the return of fascism?

KPL: Well, that depends on what you mean by fascism, really. My understanding of fascism comes from Europe of the 1930s, because that is where the word came from. The word fascism first came from Italy, from Mussolini’s version of national socialism. Hitler’s movement was also called national socialism — that is how we got the word Nazi. The initial adversaries were the socialists, who made class the basis of their solidarity. The fascist movement, which was a corporatist one, was to replace the solidarity of the working class by some form of solidarity of nation, of nationalism — hence the term national socialism. That nationalism, particularly evident in Germany, was strengthened by having adversaries, which is where it found the racialism. So that the German nation is superior to other Europeans, who are lesser breeds.

To my mind, fascism is opposed to socialism, but neither socialism nor fascism are individualistic liberal capitalism. Democracy is a relative of individualistic capital. I look at it in the Austrian way: in the 1930s, there was a fear on the part of the Austrian ruling classes about the perceived dangers of socialist parties, socialist militias, socialism. There was an effort to generate militias — called Heimwehr in Austria; in Germany they were called something else — in order to arm themselves with some power. But their aim was to maintain the basic structure of the system, to maintain the ruling classes, to continue to be the ruling classes. That was fascism.

There was also a racial element which singled out the Jews, especially. I think this was particularly European, where Jews played a particular kind of role in the societies where they became scapegoats. But I do not see fascism as necessarily identified with anti‐Semitism. Rather, it is a strategy of the ruling classes — including what were the industrial ruling classes of that time, as well as the other traditional ruling classes, the landed aristocracy — to maintain power by offering people a solidarity of nation rather than a solidarity of class. That is how I understand it in the 1930s.

So, it is interesting if you look at Trump in those terms, or even Brexit for that matter, or Italy … Definitely there is an appeal to solidarity and togetherness, whether it is more of nation or of people, and it plays to the sentiment of heimat in German, patrie in French. I don’t know what you call it in English. Maybe we do not have a word for it in the Anglosphere. Patriotism comes from the French. Fatherland already sounds fascist, it sounds German. Heimat is a very lovely phrase. It translates into homeland. We think of that as being some kind of nasty militia homeland, but homeland in German means country. It is an appealing word.

Fascism was not necessarily expansionist either. The issues with Franco were not external to Spain, they really were about the overthrow of the Republic because the Republic was feared to be socialistic. In the case of Mussolini, certainly Italians felt that they were entitled to some colonies too — ‘look at the British, the French and the Belgians, we want some too, we are going to go to Abyssinia’ — but I do not think it was a major element, because you did not have it with Franco. You did not have it with the Austrian fascists. They were not expansionist. If anything they were fearful of the Germans, and the upper classes were divided about whether to make a kind of local version of right‐wing fascism, with the heimatand so on, or whether to go with the Nazis. Austrian patriotism worked for them in a sense of nationalism against the Germans. ‘After all, we were the Great Hapsburg Empire, who are these Teutonic come‐lately god‐damned Germans? They are not civilized, they have not been here for very long, compared to the grandeur of the Hapsburg Empire, blah blah blah …’. But they were not expansionist, more defensive.

I think things like ‘Make America Great Again’ are typically fascist, kind of national. But behind fascists are the old ruling classes. I think that is a characteristic of fascism. On the other hand, there is also a deep cleavage within the ruling classes and the elites in the US today, between the neoliberal supporters of globalization and these more nationalistic elites.

AF: What role has neoliberalism — understood as a counter‐revolution that has bolstered the power of capital over labour — played in this?

KPL: I think there are two kinds of roots that we need to look at with regard to neoliberalism. One of them is in terms of the creation of the ideology. The difference between neoliberalism and classical liberalism — the John Stuart Mill kind of liberalism — was the circumstances that gave rise to the former, which seem to have been the death of liberalism, compared to the Soviet Union, the New Deal, etc. But the point of Hayek and company was not to diminish the role of the state. The point was to change it and in a sense to use the state, and the regulations and the rules that govern society, to ensure the rights of property. So it was quite a strong state in many ways, but it was a strong state for the purpose of protecting property from the rabble, in other words, from the functioning of democratic rules and regulations. That is the ideology and it is important. When Hayek got his Nobel Prize in 1974, it was a legitimation of the creed, even though the prize had to be shared with Myrdal. And [Milton] Friedman got one shortly after.

The other root is the one of policy, which is equally important. Because when they say that there was a counter‐revolution in the 1970s, I believe that counter‐revolution was predicted in a sense by Kalecki, in the lecture that he delivered to the Marshall society in 1942. I was there and I heard him lecture. What he was saying with his Marxist‐type building blocks, with department one and department two instead of consumption goods and investment goods, was that in conditions of full employment the position of workers would be strengthened. And although it might be profitable for the capitalists — they continue to make profits under this kind of system of shared productivity — they would lose their relative power. Kalecki suggested that they would not be content to lose relative power.

I think that is exactly what was happening. They were losing power, they were being challenged in various ways. When you put that together with foreign affairs — the movement against the war in Vietnam, revolutions of various kinds from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, Iran, the hostage crisis (very humiliating to the Carter regime) — there was a sense of ungovernability. There was talk about whether democracy is ungovernable. Then you had the Trilateral Commission of Japan, Europe and America in 1973, and the first convening of what became the G7 in 1975. It was the first time that the major capitalist powers had created a group expressing concern with the increasing disorder in the world, both domestically with stagflation and internationally with these apparent gains in the New International Economic Order, OPEC and the oil crisis, and all of that, a combination of circumstances. It was really a class position and it played itself out in terms of the governing classes making the case that a change of direction was needed, a regime change as somebody called it, towards what we then came to know as the neoliberal regime. So I think these go in parallel — what happens in reality and what is constructed as an ideology.

AF: Any last words?

KPL: I think there are a number of people who have proven their perceptions to be worth listening to, who have been warning us about where we are taking the world with technology. These include my father, but also many others, such as Albert Einstein. I like to cite Einstein, who said that we must be certain that the creations of our mind shall be of benefit and not a curse to mankind. And among the creations of our mind are our scientific attitude, our belief in science and technology. Economics is also a creation of our mind and I think it is one that should be questioned.

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Andrew M. Fischer ([email protected]) is Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, The Netherlands, and member of the editorial board of Development and Change. His most recent book, Poverty as Ideology (Zed, 2018), was awarded the International Studies in Poverty Prize by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and by Zed Books. He received his BA and MA in Economics from McGill University in Canada, and his PhD in Development Studies from the London School of Economics. He has been involved in development studies or developing countries for over 30 years.

Notes

1. Charles Taylor is a well‐known Canadian philosopher.

2. The social democratic party in Canada.

3. A Caribbean publication of the 1960s, no longer in print, but see: https://newworldjournal.org/volume-iv-no-2/canada-economic-dependence-ald-political-disintegration/22/

4. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sir_George_Williams_affair

This article was first published: 24 December 2018, Development and Change

In a few hours it will be another new year, 2019.  I can remember when 1984 seemed far in the future, both as a calendar date and George Orwell’s predicted dystopia, to which 9/11 and the digital revolution gave birth in the 21st century.  Now I find myself 25 years past 1984 and a stranger in a strange land.

Over these holidays two occurrances brought the strangeness of the present time home to me.

One was the arrival of the memoir, From the Cast-Iron Shore (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019) by my friend and onetime colleague, Francis Oakley, an historian of the medieval era and past president of Williams College. The other was the report that a Japanese man had married a hologram. (See this) 

Little doubt that feminism has made women troublesome, but preference for a hologram indicates a shifting preference for the virtual over the real.  Many in the younger generations have friends they have never met face to face.  They join together in teams to play Internet games, or they open themselves to the world of strangers on Facebook. It seems that digital interaction with people thousands of miles away is replacing the human interaction of a sports team or a date consisting or male-female face-to-face interaction.  

I have read reports that young women pay for their university educations, if education it is, by engaging in digital sex work.  They display themselves naked and provocatively in various sexual positions assessible on the Internet while engaging in sexual conversation, and the young men find this form of sexual engagement preferable to face to face contact with a woman. The saying is: “It is cheaper than a date and without commitments.”

On beaches I observe attractive women clothed in little but two shoe strings, a sight that would have driven the young men in my day crazy with lust, totally ignored by guys fixated on their cell phones.  I sometimes think that people will stop going to beaches as they will prefer the virtual experience to the real one.

Francis’ memoir reminds me that the world he and I knew is over and done with, and that the kind of education that we got, him more than me, is no longer attainable. 

The memoir reminds me that the rise of a poor Irish boy, via a Jesuit education and an Oxford scholarship to the presidency of America’s most prestigeous college, and my own rise to Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury, normally a post conveyed to members of the financial elite, is something that no longer takes place.  The ladders of upward mobility have been taken down.  The middle class itself is declining into poverty. 

Francis tells of the Irish farms of his relatives.  The homes had no running water, and some not even an outhouse.  My own grandparents farm did have an outhouse, but no running water.  Water was obtained by going outside to the wellhouse and lowering the bucket into the well, and when filled drawing the bucket back up.  The only hot water available was obtained by heating it on a wood stove where meals were cooked. The kitchen wood stove was usually the only heat for the house.

Francis, who attended Oxford in the decade following World War II, reports that there was no running water in his rooms.  A scout, defined as “a domestic worker at a college at Oxford University,” brought a porcelain basin and a jug of hot water to the rooms in the mornings. 

When I was at Oxford, as a rare post-graduate at Merton College, in the second decade after World War II, I could only stay in rooms during summers when I returned for collaborations with my former professor.  If memory serves, there was running cold water, but full bathroom facilities were located outside the rooms.  It wasn’t that much different from my undergraduate days at Georgia Tech where bathroom facilities were located at the end of each hall of rooms.

If time and events permit, I intend to return to Francis’ memoir, which is full of information about how the past, despite the hardships, produced more successful and more honorable people than we have around us today.

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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.

Otto von Bismarck once said, “People never lie so much as after a hunt, during a war or before an election.” For decades, a common myth pervading the American political arena has been that the left is anti-war. But they are as much opposed to war as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) – at least he is honest about his appetite for blood and desire for perpetual regime change, no matter who occupies the Oval Office. So, from where did this mendacity come?

In 2008, the United States was entrenched in an election battle and two major wars – Afghanistan and Iraq. The Democrats portrayed themselves as the anti-war party, promising to correct the foreign disasters of the incumbent administration. Since then, it’s as if former President George W. Bush never departed. The Democrats have championed military interventions, twiddled their thumbs under President Barack Obama, and nominated a hawk to lead the party in 2016.

Progressives, the same ones who, under Republican administrations, routinely held massive anti-war rallies on days that ended in “y,” have been eerily silent for the last ten years.

Today, the left has united with the neoconservatives in opposition to President Donald Trump’s decision to bring 2,000 troops home from Syria and potential plans to withdraw from Afghanistan. Because they loathe Trump so much and don’t want him to be portrayed as a more peaceful president than his predecessor, leftists demand that U.S. forces permanently stay in the region, facing death or serious injury.

Is this a case of Freaky Friday politics, or has the left always been pro-war?

Anti-War Democrats, Please Stand Up

Attempting to locate a handful of consistent anti-war Democrats is like trying to spot Vice President Mike Pence with a woman other than his wife at a restaurant: It’s never going to happen.

Even Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), the man who switches from Independent to Democrat when it suits the occasion, has come out of the closet on occasion as a hawk. In addition to supporting the so-called Little War in Kosovo in the 1990s, Sanders revealed to ABC News in September 2015 that the U.S. could use its military forces when not attacked and apply sanctions on adversaries.

For the last century, virtually every war, invasion, and occupation have been given the stamp of approval by Democrats. President Woodrow Wilson dragged the U.S. into one of those wars-to-end-all- wars fiascos. President Harry Truman sent thousands of young men to their deaths in Korea, setting the stage for perpetual global interventionism. President Lyndon Baines Johnson escalated American involvement in Vietnam. The Democratic leadership approved of the Iraq War, and Obama destabilized an entire region, killed American citizens, and intensified the drone bombing campaign.

Outside of Capitol Hill, the predominantly left-leaning mainstream media have never seen a war it didn’t like. In the last two years alone, the vacuous TV commentators have employed the same two strategies: Demand action against Russia (eh, Paul Begala?) and oppose President Trump for using diplomacy and other tactics to institute peace.

So, how exactly is the left anti-war?

The Born-Again Right

When it comes to foreign policy, there are now three wings of the GOP: hawks, doves, and those who realize the doctrine of the last 20 years has failed.

One of the biggest surprises since Trump’s election is that the right has become increasingly more cautious about seeking dragons to slay and erecting Old Glory on every plot of land in the world. House Republicans have slashed foreign aid in the billions, Senate Republicans have voted to end America’s role in Yemen’s humanitarian crisis, and prominent figures in the White House have asked one simple question: Why should the United States be the policeman of the world?

Stephen Miller, a senior adviser to the president, recently dismantled the hawkish Counterfeit News Network when he told Wolf Blitzer:

“What I’m talking about, Wolf, is the big picture of a country that through several administrations had an absolutely catastrophic foreign policy that cost trillions and trillions of dollars and thousands and thousands of lives and made the Middle East more unstable and more dangerous. And let’s talk about Syria. Let’s talk about the fact — ISIS is the enemy of Russia. ISIS is the enemy of Assad. ISIS is the enemy of Turkey. Are we supposed to stay in Syria generation after generation, spilling American blood to fight the enemies of all those countries?”

Had Obama uttered these fiery remarks in ’08, they would have been the headline for many outlets that covered the interview. Instead, The Washington Post reported, “Wolf Blitzer tells Stephen Miller to ‘calm down’ during heated interview.” The Huffington Post ran with this headline: “CNN’s Wolf Blitzer Tells Stephen Miller to ‘Calm Down.’”

Comments that should draw praise from the left have been met with mockery and scorn.

US Foreign Policy

H.L. Mencken was right when he said that “every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.” There is no other area in government that should instill more shame in the population than foreign policy.

The political theater of sending young men and women overseas to fight in wars is a tragicomedy: a comedy for those who don’t have to wield a weapon and a tragedy for those who do. It is easy and comfortable for politicians and pundits, a paltry few of whom have ever done any of the fighting, to shout platitudes as if they were reincarnated John Waynes.

It’s clear that politicians of all stripes have blood on their hands. The only difference is that some policymakers showcase this human flesh with pride, while others pretend to be benevolent. Trump’s foreign policy has not been perfect, but it has been far superior to what has transpired over the years. To rebuke the president’s withdrawal of soldiers in an NPC-like manner makes you complicit to atrocity.

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The Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, and Defence Secretary are all fighting fires of their own making, whilst stabbing each other in the back. The Tory leadership battle is definitely underway and demonstrates their continued descent into what very soon might be oblivion for one of Europe’s most successful political parties ever.

The government has declared a “major incident” in the Channel following a sudden increase in the number of migrants attempting to reach the UK on small boats.

In response to domestic pressure, Trump agreed to extend the deadline for withdrawal of thousands of US troops from the northeaster Syrian province of al-Hasaka from the initial 30 days previously announced until April this year.  Journalistic warmongers and hawks in think-tanks and among the US establishment have been railing at Trump with implausible arguments for maintaining the presence of US forces in Syria. The attacks on Trump are mainly justified on the pretext of protecting the US allies, the Kurds, from possible extermination by the Turks. Other analysts dare to repeat the absurd US mantra that “ISIS has between 20,000 and 30,000 militants in Syria and Iraq” to justify the continuous occupation of northeast Syria. If these arguments were not enough, others claim that Trump would be  delivering the north of Syria to Iranian and Russian scarecrows, or that he would be facilitating the “Iranian-Baghdad-Damascus-Beirut connection”. Trump remains determined to pull out, despite his allies Israel, France and the UK begging him to stay longer in the Levant. 

No delay will change the fate of al-Hasaka province or the unfolding course of events: 2019 will mark the return of the northeast province to the control of the Syria government forces; Turkey is choosing its camp; and the Arabs – afraid of becoming orphans like the Kurds – are overwhelming Assad with their warmth, acting as though they had not been waging war on his country since 2011.

As far as concerns the Kurds in al-Hasaka, based in the north-east of the Syrian province, they have offered themselves as human shields to Trump’s forces since they considered themselves US allies. Today, following Trump’s decision to withdraw his occupation forces, they have come to the clear recognition: the US can’t be trusted as an ally. Indeed, president Donald Trump did not consult with his European allies and certainly not with the YPG/SDF Kurds of Syria before deciding on withdrawal of his forces. The YPG, a branch of the PKK in Syria, understand that the continuous presence of the US forces as occupation troops imposes the burden of rebuilding the destroyed cities and infrastructure on the Kurds. Trump is not willing to undertake this reconstruction, and is failing to gather enough financial aid for this purpose from the Arab oil-rich countries who understand that the war in Syria is over.

It is thus clear that the current US establishment is not willing to invest in al-Hasaka province, and neither are the Arab allies who see no benefit in continuing to support “regime change” in Syria. The Arabs are engaged today in reopening their embassies in Damascus in an attempt to repair relationships they ruined during seven years of war. Sudan, the Emirates, Bahrein have all resumed official relations with the Syrian government, and soon Kuwait will do the same. Other countries are expected to follow suit. Saudi Arabia is not against the idea. Indeed, Sudan, Bahrein and the Emirates are very close allies to Saudi Arabia and would never move forward towards president Bashar al-Assad without Riyadh’s consent.

Saudi Arabia has been sending many positive signals to Damascus: the opening of the Syrian-Jordanian Naseeb crossing was not without its blessing, and Saudi Arabia is expected to play a positive role during the forthcoming European-Arab league meeting expected in February 24 in Cairo, Egypt. Saudi Arabia has never cut contacts with Syria since King Salman took power: in 2015, through a Russian initiative, Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman met with the Syrian president’s security envoy General Ali Mamlouk at Riyadh airport to explain that he inherited the anti-Assad policy from the previous Saudi ruler and that he would like to see some distance between Iran and the Levant. Mamlouk has maintained direct links with Brigadier Khaled Bin Ali Bin Abdallah al-Hneydan, the Saudi intelligence chief. He explained that Syria is faithful to its friends, the Iranians, and is not willing to limit its relationship with Tehran, although Syria does not on that account wish to be alienated from other Arab countries. Mamlouk’s recent visit to Egypt carried one message from Assad to the Arab league: “Syria did not split from the Arab League but it was the Arabs who detached themselves from Syria in 2012. Those who pushed Damascus out can bring it back in”. Also, Saudi Arabia removed Adel al-Jubeir from his previous ministerial position as a Foreign Minister, he who repeatedly called throughout the years of war for the removal of Assad “by diplomatic or military means” is no longer fit as a future link between Saudi Arabia and Syria.

Damascus finds itself in a stronger position in 2019 than it has in the last seven years of war. Turkey is not willing to stand against Assad, but is relying on Iran and Russia to establish a proxy relationship with Damascus. President Erdogan needs Russia and Iran as strategic commercial allies. He knows that the US is not a reliable partner since it has armed Turkey’s enemies, the Kurdish YPG/PKK in Syria, to the teeth, on the pretext of fighting ISIS. He also is aware that Assad could support attacks inside Turkish borders by Kurds and Arab tribes if Turkey doesn’t align itself in a partnership with Russia, Iran and Syria. Turkey would suffer if Syria were to line up with the UAE and Saudi against it. The US Gulf allies, notably the Emirates, do not hide their animosity towards Ankara. The UAE Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash says his country wants to return to friendship with Syria and aims to “stand against the Iranian and Turkish fronts in the region [of the Middle East]”.

This is forcing Erdogan to define a friendlier strategy towards Syria – without necessarily standing against the US since he does not plan to step out of NATO in the near future – by maintaining a harmonious relationship with his partners in the Levant, Russia and Iran. These are the best channels for Turkey to coordinate the presence of its forces and proxies in Syria and to avoid collision with the forces of the Syrian government. This was the context of the Russian-Turkish meeting in Moscow in late December 2018, where Erdogan agreed to refrain from replacing US forces in Manbij, allowing the US to withdraw first so that the Syrian Army can move in and later disarm the YPG/PKK in due course. Moreover, Erdogan doesn’t want to see Assad joining the emerging Arab front against Turkey. Likewise, the Arab countries who are suddenly showing care and affection for Assad seem to want to keep their options open by bringing Damascus closer in case of a Trump U-turn against them, as he has turned away from the PKK Kurds in Syria.

But Turkey has still another problem to digest: Idlib and the jihadists. In rural Aleppo and rural Idlib, the jihadists of HTS (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, i.e. ex-Nusra) have decided to cripple the pro-Turkish forces of Noureddine Zengi and have managed to take control of all fronts against the Syrian army. HTS took advantage of the presence of the bulk of pro-Turkish forces on Manbij front to attack the remnants forces left behind. These jihadists, supported by Turkistani militants, have never respected the cease-fire established in Astana by Turkey, Russia, and Iran. Their continuous violations have triggered many harsh Russian responses. If they decide to attack the Syrian army’s defence lines in large numbers, the ceasefire will no longer be valid. Syria will have to fight back, with support from its allies and Russia. The timing – if this takes place before the US withdrawal – will be inappropriate.

Regardless of the situation on the Idlib front, the government of Damascus is determined to regain the territory under jihadist control whenever the occasion for battle presents itself.

But these are not the only jihadists left in Syria: ISIS still occupy five to six villages along the Euphrates river where US forces have given them quiet protection for many months. These villages are the only physical geography still under ISIS control in Syria and Iraq, yet the Pentagon ridiculously claims there are 20,000 to 30,000 ISIS militants in the two countries. Syrian intelligence estimates the number of ISIS militants in the Euphrates villages as less than 1500. In Iraq there remain ISIS sleeper cells yet, unless the Pentagon has details on every single sleeper cell, it is impossible to count the number of ISIS supporters in various Iraqi cities. Iraqi counter-terrorism units and Hashd al-Shaabi have established tight control on all provinces and have infiltrated many ISIS cells, quietly arresting many of them on a regular basis. Iraqi security forces estimate the number of ISIS militants at between 1500 and 2000 all over Iraq. The number of car bombs and “spectacular attacks” has been insignificant in Mesopotamia in the last months. There is no doubt that ISIS can attack isolated objectives or soft targets in remote villages or travel by night in small groups to demonstrate a presence. But there is also no doubt that its “Islamic State” has been thrown irretrievably into the bin of history. The impossibly high Pentagon estimates can only be interpreted as part of an effort to justify an indefinite US presence in Syria and Iraq.

No matter whether Trump decides to delay or speed up his withdrawal, the Kurdish YPG/PKK have chosen their camp next to Damascus. The sooner US troops pull out the better,  if they wish to avoid a vindictive reaction from those who offered themselves as human shield for years and lost thousands of men and women for their dream of Rojava. No matter how long the US holds onto its hostility against the Syrian government, the Arabs are ready to invest in the reconstruction of the Levant, to atone for their sin of financing the war for years, and to return the prestigious Syrian state to their fold.

No one is more interested than the Syrian army in defeating ISIS and making sure there will be no return to an “Islamic State”. For this to happen, Assad needs to eliminate al-Qaeda and all jihadists in Syria: Turkey would be happy to lift this burden from its shoulders, and Russia and Iran consider the extermination of Takfiris in the Levant as vital for their national security.

Turkey will take further positive steps towards Assad, who today enjoys a more prestigious position than at any time since 2011. Indeed the Levant is returning to the centre of Middle East and world attention in a stronger position than in 2011. Syria has advanced precision missiles that can hit any building in Israel. Assad also has an air defence system he would have never dreamt of before 2011 thanks to Israel’s continuous violation of its airspace and its defiance of Russian authority. Hezbollah has constructed bases for its long and medium range precision missiles in the mountains and has created a bond with Syria that it could never have established if not for the war. Iran has established a strategic brotherhood with Syria thanks to its role in defeating the regime change plan. NATO’s support for the growth of ISIS has created a bond between Syria and Iraq that no Muslim or Baathist link could ever have created: Iraq has a “carte blanche” to bomb ISIS locations in Syria without the consent of the Syrian leadership (following Assad’s total blessing to the Iraqi leadership to join in the fight on ISIS), and the Iraqi security forces can walk into Syria anytime they see fit to fight ISIS. The anti-Israel axis has never been stronger than it is today. That is the result of 2011-2018 war imposed on Syria.

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A legal team is being put together in order to file lawsuits against NATO countries that took part in the 1999 bombing of Serbia. The team of experts is led by Mr Srdjan Aleksic, a well known Nis-based lawyer. The legal team will put together cases backed by firm material evidence, collected from medical documents that indicate a causal relationship between NATO’s use of (depleted) uranium ammunition, and the increased number of cancer cases in Serbia. Mr Aleksic is visiting Melbourne for few days and he has joind us to talk about his initiative in more details.

“Between 10 and 15 tons of uranium have been dropped on the territory of then Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro). The number of those ill with cancer is alarming. 2.5 percent of Serbia’s population is diagnosed with malignant diseases each year, i.e., 33,000 people. One child is diagnosed every day. Since 1999, the number of cancer patients has grown five times. The population is falling ill on a mass scale, especially in southern Serbia and in Kosovo and Metohija,” Aleksic said.

Jelena i Srdjan Aleksic (SBS Serbian)

He stressed that during the aggression, so-called hazard facilities – chemical and petrochemical industry sites – have also been targeted, although this is prohibited by international law of war.

“Our prominent scientists, doctors, oncologists – who have been researching this for years – will take part in preparing the lawsuits. The fact that a court in Italy found the state guilty for sending their Carabinieri to Kosovo and Metohija, to locations attacked with depleted uranium, speaks in favor of the veracity of our claim. 45 soldiers got cancer, and Italy has been paying big damages for this. Our claim is based precisely on this – that even the soldiers who took part in the aggression have gotten sick, and that their countries have been paying damages because of this,” says Aleksic.

According to Aleksic, “it is very important to study and prepare the lawsuits well” – because some others filed against NATO members have been thrown out in the meantime.

There is also a documentary filmed with the support of Serbian lawyer Srdjan Aleksic, whose native village in southern Serbia was bombed during the NATO bombing campaign. As a result, the region’s environment was contaminated with depleted uranium. Aleksic’s mother, just like dozens of his fellow villages, friends and relatives, died of cancer several years after the bombing, his father was also diagnosed with a malicious tumor.

“The “Uranium-238. My story” documentary tells about NATO bombings and the radioactive pollution of Serbia’s southern regions and the territory of Kosovo and Metohija which were considered environmentally pristine prior to the attack,” Aleksaic said.

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“”The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” — C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins

In less than two months, the yellow vests (“gilets jaunes”) movement in France has reshaped the political landscape in Europe. For a seventh straight week, demonstrations continued across the country even after concessions from a cowing President Emmanuel Macron while inspiring a wave of similar gatherings in neighboring states like Belgium and the Netherlands. Just as el-Sisi’s dictatorship banned the sale of high-visibility vests to prevent copycat rallies in Egypt, corporate media has predictably worked overtime trying to demonize the spontaneous and mostly leaderless working class movement in the hopes it will not spread elsewhere.

The media oligopoly initially attempted to ignore the insurrection altogether, but when forced to reckon with the yellow vests they maligned the incendiary marchers using horseshoe theory to suggest a confluence between far left and far right supporters of Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Marine Le Pen. To the surprise of no one, mainstream pundits have also stoked fears of ‘Russian interference’ behind the unrest. We can assume that if the safety vests were ready-made off the assembly line of NGOs like the raised fist flags of Serbia’s OTPOR! movement, the presstitutes would be telling a different story.

It turned out that a crisis was not averted but merely postponed when Macron defeated his demagogue opponent Le Pen in the 2017 French election. While it is true that the gilets jaunes were partly impelled by an increase on fuel prices, contrary to the prevailing narrative their official demands are not limited to a carbon tax. They also consist of explicit ultimatums to increase the minimum wage, improve the standard of living, and an end to austerity, among other legitimate grievances. Since taking office, Macron has declared war on trade unions while pushing through enormous tax breaks for the wealthy (like himself) — it was just a matter of time until the French people had enough of the country’s privatization. It is only a shock to the oblivious establishment why the former Rothschild banker-turned-politician, who addressed the nation seated at a gold desk while Paris was ablaze, is suddenly in jeopardy of losing power. The status quo’s incognizance is reminiscent of Marie Antoinette who during the 18th century when told the peasants had no bread famously replied, “let them eat cake” as the masses starved under her husband Louis XIV.

It serves as a reminder of the historically revisionist understanding of French politics in the U.S. that is long-established. The middle class dominated left-wing in America ascribes to a historical reinterpretation of the French Revolution that is a large contributor of its aversion to transformative praxis in favor of incrementalism. The late Italian Marxist philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo, who died in June of this year, offered the most thorough understanding of its misreading of history in seminal works such as War and Revolution: Rethinking the Twentieth Century. The liberal rereading of the French Revolution is the ideological basis for its rejection of the revolutionary tradition from the Jacobins to the Bolsheviks that has neutralized the modern left to this day.

According to its revised history, the inevitable outcome of comprehensive systemic change is Robespierre’s so-called ‘Reign of Terror’, or the ‘purges’ of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union. In its view, what began with the Locke and Montesquieu-influenced reforms of the constitutional monarchy was ‘hijacked’ by the radical Jacobin and sans-culotte factions. Losurdo explains that counter-revolutionaries eager to discredit the image of rebellion overemphasize its violence and bloodshed, and never properly contextualize it as self-defense against the real reign of terror by the ruling class. The idea behind this recasting of history is to conflate revolutionary politics with Nazi Germany whose racially-motivated genocide was truly the inheritor of the legacy of European colonialism, not the ancestry of the Jacobins or the Russian Revolution.

My father was a doctor in the British Royal Navy, and I grew up traveling by troop-ship between the last outposts of the British Empire – Trincomalee, Gibraltar, Hong Kong, Malta, Aden, Singapore – and living in and around naval dockyards in England and Scotland.

The British naval bases where I grew up and the fading empire they supported are now part of history. Chatham Dockyard. a working dockyard for over 400 years, is now a museum and tourist attraction. Trincomalee Dockyard, where I was born, has been in the news as a site where the Sri Lankan Navy is accused of torturing and disappearing Tamil prisoners during the Sri Lankan civil war.

Since the late 1970s, I have lived in California and Florida, grappling with the contradictions of U.S. empire like other Americans. The US does not have an internationally recognized territorial empire like the British or Ottoman Empires. American politicians routinely deny that the United States maintains or seeks an empire at all, even as they insist that its interests extend across the entire world, and as its policies impact the lives – and threaten the future – of people everywhere.

So how are we to understand this phenomenon of US empire, which is so central to all our lives and our future, and yet whose structure remains hidden and covert?

In Ethnographies of US Empire, co-edited by Carol McGranahan of the University of Colorado and John F. Collins of CUNY, twenty-four anthropologists studied groups of people whose lives are shaped by the US empire and their interactions with it. Their subjects ranged from indigenous peoples in the US and Hawaii to call center workers in the Philippines to the forcibly exiled people of Diego Garcia.

Many of the ethnographies highlighted the seeming contradiction of an actually existing global empire in a post-colonial world where nearly all countries are internationally recognized as independent and sovereign.

Stratified Sovereignty

The final entry in Etnhographies of US Empire arrived at the most comprehensive analysis of the stratified and complex patterns of sovereignty through which formally independent states and their citizens nonetheless fall under the overarching sovereignty of the US empire.

This chapter, “From Exception to Empire: Sovereignty, Carceral Circulation and the Global War on Terror,” by Darryl Li, an anthropology professor at the University of Chicago, follows a group of men who came to Bosnia Hercegovina from mostly Arab countries to fight on the Bosnian Muslim side in the U.S.-backed proxy war to break up Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

By 2001, most of these 660 men had made new homes in Bosnia. Many had married Bosnian women and had Bosnian families. All had been granted Bosnian citizenship in recognition of their role in their adopted country’s independence. But after the crimes of September 11th 2001, the US government saw these former mujahideen as inherently dangerous, and insisted that they must be “denaturalized” and “repatriated.”

At first, this was done through an extrajudicial process of “rendition,” but after 2005 it was institutionalized in a nine-member State Commission (which included a US Army officer and a British immigration official) to strip people of Bosnian citizenship; a “Reception Center for Irregular Migrants,” a prison built at European Union expense on the edge of a refugee camp for Bosnian Serbs in Lukavica on the outskirts of Sarajevo; and a “Service for Foreigners’ Affairs” under Bosnia’s Ministry of Security, organized, trained and equipped by US advisers at US taxpayer expense, to run the prison and conduct deportations.

Darryl Li visited, studied and stayed in contact with some of these men and their Bosnian families for several years. He observed how, while the US exercised supreme sovereignty over these men and their fate, the US role was carefully hidden behind and operated through the formal sovereignty of Bosnia Hercegovina; and also how the fates of groups of men of different nationalities were governed by US imperial relations with the various countries they came from and to where they could be “repatriated.”

Most Egyptian men were sent back to Egypt, a reliable US ally, where they were imprisoned, tortured and, in many cases, disappeared, according to their Bosnian families. By contrast, six men from Algeria were rendered to the US concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. They were imprisoned there until they won a landmark case in the US Supreme Court that allowed them to sue for habeas corpus in US courts, and they were finally released in 2009, 2010 and 2013.

A Syrian-Bosnian man named Abu Hamza became the de facto leader of resistance to the denaturalizations and deportations. He was imprisoned for 7-1/2 years at the Lukavica prison, during most of which time the US and its allies fought a bloody but failed proxy war to install a more subservient regime in his country of origin. He was finally released in 2016 to rejoin his Bosnian family.

When Darryl Li first visited Abu Hamza at the prison in Lukavica in 2009, he was dressed in an orange jalabiyya and baseball cap, on which he had stenciled the word “BOSNATANAMO.” He had made this uniform for himself to highlight the parallels between the plight of prisoners at Lukavica and Guantanamo.

The flags flying over the guard gate of the prison in Lukavica were those of Bosnia and the European Union, and the US was officially involved in the imprisonment of the men there only through diplomatic channels, generous funding and the assistance of American trainers and advisers. And yet the US empire was the thinly veiled power behind the very existence of the prison and all that happened there.

Darryl Li compared the fates of the men in Bosnia with other cases of post-9/11 US detention, and found a similar pattern throughout the USgulag, in which the fates of people from specific countries were largely determined by the nature of US imperial relations with the countries involved.

For example, four British men detained in Pakistan and sent to Guantanamo were among the first prisoners to be released and repatriated, and returned home to relatively normal lives in the U.K. By contrast, Li met a Palestinian man in Gaza in 2007 who was “repatriated” there despite never having lived there before. He was born in Jordan and grew up in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where he was arrested and handed over to US forces. After several years in US military and CIA prisons, mostly in Afghanistan, he was sent back to Jordan, handed over to Israel and banished to Gaza.

In all these cases, Li observed how the US empire maintained a systematic and overarching sovereignty over the people and countries involved, not by completely ignoring the sovereignty of Bosnia, Egypt, the U.K and other countries, but by selectively and opportunistically exercising its own power through their nominally independent political and legal systems and the particulars of its relations with each of them.

Darryl Li’s research revealed an international system of stratified sovereignty, in which people’s lives were subject to the overarching imperial sovereignty of the US empire as well as to the sovereignty of their own countries.

Empire, not exception.

The US concentration camp at Guantanamo in Cuba is widely viewed as a glaring exception to US and international rules of law. Darryl Li noted that the prisoners are not the only non-Americans and non-Cubans living at Guantanamo, which also has a civilian staff of janitors, cooks and other workers, mostly from Jamaica and the Philippines. Like the prisoners and their American guards, these workers also live under the stratified sovereignty of the US Empire.

“Both third-country national prisoners and workers at GTMO share the predicament of dwelling in a space between the juridical protections of their governments, the local state and the US hegemon,” Li observed.

Darryl Li concluded that this framework of stratified sovereignty, in which people live under the sovereignty of both their own country and that of the US empire, is not an exception, but a norm of life in the US empire. So the shared predicament of workers and prisoners at Guantanamo is a striking example of how the US empire works, not an exception to it.

Other seemingly exceptional cases can also be better understood as examples of this actually existing imperial system of stratified sovereignty.

Consortium News has closely followed and reported on Julian Assange’s precarious asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. In Julian’s case, US imperial power has worked through a network of four nominally independent but subordinate states – Australia, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Ecuador – to corner him in London for over six years and prevent him from regaining his freedom. And it may soon succeed in rendering him to the US in shackles.

If this is what happens to Julian, his fate will not differ substantially from that of people who dared to defy the formal, territorial empires of the past. The Saudis conquered most of Arabia in the late 18th century, but their leader Abdullah bin Saud was defeated, captured, rendered in chains to Istanbul and beheaded at the order of the Ottoman Sultan in 1818.

Until 1830, the British Royal Navy brought mutineers, smugglers and pirates captured on the high seas around the world back to London to be hung (slowly, in the case of pirates) at Execution Dock on the Thames. The most notorious pirates’ bodies were covered in tar and hung in chains from a gibbet on the riverbank as a warning against piracy to sailors on passing ships.

If anything can save Julian Assange from a 21st century version of their fate at the hands of today’s imperial power, it is empire-wide public outrage and the fear of US officials that such a naked display of imperial power will give their game away.

But fear of exposing its brutality and criminality rarely constrains the US empire. Since 2001, the US has been more ready than ever to attack or invade other countries at will, with no regard for US or international law, and to kidnap or extradite people from around the world to face imperial retribution in US prisons and courts.

Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, now detained in Canada, is the latest victim of US imperial power. At least 26 US and foreign banks have paid fines of billions of dollars for violating US sanctions on Iran, but none of their executives have been arrested and threatened with 30 year prison terms. In launching a trade war with China, challenging Chinese sovereignty to trade with Iran and holding Meng Wanzhou as a hostage or bargaining chip in these disputes, the US is displaying a dogged determination to keep expanding its imperial ambitions.

The case of NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden illustrates that there are geographic limits to US imperial power. By escaping first to Hong Kong and then to Russia, Edward evaded capture or extradition. But his narrow escape and the very narrow choices available to him are themselves an illustration of how few places on Earth remain safely beyond the reach of US imperial power.

The End of Empire

The corrosive and debilitating impact of US empire on the sovereignty of other countries has been obvious to its detractors for a long time.

In the introduction to his 1965 book, Neo-Colonialism: the Last Stage of Imperialism, President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana wrote, “The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”

Darryl Li quoted Nkrumah’s verdict that this is, “…the worst form of imperialism. For those who practice it, it means power without responsibility, and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress.”

Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup orchestrated by the CIA the year after his words were published, but his critique remains, begging serious questions, “How long will the world tolerate this irresponsible form of empire?” Or even, ” Will we allow this ‘last stage of imperialism’ to be the last stage of our civilization?”

The way the US empire exercises power through stratified layers of sovereignty is both a strength and a weakness. For a brief period in history, it has enabled the US to wield imperial power in an otherwise post-colonial world, as Nkrumah described.

But Nkrumah had good reason to call this the last stage of imperialism. Once the US empire’s subject nations decide to claim in full the legal sovereignty they gained in the 20^th century, and reject the US’s anachronistic imperial ambitions to dominate and exploit their institutions, their people and their future, this empire cannot permanently hold them back any more than the British or Ottoman Empires could.

This irresponsible empire has squandered the resources of our own and other nations, and spawned existential dangers that threaten the whole world, from nuclear war to environmental crisis. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has gradually advanced the hands of its Doomsday Clock from 17 minutes to midnight in 1994 up to 2 minutes to midnight in 2018.

The US’s system of “managed democracy” or “inverted totalitarianism”concentrates ever-growing wealth and power in the hands of a corrupt ruling class, increasingly subjecting the American public to the same “exploitation without redress” as the US empire’s foreign subjects and preventing us from tackling serious or even existential problems.

This self-reinforcing vicious circle endangers us all, not least those of us who live at the heart of this corrupt and ultimately self-destructive empire. So we Americans share the vital interest of the rest of the world in dismantling the US empire and starting to work with all our neighbors to build a peaceful, just and sustainable post-imperial future that we all can share.

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Nicolas J S Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He is a researcher for CODEPINK and a freelance writer whose work is published by a wide range of independent, non-corporate media.

It’s headquartered in Washington – with branch offices in Tel Aviv, Brussels, Berlin, London, Paris, other European capitals, and elsewhere worldwide.

It’s scourge threatens everyone everywhere, its diabolical agenda hostile to peace, equity and justice, to the public welfare, we the people meaning the privileged class exclusively, ordinary people exploited, not served.

The rage of ruling authorities in America and its junior partners to dominate and exploit aims to transform all countries into ruler-serf societies, unsafe and unfit to live in – Washington rules overriding international and sovereign state laws, US-controlled NATO operating as a global military, manufactured crises unjustifiably justifying endless wars against invented enemies, nonbelievers eliminated.

When governments fail their people, the way things are today in the West and elsewhere globally, they forfeit their right to rule, civil disobedience an essential tool to invoke for change, popular revolution the only solution.

Nothing else can work. Martin Luther King once said that disobeying unjust laws, accepting punishment, arousing public awareness through nonviolent civil disobedience “express(es) the highest respect for law” the way it should be, serving everyone equitably, adding:

“(N)on-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” He championed “creative protest,” believing passivity is no option in the face of injustice.

Henry David Thoreau’s essay on civil disobedience, titled “Resistance to Civil Government” said the following:

“The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right.”

“All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”

“Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them, or shall we endeavor to amend them, and obey them until we have succeeded, or shall we transgress them at once?”

The state “is not armed with superior wit or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion…They can only force me to obey a higher law than I.”

Thoreau argued that no one is obligated to surrender their conscience to injustice. What’s fundamentally wrong should be challenged for change.

People have power when they use it, challenging unjust authority a duty, the only way to change the wrongs of ruling authorities.

Resistance is absent in America and other Western societies, Yellow Vest protests in France an exception, what’s needed universally at a time of endless wars, eroding social justice, increasing police state harshness – governments serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of beneficial social change they abhor.

Electoral participation doesn’t work, voting a waste of time in the West and most elsewhere. Dirty business as usual always wins, notably in America, a money-controlled one-party state with two extremist right wings, pretending otherwise – a fantasy democracy, not the real thing.

Legislators serve powerful interests, laws enacted to serve them. Dominant media support what demands condemnation. Accountability to all segments of society is absent.

Over half of the US electorate abstaining from exercising their franchise is testimony to their powerlessness over how they’re ill-served by ruling authorities in Washington.

Throwing out bums for new ones each election cycle assures when things change they stay the same, the way it is in America, the West, Israel, and elsewhere.

Entrenched power yields nothing unless forced. It’s true in the public and private sectors. Years of labor organizing against long odds in America, taking to the streets, sustaining strikes, boycotts, and other work stoppages, battling monied interests, putting rank-and-file lives on the line for equitable treatment won important labor rights.

When energy waned and union bosses sold out to management, virtually everything gained was lost, organized labor today a shadow of its long ago peak strength.

The same holds in all segments of society, government and the courts in cahoots with dominant monied interests at the expense of ordinary people in America and elsewhere.

Failing to resist what’s intolerable assures unacceptable conditions steadily worsening. Challenging authority is needed, in America most of all.

It’s no simple task at a time when government is the handmaiden of business, public and private corruption extreme, electoral politics deeply flawed, along with growing tyranny, heading toward becoming full-blown if not challenged by popular upheaval, collective resistance, civil disobedience – in big cities and small, urban and rural areas, sustaining a movement for revolutionary change.

It’s unattainable any other way. American exceptionalism, moral superiority, and the indispensable state don’t exist – an increasingly totalitarian plutocracy, not a democracy, permanently at war against invented enemies.

The nation’s resources increasingly go for militarism, warmaking, and corporate handouts, ordinary Americans exploited, not equitably served, things worsening, not improving.

Full-blown tyranny may be another major homeland false flag away, another 9/11 type incident, martial law instituted on the phony pretext of protecting national security at a time the nation’s only threats are invented ones.

As long as dark forces running America go unchallenged, their rage for dominance may doom us all – by enslavement, nuclear armageddon, or ecocide.

The only solution is popular revolution, challenging authority, refusing to accept the unacceptable, defying the status quo for peace, equity and justice for everyone everywhere.

There’s no alternative to living free and safe – polar opposite how things are today.

America is far and away the most egregious human rights offender in world history, harming more people globally over a longer duration than any other nation.

If not challenged and stopped, we all may be doomed.

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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.

How low can a country governed by an unbridled greed, a notorious lack of morals and ubiquitous servility to its neo-colonialist masters, really sink?

And how can people tolerate lies, the naked cynicism and fanatical incompetence of the rulers? Can the regime in Indonesia, which was created in 1965, and then nurtured by the West, really get away with absolutely everything, even, literally, murder?

As I write this report, it has been confirmed that the tsunami which struck West Java on the 22^nd of December, 2018, killed hundreds of people. It is almost certain that the death toll will soon climb to thousands.

Yesterday, I drove to West coast of Java. I witnessed devastation, but I also observed, as on so many previous occasions, absolute collapse of the state functions, its phlegmatic unwillingness to mobilize, as well as absolutely shocking helplessness of the victims.

During an entire day, along the entire coast, I did not encounter one single foreign journalist, while the local press, corrupt and unprofessional, kept reporting only what it was paid and ordered to report, even arranging ‘positive’ shots, instead of exposing harsh reality.

*

I gave myself 3 hours to write this report; only 3 hours, and not a minute more. That is how long my late evening flight from Jakarta to Bangkok will last. There is no time to delay what has to be urgently said. No time for ‘flowery reporting’. People are dying. Now it is December 25. The day before yesterday it was announced that at least 222 human lives were terminated. Yesterday the count stood at 370. Now, before my plane takes off, it is close to 500. What should we expect tomorrow; a thousand? Are we going to be informed in one week that several thousand men, women and children were swept away, crashed, torn apart, drowned, and starved to death?

Miserable structures could not withstand tidal wave

As in 2004 when a quarter of million people, mostly in Aceh, vanished after a devastating tidal wave, I have to repeat now what I declared then: in Indonesia, it is not a tsunami that murders; it is not at all. The regime imposed on this miserably poor country by the West, in 1965, reduced the entire archipelago to a monolithic, unproductive, resigned, awfully religious cluster of islands stripped off almost all of its natural resources as well as original fauna and flora; islands polluted, inhabited by uneducated and increasingly aggressive and intolerant people; both victimizers and victims at the same time.

These people cannot fight or resist, anymore. They only brutalize each other, never their immoral rulers.

*

Mrs. Rani from Cinangka, Anyer, used to be the owner of a tiny restaurant selling fresh fish from the nearby sea. Now she is standing next to her destroyed hut. First, she appears to be angry, but then she breaks down, begins hugging us desperately as if we were her last hope, crying bitterly:

“The government does nothing, absolutely nothing for us. President Jokowi passed by here, in his motorcade, but he did not even slow down, at least to ask and see how we are doing. Nobody cares about us!”

“When the tsunami hit, we were sleeping. And my husband and I went out of the house and ran to that coconut tree across the road; you see, over there… In my mind, I still see my grilled fish tiny restaurant (warung) as if it was standing and safe. People shouted at us to go further up the hill, towards a safer place. But when we returned in the morning, to search for our house and restaurant, we were shocked – it was totally looted out by thugs!”

“Now, not only don’t I have a place to live, anymore, my only source of income is also gone.”

As always when natural or man-made disasters strike in Indonesia, the only things one can hear are the sobs of the victims and the ridiculous honking of the sirens and horns, most of them belonging to private cars that are pretending to be on an important ‘mission’.

Coming from Jakarta – hanging around, doing nothing

But almost nothing moves. Heavy equipment like bulldozers and excavators, are there, but standing still, drivers and operators are either smoking or just staring in the distance. The sky is empty – no helicopters, no amphibious planes have been visible for the entire day that I worked in the area (later I was confidentially told that Indonesia doesn’t really have enough choppers, and hardly any pilots trained to fly them).

The entire coast is covered by Poskos(posts) that are, at least in theory, erected there, in order to provide relief to the victims. But most of them belong to political parties, or to religious organizations, interested only in showing off and in promoting their own agenda. There are extreme-right-wing groups like Pemuda Pancasila, with members snapping selfies of each other: or having leisure lunches and dinners at what had still survived of the local restaurants.

Extreme right-wing groups at tsunami area

Islamists in white robes are pointing their thumbs towards the sky, laughing loudly and ridiculously, and shouting “Prabowo – Sandi”referring to the presidential and vice-presidential candidate. Prabowo, a former army general, is a brutal military man, known to have committed countless crimes against humanity while serving in the plundered West Papua, and during the anti-government demonstration that rocked the capital many years ago. His posters are visible everywhere along the coast, and his people pose for cameras and for mobile phones, promoting their movement all along the ruined beaches.

Poskos are always full of people, those individuals who are constantly pushing their idiotic speeches, shouting slogans, but above all, taking photos of each other. I saw something similar in 2004 in Aceh. While the Japanese, Singaporeans and other foreigners were working, desperately trying to save the lives of the victims, the Indonesian NGO’s and ‘volunteers’ were laughing, taking photos of each other, and promoting their religious and political agendas.

Religious cadres laughing while promoting their own agenda

Disaster or no disaster, almost every man here is puffing on his cigarette. There is always plenty of time for religion, for taking selfies, for a little cyber chat, and of course, for a smoke. And while everyone is busy banging into their phones and exhaling smoke, almost no one is working.

This is a perfect warning to the world: what happens to a country fully abandoned to Western neo-colonialism, to religion, consumerism, corruption, as well as intellectual and moral void.

We are passing Posko PKS Peduli(Post of the ‘PKS Care’). PKS party belongs to Prabowo’s coalition. The post is well-visible, noticeable, full of slogans. It is there solely to attract voters, not to save victims.

*

After progressing further south, we exit the main road at Sukarame Village, drive again, then walk up to a hill, towards a ‘camp’, where the people displaced by the nearby coastal disaster area are supposed to be taken care of by the authorities.

What we encounter there is self-explanatory, and I make sure to record the situation visually.

As elsewhere in Indonesia, the area is overtaken by thugs who are ‘regulating traffic’ and arranging parking spaces, for a fee. For them, as for almost everyone else with the exception of the victims, all of this is a great business opportunity. They are bossing drivers around, maximizing both space and the profits. At one point it begins to rain.

At night in a village destroyed by tsunami

We are following displaced people. Soon, a ‘tent city’ appears.

It consists of three tents at the lower part of the hill, and of few more a bit higher up. The tents are blue, and they are not yet assembled.

“Is that all?” I ask a man who is smoking even in the rain, periodically snapping his own selfie.

“Yes, it is,” he answers, phlegmatically.

Mr. Karid from Cibenda village recalls:

“My son who is the caretaker of a villa on the coast, suffers from a broken leg and he lost one of his children. This grandson of mine was only 6 years old. I had to go back and forth between taking care of my son and also taking care of the funeral of my grandchild.”

No one seems to be paying attention to the victims. They were told that the second wave may hit at any moment, and they are moving up, towards the highest ground, spontaneously.

“Do they help you?” We ask.

“Not really,” comes the reply, immediately. By now, it is a quite standard answer. “They don’t even give us real food”.

Then it happens: some 20 police officers on expensive motorcycles, wearing yellow wests, arrive on the scene.

Police posing, doing nothing

They walk slowly towards those parts of the tents lying on the grass and begin… Not working, no: they begin posing!

I film.

There are two men, one photographing for social media, the other in police uniform, giving precise instruction to the police officers, how to stand and how to pretend that they are actually working.

I keep filming.

Slowly, extremely slowly, those 20 well-fed men began putting together the frame of one tent. Others watched smoking and photographing.

After one part of the tent was assembled, police officers gathered in a circle and began chatting.

It was now raining, heavily. Victims were slowly walking by: no one pays any attention to them.

Down at the side of the road, I saw something that may resemble a local TV crew, dragging the operator of a huge excavator, to his cabin. A man climbed up, put his hands on the control, and… nothing. No roar of the engine, no movement. He was being photographed from below. When he climbed down, he is interviewed, his idle heavy equipment clearly visible behind his back.

Not far from the scene, people are searching through the rubble, for their belongings, for their ID papers and who knows, perhaps even for their loved ones.

While the Indonesian public and the world is shown what they are supposed to see: a natural disaster and the nation mobilizing to help its fellow citizens.

But nothing moves. Only those countless vehicles belonging to the NGOs and the right-wing political parties (there are no left-wing parties in this country), are blocking the streets, creating traffic jams. People on board are honking, blasting sirens, trying to look macho and determined, while doing nothing substantial, except what they do all their lives: smoking, sitting in endless traffic jams, and listening to junk music.

And the people, hundreds or perhaps thousands of them, are dying just few meters away.

*

And the sky is still clear: there are no helicopters or airplanes, even when it begins to rain, or when it stops raining.

And there are no battleships visible near the coast.

The Indonesian army has been well known for fighting, killing and raping its women and children, after the 1965 military coup, or in East Timor or now, in West Papua. It is also very good at protecting Western mining companies against the people, local victims. It is not here to defend its citizens: on the contrary. It commonly commits treason, but instead of being court-martialed and facing a firing squad, it is being praised and continuously rewarded with cash, training and equipment from the West.

The same can be said about the Indonesian academia and media. They are not here to tell the truth and defend the nation. They are paid to be quiet and to say what is ordered ‘from above’ and from abroad.

And no foreign media would go where I am routinely working. I am always alone here, no matter what horrors are occurring around me. The fascist, pro-Western, religious regime here reduced the Indonesian people into submissive, self-centered cowards. I don’t care. They are willing to betray, even to kill, for their own privileges. So I am trying to perform their duties, instead.

It is their problem what they do. While it is my obligation to document. Alone or not alone.

*

Some 60 kilometers further south, everything stops. By the time we arrive, it is late at night. The road is heavily damaged. This is ‘the border’. No private vehicles can pass.

Behind this point, the destruction is, most likely, even more horrid.

Were this to be a ‘normal’, read ‘not collapsed country’, there would be countless military heavy vehicles repairing the road. There would be provisory lights, thousands of experts and military men building the bridges, filling deep ditches. Helicopters would be flying, and big NAVY ships would be providing support from the sea. There would be a constant, determined fight to save human lives.

I saw it in Japan and in Chile. In Chile, after a terrible tsunami, the entire nation mobilized. The motorway was clogged with constant streams of vehicles, bringing to the devastated areas pre-fabricated wooden houses of high quality, bringing water, gas, food, medical supplies. To witness such mobilization performed by the then, still, socialist government, made one feel proud to be a human being. As a result, very few people died. Everyone got taken care of, re-housed and compensated by the government.

Here, in Indonesia, at the ghostly, destroyed village of Cikujang, we only encountered two men sitting among the rubble of destroyed house. They reluctantly explained:

“Our car got stuck in a deep ditch. Engine died. Now we are just waiting that someone will rescue us”.

All around – darkness and destruction. Carcasses of cars and motorcycles, collapsed houses, personal belongings of people scattered all around. I am trying to film and photograph, using the high beam of the car. What I see is not for the faint-hearted.

As I am working, I am aware of the warnings: the second tsunami wave can strike at any moment. If it does, my tiny crew and I will get fucked. But we have to work, because behind our backs, somewhere in the total darkness, there are tens of thousands of people, cut off from any help, abandoned by this monstrous nightmarish system.

Up the hill, we find an old scout center. There, many victims are gathered.

Mr. Iwan, the leader of this provisory camp of displaced people, readily explains:

“We have five people who lost their lives, 4 are already buried but we are still missing 1 person. “

People are praying. No one dares to blame the government or the system. To them, it is all normal.

We are told, again and again, that there is absolutely no way to go any further. We try, but confronted with flooded road, finally turn back.

There is no activity. No action. Behind this line, most likely thousands of people are dying.

*

It is now clear that the early warning system failed the people of West Java.

It was reported that it was ‘vandalized’. In fact, it was stolen. Supplied by Malaysia, Germany and UK, it was looted by local folks. And the government knew it, and did nothing at all to replace it.

In Vietnam or China, officials who allow such a disaster to take place, would be facing a firing squad, for treason.

In Indonesia, the entire system is mobilized to cover up what has taken place, and what is still taking place while this report goes to print: the ineptness of the government, of the armed forces, the tremendous greed of the NGO’s and private individuals of the country.

In Indonesia, human lives are worth absolutely nothing. Public welfare means nothing as well. The only thing that matters is profit, plus religious rituals. And the big natural disasters like this one are truly great opportunities to enrich even further those corrupt gurus of turbo-capitalism.

While thousands of families have irreversibly lost their homes and small businesses, the entire nation is mourning a pop band from Jakarta, called ‘Seventeen,’ which was performing for the elites in an exclusive beach resort, when tsunami hit the area. All band members died except their lead vocalist.

I have worked in 160 countries of the world; I have seen a lot, really a lot, but nothing so morally collapsed and corrupt as the Indonesian regime. And I have never encountered any establishment so capable of covering-up its own crimes.

*

Now most of the reports are repeating ‘how and why this tsunami occurred’. People who know nothing about science, are repeating like idiots about some underwater plates moving, about an explosion of a volcano, and other ‘technical’ issues.

But what really happened here, as has already happened so many times this year, and every other single year, is that people died for absolutely ridiculous and preventable reasons: the unwillingness of the regime to spend money on anything that does not generate ‘profit’ (like an early tsunami warning system), pathetic, laughable ‘city planning’ as well as the lack of enforceable regulations for both urban and rural areas located in danger zones, plus the endemic corruption, terrible education and therefore lack of any vision or enthusiasm, as well as many other factors along these lines.

The victims in West Java are, as it always happens here, resigned – they are as locals saypasrah. Poor people, the great majority of Indonesian citizens, are submissive. They repeat what the ‘elites’, the West and religious ‘leaders’ want them to repeat: that they are ‘grateful to God’ even for being alive. I hear it in the slums, and in devastated areas. By now, people here have nothing against their tormentors; against capitalism or imperialism (they don’t even know what these terms really symbolize). They steal from each other, but do not dare to fight those who are robbing them on a greater scale.

By not providing basic services, the state is murdering thousands, more precisely millions, annually. Now it has done it again. The definition of a ‘failed state’ is precisely that: the ‘inability to provide basic services to its citizens’. Full stop.

And my 3 hours are now up. The plane is descending.

I have just witnessed mass murder, in Java, Indonesia. Not a ‘natural disaster’, but mass murder. There is no time for elegant reporting. This is what I saw, and therefore, this is what I write. Tens of thousands are still left behind on the coast, with almost no help. The Indonesian ‘elites’ are now making profits from their suffering.  It is already dark in Bangkok, where I am landing.

It must be horribly dark ‘back there’, in Banten: dark and frightening.

I am writing this in order to warn the world: let us all unite against the regimes that have been implanted by the West in the colonies. Let us not allow such genocides to happen again and again!

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This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. 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. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

On December 9 William Blum died. He was one of the great truth-tellers of this or any other era and an example of everything a real journalist should be.

Blum began working for the US State Department as a computer programmer in the mid-’60s but the man who declared that he wanted to “take part in the great anti-communist crusade” had the scales fall from his eyes as the Vietnam war unfolded and he quit, founding The Washington Free Press, one of the New Left’s first independent newspapers.

Bill held a passionate determination to tell the truth about US foreign policy aims, and this he did for the rest of his life. Two of his books in particular should be required reading for us all, but especially for anyone with aspirations to be a journalist (rather than a state stenographer as most end up).

Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower are vital records of the rapacious truth of US policy when it comes to other nations: a violent, predatory blueprint underpinned by an utter contempt for democracy.

We need this record, because the big lie of the US as a force for good in the world is continually propagated by a corporate media fundamentally aligned with state power. Stark proof of this can be seen every single day on the BBC, ITN, Sky or Channel 4 News. Sceptical that the latter should be so maligned? You could read my series, What’s Wrong With Channel 4 News? at bsnews.info or check out 21st Century Wire’s Ch4N archive. And as for “liberal” newspapers like the Guardian, just visit the Media Lens archive for evidence of its shameful record of cheerleading for every illegal and immoral war you could name.

There is simply nowhere to go in the corporate media for an alternative to the big lie. And that is why Bill Blum’s work is indispensable. His chronicle stands as a mighty refutation of the huge deception that seeks to wipe the truth from the historical record so that the public is primed to accept whichever false justification is presented to it for the next murderous military intervention. But these rationales cannot stand if we are armed with the knowledge of what really happened, and Blum has left us, along with his books and many articles, one of the most effective weapons with which to counter the myth of a benevolent United States in its relations with the rest of the world.

Go to williamblum.org and you will find a page with the words:

“Overthrowing Other People’s Governments — The Master List. Instances of the United States overthrowing, or attempting to overthrow, a foreign government since the second world war. (*indicates successful ouster of a government).”

And then comes the list itself, beginning with:

• China 1949 to early 1960s
• Albania 1949-53
• East Germany 1950s
• Iran 1953*
• Guatemala 1954*
• Costa Rica mid-1950s
• Syria 1956-7

And on it goes, citing 57 countries in all and bringing us all the way up to the present day. The list is all the more powerful for its succinctness, each entry a tragedy and a crime, with incalculable suffering behind it. The document is stark and it is shocking and we need it now as much as ever.

Comedian Rob Newman, during his quite brilliant show A History of Oil, recounts that he was listening to the Today Programme on BBC’s Radio 4 and noticed that the headline being repeated, “on the hour, every hour” was this: “The G8 has today endorsed an American plan to bring democracy to the Middle East.” There it is, the big lie.

No corporate journalist ever questions it, having been carefully “selected for obedience” as they are, the result being that the least independent minded and most slavish of all are the Jon Snows, Krishnan Guru-Murthys and the other gallery of well-known faces in the mainstream media landscape, no matter how radical and maverick they believe themselves to be.

Newman tells his audience: “There is in our own time an absolute taboo among the corporate news media and the political class against mentioning anything to do with the strategic and economic reasons for war.” And that is exactly why the Master List is so important — we are in a constant fight to keep the truth of the historical record alive in the face of a relentless propaganda machine and the stakes are as high as they could be.

The corporate media has blood on its hands — I do not say that lightly. Because without the amplification of the big lie, these blood-soaked invasions could never have been dressed up as “humanitarian” interventions in which literally millions of innocent people have suffered and died.

Of course, corporate journalists do not take kindly to being exposed by real journalists, which is why the New York Times used this headline to report Bill’s death: “William Blum, US policy critic cited by bin Laden, dies at 85”.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), the US-based media watch group, commented: “Yes, to the Times, the most important thing about Bill Blum’s life is that Osama bin Laden once remarked to Americans, in a tape released from hiding, that Rogue State would be ‘useful for you to read’ … Should (Blum) have denied that his book would be ‘useful…to read,’ or wished aloud that bin Laden had been a supporter of the State Department’s policies? There are certainly some policies where you’d find the State Department, al-Qaida and the New York Times on one side, and Blum on the other.”

Considering the fact that the US has long colluded with radical Islam and is doing so right now in its financial and military support for jihadist terrorists in Syria, including al-Nusra (al-Qaida in Syria), the word irony doesn’t really cover it. And for Britain’s own long record of colluding with Islamists, even as the public was told these were the enemy we must all fear and despise, see the book Secret Affairs by Mark Curtis.

We would all, I hope, wish to evolve during our short time on this troubled planet, and Bill Blum appears to have been on a path of accelerated growth. From the belly of the beast to independence and freedom, he shared his journey and the vital knowledge and insights he gained along the way. Read his work — you might just be moved to send every corporate journalist you see repeating the big lie a copy of The Master List.

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The National Gathering of Martyrs’ Families has stated in its annual report for the year 2018 that Israeli soldiers have killed 312 Palestinians, including women and children, and added that this number is four times higher than the year 2017.

Mohammad Sbeihat, the Secretary-General of the Gathering, has reported that Israel and its occupation forces are encouraged by the silence of the international community, and expressed its support of the calls of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to prosecute Israel in international courts for its escalating crimes and violations.

Sbeihat added that the Gathering has thoroughly documented the Israeli violations in all governorates during the year, including reports from various human rights organizations.

The documentations reveal the following:

1. The number of Palestinians who were killed by Israeli army fire in 2018 is 312, including 310 who were shot with live ammunition, and two who died from the severe effects of teargas inhalation.

2. 271 Palestinians were killed in several parts of the Gaza Strip.

3. 42 Palestinians were killed in the West Bank.

4. Six of the slain Palestinians are females.

5. 306 of the slain Palestinians are males.

6. The youngster slain Palestinians is Laila al-Ghandour, only eight months of age, and the oldest is Ibrahim Ahmad al-‘Arrouqi, 74.

7. Fifty-seven of the slain Palestinians in 2018 are children (below the age of 18).

8. Approximately one Palestinian was killed every 28 hours, which means that, comparing to the year 2017, the average is four times higher, as Israel killed 74 Palestinians.

9. The month that witnessed the highest numbers of deaths by Israeli fire was May, as the soldiers have killed 89 Palestinians.

10. The Average age of the slain Palestinians was 24.

11. The number of married Palestinians killed by the army is 107, 104 of them were males and 3 females.

12. Israel is still holding the corpses of twenty Palestinians who were killed in 2018. This is added to 38 corpses of Palestinians killed by the army in 2015 and remain held by Israel.

13. The total number of corpses of slain Palestinians held by Israel since the year 1965 is 284.

14. Israeli forces have killed 145 Palestinians in 2015.

15. Israeli forces have killed 127 Palestinians in 2016.

16. Israeli forces have killed 74 Palestinians in 2017.

17. Israeli forces have killed 312 Palestinians in 2018.

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Featured image is from IMEMC

American journalism has become in its mainstream exponents a compendium of half-truths and out-and-out lies. The public, though poorly informed on most issues as a result, has generally figured out that it is being hoodwinked and trust in the Fourth Estate has plummeted over the past twenty years. The skepticism about what is being reported has enabled President Donald Trump and other politicians to evade serious questions about policy by claiming that what is being reported is little more than “fake news.”

No news is more fake than the reporting in the U.S. media that relates to the state of Israel. Former Illinois congressman Paul Findley in his seminal book They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby observed that nearly all the foreign press correspondents working out of Israel are Jewish while most of the editors that they report to at news desks are also Jews, guaranteeing that the articles that eventually surface in the newspapers will be carefully constructed to minimize any criticism of the Jewish state. The same goes for television news, particularly on cable news stations like CNN.

A particularly galling aspect of the sanitization of news reports regarding Israel is the underlying assumption that Israelis share American values and interests, to include freedom and democracy. This leads to the perception that Israelis are just like Americans with Israel’s enemies being America’s enemies. Given that, it is natural to believe that the United States and Israel are permanent allies and friends and that it is in the U.S. interest to do whatever is necessary to support Israel, including providing billions of dollars in aid to a country that is already wealthy as well as unlimited political cover in international bodies like the United Nations.

That bogus but nevertheless seemingly eternal bond is essentially the point from which a December 26^th op-ed in The New York Times departs. The piece is by one of the Times’ resident opinion writers Bret Stephens and is entitled Donald Trump is Bad for Israel.

Stephens gets to the point rather quickly, claiming that “The president has abruptly undermined Israel’s security following a phone call with an Islamist strongman in Turkey. So much for the idea, common on the right, that this is the most pro-Israel administration ever. I write this as someone who supported Trump moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who praised his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal as courageous and correct. I also would have opposed the president’s decision to remove U.S. forces from Syria under nearly any circumstances. Contrary to the invidious myth that neoconservatives always put Israel first, the reasons for staying in Syria have everything to do with core U.S. interests. Among them: Keeping ISIS beaten, keeping faith with the Kurds, maintaining leverage in Syria and preventing Russia and Iran from consolidating their grip on the Levant.”

The beauty of Stephens overwrought prose is that the careful reader might realize from the git-go that the argument being promoted makes no sense. Bret has a big heart for the Kurds but the Palestinians are invisible in his piece while his knowledge of other developments in the Middle East is superficial. First of all, the phone call with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had nothing to do with “undermining Israel’s security.” It concerned the northern border of Syria, which Turkey shares, and arrangements for working with the Kurds, which is a vital interest for both Ankara and Washington. And it might be added that from a U.S. national security point of view Turkey is an essential partner for the United States in the region while Israel is not, no matter what it pretends to be.

Stephens then goes on to demonstrate what he claims to be a libel, that for him and other neocons Israel always comes first, an odd assertion given the fact that he spends 80% of his article discussing what is or isn’t good for Israel. He supports the U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem, the end of the nuclear agreement with Iran, both of which were applauded in Israel but which are extremely damaging to American interests. He attacks the planned withdrawal from Syria because it is a “core interest” for the U.S., which is complete nonsense.

Contrary to Stephens’ no evidence assertion, Russia and Iran have neither the resources nor the desire to “consolidate[e] their grip on the Levant” while it is the United States has no right and no real interest to “maintain leverage” on Syria by invading and occupying the country. But, of course, invading and occupying are practices that Israel is good at, so Stephens’ brain fart on the issue can perhaps be attributed to confusion over whose bad policies he was defending. Stephens also demonstrate confusion over his insistence that the U.S. must “resist foreign aggressors…the Russians and Iranians in Syria in this decade,” suggesting that he is unaware that both nations are providing assistance at the request of the legitimate government in Damascus. It is the U.S. and Israel that are the aggressors in Syria.

Stephens then looks at the situation from the “Israeli standpoint,” which is presumably is easy for him to do as that is how he looks at everything given the fact that he is far more concerned about Israel’s interests than those of the United States. Indeed, all of his opinions are based on the assumption that U.S. policy should be supportive of a rightwing Israeli government, that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has recently been indicted for corruption and has called for an early election to subvert the process.

Bret finally comes to the point, writing that “What Israel most needs from the U.S. today is what it needed at its birth in 1948: an America committed to defending the liberal-international order against totalitarian enemies, as opposed to one that conducts a purely transactional foreign policy based on the needs of the moment or the whims of a president.”

Stephens then expands on what it means to be liberal-international: “It means we should oppose militant religious fundamentalism, whether it is Wahhabis in Riyadh or Khomeinists in Tehran or Muslim Brothers in Cairo and Ankara. It means we should advocate human rights, civil liberties, and democratic institutions, in that order.”

Bret also throws America’s two most recent presidents under the bus in his jeremiad, saying “During the eight years of the Obama presidency, I thought U.S. policy toward Israel — the hectoring, the incompetent diplomatic interventions, the moral equivocations, the Iran deal, the backstabbing at the U.N. — couldn’t get worse. As with so much else, Donald Trump succeeds in making his predecessors look good.” He then asks “Is any of this good for Israel?” and he answers “no.”

Bret Stephens in his complaining reveals himself to be undeniably all about Israel, but consider what he is actually saying. He claims to be against “militant religious fundamentalism,” but isn’t that what Israeli Zionism is all about, with more than a dash of racism and fanaticism thrown in for good measure? One Israeli Chief Rabbi has called black people “monkeys” while another has declared that gentiles cannot live in Israel. Right-wing religious fundamentalist parties currently are in power with Netanyahu and are policy making for the Israeli Government: Shas, Jewish Home, and United Torah Judaism. None of them could be regarded as a moderating influence on their thuggish serial financial lawbreaker Prime Minister.

And isn’t Israel’s record on human rights and civil liberties among the worst in the world? Here is the Human Rights Watch’s assessment of Israel:

“Israel maintains entrenched discriminatory systems that treat Palestinians unequally. Its 50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza involves systematic rights abuses, including collective punishment, routine use of excessive lethal force, and prolonged administrative detention without charge or trial for hundreds. It builds and supports illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, expropriating Palestinian land and imposing burdens on Palestinians but not on settlers, restricting their access to basic services and making it nearly impossible for them to build in much of the West Bank without risking demolition. Israel’s decade-long closure of Gaza, supported by Egypt, severely restricts the movement of people and goods, with devastating humanitarian impact.”

Israel, if one is considering the entire population under its rule, is among the most undemocratic states that chooses to call itself democratic. Much of the population living in lands that Israel claims cannot vote, they have no freedom of movement in their homeland, and they have no right of return to homes that they were forced to abandon. Israeli army snipers blithely shoot unarmed demonstrators while Netanyahu’s government kills, beats and imprisons children. And the Jewish state does not even operate very democratically even inside Israel itself, with special rights for Jewish citizens and areas and whole towns where Muslims or Christians are not allowed to buy property or reside.

It is time for American Jews like Bret Stephens to come to the realization that not everything that is good for Israel is good for the U.S. The strategic interests of the two countries, if they were openly discussed in either the media or in congress, would be seen to be often in direct conflict. Somehow in Stephens’ twisted mind the 1948 theft of Palestinian lands and the imposition of an apartheid system to control the people is in some way representative of a liberal world order.

If one were to suggest that Stephens should move to Israel since his primary loyalty clearly lies there, there would be accusations of anti-Semitism, but in a sense, it is far better to have him stick around blathering from the pulpit of The New York Times. When he writes so ineptly about how Donald Trump Is Bad for Israel the real message that comes through loud and clear is how bad Israel is for America.

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

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

Featured image is from The Unz Review

With the infamous Gulf of Tonkin incident as historical precedent, there’s a real possibility that the U.S. government could stage an incident in the Persian Gulf that would allow the Trump administration to push for military intervention in the Persian Gulf targeting Iran.

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Earlier this week, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani repeated an earlier threat to block ships from leaving the Persian Gulf if the U.S. government continues to seek to block Iranian oil exports. Rouhani’s comments came a day after the U.S. sent an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf on Monday in an apparent “show of force,” ending the longest period the U.S. had gone without an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf over the past two decades.

While some – at the time – anticipated that the U.S.’ deployment of the aircraft carrier was an empty threat meant to intimidate Iran, new developments suggest that there may soon be a military showdown in the Persian Gulf’s strategic Strait of Hormuz as Iranian and regional media have reported that the Iranian Navy has deployed a large naval contingent of 58 fleets to the northern waters of the Indian Ocean near the Persian Gulf. According to Iranian naval commander Rear Admiral Hossein Khanzadi, the naval contingent is closely monitoring the area as they await orders from the Iranian government.

The large deployment follows President Rouhani’s recent comments delivered on Tuesday in Iran’s Semnan Province. Rouhani stated that

“If someday, the United States decides to block Iran’s oil [exports], no oil will be exported from the Persian Gulf.”

Rouhani had made a similar threat earlier this year in July. An estimated 30 percent of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the Persian Gulf and thus the Gulf’s chokepoint – the Strait of Hormuz – which Iran claims to “completely control.”

A day prior to Rouhani’s speech, on Monday, the U.S. military revealed that the U.S.S. John C. Stennis and its accompanying ships will pass through the Indian Ocean and arrive in the Persian Gulf by the end of this week. While officials claimed that the deployment had been previously scheduled, officials also told the Wall Street Journal that the carrier’s deployment was a direct response to Iran’s influence in the Middle East.

Notably, the Trump administration, on the same day as the announcement of the Stennis’ deployment, asked Europe to impose new sanctions on Iran and withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, after U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo claimed that Iran had test-fired a ballistic missile that violated the deal. The U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the deal in May, while other signatories have fought to keep the deal alive, as Iran had consistently complied with the conditions of the accord.

Given the recent news of the Iranian naval deployment to the northern Indian Ocean, there is an increased chance that the U.S.S. Stennis will pass in close proximity to where the Iranian naval ships are awaiting orders from Tehran.

As a result, concerns are growing that the tensions between Iran and the U.S. could soon spark a military conflict. Indeed, just last week, Brian Hook – the U.S. State Department’s special representative on Iran — announced during a press conference that the U.S. would “not hesitate to use military force [against Iran] when our interests are threatened,” adding that the Trump administration has “the military option on the table.”

Right on Bolton’s regime-change schedule?

Considering that top administration officials like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo have long sought war with Iran, Hook’s recent statement, as well as the recent deployments near the Strait of Hormuz by both the Iranian and American navies, cannot be taken lightly.

In addition, there is the possibility that the U.S. government could stage an incident in the Persian Gulf that would allow the Trump administration to push for military intervention in the Persian Gulf targeting Iran. Indeed, there is historical precedent for such action in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which ultimately led to the escalation of U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, through the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

However, the two Gulf of Tonkin incidents that were used to justify the subsequent war in Vietnam were not what they appeared, as the first incident – which was described as an “unprovoked” attack on the U.S.S. Maddox during a “routine patrol” – actually involved the U.S. firing first, while the Maddox was involved in an aggressive intelligence-gathering operation at the time of the incident. The second Gulf of Tonkin incident was later revealed to have been made up entirely, but was used as the launching pad for the Vietnam War that left millions of Vietnamese dead and killed over 50,000 Americans.

Could the Trump administration gin up such an act again, now that Iran is undeniably in its crosshairs? Given the history of fabricating and twisting intelligence regarding Iran by current National Security Adviser John Bolton, it is a definite possibility. This is especially troublesome, not only in light of the aforementioned developments near the Persian Gulf, but also considering that Bolton last year promised regime change in Tehran before 2019 – just a little over three weeks away.

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Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

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Traditionally focused on ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam, Saudi funding in the era of crown prince Mohammed bin Salman has been streamlined and finetuned to ensure that it serves his geopolitical ambitions, primarily stymying the expansion of Iranian influence in the Middle East and North Africa and enhancing the kingdom’s global impact.

The effort, however, has so far produced a mixed bag. Spending is down but more targeted. Saudi Arabia has handed over control of the Grand Mosque in Brussels in a move designed to demonstrate its newly found moderation and reduce the reputational damage of a Saudi ultra-conservative management that had become contentious in Belgium.

Yet, monies still flowed to militant, ultra-conservative madrassas or religious seminaries that dot the Pakistani-Iranian border. The kingdom’s focus, moreover has shifted in selected countries to the promotion of a strand of Salafi ultra-conservatism that preaches absolute obedience to the ruler, a corollary to Prince Mohammed’s crackdown on critics and activists at home.

Saudi governmental non-governmental organizations that once distributed the kingdom’s largesse to advance ultra-conservatism as well as officials have adopted the language of tolerance and respect and principles of inter-faith but have little tangible change at home to back it up.

To be sure, Prince Mohammed has lifted the ban on women’s driving, enhanced women’s work and leisure opportunities and kickstarted the creation of a modern entertainment industry but none of these measures amount to his promise to foster an unidentified but truly moderate form of Islam.

The prince’s moves, moreover, have been accompanied by an embrace of the European right and far-right as well as Western ultra-conservative groups that by and large are hardly beacons of tolerance and mutual respect.

“Saudi Arabia with MBS as Crown Prince has not been advocating Islamic religious reform,” said Middle East scholar HA Hellyer, referring to the Saudi leader by his initials.

“The existing Saudi religious establishment has not been encouraged to engage in a genuine rethinking of its ideas that draws it closer to the normative Sunni mainstream, nor listen to existing Saudi religious scholars who advocate more normative and mainstream approaches. Rather, the establishment has been muzzled. MBS’s ‘reforms’ in this arena are about centralizing power—they are not about restoring the Saudi religious establishment to a normative Sunnism,” Mr. Hellyer added.

Prince Mohammed’s interest in non-Muslim ultra-conservative groups in the West fits a global pattern, highlighted by political scientists Yascha Mounk and Roberto Stefan Foa, in which technological advances and the increased importance of soft power that lie at the root of Russian intervention in elections in the United States and Europe, have informed the information and public relations policies of multiple autocratic states.

Technology and soft power are, according to Messrs. Mounk and Foa, are likely to spark greater efforts by authoritarians and autocrats in general to influence Western nations and undermine confidence in democracy.

“Indeed, China is already stepping up ideological pressure on its overseas residents and establishing influential Confucius Institutes in major centres of learning. And over the past two years, Saudi Arabia has dramatically upped its payments to registered U.S. lobbyists, increasing the number of registered foreign agents working on its behalf from 25 to 145… The rise of authoritarian soft power is already apparent across a variety of domains, including academia, popular culture, foreign investment, and development aid,” Messrs. Mounk and Foa said.

Saudi Arabia alongside other Gulf states, including the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman and Kuwait, as well as China, have furthermore been major donors to Western universities and think tanks and developed media outlets of their own such as Qatar’s Al Jazeera, Turkey’s TRT World China’s CCTV, and Russia’s RT that reach global audiences. They compete with the likes of the BBC and CNN.

The need for Saudi Arabia to acquire soft power was driven home by mounting Western criticism of its war in Yemen and condemnation of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

The Saudi effort to do so by garnering conservative, right-wing and far-right support was evident in Northern Ireland.

Investigating a remarkable campaign by Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a key support pillar of British prime minister Teresa May’s government, in favour of Britain’s exit from the European Union, Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole suggested that a senior member of Saudi Arabia’s ruling family and former head of the country’s intelligence service, Prince Nawwaf bin Abdul Aziz al Saud, as well as its just replaced ambassador to Britain, had funded the anti-Brexit effort through a commercial tie-up with a relatively obscure Scottish conservative activist of modest means, Richard Cook.

The ambassador, Prince Nawaf’s son, Prince Mohammed bin Nawaf al Saud, was Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Britain until last month’s Saudi cabinet reshuffle.

“It may be entirely co-incidental that the man who channelled £425,622 to the DUP had such extremely high-level Saudi connections. We simply don’t know. We also don’t know whether the… Saudi ambassador had any knowledge of his father’s connection to Richard Cook,” Mr. O’Toole said.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia has invited dozens of British members of parliament on all-expenses paid visits to the kingdom and showered at least 50 members of the government, including Ms. May, with enormous hampers of food weighing up to 18 pounds.

One package destined for a member of the House of Lords included seaweed and garlic mayonnaise; smoked salmon, trout and mussels; and a kilogram of Stilton cheese. Others contained bottles of claret, white wine, champagne, and Talisker whisky despite the kingdom’s ban of alcohol.

In a move similar to Russian efforts to influence European politics, Saudi Arabia has also forged close ties to conservative and far-right groups in Europe that include the Danish People’s Party and the Sweden Democrats as well as other Islamophobes, according to member of the European parliament Eldar Mamedov.

Writing on LobeLog, Mr. Mamedov said the kingdom frequently worked through the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) bloc, the third largest grouping in the European parliament. Saudi Arabia also enjoyed the support of European parliament member Mario Borghezio of Italy’s Lega, who is a member of Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENF), a bloc of far-right parties in the parliament.

The kingdom’s strategy, in a twist of irony, although in pursuit of different goals, resembles to a degree that of one of its nemeses, Indonesia’s Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim non-governmental organization that has opposition to Saudi Arabia’s puritan strand of Islam carved into its DNA and has forged close ties to the European right and far-right in its bid to reform the faith.

The Saudi strategy could prove tricky, particularly in the United States, dependent on the evolution of US special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into foreign interference in the 2016 election that brought President Donald J. Trump to office.

Mr. Mueller reportedly is set in court filings to unveil efforts by Saudi Arabia, its reputation in the US tarnished by the Khashoggi killing, and the United Arab Emirates, the kingdom’s closest ally, to influence American politics.

Said Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney.

“I guess what Mueller has to date has turned out to be pretty rich and detailed and more than we anticipated. This could turn out to be a rich part of the overall story.”

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom