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Documentary: ‘The Lobby – USA’. America’s “Special Relationship with Israel”

December 20th, 2018 by Robert Fantina

Imagine, for a moment, a foreign government spying on U.S. citizens, using the most sophisticated cyber-intelligence software available. This government particularly targets students and, through the use of fake Facebook accounts and other means, smears those that criticize its policies. Consider a government that, in addition to these activities, provides U.S. members of Congress with elaborate, all-expenses-paid trips to beautiful resorts, in addition to very generously funding their election and re-election campaigns. It then writes legislation favorable to it, that these members of Congress introduce and vote on.

Currently, Washington, D.C. is all agog over allegations that Russia attempted to influence the 2016 presidential election that brought the incompetent, unstable and erratic Donald Trump to the White House. The investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign makes almost daily headlines. Politicians of all stripes invoke it in one way or another to get favorable sound bytes on the evening news.

Yet no one is investigating, or even talking about, the other country whose government is spying on U.S. citizens, and which is, for all intents and purposes, buying member of Congress and writing U.S. legislation. That country, of course, is Israel.

For years, the U.S. has had a ‘special’ relationship with Israel. This includes providing Israel, a wealthy, prosperous, First World nation, with more foreign aid than it gives to all other nations combines. It means vetoing in the United Nations any resolution criticizing Israel for its many war crimes and crimes against humanity. It means basing U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, not on what is best for the U.S., but what is best for the Israel.

Although the nature of this ‘special’, albeit dysfunctional relationship has long been known, a documentary recently made by Al-Jazeera clearly exposes it.

In ‘The Lobby’, a pro-Palestinian Jewish man goes undercover as a pro-Israeli lobbyist. He is able to gain the trust and confidence of some of the key players in the pro-Israel lobby network. Among the things exposed by this film are the following:

Pro-Israel lobbies work to counter the growing BDS movement on campus through lies, distortions and half-truths;
AIPAC (American Israel Political Affairs Committee) has a very close relationship with the editorial board of the influential Washington Post;
There is a structured method used by pro-Israel lobbies to get journalists to ask the questions the lobbyists want asked;
Intimidation of BDS activists includes threats of assassination;
Information on BDS activists and activities is collected and used against them, if possible.

What, one wonders, would the reaction be if Russia, for example, was working closely with a prominent U.S. newspaper to assure that its point of view was reflected? How would members of Congress react if the government of Iran were found to be spying on U.S. students? Yet, due to the ‘special relationship’ that the U.S. has with Israel, violation of U.S. laws are overlooked; the privacy of U.S. citizens can be illegally invaded, they can be threatened with bodily harm by representatives of a foreign government, and the U.S. government will simply look the other way.

It would be one thing if some ragtag groups attempted, even successfully, to commit the crimes against U.S. citizens that Israel commits. But these organizations are well-financed and are affiliated with, and have the complete support of, the Israeli government.

In the movie, the director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Strategic Affairs discusses Israel’s close association with the so-called ‘Foundation for Defense of Democracies’, a Washington, D.C.-based neo-conservative think tank. Sima Vaknin-Gil says this, when discussing Israel’s efforts to track BDS activists: “Data gathering, information analysis, working on activist organizations, money trail. This is something that only a country, with its resources, can do the best. We have FDD. We have others working on this.” Included in FDD’s very pro-Israel bias are frequent criticisms of Iran’s charitable organization EIKO, ‘Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Order’, whose mission is to increase the number of schools and other services to the people of Iran.

Why is this allowed? Why does the U.S. allow a foreign government to spy on its citizens for the sole purpose of discrediting them, influence its newspapers and otherwise interfere in its workings? It is certainly a cyclical pattern.

Pro-Israel lobbies ‘donate’ to the campaigns of members of Congress, who, in turn rely on those very generous donations. In order to keep them flowing in future campaigns, the Congress men and women must then do their master’s bidding. As they do so, the rewards, in the form of contributions and ‘fact-finding’ or ‘educational’ trips, for themselves and their spouses to exclusive Israeli resorts, are provided. With these contributions, the Congress members are re-elected, and they, in turn, reward their benefactors. Any close look at those benefactors’ illegal activities in the U.S., or internationally, simply won’t do.

As a result, apartheid is supported, since any nation with separate laws depending on the ethnicity of the citizen must be considered apartheid. Genocide is also supported and financed, every time Israel bombs the Gaza Strip. Violations of international law are condoned with each new illegal settlement.

The maneuverings of pro-Israeli lobbies which operate far outside of U.S. laws are exposed in this documentary. The way money is laundered, campaign contribution laws are violated, and all the attending corruption are on clear view, often vocalized by the very people committing these crimes.

‘The Lobby – USA’ is an amazing and important film, one that has been marginalized by the U.S. media, much like ‘My Name is Rachel’, the story of Rachel Corrie, a young woman from the U.S. who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was repressed short years ago. But the Internet now is far stronger and more ubiquitous then it was when Rachel Corrie’s movie was made. Israel is learning that it can’t hide forever, and ‘The Lobby – USA’ is an important tool in exposing its crimes in the U.S. Its international crimes are well-known, in part due to social media (despite Facebook’s censorship of much information about Israel’s crimes). It is a multi-part film, and is available on Youtube.

It is vitally important for anyone who believes in democracy and justice, and sees those hallmarks of society being violated. A major violator of them on the international stage is Israel. ‘The Lobby – USA’ points this out, with clear, irrefutable facts.

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The Constitutional Right to Boycott Israel

December 20th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

America’s First Amendment affirms fundamental speech and press freedoms. It prohibits congressional legislation prohibiting the exercise of these rights.

A report by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and Palestine Legal discussed “The Palestine Exception to Speech: A Movement Under Attack in the US.”

It covers “widespread and growing suppression of Palestinian human rights advocacy in the United States” – notably on college campuses against students and teachers.

What’s going on has chilling implications for constitutionally guaranteed speech, media and academic freedoms, including an assault on “higher education to help develop critical thinking,” CCR and Palestine Legal explained.

Their report documents “event cancellations, baseless legal complaints, administrative disciplinary actions, firings, and false and inflammatory accusations of terrorism and antisemitism – that Israel advocacy organizations, universities, government actors, and other institutions have used against activists.”

It includes testimonies of supporters of Palestinian rights, targeted for their activism – in deference to Israel and its US lobby.

According to ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project attorney Brian Hauss, the right to boycott Israel is increasingly threatened in the US, saying:

“The First Amendment squarely protects the right to boycott. Lately, though, a legislative assault on that right has been spreading through the United States – designed to stamp out constitutionally protected boycotts of Israel.”

In NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982), a landmark civil rights case, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the organization’s right to boycott white-owned businesses in Mississippi – protesting against segregation and racial injustice, its constitutional right.

The ruling stressed that states may not prohibit peaceful advocacy of a politically-motivated boycott, what First Amendment rights are all about.

In recent years, 26 states enacted legislation violating the Supreme Court’s ruling and fundamental First Amendment rights. They aim to delegitimize BDS activism, prohibiting it, falsely equating it to anti-Semitism.

Beginning in April 2015, anti-BDS legislation and/or executive orders exist in Tennessee, South Carolina, Illinois, Alabama, Colorado, Indiana, Florida, Virginia, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, New York, New Jersey, California, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Texas, Minnesota, Nevada, Kansas, North Carolina, Maryland, Wisconsin, Louisiana, and most recently in Kentucky on November 15, 2018.

Another 13 states are currently considering similar laws, subordinating constitutionally protected rights to Israel’s unlawful apartheid persecution of Palestinians.

Without exception, these laws flagrantly violate the Supreme Court’s 1982 ruling and fundamental First Amendment rights.

In February 2018, Kansas District Judge Daniel Crabtree struck down a state law, requiring all state contractors “certify that they are not engaged in a boycott of Israel.”

The ruling relates to Kansas math teacher Esther Koonz – barred from renewing her teaching contract for her political beliefs.

She supports BDS activism, wanting Israel held accountable for its high crimes against Palestinians.

Kansas House Bill 2409 prohibited state contracts with individuals critical of Israeli actions – a flagrant First Amendment violation.

Judge Crabtree agreed, calling the Kansas law unconstitutional because it “bans (the First Amendment right to support and participate in) political boycotts, which is impermissible.”

Texas elementary school speech pathologist Bahia Amawi was fired for refusing to sign a pro-Israeli pledge, her constitutionally protected right.

Texas law prohibits state employees from “boycott(ing) Israel during the term of the(ir) contact(s),” along with refraining from actions “intended to penalize, inflict economic harm on, or limit commercial relations with Israel, or with a person or entity doing business in Israel or in an Israel-controlled territory.”

On behalf of Amawi, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, sued the state of Texas in federal court, explaining the following:

“Ms. Amawi advocates for boycotts of Israel due to Israel’s continuing violations of international law in its treatment of Palestinians.”

“Specifically, (she) boycotts products created in Israel in support of the peaceful Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.”

She “cannot and will not sign the contract with the ‘No Boycott of Israel’ provision, which is required by state law. As an advocate for Palestinian rights and justice, she cannot in good faith certify or state that she does not boycott Israel, and will not engage in a boycott of Israel.”

She affirmed her constitutional right to boycott Israel, saying

“I couldn’t in good conscience do that.”

“If I did, I would not only be betraying Palestinians suffering under an occupation that I believe is unjust and thus, become complicit in their repression, but I’d also be betraying my fellow Americans by enabling violations of our constitutional rights to free speech and to protest peacefully.”

Her lawsuit states that “(o)n September 17, (she) informed the school district that she would be unable to sign the addendum, citing moral issues.”

“Pflugerville Independent School District informed Ms. Amawi that it would not be able to provide her with payment if she refused to sign the addendum.”

“Ms. Amawi refused to sign and was forced to terminate her contractual relationship with the school district.”

CAIR’s suit is over the state of Texas’ violation of Amawi’s constitutionally protected First Amendment rights, stating:

“Political speech on issues of great national and international importance is central to the purposes of the First Amendment.”

“Speech and advocacy related to the Israel – Palestine conflict is core political speech on a matter of public concern entitled to the highest levels of constitutional protection.”

The landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling explained above was cited, CAIR saying “(e)conomic boycotts for the purposes of bringing about political change are entrenched in American history, beginning with colonial boycotts on British tea.”

“Later, the Civil Rights Movement relied heavily on boycotts to combat racism and spur societal change. The Supreme Court has recognized that non-violent boycotts intended to advance civil rights constitute ‘form(s) of speech or conduct that (are) ordinarily entitled to protection under the First and Fourteenth Amendments.”

The lawsuit seeks to render anti-BDS legislation unconstitutional, along with reinstating Amawi as a teacher in the Pflugerville Independent School District.

The right to boycott and otherwise criticize Israel may ultimately be ruled on by the Supreme Court.

Despite no ambiguity about First Amendment rights, it’s uncertain how the High Court may rule on this vital issue, given its right-wing majority.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

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Tags: Anti-Boycott Law, Anti-Israel Boycott, BDS movement, israel, United States

The People’s Christmas: Art, Tradition and Climate Change

December 20th, 2018 by Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin

COME, bring with a noise,
My merry, merry boys,
The Christmas log to the firing ;
While my good dame, she
Bids ye all be free ;
And drink to your heart’s desiring.

With the last year’s brand
Light the new block, and
For good success in his spending
On your psaltries play,
That sweet luck may
Come while the log is a-teending.

Ceremonies for Christmas by Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
(Psaltries: a kind of guitar, Teending: kindling)

No season has so much association with music as the mid-winter, Christmas celebrations. The aural pleasure associated with the tuneful music and carols of Christmas has been reduced in recent years by the over-playing of same in shopping malls, banks, airports etc. yet it is still enjoyed and the popularity of choirs has not diminished.

However, the visual depictions of mid-winter, Christmas celebration have also been popular since the 19th century through books, cinema and television.

The depictions of Christmas range from religious iconography through to the highly commercialised red-suited, rosy-cheeked, rotund Santa Claus.

Yet, between these two extremes of the sombre sacred and the commercialised secular lies a popular iconography best expressed in the realm of fine art and illustration. Down through the centuries the pagan aspects of mid-winter celebration and Christmas such as the Christmas tree, the Yule log, wassailing and carol singing along with winter sports such as ice skating and skiing have been depicted by many different artists. These paintings and illustrations are also beloved for the visual pleasure they afford.

More importantly, they show aspects of Christmas which are becoming more important now in our time of climate change. That is, their depictions of our past respect for nature.

In recent times, as we gradually learned to harness nature for our own ends through developments in science we also became less and less worried about the vicissitudes of nature. Our forebears, however, knew all too well hunger and cold in the depths of winter and in their own religious and superstitious ways tried to attenuate the worst of winter hardship through traditions and practices which would ensure a bountiful proceeding year.

For example, the Christmas Tree is a descendant of the sacred tree which was respected as a powerful symbol of growth, death and rebirth. Evergreen trees took on meanings associated with symbols of the eternal, immortality or fertility (See my article on Christmas Trees here). Evergreen boughs and then eventually whole evergreen trees were brought into the house to ward off evil influences. Burning the Yule log was an important rite to help strengthen the weakened sun of midwinter.

The Christmas Tree (1911)
Albert Chevallier Tayler (1862–1925)

Wassailing, or blessing of the fruit trees, is also considered a form of tree worship and involves drinking and singing to the health of the trees in the hope that they will provide a bountiful harvest in the autumn. Mumming has also been associated with the spirit of vegetation or the tree-spirit and is believed to have developed into the practice of caroling even though mumming is alive and well in many places in Ireland and England. All these nature-based practices seem to have been banned by the church at different times and then gradually integrated into church rituals (presumably because the church was not able to stop them).

Therefore our relationship with nature was demonstrated through winter activities both inside and outside the home. Outside activities consisted of ice skating, caroling, wassailing, bringing home the Yule log and the Christmas tree. Inside activities consisted of large gatherings of family and friends eating, drinking and parlour games. The indulgence of Christmas activities was balanced by an overriding concern that nature had been propitiated or appeased.

One aspect the many depictions of these activities have in common is the festive gathering of large groups of people. Modern depictions of Christmas tend to emphasise the nuclear family gathered around the Christmas tree with the focus on what Santa brought for the children. Thus Christmas today is experienced as a more isolated experience than in the past. The decline of the nuclear family in recent decades with single parent families, divorce, cohabitation, etc has created extended family gatherings more akin to the past village groupings. Outdoor activities have also declined though one can still hear carollers singing on occasion, though still common in city streets.

Many artists of over the years have tried to depict the essence of Christmas and midwinter traditions (see my article on midwinter traditions here) and thus helped to keep them in our consciences.

Let’s look at some of the illustrations and paintings that depict mid-winter festivities over the centuries.

Carole

Carols

Poetry and song are our earliest records of Christmas celebrations. According to Clement Miles the word “‘carol’ had at first a secular or even pagan significance: in twelfth-century France it was used to describe the amorous song-dance which hailed the coming of spring; in Italian it meant a ring- or song-dance; while by English writers from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century it was used chiefly of singing joined with dancing, and had no necessary connection with religion.”[1] The word carol itself comes from the Old French word carole, a circle dance accompanied by singers (Latin: choraula). Carols were very popular as dance songs and processional songs sung during festivals. In medieval times the Church referred to caroling as “sinful traffic” and issued decrees against it in 1209 A.D. and 1435 A.D. According to Tristram P. Coffin in his Book of Christmas Folklore, “For seven centuries a formidable series of denunciations and prohibitions was fired forth by Catholic authorities, warning Everyman to ‘flee wicked and lecherous songs, dancings, and leapings’” (p98).

Banqueting Hall

Mumming

The processional aspects of caroling are linked to mumming, an ancient tradition which was mentioned in early ecclesiastical condemnations. During the Kalends of January a sermon ascribed to St Augustine of Hippo writes that the heathen reverses the order of things as some of these ‘miserable’ men “are clothed in the hides of cattle; others put on the heads of beasts, rejoicing and exulting that they have so transformed themselves into the shapes of animals that they no longer appear to be men … How vile further, it is that those who have been born men are clothed in women’s dresses, and by the vilest change effeminate their manly strength by taking on the forms of girls, blushing not to clothe their warlike arms in women’s garments; they have bearded faces, and yet they wish to appear women.” [2] The original idea of wearing the hides of animals, Miles writes, may have sprung “from the primitive man’s belief ‘that in order to produce the great phenomena of nature on which his life depended he had only to imitate them’. [3]

Indeed, in Ireland, mumming is a tradition that is still going strong. In a recent article in The Fingal Independent, Sean McPhilibin notes that “In North County Dublin the masking would be traditionally made from straw and would have been big straw hats that cover the face and come down to the shoulders.” McPhilibin also states that mumming was “a mid-winter custom that in Ireland and North County Dublin and in parts of England as well, the masking element is accompanied by a play. So there’s a play in it with set characters. It’s a play where the principal action takes place between two protagonists – a hero and a villain. The hero slays the villain and the villain is revived by a doctor who has a magical cure and after that happens there’s a succession of other characters called in, each of whom has a rhyme. So every character has a rhyme, written in rhyming couplets.[…] The other thing to say about it is that you find these same type of characters all across Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, over into Slovenia and elsewhere.”

James Frazer, in The Golden Bough, discusses at length many international examples of people being being completely covered in straw, branches or leaves as incarnations of the tree-spirit or the spirit of vegetation, such as Green George, Jack-in-the-Green, the Little Leaf Man, and the Leaf King.[4]

Wassail

Wassail

The word wassail comes from Old English was hál, related to the Anglo-Saxon greeting wes þú hál, meaning “be you hale”—i.e., “be healthful” or “be healthy”.

There are two variations of wassailing: going from house to house singing and sharing a wassail bowl containing a drink made from mulled cider made with sugar, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, topped with slices of toast as sops or going from orchard to orchard blessing the fruit trees, drinking and singing to the health of the trees in the hope that they will provide a bountiful harvest in the autumn. They sing, shout, bang pots and pans and fire shotguns to wake the tree spirits and frighten away evil demons.

The wassail itself “is a hot, mulled punch often associated with Yuletide, drunk from a ‘wassailing bowl’. The earliest versions were warmed mead into which roasted crab apples were dropped and burst to create a drink called ‘lambswool’ drunk on Lammas day, still known in Shakespeare’s time. Later, the drink evolved to become a mulled cider made with sugar, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg, topped with slices of toast as sops and drunk from a large communal bowl.” (See traditional wassail recipe here)

Wassail

The Lord of Misrule

The Lord of Misrule was a common tradition that existed up to the early nineteenth century whereby a peasant or sub-deacon appointed to be in charge of Christmas revelries, thus the normal societal roles where reversed temporarily. The Lord of Misrule “would invite traveling actors to perform Mummer’s plays, he would host elaborate masques, hold large feasts and arrange the procession of the annual Yule Log.”

Mummers by Robert Seymour, 1836

The Mount Vernon Yule Log
Jean Leon Gerome Ferris (1863–1930)

The Bean King

During the the Twelfth Night feast a cake or pie would be served which had a bean baked inside. The person who got the slice with the bean would be ‘crowned’ the Bean King with a paper crown and appointed various court officials. A mock respect would be shown when the king drank and all the party would shout “the king drinks”. Robert Herrick mentions this in his poem Twelfth Night: or, King and Queen:

“NOW, now the mirth comes
With the cake full of plums,
Where bean’s the king of the sport here ;
Beside we must know,
The pea also
Must revel, as queen, in the court here.”

Twelfth-night (The King Drinks)
David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690)

The King Drinks (c.1640)
Jacob (Jacques) Jordaens (1593–1678)

Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall (1838)
Daniel Maclise (1806-1870)

Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall (1838)

Daniel Maclise’s painting Merry Christmas in the Baron’s Hall (1838) contains many aspects of the traditional Christmas festivities. The Lord of Misrule stands in the centre holding his staff and leading the procession of musicians and carolers coming down the stairs. Father Christmas, ‘ivy crown’d’, sits in front of the wassail bowl and is surrounded by mummers (the Dragon and St George sit side by side) and local people. On the left side of the picture we see a group of people playing a parlour game called Hunt the Slipper.

Maclise was influenced by Sir Walter Scott’s poem Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field, published in 1808. Marmion is a historical romance in verse of 16th-century Britain, ending with the Battle of Flodden in 1513. Marmion has a section referring to Christmas festivities:

“The wassel round, in good brown bowls,
Garnish’d with ribbons, blithely trowls.
There the huge sirloin reek’d; hard by
Plum-porridge stood, and Christmas pie:
Nor fail’d old Scotland to produce,
At such high tide, her savoury goose.
Then came the merry maskers in,
And carols roar’d with blithesome din;
If unmelodious was the song,
It was a hearty note, and strong.
Who lists may in their mumming see
Traces of ancient mystery;
White shirts supplied the masquerade,
And smutted cheeks the visors made;
But, O! what maskers, richly dight,
Can boast of bosoms half so light!”

(See full text here)

It seems that Maclise was also taken enough by the poem to pen his own poem about his painting which was published in Fraser’s Magazine for May in 1838. The poem is titled: Christmas Revels: An Epic Rhapsody in Twelve Duans and was published under the pseudonym, Alfred Croquis, Esq. The painting includes over one hundred figures covering many different traditions of Christmas and in his poem Maclise describes most of the activities taking place as some these excerpts from the poem demonstrate:

“Before him, ivied, wand in hand,
Misrule’s mock lordling takes his stand;
[…]
Drummers and pipers next appear,
And carollers in motley gear;
Stewards, butlers, cooks, bring up the rear.
Some sit apart from all the rest,
And these for merry masque are drest;
But now they play another part,
Distinct from any mumming art.
[…]
First, Father Christmas, ivy-crown’d,
With false beard white, and true paunch round,
Rules o’er the mighty wassail-bowl,
And brews a flood to stir the soul:
That bowl’s the source of all their pleasures,
That bowl supplies their lesser measures”

(See full text here)

Winter Landscapes

Winter Landscape near a Village
Hendrick Avercamp (1585 (bapt.) – 1634 (buried))

The Hunters in the Snow (1565)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1530–1569)

Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap (1565)
Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1530–1569)

These famous winter landscape paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, such as The Hunters in the Snow and Winter Landscape with Skaters and Bird Trap are all thought to have been painted in 1565. Hendrick Avercamp also made made many snow and ice landscapes coinciding with the Little Ice Age. Three particularly cold intervals have been described as the Little Ice Age: “one beginning about 1650, another about 1770, and the last in 1850, all separated by intervals of slight warming”.

Outdoor Activities: Skating, Markets and Fairs

Patineurs au bois de Boulogne (1868)
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919)

Russian Christmas
Leon Schulman Gaspard (1882-1964)

The Christmas Market in Berlin (1892)
Franz Skarbina (1849-1910)

Nature-Based vs Anti-Nature

Polydore Vergil (c.1470–1555), the Italian humanist scholar, historian, priest and diplomat, who spent most of his life in England, wrote this about Christmas: “Dancing, masques, mummeries, stage-plays, and other such Christmas disorders now in use with the Christians, were derived from these Roman Saturnalian and Bacchanalian festivals; which should cause all pious Christians eternally to abominate them.”[5]

However, Clement Miles takes a more positive view of these traditions. He writes: “The heathen folk festivals absorbed by the Nativity feast were essentially life-affirming, they expressed the mind of men who said “yes” to this life, who valued earthly good things. On the other hand Christianity, at all events in its intensest form, the religion of the monks, was at bottom pessimistic as regards this earth, and valued it only as a place of discipline for the life to come; it was essentially a religion of renunciation that said “no” to the world.” [6]

Now we have a religion of consumerism and mass consumption with Santa Claus as its main protagonist. The one extreme of the sacred St Nicholas has flipped over to the other extreme of Santa, the corporate saint. Either way the pious and the consumer pose no threat to the status quo.

Catharsis

There is no doubt that the Christmas festivities were used by elites as a form of social catharsis. The Lord of Misrule and the Bean King, encouraged by raucous mummers and lively caroling, allowed the lowly to throw off pent-up aggression and feel what it was like to be in a position of power for a very short period of time. This brief social revolution was an important part of midwinter celebrations such as the Roman Kalends and the Feast of Fools. Libanius (c.314–392 or 393), the fourth century Greek philosopher, wrote: “The Kalends festival banishes all that is connected with toil, and allows men to give themselves up to undisturbed enjoyment. From the minds of young people it removes two kinds of dread: the dread of the schoolmaster and the dread of the stern pedagogue. The slave also it allows, so far as possible, to breathe the air of freedom.” [7]

The survivals of an ancient time when man and nature were at peace (see article here), and not enslaved and forced to overexploit our natural resources for the benefit of the few, were allowed to resurface briefly at the time of year when the labouring classes were mostly idle and, once sated, posed little threat. Yet, retaining the memory of past respectful attitudes towards nature and old traditions of social upheaval will go a long way towards healing our damaged home into the future.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on gaelart.net.

Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin is an Irish artist, lecturer and writer. His artwork consists of paintings based on contemporary geopolitical themes as well as Irish history and cityscapes of Dublin. His blog of critical writing based on cinema, art and politics along with research on a database of Realist and Social Realist art from around the world can be viewed country by country here. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Notes

[1] Clement A. Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions: Their History and Significance, Dover Publications, 2017, p47.
[2] Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions, p170.
[3] Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions, p163.
[4] James Frazer, The Golden Bough, Wordsworth, 1994. See: The tree-spirit p297, Green George p126, Jack-in-the-Green p128, the Little Leaf Man p128 and the Leaf King p130.
[5] Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles, 2 vols, New York: Benjamin Blom, Inc., 1965, p118-19
[6] Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions, p25.
[7] Miles, Christmas Customs and Traditions, p168.

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Influencing Foreigners Is What Intelligence Agencies Do. Spreading Disinformation and Confusion

December 20th, 2018 by Philip Giraldi

The Rand Corporation defines America’s influence operations as… “the coordinated, integrated, and synchronized application of national diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and other capabilities in peacetime, crisis, conflict, and post-conflict to foster attitudes, behaviors, or decisions by foreign target audiences that further US interests and objectives. In this view, influence operations accent communications to affect attitudes and behaviors but also can include the employment of military capabilities, economic development, and other real-world capabilities that also can play a role in reinforcing these communications.”

In a world where communications and social networks are global and accessible to many ordinary people, influence operations are the bread-and-butter of many intelligence agencies as a means of waging low intensity warfare against adversaries. During the past week there have been two accounts of how influencing foreign audiences has worked in practice, one relating to Russia and one to Great Britain.

The Russian story is part of the continuing saga of Russiagate. On Monday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released two reports on Russian operations before during and after the 2016 election to influence targeted groups, to include African-Americans, evangelical Christians and Second Amendment supporters to confuse voters about what the candidates stood for. Russia Internet Research Agency, headed by Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, alleged to be a friend of President Vladimir Putin, reportedly coordinated the effort.

The New York Times, slanted in its coverage of the story, claiming that Moscow was “weaponizing” social media and that it was intended to support the candidacy of Donald Trump who “had a Russian blind spot and an army of supporters willing to believe convenient lies and half-truths.” They also dubbed it “a singular act of aggression that ushered in an era of extended conflict.” Of course, one might note that in 2016 the Times itself had a blind spot regarding Hillary Clinton compounded by a bias against Trump and his “deplorable” supporters, while one must also point out that Russian intentions are unknowable unless one were a fly on the wall inside the Kremlin when the US election was under discussion, so one might conclude that the newspaper is itself spreading something like disinformation.

It is undoubtedly true that Russia had a vital national interest in opposing Clinton, whose malevolent intentions towards Moscow were well known. It is also undoubtedly true that there was a campaign of manipulation of social networks by the Kremlin and its proxies to influence readers and also to assess the development of the two major party campaigns. But it also should be observed that the claim that it was seeking to suppress Democratic voters is not really borne out given the other much more conservative demographics that were also targeted. Indeed, involvement by Russia did not alter the outcome of the election and may have had virtually no impact whatsoever, so the claims by the Times that the world is seeing a new form of warfare is clearly exaggerated to reflect that paper’s editorial stance.

The fact that the Times is trying to make the news rather than reporting it is clearly indicted by its sheer speculation that “The Internet Research Agency appears to have largely sat out the 2018 midterm elections, but it is likely already trying to influence the 2020 presidential election, in ways social media companies may not yet understand or be prepared for. And Russia is just the beginning. Other countries, including Iran and China, have already demonstrated advanced capabilities for cyberwarfare, including influence operations waged over social media platforms.” It is certainly convenient to have all one’s enemies collectivized in two sentences, but the Times manages that quite neatly.

The second story, much less reported in the US media, relates to how the British intelligence services have been running their own disinformation operations against Russia, also using social networks and the internet. The British government has been financing a program that was given the name Integrity Initiative. It has been tasked with creating and disseminating disinformation relating to Russia in order to influence the people, armed forces and governments of a number of countries that Moscow constitutes a major threat to the west and its institutions.

Former British intelligence officer and established Russo-phobe Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot Integrity Initiative. The Initiative ironically claims to “Defend Democracy Against Disinformation.” According to leaked documents, the Initiative plants disinformation that includes allegations about the “Russian threat” to world peace using what are referred to as journalists ‘clusters’ in place both in Europe and the United States.

Even though the Institute and Initiative pretend to be independent Non-Government Organizations (NGOs), they are both actually supported financially by the British government, NATO and what are reported to be other state donors, possibly including the United States.

The Integrity Initiative aside, the United States has also long been involved in influence operations, sometimes also referred to as perception management. Even before 9/11 and after the breakup of the Soviet Union the State Department, Pentagon and National Security Agency were all active on the internet in opposing various adversaries, to include terrorist groups. The CIA has been spreading disinformation using paid journalists and arranging foreign elections since 1947. Sometimes US federal government agencies are operating openly, but more often they are using covert mechanisms and cover stories to conceal their identities. America’s internet warriors are adept at spreading misinformation aimed at target audiences worldwide.

The fact is that spreading disinformation and confusion are what governments and intelligence services do to protect what they consider to be vital interests. It is naïve for the US Senate and America’s leading newspapers to maintain that intelligence probing and other forms of interference from Russia or China or Iran or even “friend” Israel occur in a vacuum. Everyone intrudes and spreads lies and everyone will continue to do it because it is easy to understand and cheap to run. In the end, however, its effectiveness is limited. In 2016 the election result was determined by a lack of trust on the part of the American people for what the establishment politicians have been offering, not because of interference from Moscow.

Originally published on Strategic Culture Foundation

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Don’t Be Fooled, Trump’s “Withdrawal” From Syria Isn’t What It Seems

December 20th, 2018 by Andrew Korybko

Trump’s decision to “withdraw” US troops from Syria is being universally praised by all but his “deep state” foes, but things aren’t exactly as they seem and the celebrations might be premature because this deceptive move simply changes the nature of the Hybrid Wars on Syria, Iran, and Pakistan by making them less kinetic but nevertheless equally dangerous.

Trump supposedly “defied” his foes in America’s permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic bureaucracies (“deep state”) by ordering the “withdrawal” of American troops from Syria, which is being celebrated across the world as a pragmatic peacemaking gesture that’s long overdue. The fact of the matter, however, is that this isn’t the so-called “retreat” that some in the Alt-Media are portraying it as but is actually a cunning move for more cost-effectively advancing the US’ military, political, and ultimately strategic objectives in the Arab Republic and beyond.

On the surface, it appears to some that Trump flinched in the face of Erdogan’s threat to commence an anti-terrorist intervention east of the Euphrates in the US-occupied corner of Syria and basically betrayed America’s Kurdish allies there, but the “withdrawal” should instead be seen as keeping the Kurds in check and preempting a possible Turkish campaign against them there by getting them to curb their ambitions as part of a pragmatic US-brokered deal between them an Ankara. Still, even if Turkey does indeed intervene, then that doesn’t necessarily mean that the YPG-led SDF will be destroyed.

Most observers overlooked the US Special Representative for Syria’s statement earlier this month that his country was deliberating the creation of an Iraqi-style “no-fly zone” following a possible withdrawal of its grounds from there, which the author drew attention to in his piece at the time about how “The US Might Withdraw From Syria If A ‘No-Fly Zone’ Is Imposed In The Northeast”. The argument put forth in that analysis is that it would be much more cost-effective and less risky for the US to control the agriculturally, hydrologically, and energy-rich corner of Northeastern Syria from the air through a “no-fly zone” than through “boots on the ground”.

Under such a scenario, which is veritably plausible following Trump’s public reassurance that the “withdrawal” doesn’t imply the end of its military mission in Syria, the US and some of its “Coalition of the Willing” allies could maintain control of the region through aerial means and therefore keep Turkish, Syria, and especially Iranian forces at bay if they violate the so-called “deconfliction line” that the Pentagon imposed along the Euphrates over the past two years

This could ensure that the US-backed but Kurdish-controlled SDF doesn’t lose its predominant position in the region even in the event that Turkey launches a small-scale intervention there because it could ultimately be “contained” by the US and its allies’ de-facto “no-fly zone”. Thus, given that the “withdrawal” of American troops probably won’t have any practical on-the-ground consequences, this move should therefore be seen as a mostly political one aimed at achieving several objectives.

Most immediately, the optics of an American military “withdrawal” from Syria are supposed to catalyze the stalled peace process and create the conditions for pronounced international pressure to be brought upon Iran to follow suit, which is in alignment with President Putin’s unofficial peace plan for the country which the author touched upon in his piece last month about how “Russia’s Non-Denial About Brokering Iran’s Withdrawal From Syria Is A Big Deal”.

Furthermore, “Israel’s” publicly expressed concerns over this development could push it even further under Russian tutelage as Moscow progressively replaces Washington as Tel Aviv’s patron per the model that the author described in his summer analysis about how “It’s Official, ‘Israel’ Is Now A Joint Russian-American Protectorate”. In hindsight, it shouldn’t be seen as a coincidence that Russian and “Israeli” military officials recently visitedone another in the run-up to Trump’s announcement, suggesting that they were either informed of it in advance or accurately forecast this development and decided to publicly intensify their military relations with each other in response.

Apart from the Syrian-related analytical angle, Trump is also signaling to the Taliban (whether sincerely or not) that the US is seriously contemplating pulling its troops out of Afghanistan too, which is the group’s main condition for continuing the unofficial peace talks between the two sides. That said, it’s doubtful that the US would surrender its strategic presence in the tri-regional crossroads between Central, South, and West Asia and will probably end up replacing any of its “withdrawn” troops with mercenaries, which might be a “face-saving compromise” between itself and the Taliban but one which might deliberately drive a wedge between the so-called “moderate” and “hardline” factions of the second-mentioned and possibly “provoke” dissatisfied elements to “defect” to Daesh (which could in turn be blamed on Pakistan for escalating the ongoing Hybrid War on that country).

Lastly, Trump wants to show the American public that he’s keeping his campaign pledge to (at least conventionally) draw down the War on Syria following the Republicans’ loss of the House last month and ahead of the 2020 elections, knowing that the Democrats will hold his feet to the fire over that unfulfilled pledge and weaponize it as part of election campaign against him if he doesn’t make visible progress on that front (and possibly also in Afghanistan too per the aforementioned scenario). In view of this, domestic political interests might have also played an influential role behind Trump’s decision and the specific timing thereof.

Altogether, while the US’ “withdrawal” from Syria is certainly a welcoming move that will undoubtedly do a lot to advance the stalled peace process in the war-torn country, it’s nevertheless much more of a cunning strategy aimed at comprehensively advancing a wide range of interests than the supposed “retreat” that some are “victoriously” celebrating it as. The US’ Hybrid Wars against Syria, Iran, and also Pakistan aren’t stopping any time soon, but it’s just that they’re evolving in response to new conditions and taking on less kinetic forms that are still more than capable of creatively shaping events in America’s favor so long as its intended targets don’t understand the nature of the new threats that they’re facing.

Originally published on Eurasia Future

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Christmas: Endorse the Teachings of Jesus Christ, the Political Activist. Confront Today’s “Money Changers in the House of God”

December 20th, 2018 by Philip A Farruggio

Funny how so many ‘ so called’ Christians kneel and perform such pomp and circumstance every December 25th. All the beautiful Christmas decorations and wonderful seasonal songs are in fitting tribute to … WHAT? Do any of the myriad of hypocrites and phony spiritual seekers ever actually read what the baby Jesus said as a man:

” And when the people saw him come they said ‘All hail! Behold the king!’ But Jesus answered not; he saw the money changers in the house of God, and he was grieved. The courts had been converted into marts of trade, and men were selling lambs and doves for offerings of sacrifice. And Jesus called the priests and said ‘ Behold, for paltry gain you have sold out the temple of the Lord. This house ordained for prayer is now a den of thieves. Can good and evil dwell together in the courts of God? I tell you NO!’

And then he made a scourge of cords and drove the merchants out. He overturned their boards, and threw their money on the floor. He opened the cages of the captive birds, and cut the cords that bound the lambs, and set them free. The priests and scribes rushed out, and they would have done him harm, but they were driven back; the common people stood in his defense.”

To this writer the priests and scribes were symbolic of today’s religious, political and media hypocrites who flourish in great comfort and style. Jesus laid into them as well:

” Woe unto you , you Pharisees and Scribes! you love the highest seats in synagogues and courts, and bid for salutations in the marketplace. Woe unto you, you tinseled gentry of the land! No man would EVER think of you as servants of the Lord of hosts by what you do… Woe unto you, you masters of the law! You heap great burdens on the sons of men, yea, loads by far too great for them to bear, and you will never help to bear a feather’s weight yourselves… Woe unto you, you masters of the law! You snatch the keys of knowledge from the hands of men… “

Putting materialism and crazy consumerism aside when each Christmas season is once again upon us, please focus on something else for a moment.

Stating it succinctly, those who run our Military Industrial Empire have hijacked Jesus! They begin with the baby born in but a manger, and snatch him right up until he is crucified.

Even that aspect of his ending has been skewed. The fools and hypocrites who run this empire and influence many of its religions will tell you that his purpose here on earth was to ‘ Die for your sins’.

They go on to tell you how the Heaven after our death is all that counts etc etc. Yogananda, the great Hindu teacher who introduced yoga to the West, and even taught it to Gandhi , revered Jesus as the Logos or The Christ.

He revealed how this carnal existence is but a dream, and the manner in which each of us acts and behaves in this dream is so ever important to what will follow us after we leave this plane.

Reading the New Testament carefully will instruct anyone who really cares that what Jesus stood for was unconditional Love and forgiveness … and just as paramount: JUSTICE! As the old saying goes: ” Let justice prevail or may the heavens fall!”

Happy Christmas!

PA Farruggio

December 2018

Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, ,Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, , Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected] )

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Socialism at the Forefront of South Africa’s New Political Party

December 20th, 2018 by Palesa Dlamini

A socialist South Africa led by the working class – this is the vision of the of the newly registered political party, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers’ Party (SRWP).

At the party’s two-day long pre-launch conference, which began on Friday at the Birchwood Hotel in Boksburg, over a thousand delegates from different parts of the country congregated to discuss, among other things, what it means to promote socialism in South Africa.

According to SRWP acting spokesperson Phakamile Hlubi-Majola, this was the party’s first national gathering since a decision was taken to establish the organisation.

“This conference is an opportunity for us to get a sense of where we are in terms of the work that we have done over the last year. We will also speak about our values and general socialist principles of fighting for a society where land is owned by the working class, where the wealth is shared among us and where the mineral wealth of the country is owned by the people,” she said.

At a special national congress held by the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa) in 2013, the organisation made the decision to start a political party that put the needs of the marginalised and most affected by issues like poverty and unemployment, first.

SWRP national convener, Irvin Jim, explained: “In 2013 the central committee of Numsa resolved that we must convene a special national congress to reflect on the fact that the country was on a downward spiral, but only the working class is affected,” he said.

“Workers then decided that the working class must organise itself by forming a worker’s party and, we were very clear at the time, that workers must also present a united front to champion their struggles.That is how the party came about.”

Hlubi-Majola, who is also Numsa’s spokesperson, added, “we had realised that the political system had failed the working class. It was then decided that Numsa would do the work to give birth to a worker’s party whose focus would be to drive the agenda for the working class in South Africa and fight capitalism.”

According to Jim, the pre-launch conference would see the party make decisions as a build-up to the formal launch, which will take place early next year. Jim, who is also Numsa’s secretary-general, said that he was happy with the party’s progress since Numsa’s decision.

“The party is growing fast and has a presence in all nine provinces. We have a sizeable number of national leadership and branches all over the country,” he said.

Jim said that the “party is registered and we are eligible to participate in the elections next year.” However, he wasn’t able to say if the party will contest the elections.

“As communists we have an old view that elections are not necessarily a solution, however, they are a tactic that can be explored to test if we have the support of the working class.”

Earlier this year, the IEC rejected the party’s application to register due to issues relating to its name and logo. But in November the SRWP’s registration was finally approved.

According to Jim, the party is made up of some member’s of SA Federation of Trade Unions, members of the young nurse’s indaba trade union and members of the working class, who have come from other political parties.

Milo Semenya (48), a teacher in Klerksdorp and member of the SRWP, said that he was tired of a government that had not done enough for educators.

“I was a member of the SA Communist Party since 1990, but now I am a member of the SRWP. As educators we experience things like bullying from students, we lack resources and infrastructure. This is because the government is doing nothing to protect us or supply [us with] what we need,” he said.

“SRWP is my hope now. It represents us, the workers, those who work the hardest. I believe they will bring change.”

Earlier this week, former SABC chief operating office, Hlaudi Motsoaneng, launched his own political party, the African Content Movement (ACM), which he said would contest Cyril Ramaphosa’s presidency during the national elections next year.

Featured image: SRWP members hold up the party banner at the pre-launch. Picture: Palesa Dlamini

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“We Want Goldman Sachs Here”: This Is Malaysia’s Playbook For Prosecuting 1MDB Case

December 20th, 2018 by Zero Hedge

“Bring me Goldman Sachs!”

As outlandish as it might sound, Malaysian authorities are in the process of dragging the bank – or at least, some of its employees and subsidiaries – to Malaysia to face criminal charges filed against subsidiaries of the bank, as well as two senior bankers (who have also been indicted in the US), over charges alleging that the bank lied in its bond covenants with the intention of misleading investors in the three bond issuances it handled for 1MDB, and that Goldman knew corrupt Malaysian officials were preparing to loot 1MDB, the sovereign wealth fund at the center of one of history’s largest money laundering scandals, but chose to pursue the deals anyway.

In a guide to how the criminal charges filed yesterday against three subsidiaries of the bank and two of its employees, Bloomberg explained that Malaysian prosecutor M Kurup, who has been tasked with overseeing the case, isn’t playing around. “We want Goldman Sachs here,” he said.

Malaysian trials are similar to the English common law system (upon which they are based):

Criminal court proceedings are public and open to all, barring exceptions made by a judge or a court gag order. (Najib’s lawyers have sought such an order for his case to prevent a “trial by media.”) Malaysia’s legal system won’t be altogether alien to western companies and lawyers, since it’s fashioned on English common law. (Malaysia gained independence from Britain in the 1950s.) So there’s a presumption of innocence for defendants and a requirement by prosecutors to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. Goldman’s cases would be tried by a judge, highlighting one difference from English law: Malaysia scrapped juries in 1995. The seriousness of the charges — which carry fines for businesses and jail terms of up to 10 years and fines for individuals — means defendants are required to attend. A trial might be delayed or lengthened if the prosecution attempts to subpoena overseas-based personnel. “We want Goldman Sachs here,” said Malaysia’s prosecutor M Kurup.

The bank will be given the opportunity to make its defense – namely, that it was misled by corrupt Malaysian officials.

Goldman said the charges came without a chance for the firm to provide its view. “Certain members of the former Malaysian government and 1MDB lied to Goldman Sachs, outside counsel and others about the use of proceeds from these transactions,” the bank said in a statement. “1MDB, whose CEO and board reported directly to the prime minister at the time, also provided written assurances to Goldman Sachs for each transaction that no intermediaries were involved.” According to Nizam Ismail, a partner at RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP in Singapore, a criminal conviction against one or more Goldman units could “affect their status as fit and proper persons” and impact their standings as licensed entities. “Regulators that are regulating Goldman entities worldwide will be watching developments in Malaysia closely,” he said. In the U.S., criminal convictions against banks used to be considered a death sentence, but they’ve become common-place after a flurry of currency-rigging cases.

But perhaps the most concerning aspect of this criminal case is the possible culpability of senior Goldman executives, including CEO David Solomon and CFO Stephen Scherr, both of whom were involved with the committees of senior partners who signed off on the deal. Unlike previous Goldman scandals, 1MDB is unique in that it originated with Goldman’s investment bank – not its trading desk, which is notorious for ripping off the faces of clients, according to CNBC.

“Anyone who’s been there a long time knows you can’t do big things without senior people knowing, period,” said one former Goldman employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he still has dealings with the bank. “No matter how senior you are, there’s always somebody above you. So a lot of people had to decide they were comfortable committing billions of dollars to this.”

Goldman has argued that it couldn’t have known that corrupt Malaysian financier Jho Low was planning to plunder 1MDB (DOJ officials allege $4.5 billion was diverted into slush funds and used to pay bribes). But it’s becoming increasingly clear to all that the bank knew the deals – which generated a staggering $600 million in fees (on $6.5 billion in business) due to the bank’s need to hold the bonds on its books instead of immediately pawning them off on investors. The bank said 1MDB didn’t care about the higher fees because it wanted the capital “right away”. That this also didn’t raise red flags doesn’t reflect well on Goldman’s compliance systems, which current Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed joked “don’t work very well.”

The upshot: As the DOJ probe ramps up and governments from Switzerland and Singapore pursue prosecutions of their own related to the 1MDB fraud, Goldman won’t be able to simply write off the Malaysians as a side show to the maneuvering of prosecutors in the US. And that probably doesn’t bode well for Goldman’s battered share price.

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Blocking Nord Stream 2: To Fight “Russian Dictatorship,” US Dictates to Europe

December 20th, 2018 by Tony Cartalucci

Bloomberg in its article, “U.S. House Passes Resolution Opposing Russian Gas Pipeline,” would report:

The U.S. House of Representatives approved a largely symbolic resolution expressing opposition to Gazprom PJSC’s $11 billion Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, on concerns that the project will boost the Kremlin’s control over Europe’s energy supplies.

Bloomberg would also report:

While the resolution is non-binding, it highlights growing Congressional opposition to the Russian project. The Trump administration is reviewing potential sanctions against the European companies involved. The pipeline, which would send Russian gas to Germany, has financing agreements with Engie SA and Royal Dutch Shell Plc, among others.

By passing this resolution, the United States presumes to dictate to all of Europe who they can and cannot do business with.

And while the resolution itself is “non-binding,” the resolution itself admits it:

…supports the imposition of sanctions with respect to Nord Stream II under section 232 of the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (22 U.S.C. 9526).

The Nord Stream 2 pipeline circumvents Ukraine through which Russia had previously shipped natural gas to the rest of Europe. The Russian Federation, and before that, the Soviet Union had for decades reliably supplied Europe with natural gas through Ukraine.

It was not until an openly US-backed putsch swept the elected government of Ukraine from power in 2014 and transformed Ukrainian foreign policy into being openly hostile toward Moscow, that gas flow was jeopardized, prompting Russia to pursue alternatives – including Nord Stream 2.

US Dictates to Europe to Save it from a “Russian Dictatorship?”

Russia’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline is not a unilateral project – it includes partners from Germany such as Uniper SE and Wintershall, as well as Dutch natural gas infrastructure and transportation company, Gasunie.

The pipeline has also been approved by the elected German government itself.

German public media, Deutsche Welle (DW), in an article titled, “Germany approves Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline,” would report:

Germany has given a green light to the construction of the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea, the Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency said Tuesday.

The decision means all legal hurdles to building a 31-kilometer (20 mile) section of the pipeline in Germany’s exclusive economic zone have been cleared. In January, authorities approved construction of a gas pipeline segment in German territorial waters.

In what is essentially a bilateral deal between Germany and Russia, the US – from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean – “expresses opposition” to the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and is preparing to target companies involved to prevent the pipeline’s completion and use.

It is the ultimate irony and the pinnacle of hypocrisy that the US claims in its own resolution that Russia seeks to “control” European energy markets while the US House resolution itself is an open demonstration of Washington’s desire to control European energy policy.

Where Europe buys its energy would presumably be Europe’s – not Washington’s – business. It is unlikely that Washington would respond well to Europe attempting to pressure the United States into drastically changing its energy policy for whatever reason – particularly through coercive economic sanctions.

“Diversifying” Means Buying Anglo-American Petrochemicals

The US resolution mentions the Southern Gas Corridor as part of US “policy to support European energy security through diversification of supplies.”

That pipeline connects gas taken mostly from the Shah Deniz gas field in Azerbaijan which is jointly owned by British Petroleum and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR), but also Turkish and Russian interests as well.

What the US resolution does not mention – likely recognizing just how transparent US motivations would be if it did – is the other option the US is promoting EU energy diversification with.

In Politico’s 2014 article, “US pushes for EU energy diversification,” this other option would be spelled out. The article would admit (emphasis added):

In a joint statement issued this morning, the US and EU said that both sides underlined the importance of co-operation on smart grids, energy storage, nuclear fusion, hydrogen and fuel cells, energy efficiency, nuclear and unconventional hydrocarbons (shale gas).

By 2018, Forbes would report in its article, “The U.S. Is Still The Global Natural Gas King,” that:

In 2017, the U.S. produced an average of 71.1 billion cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) of natural gas. That’s a 1.0% increase from 2016 production, but not quite good enough to beat the 2015 record of 71.6 Bcf/d.

Forbes would put the numbers in perspective, reporting:

…natural gas production for the entire Middle East was 63.8 Bcf/d. Russia, in second place among countries, saw its natural gas production surge by 8.2%, but at 61.5 Bcf/d that was still well behind the U.S.

But two fundamental problems impede US energy dominance in Europe.

First, Russia has more proven natural gas reserves than the US. Forbes itself would admit that US domination of gas production would only last a few more years.

Second, transporting gas across the Atlantic Ocean as liquid natural gas (LNG) is more expensive than through existing pipelines delivering Russian gas to Europe.

These are not conclusions drawn by Gazprom executives or the Kremlin, but rather America’s own corporate-funded policymakers.

A 2014 Brookings Institution report titled, “Why Russian Natural Gas Will Dominate European Markets,” would admit:

LNG is more expensive, and it will take many years to get other competitive supplies, for instance from the Caspian region, into the market.

If the US cannot possibly compete in free and fair markets, why is Washington so confident it can still “support European energy security through diversification of supplies?”

US Uses Coercion/Conflict to Compensate for Inability to Compete

To compensate for America’s inability to compete through free and fair markets, Washington has resorted to a number of more dubious measures.

The 2014 violent overthrow of the Ukrainian government and the subsequently hostile regime Washington is backing in Kiev is one part of this equation.

Provocations including the more recent Kerch Strait incident help maintain political pressure on Moscow and attempt to ratchet up tensions between Moscow and its European energy partners.

Moving NATO up to Russia’s borders through such provocations helps produce and maintain wider tensions and instability amid Russian-European ties.

Passing resolutions opposing Russian pipelines and threatening economic sanctions against companies based in supposedly “allied” states is another measure.

The now 2-year-long “Russiagate” disinformation campaign, vilifying Russia is yet another.

Articles and editorials across the Western media are piggybacking on the “Russiagate” narrative and resulting Russophobia to sell America’s rationale for undermining European sovereignty by dictating who European nations can and cannot do business with.

US State Department-funded and directed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) in its September 2018 article, “Pipeline From Hell? Nord Stream 2 And Why It’s So Contentious,” is one such example.

The article claims:

Nord Stream 2 has been sharply criticized by several countries, both within the EU and abroad. Opponents of the project fear the pipeline will increase the bloc’s substantial dependence on Russian gas and argue that it runs counter to international sanctions imposed on Russia following its annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula.

The article eventually admits nations “sharply criticizing” Nord Stream 2 “both within the EU and abroad,” are actually the United States and its US-NATO proxies in Poland, the Baltic states, and of course Ukraine.

The article admits:

Germany, Italy, and others still appear to be happy to make deals with Russian gas monopoly Gazprom, but countries from the former Eastern Bloc, such as Poland, have become especially wary of Moscow’s growing influence.

It also admits:

Latvia and Estonia have echoed Polish and Lithuanian concerns. All three Baltic states and Poland have signed a joint letter that calls Nord Stream 2 “an instrument of Russian state policy,” which “should be seen in the broader context of today’s Russian information and cyber-hostilities and military aggression.”

While the article – and many others like it – suggest Nord Stream 2 is an “instrument of Russian state policy” and represents a threat to Europe’s independence, US opposition to the pipeline and Russian energy supplies to Europe in general have manifested itself in the form of political meddling, economic coercion, and even violent coups and conflict as seen in Ukraine from 2014 onward.

At the end of the day, if “Germany, Italy and others are happy to make deals” with Russia, why would the US – self-appointed arbiter of global freedom and democracy – presume to have a say otherwise?

How do deep economic ties between Europe and Russia pose a problem to regional or global peace when the alternative – as the US clearly demonstrates – is not only a growing political, economic, and even military confrontation with Russia – but also the economic coercion and threatening of America’s own European allies?

Little adds up regarding America’s narrative regarding Nord Stream 2. What is clear through objective observation is Washington’s desire to eliminate a competitor at all costs – and to do so not through actual competition, but through coercion and the threat of increasingly dangerous conflict specifically because it cannot compete economically.

Since the US admittedly cannot compete economically, its success or failure will depend entirely on its ability to wield its wide arsenal of “soft power” weaponry – coercion, subversion, sanctions, and conflict by proxy. How far the US will go to ensure success is a matter only time can tell.

Originally posted on New Eastern Outlook

Tony Cartalucci, Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

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Agreed Rules, COP24 and Climate Change Protest

December 20th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

“If children can get headlines all over the world just by not going to school, then imagine what we can alldo together if we really wanted to.” Greta Thunberg at COP24, Dec. 2018

The world, if it goes off in a burn, will do so courtesy of the rules – or their elastic interpretation. It was a fine show of contradiction at Katowice, and the Polish hospitality did not deter the 14,000 delegates drawn from 195 countries from bringing forth a beast of regulation to delight climate change bureaucrats for years. Everyone clapped themselves in way emetic to any bystander suspicious about what had actually been achieved. The question to ask, of course, is whether this fluffy, self-congratulatory exercise makes it past the canapés and becomes a genuine policy document.

Little progress was actually made on the issue of commitments to cut emissions, even if there was, in principle, an agreement on a set of rules to implement the 2015 Paris Agreement. As things stand, the planet is set to reach 3°C, while the Paris Agreement stresses the need to keep matters manageable to an increase of 1.5°C, which would lead to more modest environmental destruction. Considerable troubling silences persist on the issue of technicalities. What, for instance, constitutes a suitable, measurable reduction in emissions or who monitors a country’s progress.

There were certain concessions. Poorer states received more solid reassurances of assistance from wealthier states to deal with greenhouse-gas emissions and attendant environmental challenges. China was pressed into accepting certain uniform guidelines to measure those emissions. States who cannot follow the “rules” to reduce emissions must explain why and show a pathway to redress that failure, more a case of nudging than punishment.

Coal advocates would not, however, have left COP24 dispirited. Poland’s own president, Andrzej Duda, gave a rumbustious display of refusal: his country, with 80 percent of its energy derived from coal, could not be asked to abandon 200 years’ worth of reserves before the idealistic abstinence of any green lobby. Poland, not the planet, came first.

Michal Kurtyka, COP24’s chair and secretary of state in the Ministry of Environment, saw little by way of contradiction in a performance run by the Polish Coal Miners Band during the talks, nor coal displays in the foyer greeting guests. It would have been silly, surmised Kurtyka, to dismiss the coal industry. “There are also energy companies of course engaging in a path of sustainable development.”

But a certain smell lingered at COP24, the sense that the conference had been sponsored by the very same entities whose behaviour was to be controlled and, in the future, abolished altogether. Kurtyka did little to dispel the aroma. “I don’t sense that there is a problem with anybody’s participation, provided that we have the same goal.”

The climate change talks were also being held, as it were, in the den of fossil fuel symbolism. Katowice was made by the legacy of coal rich reserves discovered in the mid-eighteenth century. Such delightful irony, as well, that the city could play host both to such a conference and the largest coal company in the European Union.

This did not deter Joanna Flisowska, a Katowice native and policy coordinator on coal for Climate Action Network (CAN) Europe. “We can be such a bright example for the transition away from coal if only we could put effort into using these opportunities.”

On other fronts, the climate change lobby has taken something of a battering. France’s Emmanuel Macron granted some concession to massive protests against fuel-tax rises supposedly designed to curb greenhouse-gas emissions. Living standards have squared off against environmental policies.

The result of the foot dragging has been to illustrate a growing divide between citizen and government official. “Hope,” claimed a despondent May Boeve, executive director of the climate change campaign group 350.org, “now rests on the shoulders of the many people who are rising to take action: the inspiring children who started an unprecedented wave of strikes in school to support a fossil-free [sic] future; the 1,000-plus institutions that committed to pull their money out of coal, oil, and gas, and the many communities worldwide who keep resisting fossil fuel development.”

Australia is particularly illustrative of this point, something emphasised by Greenpeace chief executive David Ritter. “The divide between the Government and the young people of Australia is probably the greatest it’s been since those huge protests of the Vietnam War era, and I think it’s for a similar reason.”

Students of varying ages certainly add to Ritter’s suggestions, with thousands of Australian school children taking to the streets in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, Coffs Harbour and Bendigo, to name but a spread of Australian cities, insisting that Prime Minister Scott Morrison heed their calls. “The politicians aren’t listening to us when we try to ask nicely for what we want and for what we need,” suggested an irate Castlemaine student Harriet O’Shea Carre. “So now we have to go to extreme lengths and miss out on school.”

It was, however, a 15-year-old Swede by the name of Greta Thunberg, whose single person vigil outside Sweden’s parliament building featured the sign “school strike for climate change”. Three weeks were spent sitting in front of the Parliament during school hours, though she did return to classes for four days, using Friday as her weekly day of protest.

At Katowice, she made her own mark, a scolding aunt in the body of a disturbed teenager. “You are not mature enough to tell it like is,” she told delegates in her capacity as a representative of Climate Justice Now. “Even that burden you leave us children.”

Thunberg is right about one fundamental point. “You have ignored us in the past, and you will ignore us again.” But to ignore the future in favour of the present, to cobble together an ineffectual regime that privileges current living standards in the hope that devastation can be postponed, is an inherent condition of the species. Fiddling as the planet burns will continue.

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]

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Inside the Temple of Covert Propaganda: The Integrity Initiative and the UK’s Scandalous Information War

December 20th, 2018 by Mohamed Elmaazi

Recent hacked documents have revealed an international network of politicians, journalists, academics, researchers and military officers, all engaged in highly deceptive covert propaganda campaigns funded by the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and hardline national security institutions.

This “network of networks”, as one document refers to them, centers around an ironically named outfit called the Integrity Initiative. And it is all overseen by a previously unknown England-based think tank registered in Scotland, the Institute for Statecraft, which has operated under a veil of secrecy.

The whole operation appears to be run by, and in conjunction with, members of British military intelligence.

According to David Miller, professor of political sociology in the school of policy studies at the University of Bristol and the director of the Organization for Propaganda Studies, the Integrity Initiative “appears to be a military directed push.”

“The most senior government people are professional propagandists and spooks,” Miller explained. “The ‘charity’ lead on this [Chris Donnelly] was also appointed as a colonel in military intelligence at the beginning of the project — a truly amazing fact that suggests this is a military intelligence cut out.”

A minister for the UK FCO has officially confirmed that it has been funding the Integrity Network.

In addition to conducting diplomacy, the FCO oversees both the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) the UK equivalent to the National Security Agency, and the Secret Intelligence Services (SIS) commonly known as MI6.

SOURCE: National Intelligence Machinery, UK government briefing November 2010

The think tank that oversees the Integrity Initiative, the Institute for Statecraft, has also received funding from the British Army and Ministry of Defense.

This is pretty major. UK govt admits that not only the Foreign Office but also the Army and the Ministry of Defence have funded the Institute for Statecraft, the body behind anti-Corbyn propaganda. https://t.co/hl87oulr5t pic.twitter.com/uaROch5ivG

— Mark Curtis (@markcurtis30) December 14, 2018

That scandal involved the unmasking of “more than 400 American journalists who…in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency,” as Carl Bernstein revealed in a 1977 Rolling Stone report.

The exposing of the Integrity Initiative has just scratched the surface of what appears to be a much more sophisticated, insidious, and extremely online version of Operation Mockingbird. With new internal documents appearing each week through a hacker’s organization called Anonymous Europe, the revelations are yielding one of the most potentially explosive national security scandals in recent times.

But even as members of Britain’s parliament thunder with demands for official accountability, the UK and US mainstream media still strangely refuses to touch the story.

Smearing left-wing political figures in NATO member states

The Integrity Initiative claims that it is “counter[ing] Russian disinformation and malign influence,” and indeed, the main players behind it appear intent on hyping the Russian threat to justify ramped up military budgets and a long-term war footing.

Above: An Institute for Statecraft memo emphasizes the need for “ramping up” anti-Russian messaging

But the Integrity Initiative has also trained its fire on perceived subversives inside NATO member states, including the UK.

An article attacking left-wing activists that was listed in the “Recent Posts” section of the Integrity Initiative website

The Integrity Initiative waged a successful covert campaign to destroy the appointment of Pedro Baños to Director of Spain’s National Security Department on the bogus grounds that he was “pro-Kremlin,” thus interfering in the affairs of a fellow EU and NATO member. It carried out the hit job through a hand-picked “cluster” of Spanish politicians and operatives to flood social media and sympathetic outlets with messages demonizing Baños.

Above: an Integrity Initiative document detailing how the group’s clusters destroyed a Spanish national security appointee.

The Integrity Initiative appears to have employed the same tactics to smear left-wing journalists and political figures across the West, including the leader of the UK’s Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.

This UK government-funded, bogus McCarthyite “monitoring group” the Integrity Initiative repeatedly smeared Jeremy Corbyn, while it claims to “defend democracy against disinformation.”

These are effectively state-sponsored attacks on Corbyn and the left.https://t.co/a5V00Myw6r pic.twitter.com/sUP3C9SJ1I

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) November 27, 2018

Member of Parliament Chris Williamson – a close ally of Corbyn – is now openly and indignantly calling for “a public inquiry into the Integrity Initiative and similar information war efforts being funded by our government.”

It is not necessarily illegal for the FCO to direct propaganda towards its own citizenry, according to Miller of the Organization for Propaganda Studies. However, he said that “it is not legal for ministers to effectively direct a charity. Thus, if the MoD through military intelligence are effectively running a charity, that would be contrary to law.”

An abandoned mill in Scotland covers for an active office in London’s “Temple”

To conceal its potentially illegal activities, the Institute for Statecraft has employed a web of deceptions. Not only did they hide their government funding, the outfit listed a fake location as its address.

Mohammed Elmaazi, a co-author of this piece, discovered the elaborately hidden location of the Institute for Statecraft inside a posh warren of barristers’ offices in London. Elmaazi’s swift ejection from the premises confirmed the lengths that this shadowy organization continues to go to to avoid public scrutiny.

The Institute for Statecraft, is a registered charity in Scotland, whose registered office is listed as being an old mill in Fife Scotland involved in the “manufacture of wood and other products.” David Scott of UK Column news, visited the registered office in Fife only to find a “an empty, semi-derelict, partly demolished, building.”

The partially demolished address at Gateside Mills. Photo: David Scott

While the address in Fife, Scotland appears to be a derelict building, the London address listed in the hacked documents is fully operational, so far as Elmaazi could tell.

He located the offices belonging to The Institute for Statecraft at the Embankment at Two Temple Place in London. It shares offices in the basement of a “spectacular neo-gothic mansion” which is owned or leased by The Bulldog Trust, an organization dedicated to “promoting culture and philanthropy”. This area, known as “the Temple,” is filled with barristers’ chambers and used to serve as the precinct for the Knights of Templar.

A Christmas themed projection lights up the walls of 2 Temple Place. Photo: Mohamed Elmaazi

Elmaazi found the offices on December 6, having nearly given up and becoming convinced that he would discover nothing more than was found at the derelict house in Fife. When he arrived at the location, preparations were underway for some sort of Christmas-themed event to be held in the main building on the ground floor. But upon discovering the signs pointing downstairs to the basement, Elmaazi found himself staring at a door with a sign that read, “The Institute for Statecraft / The Fore.”

Photo: Mohamed Elmaazi

No comment

Elmaazi rang the Institute for Statecraft’s doorbell and was eventually let in by a well-dressed elderly gentleman in a beige overcoat. The man claimed that he worked neither at The Institute nor at The Fore but at “another organization.” He then called out for “Charles.” Having walked in, Elmaazi could see a few smaller offices to the side, with a larger planned office with tables and computers around the corner.

A man whom Elmaazi presumed was “Charles” came around the corner and called out, “Yes?” He seemed somewhat confused by the journalist’s presence, understandably so as he was there without an appointment. When “Charles” confirmed that he worked with the Institute for Statecraft, Elmaazi identified himself as a journalist and asked if he would be willing to be interviewed. The request was met with a curt refusal.

“Charles” then guided Elmaazi sternly with his hand back to the entrance. When the journalist repeated his request, he was met with stone silence. And that was that.

A “Charles Hart” is listed as the chairman of the Institute for Statecraft, but no photo is available to confirm that Hart was the same “Charles” that Elmaazi met.

The neocon connection

Two buildings away from the Institute for Statecraft, separated only by the home of British American Tobacco, lies the offices of the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). This think tank is key organ of the Western foreign policy establishment, pushing military interventionism and promoting the Saudi-backed Syrian opposition-in-exile.

Among the funders of IISS is the Smith Richardson Foundation.

This foundation also happens to be a supporter of the Integrity Initiative, providing it with £45,000 (about $56,600 USD) for covert propaganda activities in Europe and the US.

The Smith Richardson Foundation was founded by billionaire heir to the Vicks fortune, H. Smith Richardson, in 1935. In 1973, the founder’s son, Randolph Richardson – a free market fundamentalist and long-time patron of neoconservative ideologue Irving Kristol – inherited the organization.

Kristol’s son, William Kristol, is a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century which openly called for the US to assert itself as the single global hegemon following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Recipients of funding from the Smith Richardson Foundation include a who’s who of neoconservative and militaristic right-wing institutions. The foundation has bankrolled neoconservative outfits like the American Enterprise Institute (to the tune of nearly $10 million since 1998), the Hudson Institute, the Institute for the Study of War, Freedom House, the Hoover Institution, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, along with Democratic Party-aligned think tanks like the Center for New American Security and the Center for American Progress.

“To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,” wrote Kelley Vlahos in a profile of Nadia Schadlow, a former Trump administration deputy national security advisor who previously worked as the senior program director for Smith Richardson.

Smith Richardson complements a roster of international funders backing the Integrity Initiative’s parent organization:

HQ NATO Public Diplomacy, £12,000 for each inaugural workshop = £168,000
Partner institutions £5,000 for each inaugural workshop = £70,000
NATO HQ for educational video films – free provision of camera team
Lithuanian MOD to provide free all costs for their stratcom team for a monthly trip to support a new hub/cluster creation and to educate cluster leaders and key people in Vilnius in infowar techniques = £20,000
US State Dept, for research and dissemination activities (excluding any activity in USA) = £250,000
Smith Richardson Foundation, £45,000 for cluster activities in Europe and USA
Facebook, £100,000 for research and education activities
German business community, £25,000 for research and dissemination in EU countries

A covert asset in the Bernie campaign?

Elmaazi, the co-author of this piece, was not the only reporter to gain momentary access to the Institute for Statecraft’s hidden location at 2 Temple Place. On December 11, five days after Elmaazi’s visit, Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio entered the covert propaganda mill’s neo-gothic offices. As soon as he identified himself as a journalist, he was angrily ejected by an Institute for Statecraft staffer named Simon Bracey-Lane.

“You need to leave right now!” Bracey-Lane barked at Klarenberg. “You haven’t arranged to see us! Go! Right now! Please leave immediately! Leave!”

Bracey-Lane is a 20-something British citizen with no publicly acknowledged experience in intelligence work. But as Klarenberg noted, there are some unusual details in the young staffer’s bio.

In 2016, Bracey-Lane appeared out of nowhere to work in Iowa as a field organizer for the Bernie Sanders campaign for president.

Simon Bracey-Lane being interviewed in Bernie Sanders’ Iowa field office on January 27, 2016

“I spent a year working, saving all my money, just thought I was gonna go on a two month road trip from Seattle to New York and I thought, you know what? I’m gonna stay and work for the Bernie Sanders campaign,” Bracey-Lane told a reporter for AFP on January 27, 2016.

He said that after he decided to work for Bernie, he first went to England to “get a visa and get everything legal,” then came back to join the campaign in earnest.

Bracey-Lane also claimed to AFP, “I’m not sure there’s a place for me in British politics… I’ve never been struck by an urge to work in my own political system.”

However, a February 1, 2016 profile of Bracey-Lane by Buzzfeed’s Jim Waterson said the Brit-for-Bernie “was inspired to rejoin the Labour party in September [2015] when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday.”

It is clearly odd for Bracey-Lane to tell one reporter that he had never had any interest in British politics, while claiming to another that he had been eager to support Corbyn before he joined the Bernie campaign. What’s more, as Klarenberg reported, Bracey-Lane went on to establish a get-out-the-vote effort for various progressive politicians and parties in Britain’s 2017 general election, gaining inside access to a wide array of campaigns.

The contradiction in Bracey-Lane’s narrative raises serious questions about his real role on the Bernie campaign, as does his suddenly transition from progressive politics to a staff position at a military-backed propaganda farm that waged a covert information war on Corbyn and other left-leaning politicians across the West.

An Institute for Statecraft document on “roles and relevant experience” of the outfit’s “expert team” notes that Bracey-Lane conducted a “special study of Russian interference in the US electoral process.” The document does not make clear when that study was conducted, however, it is listed directly next to its author’s history of work with the Bernie campaign.

“At Thanksgiving, I was asked, why are you meddling?” Bracey-Lane remarked to Reuters, referring to his work for Bernie Sanders. “Which is an interesting way to phrase it, but I was happy to answer: it needs meddling with.”

Those comments take on an entirely different meaning now that the former Bernie field worker has been outed as part of a British military-intelligence influence operation.

In the coming days, the Grayzone will take a closer look at the Integrity Initiative’s activity inside the US, and whether it is interfering in American politics as it has done in other NATO member states.

Mohamed Elmaazi obtained his LLB from SOAS and Masters in International and Comparative law from the American University in Cairo. He worked in human rights law for a number of years before shifting to journalism. He occasionally reports for The Real News Network and currently contributes to Open Democracy, The Canary, and the Grayzone. You can follow him on Twitter @MElmaazi

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party, Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The Fifty One Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza, and The Management of Savagery, which will be published later this year by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie and the forthcoming Killing Gaza. Blumenthal founded the Grayzone Project in 2015 to shine a journalistic light on America’s state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic repercussions.

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Don’t Hold Your Breath on US Troop Withdrawal from Syria

December 20th, 2018 by Patrick Lawrence

The announcement on Wednesday that the U.S. will withdraw all remaining troops from Syria within the next month looked at first like a rare victory for Donald Trump in his admittedly erratic opposition to senseless wars of adventure. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there,” the president tweeted with an unmistakable air of triumph.

Don’t get your hopes up. Just about everything in these initial reports is either wrong or misleading. One, the U.S. did not defeat the Islamic State: The Syrian Arab Army, aided by Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah militias did. Two, hardly was ISIS the only reason the U.S. has maintained a presence in Syria. The intent for years was to support a coup against the Assad government in Damascus—in part by training and equipping jihadists often allied with ISIS. For at least the past six months, the U.S. military’s intent in Syria has been to counter Iranian influence.

Last and hardly least, the U.S. is not closing down its military presence in Syria. It is digging in for an indefinite period, making Raqqa the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad. By the official count, there are 503 U.S. troops stationed in the Islamic State’s former capital. Unofficially, according to The Washington Post and other press reports, the figure is closer to 4,000—twice the number that is supposed to represent a “full withdrawal” from Syrian soil.

It would be nice to think Washington has at last accepted defeat in Syria, given it is preposterous to pretend otherwise any longer. Damascus is now well into its consolidation phase. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are currently working with Staffan de Mistura, the UN’s special envoy for Syria, to form a committee in January to begin drafting a new Syrian constitution.

U.S. forces conducted a precision airstrike near Sarmada in northwest Syria Nov. 18 that Pentagon says killed a senior al-Qaida leader. (Army photo by 1st Lt. Daniel Johnson)

It would also be nice to think the president and commander-in-chief has the final say in his administration’s policies overseas, given the constitution by which we are supposed to be governed. But the misleading announcement on the withdrawal of troops, followed by Trump’s boastful tweet, suggest something close to exactly the opposite.

As Trump finishes his second year in office, the pattern is plain: This president can have all the foreign policy ideas he wants, but the Pentagon, State, the intelligence apparatus, and the rest of what some call “the deep state” will either reverse, delay, or never implement any policy not to its liking.

Blocking Few Good Ideas

Syria is a case in point, but one among many. Trump announced in March that he would withdraw American troops as soon as the fight against ISIS was finished. By September the Pentagon was saying no, U.S. forces had to stay until Damascus and its political opponents achieved a full settlement. From the new HQ in Raqqa, The Washington Post tells us, U.S. forces will extend “overall control, perhaps indefinitely, of an area comprising nearly a third of Syria.”

This is how 2018 has gone for Trump. This president has very few good ideas, but we can count on his foreign policy minders to block those he does have if they fail to conform to the orthodox playbook—the foreign policy “blob,” as Barack Obama famously called it.

Reversal on Military Budget

Earlier this month Trump complained about the Pentagon’s out-of-control budget and pledged to cut it, if marginally, from its current $716 billion to $700 billion in the 2020 fiscal year. “I am certain that, at some time in the future,” he said in one of his inevitable tweets, “President Xi and I, together with President Putin of Russia, will start talking about a meaningful halt to what has become a major and uncontrollable Arms Race. The U.S. spent 716 Billion Dollars this year. Crazy!”

Raqqa Internal Security Force Training Class receive their initial issue of equipment after training in Ayn Issa, Syria, July 31 2017.(U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Mitchell Ryan)

Days later the president had a meeting with Defense Secretary James Mattis and the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. The White House announced immediately afterward that the three had agreed on a 2020 defense budget of $750 billion: from a 2 percent cut to an increase of nearly 5 percent in the course of one meeting.

Trump’s idea of improving relations with Russia has faced a wall of opposition from the first, needless to say. His summit with President Putin in Helsinki last July ignited a fresh uproar—and his suggestion that Putin come to Washington in the autumn still another. With Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats in the lead, that invitation was mocked to death within days. A New Year’s prediction: There will be no second summit with Putin, probably for the duration of Trump’s term in office.

Among the biggest disappointments of the year has been the administration’s failure to build on Trump’s effort to advance a settlement with North Korea after seven decades of tension in Northeast Asia. The Trump–Kim summit in Singapore last May did what initial encounters between heads of state are supposed to do: It established a working rapport. By that measure, any detached judgment of the meeting would have to count it a success.

But the U.S. press uniformly criticized Trump nonetheless for not coming home with the full details of the North’s nuclear disarmament. These same media have since treated us to the usual stories, sourced from the intelligence agencies, that the North is misleading us once again. Result: A second summit appears to have fallen off the White House’s agenda despite Trump’s statement at the UN last autumn that the two leaders would meet again “quite soon.”

One does not have to entertain any liking for Donald Trump to find this pattern disturbing. It suggests that our foreign policy cliques, wedded to an orthodoxy devoted more or less entirely to U.S. primacy, have positioned themselves—over the course of many administrations—to dictate America’s conduct abroad even to our presidents. There is danger in this, no matter who the occupant of the White House happens to be.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, author, and lecturer. His most recent book is Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century (Yale). Follow him@thefloutist. His web site is www.patricklawrence.us. Support his work via www.patreon.com/thefloutist.

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U.S. Governments Must Be Held to Account Now More Than Ever

December 20th, 2018 by Shane Quinn

The manner of which political structures are erected in the United States, ensures that certain personalities inevitably rise to become elected as president. This has particularly been the case post-1945, with America having a string of dubious characters assuming leadership of the most powerful country in history.

Yet one must remember that the US has for generations comprised an empire, which has sought to maintain its strength to any degree possible. Only a certain type of figure can emerge to gain control of such a colossal power. Unreliable individuals like the Vermont senator Bernie Sanders are therefore rejected in favour of known quantities.

To sustain its might, America has felt the need to ignore and attack human rights if required, consistently pursuing policies to benefit its business-class elite and surrounding institutions.

George Kennan, the far-sighted US strategic planner, wrote in February 1948 that, “We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization”. Among other things, Kennan recognized that to achieve this “the position of disparity” between rich and poor nations must be preserved, or widened further as the case has been.

Kennan was outlining an empire’s strategies in the aim of conserving its power whatever way necessary, plans not dissimilar to those of major powers in preceding centuries. Kennan’s words have neatly summarized US foreign policy, especially so in the decades following World War II.

To implement its corporate-based ambitions, the US has generally introduced misery and inequality to places where its influence is greatest, from Chile and Colombia, to Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

For a government or media figure to exhort that America “is a beacon of freedom and democracy for the world”, is demonstrating not only high levels of naivety, but also a determined inability to grasp historical realities. It is impossible for a superpower to preserve its mastery by pursuing policies that will benefit the world’s general populations, be it in Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, and so on. This disregard for human liberties has been repeated by all imperial states over the past two millenia, dating to the Roman empire.

Should Iraq, for instance, have evolved into a flourishing democracy – as it could have become were its citizens left in peace – US influence in that country (control of oil) would have been wiped out. It was a similar situation in Vietnam, as Washington was faced with possible loss of command in a region of strategic importance. The US military, with presidential authority, decimated Vietnam and its neighbours rather than allow them to “fall like dominoes” and succumb to communism.

In north Africa, Libya is another significant nation; it has the ninth largest oil reserves in the world (more than America or China), while located in a pivotal territory. The US, and its military arm NATO, led the way in smashing Libya to pieces in 2011 so as to retain influence there – while also delivering a blow upon the Arab Spring revolution which was spreading to neighbouring Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria.

As with many US interventions, the March 2011 attack on Libya received broad support from establishment circles, later describing it as a “revolution”, and despite NATO war crimes becoming clear, “a success”.

Whether notable commentators actually believe what they are espousing, it once more reveals a glaring naivety, not to mention irresponsibility, emanating from so-called well educated people. If one should surrender themselves to institutions of power, it can be tempting to enter a domain in which the truth is difficult to locate, let alone perceive.

The result is a mixture of fantasy and self-delusion commonly on display from prominent opinion writers. The human desire for friendship – along with a need to fit in and be accepted by the right people – are other factors posing a menace to independent thinking that questions generally accepted norms.

An ingrained lack of critical, probing thought is surely a common thing at the world’s mass media centres. Yet a requirement to obey and stifle dangerous ideas is also prevalent in parliamentary buildings, universities and schools, where nonconformist beliefs are regularly suppressed or discouraged.

The political historian Gabriel Kolko noted that, “The desire to discover the truth must entail a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom… and to accept all of the potential consequences, some of them very substantial, for doing so. Only a tiny minority is ready to pursue such an innovative course”.

It may not be surprising that crucial problems are overlooked or ignored. The issue of nuclear weapons is hardly debated, and so public awareness of the enormity of this threat is low. This is incredible in itself as there will be a nuclear war before long in some region of the world – unless radical changes arrive which may only be achieved by committed, widespread activism.

In the decades following atomic attacks on Japan, increasingly powerful nuclear weapons have been used many times by US administrations – in the manner through which a bank robber takes money with the aid of a gun, but rarely fires it. There are more than two dozen documented instances of American leaders threatening to detonate nuclear bombs against enemy states (the USSR, China, etc.) so as to achieve certain demands.

Each year, false alarms occur in faulty nuclear weapons systems, be it in America or Russia, detailing a possible attack from the other side. Through sheer good luck no accident has yet occurred, but if such a conflict is to come, it will quite likely be due to an unforeseen incident. The planet is terribly fortunate to have avoided nuclear war so far, which would destroy large parts of the remaining life on our globe.

The means to deliver a nuclear assault has become increasingly sophisticated as the years go by, from jet aircraft to long-range missiles and high-tech submarines. Donald Trump, who may well be the most dangerous US president to date, has increased the likelihood of such a war with his 2018 Nuclear Posture Review. This process lowers the threshold for nuclear engagement, along with developing even more advanced means capable of launching an attack without response. The provocations are occurring “in the immediate vicinity of the Russian borders” as Moscow outlines.

Over the past generation, ongoing US-led NATO expansion up to Russia’s frontiers also increases the risk of a nuclear calamity, tactics broadly accepted and praised. It scarcely requires strong powers of deduction to realize that continually proceeding towards a nuclear superpower (Russia) increases the risk of war breaking out.

Still, a recent Guardian opinion editorial outlined that, “The NATO alliance has helped mould the modern world and ushered in a democratic, liberal world order characterised by open trade and open societies”.

In relation to the second major threat, climate change, Trump’s policies have also been disastrous – in spite of the American leader knowing precisely that the phenomenon is occurring. As Trump admitted over two months ago with regard climate change, “I think that something’s happening”. Yet from the beginning of his presidency in January 2017, he has chosen procedures which are leading to rising emissions in America for 2018 and beyond, in order to amass as much wealth as possible.

Amid other initiatives, Trump has loosened regulations on vehicle emissions, while aiding coal, oil and gas companies so that they can operate unhindered. These actions come as global carbon emissions are at an all time high and increasing, despite climate change first being discussed by government leaders at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. Since the early 1990s, the world’s greenhouse gas rates have risen by over 60%.

The critically important COP24 climate conference, which concluded in Poland last week, was described as “insufficient” due to its hijacking “by short-sighted interests”. This is primarily because of the unwillingness of wealthy nations – those most responsible for emissions – to take firm steps in addressing climate change, leaving much of the burden on poverty-stricken countries.

There have been many wishful thoughts put forward on containing the global temperature rise “to within 1.5 Celsius” of pre-industrial levels; this is a fanciful target, however. As a result of government impotence, it will prove a serious challenge to keep world temperature increases to a 3 Celsius limit, let alone 2 Celsius. That would entail unimaginable climate consequences in decades to come, unless nuclear war intervenes bringing with it dramatic global cooling, crop failure and worldwide famine.

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Brazil’s Bolsonaro Says He Will Target Venezuela, Cuba

December 20th, 2018 by Telesur

Brazil’s far-right President-elect Jair Bolsonaro said on Tuesday that he would take all action “within the rule of law and democracy” to oppose the governments of Venezuela and Cuba.

Bolsonaro, who takes power Jan. 1, is a fervent anti-communist who has praised his country’s 1964-1985 military regime. He frequently targets Venezuela and Cuba for verbal attacks, a drastic change from Brazil’s governments under the leftist Workers Party that ruled from 2003 to 2016 and had warm relations with those governments.

Brazil’s incoming president did not provide any details during the Facebook live video when he made his most recent comments on Venezuela and Cuba.

The United States is counting on Brazil under Bolsonaro to be a strategic ally.

In late November, U.S. President Donald Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton met Bolsonaro in his Rio de Janeiro home to help cement ties.

Bolton said Bolsonaro’s election was a “historic opportunity” for Brazil and the United States to work together on security, economics and other issues.

Bolton hailed Bolsonaro’s election as a positive sign that Brazil would support U.S. pressure on Venezuela’s left-wing government of Nicolas Maduro, which he describes as part of “the troika of tyranny” in the Americas, alongside Cuba and Nicaragua.

Watch video here

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Crimes Against Humanity: The British Empire

December 20th, 2018 by Paul Gregoire

First published by Sydney Criminal Lawyers and crossposted on Global Research in July 2017.

It was the largest empire ever to have existed. And as the saying used to go, the sun never sets on the British Empire. At its height in 1922, the colonial power was lording it over a fifth of the world’s population and for many of them, the sun never rose again.

Under the policies of British colonialism, people around the globe were subjected to mass famines, atrocious conditions in concentration camps, and brutal massacres at the hands of imperialist troops. The Brits also played an integral role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Although the atrocities of the British Empire are well documented, the myth of the noble colonising power continued into recent decades.

The Migrated Archives

During proceedings in the British High Court in 2010, University of Warwick historian David M Anderson submitted a statement referring to 1,500 files that went missing from Kenya as British rule in the region was coming to an end.

This led the British government to concede that they had hidden or disposed of those files, and many others at a high-security facility north of London. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office was hiding around 600,000 historical documents in breach of the 1958 UK Public Records Act.

The stash included around 20,000 undisclosed files from 37 former British colonies. Indeed, it’s common knowledge that as the British colonial edifice was disintegrating, administrators of the colonies were told to either burn their documents or try and smuggle them out.

The legal proceedings where Mr Anderson made his revelations related to a case brought against the British government by three elderly Kenyans who claimed they’d been tortured and abused by the colonial authorities during the British occupation of their country.

The British gulag in Kenya

The British first moved into East Africa in the late 19^th century, and Kenya was declared a Crown colony in 1920. In the 1940s, after half a century of British occupation, a small group of Kikuyu people – the country’s largest ethnic group – formed the Mau Mau movement and vowed to oppose colonial rule.

As word spread, Mau Mau resistance grew and they began knocking off colonial officers and local loyalists. In October 1952, Governor Evelyn Baring declared a state of emergency, which held until 1960.

In 1964, the colonial army began erecting a network of concentration camps. Historians estimate that 150,000 to 1.5 million Kikuyu people were detained. Conditions within the camps were atrocious, and people were systematically beaten and sexually assaulted during questioning.

The grandfather of Barack Obama, Hussein Onyango Obama suffered severe mistreatment in the camp where he was held, which included having pins forced under his fingernails.

The British government, after being continually defeated in the High Court, agreed to settle the Mau Mau case in 2013.

On June 6 that year, then UK foreign secretary William Hague announced 5,000 survivors would each receive £3,800 payment, and he also expressed the nation’s sincere regrets to Kenyans who were subjected to “torture and other forms of ill-treatment at the hands of the colonial administration.”

The desecration in India

It’s said that India was the jewel in the crown of the British Empire. The British East India Company began making avenues into the subcontinent in the 17^th century, and India was established as a Crown colony in 1858.

The British Raj systematically transferred the wealth of the region into their own coffers. In the north eastern region of Bengal, “the first great deindustrialisation of the modern world” occurred.

The prosperous two centuries-old weaving industry was shut down after the British flooded the local market with cheap fabric from northern England. India still grew the cotton, but the Bengali population no longer spun it, and the weavers became beggars.

India suffered around a dozen major famines under British rule, with an estimated 12 to 29 million Indians starving to death.

The Orissa famine occurred in north eastern India in 1866. Over one million – or one in three local people – perished. As the region’s textile industry was destroyed, more people were pushed into agriculture, and were dependent on the monsoon.

That year, the monsoon was weak. Crops didn’t grow and many starved to death. The colonial administration didn’t intervene as the popular economic theory of the time reasoned that the market would restore proper balance, and the famine was nature’s way of responding to overpopulation.

When the British finally got out of India, they simply drew a line down the map and partitioned the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. The move led to the mass migration of around 10 million people, and when it escalated into sectarian violence an estimated one million lost their lives.

A southern invasion

The British began invading Australia in 1788, under the pretext that it was terra nullis: a land with no owners. The High Court of Australia abolished the legal fiction of terra nullius in its 1992 Mabo versus Queensland (No 2) ruling.

It was a landmark decision, but not everyone was surprised that the court found that there were actually sovereign people living on the land prior to the arrival of the British. At that time, there were an estimated 750,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living across the continent.

The First Fleet arrived in the vicinity of what is now the city of Sydney in 1788. Around 15 months later, at least 50 percent of the local Aboriginal population was dying due to a smallpox epidemic.

Some historians put the outbreak down to contact with the Macassans from Sulawesi in the far north of the continent. However, others argue that bottles of smallpox were brought across on First Fleet ships, and the disease was then released, either accidentally or with clear intent.

Dozens of massacres of Indigenous people were carried out by the British right up until the 1920s. On June 10 1838, the Myall Creek massacre occurred near Inverell in NSW. This tragedy is well-known as it was the first time Europeans were brought to justice for such an atrocity in Australia.

At the time about 50 Aboriginal men were working for stockmen in the area. One evening the stockmen rode into the local people’s camp, tied up 29 men, women and children, and beheaded them. Seven of the perpetrators were eventually brought to trial and hanged.

Today, in Australia, the colonial legacy continues. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are the most incarcerated population on earth.

As of March this year, there were 11,288 Indigenous adults detained in the Australian prison system. First Nations peoples account for only 2.5 percent of the overall Australian adult population, yet they represent 28 percent of the adult prisoner population.

A bloody trail

But these are only some of the crimes perpetrated by the British as they carried the greatest land grab the world has ever seen.

There were the concentration camps in South Africa, where tens of thousands of the Boer population were detained in the first years of the 20^th century. The Irish potato famine occurred in the 1840s, leading to the deaths of well over a million people.

There were the torture centres in Aden in the 1960s, where nationalists were kept naked in refrigerated cells. When the Empire was facing communist insurgents during the Malaya Emergency of the 1950s, they simply decided to imprison the entire peasant population in detention camps.

And the list goes on…

Featured image from Sydney Criminal Lawyers

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The Ontario Government’s “Education Funding Guide”: A First Step Towards Privatization?

December 19th, 2018 by Dudley Paul

It is a miserable Season’s Greetings card to Ontarians; a lump of coal called the Education Funding Guide 2019-20. It’s setting us up for cuts to education in the order of 4 cents on the dollar – or about $1 billion out of a $24 billion education budget. Education Minister Lisa Thompson, prefaces this 5-page disaster with the unbelievable comment that “educating our children is the most important job in the world.” In the next breath she outlines a possible 4 percent cut and then asks us how we’d like to do it.

If it’s possible to be clearer about her lack of regard for educating our children, just as I was writing this article Ms. Thompson cut $25 million from the Education Programs- Other (EP-O). This program provides a host of services not usually covered by education grants like community outreach, after-school programs for students on the autism spectrum and leadership for youth. According to the Toronto Star, grants were cancelled outright for tutors in the classroom, support for daily physical activity, a program to promote leaders in racialized communities, as well as another to promote equitable access to post-secondary education. As usual, the cut came without warning, with an emailed announcement this past Friday night. School Boards don’t yet know how much of the money they were promised for these programs back in March will actually arrive, if any.

This is just another opportunity provided by the Ford government’s so-called ballooning deficit. There are many others: cancelling the Basic Income Pilot Project, funds for upgrading school buildings, shutting down the Truth and Reconciliation curriculum writing program, getting rid of Ontario’s child advocate – the list goes on.

So, it’s no surprise that cuts are front and centre in the Education Funding Guide. But it also raises some alarming questions under three of its headings:

Efficient Price Setting. One example of efficient price setting is basing payments on the average cost of heating, lighting and maintaining schools per square foot for each student. School boards have fought for years with the province over funding schools based on their actual needs rather than the provincial averages.

For example, boards with old schools have needs that don’t fit a funding formula based on average class sizes needed to maintain newer schools. Averages don’t work for all situations. But the Guide asks the question: Can we go further down this road? Can we make factors like efficient use of space apply to more situations? It leaves the question open as to how this government will define “efficiency.” It looks like a new way of shortchanging school boards.

As Craig Snider, Associate Director Business Operations and Service Excellence at the Toronto District School Board said in a submission to trustees:

“Efficient pricing is an economic model that suggests that perfect information is known to set a price. The concern with the example provided (in the Guide), ‘class size’ is that it only addresses averages and space usage not student achievement outcomes. The TDSB would ask: What information was used to set current benchmarks and was student well-being data used in the calculation?”

Outcomes-Based Funding: This funding approach is supposed to “aid students by encouraging schools to focus more on providing supports and clearing the obstacles that prevent some students from achieving their full potential and learning.” An example of this is the Learning Opportunities Grant (LOG) that was introduced in 1998 to funnel more money to school boards where students with lower family incomes needed more support to succeed in school. The LOG was supposed to support early intervention, guidance, individual help for kids as well as parent support. According to the advocacy group People for Education, over the years the LOG has focused less and less on providing those kinds of supports and more on general literacy and mathematics.

Since the Guide doesn’t offer any idea of what other “outcomes” might be funded, are we looking at education funds earmarked for government preferences like Science Technology Engineering and Math (STEM)? That certainly was a big interest of the recent “biggest consultation ever” run by the Ministry.

And what about this clearing of “obstacles?” Former TDSB trustee and now MPP Chris Glover argues that between 1998 and 2015 the board faced a “funding shortfall every year and had make cuts each year to programs and services which have never been restored.” He’s describing kindergartens packed with 28 children having to share their education assistants with special needs kids who need to be supervised just to be in school. If the Ford government really wants to clear obstacles, why not just restore the Learning Opportunities Grants to their original purpose?

Accountability and Value-for-Money: Watch this one. The Guide blandly asks if the Ministry of Education should “review targeted areas of the funding formula to increase accountability and value for money.” We certainly don’t want school boards wasting money by purchasing things like specially kitted-out camper vans – that appears to be Mr. Ford’s prerogative. But at a time when schools can barely keep the lights on, what does value for money really mean?

We get a good clue in the Ernst Young report: Managing Transformation: A Modernization Action Plan for Ontario. Ernst Young was commissioned by the government to find the “efficiencies” Mr. Ford promised during the election. It’s here that you can read about funding for “outcomes” as a way of increasing competition between government departments. It recommends that the government “Consider use of alternative approaches to funding including direct funding to individuals and payment for outcomes.” (emphasis added)

Do you hear that door creaking open? It’s opening up into a room called “Vouchers and Charter Schools.” The idea here is that, if you give people the option to put their tax money where they want, they might opt for sending their kids to a private school or partly government-funded charter school. Presto! This will automatically introduce the discipline of the free market, increase efficiency and save money.

That may be true in Ernst Young’s alternate universe. Here in Ontario, it will further degrade our underfunded and beleaguered public education system. Is that what the Ford government is thinking when it speaks of “value for money?” Chris Glover thinks it’s the “first step to setting up privatization of public schools.”

Let’s remember where Minister started out – that 4 percent cut. No one I spoke to sees this Education Funding Guide as anything other than an announcement of funding cuts. NDP education critic, Marit Stiles likened it to “cutting the entire transportation budget out of the Ottawa Carleton District School or slashing half of the Toronto District School Board’s Budget for Special Education.” Harvey Bischof, president of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers Federation (OSSTF) said the $1 billion dollar cut would have a “devastating effect on program and delivery of services to schools” in a system which is already underfunded. He is also concerned about the safety of teachers and other education workers in schools, reckoning that, in the end, there will be less money to pay support workers to supervise children who, through no fault of their own, may be prone to lashing out when they’re confused of frustrated in a school that doesn’t have the resources to help them.

Head of the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario (ETFO) Sam Hammond says these cuts “show absolute disregard for what teachers do.” He too worries about the prospect of a voucher system and charter schools, seeing the option of choice as a red flag announcing serious trouble for public education in Ontario. In a press release he says that “investment, not cuts” is the way forward for public education. He adds that Minister Thompson has so far been mute on the topic of whether or not cuts to education would be the full 4 percent.

If there is a 4 percent cut to funding, school boards have no wiggle room to deal with it. At the TDSB for example, most of its grants are spent as soon as it gets them; there is a small percentage left over for any discretionary expenses and the board is already stuck with nearly $100 million in accumulated deficit (2017 figures). On top of that is a $4 billion backlog in school repairs. A 4 percent cut means, quite simply, the board will have to cut programs

So, what dreadful calamity happened between last spring when a Liberal government came forward with a pre-election budget of spending and now with Doug Ford scraping for pennies?

Nothing. This is all about the appearance of a crisis – namely the $14.5 billion deficit, the Tories say forces them to make cuts everywhere. Inventing a crisis was the philosophy of the last Conservative government under Mike Harris, which went on to solve it by stripping basic services, schools and union contracts until there was indeed a crisis of public spending across the province. The effects are still seen in our crumbling schools.

It’s now the operating principle for Doug Ford’s Tories. The difference is that they work faster and more viciously.

So, what about this crisis? Before the Liberal government of Kathleen Wynne was defeated, it posted a $6.7 billion deficit in its spring budget. Auditor general Bonnie Lysyk argued that a $10.7 billion pension surplus on the province’s books shouldn’t be counted as an asset. That meant the deficit should be $11.7 billion.

Then the Tories just decided it was $14.5 billion. They neglected to ask the province’s chief controller Cindy Veinot what she thought, because she disagreed with them and Ms. Lysyk. She had signed off on the Liberals’ original deficit prediction. Ms. Veinot couldn’t sign off on the Tories’ fiction, so she resigned as provincial controller.

If the hand-wringing over the size of the deficit seems sketchy- that’s because it is. After all, it was Mr. Ford who decided to cancel the cap and trade environmental alliance with California and Quebec. This could have given him billions to wrestle that deficit – however much it is- to the ground. It had already put over $2 billion in Ontario’s coffers. Instead, he’s pledged $400 million over the next four years to encourage the private sector to reduce emissions. He could also hold off on the $275 million tax break for the province’s wealthiest people, but that didn’t happen in November’s mini-budget from Finance Minister Vic Fedeli.

Truth to told, the Tories aren’t fighting hard at all to get that deficit under control. This latest invented “crisis” is about ideology: Ontario being “open for business.” It’s about cutting government services so they can be offered for a price. As Doug Ford undercuts basic social services and education, he pays allegiance to the competitive rigour of the marketplace, or as Ernst Young puts it: “…providing funding to individuals, who can then choose their service providers through a form of market activity and discipline.”

Mr. Ford could provide sufficient and stable funding. But that’s not going to happen. Instead I think, he plans to cut public education to the point that it is unworkable. He’ll leave it to those who can pay the price to have a decent education for their children.

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Escalation: The Continued Conflict in Kosovo, The Outright “Criminalization” of the Pristina Government

December 19th, 2018 by Daniel Jankovic

Since the disintegration of Yugoslavia in the nineties, its former constituent republics have been mired in a state of perpetual conflict.

Nowhere is this more apparent than the contested state of Kosovo.

In 1998, Albanian separatists in the Serbian province of Kosovo i Metohija began a campaign of attacks, with the express objective of creating a unified, ethnically homogenous, Greater Albanian state. Spearheaded by an organization known as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which is widely regarded by many nations, including the United States, as a terrorist organization, ethnic Albanian militants attacked Serbian security forces, and terrorized civilians in a brutally violent campaign.

As Newton’s Third Law states, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” When Albanian attacks intensified, Serbian security forces rose to meet them, and the world began to take notice. Already an international pariah state following the recent conflicts in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, then known as the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and controlled by Slobodan Milosevic, found itself on the losing end of a public relations battle. The KLA, playing the role of freedom fighters, managed to find allies in many Western nations, including NATO members. What followed was a coordinated campaign against Milosevic’s Yugoslavia, including a highly controversial 78-day bombing campaign. Following this, hostilities officially ended with the passing of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, which mandated a withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo and the institution of a multinational, United Nation-led peacekeeping force, known as the Kosovo Force (KFOR).

Image on the right: The ruins of the Church of Saint Elijah (Crkva Svetog Ilije) in Podujevo, which was destroyed by Albanian radicals during the 2004 pogrom.

During the interim period between cessation of major hostilities and the unilateral declaration of independence in 2008, the region of Kosovo has witnessed an increase in tensions between Serbs and Albanians. One key occurrence was an anti-Serbian pogrom in 2004, which essentially amounted to an act of ethnic cleansing, according to Admiral Gregory G. Johnson, then commander of NATO forces in southern Europe. Nearly one thousand homes were destroyed, along with some of the most sacred and historic sites in Serbian Orthodoxy. Tensions became even more strained when, ten years on from the onset of hostilities in 1998, Kosovo unilaterally declared independence from Serbia, with the tacit approval of many Western nations. This move was and is seen as highly controversial in that it went against the binding UNSC Resolution 1244, which respects Serbian territorial sovereignty and integrity.

Twenty years have now passed since the opening of hostilities, and problems in Kosovo still run rampant. The economic situation is dire, with the employment rate sitting at 29.8% (while the unemployment rate was 30.5%, and the rate of inactivity was 57.2%) in 2017, according to a Labour Force Survey by the Kosovo Agency of Statistics. The region is experiencing a consistently declining population, as many people journey abroad in hopes of finding better economic prospects. Somewhat ironically, residents in Kosovo, including many Albanians, often opt for a Serbian passport, which they are entitled to under Serbian law (as Kosovo is still held as a Serbian province). They then make use of this document to make their way towards the more prosperous countries of the European Union.

Enter Hashim Thaci and Ramush Haradinaj: the former, a “President;” the latter, a “Prime Minister;” both, former commanders in the KLA; and both, accused of wartime atrocities. Facing an increasingly difficult economic situation in Kosovo, social tensions, and sliding approval ratings, both have run afoul of the other in their efforts to retain popular support, while attempting to stem the flow of emigres and maintain their grip on the region.

Thaci, formerly a key figure in the KLA, now appears to favour the image of a global leader and statesman. He cozies up to many leaders of the most powerful nations on Earth, and seeks to present an optimistic view of Kosovo as a new and rising star amongst the world’s nations. He sits opposite of Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic in Brussels, where normalization talks between Belgrade and Pristina occur. He purveys the image of a negotiator.

On the other hand, Haradinaj appears to prefer the image of a populist hardliner, one which he has held since his days in the KLA. His bluster and swagger is vaguely reminiscent of Benito Mussolini, and given the option between offering the carrot or the stick, he always opts for the stick. Known for his violent outbursts, Haradinaj was remembered by one British soldier who liaised with him as “a psychopath,” and has been accused of killing both his rivals and enemies. Of the two, Haradinaj is said to enjoy overwhelming support and popularity in Kosovo, more so than Thaci.

Few governments in the world are completely cohesive, and differing viewpoints and priorities often cause conflict. This goes without saying for the government of the self-proclaimed Republic of Kosovo. Fights and tear gassings in parliament are common, and partisan politics are the norm. However, politics become especially tricky when the President and Prime Minister hold different perspectives. Case and point, the normalization of relations between Serbia and Kosovo.

Talks between Belgrade and Pristina have always been tense, with bad blood running on both sides of the table. While Aleksandar Vucic’s Serbian government is well-united behind the notion of normalizing relations with Kosovo while maintaining a policy of non-recognition, Kosovo’s strategy is somewhat more divided. Hashim Thaci appeared to have favoured an exchange of territories, likely Northern Kosovo for Serbia’s Presevo Valley, a notion which has piqued the interest of many international observers. For his part, Ramush Haradinaj has bluntly stated his opposition to this plan, responding that such an action would only destabilize the region and lead to war.

Haradinaj’s strategy at reconciliation is more populist. In November of 2018, Haradinaj stirred Albanian sentiments when he announced that Kosovo would institute a tariff on Serbian products, at a rate of 100%, and that this tariff would remain until Serbia recognized Kosovo. This tariff was likely a knee-jerk response to Serbia’s efforts to torpedo Kosovo’s latest attempt to join Interpol, as well as other organizations such as UNESCO. A slap in the face to the Central European Free Trade Agreement, of which Kosovo (through the United Nations’ Mission in Kosovo) is a signatory, Haradinaj’s latest move has been met with near-universal condemnation by world leaders, many who see it as a step backwards for stability in the Western Balkans.

Serbs protesting the imposition of a 100% tariff by the provisional authorities in Kosovo.

The most recent and serious development to normalization between Serbia and Kosovo, as of December 2018, has been the announcement of the provisional institutions in Kosovo to transform the Kosovo Security Forces into the Kosovo Army. Seen by Serbia as the “most direct threat to peace and stability in the region,” denounced by NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg as ill-timed and regrettable, and noted by UN head António Guterres as a cause for concern, there are widespread fears that the creation of this new army will provide a mechanism which Kosovar Albanians may use to expel the remaining Serbian populace in Kosovo. In response, the Serbian government is now under pressure to consider options up to, and including, military intervention, in order to protect its endangered populace. They also asked for an urgent convening of the United Nation’s Security Council, which took place on December 17, 2018. This latest move by the Kosovar provisional authorities is yet another gross violation of UNSC Resolution 1244, and has arguably brought the Western Balkans, a veritable powder keg, to the absolute brink of war for the first time in two decades.

There is little doubt that the provisional authorities in Kosovo feel safe in their actions, for they have previously enjoyed the backing of many of the world’s most powerful nations. However, as they continue to unilaterally increase tensions with neighbouring Serbia, they may find that their list of allies is growing thin, as many nations tire of dealing with their impetuousness. Responses to their most recent moves have been overwhelmingly negative, with the European Union, Germany and the United States (among others) decrying many of these actions as unconstructive and destabilizing. Meanwhile, Serbian lobbying efforts against Kosovo are reaching a fevered pitch. The Serbian government and Foreign Ministry are working overtime to encourage nations to revaluate their positions on Kosovo’s sovereignty, and these efforts have proven successful, with twelve nations so far revoking their recognition of Kosovo.

Coordinated efforts between Serbian non-governmental organizations and actors have also proven effective in subverting Kosovo’s national aspirations. Serbian not-for-profits have assisted in delivering humanitarian aid to Serbian enclaves in Kosovo, many of whose residents live in abject poverty and suffer under a severely oppressive, Albanian dominated regime. These organizations endeavour not only to help their countrymen through material means, but also through the effective dissemination of information about the plight of the Serbian populace in Kosovo to audiences worldwide.

One such effort was the immensely successful #nokosovounesco social media campaign of 2015. Through an intense social media campaign and the circulation of a petition denouncing the Kosovar provisional authorities desire to join UNESCO while remaining unwilling to protect many medieval Serbian heritage sites, Canadian-based humanitarian organization 28. Jun and Serbian-Canadian filmmaker Boris Malagurski were successful in their objective of preventing the provisional authorities in Kosovo from obtaining membership in UNESCO.

These efforts continue to this day; building on the foundation of the #nokosovounesco campaign, a new program titled Dogodine u Prizrenu (Next Year in Prizren) was launched earlier in 2018 by 28. Jun and Mr. Malagurski, with the aim of concluding on the Orthodox New Year, January 14, 2019. The most critical component of the Dogodine u Prizrenu project is the recirculation of the earlier petition denouncing Kosovo’s membership in UNESCO which, as of the end of November, 2018, has attracted over 150,000 signatures. 28. Jun also enjoys the exclusive status as being the only NGO operating in the Western Balkans which has entered into the prestigious Special Consultative Status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council. This status enabled them to present this petition to Chairwoman Rita Izsak-Ndiaye during a session of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Forum on Minority Issues in Geneva, on November 30, 2018. This latest move has solidified 28. Jun’s position as Serbia’s leading voice on the international stage, and has provided Serbians with another voice by which they can denounce the provisional authorities in Kosovo.

As the Serbian government and private organizations such as 28. Jun continue to curtail the efforts of the provisional authorities in Kosovo to solidify their position as a sovereign nation on the international stage, the Kosovar authorities are playing a dangerous game. In a move reminiscent of the brinkmanship observed during the escalation of the conflict between North and South Vietnam during the early 1970s, the provisional authorities in Kosovo are ratcheting up the tensions in the Western Balkans at every point They are gauging the reactions of Serbia to determine what actions they are able to get away with, despite being in contravention of many international laws and agreements. While Serbia is now reacting passively, and remains open to negotiation and dialogue, it must be known that a nation can only be pushed so far before it is forced to react in a negative manner. In order to ensure peace and stability in the Western Balkans, the provisional authorities in Kosovo must not act rashly and impulsively. Pristina must return to the bargaining table with Belgrade, lest they push the envelope too far and find out the hard way that there are very real consequences to one’s actions.

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Daniel Jankovic serves in the position of Executive Director, North America for 28. Jun, and is an independent analyst. He was educated at the University of Alberta, and currently resides in Calgary.

All images in this article are from the author.

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Youth Entrepreneurship by Facilitating People’s Development in Morocco

December 19th, 2018 by Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir

Moroccan youth today–whether urban- or rural-based–face enormous obstacles toward achieving their own self-development, and creating change that they seek for their families, communities, country, and even world. They are confronted with the statistical reality that the more education they complete, the more likely they will be unemployed. So often they are directed toward mainstay disciplines, not out of the pull they feel toward them, but out of the fact that there are too few alternatives, especially in public sector university settings. On the one hand, they have the important freedom to create the associations, be part of the cooperatives, and form the businesses that they aspire to build. On the other hand, however, their faith in their own social system, society’s sense of fair play, and real freedom to complete what they set out to, is more often than not heavily diminished.

Youth unemployment is more severe in rural places than in the cities. The cash economies that are now the established condition forces them to perform as day-laborers, and that is provided they are fortunate enough to have those chances. Urban migration is the only alternative for so many, even when their real dream is to remain in their communities and build there, where their heart is. The inadequate and unacceptable levels of rural education compel young families to move to cities. Considering the strong will among youth to alter their reality, there are successes, but, way too few, and those that are fortunate enough tp secure funding for new projects appear to be the exception.

With all this said, there is brightness, and the light of change is also rooted in the Moroccan condition. People’s participation in their own development is the law of the land and pervades the social structure by way of policies, programs, and legal obligation. Part of these national frameworks for human development further identifies youth as primary and potentially a most effective vehicle toward catalyzing and facilitating the local participatory development movements sought by the nation. This is to say that youth’s direct engagement in bringing communities together to plan and manage the projects to enhance and fulfill their lives is a key causeway to Morocco’s best future. Said simply: Moroccan sustainable development and how and whether it becomes real for all people will be determined by the role played by the youth of the nation.

But how do we move forward and how does this embody true entrepreneurship? Whenever we are acquiring and forging new skills, we learn best simply by doing it. We coordinate inclusive, local, dialogue by assisting that dialogue. We help others define the projects of their heart and future by doing just that: asking the questions, asking others to respond, aggregating with that more responses, helping others talk it through, until a sense of consensus and direction become defined.

We write and submit successful project proposals by writing, submitting, and following-up. We learn how to create budgets by creating them. We build capacities around evaluating past actions in order to build future courses, by engaging in it. We learn from experience, and so must our youth. Thankfully, there are no preconditions to begin. There is no degree that we must have. There is no status or background that first must be ours. We begin by beginning. And time and life are short, so we must begin now.

We are often taught to think that entrepreneurship comes from our own innovation. We are often encouraged to believe that to be most creative, strategic, and successful, is doing what develops from our own ingenuity, that our own entrepreneurial selves is about ourselves, and rests in our own mind’s ability to invent and decide.

I write this to say that this outlook is categorically false, misleading, and even antithetical to sustainable development and progression toward a satisfied society. Entrepreneurship rests on what we give toward drawing out and realizing the ideas of the people. Innovation is the embodiment of a thousand voices intersecting and made into one agreed upon surge for community development. Our creativity is a reflection of how we assist others in understanding and pursuing their own hopes for the future. Youth entrepreneurship is not an endeavor of individual youths, but is a matter of all youth, building themselves by building their communities’ development course, driven by the public.

I hear and imagine the heavy burden that Moroccan youth experience and the trepidation about the future that they must feel in their hearts. To fulfill the promise of the people’s participation in development, is a truly painstaking and difficult road, without certainty, and with non-linear progress. However, there is reason for gratefulness when the nation sees youth’s role in creating sustainable change, and sees people’s participation as vital to that change. The question before us is: will we give ourselves over to the cause of others and, therefore, the vast multiplicity of what becomes entrepreneurship, and all the resources that are entailed, in order that we can effectively walk this course?

Even though time brings us understanding, today, it is not our friend. There is urgency to this call, to completing the Moroccan model, and to bring, finally, the satisfaction in our and others’ lives that we very seriously need.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

This article was originally published on High Atlas Foundation.

Dr. Yossef Ben-Meir is a sociologist and is president of the High Atlas Foundation, a Moroccan-U.S. organization dedicated to sustainable development.

Featured image: Planning local projects in the Rhamna province of Morocco, with youths’ facilitation. (Source: High Atlas Foundation)

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Brexit Update: UK Parliamentary Theatre, “The First Law of Holes”

December 19th, 2018 by Brett Redmayne-Titley

“Doesn’t the Prime Minister realize that she has handed over power…The power that they want, is to be able to demonstrate [EU power] to every other country that might be thinking of leaving the EU.” — Dennis Skinner (MP-Labour/1970-present)

What a difference a day makes, or in the case of UK parliamentary political theatre applied to the ever-changing definition of Brexit; just a couple of hours will do.

Despite her Cabinet having been found in Contempt of Parliament for the first time in UK history due to the cover-up of portions of the very damning Attorney General’s report on Brexit, UK Prime Minister- for now- Theresa May showed her continued contempt: she continued undaunted.

On Tuesday, Dec. 10, 2018, the day before the finale- the Vote -of this two-and-a-half year debacle anxiously awaited by Britons month-after-month, and still somehow called Brexit, our plucky PM would suddenly pull the rug out from under her own continuing farcical sideshow of Parliamentary and Prime Ministerial treason.

Unfortunately for the UK, Ms May, the Energizer Bunny of UK politics, just won’t quit. Does she not know about the first rule of holes?

At 11:30 AM this day, a press release from the PM “assured” all of the UK that the vote would go on as scheduled for 7 PM the next day, Wednesday. To wit, the MPs and Cabinet members that are firmly in Ms May’s tow dutifully hit that day’s noon TV news circuit with similar pablum. For, suddenly at 1:30 PM it was next announced that the long waited for Brexit vote was off by order of Ms May. With her faux-Brexit vote about to go down the tubes faster than the sinking value of the UK pound, Ms May, again having no idea what to do, had opted for that age-old political act of desperation: She punted.

After the MPs ran to the House to attend the emergency session of Parliament in order to be formally notified of her announced weakness, the howls of anger were only superseded by the cacophony of laughter ringing off the walls of the House of Commons, regularly interspersed by iron voiced House Speaker, John Bercow‘s admonitions that each MP, “will be heard!” This was due to this session being a laugh-a-minute, must see spectacle of distortion, excuses, protestations of innocence, and assurances. Oh, yes…many, many… assurances. All due to this ever more desperate PM trying to defend the indefensible, her ”Deal.”

A deal which Brussels likes very, very much.

Speaker Bercow is a character. He is a turncoat Tory, now in the Labour field of influence. The Cons detest him. It should be noted for those just now tuning in to this far-reaching day-to-day Shakespearian political tragedy, that when it comes to British parliamentary procedure, grandstanding combined with florid oration is the rule. This creates an entertaining aspect very rarely seen in the US Congress, one that borders on the theatrical. Or the farcical. Speaker John Bercow is no exception.

Short, stout, deep complexioned and featuring black bird-like eyes, with his black Speaker’s robe, draped over round shoulders he assumes an almost raven-like posture while observing all from the Speaker’s chair at the far end of the House of Commons. Again and again, he rose to deliver his riveting stare, side-to-side, to every MP. Possessed of the perfect gravel voice, Bercow holds sway with an iron presence, but loquacious voice. He is even-tempered when forceful, but not shy in his rebukes and directions. However, when the Speaker speaks, all again… becomes quiet.

Now that PM May’s chance to speak was over, it was the turn of all the MPs.

“This is a government in a total state of collapse,” said MP Kirsty Blackman (SNP) in an opening salvo. “This government [the Tories] is focused on saving the Prime Minister’s job instead of doing what right for the county!”

Sir William Cash [Cons.] calmly assessed, quite accurately, that beyond the seemingly singular focus on the “Backstop,” Britain would also lose access to the EU courts and control over its own laws because of the terms of the still existing EU Customs Union. He went on to note, that the PM had not yet released all of the Attorney General’s report for which she was already in contempt. He called on her to do so immediately.

The embattled PM, still unable to “listen,” despite her protestations to the contrary, deflected immediately; maintaining that her own separately contemptuous, but voluminous Cabinet report on this subject would suffice, instead.

Sir Vincent Cable [Lib-Dem] called the proceedings a “fiasco,” and noted that the myriad of Cabinet indiscretions had caused the Tory government “to lose all authority.” He went on further to forcefully call for labour to commence a full House vote of “no-confidence” in the PM.

Yvette Cooper [Lab.] bolstered his point. “How can she [PM] possibly talk about duty and honour and faith in politics when we can’t trust the most basic things her ministers are saying!”

Still not listening, again, the PM responded instead by pulling her own preferred question from thin air, answering irrelevantly that she had now suddenly realized that the “Backstop” needed work, and thanked her “right honourable college” for bringing it to her attention.

Really.

Well, all this was bringing the House down and the laughs and jeers were rising quickly. This brought Speaker Bercow to his feet again, this time to formally address all present. His forceful voice had been intermittently booming throughout, but now he provided, regarding the PM’s unilateral postponement of the vote today, a reasoned clinical evaluation based on previous parliamentary procedure.

All listened. Or, else.

As Bercow pointed out, the Tory cabinet and Ms May had no authority to cancel the vote without an additional and separate vote by this same seated parliament regarding whether or not to allow a postponement of the current ongoing five days of scheduled debate. Postponement of the Brexit vote was also subject a subsequent vote by parliament. To all this, he said in summation,

“Halting the debate, after no fewer than 167 colleagues have taken the trouble to contribute, will be thought by many members of this house…to… be…discourteous!”

Here he paused, tightly grinning and surveying the entire house row-by-row as the murmurs in the gallery immediately rose before his patented stare brought them down again quickly. He continued, that there were only two ways to conclude the vote.

“The first… and infinitely more preferable… would be for an MP to move at the onset of the day’s debate: that the debate be adjourned. This will give the House the chance to vote whether to terminate the debate.”

The other: Well, that was already a matter of history.

Sitting momentarily, Bercow again allowed the MPs to continue.

Featuring her listening skills again, Ms May’s ears only tuned to a single frequency coming from Brussels, somehow the Backstop regarding the Irish border, one of the most contentious give-ins by the PM, was still in place. This was was outrageous since Ireland had made their opposition clear on this for months prior.

Said, Hilary Benn [Lab.],

“It was her [PM] red-lines that created the problem with the border with Northern Island and lead to such a weak position.”

Then he added what was likely the most important question at this juncture.

“Can she [PM] tell us of any [EU] leader in the re-negotiations? If not, postponement …is a waste of time!”

Again, Ms May’s ears allowed her to answer her own chosen question, this time with her favourite set of one-liners: Her personal assurances of EU assurances. Yes, she said to the MPs, she had many re-assurances, yet those all failed to have a surname, but they would be willing to renegotiate. All was fine, the PM assured and would be worked out the very next day. She assured the MPs, that once she rushed off to Germany and Denmark she would then bring back- not to worry-a better deal.

Nigel Dodds [D.U.P.] affirmed her delusions, adding,

“This isn’t credible, is it? She talks about reassurances and assurances. But this is [Brexit] a legally binding text!”

She then assured, to howls of laughter and sideways jeers that she had indeed been listening to the will of the Parliament and that she had assurances from EU members that all would end up just fine. Assurances. Not one member received any names of those MEPs who were providing all those assurances.

Apparently unfamiliar with the first rule of holes, the PM’s ears were still not correctly receiving transmissions from Junker and Tusk either.

Junker and Tusk had already made it very clear, publicly, that no new negotiations would take place: Ever! Challenged on this point by Damian Green [Cons], Ms May provided more of her own assurances. The EU, she said, was still willing to renegotiate. Affecting a reassuring tone, she again boastfully reassured the collective House full of sceptical MPs,

“…if [EU] assurances are not sufficient, we will go back to the EU for further assurances.”

Really.

Britons would all do well at this time to discuss the true meaning- and risk- of “assurances,” with Mikhail Gorbachev: perhaps asking him about all those NATO assurances worked out post-1990, once he divested the Soviet Union in exchange for…

How did all those assurances work out?

Wednesday.

So off the Hague the next morning she was, full of smiles as the morning news saw her jet off to her promised, although belated, victory. Predictably, for those in Parliament correctly tuned into the show, her unfounded assurances, like her leadership, would be proven to be utter rot!

Before tea time on this day that was supposed to feature the Vote, PM May already had the same defeated, puppy dog look that had adorned incoming Greek PM Alexia Tsipras. He, too, returned home from trying to renegotiate with the EU’s Masters of the Universe. May, like Tsipras, had met her match quickly at the hands of the grandmother of death, German Chancellor, Angela Merkel and the grand wizards of EU central control: Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Junker. All that was missing this time was that skinny, over-tanned, IMF vulture in pearls: Christine Le Garde.

Said Tusk, now translating for the PM,

“I have no mandate to organise any further negotiations. We have to exclude any further opening of the withdrawal agreement.” Crying crocodile tears and showing an unusual sense of humour, he added,

“But of course, we are staying here in Brussels and I’m always at the PM’s disposal.”

Fortunately for those still watching, the final act of her black comedy routine was not over yet. As the PM next flew back to London, hat in hand but now empty of assurances, she was welcomed home by her Conservative Party and was presented with the Triumphal Ornaments of… a Tory vote of [no] confidence.

Enter Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn had yet to drive the knife in for the kill. He doesn’t have too. With Ms May growing more adept each day at political harikari and dragging her party with her, Corbyn can sit calmly and let the Tories feed on their PM. His nuclear option of calling a full House vote of [no] confidence sits each day tucked in his breast pocket just mere feet away as he daily stares at the PM. With the SNC and DUP calling for him to call for a full vote as well as the Labour majority, Corbyn can keep his powder dry for now. With Brussels already handing the PM all the rope she needs to hang herself and her party, her opposition has no better antagonist to exploit than the embattled Ms May.

This day’s Tory [no] confidence vote was as farcical as it was self-serving by the Tory cabinet and their lackeys. Now desperate to save face for the Conservative Party during the rapidly growing awareness that they have been collectively up to no good, they had no choice. After getting the required 48 letters, it was on for the Tories to show their outrage at the PM for the next couple of hours. The script for this act was obvious before the curtain. Only 117 voted against their PM while 200 said she could stay. This was made all the easier for them since this and the total was a secret vote, so no one was accountable for their vote.
Really.

But behind the scene was a far more obvious raison d’etre of the 200. With their PM twisting in the wind, only a political novice would allow for a changing of the guard at No. 10. It would have meant a new PM. Frontrunners, Boris Johnson, Amber Rudd, and Sajid Javid are not dumb enough to take on this mess that is political suicide for anyone. So the vote was scripted and their final line this day’s performance was, “Let her hang!”

Thursday.

Having the night before assured parliament that her version of Brexit would come up for a vote by Jan 21 the PM was off to twist her own knives into enough of her MPs in order to get them to turn on their country in favour of the EU. Ms May did finally admit that she knew her deal, the one she falsely calls Brexit, will never pass. In turn, she said rather magnanimously, that she would step down as PM before the 2022 elections.

That joke, of course, wrote itself.

Ignoring the first rule of holes, thus having already provided peerages for MPs willing to turncoat, the Tories next decided to toss the national women’s vote on top of Ms May’s grave. Proving desperation, they reinstated MPs Andrew Griffiths and Charlie Elphicke who were both suspended over sex allegations. Griffiths, the prime minister’s former chief of staff and the MP for Burton and Uttoxeter, resigned as a minister in July and suspended from the whip after sending hundreds of sexually explicit messages to two women in his constituency. Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Yardley and a campaigner for women who have been abused, said,

“The message it sends to every person who has complained, those who gave evidence to the Cox inquiry and every person who has been abused, is that the prime minister is not on your side.”

So, Ms May and her Cons must pray for the short-term memory loss of all of the UK’s women voters. And… women vote!

Friday.

The EU, thanks to Ms May has Briton right where it wants it. In the appropriate words of former US president Teddy Roosevelt,

“Once you have them by the balls… their hearts and minds will follow.”

Well, Ms May sure doesn’t have a pair, so the EU will now squeeze the UK parliament and its people… hard!

It’s easy to tell who in this national tragedy is playing chess and who is playing “chequers.” As the now cancelled five-day debate began, and after two-and-a-half years, the European Court of Justice issued an opinion that the UK could just, all-of-a-sudden, unilaterally cancel Article 50 and stay in the EU. Like Greece, Junker and his EU co-conspirators, to which Ms May must now be considered for membership, are about to divide first, and then conquer Britain.

Thanks to this latest EU chess move, the EU would Britain believe it now has more choices, not two. All of them are bad for those who voted to leave the EU and being used in a carrot-and-stick manner by the UK media to fracture voter opinion beyond yes or no. The daily papers now sing the praises of alternatives, when just a week ago they were the collective champions of Yes.

Regardless, all are victories for Brussels.

No matter, first there will be a vote on the bastardized form of Brexit as it stands. So any alternatives begin after a vote sometime before Jan. 21.

1) Vote yes to the deal and take it.

This is a very bad deal and all assurances and reassurances won’t change it. If the vote had been held on Wednesday, it would have been defeated easily. That’s why Ms May stopped it. As has been examined in a previous article, bellowed from the halls of the House repeatedly and quoted herein, the PM’s deal is worse than staying in the EU. This is now, very conspicuously, a possibility should a Yes vote be extracted, bribed, intimidated or cajoled from parliament.

Thankfully, because of the vote, turncoat MPs will be exposed and UK outrage will be given a set of names to remember. So, all will have to consider their political futures and the memory of their voters before expressing their true allegiance on paper.

What yes also means is the end of the Conservative Party’s purchased majority; the accelerated pre-2022 demise of their PM; a new Scottish independence referendum; more opposition SNC seats in the House; a subsequent Labour Party majority and/or ruling coalition; and a formal vote of no-confidence of the full House for the PM. Worse, by far, the likely ascension of Jeremy Corbyn to new PM. All before the next election. If unsuccessful, Corbyn and Labour will slowly unwrap all the rope from Ms May’s neck and use it again to strangle the Cons and any new PM. For Labour, Brexit is the gift that keeps on giving.

For the Cons, political survival is truly at historic levels.

2) Vote No and face the uncertainty of a Hard Brexit.

This is the result of more bad planning by the Cabinet that had not created a plan B- just like Greece- for when the EU would decide to drop their PM down their gallows hole. As of Tuesday, it is universally acknowledged that a No vote is highly likely. As pointed out in a previous article, should a Yes vote prevail- a vote that is not secret this time- Britons will next be able to add up and list the names of their MPs that sold out their voter’s interests and their country. If so, on March 29, 2019 Brits will have to scramble into the unknown without trade agreements in place, new treaties signed, or binding immigration standards, to mention just a few. Without a plan B, one that will have to be debated, and voted on beforehand just like the faux-Brexit deal all of the UK will be suddenly plunged into uncertainty. Uncertainty… and fear.

Fear sells.

The UK media is just as adept at using fear as a political tool of manipulation as their US counterparts. Fortunately, Brits are not, generally, as wilfully ignorant as Americans. The media, as of Wednesday, has lost the ability to promote a Yes vote on Brexit without readers wondering: why?So, daily stories of unsubstantiated but predicted gloom and doom are now suddenly splashed across all major UK newspapers and tabloids. With there being no pro-labour newspaper since the fall of Tony Blair and New Labour, all these rags are aligned to stop Jeremy Corbyn and a return to Old Labour. This allows the media to do its best to promote, like their beloved PM, this underhanded tactic designed to give Brussels and Ms May the final win.

This worked to perfection in all previous elections and referenda of the past thirty-three months. Except Brexit.

Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson stoked this growing fear this week, telling the Commons that over 3,500 troops are currently being “held at readiness”in case of a disastrous no-deal Brexit.

Merely, cancelling Article 50 is not an option procedurally at this time since the Brexit vote must first be was be finished without further dither by the PM, or a new referendum of this move must take place in an already vote weary Britain. The UK media also touts this daily alongside their fear campaign as a viable option, ignoring how that first Brexit vote turned out and the growing national anger at the Tories, anger that favours Corbyn and old Labour.

No wonder the PM and her cabinet do not support this option.

The Sun newspaper said in a report on Saturday that ministers were divided mainly along two lines of policy, namely preparing for a no-deal Brexit, in which Britain leaves the EU on March 29, 2019, without an agreement with the EU bloc, or planning a new referendum.

Wanna be Prime Ministers Amber Rudd, finance and treasury minister Philip Hammond were promoting the idea of a second Brexit referendum. Interior minister Sajid Javid and three other senior cabinet members insisted that the government should instead work on its plans for a no-deal Brexit. None of these political opportunists are interested in saving Brexit in its pure form. They are merely testing the winds while preparing for Theresa May’s certain fall before the next election.

“Remaining” in the EU, however, is not a viable option without a new referendum. Ms May and her cohorts maintained again and again throughout the debate and the emergency sessions that this would not happen. The reality of Corbyn and the DUP make this almost certain.

DUP is ferociously opposed to this Brexit deal and wants May out. Since the check for the £1.5 Billion mortita that kept the Tories in power has already cleared, it is not likely they will jump in again with the Tories if a new PM is selected. Without a coalition, the Tories are as toasted as their PM.

It is no longer hyperbole to call the current status of Brexit vote political chaos. The press is already pushing for the path of least resistance: Cancelling Article 50 in order to sway popular opinion and therefore give treasonous PM an excuse, so it is easy to see what the Tories, their PM and the“Primal Forces of Nature” in Brussels, are up to. With this self-created chaos being the two choices of either Ms May’s treasonous EU deal or the fear and uncertainty of a hard Brexit, Brits now face the same unknown that the Greeks faced when they, too, face a decision not accept to their own PM’s “deal.” Similarly, this fear will be the new national selling point over the next few weeks and could possibly provide another win for the EU’s dominance over all of its 28 vassal states.

With every UK newspaper running plenty of column inches promoting this fear, this ongoing saga is far from over.

The First Rule of Holes.

Well, Ms May is now, after her assurances of more EU reassurances were trashed by Junker, Tusk and Merkel, being handed back her shovel by Brussels. Ignoring the first rule of holes, she has come home to punt one more time. She has “assured” Parliament that the final vote- for sure- will be before Jan 19. Yesterday she announced it would be held during the week of the 17th.

Throughout the day today, she has been bouncing from broadcast to broadcast assuring and assuring, which is, it seems, the only card she has left to negotiate, not with Brussels, but with her own parliament and the British people.

On Friday PM May left for the weekend at the EU summit in another failed attempt. May said she was not expecting a “breakthrough” on the Brexit deal at this week’s EU summit. French President Emmanuel Macron has said it is up to the British Prime Minister to come up with a solution to get the Brexit deal through Parliament. “We can have a political discussion tonight, but the legal framework and the agreement that were negotiated are not supposed to change.”

Other EU leaders repeatedly said the same: they were willing to help Ms May by clarifying what was intended, but they were not prepared to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement.

After all this, PM May still managed, somehow, to say:

“I don’t expect an immediate breakthrough, but what I do hope is that we can start to work as quickly as possible on the assurances that are necessary.”

Really.

Signifying that this ongoing saga has at least one final act to play-out, upon returning to the Home Land on Sunday, Ms May was rewarded for her efforts with a brand new full House vote of [no] confidence vote, fresh from her arch enemy Jeremy Corbyn’s breast pocket.

At this juncture, one of her Ms May’s MPs would do well to recite to their PM, who still remains strangely undaunted in her quest for coercing UK servitude, the sage advice of the First Rule of Holes…

Stop… digging!

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 150 in-depth articles over the past seven years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, KXL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out and many more. He can be reached at: [email protected]. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Video: Russian Private Military Contractor Killed in New Round of Escalation in Northern Latakia

December 19th, 2018 by South Front

A former servicemen of the Russian Airborne Troops, Aleksandr Dudchenko, has been killed by a mortar shelling in northern Latakia, according to reports in Russian media outlets.

The incident reportedly took place near the town of Kinsaba, where Dudchenko came under fire from the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation (NFL). Local sources say that he was among Russian private military contractors that operate in the country.

During the past few weeks, the NFL, other pro-Turkish militant groups as well as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) and its allies violated the ceasefire regime in the Idlib de-escalation zone multiple times. On some parts of the contact line, such as northern Hama, they even carried out limited ground attacks, which were repelled.

At the same time, local activists say that Turkish servicemen in cooperation with members of militant groups prevent civilians from leaving the Idlib zone through the existing humanitarian corridor under various pretexts.

These developments are another strong signal that the militancy problem in western Syria cannot be solved by peaceful means alone. In the nearest future, Idlib militants will continue their attacks on positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) hiding behind the so-called ceasefire regime and accusing the SAA of violations every time government forces respond to these attacks.

On December 19, State Department Deputy Spokesperson Robert Palladino officially denied that US President Donald Trump had given a “green light” to a Turkish military operation against Kurdish armed groups east of the Euphrates. According to Palladino, the December 17 remarks by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan were a misstatement.

Meanwhile, the State Department notified Congress of a proposal to sell the Patriot air and missile defense system to Turkey. The potential $3.5 billion deal, which includes 20 missile launchers, is something Turkey had been seeking for a long time before deciding to buy a Russian-made S-400 system. This US move is a part of the ongoing behind the doors bargain between the Trump administration and the Erdogan government on the conflict in Syria and the Turkish stance on Russian and Iranian actions in the region in general.

Iraqi President Barham Salih will make an official visit to Damascus in the next few days for the first time since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, an Iraqi diplomatic source told the Russian state-run news agency Sputnik on December 18. This visit follows the visit of Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir to Damascus on December 17. Al-Bashir became the first Arab leader to travel to Syria since the start of the war. These diplomatic developments show that despite the still complicated situation in the country, Damascus is steadily improving its diplomatic stand in the region.

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What Happens if France’s Yellow Vests Win?

December 19th, 2018 by Andre Vltchek

What if protesters in Paris win, and the French government gives in to all their demands?

What if taxes are reduced, wages increased, President Macron steps down?

I am not talking only about the hikes of the fuel tax; attempts to impose it have been already abandoned. I am not talking about increase of the minimum wage – the government already agreed to raise it by 100 euro per month.

What I am talking about are real, fundamental changes which many protesters seem to be desiring: substantial tax reduction for the majority of French citizens, generous increase in wages and enhancement of social benefits for all.

So, if the Yellow Vests manage to win all this, then what will happen? Who would benefit? But also, who would lose?

One of my readers recently wrote to me that France should reduce its military budget and from those billions of euro saved, could easily finance demands of the protesters.

Another reader wrote that the richest citizens of France (or call them ‘elites’) should be taxed heavily, and the money saved in this way could be then distributed among the poor and the lower middle class.

Sounds ‘reasonable’? Yes, definitely; reasonable and logical. The only tiny defect is: we all know that it will never happen this way.

President Macron was elevated to the throne by precisely those so-called elites. In return, those rich folks expect their privileges to be guaranteed, even swollen.

And to imagine that a NATO member country (in this case France) would suddenly slash its military budget and from what is saved, start to finance various new social programs for the poor and the middle class, is unrealistic, even childish.

So where will the funds come from, if the French government decides to do something truly ‘radical’; radical at least by the standards of our era of turbo-capitalism: to listen to its own people?

Let me stop beating about the bush and ask my question brutally and concretely: “What if all demands of the Yellow Vests get satisfied; who will pay the bill?”

To put all this into a context: I write this essay in Hanoi, capital of socialist Vietnam.

Some time ago, I used to live in this city. I spent almost three years here, when it was still poor, and people remembered war, some even the French colonialism.

Right after I arrived, what shocked me the most was that while the Vietnamese people seemed to ‘forgive’ the USA, they had never forgiven the French colonialists.

“Why?” I asked my friends. “How is it possible? Wasn’t the US bombing and killing campaign during the ‘American War’ (which is known in the West as ‘Vietnam War’) terribly brutal, with millions of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Laotians losing their lives?”

“Of course, it was”, I was readily explained. “But we fought and, despite the terrible losses and hardship, we defeated Americans in relatively short time. And anyway, it was not only them; members of the coalition also consisted of countries like South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Thailand, and of course, France.”

And the story continued:

“The French were occupying and tormenting us for much longer. They also had been humiliating our people, continuously. They enslaved up, tortured us, took our women, they raped them, and they had stolen all that we had.”

Some instruments of rape-torture used by the French in Indochina

Near where I used to live, was a notorious “Central Jail”, equipped with guillotines, torture chambers, solitary confinement cells. Now, on exhibit there, are monstrous instruments used by the French colonizers, to torture and rape captured Vietnamese patriot women: beer bottles, electric wires, walking canes.

Whatever the colonized Indochina had, was stolen: taken to France, in order to finance construction of grandiose theatres, railroads, metro, parks, and universities. And yes, to subsidize formation of that famous French social system which, as the Yellow Vests are now correctly saying, is being dismantled by the French ‘elites’ and by the political system which they are fully controlling.

Vietnamese people fought bravely against the French, finally defeating them during an iconic battle at Dien Bien Phu. But the victorious Vietnamese Communist forces inherited ransacked, divided land, stripped of its resources and even of its art work (several French intellectuals, including famous writer and later Minister of Culture in de Gaulle’s government, Andre Malraux, confessed to stealing art objects from ‘Indochina’, when he lived there as a young man).

Needless to say, that until now, French companies are brutally pillaging many parts of Southeast Asia, through mining and other neo-colonialist projects, as they do in various areas of Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.

Now ask in Hanoi, ask in Phnom Penh or Vientiane, whether people of ‘Indochina’ (what an insulting and bizarre name was given to this part of the world by the French, during the colonial era!) are supporting Yellow Vests in Paris? Ask whether they think that if they win concessions in Paris, it would improve life in Asia.

Are you guessing what the answer would be?

I don’t say that demands of the people who are fighting in the streets of Paris are wrong. They are not. They are absolutely legitimate.

French elites are brutal, selfish, even perverse. Present French government is simply serving them, as the US presidents are all serving huge corporations, including those deadly military conglomerates. ‘They should go’, they should disappear, give way to what is logical human evolutionary pattern: a socialist, egalitarian society.

But they are not ready to go. On the contrary. They are robbing, for centuries, the entire planet, and now they went so far as to plunder their own people (who were used to sharing the booty).

French citizens are not used to being plundered. For centuries they lived well, and for several last decades, they were living ‘extremely well’. They were enjoying some of the most generous benefits anywhere in the world.

Who paid for it? Did it matter? Was it ever important to those in Paris, in other big cities, or in the countryside? Were the French farmers wondering how come they were getting generous subsidies when they were producing excessive amounts of food and wine, but also when they were asked by the government not to produce much of anything? Did they often travel to Senegal, or elsewhere in West Africa, to investigate how these subsidies thoroughly destroyed agriculture sector in several former French colonies? Did they care that lives of millions there were totally ruined? Or that as far as Indonesia or Brazil, French corporations have been, aggressively, taking over food and beverage production, as well as food distribution, and that as a result, food prices in many poor countries skyrocketed to double or triple of what they are in Paris, while the local incomes remain, in some cases, only 10% of those in France?

And the food is only one example. But this essay was supposed to be about something slightly different: about the Yellow Vests, and what will happen if all of their demands would be met.

If we agree that the regime that is governing in France, entire West, and in many of its colonies and neo-colonies, is truly monstrous, perverse and brutal, we have to come to a logical conclusion that it is not going to pay the bill for better medical care, education, as well as lower taxes and higher wages of the ordinary French citizens.

If demands of the protesters are met, there will be someone else who will be forced to cover the bill. Most likely tens of millions, or hundreds of millions will be ‘taxed’. And they will not be living in France, or in the European Union, or even anywhere near.

Are protesters of Mouvement des gilets jaunes, thinking about this? Does it matter to them at least a little bit?

It did not in the past, either. Perhaps when few people like Jean Paul Sartre were still alive, these questions were periodically asked. But not lately; not now. Not during this rebellion on Champs-Élysées.

Treatment of Vietnamese women by the French

Do people in France question how many millions would have to die in order to improve the quality of life in the French cities and in provinces?

Or perhaps, to ‘compensate’, to cover the social spending, some country would ‘have to be’ invaded? Would it be Iran? Or maybe Venezuela?

The New York Times, in one of its articles about the French provinces, mentioned that people were complaining they cannot afford to even take their wives to a restaurant for dinner, anymore. That is truly serious, but would it justify a battle for Iran or Venezuela, and their consequent plunder, or would it excuse massacre of further few hundreds of thousands of West Papuans?

I would suggest something that would help to convince the true internationalists, as well as people all over the pillaged world, that the Mouvement des gilets jaunes is not just selfishly fighting for the benefits that would improve lives of the French citizens, at the expense of many others all over the world:

They should indicate that they understand; that they are not indifferent to others. Say clearly that they are against capitalism and imperialism, against colonialism and plundering of the people and their resources in absolutely all parts of our Planet!

Say that they are for freedom, equality, and fraternity of all human beings, not just French!

Say that this is true revolution, true battle for improving the world, not just for more money, lower taxes, and better benefits exclusively for people who are living in France!

Say that they would never accept any benefits or extra money, if they come from robbing poor and colonized nations of all that have left.

If they do say all this, and if they demonstrate that they truly mean it, I will have to shout Vive la Révolution! and join them – the protesters – wholeheartedly.

But until they do, until I am convinced that their victory would not harm others, millions of others, I’ll continue to be much more concerned about people of Vietnam and Papua, about Iran, Africa, Syria or the entire Middle East, than about whether someone individual in rural France can afford to take his wife for dinner to a restaurant.

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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.

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Rising Homelessness in America: The Reality of Life for Workers in a “Booming” US Economy

December 19th, 2018 by Genevieve Leigh

On any given night in the United States 553,000 people experience homelessness, according to the 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) published by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and sent to Congress on Monday.

The report shows that homelessness is on the rise for the second year in a row. It underscores the harsh reality for broad sections of workers in the world’s richest and most “advanced” capitalist country, under what is routinely described as a “booming” economy.

The report sheds light on many aspects of the worsening social crisis in America. Below are some of its most essential findings:

Some 36,000 of those experiencing homelessness on any given night in 2018 were unaccompanied youth (defined as people under the age of 25). Of this subset, almost 90 percent were between the ages of 18 and 24. Just over half of these unaccompanied youth were unsheltered—a much higher rate than for all people experiencing homelessness.
Homelessness declined this year for all racial groups except people identifying themselves as white, who saw an increase of four percent. White people accounted for 54 percent of the homeless overall.
Half of all people experiencing homelessness were in one of five states: California, New York, Florida, Texas or Washington.
In January 2018, 3,900 people were staying in sheltered locations specifically reserved for people displaced by presidentially declared national disasters. These people were displaced from areas struck by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate, as well as regions hit by Western wildfires and other storms or natural disasters.

Largest changes in homeless people in families with children

Among the top factors driving the increase in homelessness is the drastic rise in housing costs in major cities. This is exacerbated by the continuation of wage stagnation, despite a near-record low official unemployment rate.

According to the report, over half of all people experiencing homelessness resided in one of the nation’s 50 largest cities. The most notable increase took place in King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, the sixth most expensive city in the US. Homelessness rates there rose by 4 percent.

In New York City, where the critical loss of affordable housing is well documented, homelessness increased by 2.8 percent. The report revealed that nearly three in 10 people in families that experience homelessness in the US do so in New York, which has an estimated 52,070 people in homeless families.

The rise in homelessness among people in families with children increased in 12 states between 2017 and 2018. The largest increases were in Connecticut, which experienced a 44 percent increase (516 more people in homeless families with children), and Massachusetts, which saw a 17 percent rise (1,959 more people).

The results of the HUD homeless report are damning, and even more so when one considers its significant limitations. The data largely comes from locally conducted “point in time” surveys, which are nearly a year old. This method of data collection involves teams of government workers who take a headcount of everyone they can find living outside on a single night in January.

Homeless man in New York City, Credit: WIkipedia user Lujoma ny

In addition, a number of communities did not participate at all in the 2018 national count, including San Francisco, which has seen an immense increase in homelessness in recent years. It is likely that the number of homeless people in the United States is significantly underreported.

Earlier this year, a report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition revealed that there does not exist a single place in the US where someone working a full-time minimum-wage job could afford to rent a modest two-bedroom apartment. A person working 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, would require a $26.87 hourly wage to afford such an apartment without spending more than 30 percent of his or her income. In the nation’s capital, Washington DC, where the current minimum wage is $13.25, one would have to earn $34.48 an hour to afford a modest two bedroom apartment.

These two reports taken together tear to shreds the notion that the Democratic Party’s “radical” demand for a $15 an hour minimum wage would seriously lessen the crisis facing workers. The cost of housing coupled with the attack on wages and full-time work has pushed hundreds of thousands of workers into precarious living situations, if not outright homelessness.

Such conditions are widespread across industries. Nearly 95 percent of the jobs created during the Obama administration were part-time, contract, on-call or temporary. This piecemeal work, referred to as the “gig” economy and cynically sold to the younger generation as “flexible” work, excludes health care and other benefits and is often unreliable.

It has become commonplace for workers to hold down two or three part-time jobs in order to make ends meet and provide for their families. Just 39 percent of Americans say they have enough savings to cover a $1,000 emergency room visit or car repair.

Out of Reach report on minimum wage

As the World Socialist Web Site has documented in the case of Texas Amazon worker Shannon Allen, who has been living out of her car for months after being injured on the job, tens of thousands of workers live one paycheck away from homelessness, though they are employed by some of the largest and richest companies in the world.

Reports have emerged this year documenting the growing number of adjunct college professors, many of whom have a Masters degree or PhD, who are forced to live in their cars. Dubbed the “fast food workers of the academic world,” a quarter of these workers are said to be enrolled in public assistance programs. During the wave of teachers’ strikes that erupted early in the year across the US, thousands of teachers spoke out about being forced because of low wages to take second and even third jobs to make ends meet.

In the auto industry, companies have entered into special “competitive cost structure” agreements with the United Auto Workers under which more experienced “legacy” workers are pushed out of the plants and replaced by low-paid, second- and third-tier workers, making as little as the $9 Michigan minimum wage.

These younger workers are often brought on as temporary part-time (TPT) employees, with no rights and no job security. They can be fired at will. They face the most brutal working conditions, as exemplified by the case of Jacoby Hennings, the 21-year-old TPT worker who held jobs simultaneously at two auto plants in Michigan and allegedly killed himself in the fall of 2017 in the UAW local union hall, under still unexplained circumstances. His story is representative of an entire generation of workers.

The statistics on rising homelessness are all the more significant when one considers that they have not only persisted, but worsened in the midst of the supposedly “booming” US economy.

In the “financial recovery” overseen by Democratic President Barack Obama and continued by Donald Trump, the ruling class has grown richer than ever. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has tripled since 2009, propped up by a new financial bubble created by the Federal Reserve’s $4 trillion in quantitative easing. As the Financial Times wrote at the end of this year’s third quarter: “For the big, diversified US banks—Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo—the story of the third quarter was simple: reap the benefits of a good economy, contain expenses, pay less taxes, buy back shares, and make lots of money.”

These vast fortunes were made on the backs of the working class, whose experience since the 2008 crisis has been a nightmare of immense proportions. Democratic and Republican politicians alike, at the behest of the banks and corporations, used the 2008 crash to create the best possible conditions for the financial oligarchs. This meant gutting social services, casualizing labor, loosening safety regulations and attacking healthcare and other benefits.

The indifference and contempt of the ruling class for the plight of workers is indicated by the official response to the HUD report on homelessness. It went virtually unmentioned by both big business parties and barely reported by the corporate-controlled media.

In the eyes of the banks and corporations, the chronically underemployed and unemployed are seen not as economic refugees, but as what Marx called the “industrial reserve army,” available to provide labor for sudden expansions in production while keeping wages low due to their precarious situations.

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Legacy of Colonialism: Britain Robbed India of $45 Trillion and Thence 1.8 Billion Indians Died from Deprivation

December 19th, 2018 by Gideon Polya

Eminent Indian economist Professor Utsa Patnaik (Jawaharlal Nehru University) has estimated that Britain robbed India of $45 trillion between 1765 and 1938, However it is estimated that if India had remained free with 24% of world GDP as in 1700 then its cumulative GDP would have been $232 trillion greater (1700-2003) and $44 trillion greater (1700-1950). Deprivation kills and it is estimated that 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from egregious deprivation under the British (1757-1947). The deadly impact of British occupation of India lingers today 71 years after Independence, with 4 million people dying avoidably from deprivation each year in capitalist India as compared to zero (0) in China.

Professor Utsa Patnaik is professor emeritus at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Utsa Patnaik is a Marxist economist and taught at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning in the School of Social Sciences at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) from 1973 until her retirement in 2010. She obtained her PhD in economics from Oxford University, UK, and has researched the transition from agricultural peasant societies to industrial societies, and food security and poverty, especially in India [1]. Utsa Patnaik’s latest book, co-authored with Prabhat Patnaik, is “A Theory of Imperialism” (2016) [2].

We all know that the British rapaciously exploited India. Professor Utsa Patnaik has estimated the magnitude of the British robbing of India thus: “Between 1765 and 1938, the drain amounted to 9.2 trillion pounds ($45 trillion), taking India’s export surplus earnings as the measure, and compounding it at a 5 per cent rate of interest” [3-5].

(A) How and by how much did Britain rob India?

After the betrayal and defeat of the Nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-daulah, at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, the British installed their own puppet, Mir Jafar, as Nawab. The British extracted huge concessions from the defeated Bengalis including land, a monopoly of trade with Europe, and exemption from taxation on internal trade. The British subsequently replaced Mir Jafar with Mir Kasim as Nawab of Bengal. The Bengalis under Mir Kasim were finally driven to revolt when he was in turn sacked by the British and replaced by Mir Jafar for a second term. The Bengalis were defeated at the Battle of Buxar in 1764 , and in 1765 the Moghul Emperor Shah Alam was “persuaded” to grant the power of taxation (diwani) in Bengal to the British East India Company. The British in turn sub-contracted rapacious revenue collection to Bengalis.

Some of the revenue would go the Emperor and some to the Nawab, with the remainder being retained by the British. The British described this as “farming” the Bengali peasants (ryots), but over-taxing of Bengalis meant that 10 million Bengalis perished in the Great Bengal Famine of 1769-1770. The East India Company used about one third of the collected revenue to buy Indian goods and thus the Bengalis were in effect being paid for their goods through the exorbitant taxes applied to them. 15 years later, exorbitant British taxation led to famine in the Gangetic plain to the west of Bengal. Indeed such British excesses led to the British Parliament (unsuccessfully) impeaching Warren Hastings (first Governor General of India and father by adultery of Jane Austen’s cousin Eliza) for crimes such as the violation of the Begums of Oudh – he was of course eventually acquitted [6].

By the 1840s the East India Company had dominion over most of present-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh but the British Government was increasingly keen for greater involvement in the exploitative proceedings. In 1847 the British Government introduced a scheme whereby those wishing to buy Indian goods could only do so using Council Bills issued by the British Crown in London. Traders would pay for such Bills in gold and silver and use them to pay Indian producers who would in turn cash them in for rupees at the local colonial office – rupees that been exacted by exorbitant taxation [5].

In his book “Inglorious Empire. What the British did to India”, Shashi Tharoor describes how the British looted and de-industrialized India and thus paid for Britain’s Industrial Revolution and violent global dominance: “At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India” ([7], page 3 [8]). This deadly and merciless taxation was accompanied by massive de-industrialization of India. Thus before the invasion by the British, India led the world in textiles, agriculture and metallurgy, but rapidly became an exporter of raw materials and an importer of goods manufactured in Britain [6- 8].

Professor Utsa Patnaik’s estimate of Britain’s theft from India amounting to $45 trillion (1765-1938) [3-5] can be compared with estimates based on GDP considerations. According to Wikipedia, India’s share of the world economy declined from 24.4% in 1700 to 4.2% in 1950. India’s share of global industrial output declined from 25% in 1750 to 2% in 1900 [9]. From available data on India’s GDP and India’s share of world GDP since 1700 [10, 11] one can get a very rough estimate of what India’s cumulative GDP could have been from 1700-2003 if the British had not robbed and raped India.

Thus the cumulative GDP (PPP) for India is given below for 6 periods since 1700 (A) at the observed average % of world GDP , and (B) if the average Indian % of world GDP had remained at the pre-British invasion 24.0% in 1770.

1700-1820: (A) $13.1 trillion (20.3%) versus (B) $15.8 trillion (24.0%).

1820-1870: (A) $6.2 trillion (14.0%) versus (B) $10.5 trillion (24.0%).

1870-1913: (A) $7.3 trillion (9.8%) versus (B) $18.0 trillion (24.0%).

1913-1950: (A) $7.9 trillion (5.5%) versus (B) $34.4 trillion (24.0%).

1950-1973: (A) $8.3 trillion (3.5%) versus (B) $$56.8 trillion (24.0%).

1973-2003: (A) $41.5 trillion (5.5%) versus (B) $180.9 trillion (24.0%).

It has taken India 7 decades to partially recover from 2 centuries of rapacious British imperialism. The difference in cumulative GDP is $316.4 trillion (1700-2003) and $44 trillion (1700-1950), the latter estimate of India’s deprivation being consonant with Professor Utsa Patnaik’s estimate that the British had stolen $45 trillion from India between 1765 and 1938 [3-5].

(B) 1.8 billion Indians died avoidably from egregious deprivation under the British.

Imposed poverty kills. Poverty-derived avoidable mortality (avoidable death, excess mortality, excess death, premature death, untimely death, death that should not have happened) can be estimated as the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with same demographics (birth rate and percentage of children) [12]. Below are listed in rough chronological order some shocking salient features of the deadly impact of rapacious British imperialism over 2 centuries in British India, Britain’s Auschwitz.

In the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine 10 million out of 30 million over-taxed Bengalis starved to death [6, 13].

Scores of millions of Indians perished in man-made famines between the 1769-1770 Great Bengal Famine and the 1942-1945 WW2 Bengal Famine [6].

Using Indian census data 1870-1950, assuming an Indian population of about 200 million in the period 1760-1870, and estimating by interpolation from available data an Indian avoidable death rate in (deaths per 1,000 of population) of 37 (1757-1920), 35 (1920-1930), 30 (1930-1940) and 24 (1940-1950), one can estimate Indian excess deaths of 592 million (1757-1837), 497 million (1837-1901) and 418 million (1901-1947), roughly 1.5 billion in total or 1.8 billion including the Native States [14].

Scores of millions of distant British keeping hundreds of millions of Indians on the edge of starvation was enabled by relatively small numbers of British soldiers and much greater numbers of well-fed Indian soldiers threatening requisite violence [6]. It has been estimated by Amaresh Misra that 10 million Indians were massacred in the decade after the 1857 Indian Mutiny (Indian Rebellion) as reprisals for 2,000 British deaths [15, 16].

Despite a very high birth rate, the Indian population did not increase between 1860 (292 million) and 1934 (292 million) [17]. This is indicative of massive avoidable deaths from imposed deprivation that can be estimated as 745 million (1860-1934) or an average of about 10 million Indian avoidable deaths from deprivation per year [14].

Addressing the House of Commons in 1935, racist, imperialist and mass murderer Winston Churchill made an extraordinary confession in stating of the subjugated Indians: “In the standard of life they have nothing to spare. The slightest fall from the present standard of life in India means slow starvation, and the actual squeezing out of life, not only of millions but of scores of millions of people, who have come into the world at your invitation and under the shield and protection of British power” [6, 18, 19]. 7 years later Churchill commenced the deliberate starving to death over 4 years of 6-7 million Indians in Bengal, Orissa, Bihar and Assam as the British exported grain from India and slashed grain imports [6].

8. In the 1942-1945 WW2 Bengali Holocaust (Indian Holocaust, WW2 Bengal Famine) 6-7 million Indians were deliberately starved to death for strategic reasons by the British with Australian complicity (Australia was complicit by denying starving India food from its huge wartime food stores) [6, 12-14, 19-27]. This atrocity has been white-washed from history and general public perception by successive generations of Anglo journalist, editor, politician and academic presstitutes. Indeed perpetrator Churchill made no mention for this atrocity in his 6-volume history “The Second World War” for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature [6].
According to Professor Utsa Patnaik Indian per capita annual consumption of food was 200 kg in 1900, but went down to 137 kg during World War II and in 1946 [28]. This is consonant with the following data from my book “Jane Austen and the Black Hole of British History”: “The population of India at that time [1940] was about 400 million and total grain production was 50 to 70 million tons annually. The population was growing at a rate of about 5% per year and there was a requirement of net imports of about 1-2 million tons of grain per annum to make up for deficiencies… Behrens’ figures for grain shipments (in tons) for India in 1942-1945 are as follows: 1942 (30,000), 1943 (303,000), 1944 (639,000) and 1945 (871,000). The 1942 shipment involved 2 lots from Australia contracted for at the rate of 15,000 tons per month to supply the Indian Army (the balance of the demand was not shipped that year). 2.4 million men served in the Indian Army during World War 2. This estimate can be “reduced” since not all of these were in the Army at the same time, scores of thousands were in the Mediterranean theatre (250,000 served there), had been captured by the Japanese or had died. Taking the gross Indian annual grain production estimates of about 60 million tons for 400 million people, we see that the average consumption was 0.15 tons per person per year (obviously more for adults and less for children). The annual requirement for about 2 million men in the “reduced” Indian Army was therefore 0.3 million tons. We can arrive at a figure having a similar order of magnitude from the 1942 contracted requirement of 15,000 tons per month i.e. 0.18 million tons for a whole year. If we assume that an Indian Army soldier required 50% more food than the average Indian we would estimate that the annual grain requirement for a 2 million strong Indian Army would be about 0.45 million tons. The average yearly importation in 1942-1945 was 0.46 million tons and thus we can see that the grain actually imported was merely enough to feed the Indian Army” (pages 156-158, Chapter 15 [6]).
Shashi Tharoor in “Inglorious Empire”: “The British left a society with 16 per cent literacy, a life expectancy of 27, practically no domestic industry and over 90 per cent living below what today we would call the poverty line” ([7], page 215 [8]) . As indicated in (6) above, the life expectancy of 27 years corresponded to about 10 million Indian avoidable deaths from deprivation per year.

Things got much better after Indian Independence. The 1.8 billion avoidable Indian deaths from deprivation under the genocidal British over 2 centuries is not that surprising when one considers that despite modern medicine, antibiotics, and the essential absence of famine, avoidable deaths from deprivation in the period 1950-2005 in India totalled 0.35 billion [14]. Annual avoidable deaths as a percentage of population fell from a genocidal 2.4% per year in 1947 under the British to 0.35% per year in 2005, but the population of India increased from 380 million in 1947 to about 1,100 million in 2005. Today 4 million Indians die avoidably from deprivation each year as compared to zero (0) in China that, unlike capitalist India, has overcome endemic poverty [11].

The 3 Laws of Thermodynamics that underlie Chemistry, Physics and industry are (1) the energy of a closed system is constant, (2) the entropy (disorder, lack of information content) strives to a maximum, and (3) there is zero molecular motion in a pure crystal at absolute zero degrees Kelvin (-273. 15 degrees Centigrade). Polya’s 3 Laws of Economics are based on the 3 Laws of Thermodynamics and posit that (1) Price (P) – Cost of Production (COP) = Profit (p), (2) deception about COP strives to a maximum, and (3) No work, price or profit on a dead planet [29]. The major cost of production (COP) in the British Raj was the passive mass murder of 1.8 billion Indians through deadly impoverishment, and in keeping with Polya’s Second Law of Economics, the British strove to deceive the world about this horror.

The capitalist perpetrator deception continues in a neoliberal One Percenter-dominated world that is existentially threatened by nuclear weapons (a nuclear winter from nuclear war would wipe out most of Humanity and the Biosphere), poverty (15 million people die avoidably from deprivation each year, 4 million in India) and man-made climate change (about 1 million people die from climate change each year but this set to increase to an average of 100 million deaths per year this century if urgent, requisite action is not taken) [30- 32] . Poverty kills. History ignored yields history repeated [6]. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity. Please inform everyone you can.

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

Notes

[1]. Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, “A Theory of Imperialism”, Columbia University Press, New York, 2016.

[2]. “Utsa Patnaik”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utsa_Patnaik .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[28]. Prianshi Mathur, “Did you know that back in the Raj days, British looted Rs 3.2 lakh crore from India?”, India Times, 16 December 2018: https://www.indiatimes.com/trending/wtf/did-you-know-that-back-in-the-raj-days-british-looted-rs-3-2-lakh-crore-from-india-358731.html .

[29]. Gideon Polya, “Polya’s 3 Laws Of Economics Expose Deadly, Dishonest And Terminal Neoliberal Capitalism”, Countercurrents, 17 October, 2015: https://countercurrents.org/polya171015.htm .

[30]. “Climate Genocide”: https://sites.google.com/site/climategenocide/ .

[31]. “Too late to avoid global warming catastrophe”: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/too-late-to-avoid-global-warming

[32]. “Nuclear weapons ban , end poverty & reverse climate change”: https://sites.google.com/site/300orgsite/nuclear-weapons-ban

Featured image is from Countercurrents

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French Government Responds to Mass Protests

December 19th, 2018 by Abayomi Azikiwe

Saturday December 15 marked the fifth consecutive week where thousands of people have held marches and engaged in various forms of civil disobedience throughout France.

Sparked by the imposition of a fuel tax, the “gilet jaunes” (Yellow Vest) movement has exposed the negative impact of the neo-liberal policies of the ruling La Republique en Marche President Emmanuel Macron. Even after the president announced the suspension and eventual elimination of the fuel tax along with other reforms related to minimum wages and pensions, demonstrations still took place the following week albeit in smaller numbers.

The rationale for the fuel tax imposed by Macron was ostensibly to reduce the usage of fossil fuels. This supposed “green energy policy” which includes the reduction in the speed limit disproportionately affects motorists who live outside the central metropolitan areas.

In Strasbourg on the border with Germany and the official seat of the European Parliament, an attack at the Christmas market area on December 11 resulting in the deaths of five people prompted a broadened security presence by the French authorities. International media coverage shifted from the plight of workers and the middle income sectors, to the ongoing “anti-terrorism” narrative.

However, this incident in Strasbourg did not halt the burgeoning consciousness of people surrounding the policies of the Macron administration which is deliberately designed to disempower trade unions and further impoverish large sections of the population. The Yellow Vest movement was conveniently projected as people are required to carry this apparel in their vehicles to indicate emergencies on the streets and railways.

Since the beginning of the demonstrations seven people have been killed. The French government has deployed nearly 70,000 riot police to control the protests. Police agencies have reported tremendous stress among its personnel attempting to quell the unrest and called for their own picket lines outside law-enforcement offices on December 19.

Two days after the fifth straight week of Saturday demonstrations, protesters targeted toll stations to illustrate the rising cost of personal transportation in France. Many of the participants taking part in the demonstrations are those located in the outskirts of major cities threatened with financial ruin due to the policies of the current government.

Protest actions were reported on December 18 at 40 different toll collection outlets. Several locations were set on fire.

These toll station seizures and arsons are complicating security concerns on the highways where the largest firm which administers the outlets, Vinci Autoroutes, issued a warning to drivers traveling on the highways. There were attacks on intersections near tourist towns such as Avignon, Orange, Perpignan, Agde, etc.

Early on December 18, the Bandol toll was firebombed prompting the closing of A50 Highway between Marseille and Toulon. In addition, the Manosque toll station was burned as well.

Vinci Autoroutes is heavily centered in the western and southern regions of France. The increasing attacks on highway locations are damaging the flow of traffic during the holiday season. It was announced by the French authorities that 20 people were arrested on December 18 in connection with the attacks on the toll stations.

Speed radar monitors have been hit as well over the last few weeks. The disabling of these machines mean that traffic citations for speeding cannot be documented depriving the company and the French government of millions in revenues.

Radars-auto.com reported that 1600 traffic monitoring devices have been destroyed by demonstrators. This number accounts for approximately 50% of all such machines in the entire country.

These radar machines yielded 84 million euros (US$96 million) every month during 2017. French Interior Ministry officials refused to provide a specific number of how many radar devices have been taken out in the last few weeks. The state did however note that the cost of repairing the radar monitoring devices could run from 500 to 200,000 euros.

France yellow vest demonstrations during Nov.-Dec. 2018

Conditions Which Sparked Unrest

The developments in France surrounding the Yellow Vest protests are a direct byproduct of the declining standard of living among workers, the poor and disaffected people in the middle classes. The two major political parties which contested in the 2017 runoff elections were the newly-created La Republique en Marche composed of former Socialist Party leaders and conservative elements both of whom are committed to a neo-liberal economic agenda which favors the interests of finance capital far above and beyond the working class and poor, and the National Front, headed by Marine Le Pen, a neo-fascist pro-capitalist party which takes a hardline against immigration from the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe.

Objectively many people in France are suffering from increasing marginalization. This is exemplified by the consistently high jobless rates over the last two decades.

According to a report published by tradingeconomics.com,

“The unemployment rate in France stood at 9.1% in the third quarter of 2018, the same as in the previous period and slightly below market expectations of 9.2%. In metropolitan France only, the unemployment rate was also unchanged at 8.8% in the third quarter as the number of unemployed increased by 22,000 to 2.6 million. The employment rate rose by 0.1% points to 65.9%, its highest level since the early 1980s, and the activity rate moved up to 72.3%, its highest since the series began in 1975. Unemployment rates in France averaged 9.27% from 1996 until 2018, reaching an all-time high of 10.70% in the first quarter of 1997 and a record low of 7.20% in the first quarter of 2008.”

Demands put forward by the Yellow Vest movement has extended beyond economic issues such as toll rates, fuel prices, minimum wages and the high rates of taxation on salaries and pensions. Many within the demonstrations have called for the resignation of Macron and even the overthrow of the Fifth Republic.

Right-wing elements have entered the demonstrations believing that the collapse of the Macron presidency could pave the way for the ascendancy of Le Pen. Yet there is a diversity of political and class interests involved in the protests. Absent of a clearly identifiable national political leadership the movement could potentially be a stage for the ideological struggle which is needed for France to move forward beyond the present neo-liberal impasse.

The left-wing Confederation of Trade Unions (CGT) had called for a strike over energy policy on November 27. Other radical and anarchist elements are seeking to influence the character of the protests as well.

Bruno Drweski, a historian and geo-political analyst working at the National Institute for Eastern Languages and Cultures (INALCO) in Paris, granted an interview to LeftEast online journal where Maria Cernat, a lecturer at the Communications Sciences and International Relations Department of Titu Maiorescu University in Bucharest, Romania, asked several questions about the social character of the Yellow Vest protest movement.

The observations of Drweski emphasize that:

“People are strongly determined not to capitulate, but the main problem is the lack of organization, which on one side makes the movement broader but, on the other leaves it open to provocations, manipulations and social divisions. Even if the general mood is marked with values and slogans that were first used during the French Revolution, it is hard to say if this ‘national-political-social unity’ will prevail so as to force the government to retreat on policies that are pursued not only by the government but also by the EU and the international financial organizations within the frame of the capitalist globalization process.”

International Significance of the French Movement

Throughout the entire European Union (EU) a similar economic and political crisis to what exist in France prevails. Demonstrations have erupted in other countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands.

In Brussels the demonstrations have taken on a decisively right-wing character where on December 15 crowds of people demanded the government of Prime Minister Charles Michel resign over the signing of the United Nations Global Compact on Migration at a conference in Morocco. The aims of the agreement are to develop a comprehensive approach to migration policy internationally.

Ten countries including many former socialist states in Eastern Europe have withdrawn their support for the migration pact. Earlier in July when the Morocco conference was held the United States refused to sign the UN document.

Michel offered to step down presenting his resignation letter to King Philippe on December 18 after a vote of no-confidence in parliament where other parties in the ruling coalition and the opposition refused to back his continuing rule. Right-wing elements in Belgium view the migration pact as encouraging the entry of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

These political developments which are influenced by the economic crisis gripping the western capitalist states could result in both rightward and leftward tilts in the character of the responses by the working and middle classes. Nonetheless, the adoption of a purported “populist” stance on the failure of the neo-liberal governance model provides no solution to the majority of working and oppressed peoples within the capitalist countries.

Western industrialized nations are experiencing limited growth rates with a widening gap between the rich and poor. Attacks on migrants and the nationally oppressed cannot guarantee higher wages and better living conditions for the previously more stable working and middle classes.

Imperialist wars in the last three decades in Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other geo-political regions have drained the national wealth of the western countries. The global recession after 2007 and the large-scale governmental bailouts of the international financial institutions along with the industrialists have further weakened the social fabric of world capitalist system.

Only a movement to genuinely empower the workers and oppressed on a non-capitalist basis provides the potential for moving beyond the present crisis in Europe, North America and the rest of the world.

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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author

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Iraq: The Slums of Mesopotamia

December 19th, 2018 by Bahira al-Sheikhly

It has become obvious that corruption has settled in Iraq since its occupation in 2003. Corruption has multiplied and engulfed all aspects of life.

The emergence of slums in the land of Mesopotamia is but one of the manifestations of the disastrous consequences of occupation and the bottomless corruption of the successive administrations in Iraq. It joins phenomena such as hunger, unemployment and poverty to depict a depressing picture of what has befallen this venerable country.

It is a painful paradox that in the post-2003 period we find Iraqi citizens who have become homeless, living like wild animals in the open while historically Mesopotamia was the perfect haven for man.

Dozens of slums have mushroomed on the outskirts of Baghdad and other cities in Iraq. They emerged from poverty and lack the most basic of amenities. There is no water, no electricity, no sewage and no services. Children in these slums are deprived of education and of life. Most of them eke out a measly daily income or a meagre meal by rummaging through garbage.

Data collected by the Iraqi Ministry of Planning in cooperation with the UN Human Settlements Programme last year show that about 13% of the population of Iraq lives in slums. This percentage is conceivably below the truth because the census did not include the populations of the three provinces of Iraqi Kurdistan (Erbil, Dohuk, Sulaimaniyah) and skipped the provinces of Anbar, Saladin and Nineveh due to the unstable security situations.

The ministry’s data indicated that there were 3,687 slum communities in 12 governorates. With a population of 8 million, Baghdad leads the list with 1,000 slums, followed by the province of Basra (about 3 million inhabitants) with 700 slums. The provinces of Najaf and Karbala close the list with 89 slum areas.

The Ministry of Planning’s survey estimated the number of slum dwellers to be 3.3 million people living in 522,000 housing units. Data also show that 88% of the slums were erected on government land.

Slums started mushrooming around Iraq after 2003. Poor people built houses on abandoned land parcels. Large tracts of government land were seized by party militias, which either built commercial compounds on them or distributed some to the poor in exchange for votes come Election Day.

The problem of slums was exacerbated after the rise of the Islamic State in 2014 with the exodus of thousands of families to big cities and their settling on abandoned tracts of land around them.

There have been deliberate acts of destruction and urban disfigurement in large cities, especially Baghdad. Local authorities have allowed the parcelling of large houses with large yards in the city into small parcels and for buildings to be erected on them.

Authorities also have done nothing to stop buildings being erected on sidewalks and road separators. Houses have even been built on river banks in blatant disregard for the law or civic behaviour. Extensive corruption is everywhere in Iraq.

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GlobalResearch.ca in 2019

December 19th, 2018 by The Global Research Team

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Madagascar: Electoral Threat to Biodiversity

December 19th, 2018 by Dr Peter H. Raven

In the wake of the COP24 negotiations it is easy to forget that a much less publicised event will be taking place in just a matter of days, although it is one of equal significance to the global environment.

On 19 December, the Malagasy people go to the polls to vote for their choice of one of two remaining candidates in the second round of their presidential election.

Madagascar is home to an extraordinary abundance of biodiversity, a unique and precious assemblage of flora and fauna. The island is nearly twice the size of the British Isles, but with about ten times as many species of organisms.

Significant deforestation

Perhaps as much as three percent of the world’s species are found in Madagascar, with more than 95 percent of them found nowhere else. Overall, only five to ten percent of Madagascar’s species has been catalogued by science, although we have found most of the vertebrate animals and plants by now.

Out of necessity, Madagascar’s rural poor are consuming their natural resources directly as much as the people of any other country on earth. On top of that, illegal logging for export has become a major problem in the relatively small forests that have survived.

Wood from the several species of rosewood that occur on the island has been particularly sought after. Its deep red wood is prized and most of the accessible trees in Asia have already been harvested. This wood fetches very high prices globally, and especially in China.

Industrial-scale activities such as lumbering and mining are rapidly destroying most of the natural areas left on the island and the biodiversity that live in them.

These combined forces will continue to destroy the environment unless alternatives are found for the people. All 111 species of lemurs are unique Madagascar. As a result of the activities outlined above, almost every one is on the brink of extinction, making them the most endangered group of primates on Earth.

Comparisons with Brazil

Local law enforcement already faces a near insurmountable battle against the global appetite for rosewood.

If former president and current candidate Andry Rajoelina returns to power on 19 December, their job will become essentially impossible. Under his tenure from 2009-2014, illicit exports of wood from the island soared. After coming to power on the back of a military coup, one of his first acts was to tear up legal protections against felling certain hardwoods, thereby enriching himself and a cabal of timber barons.

Comparisons have been drawn to Brazil’s President-elect Bolsonaro, who has pledged to do away with similar environmental protections to make way for mining and industrial-scale farming.

And yet, while it is being lost rapidly, most of the original Brazilian rainforest is still in place. In contrast, approximately 90 percent of Madagascar’s vegetation has been destroyed over the centuries.

Madagascar is one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average share of GDP of about US $1500, about a tenth of the average in Brazil. Madagascar’s current population of about 26 million people is estimated to be on its way to doubling within the next 30 years (by 2050). In short, the situation there is even more urgent, if nowhere near as widely known.

Environmental sustainability

The world needs to learn to care enough about Madagascar’s people to help them attain environmental sustainability, but we seem to be a very long way from that goal.

Recent years have seen a spate of new world leaders gleefully setting the global environmental agenda back by decades.

Madagascar – a biological treasure-house of great significance – has relatively few resources left to exploit. With another Bolsonaro as President, it is the Malagasy people who will suffer most of all. But if they lose, so do we all.

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Dr Peter H. Raven is a renowned botanist and environmentalist. He is president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden.

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Tags: Madagascan elections, Madagascar

Stocks Are on Pace for Their Worst December Since the Great Depression – The Dow Is Now Down over 3,300 Points from the Peak

December 19th, 2018 by Michael Snyder

U.S. stocks have not fallen this dramatically during the month of December since the Great Depression of the 1930s. On Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost another 507 points, and it is now down more than 1,000 points from Thursday’s close. This fresh downturn has pushed the Dow and the S&P 500 very firmly into correction territory, and the Russell 2000 is now officially in bear market territory. The ferocity of this stock market crash is stunning many of the experts, and many investors are beginning to panic. Back in early October, the Dow hit an all-time high of 26,951.81, but on Monday it closed at just 23,592.98. That means that the Dow has now plunged more than 3,300 points from the peak of the market, and many believe that this stock crash is just getting started.

When it was first being reported that the stock market was on pace for the worst December since the Great Depression, I have to admit that I was skeptical.

But CNBC has the numbers to back up that claim…

Two benchmark U.S. stock indexes are careening toward a historically bad December.

Both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 are on pace for their worst December performance since 1931, when stocks were battered during the Great Depression. The Dow and S&P 500 are down 7.8 percent and 7.6 percent this month, respectively.

And we still have two weeks remaining in December. If things continue to unravel, we could potentially be talking about a truly historic month for Wall Street.

But we certainly don’t need things to get any worse, because the damage that has already been done has been immense. The following numbers come from Zero Hedge…

Dow -12.7% from highs (correction)
S&P -13.7% from highs (correction)
Nasdaq Composite -17.3% from highs (correction)
Dow Transports -19.4% from highs (correction)
Russell 2000 -20.6% from highs (bear market)

The Russell 2000 is often an early indicator of where the rest of the market is going, and if that turns out to be the case this time around then we should expect the Dow and the S&P 500 to fall a lot farther.

When asked about this market downturn by CNBC, one equity strategist actually used the “R” word…

“The sell-off comes from the risk-off sentiment. Small caps are riskier than large caps, and there are some concerns about the end of a cycle in the U.S. and that we are entering a recession,” said Tobias Levkovich, chief U.S. equity strategist at Citi.

We haven’t even had any sort of a major “trigger event”, and yet stock prices have been steadily falling for weeks.

How bad could things ultimately get if there is some sort of “Lehman Brothers moment” that sets off a full-blown state of panic?

Already, many are using the term “bear market” to describe what is happening. For instance, Jeffrey Gundlach attracted a huge amount of attention when he made the following statement on Monday…

DoubleLine Capital CEO Jeffrey Gundlach said Monday that he “absolutely” believes the S&P 500 will go below the lows that the index hit early in 2018.

“I’m pretty sure this is a bear market,” Gundlach told Scott Wapner on CNBC’s Halftime Report. The major averages fell to session lows following his comments.

And some high profile stocks are already well beyond bear market territory. Goldman Sachs is now down 40 percent from the 52-week high, and the banking sector as a whole is just getting crushed.

Trillions upon trillions of dollars of paper wealth has disappeared, and needless to say, hedge funds are starting to go down like dominoes. Earlier today, a New York Post article used phrases such as “losing their shirts” and “financial wipeout”…

The stars of the biggest hedge funds are losing their shirts as analysts fear a major financial wipeout is imminent.

From Ken Griffin’s Citadel, to Israel Englander’s Millennium Management, one big name after another is racking up negative returns lately, amid bad bets in a saturated market.

On Monday, we witnessed more forced hedge fund liquidations, and that was one of the major factors that pushed prices down…

As we noted previously, you are witnessing a massive culling of the hedge fund industry as hundreds of funds are liquidated and thousands more get sizable redemptions. Many of these funds own the same companies—the outcasts from the indexed world, the cheap, the unloved; the same stocks that many other hedge fund managers own. With the hedge fund industry going in reverse, there is suddenly no natural buyer for what must be sold. As a result, you are seeing waves of forced sell orders and few buyers (which for those so inclined, is creating good bargains all around).

Those of you that have been waiting for the stock market to implode can finally stop waiting.

It is here, and it is really, really bad.

Meanwhile, a new survey contains more evidence that average Americans are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the U.S. economy. In fact, the numbers in the survey were “essentially reversed” from earlier this year…

Overall, 28 percent of Americans said the economy will get better in the next year, while 33 percent predict it will get worse, according to the survey, which was released Sunday. Those numbers were essentially reversed from January, when 35 percent said the economy would get better and 20 percent said it would get worse.

The psychological shift that I wrote about a few weeks ago appears to be accelerating. It is starting to become exceedingly clear that a major crisis has begun, and now the big question is this – how bad will things get in 2019?

Well, Ron Paul told CNBC that “it could be worse than 1929″…

Paul said Thursday on CNBC‘s “Futures Now that “Once this volatility shows that we’re not going to resume the bull market, then people are going to rush for the exits.” Paul added that “it could be worse than 1929.” He was referencing the fateful day in October of 1929 when the stock market crashed, and the United States was flung into the Great Depression that lasted ten years. During that year, a worldwide depression was ignited because of the U.S.’s market crash. The stock market began hemorrhaging and after falling almost 90 percent, sent the U.S. economy crashing a burning.

Will it ultimately be that bad?

Only time will tell, but right now things certainly do not look good, and I have a feeling that they are about to get a whole lot worse.

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Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.

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Is Canada Huawei Arrest Attempt to Sabotage Trump Xi Talks?

December 19th, 2018 by F. William Engdahl

The arrest of the CFO of the China’s largest telecoms equipment company, Huawei, carries hallmarks of deep state or behind-the-scenes sabotage designed to rupture recent progress between US President Trump and China President Xi Jinping on strategic issues. Here are some elements of the case that smack of insider sabotage from the US side, with complicity of Five Eyes member Canada.

After months of trade tariff clashes between USA and China, US President Donald Trump met with China President Xi Jinping during the Buenos Aires G-20 Summit. There the two issued a positive joint statement in which it was stated that the US on January 1 will impose a “cease-fire” and freeze current tariffs at 10% on the $200 billion of Chinese imports to the US, not raising it to 25% as scheduled. For his part, Xi agreed to resume buying US soybeans and other agriculture and energy products to cut the trade imbalance. Most interesting and little-discussed in western media coverage, on the US request, Xi also agreed to list the controversial chemical Fentanyl as a Controlled Substance, meaning that people selling Fentanyl to the United States will be subject to China’s maximum penalty under the law.

As well, they agreed to immediately begin negotiations on key US issues including forced technology transfer, intellectual property protection, non-tariff barriers, cyber intrusions and cyber theft, services and agriculture to be completed within 90 days or face resumption of the planned 25% tariff raise.

The offer by Xi to control Fentanyl, one of the most deadly synthetic drugs that has caused tens of thousands of deaths in the USA, was notable. According to U.S. law enforcement and drug investigators, China is the main supplier of fentanyl to the United States. There criminal organizations mix the Fentanyl powder with heroin. Also according to the US DEA, China companies ship Fentanyl to key points in Canada and Mexico. From Mexico it is usually repackaged by the Mexican drug cartels and smuggled into the US.

Canada Surprise?

In other words China had agreed to open strategic issues in bilateral relations that could have major positive implications for resolving the trade conflicts and other issues not public. On December 5 in Vancouver Canadian authorities arrested Meng Wanzhou, the CFO and board member of China’s Huawei Technologies Co Ltd. She is also daughter of the founder and CEO.

The arrest, reportedly on charges of illegal activities in regard to US sanctions on Iran, is unprecedented. In August the US President signed an order banning Huawei hardware in US government communications networks on grounds of national security. Huawei is at the heart of China’s vigorous effort to dominate the emerging 5G communications networks. The company is today the world’s second largest smartphone maker after Samsung and ahead of Apple and the world’s largest manufacturer of telecom network equipment with $92 billion in sales. US President Trump in August authorized a ban on the company’s hardware in US government networks, citing national security concerns – particularly in relation to the rollout of 5G networks.

That there has been growing conflicts between China and Washington over Huawei is clear. What is bizarre about the Canadian arrest of Meng, now on bail and awaiting extradition to the US, is the fact that it took place on the same day Trump and Xi in Buenos Aires were engaged in critical trade talks. According to Trump National Security adviser, John Bolton, the President was not informed beforehand of the Canadian arrest plan.

Whatever the case with many charges of hidden espionage devices embedded in Huawei technology, or Iran sanctions violations, the Canadian arrest of CFO Meng Wanzhou is having explosive consequences inside China. The CCP People’s Daily, in an editorial, wrote on December 9,

“To treat a Chinese citizen like a serious criminal, to roughly trample their basic human rights, and to dishonor their dignity, how is this the method of a civilized country? How can this not make people furious?”

In an unusual step, in the midst of the fray, Donald Trump announced that if necessary to conclude positive China trade talks, he would be ready to intervene with the US Justice Department into the controversy. On December 12 in a Reuters interview Trump stated,

“Whatever’s good for this country, I would do. If I think it’s good for what will be certainly the largest trade deal ever made – which is a very important thing – what’s good for national security – I would certainly intervene if I thought it was necessary.”

Beijing Response

So far there are more unanswered questions than answers. However, it appears that Beijing is being extremely careful not to allow the affront–ordinarily a huge face loss for the Chinese to have one of their national champion company senior people treated so–to disrupt relations with the Trump Administration. Rather than retaliate by going after the many top US executives in China, it arrested a former Canadian diplomat in Beijing on suspicion of “endangering national security,” as well as a Canadian entrepreneur with business ties to North Korea.

The connections of that former Canadian diplomat are more than interesting.

Michael Kovrig previously worked as a Canadian diplomat in Beijing, Hong Kong and the United Nations. Chinese national security police took him into custody on December 10 in Beijing. Kovrig is officially listed as “North East Asia adviser” for something called the International Crisis Group.

The International Crisis Group is an NGO with a knack for being involved in key conflict zones such as Myanmar. The magazine Third World Quarterly in a peer-reviewed article in 2014 accused the ICG of “manufacturing” crises.

It was founded by Trump nemesis and Hillary Clinton supporter, George Soros. The Trustees of Kovrig’s employer, the International Crisis Group, include some very notable names. One is of course founder and funder, George Soros. Another trustee is a Canadian billionaire, Frank Guistra. Make a note of the name as it is likely to appear in the news in coming weeks as details emerge of FBI and other US investigations into illegal or shady dealings of the tax-exempt Clinton Foundation. Frank Giustra President & CEO, Fiore Financial Corporation, is a big donor to the Clinton Foundation where he also sits on the board.

His Giustra Foundation works with Elevate Social Businesses, formerly Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, the International Crisis Group, Global Refugee Sponsorship Initiative, and other partners. Guistra’s UrAsia Energy Ltd. appears in the investigation of the infamous Uranium One scandal during Hillary Clinton’s term as Secretary of State, which some believe is the real “Russiagate” scandal. Soon we will know more as litigation in the US proceeds.

In sum, it appears that Xi Jinping has chosen a highly interesting target for retaliation in the Canadian arrest of Huawei’s CFO. To date it appears that, if it were the aim of certain dark networks in US and Canadian governments and intelligence to sabotage any constructive USA-China dialogue by the unprecedented arrest of the Huawei senior executive, it may have backfired. The next weeks will tell more.

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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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The Real Cost of Brexit Revealed

December 19th, 2018 by True Publica

Many of the national newspapers have recently reported that Theresa May’s Brexit deal will come at a substantial cost to the economy. The Guardian reported, as many others did a few days ago that – “Theresa May’s Brexit deal is expected to cost the UK economy as much as £100bn over the next decade compared with remaining in the EU, according to one of the country’s leading economic thinktanks.” But this is not actually true.

The Guardian said –

“An analysis of the prime minister’s EU withdrawal agreement from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) suggested that by 2030, Britain would lose GDP growth equivalent to the annual economic output of Wales.”

The actual statement put out by the NIESR was –

“Our assessment is that trade with the EU, especially in services, will be more costly after Brexit. This is likely to have an adverse effect on living standards in the UK. Our central estimate is that if the government’s proposed Brexit deal is implemented, then GDP in the longer term will be around 4 per cent lower than it would have been had the UK stayed in the EU. This is roughly equivalent to losing the annual output of Wales or the output of the financial services industry in London. This is equivalent to a loss of 3 per cent in GDP per head, worth around £1,000 per annum on average to people in the UK.”

Neither of these statements is absolutely clear due to their ambiguous choice of wording.

I was contacted by an eagle-eyed reader who, after providing some evidence, thought these numbers were misrepresented. To be fair, I was doubtful but contacted the NIESR myself and after some clarification, it dawned on me that the reader was indeed correct. This was in fact, a sickening moment as the consequences of this reality are more than just a bit serious.

Arno Hantzsche, co-author of the original NIESR report, stated in a tweet to the reader:

“the 3.9% figure is the difference in annual GDP relative to Remain reached in 2030 (this difference is building up over the years prior to 2030). We have calculated the cumulative “cost” (i.e. adding up annual differences over 12 years) which is £770bn by 2030, £30bn of which accrue between 2019-20. Hope that clarifies things.“

I then challenged the second co-author Amit Kara, who said:

“There is no contradiction. The cumulative loss over 12 years is £770bn. If you had asked Arno what was the loss in the 12th year, he would have said to you £100bn.“

The Guardian’s headline and overall article entitled: “Theresa May’s Brexit deal could cost UK £100bn over a decade” is, therefore, misleading.

It should be noted that the NIESR report and other media reports quoting these misleading figures of £100bn over a decade only takes account of Theresa May’s current Brexit deal. It does not make any calculations or assumptions for a no-deal or disorderly Brexit.

Having determined that the actual loss to the economy over the 10 year period 2020-2030 is £770 billion (plus £30 billion in 2019) it is worth making comparisons to figures that are known as facts.

Counting the cost of a decade after the financial crisis

The Institute of Fiscal Studies report in September this year stated that the financial crisis that broke out in 2008 was then followed by the deepest recession experienced in the UK since the Second World War. Its lingering effects continue to blight Britain through austerity measures to this day.

In referring to this ongoing recession the IFS said:

“We had got used to the economy, and with it the public finances and household incomes bouncing back strongly following previous downturns. That has not happened this time.”

But the stark reality from the IFS makes clear the cost of saving the banks in 2008.

“GDP (national income) is just 11% higher today than it was at its pre crisis peak in 2007–08. As a result the economy is 16%, or £300 billion, smaller than it would have been had it followed the pre-crisis trend. GDP per capita is now £5,900 per person lower than it might have been had pre crisis trends continued.”

From this, we can make some comparisons. The financial crisis caused the most painful, longest recession since not just the Second World War as is often muted but was actually the worst since the 1930’s Great Depression. The expected losses under Theresa May’s Brexit deal is more than double that. Britain is in for seriously tough economic times between 2020 and 2030. In fact, on those numbers, Britain is heading for an economic depression.

What makes matters worse is that Britain is still recovering from the 2008 crisis and there are no economic indicators to say that tax receipts are high enough to end the governments’ austerity programme (and/or reduce the national debt). Add then, the effects of Theresa May’s orderly Brexit due in just three months time and the current austerity measures will need to be intensified for years to come – at the very least until 2030.

One of the effects of austerity is clearly seen in the overall health of the population. According to recently published figures from the Office for National Statistics, Britain’s improvement in life expectancy has slowed at the fastest rate of any leading industrialised nation. That is except for the free-market mainstay of global health corruption that is the United States. It is ony since 2011 that the rate of life expectancy improvements for men has collapsed by over three-quarters; for women, it is worse at 91%. For decades, life expectancy steadily rose in Britain: and then, suddenly, just as the Tories took power and imposed an austerity ideology to save their friends in the city of London, this improvement peaked and then fell.

The British Medical Journal also wrote about the effects of austerity last year. It found that 120,000 extra deaths since 2010 were caused by it. That is 9 times greater than road fatalities in Britain over the same period. These extra austerity-related deaths and reductions in life-expectancy have been attributed to one thing and one thing only – the NHS has suffered the longest squeeze in its funding as a share of the economy since it was founded after the war.

Some other effects of austerity are just as awful. More than 14 million people, including 4.5 million children, are living below the breadline, with more than half trapped in poverty. That’s one million more children in poverty than in 2010. It also represents exactly one third (33%) all children in the UK. A full 12% of the total UK population is in “persistent” poverty, meaning that they have spent all or most of the last four years in poverty.

To put food on the table British households spent around £900 more on average than they received in income during 2017, pushing their finances into deficit for the first time since the credit boom of the 1980s. The financial crisis over the last ten years is the cause of the loss of purchasing power and less money in average household incomes.

In the same ten-year period there has been a dramatic rise in the effects of the housing crisis, health crisis, care crisis and others. For instance, homelessness has increased to such a point that over 500 people have died from it just last year. Some locals councils are speculatively gambling huge sums of money on the property market in an attempt to plug government-imposed funding gaps. Others are already technically insolvent.

How is Britain prepared for an economic depression that would be substantially greater than the longest recession experienced in a hundred years?

The answer – it isn’t. The national debt will likely be pushed to well over 100 per cent of GDP. This is because of the dual effect of higher borrowing to combat lower revenue. Currently, the national debt is about £1.8 trillion or about 85 per cent of total GDP. The interest charges being paid on this amount alone sits at around £48 billion. That is more than half the total education budget of the United Kingdom and 35 per cent higher than Britain’s entire defence spending budget in 2019. And interest rates are rising for the first time in over 20 years.

Remember, this outlook provided by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research is actually a best case scenario because it only takes account of the Brexit deal that Theresa May is proposing and, as you’ve probably read already today thousands of soldiers, sailors and aircrew have just been put on standby to tackle the chaos of a possible no-deal Brexit. No-ones knows what that might look like but the government will soon be making announcements about the Civil Contingencies Act as the threat of civil disturbances will rise exponentially if a disorderly break from the EU goes ahead.

Either way, Britain is in very, very serious trouble.

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“Alexa, Launch Our Nukes!” Artificial Intelligence and the Future of War

December 19th, 2018 by Michael T. Klare

There could be no more consequential decision than launching atomic weapons and possibly triggering a nuclear holocaust. President John F. Kennedy faced just such a moment during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 and, after envisioning the catastrophic outcome of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear exchange, he came to the conclusion that the atomic powers should impose tough barriers on the precipitous use of such weaponry. Among the measures he and other global leaders adopted were guidelines requiring that senior officials, not just military personnel, have a role in any nuclear-launch decision.

That was then, of course, and this is now. And what a now it is! With artificial intelligence, or AI, soon to play an ever-increasing role in military affairs, as in virtually everything else in our lives, the role of humans, even in nuclear decision-making, is likely to be progressively diminished. In fact, in some future AI-saturated world, it could disappear entirely, leaving machines to determine humanity’s fate.

This isn’t idle conjecture based on science fiction movies or dystopian novels. It’s all too real, all too here and now, or at least here and soon to be. As the Pentagon and the military commands of the other great powers look to the future, what they see is a highly contested battlefield — some have called it a “hyperwar” environment — where vast swarms of AI-guided robotic weapons will fight each other at speeds far exceeding the ability of human commanders to follow the course of a battle. At such a time, it is thought, commanders might increasingly be forced to rely on ever more intelligent machines to make decisions on what weaponry to employ when and where. At first, this may not extend to nuclear weapons, but as the speed of battle increases and the “firebreak” between them and conventional weaponry shrinks, it may prove impossible to prevent the creeping automatization of even nuclear-launch decision-making.

Such an outcome can only grow more likely as the U.S. military completes a top-to-bottom realignment intended to transform it from a fundamentally small-war, counter-terrorist organization back into one focused on peer-against-peer combat with China and Russia. This shift was mandated by the Department of Defense in its December 2017 National Security Strategy. Rather than focusing mainly on weaponry and tactics aimed at combating poorly armed insurgents in never-ending small-scale conflicts, the American military is now being redesigned to fight increasingly well-equipped Chinese and Russian forces in multi-dimensional (air, sea, land, space, cyberspace) engagements involving multiple attack systems (tanks, planes, missiles, rockets) operating with minimal human oversight.

“The major effect/result of all these capabilities coming together will be an innovation warfare has never seen before: the minimization of human decision-making in the vast majority of processes traditionally required to wage war,” observed retired Marine General John Allen and AI entrepreneur Amir Hussain. “In this coming age of hyperwar, we will see humans providing broad, high-level inputs while machines do the planning, executing, and adapting to the reality of the mission and take on the burden of thousands of individual decisions with no additional input.”

That “minimization of human decision-making” will have profound implications for the future of combat. Ordinarily, national leaders seek to control the pace and direction of battle to ensure the best possible outcome, even if that means halting the fighting to avoid greater losses or prevent humanitarian disaster. Machines, even very smart machines, are unlikely to be capable of assessing the social and political context of combat, so activating them might well lead to situations of uncontrolled escalation.

It may be years, possibly decades, before machines replace humans in critical military decision-making roles, but that time is on the horizon. When it comes to controlling AI-enabled weapons systems, as Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis put it in a recent interview,

“For the near future, there’s going to be a significant human element. Maybe for 10 years, maybe for 15. But not for 100.”

Why AI?

Even five years ago, there were few in the military establishment who gave much thought to the role of AI or robotics when it came to major combat operations. Yes, remotely piloted aircraft (RPA), or drones, have been widely used in Africa and the Greater Middle East to hunt down enemy combatants, but those are largely ancillary (and sometimes CIA) operations, intended to relieve pressure on U.S. commandos and allied forces facing scattered bands of violent extremists. In addition, today’s RPAs are still controlled by human operators, even if from remote locations, and make little use, as yet, of AI-powered target-identification and attack systems. In the future, however, such systems are expected to populate much of any battlespace, replacing humans in many or even most combat functions.

To speed this transformation, the Department of Defense is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars on AI-related research.

“We cannot expect success fighting tomorrow’s conflicts with yesterday’s thinking, weapons, or equipment,” Mattis told Congress in April.

To ensure continued military supremacy, he added, the Pentagon would have to focus more “investment in technological innovation to increase lethality, including research into advanced autonomous systems, artificial intelligence, and hypersonics.”

Why the sudden emphasis on AI and robotics? It begins, of course, with the astonishing progress made by the tech community — much of it based in Silicon Valley, California — in enhancing AI and applying it to a multitude of functions, including image identification and voice recognition. One of those applications, Alexa Voice Services, is the computer system behind Amazon’s smart speaker that not only can use the Internet to do your bidding but interpret your commands. (“Alexa, play classical music.” “Alexa, tell me today’s weather.” “Alexa, turn the lights on.”) Another is the kind of self-driving vehicle technology that is expected to revolutionize transportation.

Artificial Intelligence is an “omni-use” technology, explain analysts at the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan information agency, “as it has the potential to be integrated into virtually everything.” It’s also a “dual-use” technology in that it can be applied as aptly to military as civilian purposes. Self-driving cars, for instance, rely on specialized algorithms to process data from an array of sensors monitoring traffic conditions and so decide which routes to take, when to change lanes, and so on. The same technology and reconfigured versions of the same algorithms will one day be applied to self-driving tanks set loose on future battlefields. Similarly, someday drone aircraft — without human operators in distant locales — will be capable of scouring a battlefield for designated targets (tanks, radar systems, combatants), determining that something it “sees” is indeed on its target list, and “deciding” to launch a missile at it.

It doesn’t take a particularly nimble brain to realize why Pentagon officials would seek to harness such technology: they think it will give them a significant advantage in future wars. Any full-scale conflict between the U.S. and China or Russia (or both) would, to say the least, be extraordinarily violent, with possibly hundreds of warships and many thousands of aircraft and armored vehicles all focused in densely packed battlespaces. In such an environment, speed in decision-making, deployment, and engagement will undoubtedly prove a critical asset. Given future super-smart, precision-guided weaponry, whoever fires first will have a better chance of success, or even survival, than a slower-firing adversary. Humans can move swiftly in such situations when forced to do so, but future machines will act far more swiftly, while keeping track of more battlefield variables.

As General Paul Selva, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2017,

“It is very compelling when one looks at the capabilities that artificial intelligence can bring to the speed and accuracy of command and control and the capabilities that advanced robotics might bring to a complex battlespace, particularly machine-to-machine interaction in space and cyberspace, where speed is of the essence.”

Aside from aiming to exploit AI in the development of its own weaponry, U.S. military officials are intensely aware that their principal adversaries are also pushing ahead in the weaponization of AI and robotics, seeking novel ways to overcome America’s advantages in conventional weaponry. According to the Congressional Research Service, for instance, China is investing heavily in the development of artificial intelligence and its application to military purposes. Though lacking the tech base of either China or the United States, Russia is similarly rushing the development of AI and robotics. Any significant Chinese or Russian lead in such emerging technologies that might threaten this country’s military superiority would be intolerable to the Pentagon.

Not surprisingly then, in the fashion of past arms races (from the pre-World War I development of battleships to Cold War nuclear weaponry), an “arms race in AI” is now underway, with the U.S., China, Russia, and other nations (including Britain, Israel, and South Korea) seeking to gain a critical advantage in the weaponization of artificial intelligence and robotics. Pentagon officials regularly cite Chinese advances in AI when seeking congressional funding for their projects, just as Chinese and Russian military officials undoubtedly cite American ones to fund their own pet projects. In true arms race fashion, this dynamic is already accelerating the pace of development and deployment of AI-empowered systems and ensuring their future prominence in warfare.

Command and Control

As this arms race unfolds, artificial intelligence will be applied to every aspect of warfare, from logistics and surveillance to target identification and battle management. Robotic vehicles will accompany troops on the battlefield, carrying supplies and firing on enemy positions; swarms of armed drones will attack enemy tanks, radars, and command centers; unmanned undersea vehicles, or UUVs, will pursue both enemy submarines and surface ships. At the outset of combat, all these instruments of war will undoubtedly be controlled by humans. As the fighting intensifies, however, communications between headquarters and the front lines may well be lost and such systems will, according to military scenarios already being written, be on their own, empowered to take lethal action without further human intervention.

Most of the debate over the application of AI and its future battlefield autonomy has been focused on the morality of empowering fully autonomous weapons — sometimes called “killer robots” — with a capacity to make life-and-death decisions on their own, or on whether the use of such systems would violate the laws of war and international humanitarian law. Such statutes require that war-makers be able to distinguish between combatants and civilians on the battlefield and spare the latter from harm to the greatest extent possible. Advocates of the new technology claim that machines will indeed become smart enough to sort out such distinctions for themselves, while opponents insist that they will never prove capable of making critical distinctions of that sort in the heat of battle and would be unable to show compassion when appropriate. A number of human rights and humanitarian organizations have even launched the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots with the goal of adopting an international ban on the development and deployment of fully autonomous weapons systems.

In the meantime, a perhaps even more consequential debate is emerging in the military realm over the application of AI to command-and-control (C2) systems — that is, to ways senior officers will communicate key orders to their troops. Generals and admirals always seek to maximize the reliability of C2 systems to ensure that their strategic intentions will be fulfilled as thoroughly as possible. In the current era, such systems are deeply reliant on secure radio and satellite communications systems that extend from headquarters to the front lines. However, strategists worry that, in a future hyperwar environment, such systems could be jammed or degraded just as the speed of the fighting begins to exceed the ability of commanders to receive battlefield reports, process the data, and dispatch timely orders. Consider this a functional definition of the infamous fog of war multiplied by artificial intelligence — with defeat a likely outcome. The answer to such a dilemma for many military officials: let the machines take over these systems, too. As a report from the Congressional Research Service puts it, in the future “AI algorithms may provide commanders with viable courses of action based on real-time analysis of the battle-space, which would enable faster adaptation to unfolding events.”

And someday, of course, it’s possible to imagine that the minds behind such decision-making would cease to be human ones. Incoming data from battlefield information systems would instead be channeled to AI processors focused on assessing imminent threats and, given the time constraints involved, executing what they deemed the best options without human instructions.

Pentagon officials deny that any of this is the intent of their AI-related research. They acknowledge, however, that they can at least imagine a future in which other countries delegate decision-making to machines and the U.S. sees no choice but to follow suit, lest it lose the strategic high ground.

“We will not delegate lethal authority for a machine to make a decision,” then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work told Paul Scharre of the Center for a New American Security in a 2016 interview. But he added the usual caveat: in the future, “we might be going up against a competitor that is more willing to delegate authority to machines than we are and as that competition unfolds, we’ll have to make decisions about how to compete.”

The Doomsday Decision

The assumption in most of these scenarios is that the U.S. and its allies will be engaged in a conventional war with China and/or Russia. Keep in mind, then, that the very nature of such a future AI-driven hyperwar will only increase the risk that conventional conflicts could cross a threshold that’s never been crossed before: an actual nuclear war between two nuclear states. And should that happen, those AI-empowered C2 systems could, sooner or later, find themselves in a position to launch atomic weapons.

Such a danger arises from the convergence of multiple advances in technology: not just AI and robotics, but the development of conventional strike capabilities like hypersonic missiles capable of flying at five or more times the speed of sound, electromagnetic rail guns, and high-energy lasers. Such weaponry, though non-nuclear, when combined with AI surveillance and target-identification systems, could even attack an enemy’s mobile retaliatory weapons and so threaten to eliminate its ability to launch a response to any nuclear attack. Given such a “use ’em or lose ’em” scenario, any power might be inclined not to wait but to launch its nukes at the first sign of possible attack, or even, fearing loss of control in an uncertain, fast-paced engagement, delegate launch authority to its machines. And once that occurred, it could prove almost impossible to prevent further escalation.

The question then arises: Would machines make better decisions than humans in such a situation? They certainly are capable of processing vast amounts of information over brief periods of time and weighing the pros and cons of alternative actions in a thoroughly unemotional manner. But machines also make military mistakes and, above all, they lack the ability to reflect on a situation and conclude: Stop this madness. No battle advantage is worth global human annihilation.

As Paul Scharre put it in Army of None, a new book on AI and warfare,

“Humans are not perfect, but they can empathize with their opponents and see the bigger picture. Unlike humans, autonomous weapons would have no ability to understand the consequences of their actions, no ability to step back from the brink of war.”

So maybe we should think twice about giving some future militarized version of Alexa the power to launch a machine-made Armageddon.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is the five-college professor emeritus of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and a senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association. His most recent book is The Race for What’s Left. His next book, All Hell Breaking Loose: Climate Change, Global Chaos, and American National Security, will be published in 2019.

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“Terrorismo ‘Made in USA'”: Estado Islamita Apoiado por Washington Age Minoritariamente no Iraque Após Mais de Três Anos de Luta e Bombardeios dos EUA

December 18th, 2018 by Haidar Mansour Hadi Al-Athari

Diante do novo governo no Iraque, embaixador iraquiano em Moscou, Mansour Haidar Hadi, comenta na entrevista a seguir com o renomado jornalista Edu Montesanti a vitória de seu país sobre o Estado Islamita (EI) em dezembro do ano passado, a cooperação internacional e ameaças da organização terrorista de ressurgir em território mesopotâmico, que possui uma das culturas mais ricas da história e um povo que, até as imperialistas investidas (invasões, ocupações e guerras) das grandes potências ocidentais pós-I Guerra Mundial atrás de petróleo, convivia harmoniosamente entre si apesar das diferenças religiosas (incluindo árabes muçumanos e judeus). Terror religioso, especialmente islamita, é uma nova moda ocidental (video, videoe jornal).

“Apesar de declarar vitória sobre o EI, ainda existem pequenos núcleos atuando individualmente, o que mostra a derrota de um EI outrora forte para, atualmente, um grupo muito fraco”, afirma o diplomata. O EI permanece ativo na fronteira com a Síria, e de maneira dispera em partes do norte iraquiano..

Alguns “analistas” ocidentais de tendências bem conhecidas, no entanto, têm jogado mais gasolina sobre o fogo iraquiano bem ao gosto de uma certa CIA, segundo o dito popular “secando” para que o mesmo EI criado, financiado e armado pelos Estados Unidos, volte a aterrorizar os iraquianos nesta “Guerra ao Terror” projetada bem antes de 11 de setembro de 2001, para ser interminável.

A seguir, a íntegra da conversa com o embaixador Haidar Hadi.

Edu Montesanti: Alguns estão dizendo que a declaração de vitória do Iraque contra o Estado Islamita no final do ano passado foi prematura. Argumentando que o grupo terrorista continua representando uma ameaça profunda não apenas por sua própria perspicácia como movimento insurgente, alguns analistas também afirmam que o governo iraquiano não conseguiu atender as necessidades básicas da população, como por exemplo remediar divisões políticas e sociais além de estabelecer um projeto comum, uma estrutura nacional que unificasse o país, o que, de acordo com esses analistas, prepara o caminho para mais uma guerra civil devastadora à medida que grupos rivais disputam o controle do Estado iraquiano.

Qual sua visão deste cenário, e quanto o grupo terrorista ainda ameaça o Iraque?

Embaixador Haidar Hadi: A declaração de vitória em dezembro de 2017 veio depois de mais de três anos de luta contra a organização terrorista internacional. Essa vitória foi resultado de esforços conjuntos entre as forças de segurança do Iraque, Unidades de Combate ao Terrorismo, a Peshmerga Curda, Unidades de Mobilização Popular, bem como o apoio das forças da coalizão e da Rússia.

Foi uma vitória bem merecida e não prematura, como alguns podem descrever. Custou vidas de iraquianos inocentes e a destruição de nossa infraestrutura, de maneira que o preço dessa vitória foi alto.

O governo iraquiano, na hora de combater o Estado Islamita, executou tarefas importantes de mãos dadas uns aos outros: tarefa militar, que consistia em lutar contra a organização terrorista internacional e suas afiliadas; e a outra tarefa, proporcionar um porto seguro ao grande número de iraquianos deslocados, obrigados a deixar suas casas, fornecendo-lhes necessidades básicas ou alimentos, água, serviços médicos e, mais importante, um lugar para viver.

O governo também ajudou um grande número de iraquianos a voltar para casa depois de serem libertados, bem sucedido com a ajuda da UNAMI [United Nations Iraq].

A luta contra o EI reuniu os iraquianos, e os aproximou mais que nunca devido à ameaça contra o Iraque como um todo. Declarar vitória sobre o EI provou que a guerra civil nunca ameaçou o Iraque e nunca ameaçará, devido à integração da sociedade iraquiana entre árabes, curdos, muçulmanos, cristãos e outras minorias que vivem juntas há centenas de anos.

Também tem sido dito que a próxima guerra do Iraque provavelmente será civil, entre rivais islamitas xiitas. Qual sua visão sobre isso?

A última eleição parlamentar, ocorrida em 12 de maio de 2018, foi bem sucedida, e a formação do novo governo em Bagdá foi uma mensagem clara e forte de que todos os partidos políticos, incluindo os partidos islâmicos xiitas, trabalharam juntos para garantir o nascimento do novo governo, o qual testemunhamos em outubro quando a maioria dos deputados deu seu voto de confiança ao novo primeiro-ministro Adil Abdulmahdi, e ao seu ministério.

O EI preencheu um vácuo político e ideológico, quando surgiu no Iraque em 2014. Ainda existe algum vácuo hoje?

‫Os iraquianos praticaram o direito democrático nas últimas eleições parlamentares, que provaram que o Iraque saiu da experiência do EI como uma nação mais forte. Os iraquianos conseguiram derrotar o EI não apenas militarmente, mas também ideologicamente.

O enviado da ONU ao Iraque, Jan Kubis, disse que o EI continua ativo na fronteira ocidental com a Síria, e no norte do Iraque realizando ataques dispersos em Kirkuk, Salah, Din e Diyala. Ele também afirmou que o novo governo do Iraque planeja intensificar os esforços para erradicar as células do grupo extremista, e introduzir “medidas robustas” para alcançar a segurança sustentável em todo o país.

Como essas medidas serão colocadas em prática?

Apesar de declarar vitória sobre o EI, ainda existem pequenos núcleos atuando individualmente, o que mostra a derrota de um EI outrora forte para, atualmente, um grupo muito fraco.

Um dos principais alvos do novo governo iraquiano é continuar o trabalho do anterior, com a ajuda e apoio dos parceiros da coalizão bem como da Rússia, para manter a estabilidade sustentável resultante da vitória.

A Conferência Internacional para a Reconstrução do Iraque mobilizouquase 30 bilhões de dólares adicionais de apoio internacional ao país. “Se compararmos o que temos hoje com o que precisamos, não é segredo, evidentemente é muito menor do que o que o Iraque precisa”, disse o ministro das Relações Exteriores do Iraque, Ibrahim al-Jaafari. O que o senhor achou dessa conferência, e do dinheiro mobilizado para apoiar o Iraque, embaixador Haidar?

A conferência que ocorreu no Kuwait em fevereiro passado foi uma mensagem clara de apoio ao Iraque, apesar do resultado decepcionante da conferência.

A delegação russa foi liderada pelo vice-primeiro-ministro com mais de cem empresas, o que mostra o peso do apoio russo. Estamos otimistas diante do apoio dos parceiros para avançar, e fazer parte dos esforços de reconstrução do governo iraquiano.

Na qualidade de embaixador extraordinário e plenipotenciário da República do Iraque junto à Federação Russa, tenho me encontrado com um grande número de empresários russos que demonstraram grande interesse em fazer parte dos esforços de reconstrução.

Nos últimos dias, uma delegação de empresários e investidores russos visitou Bagdá para explorar as oportunidades de negócios, e se reunir com seus colegas.

Acredito que, nos próximos anos, haverá um aumento nas relações entre o Iraque e seus aliados, especialmente a Federação Russa.

Precise de que maneira o Iraque necessita de cooperação estrangeira para, definitivamente, vencer o terrorismo do Estado Islamita.

O EI é uma organização terrorista internacional, e não uma organização local, por isso o Iraque precisará de apoio e corporação de nossos parceiros regionais e internacionais.

Nós vencemos a guerra contra o terrorismo militarmente, mas continuaremos lutando contra o EI ideologicamente. A próxima guerra será de inteligência. O centro de informações conjunto sediado em Bagdá, que conta com especialistas do Iraque, russos, iranianos e sírios que fornecem informações importantes sobre células terroristas, ainda opera no Iraque para que nossas forças militares possam combatê-las.

Até hoje, quantas crianças voltaram do Iraque para a Rússia e países vizinhos, devido à Campanha “Bringing Them Home” [Trazendo-As para Casa], e como está o projeto agora, diante de um novo governo que recentemente subiu ao poder?

O governo iraquiano anterior apoiou muito esta questão delicada, e facilitou o procedimento legal a fim de acelerar o retorno das crianças russas aos seus familiares depois que um de seus pais, ou ambos os pais foram mortos em combates ao lado dos combatentes do EI.

Cerca de 25 crianças com idade inferior a 10 anos retornaram para casa, e continuamos resolvendo este problema através dos canais diplomáticos e legais.

As crianças cometeram o crime de entrar no Iraque ilegalmente, de modo que devem deixar o país sob uma multa de 500 mil dinares iraquianos, cerca de 420 dolares devem ser pagos ao governo iraquiano.

O novo governo está empenhado em continuar resolvendo a questão.

Alguns críticos dizem que durante os anos de Saddam Hussein o país estava sob controle, e havia uma política externa mais independente especialmente do imperialismo dos Estados Unidos, argumentando também que o Iraque, naqueles anos, era considerado pela ONU um dos países árabes que mais respeitavam as outras religiões.

Como o senhor responde a isso? O que mudou no Iraque desde a queda de Hussein?

Durante o regime de Saddam Hussein, os iraquianos viviam sob o medo de serem processados ou executados por uma simples piada sobre Saddam, ou seu regime.

Em 1991, fui forçado a deixar o Iraque com 21 anos de idade porque um dos meus parentes usou meu próprio carro na província de Najaf, durante a insurreição de 1991. Algumas semanas depois, eu estava na lista de procurados da Saddam porque eles supunham que eu estava dirigindo o carro, e sendo parte daqueles que queriam mudar o regime. Minha única opção foi fugir do país porque talvez não tivesse tido a chance de provar que não era eu quem dirigia o carro.

O regime de Saddam causou ao Iraque três grandes guerras invadindo um país vizinho, e recebeu uma sanção de 12 anos [após a Guerra do Golfo de 1991].

Assim era a vida sob um regime brutal. O Iraque era, ainda é e sempre será um dos países árabes que mais respeitam as religiões.

Então, definitivamente e apesar de todos os desafios que enfrentamos, o Iraque agora está muito melhor que o Iraque de Saddam Hussein.

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A Ministra Trenta em mimética pela «paz» no Afeganistão

December 18th, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

A Ministra da Defesa, Elisabetta Trenta (M5S), aos microfones de uma rádio musical, cantou “Havia um rapazinho que, como eu, gostava dos Beatles e dos Rolling Stones”, dizendo: “Esta música faz-me vir à mente, o valor da paz, um valor inestimável que devemos preservar sempre”. Uma dezena de dias depois, em uniforme de camuflagem no Afeganistão, a Ministra elogiava “a nossa presença armada, fora das fronteiras da Itália, guiada pelos valores da nossa Constituição, numa missão fundamental pela paz”.

A missão é a Resolute Support (Apoio Resoluto), iniciada pela NATO no Afeganistão, em 2015, na continuação da ISAF, uma missão da ONU, da qual a NATO assumiu o comando com um golpe de mão, em 2003. Assim, prossegue a guerra USA/NATO, no Afeganistão, que entrou no seu 18º ano. Foi lançada pelos USA em 7 de Outubro de 2001, com a justificação oficial de perseguir Osama bin Laden, acusado dos ataques de 11 de Setembro, escondido numa caverna afegã sob protecção dos Taliban. Quais foram os verdadeiros objectivos, é revelado pelo Pentágono num relatório divulgado uma semana antes do início da guerra: “Existe a possibilidade de que surja na Ásia, um rival militar com uma base de recursos formidável.” As nossas forças armadas devem manter a capacidade de impor a vontade dos Estados Unidos a qualquer adversário, de modo a mudar o regime de um Estado antagonista ou ocupar um território estrangeiro até que os objectivos estratégicos USA sejam alcançados”.

No período de 11 de Setembro de 2001, houve, na Ásia, fortes sinais de reaproximação entre a China e da Rússia, que se concretizaram quando, em 17 de Julho de 2001, foi assinado o “Tratado de boa vizinhança e de cooperação amigável” entre os dois países. Washington considerava a aproximação entre a China e a Rússia, um desafio aos interesses norte-americanos, no momento crítico quando os EUA estavam a tentar preencher o vazio que a desagregação da URSS tinha deixado na Ásia Central, a principal área, quer pela sua posição geoestratégica em relação à Rússia e China, quer pelas reservas limítrofes de petróleo e gás natural do Cáspio. A posição-chave para o controlo desta área é a afegã. Isso explica o forte compromisso com uma guerra que já custa aos EUA mais de 1.000 biliões de dólares. A actual é apresentada pela NATO como uma “missão não combatente”. Mas, de acordo com os mesmos dados oficiais, a Força Aérea USA lançou sobre o Afeganistão cerca de 6 mil bombas e mísseis, nos primeiros dez meses de 2018. Além de caças e drones armados, são usados bombardeiros pesados B-52, dotados de lançadores giratórios que aumentam em dois terços a já enorme carga do avião, permitindo que solte, numa única missão, até 30 bombas potentes com orientação de precisão.

Além da visível, há a guerra oculta, conduzida por forças especiais USA e aliadas, com a tarefa de assassinar chefias talibãs, ou cidadãos presumidos como tal, e outros considerados perigosos. O resultado é desastroso para a NATO: enquanto aumentam as baixas civis, os Taliban ganham terreno. Na guerra do Afeganistão, a Itália participa sob o comando USA há mais de 15 anos, violando o artigo 11 da Constituição. O seu contingente de 39 participantes, está em terceiro lugar, depois dos norte-americanos e alemães. Oficiais italianos foram transferidos para Tampa, junto ao Comando USA e no Bahrein como pessoal de ligação com as forças USA.

E enquanto a guerra continua a ceifar vítimas, no orfanato de Herat – comunica o nosso Ministério da Defesa – militares italianos entregaram cerca de duzentos agasalhos de inverno para as “crianças menos afortunadas”.

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 17 de Dezembro 2018

Artigo em italiano :

La Trenta in mimetica per la «pace» in Afghanistan

Tradução por Luisa Vasconcelos

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La Trenta in mimetica per la «pace» in Afghanistan

December 18th, 2018 by Manlio Dinucci

La ministra della Difesa Elisabetta Trenta (M5S), ai microfoni di una radio musicale, ha intonato «C’era un ragazzo che come me amava i Beatles e i Rolling Stones», dicendo «Questa canzone mi fa venire in mente il valore della pace, un valore inestimabile che dobbiamo preservare sempre». Una decina di giorni dopo, in divisa mimetica in Afghanistan, la ministra esaltava «la nostra presenza in armi fuori dai confini dell’Italia, guidata dai valori della nostra Costituzione, in una missione fondamentale per la pace».

La missione è la Resolute Support (Appoggio Risoluto), iniziata dalla NATO in Afghanistan nel 2015 in prosecuzione dell’ISAF, missione ONU di cui la NATO aveva preso il comando con un colpo di mano nel 2003. Prosegue così la guerra USA/NATO in Afghanistan, entrata nel 18° anno. Fu lanciata dagli Usa il 7 ottobre 2001 con la motivazione ufficiale di dare la caccia a Osama bin Laden, accusato degli attacchi dell’11 settembre, nascosto in una caverna afghana sotto protezione dei talebani. Quali fossero i reali obiettivi lo rivelava il Pentagono in un rapporto diffuso una settimana prima dell’inizio della guerra: «Esiste la possibilità che emerga in Asia un rivale militare con una formidabile base di risorse. Le nostre forze armate devono mantenere la capacità di imporre la volontà degli Stati uniti a qualsiasi avversario, così da cambiare il regime di uno Stato avversario od occupare un territorio straniero finché gli obiettivi strategici statunitensi non siano realizzati».

Nel periodo precedente l’11 settembre 2001, vi erano stati in Asia forti segnali di riavvicinamento tra Cina e Russia, che si concretizzavano quando, il 17 luglio 2001, veniva firmato il «Trattato di buon vicinato e amichevole cooperazione» tra i due paesi. Washington considerava il riavvicinamento tra Cina e Russia una sfida agli interessi statunitensi, nel momento critico in cui gli USA cercavano di occupare il vuoto che la digregazione dell’URSS aveva lasciato in Asia centrale, area di primaria importanza sia per la sua posizione geostrategica rispetto a Russia e Cina, sia per le limitrofe riserve di petrolio e gas naturale del Caspio. Posizione chiave per il controllo di quest’area è quella afghana. Ciò spiega il forte impegno per una guerra costata solo agli Usa già oltre 1000 miliardi di dollari. Quella in corso viene presentata dalla Nato come «missione non di combattimento». Ma, in base agli stessi dati ufficiali, l’Aeronautica USA ha sganciato sull’Afghanistan, nei primi dieci mesi del 2018, circa 6 mila bombe e missili. Oltre a caccia e droni armati, vengono usati i bombardieri pesanti B-52, dotati di lanciatori rotanti che accrescono di due terzi il già enorme carico bellico dell’aereo, permettendogli di sganciare in una singola missione fino a 30 potenti bombe a guida di precisione.

Oltre a quella visibile c’è la guerra nascosta, condotta dalle forze speciali USA e alleate con il compito di assassinare capi talebani, o presunti tali, ed altri ritenuti pericolosi. Il risultato è disastroso per la NATO: mentre aumentano le vittime civili, i talebani guadagnano terreno. Alla guerra in Afghanistan partecipa sotto comando Usa l’Italia da oltre 15 anni, violando l’Articolo 11 della Costituzione. Il suo contingente è al terzo posto, su 39 partecipanti, dopo quelli statunitense e tedesco. Ufficiali italiani sono dislocati a Tampa presso il Comando USA e in Bahrein quale personale di collegamento con le forze USA.

E mentre la guerra continua a mietere vittime, all’Orfanotrofio di Herat – comunica il nostro ministero della Difesa – militari italiani hanno consegnato circa duecento completini invernali ai «piccoli meno fortunati».

Manlio Dinucci

il manifesto, 17 dicembre 2018

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Canada: Pro-Israel MPs Flout NDP Policy

December 18th, 2018 by Yves Engler

Do New Democrat MPs who belong to the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group (CIIG) have carte blanche to flout party policy?

Last week CIIG executive member Murray Rankin participated in a press conference calling for a new round of Canadian sanctions on Iran. The Victoria MP joined CIIG chair Michael Levitt, vice-chair David Sweet and executive member Anthony Housefather for an event led by former CIIG executive Irwin Cotler.

Rankin’s role in this anti-Iranian effort runs counter to the NDP’s opposition to illegal sanctions on Iran, call for Canada to re-establish diplomatic relations with that country and support for the 2015 “p5+1 nuclear deal”. (Justin Trudeau has failed to maintain his election promise to restart diplomatic relations with Iran.)

Rankin’s departure from NDP policy takes place amidst the Donald Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal and bid to force others to adhere to its illegal sanctions, threatening to sanction any country that buys Iranian oil.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo recently said the US would seek to starve Iranians until the country’s decision-makers accept their demands. Last month Pompeo told the BBC, “the [Iranian] leadership has to make a decision that they want their people to eat.”

Along with punishing its economy, the US and Israel are seeking to foment unrest in Iran. According to a July Axios story,

“Israel and the United States formed a joint working group a few months ago that is focused on internal efforts to encourage protests within Iran and pressure the country’s government.”

The other NDP member on CIIG’s executive also recently departed from the party’s position by condemning the Palestinian solidarity movement. Randall Garrison tweeted, “Nick Cave: cultural boycott of Israel is ‘cowardly and shameful’” and linked to an article quoting the Australian musician who has criticized a growing list of prominent individuals – from Lorde to Natalie Portman – refusing to whitewash Israeli apartheid.

Garrison’s comment seems to run counter to the NDP’s vote against a 2016 House of Commons resolution condemning the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. It certainly angered many rank-and-file party members.

After the backlash to Garrison’s attack on the Palestine solidarity movement, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs put out a statement calling on people to defend the NDP MP.

It said,

“last night MP Randall Garrison tweeted an anti-BDS article, calling boycotts of Israel ‘cowardly and shameful’. Since then, the comment section of the tweet has been filled with hateful pro-BDS messages from anti-Israel trolls.”

The timing of Garrison’s tweet made it especially egregious. The day before CIIG’s vice-chair attacked Palestine solidarity activists the Israeli Knesset voted down (71 votes to 38) a bill titled the “Basic Law: Equality”, which stated, “the State of Israel shall maintain equal political rights amongst all its citizens, without any difference between religions, race, and sex.”

The bill was partly a response to the explicitly racist Nation-State law passed in the summer. (The bulk of Garrison and Rankin’s colleagues on CIIG’s Israeli partner — the Israel-Canada Inter-Parliamentary Friendship Group — most likely voted against equality.)

Three weeks ago Garrison spoke at an event organized by the Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee (CJPAC). CIIG’s chair also spoke. On Twitter, Michael Levitt noted:

“Had an amazing time talking to the CJPAC Fellowship Conference last night. Over 50 Jewish and non-Jewish university students who are pro-Israel and politically engaged.”

In his hostility to Palestine solidarity activism, Garrison has taken to blocking NDP members on Twitter. After Garrison’s attack against the BDS movement, prominent lawyer and Palestinian rights advocate, Dimitri Lascaris, wrote:

“No other Canadian MP has blocked me even though I have said far harsher things about other Canadian MPs than I have ever said about Garrison.”

Last summer NDP leader Jagmeet Singh refused to heed a call by 200 well-known musicians, academics, trade unionists and party members for the NDP to withdraw from CIIG.

Perhaps if Singh had supported the open letter signed by Roger Waters, Linda McQuaig, Maher Arar, Noam Chomsky, etc. it would have sent a message and lessened the likelihood that Garrison and Rankin would flout party policy.

It is not too late for Singh to reevaluate his position on the Canada-Israel Interparliamentary Group.

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Tags: Canada, Canada Israel Interparliamentary Group, israel

Have the Russian Military Aircrafts in Venezuela Breached the Door to “America’s Backyard”?

December 18th, 2018 by Nino Pagliccia

At an international media conference last December 12 in Caracas Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro referred emphatically to knowledge, that his government had acquired through its intelligence services, of preparations to destabilize Venezuela.

That in itself is major news but it is noticeable that his denunciation comes only two days after the well-publicized landing of Russian military aircrafts at Venezuela’s international Simon Bolivar airport of Maiquetía as part of Russia-Venezuela joint military exercises and training. This is not the first occurrence of military cooperation between Russia and Venezuela but this seems to be the first time such news has had enough impact on Washington to prompt a strong and undiplomatic reaction from the U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo who referred to the two countries as “two corrupt governments squandering public fund” in a tweet.

Is Russia putting a major gaping hole into “America’s backyard” with the help of Venezuela? It appears to be so, and certainly Venezuela is quite a wide door in geopolitical terms capable of countering the political reversals of some countries in the region surrendering to neoliberal ideology.

Russia’s display of support for Venezuela is not totally surprising for two reasons. First, the U.S. government has had a very aggressive policy against Russia by pushing the NATO military coalition to the doorsteps of Russia’s front yard despite the “iron clad guarantee” given by the U.S. administration in February 1990 to the then Soviet president Gorbachev that “NATO will not expand one inch.” The aggression continues today with the possibility of including Ukraine and Belarus in the NATO military alliance. Moscow indicates that it has the willingness and the capability to match Washington’s military threat in its own turf.

Second, in addition to military threats to both countries, the Trump administration has slapped sanctions against Russia and Venezuela, which also brings them closer as victims of economic warfare. The military threats against Venezuela are much more menacing therefore a balancing assistance from a more powerful friend is welcome.

But the timing of the assistance is also important to consider. Maduro will be sworn in as president of Venezuela for the next six years on January 10 following his re-election last May 20. This is a widely anticipated event not least because there have been “rumors” of major disruptions being organized in order to prevent it from happening. Russia is sending a clear signal that it fully endorses and supports the next Maduro presidency.

However, the official position is that these are not just rumors and the disruptions may include violent and terrorist tactics. To that effect president Maduro stated at the media conference:

“Today I come again to denounce the plot that from the White House is being prepared to violate Venezuelan democracy, to assassinate me and to impose a dictatorial government in Venezuela.“

Then he added more pointedly,

“Mr. John Bolton has been appointed again, as head of the plot to turn Venezuela to violence and to seek a foreign military intervention, a coup, to assassinate President Maduro and impose what they call a ‘transitional government council’. I’m saying this to you to unveil their plans. “

John Bolton is the National Security Advisor of the United States with the reputation of coining the term “troika of tyranny” in reference to the democratically elected, progressive governments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

Maduro’s statements are perfectly credible mainly based on specific details he provided. He revealed that a paramilitary group, called the G-8, is being trained in the municipality of Tona, in North Santander, Colombia. The group of 734 mercenaries, including Colombians and Venezuelans, are being prepared to undertake false flag actions.

Another group of mercenaries is being trained to attack Venezuela at the U.S. military case of Tolemaida in Colombia, one of the 7 bases that the U.S. maintains in that country.

Maduro also revealed that yet another commando group is located at the Eglin base of the U.S. Air Force in Florida. This “group of special forces is being trained for a surgical aggression against Venezuelan air and military bases. Its objective is to disembark, take and neutralize the Libertador air base at Palo Negro, the Puerto Cabello naval base and the Barcelona air base.”

For the historical record on these facts, Maduro’s statements and revelations were followed up with a formal diplomatic note of protest delivered by Venezuelan Minister of foreign affairs Jorge Arreaza to the U.S. chargé d’affaires, James Story in Caracas.

The deployment of the Russian warplanes in Venezuela – just one week after President Nicolas Maduro’s visit to Moscow – consists of two TU-160 long-range bombers with nuclear capability, an An-124 heavy military transport plane and an II-62 long-haul plane of the Russian aerospace forces. These are technologically advanced aircrafts whose force is still modest when compared to the 22 U.S. military bases in Latin America and the more that 800 in the world. However, the message that the action sends must be seen as a strong deterrent to any military intervention in Venezuela especially coming from Colombia.

Venezuela Minister of defense, Vladimir Padrino explained,

“We must tell the people of Venezuela and the entire world that … we are also preparing to defend Venezuela to the last extent when necessary.”

Concluding thoughts

It has been about 115 years since the practice of the Monroe doctrine established the U.S. unilateral right to dominance in the countries of Latin America. The first time that the attribution was unsuccessfully challenged was in 1962 during the so-called Cuban missile crisis when the Soviet Union attempted to deploy nuclear missiles in Cuba. The recent deployment of Russian military aircrafts in Venezuela may not be as spectacular but it is certainly of considerable importance for the reasons and the timing mentioned above.

The U.S. response must be more measured today because Washington does not have the full political hegemony in Latin America that it had in the 1960s therefore Venezuela retains a tactical advantage. At present the so-called “America’s backyard” may not appear to be as inviolable providing a new opening to the Bolivarian vision of the Patria Grande (Great homeland).

U.S. sanctions and military threats have certainly been contributing factors to the strategic alliance between Russia and Venezuela. Another possible member of this alliance of resistance is Iran, also subject to U.S. sanctions and threats. In fact, the Islamic Republic of Iran has announced that will soon send warships to Venezuela as a sign of strategic partnership.

What makes Russia’s presence in the region not only relevant but also valuable is its outstanding record in the combination of defense diplomacy and balancing role successfully used in the Middle East to allow Syria to defeat terrorism, to a great extent, while simultaneously deterring the U.S. from militarily achieving a regime change against the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad.

Russia practices a remarkable two-prong approach in its foreign policy that combines a responsible non-hegemonic military strength with careful maintenance of balance of forces in particularly conflictive areas. This is precisely what is needed in Latin America in order to preserve peace, as opposed to the divide-and-rule approach used by U.S. foreign policy.

More broadly, Russia and Venezuela share a common view of a multipolar world cooperating in social, military and economic areas of interest that replaces the hegemonic unipolar strangling financial world dominated by the U.S.

Finally, the U.S. response to the deployment of Russian aircrafts is not yet clear. Past track record may suggest a diplomatic reaction like a formal denunciations at the UN or through the OAS, or the use of any warfare tools ranging from more sanctions to infowar, to hybrid war including false flag actions as announced by Maduro. But any U.S. supported attempt to prevent the swearing in ceremony on January 10, or any subsequent attempts to destabilize Venezuela will have grave consequences in human lives to which the perpetrators will have to respond towards the international community.

Nevertheless, Venezuela is not letting its guards down and is quite aware that Russia is not there to put troops on the ground but only to provide assistance and training to the Venezuelan military to modernize its weapons systems.

Should there be a military intervention or hybrid war in Venezuela, Maduro has already given the basic instructions: “I order all our National Bolivarian Armed Forces, to be alert and maintain maximum deployment, discipline, leadership and preparation, in order to defeat imperial conspiracies and maintain peace. Venezuela counts on you!” And progressive Latin America counts on Venezuela in turn.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Nino Pagliccia is an activist and freelance writer based in Vancouver. He is a retired researcher from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who follows and writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is the editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” (2014).

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South Africa Searches for a “Financial Parachute”, A $170 Billion Foreign Debt Cliff Looms. IMF “Economic Medicine”

December 18th, 2018 by Prof. Patrick Bond

Johannesburg – This week’s hush-hush visit by International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde to Pretoria (between stops in Ghana and Angola) is mysterious. In contrast to last week’s IMF press briefing claim – “Madame Lagarde will hold meetings with the authorities, as well as fairly extensive meetings with the private sector, civil society, academia, women leaders, and of course the media” – there’s a complete information void here, with no public events scheduled.

An open, frank public discussion about the IMF’s regrettable history and current agenda is sorely needed, in a context where a few honest politicians and officials are belatedly struggling to reverse what is termed “state capture” and return stolen funds to the taxpayer. Undoing a decade of looting by former President Jacob Zuma and the Gupta empire (three immigrant brothers plus hundreds of hangers-on) is no small task.

Hence it is perhaps with discomfort that Lagarde will meet one of the main post-Zuma/Gupta leaders, Finance Minister Tito Mboweni, who twice (in 2013 and 2016) tweeted about Lagarde’s own corruption trial in France. She was found guilty of ‘negligence’ for gifting $430 million to a tycoon – Adidas founder Bernard Tapie – who donated to her Conservative Party when she was finance minister (in 2017 he was forced to pay back the French state).

Retribution for corruption is indeed in the Pretoria air. Two months ago, Mboweni replaced Nhlanhla Nene, who resigned in disgrace over lying about his secret Gupta meetings. But is Mboweni himself arranging a secret bailout deal, as happened in December 1993 when the IMF granted an infamous $850 million loan – a “Faustian Pact” (according to former Minister of Intelligence Ronnie Kasrils) replete with Washington Consensus promises – to outgoing president FW de Klerk, so as to “instil global financial confidence” in the incoming Mandela government?

After five “junk!” denunciations of South Africa by the three most powerful (albeit suspect) credit ratings agencies over the past 18 months, President Cyril Ramaphosa has tried hard to restore their trust. However, with the giant energy parastatal agency Eskom now trying to dump another $7 billion in debt onto a severely-stressed national Treasury, does Ramaphosa need a financial back-stop from the Bretton Woods Institutions?

Indeed, more to the point, is Eskom’s foreign debt again creating havoc, as happened in January with a “pending letter of default from the World Bank” that “could trigger a recall on Eskom’s $25 billion debt mountain,” as Carol Paton reported in Business Day? (Ramaphosa’s urgent meeting with Bank officials in Davos the next day was apparently temporarily soothing.)

Lagarde’s opaque visit contrasts with World Bank President Jim Yong Kim’s high-profile trip earlier this month, amidst a blaze of Global Citizen anti-poverty populism to 90,000 youth at a Soweto stadium:

“I’m telling you, you can’t trust anyone over 30 to determine your future!”

Kim also met Ramaphosa to discuss, he tweeted, urban planning and sanitation (neither of which would need US$-denominated Bank loans). He also lectured at the Wits University School of Governance about human capital investment, at one point jovially criticising another ex-lefty, his host, Vice Chancellor Adam Habib, for being a “student of Trotsky.”

Ramaphosa: “We’re not looking at the IMF. The New Development Bank has a facility…”

Are loans to South Africa from the IMF and World Bank really needed? On the one hand, their leaders are here in the wake of July’s Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA Johannesburg summit, which again raised hopes for the BRICS bloc’s international financial governance reform agenda.

For example, notwithstanding angry protests by environmental justice activists at its Africa Regional Centre office, the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB) quickly announced loans to three local parastatal agencies. One of these, Eskom’s $180 million, had been “in abeyance” since 2016 due to then-CEO Brian Molefe’s second thoughts: he opposed the loan’s linkage of privatised renewable energy to Eskom’s grid (instead, Molefe wanted to take on more nuclear debt, which Mboweni – then an NDB director – had publicly endorsed in 2015, while in Russia at that year’s BRICS summit).

The other credits went to Transnet’s Siyabonga Gama (fired for Gupta-related corruption a few weeks later) for $200 million to expand the Durban port-petrochemical complex– a project now frozen due to brazen procurement fraud involving a notorious Italian firm (unrelated to the Guptas) – and the Development Bank of Southern Africa for on-lending $300 million to municipalities (assuming there are any creditworthy ones left, able to pay sufficiently high interest rates to justify a hard-currency loan for local infrastructure).

Explained Earthlife Africa protester Makoma Lekalakala, co-winner of the 2018 Goldman Environmental Prize as Africa’s leading activist this year,

“Both Eskom and Transnet are under scrutiny for corruption and mismanagement. No due diligence was done on the Transnet loan. If this is how the [BRICS] bank operates, we have to brace ourselves for accelerated environmental degradation for the pursuit of profit.”

But the Bretton Woods Institutions are no better, and just over a year ago, Ramaphosa offered a scathing critique of Washington’s bias: “We should not go to the IMF because once we do we are on a downward path, we will be sacrificing our independence in terms of governing our country and sacrificing our sovereignty.” He cited the risk of imposed “cuts in social spending” what with anticipated IMF orders to Eskom “to do away with free electricity quotas for the poor and indigent.”

Ramaphosa repeatedly denies that the Bretton Woods Institutions will bail out South Africa:

“IMF, no, we’re not looking at the IMF. The New Development Bank has a facility that could be made available to us. And we are exploring that as well. And we want to do it in a way that does not require a sovereign guarantee.”

Actually, Ramaphosa probably didn’t mean the BRICS NDB, which makes project-specific loans, but instead its $100 billion Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA), which offers a $3 billion credit line for South Africa to immediately draw upon, in the event of a balance-of-payments emergency deficit.

BRICS v IMF – or BRICS-IMF?

On the other hand, the BRICS look much less coherent today than in July, because Brazil’s new leader Jair Bolsonaro could drop out of the bloc, and at minimum, will more firmly hitch his regime to Donald Trump’s. Yet in spite of oft-expressed Sinophobia, Bolsonaro has just grudgingly agreed to continue the rotation of BRICS heads-of-state summit hosting (although this is likely only to occur in Brasilia next November). There will be much Trump-style geopolitical, economic and especially environmental chaos starting on January 1 when he becomes president, such as paving over the Amazon. But compared to November, fewer insiders I talked to on a visit earlier this month (including former Foreign Minister Celso Amorim) fear that Bolsonaro will reduce the bloc to RICS through a “Braxit,” the way he just did to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change summit. (His predecessor Michel Temer had agreed to host it in Brazil late next year, but Chile will now take over.)

The oft-stated contrast between the agendas of BRICS and Washington, as articulated by Zuma’s scribe Gayton Mckenzie, for instance, was in any case mainly myth. From 2014, Lagarde has enjoyed the power to co-finance the more desperate of BRICS borrowers (not just SA, but also Brazil and Russia suffer junk status), because the CRA’s Articles of Agreement stipulate that if Pretoria (or any other borrower) wants the next $7 billion in BRICS funding within its $10 billion CRA quota range, it must first get an IMF structural adjustment programme.

If Pretoria needs financing to repay increasingly onerous foreign debt tranches in 2019, could this fractured society withstand IMF austerity, given what Business Day already termed 2018’s “savage fiscal consolidation”? Radically-reduced funding for basic infrastructure left even a confirmed neoliberal, Johannesburg Mayor Herman Mashaba, crying foul on Treasury’s 65% budget cut to the city’s housing program last week.

At the global scale, the BRICS financial institutions are not up to the massive bailout requirements necessary if financial meltdowns similar to 1998 and 2008 reappear in coming weeks, for instance due to Britain’s anticipated “hard crash” from the European Union on March 29. In even the recent weeks’ relatively mild economic turmoil, South Africa’s currency was the world’s most volatile (out of the 31 most traded). The Rand continues to zigzag in part because of then Finance Minister Malusi Gigaba’s February 2018 relaxation of exchange controls on $43 billion worth of local institutional investor funding that can now depart South Africa. (That puts into context the oft-remarked $7 billion exit threat from Citibank’s World Government Bond Index once Moody’s finally drops the junk axe on the domestic-denominated securities rating.)

However, while we continue to pay close to a 9% hard-currency interest rate on 10-year state bonds (even higher than does Venezuela), there will be willing buyers – until the next world financial melt ratchets rates even higher. And in spite of BRICS babble about IMF reform so as to lessen the load of borrower conditionalities, there have been no changes in economic philosophy under Lagarde. Worse, Africa lost substantial voting power in the last quota restructuring, in 2015, including Nigeria by 41% and South Africa by 21%. The main countries that raised their respective IMF shares were China (35%), Brazil (23%), India (11%) and Russia (8%).

An alternative strategy: repudiation of corrupt bankers

IMF reform that leaves most Africans with less voice is better considered deform, Ramaphosa himself seemed to concede in a speech to the United Nations in September, complaining that the IMF and other multilateral institutions still “need to be reshaped and enhanced so that they may more effectively meet the challenges of the contemporary world and better serve the interests of the poor and marginalised.”

Because their interests are not served by either Washington’s or the NDB’s lending to corrupt parastatal elites, the “poor and marginalised” need another strategy. Just as in the days of the Jubilee 2000 debt-repudiation movement, which was led in South Africa two decades ago by the late poet Dennis Brutus and Anglican Archbishop Njongonkulu Ndungane, it’s overdue we talk about, and indeed audit, South Africa’s foreign debt.

Including parastatal and private borrowers (for whom the state ensures hard currency is available for repayment), foreign debt stood at $171 billion as of mid-year (up from $25 billion in 1994). That figure, the SA Reserve Bank announced last week, is down nearly 8% from March 2018’s $183 billion, but only as a result of “non-residents’ net sales of domestic rand-denominated government bonds as well as valuation effects.”

The main foreign debtors remain Eskom and Transnet. They have contracted, over the past eight years, South Africa’s three largest-ever loans:

in 2010, $3.75 billion from the World Bank, mainly for the Medupi coal-fired power plant (a deal for which Eskom chairperson Valli Moosa was criticised by the public protector for ‘improper’ conflict of interests since he sat on the ANC Finance Committee, during the notorious Hitachi corruption of the ruling party);
in 2013, $5 billion from the China Development Bank, mainly for Transnet’s purchase of imported infrastructure inputs, especially for corrupt port-petrochemical expansion in Durban and a coal export rail line to Richards Bay (hundreds of millions of dollars were illicitly directed via China South Rail to the Gupta empire, as well as loan “success fees” from the Chinese loan); and
in 2016, $5 billion again from the China Development Bank, mainly for Eskom’s other coal-fired mega-generator, Kusile, initially arranged by Molefe and renewed at the BRICS Sandton summit last July.

None of these loans can be justified, especially on ecological grounds – since they all rapidly increase the climate debt we South Africans owe both future generations and, more urgently, contemporary African victims of worsening droughts and floods. Moreover, with state procurement corruption costing in the range of 35-40% per contract, according to the lead Treasury official in 2016, there is a strong case for a full debt audit, followed by the demand that the World Bank, China Development Bank, BRICS Bank and other lenders also assume liability.

After all, the Hitachi deal with the ANC’s investment wing Chancellor House led the U.S. government to fine the Japanese firm nearly $20 million in 2015 – for Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations at Eskom – and hence when Public Enterprises Minister Pravin Gordhan (responsible for borrowing the $3.75 billion in 2010) last week blamed Hitachi incompetence for recent load-shedding, that alone should invoke World Bank debt repudiation.

Jim Kim should not only have addressed this largest – and perhaps worst – loan in his institution’s history. The Bank’s portfolio also includes the largest share in the notorious CPS-Net1 “financial inclusion” strategy to rip off millions of poor South Africans, and a $150 million debt+equity stake in Lonmin which until just before the 2012 Marikana massacre (not long after Kim became president) the Bank was celebrating as a best-case for corporate social responsibility.

Add to all this the new threat of Faustian Pact 2.0 from the ethically-challenged Lagarde. The need for a new Jubilee movement is obvious. All existing anti-corruption initiatives should be pursued forthwith, but our ever lower expectations mean that a genuine ‘Ramaphoria’ – which if serious would include repudiation of the Gupta and ANC fraudsters’ financial facilitators, such as the World Bank, China Development Bank and BRICS Bank – is simply a fantasy. Instead, the meme best describing our current state of governance is, indeed, Ramazupta.

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Patrick Bond is a professor of political economy at the Wits School of Governance.

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NATO-Backed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko Poses with Pro-Nazi Soldier

December 18th, 2018 by Ben Norton

Petro Poroshenko, the staunchly pro-NATO president of Western ally Ukraine, posed for a photo op with a soldier wearing a Nazi symbol.

On December 6, the Ukrainian billionaire oligarch leader posted a photo on multiple social media accounts that shows him standing with armed troops. One of these Ukrainian soldiers is wearing a patch with a skull-and-bones design called the totenkopf. This is a symbol closely associated with Nazi Germany, and specifically the Third Reich’s genocidal paramilitary the Schutzstaffel (SS).

This photo op came while Poroshenko is imposing martial law and requesting a NATO military buildup in the Black Sea.

The monitoring group Defending History, which tracks neo-fascism and Nazi Holocaust revisionism in Eastern Europe, called attention to this photo:

#Ukraine’s President @poroshenko poses with his troops…one of whom is wearing a patch of the Nazi SS Totenkopf (Deaths Head) division.

And where does this info come from? Poroshenko’s own FB page! Crazy. pic.twitter.com/DMMAqWUzoi

— Defending History (@DefendingHistor) December 8, 2018

Poroshenko posted this photo on both his official Twitter profile and Facebook page.

Якщо поглянути на сучасну історію Збройних Сил України, то немає в ній жодної сторінки, де б не йшлося про десантників та їхні подвиги. Вони прославилися в боях з російським агресором за гору Карачун та Савур-могилу, в обороні Донецького та Луганського аеропортів. pic.twitter.com/EOwOQ6CS2G

— Петро Порошенко (@poroshenko) December 6, 2018

In a follow-up tweet, Poroshenko also wrote “Slava Ukrayini!” This is a Ukrainian nationalist slogan that was created in the 1920s by fascists who later became Nazi collaborators. In August, Ukraine made this fascist salute into the official greeting of its military. It was later also adopted by Ukrainian police.

This is not the first controversy linking Poroshenko to a Nazi symbol. In July, one of his advisers wrote on Facebook the neo-Nazi symbol “1488,” which combines the white supremacist “14 words” with code for “Heil Hitler.”

The Grayzone Project has previously reported on how the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion was incorporated directly into Ukraine’s National Guard, and how the United States has armed and advised these fascists.

In late November, Poroshenko’s government declared martial law, after a questionable skirmish with Russian military. This decree gives the government the authority to curtail elections, expression, movement, meetings, and strikes.

Following the incident, Poroshenko requested a major NATO military presence in the Black Sea, along with more weapons and an expansion of sanctions against Russia. The billionaire chocolate oligarch turned president has previously taken steps for Ukraine to join NATO.

The Grayzone Project also recently reported on how US-funded fascists in Ukraine have trained American white supremacists.

In October, an activist from the violent Ukrainian neo-Nazi gang C14, who collaborated with Kiev police to “purge” citizens from the Roma ethnic minority, spoke at the US government-funded America House Kyiv.

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

Featured image is from Grayzone Project

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Alleged Russia Meddling: UK Report Falsely Claims Russia Went All-Out Trying to Help Elect Trump

December 18th, 2018 by Stephen Lendman

The claim is the Big Lie that won’t die – no matter how often accusations and allegations are debunked.

Oxford University’s Computational Propaganda Research Project (COMPROP) claims to investigate “how tools like social media bots are used to manipulate public opinion by amplifying or repressing political content, disinformation, hate speech, and junk news.”

A report it prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee yet to be released, falsely claims the Kremlin used social media platforms to help Trump triumph over Hillary.

Exhaustive House and Senate investigations since January 2017 found no evidence linking Trump or his team with Russia – nor anything suggesting Kremlin election meddling.

Special council Mueller’s probe since May 2017 fared no better – nor the US intelligence community might of the DNI, FBI, CIA, NSA, and other US agencies.

US sophisticated investigatory powers, including countless millions of dollars spent, failed to find credible evidence of Russian US election meddling, nor an improper or illegal Trump team connection to Moscow – because none of the above exists no matter how long probes continue.

Did Oxford University’s COMPROP find a way to uncover information that eluded America’s best and brightest, or is its report the latest example of Russia bashing based on nothing but invented rubbish?

It reportedly analyzed material provided to the Senate Intelligence Committee, its report to be released in days.

The Washington Post said it saw a draft of the report, leaked so the broadsheet could bash Russia more than already, other US-led Western media to follow suit on their own.

Screengrab from The Washington Post

According to WaPo, COMPROP’s data “were provided by Facebook, Twitter and Google and covered several years up to mid-2017, when the social media companies cracked down on the known Russian accounts,” adding:

“The report, which also analyzed data separately provided to House Intelligence Committee members, contains no information” beyond the mid-2017 period.

COMPROP claims “all of the messaging (information it analyzed) sought to benefit the Republican party,” adding:

“Trump is mentioned most in campaigns targeting conservatives and right-wing voters, where the messaging encouraged these groups to support his campaign.”

“The main groups that could challenge Trump were then provided messaging that sought to confuse, distract and ultimately discourage members from voting.”

According to WaPo, “(t)he report offers the latest evidence that Russian agents sought to help Trump win the White House” – despite no credible evidence proving it, an indisputable fact.

It’s unclear what information Facebook, Twitter and Google provided to COMPROP. Last week, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed what he called the “full extent” of possible (not proved) Russian meddling in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

In House Judiciary Committee testimony, he said “we undertook a very thorough investigation, and, in 2016, we now know that there were two main ad accounts linked to Russia which advertised on Google for about $4,700 in advertising.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the total amount spent by candidates for all offices in US 2016 elections was around $6.5 billion (with a “B”), including for primary races.

The amount spent by 2016 presidential aspirants was $2.4 billion, including for primaries. In all races, Republicans and Dems each spent around 48% of the total amount (96% combined).

Trump spent $398 million compared to Hillary’s $768 million, nearly double DLT’s amount.

What possible impact could $4,700 have – even 10x over on all social media platforms – compared to billions of dollars spent by candidates?

Facebook explained that 56% of ads linked to Russia on its platform appeared after the US 2016 presidential election.

Alleged Internet Research Agency Russian hackers spent $100,000 from mid-2015 to mid-2017 on 3,000 ads. One-fourth of them were never shown to anyone.

Only around 1,000 ads appeared during the presidential campaign. Many ads expressed no preference for any candidate.

Facebook said US presidential candidates spent hundreds of millions of dollars in online political advertising – “1000x more than any problematic ads we’ve found” – admitting virtually no evidence of Russian use of the platform for improper meddling.

Asked to examine 450 accounts Facebook flagged as fake, no evidence connecting them to Russia was found, just groundless suspicions.

Twitter’s vice president Colin Crowell explained “(w)e have not found accounts associated with this activity to have obvious Russian origin but some of the accounts appear to have been automated.”

Twitter found and suspended 22 suspicious accounts – once again, nothing connecting them to Russia.

Another 179 were suspended for terms of service violations – none of the 201 accounts registered as advertisers.

Twitter found over 3.2 million automated accounts, providing no evidence of any connected to the Kremlin.

RT, RT America and RT en Espanol spent $274,100 for 1,823 US ads – none supporting one US presidential aspirant over another.

The bottom line conclusion is indisputable. No Russia US meddling occurred online or in any other way. No evidence suggests it. Claims otherwise are spurious.

Yet they persist endlessly, the latest from the dubious COMPROP report – rubbish masquerading as credible analysis.

A previous article said Russiagate should be called Hillarygate. With considerable media help, she, her campaign, and the DNC cooked the books for her to be Dem standard bearer.

She and the DNC hired former MI6 spy Christopher Steele to produce a dodgy dossier on Trump – filled with unverified accusations and allegations, an effort with no credibility.

No Russiagate witch hunt investigation was warranted. No special counsel should have been appointed. The whole ugly business should be terminated straightaway.

All the allegations and accusations about Russian election meddling were and continue to be bald-faced Big Lies.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Featured image: President Donald J. Trump and President Vladimir Putin of the Russian Federation | July 16, 2018 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

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Selected Articles: Pandering to Washington’s Whims

December 18th, 2018 by Global Research News

Whether your concerns are current affairs, foreign affairs, Trump or Togo, Panama or pacifism, nuclear’s nightmares and global myriad complexities, Global Research strives to shine light on the under-reported, less known injustices ignored or buried.

Governments know it too, which is why there is an unprecedented threat to the independent media and the Internet. Fight-back was never more needed.

Please, during this season of giving, consider donating something, however large or small, to Global Research’s continuation – and to mark its seventeenth birthday, “born” two days before the attacks of 9^th September 2001, which triggered the horror of the War on Terror and subsequent excuse for destruction of nations.

* * *

Canada Serves the US Empire…Again…and Again…

By Jim Miles, December 18, 2018

Once again Canada clearly signals its vassal status in relations with the U.S. The recent arrest and detention of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei Technologies’ chief financial officer, demonstrates fully Canadian compliance with U.S. desires.

Ottawa Sends Contradictory Messages on Arms Control

By Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, December 18, 2018

Fifth French “Yellow Vest” Protest Opposes Macron Government

By Alex Lantier, December 18, 2018

“Yellow vest” protesters mobilized for a fifth day of action in France on Saturday, facing a new police crackdown and clashes centered in provincial cities, as fewer protesters traveled to Paris.

Kiev Sends Tanks and Troops to Donbass, Poroshenko Regime Hatching an Armed Provocation?

By TASS, December 17, 2018

The Russian news agency TASS reports (December 16, 2018) on disturbing developments pointing to the deployment of Ukrainian troops and tanks against Donbass.

Growing US Public Support for One State Shared Equally by Israelis and Palestinians Falls on Deaf Ears

By Jonathan Cook, December 17, 2018

The American public is now evenly split between those who want a two-state solution and those who prefer a single state, shared by Israelis and Palestinians, according to a survey published last week by the University of Maryland.

Western Leaders Have A History of Pandering to Washington’s Whims

By Shane Quinn, December 15, 2018

Since the Second World War’s conclusion, Europe’s major powers have pandered politely to their master across the Atlantic, America. While the United States has waged war and ousted governments in regions around the world, European states like Britain, France and Germany have either bloodied their hands with them, provided aid, or nodded silent approval.

US Media Claims that American Citizen was “Tortured Then Executed” by Syrian Government – Admits No Evidence

By Tony Cartalucci, December 15, 2018

A particularly scurrilous op-ed appeared in the pages of the Washington Post accusing the Syrian government of detaining, torturing, then executing an American citizen, Layla Shweikani.

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Video: US “Local Partners” in Northeast Syria Are About to be “Sold to Turkey”

December 18th, 2018 by South Front

Turkey is ramping up its military preparations and propaganda campaign ahead of a possible attack on the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) in northeastern Syria.

On December 17, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) can start an “operation any moment now in Syrian territory at any place, especially along the 500-kilometer border, without harming U.S. soldiers”.

He recalled his demands that Kurdish armed groups must leave the border region, first of all the area of Manbij.

“If they don’t go, we will send them,” Erdogan said adding that US President Trump has gave a positive response to the expected TAF operation.

During a speech at the Atlantic Council in Washington DC, US Special Representative for Syria Engagement James Jeffrey said that “any offensive into northeast Syria by anyone is a bad idea”. However, at the same time, he described the US relations with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which mostly consist of YPG members, as “tactical” and “transactional”.

The TAF has also increased their strikes on the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which Ankara sees as a parent organization of the YPG, in northern Iraq. Over the past few days, Turkish warplanes eliminated about a dozen of PKK positions in the region.

On December 18, Turkey’s Defense Minister Hulusi Akar stressed that the TAF will not allow the Sinjar region to be turned into a stronghold of the PKK and called on the Iraqi government to assist in this.

Baghdad has repeatedly criticized Turkey for its cross-border operations in the region, but it does have no resources to force Ankara to stop its activity now.

In eastern Syria, the SDF captured the town of Hajin from ISIS, according to pro-Kurdish sources. The same sources claim that over 200 ISIS members were killed during the past few days there.

Despite this, ISIS is still in control of a number of positions near Hajin. Clashes are being reported in the area.

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Video: Syrian Army Is Set to Respond to Any Future Israeli Attacks

December 18th, 2018 by South Front

The Syrian Armed Forces will respond by force to any Israeli attack on its bases as a part of new policy, which was adopted by the Syrian leadership following the incident with the Russian Il-20 plane last September, the Kuwaiti al-Ra’i newspaper reported on December 15 citing a high-ranked Syrian official.

The unnamed official clarified that “this means that a strike on an airport in Syria will be met with a strike on an airport in Israel and so on.”

According to the same report, Moscow gave Damascus a green light for such actions in response to attacks that would destroy Syrian military capabilities or kill foreign advisers supporting the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).

The source denounced Israel’s claims regarding the destruction of the Syrian missile capabilities and claimed that Damascus had received medium and long range missiles guided with the Russian satellite navigation system, GLONASS. The report says that the SAA can use these missiles to respond to Israeli attacks.

Meanwhile, media reports appeared that an Israeli military delegation, which recently visited Moscow, complained to the Russian side that Hezbollah in Syria uses Russian flags to defend its positions and military convoys from Israeli airstrikes.

The cover-up flags were supposedly seen in positions of Iran and Hezbollah in Hama, Homs, Idlib and the central desert.

A week ago, Colonel Mustafa Bakkor, a spokesman for Jaysh al-Izza, made a very similar claim. According to Bakkor’s claim, Iranian forces in northern Hama are raising Russian flags over their positions in order to “protect themselves from Israeli bombardment.”

The most interesting question is: If Israel was really able to identify these positions, and was sure that there were no Russian service members there, what difference the presence of these flags did make?

U.S. officials have warned the Free Syrian Army against participating in the upcoming Turkish military operation in northeastern Syria, the Turkish Anadolu Agency reported on December 15. In a message allegedly sent to different FSA factions and to the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, Washington vowed to strike any group that would participate in the attack and to end its relations with it.

During the last few days, opposition sources confirmed that factions of the Turkish-backed National Front for Liberation and the Syrian National Army are ready to participate in the upcoming operation with more than 15,000 fighters.

In turn, the YPG expanded its operations against Turkey-led forces in Afrin. Over the past few days, the YPG claimed that it had killed 5 Turkish soldiers with an anti-tank guided missile near the village of Kimar, blown up a vehicle of the Sultan Murad Division in the village of Qastal Miqdad, killing 2 militants and injuring 2, as well as killed 4 and injured 5 members of the Sham Legion near the villages of Dersiwan and Nebi Houri.

On December 15^th, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, the YPG is their core, vowed a strong response to any Turkish attack, claiming that Turksih actions are undermining the SDF operation against ISIS in the Hajin area.

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Canada Serves the US Empire…Again…and Again…

December 18th, 2018 by Jim Miles

Canadian authorities, notably Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland and PM Justin Trudeau provide two defenses for Canada’s actions: the first is the tried and not so true “rule of law” axiom; the second is another canard, “there is nothing political” about Canada’s actions. Both are used repetitively on the news cycle and both are completely false.

International law

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is an agreement between Iran, the U.S., Russia, China, France, U.K., and Germany in order to limit what nuclear activities are available to Iran. The plan is truly comprehensive. After a leading section on principles and general provisions, a much longer and much more technical section follows defining what activities are allowed and not allowed, and after that is another long section clearly outlining what sanctions are being lifted against Iranian personnel and assets.

Two other important sections are included. The first is an extensive presentation on the extensive rights of the IAEA to inspect and verify whether Iran is upholding its end of the agreement. Another section outlines a joint dispute resolution mechanism.

Following the writing of the agreement, it was placed into international law by UNSC Resolution 2231(July 20, 2015) noting the roles of the agreeing countries, the role of the IAEA for inspections, and a reiteration concerning the principles of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It is an impressive document, not the usual UNSC one or two page document condemning or confirming some action somewhere, but a lengthy and detailed presentation on the limits imposed upon Iran and the subsequent lifting of sanctions imposed in earlier resolutions.

As everyone knows, or should know, the U.S. unilaterally abrogated its participation in the agreement without any effort to use the joint dispute resolution (probably knowing it would be ruled against). It is clearly a politically motivated action, caught up with all the usual U.S. hubris and arrogance concerning its hegemonic desires in the Middle East including containment of Russia and China and its fawning support of Israel. All the previous sanctions were unilaterally re-imposed on Iran by the U.S.

To their credit, the other members of the JCPOA have upheld the agreement. The problem with that is the U.S. essentially controls the world banking system and can isolate and attack both corporations and states with sanctions and embargoes through its own belief in its extraterritorial laws. Non-compliance leads to lawsuits imposed in the U.S. and applied externally. As an example, under the “Trading With the Enemy Act” one of France’s largest banks, Societe Generale, agreed to pay $1.34 billion to US federal and state authorities to settle a legal dispute over violations of US trade sanctions against Iran and other countries.

Canada’s “rule of law” lie

After all that preamble (and yes I did read the first sections of the JCPOA and UN2231 and scanned the rest) it is obvious that Canada is not acting according to the rule of law. Of course their argument will be about the extradition treaty Canada has with the U.S. (and many other countries of the world) while dutifully ignoring that the reason for the arrest – while not clearly defined by U.S.authorities but certainly related to the abrogation of both UNSC 2231 and the JCPOA – is completely unlawful.

I must give credit to CBC for its interview with Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Columbia University, known as one of the world’s leading experts on economic development and the fight against poverty. [As a side note, it was the application of some of his economic principles creating the “shock doctrine” disaster that occurred when the Soviet Union collapsed leading, ironically, to the rise of Vladimir Putin.] Sachs indicated that Canada’s action was “extraordinarily provocative” and “completely in violation of….completely outside” of international law. He noted that the arrest was without precedent, as HSBC – a British multinational banking and financial services holding company – had been charged with sanctions violations larger than that of Huawei without anyone being arrested (as with the Societe Generale, above).

Canada’s excuse is only good for domestic news cycles. As typical of Canada’s actions, the government pretends it has nothing to do with the action, supporting the action with the lie concerning rule of law. All it does is demonstrate Canada’s vassal status to the U.S. and Trudeau’s and Freeland’s subservience to U.S. wishes.

Canada is not part of the JCPOA, but as a signatory to the United Nations, it is thereby agreeing to UN “rules of law”. By supporting the U.S., it stands outside the law, acting as a pawn in U.S. attempts to control the world through illegal sanctions and illegal extraterritoriality proceedings.

Not political…really!?

The other argument about it not being political is simply an outright lie, a cover story in order to give a short answer to the media without admitting anything about Canada’s subservience to U.S. extraterritoriality. There is everything political about the arrest as it concerns a high level international executive, one related to China’s central power structures, with the incredible description of it being because of Meng Wanzhou’s business discussions going against U.S.’ illegal sanctions and U.S. abrogation of international law concerning Iran.

In most areas Canada has shown its support for U.S. foreign policy. This case further entrenches Canada into its position of servile vassalage to U.S. interests.

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

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Ottawa Sends Contradictory Messages on Arms Control

December 18th, 2018 by Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) is encouraged to hear that the Trudeau government is looking for ways to stop exporting armoured vehicles to Saudi Arabia. However, this news comes on the heels of last week’s passage of bill C-47, a highly flawed piece of legislation which purportedly has Canada accede to the international arms trade treaty (ATT.) For almost two years, CJPME, Amnesty International, Oxfam, Project Ploughshares, the Rideau Institute, and other civil society organizations criticized bill C-47 as falling short of the letter and spirit of the ATT. Yet when C-47 got Royal Consent last week, the concerns of civil society had been virtually ignored.

“While Trudeau is finally talking about limiting arms sales to Saudi Arabia, his government has just passed arms control legislation that will do nothing to limit future such sales,” complained Thomas Woodley, president of CJPME.

CJPME points out that, in the House, several very reasonable amendments were all voted down by the Liberals. One amendment called for the closing of a loophole which conceals Canadian arms sales to the US: a loophole in stark violation of one of the ATT precepts. Another amendment called for the review of all export permits if the human rights situation in a country had changed over time. Other amendments called for greater parliamentary oversight of arms exports and permits.

“With arms sales, you can’t have your cake and eat it too,” said Woodley.

CJPME accuses the government of pretending to be a “good citizen” on arms control, while doing little to stem the trade of arms to authoritarian and belligerent governments. CJPME points out that, other than the Khashoggi murder, little has changed recently in the human rights portrait of Saudi Arabia. The government has ignored calls for years to end the Saudi Arms deals because of Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen and Saudi Arabia’s lamentable domestic human rights record. Following the Khashoggi murder, the Canadian government is among the last of its allies to consider sanctions against Saudi Arabia.

The ATT seeks to contribute to regional peace and prevent human suffering by “establishing the highest possible international standards for regulating or improving the regulation of the international trade in conventional arms.” In the opinion of CJPME, the Trudeau government failed to meet this standard with bill C-47. CJPME points out that, despite the government’s talk about jobs from the Saudi arms deal, surveys showed that most Canadians believed that Canada should cancel the deal. The international arms trade is one of the greatest causes of instability and human rights violations in the Middle East and around the world.

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Israel: Ethnic Cleansing, Land Theft, Apartheid and Racism against Palestinians

December 18th, 2018 by Kevin Zeese

In recent weeks, racism against Palestinian people and the expansion of apartheid-Jim Crow policies have escalated. The Israeli lobby and its supporters attacked freedom of speech in the United States, showing how far they will go to prevent the US public from being aware of their behavior.

If more people in the US become aware of the truth about Israel’s genocidal policies, the economic lifeline and political protection of the United States will disappear. Israel could be forced to make significant changes that recognize the human rights and self-determination of Palestinians.

Israel knows that without the support of the United States, it could not continue these crimes against the Palestinian people. The lesson for US activists: keep telling the truth about Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

“The Israeli army has enough bullets for every Palestinian.”

That is what the Chair of the Defense Committee of the Israeli Parliament, Avi Dichter, threatened last week. He was commenting on the Great March of Return protests that took place along the eastern fence of the Gaza Strip. Saying Israel has enough bullets for every Palestinian is saying Israel could kill every Palestinian, the definition of ethnic cleansing.

Dichter is not a fringe backbencher but a senior member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party. This former director of the Shin Bet internal security service and Minister of Internal Security said that the Israeli army is prepared to use all means to stop Palestinians.

And, the Strategic Affairs Minister, Gilad Erdan, repeatedly referred to Palestinians killed in Gaza as “Nazis.” Killing Palestinians was acceptable, because “The number [of peaceful Palestinian protesters] killed does not mean anything because they are just Nazis anyhow.”

Israeli troops shot and killed 180 Palestinians and nearly 6,000 others were shot and injured during the Great March of Return. A staggering 24,000 Palestinians have been injured by Israel during the protests, aided by large corporations.

A video released last week showed Israeli soldiers shot dead a young disabled Palestinian from as far away as 80 meters. The rights group, B’Tselem uploaded the video that debunks Israeli claims that he was killed during violent clashes. The video shows 22-year-old Mohammed Habali, being fatally shot by Israeli soldiers in early December in the West Bank. It “clearly shows there were no clashes between residents and soldiers in the immediate vicinity of the spot where Habali was shot,” the group said.

Last week, a four-year-old Palestinian boy died after being injured by Israeli gunfire at a routine protest near Gaza‘s border. His father, Yasser Abu Abed, did not usually bring his son to the regular protests but the boy insisted. Within two minutes of arriving, snipers began shooting. They were a few hundred meters away from the fence. Yasser said, “We’re simply asking for basic rights…All we ever wanted was to see the blockade on Gaza come to an end.” The 11-year blockade has caused immense suffering and violations of human rights.

These are just two recent examples among many. Mondoweiss reports there are many indiscriminate killings including strikes on children playing football, a police officer’s family, a World Cup beach party, at least six hospitals including a geriatric hospital, multiple UN-run safe houses for civilians, journalists , survivors looking for family members, ambulances , among others.

Apartheid-Land Theft: 700 Israeli Communities Ban Arabs

In 2006, when fmr. President Jimmy Carter wrote, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, he was attacked by Israel’s defenders for using the word apartheid. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote that Carter’s “use of the loaded word ‘apartheid,’ suggesting an analogy to the hated policies of South Africa, is especially outrageous.”

In her book review, Karen DeYoung explained: Carter acknowledges that “the word ‘apartheid’ refers to the system of legal racial separation once used in South Africa… it is an appropriate term for Israeli policies devoted to ‘the acquisition of land’ in Palestinian territories through Jewish settlements and Israel’s incorporation of Palestinian land on its side of a separating wall it is erecting.” Carter also criticized Israelis who believe “they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly hopeless and aggravated Palestinians.”

All pretenses that Israel is not an apartheid state with policies sometimes worse than the Jim Crow south have been removed as Israel gets more overt in its racism. This week the Knesset approved 200 more communities where non-Jewish inhabitants can be banned. Now 700 communities have such Jim Crow-apartheid like laws. Banning Arabs from living in communities wipes away Palestinian history, steals land and makes Palestinians second-class citizens or worse.

The Knesset also rejected a bill to ‘maintain equal rights amongst all its citizens.’ The Basic Law: Equality bill, was clear: “The State of Israel shall maintain equal political rights amongst all its citizens, without any difference between religions, race and sex.” This is a direct quote from Israel’s Declaration of Independence, rejected last week by Israel’s parliament.

Mondoweiss describes how this action unveiled the truth about Israel, writing, “Despite one of the greatest political cons in history – ‘Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East’ – Israeli law never recognized equality between citizens. An attempt to enter an equality clause to the Human Dignity and Freedom Basic Law, back in 1992, failed – mostly due to the opposition of the religious parties.”

Last July the Knesset, amid widespread protest in Israel and in the US, adopted a basic law defining Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people,” with more rights for Jews than other groups, codifying Israel as an apartheid state. The law made Arabic no longer an official language, “Jewish settlement” a national value, and the right of “national self-determination” “unique” to Jews.

Aida Touma-Sliman, a rare Palestinian member of the Knesset, explained the new nation-state law officially established apartheid as the law in the “land of Israel” from the river to sea. American Jews decried the clause as reminiscent of racist Jim Crow laws against black people in the United States.

Palestinian women cross through the Israeli military checkpoint of Qalandiya, the main crossing point between Jerusalem and the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Israel Working to Undermine Free Speech in the United States

Israel and their US supporters fear people telling the truth about Israel. There have been attacks against the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which had victories in 2018 and has transformed the debate on Israel. People are exercising their constitutional rights and political freedom to oppose Israel. There are efforts to ban BDS across the country, but courts have found BDS bans unconstitutional. Sen. Ben Cardin is leading the effort to ban BDS under federal law.

CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for speaking truthfully about Palestine. Hill spoke at the November 29, 2018, UN International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People. This is the 70th year since the Nakba when 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their homes by the newly-declared state of Israel and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were emptied and destroyed. Hill called for the human rights of the Palestinian people. Groups moved to remove him from CNN and from Temple University.

A suppressed film by Al Jazeera was finally made public. “The Lobby” showed hidden camera footage of a British Jew who infiltrated AIPAC conferences, programs, and one-on-one meetings. The film showed that the Israeli government spies on US citizens, smears BDS activists as well as others, including Black Lives Matter, and subverts the US democratic process. Read more about the movie and get links to view it here. AIPAC is already working on newly-elected members of Congress.

Last week, the pro-Israel lobby suffered a defeat in its efforts to weaponize support for Palestinian rights when Temple University refused to fire Hill for speaking in solidarity with basic human rights of Palestinians. Their goal is that no criticism of Israel should be allowed in the US.

Unfortunately, Hill was fired as a commentator on CNN. This highlighted the bias of CNN reporting. The network has had a pro-Israel bias for quite some time, as their star news anchor, Wolf Blitzer previously worked for the right wing, Jerusalem Post and the extreme Israeli lobby, AIPAC. Blitzer regularly relies on Israeli military spokesman-turned-CNN-contributor Michael Oren to give his “expert” opinion. Blitzer is among the most overtly biased reporters in the US media. Leaked documents from the archives of the American Zionist Council, the precursor to AIPAC, show that Israeli government representatives secretly – and illegally – financed the planting of propaganda articles and speakers in many major American media outlets. There is a campaign, the Khalas! Blitzer-Oren campaign, demanding CNN end its ties with Blitzer and Oren.

Hill explained what is becoming an obvious fact, that, “Justice will come through a single bi-national democratic state that encompasses Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.” A two-state solution is no longer possible because Israel has seized so much of the land in the West Bank. The Israeli government, including Netanyahu, opposes the existence of an independent State of Palestine.

Even with the discussion of a one-state solution being suppressed in the United States, equal numbers of people in the US support a one-state solution as support a two-state solution and 64 percent support a one-state solution if a two-state solution is not possible. This has Israel, AIPAC and its supporters worried as one nation where everyone has equal rights are inconsistent with Jewish people having greater rights than others in Israel.

MintPress News reported,

“Hill is not the first academic to be targeted by pro-Israel pressure groups. They regard university campuses as a battleground to target and attack all individuals and groups who show solidarity with Palestine and its people and criticize Israel, its apartheid policies and its contempt for international laws and conventions.”

Another decline in US support for Israel is young US Jews not signing up for free ten-day birthright tours of Israel. This week it was reported that there was an unprecedented sharp drop in youth, drops range from 20 percent to 50 percent. Other youths have walked off birthright tours because they were so biased.

Israel’s actions are building opposition against them. Debra Shushan, of Americans for Peace Now, said, growing support for a one-state solution is due to “the aggressive, annexationist policies of the current Israeli government and its failure to pursue a two-state solution. This has fostered a growing perception that an independent Palestinian state is moot or impossible, which prompts people to look for alternatives.”

Time For Israel To Be Held Accountable

Israel constitutes “an open challenge to international law and the present concepts of human rights enshrined in it,” as Flisadam Pointer writes. The International Criminal Court (ICC) is conducting a pre-investigation of Israel.

On the same day that John Bolton threatened the court with economic sanctions if it investigated the US or Israeli war crimes, the Green Party of the United States completed the process of approving a letter to the ICC requesting a full investigation of Israel. We delivered that letter, and Margaret Flowers and Miko Peled met with a representative of the prosecutor’s office on November 19 in The Hague. Palestinians had previously requested an ICC investigation. Last week the ICC announced it has made progress on the pre-investigation. In October, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda said: “Extensive destruction of property without military necessity and population transfers in an occupied territory constitute war crimes.”

Holding the leaders of Israel accountable for their human rights violations will be the first step. Progress will continue if we continue to tell the truth, share videos of Israeli abuses, which occur almost daily, and participate in BDS and other movements in support of Palestine.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.

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Why the US Senate Vote to End Yemen War Is So Important

December 18th, 2018 by Rep. Ron Paul

Last week something historic happened in the US Senate. For the first time in 45 years, a chamber of the US Congress voted to pull US forces from a military conflict under the 1973 War Powers Act.

While there is plenty to criticize in the War Powers Act, in this situation it was an important tool used by a broad Senate coalition to require President Trump to end US participation in the Saudi war against Yemen. And while the resolution was not perfect – there were huge loopholes – it has finally drawn wider attention to the US Administration’s dirty war in Yemen.

The four year Saudi war on neighboring Yemen has left some 50,000 dead, including many women and children. We’ve all seen the horrible photos of school buses blown up by the Saudis – using US-supplied bombs loaded into US-supplied aircraft. Millions more face starvation as the infrastructure is decimated and the ports have been blocked to keep out humanitarian aid.

Stopping US participation in this brutal war is by itself a wise and correct move, even if it comes years too late.

The Senate vote is also about much more than just Yemen. It is about the decades of Presidential assaults on the Constitution in matters of war. President Trump is only the latest to ignore Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution, which grants war power exclusively to Congress. Yes, it was President Obama who initially dragged the US illegally into the Yemen war, but President Trump has only escalated it. And to this point Congress has been totally asleep.

Fortunately that all changed last week with the Senate vote. Unfortunately, Members of the House will not be allowed to vote on their own version of the Senate resolution.

Republican Leadership snuck language into a rule vote on the Farm Bill prohibiting any debate on the Yemen war for the rest of this Congressional session. As Rep. Thomas Massie correctly pointed out, the move was both unconstitutional and illegal.

However as is often the case in bipartisan Washington, there is plenty of blame to go around. The Republicans were able to carry the vote on the rule – and thus deny any debate on Yemen – only because of a group of Democrats crossed over and voted with Republicans. Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer is being blamed by progressives for his apparent lack of interest in holding his party together.

Why would Democrats help a Republican president keep his war going? Because, especially when you look at Congressional leadership, both parties are pro-war and pro-Executive branch over-reach. They prefer it to be their president who is doing the over-reaching, but they understand that sooner or later they’ll be back in charge. As I have often said, there is too much bipartisanship in Washington, not too much partisanship.

Americans should be ashamed and outraged that their government is so beholden to a foreign power – in this case Saudi Arabia – that it would actively participate in a brutal war of aggression. Participating in this war against one of the world’s poorest countries is far from upholding “American values.” We should applaud and support the coalition in the Senate that voted to end the war. They should know how much we appreciate their efforts.

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Number of Gun Deaths in US at All Time High

December 18th, 2018 by Daily Sabah

Deaths caused by firearms in the U.S. have reached the highest level in decades, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

According to the data, 39,773 people were killed by guns in the U.S. in 2017, making it the highest number recorded since 1979, the earliest date the CDC started tracking gun deaths.

The study showed that the number of deaths in 2017 increased by more than 10,000 from 28,874 in 1999.

In both data sets, the people who chose to commit suicide with firearms made up the majority of the toll. In 2017, some 23,854 killed themselves with firearms, an increase of more than 7,000 compared to 16,599 in 1999.

White men led the number of suicides with 18,759 deaths, followed by 2,981 white women and 1,322 black men.

When it came to homicide however, black men suffered a higher number of casualties.

Some 7,661 black men were fatally shot in 2017, followed by 4,289 white men.

Published shortly before the 6th anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, one of the worst shootings in U.S. history in which 26 victims were killed, the report reignited the old gun control debate in the nation.

“In 2017, nearly 109 people died every single day from gun violence. Gun violence is a public health epidemic that requires a public health solution, which is why we must immediately enact and implement evidence-based interventions,” the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence said in a statement.

Like before, the National Rifle Association rebuked calls for tighter firearm laws by saying gun control was not the answer.

“The facts are clear: Gun control laws are not the answer. If we want to prevent more horrific acts of violence our leaders need to stop demonizing the men and women of the @NRA and find solutions that will save lives,” the organization tweeted.

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Fifth French “Yellow Vest” Protest Opposes Macron Government

December 18th, 2018 by Alex Lantier

“Yellow vest” protesters mobilized for a fifth day of action in France on Saturday, facing a new police crackdown and clashes centered in provincial cities, as fewer protesters traveled to Paris.

The interior ministry claimed that some 66,000 people had protested across France, down by half after the brutal crackdown organized the previous week in Paris. The mobilization in the capital was certainly smaller this Saturday, as thousands marched and clashed with police in large provincial cities across the coutnry.

In Paris, several thousand protested and 144 people were held in preventive detention, amid a new massive police clampdown in the capital. Large parts of the city and subway system were shut down, as armored cars, water cannon, horse-mounted military police, and riot police firing rubber bullets and tear gas occupied much of the city.

WSWS reporters spoke to “yellow vest” protesters in Paris. One group of workers from Picardie said,

“They always take from the poor and the middle class, never the rich. We fight to defend our purchasing power, for our children, so we can make it to the end of the month. We haven’t had the money to go on vacation for five years, so we came to Paris to be heard. But then we are repressed by the riot police, we are tear-gassed, shot at with rubber bullets, everything. It is a dictatorship now and nothing else.”

Referring to the state of emergency and the recent Islamist shooting in Strasbourg, they said,

“The state of emergency was a pretext to block us a little bit more.”

They could not explain why “a yellow vest protester arriving in Paris gets goggles or protective clothing confiscated like a criminal, but a man arriving with a gun is free to shoot people at a Strasbourg Christmas market: “That’s where you see we are in a dictatorship.”

Image on the right: “2018 End of Royalism”

Another group of construction workers from Picardie told the WSWS,

“We come to demonstrate peacefully but even so they don’t want to let us do so… We’re here because we have absolutely had enough of this government, we want it to quit and we want power to go to the people.”

“When you get in your car to go to a work site and you hear about the salaries the parliamentarians are earning, and how they set up embezzlement schemes, honestly you don’t want to listen anymore because you feel so sickened,” one added. “Everyone works hard, everyone has problems at the end of the month.”

Asked about the CGT trade union’s criticisms of the “yellow vest” protesters, one construction worker replied,

“Really, frankly, we’ve had enough of the unions. Personally, I think if you see how the unions operate in the workplaces it’s a mafia. You see a guy who’s a union official, he’s sitting pretty, and if you say something he’ll tell you, ‘Look I’m CGT, don’t make trouble.’ If you’re working somewhere and you’re not a union guy and you say you don’t agree with them, they go after you.”

He added,

“If they represented the workers that would be good, but the way they work in France is not like that. Basically they’re a mafia: if you don’t toe their line, you could be lying down dying with your mouth open and they wouldn’t help you.”

Both Toulouse and Bordeaux in the southwest saw approximately 5,000 people marching, more than the Paris march. Protests in Bordeaux led to clashes with police around Pey-Berland square, with 22 wounded including six from the security forces, and 27 people held in preventive detention on charges of “bearing projectiles prohibited weapons, preparing violence or damages.”

In Toulouse, a center of high school protests against President Emmanuel Macron’s return to the draft and his school reforms, the police deployed armored cars against the “yellow vests.” Protesters kneeled on the ground in front of police, replicating the posture military police forced high school protesters to adopt, handcuffed, in the now infamous video at Mantes-la-Jolie. Clashes broke out as the Toulouse protest broke up, leading to 31 arrests and 29 wounded, including 21 among the security forces.

“Is it a revolt? No Macron, it’s a revolution”

In Marseille, where several thousand “yellow vests” marched, the police totally sealed off the Old Port, again relying on armored vehicles to oppose the protesters. Elements of the Stalinist General Confederation of Labor (CGT) and the New Anticapitalist Party (NPA) sought to join the “yellow vest” protests and control where the protesters marched, as in Toulouse. This provoked bitter comments from the “yellow vests,” who launched their movement independently of the unions and resent the CGT’s denunciation of them as neo-fascistic.

“Yellow vest” protesters in Marseille spoke out to criticize the CGT, which has a long record of working closely to negotiate austerity with successive social democratic or right-wing governments. “It’s been 40 years that they have been pissing us off. I don’t want to be with them now,” one Marseille protester told La Provence about the CGT.

In Saint-Etienne, about 2,000 people marched to calls of “Macron, resign!” Approximately 50 were arrested after clashes broke out later in the day as police tried to block Carnot square. There was widespread shock and opposition as it emerged that the police had shot a France3 journalist with a rubber bullet. France3 officials protested the measure, writing on Twitter, “It is high time that journalists, who are observers by nature, are not taken as targets by anyone.”

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Mass Demonstration by Los Angeles Teachers

December 18th, 2018 by Dan Conway

Tens of thousands of Los Angeles teachers and their supporters converged in a rally and march in downtown Los Angeles Saturday to demand better pay, smaller class sizes and increased funding for the 640,000 students in the second-largest school district in the United States. The demonstration, which involved up to 50,000 protesters, was the latest indication of the resumption of resistance by educators across the US who have been involved in the largest strike wave by teachers in decades.

More than 33,000 teachers and health and human service professionals in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) have been working without a new contract since their old agreement expired in June 2017. Like state governments and school districts across the country, LAUSD officials claim there is no money to meet the teachers’ demands and have offered an insulting three percent annual pay increase to teachers who live in one of the most expensive metropolitan areas in America.

Teachers voted by 98 percent in August to authorize the United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) union to call the first city wide strike since 1989. The UTLA has defied the strike mandate and tied up educators in months of state-supervised mediation and fact-finding. Anger among rank-and-file teachers is boiling over, however, and the UTLA has been forced to say it would call a strike sometime next month if no settlement is reached.

In addition to the teachers themselves, thousands of students, parents, retirees and other workers demonstrated at Saturday’s March for Public Education. Many recognized the historically significant character of their fight, attending with children, friends and parents as well.

While several of the teachers’ walkouts earlier this year, including West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona, occurred in states led by Republican governors and state legislatures, the entire political establishment in Los Angeles and California is run by the Democratic Party. Like their Republican counterparts, state and local Democrats in California have starved the public schools of funding, diverted public resources to for-profit charter schools and used standardized testing and other punitive teacher evaluation schemes to scapegoat educators for the inevitable educational problems produced by defunding education and the growth of poverty and other social ills.

Students and teachers march in downtown LA

Supporters of the World Socialist Web Site distributed a statement by the WSWS Teacher Newsletter, titled, “Los Angeles teachers and the fight for social equality.” Teachers spoke to the WSWS about years of budget cutting and underfunding, which have left Los Angeles schools in a deplorable state. Classrooms are regularly overcrowded with 40 to 50 students often assigned to a single teacher. Due to shortages of school nurses, medical personnel must rotate among five or more schools, leaving others uncovered for several days at a time. Music and art programs are largely nonexistent in all but the most well-off schools.

“The issues facing LA teachers are part of a national calamity that has been taking place over the last 30 to 40 years,” Brett, a teacher with 13 years who currently teaches 6th grade at Orchard Arts and Media Academy in the City of Bell, told the WSWS. “There has been a lack of public investment all across the board that really starts with education. The lack of respect for public education is glaring and tragic because it results in people suffering across this nation. We need to do more to support everyone because the inequality in our country, the gap between the rich and the poor, continues to widen.”

“In the LAUSD only 40 percent of our students are obtaining passing test scores. This is because there is a lack of investment. The result is class sizes through the roof, and teachers who are getting demoralized. The corporate agenda is causing massive fissures throughout the country and it’s not healthy for the well-being of our society,” Brett concluded.

Another section of the demonstration

Tamara, a kindergarten teacher with more than 20 years’ experience, described the impact of the social crisis on her students. “The demographics in LA have changed since I started working here. Today, students have far greater needs, mostly associated with increased trauma. At my site we only have a school nurse one to two times per week. My students are dealing with poverty, a scarcity of food and grocery stores near where they live.

“When they arrive at school, my job is far more than providing an education, but first and foremost taking care of their social and emotional needs. The meals they have at school are their only substantive meals throughout the day.”

Tamara went on to speak about the general crisis of public education.

“On a very basic level, there’s more of an interest in money than in humans,” she said. “When I think of [LAUSD superintendent and former investment banker Austin] Beutner, I become enraged. He’s lived a life of privilege. How is someone who has never spent a day of his life in the classroom a superintendent? It all comes down to commerce and business, which are placed above our students’ needs.”

Rudy, a physical education and health teacher, spoke about the global struggle by educators and workers as a whole against austerity and social inequality.

“The struggle is not only nationwide. It’s worldwide. They’re trying to privatize everything. That’s why when things go wrong, they blame us. Even though they created the problems in the first place.”

Asked what he thought about the “Yellow Vest” protests in France and throughout Europe, Rudy said,

“Workers in France are in the same situation as American workers. The rich always try to control the funding and divert it to themselves.”

Several teachers at the Los Angeles demonstration wore yellow vests in solidarity with their class brothers and sisters in France.

The school district, which is made up of Los Angeles and 31 surrounding cities and communities, has the highest number of homeless students of any district in the state. More than 17,250 LAUSD students were recorded as homeless at the start of the prior 2017-2018 academic year. That figure itself was a fifty percent increase over the previous year and was the highest number of homeless students in district history.

Students and their families in the district have also been the victims of the crackdown and deportation of immigrants by Trump and the Obama administration before him. California has the highest number of undocumented immigrants in the US and Los Angeles teachers often find themselves instructing scores of students afraid that their parents and relatives could be arrested and deported at a moment’s notice. LAUSD, like school districts around the country and in the Southwestern US in particular, has noted marked increases in absenteeism, particularly after the Trump administration began its crackdown on immigrants in 2017.

While teachers and their supporters expressed determination to fight, the union speakers at Saturday’s rally did everything to promote illusions in the Democratic Party. UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl told teachers that “hope was in the air” not due to a mass movement from below but from “a historic school funding initiative on the ballot in 2020.” The Democratic Party-backed initiative is similar to measures in other states that would modestly increase corporate taxes, which were either ruled off the ballot based on bogus technicalities, or, if passed, did little to reverse decades of defunding public education.

Caputo-Pearl also celebrated the recent elections of Democrats Gavin Newsom for governor and Tony Thurmond for state superintendent as advances for teachers. The UTLA’s promotion of the Democrats exposes the antiworker character of the unions. California Democrats have used the governor’s office as well as regular supermajorities in the state legislature to impose savage austerity and cuts to public education. With a public-school system that was once one of the best funded in the country, the state now ranks 43rd in the nation in per-pupil spending. This is despite the fact that the state is home to 141 billionaires who are centered in Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten also spoke at the rally, saying the national “union would stand with LA teachers, just like we stood with teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona.” Teachers should take such statements as a warning. Weingarten (salary $513,000) and her counterpart at the National Education Association, President Lilia Eskelsen Garcia (salary $414,000), are both part of the top one percent of income earners in the US and thoroughly hostile to a mass movement of teachers and other educators against endless austerity measures, which have fueled the stock market bubble. The AFT and NEA have spent the last year trying to prevent the outbreak of strikes and where they have broken out to sabotage and shut them down as quickly as possible before they could coalesce into a national strike of educators.

The mass protests in Los Angeles, following on the footsteps of wildcat sickouts by Oakland teachers, demonstrated the growing determination of educators to fight. This is part of a broader movement of the working class throughout the US and internationally. To take this fight forward, however, teachers have to form rank-and-file committees in every school and community, independent of the unions, to link up the struggle of educators with far broader sections of the working class. The fight for living wages and full funding for public education is only possible if the working class conducts a frontal assault on the entrenched wealth and power of the corporate and financial oligarchy and both capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans.

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Operation “Northern Shield” at the Israeli-Lebanese Border: Why Hassan Nasrallah Remains Silent

December 17th, 2018 by Sayed Hasan

The operation “Northern Shield” was launched with great fanfare by the Israeli occupier on December 4, allegedly aimed at “exposing and neutralizing the cross-border attack tunnels that Hezbollah dug from Lebanon to Israel”. Indeed, the Lebanese Resistance has repeatedly promised to no longer be on a defensive position in case of aggression or war, and carry the fighting inside occupied Palestine, or even to liberate Galilee. Spokesmen of the Israeli government ostensibly congratulated themselves on what they presented as thwarting the plans of the dreaded Hassan Nasrallah.

Israeli propaganda and its docile Western media relays presented the operation as a large-scale military offensive that would strike a huge blow to the “Party of God”, as if the Zionist entity had entered Lebanese territory (or was about to do so), whether on land or underground. A speech by the Hezbollah Secretary General was announced for the same day by the Israeli and Western media, which would have seemed to confirm the importance of the Israeli operation. And given Hezbollah’s silence, it was ultimately said that this silence was due to the shock in which the Lebanese Resistance found itself after this surprise operation that would have ruined its most secret plans.

But what is it all really about? First and foremost, it is ridiculous to equate drilling and excavation work taking place inside occupied Palestine, and not encroaching in any way on Lebanese territory, with some kind of offensive, or even a military operation. Heavy construction, earthworks and fortification work on the northern border of Israel have been conducted by the IDF since 2015, with the aim of creating a Maginot-kind line of defense against Hezbollah (to emphasize its anachronistic character, Al-Manar nicknamed it The Wall of Illusion).

If the Israeli and Western media refrained from any mediatization on this subject, it is because these works of engineering did not serve the propaganda of Israel, underlining on the contrary its weakness: the Zionist entity is indeed cornered to a defensive position for the first time in its existence. But Hezbollah itself has clearly boasted about this upheaval, notably by organizing a media tour in April 2017 to expose the Israeli measures to the world. The promise of February 16, 2011, in which Hassan Nasrallah announced to his fighters that they must be ready to receive, one day, the order to liberate Galilee, has indeed been taken very seriously by Israel. Even more so after the war in Syria, where Hezbollah has acquired and demonstrated its offensive capabilities by liberating vast areas of territory from the presence of ISIS, leading battles that, by their nature, extent and deployed personnel and weapons, are no longer guerrilla warfare. Hezbollah’s offensive capabilities have never been based on the existence of tunnels, as evidenced already by the cross-border capture of Israeli soldiers in July 2006, and are now more similar to operations launched by conventional armies, as Hassan Nasrallah pointed out in an interview on August 19, 2016:

When Hezbollah intervenes in the war in Syria, and fights as a very large formation, and with very different armaments, or as part of a very large formation with various armaments, and participates in major and very extensive offensive operations, when he manages to repel armed men (ISIS terrorists), who are not normal combatants, especially foreigners, fighters of such a level (of commitment, ready to die), when Hezbollah expels them from very large geographical areas, it means that Hezbollah gains an offensive experience, a vast experience of liberation of territory through continuous and direct military operations, and not through guerrilla warfare. And Hezbollah did not have such experience before the war in Syria.

This is where Israel is frightened and terrified. Because what Hezbollah does in Syria, if a war is launched against it, it will do it in Galilee. […] If Hezbollah emerged from the (2006) July war as a regional power, it will emerge from this war (in Syria) as a true military power representing a force capable to liberate (huge) territories not only through guerrilla warfare, but even in a war that looks much more like the classic wars (between national armies).

Hezbollah is not Hamas, and believing that their strategies and tactics are the same while their abilities and experiences are immeasurable is both an illusion and a hoax to which, of course, Hassan Nasrallah did not deign reply.

Why was this show-operation launched now? Netanyahu, who is altogether Prime Minister, Minister of Defense, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Health, is more discredited than ever in Israel, because of the recent military failure against Gaza –after which his Minister of Defense Avigdor Lieberman resigned, almost taking down his government–, and of his innumerable legal probes, which led the Israeli police to ask, at the beginning of December, his indictment as well as that of his wife in an umpteenth corruption case. The Israeli opposition, from the first days, openly expressed doubts as to the true goals of the Operation “Northern Shield”, as did Tzipi Livni, who denounced the overdramatization of this operation:

We are not now in a situation where our soldiers are behind enemy lines. We are talking about engineering activity within the sovereign territory of the state of Israel. Netanyahu is blowing the incident out of proportion. He made a defensive engineering event into a dramatic military operation. This was done for one of two reasons — either the Prime Minister is himself panicking, or he wants to sow panic to justify his actions both in delaying elections and abandoning the residents of southern Israel [against the rockets of Gaza].

But we must not rely on the Western media to bring to our knowledge this easily accessible data. For them, only the official Israeli propaganda is worthy of credit.

More weak than ever, Netanyahu wants to present himself as a strong man against Hezbollah, but the operation launched against alleged tunnels, a preposterous maneuver to divert the attention of the Israeli press and public opinion, reveals only the powerlessness of Israel against the Party of God. Hezbollah is well aware that Netanyahu will not dare to launch a war of aggression against Lebanon, and that against Hezbollah, Israel has no other recourse than Washington’s sanctions and its own appeals to international institutions –these same institutions and laws trampled on by Tel Aviv for decades– to condemn the alleged violations of Israeli sovereignty by Hezbollah –while Israel continues to violate Lebanese airspace daily– and take action against him.

In the face of such childishness –the Israeli army is more likely to find Digletts and other underground Pokemon than operational tunnels of Hezbollah–, Hassan Nasrallah was wary not to provide any fuel to Netanyahu’s show: any speech on his part would have added credibility to this hyped pseudo-operation. Hezbollah media and Lebanese civilians took care of responding, widely ridiculing the operation, mocking Israel on social media, and picnicking with family on the border to taunt Israeli soldiers on the war footing.

A clip called “We’ll meet up in Haifa”, subtitled in Hebrew, was directed by a Lebanese artist, parodying an Israeli song. Hezbollah fighters can be seen reaching Haifa by tunnel, and spying on Netanyahu in his own home.

For its part, Hezbollah’s war media published a picture of Israeli troops taken from behind, inside Israeli territory, while they were facing the Lebanese border, thus proving that even when the enemy is on high alert, its territory remains easily accessible.

Moreover, Hezbollah fighters have stolen two FN MAG machine guns under the noses of Israeli soldiers (the Israeli media have widely reported this theft), weapons that will certainly reappear in their hands at the most opportune moment to humiliate the Israeli army and its government.

And on December 12, Hezbollah released this video subtitled in Hebrew and recalling the reality of the situation: it is Israel that fears Hezbollah and takes all measures to guard against it, not the other way around.

It is unlikely that the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah will turn into war in the near future. But psychological warfare continues to rage, and the electronic battalions of Hassan Nasrallah demonstrate day after day their superiority.

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Kiev Sends Tanks and Troops to Donbass, Poroshenko Regime Hatching an Armed Provocation?

December 17th, 2018 by TASS

The Russian news agency TASS reports (December 16, 2018) on disturbing developments pointing to the deployment of Ukrainian troops and tanks against Donbass. “A spokesman for the DPR defense ministry Daniil Bezsonov said that tank and mechanized battalions of the 93rd mechanized brigade have been unloaded at the Konstantinovka railway station”

Ukraine’s forces have started reinforcing their grouping in Donbass, redeploying tanks and attack aviation to the contact line in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic, Daniil Bezsonov, a spokesman for the DPR defense ministry, said on Sunday.

“Over the past two days, tank and mechanized battalions of the 93rd mechanized brigade have been unloaded at the Konstantinovka railway station, increasing the grouping by more than 60 tanks and infantry fighting vehicles,” the Donetsk News Agency said.

The DPR intelligence has reported that four Su-25 aircraft have been sent from the Melitopol to the Berdyansk airfield. These attack planes may be used for fire support operations during a massive air strike, he said.

The Kiev forces are also planning to reinforce their grouping in the Gorlovka direction by militants of the Right Sector (extremist group, outlawed in Russia) volunteer units, the spokesman said.

“According to our data, 24 reserve hundreds have been formed, up to 150 gunmen in each,” he stressed.

Since the beginning of the Donbass conflict in April 2014 the sides have declared more than 20 ceasefires. The latest agreement of the Contact Group on the so-called “back-to-school” ceasefire took effect on August 29. However, no lasting truce has been achieved so far. (TASS, December 16, 2018)

The latest reports from Russia’s Foreign Ministry based on public statements by Sergei Lavrov suggest that “Russia Will not Wage War on Ukraine”.

This public statement is subject to interpretation. Moscow is not revealing its military and intelligence strategies with regard to Crimea and Donbass.

Lavrov’s public statement does not signify that Russia will not intervene militarily.

According to the Tass report: “the Kiev regime is hatching a scheme for an armed provocation on the border with Crimea some time in the last ten days of December”. In this regard, according to Lavrov Russia intends to respond:

Russia is not going to wage war against Ukraine but will respond in kind, if Kiev carries out a provocation on the border with Crimea, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the Komsomolskaya Pravda radio station on Monday.

“We will not wage war against Ukraine, I promise you,” he vowed.

He stressed that Ukraine’s domestic problems were “much broader and deeper” than just the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics (DPR, LPR). That’s why Russia cannot just recognize the DPR and LPR, as that would be tantamount to leaving the rest of Ukraine in the hands of the Nazi regime.

“You want to recognize the LPR and DPR? And what’s next? To lose the rest of Ukraine and abandon it to the Nazis?” he said, when asked why Russia refused to recognize these self-proclaimed republics.

He noted though that Kiev was plotting more incitement on the border with Russia. “I am sure there will be more provocations,” he warned. “”[Ukrainian President Pyotr] Poroshenko is planning an armed provocation on the border with Russia, on the border with Crimea during the last ten days of December.”

Any action by the Kiev regime against Crimea will be considered as act of war to which Russia will respond:

The minister vowed that Russia would not leave that unanswered. “The answer is: they will regret it. This is our country, this is our border. We will not allow him [Ukrainian President Pyotr Poroshenko] to try to somehow protect his interests, the way he sees it, and violate those rights that Crimeans defended in full accordance with international law,” Lavrov stressed.

Russia’s top diplomat pointed out that the current regime in Kiev was similar to that of neo-Nazis.

“We are not fighting the Ukrainian regime. It is Ukrainian citizens living in Donbass who are fighting against the Ukrainian regime, which has full Nazi and neo-Nazi characteristics,” Lavrov pointed out. According to Russia’s data, Poroshenko has been discussing the upcoming provocation on the border with Crimea with his Western sponsors. “They advise him to keep low intense combat actions to enable them to go ahead with propaganda that Russians are carrying out an offensive against Ukraine and that’s why Russia needs to be hit by sanctions, but military actions should never switch into a phase that will be followed by full-scale responses,” Lavrov stressed.

Russia’s top diplomat emphasized that Kiev’s provocations are ongoing. “Our respective services are making all necessary efforts to thwart these incidents.” (TASS, December 17, 2018)

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A Green Future for Oman: A Trail for Environmentalism in the Arab World

December 17th, 2018 by Austin Bodetti

Oman has long proved an outlier among the monarchies at the western edge of the Persian Gulf. Most Omanis subscribe to Ibadism, not Sunni Islam, and the Omani Sultan, Qaboos bin Said Al Said, has pursued a much quieter foreign policy than his counterparts in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

These examples of Omani independence extend even to the sultanate’s environmental policy, which recognises that a region dependent on the petroleum industry needs to come to terms with climate change sooner or later. The rest of the Arabian Peninsula can learn a thing or two from Oman.

“The government of Oman has been quite active in thinking about the environment,” said Dr Crystal Ennis, a lecturer at Leiden University focusing on political economy in the Gulf.

Sultan Qaboos’ support for the environmental movement has deep, historical roots. Far ahead of its neighbours in the Gulf, Oman becamethe first country in the Middle East to enact a comprehensive environmental policy in 1982 and the first to establish an environmental ministry in 1984.

“Oman’s interest in protecting its natural environment happened at the early stages of economic development,” Dr Aisha al-Sarihi, a visiting fellow at the Arab Gulf States Institute who specialises in the Gulf monarchies’ responses to global warming, told The New Arab.

“The law’s main aim was to ensure that economic development did not expand at the expense of the natural environment.”

In 1991, Oman and the United Nations Educational, Cultural, and Scientific Organisation, or UNESCO, began cosponsoring the UNESCO Sultan Qaboos Prize for Environmental Preservation.

The joint initiative furthers the work of research institutes and scientists dedicated to revolutionising the study of environmental protection with a biennial $70,000 grant.

Oman’s decision to endow the programme may seem ironic for a sultanate that built its economy off fossil fuels, but Sultan Qaboos realises that climate change could very well define the future of the Gulf and the Arab world at large.

The Law on Conservation of the Environment and Prevention of Pollution, which Sultan Qaboos issued by royal decree in 2001, enshrines his decades long commitment to the environmental movement. The law includes penalties that act as effective deterrents for contributing to pollution.

Oman’s relationship with the natural environment informs its approach to environmentalism. The sultanate boasts some of the most biodiverse, fragile ecosystems in the Middle East.

Oman hosts several endangered species, including the Arabian leopard, oryx, and tahr. Green, hawksbill, and loggerhead sea turtles nest on the sultanate’s coasts. Omani officials have tried to encourage sustainable tourism to promote the beauty of the natural environment while protecting it.

“The embrace of environmentalism among civil society and government bodies is critical for the preparation of Oman for a post-oil future,” Ennis told The New Arab.

“Two aspects are especially important here: preparing legal and regulatory frameworks for safeguarding the environment and reducing harm and raising social awareness and changing consumer preferences and practices.”

Omani Environment and Climate Affairs Minister Mohammad al-Toobi called on Omanis “to ensure that people visiting [their] country recognise the importance of the environment and preserve its natural diversity” in a 2018 interview with the UN Environment Programme, which praised Oman’s embrace of sustainable tourism and involvement in the environmental movement as a whole.

The Omani Environment and Climate Affairs Ministry’s mission statement features a similar commitment “to protect the environment and conserve [Omanis’] natural resources,” an important goal in a region on the front lines of global warming. Oman understands the need for environmentalism.

“The Omani government has already played a role in integrating civil society into environmental protection,” noted al-Sarihi.

“Examples include the integration of environmental topics, such as climate change and the protection of Oman’s biodiversity, into the education curriculum.”

Civil society in Oman has also been taking its own steps. The Facebook page Clean Up Oman has organised volunteers to collect litter across the sultanate. The Environment Society of Oman promotes wildlife conservation throughout Oman and on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. An Omani aquarium even got in on the action by coordinating the clean-up of Duqm Port and Drydock with divers.

“More generally, Oman and almost all other Arab countries could benefit greatly from combining electrical generation from abundant solar energy with energy storage and export, perhaps by using the electrical energy to produce hydrogen or synthetic hydrocarbon fuels suitable for export as liquids,” said Dr Peter Kelemen, a geochemist at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory who has studied the unique potential for carbon capture and storage in Oman.

“Such initiatives would take advantage of the Arabian Peninsula’s huge solar resources and regional expertise in hydrocarbon engineering and export.”

As desertification and other environmental issues threaten the heart of the Middle East, Oman has an opportunity to act as role model for Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.

“The oil and gas-rich states of the Gulf cannot build their way out of the crisis with ever more air-conditioned towers like you see in Dubai, Doha, and Manama,” said Dr James Russell, an associate professor of national security at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey whose research focuses on the politics of the Gulf.

“Oman should position itself as a leader – and lead.”

The economies of Oman and its neighbours have flourished because of abundant access to fossil fuels. Nonetheless, the lifespan of the petroleum industry will reach its end in the twenty-first century, and Oman has taken the most significant steps in preparation for that inevitable event.

“Oman can position itself as a regional leader if it starts to make choices now to cope with sea level rise, higher temperatures, unpredictable weather, further reduced precipitation, and the prospect of displaced environmental refugees,” Russell told The New Arab.

“Oman’s approach should feature bottom-up and top-down measures, involving local communities and civic governance in combination with national-level emphasis. It must be a ‘whole of government’ approach.”

All the Arab monarchies of the Gulf wield substantial financial resources. Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have money to spare. If any of these countries engage with the environmental movement as Oman has, they can better mitigate the inevitable consequences of global warming. For his part, Sultan Qaboos has been preparing for the effects of climate change for over forty years.

“Oman has the opportunity to punch above its weight on this vital strategic issue,” Russell told The New Arab. “The world needs countries like Oman to lead way by example.”

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Austin Bodetti studies the intersection of Islam, culture, and politics in Africa and Asia. He has conducted fieldwork in Bosnia, Indonesia, Iraq, Myanmar, Nicaragua, Oman, South Sudan, Thailand, and Uganda. His research has appeared in The Daily Beast, USA Today, Vox, and Wired.

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Theresa May Days in Britain, Stonewalled in Europe and the Parliament

December 17th, 2018 by Dr. Binoy Kampmark

It is hard to envisage sympathy for a person who made a name as a home secretary (prisons, detentions, security and such) taking the mast and banner of her country before hopeless odds, but inadequate opponents will do that to you. Vicious, venal and underdone, the enemies from within Theresa May’s own Tory ranks resemble the lazily angry, the fumingly indulgent. These are the same men, and a few women, who managed to derive enormous satisfaction from a Britain pampered and spoiled by EU largesse but questioning of its bureaucracy and demands. Patriotism has an odd habit of making one jaundiced, but manic self-interest will also do that to you.

May remains British prime minister after a botched effort to overthrow her within conservative party ranks. She faced the unenviable situation of being stonewalled in Europe and by Parliament itself. President of the European Council Donald Tusk assured May that the deal for the UK leaving the EU is not up for renegotiation, “including the backstop”.

The border with Ireland – soft, hard, or middling – is proving to be a rattling affair. Should it go “hard”, Britain will find itself trapped. As The Irish Times noted,

“It evokes genuine fear, not least in those who live near the Border or rely on trade for their livelihoods or count themselves among the silenced majority in Northern Ireland who voted Remain.”

As for Parliament, May has ducked and weaved in putting the deal to its irritable members, thereby depriving MPs a hack at sinking it. May fears, rightly, defeat over a proposal that has satisfied few. What is now being run in certain circles is the idea of “indicative votes” which might throw up various Brexit models (Canada-styled; Norwegian adapted).

The May plotters, however, showed the skills and talents of marksmen who end up shooting themselves in a fit of drunken enthusiasm on a poorly planned hunt. The leadership challenge on December 12 served to demonstrate a good level of incompetence, amplified by the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson.

The fact that May received 200 votes against 117 to stay on as PM was not enough for the righteous Rees-Moog, who spoke as if some inscrutable victory for the rebels had been attained.

“She said in 2017 she would lead the Conservative Party if she had the support of the parliamentary party.”

It was clear that a third of members voting against her suggested she did not.

“So if she honours her word she will decide in the interests of the party and the nation she will go.”

This all seems to amount to a stay of execution. May survives, but faces daggers on a daily basis. Home Secretary Sajid Javid is nipping at her heels in the hope to land a blow. Welfare Secretary Amber Rudd has made it public that she likes the idea of a UK-EU arrangement along the lines of Norway’s relationship with the union. Naturally, as with so many such ideas, the EU response is automatically assumed.

The idea of a second referendum, long seen as the ultimate betrayal of the Brexit result, has received more than a decent fanning. Vast swathes have changed their mind since the populist up swell of 2016, goes the view of conservative Dominic Grieve and New Labour’s former spin doctor Alastair Campbell on Good Morning Britain, a bastion of rusted reaction few can match on British television. The panel, as ever, was on the hunt for the elusive idea of democracy in Britain, and found wanting. The Remainers remain desperately confused.

If there is a good reason to be suspicious of a second referendum, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s endorsement of it would be one. Frankly Tony, whose rule was characterised by long spells of deception and arrogance (remember the Iraq War?), had a singular contempt for democracy that should not be forgotten. He is now spending time slumming in Brussels in the hope that people will take notice, advocating for a second people’s vote. Should parliament be unable to reach agreement on each of the forms of Brexit being put forth, he suggests, “then the logical thing is to go back to the people.”

To Blair can be added May’s own de facto deputy prime minister, David Lidington and chief of staff at 10 Downing Street Gavin Barwell. The latter has supposedly discussed the issue of a second people’s vote with Chancellor Philip Hammond and Work and Pensions Secretary Amber Rudd.

May is having none of it. “Let us not break faith with the British people by trying to stage another referendum.” To do so “would do irreparable damage to the integrity of our politics, because it would say to millions who trusted in democracy, that our democracy does not deliver.”

Brexit is the great exercise of imperfection, an experiment that the EU would like to quash just as many in the UK would like to see reversed. It has been disheartening and cruel; it has divided and disturbed. It has also demonstrated levels of marked mendacity fitting for countries British citizens tend to mock. Facts have become fictions; fictions have been paraded as exemplars of truth. The dark spirits have been released, and there are not going to be bottled any time soon.

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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]

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Smartphone Wars: Yandex and Huawei Challenge Western Monopolies

December 17th, 2018 by Caleb Maupin

The arrest of Chinese telecommunications CFO Meng Wanzhou has sent shockwaves through the global markets. The context of the smartphone industry and the challenges facing big monopolies from Russia and China is vital background information for anyone who wants to understand these recent, dramatic events.

One of the favorite talking points of defenders of free markets is “capitalism made your iphone.” According to the meme, those who believe in socialism or Marxism are presented as total hypocrites if they own smartphone as only the profit system’s rewarding of entrepreneurship could ever produce such a technological creation.

However, a little investigation reveals that the entire premise of the meme is false. The first cellphone was created by Leonid Ivanovich Kupriyanovich, a Moscow-based engineer in 1955 who conducted his research in state-run facilities. Furthermore, the screens of most smartphones are illuminated by Light Emitting Diodes (LED), the first of which was invented in 1927 by Oleg Vladimirovich Losev. Losev was also a Russian who conducted his research in state sponsored facilities.

The computer revolution itself can largely be attributed to the work of Alan Turing and his decoding machine created during the Second World War. This research was done in the context of heavy military control over industry, when Britain was aligned with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany, hardly a free market situation.

Cell-phones are simply not the product of some objectivist fantasy about a misunderstood “great man” tinkering in his garage unabated and untaxed. Cell phones, LED lights, and the Computer Revolution itself came about as a result of central planning, and the overall mobilization of society by the state to reach technological and production goals.

Today, the largest cell phone manufacturer on earth is Huawei Technologies based in the Chinese tech hub of Shenzhen. This huge manufacturer of smartphones that are purchased and celebrated all over the world, is closely tied to the Chinese government and military.

The Chief Financial Officer of Huawei was recently arrested in Canada at the request of US officials. Meng now faces extradition to the United States. Charges have not formally been named, but it is widely speculated that it is related to accusations that Huawei has violated US sanctions against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Independent Telecom on the Rise

It is perhaps a strange coincidence that just as Huawei’s CFO has been arrested, Yandex, the Russian internet corporation has announced that it is producing a smartphone of its own. On December 5th, the world became aware that soon a “Yandex Phone” produced by the government subsidized tech entity will be available for purchase. Yandex has also recently gotten in on the ride hailing and other high tech endeavors.

Even the deeply impoverished nation of Angola, led by the Socialist MPLA, was able to create its own independent cell phone company. Isabel Dos Santos utilized revenue from the state controlled oil corporation, and assistance from the People’s Republic of China, to create and expand a corporation called Unitel. Santos push for the creation other independent telecommunications apparatus in southern Africa and in Portuguese speaking countries.

Prior to the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the US FBI urged Americans not to buy Chinese smartphones. The reason given was the corporation’s ties to the Chinese government, and fears that information could be compromised.

However, it is widely known thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden, that the National Security Agency of the United States has a close relationship with many American cellular and tech companies. Google, Facebook, Apple, and other high tech companies have routinely cooperated with federal officials, and the individuals whose information is being subpoenaed or requested from the tech giants is often never informed that their privacy has been violated.

In the context of a rising challenge to the western smartphone monopolies by independent manufacturers around the world, one must find it suspicious that Federal Officials in the USA have suddenly become concerned about the privacy of American citizens, and alleged sanctions violations by China’s telecommunications giant.

One must wonder if underneath the hysteria, there is a desperate attempt to preserve a western semi-monopoly that is quickly slipping away.

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Caleb Maupin is a political analyst and activist based in New York. He studied political science at Baldwin-Wallace College and was inspired and involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from NEO

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Brazil: Fascism on the Verge of Power?

December 17th, 2018 by Jörg Nowak

The extreme right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro won the Brazilian presidential elections on 28 October in the second round with a margin of 11 million votes (all in all about 58 million or 55 per cent) against the candidate of the Workers’ Party (PT) Fernando Haddad with 47 million votes, representing 45 per cent of the vote. Another 40 million Brazilians did not vote or cast empty ballots instead. What is to be expected from the incoming presidency that starts on January 1, 2019? And why did voters turn to the radical right after 13 years of governments led by presidents from the PT plus two years of an interim neoliberal government that came to power via a parliamentary coup?

The spectacular fact is not what is visible at first sight – that the PT candidate Haddad lost – but that the traditional right-wing parties, the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) and the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), sank into meaninglessness. Their candidates, Meirelles of the PMDB, the traditional party of rural elites and the incumbent president Michel Temer, got 1.2 per cent in the first round of the elections, and Geraldo Alckmin of the PSDB, the party of urban elites and the middle-classes, got 4.8 per cent of the votes.

The PMDB and the PSDB have never been mass parties with a fixed ideology, but rather, elite formations that moulded their ideology from left to right and back again, and all the while exercising a staunch right-wing agenda in practice. Thus, Bolsonaro was able to replace the traditional right by being a member of a nano-sized party, the Partido Social Liberal (PSL), that he had joined only on January 5, 2018.

The PT defended its position as the main opposition party, and as the biggest party bloc in parliament, despite fierce anti-PT propaganda from Bolsonaro and from all other opposition parties. The strongholds of the PT are the regional states in the poor Northeast, where Haddad obtained victories in both rounds and where regional governors from left-wing parties were elected.

Corruption, Crime, Family Values

One basis for the success of Bolsonaro was the anti-corruption movement that had swept the country with massive demonstrations in 2015 and 2016 and which formed the popular basis for the impeachment of president Dilma Rousseff in 2016. The parliamentary wing of the anti-corruption movement, primarily the PMDB, was swallowed by its own success, since demonstrators developed a general anti-establishment sentiment, primarily directed against the PT, but also against the PMDB and the PSDB. A large number of politicians of all three parties went on trial or were convicted in the ongoing anti-corruption investigations, not the least of which was the powerful evangelical Eduardo Cunha from the PMDB who orchestrated the impeachment of Rousseff, and who is now in jail.

The issue dominating Bolsonaro’s campaign, apart from family values, corruption and unemployment, was unequivocally public security. Brazil saw 60,000 homicides in 2016. This is a rate of 27 homicides per 100,000 inhabitants. Only a few countries like Honduras and Venezuela have a higher homicide rate, while in violence-ridden Mexico it is 16 per 100,000, in the U.S. 5, in the UK 0.9 and in Germany 0.85. Apart from homicides there is a high number of robberies and burglaries in Brazil – in other words, Bolsonaro tapped into an area which comprises a serious issue for many citizens in Brazil.

Bolsonaro’s proposals in this regard are quite simple. Not only the possession (which is already legal) but also the carrying of firearms shall be legalised, and policemen that kill ‘gangsters’ shall not face any investigations. It is quite obvious that the latter proposal invites all kinds of misuse, including the killing of political opponents, business competitors and so on. The Brazilian police force is today already one of the most violent ones worldwide since 5,000 out of the 60,000 homicides in 2016 were committed by policemen in service. Thus, it is easy to understand that Bolsonaro’s proposals will not lead to a decrease in crime, and if anything, the opposite. Nonetheless, he was able to tap into the frustration about rising crime, which is a topic that earlier governments did not tackle enough, since homicide rates kept rising. This rise is highly unequal across regions. The states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro saw very high crime rates in the 1990s but now have a homicide rate of around 10 per 100,000 inhabitants, while in the North and the Northeast of the country, homicide rates increased significantly.

The reasons for the rise in crime were not debated during the election campaign by any of the candidates. Paradoxically, the rise in crime was one of the side effects of the social programs of PT. These brought much more income to the poor states in the North and the Northeast, which also meant that poor people could afford to buy illegal drugs for the first time.¹ This led to an expansion of the two main crime syndicates, Comando Vermelho and Primeiro Comando do Capital, in Rio and Sao Paulo to the North, respectively. These two groups established a truce regarding the division of their territories in the Southeast of Brazil, but the expansion north led to fighting for market share in the poorer regions – among themselves and against the respective local mafia. The PT governments of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula) and Dilma Rousseff had not shown much coherent initiative in engaging in public security – not really a classic area of action for social-democratic governments.

A third reason for Bolsonaro’s victory is a longer-term development. This involves the rise of evangelical churches, which command a growing wave of conservative social values that emanate from them. These are not churches in the traditional sense but commercial empires that even see bankruptcies and mergers, and acquisitions at times. They maintain political parties and influential TV channels. Similar to what emerged in the 1980s and the 1990s in the U.S., Bolsonaro consistently used the argument of a moral majority, accusing the left of ideological indoctrination, primarily through the public education system. During the electoral campaign, much of Bolsonaro’s ire was directed against topics like sexual education in schools and gender studies in general, and everything that has to do with feminism.

It was mainly these three ingredients – corruption, public security and conservative family values – that managed to form a seemingly coherent profile for voters. Taken together, Bolsonaro successfully created an image of the ‘Left’ consisting of intellectuals detached from the everyday life concerns of ordinary people, while he instead was speaking the ‘real’ language of the people, addressing their ‘real’ problems – a tactic all too well known from predecessors like Erdogan, Modi and Trump.

A striking phenomenon of the whole presidential campaign was that there was literally no public debate about policies; Bolsonaro had withdrawn himself from any public debates after the knife attack against him on September 6, 2018. Much of his campaign relied on fake news sent via whatsapp groups, which had an extraordinary effect. Any debates that happened occurred with obscure groups on social media and thus out of the traditional public realm. As an example, fake news claimed the PT’s incoming government planned that the state would decide the gender of children and that children would become the property of the state after reaching the age of five. Surveys found that 70 to 80 per cent of the receivers of this fake news believed the content.

Yet the background to this shift to the radical right reflects more than just the rise of the evangelical churches, whose members today encompass about 27 per cent of the Brazilian population. The power centres that support the rise of Bolsonaro include agribusiness, mining companies, the financial bourgeoisie and the Brazilian military. Apart from the military, they are composed both of national and international factions and are not exclusively located in the Brazilian power structure. While the Brazilian manufacturing industry’s support for Bolsonaro was not overwhelming due to his ideas on the liberalization of foreign trade, the bosses of German companies Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen – Volkswagen was for a long time Brazilian’s largest private employer – expressed unrestricted enthusiasm.

A balance-Sheet of the Workers’ Party in Power

But apart from the elites, why did the population move electoral support away from the PT governments to this odd coalition of evangelicals, Chicago boys and military generals that will take power in 2019? For an explanation, we have to go back to the time of the governments led by presidents Lula and Dilma Rousseff of the PT.

There are two explanations as to why the PT lost popular support. The first involves Rousseff’s shift toward more state intervention and the subsequent withdrawal of the bourgeoisie’s support for her government after 2013; and second, the classic PT constituency of the working class became unhappy with the too many compromises that the PT presidents made with the ruling classes.

Although these two explanations seem to contradict each other, they both hit a point. Rousseff’s government came under fire from both sides simultaneously. She did not support the large strike movements in 2011 and 2012 demanding higher wages in construction and the public sector, which she saw as being at odds with her neo-developmentalist agenda; thus, she could not use the popular drive of those strikes as support for her own project.

The two terms of Lula’s presidency have been seen as a success, since extreme poverty was reduced significantly, the minimum wage rose above inflation, and a high number of formal jobs were created. But these initial successes hit a ceiling: 95 per cent of the newly created jobs were low waged, and workers started to expect more after 10 years of social democracy. Infrastructure in health, transport and education had improved but were still deficient, and the conditions of work did not see fundamental changes. The industrialization program that Lula had started and that was taken over by Rousseff created many jobs in construction, but with miserable working conditions despite most funding for it coming from public coffers.

Rousseff tried to deepen the nature of social-democratic state intervention by lowering notoriously high Brazilian interest rates and putting a cap on energy prices. The problem was that she did this in a technocratic vein, without securing political support for it and without a powerbase of her own. In this way, it was easy for the bourgeoisie to disrupt this strategy.

In short, the main strategy of Lula and Rousseff in power relied on widening income-redistribution via compromises with the ruling class and participation by the broad masses in individual consumption but not on the active mobilization of the popular masses. This came with important side effects that now turn out to compliment the story of the PT in power.

First, capital concentration continued to increase between 2002 and 2014, primarily in landed property, agribusiness, the food sector and in the garment, construction and steel industry. Acquisitions by Brazilian companies in other countries such as Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Paraguay played a considerable role.

Second, public financial support for large agribusiness rose much faster than public support for smaller scale family agriculture. In 2003, when Lula came to power, support for agribusiness was five times higher than that for family agriculture. By 2015, one year before Rousseff left office, it rose to an amount that was six times higher. In addition, although agrarian reform proceeded during the presidencies of Fernando Henrique Cardoso in the 1990s and during Lula’s presidency until 2010, it stalled completely during the first mandate of Rousseff from 2011 on.

Third, the Brazilian economy became much more dependent on raw material exports during the presidencies of Lula and Rousseff, due to the expansion of trade relations with China. This is reflected in a steep fall in the amount of exports and value-added in manufacturing, and a corresponding rise in the agricultural and extractive industries. Primary commodity exports rose from 28 per cent of exports in the early 2000s to 50 per cent in 2015, and the contribution of industry to national GDP sank from 27.8 per cent in 1988 to 14.5 per cent in 2010. Once commodity prices went down, the Brazilian economy stuttered and shrunk in 2014 and 2015. A lack of R&D and high-tech industrial sectors led to a renewed dependence on raw material demand on the world market.

Fourth, evangelical churches were integrated into political alliances and granted huge tax relief during the 2000s. The Igreja Universal, as one example, which is now one of the most important supporters of Bolsonaro, had previously supported the PT-led governments.

Fifth, the Brazilian military saw an increase in funding during the 2000s and was granted the lead role in the United Nations Haiti Mission in 2004, where Brazilian commanders subsequently committed massacres among poor residents and social movement activists. The leader of the Brazilian mission in 2004 and 2005 was general Augusto Heleno, today one of the key figures in Bolsonaro’s team and a staunch defender of the military regime from 1964 to 1985. He is set to hold the important post of the Office of Institutional Security, which provides immediate advice to the president on military and security matters.

In short, the PT presidents nurtured many of their natural enemies, thinking they could co-opt and pacify them. This actually worked for a while but made them stronger in the long-term. One has to underline here also that both Lula and Rousseff disconnected to a certain extent from the PT itself during their presidencies, and that their presidencies were based on coalitions with the rural conservative PMDB and other old-style clientelist parties. Given that the PT never had more than 20 per cent of the seats in parliament, the room for manoeuvre was limited, and not all these were mistakes immediately attributable to the PT. In the “Mensalao” scandal in 2005-2006, it was revealed that important leading figures of the PT paid deputies of other parties in order to get legislation passed, which throws a light on its political weakness. But since their presidential candidates were in power from 2003 to 2016, the PT as a whole was made responsible for the aftermath.

Bolsonaro’s crude coalition is to some extent an expression of desperation from the side of the ruling class. The PT, with its moderate gains for the popular masses and social movements, is demonized in the eyes of the Brazilian bourgeoisie with its irrational hatred of the poor majority of the population. But the enormous problems of the Brazilian social formation will hardly be tackled by the new government, not even in the interests of the bourgeoisie. While Bolsonaro has delegated much responsibility for economic issues to the ultra-liberal Paulo Guedes, Bolsonaro himself oscillates between ultra-liberalism and statism, and it is impossible to say at this point what the economic program of the government will be. Once an ultra-liberal proposal has been sanctioned in public by Bolsonaro, he takes it back a week later.

This schema has repeated itself now various times in the past weeks. Guedes himself, who will head a super-ministry that includes the three earlier ministries of Finance, Industry and Planning, does not seem to have a well thought-out plan apart from liberalizing and privatizing everything. He is at the same time facing an investigation by the federal police due to the suspicion that one of his financial companies illegally appropriated millions from the pension funds of state companies. It would not at all be surprising if Guedes were dumped in the coming months. But who will replace him? The only figure in the government to be taken seriously could be Sergio Moro, the judge and former head of the anti-corruption investigation, who will be the minister of Justice and Security. The fact that he threw Lula, who was leading with a wide margin against Bolsonaro in opinion polls, into police custody in April 2018 (the case is not yet fully decided), and is now entering the government himself, leaves more of a bad taste in the mouth.

If one would hold the incoming government to account on the basis of its promises, voters should expect results at least in terms of a fall in crime and in unemployment. This will be hard enough to achieve on its own, given the complete lack of a proper plan and program with the incoming government. But the government will first of all have to deal with pension reform. 70 per cent of the Brazilian budget is spent on pensions for public sector workers and military personnel. The bigger portion of the deficit comes from military pensions, since soldiers usually start to receive their pension at the age of 50 and get 100 per cent of their former salary, while their daughters receive a pension also. From Guedes’ point of view, a number of privatizations are on the table: the refineries of Petrobras, the entire company Eletrobras and considerable parts of the public education system. But in this respect also, Bolsonaro keeps changing his mind.

Observers have identified three wings in the new government: the political wing around the evangelical Onyx Lorenzoni, the military wing and the economic wing, headed by Guedes. Obviously, there is considerable disunity among these three factions, and Bolsonaro’s low level of overall competence as an integrating figure means that a general consensus is missing. How the new government will fare will depend a lot on an agreement between these three wings on a coherent program and whether this program will meet with success in at least a few areas.

In order to kickstart growth and employment, a classic state investment program in R&D and public subsidies for industrial development would be necessary, which is completely at odds with Bolsonaro’s economic wing. Such a program would require that the military wing gains preeminence, which will not be to the liking of the financial bourgeoisie. Bolsonaro’s lack of a coherent economic program might be the biggest Achilles heel and can easily cost him popular support. It is obvious that voluntarism dominates, and the fact that the Brazilian bourgeoisie could not come up with a better option says a lot about its own rotten state.

In any case, a coup by the military, in the sense of immediately exercising power, is not on the agenda. If deemed necessary, the military will try to strengthen its influence within the government. Any form of immediate rule by the military would put at serious risk its own legitimacy as an institution in case the government fails to deliver, and hence, diminish its influence, which is still considerable. In this respect, some observers say that the strong presence of the military in the new government could be one of the few chances to get rid of its overarching influence, which was never diminished to an extent comparable with Argentina or Chile after the end of their respective dictatorships, since the military will be held accountable for the success or failure of that government.

External Interests

Already mentioned was the strong significance of external forces like mining companies, agricultural traders and the international financial bourgeoisie for Bolsonaro’s project. In general, the external orientation of Bolsonaro’s government aims for a tight link with the U.S., both politically and economically. Bolsonaro already made signs he will approve the sale of one of the few national champions of Brazil, the aerospace company Embraer, to Boeing. Even the neoliberal government of Temer showed strong hesitation in backing the sale.

In economic terms, this close relationship with the U.S. will only strengthen the subordination of the Brazilian bourgeoisie to other powers. Brazilian agribusiness does not have much room for manoeuvre in weakening its links to China, since it profits immensely from the trade spat between China and the U.S. and is in direct competition with U.S. agribusiness, especially in the area of soybeans. Three of the four large trading companies in Brazilian agribusiness are mainly U.S.-based (Cargill, Bunge, Archer Midlands), and they will support the maintenance of economic links with China.

One of the sectors in Brazil that currently sees significant investment is the oil sector. Various rounds of sales have taken place for the drilling rights for oil located in the so-called pre-salt geological layer that was discovered in 2006. This discovery will put Brazil on the map in terms of known oil reserves at least until 2050. In the last five bidding rounds in autumn 2018, it was mainly British, Norwegian and U.S. oil companies that received the major stakes, with smaller parts left for Chinese companies and Brazilian Petrobras.

In this vein, the realignment of the Brazilian government with U.S. interests is mainly about securing the vast natural resources in Brazil for the traditional imperialist bloc. Countless new mining projects for gold, iron and other minerals are currently planned in the Amazon, and the potential for Brazil to become a large petropower itself will be effectively prevented by the new government because it aims to subordinate national interests to U.S. imperialist interests with the sale of drilling rights to British companies BP and Shell, to U.S. companies ExxonMobil and Chevron and to the Norwegian Statoil.

Again, this can lead to some conflicts between the ultra-neoliberal and the military wings of the government, but it is not unlikely that the military , with its more statist aspirations, will have to bow down to the power of the national and international financial bourgeoisie. In this respect, we should not underestimate how Brazilian agribusiness, the powerhouse of the Brazilian economy, is today closely intermingled with the interests of the financial bourgeoisie, since it profits more from speculation with land than from the sale of agricultural commodities.

Contradictions of the New Wave of Right-Wing ‘Anti-Globalism’

Another international dynamic is the current wave of right-wing ‘anti-globalist’ governments, not the least of which is the U.S. government under Trump. We should not overestimate the stability of these governments. What we see up to now is that they do not have a stable political support base and are not able to rally the state apparatuses behind them in a coherent way. This is what distinguishes them from traditional fascism. They are also not capable of doing away with elections but have to limit themselves to manipulating them.

Since other than in the 1920s and 1930s, industrial employment is shrinking due to technological developments, these governments will also have much bigger problems in managing the economic contradictions they will face. For example, the ultra-right-wing foreign minister of the incoming Bolsonaro government, Ernesto Araújo, does not refrain in repeating that globalization is piloted by ‘cultural Marxism’. Given that the future economics minister, Paulo Guedes, got rich in international finance (as did other figures of ‘economic nationalism’ like Steve Bannon and Jacob Rees-Moog), these ideological bubbles of the extreme right-wing seem ridiculous. But especially in the area of family values, the attacks against gender studies and feminism have worked in a country like Brazil that has seen one of the highest incidences of violence against women and homosexuals for decades. Apart from offering a distraction from the blunt contradictions in the governmental agenda, the anti-feminist attacks will most likely lead to a spike in violence against women and other persons that do not conform to the ultra-conservative agenda. Violence in the rural areas where political assassinations have never stopped and have increased significantly in the past two years, will reach new record numbers. The rights of traditional communities, indigenous people, landless workers and maroons for their own land have been seen as an obstacle to more mining and agricultural projects by Bolsonaro. But the bigger change could occur in urban areas if political oppression is stepped up there too.

It is obvious that Bolsonaro still faces a high rate of rejection among the population, given the high number of voters for Haddad and the high number of non-voters. Social movement mobilizations will be stronger if the government makes mistakes, and large mobilizations can be expected in any case. In particular, the landless workers’ movement Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST), the urban-based homeless movement Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST) and the more recent incarnations of the women’s movements have a high capacity for mobilization. The parliamentary opposition is pretty much split but might cooperate on crucial legal projects. Since the agribusiness caucus is firmly behind Bolsonaro, he might be able to get important projects through parliament. One can be sure that the high amount of repression against social and labour movements will increase further and that pro-gun propaganda will motivate both paramilitaries and the police to use arbitrary violence as they please.

Nevertheless, this is not yet a program for a hegemonic fascism, which needs a positive agenda to some extent. Ailton Krenak, one of the most well-known indigenous leaders in Brazil, was asked about his expectations of the new government in the second half of November. He responded, “Well, we have been surviving for 518 years. I am rather concerned about white people and how they will deal with this.”

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Jörg Nowak is a political scientist at the University of Nottingham (UK) and co-editor of the magazine Rupture. His latest publications are “The Spectre of Social Democracy” in the Global Labour Journal, issue 3/2018, and the edited collection Workers Movements and Strikes in the Twenty-First Century. A Global Perspective. Rowman & Littlefield, 2018, co-edited with Peter Birke and Madhumita Dutta.

Note

1. For readers of Portuguese, this interview with José Maria Nóbrega from Federal University of Campina Grande, provides more insight into this issue: Alessandra Duarte: Nordeste nao está preparado para aumento da criminalidade, December 14, 2011.

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The Myth of Western Democracy

December 17th, 2018 by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts

How does the West get away with its pretense of being an alliance of great democracies in which government is the servant of the people?

Nowhere in the West, except possibly Hungary and Austria, does government serve the people.

Who do the Western governments serve? Washington serves Israel, the military/security complex, Wall Street, the big banks, and the fossil fuel corporations.

The entirety of the rest of the West serves Washington.

Nowhere in the West do the people count. The American working class, betrayed by the Democrats who sent their jobs to Asia, elected Donald Trump and the American people were promptly dismissed by the Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton as “the Trump deplorables.”

The Democrats, like the Republicans, serve power, not the people.

In Europe we see the squashing of democracy everywhere.

British prime minister May has turned Brexit into subservience to the EU. She has betrayed the British people and has not yet been hung off of a lamp post, which shows how acceptance the British people are of betrayal. The British people have learned that they do not count. They are as a nothing.

The Greeks voted for a leftwing government that promised to protect them from the EU, IMF, and big banks, but promptly sold them out with austerity agreements that destroyed what remained of Greek sovereignty and Greek living standards. Today the EU has reduced Greece to a Third World country.

The French have been in the streets in revolt for weeks against the French president who serves everyone except the French people.

There are currently massive protests in Brussels, Belgium, with half the government also resigning in protest against the government signing a pact that will replace the Belgian people with migrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. The corrupt and despicable governments who signed this pact represent foreigners and George Soros’ money, not their own citizens.

Why are citizens so powerless that their governments can elevate the interest of foreigners far above the interests of citizens?

There are a number of reasons. The main one is that the people are disarmed and are propagandized to accept violence from the state against them, but not to deliver violence in return against the governments’ illegal use of force against citizens.

In short, until the conquered peoples of Europe kill the police, who serve the ruling elite and delight in inflicting brutality against those whose taxes pay their salaries, take the weapons from the police, and kill the corrupt politicians who have sold them out, the peoples of Europe will remain a conquered and oppressed peoples.

Some time past Chris Hedges, one of the remaining real journalists, made it clear that without violent revolution to excise the tumor of government superiority over the people, freedom throughout the West is dead as a doornail.

The question before us is whether the Western peoples are too brainwashed, too firmly locked in The Matrix, to exhausted to stand up and defend their freedom. Resistance is happening in France and Belgium, but the government that sold out Greece hasn’t been hung off of lamp posts. Americans are so brainwashed that they think Russia, China, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Venezuela are their enemies when it is perfectly clear that their Enemy is “their” government in Washington.

Except for my American readers, Americans are locked in The Matrix. And they will kill in order to stay in The Matrix, where the controlled explanations are reassuring. Anyone who looks to Washington for leadership is an idiot.

Washington is a master of propaganda. Washington’s propaganda has even infected the Russian government, which from all reports stupidly believes that accommodation to Washington is the secret that will make Russia successful.

It is a foolish government that relies on agreements with Washington.

What it comes down to is this: If acceptance of provocations avoids war, that is the correct policy, but if acceptance of provocations encourages more provocations until war is unavoidable, then a more robust response to provocations is the correct policy. A more robust response introduces caution into the process, whereas acceptance of provocations encourages the aggressor.

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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.

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India Caught Between Iran and Saudi Arabia

December 17th, 2018 by Andrew Korybko

The following is an interview in which geopolitical expert Andrew Korybko offers his analysis of Saudi Arabia’s decision to offer new investments to India at a time when the US is leveraging its main south Asian partner against its partnership with Iran. The interview was originally published in the Farsi publication Basirat and in English on Eurasia Future.

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Saudi Arabia is seeking to deepen its ties with India through new investments, so what industries does it plan to focus on?

According to a report by Reuters released after Prime Minister Modi’s meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) at his private residence in Buenos Aires just prior to the G20 Summit, the Kingdom wants to invest in the South Asian state’s “National Investment and Infrastructure Fund”, but it also announced its future interest to expand its presence in India’s energy, technological, and agricultural sectors too.

What is the main purpose of these investments?

Officially speaking, India purses a policy of so-called “multi-alignment”, whereby it attempts to “balance” between various Great Powers to its own advantage, claiming that its relations with one aren’t aimed against those with another. That, however, may not be the case when it comes to Saudi Arabia’s promised investments. There’s nothing wrong in principle with any country investing in another one’s infrastructure, especially if it’s as decrepit and dangerous as India’s is, but this will inevitably strengthen relations between the two states and likely lead to the Kingdom clinching future deals in the energy, technological, and agricultural sectors too, like it announced its intent to do.

It’s the first-mentioned of these three that could most immediately concern Iran’s strategic interests because Saudi Arabia might be trying to replace the Islamic Republic’s market share in the South Asian state, thereby gradually weaning it off of Iranian energy imports during the period of its current US sanctions waiver in exchange for the quid pro quo of investment in tangible sectors of the economy like infrastructure, technology, and agriculture. The US has proudly boasted of its plans to interfere with Iran’s energy exports through sanctions in order to destabilize its economy, and India might be tempted to go along with this scheme if Saudi Arabia offers it a “deal that it can’t refuse”.

What interests does Prime Minister Modi have in these potential investments?

Everything that India does from now until the general elections in May needs to be seen through the prism of domestic electoral politics, which would therefore cast Saudi Arabia’s investments as valuable support for incumbent Prime Minister Modi by allowing him to portray the deals as delivering tangible dividends to the influential agricultural lobby and the rest of his mostly impoverished populace. This in turn could greatly increase his reelection prospects by diminishing growing domestic anger at some of his neoliberal economic policies after basically using these investments to ‘buy votes’ from each sectors’ respective constituents.

India doesn’t care whether its energy needs are met by Iran, Saudi Arabia, or whoever else, so long as the price is competitive and importing the said resource doesn’t carry with it any additional costs. In terms of its existing energy cooperation with Iran, while the price being offered might seem more attractive than Saudi Arabia’s at first, the political and economic costs associated with violating the US’ recently reimposed unilateral sanctions regime could incentivize India to go along with this Saudi plan by gradually decreasing its purchase of Iranian oil simultaneous with replacing it with Saudi imports instead.

It should be understood that for as much as India talks about so-called “multi-alignment” and loudly reiterates its commitment to multipolarity, the rising Great Power is redirecting the military-strategic attention towards the US and is reportedly in talks about reaching a future free trade agreement with it. Prime Minister Modi’s ruling BJP doesn’t see Iran as a marketplace for its goods and services like it does the US, instead considering the Islamic Republic to basically be a cheap gas station and a convenient highway facilitating its exports to Central Asia and Russia.

To put it bluntly, India’s real-sector economic trajectory has less to do with Iran and much more to do with the US, especially if compared in aggregate non-energy terms, so it’s extremely unlikely that the country will continue to purchase Iranian resources at the same level as it currently is if Saudi Arabia offers to replace these imports at a similar price point but without the political risks involved. From India’s perspective, it would have every self-interested reason to “multi-align” with Saudi Arabia under those circumstances, especially considering the domestic electoral context in which these deals are being negotiated.

What role does the US play in this game?

There’s no direct evidence tying the US to Saudi Arabia’s plan to divert India’s energy imports away from Iran and towards the Kingdom instead, but it’s self-evident that the success of this scheme would dovetail with America’s grand strategic interests by depriving Iran of billions of dollars of potential revenue in the long-term. Behind the scenes, however, it wouldn’t be surprising if the US is “encouraging” India to “seriously consider” Saudi Arabia’s proposals, possibly hinting that its anti-Iranian sanctions waiver won’t be renewed unless New Delhi makes concrete progress on decreasing its share of Iranian oil imports and replacing them with Saudi Arabia’s.

Through this tactic, the US would essentially be weaponizing its sanctions waivers against its Indian ally just like it’s weaponizing the actual sanctions themselves against Iran, reminding New Delhi of the Damocles’ Sword hanging over its leadership’s head which could come crashing down if the waiver is lifted prior to May’s election. Not only that, but the US might make any future anti-Chinese military cooperation contingent on India distancing itself from Iran, through in a phased and orderly manner via Saudi oil replacements that doesn’t inadvertently destabilize its economy and reduce Prime Minister Modi’s reelection prospects.

What’s your assessment about the success of Saudi Arabia’s “dollar diplomacy” in the long term?

Saudi Arabia’s so-called “dollar diplomacy”, whether carried out through dollars or perhaps even another current one day in the future, will likely remain pretty successful because of the excess cash that the Kingdom has to spend in trying to court new countries to its side in international disputes. India will probably never be openly “anti-Iranian”, but it could very well be tempted into disguising tacitly anti-Iranian energy moves vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia by claiming that they’re actually nothing more than the latest iteration of its “multi-alignment” policy.

Looking even deeper, however, Saudi Arabia’s new approach to India is less about “dollar diplomacy” as it’s been traditionally understood to be per se and more about offering it mutually advantageous partnerships in several economic spheres, seeing as how Riyadh isn’t exactly “buying off” New Delhi as much as it’s investing huge amounts of capital in the country with the expectation of receiving something more tangible than just political benefits in return. These sorts of relationships are less controversial to the recipient state’s citizens and much more sustainable over the long-term than simple “dollar diplomacy”.

What effect has Khashoggi’s killing had on Saudi Arabia’s “dollar diplomacy”, and has it intensified since then?

It’s difficult to tell what effect Khashoggi’s killing has had on Saudi Arabia’s “dollar diplomacy” and whether it’s intensified much since then because the only high-profile example of the country offering a multidimensional strategic investment partnership to another after that happened has been with India, but it can be expected that this model will increasingly become the norm as people across the world begin to scrutinize their governments’ acceptance of traditional Saudi “largesse”. Saudi Arabia’s intent of “buying off” new partners will never change, but the form that it takes will evolve from its naked bribery to mutually advantageous investment partnerships that are defended by the recipient on the grounds of advancing “multi-alignment”.

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

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Gulf Rivalries Spill onto the Soccer Pitch. The 2022 Tournament in Qatar

December 17th, 2018 by James M. Dorsey

With the 2018 World Cup in Russia behind it, the soccer world’s focus shifts to the 2022 tournament in Qatar. Politics and the Gulf’s internecine political and legal battles have already shaped debate about FIFA’s controversial awarding of World Cup hosting rights to Qatar. The battles highlight not only the sport’s dominance in the Middle East by autocratic leaders but also the incestuous relationship between politics and sports that is at the root of multiple scandals that have rocked the sports world for much of this decade and compromised good governance in international sports.

Three men symbolize the importance of soccer to Gulf autocrats who see the sport as a way to project their countries in a positive light on the international stage, harness its popular appeal in their cultural and public diplomacy campaigns, and leverage it as a pillar of their efforts to garner soft power: Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani and his nemeses, United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed and Saudi sports czar, Turki al-Sheikh, one of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s closest associates.

To be sure, tension between Qatar and its Gulf detractors was spilling onto the soccer pitch long before the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt took their opposition to Qatari policies to a new level with the imposition in June 2017 of a diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar. Since then, debate about the Qatari World Cup has been further politicized with the Gulf crisis driving efforts to deprive Qatar of economic and soft power benefits it derives from its hosting of the tournament, if not of the right to host the mega-sports event.

The UAE-Saudi efforts took on added significance as Qatar and its detractors settled in for the long haul. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt will likely face difficult choices if the Gulf crisis persists when the World Cup, the first such mega-tournament to be held in the Middle East, kicks off in Doha in late 2022.

Difficult choices

The choice would involve potential political risk. It would be between maintaining the boycott that has cut off all air, sea and land links between Qatar and its detractors at the expense of fans in a soccer-crazy part of the world in which little evokes the deep-seated emotions associated with religion and football or effectively breaching the embargo to evade political backlash and ensure that supporters have access to a sports milestone in the region’s history. The starkness of the boycotting states’ dilemma would be magnified if any one of them were to qualify for the Qatar World Cup and would be enhanced if they were to play the host country or, for example, Iran.

The issue of ability to attend is magnified by expectations that the demography of fans attending the World Cup in Qatar may very well be a different from that at past tournaments. Qatar is likely to attract a far greater number of fans from the Middle East as well as Africa and Asia. The Asian Football Confederation’s Competition Committee has already urged governments to exempt football teams from travel bans and would almost certainly do the same for fans.

As a result, the UAE-Saudi effort to undermine the Qatar World Cup is about more than seeking to deliver a body blow to Qatar. It is also about avoiding being further tied up into knots in an anti-Qatari campaign that has so far failed to break the Gulf state’s resolve, force it to concede, and garner international support. The campaign is multi-pronged and doesn’t shy away from violating laws as is evident in Saudi bootlegging to deprive beIN, the sports franchise of Qatar’s state-owned Al Jazeera television network, of the fruits of acquired rights to broadcast World Cup tournaments and European competitions at the risk of being penalized and/or taken to court by the likes of FIFA and the English Premier League. Saudi media reports that the government has launched an anti-piracy campaign, confiscating more than 4,000 illegal receivers that hacked beIN failed to put an end to the bootlegging.

Signalling the political importance that men like the crown princes and Sheikh Tamim attribute to sports, a former top UAE security official, Lt. Gen. Dhahi Khalfan, suggested that the only way to resolve the Gulf crisis would be for Qatar to surrender its World Cup hosting rights. “If the World Cup leaves Qatar, Qatar’s crisis will be over … because the crisis is created to get away from it,” Mr. Khalfan said.

Mr. Khalfan spoke at a time that leaked documents from the email account of Yousef Al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador in Washington and a close associate of the country’s crown prince, revealed a UAE plan to undermine Qatar’s currency by manipulating the value of bonds and derivatives. If successfully executed, the plan would have allowed Qatar’s distractors to argue that the Gulf state’s financial problems called into question its ability to organize the World Cup.

Serving national interests

Mr. Al-Sheikh, the chairman of the kingdom’s General Sport Authority, makes no bones about harnessing sports to serve the kingdom’s interests. With a career in security rather than sports, he was unequivocal in his assertion on the eve of Saudi Arabia’s debut in the 2018 World Cup in Russia that he made decisions based on what he deemed “Saudi Arabia’s best interest,” reaffirming the inextricable relationship between sports and politics.

Barely 24 hours before the World Cup’s opening match, Saudi Arabia made good on Mr. Al-Sheikh’s assertion that the kingdom’s international sports policy would be driven by former US President George W. Bush’s post 9/11 principle of “you are either with us or against us.”

With Morocco’s bid for the 2026 World Cup in mind, Mr. Al-Sheikh had warned that “to be in the grey area is no longer acceptable to us. There are those who were mistaken in their direction … If you want support, it’ll be in Riyadh. What you’re doing is a waste of time…,” Mr. Al-Sheikh said. Mr. Al-Sheikh was referring to Morocco’s refusal to join the anti-Qatari campaign. Adopting a Saudi Arabia First approach, Mr. Al-Sheikh noted that the United States “is our biggest and strongest ally.” He recalled that when the World Cup was played in 1994 in nine American cities, the US “was one of our favourites. The fans were numerous, and the Saudi team achieved good results.”

Mr. Al-Sheikh was manoeuvring at the same time to ensure that the kingdom has greater say in international soccer governance, including issues such as the fate of the Qatari World Cup and a push to extend international isolation of Iran to the realm of sports. To do so, Saudi Arabia backed a proposal to speed up the expansion of the World Cup to 48 teams from 32, which is scheduled to kick off in 2026, by making it already applicable to the 2022 World Cup. Saudi Arabia hopes that the expansion would significantly complicate Qatari preparations for the event. Implementing the expansion in 2022 would strengthen UAE and Saudi efforts to petition FIFA to force Qatar to agree to co-hosting of the World Cup by other Gulf states, a proposal that was incorporated in the UAE plan to undermine Qatar’s currency.

In an indication of things to come, the Asian Football Confederation (AFC) in early 2018 thwarted a UAE-Saudi attempt to get Asian tournament matches that were scheduled to be hosted by Qatar moved to a neutral venue. The AFC warned the two countries that they would be penalized if they failed to play in Doha or host Qatari teams.

Mr. Al-Sheikh’s moves were part of a two-pronged Saudi-UAE effort. Global tech investor Softbank, which counts Saudi Arabia and the UAE among its largest investors, is believed to be behind a $25 billion proposal embraced by FIFA president Gianni Infantino to revamp the FIFA Club World Cup and launch of a Global Nations League tournament. If approved, the proposal would give Saudi Arabia a significant voice in global soccer governance.

Complimenting the Saudi FIFA bid is an effort to expand the kingdom’s influence in the 47-nation AFC, the largest of the world soccer body’s constituent regional elements. To do so, Saudi Arabia unsuccessfully tried to create a new regional bloc, the South West Asian Football Federation (SWAFF), a potential violation of FIFA and AFC rules. The federation would have been made up of members of both the AFC and the Amman-based West Asian Football Federation (WAFF) that groups all Middle Eastern nations except for Israel and is headed by Jordanian Prince Ali Bin Al-Hussein, a prominent advocate of soccer governance reform.

The initiative fell apart when the Asian members of SWAFF walked out in October 2018 in the wake of the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The killing could also jeopardize Saudi efforts to gain control of the AFC with the Al-Sheikh-backed candidacy of Saudi Football Federation chief Adel Ezzat, who resigned in August 2018 to run for the office..

Benefits outstrip reputational risk

Mr. Al-Sheikh and his boss, Prince Mohammed, share with the crown prince’s UAE counterpart and namesake, a belief that the public diplomacy and soft power fruits of harnessing sports outstrip reputational risks. Simon Pearce, Abu Dhabi’s director of strategic communications and a director of Manchester City, the British club bought by UAE Crown Prince Mohammed’s brother but controlled by the de facto Emirati ruler’s men, said as much in leaked emails to Mr. Al-Otaiba, the UAE ambassador in Washington.

The emails discussed the UAE’s registration of a new soccer club, New York City Football Club, as the United States’ Major League Soccer newest franchise. Mr. Pearce argued that Abu Dhabi’s interests in the US political environment are best served by associating New York City FC with City Football Group, the Abu Dhabi government’s soccer investment vehicle, rather than the government itself to evade criticism stemming from the Emirates’ criminalization of homosexuality, its less than stellar record on women’s rights and its refusal to formally recognize Israel despite maintaining close security and commercial relations with the Jewish state.

The UAE’s sports-related investments, guided by the crown prince, much like the acquisition of important Qatari sports stakes on the behest of Sheikh Tamim also give Gulf states political leverage and create additional commercial opportunity. The investments constitute the flip side of large amounts of Gulf money being channelled to influential think tanks, particularly in Washington. In a series of notes in 2012, Mr. Pearce advised Prince Mohammed, a man obsessed with perceived threats posed by any form of political Islam and a driving force in the campaign against Qatar, to tempt than British prime minister David Cameron to counter what he described as Islamist infiltration of the BBC’s Arabic service in exchange for lucrative arms and oil deals.

To illustrate the UAE and Qatar’s sway in European soccer, Nicholas McGeehan, an independent researcher and former Human Rights Watch executive focussed on the region, looked at recent bookies odds for the Champions League. Abu Dhabi-owned Manchester City was the favourite followed by Qatar’s Paris Saint-Germain. Third up was Bayern Munich, whose shirts are sponsored by Qatar, fourth was Barcelona, which recently ended a seven-year sponsorship deal with Qatar, and fifth Real Madrid that sold the naming rights to its new stadium to Abu Dhabi.

Saudi and UAE public relations efforts to generate public pressure for a deprival of Qatari hosting rights were at times mired in controversy. The launch in May of the Foundation for Sports Integrity by Jamie Fuller, a prominent Australian campaigner for a clean-up of global soccer governance, backfired amid allegations of Saudi and UAE financial backing and Mr. Fuller’s refusal to disclose his source of funding.

Saudi and UAE media together with UK tabloid The Sun heralded the launch in a poche London hotel that involved a reiteration of assertions of Qatari wrongdoing in its successful World Cup bid. Media like Abu Dhabi’s The National and Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya projected the launch as pressure on FIFA to deprive Qatar of its hosting rights. “It is no secret that football’s governing body is rotten to the core. (FIFA) will rightly come under renewed pressure to strip Qatar of the competition and carry out an internal investigation in the wake of the most recent allegations. The millions of fans eagerly anticipating 2022’s festival of football deserve better,” The National said. Saudi-owned Ash-Sharq Al Awsat newspaper reported that a June 2018 FIFA Congress would hold a re-vote of the Qatari hosting. The Congress didn’t.

Qatar remains vulnerable

Despite so far successfully having defeated efforts to deprive it of its hosting rights, Qatar remains vulnerable when it comes to the integrity of its winning bid. The bid’s integrity and Sheikh Tamim’s emphasis on sports as a pillar of Qatari soft power is at stake in legal proceedings in New York and Zurich involving corruption in FIFA and potential wrongdoing in the awarding of past World Cups. Qatar has suffered reputational damage as a result of the question marks even if the Gulf crisis has allowed it to enhance its image as an underdog being bullied by the big boys on the block.

To Qatar’s credit, it has introduced reforms of its controversial kafala or labour sponsorship system that could become a model for the region. In doing so, it cemented the 2022 World Cup as one of the few mega-events with a real potential of leaving a legacy of change. Qatar started laying the foundations for that change by early on becoming the first and only Gulf state to engage with its critics, international human rights groups and trade unions.

Even so, Qatar initially suffered reputational damage on the labour front because it was relatively slow in embracing and implementing the reforms. Qatar’s handling of the Gulf crisis suggests that it has learnt from the failure of its initial response to criticism of its winning 2022 bid when it acted like an ostrich that puts its head in the sand, hoping that the storm will pass only to find that by the time it rears its head the wound has festered, and it has lost strategic advantage.

The integrity issue remains Qatar’s weak point. For activist critics of the awarding of hosting rights to Qatar, there are two questions. One is, who do they want to get in bed with? Qatar’s detractors, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia hardly have stellar human and labour rights records. If anything, their records are worse than that of Qatar, which admittedly does not glow.

The second question critics have to ask themselves is how best to leverage the World Cup, irrespective of whether the Qatari bid was compromised or not. On the assumption that it may have been compromised, the question is less how to exact retribution for a wrong doing that was common practice in global football governance. Leveraging should focus on how to achieve a fundamental reform of global sports governance that has yet to emerge eight years into a crisis that was in part sparked by the Qatar World Cup. This goes to the heart of the fact that untouched in efforts to address the governance crisis is the corrupting, ungoverned, and incestuous relationship between sports and politics.

Siamese twins: sports and politics

The future of the Qatar World Cup and the Gulf crisis speaks to the pervasiveness of politics in sports. The World Cup is political by definition. Retaining Qatar’s hosting rights or depriving the Gulf state of the right to host the tournament is ultimately a choice with political consequences. As long as the crisis continues, retaining rights is a testimony to Qatar’s resilience, deprival would be a victory for its detractors.

As a result, the real yardstick in the debate about the Qatari World Cup should be how the sport and the integrity of the sport benefit most. And even then, politics is never far from what the outcome of that debate is. Obviously, instinctively, the optics of no retribution raises the question of how that benefits integrity. The answer is that the potential legacy of social and economic change that is already evident with the Qatar World Cup is more important than the feel-good effect of having done the right thing with retribution or the notion of setting an example. Add to that the fact that in current circumstances, a withdrawal of hosting rights would likely be interpreted as a victory of one side over the other, further divide the Arab and Muslim world, and enhance a sense among many Muslims of being on the defensive and under attack.

The silver lining in the Gulf crisis may be the fact that it has showed up the fiction of a separation of sports and politics. FIFA, the AFC, and the Confederation of African Football (CAF), seeking to police the ban on a mixing of sports and politics, have discovered that it amounts to banging their heads against a wall. Despite their attempts to halt politics from subverting Asian tournaments, domestic and regional politics seeped into the game via different avenues.

As a result, FIFA and its regional confederations have been tying themselves up in knots. In a bizarre and contradictory sequence of events at the outset of the Gulf crisis, FIFA president Infantino rejected involving the group in the dispute by saying that “the essential role of FIFA, as I understand it, is to deal with football and not to interfere in geopolitics.” Yet, on the same day that he made his statement, Mr. Infantino waded into the crisis by removing a Qatari referee from a 2018 World Cup qualifier at the request of the UAE. FIFA, beyond declaring that the decision was taken “in view of the current geopolitical situation,” appeared to be saying by implication that a Qatari by definition of his nationality could not be an honest arbiter of a soccer match involving one of his country’s detractors. In FIFA’s decision, politics trumped professionalism, no pun intended.

Similarly, the AFC was less principled in its stand towards matches pitting Saudi Arabia and Iran against one another. Iranian club Traktor Sazi was forced in February to play its home match against Al Ahli of Jeddah in Oman. It wasn’t clear why the AFC did not uphold the principle it imposed on Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia in the case of Iran. “Saudi teams have been able to select host stadiums and cities, and Saudi teams will host two Iranian football representatives in the UAE and Kuwait. In return, Iranian football representatives should be able to use their own rights to choose neutral venues,” said Mohammad Reza Saket, the head of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Football Federation in a letter to the AFC.

Soccer governance bodies have long struggled to maintain the fiction of a separation in a trade-off that gave regulators greater autonomy and created the breeding ground for widespread corruption while allowing governments and politicians to manipulate the sport to their advantage as long as they were not too blatant about it. The limits of that deal are currently being defined in the Middle East, a region wracked by conflict where virtually everything is politicized.

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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

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Growing US Public Support for One State Shared Equally by Israelis and Palestinians Falls on Deaf Ears

December 17th, 2018 by Jonathan Cook

Two years of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu as a Middle East peacemaking team appear to be having a transformative effect – and in ways that will please neither of them.

And if a Palestinian state is off the table – as a growing number of analysts of the region conclude, given Israel’s intransigence and the endless postponement of Mr Trump’s peace plan – then support for one state rises steeply, to nearly two-thirds of Americans.

But Mr Netanyahu cannot take comfort from the thought that ordinary Americans share his vision of a single state of Greater Israel. Respondents demand a one-state solution guaranteeing Israelis and Palestinians equal rights.

By contrast, only 17 per cent of Americans expressing a view – presumably Christian evangelicals and hardline Jewish advocates for Israel – prefer the approach of Israel’s governing parties: either to continue the occupation or annex Palestinian areas without offering the inhabitants citizenship.

All of this is occurring even though US politicians and the media express no support for a one-state solution. In fact, quite the reverse.

The movement to boycott Israel, known as BDS, is growing on US campuses, but vilified by Washington officials, who claim its goal is to end Israel as a Jewish state by bringing about a single state, in which all inhabitants would be equal. The US Congress is even considering legislation to outlaw boycott activism.

And last month CNN sacked its commentator Marc Lamont Hill for using a speech at the United Nations to advocate a one-state solution – a position endorsed by 35 per cent of the US public.

There is every reason to assume that, over time, these figures will swing even more sharply against Mr Netanyahu’s Greater Israel plans and against Washington’s claims to be an honest broker.

Among younger Americans, support for one state climbs to 42 per cent. That makes it easily the most popular outcome among this age group for a Middle East peace deal.

In another sign of how far removed Washington is from the American public, 40 per cent of respondents want the US to impose sanctions to stop Israel expanding its settlements on Palestinian territory. In short, they support the most severe penalty on the BDS platform.

And who is chiefly to blame for Washington’s unresponsiveness? Some 38 per cent say that Israel has “too much influence” on US politics.

That is a view almost reflexively cited by Israel lobbyists as evidence of anti-semitism. And yet a similar proportion of US Jews share concerns about Israel’s meddling.

In part, the survey’s findings should be understood as a logical reaction to the Oslo peace process. Backed by the US for the past quarter-century, it has failed to produce any benefits for the Palestinians.

But the findings signify more. Oslo’s interminable talks over two states have provided Israel with an alibi to seize more Palestinian land for its illegal settlements.

Under cover of an Oslo “consensus”, Israel has transferred ever-larger numbers of Jews into the occupied territories, thereby making a peaceful resolution of the conflict near impossible. According to the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, that is a war crime.

Fatou Bensouda, the chief prosecutor of the court in The Hague, warned this month that she was close to finishing a preliminary inquiry needed before she can decide whether to investigate Israel for war crimes, including the settlements.

The reality, however, is that the ICC has been dragging out the inquiry to avoid arriving at a decision that would inevitably provoke a backlash from the White House. Nonetheless, the facts are staring the court in the face.

Israel’s logic – and proof that it is in gross violation of international law – were fully on display this week. The Israeli army locked down the Ramallah, the effective and supposedly self-governing capital of occupied Palestine, as “punishment” after two Israeli soldiers were shot dead outside the city.

The Netanyahu government also approved yet another splurge of settlement-building, again supposedly in “retaliation” for a recent upsurge in Palestinian attacks.

But Israel and its western allies know only too well that settlements and Palestinian violence are intrinsically linked. One leads to the other.

Palestinians directly experience the settlements’ land grabs as Israeli state-sanctioned violence. Their communities are ever more tightly ghettoised, their movements more narrowly policed to maintain the settlers’ privileges.

If Palestinians resist such restrictions or their own displacement, if they assert their rights and their dignity, clashes with soldiers or settlers are inescapable. Violence is inbuilt into Israel’s settlement project.

Israel has constructed a perfect, self-rationalising system in the occupied territories. It inflicts war crimes on Palestinians, who then weakly lash out, justifying yet more Israeli war crimes as Israel flaunts its victimhood, all to a soundtrack of western consolation.

The hypocrisy is becoming ever harder to hide, and the cognitive dissonance ever harder for western publics to stomach.

In Israel itself, institutionalised racism against the country’s large minority of Palestinian citizens – a fifth of the population – is being entrenched in full view.

Last week Natalie Portman, an American-Israeli actor, voiced her disgust at what she termed the “racist” Nation-State Basic Law, legislation passed in the summer that formally classifies Israel’s Palestinian population as inferior.

Screen grab from Haaretz

Yair Netanyahu, the prime minister’s grown-up son, voiced a sentiment widely popular in Israel last week when he wrote on Facebook that he wished “All the Muslims [sic] leave the land of Israel”. He was referring to Greater Israel – a territorial area that does not differentiate between Israel and the occupied territories.

In fact, Israel’s Jim Crow-style policies – segregation of the type once inflicted on African-Americans in the US – is becoming ever more overt.

Last month the Jewish city of Afula banned Palestinian citizens from entering its main public park while vowing it wanted to “preserve its Jewish character”. A court case last week showed that a major Israeli construction firm has systematically blocked Palestinian citizens from buying houses near Jews. And the parliament is expanding a law to prevent Palestinian citizens from living on almost all of Israel’s land.

A bill to reverse this trend, committing Israel instead to “equal political rights amongst all its citizens”, was drummed out of the parliament last week by an overwhelming majority of legislators.

Americans, like other westerners, are waking up to this ugly reality. A growing number understand that it is time for a new, single state model, one that ends Israel’s treatment of Jews as separate from and superior to Palestinians, and instead offers freedom and equality for all.

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

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

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Nine Things to Buy with $5 Billion Instead of a Border Wall

December 17th, 2018 by Lindsay Koshgarian

On Thursday Congress passed a stopgap funding measure to keep parts of the federal government open until December 21, when Congress must pass another spending measure or again face a government shutdown.

President Trump has said that he will veto any bill that doesn’t give him the $5 billion he has demanded for his border wall, even if it causes parts of the government to shut down and send federal employees into the holidays without their regular paychecks.

Five billion dollars is not huge in a federal discretionary budget of more than $1 trillion. But it’s an incredibly meaningful sum to any number of smaller federal government programs.

Here are nine things we could buy for $5 billion instead of a border wall:

1. Provide Medicaid for 1.4 million people

The number of uninsured Americans has plummeted since the Affordable Care Act, with 16 million more non-elderly Americans insured than before(elderly Americans are eligible for Medicare). But, 28 million Americansremained uninsured at the end of 2016.

At the program’s current costs, $5 billion could provide Medicaid – cost-effective, quality insurance – for 1.4 million Americans. That’s like giving free, quality health insurance to the entire state of New Hampshire.

2. More than double federal spending on energy efficiency and renewable energy

Climate change is real, and it’s here. Sure, it’s depressing that the United States budget for energy efficiency and renewable energy is a paltry $2 billion. Adding $5 billion to make the total $7 billion that wouldn’t be enough to slow climate change, but it would be better than building a wall.

3. Give the Environmental Protection Agency a 60% Raise

Continuing on the environmental theme, this federal defender for clean water, clean air, protection of endangered species, safe disposal of toxic waste, land conservation and even food quality and safety has been under assault by the current administration. A $5 billion raise would be enough to raise its budget by 60%, from $8.2 billion to $13.2 billion.

4. Increase federal aid to public K-12 schools by 30%

The primary source of federal aid to public schools is the Title I program that provides federal funding to schools that serve lower income students. More than half of all public schools in the United States benefit from the program. In 2017, Title I grants to public schools totaled $14.9 billion.

An additional $5 billion would be a 30% increase to this aid, and could make a big difference to our schools. U.S. schools are old, and many are desperately in need of updates, like expansion to accommodate growing enrollment, and energy retrofits to control spiking energy costs. The $5 billion spike wouldn’t be enough to solve the problems, but in a world where citizens launch GoFundMe campaigns to raise $75,000 for school heaters, it would be a good start.

5. Fund the National Endowment for the Arts through 2051

Babies born this year will turn 33 in the year 2051, and with a $5 billion raise, the National Endowment for the Arts would still be funding artists all over the country. And yet, President Trump suggested zeroing out funding for the National Endowment for the Arts – a little less than $150 million each year.

Since its founding in 1965, the NEA has spent just $5 billion in all, supporting more than 145,000 grants to artists, writers, and performers. NEA support helped create the Vietnam veterans memorial in Washington, DC; the Sundance Film Festival; and is currently partnering with the Department of Defense to implement creative arts healing programs for veterans with traumatic brain injury.

6. Double heating assistance for low-income households

The Low Income Home Energy Assistance program provides support to low-income households to help them afford heating and cooling costs. Its 2017 budget was just short of $3.4 billion, so a $5 billion increase could more than double it.

With its $3.4 billion budget, LIHEAP helps about 6.7 million families afford heat, and 1 million families afford cooling.

7. Resettle 11 times more refugees than we did in 2018

In 2018, the U.S. helped to resettle just 22,491 refugees in our cities and towns, down from 84,995 refugees in 2016. The cost of resettlement for those refugees was just under $1.7 billion.

Increasing the budget for refugee resettlement by $5 billion would allow the U.S. to accept 11 times more refugees than we did in 2018, or 253,000 desperate people.

What’s more, in recent years more than half of refugee applicants were children.

8. Double funding for substance use and mental health

With the United States facing a disturbing decline in life expectancy, experts have blamed both an opioid epidemic and a historically high suicide rate. Substance abuse and mental health should be near the top of the list for increased funding.

And yet the current budget for the main federal agency that handles both substance abuse and mental health, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), received just $4.1 billion in federal funds in 2017. Adding $5 billion to that could more than double current funding.

9. Double funding for citizenship and immigration services

Immigration policy isn’t all about walls and deportations. Citizenship and Immigration Services is the anti-ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles deportations.) This is the agency that guides new Americans on the path to citizenship. Its budget in 2017 was just under $4 billion. The program naturalizes around 700,000 new citizens each year, and has naturalized more than 100,000 members of U.S. armed services since 2001.

With a $5 billion raise, you could double its budget.

Author’s note: All budget figures are from NPP analysis of data from the Office of Management and Budget unless otherwise noted.

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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.

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