There is an emerging orthodoxy, rooted more in fiction than fact, that the 15-year regime of the Ontario Liberals somehow swung the ideological and policy spectrum sharply to the left. But this is a gross misinterpretation of actual history. While the Liberals did indeed implement a hodgepodge of policies that might selectively register as ‘progressive’, their time in power was never about a wholesale repudiation of the Conservative’s Common Sense Revolution but rather about deepening and extending it in ways that were more palatable to a public increasingly fed up with the uncompromising and aggressive style of their Conservative predecessors. In other words, it was continuity, not change, that defined the Liberals’ time in power.
Those at the centre of this historical re-imagining are increasingly recasting the Liberals’ time in government as an extreme left interregnum inconsistent with the ‘progressive’ conservative values of Ontario. They point to all day kindergarten, the expansion of prescription-drug and dental benefits, the subsidization of tuition fees for some post-secondary students, proposed pension reform, modest increases to high-income earners’ taxes, changes to labour legislation, and some investments in new infrastructure and social programs as key illustrations. But these new investments barely made up for inflation and population growth, let alone a reversal of the fiscal legacy of the Harris Conservatives.
Through their first term (2003-07), modest savings were made through the privatization of services formerly covered by the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) like chiropractic therapy, physical rehabilitation and optometry exams. The Dalton McGuinty government also spearheaded the expansion of private healthcare clinics, introducing a graduated healthcare premium that ranged from $60 to $900 per year depending on income level. But this was the calm before the storm.
Decade of Austerity
As the tailwinds of the 2008 recession swept across Ontario, the Liberal government responded with a plan outlining a decade of austerity. The major policy plank of this program was the Open Ontario Plan (OOP), which called for, among other things, tax relief, the privatization of public assets and services, and wage concessions from public sector workers. To give a few examples, the general corporate income tax (CIT) rate was cut 28 per cent, the preferential small business CIT rate was cut 36 per cent, and the tax rate on the first $37,106 of personal taxable income was reduced by more than 16 per cent, while those earning up to $80,000 per year saw a tax cut of 10 per cent. Altogether, tax cuts during this time eroded some $500-million in annual revenue generation making Ontario’s tax regime among the lowest across the OECD.
The omnibus Open for Business Act introduced over 100 amendments to legislation across ten ministries whose stated objective was to create a more competitive business climate. The Liberals solicited CIBC World Markets and Goldman Sachs to come up with a plan to monetize the province’s $60-billion worth of public assets. The idea behind “SuperCorp” was to combine Ontario’s Crown assets, including nuclear power plants, power generation facilities, 29,000 kilometres of electrical transmission and distribution lines, six-hundred plus liquor stores and gaming operations.
The Liberals also established the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services headed by former TD Bank chief economist Don Drummond. The Commission recommended cuts deeper than those of the 1990s followed by the sale of public assets and privatized service delivery. In following through on some 80 per cent of the Drummond Commission’s recommendations, the Liberals eroded an additional $300-million in public revenue by 2015-16. The “crowning irony” for the Liberals was that after a decade in power they had succeeded in cutting the size of government down to when they had taken over from their Conservative predecessors.
In 2013, amid a barrage of scandals, both Premier McGuinty and Finance Minister Dwight Duncan stepped down in what was portrayed as a period of renewal. Kathleen Wynne emerged as new party leader and Premier of Ontario, positioning herself as the “social justice” and “activist” premier against the old guard. In practice, however, much of the Harris-McGuinty legacy continued.
Privatization – Full Steam Ahead
Public-private-partnerships (P3s) proliferated, even though the Auditor General found that Ontario could have saved up to $8-billion through traditional public procurement. Premier Wynne launched a blue-ribbon panel headed by president and former CEO of TD Bank, Ed Clark, to advise the government how to privatize public assets such as the OLG and LCBO, which together bring in more than $4.5-billion annually.
Catching her own party off guard, Kathleen Wynne kickstarted the asset sell-off with Hydro One, which was estimated to bring in close to $750-million in annual public revenue. Under Wynne’s plan, the Liberals sold-off 60 per cent ownership stake bringing in roughly $4-billion in one-off monies while maintaining a 40 per cent public ownership. The Financial Accountability Office (FAO) found that the sale of Hydro one was roughly equivalent to five years of continued public ownership.
Far from progressive public policy, it has been tax cuts and austerity that has prevailed in Ontario over the last decade. Little wonder then that Doug Ford and Co. have stoked the fires of deficit hysteria given the reluctance of the Liberals to deal with the revenue side of government expenditures. The reality is that when it comes to the provinces context matters, perhaps more than anywhere else in the world.
2018’s election saw Wynne herself boasting that Ontario was now “the leanest government in Canada” when it came to per capita program spending. What wasn’t mentioned though was that among the provinces, Ontario was dead last when it came to per capita public revenue, second smallest when it came to the per capita size of Ontario’s public sector as measured by employees, and second-lowest in North America (after Alabama) when it came to corporate tax rates.
Of course, real ideological and policy differences exist between the Liberals and Conservatives. But to refer to the Liberal decade and a half in power as progressive in any meaningful sense of the term is more than just an historical misreading, it’s ideological and political gamesmanship at its worst. With the Ford Conservatives in power, Ontario has now come full circle. In an increasingly unequal and divided province, the time has come to explore what truly progressive politics, and not just those “for the [rich] people,” might actually look like.
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Seven of the 15 men suspected of being involved in an operation to kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi belong to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s personal security and protection detail, Middle East Eye can reveal.
The suspects went and ate dinner at the Saudi consul-general’s residence after murdering and dismembering Khashoggi inside the consulate, a source in the Istanbul Prosecutor General’s office also told MEE on Wednesday as Turkish police finally gained access to the building on Wednesday.
Most of them are high-ranking officers who accompanied the crown prince on diplomatic visits to the UK and France earlier this year.
MEE has obtained a document from the Saudi Interior Ministry detailing their ranks, dates of birth, passport and telephone numbers and when they accompanied bin Salman on trips abroad. All of them are members of the crown prince’s Special Security Force.
MEE is not publishing the document in order to protect the safety of its sources.
Confirmation that these seven members were high-ranking members of the crown prince’s close protection team and travelled with him on high profile visits regularly will complicate efforts currently under way to distance bin Salman from the murder investigation in Istanbul.
Three suspects visited UK
At least three of them accompanied bin Salman on his visit to the UK in March. They are First Lieutenant Dhaar Ghalib Dhaar Al-Harbi,Sergeant Major Walid Abdullah Al-Shihri, and Abdul Aziz Muhammad Musa Al-Hawsawi.
At least two of them accompanied the crown prince to France in April. They are Major General Mahir Abdul Aziz Muhammad Mutrib and Colonel Badr Lafi Muhammad Al-Oteibi.
Middle East Eye called phone numbers with Saudi dialling codes in the document for the seven men but most of the numbers had been disconnected. One of the numbers rang unanswered. Another number was answered by a man who said he was not the individual named in the document.
Turkish media published the names and photos of the 15 suspects last week after Turkish sources close to the investigation told Middle East Eye and other media outlets that prosecutors suspected Khashoggi had been killed and dismembered shortly after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on 2 October.
Several of the suspects arrived at Ataturk airport on commercial flights in the early hours on 2 October, while others arrived on a private jet from Riyadh later that morning. A second private jet landed in Istanbul that afternoon, when three suspects also flew in on commercial flights.
The suspects checked into two hotels near to the Saudi consulate but all left the country within hours of their arrival. Thirteen of the 15 suspects left Istanbul aboard the two private jets on the evening of 2 October, while the final two left on commercial flights in the early hours of 3 October.
Saudi officials have denied any knowledge about Khashoggi’s disappearance and initially said that he had left the consulate building shortly after arriving. Following publication of the names of the 15 suspects, the Saudi-owned al-Arabiya TV network described them as “tourists”.
However, CNN reported earlier this week that Saudi Arabia was preparing to admit that Khashoggi had died during a botched interrogation or attempted abduction amid growing international revulsion about the reported circumstances of the journalist’s suspected death.
Suspected ‘coordinator’
Mutrib, the highest ranked officer among the seven named on the interior ministry document, has been identified by investigators as the “coordinator of the operation”, according to MEE’s Turkish sources.
They say that Mutrib chartered the two private jets for the mission and was one of two suspects to travel on diplomatic passports.
Mutrib has previously been identified by the New York Times as a diplomat assigned to the Saudi embassy in London based on a British foreign office diplomatic list dating from 2007.
The newspaper also tracked down photographs of Mutrib standing guard next to the Crown Prince during visits to Spain, France and the US.
In this document Mutrib is referred to as a “communications engineer” and a “security companion” of the crown prince.
Two of the names on the list are not identified as having accompanied bin Salman on his visits to London and Paris.
Both, however, are high-ranking. They are Major Nayif Hasan Saad Al-Arifi, and Brigadier General Mansour Othman Aba Hussein. Both are described as “support officers (security and protection) for the Saudi Crown Prince”.
Autopsy specialist
An eighth man, identified on audio tapes whose content was disclosed to MEE as performing the dismemberment of Khashoggi while he was drugged but still alive, is Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy.
Tubaigy had two senior posts. One was as the chairman of the forensic evidence department within Saudi General Security. The second was chairman of the Scientific Council of Forensic Medicine within the Saudi Commission for Health Specialities.
This is the Saudi equivalent of the General Medical Council, the UK’s medical regulator, and in such a senior post Tubaigy would be an examiner of doctors wanting to qualify as specialists in forensic medicine, and would decide on whether doctors trained abroad were qualified to work as forensic specialists in Saudi hospitals.
The New York Times reported on Tuesday that Tubaigy had published research on dissection and mobile autopsies and said that his presence among the suspects “suggests that killing might have been part of the original plan”.
The latest revelations about bin Salman’s close links to seven of the 15 suspects are likely to further raise suspicions about what the crown prince knew, and whether an operation involving high-level members of his own security detail could have been sanctioned without his knowledge or express orders.
Officially the crown prince, who is also defence minister, controls all three of Saudi’s armed forces, the defence ministry, the national guard, and the interior ministry.
On Tuesday, US President Donald Trump tweeted that bin Salman had “totally denied any knowledge of what took place” in Istanbul and had launched a “full and complete investigation into this matter”.
…during the call, and told me that he has already started, and will rapidly expand, a full and complete investigation into this matter. Answers will be forthcoming shortly.
Trump spoke to bin Salman during a visit to Riyadh by US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo which came with the White House’s close alliance with the Saudi royal coming under growing scrutiny over Khashoggi’s disappearance.
The British foreign office told MEE that it would have to ask Saudi officials to confirm members of the crown prince’s delegation during bin Salman’s visit to London.
MEE has contacted Saudi embassies in London and Washington for comment.
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“Do this outside. You will put me into trouble.” — Mohammad al-Otaibi, Saudi consul, to Saudi agents, Istanbul, October 2, 2018
It smells, but anything wedged between the putrefaction of Saudi foreign policy, the ambition of Turkish bellicosity, and the US muddling middleman is bound to. Three powers tussling over image and appearance; all engaged in a wrestle over how best to seem the least hypocritical. US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi already seems to have found his name into the books of martyred dissidents, but we have no body, merely an inflicted disappearance suggesting a gruesome murder.
The journalist, a notable critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was last seen on October 2 entering the residence of the Saudi consul-general in Istanbul, ostensibly to obtain a document necessary for his upcoming nuptials. A senior Turkish official put forth a brutal scenario on Wednesday based on obtained audio recordings. Saudi operatives, probably numbering 15 from the intelligence services and the Royal Guards, were waiting for Khashoggi’s arrival at 1.15 pm. Within a matter of minutes, Khashoggi was dead, decapitated, dismembered, his fingers removed. The entire operation took two hours.
The New York Timespondered how the brutality was inflicted. “Whether Mr. Khashoggi was killed before his fingers were removed and his body dismembered could not be determined.” The Saudi consul Mohammad al-Otaibi was revealed to be squeamish and worried, suggesting the agents ply their craft elsewhere. The reply from one of the company was curt and unequivocal: “If you want to live when you come back to Arabia, shut up.” A Saudi doctor of forensics, Salah Muhammad al-Tubaigy, a worthy addition to the crew, got to work disposing of the body. His advice to any companions feeling wobbly: listen to music, soothe the savage breast.
A danse macabre has developed between the various power players. US president Donald Trump has asked his Turkish counterparts for any audio or video evidence that might shed light on the journalist’s fate. To date, these have been drip fed with tantalising timing, disturbing the White House’s neat and comfortable acceptance of the account put forth by Riyadh. But Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, an individual never shy to exploit a jingoistic moment, has remained cautiously reticent.
This is where the world of image, supposition, and make-believe, comes into play. The procuring of evidence is being resisted. Trump asks, but does not expect any. The Turkish side, thus far, supplies crumbs, finding their way into selected news outlets such as the Daily Yeni Şafak. Trump, for his part, remains non-committal, even indifferent to what might emerge. “I’m not sure yet that it exists, probably does, probably does.”
The picture is patchy, gathered from audio surveillance, intercepted communications and a miscellany of sources, but on this point, Ankara remains ginger. US intelligence officials have so far suggested that circumstantial evidence on the involvement of Crown Prince Mohammed is growing.
Trump’s game with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of hedging and hoping: hedging on the issue of blood-linked complicity, and hoping that the sordid matter will simply evaporate in the ether of the next event. “I just want to find out what’s happening,” he deflected. “I’m not giving cover at all.” But he has again fallen victim to the characteristic, off colour corker: allegations against the Saudis might be analogously seen with those of sexual assault against now confirmed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “Here we go again with, you know, you’re guilty until proven innocent. I don’t like that. We just went through that with Justice Kavanaugh and he was innocent all the way as far as I’m concerned.” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has also shown a marked reluctance to go near any details, telling the press that any facts on Khashoggi will not be discussed.
Politicians in the United States have been attempting to add tears and remorse to the equation, though these dry quickly. Rep. Eric Swalwell Jr. from California suggested that the explanations were needless. “If someone was killed in your home, while you were in it, and 15 days later you’re still coming up with an explanation… forget it. We already know.” US Rep. Paul Ryan and Senator Orrin Hatch are chewing over the prospect that Khashoggi’s fate might have been occasioned by an “interrogation gone wrong”.
The one person to again blow the cover off any niceties, to destroy the façade of propriety in what is otherwise a grizzly affair is the US president. He has avoided funereal respects and regrets. He has avoided referencing any idyllic notions of a free press. The all-powerful dollar and arms sales remain paramount. “You’ve got $100 billion worth of arms sales… we cannot alienate our biggest player in the Middle East.” And just to show that a love of God and the foetus won’t deter evangelicals from embracing a ghoulish Arab theocracy, Pat Robertson has added his hearty support. “For those who are screaming blood for the Saudis – look, these people are our allies.”
Whatever happens regarding Khashoggi, the relationship between Washington and Riyadh is assured. Turkey, from first signs, is avoiding open confrontation. Murder, alleged or otherwise, can take place in certain circumstances, however brazenly executed. The brutality against Khashoggi, should it ever come to be properly aired, is but another footnote in the program of a kingdom indifferent to suffering, from the saw doctor to the jet. And business remains business.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research. Email: [email protected]
This is the edited version of a panel presentation by the same title that took place in Toronto, Canada on October 13, 2018 The Event was sponsored by a number of progressive organizations
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I think this is a very important and timely topic to cover in order to have a broad context and hopefully contribute some useful thinking to the topic.
We live in times of dramatic changes, as I see it.
I am sure many are noticing that we are moving from a unipolar to a multipolar geopolitical world where important new players have something to offer.
If we are noticing this, I am sure that the United States is also paying attention.The U.S. knows that it is losing its hegemony to other powers like China and Russia. Many other countries are taking notice. Venezuela is certainly one of them.
The U.S. is showing a reaction to that inevitable occurrence and what we are seeing are the struggling gasps of a dying empire that is imminent when measured in historical time.
This will not be a peaceful death, unfortunately. The dying empire will not die in peace.
I think this image might help us understand what is happening today.
Warfare tools
There was a time – say, last century – when we used to call conflictive relationships among nations by their direct descriptive name.
We had wars that countries declared to each other and sent soldiers to kill each other. They would even “announce” their wars. They had, and still do, what is called “rules of engagement”… but this was no engagement to be married… It was truly an “engagement to be destroyed”.
Then we had invasions where one nation would attack another nation to kill their people – a kind of war that was not announced.
We even had the so-called Cold War that was nothing else than a permanent threat of war.
Today we have quite a wide range of “conflictive relationships” among countries. But it’s interesting to see the corresponding proliferation of terminology that we have come to use in describing those conflicts.
We have:
Undeclared wars. And here we have to be careful how we use the term “war”. For example, there is no war in Syria. There is a war on Syria. Semantic is important here.
New Cold War. I don’t know what’s new about it. It’s still a permanent threat of war.
Infowar. The production of false news with media participation in order to undermine the legitimacy and credibility of a government.
Economic war. This is the one that is caused through sanctions, and I’ll come back to that.
Incitation to commit political crimes. For example, the life attempt against president Nicolas Maduro and other high officials last August 4.
Incitation to mutiny. Repeated calls to the military to overthrow a government.
Coups. We still have those…with a soft touch now.
We have Soft Coups. These are the ones that have been at play in Latin America in the last few years. They oppress and kill people all the same.
Terrorism. The ultimate destructive tool to be used against another nation. And it is being used by the U.S. widely, not only in the Middle East but also in Latin America and other regions.
Finally, we have the most contradictory of all aggressions: Lawfare.
This is quite a repertoire of warfare tools that can be used in any combination with the single goal of imposing a regime change.
I recognize some of these tools were also used in the last century, but maybe not to the extent they are used today. Certainly, today they have become part of the new narrative about conflicts. They have achieved a level of recognition and acceptance that makes those actions extremely dangerous.
That is why it is important to be aware of them.
All of these actions are a form of warfare, and all have embedded an element of illegality. They are not used as legitimate self-defense. They are used to subvert democracy.
They extend the notion of weapons to situations where everything can be “weaponized” (notice the new terminology) with total disregard to legality, morality, humanity and ethical considerations.
As someone who is anti-war, I reject all implications of warfare especially when a war is carried out by a bully entity against smaller and weaker contenders.
Let’s take a closer look at lawfare and sanctions.
Lawfare
Wikipedia gives the following definition of the term:
“Lawfare is a form of war consisting of the use of the legal system against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them.” [1]
It is believed that a U.S. General by the name of Charles Dunlap used the term for the first time in 2001. He defined “lawfare” as the “use of law as a weapon of war,” which he described as “the newest feature of 21st century combat.” [2]
Another similar definition of lawfare says that it is “the abuse of Western laws and judicial systems to achieve strategic military or political ends”.
A law expert said,
“lawfare is about more than just delegitimizing a state’s right to defend itself; it is about the abuse of the law and our judicial systems to undermine the very principles they stands for: the rule of law, the sanctity of innocent human life, and the right to free speech.”
All these definitions seem to have a consensus on the blatant contradiction: lawfare is not for the pursuit of justice; it is not the application of the law. It is just the opposite. It is the breaking down of the legal and constitutional order of another state for political gain.
Reportedly, the majority of U.S. laws that have come out after 9/11 constitute today the new tools used to repress any resistance in the name of national security, not only in the U.S., but also in other countries.
But we know that other countries are also misusing their own laws in a cruel copycat fashion to repress any internal resistance. We all think of the cases against Cristina Kirchner, Dilma Rousseff, Luiz Inácio Lula, Rafael Correa, and others.
Sanctions as economic war
Something we need to know about sanctions is that the United Nations can also impose and apply sanctions on countries. And it does.
At last count, 12 countries are sanctioned by the UN. More than half are African countries. Sanctions include asset freezes; travel bans, and arms embargoes.
No Latin American country is currently being sanctioned by the UN; certainly not Venezuela.
Imposing sanctions seems to be the assumed privilege of the U.S. based on its doctrine of exceptionalism. And the UN allows this to happen in spite of its own stated principles such as:
The principle that States shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State or in any other manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations. [Remember, the purpose is to pursue peace]
The principle that States shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international peace and security and justice are not endangered. [Remember, Venezuela has persistently asked to dialogue, even to meet with Donald Trump]
The principle concerning the duty not to intervene in matters within the domestic jurisdiction of any State.
I believe that the UN is a dysfunctional institution. We have seen many times the ineffective work of the UN. Despite the purpose of the United Nations to maintain international peace and security, we see a proliferation of wars, conflicts, and interventions every day.
Despite the intention, the United Nations is not a democratic institution by design from inception.
The UN is definitely not a democratic institution when we have a body like the Security Council – with such an important responsibility as to apply sanctions according to Article 41 of the Charter – which is ruled by a handful of self-appointed permanent members that have a veto power. Security Council permanent members are: China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In addition, Article 25 says: The Members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council…
The misuse of the veto, the lack of accountability and the unfair representation at the UNSC – for example, not a single African or Latin American country is a permanent member – have all emasculated an organization that is meant, at least on paper, to uphold international law and achieve peace and global security.
If this was a country we lived in, we would have a Junta of five people – never elected; they or their successors are there in perpetuity – ruling our country, and we would have to agree to let that happen and would have to obey their decisions against the will of the majority.
This is the model of democracy that the United Nations gives to other nations.
Right now, in this kind of UN chaos, nothing prevents any country to impose sanctions unilaterally on another country if they so decide.
I have proposed an idea that all sanctioned States should start an international movement similar to the Non Aligned Movement founded in 1961. This could be called the Block of Sanctioned States Movement – the BoSS movement. I hope it catches on.
Are sanctions illegal?
Simply put, yes they are. They are against international law. Of course some disagree.
In spite of what I said about the United Nations, many States accept that only the UN has the legal right to impose sanctions. Mind you, it would have to be a drastically reformed UN.
At least there would be more eyes supervising the legal application of sanctions. And hopefully – emphasis on hopefully – there would be stronger accountability to provide evidence of any accusation against a legitimate government.
Currently there is no evidence that there is a humanitarian crisis in Venezuela!
The UN knows that, by the way, and does nothing. In the meantime, the U.S. is using infowar to create false evidence. Sanctions imposed by the U.S. are unilateral and are only based on domestic U.S. laws. The U.S. can legislate all they want within their jurisdiction but that does not make sanctions on another country legal when they break international law.
Sanctions are a form of intervention to pursue national goals.
Let me quote a paragraph from the Venezuela Report of last July:
“The policy of imposing unilateral coercive measures, known as “sanctions” … violates the Charter of the United Nations, and conceals an aggressive model of intervention…Beyond the rhetoric that justifies it in the name of “democracy”, sanctions are an instrument of war, designed to make people suffer in order to bend sovereign States.” [3]
Notice that Venezuela is calling sanctions by its full name: “Unilateral coercive measures”. That’s what they are.
It is important to know that Venezuela has responded with the most advanced economic strategy to this economic war by sanctions and the parallel foreign-induced inflation.
Venezuela has targeted the essence of the damaging effect of sanctions: the U.S. financial system itself that imposes the U.S. dollar as the world reference currency. The latest Venezuelan monetary reconversion has set an economic recovery path by which the Venezuelan economic system is not measured in terms the U.S. dollar but by the value of its own oil resources linked to a crypto currency, the Petro.
I called this a monetary revolution within the Bolivarian Revolution. It minimizes the impact of the U.S. sanctions, but most importantly it has already set an example to other nations. [4] [5]
Legal Trojan horses
It is often the case in international agreements; legislation or charters that “exceptions” are introduced, which invalidate the main thrust of the agreement or charter. I have already referred to the UN that establishes a Security Council with powers over the whole assembly of nations as such an exception.
This is what I call a legal Trojan horse that facilitates the lawfare.
I want to give an example of a legal Trojan horse in international legislation that is closer to home in Latin America, in relation to the OAS.
Lima Group
Last February the illegitimate Lima Group, with no OAS authority, used Article 19 in Chapter 4 of the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter to prevent Venezuela from participating at the OAS Summit in Lima, Peru. They quoted the following bit from the article:
“…any unconstitutional alteration or interruption of the democratic order in a state of the Hemisphere constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to the participation of that state’s government in the Summit of the Americas process.”
But they conveniently omitted in that quote of Article 19 the very relevant beginning of the article that says,
“Based on the principles of the Charter of the OAS and subject to its norms…”
Therefore the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter does not supersede, does not invalidate or cancel out the 1948 OAS Charter. It recognizes it explicitly.
If we read the principles of the 1948 OAS Charter, the relevant article – Article 19 of Chapter 4 (not to be confused by the coincidence of the same article numbers in the two different pieces of documents) – says:
“No State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements.”
In my view the 2001 Inter-American Democratic Charter is the Trojan horse introduced to weaken the OAS Charter of 1948.
I do not believe that the team of international lawyers in 2001 would have made such a gross error to have missed the most relevant article of the OAS Charter that prevents precisely what’s at the essence of all U.S. actions: Intervention!
I am inclined to believe that this was an intentional planting of confusion and attack. A true Trojan horse.
What to do?
I know what not to do. I don’t think we should all become international lawyers or experts to fight back lawfare and illegal sanctions. But we must be sufficiently aware to have a working knowledge of the implications of those interventions in Latin America.
Today we cannot lose Venezuela. We need to maintain the Bolivarian Revolution alive. I don’t say this because I am a Venezuelan and a Chavista. I say this for the sake of democracy and the rule of law in Latin America.
We have worked hard to keep the Cuban Revolution alive. We can do it. Tomorrow it might be Bolivia’s turn needing our solidarity.
Once we understand that interventions in internal affairs of another country are illegal – by tribunal decision or by people’s majority decision – we may use those arguments in our solidarity work wherever and whenever necessary.
I think that the “Canada-U.S. campaign to end sanctions against Venezuela” underway now is a great action that can bring us all together. [6] Venezuela and Latin America need us.
We only have a decaying U.S. empire to take on. We can do it if we stick together.
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This is the edited version of a panel presentation by the same title that took place in Toronto, Canada on October 13, 2018 The Event was sponsored by:
The Louis Riel Bolivarian Circle
Venezuela Solidarity Committee Toronto
Colombian Action Solidarity Alliance (CASA)
Socialist Action
NDP Socialist Caucus
Casa Salvador Allende
Toronto Association for Peace and Solidarity (TAPS)
Victor Jara Cultural Group
Communist Party of Canada (Ontario)
Hugo Chavez Peoples Defense Front (HCPDF)
Canadian-Cuban Friendship Association Toronto
Canadian Latin American and Caribbean Policy Centre (CAL&C) Common Frontiers
Latin American and Caribbean Solidarity Network (LACSN)
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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” http://www.cubasolidarityincanada.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
China and India are actively competing with one another in East Africa, though this struggle for influence has largely failed to attract significant global attention. Both Great Powers are reluctant to recognize this in order to preserve their superficial and largely limited partnership through BRICS, while the US and its Mainstream Media partners don’t want to “jump the gun” and pressure India into this role too much to the point where its leadership backtracks in order to “save face” and deflect accusations of being an “American proxy”. This is therefore a very sensitive topic, albeit one that deserves further investigation because of its geostrategic implications, particularly as they relate to Great Power competition more broadly and Africa’s rising role in the world more specifically.
China needs Africa as a market to sell its overproduced goods to in order to sustain domestic economic growth, while India needs the continent in order to grow into a Great Power with a truly transregional reach. Accordingly, China unveiled its One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity in 2013 in order to meet this pressing strategic demand, while India followed up last year in 2017 with the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” that it plans to construct together with Japan. China’s focus is on building physical infrastructure and issuing no-strings-attached loans to fund these megaprojects, while India intends to improve the capacities of Africa’s citizenry by investing in job training programs, education, and healthcare.
Military Motivations
These connectivity initiatives are complementary to one another in principle but end up being competitive in practice due to the New Cold War pressures being put upon each Great Power. A security dilemma has progressively developed between them as China’s naval base in Djibouti was politicized by the Western Mainstream Media and government officials as supposedly being the first step in a continental-wide military expansion. As such, India was encouraged to stake out an overseas military facility in the Seychelles, which it – just like China – claims isn’t aimed against anyone. Clearly, however, the Indian move was in response to the Chinese one and was more than likely supported by New Delhi’s new “Western partners” who have an interest in “containing” China and turning the South Asian state into its chief rival all across the Indian Ocean Rimland.
None of this will ever be openly admitted by any party because of the sensitivity involved in officially recognizing this for what it truly is, but it’s difficult to come to any different conclusion when considering the seemingly coordinated moves that were just described. One action appears to have beget an equal and reciprocal reaction in this Great Power rivalry, though with one of the parties – in this case, India – being encouraged to do this by its third-party partners who have a shared interest in “containing” China. To be clear, one prospective Indian military facility isn’t going to “contain” much when it comes to China’s involvement in Africa, but the point to focus on is that it’s a start and could portend the unveiling of a more robust policy from New Delhi in the near future, one which might even come to receive multilateral support from others.
There’s another driving force behind the Chinese-Indian “Great Game” in East Africa, and it’s the fear – whether justified or not – that China’s New Silk Road ports might one day come to have a dual purpose in laying the basis for the speculated expansion of the country’s military footprint in Africa. This narrative might have been introduced as part of a weaponized infowar operation to justify the establishment of anti-Chinese military bases in the continent by countervailing powers such as India, especially when it comes to convincing its people of the perceived need for their government to take such an unprecedented move in the first place. Whatever the origins of this prediction, it’s evidently served its purpose by catalyzing a self-sustaining cycle of competition between China and India in East Africa, one which began in the economic sphere but is now rapidly taking on military dimensions.
The relationship between military moves and informational warfare campaigns to justify the first-mentioned has already been extensively studied by other researchers, though public knowledge is lacking about how this plays out in the case of the Chinese-Indian “Great Game” in East Africa, ergo the need for others to delve much deeper into this topic. It might be difficult to arrive at objective conclusions, however, given that each “side” has their own self-interested stake in controlling every dimension of this narrative, including in the academic realm, which is where the utility of Russian researchers could come in handy given Moscow’s excellent relations with both Beijing and New Delhi. Going forward, it would be a service to all who are interested in this field if more neutral observers such as those in Russia invested the time and effort into producing material on this topic, since it would greatly aid in the world’s understanding of the military-infowar relationship in the given context.
The Three Theaters Of Rivalry
The East African realm of competition that China and India are competing over is a geographically extensive one that runs from the Horn of Africa all the way down to the Mozambique Channel and can correspondingly be broken down into three separate theaters. The first one begins in the north and is centered on Ethiopia, one of the fastest-growing economies in the world and an aspiring Great Power. China built the Djibouti-Addis Ababa Railway (DAAR) in order to connect this landlocked giant to the global marketplace, but Beijing and its national companies of course don’t have exclusive monopolistic rights to its use. This means that India and other countries could utilize this megaproject in order to enhance their trade ties with the country, which will ideally lead to a “win-win” outcome where Ethiopia can continue its development and therefore become a more sizeable marketplace for China’s overproduced goods as well.
The same logic holds true for Kenya and Tanzania, the two coastal states of the East African Community (EAC), where China is also building connective infrastructure projects. Beijing is behind the Standard Gauge Railway in Kenya and the Central Corridor in Tanzania, both of which aim to deepen the connectivity between these host countries and their organizational counterparts of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Tanzania is already linked to Zambia via the Cold War-era TAZARA project that represents China’s first-ever Silk Road investment in the modern era and which holds the potential for being expanded deeper into the mineral-rich southeastern reaches of the Congo one day too. Kenya and Tanzania are also more stable and developed than Ethiopia, making them much more attractive destinations for Chinese and Indian investment and the most suitable launching pads for their economic strategies in the continent.
Lastly, Mozambique has a special place in the Chinese-Indian “Great Game” in East Africa because of its enormous offshore energy reserves in the north, some of which it shares with Tanzania. In and of itself, Mozambique doesn’t have much to offer to any potential partners because of its rampant underdevelopment and comparatively small population, which is why its energy potential becomes disproportionately important. China and India are both craving new sources of supply, and it remains to be seen whether Mozambique will balance between these two Great Powers or sell more of its reserves to one or the other. In addition, any prospective reserves exported from Mozambique to either of these two would have to pass very close to the Seychelles, demonstrating a degree of prudence on behalf of India’s decision makers or their foreign patrons in choosing this country for an overseas base.
As it currently stands, the competition between China’s New Silk Road and India’s “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” is amicable at the moment and has yet to develop into anything too dramatic, but it must be accepted that the rivalry between these two has only just begun and is still in its early stages. According to the dynamics of chaos theory, it’s precisely at this time when the contours of any complex system and its working processes are formed, meaning that these moves will likely set the trajectory for how the rivalry between China and India will play out in East Africa in the coming years. Bearing that in mind, it’s possible to forecast the general direction in which events will unfold, relying on the observation that China’s strategy is to focus more on “hard” development while India’s is to take care of its “soft” counterpart.
China is hoping that the “head start” that it has over India in investing in Africa will lead to preferential trading arrangements with its partners, specifically those in East Africa who are its initial points of contact with the continent for geopolitical reasons. Beijing has sought to win their loyalty through no-strings-attached loans, but as an added “insurance policy” and as evidenced from the Sri Lankan case, it has no qualms about trading in the debt owed to it for the physical assets that it built because of those very same loans, which might have unintentionally given “credence” to the narrative that it has dual military intentions in mind for those facilities. There’s a certain believability to that, however, since China will inevitably be compelled to protect its Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC) just like all other Great Powers have done in history who depended on maritime trade for their growth.
India, meanwhile, could carve out a valuable niche for itself and Japan – and perhaps even their other “Quad” allies of the US and Australia – by delivering on the expectations that are placed upon it in developing East Africa’s “soft” infrastructure and enhancing the competitiveness of its population. China has thus far either neglected to adequately invest in this sphere or hasn’t done so in as competitive of a manner as to make much of a difference on the large scale that’s needed, though that could obviously change in the future. China is developing all the necessary “hard” infrastructure routes in East Africa and leaving none to its rivals so it will sooner or later end up expanding its influence into their “soft” infrastructural realm, whereas they’ll be hard-pressed to do the reverse in stepping on China’s toes.
Only time will tell which of the two sides will ultimately succeed in building better competencies among the East African population, but India might have an edge over China in this regard because it can rely on its partners to assist it, whereas Beijing has usually been reluctant in allowing even friendly countries to enter the economic space that it’s staked out for itself. That might also have to change in the future if China wants to keep up with its rivals, so it’s entirely possible that it might enter into multilateral coordination with its Russian, Turkish, and Pakistani partners in order to streamline investments and outreach activities that more robustly counterbalance the broad support that India is poised to receive. East Africa will benefit from this peaceful competition because it will compel all foreign stakeholders to offer their national partners the best deals possible otherwise their opponents will seize those opportunities.
Another “Scramble For Africa”?
The multilateralization of the Chinese-Indian “Great Game” in East Africa through the involvement of their partnered Great Powers could result in one of two outcomes. The first is that it stabilizes their competition by preserving a strategic balance of power between them and advances “win-win” solutions that give all players a stake in regional stability. This would be the preferred scenario for Africa, and quite frankly, each of the involved parties. The second one, though, is that the risks of destabilization exponentially increase as rival powers come into closer contact with one another in this shared three-theater space, potentially leading to inadvertently hostile competition between them that inevitably forces the weaker African objects of their geopolitical competition to “choose sides”. The logical result of this dangerous development would be that African unity begins to unravel, particularly in the continent’s leading integrational organization of the East African Community
Maintaining stability and a balance of strategic power under these challenging and increasingly unpredictable circumstances would necessitate formal or informal agreements between the competing Great Powers in this sphere, therefore amounting to a de-facto 21st-century version of the “Scramble for Africa”, with each “bloc” accusing the other of seeking to exploit their African partners in a neo-colonial fashion. The aggregate damage that an intensified infowar campaign based on this highly sensitive narrative could cause might ultimately end up being counterproductive to all parties by getting Africans to conceive of them as exploiters who don’t have their genuine interests in mind, even if they do as per the self-interested explanations discussed at the beginning of this analysis. The society-wide cynicism that this could naturally produce might detract from Africans’ willingness to enthusiastically seize the developmental opportunities that each “side” is offering, which would be to their detriment if the deals are legitimately in their interests.
The best proposal that could be made in light of these likely scenarios is for China and India to progressively involve their partners in support of their respective East African projects but not to do so too quickly in order to avoid upsetting the regional balance and inadvertently inciting an even more pronounced security dilemma than already exists. This, however, is an unenforceable suggestion that requires coordination and trust from both sides, which is presently lacking in general and especially when it comes to East Africa. The most probable development, therefore, is that the multilateralization of the Chinese-Indian “Great Game” in East Africa will speed up instead of slow down, and that it might end up becoming somewhat uncontrollable in the coming years. That doesn’t mean that anything dramatic is necessarily bound to happen, but at the same time, such eventualities can’t be discounted either.
“Black Swans”
Even though it may seem like the current state of the Chinese-Indian “Great Game” in East Africa is the epitome of the “win-win” paradigm of International Relations, it shouldn’t be overlooked how “Black Swan” events separate from those connected to the multilateralization these two Great Powers’ rivalry could unexpectedly complicate everything if they lead to the sudden onset of domestic unrest – defined in this context as large-scale protests (Color Revolutions), “rebel” insurgencies, and terrorist offensives – or regional conflict like another Congolese Civil War. These high-impact events are conceptualized as Hybrid Wars, and they might be sparked or guided ex-post-facto by the US in order to disrupt any perceived advantage that Washington may believe that Beijing has in the three competitive theaters of this region. The worst-case scenario would be that a security crisis prompts China and India to fall into the trap of “mission creep” by militarily responding in order to protect their assets, after which the security dilemma between them might become unmanageable and finally explode.
This is unlikely to happen anytime soon, except perhaps in the Congolese case, but there are still some regional fault lines that shouldn’t nevertheless be overlooked. The regular unrest driven by Ethiopia’s largest and centrally positioned plurality of the Oromo people raises concern about the country’s future stability if its new government doesn’t enact adequate reforms at the pace and scope that this influential minority group wants. Likewise, Ethiopia is surrounded by regional problems, whether the credible threats of an Egyptian airstrike over the contentious Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Eritrea’s reported assistance to all manner of rebel groups within the country, the consummate failed state of South Sudan, and the still-simmering Somalian conflict. The East African Community countries, although comparatively less at risk than Ethiopia, are also beset with identity-centric challenges to their stability and the threat of terrorist groups such as Al-Shabaab, though they’re more likely to be affected in the military and migrant sense by any prospective Third Congolese War if one ever breaks out.
Another issue to keep in mind is that piracy might emerge near the Mozambique Channel as non-state actors try to profit from ransoms after taking LNG tankers and other ships hostage. This is admittedly unlikely but can’t be ruled out because the central government barely has any presence in some parts of Mozambique, especially in the Muslim-inhabited north, and the nearby island nation of the Comoros is full of desperate people who could easily be recruited into such schemes. Just like what happened in the waters around Somalia over a decade ago, an outbreak of piracy of the Mozambican and perhaps even Tanzanian coasts as well would trigger the militarization of this waterway and encourage extra-regional states like China, India, and their Great Power partners to scramble for naval bases in the area. New Delhi could already be ahead of Beijing if its base deal with the Seychelles passes through parliament and it leverages its recently concluded LEMOA-like “logistics” pact to use France’s naval facilities in the region, but China’s checkbook and suspected dual-use intentions of its nearby port projects could bring it back into the game.
Conclusion
Having touched upon all of those scenarios, the odds of them happening appear to be slim at the present moment, and none of the examined East African states apart from Ethiopia and Kenya to a slight degree show any serious signs of domestic instability that could interfere with either China or India’s investments there in the near future. The Chinese and Indian military presences in the region will probably expand with time and be publicly justified by the need to protect their SLOCs, but they should nevertheless be monitored for signs that either of them are preparing to counter the other or intervene in any potential conflict. Thus, the “Great Game” between China and India in this part of the Indian Ocean Rimland will probably remain stable, albeit tense, for some time, and could possibly be leveraged to the advantage of each local player so long as they’re clever enough to play one of them off against the other to their country’s self-interested benefit, though the multilateral militarization of this region must through the introduction of each Great Powers’ partners to this competition could unexpectedly jeopardize regional stability.
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Andrew Korybko presented the above text on 18 April, 2018 at a conference about “Russian-African Relations In the Context Of Africa’s ‘Turn To The East’” that was hosted by the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of African Studies, and which was later published in the book “Поворот Африки На <<Восток>> ИИнтересы России” (“The Pivot Of Africa To The ‘East’ And The Interests Of Russia”). This article was also published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
All images in this article are from Eurasia Future (except the featured image on top left).
So maybe Oswald really did shoot JFK with an old Italian army rifle — that now-famous Carcano. But I seriously doubt it. I just can’t picture a Marine Corps trained rifleman selecting such a weapon to shoot anybody. That’s because Italian weapons of the World War II era had a lousy reputation, and most Marines would’ve been aware of that.
Lee Harvey Oswald spent three years in the US Marine Corps, leaving it in September 1959. That was shortly after I enlisted, my time in the USMC overlapping his by a few days. I served for four years, and received my discharge a few months before the assassination. That was over fifty years ago now, nevertheless, Marine Corps training is pretty unforgettable. Having been in the USMC about the same time as the alleged assassin, I handled the same weapons and fired on the same type of rifle range as he did. In this essay I’d like to say a bit about Marine Corps weapons training of that era and how those rifle range realities conflict with the official story.
“The most dangerous thing in the world is a Marine with his M1 rifle,” our Drill Instructors told us from day-one. The M1 Garand was the standard U.S. military rifle at that time, and the Marine Corps took intense pride in training us to use it well. Whatever our military task might’ve been, whether truck driver, cook, office clerk, infantry or radar operator, as Marines we were riflemen first of all.
We were issued the M1 during our first week in boot camp, but before we ever got to the firing range, we spent many weeks learning to dismantle and reassemble it, memorizing the name of every part and understanding its function. Terms like “trigger-housing-group” or “bolt locking lug” still come to mind after all these years. We also spent a huge amount of time on the manual of arms, practicing “right shoulder arms,” “present arms,” all that parade ground stuff. So we all came to know that rifle very, very well. All that was down pat before they ever let us fire it.
Actually, weapons training did not generally start there. Most guys I knew in the USMC came from gun culture, typically starting out in early childhood with a BB gun, later a .22 caliber target rifle, and eventually deer rifles and shotguns. So the USMC was kind of like advanced training in weaponry, where guys learned the fine points of marksmanship, also fired light and heavy machine guns as well as pistols. These guys generally liked guns, visited gun shows, and would often spend hours talking about weapons, discussing which firearm they would choose for this or that task. For long range sniper shooting one needs a very accurate weapon, the first choice being unanimously the 1903 Springfield rifle. The second choice would’ve been a Mauser. The Carcano was not in the running.
(Both the Springfield and the Mauser were ancient, but they were known to be accurate and reliable, and most importantly, in the USMC gun culture of the early 1960s, those two rifles were considered legendary.)
Oswald apparently had some interest in guns. According to his brother, the two of them hunted rabbits with .22 caliber rifles. While in Russia he reportedly joined a gun club. As for the Carcano that he allegedly owned, some gun buffs do acquire all sorts of antique and exotic firearms, and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear that he may have possessed a Carcano. What I cannot believe is that he would’ve considered it a serviceable weapon for the crime of the century — or if he had, I’m sure that President Kennedy would’ve survived the day.
In dismissing the Carcano, I don’t mean to say that Italian craftsman aren’t capable of making quality products. They indeed are. In all sorts of things from clocks to autos, Italian craftsmen have a reputation for excellence. They make good firearms too.
Carcano rifle (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Nevertheless, the Warren Commission concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald killed President John F. Kennedy with a Carcano. Yes, a Carcano! It’s hard to imagine a more bizarre story. While it served to promote the image of Oswald as an unhinged nutcase, an important element of the official narrative, it clashes with rifle-range realities.
Within the brief space of less than ten seconds, according to the Warren Commission, Oswald fired three shots, two of which hit the president, a moving target. That would’ve been phenomenal marksmanship, even with a state-of-the-art sniper rifle. Your average Marine is a good shot, but not that good. According to records that were made public, Oswald was about average.
Accurate shooting requires time and concentration; the faster one shoots, the less one hits. USMC marksmanship training included slow firing at 200 and 500 yards, and rapid fire at 300 yards. For rapid fire we were given sixty seconds to fire ten rounds. Our task also included reloading a clip since the magazine only held eight rounds. Being semiautomatic, the M1 would fire as fast as we could pull the trigger — theoretically that is. In reality, the recoil knocks the rifle off target, so each time we fired we had to find the target and line up the sights all over again. That eats up time, precious seconds. Those are physical limitations on how fast anyone can shoot and expect to hit anything. With an average of six seconds for each of those ten shots, it might seem that we had plenty of time, but in reality, those sixty seconds ran by very, very quickly, and accuracy was greatly diminished.
Unlike the semiautomatic M1 Garand, the Carcano has a bolt action, making it much slower to operate. And, that particular Carcano was equipped with a telescopic sight, which makes rapid fire even more difficult. It’s slower to resight a telescopic sight than an ordinary metal one. (Consider also the report that the telescopic sight on Oswald’s Carcano was defectively mounted — which would render any sort of accuracy impossible.)
The marksmanship attributed to Oswald in that Texas town is beyond anything he could’ve done on a USMC rifle range. It was more like what we were used to seeing on the silver screen. Shooting from the hip, Hollywood cowboys could knock a tin can out of the sky; almost every western had a scene like that. And so does the official story of what happened that November day in Dallas. Such are the legendary exploits of superheroes and arch-villains.
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A year ago the US led Coalition played a leading role in the battle for the Syrian city of Raqqa. Coalition forces carried out thousands of air and artillery strikes upon the city that left hundreds dead and helped destroy 80% of the city. A year after this war of annihilation US and UK governments are in complete denial about the war crimes they committed in the battle for Raqqa.
On 10 September the US Department of Defence sent its ‘final response’ to Amnesty International stating that the US refuses to accept any liability for civilian deaths caused by its air/artillery strikes and that it would not compensate families of the ceased or survivors. Nor would the US be prepared to investigate the massive loss of civilian life that was caused by its massive and indiscriminate bombing of the city.
The UK whose air force claims that it struck 216 ISIS targets in Raqqa has also issued the same blithe statements denying any culpability for the deaths of civilians. On 15 October Amnesty International noted that the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD)* is still, “repeating ‘incredible’ claim its own Raqqa air strikes killed zero civilians.
On 24 September Airwars, founded by investigative journalist Chris Woods, issued a damning report on the claims of the UK government that its air force has not killed any civilians in Raqqa or Mosul:
“It is the view of Airwars that the Ministry of Defences claim of zero civilian harm from its actions at Mosul and Raqqa represents a statistical impossibility given the intensity of fighting, the extensive use of explosive weapons, and the significant civilian populations known to have been trapped in both cities,”
Amnesty Internationals new Secretary General, Kumi Naidoo, has just returned from a field visit to Raqqa. Hehas responded to the mendacious statements of the US and UK governmentsdeclaring:
“Disturbingly, the Pentagon does not even seem willing to offer an apology for the hundreds of civilians killed in its ‘war of annihilation’ on Raqqa. This is an insult to families who – after suffering the brutality of IS rule – lost loved ones to the Coalition’s cataclysmic barrage of firepower.’’
He further added that:
“One year after the battle ended, the obstacles to justice are still insurmountably high for victims and their families. It is completely reprehensible that the Coalition refuses to acknowledge its role in most of the civilian casualties it caused, and abhorrent that even where it has admitted responsibility, it accepts no obligation towards its victims.”
The people of Raqqa whose city was destroyed by the precision strikes of the Coalition military have largely been left to fend for themselves. The US and its UK partner in the coalition of the killing seem unwilling to help rebuild the basic infrastructure of a city that they played a such a major role in destroying. Water, electricity, medical and phone services need to be fully restored never mind the tens of thousands of homes, schools, hospitals and government buildings that need to be rebuilt.
Journalist Patrick Coburn, who has covered the conflict in Syria since its inception, visited Raqqa in June this year and observed:
“The claim by the coalition that its air strikes and artillery fire were precisely targeted against ISIS fighters and their positions is shown up as a myth as soon as one drives into the city. I visited it earlier in the year and have never seen such destruction. There are districts of Mosul, Damascus and Aleppo that are as bad, but here the whole city has gone.’’
According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, there has been, “large-scale destruction throughout the city, a critical level of explosive hazard contamination amidst insufficient resources for surveying and removal of explosive hazards, as well as a shortage of public services.”
Civilians have to contend with large amounts of unexploded Coalition ordinanceand mines left by ISIS fighters which have killed or injured over 1,000 civilians since the battle for Raqqa ended.
Widespread looting by Kurdish troops and criminal elements together with mass unemployment are major problems that the local population have to contend with.
As we approach the centenary of World War One corporate politicians in the US and UK will shed crocodile tears and lament the tragic loss of life involved in that conflict. This will be accompanied by pious declarations that we should never let such slaughter take place again. Of course, such sanctimonious sentiments don’t apply to the slaughter of civilians when it is carried out by America and Britain in pursuit of keeping their citizens “safe from the threat of terrorism’’.
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*I contacted the MoD for a comment and was told by its spokesperson that the UK was not responsible for any civilian deaths in Raqqa. He assured me that I would receive a statement of the MOD’s position via email but it did not materialise.
When a scientist who studies the essential role insects play in the health of the ecosystem calls a new study on the dramatic decline of bug populations around the world “one of the most disturbing articles” he’s ever read, it’s time for the world to pay attention.
The article in question is a report published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showing that in addition to annihilating hundreds of mammal species, the human-caused climate crisis has also sparked a global “bugpocalypse” that will only continue to accelerate in the absence of systemic action to curb planetary warming.
“This study in PNAS is a real wake-up call—a clarion call—that the phenomenon could be much, much bigger, and across many more ecosystems,” David Wagner, an invertebrate conservation expert at the University of Connecticut, said in response to the new report. “This is one of the most disturbing articles I have ever read.”
Authored by Bradford Lister of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Andres Garcia of National Autonomous University of Mexico, the study found that
“[a]rthropods, invertebrates including insects that have external skeletons, are declining at an alarming rate.”
“We compared arthropod biomass in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest with data taken during the 1970s and found that biomass had fallen 10 to 60 times,” the researchers write. “Our analyses revealed synchronous declines in the lizards, frogs, and birds that eat arthropods. Over the past 30 years, forest temperatures have risen 2.0 °C, and our study indicates that climate warming is the driving force behind the collapse of the forest’s food web. If supported by further research, the impact of climate change on tropical ecosystems may be much greater than currently anticipated.”
As the climate crisis intensifies, Lister and Garcia continued,
“the frequency and intensity of hurricanes in Puerto Rico are expected to increase, along with the severity of droughts and an additional 2.6–7 °C temperature increase by 2099, conditions that collectively may exceed the resilience of the rainforest ecosystem.”
A truly scary new study finds that insect populations in protected Puerto Rican rainforests have fallen as much as 60-fold. https://t.co/NXMIKMCD3p
“Holy crap,” Wagner of the University of Connecticut told the Washington Post when he learned of the 60-fold drop of bug populations in Puerto Rico’s Luquillo rainforest. “If anything, I think their results and caveats are understated. The gravity of their findings and ramifications for other animals, especially vertebrates, is hyperalarming.”
The latest disturbing evidence of the destruction the climate crisis is inflicting across the globe comes just a week after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warned that the world must cut carbon emissions in half by 2030 in order to avert global catastrophe as soon as 2040.
“Unfortunately, we have deaf ears in Washington,” concluded Louisiana State University entomologist Timothy Schowalter, who has studied the Luquillo rainforest for decades.
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I’m sitting in the departure lounge at Poland’s Krakow airport, waiting for the flight to Edinburgh. Sitting opposite is a young woman with a pink mobile phone resting against her crutch and a plastic bottle of Coca Cola standing in the same place. The first, slowly destroying her brain and reproductive capacity and the second slowly destroying her gut and nervous system.
She has ear pieces extensions coming from her mobile and wears a vacant, somewhat resigned expression on her face. Unaware no doubt, that she is steadily shortening her life expectancy.
It’s a pretty crowded place. The usual array of dominant global corporations display their latest wears in the neon lit sterile corridors that have become the stereo typical environment of international airports the world over. Each processed, packaged product on offer is displayed as ‘irresistible’.
The air in this place is ‘conditioned’, but so is everything. Including the pall of microwaved electronic smog which ensures that no one’s brain is working as it should.We are all anaesthetized.
Manufactured electricity is the dominant energy here, humming and buzzing through the power points of hundreds of appliances, screens and WiFi hot spots. Airports like this pretty much symbolise the normalisation of madness. The less than human techno-dependent totems of the modern computer led era, that creep on and on in their homogenisation of planetary diversity.
The young lady opposite pears at the screen of her cell phone. Suddenly some small glimmer of an expression animates her face. Someone is texting a message to her. I wonder what it says? Maybe “How are you darling – just got back home and found your little brother playing ‘war games 3’ on his new App. Daddy is mowing the lawn – again! Have a great flight and don’t forget to text us when you arrive! Luv, mum.” Her face returns to neutral and she replaces the phone back in its original life sapping position.
Outside the window, various and sundry robotic like vehicles manoeuvre around the acres of tarmacadam that form the terminals of international airports. Not a tree in sight. A few seats down from me, a baby is sitting on its mother’s lap, musing meditatively on whatever it is that babies muse upon. Suddenly a beautiful smile lights up its face. A subtle aura of redemption hangs in the air – and for just a moment – sheer joy penetrates the small space in which this baby exudes her moment of unprocessed pleasure. How good it is to see and feel the power of the human spirit rising up amidst this restless place of concrete, wires, glass and plastic.
Earlier, on the way through security, I am taken aside for having alerted the X ray machine. A security officer takes a pair of tweezers with a tab on the end and scans my hands and wrists. How strange, I think, to be scanning here … until I remember that more and more mortals now have chips in their wrists which would no doubt alert the scanning machine. It occurs to me that maybe I have been ‘chipped’ unknowingly, and am being permanently monitored by big brother’s centralised bureau of investigation. Not impossible by any means, but more likely the reason for the red light to blip on, was a piece of steel inserted into my lower leg by the Polish bone surgeon who fixed my broken ankle a year ago.
Some thirty minutes later, on board the plane, the human side of life manages to interject once again, this time in the form of the flight steward; a jovial soul with a broad Scottish accent and twinkling smile. Laughter breaks-out as he explains why, due to incoming passengers overindulging themselves, there is a lack of sandwiches on board for the return trip. The frisky steward, well into the later stages of his professional career, reminded me of the milkman I once hired to deliver my unpasteurised Guernsey milk and cream to local residents of South Oxfordshire. He was a Glaswegian (from Glasgow) and almost no one understood a word he was saying – including me – so thick was his accent.
But let us thank God that such eccentric individuals remain at large in today’s corporate dominated, politically correct, standardised society. All is not lost, in spite of every attempt being made to drive us into submission to a soulless virtual reality existence. In fact, increasingly there are signs of new life springing up where they might least be expected – as in a routine commercial airline flight between Krakow and Edinburgh. There are always trees that, given only the slightest glimpse of light, manage to grow through the concrete designed to keep them out. Those able to be ‘human’still probably form the majority on this planet; but the pressures to conform to the cyborgian Orwellian agenda are relentless – and warmth of heart is often the first casualty in this drive for domination at the hands of a banker led military industrial ‘new world order’.
The flight is uneventful, thankfully. People settle-in to the usual occupations that preoccupy passengers packed like sardines into noisy and distinctly primitive two centimetre thick pressurised aluminium tubes, jet propelled through the upper atmosphere courtesy of huge volumes of synthesisedkerosene.
We bump down on the tarmac of Edinburgh airport and come to rest at the docking gate. Everyone leaps to their feet as though responding to refrains of God Save the Queen. There is the usual unseemly cavalcade towards the passenger exit point, with the mobile phones once again out in force; twitting and tweeting like a flock of startled birds.
But then something distinctly different – the walkways to customs formalities are completely free of advertising. There is none of the usual frenetic electromagnetic buzz; no mass produced music. People seem to slow down. At passport control an almost palpable hush fills the hall. Couples are taken through together, passing smoothly through the gates. One can almost touch the sense of something real. One can almost smell ‘the tangle of the isles’. Almost sense the not so distant highlands; the lochs, sea, seaweed, the heather – and the proud piper in the glen.
For those who know these parts, a little shiver passes down the spine. Do we not hear the distant refrain of bagpipes calling us again to arms? Ancient, ancient land of barren rugged granite hills – peppered with cascading mountain streams. The haunting, almost treeless landscape, laid waste by man in former times, but still exuding a compelling magnetic power.
Heading out of Edinburgh and beating a path across the bleak and beautiful highlands towards the Western Isles, Jadwiga declares the scene to be “A sad kind of beauty.” “Here you can see the pride of those who held-on and who refused to be ‘developed’” she mused. “A terrible beauty” quoth I, a Scotsman by dint of my forebears of the clan Rose ofKilravock.And as we journey on, so this little tale of humanity and inhumanity comes to rest. The moral, should you call for it, is this: where man has, for whatever reason, failed to install the tearing and tormenting attributes of modernity, so lives on a call upon our deeper senses to rise again and breath anew. Play on, ye pipers at the gates of dawn!
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Julian Rose is an international activist, writer, organic farming pioneer and actor.In 1987 and 1998, he led a campaign that saved unpasteurised milk from being banned in the UK; and, with Jadwiga Lopata, a ‘Say No to GMO’ campaign in Poland which led to a national ban of GM seeds and plants in that country in 2006. Julian is currently campaigning to ‘Stop 5G’ WiFi. He is the author of two acclaimed titles: Changing Course for Life and In Defence of Life and is a long time exponent of yoga/meditation. See Julian’s web site for more information and to purchase his books www.julianrose.info. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The G-20 in Buenos Aires on November 30 could set the world on fire – perhaps literally. Let’s start with the US-China trade war. Washington won’t even start discussing trade with China at the G-20 unless Beijing comes up with a quite detailed list of potential concessions.
The word from Chinese negotiators is not at all bleak. Some sort of agreement could be reached on about a third of US demands. Debate on another third could ensue. But the last third is absolutely off-limits – due to Chinese national security imperatives, such as refusing to allow the opening of the domestic cloud computing market to foreign competition.
Beijing has appointed Vice-Premier Liu He and Vice-President Wang Qishan to supervise all negotiations with Washington. They face an uphill task: to pierce through President Donald Trump’s limited attention span.
On top of it, Beijing demands a “point person” with the authority to negotiate on behalf of Trump – considering the mixed-message traffic jam out of Washington.
Now compare this with the message coming from the research institute fabulously named Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era under the Party School of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC): the US has started the “trade friction” essentially “to hinder China’s industrial upgrading.”
That’s the consensus at the top.
And the clash is bound to get worse.Vice President Mike Pence accused China of “meddling in American democracy,” “debt diplomacy,” “currency manipulation,” and “IP theft.” The Foreign Ministry in Beijing dismissed it all as “ridiculous.”
It’s enlightening to pay close attention to what Foreign Minister Wang Yitold the Council on Foreign Relations – as diplomatically as possible: “China will follow a path of development different from historical powers.” And China will not seek hegemony.
From the point of view of the US National Security Strategy, that’s irrelevant; China has been framed as a fierce competitor and even a threat. President Xi Jinping will not cave in to Washington’s trade demands. So expect a possible non-meeting between Xi and Trump in Buenos Aires.
The threat of a nuclear first strike
Things look even hairier on the Russian front. For all of Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s Taoist patience, Moscow’s diplomatic circles are exasperated by serious American threats – as in the US Navy possibly enforcing a blockade to restrict Russia’s energy trade. Or worse: the ultimatum that Russia must stop developing a missile that according to Washington violates the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, otherwise the Pentagon will destroy it.
This is as serious as it gets – because it amounts to committing to a US nuclear first strike.
In parallel, BP CEO Bob Dudley told the Oil & Money conference in London that any additional US sanctions against top Russian energy companies would be disastrous.
“If sanctions were put on Rosneft or Gazprom or Lukoil like what happened with Rusal, you would virtually shut down the energy systems of Europe, it is a bit of an extreme thing to happen,” he said.
On the BRICS front, Russia and India deftly maneuvered on their own and managed to squash some US geostrategic planning against the three major poles of Eurasia integration: Russia, China and Iran.
The Quad – US, Japan, Australia, India – was conceived to box in China across the Indo-Pacific, in parallel to confining Russia’s margin of maneuver. The Quad is not exactly in sterling form after India decided to buy Russian S-400 missile systems. Trump has promised revenge.
On top of the S-400 deal, Russian companies will be building six additional nuclear reactors in India, at a cost of $20 billion each, over the next decade. Rosneft signed a 10-year deal to sell India 10 million tons of oil a year. And India will continue to buy oil from Iran, paying for it in rupees.
On the EU front, it’s all about Germany. There are few illusions in Berlin about the EU’s wobbly future. The export-centered German economy is focused on Asia. Germany is doubling down on solidifying an Asian-style model – a few large companies that are national champions able to turbo-charge exports. The US market – under protectionist winds – now is just an afterthought.
Toxic tropics
Then there’s the Brazilian tragedy. President Mauricio Macri ruined Argentina with a neoliberal shock. The nation is now a hostage of the IMF.
A possible scenario is a G-20 in which Argentina will be learning how to deal with a fascist leading its close neighbor and top trade partner, Brazil.
Former paratrooper Jair Bolsonaro may be xenophobic and mysoginistic, but is certainly not a nationalist. The self-billed tropical “Messiah” routinely salutes the US flag. His economic hit man is a Chicago Boy bent on selling the country out – much to the delight of “investors” and “market” experts from New York and Zurich to Rio and Sao Paulo.
Forget about creating jobs or even attempting to solve Brazil’s immense social problems: acute social inequality, pressing investments in health and education, urban insecurity. Bolsonaro’s only “policy” is to weaponize the population in a Mad Max remix.
Everything under Bolsonaro should proceed under the unmitigated reign of a Hobbesian “free” market. Forget about any possibility of a moderating state intervention in the complex relations between Capital and Labor.
This is the apex of a complex process unleashed years ago in Brazil via think tanks such as the Atlas Network, loads of money and, last but not least, an evangelical/neo-pentecostal tsunami.
The pillars of the Brazilian carnage are powerful agro-business and mineral exploitation interests, toxic Brazilian mainstream media, evangelicals, a financial sector totally subservient to Wall Street, the weapons industry, the completely politicized judiciary, the police, intel services, and the armed forces.
And the stars of the show are of course the Beef-Bible-Bullet combo – with their scores of Congress members – overseen by the Goddess of the Market.
Neoliberalism never wins elections in Brazil. So the only way to implement “reforms” is via a sub-Pinochet. Expect widespread social-environmental havoc, indiscriminate killing of rural and native Brazilian leaders, an unmitigated bonanza for the weapons industry, banks celebrating Christmas every week, abysmal cultural repression, total denationalization of the economy, and workers and pensioners paying for all these “reforms.” Call it business as usual.
Bolsonaro’s fascist tendencies were normalized not only by the powers that be in Brazil. Argentina’s Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie qualified him as a “center-right” politician.
Beijing and Moscow – for BRICS reasons – and the EU in Brussels are appalled by Brazil’s descent into the maelstrom. Russia and China were counting on a strong Brazil contributing to a multipolar world as during the time of Lula, who was a major BRICS driving force.
For the EU, it is hard to stomach a fascist leading their top trading partner in Latin America, and the heart of Mercosur. For the Global South as a whole, the implosion of Brazil, one of its leaders, is an unmitigated tragedy.
Now picture Washington as a raging compendium of threats and sanctions. An EU fractured to the hilt – denouncing Asian illiberalism while impotent to fight the “rise of the deplorables” at home. BRICS in disarray, with two in a serious clash with Washington, one out of the game and one on the fence – among the top four. The House of Saud rotting from the inside. Iran not even at the G-20 table. Time to sing What a Wonderful World.
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Requesting the International Criminal Court investigate Venezuela’s government is a significant escalation in Ottawa’s campaign of interference in the domestic affairs of another country.
Supported by five like-minded South American nations, it’s the first time a member state has been brought before the ICC’s chief prosecutor by other members.
In Canada the campaign to have the ICC investigate the Nicolás Maduro government began in May.
“I would like to see the states from the G7 agreeing to refer the matter of crimes against humanity to the International Criminal Court for a prospective investigation and prosecution,” said Irwin Cotler at an Ottawa press conference to release a report on purported Venezuelan human rights violations.
The former Liberal justice minister added,
“this is the arch-typical example of why a reference is needed, as to why the ICC was created.”
Cotler was one of three “international experts” responsible for a 400-page Canadian-backed Organization of American States (OAS) report on rights violations in Venezuela. The panel recommended OAS secretary general Luis Almagro submit the report to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICC and that other states refer Venezuela to the ICC. In a Real News Network interview Max Blumenthal described “the hyperbolic and propagandistic nature” of the press conference where the report was released at the OAS in Washington. Cotler said Venezuela’s “government itself was responsible for the worst ever humanitarian crisis in the region.”
Worse than the extermination of the Taíno and Arawak by the Spanish? Or the enslavement of five million Africans in Brazil? Or the 200,000 Mayans killed in Guatemala? Or the thousands of state-murdered “subversives” in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Peru, etc.? Worse than the tens of thousands killed in Colombia, Honduras and Mexico in recent years? Worse than the countless US (and Canadian) backed military coups in the region?
Or perhaps Almagro, who appointed Cotler and the two other panelists, approves of the use of military might to enforce the will of the rich and powerful. He stated last month:
“As for military intervention to overthrow the Nicolas Maduro regime, I think we should not rule out any option … diplomacy remains the first option but we can’t exclude any action.”
Even before he mused about a foreign invasion, the former Uruguayan foreign minister’s campaign against Maduro prompted Almagro’s past boss, former president José Mujica, to condemn his bias against the Venezuelan government.
For his part, Cotler has been attacking Venezuela’s Bolivarian government for a decade. In a 2015 Miami Herald op-ed Cotler wrote that “sanctions” and “travel-visa bans …isn’t enough.” The US government “must increase the pressure on Maduro to respect the fundamental human rights of all Venezuela’s people.” The next year Venezuela’s obstructionist, opposition-controlled National Assembly gave Cotler an award for his efforts, notably as a lawyer for right-wing coup leader Leopoldo Lopez. When he joined Lopez’ legal team in early 2015 the Venezuelan and international media described Cotler as Nelson Mandela’s former lawyer (a Reuters headline noted, “Former Mandela lawyer to join defense of Venezuela’s jailed activist”). In response, South Africa’s Ambassador to Venezuela, Pandit Thaninga Shope-Linney, said,
“Irwin Cotler was not Nelson Mandela’s lawyer and does not represent the Government or the people of South Africa in any manner.”
In 2010 Cotler called on a Canadian parliamentary committee to “look at the Iranian connection to Chávez”, asking a representative of Venezuela’s tiny Jewish community:
“What evidence is there of direct Iranian influence, or involvement, on Chávez and the climate of fear that has developed? Is there any concern in the [Jewish] community, with some of the Iranian penetration that we know about in Latin America with respect to terrorist penetration, that it’s also prospectively present for Venezuela?”
Image on the right: Irwin Cotler
A year earlier “Mandela’s lawyer” accused president Hugo Chavez of anti-Semitism. Cotler co-presented a petition to the House of Commons claiming an increase in state-backed anti-Semitism in Venezuela. At the time Cotler said Venezuela had seen a “delegitimization from the president on down of the Jewish people and Israel.” These unsubstantiated accusations of anti-Semitism were designed to further demonize a government threatening North American capitalist/geopolitical interests.
As for the sincerity of his commitment to ending humanitarian crises, Cotler has devoted much of his life to defending Israeli human rights violations, including its recent killing of unarmed protesters in Gaza. His wife, Ariela Zeevi, was parliamentary secretary of Likud when the arch anti-Palestinian party was established to counter Labour’s dominance of Israeli politics. According to the Canadian Jewish News, she was a “close confidant of [Likud founder Menachem] Begin.”
Cotler was no doubt angered by Chavez’s criticism of Israel. In 2009 Venezuela broke off relations with Israel over its assault on Gaza that left 1,400 Palestinians dead. Beyond Israel, Cotler has made a career out of firing rhetorical bombs at the US and Canada’s geopolitical competitors and verbal pellets at its allies.
Of course, it is not surprising to see such hypocrisy from someone leading a hypocritical Canadian campaign to destabilize and overthrow an elected government.
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Venezuela has just taken the next step in its quest to “free” itself from the tyranny of US dollar hegemony. One year after the country said it would stop accepting US dollars as payment for its (ever shrinking) oil exports (saying the country’s state-run oil company would accept payment in yuan instead), Venezuelan Vice President for Economy Tareck El Aissami said Tuesday that Venezuela will officially purge the dollar from its exchange market in favor of euros.
While we’re sure that Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro would love to frame this as his latest gesture of defiance against tyrannical imperialist overreach by Washington, which he has blamed for aggravating the country’s humanitarian crisis by waging an “economic war” against the oil-rich nation, remember that the US effectively blocked the Venezuelan government from transacting in dollars last year when it imposed restrictive sanctions on the Maduro regime and the country’s state-run oil company, PDVSA. Maduro started the process of moving the country’s DICOM system of official tiered exchange rates in September 2017 when he declared that Venezuela would use a “new system of international payments.”
“Venezuela is going to implement a new system of international payments and will create a basket of currencies to free us from the dollar,” Maduro said in an hours-long address to a new legislative superbody, without providing details of the new mechanism.
“If they pursue us with the dollar, we’ll use the Russian ruble, the yuan, yen, the Indian rupee, the euro,” Maduro declared.
The sanctions have largely excluded Venezuela from international capital markets and the US dollar-based financial system, forcing Maduro’s regime to rely on money-for-oil loans extended by China.
Maduro and many senior members of his government have been personally singled out for sanctions by the Treasury Department, a punishment that Maduro has called “an honor.”
To help seed the Venezuelan financial system with euros, the country’s cash-strapped central bank is planning to auction 2 billion euros some time between November and December.
The American “financial blockade” of Venezuela affects both the country’s public and private sectors, including pharmacy and agriculture, and shows “just how far the imperialism can go in its madness,” the vice president said.
Venezuela’s floating exchange rate system, Dicom, “will be operating in euro, yuan or any other convertible currency and will allow the foreign exchange market to use any other convertible currency,” El Aissami said.
The vice president added that all private banks in Venezuela are obliged to participate in the Dicom bidding system.
Even if it’s insignificant relative to Russia and China’s plans to create an alternative global financial system based on rubles and the yuan, this move is one more blow against US dollar hegemony, and one more step into the open arms of China, which has helped keep Maduro’s teetering regime afloat in the face of an assassination attempt and an aborted US-backed coup.
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Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ net worth exceeds $100 billion – while around 350,000 US company workers struggle to survive on poverty wages, along with enduring deplorable working conditions for maximum productivity at company fulfillment centers.
Last March, company worker James Costello, employed at an Indianapolis warehouse, described conditions as follows:
“(W)e’re expected to push out at least around 20,000 packages, sometimes higher, sometimes lower.”
“It can get unsafe when we have 30,000 or more packages because the other part of the job is loading them into vehicles, and it’s hard to get them all pushed out.”
“Packages get stacked up so people end up tripping. People try to lift heavier packages by themselves and get sprains and other injuries, including to their back.”
“Small injuries like that are not covered by Amazon. You can go home but it’s an unexcused absence.”
“If you are severely injured, insurance will cover it, but only if it can be proven that the injury took place during working hours.”
“At the Plainfield, Ind., facility someone was killed during peak season last year. They got killed by a lift.”
“They were pulling packages, and the lift came down while they were at the bottom underneath it. This demonstrates both a lack of proper safety training and a lack of equipment maintenance.”
Lots of injuries occur, he explained. Many go unreported. People work injured, needing the pay, unable to take uncompensated time off.
When someone is injured, they bear the burden to prove it, often not easy because the company shuns payouts.
Workers are on their feet throughout their shifts, permitted one 15-minute break if work under eight hours daily. If longer, they get an optional unpaid 30-minute meal break.
Workers are pushed to meet quotas, discouraged from taking bathroom breaks, told by superiors it’s not “productive.”
Failure to meet quotas multiple times risks termination. Workers feel exploited. They’re constantly monitored, including when getting a drink of water or going to the bathroom.
Talking is discouraged, workers told they have to be more productive. Benefits are meager. Costello said he gets none because he can’t afford to pay his portion of the cost.
Many workers have no benefits. Others with them aren’t fully covered. Many need other jobs and food stamps to survive.
Turnover is high. Many workers quit or get fired for not making quotas. Some are let go before a pay raise, then rehired at less compensation.
Amazon is not a safe company to work for, he stressed, nor free from racial discrimination. No company locations are unionized, management adamant against it.
The company is like Walmart, exploiting workers for maximum productivity and company profits, way under-compensating them.
On October 2, Amazon announced a “new $15 minimum (hourly) wage…effective…November 1,” adding:
“New $15 minimum wage includes associates employed by temp agencies.”
“More than 250,000 Amazon employees, as well as more than 100,000 seasonal holiday employees, and their families will benefit from the new, higher pay.”
Reportedly, workers paid over $15 an hour will get an added $1 hourly increase.
CEO Bezos claimed management “listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” adding:
“We’re excited about this change and encourage our competitors and other large employers to join us.”
Hold the cheers. Increased hourly pay for all company workers comes at the expense of lost bonuses and stock awards – resulting in less compensation overall, greater company profits, why Bezos is “excited” about the change.
Major media largely reacted the same way. The Wall Street Journal called it “goodwill gained with politicians and workers (to) outweigh any hit to profitability, and such a move gives Amazon a possible advantage in hiring tens of thousands of workers during a competitive holiday season and in a low-unemployment environment.”
Senator Bernie Sanders embarrassed himself saying:
“This is what the political revolution is all about.”
“Today I want to give credit where credit is due, and that is that Mr. Bezos and Amazon have done the right thing. This is a significant step forward for many thousands of Amazon employees.”
Sanders like others cheering the move ignored Amazon’s plan to take more back from workers than it’s giving them, decreasing their overall compensation.
“(b)efore the raise, warehouse workers received anywhere from two to three Restricted Stock Unit (RSU) awards, vesting in full after two years.”
“Sitting at around $2,000 a share, Amazon stock is traditionally touted as a massive value-add for employees when determining base wages.”
“On top of that, employees also received monthly bonuses through the company’s Variable Compensation Pay (VCP) program, with the ability to earn up to 8 percent of their monthly income.”
According to Yahoo! Finance, the typical Amazon worker earned $1,800 to $3,000 annually through its variable compensation program. Bonus earnings could double during peak months.
An anonymous worker said an additional $1 in hourly pay amounts to $2,080. It comes at the expense of “a few thousand dollars more from the incentive programs” the company eliminated.
Last year, the media Amazon worker earned $28,446 or roughly $13.68 an hour. An extra $1.32 per hour increases their median annual income to around $30,000.
For a family of four in most US cities, it’s poverty-level income, federal guidelines indicating otherwise way unrealistic.
For decades in America, worker pay lagged inflation the way it should be calculated, not how it is to way understate reality.
People who eat, drive cars, pay rent or high mortgage obligations, have medical expenses, pay college tuition and fees, as well as heat and/or air-condition residences know more about inflation than mainstream talking head economists.
Working class Americans are overworked, underpaid and exploited while corporate giants and high-net-worth households never had things better.
Inequality in the country continues growing no matter which right wing of duopoly governance is in power.
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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.”
Two of Africa’s most influential extra-regional Great Powers are competing for influence in this East African archipelago, and the resolution of its current crisis will determine which of them comes out on top.
The Comoros is probably one of the most geopolitically curious countries in the world by virtue of its location, history, and international relationships. This former French colony off the coast of East Africa is nowadays very close to China and also counts itself as the southernmost member of the Arab League. It’s experienced over 20 coup attempts in its slightly more than 40 years of independence, some of which were carried out by the infamous French mercenary Robert Denard, and was recently in the news for a shady citizenship scheme where it sold $100 million worth of passports to people from the Mideast. Although being regarded in the past as one of Iran’s few international partners, it decisively shifted its allegiance to Saudi Arabia after breaking ties with the Islamic Republic in January 2016 over Tehran’s contemporaneous tensions with the Wahhabi Kingdom. Taken together, this makes Comoros uniquely positioned at the intersection of French, Chinese, and Saudi geopolitical interests.
Constitutional Context
The three-island archipelago was once again thrown into a sudden crisis earlier this week after protesters from the island of Anjouan blocked off some of the roads in the eastern regional capital in response to a controversial referendum that passed earlier this summer. President Azali Assoumani, who came to power in a 1999 coup and previously served two terms in office, was reelected in 2016 and succeeded in pushing forward his proposal to radically reform the constitution in July after 92% of voters out of a 62% turnout agreed to it. As an oversimplified backgrounder into the complicated domestic politics of this tiny, impoverished, but densely populated country, the capital-hosting northwestern island of Grande Comore currently holds the Comoros’ rotating presidency that was agreed upon in the 2001 constitution that followed the Fomboni Agreement which resolved Anjouan’s 1997-2001 separatist crisis.
The origins of that conflict are extraordinarily complex, but they mostly have to do with local political rivalries that emerged during the Comoros’ chaotic and unquestionably imperfect so-called “democratic transition” in the 1990s. The constitutional compromise that was reached was that each of the country’s three main islands of Grande Comore, Ajouan, and Mohéli would receive broad autonomy along the lines of Bosnia’s two constituent entities, and like that war-torn Balkan country, they’d have their own regional presidents but also participate in a rotating nationwide presidency, too. This arrangement has proven to be exorbitantly expensive and government salaries were previously estimated to account for a whopping 80% of the country’s budget. Assoumani wanted to streamline governance in order to cut down on costs and enable the government to reinvest its resources in one of the world’s most impoverished populations.
Assoumani vs. Abdou
The problem is that his successful motion to change presidential term limits and remove the rotational presidency deprived the Anjouan leader of assuming control of the country in 2021 like he and his people had assumed would happen per the Fomboni Agreement. Furthermore, the country’s second-most populous island had previously fallen back into the throes of separatism for a brief period from 2007-2008 that was only resolved through an African Union-backed military intervention, and Assoumani risks triggering a revival of those sentiments after making moves to implement the results of this summer’s referendum. Of note, the opposition called for a boycott of the vote and claimed that the president’s suspension of the Constitutional Court earlier this year before the poll was held therefore made it illegal. The latest reports coming in from the archipelago show that the country might be on the verge of another separatist crisis.
The government alleges that Anjouan governor Salami Abdou is responsible for orchestrating an “operation of destabilization”, which has included “boats with armed men” sailing from the nearby French overseas department of Mayotte to fan the flames of violence on the island. Importantly, the Comoros officially lays claim to Mayotte on the grounds that the French illegally separated the once-unified colony after the easternmost island still under its control overwhelmingly voted to remain with Paris instead of choose the path of independence like the rest of its ethno-religious compatriots in the archipelago did back in 1975. This was reaffirmed in 2009 when 95% of the 61% of participating locals voted to upgrade their status from an overseas collectivity to overseas department, which observers explained by their desire to retain access to France’s much better welfare system and economy that has made Mayotte the destination of many illegal Comorian immigrants.
Satellite-Tracking Stations & Offshore Energy Extraction
Another interesting wrinkle in all of this is that Anjouan previously requested to rejoin France during the initial days of its de-facto independence in 1997 for what can be presumed are these very same reasons but was politely rebuffed by Paris probably because it didn’t take on what it may have considered to be an economically unproductive burden, even though there was speculation that the Comoros’ former colonizer was tacitly supporting the island during its second 2007-2008 separatist crisis with the central government. Mixed in with all of this neo-colonial intrigue is the China factor, which has increasingly become just as – if not more – significant than the French one. The People’s Republic is now considered to be the Comoros’ top strategicpartner after being the first country to recognize its independence and correspondingly invest in its capabilities over the decades. This has since seen China construct state-of-the-art and much-needed infrastructure as well as help eradicate diseases there.
Somewhat conspiratorially but still reasonably, it’s been claimed that China is only paying attention to such an economically insignificant and politically unstable country as the Comoros because of the strategic interests that it has in possibly building a satellite-monitoring station along the equator and prospecting in the LNG-rich waters off the Tanzanian and Mozambican coasts where plenty of offshore gas deposits have already been found. In the worst-case scenario, China’s preeminent position in the Comoros could allow it to exert influence over those neighboring deposits and keep an eye of nearby naval activity there, thereby justifying its comparatively paltry but nevertheless locally impactful investments there. All of this could be offset, however, if Assoumani is successfully framed by the West as a “power-hungry pro-Chinese dictator irresponsibly putting the country’s territorial integrity at risk” through his “provocative” and “illegal referendum” that might lead to sanctions against him or worse.
“Patriot”, “Dictator”, Or “Patriotic Dictator”?
It’s at this point where it’s worthwhile explaining what Assoumani had in mind with his referendum and antecedent suspension of the Constitutional Court. In his view, the Fomboni Agreement – like the Dayton Accords before it in Bosnia – made the Comoros functionally ungovernable and incapable of long-term planning, which is why he felt that reforms had to inevitably be carried out even if he had to go directly to the people through a referendum by undermining the judicial branch of the “deep state” that might have had self-interested reasons for impeding him. It should be remembered that, for better or for worse, the country doesn’t have a Western democratic tradition and heavy-handed authoritarian tactics are the norm, though he should have foreseen that his brazen attempt to change the law in as dramatic of a fashion as he did and irrespective of the overall support of the electorate that he achieved would have consequences.
It’s difficult to imagine that he thought that the people of Anjouan would take this political “affront” against their island’s autonomy laying down, so the resultant Color Revolution unrest and speculative support thereof from the nearby French overseas department of Mayotte (whether coordinated by the French government or carried out independently by the huge population of illegal Comorian immigrants there) shouldn’t have been unexpected. There’s no telling what Paris’ true intentions would be in clandestinely provoking or passively exploiting this naturally occurring unrest when it previously refused to re-annex Anjouan when it had the chance two decades ago, though one possibility might be that it wants to encourage a rapidly escalating HybridWar that could in turn be used to trigger Western condemnation of the government prior to sanctioning it and subsequently advancing a regime change scenario to remove its Chinese-friendly leadership for the aforementioned speculative reasons.
Concluding Thoughts
The Comorian Crisis has only just begun, but it’s already looking to be more geostrategically significant than any of the other ones that the country has experienced in its over forty of years of independence because of the New Cold War stakes that are involved vis-à-vis China and France. If the rumor mill is even partially correct and China does indeed have some degree of satellite-tracking and/or energy extraction interests in the Comoros, then this would make its latest destabilization (however unsurprising in hindsight as it may be) part of the larger trend of attempting to “roll back” the country’s influence, although it must objectively be said that the current crisis was avoidable despite there being convincing arguments in favor of the president’s controversial referendum. The Comoros’ ignoble history of more than 20 coup attempts points to the possibility of the situation rapidly moving in that direction once again with unpredictable consequences for its lasting stability.
The four most important developments for international observers to keep an eye on are:
whether Anjouan attempts to secede once more;
whether the West attempts to pressure Assoumani through sanctions and other coercive means to cancel the results of his successful referendum and/or step down
the level of support (including military) that the African Union provides to or against Assoumani (the former in potentially repeating the 2008 anti-separatist operation if Anjouan secedes again and the latter in relation to a French-backed “Lead From Behind” regime change operation against him);
and the level of support that China and Saudi Arabia extend to Assoumani to assist him in surviving potentially forthcoming Western-imposed sanctions and/or restoring the Comoros’ sovereignty over Anjouan if the island decides to secede again.
There’s of course also the possibility that Assoumani might be deposed by a military coup and the situation will be resolved in the West’s presumed favor sooner than later, though that can’t be taken for granted in spite of the country’s history. From what it looks like, he seems to be genuinely popular among some of the people (at least those from his home island of Grande Comore, which is also the country’s most populous and importantly the seat of the national capital) and isn’t known to employ mercenaries who could suddenly stab him in the back for the right (foreign-/French-paid) price. Another scenario is that the national government reasserts control over Anjouan and the Color Revolution fails to evolve into a Hybrid War that could then be used to trigger sanctions and everything else that might follow. Nevertheless, this curious country and its ongoing crisis still deserve to be monitored because of its New Cold War relevance.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
“Power concedes nothing without a demand,” abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass declared 161 years ago.
Last week saw that truth on broad display as Amazon, facing growing political and organizing pressure, announced it was setting a minimum wage of $15/hour for its US workforce and also raising wages in England.
The company’s declaration followed months of mounting bad publicity for Amazon. US workers have been speaking out in greater numbers about the punishing pace of work, high injury rates, and a plantation mentality on the warehouse floor. A British journalist went undercover at Amazon and wrote a book describing workers forced to pee in bottles and extraordinarily high rates of depression. (Ironically, Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain is selling remarkably well on the Amazon site.)
Amazon workers in Germany, Poland, and Spain struck on Amazon’s Prime Day in June, protesting appalling working conditions.
Back in the US, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) went after the company for paying such poor wages that much of its workforce is dependent on public benefits like food stamps, housing subsidies, and Medicaid.
And Amazon’s wage concession followed continued high-visibility mobilizations by Fight for $15 against McDonald’s and other corporate targets.
Naturally, Amazon executives sought to pivot talk away from corporate concession and towards business enlightenment.
“We listened to our critics, thought hard about what we wanted to do, and decided we want to lead,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO.
Fellow billionaire Nick Hanauer teamed up with union leader David Rolf to heap praise on the company.
“Amazon has smartly chosen to lead the way into the real economy, where we solve the problems, build the things, and pay the wages that truly make America great,” Hanauer and Rolf wrote just hours after the company made the announcement.
Even Sen. Sanders, Amazon’s erstwhile nemesis, felt compelled to pile on, congratulating Bezos personally in a tweet.
So much for the back-slapping and public optics. The view from the warehouse floor is a little more complicated. For while the raise certainly is a product of sustained pressure on the company, it’s not the game-changing largesse that Amazon’s public relations department would have us believe. In low-wage states like Kentucky and South Carolina, to be sure, the raises may amount to $2 or $3 an hour or more. But many Amazon warehouse workers, particularly on the coasts, already were paid close to $15/hour.
Amazon warehouse workers. Photo credit: Scott Lewis
Indeed, setting a $15 minimum wage for 350,000 Amazon workers likely will cost the company less than one tenth of one percent of its net worth: A pittance.
Oct. 2 was the big announcement day. When a New Jersey fulfillment center manager excitedly announced the raise to a gathering of night-shift Amazon workers, the room remained silent, reported one of the workers. It was only when human resources staff started clapping aggressively that others gamely joined in, he said.
His colleagues will accept the raise since they have bills to pay, but because of the punishing pace,
“Workers hate the company. People feel they’re treated like they are slaves,” he explained.
Workers at an Amazon warehouse outside Seattle, Washington, attributed the raise to Sen. Sanders’ advocacy and “people speaking up in an organized way,” according to a part-time distribution center worker. But the issues for Amazon’s workers go far beyond low wages, he said. The constant push for impossible levels of productivity, a lack of respect from supervisors, rampant workplace injuries, and continual burnout and workforce churn are what angers workers the most.
Hands off Labour Law Rally, Toronto, October 15, 2018. [Photo: @rankandfileca]
Those issues share a common root: A business model that implacably demands that workers submit to inhumane levels of exploitation. Unlike in Europe, where many Amazon workers have organized into unions, struck, and won modest gains, US workers aren’t yet unified in sufficient numbers to make big demands on the corporate giant.
Will the splashy wage announcement head off incipient worker organizing? Quite to the contrary, asserted the Seattle worker. It will build confidence in organizing because it shows workers that the company will respond to pressure, he said.
It will take a lot more escalation to win meaningful change. The Amazon workers I’ve talked to over the last year agree that the company won’t fix the appalling conditions until it is forced to do so. That will happen when workers build union organization and, united with consumers and allies, prove they can disrupt Amazon’s operations and hit the company’s bottom line.
That may sound like a pipe-dream. But consider that 100 years ago the titans of the emerging production economy—think basic steel, auto, and electrical industries—seemed omnipotent and untouchable. It took years of struggle, including many tough battles and devastating losses, before the wave of 1930s plant occupations and strikes led by socialists and radicals of various stripes forged new industrial unions. In doing so, they boosted not just working conditions in the production sector, but propelled a broader social movement that organized and won public works jobs, Social Security, labor rights, minimum wages, and other gains of the New Deal era.
Significantly, too, the same factors that shaped the meteoric growth of basic industry 100 years ago—the tremendous economies of scale achievable in mass production, the deployment of cutting-edge technologies, and the application of precise scientific management of production and distribution, including a just-in-time employment model—are core elements of Amazon’s business model today.
The challenge, then as now, is for workers to recognize that as with the industrial monopolies of the last century, Amazon’s extraordinary sweep of power also is its Achilles heel—provided that workers organize. Alone, the Amazon warehouse worker is among the weakest of laborers in America; together in large numbers, they have the power not just to transform what it means to be a warehouse worker, but to help drive a new social movement in our country.
It’s worth recalling that in November 2012, much of the political punditocracy was aghast when a relatively small coterie of New York City fast-food workers first hoisted picket signs demanding $15 and a union. Such an unrealistic demand! Now, six years later, more than nineteen million low-wage US workers have won raises through legislation and workplace organizing as a result, directly or indirectly, of the Fight for $15 movement.
And yet, even with these gains, workers aren’t making it. Nearly eighty percent of full-time American workers say they live paycheck-to-paycheck, seventy-one percent are in debt, and most workers are unable to build up savings to get through a medical, employment, or housing crisis. America is, today, a nation of spectacular wealth enjoyed by the gilded one percent while tens of millions daily teeter on the brink of financial ruin and destitution.
Many of those desperate workers, indeed, already are paid $15 an hour. It’s just not nearly enough to live on.
Over the last six years, we’ve seen corporations like Target, Walmart, and Costco make economic concessions in an effort to forestall demands for something more valuable and radical—real worker power. Now, Amazon has fallen in line with its corporate siblings.
The pundits’ praise for Bezos is utterly misplaced. Praise should go to the workers, who endure brutal conditions, who have just achieved a modest yet remarkable concession from Amazon, and who, step by step, are struggling and learning to build worker power inside the behemoth. We must support them, because their success in this years-long battle will lift us all.
So, let’s be clear: $15 is not nearly enough. It’s time to raise a new banner, a much bolder one that demands an end to brutal working conditions and obscene profiteering, and a societal commitment to rights, security, and power for all workers.
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“It is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship…Voice or no voice the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Hermann Goering, head of the Nazi army’s equivalent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Head of the Luftwaffe (April 18, 1946).
“Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press– in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of LIBERAL excess during the past years.” — Adolf Hitler
“’The Jewish people are to be exterminated’ says every party member. That’s clear, it’s part of our program, elimination of the Jews, extermination, right, we’ll do it. The wealth that they had, we have taken from them. I have issued a strict command…that this wealth is as a matter of course to be delivered in its entirety to the Reich.” — Heinrich Himmler (1943)
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” — Joseph Goebbels, German Nazi “Minister of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment”
“The rank and file is usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly… it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” — Joseph Goebbels
“This so-called ill treatment and torture in detention centers, stories of which were spread everywhere among the people, and later by the prisoners who were freed, were not, as some assumed, inflicted methodically, but were excesses committed by individual prison guards, their deputies, and men who laid violent hands on the detainees.” — Rudolf Hoess, SS commandant at Auschwitz
“The people want wholesome dread. They want to fear something. They want someone to frighten them and make them shudderingly submissive.” — Ernst Rohm, chief of the SA, later murdered on Hitler’s orders during the Night of the Long Knives, 1934
”The more we do to you, the less you seem to believe we are doing it.” — Joseph Mengele, MD, Nazi “Angel of Death” at Auschwitz
“Fascism should rightly be called corporatism as it is a merger of state and corporate power.” — Benito Mussolini, Fascist dictator of Italy (1922 – 1945)
”We had the moral right, we had the duty to our own people, to kill this people that wanted to kill us…And we have suffered no harm from it in our inner self, in our soul, in our character.” — Heinrich Himmler (1943)
“It also gives us a very special, secret pleasure to see how unaware the people around us are of what is really happening to them…What good fortune for those in power that the people do not think.” — Adolf Hitler
“Through clever and constant application of propaganda people can be made to see paradise as hell, and also the other way around, to consider the most wretched sort of life as paradise.” — Adolf Hitler
“The fascist state must not forget that all means must serve the ends; it must not let itself be confused by the drivel about so-called ‘freedom of the press’…it must make sure that (the media) is placed in the service of the state.” — Adolf Hitler
“An evil exists that threatens every man, woman, and child of this great nation. We must take steps to ensure our domestic security and protect our homeland.” — Adolf Hitler, proposing the creation of his homeland security group, the Gestapo
“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator; by defending myself against the Jews, I am fighting for the Lord.” — Adolf Hitler
“The streets of our country are in turmoil! The universities are filled with students rebelling and rioting! Communists are seeking to destroy our country! Russia is threatening us with her might! Our republic is in danger, yes, danger from within and without! WE NEED LAW AND ORDER!” — Original quote from Adolf Hitler (indistinguishable from the rhetoric of Ronald Reagan two generations later)
“Fascism does not, generally speaking, believe in the possibility or utility of perpetual peace. It therefore discards pacifism as a cloak for cowardly supine renunciation in contradistinction to self-sacrifice.” – Benito Mussolini
”Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who COUNT the votes decide everything.” — Joseph Stalin
“First we will kill all the subversives, then we will kill their collaborators, then…their sympathizers, then…those who remain indifferent, and finally, we will kill the timid.” — Iberico Saint Jean (1977), right wing fascist governor of the Province of Buenos Aires, threatening those who failed to show the necessary enthusiasm for Argentina’s newly formed but un-elected military government, that gained power by coup d’etat.
“The conflict is for us a holy war against Communist aggression to free the peoples of Asia from the Red peril and assure peace in the Far East…Our struggle aims to find peace in new order and in a great and just spirit…New and strong foundations are being laid for world peace and the welfare of humanity.” —Matsuzo Nagai, Japanese Minister of Transport, November 25, 1936, in a message to Joseph Goebbels
“It is not necessary to bury the truth. It is sufficient merely to delay it until nobody cares.” — Napoleon Bonaparte
“Altruism is a great evil…while selfishness is a virtue.” — Ayn Rand, atheist author of Atlas Shrugged, Fountainhead and The Virtue of Selfishness. Rand is the hero of the American Libertarian Party, Tea Party, and many members in the Republican Party, as well as several ex-presidential candidates such as David H. Koch, Bob Barr, ex-US House member Ron Paul, current Senator Rand Paul, and recent GOP Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
“The individual is handicapped by coming face to face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists.” — J. Edgar Hoover, former head of the FBI and probable co-conspirator in the JFK and MLK assassinations, as well as other acts of extra-judicial violence.
“The Plan is for the United States to rule the world. The overt theme is unilateralism, but it is ultimately a story of domination. It calls for the United States to maintain its overwhelming superiority and prevent new rivals from rising up to challenge it on the world stage. It calls for dominion over friends and enemies alike. It says not that the United States must be more powerful, or most powerful, but that it must be absolutely powerful.” — Dick Cheney, Vice-President during both George W. Bush administrations – West Point lecture, June 2002
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I have lived through the authoritarian-lite, law and order, pro-militarist, pro-corporate administrations of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and now Donald Trump, I have been acutely aware of the existence of characteristics of classical fascism because of my own reading of the history of fascism. I have a couple of shelves full of books about the history of militarist/fascist states like Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain, Fascist Japan. I also have biographies about characters like Adolf Hitler,Joseph Goebbels, Heinrich Himmler, Hermann Goering, Benito Mussolini and any number of studies of fascism.
The following four paragraphs come from one of the articles that I have written about fascism:
Fascism is a form of radical authoritarian nationalism that came to prominence in early 20th-century Europe. The first fascist movements emerged in Italy during World War I before it spread to other European countries. Violently opposed to liberalism, Marxism and anarchism, fascism is usually placed on the far-right within the traditional left-right spectrum.
Fascists regarded World War I as a revolution that brought massive changes to the nature of war, society, the state, and technology. The advent of total war and the total mass mobilization of society had broken down the distinction between civilians and combatants. All citizens were involved with the military in some manner during the war. The war had resulted in the rise of a powerful state capable of mobilizing millions of people to serve on the front lines and provide economic production and logistics to support them, as well as having unprecedented authority to intervene in the lives of citizens.
Fascists believe that liberal democracy is obsolete, and they regard the complete mobilization of society under a totalitarian one-party state as necessary to prepare a nation for armed conflict and to respond effectively to economic difficulties. Such a state is led by a strong leader—such as a dictator and a martial government composed of the members of the governing fascist party—to forge national unity and maintain a stable and orderly society.
Fascism rejects assertions that violence is automatically negative in nature, and views political violence, war and imperialism as means that can achieve national rejuvenation. Fascist-leaning movements urge large budgetary outlays for war-making and “defense”.
“All fascist movements are based on hyper-nationalism,” Stanley said.
He said that hyper-nationalism may be racially, ethnically, or religiously based, and that it is always patriarchal and always anti-gay. The end goal of fascist politics, he said, is for an authoritarian leader or party to seize power and maintain power for as long as possible by altering reality to fit their warped vision of the world.
Stanley identified ten characteristics that define fascist political movements.
“I observe all ten pillars in the United States today,” he said.
1. A mythic past. “Fascism always promises to return us to a mythic past” Stanley said. For Hitler, that meant returning to the past of the Holy Roman Empire, when Germans ruled over non-Germans; for Mussolini, that meant the Roman Empire itself.
This past is a place where the patriarchy rules supreme, where in-group men are warriors and in-group women are mothers and wives. This past is mythic, Stanley said: it is fake. It never really was, except in the words of fascist politicians.
2. Propaganda. Stanley said fascist politicians always revert to anti-corruption campaigns, even when they themselves are transparently corrupt. He said the Nazis were among the most corrupt regimes in history, plundering the wealth and property of European Jews, and yet still waged a merciless propaganda campaign that promised to rid the continent of corruption supposedly introduced by Jews.
Trump branded Clinton as “Crooked Hillary” and promised to “drain the swamp,” despite his long history of underhanded business and political dealings. Vladimir Putin, the same time that he is reviving mid-20th century Russian fascist thinker Ivan Ilyin, consistently lambasts the European Union as fascist.
3. Anti-intellectualism. “The enemy of fascism is equality,” Stanley said. He said universities are continually attacked by fascist politicians as hotbeds of cultural and political Marxism. He said these politicians uphold a mythical “common man” as always knowing what is right and deride women and racial and sexual minorities who seek basic equality as in fact seeking political and cultural domination.
4. Hierarchy. As opposed to liberal democracies, which are based on freedom and equality, fascism enshrines a dominant group’s traditions as the unequivocal rule.
5. Victimhood. Throughout fascist politics, the dominant group always portrays itself as victims. Stanley said the Nazis said they were the victims of the minority Jews. He said that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán held an international conference on the persecution of Jews in October 2017, during which he declared that Christians are the most persecuted group in the world.
6. Unreality. Fascist politicians rely on conspiracy theories instead of facts to justify their calls for power. “When ‘Birtherism’ came,” Stanley said, “everyone should have been terrified.”
7. Law and order. The fascist politician promises a regime of law and order not to punish actual criminals, but to criminalize “out groups” like racial, ethnic, religious and sexual minorities. “Right now,” Stanley said, “we’re seeing criminality being written into immigration status” in the United States. He said fascist politicians thrive on launching purportedly specific attacks against certain segments of a population, like “criminal” immigrants or Jews, and then broadening that definition to include the entire group.
8. Sexual anxiety. Stanley said the fascist politician always foments panic around the threat of rape perpetrated by out-group men against in-group women. “The particular threat is rape,” he said, “and then you create fear among people by talking about rape, and then you try to attack people’s diminished sense of traditional manlihood by fomenting fear about sexuality.”
9. Sodom and Gomorrah. Fascist politicians always locate virtue in the countryside and in small towns, and never in cities with their mixtures of people, races, “decadence” and permissiveness.
10. Arbeit macht frei. (“Work Makes You Free”) Fascist politicians identify out groups as lazy, attack welfare systems and labor organizers, and promote the idea that the group on top is hard working, the groups on the bottom are lazy and drains on the state and should be forced to work, ideally for free.
Here is a 5-minute version (Great Summary with video clips):
Here is a 12-minute interview (no video clips) with Thom Hartmann:
And here is the October 11, 2018 DemocracyNow! interview with Dr Stanley:
Fascism Anyone?
By Laurence W. Britt
The following article is from the Spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry Magazine, volume 22 Number 2, Page 20
Free Inquiry readers may pause to read the “Affirmations of Humanism: A Statement of Principles” on the inside cover of the magazine. To a secular humanist, these principles seem so logical, so right, so crucial. Yet, there is one archetypal political philosophy that is anathema to almost all of these principles. It is fascism. And fascism’s principles are wafting in the air today, surreptitiously masquerading as something else, challenging
everything we stand for. The cliché that people and nations learn from history is not only overused, but also overestimated; often we fail to learn from history or draw the wrong conclusions. Sadly, historical amnesia is the norm.
We are two-and-a-half generations removed from the horrors of Nazi Germany, although constant reminders jog the consciousness. German and Italian fascism form the historical models that define this twisted political worldview. Although they no longer exist, this worldview and the characteristics of these models have been imitated by proto-fascist regimes at various times in the twentieth century. Both the original German and Italian models and the later proto-fascist regimes show remarkably similar characteristics. Although many scholars question any direct connection among these regimes, few can dispute their visual similarities.
Beyond the visual, even a cursory study of these fascist and proto-fascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi. This, of course, is not a revelation to the informed political observer, but it is sometimes useful in the interests of perspective to restate obvious facts and in so doing shed needed light on current circumstances.
For the purpose of this perspective, I will consider the following regimes: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Papadopoulos’s Greece, Pinochet’s Chile, and Suharto’s Indonesia. To be sure, they constitute a mixed bag of national identities, cultures, developmental levels, and history. But they all followed the fascist or
proto-fascist model in obtaining, expanding, and maintaining power. Further, all these regimes have been overthrown, so a more or less complete picture of their basic characteristics and abuses is possible.
Analysis of these seven regimes reveals fourteen common threads that link them in recognizable patterns of national behavior and abuse of power. These basic characteristics are more prevalent and intense in some regimes than in others, but they all share at least some level of similarity.
1. Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism. From the prominent displays of flags and bunting to the ubiquitous lapel pins, the fervor to show patriotic nationalism, both on the part of the regime itself and of citizens caught up in its frenzy, was always obvious. Catchy slogans, pride in the military, and demands for unity were common themes in expressing this nationalism. It was usually coupled with a suspicion of things foreign that often bordered on xenophobia.
2. Disdain for the importance of human rights. The regimes themselves viewed human rights as of little value and a hindrance to realizing the objectives of the ruling elite. Through clever use of propaganda, the population was brought to accept these human rights abuses by marginalizing, even demonizing, those being targeted. When abuse was egregious, the tactic was to use secrecy, denial, and disinformation.
3. Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause. The most significant common thread among these regimes was the use of scapegoating as a means to divert the people’s attention from other problems, to shift blame for failures, and to channel frustration in controlled directions. The methods of choice—relentless propaganda and disinformation—were usually effective. Often the regimes would incite “spontaneous” acts against the target scapegoats, usually communists, socialists, liberals, Jews, ethnic
and racial minorities, traditional national enemies, members of other religions, secularists, homosexuals, and “terrorists.” Active opponents of these regimes were inevitably labeled as terrorists and dealt with accordingly.
4. The supremacy of the military/avid militarism. Ruling elites always identified closely with the military and the industrial infrastructure that supported it. A disproportionate share of national resources was allocated to the military, even when domestic needs were acute. The military was seen as an expression of nationalism, and was used whenever possible to assert national goals, intimidate other nations, and increase the power and prestige of the ruling elite.
5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses.
6. A controlled mass media. Under some of the regimes, the mass media were under strict direct control and could be relied upon never to stray from the party line. Other regimes exercised more subtle power to ensure media orthodoxy. Methods included the control of licensing and access to resources, economic pressure, appeals to patriotism, and implied threats. The leaders of the mass media were often politically compatible with the power elite. The result was usually success in keeping the general public unaware of the regimes’ excesses.
7. Obsession with national security. Inevitably, a national security apparatus was under direct control of the ruling elite. It was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints. Its actions were justified under the rubric of protecting “national security,” and questioning its activities was portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.
8. Religion and ruling elite tied together. Unlike communist regimes, the fascist and proto-fascist regimes were never proclaimed as godless by their opponents. In fact, most of the regimes attached themselves to the predominant religion of the country and chose to portray themselves as militant defenders of that religion. The fact that the ruling elite’s
behavior was incompatible with the precepts of the religion was generally swept under the rug. Propaganda kept up the illusion that the ruling elites were defenders of the faith and opponents of the “godless.” A perception was manufactured that opposing the power elite was tantamount to an attack on religion.
9. Power of corporations protected. Although the personal life of ordinary citizens was under strict control, the ability of large corporations to operate in relative freedom was not compromised. The ruling elite saw the corporate structure as a way to not only ensure military production (in developed states), but also as an additional means of social control. Members of the economic elite were often pampered by the political elite to
ensure a continued mutuality of interests, especially in the repression of “have-not” citizens.
10. Power of labor suppressed or eliminated. Since organized labor was seen as the one power center that could challenge the political hegemony of the ruling elite and its corporate allies, it was inevitably crushed or made powerless. The poor formed an underclass, viewed with suspicion or outright contempt. Under some regimes, being poor was considered akin to a vice.
11. Disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts. Intellectuals and the inherent freedom of ideas and expression associated with them were anathema to these regimes. Intellectual and academic freedom were considered subversive to national security and the patriotic ideal. Universities were tightly controlled; politically unreliable faculty harassed or eliminated. Unorthodox ideas or expressions of dissent were strongly attacked, silenced, or crushed. To these regimes, art and literature should serve the national interest or they had no right to exist.
12. Obsession with crime and punishment. Most of these regimes maintained Draconian systems of criminal justice with huge prison populations. The police were often glorified and had almost unchecked power, leading to rampant abuse. “Normal” and political crime were often merged into trumped-up criminal charges and sometimes used against political opponents of the regime. Fear, and hatred, of criminals or “traitors” was often promoted among the population as an excuse for more police power.
13. Rampant cronyism and corruption. Those in business circles and close to the power elite often used their position to enrich themselves. This corruption worked both ways; the power elite would receive financial gifts and property from the economic elite, who in turn would gain the benefit of government favoritism. Members of the power elite were in a position to obtain vast wealth from other sources as well: for example, by stealing national resources. With the national security apparatus under control and the media muzzled, this corruption was largely unconstrained and not well understood by the general population.
14. Fraudulent elections. Elections in the form of plebiscites or public opinion polls were usually bogus. When actual elections with candidates were held, they would usually be perverted by the power elite to get the desired result. Common methods included maintaining control of the election machinery, intimidating and disenfranchising opposition voters, destroying or disallowing legal votes, and, as a last resort, turning to a judiciary beholden to the power elite.
Does any of this ring alarm bells? Of course not. After all, this is America, officially a democracy with the rule of law, a constitution, a free press, honest elections, and a well-informed public constantly being put on guard against evils. Historical comparisons like these are just exercises in verbal gymnastics. Maybe, maybe not.
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Kershaw, Ian. Hitler (two volumes). New York: Norton, 1999.
Laqueur, Walter. Fascism, Past, Present, and Future. New York: Oxford, 1996.
Papandreau, Andreas. Democracy at Gunpoint. New York: Penguin Books, 1971.
Phillips, Peter. Censored 2001: 25 Years of Censored News. New York: Seven Stories. 2001.
Sharp, M.E. Indonesia Beyond Suharto. Armonk, 1999.
Verdugo, Patricia. Chile, Pinochet, and the Caravan of Death. Coral Gables, Florida: North-South Center Press, 2001.
Yglesias, Jose. The Franco Years. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977.
Laurence Britt’s novel June 2004 depicts a future America dominated by right-wing extremists.
Dr. Lawrence Britt, a writer on subjects related to political, historical and economic issues, wrote the article above about fascism. It appeared in Free Inquiry magazine, a journal of humanist thought. Dr. Britt studied the fascist regimes of Hitler (Germany), Mussolini (Italy), Franco (Spain), Suharto (Indonesia), and Pinochet (Chile). He found the regimes all had 14 things in common, and he calls these the identifying characteristics of fascism.
Dr. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice he has been writing his weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader, northeast Minnesota’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging and Big Vaccine’s over-vaccination agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of all life on earth.Many of his columns have been archived at a number of websites, including
The fate of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman hangs in the balance. The common perception is that everything depends on which way President Donald Trump moves – go by his own preference to bury the scandal over Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance or give in to the rising demand that Saudi-American relations can no longer be business as usual. Trump’s mood swing suggests he is dithering.
Yet, it is Turkey – more precisely, President Recep Erdogan – who is the real arbiter. The Turks have let it be known that they are in possession of materials that expose Khashoggi’s murder. But the official position is that the onus is on the Saudis to prove that Khashoggi left their consulate in Istanbul alive.
The Saudis responded with alacrity by mooting the proposal to form “a joint action team” with “brotherly” Turkey. Turkey agreed and a Saudi team arrived in Turkey on Friday. But Riyadh and Ankara are apparently at odds. Meanwhile, reports appeared that Turkish intelligence has recordings of Khashoggi’s purported killing. Ankara has not disclaimed these reports.
Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Saturday,
“There is consensus on forming a joint working group with Saudi Arabia… It is natural for everyone to show awareness of the case and want it to be clarified.”
However, he stressed that Turkey’s own investigation will proceed independently and it is “getting deeper”. He regretted that Saudi cooperation was not optimal. Equally, the spokesman of the ruling Justice and Development Party Omer Celik warned ominously against any “cover-up”:
“The president is following the matter closely. Turkey’s independent investigation is ongoing. It is a very critical matter. There are speculative claims that a respectful journalist was killed. Such an action is an attack on all the values of the democratic world. It involves the Republic of Turkey directly. This individual went missing on our soil. He entered the premises and did not re-emerge. It will eventually become clear how he went missing, what happened and who organized it. The disappearance of Khashoggi cannot be covered up. “
Cavusoglu, who is on a visit to London, also hinted he might raise the issue with his British counterpart. Significantly, Turkish analysts and circles close to the ruling party have taken an openly hostile stance vis-à-vis Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman (MBS).
Their narrative harks back to the persistent Turkish allegation that MBS and the UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed have been the cats paw of the US and British and Israeli intelligence in the various hot spots in the Middle East – Syria, Iraq, Yemen, etc. – and even had a hand in the failed coup attempt against Erdogan two years ago.
According to this narrative, Istanbul was probably chosen as the venue of the ghastly incident, since Erdogan has been giving refuge to fugitives who oppose the two Gulf regimes – alluding to Khashoggi’s friendship with Erdogan and their shared affinity with the Muslim Brotherhood. Ibrahim Karagul, leading editor and a staunch supporter of Erdogan, wrote,
“Turkey must call Salman and Zayed to account… It must ask them to pay for the crimes they committed against our country… They think they can do anything with money and buy everyone… Our file is ready. We are going to hold them responsible not only for the Jamal Khashoggi incident, but for many things, including the July 15, 2016 coup attempt, financing terrorism against our country, arming the PKK and Daesh, the war they are carrying on against our country in northern Syria, and their cooperation in multinational attacks, including the assassination attempt on our president.”
The fact that the Saudi investigation team is headed by Prince Khalid Al Faisal, the third son of King Faisal (and a senior member of the al Turki clan), underscores that the House of Saud senses an existential moment. To be sure, Erdogan is playing his cards shrewdly. He is keeping an uncharacteristically low profile himself and speaking only the bare minimum that is necessary, but has let media leaks continue in a steady stream that has inflamed the western opinion against the Saudi regime.
Trump is having a hard time coping with Erdogan’s “maximum pressure”. On Saturday, he resorted to the “Art of the Deal”. On the sidelines of the release of the American pastor by a Turkish judge on October 12, Trump laid it on a bit thick:
“This is a tremendous step towards having the kind of relationship (with Turkey) which can be a great relationship. We feel much differently about Turkey today than we did yesterday. And I think we have a chance of really becoming much closer to Turkey and maybe having a very, very good relationship.”
Making nice with Erdogan becomes important. Trump has reason to worry that his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s close ties to the crown princes of Saudi Arabia and the UAE may come under scrutiny at some point during the investigation into the Khashoggi affair.
Indeed, many possibilities open in front of Erdogan. Quite obviously, it presents him with just the reason to re-engage with the Trump administration from a perspective of being on the right side of history. But the big question is, what is Erdogan’s agenda? To be sure, his “neo-Ottomanism” is on a roll, now that Saudi Arabia has painted itself into a corner.
Clearly, the US-backed alliance between Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel and Egypt to contain Iran does not make a new regional order. Erdogan will now assert Turkey’s leadership role in the Muslim Middle East. Importantly, he is known to champion the Muslim Brotherhood as the charioteer of a New Middle East.
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M. K. Bhadrakumar is former career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service. Devoted much of his 3-decade long career to the Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran desks in the Ministry of External Affairs and in assignments on the territory of the former Soviet Union. After leaving the diplomatic service, took to writing and contribute to The Asia Times, The Hindu and Deccan Herald. Lives in New Delhi.
In recent weeks the White House has embraced the contemporary version of the world’s most murderous regimes.President Trump has embraced the Saudi Arabian “Prince of Death” Mohammad bin Salman who has graduated from chopping hands and heads in public plazas to dismembering bodies in overseas consulates – the case of Jamal Khashoggi.
The White House warmly greeted the electoral success of Brazilian Presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, ardent champion of torturers, military dictators, death squads and free marketers.
President Trump grovels, grunts and glories before Israel, as his spiritual guide Benjamin Netanyahu celebrates the Sabbath with the weekly murders and maiming of hundreds of unarmed Palestinians, especially youngsters.
These are President Trump’s ‘natural allies’.They share his values and interests while each retains their particular method of disposing of the cadavers of adversaries and dissenters.
We will proceed to discuss the larger political-economic context in which the trio of monsters operate.We will analyze the benefits and advantages which lead President Trump to ignore and even praise, actions which violate America’s democratic values and sensibilities.
In conclusion, we will examine the consequences and risks which result from Trump’s embrace of the trio.
The Context for Trump’s Tripler Alliance
President Trump’s intimate ties with the world’s most unsavory regimes flows from several strategic interests.In the case of Saudi Arabia, it includes military bases; the financing of international mercenaries and terrorists; multi-billion-dollar arms sales; oil profits; and covert alliances with Israel against Iran, Syria and Yemen.
In order to secure these Saudi assets, the White House is more than willing to assume certain socio-political costs.
The US eagerly sells weapons and provides advisers to Saudi’s genocidal invasion, murder and starvation of millions of Yeminis.The White House alliance against Yemen has few monetary rewards or political advantages as well as negative propaganda value.
However, with few other client states in the region, Washington makes do with Prince Salman ‘the salami slicer’.
The US ignores Saudi financing of Islamic terrorists against US allies in Asia (the Philippines) and Afghanistan as well as rival thugs in Syria and Libya.
Alas when a pro-US collaborator like Washington Post journalist and US resident Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated, President Trump was forced to adopt the pretense of an investigationin orderto distance from the Riyadh mafia.He subsequently exonerated butcher boy bin Salman: he invented a flagrant lie-blaming ‘rogueelements’in charge of the interrogation,—read torture.
President Trump celebrated the electoral victory of Brazilian neo-liberal fascist Jair Bolsonaro because he checks all the right boxes:he promises to slash economic regulations and corporate taxes for multi-national corporations.He is an ardent ally of Washington’s economic war against Venezuela and Cuba.He promises to arm right-wing death squads and militarize the police.He pledges to be a loyal follower of US war policies abroad.
However, Bolsonaro cannot support Trump’s trade war especially against China which is the market for almost forty percent of Brazil’s agro-exports. This is especially the case since agro-business bosses are Bolsonaro’s principal economic and congressional supporters.
Given Washington’s limited influence in the rest of Latin America, Brazil’s neo-liberal fascist regime acts as Trump’s principal ally.
Israel is the White House’s mentor and chief of operations in the Middle East, as well as a strategic military ally .
Under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has seized and colonized most of the West Bank and militarily occupied the rest of Palestine; jailed and tortured tens of thousands of political dissidents; surrounded and starved over a million Gaza residents; imposed ethno-religious conditions for citizenship in Israel, denying basic rights for over 20% of the Arab residents of the self-styled ‘jewish state’.
Netanyahu has bombed hundreds of Syrian cities, towns, airports and bases in support of ISIS terrorists and Western mercenaries.Israel intervenes in US elections, buys Congressional votes and secures White House recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the jewish state.
Zionists in North America and Great Britain act as a ‘fifth column’ securing unanimous favorable mass media coverage of its apartheid policies.
Prime Minister Netanyahu secures unconditional US financial and political support and the most advanced weaponry.
In exchange Washington considers itselfprivileged to serve as foot solders for Israeli targeted wars in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Somalia . . . Israel collaborates with the US in defending Saudi Arabia , Egypt and Jordan.Netanyahu and his Zionist allies in the White House succeeded in reversing the nuclear agreement with Iran and imposing new and harsher economic sanctions.
Israel has its own agenda :it defies President Trump’s sanctions policies against Russia and its trade war with China.
Israel eagerly engages in the sales of arms and high-tech innovations to Beijing.
Beyond the Criminal Trio
The Trump regime’s alliance with Saudi Arabia, Israel and Brazil is not despite but because of their criminal behavior.The three states have a demonstrated record of full compliance and active engagement in every ongoing US war.
Bolsonaro, Netanyahu and bin Salman serve as role models for other national leaders allied with Washington’s quest for world domination.
The problem is that the trio is insufficient in bolstering Washington’s drive to “Make the Empire Strong”.As pointed earlier, the trio are not completely in compliance with Trump’s trade wars; Saudi works with Russia in fixing oil prices.Israel and Brazil cuts deals with Beijing.
Clearly Washington pursues other allies and clients.
In Asia, the White House targets China by promoting ethnic separatism.It encourages Uighurs to split from China by encouraging Islamic terrorism and linguistic propaganda.President Trump backs Taiwan via military sales and diplomatic agreements.Washington intervenes in Hong Kong by promoting pro-separatistpoliticians and media propaganda backing ‘independence’.
Washington has launched a strategy of military encirclement and a tradewar against China .The White House rounded-up Japan, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and South Korea to provide military bases which target China.Nevertheless, up to the present the US has no allies in its trade war.All of Trump’s so-called Asian‘allies’ defy his economic sanctions policies.
The countries depend on and pursue trade with and investments from China.While all pay diplomatic lip service and provide military bases, all defer on the crucial issues of joining US military exercises off China’s coast andboycotting Beijing.
US efforts to sanction Russia into submission is offset by ongoing oil and gas agreements between Russia , Germany and other EU countries.US traditional bootlickers like Britain and Poland carry little political weight.
More important US sanctionspolicy has led to a long-term, large-scale strategic economic and military alliance between Moscow and Beijing.
Moreover Trump’salliance with the ‘torture trio’ has provoked domestic divisions.Saudi Arabia’s murder of a US resident-journalist has provoked business boycotts and Congressional calls for reprisal.Brazil’s fascism has evoked liberal criticism of Trump’s eulogy of Brazilia’s death squad democracy.
President Trump’s domestic electoral opposition has successfully mobilized the mass media, which could facilitate a congressional majority and an effective mass opposition to his Pluto-populist (populist in rhetoric, plutocrat in practice) version of empire building.
Conclusion
The US empire building project is built on bluster, bombs and trade wars.Moreover, its closest and most criminal allies and clients cannot always be relied upon.Even the stock market fiesta is coming to a close.Moreover, the time of successful sanctions is passing.The wild-eyed UN rants are evoking laughter and embarrassment.
The economy is heading into crises and not only became of rising interest rates.Tax cuts are one shot deals – profits are taken and pocketed.
President Trump in retreat will discover that there are no permanent allies only permanent interests.
Today the White House stands alone without allies who will share and defend his unipolar empire.The mass of humanity requires a break with the policies of wars and sanctions.To rebuild America will require the construction, from the ground-up, of a powerful popular movement not beholden to Wall Street or war industries.A first step is to break with both parties at home and the triple alliance abroad.
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Award winning author Prof. James Petras is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
I maintain that regardless of the political, strategic, demographic, and regional vicissitudes, the two-state option remains the only viably sustainable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; the one-state solution is simply a non-starter. I also maintain that successive Israeli governments, irrespective of their political leanings, perpetuated the occupation. They created what is effectively an apartheid state in the West Bank by applying different laws, different roads to travel, and a different security apparatus, all designed to suppress the Palestinians.
The Israeli public is wrapped up with the illusion that the status quo can be maintained for another 50 years, or even indefinitely. The public has become complacent to the point where the conflict with the Palestinians is no longer an issue that warrants any special attention.
Right-wing Israeli governments in particular have portrayed the Palestinians as the perpetual enemy committed to the destruction of the country, and there is not much that can be done other than to keep them at bay by force.
Netanyahu changes his narrative to suit the political moment, but he cannot change the facts on the ground. The harsh policies Israel is applying to the occupied territories designed to force the Palestinians to give up in despair and leave has failed. In the process, Israel precipitated the rise of a new generation of Palestinian extremists who not only outnumber those who have left by far, but, unlike their elders, are determined to resist the occupation at all costs.
All the talks about the creation of a confederation between the Palestinians, Jordan, and potentially Israel will go absolutely nowhere. The Palestinians must have their own state first, and join such a confederation as an equal and independent partner if and when they desire.
More than any other administration, Trump’s has enabled Netanyahu to act as he pleases against the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank with impunity. Trump is providing Netanyahu with the political support that allows him to maintain his addiction to the occupation.
Given that only the US can persuade, pressure, or coerce Israel to agree to a two-state solution, the US must bear the moral responsibility to act to save Israel from the slippery slope that endangers its very survival while pushing the Palestinians to a point of no return. A wake-up call is overdue for both Israel and the US.
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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected]Web: www.alonben-meir.com
The cultivation of opium poppy in Afghanistan—a nation under the military control of US and NATO forces for more than twelve years—has risen to an all-time high, according to the 2013 Afghanistan Opium Survey released Wednesday by the United Nations.
According to the report, cultivation of poppy across the war-torn nation rose 36 per cent in 2013 and total opium production amounted to 5,500 tons, up by almost a half since 2012.
“This has never been witnessed before in the history of Afghanistan,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, the outgoing leader of the Afghanistan office of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, which produced the report.
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The U.S. military has allowed poppy cultivation to continue in order to appease farmers and government officials involved with the drug trade who might otherwise turn against the Afghan Karzai government in Kabul. Fueling both sides, in fact, the opium and heroin industry is both a product of the war and an essential source for continued conflict.
Public Intelligence has published a series of photographs showing American – and U.S.-trained Afghan – troops patrolling poppy fields in Afghanistan. Public Intelligence informs us that all of the photos are in the public domain, and not subject to copyright, and they assured me that I have every right to reproduce them.
We produce these photos and the accompanying descriptions from Public Intelligence without further comment.
U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Noel Rodriguez, a team leader with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 6, communicates with an adjacent squad while on patrol in Sangin, Helmand province, Afghanistan, May 1, 2012. Marines patrolled to provide security in the area and interact with the local populace.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will see each other during an upcoming summit, which will be their first meeting since last month’s tragedy.
The Israeli premier said that he spoke to President Putin on 7 October, which just so happened to be the Russian leader’s birthday, and announced that they’ll meet face-to-face sometime soon. There’ll surely be a lot for them to talk about when they do, though, since Moscow has already gone through with its promised shipment of S-300s to Syria that Tel Aviv warned earlier this year might prompt it to destroy these defensive anti-air systems if Damascus uses them against its aircraft whenever they engage on bombing missions in the Arab Republic. The Russian Defense Ministry acknowledged that Israel’s previous claim of carrying out over 200 bombings there in the past 18 months alone was true but remarked shortly after last month’s tragedy that they only informed Moscow in advance through the so-called “deconfliction mechanism” created just prior to Russia’s 2015 anti-terrorist intervention in only around 10% of these total attacks.
That will probably change now that the S-300s are in Syria, though that development in and of itself doesn’t exactly mean what many people might think that it does either. The Russian military is still in possession of these systems and training their Syrian counterparts over a three-month period on how to use them, after which it’s almost been left deliberately ambiguous whether they’ll be fully transferred to their host’s control or not. Russian spokespeople have said on numerous occasions that the S-300s are being shipped to Syria strictly to ensure the safety of their troops there, which leaves open the conceivable possibility that a so-called “compromise” might be reached between Russia and Israel to have Moscow retain control over these systems instead of giving Damascus full and independent control over them, which might further an incipient rapprochement between Russia and Israel and prevent the regional situation from becoming more unpredictable.
Israel has made it clear that it will not stop attacking IRGC and Hezbollah positions in Syria that it believes pose a threat to its national security, while Syria will probably defend itself with the S-300s if it does, potentially sparking a larger war despite this being its sovereign right. Understanding this dynamic, reports have recently surfaced that Russia is trying to mediate between Iran and Israel in Syria in order to prevent Tel Aviv from partaking in any more strikes in the first place, which might be why President Putin said earlier this month that Moscow is “pursuing a goal that there would be no foreign forces of third states in Syria at all” after the end of the war. Ideally, Russia will try to facilitate a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” between the two regional adversaries, which could be part of what President Putin discusses with Netanyahu during their forthcoming summit.
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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.
Facebook purged more than 800 accounts last week, continuing its scorched-earth campaign of eradicating dissent as Americans prepare to go to the polls. The social media platform is nicely settling into its role as official censor, working hand in glove with the imperialist Atlantic Council to silence all popular voices to the left and right of neoliberal orthodoxy. As the boundaries of acceptable political discourse narrow online, Big Tech has been drafted to do Big Brother’s dirty work – the methodical dismantling of First Amendment protections behind the smokescreen of private enterprise.
On Thursday, the social media platform issued a press release explaining that the offending pages were engaged in “coordinated inauthentic behavior” – self-promoting with fake accounts and circular links, a practice common to many news pages on Facebook – and even admitted that such behavior was “often indistinguishable from legitimate political debate.” There was no explanation of how they distinguished the behavior of, say, a progressive antiwar blog from a Washington Post columnist, or why they would censor the former and not the latter.
Establishment media outlets like the New York Times eagerly parroted the press release, dismissing the purge victims as dishonest spammers preying on impressionable users, even opining that there was something awfully Russian about the whole business, as if the Kremlin had invented clickbait.
But many of the deleted pages were genuine alt-media sites with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers – from AntiMedia and Free Thought Project on the Left to Nation in Distress and RightWingNews on the Right. Popular pages dedicated to exposing the horrors of the American police state like Cop Block and Police the Police also got the boot. When they took to Twitter to protest, many were removed from there as well – AntiMedia and Free Thought Project had their Twitter accounts suspended within hours of the Facebook purge, as did AntiMedia publisher Carey Weidler.
One Twitter user received a followup message thanking them for a report against AntiMedia they did not make, indicating there might be more going on here than meets the eye. The message is especially intriguing given recent admissions from Facebook that at least 90 million accounts may have been hacked. If certain entities are spoofing abuse reports in order to have pages deplatformed whose politics they disagree with – or actually hacking third parties in order to use their accounts to report those pages – users need to know (I have personally heard from a few others who received these messages – if this has happened to you please send me your story, with screenshots if possible).
I just got a notification that my “report” of @antimedia was successful, however, not only do I not recall reporting it, I don’t know of it at all – they aren’t on my block list, where anyone I’ve reported ends up – should I be CONcerned? pic.twitter.com/HDhOUyGDmD
Facebook’s press release states that “people will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.” Facebook has proven since the very early days that they are anything but trustworthy – from Mark Zuckerberg’s eager collaboration with the NSA’s PRISM program to the partnership with the pro-NATO Atlantic Council to the platform’s ultimate admission that basically everyone’s data has been compromised at this point. Anyone who “shares” on Facebook at this point is deliberately ignoring reams of proof that the platform is not “a place for friends.”
While Facebook has always been in the pocket of the security state, its alliance with the Atlantic Council earlier this year ushered in an Orwellian new era. A press release gushed that the think tank, which boasts such esteemed warmongers as Henry Kissinger,Brent Scowcroft, and Condoleezza Rice on its Board, would serve as the “eyes and ears” of Facebook so the platform could play a “positive role” in ensuring democracy was practiced correctly in the future. Since then, its news feed has been cleansed of actual news and political writers have seen their audience numbers plummet as their posts are hidden for running afoul of proprietary algorithms.
In August, hundreds more accounts got the axe after cybersecurity firm FireEye linked them (very tenuously, in some cases) to Iran and Russia. The smoking gun? “Coordinated inauthentic behavior” geared toward “shaping a message favorable to Iran’s national interests.” Anti-war activists were put on notice. One need only post “anti-Saudi, anti-Israeli, and pro-Palestinian themes” to have one’s Facebook account – which Zuckerberg wants to see become an internet drivers’ license – yanked for failure to toe the line.
As Americans, denial is our national pastime, and plenty of Facebook users will remain on the platform until they themselves are caught in the wrongthink dragnet. The use of “spam” as the rationale for removing these pages is no accident – like “hate speech,” the term inspires a visceral negative reaction while lacking a definite meaning.
Spammers are less than human – often automated bots that seem to exist just to irritate us. We do not care what happens to spammers, any more than we care what happens to the “haters” we hear about in the news but have never met. The mainstream media encourages this mentality by smearing the deplatformed users as the equivalent of 2016’s Russian trolls – worse, because they’re essentially betraying their government by promoting wrongthink in their fellow Americans.
It doesn’t take a genius to understand why the media establishment might be cheering on and enabling Big Tech’s censorship of alternative voices. As the election approaches, the establishment is panicking because they have been unable to fully regain control of the discourse.
Having long since jettisoned fact-checking and journalistic integrity in order to more effectively fearmonger, mainstream media lacks any concrete advantage over the competition, and more people than ever are turning to independent media for their news. As a result, the establishment has lost every single pitched information battle since the election. Kavanaugh’s confirmation? The media wanted to see him strung up by the balls without so much as an indictment, let alone a trial, even though as a Bush minion he was effectively one of theirs, but he’s now ensconced in the Supreme Court. The Helsinki summit? The media shrieked for a solid week that Trump had sold the nation out to Putin for a football and a pat on the head; missing evolutionary link John Brennan all but called for a military coup, but nothing happened. Both media events revealed just how impotent they have become regarding their ability to change the facts on the ground.
This is not to say they have no influence, however. The nation remains crippled by the military-industrial leeches sucking it dry through multiple wars, many undeclared. The media marches in lockstep cheering on every increase in military spending, every missile dropped on a Yemeni wedding party or Syrian child. Americans have become hyper-partisan even in our personal lives, a self-perpetuating feedback loop the media set off in 2016 with a dozen “Boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse like Trump? Dump that scumbag!” articles, no doubt due for a revival with thoughtful meditations on how we should avoid family at Thanksgiving if they voted the wrong way a few weeks before. The establishment media and Big Tech are collaborating to foster this ugly with-us-or-against-us climate, forcing us to choose between a “blue wave” or “red wave” when both are repulsive tides of sewage, reassuring us all will be well if we just hold our noses and vote the party line.
Only independent media permits sanity and reality to intrude on the delusional fantasy fed us by the ruling class. Dismissing the victims of the latest Facebook purge as “spammers” is the cowardly act of a dying species. The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the hagiographers of hegemony must join the rest of the dinosaurs in history’s tarpits.
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Helen Buyniskiis a journalist and photographer based in New York City. She covers politics, sociology, and other anthropological/cultural phenomena. Helen has a BA in Journalism from New School University and also studied at Columbia University and New York University. Find more of her work at http://www.helenofdestroy.com and http://medium.com/@helen.buyniski. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
An extremely noteworthy and negative event took place in early October, largely unreported by the corporate-controlled media: in a coordinated purge, Facebook and Twitter deactivated the accounts of hundreds of independent media pages, some of them with hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers, just a few weeks prior to a major election.
Articles describing this coordinated purge of accounts can be found here, here, and here. Lee Camp and Eleanor Goldfield’s overly profanity-laden but still substantive discussion of this important topic can be heard (or downloaded) here.
The fact that the personal Twitter accounts of some of the individuals associated with the pages that were purged from Facebook were simultaneously suspended for no specific reason (such as the Twitter account of Anti-Media editor Carey Wedler, discussed here) is a particularly ominous development and demonstrates that last week’s deletion of accounts was coordinated across two major platforms for publication and political expression.
One standard response to this outrageous action by Facebook and Twitter (and to similar coordinated censorship involving Google and its YouTube platform in previous months) is that “these are private companies, and they can do what they want.”
This opinion is so widespread that it is raised as a possible counter-argument by both Carey Wedler in her video linked above and in the podcast by Lee Camp and Eleanor Goldfield, although in both cases they argue that the “private companies can do whatever they want” assertion is invalid.
Carey, Lee and Eleanor are correct: the argument that private companies such as Facebook and Twitter can do whatever they want is invalid, although the counter-arguments offered in the video and podcast linked above are somewhat tentative.
It should be blatantly obvious that this coordinated act of political censorship is morally reprehensible and in fact patently illegal — notwithstanding the fact that both Facebook and Twitter are private corporations.
However, many in the “alternative” community are somewhat conflicted on this issue, because of the widespread adoption of the seductive but badly mistaken ideology of libertarianism, which believes there is little that cannot and should not be privatized, and rejects the idea that the government of the people should act as a counterbalance against the privatization of that which properly belongs to the public itself. As Professor Michael Hudson says in this regard, “Libertarianism thus serves as a handmaiden to oligarchy as opposed to democracy” (see full quotation on page 142 of his essential text, J is for Junk Economics, which is quoted in previous posts such as this one and this one).
The solution to the dilemma is to realize that the airwaves (or, more precisely, the electromagnetic spectrum) are part of the public domain: they are the gifts of the gods — or, if you prefer, the gifts of Nature — to all the people, not to a privileged few. Professor Hudson, who is deeply versed in the history of economic thought and in the counterattack that was launched by the proponents of “junk economics” against classical economics beginning at the end of the nineteenth century and on through the twentieth century, gets to the heart of this issue in a lengthy but extremely thought-provoking discussion that was recorded in 2004 with Standard Schaefer of Counterpunch, entitled “How Privatization Sterilizes Culture.”
Note that this interview was recorded in 2004, the very year that Facebook was initially launched and long before Facebook was the media giant that it has since grown to become. Indeed, Facebook was not even opened up to the general public until 2006 — and the very first generation of the iPhone (which would radically transform internet use and the power of social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter) was not even launched until 2007. Twitter was not created until 2006 either.
In that 2004 interview, Professor Hudson declares that “the air waves are a natural monopoly” and that “like public land, water and the air itself, these frequencies are in the public domain.”
The government, which in a democracy or a democratic republic should represent the people, has a vested interest in preserving the public domain for the use of all of the people. However, as Professor Hudson explains in that interview, the government failed to perform that duty during the first half of the twentieth century, and auctioned off the spectrum (the “airwaves”) at fire-sale prices to be privatized, primarily to those with inside connections.
In Professor Hudson’s 2004 interview, linked above, he explains that this pattern of giving away the public domain mirrors the giveaway of public land to the railroads during the nineteenth century (and created the same kind of multi-billion dollar wealth for those who benefit from these giveaways). Professor Hudson notes that the electromagnetic spectrum is technically not “owned” by the tech and telecom companies who license that spectrum from the government, but that they are paying 1920s prices for that spectrum, and that the government does not charge taxes anywhere near appropriate to the value of the public resource (the spectrum) that they are essentially giving away.
The classical economists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Professor Hudson explains in J is for Junk Economics and in his other books, articles, and interviews, saw the gifts of nature (including “land, water, mineral rights, airwaves” etc, as he writes on page 60) as belonging to the public, and that these gifts were “best administered in society’s long-term interest via government or a community, not monopolized by rentiers as the ultimate takeover objective of finance capital,” which is exactly what has taken place in so many areas of society today under neoliberalism (accelerating, as Professor Hudson points out, after 1980).
Thus, the electromagnetic spectrum is a gift of Nature (or of the gods), just as are the air we breathe, the water in the streams and rivers and lakes, the growing power of the soil to produce crops and trees and lumber, the mineral wealth under the soil, the ports and harbors along the coastline, and indeed even the rays of sunlight which give life to every living creature and growing thing on our planet.
It does not belong to Facebook.
It does not belong to Google.
It does not belong to Twitter.
It does not belong to Amazon.
It is a gift of Nature (or the gods) to all the people of the land, just as are the rivers and mountains and forests and the air we breathe.
The government — which represents the people, according to the founding documents of this nation — does not just have a right to administer that electromagnetic spectrum in society’s long-term interest: it has an absolute duty to do so.
Facebook and Twitter, it should be pointed out, would not have much of a business without access to the electromagnetic spectrum over which their websites are broadcast — and they are using that electromagnetic spectrum at the pleasure of the people, whose will is supposed to be represented by the government of the people, in a democracy or democratic republic such as that envisioned by the founding documents of this country.
Obviously, the government can be captured by corrupt forces of cronyism who give away what rightfully belongs to the people (and which by rights cannot be given away to be privatized for the benefit of just a few) — and this exact form of cronyism and the pattern of giving away of the public domain to a few well-connected insiders has played itself out over and over in our nation’s history (including in the examples cited by Professor Hudson in the above-linked interview).
However, the solution for that cronyism is for the people to wake up, and exercise their right to demand that such illegal giveaways be reversed. And, in the case of corporations who are using the public platforms they have built on top of what is, in fact, the public domain to abridge the freedom of speech, and the press, and the right of the people “peaceably to assemble,” the people must demand that their representative government put an immediate stop to such illegal behavior by those companies — which in this case includes Facebook and Twitter.
The supreme law of the land, enshrined in the Constitution, acknowledges that the freedom of speech, and of the press, and of the right to peaceably assemble are inalienable rights. Those rights are now being threatened, as a result of the egregious and lamentable giveaway of the public domain (discussed at greater length in the Michael Hudson interview) and the abject failure of the elected government (over the course of the past 100 years) to properly administer that public domain in the best interest of society and the people at large.
Because of that privatization, and that abdication, companies such as Facebook and Twitter have in large part become the public forum for the expression of ideas and political opinions. They must not be allowed to abridge the right of the people to peaceably assemble, or to express their ideas in a peaceable manner in the public forum.
I would argue that this struggle goes all the way back to the destruction of the ancient wisdom that was given to all societies on earth in remote antiquity. The ancients understood that the gifts of flowing fresh water, or of the produce of the harvest, came from the invisible realm — the realm of the gods. The story in Greek myth of the giving of the olive tree to the people of Athens, by the goddess Athena, is a good example which illustrates this principle.
Staying with ancient Greece, they likewise understood the bounty of the harvest to be a gift from the goddess Demeter, and the riches of mineral wealth locked away beneath the soil to be given by the god of the Underworld. If we had to identify the god with whom the bounty of the electromagnetic spectrum would have been understood to be associated, it would most likely be Zeus himself (see image above).
The advent of literalist Christianity, and especially the series of events which led to its installation across the Roman Empire, led directly to the overturning of this understanding in the territories over which Rome exercised power — and eventually to centuries of feudalism, during which the gifts of the gods to all the people were usurped for a small, well-connected segment of the population. The classical economists, with their focus on taxing rentier privilege and natural monopolies, wanted to undo the oppressive structures that characterized the feudal system — and they were making significant progress in that direction throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, before the rentiers struck back.
But the cause of these rentiers and privatizers is ultimately doomed, because they do not have a leg to stand on. Their cause is not merely unjust — it goes against the law of the universe itself. That which properly belongs to the gods, and which is given by the gods to the people of the land, cannot ever really be sold-off, or given away. It does not belong to the privatizers, who cannot claim to own the rivers, lakes, forests, aquifers, oil reserves, fresh air, or electromagnetic spectrum, any more than they can claim to own the sun itself.
To claim otherwise is to go against the deathless gods themselves — and that path is always shown to be a path of folly and of ultimate destruction, in the timeless wisdom of the ancient myths, scriptures and sacred stories given to the ancestors of every man and woman on this planet.
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David W. Mathisen is the author of eight books about the connections of the world’s ancient myths to the stars. His website can be found at www.starmythworld.com.
I have just received confirmation from the Metropolitan Police Press Bureau that both the European Arrest Warrant and Interpol Red Notice remain in the names of Boshirov and Petrov, with the caveat that both are probably aliases. Nothing has been issued in the name of Chepiga or Mishkin.
As for Bellingcat’s “conclusive and definitive evidence”, Scotland Yard repeated to me this afternoon that their earlier statement on Bellingcat’s allegations remains in force: “we are not going to comment on speculation about their identities.”
It is now a near certainty that Boshirov and Petrov are indeed fake identities. If the two were real people, it is inconceivable that by now their identities would not have been fully established with details of their history, lives, family and milieu. I do not apologise for exercising all due caution, rather than enthusiasm, about a narrative promoted to increase international tension with Russia, but am now convinced Petrov and Boshirov were not who they claimed.
But that is not to say that the information provided by NATO Photoshoppers’R’Us (Ukraine Branch) on alternative identities is genuine, either. I maintain the same rational scepticism exhibited by Scotland Yard on this, and it is a shame that the mainstream media neither does that, nor fairly reflects Scotland Yard’s position in their reporting.
Still less do I accept the British government’s narrative of the novichok poisoning, which remains full of wild surmise and apparent contradiction. No doubt further evidence will gradually emerge. The most dreadful thing about the whole saga is the death of poor Dawn Sturgess, and the most singular fact at present is that Boshirov and Petrov are only wanted in relation to the “attack on the Skripals”. There is no allegation against them by Scotland Yard or the Crown Prosecution Service over the far more serious matter of the death of Sturgess. That is a fascinating fact, massively under-reported.
I remain of the view that the best way forward would be for Putin to negotiate conditions under which Boshirov and Petrov might voluntarily come to the UK for trial. The conditions which I would suggest Russia propose are these:
1) A fully fair and open trial before a jury.
2) The entire trial to be fully public. No closed sessions nor secret evidence and no reporting restrictions.
3) No restrictions on witnesses who may be called, including the Skripals, Pablo Miller, Christopher Steele and other former and current members of the security services.
4) No restrictions on disclosure – all relevant material held by government must be given to the defence.
I strongly suspect that, if a trial would bring to public light something of the extent of the convoluted spy games that were being played out in Salisbury, we would find the British Government’s pretended thirst for justice would suddenly slam into reverse.
Sadly, it currently seems highly improbable that either justice will be served or the full truth be known.
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The recent UN global warming conference under auspices of the deceptively-named International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded its meeting in South Korea discussing how to drastically limit global temperature rise. Mainstream media is predictably retailing various panic scenarios “predicting” catastrophic climate change because of man-made emissions of Greenhouse Gases, especially CO2, if drastic changes in our lifestyle are not urgently undertaken. There is only one thing wrong with all that. It’s based on fake science and corrupted climate modelers who have reaped by now billions in government research grants to buttress the arguments for radical change in our standard of living. We might casually ask “What’s the point?” The answer is not positive.
The South Korea meeting of the UN IPCC discussed measures needed, according to their computer models, to limit global temperature rise tobelow 1.5 Centigrade above levels of the pre-industrial era. One of the panel members and authors of the latest IPCC Special Report on Global Warming, Drew Shindell, at Duke University told the press that to meet the arbitrary 1.5 degree target will require world CO2 emissions to drop by a staggering 40% in the next 12 years. The IPCC calls for a draconian “zero net emissions” of CO2 by 2050. That would mean complete ban on gas or diesel engines for cars and trucks, no coal power plants, transformation of the world agriculture to burning food as biofuels. Shindell modestly put it, “These are huge, huge shifts.”
The new IPCC report, SR15, declares that global warming of 1.5°C will “probably“ bring species extinction, weather extremes and risks to food supply, health and economic growth. To avoid this the IPCC estimates required energy investment alone will be $2.4 trillion per year. Could this explain the interest of major global banks, especially in the City of London in pushing the Global Warming card?
This scenario assumes an even more incredible dimension as it is generated by fake science and doctored data by a tight-knit group of climate scientists internationally that have so polarized scientific discourse that they label fellow scientists who try to argue as not mere global warming skeptics, but rather as “Climate Change deniers.” What does that bit of neuro-linguistic programming suggest? Holocaust deniers? Talk about how to kill legitimate scientific debate, the essence of true science. Recently the head of the UN IPCC proclaimed, “The debate over the science of climate change is well and truly over.”
What the UN panel chose to ignore was the fact the debate was anything but “over.” The Global Warming Petition Project, signed by over 31,000 American scientists states,
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
‘Chicken Little’
The most interesting about the dire warnings of global catastrophe if dramatic changes to our living standards are not undertaken urgently, is that the dire warnings are always attempts to frighten based on future prediction. When the “tipping point” of so-called irreversibility is passed with no evident catastrophe, they invent a new future point.
In 1982 Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” He predicted lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.” In 1989 Noel Brown, of the UN Environmental Program (UNEP), said entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. James Hansen, a key figure in the doomsday scenarios declared at that time that 350 ppm of CO2 was the upper limit, “to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” Rajendra Pachauri, then the chief of the UN IPPC, declared that 2012 was the climate deadline by which it was imperative to act: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.” Today the measured level is 414.
As UK scientist Philip Stott notes,
“In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. …Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s…By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years…Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million. In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988)…”
Flawed Data
A central flaw to the computer models cited by the IPCC is the fact that they are purely theoretical models and not real. The hypothesis depends entirely on computer models generating scenarios of the future, with no empirical records that can verify either these models or their flawed prediction. As one scientific study concluded,
“The computer climate models upon which “human-caused globalwarming” is based have substantial uncertainties and are markedlyunreliable. This is not surprising, since the climate is a coupled, non-linear dynamical system. It is very complex.”
Coupled refers to the phenomenon that the oceans cause changes in the atmosphere and the atmosphere in turn affects the oceans. Both are complexly related to solar cycles. No single model predicting global warming or 2030 “tipping points” is able or even tries to integrate the most profound influence on Earth climate and weather, the activity of the sun and solar eruption cycles which determine ocean currents, jet stream activity, El ninos and our daily weather.
An Australian IT expert and independent researcher, John McLean, recently did a detailed analysis of the IPCC climate report. He notes that HadCRUT4 is the primary dataset used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to make its dramatic claims about “man-made global warming”, to justify its demands for trillions of dollars to be spent on “combating climate change.” But McLean points to egregious errors in the HadCRUT4 used by IPCC. He notes, “It’s very careless and amateur. About the standard of a first-year university student.” Among the errors, he cites places where temperature “averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, the temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia.” In another place he found that for the Caribbean island, St Kitts temperature was recorded at 0 degrees C for a whole month, on two occasions. TheHadCRUT4 dataset is a joint production of the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This was the group at East Anglia that was exposed several years ago for the notorious Climategate scandals of faking data and deleting embarrassing emails to hide it. Mainstream media promptly buried the story, turning attention instead on “who illegally hacked East Anglia emails.”
Astonishing enough when we do a little basic research, we find that the IPCC never carried out a true scientific inquiry into the possible cases of change in Earth climate. Manmade sources of change were arbitrarily asserted, and the game was on.
Malthusian Maurice Strong
Few are aware however of the political and even geopolitical origins of Global Warming theories. How did this come about? So-called Climate Change, aka Global Warming, is a neo-malthusian deindustrialization agenda originally developed by circles around the Rockefeller family in the early 1970’s to prevent rise of independent industrial rivals, much as Trump’s trade wars today. In my book, Myths, Lies and Oil Wars, I detail how the highly influential Rockefeller group also backed creation of the Club of Rome, Aspen Institute,Worldwatch Institute and MIT Limits to Growth report. A key early organizer of Rockefeller’s ‘zero growth’ agenda in the early 1970s was David Rockefeller’s longtime friend, a Canadian oilman named Maurice Strong. Strong was one of the early propagators of the scientifically unfounded theory that man-made emissions from transportation vehicles, coal plants and agriculture caused a dramatic and accelerating global temperature rise which threatens civilization, so-called Global Warming.
As chairman of the 1972 Earth Day UN Stockholm Conference, Strong promoted an agenda of population reduction and lowering of living standards around the world to “save the environment.” Some years later the same Strong restated his radical ecologist stance: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?” Co-founder of the Rockefeller-tied Club of Rome, Dr Alexander King admitted the fraud in his book, The First Global Revolution. He stated, “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill… All these dangers are caused by human intervention…The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.”
Please reread that, and let it sink in. Humanity, and not the 147 global banks and multinationals who de facto determine today’s environment, bear the responsibility.
Following the Earth Summit Maurice Strong was named Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and Chief Policy Advisor to Kofi Annan. He was the key architect of the 1997-2005 Kyoto Protocol that declared manmade Global Warming, according to “consensus,” was real and that it was “extremely likely” that man-made CO2 emissions have predominantly caused it. In 1988 Strong was key in creation of the UN IPCC and later the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio Earth Summit which he chaired, and which approved his globalist UN Agenda 21.
The UN IPCC and its Global Warming agenda is a political and not a scientific project. Their latest report is, like the previous ones, based on fake science and outright fraud. MIT Professor Richard S Lindzen in a recent speech criticized politicians and activists who claim“the science is settled,” and demand “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.” He noted that it was totally implausible for such a complex “multifactor system” as the climate to be summarized by just one variable, global mean temperature change, and primarily controlled by just a 1-2 per cent variance in the energy budget due to CO2. Lindzen described how “an implausible conjecture backed by false evidence, repeated incessantly, has become ‘knowledge,’ used to promote the overturn of industrial civilization.” Our world indeed needs a “staggering transformation,” but one that promotes health and stability of the human species instead.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from NEO.
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On October 15, a first deadline in the roadmap for implementation of the Idlib demilitarization agreement passed. According to this agreement, militant groups had to withdraw all their heavy weaponry and equipment from the declared 15-20km deep zone and halt any actions against Syrian government forces.
When Banksy’s Girl with Balloonwas shredded at Sotheby’s (a sort of art styled seppuku), it was subsequently, and all too quickly, transformed into Love is in the Bin. Technicians in the room did not seem too fussed by the occurrence, and diligently went about their business of retouching the new piece for the market amidst nervous laughter and much tittering.
After a string of suspicious incidents involving Russia’s venerable Soyuz rocket system, several prominent American newspapers have attempted to poison the last remaining area of significant cooperation between Russia and the United States.
Disaster. Crisis. Once oil-rich nation. This is the go-to rhetoric of the government of Canada, and now also, of the CBC which is nothing but a mouthpiece of the government when it comes to their so-called reporting about the country of Venezuela.
The US-led coalition used white phosphorus (WP) munitions while delivering air strikes against the Syrian province of Deir Ez-Zor on Oct. 13. The attack resulted in civilian casualties. Last month, WP munitions were also used by two US Air Force (USAF) F-15s in an attack on the town of Hajin in Deir-ez-Zor.
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Il piano fu preannunciato tre anni fa, durante l’amministrazione di Barack Obama, quando funzionari del Pentagono dichiararono che «di fronte all’aggressione russa, gli Stati uniti stanno considerando lo spiegamento in Europa di missili con base a terra» (v. il manifesto del 9 giugno 2015).
Ora, con l’amministrazione Trump, esso viene ufficialmente confermato. Nell’anno fiscale 2018 il Congresso degli Stati uniti ha autorizzato il finanziamento di «un programma di ricerca e sviluppo di un missile da crociera lanciato da terra da piattaforma mobile su strada».
È un missile a capacità nucleare con raggio intermedio (tra 500 e 5500 km), analogo ai 112 missili nucleari Cruise schierati dagli Usa a Comiso negli anni Ottanta. Essi vennero eliminati, insieme ai missili balistici Pershing 2 schierati dagli Usa in Germania e agli SS-20 sovietici schierati in Urss, dal Trattato sulle forze nucleari intermedie (Inf), stipulato nel 1987. Esso proibisce lo schieramento di missili con base a terra e gittata compresa tra 500 e 5500 km. Washington accusa ora Mosca di schierare missili di questa categoria e dichiara che, «se la Russia continua a violare il Trattato Inf, gli Stati uniti non saranno più vincolati da tale trattato», ossia saranno liberi di schierare in Europa missili nucleari a raggio intermedio con base a terra.
Viene però ignorato un fatto determinante: i missili russi (ammesso che siano a raggio intermedio) sono schierati in funzione difensiva in territorio russo, mentre quelli statunitensi a raggio intermedio sarebbero schierati in funzione offensiva in Europa a ridosso del territorio russo.
È come se la Russia schierasse in Messico missili nucleari puntati sugli Stati uniti. Poiché continua la escalation Usa/Nato, è sempre più probabile lo schieramento di tali missili in Europa. Intanto l’Ucraina ha testato agli inizi di febbraio un missile a raggio intermedio con base a terra, realizzato sicuramente con l’assistenza Usa.
I nuovi missili nucleari statunitensi – molto più precisi e veloci dei Cruise degli anni Ottanta – verrebbero schierati in Italia e probabilmente anche in paesi dell’Est, aggiungendosi alle bombe nucleari Usa B61-12 che arriveranno in Italia e altri paesi dal 2020.
In Italia, i nuovi Cruise sarebbero con tutta probabilità di nuovo posizionati in Sicilia, anche se non necessariamente a Comiso. Nell’isola vi sono due installazioni Usa di primaria importanza strategica. La stazione Muos di Niscemi, una delle quattro su scala mondiale (2 negli Usa, 1 in Australia e 1 in Sicilia) del sistema di comunicazioni satellitari che collega a un’unica rete di comando tutte le forze statunitensi, anche nucleari, in qualsiasi parte del mondo si trovino.
La Jtags, stazione di ricezione e trasmissione satellitare dello «scudo anti-missili» statunitense, che sta per dvenire operativa a Sigonella. È una delle cinque su scala mondiale (le altre si trovano negli Stati uniti, in Arabia Saudita, Corea del Sud e Giappone).
La stazione, che è trasportabile, serve non solo alla difesa anti-missile ma anche alle operazioni di attacco, condotte da basi avanzate come quelle in Italia. «Gli Stati uniti – spiega il Pentagono nel rapporto «Nuclear Posture Review 2018» – impegnano armi nucleari, dispiegate in basi avanzate in Europa, per la difesa della Nato. Queste forze nucleari costituiscono un essenziale legame politico e militare tra Europa e Nord America». Legandoci alla loro strategia non solo militarmente ma politicamente, gli Stati uniti trasformano sempre più il nostro paese in base avanzata delle loro armi nucleari puntate sulla Russia e, quindi, in bersaglio avanzato su cui sono puntate le armi nucleari russe.
A B61-12, a nova bomba nuclear USA que substitui a B-61, inserida em Itália e noutros países europeus, começará a ser produzida em menos de um ano. Anuncia oficialmente a Administração Nacional de Segurança Nuclear (NNSA). Informa que, concluído com sucesso a revisão do projecto final, este mês começam na Pantex Plant no Texas, as actividades de qualificação da produção, a qual será autorizada a ter início em Setembro de 2019.
Em Março de 2020, entrará em funções a primeira unidade de produção, ou seja, começará a produção em série de 500 bombas. A partir desse momento, isto é, dentro de um ano e meio, os Estados Unidos começarão a instalar em Itália, Alemanha, Bélgica, Holanda e, provavelmente, noutros países europeus, em posição contra a Rússia, a primeira bomba nuclear do seu arsenal com um sistema de orientação que a conduz com precisão e dotada de capacidade penetrante para explodir no subsolo e assim, destruir os bunkers dos centros de comando. Dado que a Itália e os outros países, violando o Tratado de Não Proliferação, disponibilizam aos EUA, bases, pilotos e aviões para a instalação da B61-12, a Europa estará exposta a um risco maior, como primeira linha do crescente confronto nuclear com a Rússia.
Ao mesmo tempo, apresenta-se uma situação ainda mais perigosa: o regresso dos mísseis europeus, ou seja, mísseis nucleares semelhantes aos utilizados na década dos anos 80 pelos Estados Unidos na Europa (também em Itália), com a motivação oficial de defendê-la dos mísseis soviéticos. Esta categoria de mísseis nucleares de alcance intermédio (entre 500 e 5500 km), com base em terra, foi eliminada pelo tratado INF de 1987. No entanto, em 2014, a Administração Obama acusou a Rússia de ter experimentado um míssil de cruzeiro ( 9M729) da categoria proibida pelo Tratado. Moscovo nega que este míssil viola o tratado INF e, por sua vez, acusa Washington de ter instalado, na Polónia e na Roménia, rampas de lançamento de mísseis (as do “escudo”), que podem ser usadas para lançar mísseis de cruzeiro com ogivas nucleares.
A acusação feita por Washington a Moscovo, não apoiada por nenhuma prova, permitiu aos Estados Unidos lançar um plano destinado a instalar novamente, na Europa, mísseis nucleares de alcance intermediário com base em terra. A Administraçãp Obama já havia anunciado, em 2015, que “perante a violação da Rússia do Tratado INF, os Estados Unidos estão a considerar a instalação na Europa, de mísseis com base em terra”. O plano foi confirmado pela Administração Trump: no ano fiscal de 2018, o Congresso dos EUA autorizou o financiamento de “um programa de pesquisa e desenvolvimento de um míssil de cruzeiro lançado do solo a partir de uma plataforma móvel, a circular em estrada”. O plano é apoiado pelos aliados europeus da NATO.
O recente Conselho do Atlântico Norte, ao nível de Ministros da Defesa, no qual participou em representação da Itália, Elisabetta Trenta (M5S), declarou que “o tratado INF está em perigo devido às acções da Rússia”, acusada de implantar “um sistema de mísseis desestabilizador, que constitui um sério risco para a nossa segurança”. Daí a necessidade de que “a NATO mantenha forças nucleares seguras, confiáveis e eficientes” (o que explica por que razão os membros da Aliança rejeitaram o Tratado da ONU sobre a Proibição das Armas Nucleares).
Prepara-se, assim, na Europa, o terreno para o acolhimento de mísseis nucleares norte-americanos de alcance intermédio com base em terra, perto do território russo. É como se a Rússia instalasse no México, mísseis nucleares destinados aos Estados Unidos.
On October 15, a first deadline in the roadmap for implementation of the Idlib demilitarization agreement passed. According to this agreement, militant groups had to withdraw all their heavy weaponry and equipment from the declared 15-20km deep zone and halt any actions against Syrian government forces. By October 20, all members of radical militant groups, like Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its allies have to withdraw from the area.
Turkish media has already claimed that all heavy weaponry had been withdrawn by the so-called opposition. Nonetheless, recent rocket and mortar strikes on government targets in northern Hama and southwestern Aleppo show that this is at least partly untrue. Furthermore, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and other radicals are not hurrying to abandon their positions. The situation is developing.
On the same day, Syria and Israel reopened the Quneitra border crossing in the Golan Heights for the first time in four years. The Syrian flag was raised at the crossing, and as it reopened, the UN peacekeeping force UNDOF sent a number of white trucks from Syria to the Israeli-held area. The Israeli side declared that the reopening of the crossing “symbolizes the return of the enforcement of the 1974 disengagement agreement”
At the same time, a crossing between Syria and Jordan was opened for the first time in three years. The reopening of the crossing allows the sides to restore free movement of civilians and goods between the sides.
The reopening of Naseeb offers major financial relief to the Damascus government by restoring a much-needed gateway for Syrian exports to other Arab countries. The resumption of commercial trade is also a diplomatic victory for Syria and its allies.
Furthermore, these developments show the success of the de-escalation of the situation in southern Syria, a move supported by the Russian side for a long time. It seems that despite all the speculations in the mainstream media, the Syrian-Iranian-Russian alliance has employed the right approach and achieved an important victory in the area.
Additionally, Syria’s Foreign Minister Walid al-Moualem made a statement highlighting the further course of action in the conflict for Damascus once again saying that areas in the country’s north “had to return to Syrian sovereignty.” “After Idlib, our target is east of the Euphrates,” Muallem said, referring to the territory seized by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Nonetheless, he added that the Damascus government is ready to hold negotiations with the Kurdish-dominated faction within the existing legal framework, meaning first of all within the constitution.
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These are the degrees to which Goldman Sachs is responsible for Greece’s current woes and the highly indebted status of Deutsche Bank.
To start with the latter issue — arguably more immediately pertinent to current tribulations. The following events should raise eyebrows. In 2013 the largest bank in Europe surprised the markets and its investors when it diluted 10% of its overall equity and since then deleveraged or purged its balance sheet, quietly jettisoning billions of toxic, or potentially toxic, investments.
Nevertheless, Deutsche Bank’s 2014 annual report revealed that the super bank (in size anyway) had an eyewatering €54.7 trillion net exposure to derivatives, a sum, to put it in perspective, which is 20 times in excess of the GDP of the EU economic powerhouse, Germany.
During the 2014-2015 period the bank undertook further deleveraging of investments it deemed of risk; it sold €8 billion worth of stock at a 30% discount and failed banking industry “stress tests”. And just this month witnessed the resignation, without explanation, of its two CEO’s followed by a Standard and Poors rating of BBB+, a dangerously low rating — lower than Lehmann’s just prior to its collapse.
Deutsche Bank’s ultimate fate remains to be seen but these indicators do not present a healthy financial institution. It goes without saying that a Greek default would have massive repercussions for Deutsche Bank and by implication the entire European banking system.
This nightmare situation must be informing the thinking of Greece’s creditors, not least German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Regarding Goldman Sachs, it’s a matter of record that the global investment bank, in 2002, assisted Greece in disguising the true extent of its banking debt via a questionable process called “cross currency swapping”. While this practice itself isn’t unusual, in the case of Greece, notional currency rates were factored in to the process resulting in credit of up to $1 billion for Greece which distorted completely their national balance sheet.
This legally circumvented EU budget deficit rules which clearly stipulated a maximum budget deficit limit of three per cent of GDP and total Government debt of no more than 60%.
The 60% limit never prevailed in Greece while adherence to the three per cent ceiling was only possible via such balance sheet “manipulations”.
Those responsible for creating this controversial subterfuge, to nobody’s great surprise, quietly left it behind despite the shock waves it caused, shock waves that lead us clearly to the current impasse.
The tragic thing is that those players in the current situation, wagging fingers at Greece and portraying themselves as “adults” in all of this are well aware of all of this background music yet the dirge plays tragically on.
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US harshness toward Iran since its 1979 revolution achieved nothing. The Trump regime’s aim to crush its economy, mainly by blocking its oil sales, failed before implementation in early November.
On Sunday, OilPrice.com said Iran has ways around Trump regime sanctions, including by having “private local entities buy (its) crude and then resell it to foreign traders.”
According to FGE Energy’s Middle East managing director Iman Nasseri, Iran can work with “private middle-m(en) to…find buyers and arrange for logistics that could possibly be invisible to the monitoring systems” – payment for deliveries to be mostly in foreign currencies.
It’s unclear how much oil Iran can sell this way, likely over a million barrels daily.
Separately, China and other large oil consuming nations intend buying Iranian despite US sanctions.
In late September, Iran’s OPEC governor Hossein Kazempour Ardebili said the
“(m)arket is still open for us, and we are currently exporting oil. And we expect to go on exporting.”
Ahead of Trump regime sanctions next month to trying blocking all Iranian oil exports, Moscow, Tehran, and Ankara reportedly agreed to counter what’s imposed by transporting Iranian crude to Russian Caspian Sea refineries for sale in world markets as Russian oil, the Islamic Republic to be reimbursed for the sales.
Putin, Turkey’s Erdogan, and Iran’s Rouhani reportedly agreed on the secret agreement aimed at circumventing US sanctions.
Brussels also agreed to continue buying Iranian oil, perhaps by bartering it for European goods directly or through Russia – Asian importers reportedly intending to do something similar.
Last month, President Rouhani said “(w)e will continue by all means to both produce and export” oil. It’s “in the frontline of confrontation and resistance.”
The Trump regime “is not capable of bringing our oil exports to zero.” Russia, China, Britain, France and German vowed to save the JCPOA and continue normal relations with Iran despite Trump’s pullout.
On Sunday, Iran’s First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri said Iran was selling its oil at above $80 per barrel, adding that the country would be economically safe” despite US sanctions.
It’s finding ways to circumvent them. “It is not strange that countries that are sanctioned find ways to dodge the sanctions.”
“The Americans should know that a country which is sanctioned would still be able to find solutions to move forward.”
“They cannot do this because various mechanisms have been discovered to maintain Iran’s oil exports.”
Iran has been partially circumventing US sanctions for decades. Nations announcing a halt to Iranian oil purchases are seeking ways to continue them through intermediaries, Jahangiri explained.
Some Iranian sales will be lost, most likely to continue. Trump’s scheme to block them altogether most likely will fail.
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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.”
US plastic waste exports to developing countries in south-east Asia rose dramatically in the first six months of this year, as the international fallout from China’s decision to shut its doors to “foreign trash” continues.
Unearthed can reveal that plastic waste exports from the US to Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam shot up from January to June 2018. But with these southeast Asian countries moving to impose import restrictions and plastic scrap piling up from California to Florida, the US recycling industry is talking about a mounting crisis in the country.
China has historically been the world’s biggest importer of plastic waste, taking in 45% of cumulative imports since 1992, according to a study published this summer. The US sent around 70% of its plastic waste to China and Hong Kong last year. But Beijing’s move to stop importing low quality plastic scrap has forced recyclers in the west to take a long look at their business model. In the UK, figures from the recycling industry have said the sector is “lurching from crisis to crisis”.
US plastic scrap exports dropped by almost a third in the first six months of 2018, as waste firms struggled to find a home for their plastic scrap. From 949,789 metric tonnes (2017) to 666,760 metric tonnes (2018).
An analysis of trade data from the US Census Bureau found that other countries have accepted more plastic scrap.
In the first six months of 2017, a little over 4,000 metric tonnes of America’s plastic went to Thailand, but the country took in 91,505 metric tonnes of America’s scrap in the same period this year. That’s an increase of 1,985%.
Malaysia experienced a similar increase, a rise of 273% to 157,299 metric tonnes.
Vietnam also saw a significant rise, to 71,220 metric tonnes in the first six months of this year.
Exports to Turkey and South Korea also rose significantly in the same period, to 11,224 metric tonnes and 14,760 metric tonnes, respectively.
Despite the China ban, Asia remains the main destination for American waste exports. In the first six months of this year, 81% of plastic waste exports from the US went to Asia, a 7% drop on 2017.
Back where it came from
The influx of western rubbish into these countries has forced some to impose restrictions on waste imports.
Earlier this summer, plastic processing factories in Banting, south-west of Malaysia’s capital Kuala Lumpur were forced to close because of residents complaining of air and water pollution.
Restrictions have also been introduced in Vietnam. In May, authorities in the country announced a temporary ban on plastic and paper waste imports from the middle of this June until October. Two of the country’s biggest ports – Tan Cang-Cai Mep International and Tan Cang-Cat Lai – have reportedly become overwhelmed with plastic and paper scrap since the China ban came into force.
In Thailand, the influx of trash forced the government to introduce [story in Thai] inspections of all plastics and electronic waste imports into the country. The country’s authorities have also pledged to send waste back to where it came from if it’s imported without proper description.
Experts are concerned that these increasingly popular destinations for US waste do not have the capacity to deal with waste in a safe or environmental way.
“Some of these countries just don’t have the infrastructure in ports or roads to deal with an increase in volume of material,” Robin Wiener, CEO of US trade body the Institute of Scrap Recycling Industries (ISRI), told Unearthed.
“Pop-up recyclers are trying to take advantage of these shifting markets but they are not doing it properly. They are not following industry standards when it comes to environmental, health, and safety practices.”
A global crisis
All of this poses an unprecedented challenge for American recyclers.
“We saw the writing on the wall,” Brent Bell, VP of recycling at Waste Management, the biggest waste management firm in the US, told Unearthed. “The industry has to find domestic outlets for our material.”
Recycling firms, under pressure to meet higher standards, have seen costs rocket. While they have traditionally paid authorities for waste that could be turned into recycled goods, they are now starting to charge the state for the cost of getting rid of it.
Coastal cities have historically been more dependent on exporting waste to be recycled.s.
San Diego is now facing a potential $1.1m annual charge from its waste contractor, which last year provided the city with a $4m income stream.
“The environmental benefits of recycling now come with a cost that we haven’t seen in California before,” Zoe Heller, assistant director of policy development at CalRecycle, California’s state waste management agency, told Unearthed.
“What used to be a very profitable revenue stream is now becoming a cost.”
Residents may have to pick up the bill; one town in Vermont is soon to start charging residents for their recycling. Alternatively costs could be passed on through higher taxes.
In total, US plastic waste exports in the first six months of 2018 were worth $270m, a drop of almost $90m on the previous year.
Bell, from Waste Management, is clear about what he thinks needs to happen:
“We have toencourage manufacturers to use a high proportion of recycled content in their products. And we have to make sure recycling is clean to begin with.
“There need to be more grants to help with upfront investments in manufacturing facilities so more companies can take recycled materials and make them into new products.”
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The death toll from Hurricane Michael continues to mount as rescue and recovery crews work through the vast area along the coastline of the Florida panhandle and further inland that was laid waste by the gigantic storm, the third strongest ever to strike the mainland of the United States.
The official toll was 18 as of Monday, when President Trump and his wife Melania visited the disaster zone briefly as part of a stage-managed political tour, where he stayed as far away from actual victims as possible, while praising his political ally, Republican Governor Rick Scott of Florida, and hailing the work of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
The attitude of residents of the area was summed up in the comments of one survivor, 57-year-old Sheila Vann of Panama City, who spoke to the Associated Press in her garage, where she and her husband Joseph were cleaning up after the hurricane tore off most of the roof of her home, collapsing the ceiling. Four freezers filled with fish and meat were starting to rot since power has not been restored. “You want to see the president?” she asked her husband, adding, “I ain’t got time unless he wants to help us clean up.”
Another survivor, Nanya Thompson, 68, of Lynn Haven, said of Trump, “He’s doing this, I believe, to project a different image of himself because of all the bad publicity he’s had. He’s not going to get into the sewage water with other people and start digging. If this is just going to be another reality show, I don’t think he should come.”
Trump actually flew over the disaster zone in an Air Force helicopter, but his political handlers ensured that there would be no photographs of the president looking down on the wreckage, which would evoke the indelible memories of President George W. Bush peering down through the window of Air Force One on devastated New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Trump and his wife then walked quickly through one wrecked neighborhood near Panama City, before moving on to Tyndall Air Force Base, which sits on a spit of land projecting into the Gulf of Mexico and suffered a direct hit from the eye of the storm. The presidential party then moved on to southwestern Georgia, which suffered tremendous damage when struck by Hurricane Michael after it moved inland, still a Category Three storm.
Like any major disaster, Hurricane Michael has laid bare the class contradictions in American society, showing how the social organism as a whole functions under conditions of colossal stress, in this case driven by natural causes, although, like all extreme weather events in the era of global warming, social processes are at work as well.
Damage from Hurricane Michael (Source: US Defense Department)
The official death toll is 18, similar to that declared for Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico at the time Trump made his notorious visit to the island last year, when he was filmed throwing rolls of paper towels to a crowd of survivors, and boasted that the low death toll showed that Puerto Rico had avoided a Katrina-like catastrophe.
Subsequent studies have revised the death toll upwards enormously, to nearly 3,000, even greater than Katrina, mainly due to the prolonged cutoff of electrical power, in some areas as long as a year, which had a devastating impact on the survival rate among the sick and elderly throughout the island.
The death toll may not increase as much in Florida, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia, because of the more advanced economic conditions on the mainland as opposed to the island of Puerto Rico, but it could well rise into the hundreds. Some 1.8 million are still without electrical power in the region swept by Michael’s high winds and heavy rains. And the area devastated by the storm—the Florida panhandle, southeastern Alabama and southwestern Georgia—is already one of the poorest regions of the United States.
In an indication of the likely undercounting, the official death toll in Mexico Beach, where Michael came ashore in Florida, remains at one, even though the town was completely obliterated, with only one sizeable structure intact in a town of about 1,200 year-round inhabitants, with facilities for as many as 15,000 residents during the summer tourist season.
Town officials initially said that 285 people were unaccounted for because they had stayed behind during the storm, unable or unwilling to act on the evacuation orders from state and federal agencies. This number was lowered to 46 people missing, after accounting for those who left at the last minute, when Hurricane Michael’s rating was raised from Category Three to Category Four just before it made landfall. But that figure suggests that there may be dozens dead in Mexico Beach alone—a town that accounts for less than 0.3 percent of the population of the region directly hit by the storm’s fury.
Nongovernmental organizations said that state and federal authorities were not allowing them to enter Mexico Beach and Panama City, the two worst-hit towns, slowing down significantly the process of finding the living and dead. Geaux Rescue, a Louisiana-based search-and-rescue group, said it had 433 requests from family members looking for loved ones in the two coastal towns, but could not act on them.
While there is considerable official and media attention being paid to the coastal area most visibly devastated by the hurricane, the conditions inland are equally dire, and many of those who survived the storm find themselves trapped and completely isolated. This reality was demonstrated by a family who arranged downed trees to form the word “HELP” on the open ground in front of their home in rural Youngstown, northeast of Panama City.
The appeal was sighted by relatives on an interactive map produced by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—an agency that has been targeted for savage budget cuts and gag orders by the Trump administration and its gang of climate-change deniers. A rescue team then cut through downed trees and reached the isolated home, rescuing three people. There are undoubtedly dozens if not hundreds of such families at risk throughout the area hit by the storm.
Florida Governor Scott, like Trump, is a climate-change denier. Under his eight-year administration, Florida state officials have been forbidden to use terms like “climate change” or “global warming” in official reports dealing with such phenomenon as beach erosion, the “red tide” catastrophe on the Gulf Coast, and more frequent and catastrophic weather events, all linked to the warming of the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.
Whatever the death toll from the storm itself, the death toll from the aftermath began to rise with the shooting death in Panama City of an alleged looter by Florida State Fire Marshals. A dawn-to-dusk curfew is in effect throughout the disaster area, enforced not only by local police, but by 4,000 National Guard troops and another 2,200 federal troops.
These forces have been mobilized, nominally for rescue and recovery operations, but also, as the New York Times reported Saturday, because “Some local officials were worried about the possibility of social unrest in the areas where the poorest residents had not stocked up with multiple days’ worth of supplies.”
Conditions throughout the region are likely to deteriorate further once the national spotlight is removed. In Bay County, Florida, for example, where Mexico Beach and Panama City are located, every single public school building has been damaged, and schools are closed indefinitely for 26,000 children. Some buildings will require extensive repairs.
Much of the population of the region lived in mobile homes before Hurricane Michael made landfall. Many of these were destroyed, in some cases picked up as in a tornado and flung long distances.
There is also the spreading economic cost of the disaster. Much of southwest Georgia’s crop of sweet pecans and cotton was destroyed. Georgia is the second largest cotton-producing state, after Texas. Insurance companies have given an initial estimate of the insured losses at $6 billion to $8 billion, with projections that uninsured losses will be even greater.
There are ample resources in American society to make good the losses of the working people and small businesses of the region, and to rebuild the housing stock and other structures in ways that will better resist the impact of severe storms. But under the control of the American capitalist class, these resources will never be made available to meet such social needs, because there is no profit to be made.
The sums required for hurricane relief and rebuilding are dwarfed by the hundreds of billions squandered on the US military machine. Tyndall Air Force Base alone, with its armada of 55 F-22 “Raptor” stealth fighter jets, each one purchased at a cost of $339 million, accounts for $18.6 billion in federal spending—more than the estimated cost of all the damage caused by Hurricane Michael.
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According to CNN, Reuters, AP News, the NYT, and other media, the Saudis will admit responsibility for Khashoggi’s death.
Citing unnamed sources, media reports claim Riyadh will say he died during a botched interrogation and plan to abduct him, what happened conducted without kingdom permission, parties involved to be held responsible.
One report, citing an unnamed individual familiar with Riyadh’s plan, claimed crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) approved Khashoggi’s interrogation and abduction, the kingdom to try absolving him of responsibility for his death, shifting blame to an unnamed intelligence official.
Why would Riyadh have dispatched a 15-member security team to Istanbul on the day Khashoggi disappeared inside the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate, returning less than 24 hours later, if not to abduct and eliminate him, clearly wanting his criticism of regime policies silenced.
Trump said he saw the report. “(N)obody knows” if it’s official, he said, clearly wanting nothing interfering with longstanding US/Saudi relations.
Pre-dawn Tuesday, Turkish anti-terror branch/crime scene investigators, and others left the Saudi consulate after a reported nine-hour forensic inspection.
Ankara claims it has audio and perhaps other evidence proving Khashoggi’s murder inside the facility, Saudis responsible for what happened.
Straightaway after his disappearance inside the consulate, there was little doubt about kingdom responsibility for his fate.
The reported announcement coming clearly is a cover story to shield MBS and other key ruling family officials from what happened.
On Sunday, Riyadh warned it would act strongly against any nations imposing sanctions or taking other actions against the kingdom, a Saudi press agency statement saying:
“The kingdom affirms its total rejection of any threats and attempts to undermine it, whether by threatening to impose economic sanctions, using political pressures or repeating false accusations” – with no further elaboration.
On Monday, Saudi-owned Al-Arabiya television suggested the kingdom could use oil as a retaliatory weapon. Cutting production could spike the price sharply higher ahead of US November midterm elections.
Brent crude currently trades at around $80 a barrel. If Saudi production is cut enough, it might increase to $100 or more with potentially adverse economic effects worldwide.
On Monday, the Saudi Arabic-language daily Okaz broadsheet headlined “Don’t Test Our Patience. The Saudi Gazette stressed “Enough Is Enough.” Similarly, the Saudi Arab News said the kingdom “will not be bullied.”
CNN said the report admitting kingdom culpability is being prepared with possible changes in its content before release.
Khashoggi was a neocon/CIA house organ Washington Post columnist. On Tuesday, WaPo headlined “Trump joins Saudi Arabia’s Khashoggi cover-up,” adding:
“(T)he kingdom has circled the wagons and angrily hit back at the accusations — and it seems to have found a willing ally in President Trump.”
Sunday on CBS News’ 60 Minutes, he indicated having no intention of stopping or suspending US weapons sales to the kingdom, saying:
“I don’t wanna lose an order like that.” Separately he said it would be “foolish” to halt arms sales to the kingdom, adding “(n)obody knows” whether Saudis were responsible for Khashoggi’s fate.
They “deny it vehemently,” he stressed, following a conversation with king Salman. If the above cited report is correct, the kingdom’s story is about to change, admitting responsibility for Khashoggi’s death after initially saying he left the consulate unharmed.
Turkish sources called what happened to him “premeditated murder.” Clearly it appears that way.
Western relations with the kingdom are longstanding. Its oil, super-wealth, large-scale foreign investments, and alliance with Washington’s war OF terror in Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East assure relations with Riyadh will remain unchanged – Khashoggi’s elimination a minor short-term disruption to pass.
There’s little doubt about Saudi responsibility for his fate, mounting evidence likely proving it beyond a shadow of a doubt.
In contrast, Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and other US adversaries face repeated unfounded Western accusations, no credible proof supporting them.
Washington, NATO, Israel, the Saudis, and their imperial partners are responsible for high crimes of war and against humanity, yet remain unaccountable.
Saudi oil and super-wealth buys lots of influence. The US, other Western countries and Turkey won’t let Khashoggi’s fate disrupt relations with the kingdom.
The current storm will pass once the issue fades from world headlines.
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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.”
Interior Minister Alfonso Navarrete while unveiling the new “National People Search System”, announced the number of missing persons in the country as the most updated one.
But he also mentioned that the data might be higher than official numbers. The total number of disappeared was obtained from the creation of a registry at the national level.
“The registry yielded paradoxical data, 37,485, and surely the number of missing persons is much greater; but we had to rely on official data,” he said.
The new system was created under the General Disappearance Law, which was passed in November 2017, designed in cooperation between three levels of government to aid in the search and identification of victims. This system will be implemented in hospitals, shelters and other locations where missing people might turn up.
A cross-check system was made between two databases: the fingerprint system at forensic laboratories of the 32 states, and the National Electoral Institute (INE) database. So far this collaborative system has helped identify 340 dead persons. The minister informed the public that 4,000 more have been profiled during the cross-check system between two recognition systems.
Relatives of missing persons and human rights organizations claim that the number of disappearances is around 40,000.
The number of disappeared people rose sharply following the launch of the country’s “war on drugs” in 2007 by then President Felipe Calderon. The majority of missing people in Mexico are men between the age of 15 and 44, while the north, west, and center of the country record the highest number of missing people.
Many relatives have organized their own private search for missing persons which resulted in discovering of scores of unmarked graves in the country.
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Featured image: A march of relatives of people disappeared in Mexico demanding justice. (Photo: EFE)
My late great friend Bill K. was a man rich in life experience. Bill had been a Chicago cop during the ‘turbulent’ 60s going against the grain by refusing to hassle Black faces and anyone who demonstrated at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention. He was what the police have been charted to be: ‘To serve and protect’ … and not just property owners and businessmen. Bill and I met well after he retired and became of all things, a great sports writer, focusing on horse racing. Bill could mingle with the Fat Cat owners and trainers, but still would rather dialogue with the two dollar bettor. He had a wonderful handle on things in a Runyonesque manner, meaning that he saw through the hype and spin of this empire. On the subject of heroes Bill relayed this anecdote to me. “One day, when I was taking my son to high school, we passed by a bus stop as this workman was about to get on a bus. I told my son ‘You see that guy there, with the workman’s jacket and hard hat on, carrying that lunchbox? Well, that guy has to punch in the hours to afford to take care of his family, and he’s out there early in the morning each day. That guy is what we would call a hero!'”
Sadly, in this Military Industrial Empire that we live under, there are much too many people that the suckers, saps and lollipops celebrate as heroes. Though we have not been officially at war since 1941, the ‘US War Machine’ has created what the late great Gore Vidal labeled ‘Perpetual War’. Under the banner of phony, illegal and immoral wars on Libya, Afghanistan and Iraq, the media and right wing political whores have celebrated our young military men and women, shipped thousands of miles away to attack, destroy and occupy three sovereign nations, as heroes and brave warriors.
Sadly, most of the ‘walking sucking candy ‘fellow citizens of mine have bought into this crap! Men like Bush Jr., Dick Cheney, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and let’s not forget Donald Trump all supported the Vietnam debacle but refused to sign up to go over there and ‘Fight the Commies’. How many of today’s 40 something politicians who supported our two phony wars on Iraq refused to sign up and go over to ‘Bring Democracy to Iraq’? NO wonder that millions of people throughout the world have disgust for my country.
The real crime is when the general public, much too numerous, celebrate politicians from both of the Two Party con job. Anyone who works for a living, or wants to work for a living, should check out how many of these so called heroes are millionaires, or even mega millionaires, mostly from families of privilege.
Case in point: During the disgraceful debacle of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, the public was ‘sold’ on two Republican Senators who seemed to ‘have a conscience’. Jeff Flake made such an impassioned plea for more time for an FBI investigation… and then went ahead and voted, in reality, AGAINST the word of Ms. Christine Blasey Ford (Flake comes from a super rich family that actually had a town, Snowflake Arizona, named after them). Then we have Senator Susan Collins of Maine (from a lumber family dynasty in Maine), who always loves to give the impression of moderation etc. She too voted AGAINST the word of Ms. Ford, after making all the country think how ‘moderate and fair’ she, Senator Collins, was. The real disgrace is when most of the Republicans on that committee kept saying that Ms. Ford was credible, and then voted in essence to confirm Kavanaugh, who said that what Ms. Ford claimed was ‘not true’. Well, did any of them, or those in the right wing media, actually look up the definition of the word credible? It means: Able to be believed… convincing. Thus, if the woman was to be believed and convincing, then….
Finally, many of those like me who love sports continually make heroes of sports figures who are mega millionaires. They wear their jerseys and boast of their greatness.. yet never asking why these sports icons don’t do more with their dough to help those in need. Please don’t give me the crap about these heroes giving a fraction of their wealth to good causes. When you earn twenty or fifty million dollars a year and keep 75% of it after taxes….the unemployed guy who forks over a dollar to a homeless beggar is giving more of what he has. Who then are the real heroes amongst us, and who are the villains? Food for thought.
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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn, NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust, whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].
The modern art world is filled with pranks and pranksters, the clowns who have decided that play counts for art. Brattish artists foist a range of projects and conceptual themes upon art galleries who, foolishly, see emperors decked in the finest wear. They refuse to consider that the wear is absent, an expensive mirage that tells to an old tale of the imperial ruler without clothes.
This is a world, of transaction, appearance and display, based on conceit and seduction, the toying by the super star artist of the necessarily gullible, and the acceptance on their part they are bearing witness to the exceptional. When Banksy’s Girl with Balloonwas shredded at Sotheby’s (a sort of art styled seppuku), it was subsequently, and all too quickly, transformed into Love is in the Bin. Technicians in the room did not seem too fussed by the occurrence, and diligently went about their business of retouching the new piece for the market amidst nervous laughter and much tittering. Banksy’s own company Pest Control granted the work a new certificate. Another prank had been played.
The anonymous woman who had initially bid for the previous painting at the point of shredding found herself in raptures, but had to play along as initially shocked. (She may well have been, but this posture seemed distinctly contrived.) The £1,042,000 was well spent, thank you very much.
“When the hammer came down last week and the work was shredded, I was at first shocked, but gradually I began to realise that I would end up with my own piece of art history,” came the observation from the buyer.
Marketing executive Stephanie Fieldingfeels that Sotheby’s would have been in on it.
“One would hope in an age of security consciousness they would have known that such a contraption was inside the artwork.”
Sotheby’s did little to dispel this notion, boasting that the new work had been “created in our salesroom”, and was “the first work in history ever created during a live auction.” Its employees also added to the tattle, a layering of playfulness.
“I don’t think we knew,” came the guarded receptionist, “but we’re not allowed to say anymore.”
Put another way, in an age constipated by its preoccupation with health and safety mania, Banky would never have been able to pull this off without collaborating insiders and complicit agents. Not that it convinces the likes of photographer Matteo Perazzo, who clings, charmingly, to the belief that Banksy remains “opposed to the art establishment, so it would be weird if he had colluded with them.” With such opponents, who needs a true resistance?
Then comes the element of complicity with and in the establishment itself. Banksy realised, long ago, that his resistance to the system was its own acceptance. His entire approach was premised on mocking something that would, in time, be seen as something to assimilate. To that end, it is unsurprising that questions should be asked of Sotheby’s itself.
The same point can be made of the entire art market and the notion of “street” stencilling that used to be frowned upon as inventions of graffiti. It did not take long for such street dabbling to become the stuff of auctions, to make its way into the richest galleries and homes of private collectors.
It is fitting that nothing of this is aesthetic or remarkable. The key is the subversion of convention that, in times, becomes conventional: Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain signed by a “R. Mutt 1917” subverts conventional form to become art, turning a porcelain urinal into marketable commodity; a painting at auction is shredded, thereby creating a surge of shredding in other quarters in a blitz of increasing art value. (This can severely backfire – an owner of a Banksy print decided to vandalise his own possession, dramatically reducing its value.)
Even critics of the sober disposition of Will Gompertz claimed to be wrong in suggesting that artists for the past century had “failed to outwit and outdo Marcel Duchamp”. There had been efforts to destroy and obliterate works – Robert Rauschenberg’s rubbing out of a drawing by Dutch artist Willem de Kooning in 1953 stands out as a tendentious example that fell short. It took Banksy, claimed the gushing Gompertz, to make him realise “that there was an artwork hanging on the walls of a London auction house which was about to do just that”, another Duchamp-like experiment that could be carried off. In what smacks of unnecessary prostration before the gimmick, he suggests that Love is in the Bin “will come to be seen as one of the most significant artworks of the early 21st century.”
The late Australian art critic Robert Hughes, constantly sharp on the effects of speculation in art, reflected upon the phenomenon in 2004. His speech at Burlington House was a defence of the Royal Academy, a body he hoped could be rebooted to face the degradation brought on by wealthy collectors. He had “always been suspicious of the effects of speculation in art”; after 30 years in New York he had “seen a lot of the damage it can do: the sudden puffing of reputations, the throwing of eggs in the air to admire their short grace of flight, the tyranny of fashion.”
Banksy is less talent than a search, a hunt for the next saleable stunt which might be authentic or otherwise (fake smatterings of graffiti purportedly by the artist, by way of example, were reported in Kyiv this July); less an issue of durable statement than publicity on heat. So much so that a theory doing the rounds is that the entire shredding show was an act of inauthenticity, fakery again doing its heralded rounds in the art world. Josh Gilbert, a Chicago blacksmith and artist, is one suggesting that there was “no way these blades would cut canvas or even thick paper mounted that way.” This all reeked “of misdirection”.
Banksy is the modern statement of PR, not enduring but fleeting, an attempt to be permanently newsworthy. At a time where an orange haired monster remains all powerful in garnering headlines and proffering conspiracies in Washington, tweeting with the abandon of a wannabe felon, the likes of Banksy struggle. Times must be tough, hence the shredder. What next in that tyranny of prank peppered fashion?
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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]
After a string of suspicious incidents involving Russia’s venerable Soyuz rocket system, several prominent American newspapers have attempted to poison the last remaining area of significant cooperation between Russia and the United States.
A Russian Soyuz rocket malfunctioned two minutes after liftoff Thursday on a mission to the International Space Station, triggering an automatic abort command that forced the two-member crew — an American and a Russian — to make a harrowing parachute landing in their capsule, 200 miles from the launch site in the steppes of Kazakhstan.
The Post would further state:
Thursday’s launch failure came at a dicey moment in the US-Russia space partnership. The two nations have been congenial 250 miles above the Earth’s surface even when events on the ground, such as the Russian annexation of Crimea or the interference of Russia in the 2016 election, have stoked tensions. But the United States and Russia have been at odds over the cause of a small hole discovered in August on the Soyuz module — Soyuz MS-09 — currently docked at the space station. Moscow says the hole, now repaired, was the result of deliberate drilling and has suggested sabotage, while the US space agency said this week that investigators will determine the cause.
For NASA itself, it has expressed full confidence in the Russian space program and indicated no desire whatsoever to end its cooperation with its Russian counterparts.
Nasa’s chief has praised the Russian space programme and said that he expected a new crew to go to the International Space Station in December, despite a rocket failure.
Jim Bridenstine spoke to reporters at the US embassy in Moscow a day after a Soyuz rocket failure forced Russian cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin and US astronaut Nick Hague to make an emergency landing shortly after takeoff in Kazakhstan. The pair escaped unharmed.
The Guardian would further elaborate:
“I fully anticipate that we will fly again on a Soyuz rocket and I have no reason to believe at this point that it will not be on schedule,” the Nasa administrator said.
It was the first such incident in Russia’s post-Soviet history – an unprecedented setback for the country’s space industry.
Space travel is notoriously challenging and both incidents could just be unlucky coincidences. It is also entirely possible that quality control within Russia is lagging and needs to be reexamined and reorganized. Even for NASA, episodes of lax quality control and complacency have caused launch failures including that of the space shuttle Challenger.
Papers like the Washington Post, attempting to shoehorn the incident into the much larger adversarial narrative it has invested itself into and aimed at Moscow could indicate merely the cynical leveraging of an otherwise string of unfortunate accidents.
However, US-Russian cooperation remains a serious and prominent contradiction to those in Washington attempting to portray Russia as a threat to global peace and stability. After all, if Russia is so untrustworthy and truly involved in all that it is accused of by Washington, why does Washington still entrust the lives of NASA astronauts to the Russian Federation?
US-Russian Cooperation in Space Represents the Best of Both Nations
Space truly is the final frontier, and in more ways than one. It was one of the first areas of cooperation between the US and the Soviet Union and is one of the last areas of cooperation between the United States and Russia today. America’s NASA and Russia’s Roscosmos have proven the height of achievements possible when the US and Russia are able to set aside their differences and move forward together.
The International Space Station represents the pinnacle of human aerospace technology, a permanent homestead in Earth orbit that has been occupied by astronauts and cosmonauts continuously for nearly 20 years. The experience earned on the ISS will be used to further extend humanity’s foothold into space, possibly even making us a multiplanetary species.
The ISS would not have been possible without US-Russian cooperation. It was the US space shuttle that ferried many of the largest modules into space, but Russian components and experience with previous space stations that laid the foundation for the ISS’ construction. It is a Russian and American crew that maintain the majority of the ISS’ systems and primarily Russian and American unmanned spacecraft that resupply those living aboard ISS.
Since the US space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011, Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft has been the only means of sending astronauts and cosmonauts into space.
Beyond the ISS, US aerospace companies have long purchased Russian rocket engines to be fitted to their launch systems. This included United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rockets which used the Russian-built RD-180 engine.
Cutting the Last String of Cooperation?
Facts regarding US-Russian cooperation in space have become a point of contention as US rhetoric and aggression aimed at Russia has grown with the expansion of NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders and a campaign of destabilization and wars aimed at nations all along Russia’s spheres of influence in the Middle East and across Eurasia.
Several attempts have been made to target Russia’s aerospace industry with sanctions, including attempts at banning the sale of the RD-180 engine. Sanctions elsewhere placed upon Russia seek to generally degrade Russia’s economy, a move that may inevitably degrade Russia’s industrial capacity including its aerospace sector.
The recent incidents surrounding an otherwise premier launch system, the Soyuz, could represent a number of things.
It could represent a simple and correctable lapse in quality control. It could represent the impact of US sanctions aimed at indirectly undermining Russia’s capabilities in all areas (and thus indirectly jeopardizing the lives of American astronauts). It could also represent a concerted effort to sabotage, humiliate, and force the cancellation of US-Russian cooperation in space.
All of these possibilities must be kept in mind until evidence emerges and investigations begin yielding results.
It is clear that not everyone in the United States shares some in Washington’s enthusiasm in targeting and destroying Russia economically as well as its prestigious reputation regarding its accomplishments in space. But it is also clear that those who do are willing to do anything to further poison US-Russian relations and further isolate and place pressure on Moscow.
This includes sabotage at worst, and cynically leveraging simple accidents to poison US-Russian relations instead of contributing toward solutions that allow both nations to move forward together with the best both peoples have to offer.
Either way, it highlights the true root of current and ongoing US-Russian tensions, not the American and Russian people themselves, including the consummate professionals that make up both nations’ space programs, but those lurking in political and media circles with a long track record of promoting war, discord and tensions for shallow, political objectives, because no matter how grand the aspirations of these malign actors may be, they pale in comparison to what the US and Russia have already proven possible in space, together.
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Gunnar Ulson is a New York-based geopolitical analyst and writer especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
Trump’s claim that “rogue killers” might have been responsible for Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s possible murder is likely only half of the story in the sense that this operation probably wasn’t ordered by Riyadh but might have been undertaken at the behest of rogue royals who want to topple the Crown Prince.
Trump just dropped a bombshell when he alleged that missing Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi might have been murdered by “rogue killers”, which suggests that Riyadh didn’t officially order his assassination like many had been led to think after such claims began to spread around the world like wildfire last week. The Mainstream Media narrative was immediately suspicious because it claimed that the image-conscious Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) was so offended by Khashoggi’s critical commentary about him that he ordered his dramatic torture, assassination, and subsequent dismemberment inside his country’s Istanbul consulate in a daring move that would have reversed all of the soft power gains that he painstakingly (and expensively through paid PR) tried to make over the past three and a half years if it was true. Furthermore, Khashoggi was closely connected with the American, Turkish, and Saudi “deep states”, so assassinating him in such a manner was bound to draw global attention.
Now, however, it turns out that maybe MBS wasn’t behind this killing after all, though cynics would immediately retort that this might just be a cover story to distract from the billions of dollars in bribes that the Crown Prince might have secretly paid out to the US and Turkey over the past week in order to sweep this scandal under the rug. That’s probably not what’s happening though, since it’s much more plausible that rogue royals ordered this deliberately sloppy assassination in order to frame MBS and prompt enough international pressure against him that the King would be compelled to remove him as his heir. MBS’ so-called “anti-corruption” sweep nearly one year was in essence a “deep state” coup carried out by the elements of the military-intelligence bureaucracy that are loyal to the Crown Prince and believe that his Vision 2030 series of socio-economic reforms is the only way to save Saudi Arabia from impending collapse in the next decade.
His royalist enemies allied with the Kingdom’s influential Wahhabi clerics and have been conspiring to overthrow him ever since on the basis that he “backstabbed” his own family and is moving “too fast” in dismantling the system of extreme socio-religious restrictions that Riyadh imposed on its citizens after the 1979 Grand Mosque seizure. These political fantasies would have gone nowhere had this cabal not had sympathetic “sleeper cells” within the same military-intelligence faction that swept away most of MBS’ opposition late last year, and this was hinted at as much in late April during an hours-long outbreak of gunfire in the capital that many observers regarded as a failed coup attempt against the Crown Prince. It didn’t help matters any that MBS was missing from public sight until he reappeared at President Putin’s side in Moscow during the World Cup. Since then, there’s been a persistent threat that more “sleeper cells” might emerge, which they seem to have done earlier this month.
Instead of another brazen coup attempt where the conspirators once again rush a government building with guns blazing, this second iteration was meant to be more subtle and long-running, with the ultimate intent being to frame MBS for supposedly ordering Khashoggi’s killing in his country’s Istanbul consulate in order for the supposedly Alzheimer-afflicted King to be manipulated into deposing him as Crown Prince in exchange for relief from any forthcoming sanctions. It can’t be known for sure at this stage, but the Saudi consulate in Istanbul might have been manned by anti-MBS royalists just like some Turkish diplomatic facilities had previously been run by the Gulenists, which would explain why they allowed these “rogue killers” to enter the building. In actuality, however, they would have only been “rogue” in the sense of collaborating with MBS’ royalist enemies and operating without their government’s knowledge, but were probably indeed part of a secret assassination squad.
It’s not “conspiratorial” to exercise caution and wait for all the facts to come in before making a judgement on this matter either, since that’s incidentally the official position of Saudi Arabia’s hated nemesis, Iran. Out of all the governments in the world, one would ordinarily expect Iran to back the allegations that MBS was behind this assassination plot in order to simply undermine the reputation of their main enemy, but it’s instead maintaining an official policy of “prefer[ring] to wait until more details and facts are revealed” because “it is too early to comment”, which stands in stark contrast to what its many sycophants have been up to all weekend on social media after mistakenly thinking that their geopolitical role model wanted them to push the Mainstream Media’s narrative. It might end up being that Tehran has a change of heart and joins in the mudslinging, but right now it’s behaving very responsibly.
This in and of itself suggests that there’s certainly much more to this curious case than initially meets the eye, so much so that Iran actually appears somewhat hesitant to do anything that could advance the West’s policy of pressure against MBS in spite of them regarding him as one of their country’s most serious threats. That speaks to the enormity of the actual conspiracy that might have been attempted with Khashoggi’s likely assassination and dismemberment in Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate by “rogue killers” operating at the behest of rogue royals, the latter of whom might even be allied with Trump’s “deep state” foes for whatever their common cause may be. That could explain why the President thought it wise to introduce the “rogue killer” narrative into the discussion in order to preempt his own enemies from exploiting the current situation to their benefit. Everything might still suddenly change as new information emerges, but right now it looks like MBS is indeed being set up.
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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.
On October 11th, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), local militais, and former fighters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) prepared to launch a new offensive on the remaining ISIS fighters in the al-Safa area with support from Russia, north of al-Suwayda, local media reported. On October 12th and October 13th, pro-government sources reported that a large number of ISIS fighters had been killed. However, no notable gains were made by the SAA and its allies.
The Russia-Turkish deconfliction agreement is facing difficulties with the withdrawal of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham from the demilitarized zone, according to local sources. Militants also violated the agreement on October 13th when they shelled the town of al-Bahsa and a base of the SAA in the northwestern Hama.
According to the Russian side, the threat of chemical weapons provocations in Idlib remains high. Russia’s permanent representative to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons claimed that Moscow had obtained intelligence that militants are plotting chemical weapons provocations. The information, according to Alexander Shulgin, “comes constantly.”
Turkey could also launch new operations in northern Syria, according to Turkish President Erdogan. Erdogan renewed a threat to expand Turkey’s military operations into areas east of the Euphrates river held by SDF. Ankara views Kurdish militias, which are the core of SDF as terrorist groups.
On October 12th, following clashes between ISIS and SDF, the terrorist group news agency Amaq reported that more than 28 fighters of the US-backed group were killed and 8 were captured in the Deir Ezzor countryside.
On October 13th, warplanes of the US-led coalition reportedly carried out airstrikes with white phosphorous bombs on the ISIS-held town of Hajin. US-led forces have previously used white phosphorous bombs against targets in Syria on several occasions.
On October 14th, Sputnik cited a Pentagon representative who claimed that all weapons used by the US-led coalition in Syria comply with international laws.
On the same day, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards also vowed to keep an “effective” presence in Syria.
Brigadier General Ramezan Sharif, spokesman of the IRGC said that the “fabricated crisis” has been created in Syria to form a “safety margin” for Israel. He also said that Iran’s support for Syria adheres to all international norms and is by request of Damascus.
The US has said that its forces will remain in Syria until Iran leaves numerous times. The Trump administration and its key ally, Israel, see Syria, as well as most of the Middle East as a battleground to fight Iranian influence.
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Is Afghanistan the prototype for all US wars of aggression? Forever war rages in the country, now in its 18th year with no prospect for resolution.
Is Syria following the same pattern, war in its eighth year with no end in sight?
The difference between Washington’s aggression in the country and all its other war theaters is Russia’s intervention to combat US-supported terrorism at Assad’s request.
Is it enough to make a great enough difference? Will Russia’s involvement lead to conflict resolution?
It’s unattainable as long as US forces occupy parts of the country with no intention to leave – Washington’s goal unchanged since Obama launched war on Syria.
It’s all about regime change, controlling the country’s resources and population, partitioning it for easier control, and isolating Iran ahead of a similar scheme to topple its sovereign independent government.
The ultimate aim is achieving unchallenged US regional control along with eliminating rival governments opposed to Israel.
Forever war could continue as long as US imperial rage remains unchanged – in Syria and elsewhere.
Iranian military advisors are aiding Assad combat US-supported terrorists at his request, intending to remain in the country as long as Damascus values its involvement.
Days earlier, Iranian Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) spokesman General Islamic General Ramezan Sharif said his country’s military advisors will remain in Syria as long as their presence is “effective and useful,” and Damascus wants them to stay, adding:
“This fabricated crisis has been led from abroad with the purpose of instigating insecurity in Syria and creating a safety margin for the Israeli regime.”
Last May, Iran’s Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) spokesman Ali Shamkhani said ruling authorities in Syria and Iraq requested Iranian military aid to help combat terrorism in their countries.
In late September, US war secretary James Mattis said Pentagon forces will remain in Syria to combat ISIS – jihadists the US created and supports, he failed to explain.
Last month on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, John Bolton said
“(w)e’re not going to leave (Syria) as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias.”
US forces are “outside (their) borders” almost everywhere, waging aggression and supporting terrorists in targeted countries.
Iranian involvement abroad is all about helping to combat the scourge of terrorism Washington created and supports, using jihadists as imperial proxy fighters.
Bolton also turned truth on its head, accusing Iran of “attacks in Syria and Lebanon,” along with being “the party responsible for the shooting down of the Russian plane” the previous week.
Indisputable Russian Defense Defense Ministry evidence proved Israeli responsibility for the incident.
Netanyahu repeatedly said Israeli aerial operations will continue in Syria as long as an Iranian presence remains in the country – posing no threat whatever to Israel’s security he consistently fails to explain, nor the illegality of its terror-bombing.
Ahead of leaving for New York to address the UN General Assembly last month, he again said
“(w)e will continue to act to prevent Iranian military entrenchment in Syria…”
No Iranian “entrenchment” exists in the country, no bases, military advisors only, operating from Syrian bases and Damascus.
The Russia/Turkey-established Idlib, Syria buffer zone is shaky. Thousands of heavily armed al-Nusra fighters control the province – refusing to disarm and leave.
On Monday, the group issued a statement saying
“(w)e will not deviate from the option of jihad and fighting as a way to achieve the goals of our blessed revolution, first and foremost to bring down the criminal regime, free the prisoners, and secure the return of the displaced to their country,” adding:
“Our weapons are a safety valve for the Sham revolution. All the attempts of the criminal regime and its allies will fail and will be defeated, just like every other occupier throughout history.”
Al-Nusra partly accepted deconfliction terms, not enough to make it work as long as they intend to keep fighting, and are supplied with arms and munitions by Western and regional countries.
The group “warn(ed) (about what it called) the trickery of the Russian occupier or having faith in its intentions,” stressing it won’t end jihad or surrender its weapons.
Separately days earlier, Sergey Lavrov said the buffer zone agreement in Idlib is temporary, adding conflict will continue until Syrian forces regain control over all territory in the country, including foreign occupied areas.
Idlib remains the only significant area still controlled by thousands of US-supported terrorists. Lavrov earlier called their presence an “abscess” essential to eliminate.
On October 6, Moscow’s Special Presidential Representative for the Middle East Mikhail Bogdanov said jihadists refusing to surrender their arms and continue attacking government forces and civilians must be arrested or eliminated.
It’s an unaccomplished goal. So does ending US occupation of northeast and southwest Syrian territory.
Washington’s intention to stay could mean endless war, Syria perhaps becoming another Afghanistan, a dismal possibility if things turns out this way.
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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.”
While in New York City for the United Nations General Assembly during the last week of September the Prime Minister of Canada spoke about Venezuela. As he defended the government of Canada’s outrageous decision to lead the right-wing attempt to bring the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro to the International Criminal Court Trudeau said,
“The message is that the situation in Venezuela is catastrophic. There is a humanitarian crisis going on in a country that used to be one of the most successful and prosperous countries in South America.”
Interestingly, with this one rhetorical and inflated lie, meant to justify Canada’s intervention in the internal affairs of the sovereign and independent country of Venezuela, Trudeau has nicely summed up a recent report on Venezuela on the CBC Radio’s “The Current.”
Host Anna Maria Tremonti, began the Venezuela segment during the September 11, 2018 episode of The Current in so many words, stating,
“An estimated 2.3 million Venezuelans and counting have packed up and left their country over the last four years. That’s about 7% of the population, an exodus that could soon rival the Syrian migration crisis regarding its size and the impact that it is having on neighbouring countries, according to the UN. But Venezuelans are not fleeing civil war; they are fleeing food shortages and runaway inflation in an oil-rich nation.”
Disaster. Crisis. Once oil-rich nation. This is the go-to rhetoric of the government of Canada, and now also, of the CBC which is nothing but a mouthpiece of the government when it comes to their so-called reporting about the country of Venezuela.
The problem with this is that the CBC isn’t the government of Canada. They are, in fact, publicly- funded journalism that is supposed to operate based on its Mission and Principles; empty statements such as, “We are independent of all lobbies and all political and economic influence” or “Balance – On issues of controversy, we ensure that divergent views are reflected respectfully, taking into account their relevance to the debate and how widely held these views are” and “Impartiality – We provide professional judgment based on facts and expertise. We do not promote any particular point of view on matters of public debate.” Independence, balance, impartiality, when it comes to Venezuela, the CBC is anything but.
The objective of the government of the United States and their imperialist allies, including Canada, is to overthrow the government of President Nicolas Maduro and reverse the gains of the Bolivarian Revolutionary process. It is now also, the objective of the CBC?
For the CBC’s The Current, these basic principles of journalism have most certainly been thrown out the window, in favour of the far more sensationalist, bombastic, pro-intervention journalism – yellow journalism by definition (“the type of journalism that relies on sensationalism and lurid exaggeration to attract readers”). Yellow journalism supported the U.S./Canada/NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, the U.S./UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, the countless other devasting wars, occupations and invasions carried out by the United States and their allies, including Canada. Today, yellow journalism is fueling and fomenting ever-increasing sanctions and threats against Venezuela.
The CBC is Lying About Venezuela
In merely a 20-minute report, Tremonti, together with the on-the-ground observations of another CBC senior correspondent Adrienne Arsenault, manages to spew-forth nearly every pro-intervention exaggerated claim about Venezuela there is to be found.
Rather than share the perspectives of a leader of Venezuela’s government or one of the mass majority of people in Venezuela that support the democratically elected government of President Maduro, The Current instead chose to play a quote from the war-mongering United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley.
Without a shred of critical thinking, Tremonti let Haley take over the airwaves with the threatening statement,
“The world in general needs to realize that we have a dictator in Venezuela that is doing everything to protect himself and sacrificing all of the Venezuelan people to do it. At some point, Maduro is going to have to be dealt with.”
This certainly sounds like the CBC is drumming for war and invasion against Venezuela (on behalf of the US). When Haley says “dealt with” there is no question that she means the U.S. President Donald Trump’s “all options are on the table when it comes to Venezuela” kind of dealt with; the kind of “dealt with” that means bloodshed in Venezuela.
Anna Maria Tremonti continues her unprincipled and uncritical acceptance of every hawkish, pro-intervention statement about Venezuela as she interviews Adrienne Arsenault, who is reporting from the town of Cúcuta, Colombia. Arsenault paints a dramatic picture of the border town, carefully crafted to scream “humanitarian crisis” – an often repeated lie about Venezuela today.
However, after listening to the entire report, there is a large elephant in the room. The most glaring omission from the September 11 broadcast was a single word – sanctions. Not once did Tremonti, nor anyone else on the program even mentions that Venezuela is under a brutal sanctions regime from the United States, Canada, the European Union, Switzerland and Panama. These sanctions have been designed to have a crippling effect on the ability of the government of Venezuela to import food, medicines and basic goods. As explained by Mike Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C,
“The sanctions do their damage primarily by prohibiting Venezuela from borrowing or selling assets in the U.S. financial system. They also prohibit CITGO, the U.S.-based fuel industry company that is owned by the Venezuelan government, from sending dividends or profits back to Venezuela.”
If the government of Venezuela doesn’t have access to cash, or the world banking and financial system, exactly how can they import the necessities that the people of Venezuela need?
If brevity was your concern, then a short quote from the former Prime Minister of Spain, Jose Luis Zapatero would have sufficed,
“I must say that the intensification of the growth in emigration these past months has much to do with the economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and that has been supported by some governments.”
Or, as Alfred de Zayas, Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order from the United Nations reported,
“The effects of sanctions imposed by Presidents Obama and Trump and unilateral measures by Canada and the European Union have directly and indirectly aggravated the shortages in medicines such as insulin and anti-retroviral drugs. To the extent that economic sanctions have caused delays in distribution and thus contributed to many deaths, sanctions contravene the human rights obligations of the countries imposing them.”
Also missing from the CBC’s report is any reference to the economic sabotage being carried out by Venezuela’s counter-revolutionary opposition. The majority of the production and distribution of food and basic goods in Venezuela is still in the hands of the ultra-rich. Among other acts of violence and terrorism, the reactionary capitalist class has carried out hoarding, price-gouging and even gone so far as to light food on fire to impose chaos and hunger on the people of Venezuela.
By leaving sanctions, smuggling and economic sabotage out of the equation, The Current and Anna Maria Tremonti’s yellow journalism have left the listeners with only one conclusion, the government of Venezuela is to blame – and government of President Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian revolutionary process must be overthrown if the people of Venezuela are to get any relief.
Venezuela is Not Syria
Near the end of Arsenault’s reporting from Colombia, Tremonti gets to her very manipulative question – “Of course, officials [?] say this could rival the Syrian migration crisis regarding scale, how useful is this comparison?” Arsenault’s response,
“You know, I think that it is useful regarding people’s consciousness and understanding. There are embedded images of people leaving Syria, and I think that that comparison is what’s useful. Number wise? The UN estimates there were 5 million refugees from Syria, so if the 2.3 is accurate, and again I think it’s conservative, then we are about half-way there, and really this crisis seems nowhere close to ending.”
First of all, Venezuela is not Syria. Following seven years of U.S. attacks on Syria – bombing, intervention, and support for terrorist organizations, – 6.5 million people in Syria are food insecure, and 4 million are at risk of food insecurity (UN-FAO). More than half of the population of Syria, 12 million people, have been displaced, with more than 5.6 million people externally displaced.
The highest estimate for the number of people that have left Venezuela between 2013-2017 – between 1.5-2.3 million people – isn’t even close to these devastating numbers. However, this statistic, from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) cannot and should not be taken at face value because it doesn’t consider the nationality of the people that have left Venezuela. In a report published by the Colombian Office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in July, 2017, it was found that at the end of 2016, 67% of the people crossing into the three most effected Colombian border cities: Cúcuta, Villa del Rosario and Arauca, were either Colombian or Colombian-Venezuelans.
Also, unlike Syrian refugees, who have no idea of when they will be able to return to Syria, according to the IOM report, more than 92% of people crossing intended to return to Venezuela within two months.
In this segment, Tremonti doesn’t come close to recognizing that 5.6 million Colombians fled to Venezuela over the last decades (where was the “international outcry” about this?), or that today over 3,000 Venezuelans have returned to Venezuela through “Plan Patria” after discovering that life in Colombia, Peru or Brazil wasn’t what they were promised.
Right-wing Thugs Are the Special Guests, Revolutionary Venezuelans Never Get Heard
For her final segment, Tremonti interviews Rebecca Sarfatti, who sits on the board of the Canada Venezuela Democracy Forum, a non-profit organization in Canada. Not once has she interviewed a Venezuelan living in Venezuela, but somehow Sarfatti gets centre-stage. As the saying goes, you are the company you keep, and Sarfatti is a leader in the right-wing Venezuelan community in Canada, a community that publicly attempts to silence the voices through threats and intimidation. Most recently, the President of the Canada Venezuela Democracy Forum, Soraya Benitez, called on her right-wing mobs to give a “warm welcome” to the Vice-minister for North America of the Ministry of Foreign Relations of Venezuela when he visits Canada.
What kind of respected journalist would show such a disregard for even the appearance of impartiality?
How about playing the words of Alfred de Zayas? “A disquieting media campaign seeks to force observers into a preconceived view that there is a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. An independent expert must be wary of hyperbole, bearing in mind that ‘humanitarian crisis’ is a terminus technicus that can be misused as a pretext for military intervention…” Or would that hit too close to home? You’re much more comfortable with the words of U.S. President Trump at the United Nations General Assembly, right? “More than two million people have fled the anguish inflicted by the socialist Maduro regime and its Cuban sponsors,” might just be right up your alley.
Building a solidarity movement
As poor, working and oppressed people in Canada, we cannot rely on the CBC, or any mainstream, capitalist news outlet to tell the truth about Venezuela today. It is not only The Current, but many programs on CBC that continued to propagate the same lies about Venezuela. As the mouthpiece of the government of Canada, they will never put forward the voices of poor, working and oppressed people in Venezuela who support the revolutionary government of President Nicolas Maduro and are carrying forward the Bolivarian revolutionary process. It is our responsibility as people living in the United States and Canada to elevate their voices, and join with them in organizing to bring an end to the U.S.-led intervention, sanctions and threats against the sovereign country of Venezuela.
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October 15th, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity
The Environmental Protection Agency is considering a request by Dow AgroSciences to dramatically expand the use of the bee-killing pesticide sulfoxaflor to rice, avocados, greenhouses, tree farms and residential ornamental plants sold at retail outlets.
The EPA has already concluded that sulfoxaflor is “very highly toxic” to bees.
If granted, this action would allow the very first uses of the pesticide on commercial and residential ornamental plants that are often visited by pollinators and that make up some of the only pollinator habitat in densely populated urban areas. The proposed use on rice, grown on nearly 3 million acres in California, Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, could spell disaster for already imperiled aquatic invertebrates because rice fields are often intentionally flooded, which could allow the pesticide to reach nearby streams and rivers.
“The EPA shouldn’t allow this harmful pesticide to be used on the very plants people buy at their local nursery to attract pollinators,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We can’t provide habitat for pollinators while poisoning them at the same time.”
This request comes the same day as the public comment period ended on the EPA’s consideration of allowing use of another bee-toxic pesticide, Bayer’s flupyradifurone, across 300,000 acres of tobacco fields in Kentucky, North Carolina and four other states in the Southeast.
Sulfoxaflor and flupyradifurone are systemic pesticides with the same mode of action — and potential for harm — as neonicotinoid pesticides, a leading cause of widespread pollinator population declines. While the pesticide industry has touted these pesticides as a replacement for neonics, they pose many of the same risks to non-target species like bees and butterflies.
“Now that Canada and the European Union have concluded that neonics are incredibly dangerous to pollinators and other species and are phasing them out, the chemical industry is scrambling to popularize new, equally dangerous products to replace them,” said Donley. “The problem is the replacements are just a new method of creating the pretty much the same widespread harm. This is not the right way forward.”
Background
In response to a legal challenge by beekeepers, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA’s original registration of sulfoxaflor in 2015, finding that it was too dangerous for bees. The EPA’s new 2016 registration for sulfoxaflor — purportedly designed to ensure no exposure to bees — excluded crops that are attractive to bees and have indeterminate flowering patterns.
Since then the EPA has routinely granted so-called “emergency exemptions,” 22 so far this year and 78 in 2017, that have allowed for sulfoxaflor use on 17.5 millions of acres of farmland. The Office of Inspector General issued a report critical of the EPA’s use of these emergency exemptions weeks ago.
A recent study published in Nature found that sulfoxaflor exposure at low doses had severe consequences for bumblebee reproductive success. The authors cautioned against EPA’s current trajectory of replacing neonicotinoids with nearly identical pesticides like sulfoxaflor.
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The US-led coalition used white phosphorus (WP) munitions while delivering air strikes against the Syrian province of Deir Ez-Zor on Oct. 13. The attack resulted in civilian casualties. Last month, WP munitions were also used by two US Air Force (USAF) F-15s in an attack on the town of Hajin in Deir-ez-Zor. The Syrian government has repeatedly condemned the US-led coalition, which claims that the need to fight ISIS justifies its military actions, while denying the fact it is using white phosphorous projectiles.
WP does not fall under the category of the chemical weapons that are banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention, but it is an incendiary weapon. As such, it cannot be used against non-combatants. Protocol III of the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons “prohibits the use of said incendiary weapons against civilians (already forbidden by the Geneva Conventions) or in civilian areas.” The substance ignites spontaneously upon contact with air, producing a dense white smoke. The heat can reach 800-900°C. No water will help. Severe injuries to internal organs could be caused when absorbed through the skin, ingested, or inhaled. Burning particles of white phosphorus produce thermal and chemical burns if they come into contact with the skin.
And Syria is not the only place where the US has used WP munitions. White phosphorous artillery shells were used in Iraq during the assault on Fallujah in 2004. The US admitted that fact. There have also been media reports about the use of WP in Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria. Last year, the Washington Post published photographs of US Marines equipped with white phosphorus projectiles that were to be used in the battle for Raqqa. The source offered similar pictures showing WP munitions with US Army units outside Iraqi Mosul.
The Human Rights Watch has warned about the dangers of the use of WP in urban areas. According toSteve Goose, the director of the Human Rights Watch’s Arms Division,
“No matter how white phosphorus is used, it poses a high risk of horrific and long-lasting harm in crowded cities like Raqqa and Mosul and any other areas with concentrations of civilians.”
In 2015, the United States used depleted uranium (DU) in Syria. DU is not banned by any international treaty but its use is against International Humanitarian Law (IHW). Article 36 of the Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions requires combatants to ensure that “any new weapon means or method of warfare does not contravene existing rules of international law.” It states,
“General principles of the laws of war/IHL prohibit weapons and means or methods of warfare that cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering, have indiscriminate effects or cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment.”
In 2012, the UN General Assembly tried to adopt a resolution restricting the use of DU. The move was supported by 155 states, with 27 abstaining and four, including the United States, voting against the measure.
The American military has used cluster bombs against civilians in Yemen. The US is not one of the 102 states that are signatories to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits weapons that open in the air, dispersing multiple bomblets or submunitions over a wide area. Many submunitions fail to explode on initial impact, acting as landmines for years.
The US continues to runbiological programs, operating more than 20 laboratories around the world in blatant violation of the UN Biological Weapons Convention. An opinion paper published on Oct. 4 in the journal Science, written by an international group of researchers, claims that the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is potentially developing insects as a means of delivering a “new class of biological weapon.”
In 2011, US police used tear gas and other chemical irritants against Occupy protesters. Tear gas is prohibited for use in battle against enemy soldiers by the Chemical Weapons Convention, but it’s all right with America’s law-enforcement agencies using that dangerous substance against their own people.
There is no justification for using WP at a time when ISIS has been reduced to insignificance in Syria, but Washington did it again. It violated international law after having unilaterally imposed sanctions on Russia without any evidence to support its accusations. It should also be remembered that, unlike Russia, the US has thus far failed to meet its obligations and destroy its stockpile of chemical weapons. The use of such substances to harm civilians is a serious matter that should be addressed at the ongoing 79th session of the UN General Assembly. America’s noncompliance with generally accepted norms is the most critical problem on the international security agenda.
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Following the release of a paper earlier this year which describes how researchers stitched together segments of DNA in order to revive horsepox – a previously eradicated virus, scientists have been flipping out over the possibility that bad actors may use the study as a blueprint to revive smallpox.
The disease killed an estimated 300 million peoplebefore the World Health Organization deemed it eradicated following a long vaccination campaign. Thus, the publication of a method for reviving a closely related disease has understandably raised some red flags within the scientific community, reports futurism.com.
Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it.
Some of the horsepox scientists’ coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One’s sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published threeopinionpieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors.
Overall, everyone’s pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. –futurism.com
Prior to its eradication, smallpox was primarily spread by direct and fairly prolonged face-to-face contact between people. Once the first sores appeared in the mouth and throat (the early rash stage), they were contagious until the last smallpox scab fell off. According to the CDC,
“these scabs and the fluid found in the patient’s sores also contained the variola virus. The virus can spread through these materials or through the objects contaminated by them, such as bedding or clothing. People who cared for smallpox patients and washed their bedding or clothing had to wear gloves and take care to not get infected.”
What would a smallpox bioterror attack look like? Via the CDC:
Most likely, if smallpox is released into the United States as a bioterrorist attack, public health authorities will find out once the first person sick with the disease goes to a hospital for treatment of an unknown illness. Doctors will examine the person and use tools developed by CDC to figure out if the person’s signs and symptoms are similar to those of smallpox. If doctors suspect the person has smallpox, they will care for the person and isolate them in the hospital so that others do not come in contact with the smallpox virus. The medical staff at the hospital will contact local public health authorities to let them know they have a patient who might have smallpox.
Local public health authorities would then alert public health officials at the state and federal level, such as CDC, to help diagnose the disease. If experts confirm the illness is smallpox, then CDC, along with state and local public health authorities, will put into place their plans to respond to a bioterrorist attack with smallpox.
Kevin Esvelt, a biochemist at MIT, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so significant that “it may be wise to begin encouraging norms of caution among authors, peer reviewers, editors, and journalists.”
At present, we decidedly err on the side of spreading all information.
Despite entirely predictable advances in DNA assembly, every human with an internet connection can access the genetic blueprints of viruses that might kill millions.
These and worse hazards are conveniently summarized by certain Wikipedia articles, which helpfully cite technical literature relevant to misuse.
Note the deliberate absence of citations in the above paragraph. Citing or linking to already public information hazards may seem nearly harmless, but each instance contributes to a tragedy of the commons in which truly dangerous technical details become readily accessible to everyone.
Given that it takes just one well-meaning scientist to irretrievably release a technological information hazard from the metaphorical bottle, it may be wise to begin encouraging norms of caution among authors, peer reviewers, editors, and journalists. –PLOS
Esvelt blamed the media for amplifying the negative potential of smallpox synthesis as well:
DNA synthesis is becoming accessible to a wide variety of people, and the instructions for doing nasty things are freely available online.
In the horsepox study, for instance, the information hazard is partly in the paper and the methods they described.
But it’s also in the media covering it and highlighting that something bad can be done. And this is worsened by the people who are alarmed, because we talk to journalists about the potential harm, and that just feeds into it. –MIT News
The Canadian professors, meanwhile, shot back at their critics – arguing that smallpox was bound to be synthesized at some point anyway.
Realistically all attempts to oppose technological advances have failed over centuries.
We suggest that one should instead focus on regulating the products of these technologies while educating people of the need to plan mitigating strategies based upon a sound understanding of the risks that such work might pose.
In these discussions, a long-term perspective is essential. –PLOS
In short, prepare for the Jurassic Park of deadly pathogens and their pandemic potential.
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Nearly 250,000 people demonstrated Saturday in Berlin against racism, the far-right Alternative for Germany’s witch-hunting of immigrants, and the reactionary policies of the grand coalition government.
Organized around the central slogan “#indivisible—solidarity instead of exclusion,” the protest was one of the largest in recent German history.
The organizers had expected 40,000 participants and were stunned when more than six times that number showed up to demonstrate. The opening rally at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz was jam packed, and when the front of the demonstration arrived at the Victory Column, just under three kilometres away, many still had not set off from the starting point.
The protest was the culmination of a growing mobilization against the grand coalition government of the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats, which is implementing the xenophobic and right-wing extremist positions of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in all major policy areas.
In recent weeks, demonstrations against the AfD and the right-wing policies of the grand coalition have taken place in a number of cities. They have for the most part been given little coverage by the media. Most recently more than 40,000 people demonstrated in Munich and Hamburg against racism and a new, right-wing police law.
Especially since the events in Chemnitz and Dortmund, where far-right thugs and neo-fascists chased down foreigners, evoking sympathetic and supportive comments from the police, the secret service and the federal interior minister, resistance to the government has been increasing. On Saturday, protesters carried banners and posters saying, “No to Hate Against Muslims,” “No Place for Nazis” and “Racism is Not an Alternative.”
One banner read, “Solidarity with the Victims of Right-Wing, Racist and Anti-Semitic Violence.”
In addition to the fight against racism and xenophobia, demonstrators opposed the government’s anti-social policies and the growth of economic inequality. Ulrich Schneider, chief executive of the Joint Welfare Association, warned of the effects of rising poverty in Germany and called for urgent action by the government against uncontrolled increases in rents in many cities. He also denounced the efforts to pit the growing ranks of the poor and needy against immigrants and asylum seekers.
An employee of the low-wage airline Ryanair spoke about the brutal conditions confronting the workers and the strikes by Ryanair pilots and flight attendants in recent months.
A section of the 250,000 person demonstration
The demonstration was called by the “Indivisible” alliance, a coalition of some 4,500 associations, organizations and individuals. The alliance was joined by church organizations, charities and trade unions. Many celebrities, including the well known actor Benno Fürmann, the television presenter Jan Böhmermann and the band Die Ärzte, supported the protest. In the evening, a performance was given by songwriters Konstantin Wecker and Herbert Grönemeyer.
When it became clear in the run-up to the demonstration that the turnout could be bigger than originally anticipated, a number of political parties attempted to become involved. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) spoke of a great “affirmation of tolerance and cosmopolitanism.” Instead of sealing off [borders] and promoting nationalism, he declared, what was needed was more diversity and solidarity.
This was said by an SPD minister whose party supports the so-called “master plan” against foreigners drawn up by Interior Minister Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union (CSU). The plan is a scheme for locking up immigrants in camps, where they can be bureaucratically abused and deported as quickly as possible. Last year, in the previous grand coalition government, then-Justice Minister Heiko Maas had attacked anti-G20 demonstrators in Hamburg as “left-wing extremists” and called for the holding of a “rock against the left” concert.
At the demonstration, the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei (Socialist Equality Party—SGP) distributed many thousands of leaflets with the headline “The fight against right-wing terror requires a socialist perspective.” At two information stands, the SGP announced the publication of a new book titled Why are they back? Historical falsification, political conspiracy and the return of fascism in Germany. The book attracted great interest and sparked many discussions.
Demonstration at Potsdamer Platz
A young woman who had come to the demonstration with her mother from Luckenwalde in Brandenburg expressed great concern over the strengthening of the AfD and the increase in right-wing violence.
“I think it is high time to fight right-wing tendencies and violence,” she said. “It is already the case that too much is accepted that is inhuman. We saw in World War II where that leads. In my opinion, we can see the beginnings here. We have to oppose that.”
Another demonstrator said she was participating in the protest to deliver on a promise she had made to her grandmother that she would never again experience such terrible events as she had experienced in her lifetime.
In many discussions, the right-wing policies of the grand coalition came up. It is widely understood that the establishment of a system of camps and the brutal deportation of refugees means that the government has adopted the slogan of the AfD, “Foreigners Out!”
A young man from Frankfurt am Main, who did not want to give his name for fear of reprisals, expressed indignation at the government’s policy. The treatment of refugees was “completely unacceptable,” he said. It was also “unacceptable that those who wanted to help refugees were treated like criminals,” he added. One had to assume, he continued, that in the next few years, because of the effects of climate change and the exploitation of the countries of Africa and the Middle East, more migrants would be forced to leave their homelands.
People are outraged by the fact that more than 1,500 refugees have drowned in the Mediterranean this year alone, and the German government and European Union are under such conditions constantly tightening their refugee policies. This was made clear by banners such as “Sea Rescue is Not a Crime.”
Michael said he was “appalled and angry” about the situation. The sealing off of Europe’s borders meant the government was allowing “hundreds of refugees to drown in the Mediterranean, which is terrible.”
He stressed that the government’s inhumane policy was directed not only against refugees, but also against its own people. While “billions of euros” were being spent on arming the military, “there is just as little money left for refugees as for healthcare, kindergartens and many other social needs,” Michael said.
At the closing rally, when it was announced from the platform that there were also SPD officials and leaders of the Left Party and the Greens present, there were loud whistles and boos. Maya, a sales assistant from East Berlin, said angrily that it was “unheard of for the SPD to be demonstrating here while it carries out in government exactly the policy that is being protested against.”
Overall, the protest was characterized by a marked contradiction. While many demonstrators were outraged by the AfD, the growth of neo-fascist forces and the right-wing policies of the government, and were looking for a way to counter this, most of those addressing the rally sought to calm things down and de-escalate the situation. Their key words were harmony, reconciliation and neighbourly love.
In his speech, the secretary-general of the German section of Amnesty International, Markus Beeko, referred to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was passed almost 70 years ago. This guaranteed, he said, “universal and indivisible rights to every human being on this earth.” The right to think and say what you want, to believe who you want, to be protected from torture or persecution, to marry whomever you love—it was “a great idea” for which it was worthwhile getting involved.
The Protestant theologian and Berlin General Superintendent Ulrike Trautwein emphasized that hate damages social coexistence. She pointed to the peaceful demonstrations in East Germany in the autumn of 1989. At that time, a common slogan was “no violence.” The pastor exclaimed, “That should connect us today! No violence!” She said she feared that racism and anti-Semitism could make social violence socially acceptable again.
Jutta Weduwen, executive director of the Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (ASF), also expressed concern over the increase in social conflict and warned against “eroding solidarity and cold feelings.”
Many protesters responded to such calls for harmony with unease or hostility. This sentiment clearly emerged in a conversation with a couple from Berlin, Hannah and Mathew, who marched while wheeling their child in a pram.
“I’m not as full of love as keeps being stressed here,” said Mathew, who comes from Scotland and is studying in Berlin. “When I see the right-wing extremists on the rise again, I’m angry. What I miss in all the speeches is a fight—not violence, but a political struggle.”
“It’s not all about love,” added Hannah, who has already completed her biology studies. “The cause of the problems is capitalism and the constant intensification of exploitation. We need a left-wing movement that fights against the existing system and does more than say love one another, be nice to each other. What is missing is a vision, a political idea.”
The demonstration Saturday was marked by the fact that very different positions on the fight against right-wing extremists and neo-fascists existed side by side. But it can already be seen that the aggravation of social conflicts will very quickly lead to a political differentiation.
The intervention of the Sozialistische Gleichheitspartei was directed toward preparing the next stage of the struggle and making clear that the fight against the right requires a struggle against capitalism and therefore a socialist perspective.
The SGP has shown in recent years how the rise of the AfD and the neo-fascists was ideologically prepared. It has fought against efforts to downplay the crimes of German imperialism and the Nazi regime by professors such as Jörg Baberowski and Herfried Münkler at Humboldt University. It has warned of and exposed the return of German militarism. It has fought to mobilize the working class against these developments and their source in the capitalist system and all of its political parties and apologists, including the supposedly “left” organizations such as the SPD, the Left Party and the Greens.
The SGP leaflet to the demonstrators states: “The only social force that can counter this development and stop the right wing is the international working class. For this reason, we call for the expansion of working class struggles across the continent. The conspiracy of the grand coalition, the intelligence services and right-wing extremists must be ended.
“It is time to revive the revolutionary socialist traditions of Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Lenin and Trotsky, defended only by the International Committee of the Fourth International and its sections. The SGP calls on workers and young people to join and to take up the fight against capitalism, fascism and war.”
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Former US national security adviser Michael Flynn has denied claims he was offered a bribe to kidnap an Islamic cleric and smuggle him to Turkey, where he is accused of masterminding the failed 2016 coup.
His appearance and election (unless something utterly unexpected happens on 28 October) should be understood within Brazil’s ancient domestic political culture and the subordination of the Brazilian military in the widest sense of the term to the hemispheric national security ideology that has prevailed since its formulation in the late 1940s.
Sabra and Shatila, September 1982, stands as one of the worst single atrocities in modern history. Up to 3500 Palestinians were massacred when Israel’s Falangist proxies surged through the two Beirut camps in September 1982. Israel sought to dump the blame on to the Falangists.
As Israeli soldiers gun down unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in the Great March of Return, their lethal operations depend on an array of contractors and suppliers, many of them companies based outside Israel.
In total, 559 pages and 251 personal accounts were instantly removed from the platform, for having “consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior” according to Nathaniel Gleicher, Facebook’s Head of Cybersecurity and former White House National Security Council Director of Cybersecurity Policy under Obama.
Cracks are forming within the Western alliance: but they are not of a political nature. Western European countries are struggling to remain in line with their American ally, and a change in strategy has nothing to do with it: they simply can’t keep up. Financial resources necessary to fund defense efforts are increasingly difficult to find and industrial standards are slipping across the continent.
The first provision obliges Canada to make available to the USA the same proportion of any type of energy that it has exported over the previous three years, even if Canada itself needed this energy product. The second was a dispute settlement provision that allowed American and Mexican corporations to sue Canada for any law or regulation that they think causes them “loss or damage” and which they feel breaches the spirit of NAFTA.
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I read the Saudi statement in response to the American proposals regarding sanctions on Saudi Arabia. The information circulating within decision-making circles within the kingdom have gone beyond the language used in the statement and discuss more than 30 potential measures to be taken against the imposition of sanctions on Riyadh. They present catastrophic scenarios that would hit the US economy much harder than Saudi Arabia’s economic climate.
If US sanctions are imposed on Saudi Arabia, we will be facing an economic disaster that would rock the entire world. Riyadh is the capital of its oil, and touching this would affect oil production before any other vital commodity. It would lead to Saudi Arabia’s failure to commit to producing 7.5 million barrels. If the price of oil reaching $80 angered President Trump, no one should rule out the price jumping to $100, or $200, or even double that figure.
An oil barrel may be priced in a different currency, Chinese yuan, perhaps, instead of the dollar. And oil is the most important commodity traded by the dollar today.
All of this will throw the Middle East, the entire Muslim world, into the arms of Iran, which will become closer to Riyadh than Washington.
There are simple procedures, that are part of over 30 others, that Riyadh will implement directly, without flinching an eye if sanctions are imposed. – Turki Aldakhil
This is all when it comes to oil, but Saudi Arabia is not just about oil, it is a leader in the Muslim world with its standing and geographical importance. And perhaps trusted exchange of information between Riyadh and America and Western countries will be a thing of the past after it had contributed to the protection of millions of Westerners, as testified by senior Western officials themselves.
Imposing any type of sanctions on Saudi Arabia by the West will cause the kingdom to resort to other options, US President Donald Trump had said a few days ago, and that Russia and China are ready to fulfill Riyadh’s military needs among others. No one can deny that repercussions of these sanctions will include a Russian military base in Tabuk, northwest of Saudi Arabia, in the heated four corners of Syria, Israel, Lebanon and Iraq.
At a time where Hamas and Hezbollah have turned from enemies into friends, getting this close to Russia will lead to a closeness to Iran and maybe even a reconciliation with it.
It will not be strange that Riyadh would stop buying weapons from the US. Riyadh is the most important customer of US companies, as Saudi Arabia buys 10 percent of the total weapons that these US companies produce, and buys 85 percent from the US army which means what’s left for the rest of the world is only five percent; in addition to the end of Riyadh’s investments in the US government which reaches $800 billion.
The US will also be deprived of the Saudi market which is considered one of the top 20 economies in the world.
These are simple procedures that are part of over 30 others that Riyadh will implement directly, without flinching an eye if sanctions are imposed on it, according to Saudi sources who are close to the decision-makers.
The truth is that if Washington imposes sanctions on Riyadh, it will stab its own economy to death, even though it thinks that it is stabbing only Riyadh!
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Turki Aldakhil is the General Manager of Al Arabiya News Channel. He began his career as a print journalist, covering politics and culture for the Saudi newspapers Okaz, Al-Riyadh and Al-Watan. He then moved to pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat and pan-Arab news magazine Al-Majalla.
The apparent victory of Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections has been analysed as the return of some kind of fascism to Brazil: electing dictators where they previously had to enter office in tanks. However, Brazilians, unlike Portuguese, did not remove their dictators from power. The Brazilian military gave way to its civilian counterparts. A governing structure was created in 1986, which permitted the discrete withdrawal of uniformed personnel from public offices and public liability for the consequences of their acts. However, it did not end the role of the military in ruling Brazil. For both historical and ideological reasons this was not necessary.
The military-technocratic tradition in Brazil is as old as the founding of the republic.1 That was one reason why the Brazilian military so readily accepted the same “national security ideology” that the US propagated in its cadre institutions like the National Defence College/University, the curriculum of which was largely imitated by the Superior War College in Brazil. The “military” in Brazil is best understood as the elite managers of the republic’s military – industrial – technological complex, one of the products to survive the dictatorship.
Although certainly not an accident, the anointment of Bolsonaro as a saviour in Brazil’s time of troubles, is incidental. His appearance and election (unless something utterly unexpected happens on 28 October) should be understood within Brazil’s ancient domestic political culture and the subordination of the Brazilian military in the widest sense of the term to the hemispheric national security ideology that has prevailed since its formulation in the late 1940s.
Comparisons with Trump are distractions, like the attacks on Trump. They draw attention away from the actual power issues involved and who actually wields power.
Bolsonaro’s election cannot be fully understood without an international perspective. Brazil, although a very large country with an enormous economy, is a very closely held property dominated by a tiny elite with more loyalty to the North American elite than to its own national interests. It has always been a subordinate country in the hemisphere although the mechanisms of subordination have changed over time. Unlike in the US, Brazilian elections are actively manipulated by foreign governments. Brazilian media are even more concentrated than in the US, with Globo occupying virtual monopoly control over every media outlet in Brazil not controlled by a US conglomerate.
Yet there has always been a tension between pro-US and nationalistic factions in Brazil’s elite. The only mass political base ever established in Brazil — prior to the PT — was the Vargas regime, which was vigorously opposed by those in Brazil who hate anything resembling democracy, nationalism or mass-based politics. The PT emerged despite repression to become Brazil’s first mass democratic party. When it was allowed to govern after the long-forgotten corruption of the Collor de Melo presidency, it was because it had attained this broad democratic base capable of winning elections.
Winning elections was considered in the early period after the collapse of the Soviet Union to be the sine qua non of the “victory” of capitalism. The PT then started to create its own political base in the Brazilian context– a combination of local clientelism and organised labour, but including sectors that had previously been excluded from this formula. In Brazil’s federal system it was necessary to establish a serious social budget at federal level to compensate for the intransigence at state level. To do this the PT needed a public budget to finance that expenditure. And here is where international banking– a historical force in suppressing Brazilian national development– applied the brakes. The PT had to commit itself to servicing the extortion aka foreign debt. Like in every other country held down by “debt”, Brazil could not fulfill any but the most superficial social promises and pay the extortion to banks.
So what happened was surely this: the PT political engineers decided to covertly subsidise their political consolidation and some of the social budget by siphoning funds from the parastatal oil company, Petrobras. This had to be done covertly to prevent the extortion ring (international banking and monetary agencies) from manipulating the Brazilian credit ratings and exchange rate to prevent it. So a lot of people got on the gravy train to keep this scheme working. Of course, the drain of paying all those whose cooperation was necessary to maintain this finance mechanism became parasitical so that more money was reaching the facilitators than the intended beneficiaries of the policy.
The idea of draining funds from a corporation through covert means is not new. (Enron was essentially a banking-led investor scheme for laundering money and exporting it to off shore banks. It would have continued had it not been for some personnel problems and a few accidents– biggest of which that it threatened to implicate POTUS G W Bush.) It is entirely excusable as greed when the funds are transferred to the wealthy. However, it becomes a horrible crime if the money benefits masses of ordinary people. The multilateral (US) debt enforcers have always upheld the claims against sovereign states by those who made official loans to corrupt dictators where the money was transferred to private Swiss accounts.
Hence, given the number of people on the Petrobras gravy train, this policy might have continued with relative impunity were it not for two very important international issues where the US regime has a direct interest: BRICS and Venezuela.
It is worth viewing a small segment in the late Allan Frankovich’s 1980 documentary On Company Business. There is an interview with a labour organizer from the US who is recruited by the AIFLD to go to Brazil and organise “anti-communist unions”. He explains what he thought he was doing and what he found to be his actual mission. But his most striking realisation was that he had been sent to Brazil for this work in 1962– a full two years before the “crisis” that officially led to the Brazilian military coup removing João Goulart.
Bolsonaro is discussed as a product of the “anti-corruption” crusade. “Anti-corruption” has merely replaced “anti-communism” since the latter is deemed extinct. In fact, the case for disrupting Brazil’s BRICS policy and isolating it from the Venezuela – Cuba “axis”, was given almost immediately after Lula’s first election. However, it would have taken some time to place everyone and everything in the best position to depose the PT. This was certainly ready by the time Lula’s second term expired. The death of Chavez and recently the death of Castro (at least of natural causes) have made it imperative to close the Brazil-Venezuelan border in every sense. The escalating war against Russia and China had already made it imperative to take the “B” out of BRICS.
The success of the “anti-corruption” strategy in legitimating the overthrow of heads of state had been proven along with the capabilities to generate synthetic social support for such exercises as elections and street demonstrations. Anti-corruption campaigns are directed against public officials and civil servants but not against the military (although the corruption of the arms trade is endemic and apparently incurable) or corporations who initiate the corrupt acts and/or benefit from them. There is a conspicuous reluctance to attack fundamentally anti-democratic institutions: Business and the military. “Anti-corruption” is really a euphemism for a broad attack on all democratic institutions since 1989-90.
It is one of the failures of the Left and faux gauche to grasp these fundamental issues. This is in part because they share the same “moral language” and progressive technocratic ideas about how the State should be constituted and operated. There has been a distinct inability or reluctance to retool, to defend fiscal independence, to recognise and call foreign debt (or in many countries all public borrowing) what it, in fact, is: a deliberate conversion of community resources into private cash streams for the ruling class compulsory debt financing of public expenditure by private banks. This is the main reason why the central banking system adopted by the US regime in 1913 and internationalised at Bretton Woods and in the EU, impoverishes all attempts at socialism. It is impossible to remedy the corrupt system of public finance and government operations without a radical change in the anti-democratic control over money. As long as economics is treated as a science when it is, in fact, a theology, every Left government will have its Luthers praising the slaughter of revolting peasants, while claiming the privileges of their own particular liberties.
The PT attempted to evade this criminal constraint on the democratic government by using a parastatal for social purposes– this was a capital crime and will be punished as such. It makes little difference that Petrobras could never have funded all the activities that the PT government would have implemented were it not constrained by compulsory “debt” service. The scandal effect of a rather thinly disguised evasive tactic by a slightly socialist government was a necessary catalyst to break the electoral majority that had delivered the PT solid election results.
The strategies of Langley have also matured with the years. In 1964 there was no hesitation to use direct military force to seize control. But now this is unnecessary and undesirable. No amount of protest prevented Temer exercising the office of President, despite massive corruption charges pending against him. No one can defend notorious criminal acts if they are made notorious even before trial has established whether a crime was committed. In the 60s and 70s no one in the Western hemisphere or Africa could be “for” a government notorious as socialist/communist, even if it was neither; in fact, (Goulart was no communist but there are people from Brazil who still say that he was. There are also people in Portugal who think that the 1974 revolution was directed from Moscow, although it was clearly the director of the counter-revolution, Frank Carlucci, who died this year.)
Another innovation has gone largely without comment: that is the refinement of the Phoenix programme. The so-called “war on drugs” and its various theatres provide cover throughout Central and South America for counter-insurgency or political warfare against the poor. When Temer ordered the military into Rio the attention was given to the extreme criminality and danger to normal inhabitants, which the military was needed to suppress. Aside from the fact that the military and police in all countries are integral components of the trade in drugs and other contraband, law enforcement militarisation is a classic cover for death squads and similar terror instruments. Placing the poor under martial law is something the Brazilian military actively practiced together with US Forces while deployed in Haiti under UN cover. No serious commentator on Haiti doubts that the “crime” in Haiti is any kind of base organisation against the owners of the neo-slave state.
Bolsonaro’s election result has to be seen, together with the combined operations to demobilise those sectors of the Brazilian electorate that provided the support and legitimacy for the PT, leaving only the historically unreliable and proportionately insignificant middle class to be disaffected (not unlike the anti-Chavista middle in Venezuela) to vote for the mythical “clean broom”. Here we return to the fact that the military never really left the stage. The military can be better grasped in a “cultural” sense — all those people in the elite and supporting classes who think with the military whether members of the armed forces or not. This includes the technocratic strata and those who naively believe in “military rationality” as a pure and national virtue. But one thing should be remembered about modern politics and “independent” candidates. Bolsonaro is expendable. He can be seen as a placeholder for the wider institutional force that combines actively to frustrate any democratisation of Brazil, most importantly by preventing any meaningful self-confident lower class political organisation and obstructing anything but the most meagre attempt to remedy Brazil’s grotesque economic inequalities.
The resistance to political and economic equity, let alone equality, is a centuries-old tradition in the two largest slaveholder republics of the Western hemisphere. This commitment to enrichment by forced labour and plunder has always been the driving force in the US and in Brazil. It makes little difference that chattel slavery was abolished in the 19th century. Democratic allocation of a country’s resources by whatever formula violates the very essence of the economic system slavery made possible. Facing that deep corruption in the Brazilian and US regimes will help in the appraisal of measures and movements to create genuine democracy and maybe even socialism in the majority of countries of the Americas, which have had neither.
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1. Ordem e Progresso (order and progress), the Brazilian national motto is a slogan from the 19th century Positivist Church. The leading figures of the Brazilian military, e.g. Benjamin Constant, who overthrew the monarchy to establish the republic were members. The Positive Church was based on the teachings of Auguste Comte, credited as the founder of positivism and sociology. It was conceived as a “religion of humanity”, emphasising science and progress. This coincided with the development of modern militaries in Latin America based on science and engineering as the foundations of military education. The military’s “modernising” role and its supposed rational objectivity originate in this tradition.
Insektenschwärme, die gentechnisch veränderte infektiöse Viren transportieren, die landwirtschaftliche Nutzpflanzen eines Landes angreifen und seine Nahrungsmittelproduktion zerstören – das ist kein Science-Fiction-Szenario, sondern ein Plan, der von der DARPA, der Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency des Pentagons, derzeit vorbereitet wird.
Fünf Wissenschaftler von einer französischen und zwei deutschen Universitäten haben diese Informationen in Science, einem der angesehensten wissenschaftlichen Magazinen der Welt, veröffentlicht [1]. In ihrem am 5. Oktober veröffentlichten Leitartikel stellen sie ernsthaft in Frage, dass die Forschung der DARPA mit dem Titel “Insektenverbündete” nur für den von der Agentur erklärten Verwendungszweck – den Schutz der US-Landwirtschaft vor Krankheitserregern durch die Verwendung von Insekten als Überträger gentechnisch veränderter Infektionsviren – bestimmt sei. Diese Viren werden auf Pflanzen übertragen und verändern deren Chromosomen. Diese Kapazität – wie von den fünf Wissenschaftlern erklärt – scheint ” sehr begrenzt ” zu sein.
Innerhalb des wissenschaftlichen Milieus wird das Programm jedoch “weithin als Versuch wahrgenommen, biologische Kampfstoffe für feindliche Zwecke und ihre Trägersysteme zu entwickeln”, mit anderen Worten ” eine neue Form von biologischer Waffe “. Dies verstößt gegen das 1975 in Kraft getretene Übereinkommen über biologische Waffen, das jedoch vor allem aufgrund der Weigerung der USA, Inspektionen ihrer eigenen Labors zu akzeptieren, inaktiv geblieben ist.
Die fünf Wissenschaftler stellen fest, dass “unschwer Vereinfachungen genutzt werden könnten, um eine neue Klasse von biologischen Waffen zu entwickeln, Waffen, die aufgrund der Insektenausbreitung als Trägermittel extrem übertragbar auf empfängliche Pflanzenarten wären”.
Dieses Szenario eines Angriffs auf die landwirtschaftlichen Kulturen in Russland, China und anderen Ländern, angeführt vom Pentagon mit Schwärmen von Insekten, die das Virus transportieren, ist keine Science-Fiction-Geschichte. Das Programm der DARPA ist nicht das einzige, das Insekten als Kriegswaffe einsetzt. Das US Office of Naval Research hat die Washington University in St. Louis um Forschung gebeten, um Heuschrecken in biologische Drohnen zu verwandeln.
Mit einer in das Gehirn implantierten Elektrode und einem winzigen Sender auf dem Rücken des Insekts kann der Bediener am Boden entschlüsseln, was die Antennen der Heuschrecke aufnehmen. Diese Insekten haben eine olfaktorische Fähigkeit, verschiedene Arten von chemischen Substanzen in der Luft sofort wahrzunehmen – was die Identifizierung von Sprengstofflagern und anderen Stätten ermöglicht, die von Luft- oder Raketenangriffen getroffen werden können.
Noch beängstigendere Szenarien wurden im Editorial von den fünf Wissenschaftlern im Science Magazine erwähnt. Das Programm der DARPA – betonen sie – ist das erste Programm zur Entwicklung von genetisch veränderten Viren, die in der gesamten Umwelt verbreitet werden können und andere Organismen ” nicht nur in der Landwirtschaft ” infizieren könnten. Mit anderen Worten, Menschen könnten zu den Organismen gezählt werden, die von den durch Insekten übertragenen infektiösen Viren potenziell betroffen sind.
Wir wissen, dass während des Kalten Krieges in den Labors der USA und anderer Nationen an Bakterien und Viren geforscht wurde – wenn diese Erreger durch Insekten (Läuse, Fliegen, Zecken) verbreitet werden, können sie Epidemien in der feindlichen Nation auslösen. Dazu gehören die Bakterien Yersinia Pestis, die Ursache der Beulenpest (der schreckliche “Schwarze Tod” des Mittelalters) und das Ebola-Virus, das sowohl ansteckend als auch tödlich ist.
Mit den heute verfügbaren Techniken ist es möglich, neue Arten von Krankheitserregern zu produzieren, die sich durch Insekten ausbreiten und gegen die die Zielbevölkerung keine Verteidigung hätte.
Die “Plagen”, die in der biblischen Erzählung von Gott gesandt wurden, um Ägypten mit riesigen Schwärmen von Moskitos, Fliegen und Heuschrecken zu treffen, können heute tatsächlich von Menschen gesandt werden, um die ganze Welt zu treffen. Diesmal werden wir nicht von Propheten gewarnt, sondern von Wissenschaftlern, die ihre Menschlichkeit bewahrt haben.
How do you feel about taxpayer-funded organizations using your tax dollars to lobby elected politicians for more of your tax dollars?
Welcome to the Canadian military.
Last week Anju Dhillon told the House of Commons
“I saw first-hand the sacrifices that our men and women in the navy have made to protect our country.”
The Liberal MP recently participated in the Canadian Leaders at Sea Program, which takes influential individuals on “action-packed” multi-day navy operations. Conducted on both coasts numerous times annually, nine Parliamentarians from all parties participated in a Spring 2017 excursion and a number more joined at the end of last year. The Commander of the Atlantic Fleet, Commodore Craig Baines, describes the initiative’s political objective:
“By exposing them to the work of our men and women at sea, they gain a newfound appreciation for how the RCN protects and defends Canada at home and abroad. They can then help us spread that message to Canadians when they return home.”
And vote for more military spending.
MPs are also drawn into the military’s orbit in a variety of other ways. Set up by DND’s Director of External Communications and Public Relations in 2000, the Canadian Forces Parliamentary Program was labeled a “valuable public-relations tool” by the Globe and Mail. Different programs embed MPs in the army, navy and air force. According to the Canadian Parliamentary Review, the MPs “learn how the equipment works, they train with the troops, and they deploy with their units on operations. Parliamentarians are integrated into the unit by wearing the same uniform, living on bases, eating in messes, using CF facilities and equipment.” As part of the program, the military even flew MPs to the Persian Gulf to join a naval vessel on patrol.
The NATO Parliamentary Association is another militarist lobby in the nation’s capital. Established in 1955, the association seeks “to increase knowledge of the concerns of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly among parliamentarians.” In The Blaikie Report: An Insider’s Look at Faith and Politics long time NDP external and defence critic Bill Blaikie describes how a presentation at a NATO meeting convinced him to support the organization’s bombing of the former Yugoslavia.
Military officials regularly brief members of parliament. Additionally, a slew of “arms-length” military organizations/think tanks I detail in A Propaganda System: How Canada’s Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation speak at defence and international affairs committees.
More politically dependent than almost all other industries, arms manufacturers play for keeps in the nation’s capital. They target ads and events sponsorships at decision makers while hiring insiders and military stars to lobby on their behalf.
Arms sellers’ foremost concern in Ottawa is accessing contracts. But, they also push to increase Canadian Forces funding, ties to the US military and government support for arms exports, as well as resisting arms control measures.
In a recent “12-Month Lobbying Activity Search” of the Office of the Commissioner of Lobbying of Canada the names of Lockheed Martin, CAE, Bombardier, General Dynamics, Raytheon, BAE, Boeing and Airbus Defence were listed dozens of times. To facilitate access to government officials, international arms makers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications, Airbus, United Technologies, Rayethon, etc. all have offices in Ottawa (most are blocks from parliament).
The Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries is the primary industry lobby group. Representing over 900 corporations, CADSI has two-dozen staff. With an office near parliament, CADSI lobbyists focus on industry-wide political concerns. The association’s 2016 report described: “an intense engagement plan that included hundreds of engagements with targeted decision makers, half of which were with Members of Parliament, key ministers and their staffs, including the Prime Minister’s Office. From one-on-one meetings, to roundtables, to parliamentary committee appearances, to our first ever reception on Parliament Hill, we took every opportunity to ensure the government understood our industries and heard our message.”
CADSI organizes regular events in Ottawa, which often include the participation of government agencies. The CANSEC arms bazar is the largest event CADSI organizes in the nation’s capital. For more than two decades the annual conference has brought together representatives of arms companies, DND, CF, as well as the Canadian Commercial Corporation, Defence Research and Development Canada, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Public Services and Government Services Canada, Trade Commissioner Service and dozens of foreign governments. In 2017 more than 11,000 people attended the two-day conference, including 14 MPs, senators and cabinet ministers,andmany generals and admirals. The minister of defence often speaks at the 600-booth exhibit.
The sad fact is enormous profits flow to a few from warfare. In a system where money talks, militarists on Parliament Hill will always be among the loudest voices.
To rise above their din, we need to figure out ways to amplify the sound of the millions of Canadians who prefer peace.
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“It is to be regretted that the rich and powerful too often bend the acts of government to their selfish purposes.” — President Andrew Jackson, Washington, July 10, 1832
They are three players, all problematic in their own way. They are the creatures of inconvenient chaos. Donald Trump was born into the role, a misfit of misrule who found his baffling way to the White House on a grievance. Wall Street, with its various agglomerations of vice and ambition constitute the spear of global instability while the US Federal Reserve, long seen as a gentlemanly symbol of stability, has done its fair share to avoid its remit to right unstable ships, a power in its own right.
The Federal Reserve, despite assuming the role of Apollonian stabiliser, remained blind and indifferent through the Clinton era under the stewardship of Alan Greenspan. The creatures of Dionysus played, and Greenspan was happy to watch. While he is credited with having contained the shock of the 1987 stock-market crash, he proceeded to push a period of manically low interest rates and minimal financial regulation through the hot growth of the 1990s and early 2000s. Rather than condemning “Ninja loans” and other such bank exotica, he celebrated them as creations of speculative genius.
The mood at the Fed these days might seems chastened. They are the monkish wowsers and party poopers, those who lock down the bar and tell the merrily sauced to head home. The sense there is that the market, boosted and inflated, needs correction after years of keeping interest rates at floor levels. Unemployment levels are at 3.7 percent; inflation levels are close to 2 percent.
“If the strong growth in income and jobs continues,” reasoned Federal Reserve chairman Jerome H. Powell in August, “further gradual increases in the target range for the federal funds rate will likely be appropriate.”
Cooling through an increase in interest rates was deemed necessary in light of a consumer binge induced by Trump’s tax cuts, and no one knows when it will stop. “What’s not yet clear,” observesTimothy Moore, “is how far rates will have to rise to reach a level that the Fed considers neutral – where rates neither bolster nor restrain the pace of growth – because rates already have risen so much.”
To three rises in the federal-funds rate that have already taken place could be added another in December and in 2019.
Powell is now facing attacks by President Trump, a self-described “low interest rate person,” in a manner not unlike the assault on the Second Bank of the United States by President Andrew Jackson. Trump’s adolescent indignation is akin to the person whose balloons have been pinched. In July, he was “not thrilled” with that round of rate hikes and said as much. “Because we go up and every time you go up they want to raise rates again.” Markets, playing their side of the disruptive bargain, reacted, with the dollar, stocks and treasury yields falling.
This month, the same story repeated itself. When the markets go up, Trump, invariably, sees his hand in it; when they go down, someone else foots the blame. Now, according to the president, the Federal Reserve has “gone crazy” and “wild” in various measures. “I’d like our Fed not to be so aggressive, because I think they’re making a big mistake.” To Fox News’s Shannon Bream, Trump insisted that, “The Fed is going loco and there’s no reason for them to do it.” White House chief economic advisor Larry Kudlow found himself defending his boss “as a successful businessman and investor” informed about such matters.
The history between the Fed and the White House has been punctuated by occasional bouts of surliness. Paul Volcker’s time as chairman saw an irate, desperate James Baker, when President Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff, attempt to gain an assurance that interest rates would not rise. He failed. By and by, however, the Fed has remained something of a holy cow, a point Trump cares little about.
But it was Jackson’s loathing of banks that proved not only effectual but the stuff of legend. He found much suspicion in the whole notion of credit. He had also previously suffered at the hands of a land transaction involving the use of valueless paper notes. Only specie – silver and gold – deserved his commanding trust.
The very idea of a central bank running rough shod over state rights presented the hero of the Battle of New Orleans with a perfect target. His vision of frontiersman expansionism was being foiled. Such acrimony, according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s The Age of Jackson, was a case of socio-economic falling out. Elites were attempting to monopolise financial power; Jackson, if in somewhat exaggerated fashion (though less so than Trump) spoke of common-man values against big business.
John M. McFaul, on the other hand, sees it somewhat differently. “Jacksonian banking policy was the result of neither an ideological timetable of entrepreneurial design nor radical hard-money purposes.” Political expedience came first. The truth lies tantalisingly in between: the ideologue and the opportunist sharing the same body of a man.
From 1823 to 1836, Nicholas Biddle served as president of the Second Bank. While he was deemed within pro-banking advocates competent and assured, his values were those of a system that had entitled him. He dispensed favours to his friends with aristocratic grace; he resisted regulatory efforts. His move to limit credit and insist on calling in loans was intended to corner Jackson, forcing his hand to add more government funds to the bank deposits.
Jackson called his bluff, and his 1832 veto not to renew the bank’s charter remained, an effective freeze on supplying federal funds. “Is there,” he rhetorically posed to the Senate in his veto message, “no danger to our liberty and independence in a bank that in its nature has so little to bind it to our country?” Eventually, Congress was won over, leaving the Second Bank defunct on the expiry of its charter in 1836. Jackson did his own bit of chaotic undermining by draining the bank coffers in a way that would subsequently be deemed an abuse of executive power.
The stock gurus and economic wizards are waving wands and gazing at crystal balls, but the markets are simply engaging in the usual frenetic activity that accompanies remarks made by figures of power. Behind the scenes, the speculators get busy and anticipate the next flurry. Creative – or perhaps not so creative destruction – is currently unfolding, much of it an illusion. Trump’s America remains, much like Jackson’s discredited paper notes, of questionable value. But unlike the Second Bank, the Federal Reserve is very much intact in the face of institutional mocking. Thankfully for its board and Powell, its charter is not coming up for renewal, nor is Powell going to prove to be another Biddle.
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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]
Get ready for a major geopolitical chessboard rumble: from now on, every butterfly fluttering its wings and setting off a tornado directly connects to the battle between Eurasia integration and Western sanctions as foreign policy.
It is the paradigm shift of China’s New Silk Roads versus America’s Our Way or the Highway. We used to be under the illusion that history had ended. How did it come to this?
Hop in for some essential time travel. For centuries the Ancient Silk Road, run by mobile nomads, established the competitiveness standard for land-based trade connectivity; a web of trade routes linking Eurasia to the – dominant – Chinese market.
In the early 15th century, based on the tributary system, China had already established a Maritime Silk Road along the Indian Ocean all the way to the east coast of Africa, led by the legendary Admiral Zheng He. Yet it didn’t take much for imperial Beijing to conclude that China was self-sufficient enough – and that emphasis should be placed on land-based operations.
Deprived of a trade connection via a land corridor between Europe and China, Europeans went all-out for their own maritime silk roads. We are all familiar with the spectacular result: half a millennium of Western dominance.
Until quite recently the latest chapters of this Brave New World were conceptualized by the Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman trio.
The Heartland of the World
Halford Mackinder’s 1904 Heartland Theory – a product of the imperial Russia-Britain New Great Game – codified the supreme Anglo, and then Anglo-American, fear of a new emerging land power able to reconnect Eurasia to the detriment of maritime powers.
Nicholas Spykman’s 1942 Rimland Theory advocated that mobile maritime powers, such as the UK and the U.S., should aim for strategic offshore balancing. The key was to control the maritime edges of Eurasia—that is, Western Europe, the Middle East and East Asia—against any possible Eurasia unifier. When you don’t need to maintain a large Eurasia land-based army, you exercise control by dominating trade routes along the Eurasian periphery.
Even before Mackinder and Spykman, U.S. Navy Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan had come up in the 1890s with his Influence of Sea Power Upon History – whereby the “island” U.S. should establish itself as a seaworthy giant, modeled on the British empire, to maintain a balance of power in Europe and Asia.
It was all about containing the maritime edges of Eurasia.
In fact, we lived in a mix of Heartland and Rimland. In 1952, then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles adopted the concept of an “island chain” (then expanded to three chains) alongside Japan, Australia and the Philippines to encircle and contain both China and the USSR in the Pacific. (Note the Trump administration’s attempt at revival via the Quad–U.S., Japan, Australia and India).
George Kennan, the architect of containing the USSR, was drunk on Spykman, while, in a parallel track, as late as 1988, President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters were still drunk on Mackinder. Referring to U.S. competitors as having a shot at dominating the Eurasian landmass, Reagan gave away the plot: “We fought two world wars to prevent this from occurring,” he said.
Eurasia integration and connectivity is taking on many forms. The China-driven New Silk Roads, also known as Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the Russia-driven Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU); the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB); the International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and myriad other mechanisms, are now leading us to a whole new game.
How delightful that the very concept of Eurasian “connectivity” actually comes from a 2007 World Bank report about competitiveness in global supply chains.
Also delightful is how the late Zbigniew “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski was “inspired” by Mackinder after the fall of the USSR – advocating the partition of a then weak Russia into three separate regions; European, Siberian and Far Eastern.
All Nodes Covered
At the height of the unipolar moment, history did seem to have “ended.” Both the western and eastern peripheries of Eurasia were under tight Western control – in Germany and Japan, the two critical nodes in Europe and East Asia. There was also that extra node in the southern periphery of Eurasia, namely the energy-wealthy Middle East.
Washington had encouraged the development of a multilateral European Union that might eventually rival the U.S. in some tech domains, but most of all would enable the U.S. to contain Russia by proxy.
China was only a delocalized, low-cost manufacture base for the expansion of Western capitalism. Japan was not only for all practical purposes still occupied, but also instrumentalized via the Asian Development Bank (ADB), whose message was: We fund your projects only if you are politically correct.
The primary aim, once again, was to prevent any possible convergence of European and East Asian powers as rivals to the US.
The confluence between communism and the Cold War had been essential to prevent Eurasia integration. Washington configured a sort of benign tributary system – borrowing from imperial China – designed to ensure perpetual unipolarity. It was duly maintained by a formidable military, diplomatic, economic, and covert apparatus, with a star role for the Chalmers Johnson-defined Empire of Bases encircling, containing and dominating Eurasia.
Compare this recent idyllic past with Brzezinski’s – and Henry Kissinger’s – worst nightmare: what could be defined today as the “revenge of history”.
That features the Russia-China strategic partnership, from energy to trade: interpolating Russia-China geo-economics; the concerted drive to bypass the U.S. dollar; the AIIB and the BRICS’s New Development Bank involved in infrastructure financing; the tech upgrade inbuilt in Made in China 2025; the push towards an alternative banking clearance mechanism (a new SWIFT); massive stockpiling of gold reserves; and the expanded politico-economic role of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).
As Glenn Diesen formulates in his brilliant book, Russia’s Geo-economic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia, “the foundations of an Eurasian core can create a gravitational pull to draw the rimland towards the centre.”
If the complex, long-term, multi-vector process of Eurasia integration could be resumed by just one formula, it would be something like this: the heartland progressively integrating; the rimlands mired in myriad battlefields and the power of the hegemon irretrievably dissolving. Mahan, Mackinder and Spykman to the rescue? It’s not enough.
Divide and Rule, Revisited
The same applies for the preeminent post-mod Delphic Oracle, also known as Henry Kissinger, simultaneously adorned by hagiography gold and despised as a war criminal.
Before the Trump inauguration, there was much debate in Washington about how Kissinger might engineer – for Trump – a “pivot to Russia” that he had envisioned 45 years ago. This is how I framed the shadow play at the time.
In the end, it’s always about variations of Divide and Rule – as in splitting Russia from China and vice-versa. In theory, Kissinger advised Trump to “rebalance” towards Russia to oppose the irresistible Chinese ascension. It won’t happen, not only because of the strength of the Russia-China strategic partnership, but because across the Beltway, neocons and humanitarian imperialists ganged up to veto it.
Brzezinski’s perpetual Cold War mindset still lords over a fuzzy mix of the Wolfowitz Doctrine and the Clash of Civilizations. The Russophobic Wolfowitz Doctrine – still fully classified – is code for Russia as the perennial top existential threat to the U.S. The Clash, for its part, codifies another variant of Cold War 2.0: East (as in China) vs. West.
Kissinger is trying some rebalancing/hedging himself, noting that the mistake the West (and NATO) is making “is to think that there is a sort of historic evolution that will march across Eurasia – and not to understand that somewhere on that march it will encounter something very different to a Westphalian entity.”
Both Eurasianist Russia and civilization-state China are already on post-Westphalian mode. The redesign goes deep. It includes a key treaty signed in 2001, only a few weeks before 9/11, stressing that both nations renounce any territorial designs on one another’s territory. This happens to concern, crucially, the Primorsky Territory in the Russian Far East along the Amur River, which was ruled by the Ming and Qing empires.
Moreover, Russia and China commit never to do deals with any third party, or allow a third country to use its territory to harm the other’s sovereignty, security and territorial integrity.
So much for turning Russia against China. Instead, what will develop 24/7 are variations of U.S. military and economic containment against Russia, China and Iran – the key nodes of Eurasia integration – in a geo-strategic spectrum. It will include intersections of heartland and rimland across Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan and the South China Sea. That will proceed in parallel to the Fed weaponizing the U.S. dollar at will.
Heraclitus Defies Voltaire
Alastair Crooke took a great shot at deconstructing why Western global elites are terrified of the Russian conceptualization of Eurasia. It’s because “they ‘scent’…a stealth reversion to the old, pre-Socratic values: for the Ancients … the very notion of ‘man’, in that way, did not exist. There were only men: Greeks, Romans, barbarians, Syrians, and so on. This stands in obvious opposition to universal, cosmopolitan ‘man’.”
So it’s Heraclitus versus Voltaire – even as “humanism” as we inherited it from the Enlightenment, is de facto over. Whatever is left roaming our wilderness of mirrors depends on the irascible mood swings of the Goddess of the Market. No wonder one of the side effects of progressive Eurasia integration will be not only a death blow to Bretton Woods but also to “democratic” neoliberalism.
What we have now is also a remastered version of sea power versus land powers. Relentless Russophobia is paired with supreme fear of a Russia-Germany rapprochement – as Bismarck wanted, and as Putin and Merkel recently hinted at. The supreme nightmare for the U.S. is in fact a truly Eurasian Beijing-Berlin-Moscow partnership.
The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has not even begun; according to the official Beijing timetable, we’re still in the planning phase. Implementation starts next year. The horizon is 2039.
This is China playing a long-distance game of go on steroids, incrementally making the best strategic decisions (allowing for margins of error, of course) to render the opponent powerless as he does not even realize he is under attack.
The New Silk Roads were launched by Xi Jinping five years ago, in Astana (the Silk Road Economic Belt) and Jakarta (the Maritime Silk Road). It took Washington almost half a decade to come up with a response. And that amounts to an avalanche of sanctions and tariffs. Not good enough.
Russia for its part was forced to publicly announce a show of mesmerizing weaponryto dissuade the proverbial War Party adventurers probably for good – while heralding Moscow’s role as co-driver of a brand new game.
Were the European peninsula of Asia to fully integrate before mid-century – via high-speed rail, fiber optics, pipelines – into the heart of massive, sprawling Eurasia, it’s game over. No wonder Exceptionalistan elites are starting to get the feeling of a silk rope drawn ever so softly, squeezing their gentle throats.
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Pepe Escobar is the correspondent-at-large for Hong Kong-based Asia Times. His latest book is 2030. Follow him on Facebook.
All images in this article are from Consortiumnews except for the featured image.
Whenever US forces aggressively attacks countries, dirty war is waged, including use of banned weapons.
Prohibited terror-bombing is longstanding US policy, indiscriminately harming civilians.
The Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (1907 Hague IV Convention) states:
Article 25: “The attack or bombardment, by whatever means, of towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings which are undefended is prohibited.”
Article 26: “The officer in command of an attacking force must, before commencing a bombardment, except in cases of assault, do all in his power to warn the authorities.”
Article 27: “In sieges and bombardments, all necessary steps must be taken to spare, as far as possible, buildings dedicated to religion, art, science, or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected, provided they are not being used at the time for military purposes.”
Fourth Geneva protects civilians in time of war. It prohibits violence of any type against them, requiring treatment for the sick and wounded.
In September 1938, a unanimously adopted League of Nations resolution prohibited the:
“bombardment of cities, towns, villages, dwellings or buildings not in the immediate neighborhood of the operations of land forces.”
“In cases where (legitimate targets) are so situated, (aircraft) must abstain from bombardment” if it indiscriminately harms civilians.
The 1945 Nuremberg Principles prohibit “crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
These include “inhumane acts committed against any civilian populations, before or during the war,” including indiscriminate killing and “wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.”
The 1968 General Assembly Resolution on Human Rights prohibits attacks against civilian populations. US-led NATO and Israel do it repeatedly – by land, sea, and aerial terror-bombing, flagrantly violating international laws.
US forces used banned weapons during and since WW II. Illegal incendiary and cluster munitions were used against German and Japanese forces.
In February 1945, three months before war against Nazi Germany ended, US and UK heavy bombers used thousands of tons of high-explosive and illegal incendiary weapons against Dresden, creating a firestorm, an act of barbarism against the defenseless city, massacring 100,000 or more Germans, mainly civilians.
In February 1945, US warplanes firebombed Tokyo when war in the Pacific was effectively won, Japan at the time willing to surrender unconditionally provided its emperor was retained.
The overture was declined by Franklin Roosevelt, later by Harry Truman before formally accepting Japanese surrender on September 2 aboard the USS Missouri.
Ahead of war’s end in August 1945 with Japan defeated, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were gratuitously nuked, hundreds of thousands killed or harmed by nuclear radiation, mostly civilians.
During Truman’s aggression on North Korea, US forces used biological and other banned weapons.
According to Professor Stephen Endicott’s research on the war,
“American aircraft…dropped strange objects, including live spiders, flies, bees, snakes, fleas (with bubonic plague), ticks, dead rats, and mosquitos encased in US military tubes.”
Anything goes terror war was waged on the country, killing three or four million people, destroying most of it.
US forces notoriously used cluster, incendiary, and radiological munitions, deadly dioxin (Agent Orange), and other banned weapons in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.
Since the 1991 Gulf War, illegal depleted uranium (DU) weapons were used. The 1925 Geneva Protocol and succeeding Geneva Weapons Conventions prohibited use of chemical and biological agents in any form as weapons of war.
The 1907 Hague Convention banned use of any “poison or poisoned weapons.”
DU munitions are radioactive, chemically toxic and poisonous. America is a signatory to the Hague and Geneva Conventions. Using these weapons in combat is a war crime.
In all post-9/11 wars, US forces used banned chemical, biological, radiological, incendiary and cluster munitions. They’re still used in all US war theaters.
“(t)he US-led coalition bombed several areas in the town of Hajin, 110km east of the city of Deir Ezzor, with internationally forbidden white phosphorous bombs” – on the phony pretext of combating ISIS the US created and supports, as well as al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
Russian lower house Duma Deputy Defense Committee chairman Yury Shvytkin called for an international investigation to learn precisely what happened, urging Security Council involvement.
According to Russia’s Defense Ministry, US-led forces in Syria used banned white phosphorous bombs in earlier airstrikes – including during the rape and destruction of Raqqa, massacring countless thousands of civilians, destroying most of the city, a high crime of war and against humanity.
A Pentagon statement lied, saying
“(a)s a matter of policy, the coalition will not publicly discuss the use of specific weapons and munitions in operations.”
“However, every weapons system in the US inventory undergoes a legal review to ensure the weapon complies with the Law of Armed Conflict.”
In all US wars since the misnamed “good war” against Nazi Germany and imperial Japan, US forces used banned weapons.
Pentagon claims otherwise are false, issued to try concealing its war crimes in all US war theaters – naked aggression waged in them all from Korea to post-9/11 conflicts.
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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.”
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Former US national security adviser Michael Flynn has denied claims he was offered a bribe to kidnap an Islamic cleric and smuggle him to Turkey, where he is accused of masterminding the failed 2016 coup.
According to the Wall Street Journal and NBC news, Mr Flynn was offered $15 million (£11.5m) to deliver Fethullah Gulen to Ankara, where the government has repeatedly demanded his extradition to face criminal charges.
They claim that the elaborate plan was discussed by Mr Flynn and his son with representatives of the Turkish government at a meeting in New York last December.
Image on the right: Fethullah Gulen
According to the reports, Mr Gulen was to be kidnapped from his Philadelphia home and taken by private jet to the prison island of Imrali, where Kurdistan Workers Party leader Abdullah Ocalan has been held in isolation for more than 20 years.
Details of the plot first came to light after Mr Flynn failed to register details of his work as a lobbyist for the Turkish government, which paid his consultancy, Flynn Intel Group, $530,000 (£402,850) in 2016.
Investigators are looking into whether Mr Flynn used his influence to push for the extradition of Mr Gulen during his period of office in the White House.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan alleges that Mr Gulen was behind the coup attempt of July 2016.
Mr Erdogan described the brief military revolt as “a gift from God” and the ensuing backlash has severely undermined Turkish democracy, with hundreds of thousands of public-sector workers sacked and journalists and opposition MPs jailed.
Relations between the US and Turkey have been strained over recent months as Ankara accuses Washington of supporting “terrorists” due to its support for the Kurdish-led People’s Protection Units in Syria.
US President Donald Trump imposed tough economic sanctions on Turkey in retaliation for the imprisonment of pastor Andrew Brunson, who was held under house arrest for two years.
A court gave him a three-year sentence on terror-related charges yesterday, but he was released due to time already served.
Mr Flynn denied the allegation through his lawyer, Robert Kelner, who said that, while they would not normally respond to rumours,
“today’s news cycle has brought allegations about General Flynn, ranging from kidnapping to bribery, that are so outrageous and prejudicial that we are making an exception to our usual rule: they are false.”
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Yesterday, the alternative media purge was boldly advanced in a coordinated effort to silence people who dissent from establishment views. It’s just one more step toward a monopoly on information by those who hate freedom. At this rate, they’ll soon have unquestioned access to the minds of more than 2 billion people. And this should terrify everyone who wants to be free to question the status quo and to seek a wide range of information.
Hundreds of alternative media site administrators logged onto Facebook to discover that their accounts had been removed. Soon after, many of these sites and their writers found that their Twitter accounts had also been suspended.
Popular pages like The AntiMedia (2.1 million fans), The Free Thought Project (3.1 million fans), Press for Truth (350K fans), Police the Police (1.9 million fans), Cop Block (1.7 million fans), and Punk Rock Libertarians (125K fans) are just a few of the ones which were unpublished.
Why were these alternative media accounts removed?
The reason given doesn’t really add up.
Facebook told the LA Times that these pages had violated the company’s spam policies.
“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” the company said in a blog post. “People will only share on Facebook if they feel safe and trust the connections they make here.” (source)
But this isn’t actually what their spam policy says. Here’s the policy.
We work hard to limit the spread of commercial spam to prevent false advertising, fraud, and security breaches, all of which detract from people’s ability to share and connect. We do not allow people to use misleading or inaccurate information to collect likes, followers, or shares.
Do Not:
Artificially increase distribution for financial gain
Create or use fake accounts or compromise other people’s accounts to
Impersonate or pretend to be a business, organization, public figure, or private individual
Attempt to create connections, create content, or message people
Restrict access to content by requiring people to like, share, or recommend before viewing
Encourage likes, shares, or clicks under false pretenses
Maliciously use login credentials or personally identifiable information by:
Attempting to gather or share login credentials or personally identifiable information
Using another person’s login credentials or personally identifiable information
The Washington Post originally said that these pages were purged for “pushing political messages for profit” as you can see here.
But of course, since they too push political messages for profit (waaah, Trump!) as do all the other corporate media outlets out there, they changed their headline to “Facebook purged over 800 U.S. accounts and pages for pushing political spam.”
The fact that many of these accounts were also suspended by Twitter shortly thereafter should tell you that this is a coordinated effort to silence large swaths of the population.
Of course, the best coverage of this is from…Russia.
Sputnik News contacted many of the alternative journalists who were purged to get their take on what happened. You may recall that basically every blogger outside the establishment media was accused of being secretly Russian during the 2016 election by the Washington Post, so perhaps actual Russians have a vested interest in the truth coming out on this topic.
This signifies a re-consolidation of the media. Cable news media controlled the narrative for most of modern history, but the internet has lowered that barrier to entry and allowed the average person to become the media themselves. This obviously took market share and influence away from the traditional media, and it has allowed for a more diverse public conversation. Now it seems the platforms that have monopolized the industry are favoring mainstream sources and silencing alternative voices. So now, instead of allowing more people to have a voice, these platforms are creating an atmosphere where only powerful media organizations are welcome, just as we had on cable news.
People think that we are just providing an activist spin on the news, but they don’t see the families struggling to have their voice heard. For example, when someone is shot by police, mainstream media sources often just republish the press release from the police department, without presenting the victim’s side of the story. We give the victims and their families a voice, which is essential to keep power in check. This also goes for bigger issues like foreign policy as well; multiple full-scale invasions of Syria have been prevented because of information that the alternative media made viral. (source)
Nicholas Bernabe of The AntiMedia is another alternative journalist I consider a friend and support wholeheartedly. He’s worked tirelessly to be a voice of truth in a world of lies. He told Sputnik:
Our approach generally is to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport and to amplify activist and anti-war voices and stories. All of our content is professionally fact-checked and edited.
I got into this line of work because I felt there was a need for media that challenged mainstream assumptions and biases in politics. I wanted to shed light on corruption and wrongdoing against oppressed peoples and cover the harsh truth about American foreign policy.
Over the last 28 days, we reached 7,088,000 people on Facebook.
The timing of this purge is rather dubious in my view, coming shortly before the midterm elections. This could be an attempt by Facebook itself to affect the outcome of the coming elections. The Twitter suspension caught me by surprise. I can only speculate that these suspensions were a coordinated effort to stifle our message ahead of the coming elections. (source)
Remember, this is coordinated, across multiple platforms.
Remember when this happened to Alex Jones?
Back in September, an assault was led by YouTube, Google, and Facebook against Alex Jones of Infowars fame. All of his accounts were shut down in quick succession, followed by his credit card processing companies and his newsletter service providers. I wrote at the time, “Alex Jones is just the beginning of this purge. It’s going to get much worse.”
Meanwhile, other dissenting voices were being silenced on social media with limited reach and “shadow banning.”
Infowars is a massive profit machine. But what happens when similar attacks are launched on smaller alternative media outlets? It hits us right in the wallet. And if they’re hit hard enough, they’ll cease to be able to function.
Jones has a lot of money so this may not be the end of him, but for most website owners, this would be the absolute end of our ability to do business. And to be able to bring the information we bring, we do have to run our websites as businesses. It’s far more expensive than most people realize to run a site. I know that my own operating costs every month are more than $2000. A site as big as Jones’s would be many times that amount. When all your avenues of monetization are cut off, it wouldn’t be hard for a site – and the dissent and information they share – to cease to exist. (source)
This is not just about Facebook or Twitter. It’s about the ability to find dissenting information, period. Google is in on it too. A leaked document from Google supported the idea of censorship.
Another Google document has found its way into the public domain, this time through Breitbart. The news publication reports that an 85-page briefing entitled “The Good Censor,” advises tech companies to “police tone instead of content” and to not “take sides” when censoring users…
Google might continue to shift with the times – changing its stance on how much or how little it censors (due to public, governmental or commercial pressures). If it does, acknowledgment of what this shift in position means for users and for Google is essential. Shifting blindly or silently in one direction or another rightly incites users’ fury…
The Google “internal research” even quotes outside experts like George Soros who express justification of censorship in non-U.S. markets, noting that Google should police “tone instead of content” and “censor everyone equally,” as Breitbart put it. (source)
There are 2 trillion Google searches per day. PER. DAY.
That should give you an idea of the power of something like Google. Combine it with billions of Facebook and Twitter users and you can easily see the influence wielded here. This is where free thought goes to die.
Ron Paul reminds us that truth is treason.
Ron Paul, former congressman and the libertarian voice of reason, said when Jones was purged:
“You get accused of treasonous activity and treasonous speech because in an empire of lies the truth is treason,” Paul told the Russia-based news outlet. “Challenging the status quo is what they can’t stand and it unnerves them, so they have to silence people.”
“Some of us tell the truth about our government, they call us treasonous and say we’re speaking out of line and they’d like to punish us, and I think that’s part of what’s happening with social media,” Paul told RT, adding that he hopes anti-government or anti-war voices can eliminate their “dependency” on the current social media platforms.
“I’m just hoping that technology can stay ahead of it all and that we can have real alternatives to the dependency on Twitter and other companies that have been working hand in glove with the government,” Paul added. (source)
Here’s a video from last month with Dr. Paul’s thoughts about the social media purge. In it, he reminds us that Facebook is a private entity so they do have every right to remove the pages they wish. The danger – and the area in which this treads on the First Amendment – is their direct ties to the government.
This affects everyone.
If you’re reading this and you shrug because you, personally, don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account, you’re missing the bigger point.
That’s how many people will now only receive one side of the story on things like war, politics, guns, and current events. People will believe what they’re told because there is no alternative information presented. There are no questions asked. It’s literally the textbook definition of brainwashing.
Definition of brainwashing
1: a forcible indoctrination to induce someone to give up basic political, social, or religious beliefs and attitudes and to accept contrasting regimented ideas
2: persuasion by propaganda or salesmanship (source)
Social media is a massive source of information and influence today. If the information is rigged by entities that support socialism, gun control, and the end of privacy, we’re doomed. 2.2 billion active users will be bombarded with these messages without any real option for the other side of the story.
So regardless of whether you, personally, participate, this will color popular sentiment to a massive degree. It will grow the cognitive dissonance that assures people of things like “the government is your friend” and that “you don’t need to protect yourself, the police will take care of you.”
People who hate freedom will get unfettered access to the minds of 2 billion people. That should scare the crap out of you.
What can you do about the alternative media purge?
It’s possible but unlikely that social pressure on Facebook and Twitter will push the outlets into restoring the accounts of these alternative media networks. But even if they are restored, I suspect their reach will dwindle even further.
Here are a few things you can do:
Subscribe to the newsletters of websites you enjoy. Don’t count on seeing their work on social media. (You can subscribe to my newsletter here, incidentally.)
Support them financially if you can. Many sites have Patreon accounts or donate buttons
Bookmark them and visit regularly – if they have ads, your visits help them to make the money they need to stay afloat.
Share their articles on your own social media accounts. If they can’t get their work out there, we can help.
Join alternative social media outlets like Gab and MeWe.
The truth is getting harder and harder to find. You’re going to have to dig for it.
We’re watching the biggest campaign against freedom of speech and thought that has ever occurred in our part of the world.
The alternative media purge is just the beginning. And we should all be very concerned.
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Daisy Luther is a coffee-swigging, gun-toting blogger who writes about current events, preparedness, frugality, voluntaryism, and the pursuit of liberty on her website, The Organic Prepper. She is widely republished across alternative media and she curates all the most important news links on her aggregate site, PreppersDailyNews.com.
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Sabra and Shatila, September 1982, stands as one of the worst single atrocities in modern history. Up to 3500 Palestinians were massacred when Israel’s Falangist proxies surged through the two Beirut camps in September 1982. Israel sought to dump the blame on to the Falangists. “Goyim kill goyim and they come to blame the Jews,” Israel’s Prime Minister, Menahim Begin, complained. In fact, Israel commanded and controlled the entire operation. The punishment meted out by the Kahan commission of inquiry was derisory. Ariel Sharon, the Israeli ‘defence minister’ was demoted but remained in government, after Begin refused to sack him. Despite his own complicity, Begin was not punished and neither were any of the politicians who had agreed that the camps had to be ‘cleaned out.’ World opinion was outraged, but not even this fearful event was sufficient for Israel to be held to account. Unrestrained, Israel remained free to kill at will.
The secret annex to the Kahan commission has recently made its way into the mainstream. (See Rashid Khalidi, ‘The Sabra and Shatila Massacres: New Evidence,’ Palestine Square, Institute of Palestine Studies, September 25, 2018). The basic facts are well established, so the interest lies in what these documents tell us about the interplay between the Israelis and the Falangists, and why, ultimately, Sabra and Shatila had to be invaded.
Even before 1948 Israel was setting out to turn Lebanon into a satellite state by playing on the fears of the country’s Maronite Christian community. In 1958 Lebanon endured its second civil war (second to the Druze-Maronite conflict of 1860). This war was part of a regional drama involving anti-Nasserism, anti-communism, the overthrow of the monarchy in Iraq and a planned coup attempt in Jordan. No event in Lebanon is ever simply internal, but while the collective ‘west’ and Israel had a big stake in what happened in 1958, the war developed largely as cause and effect between internal factions. By the time the US intervened, sending the Sixth Fleet and landing marines on Beirut’s beaches, these factions had for the moment resolved their differences.
In 1968, against a background of Palestinian resistance from southern Lebanon, Israel destroyed 13 commercial aircraft sitting on the tarmac at Beirut international airport. Lebanon was being warned to control the Palestinians, or else. Of course, given its highly factionalized nature, Lebanon could not control the Palestinians.
In April 1973, the Israelis infiltrated West Beirut from the sea and killed four leading Palestinian political and cultural (Kamal Nasser, a poet) figures and by 1975 the country was right on the edge. A drive-by shooting at a Maronite church in East Beirut on April 13 pushed it off. The dead included members of the Kata’ib, the Lebanese Falange, a party founded on the Spanish model in the 1930s. Falangist gunmen struck back, shooting up a bus full of Palestinians and the war was on.
As Israel was already involved with the Falangists, as it wanted chaos in Lebanon ending in the defeat of the Palestinians and the destruction of their institutions, the church shooting was very likely a deliberate Israeli provocation. The secret annex to the Kahan commission reveals that by 1975 Israel was holding secret meetings with Falangist leaders, aimed at political and military coordination, towards which end Israel gave the Falangists $118.5 million in military aid (the figure given in the Kahan annex, the true figure possibly being much higher) and trained hundreds of Falangist fighters, in preparation for the war which Israel wanted the Falangists to launch.
Israel maintained its relationship with the Falangists through the civil war. By 1982 there was an “alliance in principle,” as described by papers in the Kahan annex. Trained in Israel up to Israeli military standards, however this is understood, Israel was confident that the Falangist tough Bashir Gemayel, the dominant figure in the Christian umbrella group, the Lebanese Forces (LF), had evolved “from the emotional leader of a gang, full of hatred, into a relatively prudent and cautious political leader.” No doubt this was how Bashir presented himself at meetings with the Israelis, but his actions in the past, and in the future, indicate that he was merely concealing the brutality that still lay within.
In January 1976, the LF attacked the slum Karantina port district of Beirut, killing or massacring at least 1000 Palestinian fighters and civilians. In June, the Falangists, along with other LF factions, including the Lebanese Tigers of the Chamoun family and the Guardians of the Cedars, besieged the Tal al Za’atar Palestinian camp. Their military equipment included US tanks and armored cars. The camp held out for 35 days before being overrun. Up to 3000 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered.
The Kahan papers include an interesting exchange between Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres, Minister of Defence in 1976, who asked Sharon whether an IDF officer had warned him against sending the Falangists into Sabra and Shatila. Sharon responded that “you” (the Rabin government of 1976 of which Peres was part) had established the relationship with the Falangists and maintained it even after the massacre at Tal al Zaatar:
“You [Peres] spoke of the moral image of the government. After Tal al Zaatar, Mr Peres, you have no monopoly on morality. We did not accuse you, you have accused us. The same moral principle which was raised by the Tal al Za’atar incident [sic.] still exists. The Phalangists murdered in Shatila and the Phalangists murdered in Tal Za’atar. The link is a moral one: should we get involved with the Phalangists or not? You supported them and continued to do so after Tal Za’atar. Mr Rabin and Mr Peres, there were no IDF officers in Shatila, the same way they were absent from Tal Za’atar.” What is left unsaid is that Israel had a ‘liaison office’ at Tal al Za’ater even if IDF officers were not inside the camp.
‘High stature’
The refrain constantly repeated by Israeli intelligence and military personnel in 1982 was that no-one expected the Falangists to behave so badly. They were people of high caliber, people of quality, “men of much higher personal stature than is common among Arabs,” according to the statements made to the Kahan commission.
“I interrogated the Lebanese commanders [all Lebanese ‘commanders’ operated under direct Israeli command],” said Sharon. “I asked them, why have you done it? They looked into my eyes, as I am looking at you and their eyes did not twitch. They said ‘we did not do this, it was not us.’ I am not talking about bums, we are talking about people who are engineers and lawyers, the entire young elite, an intelligentsia, and they are looking into my eyes and saying ‘we did not do it.’
In fact, not just during the long civil war but throughout its invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israel had abundant evidence of the Falangist capacity for brutality, not just in the massacre of Muslims caught at checkpoints or the Druze in the mountains but in the statements of Falangist leaders. On September 12, two days before he was assassinated, Bashir Gemayel told Sharon that conditions “should be created” which would result in the Palestinians leaving Lebanon.
At the same meeting, it transpired that the Israelis had evidence that “as a consequence of Elie Hobeika’s activities” 1200 people had “disappeared.” Hobeika, a senior and extremely brutal Falangist figure, implicated in the CIA attempt in 1985 to assassinate the Shia spiritual leader, Shaikh Muhammad Hussain Fadlallah, was assassinated in 2002 shortly after he announced he was ready to give evidence in a Belgian court about Sharon’s role in the Sabra-Shatila massacres. His car was blown up, his head landing on the balcony of a nearby apartment.
On July 8 Bashir spoke of wanting to bulldoze the Palestinian camps in southern Lebanon. At a later meeting, asked by Sharon “What would you do about the refugee camps?,” he replied, “We are planning a real zoo.”
An IDF colonel gave evidence to the Kahan commission that it was “possible to surmise from contacts with Phalange leaders” what their intentions were. If Sabra would become a zoo, Shatila’s destiny was to be a parking lot.
The IDF colonel spoke of massacres of Druze villagers by Elie Hobeika and his men. A document dated June 23 refers to “some 500 people” detained by Christians in Beirut being “terminated.” Nahum Admoni, the Mossad head, who said he knew Bashir well, having met frequently with him in 1974/5, said that “When he talked in terms of demographic change it was always in terms of killing and elimination. This was his instinctive style.” The “demographic change” refers to Bashir’s concern at the size of Lebanon’s Shia population, and its high natural birth date compared to the Christians. To resolve this problem, Bashar said, “several Deir Yassins will be necessary.”
While referring to Bashir’s brutal talk, Admoni said that “at the same time he was a political human being and as such he had an extremely cautious thinking process and thus he avoided taking part in various warlike activities.” The evidence does not bear out the last part of this statement, as Bashar had a long record even before 1982 of engaging in extremely brutal “warlike activities.”
The violence during the Israeli onslaught on Lebanon ran from the Falangists at one end of the spectrum to the extreme violence of Ariel Sharon, including massacres of civilians in Gaza and the West Bank, at the other end. The two extremes met in the middle at Sabra and Shatila and the outcome was predictably catastrophic.
‘Totally subservient’
What must be reaffirmed is that the “cleaning” or “combing” out of Sabra and Shatila was planned, coordinated and commanded by the Israeli military. It was not a Falangist operation with Israel playing some loose supervisory role. It was an Israel operation, involving the intelligence agencies and approved by the Israeli government. The Falangists were trained and armed by Israel and the LF commanders were “totally subservient” to the commander of the Israeli force sent to the camps, the 96th division. The Falangists were told when to enter the camps and when to leave. The Israelis lit up the camps at night with flares so the Falangists could see what they were doing (or who they were killing) and they stood ready to provide medical assistance to wounded men and intervene if they got into trouble.
Any notion that Menahim Begin, the Prime Minister, had no idea what was going on until a later stage has to be discarded. As Sharon remarked at a Cabinet meeting on August 12, “to say that I speak with the PM five times a day would be an understatement.”
Israel had agreed in negotiations with the Americans not to enter West Beirut. The assassination of Bashir Gemayel on September 14 precipitated the invasion of West Beirut the following day, the seizure of key positions and the encirclement of Sabra and Shatila according to a well-prepared plan. The Falangists entered the camps in the early evening of September 16, on Israeli orders, and did not withdraw until September 18, again on Israeli orders.
There were no “terrorists” in the camps, let alone the 2500 Sharon claimed had been left behind after the PLO withdrawal from Beirut in August. There were only civilians and there was no armed resistance from them. The Falangists did their work silently, mostly with knives so that the next victim would not be aware of the fate of the one before him (or her – many of the dead were women and children and even the camp animals were butchered) until it was too late.
The Falangist liaison office was established in the headquarters of the 96th Israeli division, where eavesdropping yielded unspecified “important evidence,” according to the Kahan commission annex. Professional electronic tapping of the Falangist communications network inside the camps was maintained in addition to “improvised” tapping of the conversations inside the HQ of the 96th division. According to the Kahan commission’s annex, the Falangist liaison officer reported “abnormal occurrences” in the camps to several officers only a few hours after the Falangists entered them.
Clearly, statements by intelligence and military personnel that they did not know what was going, or that they did not know until it was too late cannot be taken at face value. There was no gunfire from the camps and no resistance as would have been expected from armed “terrorists.” In this deathly silence, with no bursts of gunfire, and not the slightest sign or sound of armed combat, did the Israelis really think the Falangists were only killing armed men? Furthermore, Sharon had made it clear that he wanted to break up all the Palestinian camps and disperse their inhabitants. A cruel and brutal figure, he was perfectly capable of doing it. What could be better calculated to drive Palestinian civilians everywhere into panicked flight than an even more monstrous Deir Yassin? There may be a lot more evidence about this, textual and graphics, that has not made its way even into the secret annex.
Sharon freely insulted and demeaned the two chief US representatives in Beirut, Ambassador Morris Draper, whom he accused of impudence in demanding that Israel withdraw from West Beirut, and President Reagan’s special envoy, Philip Habib. “Did I make myself clear?,” “Don’t complain all the time” and “I’m sick of this” are samples of his aggression when in their company but as he said of the Americans on another occasion, “I hate them.”
Ghost towns
This remorseless liar claimed that there were no civilians in the camps. “I want you to know that Burj al Barajneh and its vicinity and the area of Shatila and similar places are ghost towns” he insisted, according to the Kahan annex. In August, as the aerial and land bombardment of Beirut approached its peak, he told the Cabinet that “we are not striking at the area where the Sunni Lebanese population resides.” On August 18 he lied again:
“Today there is no-one living in the refugee camps. Only terrorists remain in the refugee camps. That is where their positions remain, in the refugee camps. That is where their positions, bunkers, and HQs were located, and all the civilians had fled.”
In fact, the camps were packed with civilians who had nowhere else to go, while in West Beirut, thousands of Sunni Muslims, Christians, and anyone who was living there, were being killed in air strikes.
At the same time, Sharon had the extraordinary gall to present himself as some kind of savior of the civilian population. After entering West Beirut he remarked that “in reality, we are not looking for anybody’s praise but if praise is due, then it’s ours as we saved Beirut from total anarchy. On September 21, a few days after the Sabra and Shatila massacres, he told the Cabinet that “We prevented a bloodbath.” In fact, the invasion had been a bloodbath from the beginning. By the end of the year, about 19,000 people had been killed, almost all of them Palestinian or Lebanese civilians.
Two issues take up numerous pages in the Kahan report annex. One is the speed with which the Israeli army moved into West Beirut after the assassination of Bashir Gemayel. The reason was that the assassination “threatened to bring down the entire political structure and undermine the military plan years in preparation over long months.” Having promised full support, Bashar had ultimately refused to send the Falangists into West Beirut and with this commanding figure dead, the Israelis feared that their invasion was going to fail at the critical moment. With no-one to stop them, Sharon’s imaginary “terrorists” would be free to rebuild their infrastructure.
‘Supreme value’
The other issue is why Israel did not send its own troops into the camps. As expressed in the Kahan papers, “the expected nature of the fighting in the camps did not arouse much enthusiasm for the deployment of the IDF.” There would be difficult fighting “which could result in a lot of bloodshed in a densely populated area, where terrorists who have to be located are disguised as civilians in a hostile environment.” Such an action would involve a large number of casualties and the IDF had no wish to involve itself “in such an unpleasant but necessary military move.”
The deployment of the Falangists instead caused “great relief” to the military: the “supreme value” governing the decision was the desire not to cause IDF casualties. So, Israel’s proxies were sent in to do the dirty work instead.
After being elected president, as he was in a dodgy way in August, Bashir Gemayel had shown he realized he would have to act as one, which meant putting the Lebanese consensus before the alliance with Israel. He would have to work with the Sunnis and Shia and repair the fractured relations with other Maronite factions. He would have to take the interests of Arab states into account. He could not simultaneously be Lebanon’s president and Israel’s president. As a senior Falangist figure, Antun Fattal remarked to Morris Draper on December 13, 1982: “Our economy is dependent on the Arab world and we cannot sacrifice it because of a peace treaty [as demanded by Israel].”
On December 14, Bashir’s successor, and milder brother, Amin, asked Israel to stop all contact with Lebanon, saying that he intended to announce at the UN that Lebanon was occupied by Israel. Like Bashir, he knew he had to respect the Lebanese consensus. By the end of 1982 what Israel had comprehensively demonstrated was that it simply did not understand Lebanon. All it had was brute force. The invasion certainly succeeded in changing the geopolitical strategic situation, but not to Israel’s advantage. Yes, the PLO went, but only for Hizbullah to take its place. By 2000 Hizbullah had driven Israel out of the occupied south, in 2006 it frustrated Israel again and by 2018 it had missiles that will cause unprecedented damage if Israel goes to war again. The country Israel regarded as the weakest link in the Arab chain had turned out to be one of the toughest.
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Jeremy Salt has taught at the University of Melbourne, Bosporus University (Istanbul) and Bilkent University (Ankara), specialising in the modern history of the Middle East. His most recent book is “The Unmaking of the Middle East. A History of Western Disorder in Arab Lands” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008.)
All images in this article are from American Herald Tribune.
Restricting Our Right To Protest Shows We Are Winning
The radical attack on our constitutional right to protest in Washington, DC needs to be stopped. The National Park Service (NPS) has published proposed rules that would curtail First Amendment rights to assemble, petition the government and exercise free speech in the nation’s capital. Together, we can stop this proposal from going forward.
Popular Resistance submitted comments to the National Park Service and is working in coalition with numerous organizations in Washington, DC to protect our constitutional rights. We will be joining with other organizations in submitting coalition comments. We need everyone to participate, submit a comment this weekend, the deadline is Monday.
Tell the NPS why protest in Washington, DC is important, your experience with protest and why these new restrictions will make it difficult to exercise your constitutional rights. Your comment will be the evidence courts will consider in reviewing these proposed rules.
Submit your comment here. The deadline is Monday, October 15th. More specifics are provided below. Please act today.
This is part of the effort to curtail dissent in the United States
The proposal would result in people being charged fees if they hold a protest. That means in order to exercise your constitutional right, the government can charge you for the police barricades, the Park Service police time and even their overtime. And, if you hold a concert with your protest where people make speeches, play music or use spoken word, you can be charged for that exercise of Free Speech as well.
While the “pay to play” rules have gotten some attention in the media, that is just the beginning of the restrictions. The area around the White House would basically be off-limits as they would close the walkway and sidewalk in front of it. This area that was used by suffragists to appeal to President Wilson for the right to vote would no longer be available. There are hundreds of protests every year around the White House as this iconic spot has been used for protests on civil rights, opposition to war, protection of the environment, urging climate justice, for economic fairness and so much more. It is used to get the attention of the president to use the presidential power to pardon, as we did in the campaign for Chelsea Manning directed at President Obama.
In this time of immediate news coverage and the ability to use social media for breaking news as it happens, NPS proposed restricting “spontaneous demonstrations.” Rather than the current rule, which presumes a permit is granted if it is not denied within 24 hours, the NPS would now put such requests in limbo and have until the last minute to deny the permit. And even if a permit is granted, the proposed rules would allow a permit to be revoked for any infraction of the permit.
Under international law, no authorization should be required to assemble peacefully, and a system of prior notification should only be intended to allow authorities to facilitate protests and peaceful assemblies. This standard would be a standard consistent with the US Constitution which forbids the abridgment of the rights to assemble, petition the government and to speak freely. The permit process already violates international law, making it more restrictive moves the United States further into the territory of a rogue nation that ignores the law even though it ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1992.
The proposed rules would also limit the size of signs and banners in many parts of the city and asks whether more parks should be labeled as parks that do not allow protest. And, in response to the Occupy protests, the NPS would limit vigils and encampments to one month — letting the people in power know that long-term protests are only a short-term threat.
Protests are increasing and will continue
Protests have been escalating in the United States since the 2009 economic collapse. That collapse was followed by a wide range of protests at banks and the Federal Reserve as well as in state capitals across the country. That was followed by the sustained multi-month protest of the Occupy encampments in hundreds of cities across the country. Out of police violence and killings of black people came the Black Lives Matter movement, and out of the poverty wages of low wage workers came Our Walmart and Fight for $15. As the US moved to become the largest oil and gas producing nation in the world — at a time when climate change science said we should build no oil and gas infrastructure — protests across the country against pipelines, compressor stations, export terminals and other infrastructure grew. This climaxed in the No DAPL protest at Standing Rock, and continues to build.
There has been a dramatic increase in protests since President Trump was elected president. In the last year, one-fifth of people in the United States say they have participated in a protest, rally or other First Amendment event. A recent poll found, “One in five Americans have protested in the streets or participated in political rallies since the beginning of 2016. Of those, 19 percent said they had never before joined a march or a political gathering.”
This is a time to be protecting constitutional rights, not curtailing them. People understand the government is not listening to them or meeting their needs and are protesting in order to be heard as they face economic insecurity – high debt and low pay.
Efforts to curtail protest are a sign that the movement is having an impact. We are building our power and are getting more organized. We have the power to stop these unconstitutional restrictions on our right to protest.
Together we can keep building a movement for transformational change. Economic, racial and environmental justice as well as an end to war can be achieved. We are closer than we realize, efforts to stop us are a sign that the power structure is afraid of the people organizing to demand change.
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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers co-direct Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.
All images in this article are from Popular Resistance.
A recent opinion piece by a certain Ben Cohen for the ‘Jewish News Syndicate’ entitled “Soviet anti-Semitism in a British guise” presented the view that the Jeremy Corbyn-led British Labour Party has adopted the trappings of an anti-Jewish political ethos which he claims has been adopted from the Soviet Union. He also points the finger at Corbyn for empathising with the Soviet Union which the author charges as having operated a state policy of anti-Semitism from the time of the coming to power of the Bolsheviks.
However, a close scrutiny of Cohen’s claims reveal that they are in several respects lacking in historicity and in others are devoid of the context that helps explain -though not condone- the persecutions visited upon Soviet Jewry, as well as the mutual antagonism developed between the Soviet Union and Israel during the Cold War. Cohen’s accusation of the Labour Party as being the repository of “Jew-hatred” is a huge one, but one that is flawed. It is symptomatic of an ongoing series of accusations and allegations which many are beginning to understand is a reaction against Labour’s tilt towards a stance that is predicated not on “Jew-hatred, but on an ideological rationale which comprehends the state of Israel as a colonial-settler project that has involved the continuous policy of ethnic cleansing against the indigenous Palestinian population, as well as the above-the-law actions of the Israeli state, which acts with impunity in its ill-treatment of the Palestinian people and its persistent defiance of international law.
1. Anti-Semitism and pre-World War II Soviet Union
Cohen’s suggestion that Soviet anti-Semitism “was state policy in the USSR, arguably from the 1917 Revolution onwards” simply does not stand the test of scrutiny.
No professional historian of repute could accept this given that a good amount of figures of Jewish origin served at the helm of the Soviet state. In fact, it would not be inaccurate to state that many compartments of the state including its political, administrative, cultural and security establishments were dominated by Jews.
The top echelon of the leaders of the early USSR included Leon Trotsky, the founder of the Red Army; Yakov Sverdlov, the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee; Grigori Zinoviev, who headed the Communist International; Karl Radek, the commissar for the press and Maxim Litvinov, the foreign affairs commissar. Other key figures of the time include Lev Kamenev, one of seven members of the first Politburo who served for short periods respectively in the office equivalent of head of state, and later as the Prime Minister of Soviet Russia.
Jews formed a sizeable proportion of the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom), the diplomatic corps, and trade missions. They also served as key administrators within the state security apparatus comprising the secret police (Cheka) and the network of labour camps. Indeed, Yuri Slezkine, the Jewish-Russian academic who authored The Jewish Century which was published by Princeton University Press in 2004, wrote that the NKVD “was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions.”
Before Slezkine, the British Jewish historian Leonard Schapiro noted that
“anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator.”
Slezkine also makes clear in his book that the preponderance of ethnic Jews in the Soviet state apparatus benefitted the aggregate of Jews living in the USSR. The resentment this caused to non-Jewish Soviet citizens was reflected in private letters intercepted by the Soviet state, samples of which Slezkine refers to in his book. For instance, one correspondence in October 1925 stated that “the Jewish dominance is absolute”. Another from the previous month, claimed that “every child knows that the Soviet government is a Jewish government”, while another opined that “the Jews for the most part, live extremely well: everything, from trade to state employment, is in their hands.” And another from June 1925 complains that “the whole press is in the hands of the Jews”.
These sorts of observations were not confined to non-Jews. Slezkine refers to the diary of a Russian writer named Mikhail Bulgakov, in which Bulgakov records visiting the editorial offices of a magazine named Godless with a Jewish friend Dmitry Stonov. While walking out of the premises, Stonov is recorded as remarking “Reminds me of a synagogue…”
Anti-Jewish sentiment was a matter keenly noted by the steers of the Soviet state and in response to this, Joseph Stalin launched a massive campaign against anti-Semitism in December 1927. At the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin declared “This evil has to be combated with the utmost ruthlessness, comrades.”
What followed were newspaper exposes, speeches by celebrities and legal action was taken against transgressors who were prosecuted in show trials. In 1931, Stalin himself said in an interview that “active anti-Semites” faced the death penalty, and it was under Stalin’s watch that the Soviet state set up the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in 1934 with Birobidzhan as its capital.
When they took control of the Russian Empire in 1917, the Bolsheviks officially abolished the Pale of Settlement, the region of Imperial Russia within which Jews were legally confined. Lenin had at the outset of his seizure of power underlined the commitment of his regime to stamping out anti-Jewish sentiment in the Russian population. In a speech that he delivered in March 1919 called “On Anti-Jewish Pogroms”, he spoke about the “lies and slander that are spread about the Jews” and enjoined the Russian masses to embrace Jews as “our brothers” and to consider them as “our comrades in the struggle for socialism”.
So much for Cohen’s supposition of anti-Semitism “arguably” being Soviet state policy from the 1917 revolution.
2. Anti-Semitism in the Post-War Soviet Union
While he is less than definitive in his claim of the existence of an anti-Jewish state policy from the time of the Bolshevik ascent to power and the official inception of the Soviet Union, Cohen expresses a greater level of certainty about state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the post-war years. He is on surer ground here. The ‘anti-Cosmopolitical campaign’, and the ‘Doctor’s Plot’, for instance, bear testament to this. There is evidence of state policies in areas such as education and employment which targeted Jews on the basis of their ethnicity. In a similar vein, it is clear that there were policies directed at Jews on the basis of their commitment to an ideology which stood in opposition to that of the Soviet state.
However, what Cohen fails to do is to give this turn of events a proper socio-historical context. Why would the Soviet Union which as Cohen acknowledges “liberated Auschwitz in 1945”, and which, although he does not refer to it, was the first country to provide de jure recognition to the state of Israel after its creation in 1948, turn from a state policy geared towards combating anti-Semitism to one of state sanctioned persecution?
The Second War, which was known as ‘The Great Patriotic War’ during its prosecution, as indeed it is still known to this day, involved Stalin’s invocation of Russian history and sense of patriotism as a motivational tool to fight the invader armed forces of the German Reich.
While the Soviet effort essentially involved a coalition of the different ethnic groups who lived in the Soviet Union, the heightened atmosphere of national feeling created the conditions within which ethnic Russians began to consider themselves to be underrepresented and Jews overrepresented in many institutions, and sought to regain control -as they perceived it- of these institutions. Thus a clandestine system of quotas was implemented in the social and economic spheres such as in relation to the admission of Jews into the Communist Party, the army, and trade unions. This does not serve as an excuse for the venom of racism, but supplies the necessary background, without which anti-Jewish feeling is simply presented as an inexplicable phenomenon.
The other post-war development to contribute to what would formally develop into an era of persecution was the growth among Soviet Jews of the ideology of political Zionism. While Stalin may have been favourable to the creation of an Israeli state which he thought would serve as a Soviet-friendly outpost in the Middle East that was dominated by the old European colonial powers (he assumed that the new state, led by Labour Zionists, many of whom originated from the old Russian Empire would be a socialist one with a pro-Soviet outlook), he soon became disillusioned and evidently believed that the loyalties of Soviet Jews would be focused on a foreign state rather than on the Soviet state.
January 20, 1953. Soviet ukaz awarding Lydia Timashuk the Order of Lenin for “unmasking doctors-killers”. It was revoked after Stalin’s death later that year. (Source: Public Domain)
The beginnings of a purge is evidenced by the so-called ‘Doctors Plot’ and the clamp down on the membership of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee most notably through the murder of its chairman Solomon Mikhoels, and the sending to a gulag of individuals such as Polina Zhemchuzhina, the Jewish wife of long-time foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, who was an active supporter of the committee.
It is important to note that Jews were not the only victims of Soviet state policies in the aftermath of the war. In fact, beginning during the war, other ethnic groups and nationalities bore the brunt of state-directed programmes which targeted them with mass deportation and persecution.
These include ethnic Germans, Koreans, Finns and other diaspora nationalities such as Karachais, Kalmyks, Chechens, Inguish, Balkars, Crimean Tartars, and Meskhetian Turks. The internal measures of forced repatriation were based on the premise of collaboration with the wartime enemies of the Soviet state, and were carried out on the basis of being either preventive or punitive.
It is also important to note that Soviet Jewry did not suffer the same fate as these nationality groups and no documentary evidence of a plan to deport the Jewish population to Siberia or other Soviet region has ever materialised. As Antonella Salomoni wrote in a 2010 essay entitled “State-Sponsored Anti-Semitism in Postwar USSR. Studies and Research Perspectives”, the allegation of a planned mass deportation of Soviet Jews is “a ‘myth’, which was the product of ‘social hysteria’ and panic permeating the Jewish community in the years immediately after the war and the Holocaust, later on purposely fomented in the peculiar context of the cold war.”
The Cold War became a stage through which the anti-colonial stance of the Soviet Union clashed with Israel’s affiliation with the United States, the ideological competitor of the Soviet Union, which of course was perceived as a force for global imperialism. The political and military enmity between the Soviet Union and Israel was also fueled by Soviet support for Palestinian militant groups, as well as the granting of military aid to Israel’s major Arab foes, Egypt and Syria.
Israel’s leaders considered the the Soviet Union to be the overseer of international terrorist movements, and also to be the backer of Arab states bent on its destruction. The Israeli military of course prevailed over Soviet-armed Arab armies in the wars of 1967 and 1973. However, one other notable, but largely unremarked upon episode during this period of mutual antipathy was the part played by Israeli military intelligence in arming and training Hezb-i-Islami Mujahideen, an Islamist guerrilla group fighting Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s.
While Cohen portrays Soviet policies in the Middle East as having been inextricably linked to anti-Jewish sentiment, he conveniently ignores the fact that the USSR supported a whole range of national liberation movements around the world, and that Soviet support for Middle Eastern Arab regimes was consistent with a policy seeking to combat American influence in the region in a similar vein to other contests for ideological supremacy in other parts of the globe.
3. Jewish Estrangement with the Left
There is a noticeable tendency among those who defend the state of Israel against the political Left to explicitly or implicitly position Leftist thinking as being somehow ineluctably anti-Jewish. The Left or the ‘hard’ Left, the argument goes, has either always been or has now morphed into a bastion of anti-Semitism, once the sole preserve of the far Right.
Ben Cohen’s piece neatly fits into this paradigm.
There are, however, problems with this narrative. And a legitimate point of scrutiny must begin by acknowledging the historical prominence of Jewish individuals and swathes of Jewish communities in the promotion, during a large period of the 20th century, of the radical ideologies of the Left, including Marxism.
The contention between the ideologies of Bolshevism on the one hand, and Zionism on the other in the hearts of Jewish communities alluded to by Winston Churchill in a 1920 article for the Illustrated Sunday Herald entitled “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People”, was a real one. And the resolution of this intellectual conflict in favour of Zionism is one that needs referencing in contemporary debates about the relationship between the political Left and Jewry.
A necessary part of explaining what may be termed the Jewish estrangement from the Left must consider the waxing and waning of Jewish power and influence during the 20th century -the “Jewish Century” according to Yuri Slezkine- which saw the diminution of Jewish power in the Soviet Union and its rise in the Middle East.
The prominence of Jews in the empire which preceded the Soviet Union cannot be underestimated. As Professor Robert Service, a historian once remarked,
“Jews supplied leaders and activists to revolutionary parties in the Russian Empire wildly out of proportion to their size in the population.”
Outside of Russia were the likes of Rosa Luxemburg in Germany, Bela Kun in Hungary and Emma Goldman in the United States who the philo-Semite Winston Churchill once wrote were involved in a “worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and impossible equality.” He waxed lyrical about this “mystic and mysterious race” who he claimed “have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire.”
There are numerous instances of Jewish individuals and organisations of the time affirming that Jews were at the vanguard of the Bolshevik takeover of Russia. For instance, an article in the September 10 1920 edition of the American Hebrew periodical which referred to the revolution as “an achievement” went on to proclaim the event as having been “largely the outcome of Jewish thinking, of Jewish discontent, of Jewish effort to reconstruct”.
A few even went further to assert a coherence between Communism and Judaism. In an article published by the Jewish Chronicle in 1919, Leopold J. Greenberg, the paper’s editor wrote that
“The ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism”.
And in a book published in 1939, A Program for the Jews and Humanity, Harry Waton, a rabbi and philosopher, claimed that
“The Communist soul is the soul of Judaism”, adding that “the triumph of Communism was the triumph of Judaism”.
Jews were attracted to Marxism for a multiplicity of reasons. For one, it promised salvation from the anti-Jewish policies of the Russian Tsars, and, as Robert Service wrote: “its replication of Judaic traditions of book-learning, exegesis and prediction”. Furthermore, the Judaic tenet of Tikun Olam, which refers to the desire to create a “more perfect society”, nourished the messianic impulse that has often guided the thinking of both secular and religious Jews. As an opinion piece published in the Jerusalem Post in November 2017 surmised, “It was a utopian urge that makes one suspect Trotsky et al remained infected by the messianic bug of the Judaism that had vowed to shed.”
I.M. Berkerman, one of several Jewish intellectuals who contributed to a collection of essays in 1923 entitled Russia and the Jews, cautioned that “it goes without saying that not all Jews are Bolsheviks and not all Bolsheviks are Jews”. But in arguing that Jews had committed a “bitter sin” during the revolution, he said that it was “obvious that a disproportionate” amount of Jews who were “immeasurably fervent”, had participated in what he called “the torment of half-dead Russia by the Bolsheviks.” Yet, in the run up to last year’s centenary commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the writer Ruth R. Wisse saw fit to ask the following in an article for the Tablet: “Why do American Jews Idealise Soviet Communism?”
The waning of Jewish power in the USSR began with the rise to power of Stalin in the 1920s. Although some Russians have in popular lore characterised the manoeuvre as one involving Stalin and a clique of ‘gangsters’ from the Caucasus taking power from Trotsky and his Jewish associates at the point of a dagger, this is much too crude and inaccurate a summation. But his outmanoeuvring of Trotsky on the one hand and of Zinoviev and Kamanev on the other, began a trend that pushed Jews out of the party. As Karl Radek ruefully put it: “Moses took the Jews out of Egypt; Stalin takes them out of the Communist Party”.
The hold that international communism held over many Jews outside of Russia took some time to wane after Stalin’s bloody purges and the post-war policy of Russification. In the 1950s, anti-Leftist witch hunts in the United States affected many Jews in Hollywood, and many episodes of Soviet espionage against the United States related to the Manhattan project involved Jewish figures.
But the consolidation of the Zionist dream through the creation of Israel, the burgeoning Refusenik Movement in Russia, the euphoria surrounding Israel’s remarkable rout of Arab armies in the Six Day War, as well as the germination of the neoconservative philosophy of which several leaders of the anti-Stalinist Trotskyite faction of the Left played a defining role, all serve, to varying degrees, as key developments in the severing of Jews from the Left.
4. Corbyn’s comments as evidence of his defence of the Soviet Union
The two specific quotes used by Cohen as evidence of Jeremy Corbyn being a defender of “the Soviet regime”, and of Corbyn’s disposition as an “ideological fellow-traveller”, are symptomatic of a campaign that is geared to defame and to denigrate.
When Corbyn rose up in Parliament in July 1984 during a debate on employer-provided nurseries to claim that “the Soviet Union makes far greater nursery provision than this country”, he was in the first instance expressing the widespread revulsion of many inside the House of Commons and in the wider public at Conservative government plans to tax nurseries. This according to Corbyn was an inhumane encumbrance on women who wished to work. It would, in his words, also effectively serve as a “tax on children”.
Hansard records him as then going on to say the following:
The Soviet Union makes far greater nursery provision than this country, as do many other countries in both eastern and western Europe, including West Germany.
The snippet relied upon by Cohen thus take Corbyn’s words out of their correct context. Rather than upholding the Soviet Union as a paragon of virtue and achievement, he was underlining the fact that the British government was falling short of a standard set by countries designated as the ‘Second World’, that is, the socialist states of eastern Europe, and by other developed Western nations such as West Germany.
So far as his second quote is concerned, Corbyn’s disbelief, expressed in a Parliamentary debate, that the Soviet Union ever had the intention of invading western Europe, is one which with hindsight a great many people of different political outlooks would agree with. As the Cold War progressed after the Cuban Missile Crisis, it was clear that the spectre of mutually assured destruction served as a great disincentive for either NATO or the Warsaw Pact to initiate a full-blown conflict. Battle plans drawn up by the Warsaw Pact such as “Seven Days to the Rhine”, a simulation exercise of a seven-day nuclear war with NATO were framed as reactive measures to a first strike by NATO.
Again, Cohen conveniently ignores part of Corbyn’s rationale which was predicated on the huge loss of life sustained by the Soviets during the Second World War. And while his preceding words that “Conservative Members seem to be pretending that the Soviet Union is our enemy” may at first sight strike the unerring observer as being somewhat strange given the hostilities manifested by the arms race, through espionage intrigues and via proxy wars, it should be remembered that Corbyn was speaking in the context of the policies of detente embarked upon by Soviet leaders in concert with their American counterparts during the 1970s, as well as the later efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to end the arms race.
He may have been thinking of the fact that the Soviet Union entered into a war time alliance with Britain and the United States to defeat Nazi Germany, a burden which was largely executed by Soviet armies in epic battles such as that fought in Stalingrad.
5. Conclusion
The present and ongoing campaign by groups representing the British Jewish community against Jeremy Corbyn thus cannot be fully understood without comprehending the lengthy and complex historical backdrop of Jews and the political Left.
Once upon a time, the majority of Jewish communities around the world were staunchly anti-Zionist. Jewish leaders such as the American Henry Morgenthau thought Zionism was “the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history”, arguing that it was “fanatical in its politics” and “sterile in its spiritual ideas”. Edwin Samuel Montagu, a Jewish-English politician, scathingly described it as a “mischievous political creed”. And needless to say, most Jews once adhered to the view that the man-made creation of a modern Israel would be an abomination.
But the triumph of Zionism over Bolshevism in the hearts of the majority of global Jewry has contrived to link the fortunes of Jews with that of Israel. Distinctions between political Zionism and Judaism are often blurred and criticism of Zionism as an ideology is interpreted as an attack on the Jewish people. This, critics point out, is borne out by the term “delegitimisation of Israel” which the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), interprets as the denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination, such as by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is “a racist endeavour”.
For many who are aware that a fundamental aspect of Zionism, whether emanating from the Left-wing Labour Zionists who publically espoused an accommodationist stance or from the Revisionist Zionism embraced by the followers of Vladimir Jabotinsky, was to expel Arab inhabitants in order to create a Jewish state, the supposition that the creation of Israel was not a racially-motivated project is one which does not rest well with logic. For them, the recent passage through the Knesset of the Basic Law on Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People serves as a formal acknowledgement of Israel as a racialist, ethno-state.
The frequent barbs relating to the inherent hostility to Jewry of Left-wing thinking as well as occasional ones pertaining to the existence of a supposedly Soviet form of “Jew hatred” that is capable of been appropriated is flawed and in the context of Ben Cohen’s piece intellectually dishonest.
In the final analysis, the struggle with the Labour Party, which under Tony Blair was ardently pro-Israeli and biased against Palestinian interests, is less about the existence of genuine anti-Jewish sentiment and more about protecting Zionist Israel from the sort of criticism never directed against it by a mainstream British political party. It is a party that the instigators of the campaign know is capable of winning a future general election, and which if in office would be more vigorous in holding the Israeli state to account for its multitude of violations of human rights as well as its persistent disregard for international law.
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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Adeyinka Makinde.
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
The massive shutdown affected many progressive sites devoted to covering war, police brutality, and other issues neglected by the corporate media.
After Facebook announced on October 10 that it shut down and removed hundreds of pages and accounts that it vaguely accused of spreading “spam” and engaging in “inauthentic behavior,” some of the individuals and organizations caught up in the social media behemoth’s dragnet disputed accusations that they were violating the platform’s rules and raised alarm that Facebook is using its enormous power to silence independent political perspectives that run counter to the corporate media’s dominant narratives.
While it is reasonable to assume that some of the more than 800 total pages and accounts shut down by Facebook were engaged in overtly fraudulent behavior—such as the use of fake accounts and bots to generate ad revenue—numerous independent media outlets that cover a wide array of issues say they were swept up in the massive purge despite never using such tactics.
“Facebook has removed the pages of several police accountability/watchdog/critic groups, including Cop Block, the Free Thought Project, and Police the Police,” Washington Post journalist Radley Balkonoted in a tweet following Facebook’s announcement. “They’ve also apparently severely restricted activity for the Photography Is Not a Crime page.”
Activist, comedian, and political commentator Lee Camp argued that Facebook’s purge is clear evidence that the “purging of anti-establishment thought is upon us” and described the account shutdowns as “full-frontal suppression of dissent.”
Everyone, this is MASSIVELY important. American censorship is reaching a new level. Sites like Anti-Media, Free Thought Project and others, have been ripped down by Facebook today. The purging of anti-establishment thought is upon us. https://t.co/7SrRcwBsfs
NOT ONLY were great journalistic sites like @AntiMedia and @TFTPROJECT banned from Facebook in yesterday's PURGE of dissident voices, but simultaneously their Twitter accounts & the accounts of their editors were SUSPENDED, like @CareyWedler. Full-frontal suppression of dissent!
Speaking to journalist Alex Rubinstein after they found out Facebook shut down their pages—some of which had hundreds of thousands of followers—the founders of Police the Police, the Free Thought Project, and other now-shuttered pages denied Facebook’s hazy charge of “fraudulent” activity and accused the company of attempting to suppress dissenting voices that refuse to toe the corporate line.
“Our approach generally is to cover stories and angles that corporate media underreport or misreport and to amplify activist and anti-war voices and stories. All of our content is professionally fact-checked and edited,” said Nicholas Bernabe, founder of The Anti-Media, a self-described “anti-establishment” website whose Facebook page was shut down along with hundreds of others on Thursday. “I can only speculate that these suspensions were a coordinated effort to stifle our message ahead of the coming elections.”
While some of the pages Facebook removed on Thursday were affiliated with right-wing sites that were spreading patently false stories, censorship opponents have long warned of the “slippery slope” of empowering corporate giants to suppress certain kinds of content, given that the suppression almost always expands far beyond the original target.
“Those who demanded Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants censor political content—something they didn’t actually want to do—are finding that content that they themselves support and like end up being repressed,” notedThe Intercept‘s Glenn Greenwald in response to Facebook’s announcement. “That’s what has happened to every censorship advocate in history.”
Though Facebook has yet to release a full list of the pages and accounts it removed, several individuals affected by the purge have taken to other social media platforms to denounce the social media giant for squashing pages that took years to develop.
Facebook took down my page with nearly 70,000 followers, labeling it as "spam," when I have spent 4 years working to build that page up and using it to post the articles I wrote and videos of my reporting. This is so incredibly wrong and is affecting hundreds of similar pages.
