Global Research

On the 22nd of October 1962 the US 2nd Fleet began the blockade of Cuba, an action that immediately threatened the world with nuclear war and annihilation. Those of us old enough to remember President Kennedy’s statement on live television will never forget the fear we all felt as the images of mushroom clouds swept across the TV screens and air raid sirens began their haunting screams as we were told to “duck and cover.”

The blockade’s objective was to force the USSR to withdraw nuclear weapons from Cuba that it had placed there in order to guarantee Cuba’s security from American attack. Fortunately the crisis ended a few days later with the missiles being withdrawn in exchange for the US withdrawing similar missiles from bases in Turkey that threatened the USSR, and a US pledge not to invade Cuba. The blockade proved to be not only a dangerous provocation but also a humiliating fiasco for the US. A year later President Kenned was assassinated.

But today the US leadership is threatening another blockade, this time of Russia, as well as threatening pre-emptive strikes to neutralise Russian cruise missiles, not located in Cuba, but in Russia itself. And the same fleet that conducted the Cuban blockade, that took part in the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the 2nd Fleet, has once again been reactivated with all the ships necessary to attempt just such a blockade.

The 2nd fleet was broken up in 2011 when the US thought it controlled the world and decided it was not needed. Today it has been reassembled to threaten Russia once again, a Russia that refuses to acknowledge US world hegemony and or permit US control of it or its allies sovereignty, economies and resources. Based in Norfolk, Virginia, the fleet’s declared mission is to “help protect the sea lanes between the United States and Europe, as well as to help allies deal with increased Russian military activity in the Greenland-Iceland-U.K. gap.”

It was agreed at the NATO Summit in Brussels that the 2nd Fleet will also become a NATO command should hostilities break out. It is so important to them that the NATO officer commanding the massive Trident Junction military exercises taking place in Norway this month is an American admiral, Admiral James Foggo, who also serves as NATO’s commander of Joint Force Command in Naples.

The Trident Junction war games posit an imaginary invasion of Norway by Russia. Since such an invasion is not conceivable it must be assumed by Russian military planners and neutral observers, by any intelligent person, that the exercise is meant to be major provocation against Russia, a threat, for to put 40,000 men, 70 major ships, including a nuclear aircraft carrier strike group, and hundreds of aircraft into Norway, a major effort in logistics and planning is not just to show Russia NATO’s capabilities. It’s a practice for the real thing.

As I wrote in an earlier article the threat of a naval blockade of Russia to stop its exports of energy, the threat made by the US Interior Minister, Ryan Zinke, seems absurd. Most of Russia’s energy exports are by pipeline but a significant amount of liquefied natural gas is now shipped from its new Yamal LNG plant in northern Russia on the Arctic Ocean to markets in Venezuela, India and China and large amounts of oil are shipped out of ports in the Baltic, the Black Sea and from Vladivostok. In fact Russia exports millions of barrels of oil to US west coast consumers which cannot obtain domestic US or Canadian oil as easily as in the past due to lack of pipelines from currently producing fields in the US and Canada.

This reliance on Russian oil is anathema to the American strategic planners, yet a blockade of that oil supply would raise oil prices to very high levels, hurting US consumers while helping Russia increase its revenue. Some US oil companies would benefit from higher prices, if there was no war, of course, but not as much as Russian companies in this scenario, so again, the threat seems as stupid as it is reckless, because it would not benefit the US and would lead to war. So why make it? And why make the threat shortly thereafter of a preemptive strike on Russia to “take out” Russian defence systems?

The US ambassador to NATO, Bailey Hutchinson stated on October 2nd that

“The question was what would you do if this continues to a point where we know that they are capable of delivering the weapons in question. And at that point we would then be looking at a capability to take out a missile that could hit any of our countries in Europe and hit America in Alaska.”

US commentators tried to play down what she said and she later tried to tone down her remarks but the threat was not withdrawn and we have to consider that she spoke for senior NATO commanders as she has a long pedigree working with them and must know what they are thinking and what they are planning. She was a US senator from Texas from 1993 to 2013 and during her term in office was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee and various other defence and military subcommittees. She has a pedigree and she has connections. Many have shrugged off her remarks as stupid or over the top, but to shrug her off as a joke is a mistake. The Russian government took what she said seriously and stated that she was engaging in dangerous aggressive rhetoric while the head of the Arms Control Association stated,

“If she is saying that if the diplomatic route doesn’t work we will destroy the missiles, that’s obviously dangerous and risks triggering a war that could go nuclear. I cannot recall anything like this in the post cold-war period.”

But then NATO has risked starting world war before, first with the Cuba Crisis, then when they attacked Yugoslavia in 1999 and, by trying to kill the Chinese Ambassador in the process, attacked China as well. They even brag about it. The Mr. Goebbels of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, in Belgrade a few days ago, told university students that they were bombed for their own good, so ipso facto any bombing NATO does of anyone is therefore for their own good, and therefore “necessary.” The megalomania is astounding.

And while the build-up and threats against Russia mount in the Baltic, in Ukraine, in Syria, and as threats against Iran mount, against North Korea, Venezuela, threats against China mount with rapidly increasing economic warfare, with new accusations that China is also trying to influence US elections, with over flights of Chinese waters by nuclear-capable bombers, incursions of US and allied military vessels in Chinese waters leading to direct confrontation, and threats of a blockade of the Malacca Straights cutting off China’s oil supplies from the middle east. The war in Syria continues, with the US, Israel and their various national and mercenary allies not willing to accept defeat. War or threats of war by the US and its allies against the powers resisting its hegemony is the constant theme of their leadership and their media. In whichever direction you look, you cannot escape the images of war or news of war.

So why would they take the risk of a naval blockade, the risk of a pre-emptive attack? It is clear that the economic warfare being conducted against Russia is not working and has only served to make Russia more independent and self-sustaining. Threats of further economic warfare in the form of punishment of its European allies if they buy Russian energy supplies, in tandem with the same measures against Iran, will mean the ruin of Europe for those countries really have no alternative except unreliable and very expensive US natural gas delivered by sea. So a naval blockade preventing Russian ships from delivering their cargoes is a logical step in their thinking, which is focused on destroying Russian economic and military power.

The other reason they would risk it is that the NATO leadership are in love with war. They worship war. It gives them, they think, what they desire; power and they want world power. They mean to take it and they mean to keep it. They enjoy frightening people. They enjoy the killing. It gives them a thrill talking about it when they sit down in their comfortable chairs and have their cocktails after a hard days war. So it cannot be assumed that the statements they make, the threats of blockade, of pre-emptive strikes, of nuclear first strikes, are just so much chatter, so many stupidities. They are evidently a set of psychopaths, like Hitler and the Nazi leadership were. They think they are omnipotent and are willing to risk everything, as they did, because they have deluded themselves into thinking that it is possible to win, to survive, and to profit from the war they are preparing for. We can pretend it’s all just bluff and loose talk, or we can take it seriously and wake up to the reality of where they are taking us and try to stop them before it’s too late. But we haven’t too long. The 2nd Fleet is ready for action. Are we?

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Christopher Black is an international criminal lawyer based in Toronto. He is known for a number of high-profile war crimes cases and recently published his novel “Beneath the Clouds. He writes essays on international law, politics and world events, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from NEO.

Nikki Haley surprised the American and international foreign policy establishment by announcing her intention to resign as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, effective at the end of this year. While President Donald Trump indicated he had known of her desire in this regard for some time, the announcement took virtually everyone else in the Trump administration—including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton—by surprise. Unlike previous senior-level administration departures, which were charged with acrimony and angst, Trump went out of his way to praise Haley, holding a news conference at which he complimented her for her work.

The reasons for her decision are stated as “personal,” and speculation abounds about potential causal factors. But at the end of the day, Haley’s resignation was a political act carried out by a political person for her own personal political gain.

To back up this assertion, here’s a bit of background about her political evolution. The daughter of Sikh immigrants, Nimrata “Nikki” Haley was schooled as an accountant and cut her teeth as a businesswoman by assuming various positions in her mother’s upscale women’s clothing establishment. Born and raised in South Carolina, Haley became a rising star for women in the Republican Party, a woman of color who embraced the conservative Christian-based ethos of the Deep South. She was a non-threatening figure in the eyes of those who would become her target demographic once she left her family business for a career in politics. In 2004, she won a seat in the South Carolina state Legislature, where she campaigned on a GOP-friendly platform of reducing taxes.

Haley was, by all accounts, a deft and capable political operator, pursuing conservative policies across the board. In 2009, encouraged by then-Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Haley announced she would run for governor of South Carolina. She won the election after receiving the support of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, vice presidential running mate of presidential candidate Sen. John McCain and (at the time) the darling of the American conservative establishment.

Once established in her role, Haley eschewed national politics—at first. She turned down an opportunity to be  Romney’s running mate in the 2012 U.S. presidential election; instead, she ran for re-election in 2014, winning handily. As governor, she backed conservative causes as she sought to further South Carolina’s fortunes. She oversaw the emergency response to Hurricane Matthew in 2016, and she faced controversy when she ordered the Confederate flag removed from the state Capitol in the aftermath of the racially motivated 2015 mass shooting at a Charleston church. Her status as a minority female, combined with her record of capable conservative governance, made her an ideal candidate for national-level politics, and she was widely touted as vice presidential material in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. She was an early supporter of Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and later, after Rubio withdrew, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.

In a moment of significant national exposure, Haley was chosen by the GOP to deliver the Republican response to President Barack Obama’s 2016 State of the Union address, during which she singled out then-presidential candidate Trump for criticism.

“Some people think that you have to be the loudest voice in the room to make a difference,” she stated. “That is just not true. Often, the best thing we can do is turn down the volume.”

Later, during an interview on NBC’s “Today” show, Haley observed that “Mr. Trump has definitely contributed to what I think is just irresponsible talk.” Later still, after she incurred the Twitter-borne wrath of Trump by calling for him to release his tax returns, she kept her response short and Southern: “Bless your heart.”

It was a job for which she was singularly unqualified.

An ambitious politician in her own right, it was no secret that Haley viewed herself as someone who could one day take the top job at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and thus she knew  a high-profile assignment at the United Nations would not only increase her visibility nationally but would also help her gain critical national security and foreign policy experience, both of which her resume clearly lacked. Under normal circumstances, heading up the U.S. Mission to the United Nations (USUN) would be an ideal place to carry out on-the-job training in the field of international relations. Foreign policy is made in Washington, D.C., and implemented in New York, where the United Nations is headquartered. The job of the USUN, a facilitator and implementer of policy as opposed to conceiving and framing policy, is to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives to the rest of the world—the perfect setting for a novice to cut her teeth while being guided by a seasoned staff of experts.

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. is not traditionally a Cabinet-level position per se. However, starting with the Ford administration in the 1970s, the position had been granted Cabinet-level status. This practice ended under President George H.W. Bush, only to be reinstated under Bill Clinton. Like his father, George W. Bush rescinded Cabinet status; then Obama reinstated it. In a break from past Republican practice, Trump agreed to keep it a Cabinet-level post, acceding to one of Haley’s preconditions for accepting the job.

Typically, the detrimental consequences of appointing someone without any foreign policy experience to a Cabinet-level diplomatic post could be offset by ensuring they are adequately back-stopped by the rest of the national security/foreign policy team, especially a strong, experienced secretary of state. Trump’s initial appointment of Rex Tillerson to lead the State Department, along with Mike Flynn as national security adviser, represented the antithesis of such a move. These factors, combined with the wholesale flight of veteran diplomats from the State Department following Trump’s election, meant Haley would be assuming her post lacking the kinds of bureaucratic and procedural checks and balances one would normally expect to see in place prior to her starting date.

The USUN is one of the most sensitive and complex diplomatic posts in the American foreign service, requiring a firm but deft hand combined with tact and patience. By design, it is not intended to be used as a blunt instrument of American foreign policy—again, not under normal circumstances. But there has been nothing normal about the presidency of Donald Trump. In late 2016, after the outgoing Obama administration refused to employ a veto to block U.N. action targeting Israel, then President-elect Trump condemned the action (or lack thereof), bemoaning on Twitter that the U.N. had “such great potential” but it had become “just a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time. So sad!” He later ominously noted “things will be different after January 20^th,” referring of course to the date of his inauguration.

Tillerson was never able to establish firm footing as secretary of state, overseeing, as he was, a department comprised of staffers whose morale was collectively in free fall and undercut at every step by a president who viewed himself as America’s most senior, all-knowing diplomat. Haley, on the other hand, thrived in her role as the administration’s mouthpiece at the United Nations. On matters of foreign policy, there was no semblance of originality vis-à-vis the White House emanating from USUN, or even an effort to take into consideration the viewpoints of the rest of the world. In the my-way-or-the-highway global view of Trump, the U.N. became little more than a podium from which America issued its demands and organized its retribution for anything less than absolute subservience. Haley played her role to a T, issuing dictates, threats and demands without displaying any notable grasp of the underlying issues or her office’s past negotiating history. In the fact-free world of the Trump administration, in which inciting global angst is considered a good thing, Haley’s purportedly muscular diplomacy played well—until it didn’t.

Haley was a loyal soldier to Trump, aggressively advocating for what passed for policy. In this she was no different than those who had preceded her. Indeed, there was little to separate her condemnation of Syrian President Bashar Assad, or Russia’s support of the Assad regime, from that of her predecessor, Samantha Power, when it came to tone and content. But the difference between the two was discernible. Power—an Ivy League-educated foreign policy wonk whose book on the Rwandan genocide garnered her a Pulitzer Prize and the attention of her future boss, Barack Obama—was at least conversant in multiple aspects of a given issue and able to engage  a wide variety of topics freely and without notes.

Ambassador Haley, on the other hand, carefully operated from a script prepared by others, reading her notes and rarely venturing into the world of free thinking. She had no experience to draw upon, lacking both academic and practical preparation. She was the dutiful puppet, unashamedly raising her hand to be the sole vote cast against a resolution condemning Trump’s precipitous decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, and then woodenly holding up the images of stricken Syrian civilians as part of an orchestrated campaign to justify military action against the Syrian government. She lambasted the Russians and Chinese, insulted virtually every other nation and international institution, and threatened to “take names” when nations dared oppose the policies she fronted.

Haley was at the forefront of America’s retreat from multilateral engagement, leading the charge as the United States withdrew from U.N. treaties and agreements (the Paris Accords and the Iran Nuclear Agreement foremost among them), slashed America’s financial contributions to the U.N. and its affiliates, and otherwise denigrated anything that didn’t directly benefit the U.S. In her defense, she was not the author of these policies, only the face the Trump administration used to sell them to the rest of the world. But as every able politician understands (and Haley is, if anything, an able politician), perception is its own reality, and as the individual who gave voice and presence to these actions, she now owns them forever.

Under any rational standard, Haley would (and should) be mocked and reviled for her performance as America’s ambassador to the United Nations. Her tenure was an exercise in pathos, the living embodiment of American power and influence in decline. Her speeches, if viewed in isolation, were one step removed from a “Saturday Night Live” send-up. At the end of the day, Haley was little more than a polished cipher put forward to sell bad policy, something Trump himself alluded to when he credited Haley with making the job of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. “a more glamorous position than it was two years ago.”

It’s not as though Haley was constitutionally incapable of independent thought—far from it. Her experience as South Carolina’s governor proved she can be a savvy and self-reliant politician, able to weigh costs and benefits when making difficult decisions. Perhaps the most difficult decision Haley had to make, then, was to allow herself to be used in such an egregious fashion so that she could build a resume capable of sustaining and supporting her own aims. She showed flashes of independence, not on matters of policy but rather personal morality, challenging the president on his Muslim ban and insisting that women who claim to have been sexually assaulted have a right to be heard.

But these isolated moments of autonomy could not hide the reality that at the end of the day, Ambassador Haley was little more than a puppet. Her days were numbered with the resignation of Tillerson and the departure of H.R. McMaster as national security adviser. In the confusion that reigned in the White House during the transition from Tillerson to Pompeo, Haley got caught out as she advanced a policy position regarding Russian sanctions that was outdated, prompting a comment from within the White House she was “confused.” “I don’t get confused,” she snapped back. This was in April 2018, about the same time she reportedly first indicated to the president she was looking to leave.

Unlike Tillerson and McMaster, Pompeo and Bolton ran a tighter ship. Bolton in particular was opposed to the idea of the U.S. ambassador to the U.N. enjoying Cabinet-level status, having noted during his time at USUN that “it overstates the role and importance the U.N. should have in U.S. foreign policy,” adding that “you shouldn’t have two secretaries in the same department.”  There could be only one voice fronting for U.S. foreign policy on behalf of the president, and it would no longer be Haley’s.

Trump did his part to make Haley’s exit appear dignified and positive. She, too, played her prescribed role, making it known she was not positioning herself to become Trump’s political rival in 2020 while also offering she planned to make her opinions on policy matters known from time to time. Perhaps she will assemble a team of foreign policy experts to help her better shape these opinions, allowing her to continue the artifice that she somehow possesses depth when it comes to issues of diplomacy and foreign relations. In the shallow world of current American politics, Haley is a master at shaping perception.

One thing is for certain—barring some unforeseen turn in her career trajectory, this isn’t the last the American people will be seeing of Haley. She is far too ambitious, far too intelligent and far too “glamorous” to simply fade away. Trump hinted at a possible future role in his administration—perhaps secretary of state during a hypothetical second Trump term. And there is always 2024. Haley would be 55 years old, ideally situated in the prime of her life to make a run for the most powerful job in the world—that is, if America still retains the status of unmatched global superpower.

Present circumstances suggest this may not prove to be the case. For all his rhetoric about “making America great again,” Trump is presiding over the greatest loss of power and prestige in American history, not insignificantly because of policies Haley helped promote and implement. And while her departure from the role of U.S. ambassador to the U.N. appears perfectly timed to insulate her, at least in the minds of the American electorate, from the consequences of any future political catastrophe that might befall Trump, the rest of the world is not so easily confused, possessing superior memory and a grasp of a reality to which Haley’s ambition seems to have blinded her.

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Scott Ritter has published op-ed essays in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Guardian, the Finacial Times, Le Monde, and numerous other newspapers. He has been a contributor for Al Jazeera, AlterNet, the Huffington Post, the Washington Spectator, the American Conservative, and TruthDig. He has written articles for The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, Arms Control Today, and others. He is the author of eight books: Endgame (1999), War on Iraq (with William Rivers Pitt) (2001), Frontier Justice (2003), Iraq Confidential (2005), Target Iran (2006), Waging Peace (2008), Dangerous Ground (2010), and Deal of the Century (2017.)

Featured image is from Eric Bridiers /United States Mission Geneva / Flickr)(CC BY-ND 2.0.

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.

“The Israeli military relies on a network of international companies, supplying everything from sniper rifles to tear gas, to carry out its massacres of protesters in Gaza,” Tom Anderson, a researcher for Corporate Occupation, told MintPress News. “These companies are knowingly supporting war crimes, and are complicit in state-orchestrated murder.”

Since the mobilization began on March 30, Israeli forces have killed 205 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory reported on October 4.

There have been 21,288 injured, including 5,345 from live ammunition, resulting in 11,180 hospitalizations. Thirty-eight of the dead and 4,250 of the wounded were children.

A press release accompanying a September 25 report by the World Bank warned, “The economy in Gaza is collapsing,” adding that “the decade-long blockade is the core issue.”

Corporate Occupation and the American Friends Service Committee, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement, and Who Profitsmaintain comprehensive lists of corporations enabling Israel’s crimes against Palestinians.

Here are a few of them:

Caterpillar, Inc.

Caterpillar is known internationally for Israel’s use of its bulldozers to demolish Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank and inside Israel itself, as well as for its role in the killing of Rachel Corrie, an International Solidarity Movement activist from the United States, who was crushed to death by one of the company’s Israel-operated machines in the southern Gaza Strip on March 16, 2003. In Gaza, Caterpillar is notorious for Israel’s deployment of its equipment to reinforce a military barrier around the Strip, as well as to level Palestinian farmland inside it. These levelingoperations both destroy Palestinian agriculture, keeping Gaza a captive market for Israeli producers, and maintain a clear line of fire for Israeli soldiers to shoot Palestinians.

Combined Systems, Inc.

Combined Systems — a Jamestown, Pennsylvania-based manufacturer owned by Point Lookout Capital and the Carlyle Group — supplies light weaponry and security equipment, such as tear gas and flash grenades, to repressive governments worldwide. In May, Corporate Occupation researchers spotted an Israeli vehicle, with police markings but obviously intended for military use, equipped with the company’s ‘Venom’ tear gas launcher next to the Gaza barrier.

Ford Motor Company

While other manufacturers, like General Motors, also provide vehicles used by the Israeli army to deploy its soldiers along the Gaza barrier, Ford’s are distinctive for their creative use. In 2003, Israeli vehicle manufacturer Hatehof began retrofitting Ford F550 trucks as armored personnel carriers. By 2016, Israel had moved on to F350s, modified by Israeli military electronics company Elbit Systems as autonomous unmanned vehicles capable of remotely controlled fire.

A modified Ford vehicle belonging to Israeli police blocks Palestinian shepherds from accessing their land near a Jewish settlement in Hebron. Photo | Ta’ayush

Monsanto

Along with herbicides from the Dow Chemical Company and ADAMA Agricultural Solutions, an Israeli unit of China’s state-owned National Chemical Corporation (ChemChina), Israel sprays Bayer subsidiary Monsanto’s notorious Glyphosate (marketed as Roundup), a known human carcinogen, on Palestinian fields across its military barrier with Gaza several times annually. As does its deployment of Caterpillar bulldozers to level the same fields, the aerial application, conducted by two civilian Israeli companies under contract to the army, serves both Israeli economic and military interests — preventing Palestinian self-sufficiency in agriculture, while allowing its forces to easily detect and fire upon Palestinian farmers and other civilians using their own land.

G4S plc

Formerly one of Israel’s biggest occupation contractors, G4S sold its major Israeli subsidiary, G4S Israel, in 2016, but kept a stake in the construction and operation of Policity, Israel’s privatized national police academy. Israel claims that its police enjoy civilian status, but routinely deploys them in military operations against Palestinians in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, including their use of both Combined System’s ‘Venon’ tear-gas launcher and weaponized drones to repress the Great March of Return.

A protest against G4S’ support of Israeli human rights abuses. Photo | Hilary Aked

Hewlett Packard

Now three companies with interlocking operations — HP Inc., Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and DXC Technology — HP equips the Israeli military with computers and has undertaken contracts to “virtualize” IDF operations, starting in 2007 with a pilot program for the Israeli navy, which enforces the blockade of Gaza.

HSBC Bank plc

HSBC provides extensive financing to some of the most notorious military manufacturers in the world, several of them Israeli.

“HSBC holds over £800m worth of shares in, and is involved in syndicated loans worth over £19b to, companies that sell weapons and military equipment to the Israeli government,” Huda Ammori, campaigns officer for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, told MintPress. “These investments include Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private security firm, which markets its weapons as ‘field-tested,’ due to them being tested on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

A leading drone manufacturer, Elbit has played a key role in aerial attacks on the Great March of Return.

Motorola Solutions Inc.

Motorola provides the encrypted smartphones the Israeli military uses to deploy soldiers, as well as radio and communications services for the Israeli police.

Remington

Among casualties of the Great March of Return, Amnesty International reports, some “wounds bear the hallmarks of U.S.-manufactured M24 Remington sniper rifles shooting 7.62mm hunting ammunition, which expand and mushroom inside the body,” along with others indicative of Israel Weapon Industries’ Tavor rifles. “In the United States this is sold as a hunting rifle to kill deer,” Brian Castner, a weapons specialist for the human-rights organization, said in April.

Sabra Dipping Company, LLC

The White Plains, New York-based food manufacturer, co-owned by PepsiCo and Israeli foodmaker Strauss, has donated food packages to the Israeli Army’s Golani Brigade, notorious for its human-rights abuses in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“We must channel our rage”

As the Great March of Return, now in its 29th week, continues, participants and supporters say targeting firms complicit in its repression is one of the most effective means of solidarity.

“We must channel our rage at Israel’s atrocities into effective actions to hold Israel accountable,” the BDS National Committee said in a statement on April 12. “Together, we can escalate Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns.”

“Israel is meeting the Palestinian protesters with live fire, massacring over 190 Palestinians to date,” Ammori told MintPress. “Israel’s racist discrimination and brutal violence is evident, and the campaign to end complicity is vital.”

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Joe Catron is a MintPress News journalist covering Palestine and Israel. He is also a solidarity activist and freelance reporter, recently returned to New York from Gaza, Palestine, where he lived for three and a half years. He has written frequently for Electronic Intifada and Middle East Eye, and co-edited The Prisoners’ Diaries: Palestinian Voices from the Israeli Gulag, an anthology of accounts by detainees freed in the 2011 prisoner exchange.

Dear friends and comrades,

On October 27, 2018, activists and witnesses from Puerto Rico, the Puerto Rican diaspora, the U.S. and the world will gather in New York City to participate in a tribunal on the crimes of colonialism.

The court will present a people’s investigation into the role of the U.S. government during its 120-year colonial rule over Puerto Rico.

They will be joined by renowned Nicaraguan jurist and lawyer Dr. Augusto Zamora, who will serve as prosecutor, and a distinguished jury of U.S. and international human rights leaders.

The United States has attempted to isolate Puerto Rico from its Caribbean, Central and South American neighboring countries through the imposition of the “carimbo,” that is U.S. citizenship. Only through resistance and struggle has Puerto Rico been able to maintain its Spanish language, culture and traditions.  But now, the Puerto Rican archipelago is in immense danger.

What is happening now is the culmination of a process of national destruction that began on July 25, 1898, when the U.S. military invaded the islands. Privatization of Puerto Rico is being carried out by a dictatorial Fiscal Control Board imposed by the U.S. Congress to manage an illegal and unpayable debt under the law known as “PROMESA” passed in 2016.

Hurricanes Irma and Maria demonstrated in 2017 the power of nature and the failure of capitalism to prioritize the most basic need: the health of our planet. But the aftermath of the hurricanes also demonstrated the criminal cruelty with which the U.S. responded to the devastation, accelerating its plans to restructure Puerto Rico for corporate and imperialist gain.

The Puerto Rican people are being suffocated by a neoliberal economic policy, combined with a colonial political status that holds their sovereignty hostage to Washington.

The neoliberal and colonial vision for a fully privatized Puerto Rico that current policies regarding education reforms and other essential services contemplate: a country bought and “resettled” by capitalist vultures and foreign billionaires, freed of taxes or regulation to exploit an impoverished, badly educated and politically repressed youth.

Ethnic cleansing and population substitution are internationally recognized as crimes. The population is shrinking because thousands of Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) are forced to emigrate in order to survive. Neoliberals envision a Puerto Rico without Puerto Ricans, echoing the warning of nationalist leader Pedro Albizu Campos that the United States “wants the cage, but not the birds.”

What is happening in Puerto Rico is different only in scale and duration from the destruction perpetrated by the U.S. elsewhere.

Only a people’s campaign in solidarity with the Puerto Rican struggle for decolonization, self-determination and justice can begin to put an end to the continued presence and domination of the United States, not only in Puerto Rico, but in the Caribbean, Latin America and other countries. We hope that your organization will be able to support this important organizing effort, and that you will be able to join us on October 27, in New York City.

We hope that your organization will attend and promote the Tribunal. There are several ways to help:

• Send a representative to the Tribunal
• Promote the Tribunal in your networks
• Follow the Tribunal’s broadcast on October 27, on the Tribunal’s Facebook page
• SEND A SOLIDARITY MESSAGE to be read during the Tribunal.
• Visit the PuertoRicoTribunal.org web site.

Solidarity is the tenderness of peoples. Only the People can save the People.

We look forward to your collaboration in this struggle that belongs to everyone.

In solidarity,

Berta Joubert-Ceci

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After decades of stagnation, corruption and deadly dependency on the United States, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is considered by many ordinary people, as well as by intellectuals, to be the last chance for Mexico.

Two important news developments are circulating all over North America: US President Donald Trump will not attend the inauguration of the Mexican left-wing President elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO). And yes, despite all tensions and disagreements, the new deal to replace NAFTA has been reached. It is called the USMCA – the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement.

Paradoxically, if Obrador is to fulfill at least half of his electoral promises, it would inevitably lead to a clash between Mexico and both the United States and Canada. The US absorbs around 80 percent of Mexican exports. Various Mexican intellectuals believe that their country was, until now, nothing more than a colony of their ‘big brother’ in the north. Canadian mining companies are brutally exploiting Mexico’s natural resources, and united with local politicians and paramilitaries, are tormenting almost defenseless native people.

After decades of inertia and decay, Mexico is ready for dramatic, essential change which, many argue, will this time not arrive directly under red banners and through revolutionary songs, but with the carefully calculated, precise moves of a chess player.

Only a genius can break, without terrible casualties, the deadly embrace of the United States. And many believe that President-elect Obrador is precisely such leader.

‘Not a poker player, but a chess player’

Mexico is in a ‘bad mood’, despite the victory of a left-wing leader. Hope is in the air, but it is fragile hope, some even say ‘angry hope’. Decades of stagnation, corruption and deadly dependency on the US, have had an extremely negative impact on the nation.

John Ackerman, US-born, Mexican naturalized legendary academic at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico) explained during our encounter in Coyoacan:

“This has been a long time coming. Throughout Latin America there has been great transformation, except in Mexico. Mexico has been the same since 1946 since PRI was created… Education, healthcare, serious commitment to social system, infrastructure; he promises to improve all this… in terms of working-class population, he expresses great interest in the union democracy, which could be a true vehicle of revolution … unions could be used to create democratic participation in the country.”

We both agree that Obrador is not Fidel, or Chavez. He is pragmatic and he knows how dangerous the proximity of Mexico to the US is. Governments get overthrown from the north, and entire socialist systems get derailed, or liquidated.

Professor Ackerman points out:

“Obrador is not a poker player, like Trump; Obrador is a chess player.”

He is extremely well informed; on his own and through his wife, an accomplished Mexican academic from a prominent left-wing family, Irma Sandoval-Ballesteros. She will soon become Minister of Public Administration in the Obrador administration, which means she will fight against endemic Mexican corruption. 

This will be, no doubt, one of the toughest jobs in the country.

From the revolutionary days

Among the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries Mexico has the second highest degree of economic disparity between the extremely poor and extremely rich. According to the government, about 53.4 million of Mexico’s 122 million people were poor in 2016.

Crime is out of control, and so is corruption. According to Seguridad Justicia y Paz, a citizen watch dog NGO in Mexico, five out of ten cities with the highest homicide rates in the world are located in Mexico: Los Cabos (1), Acapulco (3), Tijuana (5), La Paz (6), and Ciudad Victoria (8).

Some 460,000 children have been recruited by the drug rings in Mexico, according to the incoming Minister of Public Security of the Obrador government. As bodies are piling up and insecurity grows (recently, at least 100 dead bodies have been found in the state of Jalisco), the Mexican police continues to be hopelessly corrupt and inefficient. But it is now everywhere, ‘true reason for astronomic crime rate’, say many.

Misery everywhere

It is all elegance and style at one of an old hacienda, lost in time in the middle of jungle, in the State of Yucatan. Some twenty years ago I used to live very near this place, working on my novel, in self-imposed-exile. Even then, Yucatan was poor, conservative, and traditional. But there was pride and dignity even in the poorest of the villages.

Things changed dramatically, and not for the better. Now naked misery is everywhere. Just two kilometers from the hacienda Temozon, traditional rural houses have holes in the roofs, and many dwellings have already been abandoned. People are not starving; not yet, but that is mainly due to the fact that in Yucatan, there is still a great sense of community and solidarity.

Don Alfredo Lopez Cham and Dona Consuelo

Don Alfredo Lopez Cham lives in a village of Sihunchen. Half of the roof of his house is missing. He is blind in one eye. He is dirt poor. I asked him how things have been here, since I left. He just nodded his head, in despair:

“You just saw my house, there… You can imagine how it is…I cannot fix anything. For years I did not have any work. And now I am old.”

Senora Consuelo Rodriguez, his neighbor, jumps in. She is an outspoken, tough but good-hearted matron, always surrounded by a flock of chickens:

“Look, he has really nothing! Here, we are trying to help those in need, but ourselves we have close to nothing. Few years ago, the government sent some people to help to fix our houses, but they never came back again.”

In theory, Mexico has free education and health care, but in practice, it is just for those who hold government or good private jobs. President-elect AMLO  is promising to fix all that, but people all over the country are skeptical, including Senora Consuela.

“If we get sick, we have to pay, unless we have insurance from our work. And most of us, here, don’t have any steady job.”

Do people here have faith in the new government? She shrugs her shoulders: “We will see.”

This is what I hear everywhere, from coast to coast of this enormous and potentially rich country, which is the 15th largest economy in the world. There is very little enthusiasm: the majority of people adopted a ‘wait and see strategy’.

Don Rudy Alvarez who has worked for more than 20 years at one of the luxury hotels in Yucatan, is only cautiously optimistic about the future.

 “Even we who have permanent jobs at the multi-national establishments, cannot dream very big. I can feed my family well, and I can send one son to study law at the university. But no bigger dreams. My family would never be able to afford a car or any other luxury. We hope that Obrador (AMLO) will change things. Here, many people feel that Yucatan has been sold to tourists as the ‘Mayan Disneyland’, with very little respect for our culture.”

Mexico is the second most visited country in the Western hemisphere, right after the United States. But income from tourism very rarely brings a better life for local people.

Crime and drug wars are far from being the only concerns. In the center of the indigenous and historic city of Oaxaca, the armed forces are blocking the entrance to the Governor’s Palace. Why? The graffiti protesting against disappearances and extrajudicial killings of the activists, as well as forced evictions of indigenous people by the multinational companies.

Ms. Lisetta, who lives with many others, as a protest, in a tent right in front of the palace, explained:

“For 9 years we have no home. Paramilitaries and the government forces came and threw us out of our dwellings, in San Juan Copala. Some people were killed, women raped, many disappeared. We are here to demand justice.” 

She showed me her bruises.

“Recently, police came, broke my cell phone, and then injured my arm…”

At night, live bands are playing old ballads, all over the city center. People are dancing, drinking and promenading. But displaced men, women and children living in the tents are brutal reminder of real Mexico, of true suffering of many poor and almost all native people.

Construction of US-Mexico wall

I found Sra. Lorena Merina Martinez, Spokesperson of the Displaced Persons from the Autonomous Community of San Juan Copala, Oaxaca State. She spoke to me bravely, coherently and with passion:

“In 2007, San Juan Copala declared autonomy and became autonomous municipality.  There was much peace and tranquility in our community.  Then in 2009 the PRI-led government of Oaxaca started making noise as San Juan Copala is the ‘head’ of 32 communities of Trique District.  The PRI-government did not want autonomy of San Juan Copala, thus unilaterally finished it in 2009. From 2010 we resisted for 10 months so that we could bring food to our children.  They had blocked our roads.  We didn’t have anything to eat anymore.  They were killing our colleagues, but also children.  Women were raped as they went looking for food and brought it back to their children.  They cut off their hair as well.  I am talking about the rape of a 65-year-old community member, for instance.  Another woman was gravely injured.  The attackers and rapists all escaped.  For ten months we resisted with no water, no food, no electricity as the PRI-government had cut us off from everything.  The date of 16 September 2010 was when PRI-backed paramilitaries entered our community, first to the municipality building, and used big microphone to tell us to leave our houses.  We were not given any time at all to leave.  Because they saw smoke come from houses, which was basically because we were cooking, they were shooting at our houses and us.  We just had to escape with nothing and were forced to find a way to survive with our children, with nothing at all, not even our id cards.  We needed to make sure to escape with our children because we were warned that if we didn’t, then they would burn alive our children.  By 18 September 2010, PRI-backed paramilitaries started entering our houses, burning and destroying them.  We fled as by then they had killed another community member who had been resisting forced displacement.  This is when a group of women started demanding the State Government to intervene in our community.  The State nor Federal Government ever intervened.  We demanded that something is done, so that we could safely return to our community.  Since September 2010, we have been here.  But they have never done anything to let us return, nor to get rid of those who displaced us because they were the accomplice of those paramilitaries who made us forcibly displaced.”

I asked her why it happened? Were multi-national companies involved?

“Yes, there are mineral resources.  The government wants to take charge of this community.  We have very futile lands.  Lots of water, vegetables, fruits.  The government wants to suck everything from our community.”  

I recalled massacres in Chiapas, that I covered some two decades ago and later described, under different name in my revolutionary political novel Point of No Return   (Point of No Return – ebook).

At the Center of Photography Manuel Alvarez Bravoin Oaxaca, Mr. Leo (who only gave his first name), confirmed:

“It is terrible what happened to those people. Imagine that you are at home, and suddenly someone comes, with armed forces, and kicks you out. But in Mexico it’s normal, and not only in this area. Multinational companies, particularly Canadian ones, are controlling around 80 percent of the mining in this country. People, particularly indigenous ones, are treated brutally. Mexico suffered terribly from the Spanish colonialism, but it often feels that things didn’t change much. We are not in full control of our country!”

And the new administration of Obrador? Leo and his colleagues are only moderately optimistic.

“We are not sure he would dare to touch essential problems: the dependency of this country on the North, and the horrendous disparities between the rich and poor, between the descendants of the Europeans and the majority, which consists of the indigenous people. Until now you can see it everywhere: Westerners and their companies come and do what they want, while the native people are left with nothing.”

But many others remain hopeful. AMLO’s left-wing Moreno Party will soon govern in a coalition with PT (Partido del Trabajo) and the conservative Social Encounter Party. Again, it is unlikely that Mexico will follow the path of Cuba or Venezuela, but the Bolivian model is very likely. It could be a silent revolution, a change based on an extremely progressive and truly socialist constitution of the country, remarkably dating back to 1916.

A Mexican academic, Dr. Ignacio Castuera who teaches at Claremont University in California, explains:

 “I believe Obrador has to bring several factions together to implement some of what he wants to achieve. No individual alone can solve the problems of a nation. I hope many rally around him, if that happens then significant changes can be brought about. The long shadow of the US policies and corporations will continue to exert major influence.”

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In Tijuana I witness absolute misery, I visit multinational maquiladoras that pay only an equivalent of $55 USD per week to their workers, I manage to enter gangland, and I see how the US is building a depressing wall between two countries.

Gang land Tijuana

I spend hours listening to stories of Sra. Leticia, who lives just one meter away from the wall.

Image below: Sr. Leticia facing the wall

“They are cutting across our land, and it harms many creatures who live here. It also prevents water from circulating freely.”

“All this used to be Mexico. North Americans had stolen several states from us. Now they are building this wall. I visited their country on several occasions. And let me tell you: despite all our problems, I like where I am, at this side!”

Then, late at night, I listen to a man who knows his country from north to south, from east to west. We are sitting in a small café; sirens are howling nearby, another murder has just taken place. He faces me squarely and speaks slowly:

“Mexico has its back against the wall. This situation cannot continue. This is our last chance – Andrés Manuel López Obrador. We will rally behind him, we will help him. If he delivers what he promises, great; then Mexico will change and prosper. If not, I am afraid that our people will have no other choice but to take up arms.”

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This is an extended version. Essay was originally published by RT.

Andre Vltchek is a philosopher, novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He has covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. Three of his latest books are Revolutionary Optimism, Western Nihilism, a revolutionary novel “Aurora” and a bestselling work of political non-fiction: “Exposing Lies Of The Empire”. View his other books here. Watch Rwanda Gambit, his groundbreaking documentary about Rwanda and DRCongo and his film/dialogue with Noam Chomsky “On Western Terrorism”. Vltchek presently resides in East Asia and the Middle East, and continues to work around the world. He can be reached through his website and his Twitter. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from the author.

A team of database experts, statisticians, lawyers and investigators working with the Palast Investigative Fund discovered — and Indiana now admits — that these thousands of voters were cancelled in violation of a June 2018 federal court order that barred the state from using the notorious Interstate Crosscheck purge list sent to state officials by Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas.

The court order stemmed from a suit by the NAACP and League of Woman Voters against a 2017 Indiana law ordering counties to remove voters if they appear on Kobach’s list which purports to identify voters who have left the state. The NAACP and League cited the Palast team’s evidence in our 2016 Rolling Stone article showing that Crosscheck is overwhelmingly wrong in identifying voters who have moved — and extremely racist in operation.

Altogether, Indiana cancelled the registrations of a mind-boggling 469,000 voters, the majority using suspect methods.

The problems, say our experts, go way beyond the violation of the federal court order. A name-by-name analysis indicates the vast majority of the nearly half million purged remain Indiana residents who should not have lost their rights..

The Palast Investigative Fund, which obtained the list after sending a formal notice that, unless Indiana opens its files, the state will be hauled into another federal suit under the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. Indiana is one of 26 states receiving notice of suit resulting in a flood of responses now being analyzed by our investigations team.

Admission of violation of the court ruling

Rachel Garbus, researcher with Mirer Mazzocchi & Julien, our New York based attorneys, asked a top Indiana official for the reason our database experts found 27,000 voters purged whose names appeared on the Crosscheck list of voters who allegedly left the state. Post Office files indicate only 7,000 of them have moved.

The official agreed that the only reasonable explanation was a violation of the court order against using Crosscheck, though he considered the error inadvertent.

“I’m just speculating, but it is possible that some counties used the 2017 legislation so were cancelling voters using that method.”

Asked if this violated the federal court order, the official, whose name we are withholding, stated: “Yes, I’m not sure, but the county elections officials follow the law, so if that’s what the law said, then it’s possible that’s what they were doing.”

The official’s “speculation” is doubtless correct as there is no other explanation for the wrongful purge of over 20,000 citizens other than a violation of the court order overturning that 2017 law.

The Palast team and our lawyers are considering our next steps.

In the meantime, we will continue to release purge lists as states surrender to our lawsuit threat (after they have been analyzed and prepared for public review).

I am sorry that many lists are on the last days of registration or after the final date. We have been demanding this data for several months.

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Greg Palast has written four New York Times bestsellers, including Armed Madhouse, Billionaires & Ballot Bandits, and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, now a major non-fiction movie, available on Amazon — and can be streamed for FREE by Prime members!

Featured image is from the author.

Israeli occupation authorities yesterday, issued a confiscation order against 8,242 dunums (2,036 acres) of Az-Zawiya village’s lands in the Salfit district of the West Bank for alleged military purposes, Alghad TV reported.

The land is located in the west part of the village where illegal Israeli settlements are built on Palestinian land, including outposts that are not unauthorised by the Israeli authorities.

The military order gave land owners seven days to appeal through the so-called Israeli Civil Administration.

Last July, Israeli authorities issued a confiscation order against at least 140 dunums (34 acres) of land from Az-Zawiya declaring it “state land” for the purpose of building a Jewish cemetery that serves the illegal Israeli settlements in the area.

Israeli occupation forces issue Palestinians in the West Bank village of Az-Zawiya orders claiming their property as ‘state land [Facebook]

Israeli occupation forces regularly issue demolition and confiscation orders to Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, in particular in the areas surrounding illegal settlements. Issued under the pretext that the land is to be used for “military purposes”, it is often later used for the expansion of settlements.

The Palestinian Bedouin village of Khan Al-Ahmar is currently under threat of demolition, with occupation setting a deadline of 1 October. The approximately 180 residents are being forced out of homes they have lived in since their displacement by the Israeli army in 1967. The demolition would make way the E1 settlement project, linking Jerusalem to the illegal Maale Adumim settlement.

Settlement construction has increased since US President Donald Trump came to power in 2017. Trump has repeatedly backed Israel’s policies, recently moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem after declaring the holy city the undivided capital of Israel, in contravention of international law.

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Featured image is from MEMO.

After Hurricane Michael rendered Tyndall Air Force Base a “complete loss” from “widespread, catastrophic damage” – questions remain over nearly two-dozen F-22 Stealth Fighters which are unaccounted for. 

According to the New York Times, Tyndall is home to 55 stealth fighters, “which cost a dizzying $339 million each.” Before Michael hit, the Air Force evacuated at least 33 of the planes to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, however they would not comment on the status of the remaining 22 fighters.

F-22 Raptor

Air Force officials have not disclosed the whereabouts of the remaining 22 planes, other than to say that a number of aircraft were left at the base because of maintenance or safety reasons.

An Air Force spokeswoman, Maj. Malinda Singleton, would not confirm that any of the aircraft left behind were F-22s.

But photos and video from the wreckage of the baseshowed the distinctive contours of the F-22’s squared tail fins and angled vertical stabilizers amid a jumble of rubble in the base’s largest building, Hangar 5. Another photo shows the distinctive jet in a smaller hangar that had its doors and a wall ripped off by wind.

All of the hangars at the base were damaged, Major Singleton said Friday. “We anticipate the aircraft parked inside may be damaged as well,” she said, “but we won’t know the extent until our crews can safely enter those hangars and make an assessment.” –NYT

F-22s are notoriously finicky and, as the Times puts it “not always flight-worthy.” The Air Force reported earlier this year that just 49% of F-22s were mission ready at any given time – the lowest rate of any fighter in the Air Force. The total value of the unaccounted-for fighters is arouind $7.5 billion.

The eye of Hurricane Michael traveled directly over Tyndall, peeling back stormproof roofs like tin cans and flipping over an F-15 fighter jet display at the base entrance.

When it was over, the base lay in ruins, amid what the Air Force called “widespread catastrophic damage.” There were no reported injuries, in part because nearly all personnel had been ordered to leave in advance of the Category 4 hurricane’s landfall. Commanders still sifting through mounds of wreckage Thursday could not say when evacuation orders would be lifted. –NYT

So one F-22 airframe has been spotted in a roofless hangar at Tyndall. Check out the upper left portion of this photo. No idea if this is flying airframe or a ground trainer or what, but it doesn't look good. More on Tyndall AFB's sad state here: https://t.co/JikiO65eny pic.twitter.com/GlvQ6hnJP7

— Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) October 12, 2018

The last Air Force Base to suffer catastrophic damage was in 1992, when Category 5 Hurricane Andrew slammed into Homestead Air Force Base just south of Miami with winds estimated at 150 m.p.h. Two years later it was reopened as a smaller, Air Force Reserve base.

Tyndall, where about 3,600 airmen are stationed, sits on 29,000 acres that include undeveloped woods and beaches, as well as stores, restaurants, schools, a bowling alley and quiet, tree-lined streets with hundreds of homes for both active-duty and retired military. Video footage captured the ruin there, too: The high-powered storm skinned roofs, shattered windows, and tossed cars and trailers like toys, transforming the normally pristine base into a trash heap. Multistory barracks buildings stood open to the sky. –NYT

“Tyndall residents and evacuated personnel should remain at their safe location,” said Col. Brian Laidlaw on Thursday. “We are actively developing plans to reunite families and plan to provide safe passage back to base housing.”

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All images in this article are from Zero Hedge.

In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of “Sovereignty in the Information Age.” The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.

This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.

The Atlantic Council, a think tank with close ties to the highest levels of the state, has been a key partner in the social media companies’ censorship of left-wing views. Most notably, Facebook acted on a tip from the Atlantic Council when it shut down the official event page for an anti-fascist demonstration in Washington on the anniversary of last year’s neo-Nazi riot in Charlottesville.

Confident that none of the thousands of journalists in Washington will question, or even report, what he writes, Watts lays out, from the standpoint of the repressive apparatus of the state and the financial oligarchy it defends, why censorship is necessary.

The central theme of the report is “sovereignty,” or the state’s ability to impose its will upon the population. This “sovereignty,” Watts writes, faces “greater challenges now than it ever has in the past,” due to the confluence between growing political opposition to the state and the internet’s ability to quickly spread political dissent.

Watts cites the precedent of the invention of the printing press, which helped overthrow the feudal world order. In the Atlantic Council’s estimation, however, this was an overwhelmingly negative development, ushering in “decades, and arguably centuries, of conflict and disruption” and undermining the “sovereignty” of absolutist states. The “invention of the internet is similarly creating conflict and disruption,” Watts writes.

“Trust in Western society,” he warns, “is experiencing a crisis. The 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer has tracked this erosion, showing a 30 percent drop in trust in government over the last year in the United States.”

Watts notes that this collapse in support for the government cannot be explained merely by the rise of social media. This process began in the early 2000s, “at the dawn of the social media age but before it had become mainstream.” Left out are the major reasons for the collapse of popular support for government institutions: the stolen election of 2000, the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction, unending war and the impact of the 2008 financial crisis.

However, while it is “hard to argue that the current loss of trust results solely from the emergence of social media,” Watts writes, there “can be little doubt that it acted as a critical amplifier of broader trends.”

He continues: “

Technology has democratized the ability for sub-state groups and individuals to broadcast a narrative with limited resources and virtually unlimited scope.” By contrast, “In the past, the general public had limited sources of information, which were managed by professional gatekeepers.”

In other words, the rise of uncensored social media allowed small groups with ideas that correspond to those of the broader population to challenge the political narrative of vested interests on an equal footing, without the “professional gatekeepers” of the mainstream print and broadcast media, which publicizes only a pro-government narrative.

When “radical and extremist views” and “incorrect ideas” are “broadcast over social media, they can even influence the views of people who would not otherwise be sympathetic to that perspective,” Watts warns. “When forwarded by a close friend or relation, false information carries additional legitimacy; once accepted by an individual, this false information can be difficult to correct.”

People must be isolated, in other words, from the “incorrect” ideas of their friends and family, because such ideas are “difficult to correct” by the state once disseminated.

But how is this to be done? The growth of oppositional sentiment cannot be combatted with “facts” or the “truth,” because “facts themselves are not sufficient to combat disinformation.” The “truth” is “too complex, less interesting, and less meaningful to individuals.”

Nor can the growth of political opposition, for the time being, simply be solved by “eliminating” (i.e., killing or jailing) political dissidents, because this only lends legitimacy to the ideas of the victims.

“Eliminating those individuals and organizations will not be sufficient to combat the narrative and may in fact help amplify it.” He adds, “This is also the case for censorship as those behind the narrative can use the attempt to repress the message as proof of its truth, importance, or authenticity.”

Enter the social media companies. The best mechanism for suppressing oppositional viewpoints and promoting pro-government narratives is the private sector, in particular “technology giants, including Facebook, Google, YouTube, and Twitter,” which can “determine what people see and do not see.”

Watts adds,

“Fortunately, shifts in the policies of social media platforms such as Facebook have had significant impact on the type and quality of the content that is broadcast.”

The private sector, therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. “Business and the private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important…. In the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the general public’s increased trust in them as institutions.”

But this is only the beginning. Online newspapers should “consider disabling commentary systems—the function of allowing the general public to leave comments beneath a particular media item,” while social media companies should “use a grading system akin to that used to rate the cleanliness of restaurants” to rate their users’ political statements.

Strong-arm tactics still have a role, of course. Citing the example of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, Watts declares that

“governments need to create consequences” for spreading “disinformation” similar to those meted out for “state espionage” – which can carry the death penalty.

What Watts outlines in his document is a vision of a totalitarian social order, where the government, the media, and technology companies are united in suppressing oppositional viewpoints.

The most striking element of the document, however, is that it is not describing the future, but contemporary reality. Everything is in the present tense. The machinery of mass censorship has already been built.

The Atlantic Council report, based on high-level discussions within the military and state, is a confirmation of everything the World Socialist Web Site has said about the purpose of changes in the algorithms of internet and social media companies over the past year-and-a-half.

On August 25, 2017, the WSWS published an open letter to Google alleging that the company is “manipulating its Internet searches to restrict public awareness of and access to socialist, anti-war and left-wing websites.” It added, “Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting.”

Over the subsequent year, key details of the open letter have been indisputably confirmed. At congressional hearings and in other public statements, leading US technology companies have explained that they reduced the propagation of political views and statements targeted by US intelligence agencies, and did so in secret because they feared a public outcry. At the same time, they have explained the technical means by which they promoted pro-government, pro-war news outlets, such as the New York Timesand Washington Post.

But the Atlantic Council document presents the most clear, direct and unvarnished explanation of the regime of state censorship.

The struggle against censorship is the spearhead of the defense of all democratic rights. The most urgent task is to unify the working class, which is engaged in a wave of social struggles all over the world, behind the struggle against censorship as a component of the fight for socialism.

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Image. CNN Report: “Chinese Cops” in Tibet:  Footage of a protest movement in India, 2008

While Google and Facebook relentlessly target the independent online media in their campaign against “Fake News”, the routine use of fake videos and images by the mainstream media, is not an object of concern. 

It has become routine for the mainstream media including network TV to present fake images and footage of protest movements.

This process of manipulating the truth and presenting fake images is nothing new. When it is discovered, CNN or the BBC will invariably apologize for having used the “wrong image”, from the “wrong country” from its extensive archives.

The February 2014 anti-government riots in Venezuela  were “documented” by numerous fake images.

“Here are some brutal cops, with nice woolly caps and fur collars to guard against the 24°C Caracas weather, I assume.”

Below:

“This one is so iconic! But CNN had to admit that the graphic photo depicting a Venezuelan cop threatening a protester was actually taken in Singapore. See Constructing the Deception of the Anti-Government “Protests” in Venezuela: A Photo Gallery, Global Research, 18 February 2014

Green Square Tripoli, 2011.

Libyans are seen celebrating the victory of Rebel forces over Gaddafi in this 2011 BBC News Report (see below)

–

Examine the footage: It’s not Green Square and it’s not the King Idris Flag (red, black green) of the Rebels.

Its the Indian flag (orange, white and green) and the people at the rally are Indians.

Perhaps you did not even notice it.

And if you did notice, ”it was probably a mistake”, according to the BBC: “we’re so sorry, got it mixed up”

The Tibet 2008 Riots

Scroll down for complete report.

Alleged Chinese cops in khaki uniforms are shown repressing Tibet demonstrators in China.

CNN, March 14, 2008  1′.36”

But the cops are not Chinese. They are Indian.

Khaki colored uniforms were first introduced in the British cavalry in India in 1846.

No khaki uniforms in China. These are the uniforms of China’s “Armed Police”.

Most people who viewed the CNN report failed to notice that these Chinese cops with khaki uniforms and mustache do not look Chinese.

I think the issue is that most viewers trust CNN. They would not –by any stretch of the imagination– accept the fact that CNN is quite deliberately falsifying the news using fake video footage.

Think Twice.

CNN has got its countries mixed up. Sloppy journalism or media fraud?

The following text written in April 2008 shows how CNN reported on the Tibet riots by using footage of a protest movement which occurred in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.

And then they accuse the independent online media including Global Research of “fake news”.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, February 22, 2014, updated, August 10, 2015

Western Media Fabrications regarding the Tibet Riots

by Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research,  April 16, 2008

On the day of the Lhasa Riots (March 14, 2008), there is evidence of media fabrication by CNN.

The videotape presented by CNN in its News Report on the 14th of March (1.00pm EST) was manipulated.

VIDEO: Tibet monks protest against Chinese rulers (CNN, March 14, 2008)

The report presented by CNN’s Beijing Correspondent John Vause focused on the Tibet protests in Gansu province and in the Tibetan capital Lhasa.

What was shown, however, was a videotape of the Tibet protest movement in India.

Viewers were led to believe that the protests were in China and that the Indian police shown in the videotape were Chinese cops.

At the outset of the report, a few still pictures were presented followed by a videotape showing police repressing and arresting demonstrators in what appeared to be a peaceful protest:

“CNN received these photographs from Gansu province, where there is a large Tibetan population”

JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT

[CNN Vause reports on the protest movement in Gansu province. (starts at 1′.00)]

CNN received these photographs from Gansu province, where there is a large Tibetan population. [still photographs followed by video footage] According to Students for a Free Tibet, about 2,000 protestors took to the streets earlier today. They were there for about three hours. They flew the Tibetan flag and called for an independent Tibet. All of this comes after days of unrest in Tibet after monks, who were marking the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule.(CNN News, 1.00pm EST, March 14, 2008)

The voice over of John Vause then shifts into reporting on violence in Lhasa. The videotape however depicts the Tibetan protest in Himashal Pradesh, India.

[JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT]

And what could be worrying here to Beijing is that these demonstrations are being joined by ordinary Tibetan civilians, lay Tibetans. The targets here are ethnic Chinese. We’ve been told by one Chinese woman that she was attacked by Tibetan rioters. Her injuries sent her to hospital.

Also under fire here, Chinese-owned businesses, as well as government offices, and also the security forces.

According to U.S.-based human rights groups, the three main monasteries on the outskirts of Lhasa have now been surrounded by Chinese troops, and they’ve been sealed off.

We’ve also heard over the last couple of days, according to human rights groups, that more than a dozen monks have been rounded up and arrested. And there are reports, unconfirmed, that at least two people have been killed.

Chinese Cops in Khaki Uniforms

The video footage, which accompanied CNN’s John Vause’s report, had nothing to do with China. The police were not Chinese, but Indian cops in khaki uniforms from the Northeastern State of Himachal Pradesh, India.

Viewers were led to believe that demonstrations inside China were peaceful and that people were being arrested by Chinese cops.

1′.27-1′.44″ video footage of “Chinese cops” and demonstrators including Buddhist monks. Chinese cops are shown next to Tibetan monks

Are these Chinese Cops from Gansu Province or Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, as suggested by CNN’s John Vause’s Report?

REPORT ON CHINA, MARCH 14

Alleged Chinese cops repressing Tibet demonstrators in China , CNN, March 14, 2008  1′.36”

Alleged Chinese cops in khaki uniforms repressing Tibet demonstrators in China, CNN, March 14, 2008  1’40”

Their khaki uniforms with berets seem to bear the imprint of the British colonial period.

Khaki colored uniforms were first introduced in the British cavalry in India in 1846.

Khaki means “dust” in Hindi and Persian.

Moreover, the cops with khaki uniforms and mustache do not look Chinese.

Look carefully.

They are Indian cops.

The videotape shown on March 14 by CNN is not from China (Gansu Province or Lhasa, Tibet’s Capital). The video was taken in the State of Himachal Pradesh, India. The videotape of the Tibet protest movement in India was used in the CNN report on the Tibet protest movement within China.

In a March 13 Report by CNN, demonstrators are being arrested by Indian police in khaki uniforms during a protest march at Dehra, about 50 km from Dharamsala in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh.

VIDEO; Tibet Protest movement in India, CNN, March 13, 2008

“Indian police arrested around 100 Tibetans on Thursday, dragging them into waiting police vans, as they tried to march to the Chinese border to press claims for independence and protest the Beijing Olympics.” (REUTERS/Abhishek Madhukar (INDIA))

Below are images from CNN’s report on March 13, on the protest movement in Himachal Pradesh, India:

Compare these images to those in the March 14 CNN report. Same cops, same uniforms, same Indian style mustache

CNN MARCH 13 REPORT ON INDIA

Indian cops repressing Tibet demonstrators in Himachal Pradesh, India CNN, March 13, 2008  0′.53″

Indian cops repressing Tibet demonstrators in Himachal Pradesh, India CNN, March 13, 2008  1′.02″

Indian cops repressing Tibet demonstrators in Himachal Pradesh, India CNN, March 13, 2008, 1′.18″

Indian cops repressing Tibet demonstrators in Himachal Pradesh, India CNN, March 13, 2008  2.04″

We invite our readers to examine these two reports as well as the Transcript of the March 14 CNN program.

The CNN’s March 14 report on the Tibet Protest movement in China shows Chinese cops in khaki uniforms, yellow lapels and berets. While the videotape is not identical to that of March 13, CNN’s coverage of the events in China on March 14 used a videotape taken from the coverage of the Tibet Protest movement in India, with Indian cops in khaki uniforms.

The video footage was not provided to CNN by a third party. It was part of CNN’s videotaping of  the protest movement in Dharamsala on March 13.

The protest movement in India on March 13 was “peaceful”. It was organised by the Dalai Lama’s “government in exile”. It took place within 50 km of the headquarters of the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala.

The Western media was invited in to film the event, and take pictures of Buddhist monks involved in a peaceful, nonviolent march. These are the pictures which circled the World.

So what has occurred is that CNN  has copied and pasted its own videotape of the Tibet Protest movement in India and has fabricated a Gansu Province/ Lhasa, China “peaceful” protest movement with Chinese cops in khaki British colonial style uniforms.

The Chinese never adopted the British style khaki uniform and beret.

These uniforms do not correspond to those used by the police in China. (See photograph below)

No khaki uniforms in China. These are the uniforms of China’s “Armed Police”.

Meanwhile, the images of the violent riots in Lhasa, in which a criminal mob set fire to shops, homes and schools, burning several people alive, and stabbing innocent civilians with knives were not shown on network TV in the US and Western Europe. Small segments of the riots in Lhasa were shown out of context and with a view to accusing the Chinese authorities of repressing a “peaceful protest”.(See our report on the events, see coverage of the Lhasa Riots by China’s CC-TV)

While the videotape used is not identical, both CNN reports, however, show the same cops in khaki uniforms and the same Tibetan demonstrators in India. The footage used in support of CNN’s March 14 coverage of the protext movement in China has nothing to do with China. it happened in India.

CNN has got its countries mixed up.

Sloppy journalism or media fraud?
VIDEO: Tibet monks protest against Chinese rulers (CNN, March 14, 2008)

VIDEO; Tibet Protest movement in India, (CNN, March 13, 2008)

COMPLETE TRANSCRIPT OF CNN NEWS COVERAGE ON TIBET (MARCH 14, 2008

CNN NEWSROOM 1:00 PM EST

March 14, 2008 Friday

[with Don Lemon and John Vause reporting from Beijing]

….

LEMON: All right. So this place, we know, should be known for peace. Right? But that is not what is happening here lately.

Buddhist monks demonstrating for independence from China. Ethnic Tibetans join in, and soon — soon streets are filled with screams, with gunfire, with rioting. And so far the Chinese government has refused to allow CNN to even enter Tibet.

Our John Vause brings us what he knows. He’s in Beijing.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN VAUSE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: The latest information from our sources in Lhasa tell us that the streets are basically deserted, except for patrols by police cars and armored military vehicles.

We’re told fires are still burning and phone lines are still down, but electricity has been restored. And the situation there now is described as relatively calm. But these protests do appear to be spreading to the east of the country.

CNN received these photographs from Gansu province [still picture followed by live video of Indian protest], where there is a large Tibetan population. According to Students for a Free Tibet, about 2,000 protestors took to the streets earlier today. They were there for about three hours. They flew the Tibetan flag and called for an independent Tibet. All of this comes after days of unrest in Tibet after monks, who were marking the 49th anniversary of a failed uprising against Chinese rule.

And what could be worrying here to Beijing is that these demonstrations are being joined by ordinary Tibetan civilians, lay Tibetans. The targets here are ethnic Chinese. We’ve been told by one Chinese woman that she was attacked by Tibetan rioters. Her injuries sent her to hospital.

Also under fire here, Chinese-owned businesses, as well as government offices, and also the security forces.

According to U.S.-based human rights groups, the three main monasteries on the outskirts of Lhasa have now been surrounded by Chinese troops, and they’ve been sealed off.

We’ve also heard over the last couple of days, according to human rights groups, that more than a dozen monks have been rounded up and arrested. And there are reports, unconfirmed, that at least two people have been killed.

Beijing has now moved to seal off Tibet, banning foreigners and journalists from traveling there. Flights and train services have also been canceled.

John Vause, CNN, Beijing.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

This is not the only example of media fabrication where video images and  photographs are manipulated.

What really happened.

Compare CNN’s report using a fake videotape to the coverage of the Lhasa riots on China State TV.

coverage of the Lhasa Riots by China State Television CC-TV

Who is Telling the Truth?

Michel Chossudovsky is Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). He is the author of several international best-sellers including The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order, Global Research, 2003 and America’s “War on Terrorism”, Global Research, 2005. He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Michel Chossudovsky is also the author of the first comprehensive study on the restoration of capitalism in China, published more than twenty years ago. Michel Chossudovsky, Towards Capitalist Restoration. Chinese Socialism after Mao, Macmillian, London, 1986. He has recently returned from a visit to China. He was in Shanghai and Beijing in March 2008.

On October 11, the Israeli military announced that it had halted flights of F-35I stealth fighter jets following the crash of the US Marine Corps F-35B jet in South Carolina on September 28. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) stated that the F-35B crash was caused by a technical malfunction in the engine’s fuel pipe. So, the IAF decided to make additional precautions and conduct tests on all F-35I aircraft before continuing to employ them.

Earlier, multiple Israeli experts and even top officials claimed that the IAF may soon employ F-35I jets to challenge S-300 air defense systems, which were recently received by the Syrian military. However, it seems any kind of these actions is now delayed.

Heavy clashes erupted between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and ISIS in the villages of al-Shaafah, al-Susah and al-Baghuz al-Fawqani in the Hajin pocket in the province of Deir Ezzor. According to the SDF, ISIS members used a sandstorm to carry out a series of attacks. The US-backed group also claimed that 35 ISIS members were killed during the 24 hours of the clashes.

In turn, the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq claimed that ISIS attacked 9 SDF positions, killed several US-backed members and destroyed 3 of their vehicles.

The US-led coalition announced in a statement that it and Iraqi security forces had neutralized a key ISIS financial facilitation network during in the Iraqi cities of Baghdad and Erbil in the period from October 7 and October 9.

According to the statement, security forces arrested ten members of the financial network, which is known as the “al-Ray network.” No further details about the detained persons were provided.

“The arrests deal a major blow to ISIS’s capacity to threaten and terrorize civilians … This demonstrates that those who assist in, sponsor, or provide financial, material or technological support to ISIS will face severe consequences,” Major General Patrick B. Roberson, commander of the US-led coalition Special Operation Joint Task Force said in the statement.

The Iraqi government announced defeat of ISIS in the country in 2017. However, multiple ISIS cells and ISIS-linked networks have remained in many desert region sand big cities. These cells still pose a significant security threat.

Forty two years ago director Sidney Lumet brought to the big screen writer Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant story of Network. This great satirical film can now be looked at through the prism of our current state of Amerikan culture, or lack of same.

In the film top prime time newscaster Howard Beale has a nervous breakdown on air, but not before he gets at the truth, the crux of it all. Beale rants and raves about how this whole system is totally broken and corrupt, with the media leading the way… or perhaps echoing it. He tells the public to go to their windows, open them up and yell ” I’m mad as hell and not going to take it anymore!!” When the story of the inner story of this event goes viral throughout the country, Beale is no longer looked upon as a ‘Nut’ but as an icon. The whores at his network realized that their faulty ratings could now be rocketed to the top. And thus, what we now call Reality Television was born. As with today’s Reality TV, his station not only gave Beale a show of his own, to continue with both his rants and his passing out each time, but they created  a myriad of far out Reality TV shows. One of them actually had a violent revolutionary group under the microscope of the television lens. That would be like having a Reality TV show today following ISIS, or maybe one of our rogue and covert CIA units planning to undermine another nation’s sovereignty.

The inner secret behind the ‘Why’ of his network allowing, even encouraging, Howard Beale to continue to rile people up, was this: The American public are and have always been suckers for the hype, and only care about being ENTERTAINED. And so, forty two years go by and nothing changes on that account. Bread and circuses is all the majority of our fellow suckers want… and need! You see, Howard Beale did not offer solutions, only criticisms. That is all the movers and shakers of this empire can and will tolerate. When voices of dissent give out ideas of how to radically transform this empire into something much more viable, they are silenced or blacklisted from the mainstream media. To paraphrase and re-edit the famous Mark Twain quote: Politics and Mainstream Media are the  last refuge of scoundrels. Of course, to make certain that Howard Beale did not begin offering real and viable solutions (or to incite mass demonstrations) the head of the Network, Arthur Jenson, had him come up for a ‘One on One’. Actually, Jenson did all the talking, and how appropriate his monologue was for today’s times. He begins by shouting at Beale that “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and I won’t have it!!” Jenson then informs Beale, very powerfully, that “There is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT& T and IT& T, Dow and Union Carbide and Exxon….We no longer have nations… The world is a ‘College of Corporations’ …”

Watching Network, a film that every high school civics class should be shown, we see how Chayefsky realized then (as now) that with this dumbed down populace there is only entertainment and consumerism. Nothing else matters to the empire. Wars are staged and sold to us like toothpaste. Network news is scripted only to get us to watch their commercials, and nothing more. We can get the same from reading supermarket tabloids. Debate on real issues for our very physical, economic and environmental survival are tossed aside to make room for sex scandals, false patriotism and scapegoating. The Congress, Presidency and mainstream media are composed of millionaires, as are the sports we watch. Everyone is super rich except the suckers who buy into the con. What the Trump phenomena revealed is how the rage of Everyman can be channeled into following demagogues right over the cliffs of reason. Sadly, the key is to make the suckers always look below their caste and never above it. The whole Tea Party movement has shown how that works. On the other side of that phony Two Party/One Party coin we have the Democrats who rail against the very corporate sharks that most of their party takes donations from. In Network the powers that be knew that it was healthy for the suckers to vent rather than act. This writer remembers standing in the public square with my activist friend and I holding our protest signs against the illegal (and immoral) invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. A lady, recently emigrated from Germany, approached me. “You know”, she offered, “If my country did what yours did in the Middle East, there would be thousands out in the streets demonstrating, not just like the two of you here.”

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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].

As key representatives of the three chief villains of international finance and trade, the IMF, World Bank (WB) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) met on the lush resort island of Bali, Indonesia, they warned the world of dire consequences in terms of reduced international investments and decline of economic growth as a result of the ever-widening trade wars initiated and instigated by the Trump Administration. They criticized protectionism that might draw countries into decline of prosperity. The IMF cuts its global economic growth forecast for the current year and for 2019.

This is pure scaremongering based on nothing. In fact, economic growth of the past that claimed of having emanated from increased trade and investments has served a small minority and driven a widening wedge between rich and poor of both developing and industrialized countries. It’s interesting, how nobody ever talks about the internal distribution of GDP growth that these handlers and instruments of empire and liars for the elite are boasting about; nobody ever seems to question the way these growth rates are calculated – or perhaps just drawn out of hot air? Take the case of Peru, a resource-rich country that boasted in the past often an economic growth of 5% to 7%. On average, the distribution of this growth was such that 80% went to 5% of the population and 20% was to be distributed among 95% of the people. This doesn’t even address the fragmentation of the lower and higher tiers of the percentage breakdowns, but it surely creates more poverty, more inequality, more unemployment and more delinquency. 

Or just look at the insane and totally unfounded IMF prediction of 1 million percent inflation of the Venezuelan new currency in 2018 and 2019? – What are they talking about? No substantiation whatsoever. The same with the prediction of dire consequences from reduced trade, when trade as we know it, has and is serving almost exclusively the corporate world of rich industrialized countries, leaving poorer developing countries behind with a burden of unfair deals and often a resulting debt trap.

Such manipulations of truth coming out of international financial and trade organizations, especially the IMF and the WB, are so flagrantly and scrupulously wrong that they cannot be backed with a shred of professionalism, yet they get away with it, because of their apparent unfailable reputation, scaremongering government into doing what is against their and their peoples’ best interest, namely caring for their own local, sovereign economy, without any foreign interference. 

Time and again it has been proven that countries that need and want to recover from economic fallouts do best by concentrating on and promoting their own internal socioeconomic capacities, with as little as possible outside interference. One of the most prominent cases in point is China. After China emerged on 1 October 1949 from centuries of western colonization and oppression by Chairman Mao’s creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Mao and the Chinese Communist party first had to put a devastated ‘house in order’, a country ruined by disease, lack of education, suffering from hopeless famine as a result of shameless exploitation by western colons. In order to do that China remained practically closed to the outside world until about the mid- 1980’s. Only then, when China had overcome the rampant diseases and famine, built a countrywide education system and became a net exporter of grains and other agricultural products, China, by now totally self-sufficient, gradually opened its borders for international investments and trade. – And look where China is today. Only 30 years later, China has not only become the world’s number one economy, but also a world super power that can no longer be overrun by western imperialism.

But you don’t need to look that far. North Dakota saved herself from the 2008 “crisis”, by using public banking addressing the ND State’s economic needs – not the shareholder’s greed – and planning production and service activities that guaranteed basically full employment, while the rest of the country’s unemployment skyrocketed. The State’s economy grew by close to 3% in 2008 and 2009 – and is still today the State with the fastest growth rate in the country and with the lowest unemployment rate. This is mostly due to a state economic development policy that concentrates on local capacities and that banks on public banking. Today, North Dakota has still the only public bank in the country; but other States, like New Jersey, New Mexico, Arizona and others, as well as the city of Los Angeles are at the brink of creating pubic banking. The mainstream media, however, doesn’t propagate such examples, as they are not in the interest of the banking and corporate oligarchs.

Local economy with local investments for the benefit of the local population, is, of course, not what the ultra-capitalist system wants. It doesn’t fit the neoliberal economic doctrine – driving globalization forward, pushing its bitter medicine of austerity down poor governments throats, so to further exploit their people, creating more poverty, milking their social systems and steeling their natural resources.

Enough! Wake up! – Whatever you may think of President Trump – and he is certainly no panacea for world peace and his abject policy of interference in foreign lands and fueling conflicts and wars in the Middle East and around the globe must be condemned – but his protectionist policies, the “tariff wars” are a welcome sword into the belly of globalization – of the very neoliberal doctrine that has for the last thirty years brought more misery to 99.99% of the planet’s population than any other economic doctrine since Adam Smith. Trump may or may not know what he is doing, but certainly his handlers and advisers, hidden or overt, know the purpose of their newly professed turn of international policy. 

Its intention is to cut the political cohesion created by globalization, to divide again for the empire to conquer. Yes. The intention is not to promote local economies, per se, but rather to get countries ready for unguarded bilateral negotiations and agreements between Washington and the developing world, under which the latter have no protection, and with their mostly corrupt leaders, they buckle under facing the harsh conditions of the empire. So, the purpose is not to help, say, the Latin American US backyard to become sovereign again, to the contrary, with imposed bilateral deals – see Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Colombia – they are slated to become increasingly vulnerable to and dependent on the US and US-dollar hegemony.

The point is – for self-conscious and alert governments with the desire to return to their sovereign national politics – this is a crucial moment of truth to take advantage of. The ship is turning. It is the moment to jump off the globalized bandwagon, the globalized trade – the open borders for indiscriminate foreign investments; it is time to sit down and reflect – and return to autonomous local policies: local economies, for local markets, with local money and local public banking for the benefit of the local economy. Trade, of course is part of a local economy; but trade should best be kept within the realm of friendly neighbors and nations that have similar interests and similar political convictions. Trade under de-globalized circumstances should and will return equal benefits for partners, a win-win situation for all trading partners – as it should be according to the original interpretation of trade. By contrast, modern trade as we know it, has almost consistently benefitted the rich countries to the detriment of the poorer ones. 

A good example for fair and equal trade may be ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) – an association of 11 Latin American and Caribbean countries (Antigua and Barbuda Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, Nicaragua, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent, Surinam, the Grenadines and Venezuela), initiated and created by Venezuela and Cuba. ALBA may be an excellent illustration on how trade should work between countries or groups of countries. Most people have never heard of ALBA, for the simple reason, the international media are typically silent about it, because the neoliberal elite doesn’t want a case of equality to become an example for others to follow. There exist currently other similar, even lesser known cases of fair and equal trade, throughout the world, that are equally silenced by the media. 

Promoting fair and equal trade is not an agenda item of WTO, nor of the IMF or the World Bank. Their role is just the contrary, being facilitators for the west to further exploit the people of the South and to further deplete the workers’ accumulated funds of their social safety-net that are still available in many western industrialized countries, especially in the western EU. It’s the bedrock of social safety that can be privatized and sucked empty by the international corporate banking system, along with privatization of social infrastructure, such as water supply and sanitation, electricity, hospitals, airports, railways – and much more. All what has the air of profitability can and must be privatized under neoliberal economic doctrines.

Countries, nations and societies, beware from listening and adhering to and working with these nefarious globalizing organizations – IMF, WTO and WB. They are mere servants of western corporatism and debt enslaving financial systems driven by the US Federal Reserves (FED), as well as Wall Street and their European banking partners.

This is an appeal to all countries that are proud of regaining their political sovereignty and economic autonomy, to ignore scaremongering and fear imposing threats by the IMF, the World Bank and WTO. They are not representing the truth, but their nasty role is to belie reality in favor of manipulative invented statistics that are expected to being believed because they stem from these so-called well-reputed institutions. Again, the best example of the IMF’s nonsensical statements is their repeated denigration of Venezuela, accusing the country of fostering an economy that creates a one million percent inflation in 2018 and even higher, they say, in 2019. – Can you imagine? – That says it all. Be aware – their words, whether spoken in Bali, Washington or Geneva, are nothing more than fear- and threat mongering hot air.

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

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 most visible kink in the European part of the NATO armor is, of course, financial. With military budgets pressed into the ground in most nations of Europe, armies across the old continent have been forced to mothball projects, outright cancel others, and drastically reduce the scale of those which remain. This meager funding is a problem for the United States, which heads the Atlantic alliance. As a primus inter pares, but a member nonetheless of NATO, America is expected to pay its share – albeit the bulkiest one, given its hegemonic economy. But even with regards to proportionality, European countries are nowhere near financial par. In 2017, the US floated over half of NATO’s expenses, despite being one member among 29. CNBC Amanda Macias reports:

“In 2017, the U.S. accounted for 51.1 percent of NATO’s combined GDP and 71.7 percent of its combined defense expenditure. In short, the U.S. contributed more funds to NATO than Germany, France, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and Canada combined.”

As a result, Washington has been pressuring its transatlantic allies to increase their military spending. German news site Deutsche Welle reported: “

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said Germany should be more vigilant in increasing its defense spending, as 29 countries prepare to meet for a NATO summit on Wednesday. Stoltenberg said he welcomed the German government’s pledge to increase the defense budget to 1.5 percent of GDP by 2024. But he said he expected the country “to do even more” to meet the 2024 alliance target of 2 percent of GDP that Germany and other NATO countries agreed on during a 2014 summit.”

But it is doubtful that all European countries are willing, or even able to fork out more military dollars.

The military gap doesn’t end there, and this situation is not only a question of defense budgets: Europe also lacks some strategic capabilities. The aerial technological shortage is especially visible on the strategic airlift. Due to political tensions and contract mismanagement, Russians will no longer be leasing Antonov-124 to NATO, making the entire logistics burden rest on American capacities, as long as the A400 isn’t fully operational. Even if the new military Airbus were up and running, its payload is still greatly inferior to Russian AN-124 120-ton capacity, making European transport contributions minimal and barely self-sufficient.

Finally, comes the question of industrial standards which have been slipping all over Europe. In some views, the American military industry is in better shape because the numerous conflicts in which the US has been involved in, in recent decades, has battle-hardened both troops and engineering firms. On the contrary, Europe has only engaged in comparatively smaller and selective deployments. Germany has been providing an unfortunate example of the capacity and quality downfall. Once known for its robust quality levels all across the industry and its tip-of-the-spear shipbuilding, German armed forces have recently been plagued with a string of embarrassing quality-related disasters. TKMS, the shipbuilding subsidiary of ThyssenKrupp, obtained a four-frigate contract from the German Navy, but delivered ships that we unseaworthy, leading them to be locked in their harbors. Defense specialist James Rogers writes:

“Citing the German newspaper Kieler Nachrichten, the WSJ reports that the Baden-Württemberg experienced problems with its radar, electronics and the flameproof coating on its fuel tanks. During its sea trials, the frigate was also found to list slightly to its starboard side”.

The 6 new German U-boots, which comprise the entire German underwater fleet, are all back in their pens due to maintenance and quality problems, effectively depriving Berlin of a submarine capacity – a large hole in any military defense plan. Defense News reports:

“The German Navy’s six-strong fleet of submarines is completely out of commission after the only operational sub had an accident off the coast of Norway on Sunday.”

TKMS was previously seen as one of the best shipbuilding companies in the world.

Britain, the largest non-US NATO contributor, contributed to the European situation and has simply accepted the idea that it has lost its footing in the fold of nations. Geostrategy expert Matthew Jameson echoes former military chiefs of department and writes

“The first duty of any military is to be able to secure and defend the homeland of its country. If the UK military are not even up to this task, how can they be called a major military power and how can Theresa May with any credibility lecture other countries about their defence preparations when the UK military could not even defend the UK in the event of a major military attack?”

Put simply, neither the UK, nor any European ally, would have the funds to get anywhere near even contributions to the American war effort. And even if unlimited funds were available, the technological know-how would still lack.

America has been pounding the table and pushing its allies to step up their game. The election of President Trump has upped the inter-ally rhetoric, as the US no longer wished to bear the brunt of the military defense effort. But even if the American rallying cries for a renewed onslaught are heard, it will probably take years to restore economic levels, quality levels within the industry or to close the technological gap.

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The first death was soon after midnight, a policeman killed on night watch near the Tajik border. The bloodshed continued as the sun rose then set again, ending only as the day did.

Three beheadings at a school, and an airstrike around 11.30pm were the last conflict-related violence recorded in Afghanistan on June 30; the culmination of a day of murder and maiming, shootings, explosions, air strikes and one unclaimed political assassination.

For everyone except injured survivors, and the families of the dead, it was an unexceptional day in a war that much of the world appears to have forgotten. There were no major attacks in big cities, no key battles, no catastrophic air strikes, just the ceaseless grind of war.

On October 7, it will be 17 years since US troops and Afghan allies began their march to topple the Taliban in Kabul, launching the latest iteration of Afghanistan’s civil war.

In the intervening years foreign troop numbers have surged and been cut back again; leaders in the US and the UK have declared “our war” in Afghanistan over, and “mission accomplished”.

Yet the Taliban have kept fighting and a regional affiliate of Islamic State has joined them on the battlefield. Today insurgents control or threaten more territory than they have done since 2001, and civilian casualties are setting grim records.

In a bid to capture the relentless nature of the war, and the spread of violence around the country, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Observer have compiled a list of all attacks reported on a single day, using unpublished official documents and on the ground reporting, to give a snapshot of the war today.

The snapshot details the death of at least 60 people, and the wounding of over a dozen more, in more than 50 different attacks spread across 16 provinces – nearly half the country. Every outbreak of violence that we could identify, from a few shots fired at a police station in eastern Ghazni, to an airstrike on Taliban positions in western Farah, is listed.

June 30 is particularly poignant because it was the first day of fighting after an unprecedented and unexpectedly successful three day ceasefire between government and Taliban forces ended. Desperately weary of war, many Afghans were hopeful that the truce would be extended. This is what they got instead:

Murad (photo on left) and Khawja (photo on right) died in the 1am attack on the border police post

In February 2018 Oskar Lafontaine wrote: “Do we need a movement of the political left accumulating broader forces (Sammlungsbewegung)? Yes, if we want social cuts to be halted, wages and pensions to rise again, foreign policy to reinstate Willy Brandt’s policy of detente, and the progressive destruction of our environment and species extinction to be stopped.” His analysis of the results of the German national election of autumn 2017 was that DIE LINKE Party with 9.2 per cent is too weak to challenge the rise of the political right and to fill the vacuum that the decline of the SPD has created. Pointing out Bernie Sanders in the U.S., Jeremy Corbyn in the UK or Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise as new successful attempts to create broader movements against neo-liberalism by mobilising via social media, he called: “Left, unite!” The aim is to appeal especially to those who have been disappointed and disillusioned for many years and who don’t see themselves represented any longer by the current political spectrum.

Sahra Wagenknecht (co-chair of DIE LINKE group in the German national parliament, the Bundestag), argued along the same line as her husband Lafontaine in numerous interviews and articles. Together with Bernd Stegmann, a theater director, Wagenknecht announced on 6 August 2018 her intention to launch a new ‘movement’ called ‘Aufstehen!’ (Stand up!): “In order to be able to make a different policy in Germany, other majorities are needed. To regain these, there must be a left-wing rallying movement that has the courage to engage with the powerful actors. The basis of such a movement is the classic social democratic tradition that politics cares about the material living conditions and ensures that they are good for all people and the opportunities are equally distributed.”

 From interviews to the ‘appeal’

They created a website of ‘Stand Up!’, calling on people to register to the new movement via Internet – in the first weeks even without any political platform being presented. Just carefully manufactured video statements from ‘normal people’, why a profound change of policy in Germany is necessary, was all that was presented. For weeks, there was absolute silence who (except Wagenknecht and Stegmann) is ‘behind’ this initiative. Finally, as presented at a well attended press conference on 4 September 2018,  the co-initiators of that appeal are e.g. Marco Bülow (MP, SPD), Ludger Volmer (the former chair of the Greens in the 1990ies), Antje Vollmer (Greens, former vice-president of the German national parliament 1994 – 1998), Fabio De Masi (MP, DIE LINKE), trade unionists, academics such as Wolfgang Streeck, writers and artists. ‘Stand Up! was able to gather all in all quite a broad spectrum. As of October 2018, ‘Aufstehen!’ claims to have gained about 150.000 registered supporters, most of them without any party affiliation. Currently its focus seems to be to create local groups and start discussions about what to do next.

Vague political platform

The appeal states clearly that ‘Stand Up!’ does not want to create a new party, but considers itself as a (cross-party) movement open to anybody (party-affiliated or not) who supports its aims.  The political platform of ‘Stand Up!’ is quite vague and mildly social democratic. It focuses on rebuilding and strengthening the welfare state, protecting the environment, stopping privatization and neo-liberal de-regulation and so on. It’s perhaps clearest message is calling for peace and detente with Russia (which is currently not so much supported by Social Democrats and Greens in Germany). Wagenknecht’s wing within DIE LINKE has strong controversies with the party’s majority on issues such as the European Union and the Euro regime (Lafontaine and Wagenknecht supporting Lexit and PlanB orientations) and on migration policy (Wagenknecht arguing against the concept of open borders).

On EU issues, the appeal states: “A European Germany in a united Europe of sovereign democracies. The European Union should be a space for protection and organization, but not a catalyst for market-radical globalization and the erosion of democracy. European politics needs democratic legitimacy.” On migration, it demands: “Ensuring the right to asylum for the persecuted, stopping arms exports to areas of tension and ending unfair trade practices, helping war and climate refugees, tackling hunger and poverty on the ground and creating prospects in their home countries. Through a new world economic order, guaranteeing the life chances of all peoples at a high level and in line with the available resources.”

Economist Heiner Flassbeck (editor of Makroskop) is quite disappointed about the current appeal (‘beautiful words, but few content’). On Europe, he comments: “The European Union should not be a catalyst for market-radical globalization, states the paper. So what? Not a word about the great tensions between Germany and the countries of Southern Europe, not a word about the devastating German role in the monetary union, not a word about the necessary new economic policy and the reduction of Germany’s current account surplus, not a word about the future and the all-important question, such as how Germany should position itself to prevent the collapse of Europe.”

However, the initiators of ‘Stand Up!’ claim that the current appeal is not final and that there will be debates with the grass roots supporters to develop a programmatic platform of the ‘movement’. So what will be next for ‘Aufstehen!’? A phase of organizing and programmatic debate? What will be its future trajectory?

Options under discussion (or feared)

Is ‘Aufstehen!’ about creating a broad left-wing movement (with conferences, debates, mass mobilisations, demonstrations) to counter right wing street movements such as PEGIDA (the anti-Muslim and xenophobic alliance in Germany working closely with the hard right AfD as their parliamentary wing)? Will it be focusing on extra-parliamentary activities to create a momentum for shifting policies in Germany to the left? We shall see …

Some of its initiators discuss the idea to put pressure on DIE LINKE, the Greens and the SPD  to put candidates from ‘Stand up!’ on those parties electoral lists, in the hope that those  might be able to jointly re-conquer lost space amongst voters. However, ‘Stand up’s’ Green representatives such as Ludger Volmer and Antje Vollmer have only a very marginal influence within the current German Greens. The moderate German Greens are flying high in opinion polls (15 to 17 per cent) with an orientation to become a major party of the ‘extreme centre’, future coalitions with conservatives (Jamaica-like) included. Also, ‘Stand Up’s’ representatives coming from the SPD are quite isolated within their own party. In my view, this approach is not very realistic.

The crucial question for many political observers is this: the real (still hidden) long-term project of Stand Up! could be to create a social democratic ‘left populist’ party, using Internet and social media mobilisation, if it can consolidate and establish itself. As mentioned by Lafontaine earlier on, the templates for this are ‘Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise , Momentum linked to Jermy Corbyn as Labour leader in the UK, or Podemos in Spain. This seems to be the dream of Wolfgang Streeck (one of ‘Stand Up’s’ prominent initiators): “There is very little to distinguish many leftwing members of the SPD from the non-sectarian wing of Die Linke, and the same holds for many non-voters. All could find an electoral home in a new combination of leftist Social Democrats and the realistic wing of Die Linke.”  In Streecks view, Lafonatine and Wagenknecht are that ‘realistic wing’. But not the self-proclaimed ‘realists’ from eastern Germany such as Gregor Gysi and his followers, which for decades preached about the need for compromise, moderation and ‘Red-Red-Green’  (R2G) coalitions. This happened in Germany’s eastern ‘Länder’, and proved to be disappointing – DIE LINKE losing many votes to the hard right AfD in the East, because it is regarded (quite justifiedly) as being part of ‘the establishment’. The perspective of a new party formation emerging from ‘Stand Up!’ is  thus the main fear of the current majority of DIE LINKE, whose executive committee (Bundesvorstand) distanced itself from that project.

All that told, splitting DIE LINKE along those lines is a risky endeavour, if ‘Aufstehen!’ should not be able to compensate that by organizing a much broader and radical left wing political base (as with the Corbyn project). Currently, programmatically it represents a ‘weak social democracy’, if at all. The Greens are becoming more and more one of the main pillars of the German ‘extreme centre’ (Tariq Ali), the SPD is unable to renew itself and in free fall. And the two other more or less ‘left social democratic’ formations in Germany (such as DIE LINKE and possibly ‘Aufstehen!’) each receiving something about or above 5 per cent of the vote – this does not look like initiating a ‘left turn’ of German politics.

There is also a certain irony in all this: in former times, Wagenknecht and Lafontaine were very sceptical about R2G – rightly in my view – pointing out its failures to combat neo-liberalism and strongly criticizing the R2G oriented wing of DIE LINKE. Now, it seems, that ‘Stand Up!’ tries to promote a ‘new’ strategy for forging an R2G electoral and governmental alliance, which in my view is based on a lot of ‘wishful thinking’.

Which of the options discussed above ‘Stand Up!’ will follow, is far from clear at the current stage. Whether the new ‘movement’ will be able to create some extra-parliamentary momentum to push German politics leftwards also remains to be seen. To cite the famous literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920 – 2013): “The curtain is closed and all questions open”.

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Klaus Dräger worked for the group of the European United Left/ Nordic GreenLeft as staff co-ordinator in the European Parliament’s Committee on Employment and Social Affairs; now retired. He is a member of the advisory board of the German magazine ‘Z’ (Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung ZME; Journal Marxist Renewal).

Featured image is from The Asian Age.

Thousands of activists, women and young Brazilians marched in Sao Paulo Thursday to protest against right-wing presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who won the first round of the Brazilian presidential election on Oct. 7.

Angered by Bolsonaro’s sexist, misogynist, and homophobic comments, along with a wave of violence against persons unwilling to support Bolsonaro, protesters used the hashtag #EleNao, or #NotHim to drum up support against the former army captain.

The #NotHim hashtag, which has become increasingly popular over the last few weeks, has seen people in 24 countries and 52 cities show solidarity with Brazilian women and other at-risk groups. According to the Facebook account of “Women United Against Bolsonaro,” which now has over two million followers, the demonstrations are nonpartisan. International rallies have also been organized through the “Brazilian Women Abroad Against Bolsonaro” Facebook account and incorporated the #EleNão hashtag and “No to Fascism” slogan on social media.

According to Agencia Publica, an independent investigative journalism agency based in Brazil, Bolsonaristas have been behind at least 50 separate attacks targeting left-wing activists and groups since 30 September, with several other unconfirmed cases reported. Another group the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (Abraji) has also registered more than 60 physical attacks on reporters, which took place “in a political, partisan and electoral context”.

In one such attack, a Workers Party (PT) supporter was murdered in Salvador, Bahia state, after a disagreement with a Bolsonaro supporter. In another, a 19-year-old girl was attacked and marked with a swastika for wearing a t-shirt that read “Ele Nao” (“Not Him”).

The acts of violence have led to fear and a general sense of uneasiness about life under Bolsonaro’s presidency since he has repeatedly expressed support for Brazil’s military dictatorship.

“The election has divided the country amongst a population that after four elections is tired of the government in power, and who wants radical change. This radical change is the far right. They (far-right supporters) defend Nazis, fascists, racists, homophobes, human rights ideals,” protester Gabriela Gomez told Reuters in an interview.

Caroline Salgao, another anti-Bolsonaro voter, told Al Jazeera:

“I was really sad when I voted, I cried because of what is going to happen in this country.”

While protester, Vitor Nascimento, who has been attacked previously, said:

“Being LGBTI, I am afraid of his supporters beating us up. It has happened to me.”

Members of the media have also come under attack in recent weeks, in one case a 40-year old female reporter was assaulted with a knife while attempting to vote. According to local media, two Bolsonaristas attacked the journalist after seeing her press credentials hanging from her neck. One of the attackers, while waving a knife and a Bolsonaro T-shirt, grabbed her and said:

“When my commander wins the election you lot in the press will die.”

“The other one said, ‘Let’s take her off and rape her,’ and the one with the knife, said, “‘No, let’s cut her,’” according to a statement made by the journalist, who has pleaded for anonymity fearing further attacks.

Bolsonaro has also attacked the media labeling them as “trash” in a Twitter post Thursday and dismissed instances of violence saying they have been exaggerated by members of the media. He later attempted to walk back the comments in another post to the platform.

Bolsonaro claimed 46.03 percent of the votes in the first round of the election, with Worker’s Party candidate Fernando Haddad taking 29.28 percent. Both candidates will contest the run-off on Oct. 28.

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Media outlets removed by Facebook on Thursday, in a massive purge of 800 accounts and pages, had previously been targeted in a blacklist of oppositional sites promoted by the Washington Post in November 2016.

The organizations censored by Facebook include The Anti-Media, with 2.1 million followers, The Free Thought Project, with 3.1 million followers, and Counter Current News, with 500,000 followers. All three of these groups had been on the blacklist.

In November 2016, the Washington Post published a puff-piece on a shadowy and up to then largely unknown organization called PropOrNot, which had compiled a list of organizations it claimed were part of a “sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign.”

The Post said the report “identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans.”

The publication of the blacklist drew widespread media condemnation, including from journalists Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, forcing the Post to publish a partial retraction. The newspaper declared that it “does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings regarding any individual media outlet.”

While the individuals behind PropOrNot have not identified themselves, the Washington Post said the group was a “collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds.”

PropOrNot, which remains active on Twitter, publicly gloated about Facebook’s removal of the pages on Thursday. “Russian propaganda is VERY VERY MAD about their various front outlets & fellow travellers getting suspended by @Facebook &/or @Twitter,” it wrote. The tweet tagged The Anti Media and The Free Thought Project, and included a Russian flag emoji next to an emoji depicting feces.

PropOrNot did not attempt to reconcile its own narrative that the targeted organizations were front groups for the Kremlin with Facebook’s official claim that they operated independently of any government but sought to “stir up political debate” for financial motives. This is because both accusations are hollow pretexts for political censorship.

In a separate post, PropOrNot added: “Well, look at that… @Facebook removed some of the most important gray/black Russian propaganda outlets from their platform! Bravo @Facebook – better late than never, so a BIG thank you for this.”

It added, ominously: “All of these [organizations] are cross platform & have websites, but one thing at a time.”

These comments by PropOrNot make clear where the censorship measures supervised by the US government and implemented by the internet companies are going. While these organizations still “have websites,” the authorities are handling “one thing at a time.”

The clear implication is that censorship will not end with Google’s manipulation of its search platform or the removal of accounts by Facebook and Twitter. The ultimate aim is the total banning of oppositional news web sites.

The publication of the PropOrNot blacklist and its promotion by the Washington Post helped trigger a wave of censorship measures against oppositional news sites by the major technology companies, working at the instigation of the US intelligence agencies and leading politicians.

Last year, the World Socialist Web Site reported that it an other sites, including Global Research, Counterpunch, Consortium News, WikiLeaks and Truthout,saw their search traffic plunge after search giant Google implemented a change to its search ranking algorithm.

In the subsequent period, search traffic to these sites has fallen even further. Search traffic to Counterpunch has fallen by 39 percent, and Consortium Newshas fallen by 51 percent.

These developments confirm the analysis made by the World Socialist Web Site in its open letter to Google alleging that it was censoring left-wing, anti-war and socialist websites.

“Censorship on this scale is political blacklisting,” the letter declared. “The obvious intent of Google’s censorship algorithm is to block news that your company does not want reported and to suppress opinions with which you do not agree. Political blacklisting is not a legitimate exercise of whatever may be Google’s prerogatives as a commercial enterprise. It is a gross abuse of monopolistic power. What you are doing is an attack on freedom of speech.”

On Tuesday, Google admitted in an internal document that it and other technology companies had “gradually shifted away from unmediated free speech and towards censorship and moderation.” The document stated that an aim of the censorship was to “increase revenues” under conditions of growing government and commercial pressure.

The document acknowledged that such actions constitute a break with the “American tradition that prioritizes free speech for democracy.”

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Daniel Ellsberg is an American anti-war activist who in 1971, while working for the RAND Corporation, leaked a series of documents called “The Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times and other news outlets. The papers revealed to the American public that successive US administrations from Truman to Nixon lied about the scale and legality of increasing US involvement in the Vietnam War.

Ellsberg was charged with treason under the Espionage Act by the Nixon administration, which sought a court order to prevent the New York Times from publishing the documents, ultimately denied by the Supreme Court. The most recent film by Steven Spielberg, The Post, concerned itself with these events.

Ellsberg himself was the target of extra-legal harassment by the Nixon administration before the charges against him were dropped against the backdrop of the unfolding Watergate crisis.

The publication of the Pentagon Papers was arguably the last time the American bourgeois press had any real commitment to democratic rights and journalism. In the ensuing decades, Ellsberg has become a pariah to the establishment as he has maintained his commitment to anti-war activism and spoken out in defense of modern-day whistle-blowers such as Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange.

Ellsberg is one of the few figures from the establishment, like Chris Hedges, formerly of the New York Times, who broke from their privileged background and took considerable personal risk to tell the truth. Moreover, as someone who was privy to top-secret and classified information, he knows whereof he speaks. Any class-conscious worker, serious intellectual, and young person can learn something from his work.

In December 2017, Ellsberg published The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner, a memoir of his days as a nuclear war strategist for the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation in the early 1960s. Ellsberg has said that he copied nuclear war plans and intended to release them to the public after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Unfortunately, while Ellsberg was on trial these documents were hidden in a briefcase in a landfill and were lost when a tropical storm swept in.

The contents of the book are disturbing on many levels. Ellsberg recollects his own personal history and how he came to work for the “defense” establishment during a time of critical episodes of the Cold War, including the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he provides his own version of events.

Chapter by chapter, Ellsberg describes US plans for nuclear attack that can be triggered by accident, or by intention, very easily, leading to a nuclear holocaust which would wipe out all life on the planet.

In the prologue he writes how, when he was working in the Pentagon as a special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense, he came upon a document which read, “Top Secret- Sensitive” and marked “For the President’s Eyes Only.” The document was a question to the Joint Chiefs of Staff which read: “If your plans for general [nuclear] war are carried out as planned, how many people will be killed in the Soviet Union and China?”

The answer was in the form of a graph, which Ellsberg reproduces in the book from memory. The vertical axis showed the number of deaths in the millions while the horizontal axis showed the amount of time in months. It was assumed that at least 275 million people would die almost instantaneously, while after six months the number would rise to 325 million deaths.

When the question was asked, “[H]ow many would die from radioactive fallout?” the Pentagon calculated another 100 million deaths in the Warsaw Pact countries and probably another 100 million dead in Western Europe, “depending on which way the wind blew.” Thus, the grand total of a nuclear US first strike would be at least 600 million dead, “a hundred holocausts” by the Pentagon’s own estimate.

Ellsberg writes,

“I remember what I thought when I first held the single sheet with the graph on it. I thought, This piece of paper should not exist. It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to.”

So begins the book. Over the next pages and chapters Ellsberg sets out to demolish all preconceived notions of nuclear warfare, to lay out what really is. His assertions include the following:

• The basic plans of nuclear war today are essentially the same as those developed in the 1960s, which is essentially a system of thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at Russian cities and military targets ready to be launched at a moment’s notice.
• The US strategy has always been for a first strike: not necessarily a surprise attack but not an attack which came “second” in a nuclear war.
• Every US president, all the way to Trump, has used the threat of nuclear war as deterrence to their adversaries.
• The US threat of nuclear attack has precluded any “effective nonproliferation campaign” among other nation-states which have decided to acquire nuclear weapons themselves.
• US nuclear war plans, and the hypothetical and real scenarios under which they unfold, are far more extensive than the public can imagine. Ellsberg writes how the public perception of a “nuclear button” with one finger on it, presumably the President’s, is a lie. In fact, there are many fingers on many buttons, to delegate authority to launch nuclear missiles in case the President and the leadership were incapacitated. These same systems exist in Russia, and probably other nuclear-armed powers as well.
• The Cuban Missile Crisis was even more dangerous than previously thought, as demonstrated in a highly classified study in 1964 which was never made public until this book.
• The strategic nuclear war systems are much more prone to “accidents” and false alarms than previously thought, risking the threat of unauthorized launchings.
• The potential risk of nuclear war has been systematically covered up from the public, including the aforementioned graph showing hundreds of millions of deaths, a third of the planet at the time. Ellsberg notes that in 1961 when the document was made, it was two decades before the concept of nuclear winter and nuclear famine were accepted, which meant that in reality most humans would die along with most other large species after a nuclear war.

Perhaps the greatest value of Ellsberg’s work is its sense of urgency. Despite the fact that nuclear weapons stockpiles have decreased by 80 percent from their height in the 1960s just a small fraction of the existing arsenals would still kill all seven billion people alive today.

Yet the official public discourse treats the threat and fear of nuclear conflict as something of an anachronism from the Cold War era. Masses of people are simply not as aware of the dangers as previous generations. Even into the 1980s there were mass rallies opposing nuclear war, involving hundreds of thousands of people. The fear of a Third World War affected the culture of all the major industrialized countries of the world, prompting the building of fall-out shelters, duck-and-cover drills in classrooms, and immortal satire like Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove.

Ellsberg warns that the threat of nuclear destruction has only increased since the end of the Cold War, precisely because the public sense of the dangers has steadily eroded, in addition to the American government’s quest for world hegemony as exemplified by the Trump administration. To his credit, Ellsberg writes that Trump is not an aberration from previous administration, but the fitting culmination of an insane system.

To underscore this point, in Chapter 20, Ellsberg writes how in many ways the bellicose threats from the “madman” Trump is little different from the “madman theory” pioneered by President Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Ellsberg likens the threat of nuclear war by a nation as akin to a robber holding up a store with a gun. It matters not whether the gun or threat is real, what matters is that the robber threatens to use violence to get their way.

In this respect, we have the logic of Nixon’s and Trump’s threats on the world stage. The notion that the commander-in-chief whose finger is on the button is not mentally stable is supposed to be enough to get the opposing side to negotiate.

Ellsberg includes the following exchange between Nixon and Kissinger, based on a tape of Oval Office conversations regarding an ongoing North Vietnamese offensive from April 25, 1972:

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no … I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christ sakes.

This would not be the first or last time, nuclear weapons were threatened by the United States against another country. Ellsberg mentions how during the Korean War, both Truman and then Eisenhower threatened to drop nukes in order to get the Chinese to negotiate. However that is not all. Ellsberg then lists more than 25 such incidents throughout the Cold War of public and private nuclear threats by US presidents, some little known.

Of course, this list is incomplete. Ellsberg then illustrates how Presidents Bush and Obama have threatened nuclear war on Iran on several occasions. All the recent presidential contenders, including both Democrats and Republicans, have shown their willingness to use nuclear weapons as a kind of litmus test to prove to the ruling class their ruthlessness. Trump’s tweets are just the public and open version of what American presidents and presidential hopefuls have been doing for decades.

It is beyond the scope of this review to go into every chapter and detail, as fascinating and horrifying as it is. This reviewer simply recommends readers of the WSWS buy or at least rent the book to discover more.

This is not a book for late-night reading and yet one can’t put it down. When the pages have all been read, one doesn’t necessarily want to jump back into it, almost out of self-preservation, and so it lies around the table or book shelf upsetting the conscience like something out of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe. The best sort of books tend to do that.

It is essential to note that Ellsberg offers no serious solution to this existential crisis facing mankind, the greatest in our history. He is of the opinion that an informed citizenry can exert pressure on the existing political leaders and institutions. In our view, this is a futile perspective because, as Ellsberg’s books so eloquently explains, we are dealing not with individuals who may or may not be mad, but a system which is mad, namely, capitalism.

The Marxist would argue that dying capitalism can only offer two alternatives that Rosa Luxemburg called “socialism or barbarism.” Ellsberg, like many of his generation, sees the threat of omnicide, the destruction of the species, as something inherent in the human condition itself, thus minimizing the overall impact and seriousness of his work.

Despite this, The Doomsday Machine is an extremely prescient and important book. Ellsberg, now 87, has devoted his remaining years to speaking out against the approaching Third World War, and even more significant, makes the argument that it can and must be stopped.

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In a recent article by David Orchard and Marjaleena Repo, concern has been raised that even if NAFTA has been replaced by the USMCA, Canada may still be subject to the provisions of the 1989 Canada-US Free Trade Agreement (FTA). They state that a trade lawyer, Robert Wisner, had written that “termination of NAFTA could arguably mean that the provisions of CUSTA (FTA) go back into force.”

However, in a press conference on October 1 when Canada’s prime minister and the minister of foreign affairs announced the replacement of NAFTA with the USMCA, they made no mention of any continuing role by the original FTA. In fact, they pointed out that the two most contentious provisions in NAFTA have now been eliminated in the new agreement. 

Strangely, there was hardly any mention in the mainstream media of the elimination of these two contentious provisions in NAFTA. Largely because of this, I wrote a review of the renegotiation of NAFTA and dealt at some length with the elimination of these two provisions and with the prospect of any continuing role by the FTA. 

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. Both of these provisions were highly resented by knowledgeable Canadians. The elimination of these two sections is of substantial benefit to Canada in the new agreement. 

Drawing attention to the possibility that because of previous legislation the original FTA could nullify the provisions of the new USMCA is a matter that the federal government should be asked to clarify. 

Regardless of the government response, once the USMCA is ratified, if the USA should still on the basis of the FTA provisions proceed to require Canada to abide by the energy proportionality rule or if a corporation should still attempt to sue Canada for some perceived infraction of their right to profit, Canada should immediately give a six month notice to abrogate the FTA. 

Following this, the ill-conceived FTA would be dead and gone. On the basis of Canada being able to pursue such a course of action, the ghost of the FTA is of little consequence. 

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John Ryan, Ph.D., is Retired Professor of Geography and Senior Scholar at the University of Winnipeg.

Media companies including the New York Times and CNN are pulling out of a Saudi investment conference because of growing outrage over the disappearance of a prominent Saudi journalist in Turkey.

British billionaire Richard Branson has also announced that his Virgin Group would suspend its discussions with Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund over a planned $1bn investment in the group’s space ventures in light of events involving Jamal Khashoggi.

“What has reportedly happened in Turkey around the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, if proved true, would clearly change the ability of any of us in the West to do business with the Saudi government,” Branson said in a statement on Thursday evening.

The veteran Saudi journalist, 59, has been missing since last Tuesday when he entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain paperwork so he could remarry, and has not been seen since.

Turkish officials have told Middle East Eye that they know when and where in the building the veteran Saudi journalist was killed and are considering whether to dig up the consul-general’s garden to see whether his remains are buried there.

Saudi officials have strongly denied any involvement in his disappearance and say that he left the consulate soon after arriving. However, they have not presented any evidence to corroborate their claim and say that video cameras at the consolate were not recording at the time.

As leaks have emerged, focus has turned to the kingdom’s high-profile Future Investment Initiative conference, scheduled to be held in Riyadh later this month, with a handful of participants pulling out of the event over the past 24 hours.

Among those who have said they will no longer participate are Economist editor-In-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes and Andrew Ross Sorkin, a CNBC anchor and New York Times business journalist.

I’m terribly distressed by the disappearance of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and reports of his murder. I will no longer be participating in the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh.

— Andrew Ross Sorkin (@andrewrsorkin) October 11, 2018

The New York Times, CNN, Financial Times, CNBC and Bloomberg have pulled out of the event. Fox Business Network is still slated to appear at the event, according to the event website.

Uber Technologies Inc chief executive officer Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement he won’t attend the FII conference in Riyadh unless substantially different set of facts emerge. Arianna Huffington, who sits on Uber’s board, has also reportedly said she will no longer attend.

Viacom Inc CEO Bob Bakish, who was slated to speak at the conference, has decided to not attend the event, company spokesman Justin Dini said.

The FT reported that Jim Yong Kim, president of the World Bank, has pulled out of attending the conference.

‘Davos in the desert’

The disappearance of Khashoggi, a US resident who wrote columns for the Washington Post, has cast a shadow over the three-day conference known as “Davos in the desert”. The Post is owned by Amazon.com Inc founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos.

Last year’s conference was held in part at the Ritz Carlton, which would serve just weeks later as a makeshift prison for hundreds of Saudi businessmen and figures accused of corruption by the state.

This year’s event has attracted some of the world’s business elite including Wall Street’s top bosses and executives from multinational media, tech and financial services companies.

JPMorgan Chase & Co CEO Jamie Dimon is scheduled to speak, as is Mastercard Inc CEO Ajay Banga. Representatives for both companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Another billionaire, Steve Case, one of the founders of AOL, also decided to distance himself from Saudi Arabia, saying he would no longer attend the event.

“In light of recent events, I have decided to put my plans on hold, pending further information regarding Jamal Khashoggi.”

Despite the growing outcry about Khashoggi’s purported murder, US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin confirmed on Friday that he will attend the Saudi investment summit.

“If more information comes out and changes, we could look at that, but I am planning on going,” Mnuchin told CNBC.

He called Saudi Arabia a “terrific partner” in combating terrorist financing.

Asked about his advice to business executives who may be reluctant about going to the conference, Mnuchin said: “My comment is: We all want the information, so let’s wait and see what information comes out next week.”

US President Donald Trump was asked on Friday if he believed it was appropriate for Mnuchin to attend the event.

“He will make that determination. But he was partially over there, anyway. A lot of people are going over to the investment conference. We’ll see what happens. Maybe some won’t be going. We’ll make that determination very soon,” Trump said.

Khashoggi’s disappearance has led officials and business leaders to drop out of another one of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman‘s – commonly referred to as MBS – large projects.

On Wednesday, former US energy secretary Ernest Moniz said that he had suspended his role on the board of Saudi Arabia’s planned mega business zone NEOM until more is known about what happened.

“The recent trend in many countries of targeting journalists for doing their jobs is a fundamental threat to freedom of the press, human rights and the rule of law,” Moniz said in a statement.

Moniz was named on Tuesday as one of 18 people advising the $500bn NEOM project. Last week, MBS said the project would build two to three towns each year starting in 2020 and be completed by 2025.

According to the Wall Street Journal, two other board members – Sam Altman of Y Combinator and Nellie Kroes, former European Commission vice president – have suspended their involvement.

The Harbour Group, a Washington firm that has been advising Saudi Arabia since April 2017, ended its $80,000 a month contract on Thursday.

“We have terminated the relationship,” managing director Richard Mintz said.

‘Massive waste of time and money’

It was just six months ago that images of MBS were plastered across the streets of London as he embarked on the first leg of a road show to the UK and the US that was meant to show he was “opening Saudi Arabia to the world”, as one of the signs said.

British PR agent Mark Borkowski told MEE he found the contrast between the campaign and the reports coming out this week about Khashoggi “incredibly peculiar”.

It was “something of a massive waste of time and money putting together such a lavish exercise in this charm offensive”, he said.

“Unfortunately, as a PR thing, it’s going to be an incredibly bad smell that surrounds the government and their tactics to silence the press potentially.”

As the PR fallout has gathered momentum, human rights advocates and others, however, have questioned why that the kingdom’s three-year-long offensive in Yemen and arrests over the past year of activists, business people and religious scholars hasn’t elicited similar high-profile outrage.

MBS publicity tour was a farce from the start, whitewashing his disastrous foreign policy and domestic repression. Didn’t need this atrocity to see that. https://t.co/7MXOLxgb0e

— Marc Lynch (@abuaardvark) October 12, 2018

Adam Coogle, Middle East researcher at Human Rights Watch (HRW), said he had a feeling the day Khashoggi disappeared that it would be a big story.

“But this has blown up beyond that,” he told MEE.

“Jamal had friends – a lot of people knew him and a lot of people liked him, especially in the media. One of the crucial things was he was a Washington Post columnist. I think that really played at least some role in blowing this up.”

But Coogle is unsure whether the fallout will be sustained. He said HRW has tried to reach out to major car companies who had hailed the announcement in June that Saudi women would be allowed to drive, and asked them to tell the Saudi government to stop arresting female activists who had campaigned for that right.

“The responses we got were incredibly limited,” he said. “The companies hide behind, ‘We don’t deal with political issues’.”

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The partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council is an attempt to ensure the grip of dominant imperialist powers – militaries, multinationals, banks, and philanthropists – who feel threatened by the unrestricted flow of information and anti-systemic narratives on social media.

Facebook is hoping that a new alliance with the Atlantic Council — a leading geopolitical strategy think-tank seen as a de facto PR agency for the U.S. government and NATO military alliance – will not only solve its “fake news” and “disinformation” controversy, but will also help the social media monolith play “a positive role” in ensuring democracy on a global level.

The new partnership will effectively ensure that Atlantic Council will serve as Facebook’s “eyes and ears,” according to a company press statement. With its leadership comprised of retired military officers, former policymakers, and top figures from the U.S. National Security State and Western business elites, the Atlantic Council’s role policing the social network should be viewed as a virtual takeover of Facebook by the imperialist state and the council’s extensive list of ultra-wealthy and corporate donors.

The partnership is only the latest in a steady stream of announced plans by the Menlo Park, California-based company to address controversy surrounding its role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The company has been mired in scandal stemming from the allegations of “election interference” carried out through the social network – usually pinned on the Russian government and ranging from the use of independent media to the theft of Facebook user data by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica.

We're proud to partner with @AtlanticCouncil to strengthen our election integrity efforts around the world. We'll work with experts from their Digital Research Labs to share real-time insights and ideas to better fight abuse on our platform.https://t.co/qgv7lgC4rR

— Facebook (@facebook) May 17, 2018

The announcement should sound alarm bells when one considers the Atlantic Council’s list of sponsors – including, but not limited to, war-profiteering defense contractors; agencies aligned with Washington and the Pentagon; Gulf Arab tyrants; major transnational corporations; and such well-loved Western philanthropic brands as Carnegie, Koch, Rockefeller, and Soros. Even the name of the group itself is meant to evoke theNorth Atlantic Council, the highest political decision-making body of North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

The announcement, made last Thursday in a Facebook Newsroom post, explained that the social network’s security, policy and product teams will coordinate their work with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) to analyze “real-time insights and updates on emerging threats and disinformation campaigns from around the world.”

DFRLab employees include pro-war media activist Eliot Higgins (of Bellingcat fame) and Ben Nimmo — a senior fellow for information defense at the Atlantic Council, who earned infamy for his groundless accusations that actual Twitter users are Russian trolls.

Continuing, Facebook global politics and government outreach director Katie Harbath explained:

This will help increase the number of ‘eyes and ears’ we have working to spot potential abuse on our service — enabling us to more effectively identify gaps in our systems, preempt obstacles, and ensure that Facebook plays a positive role during elections all around the world.”

“We know that tackling these problems effectively also requires the right policies and regulatory structures, so that governments and companies can help prevent abuse while also ensuring that people have a voice during elections. The Atlantic Council’s network of leaders is uniquely situated to help all of us think through the challenges we will face in the near- and long-term.”

The think-tank’s Digital Research Unit Monitoring Missions will also be tapped by the social network during elections and “other highly sensitive moments” to allow Facebook the ability to zero in on key locales and monitor alleged misinformation and foreign interference.

Who is the Atlantic Council?

Hillary Clinton at the 2013 Atlantic Council Distinguished Leadership Awards (Photo: Atlantic Council)

The Atlantic Council was recently in the news for receiving a donation of $900,000 from the U.S. State Department for a “Peace Process Support Network” program to “promote non-violent conflict resolution” in support of Venezuela’s scattered opposition, with which the council enjoys very close ties. The council also advocates the arming of extremist militants in Syria (a “National Stabilization Force”) and a hard-line policy toward Russia.

Established in 1961 by former U.S. Secretaries of State Dean Acheson and Christian Herter, the Atlantic Council of the United States was originally conceived as a means to drum up support for the Cold War-era NATO alliance, which had formed in 1949 as the basis of the Euro-Atlantic security architecture during the post-WWII competition with the Soviet Union. Dozens of similar Atlantic Councils were eventually established throughout the NATO and Partnership for Peace states.

The council is a part of the Atlantic Treaty Association, a NATO offshoot that claims to unite “political leaders, academics, military officials, journalists and diplomats in an effort to further the values set forth in the North Atlantic Treaty, namely: democracy, freedom, liberty, peace, security, and the rule of law.”

In general, groups such as the Atlantic Council are meant to secure the legitimacy of U.S. policies and neoliberal economics in the eyes of world audiences and academia, whether they live in the “advanced democracies” (the imperialist center) or “developing democracies” (the post-colonial and economically exploited nations).

Similar organizations and think-tanks include the Brookings Institute, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Trilateral Commission, the Wilson Center and other pro-imperialist think-tanks.

Such institutions enjoy significant financial support from Washington, NATO governments, and transnational corporations for the purpose of advancing studies legitimizing “Euro-Atlantic” interventionism and Western-backed “regime change;” spreading the cultural and ideological values of imperialism; and debunking policies favoring independent development and income redistribution among historically dispossessed and exploited nations and peoples.

Atlantic Council promotional video

With the Atlantic Council’s “supreme leadership” headquartered in Washington, the group is cut of cloth similar to that of the U.S. diplomatic services: blue-blooded Ivy Leaguers from Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Princeton and Yale who are generally committed to Atlanticism, Jeffersonian Democracy, liberal interventionism, and the idea that U.S. imperial interests generally coincide with those of the rest of the world. A cursory glance at the council’s current International Advisory Board reveals a list of such foreign policy “luminaries” and their U.S.-friendly international counterparts.

Events and conferences held by the Atlantic Council are a regular stop for foreign military brass, top diplomats, and heads of state who are visiting the Pentagon, State Department, and White House.

The Atlantic Council also acts as a lobbying group to NATO. The current sponsor-list published by Atlantic Council shows a wide array of interested parties supporting the group, including the foreign ministries and militaries of several NATO- and U.S.-aligned states along with the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines. Other donors, such as the Turkey-focused 501(c)3 non-profit foundation “United Minds for Progress,” can be described as shadowy, at best, with a vaguely-defined mission-statement barely hiding strong ties to the energy industry.

According to The New York Times, about 25 foreign governments have donated tens of millions of dollars to the council from 2008 to 2013 — including the governments of Japan, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and de facto U.S. embassy of Taiwan — often with the implicit understanding that the group abstains from criticizing such sponsors in its policy papers and generally serves an advocacy role. This has drawn criticism of the think-tank’s ethics policies and compliance with its stated commitment to the “rule of law, ” democracy, and other ostensible “Euro-Atlantic values.”

Other supporters include:

• Wealthy Gulf Arab emirs and magnates including the government of the United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., Crescent Petroleum (Sharjah), Lebanese-Saudi billionaire Bahaa Hariri, the International Petroleum Investment Company (Abu Dhabi), and various other groups and individuals.
• Major multinational corporations like 21st Century Fox, Chevron, Coca-Cola, Crescent Petroleum, Dow Chemicals, ExxonMobil, Google, Hanes, Microsoft, Panasonic, Pfizer, QUALCOMM, Royal Dutch Shell, Saab, Sony, and Walmart, among others.
• Asset management/consultancy firms and banks, including Bank of America, The Blackstone Group, HSBC Holdings, JPMorgan Chase & Co., MetLife, and Zurich Insurance Group Ltd.
• Top military contractors like Airbus, Beretta USA, Boeing, Elbit Systems of America (a subsidiary of the Israeli firm), Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Safran of France.

The partnership between Facebook and the Atlantic Council is manifestly an attempt to ensure the grip of dominant imperialist powers – militaries, multinational corporations, banks, and philanthropists – who feel threatened by the unrestricted flow of information and anti-systemic narratives on social media.

Capitalism, the State, and Facebook crack the whip

Facebook’s scandals involving “fake news” and the PR disaster of Cambridge Analytica forced the company to confront the threat of new regulations in Europe and North America, falling market value, and shambolic damage-control preparedness by the company’s management.

Yet Facebook – like fellow Silicon Valley behemoth Google – has bounced back with the promise of new partnerships with traditional media groups to crack down on fake news; new ways of burying independent media through “algorithmic censorship;” and even a new policy that would “provide transparency for political advertising” by notifying users that news organizations are, in fact, advertisers.

As it was, so shall it be: similar to the commercial model of monopolized ownership and editorial control during the times when television, radio and newspaper reigned over the media landscape, new media corporations and social networking platforms are inextricably becoming linked with powerful business associations, well-established think-tanks and charities, and large corporations with big advertising budgets while audiences or groups aligned with the public interest are left out in the wilderness.

Relationship between states and tech giants

Independent voices are being squeezed out of user news-feeds, as a homogenized, pre-cooked and generic chorus of media reinforcing the capitalist world-system regains its footing and Facebook announces that it will prioritize “soft” content rather than “hard” news. As most English-language social media users are to be found on Facebook, the adoption of VKontakte, Weibo, or other social platforms by dissatisfied news organizations is hardly a credible alternative for reaching audiences.

The result is that our “news” increasingly resembles a Sartre-esque inferno populated by Morning Joe & Mika enthusing about “Bob” Mueller with their Washington Post buddies; Fox & Friends cretins chewing the fat with John Bolton about which country to bomb next; and Brian Williams chatting with Jake Tapper about the sanctity of journalistic integrity.

In the meantime, progressive and independent publications — ostracized and shamed as “fake news,” virtually criminalized as propagandistsserving “foreign interference,” deranked or buried by algorithms, deprived of funding sources and eventually readers — face the growing possibility of insolvency.

Seen as holding the conduit for potential threats to the cultural, ideological, and political hegemony of the ruling class, the media barons of Silicon Valley are increasingly being brought to heel by corporate-militarist policymakers and Washington think-tanks.

As the new alliance with the Atlantic Council shows, the previously unregulated and raucous world of social networking is fast becoming indistinguishable from the state itself. In typical U.S. fashion, authentic pluralism and the so-called “free market of ideas” is being suppressed by the possessors of capital in the name of defending democracy and ensuring national security.

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Elliott Gabriel is a former staff writer for teleSUR English and a MintPress News contributor based in Quito, Ecuador. He has taken extensive part in advocacy and organizing in the pro-labor, migrant justice and police accountability movements of Southern California and the state’s Central Coast.

Bolsonaro is a symptom of a much larger disease. He has only reached this level, a head-to-head in the second round against Lula’s candidate Haddad, because of a sophisticated, rolling, multi-stage, judicial/congressional/business/media Hybrid War unleashed on Brazil.

-Pepe Escobar [1]

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On October 7th, in the first round of the 2018 Brazilian elections, Jair Bolsonaro, notorious for his sympathies for past military dictatorships scored a decisive victory over his nearest rival Fernando Haddad of the Workers Party (PT). If successful in the October 28th run-off elections, as is widely anticipated, Bolsonaro will preside over the eighth largest economy in the world.

From 2002 to 2016, the Latin American country has been governed by presidents affiliated with the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT). The party’s popularity had taken a dive in the wake of corruption scandals and massive protests for lower transit rates and improved public services.

One of the countries swept under the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ of leftist governments, Brazil now stands poised to elect a leader who has been compared to U.S. President Donald Trump, if not Adolph Hitler, in his demagoguery and his predilection for expressing racist and misogynistic sentiments.

What is behind the apparent decline of the PT party and the rise of a fascist leaning leader? As significantly, who is supporting Bolsonaro’s leadership, both at the polls and in the streets, and why?

The Global Research News Hour attempts to address these questions with three guests.

Our first guest, Pepe Escobar, sees foreign interference at work in Brazil’s political situation, detailing what he sees as the trumped up charges against both PT presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff. Escobar also spotlights the role of the populist Right and particularly on Steve Bannon in the Bolsonaro campaign.

Around the mid-point of the program, a former radio colleague at radio station CKUW and student named Alex, who also happens to be Brazilian, with a background in political activism, provides his grounds-eye view of what is motivating the people of Brazil to support a man like Bolsonaro, and what is also turning them away from the PT and its candidate Fernando Haddad.

Finally, Professor Michel Chossudovsky provides a broad analysis which reveals the history and role of neoliberal economic policy, even under former President Lula Da Silva, as a factor in the rise of Bolsonaro, and the decline of PT.

Pepe Escobar is a veteran Brazilian Journalist, geopolitical analyst and Correspondent at large for Asia Times based out of Hong Kong. He has written for Tom Dispatch, Sputnik News, and Press TV, and RT. His articles appear in a number of websites including Global Research, and is a frequent commentator on radio and tv.

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005), and Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011),

Global Research News Hour Episode 232

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Click to download the audio (MP3 format)

The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM in Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca . Excerpts of the show have begun airing on Rabble Radio and appear as podcasts at rabble.ca.

The Global Research News Hour now airs Fridays at 6pm PST, 8pm CST and 9pm EST on Alternative Current Radio (alternativecurrentradio.com)

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

CHLY 101.7fm in Nanaimo, B.C – Thursdays at 1pm PT

Boston College Radio WZBC 90.3FM NEWTONS  during the Truth and Justice Radio Programming slot -Sundays at 7am ET.

Port Perry Radio in Port Perry, Ontario –1  Thursdays at 1pm ET

Burnaby Radio Station CJSF out of Simon Fraser University. 90.1FM to most of Greater Vancouver, from Langley to Point Grey and from the North Shore to the US Border.

It is also available on 93.9 FM cable in the communities of SFU, Burnaby, New Westminister, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Surrey and Delta, in British Columbia, Canada. – Tune in  at its new time – Wednesdays at 4pm PT.

Radio station CFUV 101.9FM based at the University of Victoria airs the Global Research News Hour every Sunday from 7 to 8am PT.

CORTES COMMUNITY RADIO CKTZ  89.5 out of Manson’s Landing, B.C airs the show Tuesday mornings at 10am Pacific time.

Cowichan Valley Community Radio CICV 98.7 FM serving the Cowichan Lake area of Vancouver Island, BC airs the program Thursdays at 6am pacific time.

Campus and community radio CFMH 107.3fm in  Saint John, N.B. airs the Global Research News Hour Fridays at 10am.

Caper Radio CJBU 107.3FM in Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia airs the Global Research News Hour starting Wednesday Morning from 8:00 to 9:00am. Find more details at www.caperradio.ca

RIOT RADIO, the visual radio station based out of Durham College in Oshawa, Ontario has begun airing the Global Research News Hour on an occasional basis. Tune in at dcstudentsinc.ca/services/riot-radio/

Radio Fanshawe: Fanshawe’s 106.9 The X (CIXX-FM) out of London, Ontario airs the Global Research News Hour Sundays at 6am with an encore at 4pm.

Los Angeles, California based Thepowerofvoices.com airs the Global Research News Hour every Monday from 6-7pm Pacific time. 

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/future-of-western-democracy-being-played-out-in-brazil/5656672

This carefully documented article on Weather Warfare was first published by Global Research on August 1, 2010.

Some small edits have been made. The CBC, History Channel and Trutv.com documentaries quoted in the article can now be viewed. They by no means can be considered as “conspiracy theories”.

Moreover, the US Air Force has referred to “Owning the Weather for Military Use”.

Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence  purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog, and storms on earth or to modify space weather, … and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of technologies which can provide substantial increase in US, or degraded capability in an adversary, to achieve global awareness, reach, and power. (US Air Force, emphasis added. Air University of the US Air Force, AF 2025 Final Report,

http://www.au.af.mil/au/2025/ emphasis added, original link removed)

The HAARP facility in Gakona Alaska was closed down in 2014.

The Recent IPCC Climate Change report quite deliberately fails to identify the instruments of weather warfare.

Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, October 14, 2018

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“It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. The European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”

— Quote from a TV documentary on HAARP by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

HAARP (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) is a little-known, yet critically important U.S. military defense program which has generated quite a bit of controversy over the years in certain circles. Though denied by HAARP officials, some respected researchers allege that secret electromagnetic warfare capabilities of HAARP are designed to forward the US military’s stated goal of achieving full-spectrum dominance by the year 2020. Others go so far as to claim that HAARP can and has been used for weather modification, to cause earthquakes and tsunamis, to disrupt global communications systems, and more.

Major aspects of the program are kept secret for alleged reasons of “national security.” Yet there is no doubt that HAARP and electromagnetic weapons capable of being used in warfare do exist. According to the official HAARP website, “HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on being able to understand and use it to enhance communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.” The ionosphere is the delicate upper layer of our atmosphere which ranges from about 30 miles (50 km) to 600 miles (1,000 km) above the surface of the Earth.

The HAARP website acknowledges that experiments are conducted which use electromagnetic frequencies to fire pulsed, directed energy beams in order to “temporarily excite a limited area of the ionosphere.” Some scientists state that purposefully disturbing this sensitive layer could have major and even disastrous consequences. Concerned HAARP researchers like Dr. Michel Chossudovsky of the University of Ottawa and Alaska’s Dr. Nick Begich (son of a US Congressman) present evidence suggesting that these disturbances can even cause tsunamis and earthquakes.

Two key major media documentaries, one by Canada’s public broadcasting network CBC (see below) and the other by the History Channel (below), reveal the inner workings of HAARP in a most powerful way. The very well researched CBC documentary includes this key quote:

“It isn’t just conspiracy theorists who are concerned about HAARP. In January of 1999, the European Union called the project a global concern and passed a resolution calling for more information on its health and environmental risks. Despite those concerns, officials at HAARP insist the project is nothing more sinister than a radio science research facility.”

To watch this engaging 15-minute CBC documentary online, click here.

To view the European Union (EU) document which brings HAARP and similar electromagnetic weapons into question, click here.

The actual wording at bullet point 24 in this telling document states that the EU “considers HAARP by virtue of its far-reaching impact on the environment to be a global concern and calls for its legal, ecological and ethical implications to be examined by an international independent body before any further research and testing.” This reveling document further states that the EU regrets the repeated refusal of the U.S. government to send anyone to give evidence on HAARP.

For an even more detailed and revealing 45-minute History Channel documentary on HAARP and other secret weapons used for electromagnetic warfare, click here. Below are two quotes from the History Channel documentary:

“Electromagnetic weapons … pack an invisible wallop hundreds of times more powerful than the electrical current in a lightning bolt. One can blast enemy missiles out of the sky, another could be used to blind soldiers on the battlefield, still another to control an unruly crowd by burning the surface of their skin. If detonated over a large city, an electromagnetic weapon could destroy all electronics in seconds. They all use directed energy to create a powerful electromagnetic pulse.”

“Directed energy is such a powerful technology it could be used to heat the ionosphere to turn weather into a weapon of war. Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert. The military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments. If an electromagnetic pulse went off over a city, basically all the electronic things in your home would wink and go out, and they would be permanently destroyed.”

History Channel Documentary

For those who still doubt that such devastating secret weapons have been developed, here is an intriguing quote from an article in New Zealand’s leading newspaper, the New Zealand Herald:

“Top-secret wartime experiments were conducted off the coast of Auckland to perfect a tidal wave bomb, declassified files reveal. United States defence chiefs said that if the project had been completed before the end of the war, it could have played a role as effective as that of the atom bomb. Details of the tsunami bomb, known as Project Seal, are contained in 53-year-old documents released by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.”

If the military secretly developed a weapon which could cause a tsunami over half a century ago, what kind of advanced deadly weapons might be available now?

And why is it that the general public still doesn’t know about secret weapons developed over 50 years ago?

To understand why the media isn’t covering these highly critical issues, click here. Clearly the military has the capability to cause a tsunami and likely to cause earthquakes and hurricanes, as well. It’s time for us to take action to spread the word on this vital topic.

Having interpreted to for top generals in my work as a language interpreter with the US Department of State, I learned that military planners are always interested in developing the most devastating weapons possible. Yet these weapons are kept secret as long as possible, allegedly for reasons of national security. The many layers of intense secrecy both in the military and government result in very few people being aware of the gruesome capabilities for death and destruction that have been developed over the years. There are many examples of major defense projects kept successfully out of the public’s eyes for years and even decades.

The massive Manhattan Project (development of the first atomic bomb) is one such example. The building of an entire city to support the project in Oak Ridge, Tennessee was successfully kept secret even from the state’s governor. The stealth bomber was kept top secret for many years, and the public still has no way of knowing it’s full capabilities. It is through the use of the highly organized military and intelligence services that the power elite of our world, working in cooperation with key allies in government and corporate ownership of the media, are able to carry out major cover-ups and secret operations like those involved with HAARP.

Some researchers have raised questions about the possible involvement of HAARP in major disasters like the earthquake in Haiti, Indonesian tsunami, and hurricane Katrina. Could these have been HAARP experiments gone awry? Might they even have been caused by rogue elements which gained control of this devastating technology. Of course disasters like this happen regularly on a natural basis, yet if you begin to research, there is some high strangeness around some of these disasters. The evidence is inconclusive, yet with the known and unknown major destructive capabilities of this weapon, serious questions remain.

Jesse Ventura, the former Navy Seal who turned pro wrestler only to then become governor of Minnesota, has also done a special on HAARP that is a bit sensationalized, yet contains useful information. You can watch this special on YouTube at this link.

Both countries are longstanding allies, partnered in Washington’s imperial agenda, waging war OF terror in the Middle East against nations Republicans and undemocratic Dems target for regime change.

As long as Saudi oil keeps flowing and the kingdom continues spending tens of billions of dollars for US assets and weapons, bilateral relations won’t change.

Jamal Khashoggi’s abduction and likely murder by the Saudis is a temporary disruption of the longstanding relationship that will pass.

Trump initially was silent about the incident for days. On Thursday, he said stopping US arms sales to Riyadh “would not be acceptable to me,” adding:

“I don’t like stopping massive amounts of money that’s being poured into our country. They are spending $110 billion on military equipment and on things that create jobs for this country.”

Saudi wealth pouring into America, along with partnering with Washington’s imperial agenda, alone matter, not jobs creation, a minor factor.

According to unnamed Turkish officials, audio and video recordings prove Saudi responsibility for abducting and murdering Khashoggi, his body believed dismembered and flown back to the kingdom to be disposed of.

An unnamed Turkish official said

“(t)he voice recording from inside the embassy lays out what happened to Jamal after he entered,” adding:

“You can hear his voice and the voices of men speaking Arabic. You can hear how he was interrogated, tortured, and then murdered.”

According to another unnamed Turkish official, Saudi men could be heard beating Khashoggi on the recording.

Reportedly Ankara and Washington have damning evidence of what happened.

An unnamed Turkish source with direct knowledge of Ankara’s information said:

“We know when Jamal was killed, in which room he was killed, and where the body was taken to be dismembered. If the forensic team (is) allowed in, (its members) know exactly where to go.”

Exiled Saudi prince Khaled bin Farhan al-Saud said luring kingdom dissidents to meetings with intent to disappear them is longstanding regime strategy, Khashoggi the latest victim.

Saud said Riyadh authorities tried over 30 times to lure him to a meeting.

“I refused every time, he said,” adding:

“I know what can happen if I go into the embassy. Around 10 days before Jamal went missing, they asked my family to bring me to Cairo to give me a check. I refused.”

Five Saudi royal family members asking the leadership for information about Khashoggi were detained to silence them.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker said intelligence information he’s seen indicates Saudi responsibility for abducting and killing Khashoggi.

“It does appear that he’s been murdered, and I think over the next several days things are going to become much clearer,” he said, adding:

It appears “they killed him and probably very high level people were aware of it.”

Senator Lindsey Graham saw the intelligence report, calling it “very unnerving,” adding “(y)ou don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure this out.”

Turkish President Erdogan challenged Riyadh to provide video images, backing its claim that Khashoggi left the Istanbul consulate unharmed, adding the kingdom’s explanation is unacceptable.

On Thursday, Erdogan’s aide Ibrahim Kahn said a joint Turkish/Saudi investigation of the incident will be conducted. Istanbul’s public prosecutor said he’ll continue the investigation separately.

According to Global Security Group CEO David Katz, audio and video evidence is sufficient forensic information to conclude what happened, no further investigation needed.

Clearly Saudi officials will do nothing to conflict with their fabricated explanation about Khashoggi’s disappearance.

Turkey, the US, and other countries have “robust electronic devices” to listen to conversations inside buildings from outside.

Turkey knows the identity of at least eight of the 15-man Saudi security team sent to Istanbul to abduct and eliminate Khashoggi, arriving on the day he disappeared.

They include a Saudi defense force forensic unit head, a former London embassy intelligence head, and several special forces officers. They left Istanbul less than a day after arriving.

Khashoggi was a Washington Post columnist. The broadsheet accused crown prince Mohammad bin Salman of personally ordering his elimination.

On October 11, WaPo headlined “Turks tell US officials they have audio and video recordings that support conclusion Khashoggi was killed.”

The storm over the incident rages. It’ll pass, US/Saudi relations to remain unchanged once the furor cools.

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

Around one-third of world nations impose the death sentence in judicial rulings.

Of all known state-sponsored executions, 12 nations carry out most of them: America, Bangladesh, China, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, and Sri Lanka, – according to deathpenaltyinfo.org.

Capital punishment flagrantly violates the Eight Amendment, prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments.”

On October 11, Washington because the 20th US state, along with the District of Columbia, to prohibit it.

In State of Washington v. Allen Eugene Gregory, its Supreme Court unanimously ruled to end the practice, calling it unconstitutional, arbitrary and racially discriminatory, adding:

“The most important consideration is whether the evidence shows that race has a meaningful impact on imposition of the death penalty. We make this determination by way of legal analysis, not pure science.”

“As noted by appellant, the use of the death penalty is unequally applied — sometimes by where the crime took place, or the county of residence, or the available budgetary resources at any given point in time, or the race of the defendant.”

“The death penalty, as administered in our state, fails to serve any legitimate penological goal; thus, it violates article I, section 14 of our state constitution.”

“All (outstanding death) sentences are hereby converted to life imprisonment.”

“We leave open the possibility that the legislature may enact a ‘carefully drafted statute’ to impose capital punishment in this state, but it cannot create a system that offends constitutional rights.”

In 2014, Washington imposed a capital punishment moratorium.

In May 2002, the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty alliance of NGOs, bar associations, local bodies and unions designated October 10 as the annual World Day Against the Death Penalty beginning in 2003.

There’s nothing just about state-sponsored murder, notably when against wrongfully accused victims.

In America, they’re mostly poor Blacks and Latinos, denied due process and judicial fairness. The system is rigged against them – internationally famous Mumia Abu-Jamal’s wrongful conviction best known.

Many others in America languish unfairly on death row – innocent of what they’re accused of.

In 2000, former Illinois Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on capital punishment after 13 prisoners were found innocent and released.

On January 11, 2003, two days before leaving office, he cleared death row, commuting sentences for 163 men and four women to life imprisonment – declaring a moratorium on future executions, saying:

“The facts that I have seen in reviewing each and every one of these cases raised questions not only about (their innocence), but about the fairness of the death penalty system as a whole.”

“Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error: error in determining guilt and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die.”

Calling Illinois’ death penalty system “arbitrary, capricious, and therefore immoral,” he ended his gubernatorial tenure by pardoning four men and issuing a blanket commutation for all state prisoners on death row, adding “The legislature couldn’t reform it. Lawmakers won’t repeal it, and I won’t stand for it. I must act.”

In January 2011, both Houses of Illinois’ legislature voted to end capital punishment, Gov. Pat Quinn officially abolishing it in March, saying it’s impossible “to create a perfect, mistake-free death penalty system.”

The Campaign to End the Death Penalty (CEPD) has chapters in California, Delaware, New York, Texas, and Chicago.

CEPD gained prominence after California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency to save Stan “Tookie” Williams from execution.

As a teenager, he co-founded the Crips street gang in South Central Los Angeles – later was unjustly convicted and sentenced to death for multiple murders he said he had nothing to do with.

He was denied a proper defense, proceedings rigged against him. Though later evidence was exculpatory, it wasn’t enough to save him.

Countless other Blacks and Latinos in America are mistreated the same way.

Williams was a model prisoner, becoming an anti-gang activist on death row, renouncing his former affiliation. He co-wrote books and engaged in other activities to convince youths not to join street gangs.

He was nominated for Nobel Peace Prize recognition several times. In 2004, a feature film called Redemption: The Stan Tookie Williams Story was made about his life to honor him.

It wasn’t enough. On December 13, 2005, he was put to death by lethal injection in San Quentin State Prison. Numerous others in America annually perish the same way unjustly.

CEPD chapters and other anti-capital punishment activists aim to end the barbaric practice – state-sponsored murder harming the innocent as well as guilty, flagrantly flouting due process and judicial fairness.

It’s notably ineffective in deterring crime, unacceptable in civilized societies. Most countries prohibit the practice.

Law Professor/constitutional expert Charles Black (1915 – 2001), author of the book titled “Capital Punishment,” denounced the practice as fatally flawed, saying:

There are some “hanging prosecutors, hanging juries, hanging judges, and hanging governors. But, overwhelmingly, the trouble is not in the people but in the system – or nonsystem.”

Separately, he said

“(t)he possibility of judicial fairness for accused minorities is as likely their “learn(ing) to speak decent Japanese by the end of the month.”

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

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

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

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

It is an organisation not without its problems. Conceived in the heat of idealism, and promoted as the vanguard of medical rescue and human rights advocacy, Médecins Sans Frontières has had its faults.  Its co-founder Bernard Kouchner went a bit awry when he turned such advocacy into full blown interventionism.  As Nicolas Sarkozy’s foreign minister, his conversion to politicised interventionism in places of crisis went full circle.  He notably split from MSF to create Doctors of the World, where he felt imbued by the spirit of droit d’ingerence, subsequently given the gloss of “humanitarian intervention”. With its mischief making properties, such interventions have manifested, usually in the guise of wealthy Western states, from the Balkans to Africa. 

MSF, at least in its operating protocols, is meant to be solidly neutral and diligently impartial.  But neutrality tends to be compromised before the spectacle of suffering.  Bearing witness disturbs the mood and narrows objective distance.  On June 17, 2016, by way of example, the organisation stated that it could not “accept funding from the EU or the Member States while at the same time treating the victims of their policies! It’s that simple.”  Central to this, as Katharine Weatherhead explained in an analysis of the organisation’s stance, is the “ethic of refusal” and témoignage, “the idea of being a witness to suffering.”

Australia’s gulag mimicry – a prison first, justice second mentality that governs boat arrivals – has done wonders to challenge any stance of distance humanitarian organisations might purport to have.  To see the suffering such policies cause is to make converts of the stony hearted.  What matters in this instance – the MSF condemnation of Australia’s innately brutal anti-refugee policy on Nauru – is its certitude.

The Australian government has taken the high, icy road and left the UN Refugee Convention in shambolic ruin; it insists, repeatedly, that refugees are to be discriminated against on the basis of how they arrive to the country; it also suggests, with a hypnotically disabling insistence that keeping people in open air prisons indefinitely is far better than letting them drown.  (We, the message goes, stopped the boats and saved lives!)

MSF, which had been working on the island since November 2017 primarily providing free psychological and psychiatric services, was given its marching orders by Nauru’s authorities last week.  Visas for the organisation’s workers were cancelled “to make it clear there was no intention of inviting us back,” explained MSF Australia director Paul McPhun. 

A disagreement about what MSF was charged with doing developed.  The original memorandum of understanding with the Nauru government tends to put cold water on the suggestion by Australia’s Home Affairs Minister that MSF had not been involved in supplying medical services to the detainees on the island.  In dull wording, the agreement stated who the intended recipients of the project would be: “People suffering from various mental health issues, from moderate to severe, members of the various communities living in the Republic of Nauru, including Nauruan residents, expatriates, asylum seekers and refugees with no discrimination.”

It was obvious that the revelations would eventually become too much for either the authorities of Australia or Nauru to tolerate.  Having been entrusted with the task of healing the wounds of the mind, MSF’s brief was withdrawn after the organisation’s findings on the state of mental health of those in detention.

“Five years of indefinite limbo has led to a radical deterioration of their medical health and wellbeing,” claimed McPhun in stark fashion to reporters in Sydney on Thursday.  “Separating families, holding men, women and children on a remote island indefinitely with no hope of protection except in the case of a medical emergency, is cruel and inhumane.”

Undertaking a journey from war torn environs and famine stricken lands might well inflict its own elements of emotional distortion and disturbance, but Australia’s policy of keeping people isolated, distant and grounded took it further.  It was penal vindictiveness, a form of needless brutal application.

In McPhun’s sharp assessment,

“While many asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru experienced trauma in their countries of origin or during their journey, it is the Australian government’s policy of indefinite offshore detention that has destroyed their resilience, shattered all hope, and ultimately impacted their mental health.”

The organisation has made it clear that Canberra’s insistence that “offshore detention” remains somehow humanitarian is barely credible, there being “nothing humanitarian saving people from the sea only to leave them in an open air prison on Nauru.”

Such a cruel joke has turned the members of MSF into a decidedly militant outfit.

“Over the past 11 months on Nauru,” states psychiatrist Beth O’Connor, “I have seen an alarming number of suicide attempts and incidents of self-harm among the refugee and asylum seeker men, women and children we treat.”

Particularly shocking were the number of children enduring the effects of traumatic withdrawal syndrome “where their status deteriorated to the extent they were unable to eat, drink, or even to walk to the toilet.”

With such observations, there is little surprise that Nauru’s government, which was evidently seeking to find an ally and an alibi, felt slighted.  The doctors had to go.

 “Although MSF claimed to be a partner to Nauru and the Nauruan people instead of working with us,” came the government justification, “they conspired against us.”

The government was no longer inclined “to accept the concocted lies told about us purely to advance political agendas.”

What the government statement also insisted upon was the comparative advantage the hosted refugees and asylum seekers had.  They had their own tissue of mendacity to proffer.  “The facilities, care, welfare and homely environment offered to refugees and asylum seekers are comparable or better than what other refugees and asylum seekers across the globe receive.”  For that to make any sense, a comparative study on suicides, psychological corrosion and trauma would have to be done across the world’s refugee camps.  In those terms, Nauru’s performance, aided and abetted by their Australian sponsors, has been ghoulishly stellar.

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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]

Food and environment campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason has just produced the report ‘Shockingly high levels of weedkiller found in popular breakfast cereals marketed for British children’. In this 68-page document, she draws from new research in the UK that mirrors findings from the US about the dangerous levels of glyphosate found in food, especially products aimed at children (glyphosate is the active ingredient in Monsanto’s weedicide Roundup). Readers can access this report here (which contains all relevant references).

Mason begins by reporting on research that significant levels of weedkiller were found in 43 out of 45 popular breakfast cereals marketed to US children. Glyphosate was detected in an array of popular breakfast cereals, oats and snack bars.

Tests revealed glyphosate was present in all but two of the 45 oat-derived products that were sampled by the Environmental Working Group, a public health organisation. Nearly three in four of the products exceeded what the EWG classes safe for children to consume. Products with some of the highest levels of glyphosate include granola, oats and snack bars made by leading industry names Quaker, Kellogg’s and General Mills, which makes Cheerios.

Back in April, internal emails obtained from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that scientists had found glyphosate on a wide range of commonly consumed food, to the point that they were finding it difficult to identify a food without the chemical on it. In response to these findings, however, The Guardian newspaper in the UK reported that there was no indication that the claims related to products sold outside the US.

In view of this statement by the Guardian, Mason was involved in sending samples of four oat-based breakfast cereals marketed for children in the UK to the Health Research Institute, Fairfield, Iowa, an accredited laboratory for glyphosate testing.

After testing the samples which were sent, Dr Fagan, the institute’s director, said:

“The levels consumed in a single daily helping of any one of these cereals, even the one with the lowest level of contamination, is sufficient to put the person’s glyphosate levels above the levels that cause fatty liver disease in rats (and likely in people).” (Access the Certificate of Analysis here.)

Just as concerning were results for two ‘organic’ products from the US that were also tested at the time: granola had some glyphosate in and ‘organic’ rolled oats had even higher levels of the chemical.

Mason argues that the fact such high levels of glyphosate have been found in cereals in Britain should ring alarm bells across Europe, especially as the distribution of glyphosate and aminomethylphosphonic acid in agricultural top soils of the European Union is widespread.

A question of power

As in her previous documents, Mason describes how regulators in the EU and the UK relicensed Roundup for the benefit of the industry-backed Glyphosate Task Force. Even more alarming is that, on the back of Brexit, she notes that a US-UK trade deal could result in the introduction of Roundup ready GM crops in the UK. Indeed, high-level plans for cementing this deal are afoot.

Mason offers worrying data about the increasing use of biocides, especially glyphosate, as well as the subsequent destruction of the global environment due to their use. As usual, she produces a very data-rich report which draws on many sources, including official reports and peer-reviewed papers.

Of course, there is a strong focus on Monsanto. Aside from the use of glyphosate, she also documents the impact of the company’s presence in Wales, where she lives, with regard to the dumping of toxic chemicals (PCBs) from its manufacturing site there between 1949 and 1979, the effects of which persist and still plague the population and the environment.

Mason asks:

“Monsanto has been bought up by Bayer, so the Monsanto name has disappeared but where are the Monsanto executives hiding?”

She is aware of course that such figures don’t have to hide anywhere. The company ‘got away with it’ in Wales. And its recent crop of executives received huge ‘golden handshakes’ after the Bayer deal despite them having perpetuated a degenerative model of industrial agriculture. A model that has only secured legitimacy by virtue of the power of the global agritech lobby to lock in a bogus narrative of success, as outlined in the report ‘From Uniformity to Diversity’ by The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems.

As that report notes, locking farmers into corporate-dependent treadmills, state support of (export) commodity cropping via subsidies and the discounting of the massive health, environment and social costs of industrial agriculture ensures that model prevails and makes it appear successful. If you base your food regime on short-term thinking and a reductionist yield-output paradigm and define success within narrow confines, then the model is a sure-fire winner – for corporate growth (profit) if little else.

Without being able to externalise the health, social and environmental costs of its actions and products, this model would not be viable for the corporations involved. Widening the parameters to properly evaluate ‘success’ entails asking the industry questions that it finds very difficult to gloss over, not least what has been the cost of input-(biocide)dependent yields of commodities in terms of pollution, health, local food security and caloric production, nutrition per acre, water tables, soil quality and structure and new pests and disease pressures?

Why have African countries been turned from food exporters to food importers? Why is land in South America being used for Roundup Ready crops to feed the appetite for meat in rich countries, while peasant farmers who grew food for themselves and local communities have been displaced?

And what are the effects on once thriving rural communities; on birds, insects and biodiversity in general; on the climate as a result of chemical inputs and soil degradation; and what have been the effects of shifting towards globalised production chains, especially in terms of transportation and fossil fuel consumption?

The global food regime degrades public health and the environment, and it has narrowed the range of crops grown, resulting in increasingly monolithic, nutrient-deficient diets. Yet the powerful industry lobby calls for more deregulation and more techno-fixes like GMOs to ‘feed the world’. This is in spite of the fact that hunger and malnutrition are political: these phenomena are in large part the outcome of a global capitalist food regime that, with help from IMF/World Bank geopolitical lending strategies and WTO rules, has undermined food security for vast sections of the global population by creating a system that by its very nature drives inequality, injustice and creates food deficit areas.

Moving to a more sustainable model of agriculture based on localisation, food sovereignty and agroecology calls for a different world view. Proponents of industrial agriculture are resistant to this because it would harm what has become a highly profitable system based on the capture of political, research and media institutions.

And this is where we return to Rosemary Mason. If there is an overriding theme within her work over the years, it is corruption at high levels which facilitate much of the above. For instance, she notes the determination of the UK government, working hand in glove with global agribusiness, to ensure certain biocide products remain on the market and to help major corporations avoid any culpability for their health- and environment-damaging practices and chemicals.

Mason and various whistleblowers and writers have over the years described how these corporations have become institutionally embedded within high-profile public bodies and scientific research policy initiatives. Regulatory delinquency, institutionalised corruption and complete disregard for the health and well-being of the public is the order of the day.

GMOs and a post-Brexit deal with the US

If the UK is about to introduce GM crops into its fields on the back of a post-Brexit deal with the Trump administration, then it should take heed of what the ex-director of J.R. Simplot and team leader at Monsanto Dr Caius Rommens says in his new book:

“The main problem about the current process for deregulation of GMO crops is that it is based on an evaluation of data provided by the developers of GMO crops. There is a conflict of interest. I propose that the safety of GMO crops is assessed by an independent group of scientists trained at identifying unintended effects.”

This former high-level Monsanto researcher of potatoes now acknowledges that genetic engineers had limited insight into the effects of their experiments. Genetic engineering passes off the inherent uncertainty, unintended consequences and imprecision of its endeavours as unquestionable certainty. And the USDA accepts industry information and reassurances.

After finding that most GMO varieties of potatoes that he was involved in developing were stunted, chlorotic, mutated or sterile, and many of them died quickly, Rommens renounced his genetic engineering career and wrote a book about his experiences, ‘Pandora’s Potatoes: The Worst GMOs’.

In an interview with GMWatch, Rommens is asked why regulators in the US, Canada and Japan, which have approved these potatoes, are ignoring these aspects.

Rommens responds:

“The standard tests needed to ensure regulatory approval are not set up to identify unintended effects. They are meant to confirm the safety of a GM crop, not to question their safety. None of the issues I address in my book were considered by the regulatory agencies.”

A damning indictment of regulatory delinquency based on ‘don’t look, don’t find’. GMOs have nonetheless become the mainstay of US agriculture. Now the industry is rubbing its hands in anticipation of Brexit, which would pry the UK from the EU and its precautionary principle-based regulation of GMOs.

The push to open up Britain to globalisation in the 1980s ushered in a free-for-all for global capital to determine the future direction of a deregulated UK. Three decades down the line, the consequences are clear for food, agriculture, democracy and public health. The worrying thing is that thanks to Brexit, it could be the case that even worse is yet to come!

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

Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation

Author Name: F. William Engdahl

ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2

Year: 2007

Pages: 341 pages with complete index

List Price: $25.95

Special Price: $18.00

This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”

This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.

The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.

Introduction

The decisive electoral victory of far-right Brazilian presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro startled politicians and analysts of the traditional parties of the left and right.

The possible implications for the present and near future raises a number of fundamental questions whether it represents a ‘model’ for other countries or is the result of the specific circumstances of Brazil.

We shall proceed by outlining the socio-economic events and policies of Brazil which led up to the rise of the highly authoritarian, neo-liberal Bolsonaro regime.  We will then discuss if similar circumstances are emerging elsewhere and whether anti-authoritarian popular-democratic politics challenge the threat. We will conclude by evaluating the future of far-right regimes and their enemies.

Brazil :Two Decades of Military Rule and the Legacy of Impunity

Brazil was ruled by a military dictatorship between April 1964 and March 15, 1985.  Though the military formally withdrew from the regime it retained many powers and prerogatives, including impunity for the thousands of cases of arbitrary violations of human rights including torture and assassinations.

However, during the height of the so-called ‘economic miracle’ during the 1970’s, sectors of the middle class supported the rule by the triple alliance of private business, state enterprise elites and the military.  Only when the regime faced a major crisis in the early 1980’s did the military give way to electoral politics.  The authoritarian legacy remained embedded in the political culture of the military and its followers.  With the deepening economic crises of neo-liberalism, the corruption of civic culture and the increase of crime during the second decade of the 21^st century, a militarized political movement headed by Jair Bolsonaro came to the fore.

The Social Bases of the Authoritarian regime

Most commentators have emphasized the amorphous mass of voters’ discontent with political corruption as the basis for the rise of the right.  Moralism and insecurity with street crime were cited as the driving force of rightwing extremism.

Yet powerful economic power elites played a decisive role in propelling Bolsonaro to power. While masses were in the street, the Brazilian National Agricultural Confederation, the Federation of Banks and other prominent elite associations provided the funds, the legitimacy and legislative muscle.  Over 40% of the Senate and Congress was controlled by the ‘ruralist bloc’, which came out in favor of Bolsonaro.  Many of the voters who previously supported ex-President Cardoso’s center-right candidate Geraldo Alickman defected to the authoritarian right reducing his estimated vote by half.

The judiciary, under the influence of the agro-business and banking elite exploited political corruption to discredit and prosecute the center-left and the traditional political parties, leading to the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and the arrest and prosecution of the leading left candidate Lula Da Silva.

From Authoritarianism to Fascism

Bolsonaro’s appeal to the elite is grounded in his program of savaging the working class:  he promises to freeze public salaries for twenty years; lower pensions and increase retirement age up to twenty years; increase the role of the military and police in repressing strikes and land reform movements; end all restraints on pillaging the Amazon forest; lower taxes for the rich, deregulate the private economy and privatize the public sector.

In effect the Bolsonaro’s policies follow the script of a corporatist – neoliberal state: fascism with ‘free markets’.  The pro-military policies are code words for mass repression; his pro-business strategy is disguised by an embrace of ‘family values’ and virulent hostility to working women, Afro-Brazilians, gays and indigenous people.  His crusade against crime excludes bankers, landowners and industrialists who bribed politicians and congress- people – only the latter were prosecuted.

The Future of Neo-Liberal Fascism; Wave of the Future?

Will Bolsonaro’s version of neo-liberal fascism set the mark for other Latin American countries?  Will his regime intervene and overthrow progressive countries?  Will his victory in Brazil spur similar developments throughout the world?

In the aftermath of Bolsonaro’s first round electoral rout, the real (Brazilian currency) rose 3% against the dollar and the stock market jumped 4.5% in expectations of the total de-regulation of markets, and the privatization of the entire public sector.

Though Bolsonaro is compared to President Trump, there are both similarities and differences.  Both share hostility to minorities, flaunt a rabidly chauvinist ideology and embrace ‘nationalist’ slogans. Yet Bolsonaro cannot embrace Trump’s protectionist policies and trade war with China. The agro-business elite in Brazil, which is an essential social bloc, would not permit him to undercut their vital export markets.

Bolsonaro’s neo-liberal fascist policy resonates with several regimes in Latin America, namely Colombia and Argentina.  In Colombia large scale militarization and death squads’ collaboration in support of neo-liberalism have been in place for decades prior to Bolsonaro’s rise to power.  Moreover, Colombia’s oligarchic regime does not depend on the mass base and charismatic leadership of a ‘fascism’ regime.

Argentina under President Mauricio Macri might like to imitate Bolsonaro but his dependence on the IMF and its austerity program precludes any ‘mass base’ which might have been mobilized at the start of his neo-liberal regime.

This takes us to consider the stability and duration of the Brazilian experience of neo-liberal fascism.  Several considerations are foremost.

Bolsonaro’s embrace of radical attacks of wage earners, salary employees, pensioners, debtors, small farmers and business-people may erode his ‘mass appeal’ and charisma.

The mass electoral fervor may not withstand the deterioration of basic socio-economic living standards.

Bolsonaro’s regime lack a congressional majority will obligate him to form alliances with the same corrupt parties and politicians which he denounced. The post-election political deal making may disillusion many of his ‘moral’ supporters.

If his free market program deepens social polarization and the class struggle, general strikes may result – though Brazil lacks the Argentine working-class tradition.

The agro-mineral elite, the military and the bankers will back Bolsonaro’s ‘war on crime’, and even benefit from the war in the slums, but unless he can stimulate investments, export markets and incorporate skilled workers and innovative technology, Brazil would be reduced to becoming merely an agro-mineral economy run by oligarchs and warmed over corrupt politicians.

Bolsonaro’s hostility to blacks, women, gays, trade unions and urban and rural social movements may win votes, but it does not increase profits and growth. Reactionary policies may attract amorphous middle-class voters, but it is not a program for governing nor does it serve as a coherent economic strategy.  

There is no doubt that the explosive appeal of the ‘anti-establishment rhetoric has initially successful.  There is no doubt that the military-regime alliance can withstand and repress a popular backlash, but can the regime rule sitting on bayonets?

The defeat of neo-liberal fascism in Brazil and its possible imitators elsewhere depends on the scope and depth of organized resistance.  Bolsonaro’s ability to implement his assault on the living standards of the popular classes will depend on the scope and intensity of the class struggle.  For starters Bolsonaro has won an election – but it has yet to be determined whether neo-liberal fascism is a viable, durable alternative to populist nationalism and social democracy.  Likewise, it is not yet evident that the declining Left, fragmented and discredited can regroup and offer an alternative road to power.

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

The (unconfirmed) death of famous journalist Saudita Jamal Khashoggi is likely to have important repercussions, revealing the hypocrisy of the mainstream media, tensions inside the Saudi regime, and the double standards of Western countries.

On October 2nd, 2018, Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was allegedly killed inside Saudi Arabia’s embassy in Turkey. The sequence of events seems to show that the murder was premeditated. Two days before his death, Khashoggi went to the Saudi embassy in Istanbul to obtain documents pertaining to his divorce in preparation to remarry in the United States. The Saudi embassy instructed him to return on October 2nd to collect the documents, which he duly did. He entered the embassy around 1pm on October 2nd but never exited. Khashoggi’s fiancée, after waiting several hours, raised the alarm as Khashoggi had instructed her to do should he not reemerge after two hours.

It is from here that we should start to reconstruct this story that resembles a science-fiction novel even by Saudi standards, a country that does not hesitate to kidnap heads of state, as was the case with the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, about a year ago.

Jamal Khashoggi is a controversial figure, a representative of the shadowy world of collaboration that sometimes exists between journalism and the intelligence agencies, in this case involving the intelligence agencies of Saudi Arabia and the United States. It has been virtually confirmed by official circles within the Al Saud family that Khashoggi was an agent in the employ of Riyadh and the CIA during the Soviet presence in Afghanistan.

From 1991 to 1999, he continued to serve in several countries like Afghanistan, Algeria, Sudan, Kuwait and other parts of the Middle East, often maintaining an ambiguous role in the service of his friend Turki Faisal Al-Saud, the future Saudi ambassador to Washington and London and later supreme head of Saudi intelligence for 24 years.

Khashoggi was named editor of the leading English-language magazine in Saudi Arabia, Arab News, from 1999 to 2003. In late 2003, he transferred to Al Watan, one of the most liberal, Western and pro-reform newspapers in the country. His job lasted only 52 days, with him being removed strongly criticizing the Wahhabi clerical extremist Ibn Taymiyyah. Khashoggi had turned into a critical voice of the Saudi regime following the internal struggles between King Abdullah and Turki Faisal Al-Saud.

One of the main criticisms of Khashoggi coming from factions loyal to Abdullah was that he had recruited and paid several journalists on behalf of the CIA during his time as an editor. Such an accusation would conform with the widespread practice of the CIA seeking to influence the media, and therefore public opinion, and to put pressure on leaders failing to do what Washington wants.

To fully understand what has led to the disappearance of Khashoggi, it is important to dissect the career of Turki bin Faisal Al-Saud, Khashoggi’s political protector.

During the reign of King Khalid (1975-1982), Turki bin Faisal Al-Saud was at the center of relations between Washington and Saudi Arabia, committed to inflicting as much damage as possible on the USSR while it was in Afghanistan, with the help of foreign fighters (those who later became known as Al Qaeda) armed by Pakistan and financed by the Saudis. Following the end of the war in Afghanistan in 1982, Fahd bin Abdulaziz Al Saud became king until 2005. During this period, Faisal became a respected man within Saudi intelligence, leading to him becoming the undisputed leader. He was removed from his post on May 24, 2001, a few months before September 11, 2001. The connections he had with Osama bin Laden, following the attacks of September 11, 2001, continued to hound the Turki bin Faisal in subsequent years, even being sued by relatives of 9/11 victims in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit directed at him and other Saudi operatives. From 2003 to 2005, Turki bin Faisal served as ambassador to the UK, emphasizing his role as a leading Saudi in the international community, and came across Khashoggi, taking him under his wing as a personal advisor.

In the ensuing years there was an explosive internal fracture within the Kingdom, accentuated by the death in 2005 of King Abdulaziz Al Saud, who was succeeded by King Abdullah until 2015.

In 2005, Turki bin Faisal was appointed Saudi ambassador to the US during the Bush administration, with Khashoggi accompanying him as a media advisor. During this period, Khashoggi became one of the strongest supporters of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, invoking diplomatic discussions between Riyadh and Tehran and travelling to over 37 American states to explain his point of view. While advancing the interests of the Saudi regime bent on Wahhabism, while at the same time being a friend to Israeli Zionism and the American neocons, Turki bin Faisal took a less extremist position, one more directed towards dialogue. For these reasons, he was not often received at the White House during his reign as ambassador, with the US administration openly preferring the extremist Bandar bin Sultan (a great friend of the Bush family) to the apparently moderate Turki bin Faisal.

The natural result was that King Abdullah excluded him more and more from the main meetings that occurred between the Saudis and the Americans. Finally, bin Faisal resigned in protest. He was succeeded by Bandar bin Sultan.

Back to Khashoggi. It is important to note that after his departure from Al Watan he moved to London and became a senior advisor in Turki bin Faisal’s team. During Turki bin Faisal’s ambassadorship in Washington, Khashoggi assumed the position of head of press relations, coming into direct contact with major national and international organs of US media.

In the years following Turki bin Faisal’s ambassadorship in Washington, Khashoggi became a new publisher of the liberal Saudi newspaper Al Watan, publishing an article that was highly critical of the Saudi clerics and of Salafism in general. A few days later, he was again forced to resign and left the newspaper. It was after this event that Khashoggi came into direct contact with Al-Waleed bin Talal, one of the richest men in Saudi Arabia, who had been appointed director of the Al Arab news channel based in Bahrain. The news channel sought to offer an impartial and objective view of events in the Middle East and in Saudi Arabia. As director of Al Arab, he often released statements and interviews for international organs like the BBC, ABC News, Al Jazeera and Dubai TV. In recent years, he became a recurring guest on Al Jazeera and had a weekly column in The Washington Post.

What happened to Khashoggi is the story not so much of a dissident as of a struggle within the highly complicated Zionist-Saudi-Neoconservative nexus that is intertwined with the struggle against the neoliberal component of US imperialism. It is a story that deserves to be fully explored to understand the behind-the-scenes struggles that afflict US politics, the hypocrisy of the media when it comes to the Saudi dictatorship, and the ambiguous role of Turkey.

Returning to Khashoggi, it was during the Obama presidency that the journalist played a primary role in encouraging important reforms in Saudi Arabia as being essential to the survival of the Kingdom. During this time, relations between Riyadh and Washington steadily worsened for many reasons, primarily in regard to diverging policies on Egypt and Syria as well as on human rights in Saudi Arabia.

Many in the Saudi royal family suspected that Obama was willing to use the Arab springs to get rid of the Al Saud family in Saudi Arabia. The relationship between Riyadh and Washington subsequently sunk to an all-time low. Khashoggi was the spearhead of this media and political strategy against Riyadh. An intimate friend of the royal family who ends up publicly criticizing them causes quite a stir, selling copies and drawing attention to what he writes.

Keep in mind that we are splitting the atom of the Saudi universe. But it should never be forgotten that we are talking about a regime that tortures and kills its fellow citizens as well foreigners. It is a regime that creates terrorism as a weapon used to further its own political goals. These are not people burdened by moral scruples.

Yet in spite of this, no country is monolithic in terms of those who hold the reigns of power, especially when it comes to foreign affairs. It is the competing views and internal struggles that determine the course of events, as with the case of Khashoggi’s death.

During the Obama administration, the former Saudi intelligence man and intimate of the royals continued to work as a house organ linked to the US world of soft power (color revolutions, Arab Spring), the form of power that was particularly favored by the Obama administration as a new strategy to extend US imperialist domination following the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. The criticism of the Saudi royal family was constant, even though the journalist appreciated the role Riyadh played in the region, especially with regard to the aggression against Syria.

In the following years, with the rise to power of King Salman, and especially after the victory of Donald Trump, everything changed for the worse in the region and for the “dissident” journalist. Bin Salman became the strongman holding power in Saudi Arabia, triggering, with a nod from Trump, a near war with Qatar, especially over the role of Al Jazeera, which often hosted Khashoggi and was increasingly critical of bin Salman and his vision for the Kingdom’s future (Vision 2030).

During bin Salman’s campaign of repression, the King’s nephew took the opportunity to attack all his opponents, with many people close to Khashoggi being arrested, tortured and killed. His old acquaintance in particular, Al-Waleed bin Talal, was arrested and tortured, much to the displeasure of the West, given that he was one of the most famous Saudis abroad, being involved with companies like Twitter. In a climax of repression, even the Lebanese prime minister, Saad Hariri, was kidnapped and spirited to Riyadh to be re-educated over a number of days. Khashoggi sensed the looming danger, and in 2017 escaped from Saudi Arabia to settle in the United States.

Khashoggi continued with his columns criticizing the Saudi regime, attacking its campaign in Yemen on Al Jazeera, and accusing bin Salman of being anything but a positive revolutionary for the Kingdom. Khashoggi’s criticism pointed to the lack of democracy as well as the sclerosis at the top in the Saudi kingdom, accusations that bin Salman chafed at, finally deciding to be rid of the journalist.

The events in Istanbul are the culmination of a grotesque situation whereby Donald Trump has granted a free hand to his two close allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Analyzing the actions of these two countries over the last 24 months, the extent of Washington’s carte blanche has become clear.

We could venture into fanciful speculation about Khashoggi’s death, citing anonymous Saudi sources; or we could simply come to the most obvious conclusion. Khashoggi was arrested in the embassy before being tortured, killed and dismembered by about 15 Saudi operatives who arrived in Istanbul on a day flight from Riyadh and departed a few hours after Khashoggi’s killing. It is hard to believe that the Turkish services, which have always played the double- and triple-crossing game, did not know what was happening. Khashoggi himself had probably received assurances that the Saudi embassy in Istanbul was a safe place to collect the documents. He was obviously betrayed by someone in whom he had strong trust.

Turkey is a strong ally of Qatar and plays a major role in the region. Relations between Riyadh and Ankara have not been the best in recent years, but their common interests in the region are so high that it is not surprising that Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization has closed more than one eye to allow Khashoggi’s assassination and the exit of the 15 operatives. Besides, Erdogan was well aware of the problems that this story would have created between the United States and Saudi Arabia, especially within the ranks of the liberal media of the US establishment.

The problems flowing from this settling of internal accounts are manifold. They range from the indignation of such mainstream media as The Washington Post, CNN and ABC News that are beginning to reveal grisly details about Khashoggi’s death, even if they treat the news with detachment, not openly attributing blame to Riyadh. Saudi money from various lobbies dampens the effect of such media attention, succeeding in dissuading direct accusations of Saudi involvement in Khashoggi’s disappearance. The more time that passes the more obvious it becomes how Khashoggi was killed in the Saudi consulate on the orders of bin Salman as a critic of the Kingdom. At some point, the mainstream media will no longer be able to cover up for the Saudis. It all comes down to the possibility of plausible deniability or legitimate justification. Both these elements are difficult for the US to employ in this case.

The upshot is an explosive situation that threatens to further isolate Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United States from the rest of the world. Thus the White House had to even express in an official note confusion and concern, asking the Saudis to provide real evidence of Khashoggi’s exit from the Saudi consulate. We must also consider that Riyadh planned to blame Turkey for the disappearance of the journalist, stating that, having come out from the embassy, ​​the disappearance was the fault of Turkey.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Erdogan has insisted that “the burden of demonstrating how Khashoggi is still alive belongs to Saudi Arabia.” Even the tour of the consulate offered to foreign journalists has failed to silence what seems too obvious. Riyadh overreached following Trump’s wink and nod, eliminating an uncomfortable voice that was also very close to Riyadh’s geopolitical enemies like Qatar as well the US neoliberal faction (linked to Obama and to the faction close to the Muslim Brotherhood, outlawed in Saudi Arabia because it presents itself as a political alternative to the state religion of Wahhabism).

In an series of reckless actions, the last 12 months have seen all sorts of provocations from Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia. There was the downing of a Russian Il-20 through the intentionally reckless maneuvers of Israeli pilots, the more than 200 bombings on the sovereign state of Syria, cooperation with Riyadh in the war in Yemen, the threats to Hezbollah and Iran that Netanyahu even proclaimed in front of the United Nations General Assembly. Saudi Arabia even managed to do worse, with the abduction of the Lebanese prime minister, the continued funding of extremists like Daesh and al Qaeda, the nefarious actions against Qatar and Iran, the bombing of Yemen, and recently the killing of a journalist in a Saudi embassy. For its part, the US in recent days has made two unthinkable declarations, namely, threatening a first strike against Moscow to eliminate some military weaponry, as well as a naval blockade to prevent energy exports.

With the Khashoggi incident and the ensuing media outcry, the ideological hatred of the mainstream media against Trump and the increasingly precarious situation of Netanyahu (accused of corruption, with his wife also being investigated), it should not be surprising if this latest incident only serves as ammunition in the political war amongst the elite that shows no signs of subsiding and is instead growing in intensity by the day.

One of the last alliances that the United States has available to influence events in the Middle East risks falling apart as a result of bin Salman’s ill-advised actions. Erdogan has already challenged the Saudis by asking them to prove that the journalist is alive. There is open speculation in the Kingdom about the implications of the clash between Ankara and Riyadh and between bin Salman and Erdogan. There are those who are willing to bet that this latest reckless action could prove fatal for the ruler who, after just a year and a half, seems to have exhausted his whole store of experience as the Kingdom’s young despot.

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Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Flickr.

Canada is fast-becoming a safe-haven for terrorists. 

Al Qaeda/al Nusra Front and ISIS are openly being welcomed[1] and protected from public scrutiny and juridical consequences, including “Anti-Terror” legislation.[2]

All of this exposes yet again that the “War on Terror” is a fraud, and that the Canadian government and its agencies support all of the terrorists in Syria, including ISIS[3].

This is known BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT.

Similarly, internet censorship, including algorithms imposed on anti-war sites, and Facebook censorship, are the spawn of pro-wars of aggression policymaking groups such as the Atlantic Council, which is partnered with Facebook[4]. 

These measures serve to strengthen and protect the “Shadow state” and the policymakers who are governing our lives and determining where our tax dollars flow. And a significant portion of our taxes flow into the pockets of terrorists, beneath the cover of a “feminist” foreign policy.

All of this is about destroying democracy – a fait accompli – and advancing anti-democratic political economies here and abroad.

Elected politicians, supporters of the above-mentioned agenda, do not represent the views of an informed Canadian population. They represent the views of globalist neo-con policymakers.

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Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) and the author of Voices from Syria, Global Research Publishers, 2017.

Notes

1. Stewart Bell,“Exclusive: Canadian member of Islamic State caught, but RCMP struggle to lay charges against ISIS fighters.” Global News. 8 October, 2015. (https://globalnews.ca/news/4526514/canadian-isis-caught-in-turkey/) Accessed 12 October, 2018.

See also:

Mark Taliano, “The White Helmets are “Black Helmets”, They are Al Qaeda

And Canada Supports Them.” Global Research. 2 April, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-white-helmets-are-black-helmets-they-are-al-qaeda/5634301) Accessed 12 April, 2018.

2. “Breaking Down Bill C-59: The New National Security Act.” ICLMG video. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fti5L7_0670). Accessed 12 October, 2018.

3. Prof. Tim Anderson, “The Dirty War on Syria: Washington Supports the Islamic State (ISIS)

The Evidence.” Global Research, 29 December, 2015. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-dirty-war-on-syria-washington-supports-the-islamic-state-isis/5494957) Accessed 12 October, 2018.

4. Elliott Gabriel, “Facebook Partners With Hawkish Atlantic Council, a NATO Lobby Group, to ‘Protect Democracy’.” Mint Press News. 22 May, 2018. (https://www.mintpressnews.com/facebook-partners-hawkish-atlantic-council-nato-lobby-group-protect-democracy/242289/) Accessed 12 October, 2018.  

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.

Mark Taliano combines years of research with on-the-ground observations to present an informed and well-documented analysis that refutes  the mainstream media narratives on Syria. 

Voices from Syria 

ISBN: 978-0-9879389-1-6

Author: Mark Taliano

Year: 2017

Pages: 128 (Expanded edition: 1 new chapter)

List Price: $17.95

Special Price: $9.95 

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Both the Free Thought Project and The Anti-Media lost their social media accounts in a coordinated attack today by Facebook and Twitter. 

Facebook alone removed 559 pages and 251 accounts. 

.

Antiwar critics of establishment politics @AntiMedia and @TFTPROJECT just had their pages with millions of followers deleted by Facebook, along with hundreds of other alternative media outlets. Latest escalation of corporate censorship used as state censorship in the west. pic.twitter.com/Fdk9Yd13jI

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) October 11, 2018

Facebook has unpublished our page

After 5 years of building fans Facebook has officially unpublished our page (3.1 million fans) so we can’t post on it anymore. This is truly an outrage and we are devastated. We will do everything we can to recover our page and fight back. pic.twitter.com/H3AmHTT8Qo

— Free Thought Project (@TFTPROJECT) October 11, 2018

Dan Dicks is another victim. 

“The Press For Truth FaceBook Page with 350k followers has just been memory holed form the internet! 350k followers gone in the blink of an eye as we are right before our eyes witnessing the results of what happens when these big tech companies appoint themselves as the gatekeepers of political thought and opinion,” a headline story at Press For Truth reports today. 

First they came for Alex Jones and now @facebook has taken down @DanDicksPFT Press For Truth page! This is insanity, Dan has been one of the most inspirational and rational independent journalists of our era! @DewsNewz @PrisonPlanet @LeighStewy @PressForTruth pic.twitter.com/EA5WatAHUI

— Jason Bermas (@JasonBermas) October 11, 2018

Facebook just shut down, Free Thought Project, Press For Truth, Anti-Media and dozens of other VERY IMPORTANT alternative media pages that we, of course, have a very close relationship with.

EVERYONE b4 we get totally erased please sign up here https://t.co/TjukqdhBwl

— Luke Rudkowski (@Lukewearechange) October 11, 2018

The midterm election is being used as an excuse to purge social media accounts and thus reduce traffic to websites on the target list. 

First it was alt-right figures like Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich who had their accounts pulled for behavior that is an every day occurrence by others on social media.  

Then Alex Jones was taken down. This was a landmark event that served notice on other websites diverging from the establishment narrative and spreading dangerous “alternative facts.”

Now the effort has moved on the the next level of targets, those with moderate to high social media traffic and successful websites with growing viewership. Not millions like Jones, but a couple hundred thousand all the way down to tens of thousands. 

Numbers are way down for sites banished from the corporate social media kingdom. Traffic is drying up and thus support. 

This is precisely what the establishment and its political class have in mind. It has nothing to do with “inauthentic” content as they claim. It is a concerted effort to wipe out for good entire segments of the alternative media. 

If Democrats take control of Congress next month, watch out. They will make it impossible for another Donald Trump to get elected with the help of social media.

They leveraged the patently absurd and widely discredited Russian influence scam. The accusation Trump somehow colluded with the Russians has been used to tarnish his supporters, conservatives in general, and other groups not part of the establishment engineered political arrangement. 

Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others are building an algorithmic filter. It will not permit entire segments of the population to weigh in on political issues during federal elections. 

That model, most recently tested in Brazil, will be used. If successful in November, it will be further implemented after the election. 

The European model (not based on constitutional liberties) will be adopted. This is a collectivist arrangement where certain groups are protected by the government while individual Germans and Swedes are singled out and prosecuted for criticizing the arrangement on social media. 

Finally, I believe somewhere down the line many of us will barred access to the internet if were appear on a government list similar to the malfunctioning no-fly list. This will be easy to implement. Pass a law forbidding ISPs from selling service to Americans espousing political ideas considered racist, homophobic, misogynistic, transphobic, etc., by the government. 

In the current political climate, it’s easy to fall into one of these categories. Others will be memory holed simply due to their political philosophy, most notably conservatives and libertarians, but also nonviolent radical leftists and progressives opposed to the military-industrial-surveillance complex and neoliberal globalism. 

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

Turmoil reigns in Venezuela. A story serves to illustrate and to introduce the report presented here.

The Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV) on its website claims that the national police in Táchira state recently arrested and tortured PCV member José Luis Daza, who remains in prison in Caracas. The location of the incident near the Colombia-Venezuela border points to the role of Colombia in undermining the government of President Nicolás Maduro.

According to the PCV statement, the police were intent upon securing “a false accusation” from Daza against Yhon Luna, for whom he is an assistant and who is a member of the PCV Central Committee and the Tachira Legislative Council.

The PCV, a long-time supporter of the Bolivarian Revolution now headed by Maduro, alleges that Luna is of interest to the police because, as a member of a regional justice and human rights commission, he was dealing with accusations of corruption, smuggling, and bribery against local police and the military. His release is demanded.

A new way

Now survival of the socialist movement founded by the late Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela from 1999 until his death in 2013, is very much in question. Over a year ago, opposition forces, having tried in one way or another to remove the Bolivarian government, resorted to an iron fist.

Their operatives had orchestrated a failed coup against Chávez in 2002; induced corrupt officials and unionists to shut down operations at the state-owned PDVSA oil company in 2002-03; experimented with a separatist plot in oil-rich Zulia state in 2008; mounted an electoral opposition to compete for votes, despite divisions; backed violent, anti-government street demonstrations that morphed from violence during the Chavez era to wholesale killings in 2014 and 2017, during Maduro’s time.

U.S. operatives smoothed the way for the 2002 coup. Over many years, the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID arranged for millions of dollars to be distributed among youth groups, politicians, and right-wing organizations. The funding, aimed at advancing U.S. influence, went toward enabling electoral and street-fighting capabilities.

Chavistas during the April 19 demonstration supporting the government in Caracas (Source: Investig’Action)

Despite the destabilization campaign and mounting economic crisis leading to shortages and inflation, Maduro’s government endured. He won re-election to the presidency in May 2018, helped along by opposition disunity and voter abstention.

Three recent news items signal a change of gears. First, the New York Times on September 9 featured a front page article describing meetings during the past year between U.S. officials and Venezuelan military plotters who were seeking advice and assistance. They apparently received nothing, but the article gave no indication such meetings wouldn’t occur in the future, nor did it suggest that the idea of military collaboration was off limits.

A Times editorial soon appeared, titled “Stay out of Venezuela, Mr. Trump,” which declared, “President Maduro has to go, but an American-backed coup is not the answer.” It asked for “a more intelligent approach” and, possibly, increased economic sanctions, according to one commentator, and another.

Additionally, dissident military and police officers took things into their own hands: In 2017 government ministries in Caracas were assaulted (with a helicopter), military bases were attacked in Valencia and in Miranda state, and in January 2018 the Cuban embassy was hit. On August 4, 2018, plotters, soldiers among them, used armed drones to attack Maduro and other officials attending a Caracas event honoring the National Guard. They survived. Authorities have indentified dozens of suspects and have jailed 28. The intellectual author of the attack, a former National Assembly head, was based in Colombia and training for the attack took place there.

Then President Trump took center stage. Speaking at the United Nations, he revived the idea of foreign military intervention, warning before the General Assembly of “further action” and remarking at a press conference that Venezuela’s government is “a regime that, frankly, could be toppled very quickly by the military if the military decides to do that.”

U.S. leaders had already threatened Venezuela with possible military intervention, among them Trump, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. Luis Almagro, secretary general of the Organization of American States, recently joined in.

Realities

Almagro’s announcement gained attention. Bolivian President Evo Morales observed that, “Attacking Venezuela is attacking Latin America.” In a turn to “pragmatism,” all but three member states of the anti-Bolivarian Lima Group of Western Hemisphere nations criticized Almagro’s position. (Almagro helped create the Lima Group in 2017; its purpose is to isolate Venezuela diplomatically and provide support for U.S. economic sanctions.)

The prospect materialized also of a bloody repression of Bolivarian sympathizers. And uncertainty reigns as to who might govern, and how, after the Maduro government is removed. According to one observer, the opposition has “shown itself to be incapable, ineffective, and without proposals.”

What with military intrusion of the usual sort looking to be unfeasible, humanitarian intervention with military characteristics emerged as an option. After all, shortages and inflation have caused Venezuelans extreme hardship, even suffering. Goods people need are costing 100 percent more every month. They are often unavailable because things can’t be imported. That’s because of U.S. sanctions and reduced availability of dollars, required for importing goods. Dollars are short because of inflation and diversion into the black market.

An early end to the economic crisis is unlikely. Venezuela’s GDP has sharply contracted; a 15 percent drop is expected for 2018, U.S. sanctions introduced in August 2017 caused a $6 billion decline in oil revenues and a 37 percent reduction in oil production.

Distress and desperation in Venezuela have fueled migration. That dimension of the catastrophe signals to foreign onlookers that action may be required. According to United Nations figures, 2.3 million Venezuelans are living abroad now; as of February 2018, 600,000 of them were in Colombia. Discussion of humanitarian intervention thus involves Colombia.

Surely, Colombia’s national leaders, who recently concluded a 50-year war with leftist rebels, who are allied with the Unites States, and whose right wing orientation is strong, are less than enchanted by a socialist government next door.

Colombian paramilitaries have crossed regularly into Venezuela to commit murder and mayhem and, on one occasion, to attempt to kill Chávez. Colombian authorities allow smugglers to market subsidized Venezuelan goods. The United States maintains a strong military presence in Colombia, complete with airbases. Colombia, with U.S. encouragement and together with Peru, Guyana, and Brazil recently bolstered its military strength along Venezuela’s borders.

In January 2018, Venezuelan government and opposition negotiators, meeting in the Dominican Republic, had reached agreement on issues dividing them. Then the opposition took the call from Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos. “Don’t sign,” he said. They didn’t.

Within hours of President Trump’s address to the United Nations, the UN Council of Human Rights issued a resolution calling upon Venezuela to accept humanitarian aid. Units of the Colombian air force adopted a state of readiness. They were supposedly responding to Venezuelan troops having concentrated at the Venezuela-Colombia border. That deployment prompted U.S. Vice President Pence to warn the Venezuelan government “not to test the resolve of the President of the United States or the American people in this regard.”

Revolution at risk

In summary: survival of the government of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, custodian of that nation’s Bolivarian Revolution, is at extreme risk. It confronts economic turmoil, is unable adequately to meet people’s needs, and is besieged by foreign enemies. There are two further points of explanation.

What causes human distress in Venezuela and what might be the impact of military intervention billed as humanitarian? Lawyer and scholar Alfred–Maurice de Zayas recently submitted a report on economic and humanitarian aspects of the crisis to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. It goes to the heart of the assault on Venezuela and establishes responsibilities.

Suffering and disruption in Venezuela, he asserts, stem from: 1) “the century-old dependence on the sale of petroleum” and “devastating” effects of falling oil prices; 2) “19 years of economic war”; 3) “financial blockade”; and 4) effects of economic sanctions since 2015, “which have immensely aggravated the scarcity of foods and medicines.”

Moreover, sanctions “amount to crimes against humanity.” De Zayas warns that “economic sanctions kill,” also that, “humanitarian crisis can be misused as a pretext for military intervention.”

Furthermore, media bias impinges upon the course of events. A report on migration presented recently by the Latin American Center for Strategic Analysis makes the point.  Author Gabriele Kuehnle notes that by 2016 over 2.6 million Colombians, not counting children, were living in other countries, mainly Venezuela. He cites ex-Colombian President Andrés Pastrana’s estimate that because of Colombia’s civil war almost five million Colombians migrated to Venezuela over the course of 30 years. There, they’ve received government-supplied social services. Kuehnle points out that so far in 2018, 250,000 Colombians have joined refugees from Venezuela arriving in Colombia. Many Colombians returning from Venezuela “have never lived a single day” in Colombia.

This is an untold story. Anti-Venezuela prejudice in fact pervades the U.S. and European media. A recent survey of slanted reporting emphasizes the spread between what’s reported and actual context. It’s essential reading.

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W.T. Whitney Jr. grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont and now lives in rural Maine. He practiced and taught pediatrics for 35 years and long ago joined the Cuba solidarity movement, working with Let Cuba Live of Maine, Pastors for Peace, and the Venceremos Brigade. He writes on Latin America and health issues for the People’s World.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has said the Trump administration is seeking to assassinate him, as relations strain between the two nations. 

Maduro said in a nationally televised speech on Thursday that the United States had instructed the Colombian government to organize his assassination which failed in early August.

“I am saying this to the entire world — the order to kill Maduro was given to the [Colombian] government in Bogota from the White House that wants to kill me,” he said, stressing that any future assassination attempt on him would fail.

Maduro survived an assassination attempt in early August during a military parade in capital Caracas. He was unharmed while seven Venezuelan soldiers sustained injuries in the incident.

Venezuela’s president has repeatedly accused Washington and Bogota, particularly Colombian ex-president Juan Manuel Santos, of having a role in the attack. Moreover, Venezuela has already said it would put the blame for any future attack on its territory on Colombia. The Colombian Foreign Ministry denied any involvement of Bogota in the assassination attempt on Maduro, according to a report by Sputnik news agency.

The allegations come amid heightened tensions between Caracas and Washington.

The recent UN General Assembly saw a war of words between the two countries’ heads of state in which Maduro vehemently condemned “US interventionism” in the Latin American country after US President Donald Trump controversially suggested that a military coup could topple the Venezuelan government.

Washington has also intensified unilateral sanctions on the socialist country, announcing bans on Maduro’s wife and several of his top allies to further increase pressure on the government in early September.

Caracas has been facing a series of US embargoes targeting its economy and political authorities since 2014 under the pretext of alleged human rights abuses and threats to US national security.

Moreover, massive inflation and a shortage of basic commodities such as foodstuffs and medicine have forced an estimated 2.3 million Venezuelans to immigrate to other South American countries.

Maduro, however, remains steadfast in the face of criticism towards his socialist government, calling on Venezuelan immigrants to return amid economic reforms.

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In a number of countries, the week of October 6-13 is being observed as Keep Space for Peace Week. This year the theme for the week is No Space Force, in reaction to U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposal to create a separate military service, whose mission would be the “domination of space” on behalf of corporate interests.

The U.S. military is demanding its budget be increased to have seven space squadrons. This military service would either come under the direction of the existing U.S. Space Command (under the air force) or a new separate branch of the military called the Space Force.

Research and development, production and testing for new generations of offensive space weapons is well underway in the United States’s wild desire for “control and domination of space” and “full spectrum dominance on Earth”.

This program requires massive amounts of tax dollars, and is in sharp contradiction to the United Nations Outer Space and Moon Treaties, which declare space must be preserved for all humanity.

It is in the interest of Canadians, indeed all people around the globe, that Trump’s plans to weaponize space are defeated. Canada needs to lead in defeating U.S. plans and ensure we do not take part in it.

ISIS terrorists have been able to seize toxic chemicals due to the irresponsible actions of the representatives of the Western countries, Lieutenant General Vladimir Savchenko, chief of the Russian center for the reconciliation of the conflicting sides in Syria, said on October 10.

According to Savchenko, on October 9, a group of ISIS-linked militants attacked the headquarters of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra) in the village of al-Lataminah.

He added that four militants and two members of the White Helmets organization were killed in the attack and two cylinders containing chlorine were taken out of the headquarters. The seized cylinders were transported to southern Aleppo and handed over to members of another terrorist group – Hurras al-Din.

“The Western countries, while planning provocations against Syrian government forces and employing their controlled bandit groups, do not take into account the complicated situation in the Idlib de-escalation zone. As a result of those irresponsible actions, poisonous chemicals ended up in the hands of Islamic State terrorists whose actions are hard to predict,” the Center head stated.

It is interesting to note that Savchenko described Hurras al-Din, which is known for its links to al-Qaeda, as an ISIS-associated group. This may indicate that in Idlib pro-al-Qaeda and pro-ISIS organizations are now working together to sabotage the Idlib demilitarization deal.

Meanwhile, the Turkish Defense Ministry stated that the demilitarized zone had been completely established around the province of Idlib. The defense ministry added that the withdrawal of all heavy weapons from the zone had been completed.

Earlier, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that the establishment of the demilitarized zone around Idlib is “progressing quite well” and praised Turkey’s efforts to implement the agreement within the agreed-upon timeline.

Nonetheless, the Russian Defense Ministry has not released official comments on the Turkish statement so far. Thus, it’s still possible that this effort is yet to be finalized.

The Syrian Army and is allies eliminated 19 ISIS members in clashes in Qa’a al-Banat in the al-Safa area in the al-Suwayda-Damascus desert. 6 pro-government fighters were also killed in these clashes.

On October 10, the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) claimed  that they had eliminated 651 ISIS members and captured 6 others since the start of the SDF advance on Hajin. According to the SDF, the advance was supported by 215 airstrikes and 17 artillery strikes from the US-led coalition.

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Saudi Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman, popularly known by his initials as MBS, is either one of the world’s most admired leaders or its most reviled depending on who one asks. His friends characterize him as a noble reformer while his foes denounce him as a bloody tyrant. In reality, however, MBS is actually both, and that’s why the leaders of the US, China, and even Russia are competing to court him for their own reasons.

To get the dirt out of the way first, MBS was single-handedly responsible for ordering the ongoing Saudi-led War on Yemen that’s contributed to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, and he’s so ruthless that he even imprisoned members of his own family last year in a de-facto “deep state” coup when his allied military-intelligence services detained them on supposed “anti-corruption” charges. Moreover, it’s recently come to light that he might have even ordered the gruesome assassination of a dissident in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

At the same time, however, there’s no denying the gradual progress that MBS has made in reforming the Wahhabi and oil-dependent socio-economic situation in the Kingdom through his ambitious legacy-defining Vision 2030. Although unstated for “politically correct” reasons, and whether for good or for bad, he seems intent on getting women out of their households and into the workforce as the country’s majority-youthful and comparatively “liberal” population attempts to transition to a post-oil future.

In terms of external politics, MBS pioneered his country’s fast-moving rapprochement with Russia which has seen Saudi Arabia consider purchasing S-400 anti-air defense systems after committing to a portfolio of other arms during King Salman’s historic visit to Moscow in October 2017. This led to the two Great Powers dominating the global oil industry through their OPEC+ partnership and cooperating in reaching a pragmatic solution to the War on Syria given their premier sponsorship of the opposing parties.

China can’t get enough of MBS after his country agreed to receive over $130 billion worth of Silk Road investments from the People’s Republic in two separate deals last year, predicated as they are on both Beijing’s pressing energy interests but also its desire to link the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) with Vision 2030. China considers Saudi Arabia to be a tri-continental pivot state at the crossroads of Afro-Eurasia, therefore making it an indispensable geostrategic partner, to say nothing of an economic one when it comes to the “petroyuan”.

As for America, it loves MBS’ insatiable hunger for arms and is eager to do all that it takes to get his country to go forward with the high-profile $110 billion arms deal that was signed last year. It also requires his stamp of approval on any forthcoming “deal of the century” for Palestine in order to at least “officially” deflect the expected opposition that this presumable sell-out arrangement will provoke among the international Muslim community (“Ummah”). In addition, there are obvious energy interests between the two, too.

It’s “politically incorrect” for anyone to openly say, but none of these three countries sincerely cares about the domestic situation in Saudi Arabia or the country’s alleged assassination of dissidents abroad, but the US at least sometimes speaks out on these issues from time to time in order to put more pressure on its counterpart in a bid to get a better deal on whatever it is that they’re negotiating for at the time. The same can be said of Russia if it chooses to ever comment on these topics.

MBS is so attractive to each of them precisely because he’s both a noble reformer and a bloody tyrant. The first-mentioned part is responsible for his country’s unprecedented but nevertheless imperfect geopolitical balancing act and structural complementarity with the New Silk Road, while the second is ultra-profitable for the Russian, American, and even Chinese military-industrial complexes. All of these Great Powers also like that he cooperates with them in the energy sphere too, albeit in different ways and towards different ends.

The confluence of interests that the US, Russia, and China share when it comes to MBS makes him “too important” for any of them to “discredit” and risk jeopardizing their win-win partnerships with his country. The US, and perhaps maybe even Russia, might occasionally “virtue signal” opposition to some Saudi actions, though it’s “normatively disingenuous” because such statements are only made for negotiating leverage. All three countries see the character behind the caricatures that realize that MBS’ mix of noble reformer and bloody tyrant is just the way he is.

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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.

All images in this article are from Oriental Review.

Trump’s Administration is putting its ‘all’ on red on the roulette wheel of a radically leveraged US trade and foreign policy.  It is a bet that a ruthless ‘no prisoners taken’ pursuit of naked US commercial interest can restore American economic hegemony.  But, as Vali Nasr has pointed out in The Atlantic, the radical, scorched-earth leverage now being pursued in Trump’s companion foreign policy lunge is aimed, not just at returning the US to its status quo ante, but is aimed rather at forcing the capitulation of all resistance to US hegemony (whether it is coming from friends, such as Canada, or from the so-called ‘revisionist’ powers and the nuclear states):

“It’s increasingly clear that what Trump hopes to achieve through a maximum-pressure campaign does not align with the vision of his national-security team: Judging by his behavior with Kim Jong Un and his statement on Iran, [Trump’s] goal is to bring North Korea and Iran into diplomatic talks. Members of his team speak as if they’d rather force the countries’ surrender. Pyongyang and Tehran understand this very well.” (emphasis added)

But the crux of it is that when you put ‘all’ on one colour or the other in roulette, you either win big, or lose all.

In trade policy, the earlier US claim to be correcting for ‘unfairness’ in international trade policy is now a sham: The policy is now simply the pursuit of US economic advantage à outrance. The US Department of Commerce, for example, recently  imposed restrictions on 12 Russian corporations that are “acting contrary to the national security, or foreign policy interests of the US.”  None of these twelve, however, have anything to do with Russia’s military sphere, or threaten US ‘security’.  They are simply building a new passenger airliner.

As Arkady Savitsky demonstrates, the real US target is Russian civil aviation:

“A closer look at the blacklist, shows the US has sanctioned those who are involved in the production of the Russian civilian airliner Irkut MC-21”.

The MC-21 is a next-generation passenger jet, geared towards the use of composite materials and advanced metal alloys. In short, these sanctions are all about protecting the mercantile advantage of Boeing (rather than US national security) – and undermining the plans to apply the MC-21 technology to the wide-body commercial jet CR929, being co-developed by China and Russia.

Of course, Russia has been determined by the US to be a ‘revisionist power’, but Canada is not. Yet, in the recently announced United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the Canadian government (in the words of the Canadian Globe and Mail) was bullied into signing away a vital part of Canadian sovereignty to the United States:

“Few have realized the killer clause that allows U.S. control over Canadian diplomacy in the rather explicit text buried in Article 32.10: “Non-Market Country FTA”… Contrary to Mr. Trudeau’s vague assurance that the article has very little effect, Canada is no longer free to pursue a free-trade agreement (FTA) with China under USMCA.

Ottawa now must notify other USMCA partners if it just intends to pursue a trade deal with a “non-market economy” (code name: China.) And Canada has no independence to classify China as a free-market economy… Ottawa’s trade and economic diversification drive will [now] be subject to Washington’s interference. This is an overall veto power given to the United States, literally forcing Beijing to negotiate with Washington if it intends to pursue an FTA with either Canada or Mexico.” 

By giving in on such a crucial issue, Canada has set the scene for the Trump Administration potentially to demand other trading partners such as the European Union and Japan, to insert similar clauses in their trade deals – thus polarising the globe into a US-linked, dollar-based sphere – precluded from doing business with China, except by US ‘waiver’ – and the marginalised ‘rest’.

This ‘going for broke’ approach on trade has begun to create a rift between Team Trump and Wall Street (which until recently, has been wholly sanguine that US has all the leverage, and that others have none). Markets are now worrying about the consequences for global trade – and US corporate earnings – were this Cold War to deepen: i.e. that the roulette ball does not happen to land on ‘red’.

So what might a Trump ‘win’ – now very much focused-in, on hobbling Russia and China – really mean?  Well, that question precisely underlines the uncertainty caused by schism that is embedding itself between Trump and his ideologically-driven, trade-warrior team.  We just don’t know what it means.  Trump probably would settle for President Xi just simply putting his hand up (like Trudeau) and asking a trade deal: It would, of course – even that – be one that would certainly come at the expense of China’s sovereignty, and its high expectations for its future.

Depending how far China was willing to abase itself, Trump’s Robert Lighthizer might go along with that. But there are obvious signs that his advisers are looking for more – much more. Steve Bannon, who says he was a direct participant in the genesis to Trump’s China Trade policy, is blunt:

“Trump’s strategy is to make the trade war with China ‘unprecedentedly large’ and ‘unbearably painful’ for Beijing; and he will not back down before victory”.  Bannon said (in an interview with South China Morning Post, that) the aim was not just to force China to give up on its “unfair trade practices” – the ultimate goal was to “re-industrialise America” – because manufacturing was the core of a nation’s power.

“It’s not just any tariff. It’s tariffs on a scale and depth that is previously inconceivable in US history,” Bannon said. He said Beijing had relied on “round after round of talks” to take the momentum out of the US punitive measures, but the delaying tactics would not work. “They always want to have a strategic dialogue to tap things along. They never envisioned that somebody would actually do this.”

Bannon, effectively, is saying that the goal is uproot US businesses from China, and to bring them back home: which is to say, to sever and disrupt extended US corporate supply-chains, and re-implant them – and the jobs – back into the US.  But plainly then, US corporations will lose precisely those cost advantages that took them to China in the first place.  To try to compensate for the additional costs through more corporate tax breaks (as is being mooted for October) though, risks a borrowing-requirement ‘Armageddon’ of high interest rates, and bond collapse.

So, this Trump-Lighthizer plan only works if the US stock-market keeps rising long enough for the tariffs hikes to make China bend.  But, Xi can’t bend so easily (even if so disposed).  China’s diverse plans are written into the CCP constitution, and this means that China collectively can only take the long view.  This about China’s self-esteem now. It is not any Art of the Deal stroke to insist your counterparty commits suicide – quickly, publicly, and humiliatingly. It is not Xi’s nature anyway. He has developed an ‘inner steel’ arising from coming from an ‘out of favour’ family, and he is not about to be the one to ‘cross-out’ the CCP’s definition of China’s ‘destiny’.

What China is inching toward is to make some moves to further open markets, reform regulation, and become more business-friendly.  Trump can proclaim this a ‘win’, and halt the war; but will he?  Bannon’s comments about China being adept at ‘tapping things along’ without making real change – and his comment that the re-industrialisation of America is the true goal, throw some doubt on the prospect that an end to the ‘truce’ will come soon.  His trade team is plainly after a scalp.

The two contrasting timelines – the US leverage being contingent on the continuing perception of its strong economy, and needing a quick win – versus China’s political need to play it long, will determine the outcome to this wrestling match.  US markets are experiencing a rush of dollars into safe-haven US equities that is buoying markets, but this is an ephemeral flow.  It will subside.  After that, other (adverse, possibly recessionary) ‘de-growth’ trends, may take a hold.

In the longer term – if there is to be a longer term – the ‘rest of the world’ will be working to build new conduits and frameworks to trade, precisely in order to by-pass the US – and its toxic, sanction-vulnerable, dollars.  Will Trump’s ‘red’ come up, before de-dollarising takes concrete form?

What all this latter analysis entirely omits, however, is that the prospects for a trade war ‘truce’, or contrived ‘win’, are being daily undercut from a different quarter: The Robert Lighthizer naked pursuit of America’s individual economic advantage has proved to be the perfect tent under which the foreign policy, war-hawks could gather to pursue their own foreign policy ‘nirvana’ – restoring Israel as the military hegemon in the Middle East, destroying Iran, disrupting the Eurasian project, and revenging themselves on Russia for earlier spoiling America’s unipolar moment through re-entering the Middle East.

“In April, the US president said the forces would leave Syria soon – with the decision taken “very quickly” on how long they will remain there”, writes Arkady Savitsky. “We’ll be coming out of Syria, like, very soon. Let the other people take care of it now,” Trump stated.  “Yet John Bolton said recently the US would remain in Syria “until Iran leaves … We’re not going to leave as long as Iranian troops are outside Iranian borders, and that includes Iranian proxies and militias”…

According to [US] Military Times, his statement was “signaling a fundamental shift from the current counter-terrorism operations to a mission focused more on geopolitical maneuvering and proxy warfare.”

This is the second misalignment (in Vali Nasr’s terminology), between Trump – and this time, with his ideological foreign policy hawks.

And – here is the point – this becomes the second component to the trade war calculus. We are talking here of a massive foreign policy mission creep, maneuvered by Bolton et al. “Clearly, Trump believes his strategy of maximum pressure will result in historic deals with North Korea and Iran”, writes Vali Nasr:

“But even if developments with North Korea have given Trump reason for hope, this is not going to be a winning strategy. At the United Nations last week… North Korea’s foreign minister, rejected any move toward denuclearization—the wholesale and unconditional surrender of nuclear and missile programs—unless it came with tangible U.S. concessions. Pressure, in other words, may have persuaded Kim Jong Un to engage, but pressure alone will not get Trump the deal he covets. Despite Trump’s charm offensive, his administration seems to be pursuing what John Bolton has called the “Libya outcome”, a reference to the 2003 deal, in which Muammar Qaddafi surrendered Libya’s nuclear program and shipped it out of the country.”

It is not just North Korea and Iran that are exposed to radical (foreign policy) leverage: So is everyone else. It has become contagious. US Interior Secretary, Zinke, last month threatened that the US Navy has the ability to blockade Russia from controlling energy supplies from the Middle East:

“The United States has that ability, with our Navy, to make sure the sea lanes are open, and, if necessary, to blockade … to make sure that their energy does not go to market”.

And “Russia must halt its covert development of a banned cruise missile system or the United States will seek to destroy it before it becomes operational”, Washington’s envoy to NATO said last Tuesday.

This is the point: the trade ‘wars’, potentially could be alleviated if China would give Trump the trade deal he wants, and if Iran and North Korea would give Trump the nuclear deals he wants. But these outcomes are will not happen, because of the confrontational geopolitics, standing in the way.

Xi, almost certainly, is not opposed in principle, to making some trade concessions to the US (indeed, China may make some irrespectively); but the US’ leveraging of the Taiwan issue, America’s insistence to aggressively contest China in the South China Sea, its sanctioning of China for the purchase of Russian weapons systems; its imposition of Magnitsky-style sanctioning of Russian individuals and businesses (which China believes soon will be extended to them), now constitute another, militarised, and further financialised, dimension to the Cold War.

The move toward Magnitsky-style sanctions being imposed on China now seems inevitable, in the wake of Mike Pence’s claim that “China exerted influence and interference in US domestic policies and elections”, and his noting that noting that Russia’s interference in US domestic affairs paled in comparison with China’s actions. These are the real obstacles standing in the way.  They compellingly suggest to all observers that America does not want just ‘fairer trade’ with China; it also wants to cut it down to size militarily, in technology, in regional influence, and in its attempt to build the connectivity to mount its own supply chains (also known, as the Belt and Road Initiative.)

And if Trump’s ‘going for broke’ on red doesn’t come up, at the table? As one financial commentator wryly noted:

“Trump is doing everything he can to bring on the end of the days when the US can borrow whatever it wants – in whatever amounts it wants. To be sure, there is no recipe book … it’s not at all clear what you would do. But you’d start by doing everything that Trump is doing — pick fights with all your allies, blow the government deficit wide open at the peak of an economic recovery, abandon any notion of fiscal responsibility, threaten sanctions on anyone and everyone, who seeks to honor the deal Obama struck with Iran (thereby almost begging everyone to figure out some way to bypass the US banking system in order to do business), throw spanners into the works of global trade without any clear indication of what it is precisely you want (for a country that structurally… MUST run trade and current account deficits)”.

This is indeed what ‘one’ might do. In other words, one would end up on ‘black’.

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Alastair Crooke is former British diplomat, founder and director of the Beirut-based Conflicts Forum.

Featured image is from SCF.

The term “buffer zone” in land and at sea is used for land and sea areas, which were unilaterally and illegally declared by Israeli forces as areas with no access along the eastern and northern borders and in the sea of the Gaza Strip following the Israeli Disengagement Plan in 2005. In violation of the provisions of the international humanitarian law, the Gaza Strip’s population are denied access to their property in the “buffer zone” in land while the fishermen are prevented from sailing and fishing in the “buffer zone” at sea.

The area  of the buffer zone vary from time to time according to the Israeli forces declarations, without taking in consideration the international law that bans any changes to the occupied territories. According to Israeli forces instructions, the “buffer zone” extends to an area ranging between 100 to 1,500 meters in some eastern land borders, while ranges between 3 to 9 nautical miles in the Gaza Strip sea.

Israeli forces expanded the fishing area in the Gaza Strip from 3 to 6 nautical miles following the ceasefire agreement post November 2012 Israeli offensive. However, there is conflict over the Access Restricted Area (ARA) in land, which increases the risks endured by the Palestinian civilians. In a statement on his official website, the Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) declared that fishermen could now access the sea up to 6 nautical miles offshore, and that farmers could now access lands in the border area up to 100 meters from the border fence. However, both references have since been removed from the statement, which obviously indicates the Israeli forces retreat of the abovementioned ceasefire. On 21 March 2013, the Israeli forces’ spokesperson announced re-reducing the fishing area allowed for Palestinian fishermen from 6 nautical miles to 3 nautical miles. The same announcement also included the re-expansion of the “buffer zone” in land up to 300 meters. However, on 21 May 2013, the Israeli authorities decided to allow fishermen to sail up to 6 nautical miles.

Following the latest Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip in 2014, a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Palestinian armed groups was brokered by the Egyptian government, which allowed fishermen to sail up to 6 nautical miles. However, the Israeli naval forces have not allowed fishermen to sail up to this limit. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) observed that all the Israeli attacks have taken place within less than 6 nautical miles. On 07 March 2015, the Israeli naval forces declared via loud speakers that the allowed fishing area reduced to 4 nautical miles and warned Palestinian fishermen from approaching this area along the Gaza Sea. On 01 April 2016, the Israeli authorities expanded the fishing area from 6 to 9 nautical miles between the area from Gaza valley to the southern Gaza Strip, while denied access to more than 6 miles in the other areas. On 03 May 2017, the Israeli authorities allowed fishermen to fish up to 9 nautical miles, instead of 6 nautical miles in the Sea in Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip.

According to field updates followed up by PCHR, the Israeli occupation forces have escalated their attacks against the Palestinian civilians, including farmers and fishermen, and prevented them from safe and free access to their lands and fishing areas. This constitutes a violation of their rights according to the international human rights standards, including their right to security, personal safety and protection of their property, their right to work, the right to adequate standard of living, and the right to the highest attainable standard of health. Enforcing the “buffer zone” through the use of live fire which has often led to direct targeting of civilians, is a war crime, where killings under these circumstances constitute a wilful killing in grave violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

Attacks

September 2018

Consequences of attacks from September 2018

1. Deaths and injuries

2. Property related violations

3. Detention

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“The making of a journalist: no ideas and the ability to express them.” – Karl Kraus, Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress.  But I repeat myself.” – Mark Twain

“All cats die. Socrates is dead. Socrates is a cat.” – Eugene Ionesco, Rhinoceros

If believability is your gauge for discerning truth, you are living in a fantasy world.  But that is the reality of life in the United States today. This is the land of make-believe in which actors and audiences are engaged in a vast folie à deux full of sound and fury signifying a nothingness that passes for intelligence.  Assertions made convincingly enough are the new facts for a population hypnotized by a stage-managed reality show.

The recently closed Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Show that mercifully had a short run at the National Comedic Congressional Theater is the latest case in point.  The believability of the actors was said to be the key issue.  In other words, who seemed to be telling the truth.  Demeanor was determinative.  Facial expressions evidence.  The mass media, those paragons of truth-telling, entertained their audiences for a few weeks by marching out their puerile pundits to tell audiences who of the two primary actors was more believable, while the politicians, not willing to allow their media accomplices to outdo them in truthfulness, donned their masks and performed their usual public service of moral outrage and did the same in their unbiased ways.

There was no child to yell and tell the world that all the king’s sycophants, like the king, were naked – naked  liars whose jobs depended on disinformation and deceptions meant to amuse an entertainment-besotted and bored public hungry for a bit of truth in a society drowning in agitprop and propaganda.  A public watching the wrong show.

The words the real Frank Serpico, the honest and brave cop, not the actor, Al Pacino, who played him in the movie Serpico, come to my mind.  He told me that when he was lying in a pool of his own blood on the night of February 3, 1971, having been shot in the face in a set-up carried out by fellow cops, he heard a voice that said, “It’s all a lie.”

“It’s all a lie.”  

Those words sum up the spectacle that is American society today.  And while lies are nothing new – didn’t Aletheia, the Greek goddess of truth, flee into the wilderness just last week and say to a wandering searcher, “Among the people of old, lies were found among only a few, but now they have spread throughout all of human society”? – we are living in a time of unprecedented technological media mind manipulation difficult to penetrate.  Harold Pinter called it “a tapestry of lies” in which facts don’t matter.  What happened never happened; what never happened happened.  It’s all about believability in the national media’s hypnotic show, whose purpose Russell Baker described 25 years ago as being to “provide a manageably small cast for a national sitcom, or soap opera, or docudrama, making it easy for media people to persuade themselves they are covering the news while mostly just entertaining us.”

I know something about believability.  When I was a young teenager I appeared on a famous game show called “To Tell the Truth.”  Of course I lied, since lying was the name of the game then, as now.  I was not who I said I was.  When I walked out in front of millions of television viewers and the celebrities who would question my veracity, I knew (although I was an impostor and not the real Robert McGee – son of a U.S. Senator, by the way) how to put on a face to fool the faces that would scrutinize my smallest expressions for any sign of feigning.  Although these celebrities knew the game well, I beat them at the believability game, I am sorry to say.  My demeanor or mien (facial expression) was in sync with my words, an ability to act that I didn’t know I had.  I was an all-American boy – a student at an elite Jesuit boys’ prep school, the captain of the basketball team, my father (Edward) a lawyer – learning the national pastime of seemingly being “perfectly honest” as I lied.  And it worked, and the $250 that I won – I almost said earned – set me on a path that led to a fork in the road that I took.  When I picked this fork up, it hissed and tried to bite me with its poisonous forked tongue. So I quickly threw it down.  It was then I realized that my thirty pieces of silver ($250) were a betrayal that would haunt me forever if I didn’t try to become a genuine actor.

Soon I would come to realize that my Jesuit schooling was preparing me to be “a man for all seasons.” It had nothing to do with beer and girls. It was all about becoming a member of the ruling class.  In other words, a man with a forked tongue who could speak out of both sides of his mouth to suit the occasion.  Learning this skill would lead me to the social heights where I could smoothly move among Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, elites and regular people, defense attorneys and prosecutors, actors and audiences, alleged victims and alleged victimizers, etc.  Nothing would be foreign to me, except myself, for I could become a perfect hypocrite, a double-man, my own doppelgänger without a shadow.

I could become another judge-penitent like Albert Camus’ Jean-Baptiste Clamence in his novel, The Fall, and take up a double profession, become double-faced and rich in the process.  Perhaps I could join the CIA and “sincerely” follow its motto:

“And you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).  

I could become a professor with nothing to profess but my innocence.  I could become a psychologist and specialize in lie detector tests.  I could learn how to lie while sincerely telling the truth while hooked up to one.  I could be confused and act confused and not know the difference

I could denounce torture while justifying it.  I could pretend impartiality while being partial.  I could claim independence while playing the puppet. I could remember to forget and forget to remember and remember that I forgot the details of what I remembered.  

And no matter how I acted or what I did I could always remain a “nice guy.” 

I could even say with Clamence that I am 100 % innocent, my case is exceptional, as I played the parts of victim and victimizer; could say: 

As I told you, it’s a matter of dodging judgment.  Since it is hard to dodge it, tricky to get one’s nature simultaneously admired and excused, they [we] all strive to be rich.  Why?  Did you ever ask yourself?  For power, of course.  But especially because wealth shields from immediate judgment, takes you out of the subway crowd to enclose you in a chromium-platted automobile, isolates you in huge protected lawns, Pullmans, first-class cabins.  Wealth, cher ami, is not quite acquittal, but reprieve, and that’s always worth taking.

I could become such a celebrated actor that I could make you believe my believability when I put on a tearful face or a devastated face or a confused face or an angry face. I could confess my vulnerability and make you my ally, and I could plead with you in a halting way to sympathize with how I was victimized so long ago or yesterday.  But even if you didn’t believe me, I could feel justified in knowing that I was playing my part in ShowTime in America, keeping you amused, and doing my part to advance the interests of those who accepted me for the role.  And I could always deny that I had been selected, and could always maintain I entered center stage of my own volition because I wished to fulfill my civic duty to see justice done.

But I promise, like Clamence, I would never reveal who stole the painting of “The Just Judges” that I keep hidden in my cupboard.  Some things must remain hidden.  After all, who wants to know the truth?

But I digress.  I’ll be quiet, and stop with the what-could-have-beens.  The show must go on.  We both know that.  It is what is.  I look forward to reading what will no doubt be a best-selling and most truthful exposé of the Kavanaugh/Blasey Ford Show.  I imagine contracts have been signed, and the mini-series shouldn’t be far behind.

In the meantime, I would like to leave you laughing with a quote that has been disturbing me since I first read it after writing it:

Until we see through the charade of social life and realize the masked performers are not just the politicians and celebrities, not only the professional actors and the corporate media performers, but us, we won’t grasp the problem.  Lying is the leading cause of living death in the United States.  We live in a society built of lies; lying and dishonesty are the norm.  They are built into the fabric of all our institutions, into our psyches.  In America, there’s no business but show business, and we are sham actors, amusing ourselves to death while we spread death and destruction in our war theaters all around the world.  Theaters in which the tragic plays we direct hold no interest for us.  We prefer our Idiots’ Delight.

“It’s All a Lie.”  Maybe that should be the title of the next show.

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Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely.  He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). 

Much of what Israel and the Palestinians are experiencing today has befallen them under Netanyahu’s leadership. He believes that the Palestinians will always pose an existential threat to Israel, which led him to pursue domestic policies that dangerously undermined the country’s founding principles of freedom and equality. Concurrently, he has taken extreme measures to suppress the Palestinians and maintain the occupation to keep them at bay. This has resulted in the disintegration of the social fabric of both societies, and prevented the rise of new political leadership to change course.

Notwithstanding Israel’s remarkable military, economic, and technological achievements and the dramatic expansion of its trade and diplomatic relations since its creation in 1948, Israel failed to live up to its promise. Under Netanyahu’s watch, Israel’s democracy is tearing apart at the seams, the unity of purpose between Israeli and diaspora Jewry is crumbling, the social and political divide among Israelis is dangerously widening, and the prospect of living in peace and security is becoming increasingly untenable.

During the same period, the Palestinians’ situation has become ominously worse. They remain dependent on handouts, millions of refugees still languish in camps, and they are socially and politically disintegrating, insecure, and despairing. The hopelessness of young Palestinians and the self-resignation of old, with diminishing prospects of escaping the harsh reality of the occupation, further intensified their hatred and resentment toward Israel. And the Palestinians’ distant dream of establishing their own state is rapidly fading away.

Netanyahu seems to forget that the historic survival of the Jews and the secret behind it did not rest on military prowess or financial dexterity or the most advanced technology, but on an unwavering moral commitment to human and civil rights and the brotherhood of man. They stood steadfastly behind the poor and the despairing, and championed the causes of freedom, liberalism, and equality. These attributes were engrained in the minds and souls of the Jews, due, in the main, to their horrifying experiences throughout the millennia of dispersement, persecution, expulsion, discrimination, and death.

One might think that these terrifying historical experiences would influence Netanyahu and his followers to fully adhere to human rights, and exhaust every conceivable way not to betray these principles in dealing with the Palestinians. But sadly, Netanyahu has capitalized on a certain segment of Palestinians that still resist Israel’s existence to legitimize Israel’s actions against the Palestinians.

Netanyahu pushed for the passing of the Nation State Law, which degrades non-Jews to second-class citizens. The law affirms that

“The state of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people, in which it fulfills its natural, cultural, religious and historic right to self-determination.”

The law discriminates against Israeli Arab citizens, intensifies their resentment toward and hatred of the state, and widens the gap between the two sides, which dangerously increases Israel’s vulnerability from within.

Netanyahu supported Trump’s cuts of US funding to organizations that promote dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, and barred scores of other Israeli organizations dedicated to peace from raising money in foreign countries. Netanyahu is denying the necessary process of reconciliation between the two sides, which is central to peaceful coexistence and the only way to resolve the conflict. To be sure, Netanyahu is tearing down instead of building bridges to promote peace.

Additionally, Netanyahu is destroying Israel’s democracy brick by brick, starting with the judiciary, which is the most revered and independent institution in Israel. He is supporting an amendment that transfers jurisdiction of certain cases regarding the West Bank away from the Supreme Court, which will complicate its decrees to remove illegal outposts and settlements, and another law that would allow Members of the Knesset to reinstate laws struck down by the Supreme Court.

In the words of the Court’s President Esther Hayut, the proposed legislation “would bypass the human rights of every individual in Israeli society”, adding that “[i]t [the amendment] voids the Basic Law. The cynical use made of the problem of infiltrators as an excuse to legislate such a bill cannot hide its destructive significance.”

Under Netanyahu, the growing power of the Orthodox religious institution and the steady shift of the country to the extreme right are effectively blurring the lines of separation of power between ‘church and state.’ He supported the Religious Services Ministry’s threats to bar the “Women of the Wall” from praying at the Western Wall, warning that if they do not obey, they will not be allowed to worship at all. Sadly and tellingly, the police did nothing to stop verbal and physical attacks against women praying at the Kotel in July.

He further alienated diaspora Jewry, especially in the US, by caving in to the rabbinical institutions. He reneged on his decision to allow men and women to pray together at the Western Wall, what would have been a historic agreement with liberal Jewish denominations. This was not only a slap in their face, but defiance of one of the most critical aspects of Jewish survival, which is maintaining their powerful and uncompromising affinity despite being dispersed in over 100 countries.

Finally, Netanyahu is gradually chipping away at one of the central pillars of democracy—freedom of the press. He has become increasingly critical of the free press and has meddled with no less than 13 media outlets. As being investigated in corruption Cases 2000 and 4000, he constantly attempts to manipulate the media to receive favorable coverage, increases political interference, and actively uses the courts to propagate libel and defamation lawsuits, while further extending the military censure into social media.

Every measure Netanyahu has taken is acutely undermining Israel’s very existence. But the biggest threat as we know it is its leaders, especially Netanyahu’s unwillingness to realistically face the conflict with the Palestinians while acting to destroy the Palestinians’ aspiration for statehood. Instead of remaining relentless in the search for a solution dictated by the unimpeachable reality of coexistence, he chose to suppress the Palestinian national movement by whatever means necessary, including force.

Every punitive measure that has been taken against the Palestinians, be that administrative detentions, demolishing Palestinian villages such as Khan al Ahmer in favor of new Israeli settlements, expropriating private land to build Israeli outposts, night raids, limiting mobility, denying building permits, uprooting olive trees, and arbitrary incarcerations, have led to the gradual destruction of the Palestinians’ social fabric and cohesiveness, prolonging the occupation and displacement for decades. The humiliation of the Palestinians for three generations has rendered their present leadership helpless, with little or nothing to offer to change their plight.

To be sure, Netanyahu betrayed the very reason behind Israel’s creation—to live in peace, provide a safe refuge for the Jews, and foster strong and unwavering ties with diaspora Jewry, while feeding into one another to maintain their strength, harmony, and purpose.

Netanyahu could have been the prime minister to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians, but did not because he was and still is determined not to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state as long as he is in power.

He will leave behind a garrison pariah state and shattered Palestinian community, while setting back the prospect of peace for another generation.

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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

Consider Making a Donation to Global Research

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

When the Lie becomes the Truth, there is no turning backwards. 

Support Global Research.

Today, more than ever before, war depends on deception. To oppose war without seeing through the deceptions currently being practiced by governments of the West is to act in vain. I have visited many websites that attempt to offer alternatives to the mainstream media, but I have been disappointed repeatedly by their inability or refusal to challenge these myths and deceptions.

Global Research bravely takes on this task, and that is why it is a vital resource for us all. This is why I have made its website my homepage and why I have taken out a membership. I hope you will do the same. – Prof. Graeme MacQueen (for list of articles, click here), Co-editor, Journal of 9/11 Studies

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History of the Third Reich: Hitler’s Armaments Minister Albert Speer’s Complicity in the Nazi Genocide

By Shane Quinn, October 12, 2018

In reality, Speer had knowledge at least months before the Hanke meeting that killings on a vast scale were being committed in Upper Silesia, and in other Nazi-occupied regions. Historians such as veteran author Martin Kitchen have asserted that Speer, and his team, were involved in concentration camp construction alongside the SS, and therefore had a role in implementing the “Final Solution”.

The Electric Revolution: Move Aside Lithium, Vanadium Is the New Super-Metal for Bigger Batteries

By James Burgess, October 12, 2018

The lithium ride was a great one. Cobalt, too. All they needed was their Elon Musk moment, which came in the form of the Nevada battery gigafactory. The next Elon Musk moment won’t be about lithium at all—or even cobalt. It will be for an element that takes everything electric to its revolutionary finish line: Vanadium.

Missing Saudi Journalist Jamal Khashoggi Rejiggers the Middle East

By James M. Dorsey, October 12, 2018

A US investigation into Mr. Khashoggi’s fate mandated by members of the US Congress and an expected meeting between President Donald J. Trump, and the journalist’s Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, could result in a US and European embargo on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and impact the kingdom’s brutal proxy war with Iran in Yemen.

Monsanto Seeks to Undo $289M Roundup Verdict as 8,700 Similar Lawsuits Await

By Lorraine Chow, October 12, 2018

Monsanto will ask a San Francisco judge on Wednesday to throw out a jury’s $289 million award to a former school groundskeeper who claimed the company’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, Roundup and Ranger Pro, caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The Two Brett Kavanaugh Stories

By Philip Giraldi, October 11, 2018

The failure of Congress to carry out its duty to review Kavanaugh’s ability or lack thereof to interpret the constitution impartially was the more important story line in the confirmation process but it was ignored by the media.

Russian ‘Collusion’ Is a Red Herring, Emergence of the Far Right, New Wave of Fascism

By Max Parry, October 11, 2018

As the 2018 U.S. midterm elections approach, there is still no evidence of ‘collusion’ between the campaign of President Donald J. Trump and the Russian government after nearly two years of inquiry. Thus far in the Department of Justice’s investigation led by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, only a trail of corruption involving Trump associates has been discovered. None of their wrongdoings connect to the Russian nationals also indicted in the probe, including the illicit lobbying by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in Ukraine which actually went against Russia’s interests on behalf of the EU.

Over the past two weeks, with next to no media coverage, the United States has moved substantially closer toward open military confrontation with both Russia and China, the second- and third-ranked nuclear powers in the world.

On October 3, the United States threatened, for the first time since the Cold War, to directly attack the Russian homeland. UN Ambassador to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchison accused the country of violating the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty by developing a nuclear cruise missile and said that Washington was preparing to “take out” the weapon with a US strike.

This statement came just three days after a Chinese warship set a collision course with a US destroyer carrying out a so-called “freedom of navigation” operation in the South China Sea, forcing the American ship to maneuver to avoid a collision and the potentially deadliest military clash in the Pacific in decades.

Behind such hair-raising incidents, the United States is undertaking serious, long-term preparations to restructure the American economy to fight a major war with a “peer” adversary, entailing radical changes to American economic, social and political life.

This is the essential content of a 146-page document released by the Pentagon last Friday, titled “Assessing and Strengthening the Manufacturing and Defense Industrial Base and Supply Chain Resiliency of the United States.” It makes it clear that Washington is preparing not just for isolated regional clashes, but rather for a massive, long-term war effort against Russia and China under conditions of potential national autarchy.

Martin employees work on the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter production line in Fort Worth, Texas (Source: Defense Contract Management Agency)

The document made clear that a major restructuring of the American economy will be necessary to reach the United States military’s stated goal of being prepared to “fight tonight” against a “peer adversary.” The United States must “retool” for “great-power competition,” the document declared.

“America’s manufacturing and defense industrial base,” observes the report, creates the “platform and systems” upon which “our Warfighter depends.” This complex encompasses not just the government, but the private sector, as well as “R&D organizations” and “academic institutions.” In other words, the entire economy and society.

It warns that “The erosion of American manufacturing over the last two decades… threatens to undermine the ability of U.S. manufacturers to meet national security requirements. Today, we rely on single domestic sources for some products and foreign supply chains for others, and we face the possibility of not being able to produce specialized components for the military at home.”

Correcting this strategic deficiency, the report concludes, means that “support for a vibrant domestic manufacturing sector, a solid defense industrial base, and resilient supply chains is a national priority.”

The report squarely targets China, declaring,

“China’s economic strategies, combined with the adverse impacts of other nations’ industrial policies, pose significant threats to the U.S. industrial base and thereby pose a growing risk to U.S. national security.”

The promotion of US manufacturing dominance, in other words, is vital for promoting military dominance.

The protection of heavy industry goes together with the administration’s efforts to defend America’s high-tech sector, the source of a vast portion of US profitability.

As the report notes,

“One of the Chinese Communist Party’s primary industrial initiatives, Made in China 2025, targets artificial intelligence, quantum computing, robotics, autonomous and new energy vehicles, high performance medical devices, high-tech ship components, and other emerging industries critical to national defense.”

It warns that “Chinese R&D spending is rapidly converging to that of the U.S. and will likely achieve parity sometime in the near future,” and worriedly points to the fact that the Chinese manufacturer DJI dominates the commercial aerial drone market.

The Pentagon’s plans for protecting and expanding the US high-tech sector include its backing for the administration’s efforts to limit the admission of Chinese students to US universities through visa restrictions. The report complains that, with as many as 25 percent of “STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics] graduates in the U.S. being Chinese nationals… American universities are major enablers of China’s economic and military rise.”

The vision in the document, in other words, is the concrete expression of the conception outlined in the latest US national security strategy, calling for “the seamless integration of multiple elements of national power—diplomacy, information, economics, finance, intelligence, law enforcement and military.”

A leading element of this equation is the American corporate technology sector, which has scrambled for fat Pentagon contracts to develop the latest generation of weapons systems. In exchange for these payouts, and aggressive protection from their international rivals, they have worked closely to implement what one leaked internal Google document called a “shift towards censorship” in cooperation with the demands of the US military and intelligence agencies.

The logic of this growing fusion between the repressive apparatus of the state and increasingly powerful monopolies is the necessary correlation between “total war” and a “totalitarian” society, in which key constitutional provisions are rendered effectively meaningless.

The central target of such measures will be the forcible suppression of the class struggle in the name of promoting “national security.” The escalation of global US militarism has coincided with a major upsurge in the class struggle, including the rejection of a concessions contract by workers at UPS, the logistics giant whose powerful workforce is capable of crippling not just America’s industrial base, but substantial sections of the wartime economy.

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One summer day in 1944, the Nazi armaments chief Albert Speer had a visit from his old friend Karl Hanke, the Gauleiter of Lower Silesia. Twelve years before, Hanke had “discovered” Speer when recommending the precocious architect to Joseph Goebbels, in order to refurbish the Nazis’ ill-decorated Berlin headquarters.

Hanke now cut a desolate figure before Speer. The Gauleiter had just returned from an “invitation” to see a concentration camp in Upper Silesia, located in Nazi-occupied Poland. The death camp Hanke saw was Auschwitz, where prisoners were being systematically killed from September 1941, as Hitler’s war machine marched towards a seemingly certain victory in the USSR.

When Hanke visited Auschwitz in mid-1944, hundreds of thousands had already been murdered there by the SS. Sitting opposite him, Speer wrote that Hanke “seemed confused” and “spoke falteringly”, advising the war minister “never to accept an invitation to inspect a concentration camp in Upper Silesia… He [Hanke] had seen something there which he was not permitted to describe and moreover could not describe”.

What the Nazi official may have observed were rows of corpses, or perhaps he had witnessed the gassing of innocent victims. When the Soviet army finally liberated Auschwitz on 27 January 1945, over one million people had been killed there. About 90% of those murdered were Jewish peoples, while also among the dead were Poles, Soviet POWs, along with ethnic groups like Roma and Sinti.

Following Hanke’s warning, Speer wrote a quarter of a century later that,

“I did not query Himmler, I did not query Hitler… I did not investigate – for I did not want to know what was happening there. Hanke must have been speaking about Auschwitz”.

All is not as it appears, however. It is unimaginable that, during Speer’s many years at the core of the Third Reich, he was somehow unaware of the Nazis’ crimes until summer 1944.

In reality, Speer had knowledge at least months before the Hanke meeting that killings on a vast scale were being committed in Upper Silesia, and in other Nazi-occupied regions. Historians such as veteran author Martin Kitchen have asserted that Speer, and his team, were involved in concentration camp construction alongside the SS, and therefore had a role in implementing the “Final Solution”.

During the postwar Nuremberg trials, Speer denied being present at the Posen Conference of October 1943, where SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler said of Jewish populations that,

“The grave decision had to be taken to cause this people to vanish from the earth”.

Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer in 1943. (Source: Wikipedia)

It is in fact certain Speer was in attendance at the Posen Conference. Himmler addresses him personally during the speech and, crucially, it was discovered that Speer wrote in December 1971,

“There is no doubt; I was present as Himmler announced on October 6, 1943 that all Jews would be killed”.

Previously, on 20 January 1942, a separate notorious meeting was organized in Wannsee, south-west Berlin. It was chaired by the SS commander Reinhard Heydrich who said that

“Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west”.

Speer was not in attendance at the Wannsee Conference – yet it is likely he was informed of this order for genocide, as Speer was well acquainted with some of those present at Wannsee like Heydrich himself, the Gestapo’s Gerhard Klopfer, Reich Minister Georg Leibbrandt and Gauleiter Alfred Meyer.

Hitler had in 1937 assigned Speer as General Building Inspector of the Reich. In the late 1930s and early 40s, the architect was at least partially culpable in the eviction of Jewish tenants in Berlin, to be replaced by “Aryan” dwellers. Speer even inquired as to how the expulsions were progressing, with 75,000 Jewish tenants eventually evicted.

In early February 1942, Speer was appointed as armaments minister by Hitler at the Wolf’s Lair headquarters, following the mysterious death of Fritz Todt in a plane crash. From 1942 onward, Speer was directly complicit in sustaining Hitler’s increasingly criminal dictatorship. He poured all his energy into the challenges ahead, quickly becoming one of Nazi Germany’s most powerful men.

Speer had no experience in the field of armaments, he had not even fired a gun before. Regardless, Speer was remarkably adept in his new role, using his organizational skills and intelligence to produce weapons on a massive scale – despite the indiscriminate Allied bombing from above. The results Speer achieved saw his stock rise even further with Hitler, who was soon addressing him as “My dear Speer”.

In the time ahead, Speer cast away further scruples by extensively exploiting slave labor, with the final aim of turning the war around and preserving the Third Reich. Speer’s policies prolonged the global conflict by many months, thereby allowing the extermination camps to remain in existence for longer, while Hitler’s military could continue fighting across various fronts.

As Soviet and Allied forces closed in from east and west, the discovery of the death camps sent waves of horror across the world. Yet on 30 January 1939, Hitler had explicitly remarked during a Reichstag speech of “the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe” should Germany enter “once more into a world war”.

Britain and France may have declared war on Germany two days after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, but it was almost a token gesture. British and French elites cared little for the fate of Poland, as the country was dissected by Nazi Germany and the USSR.

Almost three decades after the war, Britain’s Conservative MP Robert Boothby candidly commented that,

“We’d gone to war for the defense of Poland. In the event, we did nothing to help Poland at all. We never lifted a finger… we confined our war efforts [in 1939] to dropping leaflets on the German people”.

This dismal inaction had major consequences for millions of people. At the start of hostilities in September 1939, Poland’s Jewish population was 3.3 million, the second largest such community in the world (behind the Soviet Union’s Jewish populace). Hitler’s address the previous winter outlined precisely what fate lay in store for them.

By 1945, over 1.8 million Polish Jews would be killed, about half of whom were murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp in eastern Poland. Altogether, about six million Poles lost their lives at the hands of the Nazis.

During Speer’s collaboration with Hitler, which included their enacting of vast architectural aims and ambitions, he claims that

“scarcely any anti-Semitic remarks of Hitler’s have remained in my memory… Hitler’s hatred for the Jews seemed to me so much a matter of course that I gave it no serious thought. I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me”.

Political events may not have concerned Speer in the Reich’s early years when he was a naive, reserved young architect “completely under the sway of Hitler”. As time moved by, however, Speer’s character was inevitably corrupted by the all-consuming nature of Hitler’s dictatorship, along with the personalities that surrounded him.

From late 1933 onward, Speer was in close contact with Hitler on an almost daily basis. The relationship included morning walks and conversations, dinner outings and tea parties. This incredibly intimate association with the Nazi leader – who was 16 years older than Speer – must have profoundly impacted the latter’s still developing disposition.

Hitler was known for his remote nature with people, yet he spoke of “the warmest human feelings” for Speer who represented a “kindred spirit” for him. Speer later admitted that, “All I wanted was for this great man [Hitler] to dominate the globe”.

Speer was, in the meantime, increasingly in the presence of figures like Hermann Goering, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler. Sustained relations with nefarious men such as these was bound to have further detrimental effects upon him.

Speer had been a latecomer to the Nazi Party having applied for membership on 1 March 1931, when he was aged almost 26. Speer had only seen Hitler for the first time four months previously, when the aspiring dictator was delivering a speech in Berlin at a dilapidated beer hall. About five thousand people were in attendance that evening, mostly students, and Speer wrote that Hitler “spoke urgently and with hypnotic persuasiveness” which “swept away any skepticism, any reservations”.

Despite hailing from an upper class background in Mannheim, south-west Germany, Speer had lived through challenging times. In his late teens, he struggled through the hyperinflation years of the Weimar Republic, which reached crippling levels in the early 1920s. By 1929 and the early 1930s Speer’s architectural dreams lay in apparent ruins, with the Great Depression resulting in unprecedented hardship in Germany.

Overlooking his travails, Speer’s driving force remained finding a master who would bestow upon him the architectural tasks he desired. He confessed that, “For the commission to do a great building, I would have sold my soul like Faust”.

Capitalizing on his contact with Hanke, Speer finally met Hitler in person during July 1933, when he was invited to the Nazi leader’s modest apartment in Munich.

Having impressed Hitler with his architectural style, speed and efficiency, Speer was admitted to his inner circle by the autumn of 1933, and soon sat beside the dictator at dinner. Some years later Hitler informed Speer that,

“You attracted my notice during our rounds. I was looking for an architect to whom I could entrust my building plans. I wanted someone young, for as you know these plans extend far into the future”.

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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

The lithium ride was a great one. Cobalt, too. All they needed was their Elon Musk moment, which came in the form of the Nevada battery gigafactory. The next Elon Musk moment won’t be about lithium at all—or even cobalt. It will be for an element that takes everything electric to its revolutionary finish line: Vanadium.

The one moment that will change everything … and that moment may be near.

Vanadium is lithium on steroids—wildly bigger and the only way forward from here. We may have already reached the peak of our electric revolution through batteries with lithium.

We need bigger batteries, preferably the size of a football field—or 20.

That’s vanadium—Element 23. The answer to our issue of scale.

“It’s no longer a technological maybe,” says Matt Rhoades, president and CEO of United Battery Metals, a Colorado vanadium explorer sitting on one of the few known sources of the next big battery metal in the entire United States.

Rhoades should know … his company is behind the discovery that hopes to put America definitively on the vanadium map. UBM’s Wray Mesa Project in Colorado has a mineral resource base estimate indicating resource of around 2.7 million pounds of vanadium—not to mention all the uranium they already know is there for additional upside.

“Vanadium is here, and lithium is scared because the $13-billion energy storage market has already found its new poster boy,” Rhoades told Oilprice.com.

China, followed by Russia and South Africa, have the largest reserves of Vanadium, which has become a strategic raw material in electric energy technology

Screenshot from Investingnews.com report

The Moment of Truth

Indeed, Rhoades is an expert at timing.

The worldwide battle for vanadium is ramping up …

The Chinese have already had their Elon Musk moment …

The U.S. has none …

And vanadium was the best-performing battery metal last year, beating out even lithium and cobalt.

The truth is that it’s been a long road for vanadium to not only break into the energy storage market, but to actually become the future of the energy storage market.

The next ‘moment’ will be when someone in the U.S.—always one step behind the Chinese—announces plans for an American vanadium battery gigafactory. Anyone who hasn’t gotten in before that moment will be nursing their lithium hangover.

China is already building the world’s largest vanadium flow battery (VFB) gigafactory in Dalian, with the massively powerful (200MW/800MWh) batteries to be manufactured by Rongke Power.

Source: Electrek

It covers an area bigger than 20 soccer fields.

And thanks to the Chinese, vanadium was the best-performing battery metal last year.

Source: Bloomberg

And this year is the kicker. In just the past month, ferro vanadium prices have soared 33%. A month ago, ferro vanadium prices were at $79 per kilogram. Now we’re looking at $105 per kilogram.

(Click to enlarge)

Vanadium pentoxide flake is following the same speedy upward mobility:

(Click to enlarge)

And it’s vanadium pentoxide that is the main ingredient in vanadium redox flow batteries used for grid energy storage.

For a junior minor like UBM with a market cap of just over $10 million—that potential 2.7 million pounds of vanadium begins to sound like strategy at its best and brightest.

Why Vanadium Changes Everything

But let’s back up a bit …

If you were just getting the hang of lithium and cobalt in the battery mix, vanadium might sound complicated—but it’s not.

It’s as simple as size. This is where we get to scale up because when it comes to energy storage, bigger is better. In fact, bigger is the only way forward in this game.

This is possible because vanadium flow batteries store their energy in tanks. The fluid (electrolyte) that transfers charges inside a battery flows from one tank through the system and back again, making a closed circuit. They can charge and discharge simultaneously.

We’re talking tanks that can be as big as you want them: an aquarium, a shipping container or even an Olympic swimming pool—as big as your imagination can take you.

For renewable energy it is a game-changer. VRBs will forever change the capacity of wind and solar energy, making it limitless and cheap.

Vanadium is superior to lithium in every way. Not only does it have eternal life (unlike lithium), it’s not explosive, flammable or toxic.

Not only can it be scaled up cheaply, but it’s actually cheaper to scale it up, making it the antithesis of lithium.

Put in another way: It’s tough to scale up a lithium-ion system. If you double the size, you double the cost. Not so with vanadium: All you have to do is make the tank bigger, and the bigger the scale the lower the cost.

And that scaling up is already happening. Vanadium batteries are already providing complete energy storage system for $500 per kilowatt hour. In less than a year, that is expected to be down to $300. By 2020, we could be looking at $150/kilowatt hour.

A lithium-ion battery gigafactory couldn’t come close to this fast-paced cost reduction.

Vanadium: Finally, America Gets A Piece of the Pie

Even though this is the biggest energy story right now, vanadium isn’t just a bet on batteries—that’s why Mining.com calls it “the metal we can’t do without and don’t produce”.

Just as UBM’s new vanadium discovery is also an original uranium resource, vanadium can also be used in nuclear energy. By 2025, analysts estimate that 85 percent of all vehicles will incorporate vanadium alloy to reduce their weight and increase fuel efficiency.

Still, strategic as it is, America has fallen behind, and now that the global race for vanadium is on in the battery game, that will hurt.

In China, vanadium is already becoming the alternative to lithium. The next big moment will be this:

“If a vanadium battery producer steps forward with bold plans to produce vanadium flow at mass scale, giving the industry its Elon Musk or lithium ion moment, the potential for the technology to be the second most deployed ESS battery in the world is there,” says Simon Moores of Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, a battery materials research and price discovery provider out of London.

Rhoades certainly agrees and UBM is in that wonderful position of potentially becoming the only American source for the key rare earth metal that will power our scaled-up “liquid electricity” breakthrough.

“The vanadium flow battery scale-up for massive energy storage makes the electric vehicle push look like child’s play,” he said. “Lithium was a teaser. Vanadium is where it all gets huge.”

We watched lithium take center stage, but that may be just the prologue. Vanadium could be the conclusion.

Other companies in the booming commodity space you should keep an eye on:

Tesla Motors Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA): No large cap company has dazzled over the past couple of years like Tesla, which overtook giant GM this year in market cap—a major, unexpected feat. Tesla is the future, and its stock price agrees.

Tesla’s electric cars will eventually be more profitable than traditional cars, and easier to produce. Costs will keep coming down, especially now that Tesla’s has launched its battery gigafactory in Nevada, and when it gets battery (and lithium) prices down.

It is entirely feasible that Tesla will be selling over 2 million cars annually in less 6-7 years from now, despite recent management issues.

General Motors (NYSE:GM) is a household name. GM was born at the turn of the 20^th century and has been a leading innovator in the automotive industry ever since. Even though it’s been surpassed in market cap by Tesla (of all companies), it is still the furthest ahead of the Big 3 car makers from Detroit in terms of EVs and self-driving cars.

Recently, GM acquired Cruise Automation—a self-driving car company, and it seems determined to forge ahead even faster to play catch-up with the future. Additionally, GM is a leader in the booming electric vehicle market. As countries across the world begin to pass regulations on combustion engines, GM stands to gain significantly as an early adopter in the EV game.

Cameco Corporation (NYSE:CCJ) Cameco is one of the largest global producers and sellers of uranium and nuclear fuel. Its operating uranium properties include the McArthur River/Key Lake, Cigar Lake, and Rabbit Lake properties located in Saskatchewan, Canada; the Inkai property situated in Kazakhstan; the Smith Ranch-Highland property located in Wyoming, the United States; and the Crow Butte property situated in Nebraska.

While many analysts see low uranium prices as a problem for miners, the OPEC like move from world uranium leader Kazakhstan to bump prices has benefited Cameco and its peers significantly.

FMC Corp. (NYSE:FMC) founded in 1883, FMC has been around the block and back. FMC has a long history stretching between many different industries, but within all of them, FMC has remained a leader in innovation.

FMC’s involvement in the lithium industry is particularly notable. The company is one of the top three in lithium and associated technologies. And recently, the company announced that it will be launching a new company, Livent, which aims to raise $100 million in an initial public offering to establish its place as a dominant lithium supplier.

Ballard Power Systems (NASDAQ:BLPD) Ballard develops and produces hydrogen fuel cell products for markets such as heavy-duty motive, portable power, material handling and transportation. In addition to its production and development of fuel cell products, Ballard also holds over 2,000 patents/applications.

At the end of August, Ballard announced a huge divestment agreement, releasing non-core assets to Revision Military Ltd., for up to $16 million in cash to provide a hefty boost to its fuel cell business.

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This article was originally published on OilPrice.com.

James Burgess studied Business Management at the University of Nottingham. He has worked in property development, chartered surveying, marketing, law, and accounts. He has also studied journalism and has written many articles over the years for a wide variety of sources. James is the Deputy Editor of Oilprice.com

For the first time in recorded history, a Category 4 hurricane is striking the Florida Panhandle.

Hurricane Michael made landfall today, packing winds of 145 miles per hour — strong enough to collapse houses and cause massive damage to other infrastructure. Forecasts have also warned of a storm surge that could reach a stunning 14 feet in height.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Hurricane Center describes a Category 4 hurricane’s winds thus:

Catastrophic damage will occur: Well-built framed homes can sustain severe damage with loss of most of the roof structure and/or some exterior walls. Most trees will be snapped or uprooted and power poles downed. Fallen trees and power poles will isolate residential areas. Power outages will last weeks to possibly months. Most of the area will be uninhabitable for weeks or months.

The storm is powerful enough that it will remain a hurricane long after it is far inland: Models show it will still have hurricane-force winds by the time it reaches as far inland as Albany, Georgia.

The storm exploded in intensity in the 24 hours before making landfall. Reuters reported on Weather Underground meteorologist Bob Hensen’s assessment of this phenomenon: “Satellite images of Michael’s evolution on Tuesday night were, in a word, jaw-dropping.”

Experts are warning that damage is expected to be “catastrophic,” and rainfall of up to half a foot could be dumped across much of the Carolinas, which are still recovering from Hurricane Florence.

Truthout has reported repeatedly on how human-caused climate change is super-charging the amount of rainfall potential for hurricanes. The current storm is displaying what scientists have been warning us about for years.

Hurricane Michael Is Not a Surprise

NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory has been warning us for years that human-caused climate change would increase key variables of hurricanes, including wind strength, the amount of rainfall, and storm surge levels.

The lab’s main conclusions on “detectable” changes are clear: Sea-level rise should be causing higher storm surge levels, rainfall rates will likely increase, tropical cyclone intensities around the globe will increase, and the proportion of storms being either Category 4 or 5 will increase.

Meanwhile, Florida Governor Rick Scott, who made a name for himself as a world-class climate change denialist by forbidding state employees from using the words “climate change” or “global warming,” is warning state residents of the ferocity of the current storm.

In 2017, Gov. Scott approved Florida’s “anti-science law,” which The Guardian reported as being “aimed at allowing legal challenges to the teaching of the realities of climate change and global warming in the state’s classrooms.”

Last year, the Tampa Bay Times reported that Gov. Scott’s personal investments in the energy industry actively helped shape Florida’s lack of adequate policies towards dealing with climate change impacts. The report showed how parts of Gov. Scott’s quarter-billion-dollar fortune were invested in petroleum and power-generating companies that are directly opposed to restricting greenhouse gas emissions, as well as environmental regulations.

More importantly, given his denialism, Gov. Scott has not committed state resources to relocating people in flood zones, or preparing communities for storms like Hurricane Michael.

Given that we know human-caused climate change impacts will only continue to intensify from now on, and damage from hurricanes such as this one will increase right along with them, Florida is the micro of the macro of a country led by a climate change-denying president.

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Dahr Jamail, a Truthout staff reporter, is the author of The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last 10 years, and has won the Martha Gellhorn Award for Investigative Journalism, among other awards.

Featured image is from Live Science.

The fate of missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, assuming that his disappearance was the work of Saudi security and military officials, threatens to upend the fundaments of fault lines in the Middle East.

At stake is not only the fate of a widely respected journalist and the future of Turkish-Saudi relations.

Mr. Khashoggi’s fate, whether he was kidnapped by Saudi agents during a visit to the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul to obtain proof of his divorce or murdered on its premises, threatens to severely disrupt the US-Saudi alliance that underwrites much of the Middle East’s fault lines.

A US investigation into Mr. Khashoggi’s fate mandated by members of the US Congress and an expected meeting between President Donald J. Trump, and the journalist’s Turkish fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, could result in a US and European embargo on arms sales to Saudi Arabia and impact the kingdom’s brutal proxy war with Iran in Yemen.

It also would project Saudi Arabia as a rogue state and call into question US and Saudi allegations that Iran is the Middle East’s main state supporter of terrorism.

The allegations formed a key reason for the United States’ withdrawal with Saudi, United Arab Emirates and Israeli backing from the 2015 international agreement that curbed Iran’s nuclear program and the re-imposition of crippling economic sanctions.

They also would undermine Saudi and UAE justification of their 15-month old economic and diplomatic boycott of Qatar that the two Gulf states, alongside Egypt and Bahrain, accuse of supporting terrorism.

Condemnation and sanctioning of Saudi Arabia by the international community would complicate Chinese and Russian efforts to walk a fine line in their attempts to ensure that they are not sucked into the Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

Russia and China would be at a crossroads if Saudi Arabia were proven to be responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance and the issue of sanctions would be brought to the United Nations Security Council.

Both Russia and China have so far been able to maintain close ties to Saudi Arabia despite their efforts to defeat US sanctions against Iran and Russia’s alliance with the Islamic republic in their support for Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

A significantly weakened Saudi Arabia would furthermore undermine Arab cover provided by the kingdom for Mr. Trump’s efforts to impose a settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that would favour Israel at the expense of the Palestinians.

Finally, a conclusive determination that Saudi Arabia was responsible for Mr. Khashoggi’s fate would likely spark renewed debate about the wisdom of the international community’s support for Arab autocracy that has proven to be unashamedly brutal in its violation of human rights and disregard for international law and conventions.

Meanwhile, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has suffered significant reputational damage irrespective of Mr. Khashoggi’s fate, raising the question of his viability if Saudi Arabia were condemned internationally and stability in the kingdom, a key tenant of US, Chinese and Russian Middle East policy, were to be at risk.

The reputational damage suffered by Prince Mohammed embarrasses UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed, who together with his aides and representatives in world capitals, worked hard to project his Saudi counterpart as the kingdom’s future.

Saudi Arabia has so far done itself few favours by flatly rejecting any responsibility for Mr. Khashoggi’s disappearance with no evidence that the journalist left the consulate at his own volition; asserting that claims that it was involved were fabrications by Turkey, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood; seeking to defame Mr. Khashoggi’s fiancé and supporters; and refusing to fully cooperate with Turkish investigators.

Saudi reluctance to cooperate as well as the US investigation and Ms. Cengiz’s expected meeting with Mr. Trump complicate apparent Turkish efforts to find a resolution of the escalating crisis that would allow Saudi Arabia to save face and salvage Turkey’s economic relationship with the kingdom.

Turkey, despite deep policy differences with Saudi Arabia over Qatar, Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood, has so far refrained from statements that go beyond demanding that Saudi Arabia prove its assertion that Mr. Khashoggi left the Istanbul consulate at his own volition and fully cooperate with the Turkish investigation.

Reports by anonymous Turkish officials detailing gruesome details of Mr. Khashoggi’s alleged murder by Saudi agents appear designed to pressure Saudi Arabia to comply with the Turkish demands and efforts to manage the crisis.

Widely acclaimed, Mr. Khashoggi’s fate, irrespective of whether he as yet emerges alive or is proven to have been brutally murdered, is reshaping the political map of the Middle East. The possibility, if not likelihood is that he paid a horrendous price for sparking the earthquake that is already rumbling across the region.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title and a co-authored volume, Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa as well as Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa and just published China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom 

France’s Sahel-wide “Operation Barkane” has recently been forced to pay increasing attention to the upsurge of terrorism in Burkina Faso, which is quickly turning into another flashpoint in the War on Terror.

The G5 Sahel & “Operation Barkhane”

Most of the world missed it last week because of the global hysteria surrounding Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in the US, but France was forced to launch an airstrike against terrorists in the eastern part of Burkina Faso, one of the G5 Sahel countries that Paris has partnered with as part of its Sahel-wide “Operation Barkhane”. The former colonial power launched this open-ended mission following the conclusion of “Operation Serval”, which is the name that was given to its January 2013 military intervention in Mali that it organized in response to Islamic terrorists hijacking a fast-moving Tuareg separatist movement that swept across the country the year prior. In the years since, the regional terrorist threat has only increased as Daesh expanded to West Africa and dethroned Al Qaeda as the most notorious armed actor in the area, though the latter isn’t hasn’t been “put out of business” just yet.

In fact, it’s thought a new Al Qaeda cell is responsible for the recent spate of violence in eastern Burkina Faso, a sparsely populated and extremely poor part of the country that borders eastern Mali and western Niger, both of which have been afflicted by serious terrorist violence over the past couple of years. Casual news consumers might remember the deadly attack that took place in western Niger last year against American special forces there and which was described by some as “Trump’s Benghazi” because of the alleged cover-up that followed, while others might vaguely recall the Mainstream Media occasionally talking about the never-ending destabilization of Mali, to which Canada has recently dispatched its military forces to aid its NATO allies. For the most part, however, this corner of the world is largely unknown to all but the locals themselves and any interested foreigners who follow its developments.

Strategic Significances

Most of the global public is therefore unaware of how serious the terrorist threat in West Africa is. Apart from Niger’s uranium deposits and China’s long-term bi-coastal Silk Road plans that traverse through the Sahel, there admittedly isn’t much of strategic significance here to warrant many people’s attention, though that’s not to say that the aforementioned aren’t important at all. Probably the most pressing reason why West Africa is so significant to European interests, however, is because it’s both an origin and transit country for EU-destined migrants whose numbers are only expected to continue growing to the point of possibly unleashing a large-scale Migrant Crisis 2.0in the future that could dwarf the previous one from the Mideast. Even with this impending out-of-control threat, many people have no idea what’s really going on in West Africa, partly due to the adage of “out of sight, out of mind”.

France’s War on Terror in West Africa, which isn’t solely driven by anti-terrorist objectives but is also motivated by anti-migrant and other ones too, is rapidly heating up and turning into a quagmire as the scale and scope of asymmetrical Hybrid War threats spread throughout the entire Sahel region and begins to destabilize this part of the African continent at large. Burkina Faso is but the latest flashpoint in this transnational conflict after NATO’s destruction of Libya in 2011 contributed to Mali’s 2012 Tuareg separatist insurgency that in turn was hijacked by the Salafists who France intervened to depose in 2013. The chain reaction of unrest eventually spread to Niger after terrorists started using the unguarded and largely ungoverned border region with Mali to set up a base of operations that has since also enveloped parts of eastern Burkina Faso as well.

Burkinabe Rumblings

About that, the subject of this analysis was previously known (if at all by anyone outside of the region) as the homeland of famous late-Old Cold War African socialist visionary Thomas Sankara and used to be called Upper Volta, a name that some in the West might remember for its use in mocking the Soviet Union as “Upper Volta with nukes/missiles/rockets” (the variation changes depending on who’s employing the phrase). It was ruled with an iron fist by Blaise Compaoré following the coup that he committed against his former friend Sankara in 1987 until his own overthrow in 2014, after which terrorist attacks became more frequent because of a combination of the regional and domestic situations. The author realized in August 2017 that “Burkina Faso Is Becoming A Battlefront In The War On Terror” after terrorists seized a restaurant in the capital of Ouagadougou and killed over a dozen people.

That dramatic event proved that Burkina Faso was at risk of falling victim to the region’s terrorist spillover, which appears to have already quietly happened judging by the recent French airstrike in the east after that part of the country unofficially became part of the “Sahel Triangle of Terror” between eastern Mali and western Niger. This is significant not just for the fact that yet another country in the world is facing a pronounced terrorist threat, but because of the potential that it could spread further throughout West Africa due to the prevalence of the country’s labor migrants in neighboring Ivory Coast, whose 2002-2007 civil war was caused in part (though importantly not in full) by the fear that many Christian citizens had of Muslim Burkinabe migrants taking over the north. Whether based in truth or not, fearmongering about terrorist infiltrators among Burkinabe migrants in Ivory Coast and even Ghana could raise regional tensions.

Concluding Thoughts

Burkina Faso is therefore so important because it functions as a geo-demographic pivot between the Sahel and the jungled regions of West Africa, meaning that its terrorist-driven destabilization (influenced as it is by the security dynamics in neighboring Mali and Niger) could spread further throughout this part of the continent if left unchecked. The country could thus be perceived as an anti-terrorist “firewall” protecting the states along Africa’s Atlantic coast from falling victim to this scourge, which is why events in this landlocked and seemingly godforsaken land are so crucial to continental affairs. The failure of the Burkinabe “firewall” to hold back Sahel-originating destabilization processes could catalyze a chain reaction of state fragmentation in the vulnerable post-civil war countries of the Ivory Coast, Liberia, and possibly even Sierra Leone given how interconnected their strategic situations have been since the end of the Old Cold War, which might make the EU’s African Migrant Crisis much worse in the coming future.

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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.

Sixteen years ago this week, 77 U.S. senators and 296 members of the House of Representatives gave President George W. Bush the authority to wage war in Iraq.

That monumental vote enabled what is arguably the biggest strategic foreign policy blunder in American history, needlessly killing hundreds of thousands and costing trillions of dollars. To this day, the United States is still militarily engaged in Iraq and Syria, dealing with the continued fallout of Bush’s decision to invade back in 2003. For decades to come, the United States will spend tens, if not hundreds, of billions of dollars caring for American service members wounded both mentally and physically in that conflict.

If you think the U.S. government learned its lesson from this tragedy, think again. 

Former Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) was one of just 29 senators—all Democrats—who voted against the Iraq war authorization in October 2002. Last year, he issued a stark warning:

If an administration again pounds the drums for war and the media reacted as they did [during the run-up to the Iraq war], without serious thought, with just a visceral emotional response rather than thinking critically and seriously and responsibly, I don’t think what happened in Iraq will unfortunately matter very much. I wish I could say to you something else.

Well it just so happens that an administration is pounding the war drums again, and the media is playing right along.

Trump’s Approach to Iran

Team Trump showed its hand in the early days of the administration when then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn randomly stormed into the White House press room to put Iran “on notice” (for what, it was unclear, but in any event, Iran was on notice). Soon after, the Trump administration began its quest to dismantle the Obama administration’s legacy of working through differences with Iran diplomatically and to put the United States back on the path to war.

While Trump began signaling his desire to leave the historic nuclear deal, administration officials started dialing up the bellicose rhetoric. Later that year, then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo pushed the baseless narrative that Iran is in cahoots with al-Qaeda. U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley later put on a flashy show accusing Iran, without evidence, of violating UN resolutions in Yemen. That episode led one former Bush administration official involved in selling the Iraq War to sound the alarm that Team Trump was applying the same approach to Iran.

Trump then dismissed two senior officials—Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Flynn’s successor, H.R. McMaster—who favored remaining in the Iran nuclear deal, and replaced them with uber Iran hawks Pompeo and John Bolton, both of whom hated the agreement and have pushed for war with Iran.

After Trump finally announced that the United States would violate the deal and reimpose sanctions, Pompeo again went on the offensive in a series of speeches outliningwhat everyone (even the right wing) knows but Trump officials won’t say outright: a policy of regime change in Iran.

Let’s not underestimate the impact of withdrawing from the Iran deal. The agreement is currently on life support. If the Europeans can’t make it worthwhile for the Iranians to stay in it once U.S. oil sanctions go into effect this November, the Iran deal is likely dead, leaving Iran free to restart its nuclear program and raising the prospect for war.

But the last couple weeks have been particularly alarming. Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton used their spotlights on the world stage last month during the UN General Assembly and a U.S.-hosted UN Security Council meeting to lash out at Iran “with unusual venom,” as the Associated Press put it. The administration is also increasing the likelihood of military confrontation with Iran in the region, announcing plans to keep U.S. troops in Syria to counter Iranian forces and, more recently, blaming Iran for attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq.

Media Mistakes

On the media side, there are some differences between now and the run-up to the Iraq War. For example, the Bush administration’s case for war was a conversation that started shortly after 9/11 and was a primary media topic for the next year and a half. The country was still reeling in the aftermath of the attacks.

The context is different today, but the media is still making the same mistakes.

First, the Trump administration’s sharp focus on Iran has been covered here and there but it’s by no means the topic of conversation on a day-to-day basis. That’s largely because there’s just so much distraction, whether from the Mueller investigation, the many destructive policy decisions made by this White House, or just the ongoing ridiculousness of Trump himself.

Second, media outlets are beating the Iran war drums themselves now too, particularly Fox News and right-wing media.

But there’s a mainstream media element too. Iran hawk columnists masquerading as hard-news reporters hold high perches at the some of the nation’s most elite media outlets, while others have promoted baseless claims about the Iran deal to help lay the groundwork for Trump to withdraw. And those who advocated for war in Iraq are getting plenty of air time these days to talk about confronting Iran.

On that front, there’s also a newer game in town. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, while not a player during the run-up to the Iraq War, is the most prominent and influential hawkish “think tank” in DC pushing for war and regime change in Iran. Whether in the op-ed pages of the nation’s most widely read newspapers, on major TV and radio news, or even in newer media puff pieces, mainstream outlets regularly give FDD’s staffers wide latitude to trash the Iran deal or make the case for war and/or regime change. And they’re usually presented as neutral experts and analysts without giving any sense of what FDD is actually pushing for. They sometimes even get happy birthday wishes.

Just last week, mainstream outlets largely ignored the fact that Pompeo and Bolton were delivering their hostile Iran speeches before a shady but influential and well-funded group with ties to Gulf countries urging a more aggressive U.S. approach to Iran.

This march to war with Iran is happening. Because of the chaos that is this Donald Trump presidency, it’s not getting the widespread attention it needs. Indeed, as if reading right from the Iraq-War playbook, and without offering any evidence, Pompeo said last week he has “solid” intelligence that Iran is responsible for attacks on Americans in the Middle East. “We can see the hand of the Ayatollah and his henchmen supporting these attacks on the United States,” he said. Given the widespread media attention on the Supreme Court nomination circus, Pompeo’s remarks barely made a blip in the national media.

Although some in Congress have recognized that Trump has put the United States back on the path to war, the alarm bells aren’t as loud as they should be. And that recalls Kent Conrad’s disturbing warning: “If the president of the United States wants to take this nation to war, he can take this nation to war. And stopping that is incredibly difficult.”

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Ben Armbruster is the communications director for Win Without War and previously served as national security editor at ThinkProgress.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Monsanto will ask a San Francisco judge on Wednesday to throw out a jury’s $289 million award to a former school groundskeeper who claimed the company’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, Roundup and Ranger Pro, caused his non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos, who oversaw the trial, has the power to overturn the verdict, reduce the award amount or order a new trial.

The plaintiff, Dewayne Johnson, was the first among 8,700 people in the U.S. who have made similar cancer claims against Monsanto, which is now owned by Germany’s Bayer.

The Associated Press reported:

Attorneys for the company say Johnson failed to prove that Roundup or similar herbicides caused his lymphoma, and presented no evidence that Monsanto executives were malicious in marketing Roundup. Bolanos was not expected to rule immediately.

Regulators around the world have concluded on “multiple occasions” that the active ingredient in Roundup — glyphosate — is not a human carcinogen, the attorneys said in court documents. They called the jury verdict “extraordinary” and said it requires “exceptional scrutiny.”

A judgement in favor of the company could discourage the other lawsuits and allow Bayer to avoid a “rush to trial after trial,” Bloomberg reported. More trials over the controversial herbicide are scheduled for February.

A San Francisco jury's $289 million verdict in favor of a school groundskeeper who says Roundup weed killer caused his cancer faces first court test. https://t.co/ffdYw9afwC see court dox here: https://t.co/4fYkepgun9

— carey gillam (@careygillam) October 10, 2018

Jonas Oxgaard, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., estimated to Bloomberg that Bayer’s market value is discounted by as much as $15 billion due to the jury’s verdict.

“Getting the first ruling overturned would be huge for Bayer—likely reversing most of the discount,” Oxgaard told the publication.

Johnson’s lawyer, Brent Wisner, said the jury made the right decision in August when they awarded his client with $289 million in damages.

“This was a considerate, thoughtful and well-educated jury that looked at the science to conclude glyphosate causes cancer,” Wisner told Reuters in August.

“Mr. Johnson’s story is tragic and could have been prevented if Monsanto actually showed a modicum of care about human safety,” Johnson’s lawyers also responded in court documents cited by the AP.

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Featured image is from EcoWatch.

When the global financial crisis resurfaces, we the people will have to fill the vacuum in political leadership. It will call for a monumental mobilisation of citizens from below, focused on a single and unifying demand for a people’s bailout across the world.

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A full decade since the great crash of 2008, many progressive thinkers have recently reflected on the consequences of that fateful day when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed, foreshadowing the worst international financial crisis of the post-war period. What seems obvious to everyone is that lessons have not been learnt, the financial sector is now larger and more dominant than ever, and an even greater crisis is set to happen anytime soon. But the real question is when it strikes, what are the chances of achieving a bailout for ordinary people and the planet this time?

In the aftermath of the last global financial meltdown, there was a constant stream of analysis about its proximate causes. This centred on the bursting of the US housing bubble, fuelled in large part by reckless sub-prime lending and an under-regulated shadow banking system. Media commentaries fixated on the implosion of collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps and other financial innovations—all evidence of the speculative greed and lax government oversight which led to the housing and credit booms.

The term ‘financialisation’ has become a buzzword to explain the factors which precipitated these events, referring to the vastly expanded role of financial markets in the operation of domestic and global economies. It is not only about the growth of big banks and hedge funds, but the radical transformation of our entire society that has taken place as a result of the increasing dominance of the financial sector with its short-termist, profitmaking logic.

The origins of the crisis are rooted in the early 1970s, when the US government decided to end the fixed convertibility of dollars into gold, formally ending the Bretton Woods monetary system. It marked the beginning of a new regime of floating exchange rates, free trade in goods and the free movement of capital across borders. The sweeping reforms brought in under the Thatcher and Reagan governments accelerated a wave of deregulation and privatisation, with minimum protective barriers against the ‘self-regulating market’.

The agenda was pushed aggressively by most national governments in the Global North, while being imposed on many Southern countries through the International Monetary Fund and World Bank’s infamous ‘structural adjustment programmes’. A legion of books have examined the disastrous consequences of this market-led approach to monetary and fiscal policy, derisorily labelled the neoliberal Washington Consensus. As governments increasingly focused on maintaining low inflation and removing regulations on capital and corporations, the world of finance boomed—and the foundations were laid for a dramatic dénouement in 2008.

Missed opportunities

What’s extraordinary to recall about the immediate aftermath of the great crash is the temporary reversal of those policies that had dominated the previous two decades. At the G20 summit in April 2009 hosted by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, heads of state envisaged a return to Keynesian macroeconomic prescriptions, including a large-scale fiscal stimulus in both developed and developing countries. It appeared that the Washington Consensus had suddenly lost all legitimacy. The liberalised global financial system had clearly failed to provide for a net transfer of resources to the developing world, or prevent instability and recurrent crisis without effective state regulation and democratic public oversight.

Many civil society organisations saw the moment to call for fundamental reform of the Bretton Woods institutions, as well as a complete rethink of the role of the state in the economy. There was even talk of negotiating a new Bretton Woods agreement that re-regulates international capital flows, and supports policy diversity and multilateralism as a core principle (in direct contrast to the IMF’s discredited  approach).

The United Nations played a staunch role in upholding such demands, particularly through a commission set up by the then-President of the UN General Assembly, Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann. Led by Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, the ‘UN Conference on the World Financial and Economic Crisis and its Impact on Development’ proposed a number of sensible measures to protect the least privileged citizens from the effects of the crisis, while giving developing countries greater influence in reforming the global economy.

Around the same time, the UN Secretary-General endorsed a Global Green New Deal that could stimulate an economic recovery, combat poverty and avert dangerous climate change simultaneously. It envisioned a massive programme of direct public investments and other internationally-coordinated interventions, arguing that the time had come to transform the global economy for the greater benefit of people everywhere, including the millions living in poverty in developing and emerging industrial economies.

This wasn’t the first time that nations were called upon to enact a full-scale reordering of global priorities in response to financial turmoil. At the onset of the ‘third world’ debt crisis in 1980, an Independent Commission on International Development Issuesconvened by the former West German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, also proposed far-reaching emergency measures to reform the global economic system and effectively bail out the world’s poor.

Yet the Brandt Commission proposals were widely ignored by Western governments at the time, which marked the rise of the neoliberal counterrevolution in macroeconomic policy—and all the conditions that led to financial breakdown three decades later. Then once again, governments responded in precisely the opposite direction for bringing about a sustainable economic recovery based on principles of equity, justice, sharing and human rights.

A world falling apart

We are all familiar with the course of action taken from 2008-9: colossal bank bailouts enacted (without public consultation) that favoured creditors, not debtors, despite using taxpayer money. Quantitative easing (QE) programmes that have pumped trillions of dollars into the global financial system, unleashing a fresh wave of speculative investment and further widening income and wealth gaps. And the perceived blame for the crisis deflected towards excessive public spending, leading to fiscal austerity measures being rolled out across most countries—a ‘decade of adjustment’ that is projected to affect nearly 80 percent of the global population by 2020.

Source: eyewashdesgin: A. Golden, flickr creative commons

To be sure, the ensuing policy responses across Europe were often compared to structural adjustment programmes imposed on developing countries in the 1980s and 1990s, when repayments to creditors of commercial banks similarly took precedence over measures to ensure social and economic recovery. The same pattern has repeated in every crisis-hit region, where the poorest in society pay the price through extreme austerity and the privatisation of public assets and services, despite being the least to blame for causing the crisis in the first place.

After ten years of these policies a new billionaire is created every second day, banks are still paying out billions of dollars in bonuses each year, and the top 1% of the world population are far wealthier than before the crisis happened. At the same time, global income inequality has returned to 1820 levels, and indicators suggest progress is now reversing on the prevention of extreme poverty and multiple forms of malnutrition.

Indeed the United Nations continues to face the worst humanitarian situation since the second world war, in large part due to conflict-driven crises that are rooted in the economic fallout of the 2008 crash—most dramatically in Syria, Libya, and Yemen. Countries of both the Global North and South remain in the grip of a record upsurge of forced human displacement, to which governments are predictably failing to respond to in the direction of cooperative burden sharing through agreements and institutions at the international level.

Not to mention the rise of fascism and divisive populism that is escalating in almost every society, often as a misguided response to pervasive inequality and a widespread sense of unfairness among ordinary workers. It is surely reasonable to suggest that all these trends would not be deteriorating if the community of nations had seized the opportunity a decade ago, and acted in accordance with calls for a just transition to a more equitable world order.

The worst is yet to come

We now live in a strange era of political limbo. Neoclassical economics may have failed to predict the great crash or provide answers for a sustained recovery, yet it still retains its hold on conventional academic thought. Neoliberalism may also be discredited as the dominant political and economic paradigm, yet mainstream institutions like the IMF and OECD still embrace the fundamentals of free market orthodoxy and countenance no meaningful alternative. Consequently, the new regulatory initiatives agreed at the global level are largely voluntary and inadequate, and governments have done little to counter the power of oligopolistic banks or prevent reckless speculative behaviour.

Banks may be relatively safer and possess a bigger crisis toolkit, but the risk has moved to the largely unregulated shadow banking system which has massively increased in size, growing from $28 trillion in 2010 to $45 trillion in 2018. Even major banks like JP Morgan are forewarning an imminent crisis, which may be caused by a digital ‘flash crash’ in which high frequency investments (measuring trades in millionths of a second) lead to a sudden downfall of global stock markets.

Another probable cause is the precipitous rise in global debt, which has soared from $142 to $250 trillion since 2008, three times the combined income of every nation. Global markets are running on easy money and credit, leading to a debt build-up which economists from across the political spectrum agree cannot last indefinitely without catastrophic results. The problem is most acute in emerging and developing economies, where short-term capital flowed in response to low interest rates and QE policies in the West. As the US and other rich countries begin to steadily raise interest rates again, there is a risk of a mass exodus of capital from emerging markets that could trigger a renewed debt crisis in the world’s poorest countries.

Of most concern is China, however, whose credit-fuelled expansion in the post-crash years has led to massive over-investment and national debt. With an overheating real-estate sector, volatile stock market and uncontrolled shadow banking system, it is a prime candidate to be the site for the next financial implosion.

However it originates, all the evidence suggests that an economic collapse could be far worse this time around. The ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem remains critical, with the biggest US banks owning more deposits, assets and cash than ever before. And with interest rates at historic lows for many G-10 central banks while the QE taps are still turned on, both developed and developing countries have less policy and fiscal space to respond to another shock.

Above all, China and the US are not in a position to take the same decisive central bank action that helped avert a world depression in 2008. And then there all the contemporary political factors that mitigate against a coordinated international response—the retreat from multilateralism, the disintegration of established geopolitical structures and relationships, the fragmentation and polarisation of political systems throughout the world.

After two years of a US presidency that recklessly scraps global agreements and instigates trade wars, it is hard to imagine a repeat of the G20 gathering in 2009 when assembled leaders pledged never to go down the road of protectionist tariff policies again, fearing a return to the dire economic conditions that led to a world war in the 1930s. The domestic policies of the Trump administration are also especially perturbing, considering its current push for greater deregulation of the financial sector—rolling back the Dodd-Frank and consumer protection acts, increasing the speed of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington, D.C., and more.

Mobilising from below

None of this should be a reason to despair or lose hope. The great crash has opened up a new awareness and energy for a better society that brings finance under popular control, as a servant to the public and no longer its master. Many different movements and campaigns have sprung up in the post-crash years that focus on addressing the problems wrought by financialisation, which more and more people realise is the underlying source of most of the world’s interlinking crises. All of these developments are hugely important, although the true test of this rising political consciousness will come when the next crash happens.

After the worldwide bank bailouts of 2008-9—estimated in excess of $29 trillion by the US Federal Reserve alone—it is no longer possible to argue that governments cannot afford to provide for the basic necessities of everyone. Just a fraction of that sum would be enough to end income poverty for the 10% of the global population who live on less than $1.90 a day. Not to mention the trillions of dollars, euros, pounds and yen that have been directly pumped into financial markets by central banks of the major developed economies, constituting a regressive form of distribution in favour of the already wealthy that could have been converted into some form of ‘quantitative easing for the people’.

A reversal of government priorities on this scale is clearly not going to be led by the political class. They have already missed the opportunity, and are largely beholden to vested interests that are unduly concerned with short-term profit maximisation, not the rebuilding of the public realm or the universal provision of essential goods and services. The great crash and its aftermath was a global phenomenon that called for a cooperative global response, yet the necessary vision from within the ranks of our governments was woefully lacking. If the financial crisis resurfaces in a different and severer manifestation, we the people will have to fill the vacuum in political leadership. It will call for a monumental mobilisation of citizens from below, focused on a single and unifying demand for a people’s bailout across the world.

Much inspiration can be drawn from the popular uprisings throughout 2011 and 2012, although the Arab Spring and Occupy movements were unable to sustain the momentum for change without a clear agenda that is truly international in scope, and attentive to the needs of the world’s majority poor. That is why we should coalesce our voices around Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which proclaims the right of everyone to the minimal requirements for a dignified life—adequate food, housing, medical care, access to social services and financial security.

Through ceaseless demonstrations in all countries that continue day and night, a united call for implementing Article 25 worldwide may finally impel governments to cooperate at the highest level, and rewrite the rules of the international economic system on the basis of shared mutual interests. In the wake of a breakdown of the entire international financial and economic order, such a grassroots mobilisation of numberless people may be the last chance we have of resurrecting long-forgotten proposals in the UN archives, as notably embodied in the aforementioned Brandt Report or Stiglitz Commission.

The case of Iceland is widely remembered as an example of how a people’s bailout can be achieved, following the ‘Pots and Pans Revolution’ that swept the country in 2009—the largest protests in the country’s history to date. As a result of the public’s demands, a new coalition government was able to buck all trends by avoiding austerity measures, actively intervening in capital markets and strengthening social programs for the less privileged. The results were remarkable for Iceland’s economic recovery, which was achieved without forcing society as a whole to pay for the blunders of corrupt banks. Yet it still wasn’t enough to prevent the old establishment political parties from eventually returning to power, and resuming their support for the same neoliberal policies that generated the crisis.

So what must happen if another systemic banking collapse occurs of even greater magnitude, not only in Iceland but in every country of the world? That is the moment when we’ll need a global Pots and Pans Revolution that is replicated by citizens of all nationalities and political persuasions, on and on until the entire planet is engulfed in a wave of peaceful demonstrations with a common cause. It will require a huge resurgence of the goodwill and staying power that once animated Occupy encampments, although this time focused on a more inclusive and universal demandfor implementing Article 25 and sharing the world’s resources.

It may seem far-fetched to presume such an unprecedented awakening of a disillusioned populace, as if we can expect a visionary leader of Christ-like stature to point out the path towards resurrecting the UN’s founding ideals of “better standards of life for everyone in the world”. However nothing less may suffice in this age of economic chaos and confusion, so let us all be prepared for the climactic events about to take place.

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This article was originally published on Share The World’s Resources.

Adam Parsons is STWR’s editor and can be contacted at [email protected].

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Kuwait has not sent any crude oil to the United States for at least four weeks, EIA’s weekly petroleum reports for the last four weeks, which also include a weekly comparison, have revealed.

The last week that saw Kuwaiti crude coming into the United States was August 24th, when 49,000 bpd were received at U.S. ports. This compares with 214,000 bpd a year earlier, suggesting that Kuwait is reorienting itself to the more lucrative Asian markets, Bloomberg reports, having calculated that Kuwaiti crude costs an average of US$80 a barrel in Asia, which is a dollar more than it costs in the United States.

Kuwaiti oil is predominantly high-sulfur, which is what a lot of Asian refineries prefer to process and are willing to pay more for it, a source in the know told Bloomberg, asking to not be identified.

So far so good for Kuwait, which is a relatively small producer, but the emirate is facing a production cap, Bloomberg notes, because of an ongoing dispute with ally Saudi Arabia about the fields that they share in the so-called neutral zone. On Sunday, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed went on a visit to Kuwait to discuss the topic in light of growing pressure on Middle Eastern producers to ramp up production to offset a loss of supply caused by the U.S. sanctions against Iran.

Joint oil production in the neutral zone was suspended in 2015, but earlier this month the Financial Times reported that the two countries were mulling over a restart amid rising oil prices and the matching rise in worry among large oil buyers.

The neutral zone, the FT reported at the time, could be pumping half a million barrels daily in a few months, according to the International Energy Agency, which would add to more than 10 million bpd of Saudi production and almost 3 million bpd on Kuwaiti production based on the latest figures for July.

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Irina Slav is a writer for the U.S.-based Divergente LLC consulting firm with over a decade of experience writing on the oil and gas industry.

Featured image is from OilPrice.com.

In their long recapitulation of the case that Russia subverted the 2016 election, Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti of The New York Times painted a picture of highly effective Russian government exploitation of social media for that purpose. Shane and Mazzetti asserted that “anti-Clinton, pro-Trump messages shared with millions of voters by Russia could have made the difference” in the election.

“What we now know with certainty: The Russians carried out a landmark intervention that will be examined for decades to come,” they write elsewhere in the 10,000-word article.

But an investigation of the data they cite to show that the Russian campaigns on Facebook and Twitter were highly effective reveals a gross betrayal of journalistic responsibility. Shane and Mazzetti have constructed a case that is fundamentally false and misleading with statistics that exaggerate the real effectiveness of social media efforts by orders of magnitude.

‘Reaching’ 129 Million Americans

The Internet Research Agency (IRA), is a privately-owned company run by entrepreneur Vevgeny V. Prigozhin, who has ties with President Vladimir Putin. Its employees poured out large numbers of social media postings apparently aimed at stoking racial and cultural tensions in the United States and trying to influence U.S. voters in regard to the presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti suggest. They even adopted false U.S. personas online to get people to attend rallies and conduct other political activities. (An alternative explanation is that IRA is a purely commercial, and not political, operation.)

Whether those efforts even came close to swaying U.S. voters in the 2016 presidential election, as Shane and Mazzetti claimed, is another matter.

Shane and Mazzetti might argue that they are merely citing figures published by the social media giants Facebook and Twitter, but they systematically failed to report the detailed explanations behind the gross figures used in each case, which falsified their significance.

Their most dramatic assertions came in reporting the alleged results of the IRA’s efforts on Facebook.

“Even by the vertiginous standards of social media,” they wrote, “the reach of their effort was impressive: 2,700 fake Facebook accounts, 80,000 posts, many of them elaborate images with catchy slogans, and an eventual audience of 126 million Americans on Facebook alone.”

Then, to dramatize that “eventual audience” figure, they observed, “That was not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the 2016 presidential elections.”

But as impressive as these figures may appear at first glance, they don’t really indicate an effective attack on the U.S. election process at all. In fact, without deeper inquiry into their meaning, those figures were grossly misleading.

A Theoretical Possibility

What Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch actually said in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee last October was quite different from what the Times reporters claimed.

“Our best estimate is that approximately 126,000 million people may have been served one of these [IRA-generated] stories at some time during the two year period,” Stretch said.

Stretch was expressing a theoretical possibility rather than an established accomplishment. Facebook was saying that it estimated 126 million Facebook members might have gotten at least one story from the IRA –- not over the ten week election period but over 194 weeks during the two years 2015 through 2017. That, figure, in turn, was based on the estimate that 29 million people might have gotten at least one story in their Facebook feed over that same two-year period and on the assumption that they shared it with others at a particular rate.

The first problem with citing those figures as evidence of impact on the 2016 election is that Facebook did not claim that all or even most of those 80,000 IRA posts were election–related. It offered no data on what proportion of the feeds to those 29 million people was, in fact, election-related. But Stretch did testify that IRA content over that two–year period represented just four thousandths (.0004) of the total content of Facebook newsfeeds.

Thus each piece of IRA content in a twitter feed was engulfed in 23,000 pieces of non-IRA content.

That is an extremely important finding, because, as Facebook’s Vice President for News Feed, Adam Moseri, acknowledged in 2016, Facebook subscribers actually read only about 10 percent of the stories Facebook puts in their News Feed every day. The means that very few of the IRA stories that actually make it into a subscriber’s news feed on any given day are actually read.

Facebook did conduct research on what it calls “civic engagement” during the election period, and the researchers concluded that the “reach” of the content shared by what they called “fake amplifiers” was “marginal compared to the volume of civic content shared during the U.S. elections.” That reach, they said, was “statistically very small” in relation to “overall engagement on political issues.”

Shane and Mazzaetti thus failed to report any of the several significant caveats and disclaimers from Facebook itself that make their claim that Russian election propaganda “reached” 126 million Americans extremely misleading.

Tiny IRA Twitter Footprint

Shane and Mazzetti’s treatment of the role of Twitter in the alleged Russian involvement in the election focuses on 3,814 Twitter accounts said to be associated with the IRA, which supposedly “interacted with 1.4 million Americans.” Although that number looks impressive without any further explanation, more disaggregated data provide a different picture: more than 90 percent of the Tweets from the IRA had nothing to do with the election, and those that did were infinitesimally few in relation to the entire Twitter stream relating to the 2016 campaign.

Twitter’s own figures show that those 3,814 IRA-linked accounts posted 175,993 Tweets during the ten weeks of the election campaign, but that only 8.4 percent of the total number of IRA-generated Tweets were election-related.

Twitter estimated that those 15,000 IRA-related tweets represented less than .00008 (eight one hundred thousandths) of the estimated total of 189 million tweets that Twitter identified as election-related during the ten-week election campaign. Twitter has offered no estimate of how many Tweets, on average were in the daily twitter stream of those people notified by Twitter and what percentage of them were election-related Tweets from the IRA. Any such notification would certainly show, however, that the percentage was extremely small and that very few would have been read.

Research by Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University on 2.9 million Tweets from those same 3,814 IRA accounts over a two year period has revealed that nearly a third of its Tweets had normal commercial content or were not in English; another third were straight local newsfeeds from U.S. localities or mostly non-political “hashtag games”, and the final third were on “right” or “left” populist themes in U.S. society.

Furthermore, there were more IRA Tweets on political themes in 2017 than there had been during the election year. As a graph of those tweets over time shows, those “right” and “left” Tweets peaked not during the election but during the summer of 2017.

The Mysterious 50,000 ‘Russia-Linked’ Accounts

Twitter also determined that another 50,258 automated Twitter accounts that tweeted about the election were associated with Russia and that they have generated a total to 2.1 million Tweets — about one percent of the total of number election-related tweets during the period.

But despite media coverage of those Tweets suggesting that they originated with the Russian government, the evidence doesn’t indicate that at all. Twitter’s Sean Edgett told the Senate Intelligence Committee last November that Twitter had used an “expansive approach to defining what qualifies as a Russian-linked account.” Twitter considered an account to be “Russian” if any of the following was found: it was created in Russia or if the user registered the account with a Russian phone carrier or a Russian email; the user’s display name contains Cyrillic characters; the user frequently Tweets in Russian, or the user has logged in from any Russian IP address.

Edgett admitted in a statement in January, however, that there were limitations on its ability to determine the origins of the users of these accounts. And a past log-in from a Russian IP address does not mean the Russian government controls an account. Automated accounts have been bought and sold for many years on a huge market, some of which is located in Russia. As Scott Shane reported in September 2017, a Russian website BuyAccs.com offers tens and even hundreds of thousands of Twitter accounts for bulk purchase.

Twitter also observed that “a high concentration of automated engagement and content originated from data centers and users accessing Twitter via Virtual Private Networks (“VPNs”) and proxy servers,” which served to mask the geographical origin of the tweet. And that practice was not limited to the 50,000 accounts in question. Twitter found that locations of nearly 12 percent of the Tweets generated during the election period were masked because of the use of such networks and servers.

Twitter identified over half of the Tweets, coming from about half of the 50,000 accounts, as being automated, and the data reported on activity on those 50,000 accounts in question, indicates that both the Trump and Clinton campaigns were using the automated accounts in question. The roughly 23,000 automated accounts were the source of 1.34 million Tweets, which represented .63 percent of the total election-related Tweets. But the entire 50,000 accounts produced about 1 percent of total election-related tweets.

Hillary Clinton got .55 percent of her total retweets from the 50,000 automated accounts Twitter calls “Russia-linked” and .62 percent of her “likes” from them. Those percentages are close to the percentage of total election-related Tweets generated by those same automated accounts. That suggests that her campaign had roughly the same proportion of automated accounts among the 50,000 accounts as it did in the rest of the accounts during the campaign.

Trump, on the other hand, got 1.8 percent of this total “likes” and 4.25 percent of his total Retweets for the whole election period from those accounts, indicating his campaign was more invested in the automated accounts that were the source of two-thirds of the Tweets in those 50,000 “Russia-linked” accounts.

The idea promoted by Shane and Mazzetti that the Russian government seriously threatened to determine the winner of the election does not hold up when the larger social media context is examined more closely. Contrary to what the Times’reporters and the corporate media in general would have us believe, the Russian private sector effort accounted for a minuscule proportion of the election-related output of social media. The threat to the U.S. political system in general and its electoral system in particular is not Russian influence; it’s in part a mainstream news media that has lost perspective on the truth.

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Gareth Porter is an independent investigative journalist and historian writing on US national security policy. His latest book, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare, was published in February of 2014. Follow him on Twitter: @GarethPorter.

All images in this article are from Consortiumnews.

There were two simultaneous Brett Kavanaugh stories. Together, as part of the confirmation process regarding his nomination as Supreme Court Justice, they revealed how political discourse in the United States has reached a new low, with debate over the man’s possible predilection to make judgments based on his own preferences rather than the US Constitution being ignored in favor of the politically motivated kabuki theater that was deliberately arranged to avoid that issue and instead go after his character.

Consider first of all, his flaws as a candidate. He was regularly framed as a “conservative,” but what did that mean in the context of his career? Some of the critics are referring to his time spent as a government lawyer, specifically for the George W. Bush Administration, where he was a supporter of wide executive authority in the context of the war against terror while others point to his decisions and writings during his time as a US Circuit judge from 2006 until the present. That meant essentially that Kavanaugh then supported and apparently continues to support what is now referred to as the John Yoo doctrine, named after the Department of Justice lawyer who penned the memo that made the case for the president to act unilaterally to do whatever is required in national security cases even if there be no direct or immediate threat. Yoo specifically argued that the president, by virtue of his office, is not bound by the War Crimes Act. This theory of government, also more broadly dubbed the unitary executive, was popularized by Yoo, fellow government lawyer Jay Bybee and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.

For those who find Kavanaugh unacceptable in terms of his judicial philosophy, this repudiation of the constitutional principle of three branches of government that check each other was enough to disqualify him from a position on the Supreme Court, principally as it impacts on both the first and second articles of the constitution by granting to the president the authority to both begin and continue a war on his own recognizance. It also means that the president on his own authority can suspend first and fourth amendment rights to freedom of speech and association as well as freedom from illegal search. He supported, for example, the government’s “right” to conduct mass searches of private data such as was conducted by the NSA. Kavanaugh supports government authority to legitimize incarceration without trial and to order assassinations and torture. Kavanaugh is also on record as favoring limiting the public’s right to use the courts to redress government overreach.

But curiously enough, or perhaps not so curiously, Kavanaugh was treated with kid gloves on those critical issues, basically because both major parties are now supportive of the unitary executive concept even if they would not admit that to be the case. Bill Clinton launched cruise missiles attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan on his own authority and involved the US in a war in the Balkans. George W. Bush did the same in approving torture and expanding the war on terror to Iraq and also globally, while Barack Obama attacked both the Syrian and Libyan governments and assassinated US citizens abroad, all acts of war or war crimes carried out without a congressional declaration of war or without any real pushback by the judiciary.

The failure of Congress to carry out its duty to review Kavanaugh’s ability or lack thereof to interpret the constitution impartially was the more important story line in the confirmation process but it was ignored by the media. The other narrative that ran simultaneously, the purely political attempt made by the Democrats and some Republicans to destroy Kavanaugh as a person through the exploitation of random claims of sexual assault dating from more than thirty-five years ago, was an attempt to discredit the candidate that everyone knew right from the beginning could not be substantiated.

This all means that the important issue of Kavanaugh’s likely comportment as a judge was subjected to too little inquiry while his character as evidenced by tales from his past life received far too much attention. Ironically, the media, which has been frantically searching for an explanation for the breakdown of democracy in the United States, has been pillorying the Russians and more recently the Chinese for outside interference in the process, while ignoring the intense public dissatisfaction with the government it has been allowed to have by the Establishment, which is exemplified by the dystopic reality demonstrated by Kavanaugh. Some Americans would have rejected him based on his merits as a judge, but the case was not clearly made. Many instead came to view him as a victim of a vicious personal campaign and that was apparently enough to win confirmation, at least as reckoned by the calculus of those in Congress who cast the actual votes. In either case, the system failed to produce a good result and we only have our polarized and dysfunctional government to blame for that failure.

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

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As the 2018 U.S. midterm elections approach, there is still no evidence of ‘collusion’ between the campaign of President Donald J. Trump and the Russian government after nearly two years of inquiry. Thus far in the Department of Justice’s investigation led by Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, only a trail of corruption involving Trump associates has been discovered. None of their wrongdoings connect to the Russian nationals also indicted in the probe, including the illicit lobbying by former campaign chairman Paul Manafort in Ukraine which actually went against Russia’s interests on behalf of the EU. One can anticipate that more misdeeds by his cronies will be uncovered given that corruption in Washington grows on trees, some of which may even implicate Trump himself. However, if there were anything incriminating at the level of high treason, the likelihood that it wouldn’t have been unearthed already after such an exhaustive inquest relying on splitting hairs for indictments is slim.

The Kremlin has also fulfilled the need of a scapegoat across the Atlantic for the UK’s Brexit referendum. Mueller has examined emails from the shadowy British consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, but seemingly only to scrutinize whether they contain evidence of intrigue between Trump and Russia. The UK-based voter profiling company, chaired by former Trump campaign and Breitbart CEO Stephen K. Bannon and owned by the mysterious right-wing billionaire Robert Mercer, provided services for both the Trump and Brexit campaigns using the collected data of more than 80 million Facebook users for ‘electoral engineering.’ After the scandal broke, the firm was suspended by Facebook and then reported to have shut its doors. It quickly came to light that the company had merely re-branded itself under the handle Emerdata Ltd., now under the management of Mercer’s daughters Rebekah and Jennifer. It is even operating out of the same headquarters in London and although it is still under federal investigation, no criminal charges appear imminent against its previous incarnation. Cambridge Analytica denies breaking any laws but it is widely believed to have done so by electoral watchdog groups. Have there been no legal proceedings because the DOJ is prioritizing finding connections between Trump and Moscow?

Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie made several admissions about its activities. One significant disclosure was that its database building of social media users was assisted by employees of Palantir Technologies, the software company owned by pro-Trump billionaire, Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel.

A GOP mega-donor and Silicon Valley venture capitalist with close ties to Robert Mercer, Thiel was rewarded with a spot on the executive committee of Trump’s transition team after his surprising victory.

Palintir employees aided the firm in constructing ‘psychographs’ of voters based on their preferences, behavior, and internet activity in order to target them with advertising. Why on earth is Russia the center of the investigation and not the multiple private intelligence and data mining firms hired to stage-manage the election?

One possibility is because Palintir’s expertise has previously been employed for data scraping services by a range of powerful clients, including predictive-policing software for law enforcement and even the National Security Agency for developing its XKEYSCORE internet surveillance database. If election manipulation by the Trump campaign was facilitated by a company previously contracted by the Pentagon to weaponize data using social media as a global spy tool, it is easy to conclude why Russia would be a preferred suspect in the investigation. Only the naive could believe the Mueller inquiry represents anything other than the interests of the U.S. intelligence apparatus. After all, it is their unsubstantiated word alone that has been the entire source for the claims of Russia’s alleged interference.

Palintir also has an outpost in Tel Aviv, Israel. One of Trump’s most controversial foreign policy moves has been the abandonment of the Iran nuclear deal accord and it just so happens that the inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency used Palintir’s Mosaic software to ensure Tehran was in compliance.

If the President of the United States is openly supported by the billionaire supplying the technology to verify Iran is in accordance with the agreement and has campaigned vowing to sabotage it, how in the world is this ethical and not a conflict of interest? Shortly before the U.S. withdrawal, Trump even met with Thiel just hours after speaking with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu about Iran. Cambridge Analytica is also tied to Israel through private intelligence firm Wikistrat Inc. which offered the Trump campaign social media election manipulation services in a partnership. It is clear that any loose associations between the Kremlin and Trump have been overplayed in order to soft pedal the overwhelming influence by Israel. Meanwhile, Putin cannot even appear to rig the vote in his own country, as following Russia’s recent unpopular pension reforms his political party suffered losses in regional elections.

Christopher Wylie indeed testified that it was a Russian data scientist who authored the survey app which gathered the information used by Cambridge Analytica from millions of Facebook profiles. The psychology professor, Aleksandr Kogan, provided the data to Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL). Evidently, his research for the app through the University of St. Petersburg was funded using Russian government grants but Kogan, who is actually a Moldovan-born U.S. citizen, has done academic studies subsidized by the U.S., UK, Chinese and Canadian governments as well. The dots that have been connected to Russian intelligence possessing access to Kogan’s data are pure speculation, as are the claims that Kogan is a spy, a highly unlikely possibility considering he is still currently employed by the University of Cambridge.

What is more certain is Cambridge Analytica’s nefarious use of private information to target voters for the Trump and Leave.EU campaigns, but the Mueller team remains fixated on Moscow.

What are the consequences of this smokescreen? Steve Bannon has been free to move on from his ouster in the Trump administration to offer his prowess to far rightists around the world with the formation of an organization dubbed “The Movement.” Based in Belgium and co-founded with the country’s populist demagogue Mischaël Modrikamen, its stated aim is to prop up ultra nationalism across the EU before next year’s European Parliament elections. The shady organization is intended to be a right-wing equivalent of the Open Society Foundation by bolstering far right political movements from behind the scenes. Bannon’s modus operandi is in giving a businesslike and accessible polish to right-wing populism while placing greater emphasis on anti-immigration, the refugee crisis and Islamophobia. The Movement is consulting parties such as:

• Fidesz, party of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban
• The Italian League, party of Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini
• Alternative for Germany / Alternative  fur Deutschland (AfD)
• Sweden Democrats, third place in last month’s general election
• Dutch Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders and is the second largest party in the Netherlands House of Representatives
• Freedom Party of Austria
• Swiss People’s Party
• UK Independence Party (Ukip), Bannon is close colleagues with leader Nigel Farage
• National Front/National Rally (France) led by Marine Le Pen
• Belgium People’s Party
• VOX (Spain)

Prior to the Great Recession, far right political organizations had remained on the periphery for decades following the Second World War until the 2008 financial crash reintroduced the economic circumstances that gave rise to fascism in the 1930s. Suddenly, the far right began to flourish in countries hit hardest by the Eurozone’s debts. This development was simultaneous with the emergence of the Tea Party in the U.S. resurrecting the Gadsden banner. Golden Dawn made notable gains in the Greek parliament but their brand still resembled the anti-Semitic nationalists of Eastern Europe, a hard sell in the rest of the continent. When a further destabilized Middle East facilitated by Western interventionism led to a flux of migrants seeking refugee status in the EU, an opportunity arose for transformation of nationalism in Western and Southern Europe to an ‘accessible’ Islamophobic variety.

The distinguishing characteristic of this new wave of fascism is not just jettisoning of anti-Semitism, but strong support of the state of Israel. For instance, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) which is now the largest opposition party in the Bundestag is bankrolled by the pro-Israel Gatestone Institute and closely aligned with Netanyahu’s Likud party. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front (now known as National Rally) is historically anti-Semitic but has gradually shifted its agenda toward attacking Islam in recent decades as well. Steve Bannon himself even boasted he is an avowed “Judeo-Christian Zionist.” On the surface this disturbing alliance between Holocaust-denying figures like Viktor Orban and Israel may seem unlikely, it also makes perfect sense considering both Zionists and the extreme right hold the historical view that Jews are fundamentally non-native to Europe and they have a common civilizational ‘enemy’ in Islam.

Jair Bolsanaro with Steve Bannon

Bannon isn’t limiting his enterprise to the Northern Hemisphere either and has already exported it to the global south. It was recently reported that the former White House Chief Strategist is advising the campaign of the runoff winner for Brazil’s presidency, Jair Bolsanaro, who has been described as a “Brazilian Trump” and “Tropical Hitler” for his disparaging statements about women, gays, blacks and the country’s indigenous minority. Bolsanaro has also expressed nostalgia for the military dictatorship that lasted more than two decades in Brazil after a 1964 U.S.-backed coup. Bolsanaro has been such a paralyzing figure in Brazilian politics, he was hospitalized after a knife stabbing at a campaign event last month. Historically, fascism and South America are no strangers — following WWII, it was Argentina under Juan Perón which provided secret safe harbor to Nazi war criminals such as Adolf Eichmann and Auschwitz physician Josef Mengele.

With no end or likely impeachment in sight, it is clear that the media and public have been diverted toward a ruse contrived by the U.S. intelligence community. The entire premise of the Russia investigation ostensibly presumes its own conclusion, searching for the missing pieces to a preconstructed narrative rather than determining what actually transpired. It has all the hallmarks of a counterintelligence PSY-OP, designed to commandeer public disapproval of Trump into serving the State Department’s objective of undermining Russia and sabotaging even the most modest efforts to be diplomatic with Moscow. The media and establishment can hardly contain their contempt for the working class in the theft of their agency, as if none of their grievances which the extreme right has capitalized on could be legitimate. Still, if it were to be determined that the election was compromised by the likes of Cambridge Analytica and Palintir instead of the Kremlin, it would remain a distraction from underlying causes.

The global economic downturn is what has nurtured the far right, but its rebirth in Europe truly originates with the fall of the Soviet Union. In 1989, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously hypothesized in The End of History and the Last Man that Karl Marx had been proven wrong that communism would replace capitalism with the advent of liberal democracy. Fukuyama wrote:

“What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

If socialism failed, almost thirty years later it appears that so too are capitalism and liberal democracy. We were told the fall of communism was the ‘end of history’, and there were no longer any further steps in humanity’s evolutionary process. Once a celebrated figure, what Fukuyama wrote then can only be interpreted today as a colossally failed prediction by an intellectual charlatan. Both a resurgence of socialism as well as a potential descent into fascist barbarism are back on the table in our present historical moment.

Last month, the media was enthralled by the collective laughter of the international community at Trump’s embarrassing speech to the United Nations General Assembly that seemed to all but confirm the dismantling of U.S. hegemony. While Trump made clear his ultra-nationalist departure from his predecessors in denouncing “the ideology of globalism”, per usual the presstitutes overlooked one of the address’s most significant moments when he stated:

“Virtually everywhere socialism or communism has been tried, it has produced suffering, corruption, and decay. Socialism’s thirst for power leads to expansion, incursion, and oppression. All nations of the world should resist socialism.”

That Trump devoted a portion of his tirade to denounce socialism is remarkable and a virtual admittance that the ruling classes are trembling that it is no longer a dirty word in the Western lexicon. On the one hand, because capitalism is in a crisis large sections of the working class are desperately turning to a far-right appealing to their popular anger at the elite and prejudices against migrants. Capitalism has historically kept the far right on life support in reserve for absorbing revolt in its periods of crisis to be misdirected into jingoism and scapegoating, an opposition much easier to control. If the far right today is ascendant, so too is socialism which must seize upon the class struggle that has once again returned to the forefront determining political life. If liberal democracy speaks of the ‘end of history’, fascism represents the end of humanism in its hostility to culture and civilization, no matter how new and improved its image. History is indeed repeating itself. As the great Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano once said in what could have been a rebuttal to Fukuyama’s thesis —“History never really says goodbye. It says, ‘see you later.’”

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Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in publications such as The Greanville Post, Global Research, OffGuardian, CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, Signs of the Times, and more. Read him on Medium. Max may be reached at [email protected]

The Mainstream Media is approaching a very slippery slope after insinuating that Chinese citizens are loyal to the Communist Party of China first and foremost above any and all of their other duties, and that failure to obey Beijing could lead to them “disappearing” regardless of how high-profile of an international individual they may be.

Details are still emerging about the case of former Interpol chief Meng Hongwei who Chinese officials finally confirmed was detained in his home country late last month and is being investigated for corruption. He also supposedly resigned from his post despite not (at least yet) being found guilty of anything, which has led to speculation that he might have been pressured to do so by the authorities. Whatever it is that may or may not be going on, and it’ll probably take some time for all of the facts to be released, the Mainstream Media wasted no time in spreading dangerous insinuations that could quickly lead down the slippery slope of discrimination or worse.

ABC News ran a report from the Associated Press that quoted Willy Lam, a Chinese politics expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, who went on record as saying that

“Meng’s case shows how Chinese officials, no matter where they are, have to obey the Communist Party first and foremost.”

This came out the same day as a New York Times piece that cited Michael Caster, a researcher and human rights advocate in Bangkok who studies China’s legal system, who encouraged the reader to “Imagine if China were to somehow, someday, get a U.N. secretary general, and then he too one day disappeared”. The innuendo is that all Chinese citizens across the world have to follow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), or else.

Taken to its “logical conclusion”, this narrative could be expanded to include anyone with family living in China too, including members of the Chinese diaspora born abroad who aren’t citizens of their ancestors’ homeland. The implied idea is that the Chinese are just as “untrustworthy” as Catholics and Jews, both of whom persistent stereotypes paint as being “secretly loyal” to the Vatican and “Israel” above all else, just like the developing one seeks to do regarding Chinese and the CCP. This sentiment was already practiced to genocidal effect during the Old Cold War when Indonesian usurper Suharto presided over the killing of at least half a million Chinese on the alleged basis that they were all “communist subversives”.

Nobody needs to be reminded of the dangers of irresponsibly attaching a label to any identity group simply because some of their representatives might conform to a prejudiced stereotype, but that’s precisely what might be about to happen to the Chinese after the Mainstream Media’s insinuations. The Trump Administration even reportedly considered banning Chinese students from the country out of fear that they’re infiltrating America as spies, and this initiative might receive a second wind if neoconservative officials exploit Meng’s situation to argue for its revival on national security grounds. Last week’s accusations about an unprecedentedly expansive Chinese espionage operation could also add fuel to this fire.

The end result is that the Chinese are at risk of being treated as second-class citizens in the West simply because of the insinuations that are being levelled against them for purportedly being susceptible to blackmail by the CCP. The anti-communist McCarthyism of the Old Cold War is giving rise to an anti-Chinese variant in the New Cold War that also combines with the legacy of its predecessor to form an ethno-ideological cocktail of potential discrimination in the future. History is replete with regrettable examples of what happens whenever an entire people are targeted based on their identity, and while it’s unlikely that an Indonesian-like genocide of the Chinese will ever repeat itself, the world would do well to not run that risk again.

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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.

After votes were counted last Sunday and confirmed a second round between Brazilian presidential candidates Fernando Haddad (Workers’ Party – PT) and Jair Bolsonaro (Social Liberal Party – PSL), a member of the national board of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) João Pedro Stedile spoke with Brasil de Fato Radio about the next steps in Brazil’s presidential elections, saying voters will now have the opportunity to learn more details about the platforms and interests each candidate represents.

Stedile argued it is necessary to show people that Bolsonaro’s economic plan, devised by ultra neoliberal economist Paulo Guedes, includes raising taxes on the poor and reducing them on the weathy.

He said Bolsonaro is getting a lot of votes because he claims to be an “anti-system candidate,” even though, right now, he is the one representing capital the most.

Even in case of a democratic defeat, Stedile believes it will be possible to carry on a progressive political struggle. “In case of an eventual Bolsonaro administration, there is no reason for despair. Contradictions will increase, problems will increase. We must strengthen our grassroots work, our ideological work. Strengthen the work toward resistance.”

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Brasil de Fato (BdF): What is your take on this Sunday’s elections?

João Pedro Stedile (JPS): Well, there was a scenario where voters wanted change. To change what they saw in old politics. Old politicians. And, in a way, the elections did not follow so much the strength of traditional parties. And that change was found in Lula [da Silva]. Unfortunately, the dictatorship of the court system, clearly breaking the laws of this country, barred Lula from running. [If it hadn’t done that], at this point, we would be celebrating his outright victory in the first round.

Bolsonaro, in a way, was appealing to these nonpolitical, nonpartisan voters who wanted change from the beginning. So he managed to galvanize the idea that he is the anti-system candidate, even though, right now, he is the one representing the Brazilian bourgeoisie, capital, and this political system of domination.

He made it into the second round exactly because he has the ideological skill to fool the poor and say, “I’m against the rich.” He replicates, in a way, the role [Fernando] Collor played in 1989, when, as a legitimate representative of Globo [Brazil’s largest media conglomerate], he made that speech against the ‘maharajahs,’ fooled the poor and defeated Lula in the elections.

There were surprises, especially unpleasant ones, in [the elections for] the Senate, because we lost several valuable [candidates for] senators that proved to be, in the latest term, fighters against the coup and all this attack against national sovereignty. But, on the other hand, they also lost [names] that represented the oligarchy.

BdF: Haddad won in most northeastern states. How do you see this victory?

JPS: There is no surprise in the Northeast. When we look back at previous elections, that happened with Lula as well. I think that, in the runoff, it is not going to be about parties. Of course Haddad will have to negotiate with parties, especially the PDT [Ciro Gomes’ party]. Of course there will be conversations between parties, but that is not what is going to make up voters’ minds.

Fernando Haddad, presidential candidate for the Workers’ Party, election night rally in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Sunday, Oct. 7, 2018.

I think that, in the runoff, it is not going to be about regions. What it is going to be about is a battle between projects and classes. Haddad won in the Northeast, but not because they live in the Northeast. It’s because there are poor people there whose lives changed with the Lula and Dilma [Rousseff] administrations, and therefore they raised their class consciousness.

As now it’s only two candidates [running in the second round], it is clear that it’s about two projects. Bolsonaro, despite his hypocritical speech, obviously represents this country’s reactionary forces. It’s not a coincidence that most of the armed forces support him, most members of the military police support him, most bankers, represented by [his economic guru] Paulo Guedes – who is a partner at the investment bank Bozano. So I think it will become clearer to the people. And that is what I hope Haddad can explain to the people. More than being a spokesman for Lula, he has to be a spokesman for the working class.

BdF: Will this argument, showing the project that Bolsonaro represents, produce results on the ballot?

JPS: It has to. After all, in the first round, Bolsonaro hid behind the stabbing incident.

BdF: And what is the role of the activists in this process?

JPS: First, let’s keep showing the powers that are behind Bolsonaro. He is being provided intelligence services from abroad, which means the power of international capital is backing him. Just like it is necessary to expose all these bots, which we know cost a lot of money, and which he is using to make a media warfare online.

We have to show the people, we have to engage with workers, with the poor. And to do that, we have to use arguments, facts. We have to tell people not to fear – because they are using fear a lot – and show that, even though Bolsonaro has fascist ideas, there is no fascist movement in Brazil. There is no grassroots movement in society for fascism in Brazil.

BdF: Is it surprising that Bolsonaro won in the North? Is that connected to his alliances with the ruralist lobby?

JPS: The Center-West and North regions of Brazil are where latifundia [system of large estates and big monoculture] are very hegemonic in society. It’s not just that they win the elections: they rule the churches, it’s where security forces barracks are, they rule society’s life. It’s very hard for the Left to thrive there, because there is no working class. The working class migrates, they come looking for jobs in the Southeast or other regions.

That does not worry me. What worries me is that, now, in the second round, we have to do grassroots work, go door to door, hold meetings at parishes, at churches, call progressive ministers to explain to the people that voting for Bolsonaro is voting for LP gas price hikes, rental price hikes, bus fare hikes. And, looking at Brazil’s map to see how contradictory that is, most governors [who won outright majority in the first round] are progressive. So we are good with candidates for governor. That does not mean that people drank a ‘fascism tea’ and is now voting for fascism.

BdF: Most people who vote for Bolsonaro are thinking about change, but it’s only a small part that really agrees with his more aggressive views.

JPS: You’re right. Bolsonaro’s big strength is that he was able to mobilize activists, military police officers, the Armed Forces, especially retired officers, most of the Freemasonry, and these intelligence services that helped him online [with a strong campaign on social media and messaging apps]. Just like they managed to convince some ministers, who are not evangelical at all in the sense of the gospel, who are spreading fake news, [talking about] topics such as gay marriage to terrorize people who have conservative values, and ministers who openly campaigned for Bolsonaro. That explains why Marina [Silva]’s campaign melted down.

BdF: What are the possible challenges of a Bolsonaro or Haddad administration?

JPS: In case we have a Bolsonaro-led government, there is no reason for us to despair. On the contrary. We must strengthen our grassroots work, strengthen our ideological work, strengthen our political power in other spaces in order to be in opposition. So, if we lose space in the executive branch, that will be a reason for us to be more careful in the political struggle: replenish our energy to develop people’s communication outlets, to be able to convey the ideas of the working class and how the working class collectively understands the political scenario. They don’t have a platform for Brazil. A Bolsonaro-led government will mean four years of deep crisis.

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Featured image is from Brasil de Fato.

Our good friend Dave Hooper, who created the 2014 hit documentary The Anatomy of a Great Deception, is making a “Part 2.” He’s already filmed most of it, and it’ll be released in September 2019!

Millions of people around the world have seen “AGD 1.” If you’re one of them, you probably agree that it’s one of the best films ever made for waking up new audiences to the truth about the events of September 11, 2001.

Its power lies in Dave’s heartfelt tale of how he learned the awful truth that he’d been deceived about 9/11 — the most seminal event of the 21st century. He uses his personal process of discovery to guide viewers through an accessible but technically sophisticated presentation of the World Trade Center evidence.

Watch the trailer of The Anatomy of a Great Deception – Part 1

In AGD 2, Dave steps up his analysis by digging even deeper into how such a massive deception was pulled off. He also updates viewers on his personal struggles and victories, providing a powerful cathartic experience for 9/11 activists and a sympathetic, relatable portrait for people who have yet to go down this rabbit hole.

Dave’s first film was a smash hit by any measure. It received 30 million views on the Internet and sold tens of thousands of DVDs. But he’s aiming even higher for the sequel: theatrical, digital, and guerilla DVD distribution that will reach an audience of millions even before it’s posted online in 2020.

Watch the trailer of The Anatomy of a Great Deception – Part 2

Today, I’m urging you, as a fellow 9/11 Truth activist, to help Dave complete Part 2 and make its release next September a resounding success.

Please go to Dave’s Indiegogo page, check out the new trailer videos, and donate whatever you can. With a contribution of $29 or more, Dave will send you an autographed DVD before the 9/11 anniversary. Invest $109 in his vision, and he’ll send you six autographed DVDs to share with friends and family — just as the film is premiering in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco next September.

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This article was originally published on ae911truth.org.

The CDC (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) was born, just like the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), as an important regulatory agency of the United States government that was intended to regulate various corrupt and monopoly-seeking industries that could harm the environment and/or the health of individuals and other weaker entities that had no other way to protect themselves from the dangerous practices of any number of powerful industries.  

Tragically, over the past couple of generations (particularly since the presidency of Ronald Reagan), both the CDC and the FDA have come under the tight control of many Big Pharma and Big Vaccine corporations (and their Big Bank lenders and lobbying groups) while at the same time abandoning their original charge of protecting the people from the consequences of corporate greed. 

The multibillionaire and multimillionaire owners, investors, lobbying groups and think tanks have become grotesquely wealthy and powerful because of their ownership and/or investments in a multitude of profitable, highly secretive, non-elected and anti-democratic entities that are over-charging for their often toxic and often addictive products that often sicken the users with toxic side effects, drug-drug or vaccine-vaccine interactions, all of which are actually iatrogenic disorders (= doctor- or drug-caused).

The control that those private/corporate/non-elected entities have acquired is easily seen in the day-to-day actions of the corporate-influenced Presidency, the corporate-influenced Congress and the corporate-influenced Supreme Court, all of which seem to be doing the biding of whatever entities will sustain Wall Street’s and War Street’s grotesque profit-making actions. 

There should be no surprise why many governmental entities, many of our regulatory agencies, Big Pharma, Big Vaccine, Wall Street, etc have lost a lot of credibility among the populace. But in today’s column I want to focus on the CDC, which annually deals in 4 billion dollar’s worth of vaccines every year and owns dozens of vaccine-related patents that might make the CDC a lot of money in the future. 

The CDC is no longer an un-biased entity that is supposed to protect the citizenry from sociopathic corporations. As a matter of fact, the CDC actually acts a lot like such a corporation. A good example is the annual push by the CDC to get everybody in America to get their influenza vaccines, despite the powerful (and often censored-out) evidence that influenza vaccines can be harmful while offering little or no benefit.

One starting point in the debate over the logic of getting annual intramuscular injections of flu vaccines is the reality of Influenza-Like Illnesses (ILI), which comprise 80% of all “flu-like” illnesses that the CDC, Big Medicine and the mainstream media call “the flu” but is actually only “the flu” less than 20% of the time. 

ILI is a transient respiratory illness that can be mild, moderate or severe and is usually accompanied by a body temperature (sometimes with chills) greater than 100˚F, a cough and/or sore throat, a runny or stuffy nose, muscle aches, headaches, fatigue and no other known causes for the symptoms. Diarrhea or other gastrointestinal symptoms are not part of an ILI. 

ILI is an intermittently-common seasonal syndrome that is best prevented by a combination of good nutrition, good hygiene and avoidance of exposure to virus-shedding individuals. Only in a small minority of instances (see chart below) is the illness prevented by “getting your damn flu shot”. 

The actual viruses that cause ILI (usually NOT actual influenza viruses) can only be positively-identified when appropriate costly laboratory tests are done, which doesn’t often happen outside of hospital ER settings because of the high costs. In 2017, Blue Cross reimbursed Medicare $571 (!) for a single Multiplex PCR (Polymerase Chain Reaction) Viral Panel test (CPT code = #87633). Since failure to do a PCR test precludes making a precise diagnosis, the CDC and state Departments of Health take the easy data-gathering route by “assuming” (and then readily publishing) that every ILI is actually a case of influenza! GIGO (Garbage In/Garbage Out) 

GIGO: Comparing ILIs (influenza-like illnesses) with MLIs (measles-like illnesses)

The same GIGO reality happens whenever there is a mini-epidemic of any illness that the CDC wants to propagandize. A good example was the “measles” outbreak that happened a few years ago at California’s Disney Land. The cluster of cases was actually a group of “measles-like illnesses” (MLI).  PCR tests apparently were not done on all the subjects and so the CDC falsely “assumed” (and then published) that whatever MLIs occurred were “vaccine-preventable” illnesses. PCR tests are not often thoroughly done before the CDC makes use of such propaganda-worthy opportunities that will benefit the CDC and its corporate partners. And the media happily goes along with the charade by over-reporting and over-emphasizing the story. 

When PCR studies are actually done in any ILI outbreak, influenza viral infections are usually only identified in less than 25% of patients. The differential diagnosis for ILI syndromes is large. Some of the possibilities, most of which are not even theoretically “vaccine-preventable” – much less medically-treatable – include the following conditions:

Adenovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, human metapneumovirus, HIV, EBV, CMV, viral meningitis or viral or inflammatory encephalitis, West Nile virus, Chickungunya virus, Dengue virus and non-infectious causes such as arthritis, myositis, dermatitis, and oral ulcers.

Of course, no differential diagnostic list on a patient chart is complete until the possible iatrogenic causes of ILI are listed. 

Iatrogenic illnesses can be caused by any number of prescription drugs and prescribed vaccines, especially when they are used in drug-drug combinations or vaccine cocktails, none of which have ever been adequately tested for safety or even efficacy. 

The potentially toxic ingredients (such as mercury, aluminum, live viruses, etc.) that are in many vaccines are known to actually cause influenza-like symptoms. Here is a list of some of the published adverse effects of typical CDC-approved influenza vaccines: 

Headache, fever, nausea, muscle aches, weakness, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, dizzyness, hoarseness, wheezing, hives and soreness, redness, and/or swelling from the shot.”

There are many “white lies” that most “healthcare” reporters tell their readers when their editors order them to help the CDC promote its annual “get your damn flu shot” campaign every fall. Among the many untruths is the lie that 36,000 Americans die of influenza every year. The truth of the matter is that the CDC has always lumped the much larger number of pneumonia deaths with the small number of influenza deaths and then mis-represented the number as influenza deaths!! Just another example of GIGO as investigative reporter Jon Rappaport has written: 

“The CDC says that 36,000 people die from the flu every year in the US, but actually, it’s closer to 20. However, we can’t admit that, because if we did, we’d be exposing the (CDC’s) gigantic psy-op. The whole campaign to scare people into getting a flu shot would have about the same effect as warning people to carry iron umbrellas, in case toasters fall out of upper-story windows.”

Another “white lie” that promotes the flu shot campaign is the use of the vaccine efficacy (VE) figure. When such figures are used, percentages like “50% effective” are used to make the vaccine sound good, whereas that number is a miserably low, deceptive “relative risk” figure. Big Pharma corporations, sociopathic entities that they are, always use RRR when they want to make a new drug sound far more effective to its physician-prescribers than it actually is. Check out this common subterfuge by reading an article that I wrote on the subject here.

In that article I revealed how Big Pharma’s common use of the relative risk reduction (RRR) allowed Merck to fooled everybody – especially us physicians – by claiming that their block-buster osteoporosis drug Fosamax (and probably all the “me-too” drugs as well) was 50% effective (an RRR statistic) in reducing bone fractures. 

However, in Merck’s own raw statistics, it was clear that patients who took the drug for 4 years actually had a miniscule 1-2% absolute risk reduction (AAR) in the incidence of fractures. The 1-2% figure, which would have sunk the product (and the related bone density screening industry) if it was ever revealed, is actually a negative number, especially when the high cost of the drug and its unadvertised risks are considered – such as the incurable, iatrogenic, Fosamax-induced, disastrous osteonecrosis of the jaw.

The most important white lie that is told to us naïve consumers of vaccines is actually the censored-out facts about how the ingredients of America’s annual flu vaccine are chosen. A committee of the CDC meets every early spring to look at the strains of influenza that were most commonly identified in Australia’s “flu season” the year before (the southern hemisphere’s winter flu season occurs during our northern hemisphere’s summer season).

The unproven supposition is that the flu viruses that infected Australians the year before will be the same ones that we Americans will be facing. Then samples of the 3 or 4 live influenza viruses most likely to be epidemic (out of over 100 known viruses that could have been chosen) will be collected and grown in Big Vaccine’s chicken egg labs until enough of the viruses is obtained and then added to the toxic brew that will be included -with finger’s crossed – in next fall’s vaccine vials. Of course, there is never any assurance to potential vaccines that there will be a match. In fact, the odds are against any match in any given year.

So I suppose the lesson to any given patient or parent of a potential vaccine (or a physician, nurse practitioner or nurse) is to know everything possible about the actual risks and benefits of any intramuscular vaccination by studying the information above and below before going to the pharmacy or clinic and offering your arm (or thigh, in the case of small infants). 

Definitions (from GGK):

Vaccine efficacy (VE) is the percentage reduction in a particular disease outcome in vaccinated compared to unvaccinated individuals. (For example, a VE of 60% means that vaccinated people have a 60% (relative) reduction in their risk of a given outcome compared to unvaccinated people. Ex: After last year’s flu season was over, the VE for flu shots was calculated in one study as being a miserable 9%, and that is a relative risk reduction figure.!!

The Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV) is the number of individuals that must be vaccinated for an expected benefit to be attained in one individual. Mathematically, the NNV is expressed as a ratio of 1 divided by the Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR). 

The very similar Number Needed to Treat (NNT) is the number of individuals that must be treated with a drug or surgery that results in benefit to one individual. It is the inverse of ARR. The larger the NNV (or NNT) is, the more useless is the vaccine (or drug).

The Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) signifies the true difference in the reduction in risk between unvaccinated (or untreated) and vaccinated (or treated) individuals. (The ARR is vastly more meaningful than the widely used and very deceptive Relative Risk Reduction [RRR] figure., which is seriously deceptive.) 

(More helpful information:  From the American Academy of Pediatrics journal Pediatrics – September 2014, Volume 134 / Issue 3)

Severe Complications in Influenza-like Illnesses

By Rakesh D. Mistry, Jason B. Fischer, Priya A. Prasad, Susan E. Coffin, Elizabeth R. Alpern

Below is a pie graph depicting the PCR results that were published in the above journal article about Influenza-like Illnesses. Note that actual influenza was only diagnosed in 19% of the patients represented in the graph: 

Only 19% of the patients with “influenza-like illnesses” in the study actually had influenza. Interestingly, 57% of the patients with actual influenza had had their routine seasonal influenza vaccinations but had not been protected by the shot.

55% of the study patients that had influenza-like illnesses (but not actual influenza) had likewise not been protected by the flu shot. And of course, every person in the above study that had been intramuscularly-injected with the vaccine could have suffered significant adverse effects.

Relevant quotes

“6000 to 32,000 hospital workers would need to be vaccinated (with an influenza vaccine) before a single patient death would be averted.” (That is, the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV) for hospital healthcare workers to prevent one patient from dying because of influenza contagion from an un-vaccinated worker is as high as 32,000!) — see this

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair

“If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been “taken”. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” — Carl Sagan, – author of “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”

The Semmelweis Reflex: “The reflex-like tendency to reject new evidence or new knowledge because it contradicts established norms, beliefs or paradigms.” — see this

“A recent study by the world-renowned immunologist Dr. H. Hugh Fudenberg found that adults vaccinated yearly for five years in a row with the flu vaccine had a 10-fold increased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease. He attributes this to the mercury and aluminum in the vaccine. Interestingly, both of these metals have been shown to activate microglia and increase excitotoxicity in the brain.” — Russell Blaylock, MD

“We already know that the aluminum content of brain tissue in late-onset or sporadic Alzheimer’s disease is significantly higher than is found in age-matched controls. So, individuals who develop Alzheimer’s disease in their late sixties and older also accumulate more aluminum in their brain tissue than individuals of the same age without the disease.

“Even higher levels of aluminum have been found in the brains of individuals, diagnosed with an early-onset form of sporadic (usually late onset) Alzheimer’s disease, who have experienced an unusually high exposure to aluminum through the environment (e.g. Camelford) or through their workplace. This means that Alzheimer’s disease has a much earlier age of onset, for example, fifties or early sixties, in individuals who have been exposed to unusually high levels of aluminum in their everyday lives.”  – Christopher Exley, PhD

“In the field of chemical toxicology it is universally recognized that combinations of toxins may bring exponential increases of toxicity; ie, a combination of two chemicals may bring a 10-fold increase in toxicity, three chemicals 100-fold increases. This same principle almost certainly applies to the immunosuppressive effects of viral vaccines when administered in combination, as with the MMR vaccine, among which the measles vaccine is (known to be) exceptionally immunosuppresive.” – Harold Buttram, MD

“[According to CDC statistics], ‘influenza and pneumonia’ took 62,034 lives in 2001 – 61,777 of which were attributable to pneumonia and 257 to flu, and in only 18 cases was the flu virus positively identified.” – Dr Peter Doshi, from in his 2005 BMJ report, titled, “Are US flu death figures more PR than science?” (BMJ 2005; 331:1412)

“The most lucrative areas of medicine are the most corrupted by financial (and academic) conflicts of interest. So-called ‘authoritative’ sources of medical information are thoroughly corrupted not only by pharmaceutical industry manipulation but also by government officials and financially conflicted academic gatekeepers of medical science, ’expert’ panels, medical journal editors and the largely corrupted vaccine information base.” – Vera Sharav, MD

“For a long time no one considered the effect of repeated vaccinations on the brain. This was based on a mistaken conclusion that the brain was protected from immune activation by its special protective gateway called the blood-brain barrier. More recent studies have shown that immune cells can enter the brain directly, and more importantly, the brain’s own special immune system can be activated by vaccination.” – Russell Blaylock, MD

More important quotes about vaccine effectiveness are posted here)

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Dr. Kohls is a retired family physician from Duluth, MN, USA. Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice (in 2008), 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

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; and

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles