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The pulse of negotiations, a flurry of communications, and the person central to this is one who threatens to go nowhere – for the moment.  But go somewhere these parties would wish Julian Assange to do.  For six years, cramped within a space in London a stone’s throw away from Harrods, one he has made his tenuous home, a citadel of sporadic publishing and exposes; for six years, an unruly, disobedient tenant whose celebrity shine has lost its gloss for certain followers and those who did, at one point, tolerate him.

The landlords have lost patience, and Lenín Moreno is willing to call in the arrears.  He has made it clear that, whilst Assange has been subjected to an unacceptable state of affairs (“Being five or six years in an embassy already violates his human rights”), he should also be moved on in some form with the British authorities.  How that moving takes place is producing a host of large, ballooning questions.

Ultimately, the current Ecuadorean leadership finds little to merit Assange’s effort.  He intrudes into the political affairs of other countries with audacity; he disturbs and interrupts the order of things with relish and, for those reasons, ought to be regarded with suspicion. 

“I don’t agree with what he does,” Moreno is on record as saying.  “It is somewhat disgusting to see someone violating people’s right to communicate privately.” 

Moreno, despite being classed as a protégé of his predecessor Rafael Correa, has done his level best to spruce up the country’s image for the United States whose Vice President, Mike Pence, duly acknowledged on a visit in June this year. He has moved on former figures within the previous administration, including Correa, claiming instances of corruption and crime.  Previous contracts made with Chinese companies are also being scrutinised for their value. 

Moreno is prudish and inaccurate on the issue of private communications and the WikiLeaks experiment. What he ignores is the driving rationale for the spicy vigilantism of the publishing outfit, an attempt to subvert a certain order of power that was crying out for a revision. This revision, applied through the lens of transparency, would arm the weak and powerless with knowledge while defending their privacy.  The powerful and brutish, on the other hand, must be kept exposed, under a form of public surveillance and permanent review.  Transparency for the powerful; privacy for the powerless.   

The asymmetrical order of information, however, lauds the reverse of this. States are patriarchs beyond scrutiny; they dispense, with occasional bad grace, the odd favour that entitles the public to see its activities.  Freedom of information statutes and regulations give the impression that the public are, somehow, entitled to see material that is supposedly their resource. (How condescending to tell citizens that they have a resource that can only be accessed carefully, via suspicious gatekeepers obsessed with national security.)  

In return, these gorged bureaucracies conduct surveillance upon their citizens with a sneering conviction, and ensure that a fictional public interest is deployed against those who would dare air the cupboard of skeletons. 

The current state of negotiations are blurry.  On Wednesday, Moreno claimed that Ecuadorean and British officials were nattering over permitting Assange to leave the embassy “in the medium term”.  His lawyers have been notified of the process, but nothing else is forthcoming.   

What tends to be written about Assange is itself a product of the dissimulation that he has attempted to banish from political conservation.  His variant of the Midas touch is less turning things to gold than simulacrums of truth.  A piece on the Australian SBS site notes how, “Previous sexual assault charges filed against him in Sweden have been dropped.”  The stopper here is that he was never charged, being merely a subject of interest who needed to be questioned.  The rest is an awkward, concocted silence.

Assange, more significantly for the geopolitical boffins, took a dump in the imperium’s gold water closet, and now faces the consequences.  It has come in drips and drabs: cutting off internet access on March 27; restricting visitors and the access of journalists.  Moreno himself has suggested that Assange stop what he does best: express unsavoury opinions.  Should Assange promise “to stop emitting opinions on the politics of friendly nations like Spain or the United States then we have no problem with him going online.”  Turning Assange into a eunuch of public affairs is a top priority.    

Moreno’s predecessors have shaken their heads in disbelief at the treatment being dished out to the Australian publisher.  To ban visitors, argued Correa, was “a clear violation of his rights.  Once we give asylum to someone, we are responsible for his safety, for ensuring humane living conditions.” (It should be noted that Correa himself authorised a temporary suspension of internet access to Assange in 2016, a brief measure taken to stem the publisher’s zeal in attacking Hillary Clinton during the US presidential elections.) 

This will be a slow torture, a cruel process of breaking down resistance.  The issue in such cases is to avoid going potty and losing all sense of bearing.  Should Assange even maintain a sense of psychic composure after this relentless attempt to dissolve his will, history should record it as one of those infrequent secular miracles that the human spirit can provide.

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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. Email: [email protected]

Iran’s nuclear program is the most intensively monitored on the planet. It has no military component, no credible evidence suggesting otherwise.

All the huffing, puffing and posturing histrionics by Netanyahu and other Iranophobes can’t refute cold hard facts.

IAEA officials have unimpeded access to all Iranian sites designated for inspection.

Twelve consecutive agency reports unequivocally affirmed full Iranian compliance with JCPOA provisions. No Islamic Republic nuclear weapons program exists. No credible evidence suggests its leadership or military intends one.

Claims otherwise are bald-faced lies. On Thursday, Netanyahu once again used the UN General Assembly as a platform to turn truth on its head about Iran.

He was silent about Israel’s open secret. It’s the only nuclear armed and dangerous regional state. The whole world knows what he and other Israeli officials won’t openly admit.

In a 2012 General Assembly address, Netanyahu made a fool of himself before a world audience. His cartoon bomb presentation on Iran bombed.

So did his Wednesday presentation, a litany of beginning-to-end Big Lies.

Netanyahu:

“We opposed (the JCPOA) because the deal paved Iran’s path to a nuclear arsenal.”

“And by lifting the sanctions, it fueled Iran’s campaign of carnage and conquest throughout the Middle East.”

“We oppose it because the deal was based on a fundamental lie that Iran is not seeking to develop nuclear weapons.”

Fact: The world community, including leaders and diplomats attending the UNGA session, knows all of the above accusations are disgraceful bald-faced lies.

Not a shred of credible evidence supports them. Plenty of evidence debunks them, notably from IAEA inspectors.

Watch below Netanyahu’s speech at the UNGA.

Last May, coincidentally with Trump’s JCPOA pullout, Netanyahu claimed Israel has thousands of incriminating documents, charts, presentations, photos and videos, showing Tehran lied for years to the international community.

Without credible evidence backing his announcement, he falsely claimed Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program called Project Amad – to “design, produce and test 5 warheads, each of 10 kilotons TNT yield for integration on a missile.”

He turned truth on its head, claiming Iran built a secret underground facility for developing nuclear cores and implosion systems.

Intensive IAEA inspections refuted him, an agency statement repeatedly stating that

“Iran is (fully) implementing its nuclear-related commitments.”

Time and again, Netanyahu turns truth on its head about Iran. His dissembling wore thin long ago. His Wednesday theatrics once again backfired, a clearly understood exercise of Iranophobic deception – new accusations as fabricated as earlier ones.

Netanyahu:

“Today I’m disclosing for the first time that Iran has another secret facility in Tehran. A secret atomic warehouse for storing massive amounts of equipment and material for Iran’s secret nuclear weapons program.”

Fact: Not a shred of credible evidence supports his fabricated accusation.

Press TV called his Wednesday theatrics a “new vaudeville” act “without providing any proof to support his claims” because none exists.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif blasted him, saying

“the boy who can’t stop crying wolf is at it again.”

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said his presentation failed to mention full Iranian compliance with JCPOA provisions.

In late August, Netanyahu disgracefully threatened Iran with “atomic annihilation,” adding “our enemies know very well what Israel is capable of doing” – virtually admitting that the Jewish state is nuclear armed and dangerous.

At the time, Zarif tweeted:

“Iran, a country without nuclear weapons, is threatened with atomic annihilation by a warmonger standing next to an actual (Dimona) nuclear weapons factory,” adding:

His remarks were “beyond shameless…No arts and craft show will ever obfuscate that Israel is only regime in our region with a secret and undeclared nuclear weapons program — including an actual atomic arsenal.”

“Time for Israel to fess up and open its illegal nuclear weapons program to international inspectors.

Israel refuses to join the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran a signatory country since 1968 when NPT was opened for signatures.

The Islamic Republic fully complies with its provisions. The US and Israel flagrantly breach them unaccountably.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

The recently published, U.S.-financed report on South Sudan’s brutal conflict is just another dramatic illustration of how the U.S. publicly laments violence it has helped to create and perpetuate while obfuscating the sordid legacy of its foreign interventions.

A new report financed by the U.S. government on the state of South Sudan’s civil war has found that the conflict has resulted in the deaths of nearly 400,000 people since it began five years ago, indicating that past statistics had severely underestimated the death toll.

Yet, while the U.S.-funded report bemoans the situation in Africa’s youngest country, it fails to acknowledge the U.S.’ role in igniting the conflict, which largely resulted from the U.S.’ 2011 intervention in Sudan that led to the country’s partition and later to the current chaos that has now claimed hundreds of thousands of lives.

The report, published by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and funded by the U.S. Institute of Peace, revealed on Wednesday that at least 382,900 people in South Sudan have died as a result of the conflict in the country. About half of the deaths resulted from ethnic violence while the remaining deaths were caused by the increased risk of disease and reduced access to health care — underscoring the drastic effect the fighting has had on the country’s infrastructure.

The statistics provided in the report are astronomical compared to past estimates of the death toll resulting from the conflict, as past estimates claimed that the death toll stood at around 50,000. Yet, as the new report reveals, the actual death toll is more than seven times higher than past estimates.

Illuminating but leaving much in the dark

While the U.S.-funded report seems to be the first of its kind to more accurately record the massive toll the war has taken on the people of South Sudan, it unsurprisingly fails to acknowledge the U.S.’ role in perpetuating as well as creating the conflict.

This is likely a result of the U.S. Institute of Peace having funded the project, as that organization — much like the related organization, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) — promotes the role of the U.S. as benevolent global hegemon in “managing international conflicts.” In other words, the USIP — currently headed by former National Security Adviser under George W. Bush and Raytheon board member Stephen Hadley (image on the right)— sees American foreign interventions, including military interventions, as not only positive but necessary.

Yet, the conflict of South Sudan, which is undeniably the result of U.S. policy, has hardly had positive results. As The New York Times noted in 2014, South Sudan – as well as its brutal civil war – “is in many ways an American creation, carved out of war-torn Sudan in a referendum largely orchestrated by the United States, its fragile institutions nurtured with billions of dollars in American aid.”

Indeed, the creation of South Sudan at America’s behest was the ultimate result of long-standing U.S. efforts to exploit the decades-old conflict between Sudan’s northern and southern elites in a bid to weaken the Sudanese government, whose growing ties to China and the Soviet Union threatened American access to Sudan’s oil fields as well as American hegemony in Africa.

Soon after the state’s creation, civil war broke out, officially the result of a straightforward power struggle between U.S.-backed President Salva Kiir and his former deputy, Riek Machar, with the violence subsequently taking on an ethnic component.

Yet, a major reason for the perpetuation of the ethnic violence and high death toll of the conflict is the policies of President Kiir, whose government utilized a “scorched earth” campaign and has sought to use “population engineering” to forcibly relocate ethnic minorities. Kiir, and officials in his government have also directly ordered mass killings and property seizures against civilians.

In addition, Kiir’s rival, Machar, also has a long history of ethnic massacres and mass murder under his belt. The U.S., having thrown its support behind Kiir and Machar after elections in 2011, was well aware of the fact that it had effectively backed mass murderers taking control of the country after helping to create it. Many analysts have pointed out that Machar apparently instigated the country’s civil war at Washington’s behest after the Kiir government began to work closely with China, particularly in South Sudan’s oil sector.

Furthermore, the U.S. has continued to exacerbate the situation in South Sudan, as it wages a barbaric proxy war between the U.S. and China over the new nation’s considerable oil reserves. While a recent “peace deal” between the two factions supporting Kiir and Machar in the conflict has given some hope, the reality of the conflict as a battle between powerful U.S. and Chinese oil interests instead suggests that such peace efforts are likely doomed to fail.

Thus, in a sense, the recently published, U.S.-financed report detailing the jarring death toll of South Sudan’s “civil war” is just another dramatic illustration of how the U.S. publicly laments violence it has helped to create and perpetuate, while obfuscating the sordid legacy of its foreign interventions.

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Whitney Webb is a staff writer for MintPress News and a contributor to Ben Swann’s Truth in Media. Her work has appeared on Global Research, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has also made radio and TV appearances on RT and Sputnik. She currently lives with her family in southern Chile.

Western interference in all things Bosnian is hardly news. Not today, not yesterday, not 26 years ago, when the then-US ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmerman, encouraged Bosnian Muslim fundamentalist leader Alija Izetbegovic to reject a peace plan – accepted, incidentally, by the very same Bosnian Serb leaders soon to be demonized by the unipolar West as “aggressors” on their own land – that had a good chance of preventing the outbreak of a bloody, three-and-a-half-year civil war that produced about 100,000 dead and many more wounded and homeless people in this former federal republic of ex-Yugoslavia.

But it is news when such a charge comes out of the mouth of Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic, who, although eager to keep and develop good relations with Russia and China, has over the years remade himself into an essentially pro-Western politician, whose main ambition is to integrate his country and the rest of the Balkans into the EU, torpedoes be damned. Thus, Vucic’s announcement that, as soon as the October 7 general elections in Bosnia were over, he would present “astonishing evidence of the most brutal interference of certain Western powers in the elections in Republika Srpska” (one of two entities in Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a majority Orthodox Serb population, taking up 49% of the country, the other being the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, dominated by Muslims and Catholic Croats), is a fairly reliable sign that the West has truly outdone itself, even by its own standards of “democracy export,” going so far, in Vucic’s words, that certain Western ambassadors were calling opposition candidates and threatening them not to switch allegiances, otherwise they would “answer both for real and imagined crimes.”

The first accusations of US meddling in the upcoming Bosnian general elections could already be heard back in May, when the Bosnian Serb government presented evidence to the UN Secretary-General regarding US State Department and USAID media financing designed to influence the elections, to the tune of more than $12 million. Then in June, President of Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik similarly accused the British government, referring to its decision to send 40 intelligence specialists to, as British Defence Secretary Gavin Williamson (he of the “go away and shut up” Russia fame) put it, counter “malign external influence” – as “meddling in internal affairs” and “an act that borders on intrusion into this country.” In August, Dodik once again pointed his fingers at the Americans, charging that they were interfering in the upcoming elections by funneling “anti-corruption” funds to local, anti-government NGOs. And then in the first days of September, Dodik reproached the outgoing US ambassador to B-H, Maureen Cormack for – you guessed it – “flagrantly meddling in political processes and elections in Bosnia,” having lobbied for US sanctions against the vice-president of Dodik’s party, Nikola Spiric and his family, for alleged corruption – during the 2014 (!) election campaign. In Spiric’s own words, Cormack “made a desperate move 28 days before the general election in order to help her puppets from Sarajevo – the Alliance for Change.”

Dodik went even further, opining that Cormack was, in fact, the ambassador of George Soros, and that the real reason behind the sanctions against Spiric was his “refusal to support the anti-Serbian agenda of the B-H Intelligence-Security Agency… and participate in a commission that was supposed to legalize eavesdropping” of him, current Republika Srpska Prime Minister Zeljka Cvijanovic, Serbian President Vucic and other officials of Serbia and Republika Srpska. Earlier in the month, before the sanctions against Spiric had been announced, Zeljka Cvijanovic had already publicly accused the B-H agency of illegally eavesdropping on “around 70” officials from Serbia and Republika Srpska.

So the stage is set for, to say the least, eventful elections in the (former) unipolar world’s model democratic and multi-ethnic protectorate, Bosnia and Herzegovina, still “supervised” by a de facto viceroy in the form of a “High Representative,” with a “constitutional court” in which three of the nine judges are foreigners, and unwieldy and paralyzed institutions that are producing a “fatalistic cynicism” amongst its populace. That is, if regular elections even take place. For, there are increasing fears that there is a (naturally) Western scenario for preventing or voiding the elections in Republika Srpska in order to block the victory of Dodik and his ruling coalition. According to sources cited by Serbian Sputnik, two scenarios are in play: according to the first, the elections would be sabotaged in advance if it was judged that Dodik is too strong, while, according to the second, the election results would not be recognized should Dodik’s party gain the majority of the vote. Mass demonstrations would be incited in either case, with the lead role being played by the British, due to the “weakening” of America’s Balkan policy under Donald Trump.

The mass demonstration scenario is not unrealistic. Demonstrators in varying numbers have been occupying the main square of Banja Luka, the Republika Srpska capital, for months, accusing the government of complicity in the death of 21-year old David Dragicevic, even though they have yet to produce concrete evidence (doesn’t that sound familiar) for their claims. The victim’s father has even threatened that there would be “no election in Republika Srpska until the murder of David and other children is solved.” The demonstrations are obviously well financed, and are supported and occasionally attended by members of the pro-Western opposition. And, considering that, on the eve of the elections, Dodik is slated to visit Russia and meet its president, Vladimir Putin (Russia has consistently upheld the integrity of B-H, as provided for by the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, and the absolute equality of its three constituent peoples, which was reiterated during Sergey Lavrov’s recent visit to the country) it will indeed be exceedingly difficult for the end-of-history West to refrain from trying to “teach” the Balkan deplorables at least one more lesson in “democracy.” Because all the previous ones there and elsewhere – Syria, Libya, Iraq instantly come to mind – have produced such wonderful results…

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Aleksandar Pavic is an independent analyst and researcher.

Featured image is from the author.

The scientific journal Critical Reviews in Toxicology has issued a rare “Expression of Concern” and requested corrections to articles it published that failed to fully disclose Monsanto’s role in reviews of glyphosate’s cancer risks.

The journal said all five articles it published in a 2016 supplemental issue titled “An Independent Review of the Carcinogenic Potential of Glyphosate” failed to include an accurate disclosure of the pesticide-maker’s involvement.

The five articles at issue were all highly critical of the 2015 finding by the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer that glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup, is a probable human carcinogen.

“It’s deplorable that Monsanto was the puppet master behind the supposedly ‘independent’ reviews of glyphosate’s safety,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “These papers were manufactured as a way to counteract the World Health Organization’s findings on glyphosate’s cancer risks. They could mislead the public in dangerous ways and should be completely retracted.”

The documents revealing Monsanto’s role in the reviews came to light during a trial that culminated last month when a jury found that exposure to glyphosate products was a “substantial” contributing factor to the terminal cancer of a California groundskeeper, who was subsequently awarded $289 million in damages.

Those documents exposed that Monsanto improperly edited the articles and directly paid some of the authors a consulting fee for their work.

In an October 2017 letter to the publisher, the Center for Biological Diversity and three other national environmental health groups demanded the articles be retracted.

The Declaration of Interest statement that was originally published with the papers:

• Failed to disclose that at least two panelists who authored the review worked as consultants for, and were directly paid by, Monsanto for their work on the paper;
• Failed to disclose that at least one Monsanto employee extensively edited the manuscript and was adamant about retaining inflammatory language critical of the IARC assessment — against some of the authors’ wishes; the disclosure falsely stated that no Monsanto employee reviewed the manuscript.

Additionally, multiple internal emails from Monsanto indicated the pesticide maker’s willingness to ghostwrite or compile information for the authors of the reviews, dictate the scope of one of the reviews, and identify which scientists to engage or list as authors of the reviews.

In an email sent yesterday to the Center, a representative from the publisher of the articles, Taylor and Francis, wrote:

“We note that, despite requests for full disclosure, the original Acknowledgements and Declaration of Interest statements provided to the journal did not fully represent the involvement of Monsanto or its employees or contractors in the authorship of the articles.”

Despite the misconduct that Taylor and Francis acknowledged in the Expression of Concern, the publisher has refused to issue a retraction for the papers, in contradiction to its own Corrections Policy, and has allowed the title of the supplemental issue to retain the phrase “an independent review.”

“This peek behind the Monsanto curtain raises serious questions about the safety of glyphosate,” said Donley. “Monsanto’s unethical behavior and the publisher’s response undermine scientific integrity and ultimately public health.”

Evidence continues to mount about the toxicity of glyphosate, not only to humans, but to the broader environment. Glyphosate was recently found to make honeybees more susceptible to infection from pathogens, implicating it as a contributing factor in worldwide bee declines.

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Just as any new technology claims to offer the most advanced development; that their definition of progress will cure society’s ills or make life easier by eliminating the drudgery of antiquated appliances, the Wifi Alliance  was organized as a worldwide wireless network to connect ‘everyone and everything, everywhere” as it promised “improvements to nearly every aspect of daily life.”   

The Alliance, which makes no pretense of potential health or environmental concerns, further proclaimed (and they may be correct) that there are “more wifi devices than people on earth”.   It is that inescapable exposure to ubiquitous wireless technologies wherein lies the problem.   

Soon after the 1895 discovery of xrays, the budding new technology was not without its health risks of burns and hair loss.  Yet the use of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) has evolved at a dramatic exponential rate from Marie Curie’s day into a mega-trillion dollar omnipotent industry creating a world totally dependent on its pernicious wireless applications.

The medical and scientific data is overwhelming and irrefutable as the wireless industry, the MSM and government agencies, frequently the last to acknowledge a pervasive health problem, continue to protect the industry from widespread public awareness of the insidious effects of the latest generation of digital by-products.   

Even prior to the 1997 introduction of commercially available wifi devices which has saturated every industrialized country, EMF wifi hot spots were everywhere.  Today with the addition of cell and cordless phones and towers, broadcast antennas, smart meters and the pervasive computer wifi, both adults and especially vulnerable children are surrounded 24-7 by an inescapable presence with little recognition that all radiation exposure is cumulative.    

Without the expansion of EMF and all its invasive algorithmic gadgets into our personal lives, intelligence gathering would be severely curtailed, without which Big Brother would be relegated to knocking on doors and hand written notes.  Surely with an estimated $21 trillion missing from the Pentagon, there must be one black budget item to lessen the harmful EMF emissions?

The National Toxicology Program (NTP), a branch of the US National Institute for Health (NIH), conducted the world’s largest study on radiofrequency radiation used by the US telecommunications industry and found a ‘significantly statistical increase in brain and heart cancers” in animals exposed to EMF (electromagnetic fields).  The NTP study confirmed the connection between mobile and wireless phone use and human brain cancer risks and its conclusions were supported by other epidemiological peer-reviewed studies.  Of special note is that studies citing the biological risk to human health were below accepted international exposure standards.    

Professor Emeritus Martin Pall, PhD with degrees in physics, biochemistry and genetics is uniquely qualified and has been researching EMF health effects for almost twenty years.  

“…what this means is that the current safety standards as off by a factor of about 7 million.’ Pointing out that a recent FCC Chair was a former lobbyist for the telecom industry, “I know how they’ve attacked various people.  In the U.S. … the funding for the EMF research [by the Environmental Protection Agency] was cut off starting in 1986 … The U.S. Office of Naval Research had been funding a fair amount of research in this area [in the ‘70s]. They [also] … stopped funding new grants in 1986 …  And then the NIH a few years later followed the same path …”

As if all was not reason enough for concern or even downright panic,  the next generation of wireless technology known as 5G (fifth generation), representing the innocuous sounding Internet of Things, promises a quantum leap in power and exceedingly more damaging health impacts with mandatory exposures.    

 The immense expansion of radiation emissions from the current wireless EMF frequency band and 5G about to be perpetrated on an unsuspecting American public should be criminal.  Developed by the US military as non lethal perimeter and crowd control, the Active Denial System emits a high density, high frequency wireless radiation comparable to 5G and emits radiation in the neighborhood of 90 GHz.   

The current Pre 5G, frequency band emissions used in today’s commercial wireless range is from 300 Mhz to 3 GHZ as 5G will become the first wireless system to utilize millimeter waves with frequencies ranging from 30 to 300 GHz. One example of the differential is that a current LANS (local area network system) uses 2.4 GHz. 

Hidden behind these numbers is an utterly devastating increase in health effects of immeasurable impacts so stunning as to numb the senses.

In 2017, the international Environmental Health Trust recommended an EU moratorium “on the roll-out of the fifth generation, 5G, for telecommunication until potential hazards for human health and the environment have been fully investigated by scientists independent from industry.”   In its declaration, the EHT asserted that current “radio frequency electromagnetic fields has been proven to be harmful to humans and the environment”…”at levels well below most international and national guidelines.”

Described by the ETF as the “next great unknown experiment on our children”, the FCC approved “Spectrum Frontiers, in July, 2016 “making the US the first country in the world to open up higher-frequency millimeter wave spectrum for the development of 5G fifth-generation wireless cellular technology.” 

Here’s how ETF summarizes 5G:  

“5G technology is designed to carry “higher loads of data more rapidly through wireless transmission and will be effective only over short distance. It is poorly transmitted through solid material.  Construction of many new antennas will be required and full-scale implementation will result in antennas every 10 to 12 houses in urban areas, thus massively increasing mandatory exposure.”  

5G small cell antennas will unleash round-the-clock millimeter, mini and micro wave radiation immensely more powerful than the current EMF wireless system and will no doubt be sold to a gullible American public as an economically beneficial national jobs program.  

In addition, 5G is required to create the Internet of Things (IoT) which promises to wirelessly connect all devices able to transfer data over a cohesive network without computer or human interaction  including homes appliances, every ‘smart’ device, city and vehicle and any embedded electronic system that can exchange data.  The IoT of building a new ‘smart’ grid of communications that will connect, just as the Wifi Alliance once suggested, “everyone, everything and everywhere.” 

An integral part of IoT will be to function at its true potential as an interface with Artificial Intelligence.  AI is a self-aware intelligent computer with an ‘automated reasoning’ ability that “perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of success.”  

Today’s AI’s are able to replace human functions and are capable of doing human things faster and better than any human.   In other words, you may be relieved of all requirements to work or think or function as an engaged human being.   All it would take is for an indulgent public to allow IT to do the thinking; make all life decisions until eventually there would be no real purpose in life and humans will be superfluous or extinct. 

As AI development is being driven by superstars at Silicon Valley, pre-eminent scientist Stephen Hawking suggested that

“AI would be biggest event in human history.  Unfortunately it might also be the last” and he feared “the consequences of creating something that can match or surpass humans.”

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Renee Parsons served on the ACLU’s Florida State Board of Directors and as president of the ACLU Treasure Coast Chapter. She has been an elected public official in Colorado, an environmental lobbyist for Friends of the Earth and a staff member of the US House of Representatives in Washington DC. She can be found on Twitter @reneedove31. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Despite being a far-flung and underdeveloped region, the Russian Far East might turn out to be the country’s most promising one if several visionary connectivity proposals are implemented.

Russia has been prioritizing the development of its far-flung and long-neglected Far Eastern region for the past three years now ever since it commenced the now-annual Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in September 2015, but despite the plethora of deals that were signed during the last four such gatherings, what’s urgently needed is the implementation of four visionary connectivity projects in order to turn this part of the country into the next frontier of the emerging Multipolar World Order. In the order of their prospectively phased implementation, these initiatives are:

• The Northern Islands Socio-Economic Condominium (NISEC);
• The Korean Corridor (KC);
• The Tikhi-to-Tiksi Corridor (TTC, via the hub city of Yakutsk);
• and the InterContinental Railway (ICRR).

The above hyperlinks provide more information about what each megaproject entails, but for simplicity’s sake, here’s a rough approximation of how they’d all look if ever successfully completed:

Red: NISEC

Blue: KC

Pink: TTC

Green: ICRR

Brown: Trans-Siberian Railway (TSR)

Yellow Stars: Yakutsk and Vladivostok

The TSR already exists, and a rail link between Yakutsk, Tynda, and Skovorodino forms part of the TTC, but the rest of this ambitious connectivity vision still has to be constructed. It’s hampered, however, by three geopolitical impediments that affect the following projects:

• no Russian-Japanese World War II peace treaty (NISEC);
• no Korean War peace treaty (KC);
• and poor Russian-American relations (TCRR).

Another obvious obstacle is the capital needed to fund everything, though that could potentially be unleashed after the peaceful resolution of the three aforementioned issues. All the related parties have an enduring strategic interest in strengthening their complex interdependency with one another in order to reap the mutually beneficial dividends associated with multilateral integration projects, reduced transportation costs, and quicker shipment times brought about by these overland shortcuts.

Although the Northern Sea Route will undoubtedly become an important transit route in the future, it’s nowhere near as time-efficient as if exports were made across the highlighted rail routes. The grand strategic vision is to use these connectivity corridors as avenues for comprehensively expanding each partner’s relations with one another, with the final goal being the creation of a new large-scale integrational platform between them that could be relied upon to stabilize the region and bring wealth to its people through the improved access to previously untapped natural resources that it’ll provide.

For this far-reaching series of ideas to become a reality, however, the three previously mentioned impediments must be resolved. NISEC is in and of itself both a sub-regional integrational platform and a proposal for solving the long-running dilemma that’s thus far prevented Russia and Japan from signing a World War II peace treaty. As for the KC, the US is working very hard to denuclearize North Korea and promised its leadership plenty of American investments if this process is ultimately completed, which could in turn make a South Korean-Russian rail route feasible. Regarding Russian-American relations, these might be improved through a so-called “New Détente”.

So long as the political will is there, then the capital can be found, though Russia could greatly facilitate this by requesting to join the joint Indo-Japanese “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” (AAGC) as its third strategic partner following the conclusion of a peace treaty with Tokyo. Furthermore, North Korea’s successful denuclearization and America’s promised investments to it afterward could conceivably see both of them and South Korea joining in the AAGC too, with all parties pooling their resources to participate in the Russian Far East’s integrational development as the crucial link connecting each of them. Russian-American relations would have to remarkably improve, but this isn’t impossible.

Even in the event that they don’t, however, then Russia, Japan, the Koreas, and India could cooperate in developing the Far East together without the US’ participation. These leading Asian economies might also having an interest in funding the remaining portion of the TTC in order to offset any speculative future disruptions across the Bering Strait if they forecast that Russian-American tensions will continue to endure across the decades. This overland shortcut to the Arctic might be expensive but it would more than pay for its cost through the investor states’ access to the region’s untapped mineral and energy resources, as well as their reliable access to the Arctic Ocean.

Altogether, the ambitious grand strategic vision put forth in this policy proposal aims to transform the Russian Far East from the country’s domestic backwater to its international showcase, and in the process make it the next frontier for multipolarity. The solely economic nature of this series of initiatives makes it so that they holistically complement China’s own One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity and thus enable Russia to “balance” between it and the AAGC, which can bring about enormous economic benefits if it can encourage them to engage in an intense “friendly competition” over developing the Far East.

This policy proposal was inspired by the insight obtained through the author’s participation in a Duma round table discussion about the integrational prospects of the Russian Far East that was held on 27 September, 2018.

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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.

Components of chemical weapons were delivered to the Syrian province of Idlib from several European states, Director of the Department for Arms Non-Proliferation and Control at the Russian Foreign Ministry Vladimir Yermakov stated on September 25. On September 20, Russian Foreign Minisry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated that a threat of staged chemical attack in the province of Idlib still remains. The diplomat stated that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) was supplying its allied militant groups with chemical agents with this purpose.

These statements by the Russian side show that the situation in Idlib still remains complicated and chances of a new escalation are high if militants attempt to sabotage the demilitarization agreement reached earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the Russian-language media speculates that Russia will provide Syria with a batch of short-to-medium range air defense systems additionally to the already announced supply of S-300. These reports remain unconfirmed.

Jordan and Syria may open the Nasib border crossing in the first half of October, according to the Jordanian newspaper al-Ghad. On September 25, Syrian Prime Minister Imad Khamis announced that the Syrian side of the crossing had been restored.

If true, this development will mark another stage in the restoration of southern Syria after its liberation by government forces earlier this year. This will also allow more Syrian refugees to return to their homes from Jordan.

US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis has ordered the military to pull out four Patriot air defense systems from from Jordan, Kuwait and Bahrain in the Middle East, the Wall Street Journal reported on September 26, citing several senior military officials.

According to speculations sparked by this report, the decision is aimed at boosting the US effort to counter more global “threats” such as China and Russia as Washington shifts its global strategy. Nonetheless, a conflict with Iran and support to Israel are important points of the foreign policy of the current US administration. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly stated this officially. Furthermore, his administration has made a number of steps in this direction. In light of the recent developments over Syria, including the IL-20 incident and a Russian decision to supply an S-300 system to the Syrian military, it is highly unlikely that the US will decrease its military, diplomatic and economic involvement in the Middle East issues anytime soon.

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Trump at the UN: Lies, Damn Lies, & Statistics

By Dr. Jack Rasmus, September 28, 2018

In typical Trump style, he immediately launched into bragging about his accomplishments. Like most of his recent public appearances, it was a campaign speech directed to his political base.

Did Donald Trump Kill the Liberal-Globalist “New World Order” at the UN?

By Andrew Korybko, September 27, 2018

The future that Trump envisions is “classic” in the sense of evoking key components of the US’ historic soft power (“freedom”, “liberty”, “sovereignty’) but also “modern” in that they’re all being put to use to defend and ultimately advance the country’s global leadership at the expense of its rivals, which it expects to either destroy (be it through kinetic Hybrid War means or non-kinetic economic ones) or co-opt into this “reformed” framework.

Washington Amplifies War Threats Against Iran, Bullies the World

By Keith Jones, September 27, 2018

US President Donald Trump used his second day of high-profile appearances at the United Nations Wednesday to amplify Washington’s war-threats against Iran and bully countries around the world.

Video: President Trump’s Disturbing Speech at the UN: This Is Not the Time to Just Laugh!

By Farhang Jahanpour, September 27, 2018

His two favourite countries that he singled out as examples for other countries to follow are Saudi Arabia and Israel (if you think I am joking please listen to the speech again, see below), while he attacks Germany, Sweden, China, Iran, Syria and many other countries.

Lies and Laughter: Trump’s UN General Assembly Dissembling and Rage

By Stephen Lendman, September 26, 2018

Laughter by attending world leaders and diplomats followed, then silence as DJT recited a litany of one Big Lie after another, along with taking credit for deplorable policies he called major achievements.

Trump Praises Saudi Arabia, Israel at UN, Rejects Globalism

By Telesur, September 26, 2018

U.S. President Donald Trump praised right-wing and authoritarian governments around the world including Saudi Arabia, Israel, the right-wing Modi government of India, while promoting his economic war of sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, and bragging about his administration’s push for more military spending, furthering neo-liberal policies, trade war with China, crackdown on immigration, as well as rejecting the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court.

This past week Donald Trump appeared before the United Nations Assembly in New York. In typical Trump style, he immediately launched into bragging about his accomplishments. Like most of his recent public appearances, it was a campaign speech directed to his political base. He proclaimed to the Assembly he had achieved more in his first two years than had any other president in a like period. The claim elicited laughs from the audience, which Trump would brush off later in a press conference saying “We were laughing together, they weren’t laughing at me”. Sure, Donald. That’s what happened! 

In the course of his over-the-top, self-congratulatory announcement he said the US economy had grown faster in his first two years at the presidential helm than in any administration before during a like period, he had reduced unemployment to the lowest rate ever in the US, and his policies have produced record wage gains for American workers.  The reality, however, is none of the above is true.

What’s somewhat ironic is that Trump’s lies and misrepresentations about the performance of the US economy are buttressed in part by official US statistics. He didn’t have to lie outright. It is often forgotten that statistics are not actual data. They are not numbers and facts that are actually observed, collected and reported in their original form. Statistics are ‘operations’ on and manipulation of the actual data, i.e. the real numbers. Statistics are created numbers. The operations and manipulations are often justified by arguing they improve the data, reveal it more accurately. Sometime this is so. But too often the manipulations are designed to boost the raw data to show the economy is doing better than it actually is (i.e. GDP and growth is better than it really is); or reduce the numbers to show the same effect (i.e. inflation is not as high as it really is); or that wages are rising for everyone when in fact they may not be for most.

In Trump’s UN speech, we therefore find an ironic congruence of typical Trump imagined facts that don’t actually exist and official government statistics that are not lies per se but are nonetheless distortions and misrepresentations created by the many complex, often convoluted operations and manipulations performed on the actual facts.

Who’s lying? There are different ways to lie. Trump does it crudely and blatantly. Official stats often do it cleverly and opaquely. The debunking of Trump claims before the UN about US GDP, US unemployment, and US wages in what follows shows how the crude and the clever often coincide.

Trump’s ‘US GDP Is Growing at Record Rate’ Claim

Let’s take US economic growth or GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Trump claims the last quarter’s GDP growth of 4.2% was the best ever.  Apart from the fact that the US economy has grown quarterly faster many times before, the 4.2% is a misrepresentation—even if it’s the official US figure. Here’s why:

GDP is defined as the total goods and services produced in a given year that is sold in that year. So prices are associated with the output of actual goods and services produced. But real growth of the economy should not include prices. Therefore prices are adjusted out from what’s called the ‘nominal GDP’ number. Nominal GDP last quarter was 5.4%. Trump’s ‘real GDP’ number of 4.2% means inflation was 1.2% for the period, according to the ‘GDP Deflator’ price index that’s used to adjust GDP for inflation.

But does anyone really believe inflation was only 1.2%? No one that was paying for double digit hikes in insurance premiums and copays during the quarter, or a dollar plus more for a gallon of gasoline to get to work, or who has had to pay rent hikes by their landlord of 20% or more, or is paying higher local property taxes and fees, or has opened their utility bill envelopes lately. What wage earning household believes inflation is running at only 1.2%? And if inflation is higher than that, then the adjustment for inflation to the 5.4% nominal GDP results in a ‘real GDP’ of far less than Trump’s official 4.2%.

So why is inflation so underestimated, resulting in real GDP being over-estimated at 4.2%?

One reason actual inflation is much higher is that government statisticians arbitrarily assume that consumers are buying more online where goods are cheaper, even though the government itself has said its procedure for estimating online sales is a ‘work in progress’ and at best a guesstimate.

Another reason inflation is underestimated at 1.2% is government bureaucrats at the Commerce Dept. (responsible for estimating GDP) assume that the quality of goods sold today is better than in the past. So they reduce the actual price that households really pay for the product in the marketplace and assign a lower, fictional price when they calculate the 1.2% GDP Deflator.

Or they assume that rents aren’t really rising as fast as they are in fact, because their models definition of rent includes homeowners with mortgages supposedly paying a ‘rent’ to themselves as well. That’s called ‘imputed rents’. Of course it’s nonsense. Homeowners don’t pay themselves rents. But when you assume they do, it means 100 million homeowners pay rents to themselves that barely changes year to year, while true renters keep paying 20% or more. When rents are then ‘averaged out’ for both homeowners and real renters, the actual rent inflation comes out much lower as a contribution to total GDP inflation. There are dozens of other techniques by which the ‘GDP Deflator price index’ is manipulated to come up with only 1.2% inflation—and thus overstate real GDP to 4.2%.

The US has other inflation indexes it could use to adjust for real GDP more accurately, but it doesn’t use them. It prefers the ‘lowball’ GDP Deflator price index. The Consumer Price Index, CPI, is closer to the actual inflation, at  2.7%. If the CPI were used to adjust nominal GDP, the 4.2% real GDP would be only 2.7%. The US Central Bank, the Fed, uses yet another index called the Personal Consumption Expenditure or PCE. That’s at 2.2%, also much higher than 1.2%. If the PCE was used real GDP would be 3.2% not 4.2%. So the most conservative and lowest inflation indicator is used to estimate real GDP. And that’s how Trump gets his phony 4.2% real GDP—i.e. his ‘greatest in history’ US growth number.

But even the CPI, at 2.7%, underestimates inflation. It uses what’s called the ‘chained index’ method for calculating annual inflation rates. That simply takes the actual current year CP inflation and averages, or ‘smooths’, it out with the preceding years of inflation. The resulting ‘averaging of averages’ is a lower than actual annual rate of inflation.

There are other problems with GDP that further reduce the 4.2% assumed real growth rate. Periodically the government changes its definition of what makes up the GDP. The re-definitioning often results in a higher GDP than previous. It’s not a real growth increase, just growth by definition. This redefining GDP is going on globally as well. In Europe for example they now include drug smuggling and services from brothels as contributing to GDP. Of course, to estimate these ‘services’ contributions to total GDP one needs to get a price. Drug peddlers don’t tell the government what they’re selling their heroin or cocaine for. And it’s doubtful that government statisticians stand outside the brothels or interview street walkers to determine the price they charged their ‘johns’. So government statisticians simply make up the numbers and plug them into their GDP calculations. One of the most egregious examples of GDP growth by definition occurred in recent years in India. By redefining GDP it doubled its value overnight.  The US engaged in its own form of GDP redefinition a few years back as well, when the economy recovery just couldn’t get off the ground and stagnated in late 2012.

Back in 2013 US GDP was arbitrarily redefined to include categories that had never been included—like the estimation of the value of company logos, trademarks, and intellectual property that never gets sold. What was for decades considered a business cost and not an investment—i.e. research and development—was now added to GDP figures. This change to GDP raised it by $500 billion annually starting in 2013. It’s no doubt higher today. That’s about 0.2% to 0.3% artificial boost to GDP just by redefining it. The point is no one knows the price of new categories like logos, trademarks, and the like. Government bureaucrats simply make them up (like they do ‘imputed rents’) and add them to the GDP totals.

What this all means is that Trump’s boast of his record 4.2% GDP is not really 4.2%, but something far lower, probably around 2%.  That’s only a few tenths of one percent higher than under Obama, when GDP averaged around 1.7%-1.8% annually.

Trump’s bragging of historic growth misses another really important problem with GDP:  It avoids the question of who benefits from the 4.2% (or 2% in fact).  Who gets the income generated from the 4.2%, or 2.7%, or 2%, or whatever. The flip side of the 4.2% GDP is what is called National Income. National Income is what the GDP creates for businesses, investors, wage earners, etc. who make the goods and services that create the National Income. But to whom is the 4.2% national income equivalent of GDP really benefitting? Is it the roughly 130 million wage earners? Or is it the owners of capital, their shareholders and managers, the self-employed? How much do those who make the goods and services—i.e. wage earners—get of the National Income?  And is the share of total National Income they are getting distributed more or less equally among the 130 million, or is it skewed to the high end of the wage and salary structure, i.e. the top 10% of wage and salary earners—i.e. the business professionals, tech sector engineers, high paid health professionals, etc.?

Trump’s ‘Wages Are Rising Fast’ Claim

Trump brags that wages are rising at 2.9% a year now. However, that 2.9% is for full time permanent employed workers only. (Read the fine print in the Labor dept. definitions).  Excluded are the roughly 50 million part time, temp, on call, under-employed and unemployed. And the wages are rising nicely claim may include extra hours worked—i.e. more overtime for the full time employed and extra part time jobs and gig jobs for the part time and temp employed. Workers’ earnings may thus rise due to more hours worked, not actual wage rate increases. Independent reports show, moreover, that employers are giving raises mostly in lump sum and bonus payments instead of wage rate per hour hikes. That way they can discontinue paying the lump sums and bonuses more easily in the future.

Apart from applying only to full time permanent employed, the 2.9% is a distortion for tens of millions of workers as well because it is an average. It represents those at the top of wages and salary—the best off 10% of tech, healthcare, and select other occupations getting most of the 2.9%. They may be getting 4% and more. Those in the less preferred occupations get far less than 2.9%, or nothing at all in wage hikes. The average is 2.9%. So at least 100 million wage earners are getting far less than 2.9%–which then needs adjusting for a much higher than reported inflation rate. The result is a real wage gain for 100 million or more that is negative, not 2.9%.  But Trump doesn’t bother to explain that. The devil is in the details, as they say.

Here’s another problem with the official government wage data reported in the GDP-National Income numbers you probably never heard of. It reduces the share of wages in National Income even more than is reported officially. According to GDP rules, 65% of the profits of unincorporated businesses (i.e. sole proprietorships, partnerships, S-corps, etc.) are considered wages in the National Income data. That’s right. Business Income—aka profits of non-corporate business—is considered ‘wages’ and added to the totals for wages in the GDP-National Income calculations.

The biggest misrepresentation of wage gains, however, is due to the underestimating of true inflation. What matters is ‘real wages’, what wages can actually buy. Trump’s 2.9% wage increase is not adjusted for inflation. It’s not ‘real’. If CPI inflation is 2.7% and nominal wages are rising at 2.9%, then real wages are actually stagnant at best at 0.2%. And if inflation for the more than 100 million primarily wage earning households is really around 3.5%–given recent hikes in oil and gas prices, rents, healthcare costs, utilities costs, local taxes and fees, etc.—then real wages for the 100 million or so are actually falling by 0.6% or more. Just as they have been falling every year since 2009.

Trump’s ‘Unemployment is at an Historic Low 3.9%’ Claim 

Like the numbers for GDP, inflation, and wages there are problems associated as well with Trump’s jobs data claim in his UN Speech.  The 3.9% unemployment rate Trump declared as ‘the lowest it’s ever been’ refers to the unemployment rate for only former full time permanently employed workers. (The lowest ever rate was 1.9% in 1944, by the way). The 3.9% excludes the 50 million part time, temps, on call, i.e. what’s called the underemployed. If the underemployed are included the unemployment rate rises to about 8%–in other words more than double the 3.9% for full time permanent workers only.

But both the 3.9% and 8% are still underestimates of the true unemployment in the US at present. In the US, someone is considered unemployed only if they are ‘out of work and looked for work in the preceding 4 weeks’. Otherwise, they’re considered part of what’s called the ‘missing labor force’ and not counted in the 3.9% (or 8%). (Note that being unemployed in the US also has nothing at all to do with whether or not you’re getting unemployment benefits).

Another problem with the 3.9% is that it is based in large part on gross and arbitrary assumptions by government statisticians as to the number of new jobs that were created due to ‘new businesses being formed’. The government assumes hundreds of thousands of net new businesses are created every month, each with a number of employees. But the government just makes an assumption of how many businesses and number of employees. It then adds these assumed numbers to the actual numbers of unemployed counted for a recent month. Worse still, this assumed number of new jobs is based on businesses and jobs created nine months prior to the present. For example, assumed new business formations and jobs back in January 2018 are then plugged into current September 2018 job numbers. That boosts the number of jobs in September, to get the lower, 3.9% unemployment rate. And we’re talking about tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of net jobs from nine months ago being added to current unemployed totals in the present. In short, boosting job numbers (and thus reducing unemployment to 3.9%) from ‘New Business Formation’ assumptions nine months prior is a way of padding the numbers.

Another set of problems in estimating the 3.9% occurs due to how the Labor Dept.’s household surveys are conducted to provide the 3.9% unemployment rate. The government surveys 60,000 households a month by telephone. But not everyone has a telephone or responds to a government call to participate in the survey. Typically refusing to participate in such government surveys are inner city youth, workers ‘working off the books’ and receiving cash instead of wages, most of the 10 undocumented workers in the US, itinerant workers without cellphones, and others. In other words, how the government surveys to get its estimated 3.9% unemployment rate is not sufficiently accurate either.

There’s an even greater gap in government estimations of unemployment. There’s still millions more who are not counted at all.  Millions of workers in recent years have dropped out of the labor force altogether. Remember, if you’re not working or looking actively for work you’re not even in the labor force. Your ‘joblessness’ is therefore not even considered in calculating the unemployment rate.  You may be jobless but you’re not unemployed, given the oxymoron US definition of unemployed. And the number of those who have dropped out of the labor force altogether, and thus not considered in calculating the unemployment rate, in the past decade number in the millions!

There’s what’s called the ‘Labor Force Participation Rate’ (LFPR). It is the percentage of the working age population that is employed or else unemployed and actively looking for work. That’s about 58% of the potential working age workforce in the US at present. But before the 2008 crash the percentage or LFPR was 63%. So 5% of the labor force has somehow ‘disappeared’ during the last decade. They’re not factored in the unemployment rate calculations. They may be without jobs, but they’re not considered unemployed. That 5% decline in the LFPR represents 5% of the total civilian labor force, which is about 165 million. So 5% of 165 million is a massive number of another 8.25 million. Having dropped out of the labor force, it is safe to assume most are unemployed or only temporarily or partially employed. About a million of them were able to arrange permanent social security disability benefits.

Mainstream and government economists try to explain away this massive drop out of the labor force by saying it reflects a growing number of retiring baby boomers. But that’s questionable, since the fastest growing numbers of people entering the labor force today (not dropping out) are workers older than 65 and 70, who are returning to work because they cannot afford to retire on the paltry benefits, 401k pensions, and IRAs they have, or the minimal savings they were able to accumulate since the 2008 crash.

To sum up:  If to the ranks to the roughly 6.5 million full time permanent unemployed (the 3.9%) are added the 4% or so underemployed and discouraged, there are officially about 8% of the 165 million that are unemployed. That rate is double Trump’s claim of only 3.9%. But add a further 2%–i.e. the ‘hidden’ unemployed not counted in the underground economy, plus the mis-estimation of unemployment due to government survey methods, plus the million or so who have gone on social security disability, plus the 8 million more who have dropped out of the labor force altogether—and the true unemployment rate is somewhere between 15% and 18%, not 3.9%.  But you won’t hear that from Trump, or for that matter from government bureaucrats that create the low ball number, or from the media and press that favorably promote the lowest possible number.

Trump’s ‘Stock Markets are at Record Highs’ Claim  

In this case Trump is also lying. He claims that he is totally responsible for the current record highs in the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq stock markets in the USA. Record levels in all the three major stock markets are of course fact. That is not the locus of Trump’s lying. The lie is he claims his economic policies, especially tax cuts and military spending and business deregulation are the direct cause of the record stock market levels. While it is true that Trump’s investor-business tax cuts have contributed in 2018 to boosting stocks. The cuts have reduced US budget revenues by more than $300 billion in just the first half of 2018. The tax cuts have thus far provided an artificial windfall to corporate profits of at least 20%, according to numerous studies. Other studies show that 49% of the tax-profits windfall has gone into corporations buying back their stock and paying more dividends to shareholders. Estimates by Goldman Sachs bank research and other sources are that $1.3 trillion will be spent by corporations on buybacks and dividends. That is a major factor why stocks just keep rising this year regardless of concern about trade wars, emerging markets’ currency collapse, Fed raising rates, the spread and deepening of recessions in key global economies, etc.  Trump’s lie, however, is his taking credit for the entire stock bubble, when in fact a wall of money has been handed to investors and corporations ever since 2009 by continuous tax cutting under Obama, free low interest money provided by the Federal Reserve for six years, and other forms of subsidization or business by the US government, which is now the hallmark of 21^st century capitalism in America.

Trump’s tax cuts and spending may be boosting stock buybacks and dividends—that in turn keep driving stock prices ever higher. But this policy has been going on since 2010. Every year since 2010, buybacks and dividend payouts have on average exceeded $1 trillion a year. Corporate profits have almost tripled. The Fed kept interest rates so low for so long that corporations, like Apple, borrowed billions by issuing new corporate bonds, with which to buy back its stock, increase its dividends, and invest massive sums directly itself in the stock market—even as it hoarded 97% of its $252 billion in cash offshore.

Trump thus lies when he takes full credit for the stock market at record highs. Obama and George W. Bush before him actually are even more responsible than he is.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Jack Rasmus. 

Jack Rasmus is author of the book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, August 2017, and the forthcoming book, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US policy from Reagan to Trump’, 2019, also by Clarity Press. He blogs at jackrasmus.com, hosts the weekly radio show, Alternative Visions, on the Progressive Radio network, and tweets at @drjackrasmus. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Read Part I and II.

The Grand Duchy of Lithuania in Vitezović’s anthropological-political ideology

One of the most significant questions of our interest, which needs a satisfactory answer, is: Why P. R. Vitezović considered Lithuania as a Croato-Slavonic land, and therefore, Lithuania’s inhabitants as the Croato-Slavs?

The most possible and realistic answers to this question are:

1. Because of the historical development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which brought the ethnic Lithuanians into very closer cultural relations with the Slavs (the Eastern and the Western) that resulted in the graduate process of Slavization of Lithuania’s cultural life and Lithuania’s ruling class. This historical fact influenced Vitezović to conclude that all (or majority) inhabitants of Lithuania were of the Slavic, i.e. the Croat origin.
2. Because of pro-Slavic and pro-Polish historical sources and writings related to the affairs of the common Polish-Lithuanian state which were read and used by Vitezović. Consequently, a Croatian nobleman got the impression that the entire territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was settled by the Slavic population and that their common spoken and written language was Slavic.

In the next paragraphs the most remarkable historical facts in connection with this problem and offered hypothetical answers to the formulated question are going to be presented.

In several letters written by the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas (1316–1341) from 1322 to 1324, he named himself as lethphanorum ruthenorumque rex (“King of the Lithuanians and Ruthenians”[1]), although he did not have in reality a title of the king. However, it clearly shows that he was a ruler of the Slavic subjects. When the Grand Duchy of Lithuania during the time of Gediminas extended its state borders towards the east and the south-east, i.e. when the territories populated by the Slavic people became incorporated into the 14^th-century Lithuania, the country became multiethnic, multilinguistic and multiconfessional medieval state in which gradually the Slavs significantly outnumbered the ethnic Lithuanians: for instance, there were 70% of the Slavs and 30% of the Lithuanians in the mid-16^th century on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (Kapleris, Meištas 2013: 123).[2] Furthermore, in the following centuries, as Lithuania was extending her borders far to the east, south-east and south-west, making more profound contacts with her Slavic neighbors and even including them into her state borders, the Lithuanian language acquired significant and numerous Slavic borrowings.

The map of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

The conflict with the Polish Kingdom over Galicia, Volynia and Podolia in the 14^th–15^thcenturies ended in the sharing of these three provinces, mainly populated by the Slavs, between Poland and Lithuania (Kojelavičius 1650/1669: 489–513). It is known that nearly 150 Slavisms entered Lithuanian language, either from the side of East Slavs or from the Poles, before the 17^th century (for instance, words like angelas, bažničia, gavėnia, kalėdos, krikštas, velykos, etc). A number of the Slavic borrowings in the Lithuanian language appreciably increased during the time of J. Križanić and P. R. Vitezović – for both of whom the language was a crucial indicator of the national identity.

The Slavic population (for example, tradesmen from Rus’ lands) was living in Lithuania’s capital Vilnius from the time of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Algirdas (1345–1377), who declared in 1358 that all “lands of Rus’” should belong to Lithuania (Kiaupa et al. 2000: 110). J. Križanić, who was travelling across the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and was living in Vilnius for several months in a Dominican monastery, became familiar with ethnically and religiously heterogeneous situation within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, with number of Slavic population in Lithuania and Vilnius and with often usage for the official purposes of the Slavic language within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which in general became a Lithuanian-Slavic state.

An influence of the Slavic tradition, culture, and especially vernacular, within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, have been particularly strong in the area of writings (literal-administrative language). In the first half of the 15^th century, the Old Slavonic language was used in Lithuania as one of the three written languages alongside with the Latin and the German. The so-called Old Church Slavonic language was used in Lithuania in relations with the Russian duchies, the Tatars in Crimea and in the internal life of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. For instance, during the time of the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Vytautas the Great 1390–1430, a state-official Slavonic language (Old Church Slavic) was used for writing of the first annals of the Lithuanian Grand Dukes (Chronicle of the Lithuanian Grand Dukes, 1429–1430, with Shorter Compilation of Lithuanian Chronicles added around 1446). Furthermore, Christianisation of Lithuania from 1387 established strong prerequisites for the usage of the Polish language for the official purposes in the next centuries.

In a period of the Lithuanian history after the death of Vytautas the Great, in the official domestic civic life, in addition to the Lithuanian and the East Slavic language (spoken in the cities) were used as well as the German, Latin and Polish (spread out in the second half of the 15^th century). In the Renaissance time, there were many texts and books in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania printed in the Old East Slavonic or the Polish language (as well as in the Lithuanian). It is a fact that on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the first half of the 16^th century the first books were printed in two Slavonic languages: the Old East Slavonic and the Polish. The printing of the so-called Brasta Bible in the Polish language in 1563 shows clearly that a sphere of influence of the Polish (i.e. Slavic) language within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was significantly spreading on. At that time, the Lithuanian rulers, court, and nobility (magnates) already used overwhelmingly the Polish language in a public life within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. It is paradoxically, but true, that the Lithuanian aristocracy and ruling political elite, which tried to defend Lithuania’s state (political) independence from the Kingdom of Poland, accepted both the Polish culture and the Polish language, which became an official language of their communication with a Polish-Lithuanian ruler and the Polish political elite. Shortly, Lithuanian magnates did not become defenders of the Lithuanian language, as they were defenders of the Lithuanian independent statehood. Subsequently, spoken Polish language became a very serious competitor to the Lithuanian language (vernacular) within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania that finally led to the gradual, but inevitable, Polonization, i.e. Slavization, of Lithuania’s cultural life.[3] Literary and linguistic developments within the Republic of Two Nations (Poland-Lithuania) helped to accelerate the Polonization of the ethnic Lithuanian, Russian, Byelorussian and Ukrainian aristocratic circles (Kamiński 1980; Kamiński 1983: 14–45; Maczak 1992: 194; Bideleux, Jeffries 1999: 129).

For Lithuania’s ruling elite the notion of “nation” was not connected with the language (spoken or written) or ethnicity as it was in the case of J. Križanić and P. R. Vitezović for whom spoken and written language was a crucial national identifier. Contrary to these two Croatian intellectuals, for Lithuania’s magnates, the “nation” (natio) was connected to the statehood and social strata belonging, but not to the language or ethnicity. Therefore, for example, during the conclusion of the Lublin Union with Poland in 1569 the ruling elites of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, composed by the ethnic Lithuanians and the ethnic Slavs, who spoke and wrote in the Polish language, called themselves Lithuanians what means actually natio Lithuanica (Lithuania’s “political nation”), i.e. the aristocracy who lived within the state borders of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.[4] In this respect, the most influential champion and ideologist of natio Lithuanica was Mykolas Lietuvis (Vaclovas Mikolajaitis/Michalo Lituanus), a Lithuanian aristocrat from Maišiagala, who developed his theory about “political nation” of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in his historic treatise De Moribus Tartarorum, Lithuanorum et Moschorum (“On the Customs of the Tatars, Lithuanians and Muscovites”), written in the Latin in 1550 (incomplete text of this treatise was printed in 1615). It is a matter of fact that after the Lublin Union of 1569 the Poles became the senior partners in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth till its final dismemberment in 1795 (Wandycz 1997: 72–78, 88–93, 102–107). The Lithuanian nobility, i.e. natio Lithuanica, became assimilated or Polonized to such extent that the term “Polish” represented joint Lithuanian and Polish interests. In fact, Polish and Lithuanian ethnically different groups of aristocracy identified themselves with one cultural tradition and as a united “political nation” (Davies 1981: 115–159; Johnson 1996, 52).

The ethnolinguistic structure of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the following centuries was changing in the favor of the ethnic Slavs. Thus, at the time of the Lublin Union in 1569, the ethnic Lithuanians constituted around one-third of total Lithuania’s population (approximately 3.000.000 people were living at that time within the whole territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania). However, at the same time, 2/3 of the population of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania were ethnic Slavs who lived in the eastern and south-eastern provinces annexed by the Grand Dukes of Lithuania, i.e. the former duchies of Polotsk, Vitebsk, Volynia, Kiev and Smolensk (Kiaupa et al. 2000: 162). We have to keep in mind as well the fact that the Slavic territories, ruled by Lithuania’s nobility till the Lublin Union of 1569, were approximately ten times bigger than Lithuania proper (Samalavičius 1995: 42).

After 1569, a linguistic polarization within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania remained. There were still two basic spoken languages – the Lithuanian and the Slavic – and two bureaucratic languages – the Old Slavic and the Latin (Bideleux, Jeffries 1999: 122). However, in present-day West Belarus and present-day West Ukraine after 1569, the educated, middle, and administrative classes and the landowning gentry became predominantly the Polish-speaking social strata. The spreading of the Polish language in both written and spoken forms in Lithuania was going through Lithuania’s landowning and political aristocracy who have been in most frequent contacts with their Polish counterparts, through the Polish priests, monks and the Polish intellectuals.

Especially the 17^th century, a century of J. Križanić and P. R. Vitezović, was a period of expansion of the Polish language in the public life in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. Moreover, at the first year of realm of Friedrich August II Saxon (1697–1706/1709–1733) in 1697 the Polish language officially eliminated the Old East Slavonic language from public offices in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania – coaequatio iurium (Šapoka 1936: 371–374; Kiaupa et al. 2000: 265). In the late 17^th century, both magnates and gentry of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania knew Polish and used it. There was formed, even, the so-called Lithuanian type of the Polish language. On the same territories of the Polish Kingdom and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania through which J. Križanić traveled, the urban centers were as well Polonized (i.e. got Slavic feature). The lower classes and the rural population of serfs were East Slavs. Even Lithuania’s capital Vilnius or Ukrainian L’viv, a political-cultural center of Galicia, became the “Polish”, i.e. the Slavic, that the Polish-speakers regarded themselves as essentially Poles even at the beginning of the 20^th century (Johnson 1996, 52).

The Polish historiography during the last two centuries created an image that a federal state of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth after 1569 was actually only the Polish one. Certainly, cultural-linguistic Polonization spread faster, but in the sphere of politics and social life the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was as well, gradually, but certainly becoming the “Polish” for the reason that people from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania did not oppose in high degree the appropriation of the Polish language and culture (Kiaupa et al. 2000, 362). According to Robert Bideleux and Ian Jeffries, “since Lithuanian [language] is directly related to the Slavonic languages, and since an old form of Byelorussian (not Lithuanian) was the official language of the grand duchy [of Lithuania], the Lithuanian nobility probably felt some degree of cultural kinship with their Polish counterparts… Indeed, the Lithuanian nobility gradually became thoroughly ‘polonized’” (Bideleux, Jeffries 1999: 122)… “with the ironic result that Polish [language] eventually became more widely used among the Lithuanian than among the Polish nobility in the future Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth” (Davies 1982: 20–21).

Because of right belief that the Lithuanian language is closely related to Slavonic languages (the standpoint favored by our-days contemporary linguistics) and because of the Polonization (Slavization) of upper strata of the Lithuanian society, Pavao Ritter Vitezović at the end of the 17^th century considered all (or at least overwhelming majority) inhabitants of Lithuania as the Slavs (i.e. the Croats) and Lithuania as the Slavic (i.e. Croatian) country.

As a result of the Polonization of the vast territories of East-Central Europe from 1569 to 1795 many Poles considered these lands as the Polish linguistic and cultural space. It became a common attitude of modern Western historians of non-Polish origin to describe the Republic of Two Nations as an exclusively the Polish one, due to the great scope of the Polonization of the Lithuanian society and culture. For example, Alan Palmer has an opinion that the ethnic Lithuanians were readily assimilated by the Poles: the greatest of the Polish dynasties, the Jagiellonian one (1386–1572) was in fact of the Lithuanian origin, and Vilnius (Wilno) was a city, despite its Lithuanian foundation, a symbol of the Polish-Lithuanian cultural union (Palmer 1970: 4). Such impression had and Juraj Križanić who passed across the whole present-day Ukraine, a main part of present-day Belarus and who spent some time in Vilnius as well becoming a member of estate circle of the Dominican Order in Lithuania’s capital. At the turn of the 18^thcentury, the members of natio Lithuanica and the Lithuanian middle-class society faced the real danger of denationalization through the process of Polonization. Ultimately, it should not be forgotten that overwhelming majority of 7,5 million of total population of the Republic of Two Nations (Rzeczpospolita Obojga Narodow), i.e. the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (established by the Lublin Union in 1569) were the ethnic Slavs; the fact which induced P. R. Vitezović to consider the whole Republic as exclusively the Slavic state and, according to his Croatocentric theory, to understand the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as in fact the Croatian ethnolinguistic territory.

A pro-Polish viewpoint of Stanislaw Orzechowski and especially of Martinu Kromer (Martin Cromer) about the Polish-Lithuanian relationships, Lithuania’s incorporation into the Polish Kingdom after 1569, and the Polonization of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, became one of the most significant sources about the ethnolinguistic situation within the borders of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for both J. Križanić and P. R. Vitezović. In his Razgowori ob wladatelystwu (1661–1667), J. Križanić frequently cited Martinu Kromer, the author of a history of Poland under the title De origine et rebus gestis Polonarum (Basel, 1555), who saw Lithuania as an ordinary province of Poland. Particularly it has been Križanić who was acquainted with quite number of the Polish and other authors who wrote on “Slavic matters” and who considered the whole territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as an exclusively Slavic country.

As a consequence, J. Križanić became acquainted with the work Bellum Prutenum (“The Prussian War”) written in 1515 by the poet Jan Vislicius who presented the Lithuanian history as a part of the Slavic one. J. Vislicius viewed the future development of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania only within a united “Polish Sarmatian Empire”. After the Lublin Union of 1569, the Polish doctrine of Sarmatism, which proclaimed Lithuania, Samogitia (Žemaitia) and the Russian duchies as integral parts of the Polish state, became popular on the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as a result of firm contacts of Lithuania’s nobles (ethnic Lithuanians and ethnic Slavs) with Poland, the Polish culture and the Polish state ideology. It is quite sure that J. Križanić and P. R. Vitezović were familiar with the Polish doctrine of Sarmatism and especially J. Križanić with the influence of this doctrine among noble circles within the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. However, the line of reasoning of the Sarmatian doctrine presented the territory of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as the Slavic one; a viewpoint that was accepted by P. R. Vitezović and even served him to name total population of the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Muscovite Russia as Sarmaticos, which belonged to his Croatia Septemtrionalis.

Finally, if we know that J. Križanić’s writings about the “Slavic matters”, based very much on his personal experience about the Polonization of Lithuania, were one of the most significant sources for P. R. Vitezović, it is not surprising that Pavao Ritter Vitezović interpolated the whole territory of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania into the Slavic lands, and furthermore, according to his ideological doctrine into a Greater Croatia.

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Dr. Vladislav B. Sotirović is Founder & Editor of POLICRATICUS-Electronic Magazine On Global Politics Since 2014 (www.global-politics.eu). Contact: [email protected]. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] A meaning of the ethnonym „Ruthenians“ is very disputed among the historians and ethnologists. Undoubtedly, it lables the East European Slavs in whole or in part.

[2] According to Istorijos egzamino gidas, in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1430, there were 24% Lithuanians, 72% East Slavs and 4% Tatars while in 1569, there were 30% Lithuanians, 63% East Slavs and 7% Poles (Kapleris, Meištas 2013: 123).

[3] For a more extensive treatment of the Polish-Lithuanian relationships, see in (Davies 1981).

[4] About differences between the feudal-time “political” and Romanticism-time “linguistic” conceptions of “nation”, see in (Hutchinson, Smith 1994; Johnson 1996: 45–62, 136–148; Bideleux, Jeffries 1999: 153–161; Guibernau, Rex 1999; Hobsbawm 2000).

Featured image is from Global Politics.

After the assassination of German diplomat Ernst Vom Rath in Paris by a 17 year old Polish Jewish boy, all hell broke loose November 9th and 10, 1938 in Germany. Hitler’s SA Nazis, along with a multitude of German civilians went on a rampage never seen before of that magnitude. They burnt to the ground 267 Jewish synagogues, ravaged 7,500 Jewish owned businesses, and most horrific, beat, tortured and even raped. Thirty thousand Jewish men and boys were rounded up and shipped to concentration camps, many never to be seen again. Blaming the victim for all this, the German government issued a one billion Reich mark atonement tax on the Jewish community. Laws were then passed to ultimately deny German Jews their basic citizenship and rights as human beings. The pogroms went on into Austria as well, with Austrian Nazis and their sympathizers doing equally horrendous deeds. As historians of any note fully realize, Kristallnacht paved the way for the Final Solution, replete with  gas chambers and crematoriums. These anger filled thugs could have easily chanted ‘Jews won’t replace us’ as they did their dirty deeds.

Almost 80 years later, the usually serene college town of Charlottesville, Virginia heard the chants of ‘Jews won’t replace us’. We all saw and heard the marchers that night carrying those Nazi like torches and chanting that phrase… over and over. Our fine president, after surmising all that occurred  between what the media labeled the Alt Right and Alt Left, was more than charitable. He simply said that there were ‘nice folks’ on both sides of the skirmishes. I for one did not hear or see the following: Jewish folks working for the Trump administration, Jewish supporters of Trump and the Israeli government showing outrage at his remarks and handling of it all. Imagine for a minute if it were a march by Palestinian Americans carrying those torches and shouting that phrase. Imagine if it were a march of Black Americans shouting ‘Whites won’t replace us’. Just you imagine.

My column is not just about white supremacists spreading their hate. Yes, it includes that of course. No, my column is about the legitimization by those in elected office of this mindset. Once we all sit back and say nothing to these actions or really inactions, we give them license! As with the 2002-03 illegal and immoral invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, too much silence by too many Americans just gives the evil ones the green light. Evil is defined in many ways. I like this one: Something that brings sorrow, distress or calamity. As the great Ed Norton said to Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners: “Maybe the phrase fits Ralph.”

When we as a culture allow such terrible actions to be conducted, the ‘skies that limit’. When some of our police officers (a small minority) start shooting unarmed people, many who happen to be Black, and there is not enough outrage by the majority of us… sadly the signs point to a coming ‘Police State’. When peaceful protest is restricted or now even taxed with fees, that ‘Police State’ is around the corner.

You know, look at that Charlottesville incident closely. By many accounts the local police were actually told to ‘Stand down’ as the two opposing protest groups were nearing each other. Why? Was it to allow for what then happened? The more there is such conflict and street violence, the more those who run things can use for a coming ‘Police State’. All Trump did was exacerbate things by giving a pass to those Neo Nazis. The same thing is happening throughout Europe, as more countries are experiencing  this new Neo Nazi upsurge. Over there the main focus is on all those refugees from places like Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen to name but a few. Why are there so many refugees? Well, ask yourself if our government, from Bush Jr. to Obama and now to Trump, did not intercede in those nations to cause such chaos? Sadly, for those of us who truly love our nation, the frustration levels are higher than ever before! During the Vietnam era things were terrible, but now…. when will the next Kristallnacht occur?

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

The so-called “New World Order” of American-led unipolar globalism is dead after “The Kraken” delivered a scathing attack against all aspects of the Liberal-Globalist system that America itself previously pioneered, which he’s proudly seeking to replace with a nationalist-oriented model of International Relations that cleverly attempts to co-opt multipolar processes in order to most effectively thwart China’s Silk Road-assisted rise. 

[The kraken (/ˈkrɑːkən/) is a legendary cephalopod-like sea monster of giant size that is said to dwell off the coasts of Norway and Greenland.]

The “New World Order” is dead, and Trump killed it. The pre-2016 worldwide power structure of American-led unipolar globalism was already fraying at the seams with the rise of China, Russia, Iran, and other multipolar Great Powers, but it could have nevertheless evolved to incorporate all of them within the prevailing Liberal-Globalist system as long as the US was willing to continuing sacrificing its own sovereignty to do so in becoming the “first among equals” prior to its eventual “dethroning”. That was the approach that Obama and his predecessors were applying in leveraging a combination of divide-and-rule policies to weaken America’s rivals alongside carrying out nifty outreaches to co-opt them into what it hoped could indefinitely remain a primarily US-influenced system, but Trump has done away with any pretenses of “equality” and is unabashed in his pursuit of unparalleled American hegemony across the world.

Reference Materials 

For the majority of the global public who might have yet to realize what’s going on and why, here are five of the author’s previous articles that should be skimmed through in order to provide the appropriate strategic context to Trump’s plans:

• “Trump’s UN Reform Plan Is All About The ‘Lead From Behind’ Strategy”
• “The Trump Doctrine in a Regional Context”
• “Trump: Agent Of Chaos (a.k.a. ‘The Kraken’)”
• “The US’ National Defense Strategy Is The Epitome Of Neo-Realism”
• “Top Trends: Hybrid War Balkanization, Trumpism vs. Globalism, Renaissance 2.0”

The ultra-concise summary of the above is that Trump is deliberately behaving as chaotically as possible in his quest to destroy everything that he inherited so as to provide the US with the greatest possible opportunity to shape the new global system that will arise out of the ashes of the old one. 

The Reverse-Thucydides Trap 

The primary motivation for doing so is that the US gradually lost its previous monopoly over the Liberal-Globalist processes that it relied upon to control the international system after the Old Cold War, with the unofficial beginning of the New Cold War in 2014 and its resultant developments making this obvious beyond any doubt. China, more so than any of the US’ other rivals, managed to obtain an “uncomfortable” amount of influence over the world system, especially after unveiling its One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity that would inevitably lead to it replacing the US as the worldwide hegemon (albeit in what it purports will be a more equal international order) if left unobstructed. The US’ many Hybrid Wars were thus far insufficient in thwarting China’s Silk Road-assisted rise, which is why Trump decided to go for the “nuclear option” of trying to radically change the course of International Relations from Liberal-Globalism back to its erstwhile model of Nationalism. 

China can only succeed with the Silk Road so long as the processes of American-initiated Liberal-Globalism continue unabated, as it’s impossible for it to achieve its goals without free trade, a UN-centric rules-based system, and the progressive surrendering of US state sovereignty to the so-called “international community”, all of which are opposed by Trump. Thus, the Thucydides Trap that’s been often discussed in academic circles as supposedly being in effect between a hegemonic US and a rising China is actually reversed since the US has ceded its control over the previous hegemonic system to China and is now behaving as the upstart power trying to undermine the existing state of affairs. The US is therefore functioning as a “revolutionary state” in many – but, importantly, not all – ways, and everything that Trump spoke about in his UN speech should be seen as describing his country’s alternative model to what is now the Chinese-led Liberal-Globalist order.  With that in mind, it’s possible to identify some of its main characteristics. 

The Trump World Order

The future that Trump envisions is “classic” in the sense of evoking key components of the US’ historic soft power (“freedom”, “liberty”, “sovereignty’) but also “modern” in that they’re all being put to use to defend and ultimately advance the country’s global leadership at the expense of its rivals, which it expects to either destroy (be it through kinetic Hybrid War means or non-kinetic economic ones) or co-opt into this “reformed” framework. Without further ado, here are the three main tenets of the Trump World Order:

Trump has a burning hatred for the Liberal-Globalist order and sincerely believes that it infringes on every country’s sovereignty, thus restricting its citizens’ freedom to prosper and undermining their personal liberties. In the Trump World Order, the UN either remains the practically useless talking club that it already is or is turned into a more effective instrument of American power after others submit to its authority and “allow” the “benevolent hegemon” to shape the world as it sees fit. The latter scenario isn’t going to happen without Russia, China, Iran, and even the EU resisting as much as realistically possible within their individual limits, which is why Trump is essentially encouraging the small- and medium-sized countries that function as objects of competition between them and other Great Powers to break ranks with everyone else and “go it their own way” while following America’s lead. 

Trump is counting on the de-facto “defection” of those states to pave the way for its Liberal-Globalist “Lead From Behind” Great Power proxies to join the Trump World Order as well prior to commencing the UN’s much-needed reform, which is a seemingly impossible feat to pull off but could nevertheless potentially succeed through the US’ weaponization of “Economic Nationalism” that will be described in a moment. Simply put, the US is basically trying to rewrite the “rules-based” order so that national interests aren’t as obviously subordinated to supranational ones like they’re presently becoming, even if the rest of the world ends up being compelled to settle for less by surrendering some of their own sovereignty to America in order to receive the “least-bad” outcome from this “New Deal”. Correspondingly, Trump sees the UN’s radical reform as an eventual step towards “stabilizing” this new US-led nation-centric arrangement. 

The Weaponization Of “Economic Nationalism” Is The US’ Modus Operandi: 

Trump’s speech drew a lot of attention to the unbalanced trade deals between the US and its many partners across the world, with the American leader arguing that everyone else is ripping his country off in order to profit at its workers’ expense. He’s previously accused corrupt politicians of continuing these outdated arrangements after the Old Cold War in order to satisfy their short-term self-interests despite these deals being completely disadvantageous to the US’ own long-term national ones. The US never used to mind “subsidizing” its “vassals” so long as this contributed to them reinvesting their profits in socio-economic programs designed to keep communism at bay, but the end of the Old Cold War changed that strategic paradigm, as did the EU and other countries’ incremental adoption of some core socialist principles. As such, Trump is opposed both in principle and strategy to continuing what he views as a Liberal-Globalist subsidization scheme for transferring American wealth to the rest of the world. 

The Empire Will Be Reformed Through More Burden-Sharing And The “Lead From Behind” Stratagem

The US knows that its “vassals” are slowly but surely being wooed by its rivals, especially China and Russia, even though Washington has been subsidizing their economies and militaries for decades. This calls for drastic measures to prevent those countries from fully drifting out of its orbit, hence the weaponization of “Economic Nationalism” that’s exploiting their existing “complex interdependency” with the US while it still exists as a tool of American coercion. The US is leveraging its relationships with the EU, NATO, and the Gulf Kingdoms in order to get the first-mentioned to purchase its comparatively more expensive energy and the latter two to pay more for the so-called “security umbrella” that they’re led to believe “protects” them from Russia and Iran, respectively. Proverbially speaking, Trump is discontinuing the US’ previous policy of “providing free lunches” to its partners and is now trying to gain a tangible “return on investment” for the billions that it subsidized over the decades. 

It’s notable that the American President specifically praised India, Saudi Arabia, “Israel”, and Poland all in a row in his speech, which signals that they’re the US’ preferred “Lead From Behind” partners for managing regional affairs in the Trump World Order. These countries are such promising “vassals” for the US because they each aspire to become regional hegemons and already preside over their own integrational frameworks. India is expected to become the US’ most important strategic partner in the 21^st century, and the “Asia-Africa Growth Corridor” that it jointly founded with Japan could one day compete with China’s Silk Road in the broader Afro-Bengal Ocean. As for Saudi Arabia and “Israel”, they manage what could be described as the GCC+ that also counts Jordan and Egypt as members, while Poland is the leader of the “Three Seas Initiative”. Altogether, the US is building a new system of alliances all across the Eurasian Rimland for “containing” China, Iran, and Russia respectively. 

Concluding Thoughts 

Wrapping everything up, “The Kraken’s” UN speech can be read as a manifesto of the Trump World Order that the US is striving to build as an alternative to the Chinese-led Silk Road one that poses the greatest challenge thus far to America’s predominant position over global affairs. Instead of continuing to play by the rules that his predecessors established and which at one time were advantageous to America’s grand strategic interests, Trump is creating as much chaos as possible in order to destroy the world system that previous presidents built after China began to gradually take it over. The US’ hegemony would eventually decline with the passage of time if it didn’t radically reverse its decades-long stance and start rapidly replacing Liberal-Globalism with the “classic” nation-centric model, one which also at the very least superficially appeals to the ongoing multipolar processes of the day and is more than capable of co-opting “Rising Powers”. 

Interestingly enough, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova seemingly endorsed two of the main tenets of the Trump World Order by writing on Facebook that “The two cross-cutting themes in Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly are: the need to defend their own sovereignty and the lack of alternatives for defending national interests. It is worth noting that this is applicable not only to the US, but all the countries in the world.” She may have been trying to make a witty rhetorical point, but nonetheless there’s a lot of substance to her reaction because Russia does indeed defend its sovereignty and sees no alternative to advancing its national interests, which is proven by its Machiavellian “balancing” strategy all across Afro-Eurasia. That’s not to say that Russia will finally do what the US wants and begin “balancing” between it and China, but just that Moscow will still survive and thrive if Washington’s model happens to gain the upper hand over Beijing’s in the New Cold War.

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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.

Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

For all that China’s twenty-first-century ‘rise’ is a much-discussed notion both within the country and globally, it is an increasingly difficult concept to grasp or keep pace with. As a result, books which dissect and analyse developments from a regional perspective are of great value, particularly when they focus on widely-overlooked regions as James M. Dorsey‘s China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) does.

Exploring China’s growing and increasingly complex political, economic and security entanglements in the ‘Greater Middle East’ (a region whose extent and diversity is discussed in this podcast), Dorsey argues that this “key global crossroads” (p. 1) is already becoming an arena where Beijing is being forced to reappraise its international strategy and abandon long-cherished principles including ‘non-interference’. In a time of profound transition documented by Dorsey himself, such developments are likely to have implications of not just regional, but global significance.

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China and the Middle East: Venturing Into the Maelstrom (Global Political Transitions)

Author: James M. Dorsey

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan; 1st ed. 2019 edition (July 20, 2018)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 3319643541

ISBN-13: 978-3319643540

Click here to order.

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US President Donald Trump used his second day of high-profile appearances at the United Nations Wednesday to amplify Washington’s war-threats against Iran and bully countries around the world.

At a UN Security Council session ostensibly devoted to preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, Trump put the world on notice: the US—acting in flagrant violation of the UN-backed nuclear accord that it, the four other permanent UN Security Council members, and Germany reached with Tehran in 2015—will launch the next volley in its economic war against Iran in little more than a month. Starting November 5, the US will enforce a total embargo on Iranian oil exports, the principal source of funds for its state budget, and freeze Iran’s central bank out of the US-dominated world banking system thereby crippling the rest of its foreign trade.

Companies and countries that fail to abide by these “tougher than ever before” sanctions will, Trump vowed, face “severe consequences.” That is fines, exclusion from the US market, and other “secondary sanctions.”

The US sanctions against Iran are both illegal and an act of war. They are aimed at crashing Iran’s economy and impoverishing its people so as to either force Iran’s bourgeois nationalist regime to surrender to US diktats or goad it into military action.

In his UN Security Council appearance Trump tried to legitimize this reckless, criminal enterprise with the most hackneyed denunciations. The fascist-minded billionaire accused Iran of being “the world’s leading sponsor of terror” and fueling “conflicts across” the Middle East “and beyond.”

As if the world could forget that it was US imperialism that was the principal bulwark of the bloody quarter-century long dictatorship of the Shah; that in the four decades since the 1979 Iranian Revolution Washington has waged an unrelenting campaign of economic pressure and military threats against Iran; that since 2001 the US has invaded and occupied Iran’s neighbours, Iraq and Afghanistan; that these wars are part of more than a quarter-century of ruinous wars Washington has waged across the Middle East with the aim of securing unbridled hegemony over the world’s most important oil-exporting region; and that in its regime-change wars and intrigues the US has repeatedly aligned, in Libya, Syria, and elsewhere, with al-Qaeda and other Islamist terrorists.

Trump, who doubled as chair of the Security Council session and head of the US delegation, led off the main discussion at Wednesday’s meeting with a brief ten-minute speech in which he repeated many of the threats he had made in a longer rant before the UN General Assembly Tuesday.

He denounced Iran and Russia for “enabling” the “butchery” of Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime. He boasted of the missile strikes the US mounted on Syria in April 2017 and April 2018 and he signaled that the US stands ready to intervene on a much wider scale should Assad and his allies launch an offensive in Idlib.

Trump, who in his first appearance at the UN General Assembly last year threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, told the Security Council he believes the US can now work with Pyongyang. But, he insisted, there would be no lessening in the brutal sanctions that have been imposed on North Korea until it has completely “denuclearized,” and he underlined the point by denouncing unnamed countries for purportedly violating the sanctions.

The only new element in Trump’s Security Council remarks was an entirely gratuitous attack on China, which he claimed “is attempting to interfere in our upcoming 2018 (congressional) election … against my administration.”

Trump coupled this inflammatory charge to the trade war that he has launched against Beijing, with $250 billion in Chinese exports now subject to punitive US tariffs. “They do not want me, or us, to win” the elections, asserted Trump. “Because I am the first president ever to challenge China on trade. And we are winning on trade, we are winning at every level.”

The Security Council meeting was tension-filled, a product of the mounting tensions between all the great powers as they strive to assert the economic and strategic interests of their rival capitalist elites under conditions of economic crisis, trade war, surging geopolitical conflict and mounting class struggle.

French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Theresa May both solidarized themselves with the US campaign for regime-change in Syria, with May thanking the US for spearheading last April’s airstrikes, in which both France and Britain participated. Both also said Russia needed to be called to account for the Skripal affair, recycling the utterly unsubstantiated claims that the Kremlin ordered a chemical-weapons hit on a one-time double agent.

However, both Macron and May felt compelled to restate their support for the nuclear deal and warn about the repercussions of repudiating an agreement negotiated by the great powers and at the behest and largely in conformity with the aims of Washington.

Macron and May’s remarks merely reiterated what they and German Chancellor Angela Merkel have been saying for months. However they were given added force by Tuesday’s joint declaration from the foreign ministers of the three countries and Russia and China that the European Union is setting up a “special purpose vehicle” to enable European companies and ultimately others to carry on trade with Iran in defiance of the US sanctions.

The European imperialists, as demonstrated by their history and their frantic efforts to rearm, are no less rapacious than Wall Street and Washington. But they are irate that the US has sabotaged their plans to conquer the markets and lay claim to the energy reserves of Iran, a country that business publications describe as the world’s last “liberalizing” large economy and which has a government eager to extend them lucrative concessions.

Even more grating is their fear of the economic and political fallout of the military-strategic collision that Washington is precipitating. A war between the US and Iran would engulf the entire Middle East, send oil prices soaring, precipitate a surge in refugees, and result in a bloody repartition of the region under conditions where the European powers do not as of yet have the military means to determine or decisively shape the outcome.

Many informed observers question whether the “special vehicle,” the details of which have yet to be hammered out, will prove effective in sustaining anything more than token levels of trade between Europe and Iran in the face of Washington’s capacity to inflict punishment on those who defy its sanctions. Already a “Who’s Who” of major European-based companies have announced they are pulling out of Iran.

Politically, however, the “special vehicle” represents an unmistakable challenge to Washington—all the more so that it is being mounted in conjunction with Russia and China—and one with potentially tectonic implications for the world economy and geopolitics, given the vital importance to American imperialism of maintaining the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency and principal medium of trade.

Not surprisingly, the European announcement has enraged the Iran regime-change hawks at the helm of the Trump administration. Appearing at a United Against Nuclear Iran conference in New York later Tuesday, alongside the director of Israel’s Mossad spy agency and the Saudi Foreign Minister, Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo acted as a tag team.

Bolton ratcheted up the war threats against Iran. Addressing Tehran, he thundered,

“If you cross us, our allies, or our partners; if you harm our citizens; if you continue to lie, cheat, and deceive, yes, there will indeed be hell to pay. … We are watching, and we will come after you.”

Pompeo used similar language, but also lashed out at the P-5, the other great powers that negotiated and continue to uphold the Iran nuclear accord:

“I was disturbed and indeed deeply disappointed to hear remaining parties in the deal announced they are setting up a special payment system to bypass US sanctions. This is one of the most counterproductive measures imaginable for regional and global peace and security.”

Iran has emerged as a focal point of US-European tensions. But the rift is deep with Germany, the EU’s dominant power, insisting that Europe can no longer rely on the Trans-Atlantic alliance, forged to wage the Cold War, and must develop the military and financial infrastructure to assert its own predatory interests on the world stage, independently of, and, when needed, against America.

Trump, for his part, further stoked tensions with Europe in recent days. According to news reports, he railed against the EU, saying its trade practices were “worse” than China’s in a meeting with Macron Monday. And in his General Assembly speech the next day, he attacked Germany, saying it “will become totally dependent on Russian energy if it does not immediately change course” and scrap the Nord Stream II gas pipeline project.

Over the course of his two days at the UN, Trump threatened, bullied and denounced much of the world, giving voice both to the insatiable aspirations of US imperialism for world hegemony and the acute dissatisfaction of its ruling elite at the vast erosion of its economic and geopolitical power. More than a quarter-century of mounting imperialist violence has failed to reverse this decline. But the response of the American oligarchy is to double-down on aggression and militarism, setting a course for war with Iran, while mounting military-strategic offensives against Russia and China, and roiling its ostensible European allies.

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Straightaway in office, Trump was co-opted by hardline extremists. Things worsened dramatically after Pompeo replaced Tillerson at State and Bolton took over from McMaster as national security advisor.

Trump’s outreach to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was all for naught, his agenda undermined by Pompeo and Bolton, making unacceptable demands in return for hollow promises sure to be broken.

Trump’s eagerness to rapprochement with Russia and Vladimir Putin personally was sabotaged by falsely accusing the Kremlin of interfering in America’s political process, along with numerous other fabricated charges.

Pompeo, Bolton, other regime hardliners, and congressional Russophobes want adversarial relations with Moscow maintained, demonization is their strategy, preventing any chance for improved ties.

“The Russian are Coming”. Washington considers Russia its sworn enemy, China increasingly treated the same way, the only two nations able to effectively challenge US hegemonic aims, especially when united for common objectives.

Trump regime anti-Iran rage risks possible war on the Islamic Republic, hellbent for regime change.

Pompeo, Bolton, and other regime extremists want Israel’s main regional rival eliminated, despite the Islamic Republic wanting cooperative relations with all countries, threatening none – not America, Israel or any others.

Iran hasn’t attacked another country in centuries, a cold hard fact ignored by Iranophobic US officials and major media.

They feature the official falsified narrative alone, suppressing hard truths. Iran’s leadership renounced nuclear weapons, wanting them eliminated altogether. Its ballistic and other missiles, along with its military preparedness, is all about defense, not offense.

Trump’s geopolitical team is going all-out to replace its sovereign independent governance with pro-Western puppet rule.

If sanctions, orchestrated terrorist attacks and other destabilization tactics fail, naked aggression may be next.

Other JCPOA signatories oppose DLT’s opposition to the deal. Russia and China intend maintaining normal relations with the Islamic Republic, refusing to go along with illegal US sanctions.

Days earlier, EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said Brussels intends creating special payment channels to maintain trade relations with Iran, facilitating its oil, gas, and other exports, bypassing the US-controlled Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) system.

What Brussels actually implements, not what it says, alone matters, the jury still out on its policies toward Iran.

After chairing a Security Council session, Trump’s news conference included disinformation and Big Lies – notably on Syria, Iran, Israel/Palestine, and China.

Venezuela was also harshly targeted in his General Assembly address and on the sidelines of the session. More on this below.

Moscow, Damascus, Hezbollah fighters, and Iranian military advisors alone have gone all-out to defeat the scourge of ISIS and other terrorists in Syria the Trump regime and its imperial partners support.

During his Wednesday press conference, Trump took credit for their accomplishments.

“Nobody is going to give me credit, but that’s OK,” he roared.

He falsely claimed orders given to Pompeo and Bolton, along with his tweets, stopped an Idlib (liberating) offensive, saving “millions of people (from being) killed.”

He repeated the Big Lie about the  JCPOA being the “worst deal ever,” unleashing venom on the Islamic Republic whenever the topic is raised.

He boasted about US sanctions war on the country, harming ordinary people – accomplishing no strategic aims now or earlier since the 1979 revolution ended a generation of US-installed fascist dictatorship.

He falsely called himself “a facilitator” in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict – ignoring his one-sided support for the Jewish state, inflicting enormous hardships on millions of Palestinians, including illegally blockaded Gazans and refugees he doesn’t give a hoot about.

He lied claiming “(w)e have evidence” that China is interfering in America’s upcoming midterm election, adding Xi Jinping may not be a good friend “anymore.”

Beijing’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi denounced the false accusation, saying

“(w)e do not and will not interfere in any countries’ domestic affairs,” adding:

“We refuse to accept any unwarranted accusations against China, and we call on other countries to also observe the purposes of the UN charter and not interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.”

Trump escalated Obama’s political and economic war on Venezuela. His Tuesday General Assembly remarks viciously attacked its sovereign independent Bolivarian social democracy – calling its legitimate governance “the socialist dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro” – a bald-faced lie.

He vowed “further action” against the country, coinciding with implementing additional illegal sanctions on high-ranking Maduro officials.

Earlier US sanctions created economic and financial crisis conditions. “(A)ll options are on the table” to topple its government, he roared earlier.

Ahead of his Wednesday Security Council remarks, he repeated the threat, adding stronger measures may be implemented against the country than already, telling reporters “you know what I mean by strong” – suggesting another coup attempt or possible military intervention.

During his Wednesday press conference, he again said

“(a)ll options are on the table, every one…with respect to Venezuela.”

Maduro’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza called Trump’s threats “grotesque,” adding “its easy for (him) to promote violence and the assassination of leaders in a country.”

Hardline US geopolitical policies are counterproductive longterm, making more adversaries than friends.

They’re contributing to growing US isolation internationally. They risk greater aggressive wars than already, including possible direct confrontation with Russia and China.

Imperial madness is self-defeating longterm, a reality Trump doesn’t understand, nor his extremist geopolitical team.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

Israel has very real reasons to fear Russia’s S-300 shipment to Syria if Damascus actually ends up independently wielding this defensive system to safeguard its airspace every time that it’s threatened, though that might be exactly why Tel Aviv and its American ally might wage an overwhelming preemptive strike to prevent that from happening. 

It would be a strategic game-changer if the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) obtained the S-300s and used them to protect against any forthcoming Israeli and/or American strikes (whether carried out by warplanes or missiles), but it’s doubtful that either of them will peacefully forgo their freedom to militarily operate in the country with impunity. In and of itself, the SAA’s possession of this system would enable it to impose a “no-fly zone” over the country, to say nothing of extending this weapon’s reach into Israel’s de-facto borders and therefore hindering the Israeli Air Force’s ability to fly over its own territory. There’s no conceivable way that Israel would allow that to happen, nor that the US would accept its aircraft being unable to enter into the northeastern Kurdish-controlled part of the country that it’s occupying, which is why there’s either more to this announcement than is being made public or the world should brace for an impending joint strike by both of them against these systems.

About the first possibility, it should be noted that Shoigu didn’t say anything about Russia pulling out of its existing “deconfliction mechanisms” with Israel or the US, meaning that a “loophole” technically exists for both of them to avoid having their aircraft or missiles shot down so long as they coordinate their operations with Moscow like they were supposed to all along through these agreements. That, however, doesn’t remove the challenge posed to these “gentlemen’s deals” by the SAA, which could theoretically shoot down their aerial assets or missiles despite Russia “greenlighting” them beforehand. The very fact that the SAA might be able to independently wield the S-300s outside of Russian control terrifies Israel and the US and is enough of a strategic uncertainty that neither of them is likely to allow that state of affairs to ever enter into existence. The reasons for this are many, but the most important ones are as follows.

To begin with and to repeat what was mentioned earlier, Israel will not accept Syria having the military possibility to target aircraft over its own airspace, the same as the US won’t do the same when it comes to Damascus obtaining the means to shoot down its planes flying over the northeast of the country. This would suggest that Russia might place restrictions on the locations where Syria could deploy these systems in order to prevent them from targeting either of those parties’ aircraft over those areas, but since the S-300’s range is between 200-250km, they can easily cover those territories anyhow, thus making this a moot point. Furthermore, there doesn’t exist enough trust between Israel and the US on the one hand and Russia – let alone Syria, too – on the other for the first-mentioned pair to not be concerned about this even if it was the case.

Another point that needs to be mentioned is that Israel isn’t going to tolerate any so-called “safe zones” for the IRGC and Hezbollah in Syria, which is what Damascus would de-facto be creating if it was given control of its own S-300s. Russia must certainly be aware of Israel’s publicly proclaimed stance on this issue and would know that delivering the S-300s to Damascus could trigger Tel Aviv into destroying these assets if they ever targeted its aircraft, so this once again brings the analysis back to wondering whether Syria would really be gaining independent control over these systems like many in the public seem to think they would or if Russia would secretly still be in control of them. The latter scenario isn’t speculation either because presidential spokesman Peskov said that the S-300s are “not directed against third countries, they are meant to protect our own troops.

This statement is relatively ambiguous because it seems to somewhat contradict what Shoigu said about Syria obtaining control over these systems, and it would be unprecedented for Russia to “outsource” the security of its personnel to Syria when it’s more than capable of protecting them on its own with the said systems. It could be, however, that Peskov is just adding “diplomatic sugar” to Shoigu’s announcement and “covering up” for Russia’s shipment of S-300s to the SAA by giving it a “publicly plausible” reason that doesn’t have any official “anti-Israeli” purpose. If that’s what’s happening, then it should still be expected that Israel will strike these units like it threatened to do earlier in the year when there was renewed talk about their transfer to the SAA, and it might even be joined by the US in doing so for the reasons mentioned earlier in this analysis.

Russia didn’t sacrifice as much as it already did just to get to this far of a point in the war and have the SAA possibly obliterated by an overwhelming swarm of Israeli and American missiles in response to its partner using the S-300s against either of their aircraft, nor will Moscow likely order its soldiers to function as “human shields”/“tripwires” for guaranteeing that Russia retaliates against their possible destruction. The stakes seem to have been raised in this game of geopolitical poker, though cooler heads will probably prevail in thwarting the worst-case scenario that was just described. Some way or another, Russia will probably ensure that it still retains a degree of control over the S-300s that it transfers to the SAA, possibly including the authority to temporarily prevent them from locking onto certain targets on a case-by-case basis following the approval of Israeli and American operations coordinated through the “deconfliction mechanism”.

Syria must certainly know that using the S-300s to attack Israeli aircraft over Israel or American ones over the Kurdish-controlled northeast that the Pentagon is occupying would most likely trigger a devastating response, so even in the event that it has full independent control over these weapons, it probably wouldn’t use them for those purposes. It would, however, protect its most important infrastructure and facilities from attacks by either of them, but therein lays the rub because neither Israel nor the US could be certain that those locations aren’t functioning as “safe zones” for the IRGC or Hezbollah, much less their speculative missile-making warehouses, so the “security dilemma” (to reference a well-known concept of International Relations theory) is still much too intense for them not to be “provoked” into a “preemptive”, or at the very least overwhelming retaliatory, strike.

In summary, Israel and the US have everything to fear from Syria gaining unrestricted control over the S-300s, but likewise, so too does Syria almost counterintuitively have something to fear from this too because of the likelihood that it could “push” both of them into launching a preemptive strike against it. Russia also – again, counterintuitively – shares the same fears as well because it probably doesn’t have the “political will” to risk World War III through the necessary brinksmanship of backing up the SAA if it shoots down Israeli and/or American jets and/or missiles, leave alone if it’s victimized by a devastating preemptive or retaliatory strike, which raises the question of why it’s transferring S-300s to it in the first place unless there’s much more to this agreement than meets the eye. Nothing is as it seems, that much is clear, but it’ll take the unfolding of forthcoming events for observers to get a better idea of what might really be going on.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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.

In my recent essay, I argued that power in our societies resides in structure, ideology and narratives – supporting what we might loosely term our current “neoliberal order” – rather than in individuals. Significantly, our political and media classes, who are of course deeply embedded in this neoliberal structure, are key promoters of the very opposite idea: that individuals or like-minded groups of people hold power; that they should, at least in theory, be held accountable for the use and misuse of that power; and that meaningful change involves replacing these individuals rather than fundamentally altering the power-structure they operate within.

In other words, our political and media debates reduce to who should be held to account for problems in the economy, the health and education systems, or the conduct of a war. What is never discussed is whether flawed policies are the fleeting responsibility of individuals and political parties or symptoms of the current neoliberal malaise – manifestations of an ideology that necessarily has goals, such as the pursuit of maximised profit and endless economic growth, that are indifferent to other considerations, such as the damage being done to life on our planet.

The focus on individuals happens for a reason. It is designed to ensure that the structure and ideological foundations of our societies remain invisible to us, the public. The neoliberal order goes unquestioned – presumed, against the evidence of history, to be permanent, fixed, unchallengeable.

So deep is this misdirection that even efforts to talk about real power become treacherous. My words above and below might suggest that power is rather like a person, that it has intention and will, that maybe it likes to deceive or play tricks. But none of that is true either.

Big and little power

My difficulty conveying precisely what I mean, my need to resort to metaphor, reveals the limitations of language and the necessarily narrow ideological horizons it imposes on anyone who uses it. Intelligible language is not designed adequately to describe structure or power. It prefers to particularise, to humanise, to specify, to individualise in ways that make thinking in bigger, more critical ways near-impossible.

Language is on the side of those, like politicians and corporate journalists, who conceal structure, who deal in narratives of the small-power of individuals rather than of the big-power of structure and ideology. In what passes for news, the media offer a large stage for powerful individuals to fight elections, pass legislation, take over businesses, start wars, and a small stage for these same individuals to get their come-uppance, caught committing crimes, lying, having affairs, getting drunk, and more generally embarrassing themselves.

These minor narratives conceal the fact that such individuals are groomed before they ever gain access to power. Business leaders, senior politicians and agenda-setting journalists reach their positions after proving themselves over and over again – not consciously but through their unthinking compliance to the power-structure of our societies. They are selected through their performances in exams at school and university, through training programmes and indentures. They rise to the top because they are the most talented examples of those who are blind or submissive to power, those who can think most cleverly without thinking critically. Those who reliably deploy their skills where they are directed to do so.

Their large and small dramas constitute what we call public life, whether politics, world affairs or entertainment. To suggest that there are deeper processes at work, that the largest of these dramas is not really large enough for us to gain insight into how power operates, is to instantly be dismissed as paranoid, a fantasist, and – most damningly of all – a conspiracy theorist.

These terms also serve the deception. They are intended to stop all thought about real power. They are scare words used to prevent us, in a metaphor used in my previous post, from stepping back from the screen. They are there to force us to stand so close we see only the pixels, not the bigger picture.

Media makeover

The story of Britain’s Labour party is a case in point, and was illustrated even before Jeremy Corbyn became leader. Back in the 1990s Tony Blair reinvented the party as New Labour, jettisoning ideas of socialism and class war, and inventing instead a “Third Way”.

The idea that gained him access to power – personified in the media narrative of the time as his meeting with Rupert Murdoch on the mogul’s Hayman Island – was that New Labour would triangulate, find a middle way between the 1 per cent and the 99 per cent. The fact that the meeting took place with Murdoch rather than anyone else signalled something significant: that the power-structure needed a media makeover. It needed to be dressed in new garb.

In reality, Blair made Labour useful to power by re-styling the turbo-charged neoliberalism Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative party of the rich had unleashed. He made it look compatible with social democracy. Blair put a gentler, kinder mask on neoliberalism’s aggressive pursuit of planet-destroying power – much as Barack Obama would do in the United States a decade later, after the horrors of the Iraq invasion. Neither Blair nor Obama changed the substance of our economic and political systems, but they did make them look deceptively attractive by tinkering with social policy.

Were the neoliberal order laid bare – were the emperor to allow himself to be stripped of his clothes – no one apart from a small psychopathic elite would vote for neoliberalism’s maintenance. So power is forced to repeatedly reinvent itself. It is like the shape-shifting Mystique of the X-Men films, constantly altering its appearance to lull us into a false sense of security. Power’s goal is to keep looking like it has become something new, something innovative. Because the power-structure does not want change, it has to find front-men and women who can personify a transformation that is, in truth, entirely hollow.

Power can perform this stunt, as Blair did, by repackaging the same product – neoliberalism – in prettier ideological wrapping. Or it can, as has happened in the US of late, try a baser approach by adding a dash of identity politics. A black presidential candidate (Obama) can offer hope, and a woman candidate (Hillary Clinton) can cast herself as mother-saviour.

With this model in place, elections become an illusory contest between more transparent and more opaque iterations of neoliberal power. In failing the 99 per cent, Obama so woefully voided this strategy that large sections of voters turned their back on his intended successor, the new makeover candidate Hillary Clinton. They saw through the role-playing. They preferred, even if only reluctantly, the honest vulgarity of naked power represented by Trump over the pretensions of Clinton’s fakely compassionate politics.

Unstable politics

Despite its best efforts, neoliberalism is increasingly discredited in the eyes of large sections of the electorate in the US and UK. Its attempts at concealment have grown jaded, its strategy exhausted. It has reached the end-game, and that is why politics now looks so unstable. “Insurgency” candidates in different guises are prospering.

Neoliberal power is distinctive because it seeks absolute power, and can achieve that end only through global domination. Globalisation, the world as a plaything for a tiny elite to asset-strip, is both its means and its end. Insurgents are therefore those who seek to reverse the trend towards globalisation – or at least claim to. There are insurgents on both the left and right.

If neoliberalism has to choose, it typically prefers an insurgent on the right to the left. A Trump figure can usefully serve power too, because he dons the clothes of an insurgent while doing little to actually change the structure.

Nonetheless, Trump is a potential problem for the neoliberal order for two reasons.

First, unlike an Obama or a Clinton, he too clearly illuminates what is really at stake for power – wealth maximisation at any cost – and thereby risks unmasking the deception. And second, he is a retrograde step for the globalising power-structure.

Neoliberalism has dragged capitalism out its nineteenth-century dependency on nation-states into a twenty-first ideology that demands a global reach. Trump and other nativist leaders seek a return to a supposed golden era of state-based capitalism, one that prefers to send our children up chimneys if it prevents children from far-off lands arriving on our shores to do the same.

The neoliberal order prefers a Trump to a Bernie Sanders because the nativist insurgents are so much easier to tame. A Trump can be allowed to strut on his Twitter stage while the global power-structure constrains and undermines any promised moves that might threaten it. Trump the candidate was indifferent to Israel and wanted the US out of Syria. Trump the president has become Israel’s biggest cheerleader and has launched US missiles at Syria.

Faustian pacts

The current power-structure is much more frightened of a left insurgency of the kind represented by Corbyn in the UK. He and his supporters are trying to reverse the accommodations with power made by Blair. And that is why he finds himself relentlessly assaulted from every direction – from his political opponents; from his supposed political allies, including most of his own parliamentary party; and most especially from the state-corporate media, including its bogus left-liberal elements like the Guardian and the BBC.

The past three years of attacks on Corbyn are how power manifests itself, shows its hand, when it is losing. It is a strategy of last resort. A Blair or an Obama arrive in power having already made so many compromises behind the scenes that their original policies are largely toothless. They have made Faustian pacts as a condition for being granted access to power. This is variously described as pragmatism, moderation, realism. More accurately, it should be characterised as betrayal.

It does not stop when they reach high office. Obama made a series of early errors, thinking he would have room to manoeuvre in the Middle East. He made a speech in Cairo about a “New Beginning” for the region. A short time later he would help to snuff out the Egyptian Arab Spring that erupted close by, in Tahrir Square. Egypt’s military, long subsidised by Washington, were allowed to take back power.

Obama won the 2009 Nobel peace prize, before he had time to do anything, for his international diplomacy. And yet he stepped up the war on terror, oversaw the rapid expansion of a policy of extrajudicial assassinations by drone, and presided over the extension of the Iraq regime-change operation to Libya and Syria.

And he threatened penalties for Israel over its illegal settlements policy – a five-decade war crime that has gone completely unpunished by the international community. But in practice his inaction allowed Israel to entrench its settlements to the point where annexation of parts of the West Bank is now imminent.

Tame or destroy

Neoliberalism is now so entrenched, so rapacious that even a moderate socialist like Corbyn is seen as a major threat. And unlike a Blair, Obama or Trump, Corbyn is much harder to tame because he has a grassroots movement behind him and to which he is ultimately accountable.

In the US, the neoliberal wing of the Democratic party prevented the left-insurgent candidate, Bernie Sanders, from contesting the presidency by rigging the system to keep him off the ballot paper. In the UK, Corbyn got past those structural defences by accident. He scraped into the leadership race as the token “loony-left” candidate, indulged by the Labour party bureaucracy as a way to demonstrate that the election was inclusive and fair. He was never expected to win.

Once he was installed as leader, the power-structure had two choices: to tame him like Blair, or destroy him before he stood a chance of reaching high office. For those with short memories, it is worth recalling how those alternatives were weighed in Corbyn’s first months.

On the one hand, he was derided across the media for being shabbily dressed, for being unpatriotic, for threatening national security, for being sexist. This was the campaign to tame him. On the other, the Murdoch-owned Times newspaper, the house journal of the neoliberal elite, gave a platform to an anonymous army general to warn that the British military would never allow Corbyn to reach office. There would be an army-led coup before he ever got near 10 Downing Street.

In a sign of how ineffectual these power-structures now are, none of this made much difference to Corbyn’s fortunes with the public. A truly insurgent candidate cannot be damaged by attacks from the power-elite. That’s why he is where he is, after all.

So those wedded to the power-structure among his own MPs tried to wage a second leadership contest to unseat him. As a wave of new members signed up to bolster his ranks of supporters, and thereby turned the party into the largest in Europe, Labour party bureaucrats stripped as many as possible of their right to vote in the hope Corbyn could be made to lose. They failed again. He won with an even bigger majority.

Redefining words

It was in this context that the neoliberal order has had to play its most high-stakes card of all. It has accused Corbyn, a lifelong anti-racism activist, of being an anti-semite for supporting the Palestinian cause, for preferring Palestinian rights over brutal Israeli occupation. To make this charge plausible, words have had to be redefined: “anti-semitism” no longer means simply a hatred of Jews, but includes criticism of Israel; “Zionist” no longer refers to a political movement that prioritises the rights of Jews over the native Palestinian population, but supposedly stands as sinister code for all Jews. Corbyn’s own party has been forced under relentless pressure to adopt these malicious reformulations of meaning.

How anti-semitism is being weaponised, not to protect Jews but to protect the neoliberal order, was made starkly clear this week when Corbyn criticised the financial elite that brought the west to the brink of economic ruin a decade ago, and will soon do so again unless stringent new regulations are introduced. Useful idiots like Stephen Pollard, editor of the rightwing Jewish Chronicle, saw a chance to revive the anti-semitism canard once again, accusing Corbyn of secretly meaning “Jews” when he actually spoke of bankers. It is a logic intended to make the neoliberal elite untouchable, cloaking them in a security blanket relying on the anti-semitism taboo.

Almost the entire Westminister political class and the entire corporate media class, including the most prominent journalists in the left-liberal media, have reached the same preposterous conclusion about Corbyn. Whatever the evidence in front of their and our eyes, he is now roundly declared an anti-semite. Up is now down, and day is night.

High-stakes strategy

This strategy is high stakes and dangerous for two reasons.

First, it risks creating the very problem it claims to be defending against. By crying wolf continuously about Corbyn’s supposed anti-semitism without any tangible evidence for it, and by making an unfounded charge of anti-semitism the yardstick for judging Corbyn’s competence for office rather than any of his stated policies, the real anti-semite’s argument begins to sound more plausible.

In what could become self-fulfilling prophecy, the anti-semitic right’s long-standing ideas about Jewish cabals controlling the media and pulling levers behind the scenes could start to resonate with an increasingly disillusioned and frustrated public. The weaponising of anti-semitism by the neoliberal order to protect its power risks turning Jews into collateral damage. It makes them another small or bigger drama in the increasingly desperate attempt to create a narrative that deflects attention from the real power-structure.

And second, the effort to stitch together a narrative of Corbyn’s anti-semitism out of non-existent cloth is likely to encourage more and more people to take a step back from the screen so that those unintelligible pixels can more easily be discerned as a smoking gun. The very preposterousness of the allegations, and the fact that they are taken so seriously by a political and media class selected for their submissiveness to the neoliberal order, accelerates the process by which these opinion-formers discredit themselves. Their authority wanes by the day, and as a result their usefulness to the power-structure rapidly diminishes.

This is where we are now: in the final stages of a busted system that is clinging on to credibility by its fingernails. Sooner or later, its grip will be lost and it will plunge into the abyss. We will wonder how we ever fell for any of its deceptions.

In the meantime, we must get on with the urgent task of liberating our minds, of undoing the toxic mental and emotional training we were subjected to, of critiquing and deriding those whose job is to enforce the corrupt orthodoxy, and of replotting a course towards a future that saves the human species from impending extinction.

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This article was originally published on CounterPunch.

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

Featured image is from the author.

“White Man’s Burden”, a colonial euphemism for what Marthe Raymond calls “White Supremacy Colonialism” is a subconscious driver behind what Canada and its allies are currently imposing on Syria. According to this “logic”, we can bomb and slaughter and behead and deny food and medicine and almost everything else to Syrians because, apparently, they DO NOT HAVE HUMAN RIGHTS. It is the “logic” of imperialism.

As soon as you go to Syria and meet Syrians, the logic is totally destroyed, and the “civilized” mask of imperialists disintegrates and reveals them for what they are: war criminals.  Whereas colonial logic would have us believe that we are superior to Syrians, the inverse is true on many levels. For example, whereas Canada and its allies support al Qaeda in Syria, Syria and Syrians are (successfully) combatting al Qaeda.  Whereas Canada and its allies support sectarianism and fundamentalist interpretations of Sharia law, as observed in terrorist-occupied areas of Syria, the Syrian government supports the opposite: democracy, pluralism, and non-sectarianism.

Whereas the West supports ignorance and barbarism, Syria supports enlightenment and civilization. Prof. Tim Anderson reports that,

“(u)nder the Saudi-backed sectarian terror groups (mainly Jaysh al Islam, Faylaq al Rahman, and Jabhat al Nusra), all schools had been closed, commandeered by the armed groups for their own purposes. Only a few small classrooms were used for Saudi-style religious instruction.

The result is that, after six years of jihadist occupation, as teachers confirmed to us, most primary school age children had never been to a real school; until now.” [1]

(Source: Prof. Anderson/AHT)

Despite 7 years of imperial war against Syria, most Canadians find evidence-based assertions about Syria and Syrians to be ridiculous.  Why is this?  The broad-based ignorance is largely a product of our “colonial” monopoly mass media, which is an echo chamber for criminal war propaganda.      

We have allowed this colonial mindset, coupled with a sophisticated apparatus of deception, to blind us to the reality to which we are accomplices.  The reality is an overseas holocaust where Western barbarism is slowly but surely being defeated as the world tilts towards a multipolar orientation. 

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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.

Note

1. Prof. Tim Anderson, “After Years of War, East Ghouta’s Schools Reopen.” American Herald Tribune, 24 September, 2018.( https://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa-south-west-asia/syria-crisis/2492-east-ghouta-schools.html) Accessed, 26 September, 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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Since 2012 Venezuela has undergone an economic war directed mostly by and from the U.S. that has targeted market prices of goods and services, in part, by the impact of unilateral economic sanctions, but also in large part by the manipulation of the exchange rate in the illegal parallel market that determined the prices of goods and services in Venezuela. The aim has been to disarticulate the economic and political stability of the Venezuelan constitutional order, within a plan that aims for regime change. 

The economic war has partially achieved the intended goal by creating shortages and disrupting production. The result has been a spiraling inflationary process, only kept at bay by the recent monetary measures adopted by the Maduro government.

But in order to understand the importance of those monetary measures, it is first essential to understand the mechanism of the foreign induced inflationary process that had taken a grip on the Venezuelan economy.

The inflationary phenomenon

In her outstanding book “The Visible Hand of the Market – Economic Warfare in Venezuela”, Venezuelan economist Pasqualina Curcio describes in full details the mechanism by which “people in Venezuela have endured episodes of disproportionate and induced increase of prices, of galloping inflation, with repercussions on the purchasing power, especially the working class.” [1] 

She backs up her conclusions with statistical analyses and econometric models to show how the “economic crisis” is induced by external factors with the participation of domestic economic forces.

Inflation is basically a situation where there is a distortion of prices that affects the purchasing power of individuals. That is, prices rapidly go up while consumers’ purchasing power decreases. A high inflation rate is considered an anomaly in the economy. This anomaly is often caused by factors such as shortages of goods and services and/or high exchange rates resulting in a rise in prices.

First, it’s important to notice three important features of Venezuelan economy that are relevant to the way market prices are determined:

1. There are relatively few private importers in Venezuela but they control an important economic sector. This implies that they have the power to fix prices differently from what demand and supply would dictate. 

2. In Venezuela there has been a Currency Exchange Control since 2003 with a preferential U.S. dollar to the (Venezuelan currency) Bolivar exchange rate to favor imports.

3. Venezuela is a large importer of many products for direct consumption (20% of imports) and as inputs for national production (79% of imports); therefore market prices are determined largely by the value of the international currency. For example, if corn is purchased abroad at $1 a kilo, say, the retail price in Venezuela, under normal circumstances, should be $1 plus any other additional cost incurred by the importer/distributor/retailer, and his/her profit, in equivalent Venezuelan currency.

The first feature of the Venezuelan economy has allowed importers to control the supply of products creating shortages and fixing higher prices. We can be sure that at a time of economic uncertainty they may be inclined to use the power to their advantage, financial or political.

The second feature is intended to help society with affordable imports of essential goods that would be retailed at lower prices.

The third feature makes it such that prices will be in turn determined by the exchange rate. Therefore, prices of goods and services can easily be manipulated by manipulating the exchange rate for financial or political gain.

But another reality – outside Venezuela – is central to understanding how prices are pushed out of control. A parallel and illegal exchange rate “market” has been represented by a website identified as Dolar Today established in Florida that is overtly anti Venezuelan government. The site has been publishing subjective rates drastically devaluating the real market value of the Venezuelan currency. What makes this market illegal is that it is totally unregulated and it is driven by websites and social media, not to mention by its political intent. 

Example

Keeping these few elements in mind, I will try to provide a simple hypothetical example that might help understand the mechanism of the inflationary process that has wrongly been attributed to the socialist administration of the Maduro government. [2]

This might actually point out that it is the capitalist behavior, particularly when it is politically motivated, that has manufactured the economic crisis in Venezuela.

Let’s say an importer wanted to buy 1,000 Kg of a certain product in the international market at a cost of US$ 10 per kilo. The importer would need to get US$ 10,000 from the Central Bank of Venezuela at the official preferential exchange rate of, say, BsF 10 for US$ 1, for a total of BsF 100,000 in Venezuelan currency (we use here the old currency, Bolivar Fuerte, used at the time reference in the example).

Let’s say the importer uses a mark up of 100%, the price of the product in Venezuela should be the equivalent of US$ 20/Kg, that is BsF 200/Kg, using the same preferential rate of exchange (assuming no other costs for the sake of the example).

However, the importer (and/or any other economic player including individual speculators) may use his/her economic power or opportunity in either or both of the following actions:

1. Reduce the supply in order to increase the price (this has explained in large part the shortages of certain essential products and the corresponding price increase).

2. Jack up the price by claiming a much higher parallel and illegal exchange rate posted in the website Dollar Today. If the website posted, for example, an exchange rate of BsF 100,000 for US$ 1, the speculative retail price of a kilogram of the product in question would be BsF 2 million (BsF 100,000 x US$ 20/Kg), instead of BsF 200 (BsF 10 x US$ 20/Kg). 

The example is simple but the price fixing based on the parallel exchange rate market is real and proven by Pasqualina Curcio in her book. 

The Maduro government has implemented remedial policies like the CLAP (Local Distribution and Production Committees) to offset shortages and price hikes. However, the Venezuelan government has been unable to stop the parallel market based in the U.S. This market has falsely and relentlessly devaluated the Venezuelan currency over time.

How is the monetary conversion solving the problem

Last August the Maduro government announced an ambitious but realistic plan called Program of Economic Recovery, Growth and Prosperity. The program has 10 strategies including a new redesign of fiscal and tax policy, a new policy of subsidizing gasoline, an increase of four percentage points to the Value Added Tax (IVA), a guaranteed minimum wage, and the establishment of a single exchange rate, which will fluctuate according to the auction system under the Venezuelan Central Bank (BCV) regulation. [3]

In fact, just last September 7 Venezuela has taken a further step towards freeing up the exchange of its new Sovereign Bolivar (BsS) currency, with the government authorizing public and private firms and banks, as well as ordinary citizens, to trade in other currencies for the first time since 2003.

When Maduro launched the plan he said,

“We are going to dismantle the perverse war of neoliberal capitalism to install an honest, balanced, sustainable, healthy and productive economic system.”

This might have not been a coincidental reference to the IMF neoliberal measures being forced on the Mauricio Macri government in Argentina causing, by the way, high inflation and popular unrest.

The centerpiece of the economic plan, however, has been the implementation of a drastic monetary reform in order to stop the rampant inflation that was facilitated by a financial system dependent on the U.S. dollar as a reference currency. The reform slashed five zeros to the old currency and linked the new BsS to the crypto currency Petro, in turn anchored to one of the largest of Venezuelan natural resources, oil. Currently, one Petro equals US$ 60, based on a barrel of Venezuelan crude, and that is equivalent to 3,600 BsS. More significant is that the minimum wage is now BsS 1,800, which increased dramatically the purchasing power of workers. Before the reform the minimum wage in today’s currency would have been BsS 51.96.

Maduro has stated that anchoring serves to lower inflation because

“we are not going to be subject to the value of our monetary sign being determined by a web page, [but] it will be determined by the oil market, which may be unstable at some point but has its regularity, its own structuring, many countries are involved.”

There is no shortage of critics saying that the monetary reform will not work but I have yet to read any sound explanation for the criticism.

Certainly, prices fixing and control remain an issue to watch carefully. The Venezuelan government and 35 companies, including Cargill, Polar and El Tunal (among the largest in the food sector), have agreed and made public the first 25 prices of items prioritized by the Venezuelan government that will be subject to regulation, under a scheme of sustainable prices and subject to modification. More items will be regulated in the near future.

The new economic program will reduce or mitigate the temptation of illegal resale, contraband or hoarding, because the new price structure is now anchored to an international reference currency that cannot be manipulated.

Another important outcome is that by de-linking the currency from the dollar, Venezuela is effectively able to bypass the multiple sanctions from the US, Canada and European countries. There have been no new sanctions against Venezuela since last May. [4]

Although it is too soon to see any real impact, these new measures promise to put an end to inflation by regaining control of the economy that was left in the hands of a small powerful minority taking advantage of the possibilities of speculation and corruption allowed by the illegal currency exchange market. 

Internationally, the new economic plan has implicitly been endorsed by China. The online media outlet venezuelanalysis.com reported that Maduro’s visit to China at the beginning of September has resulted in Venezuela and China signing twenty-eight bilateral agreements, including a new US$ 5 billion Chinese loan and joint plans for a fourth satellite, in addition to strengthening political ties.

Even further, Venezuela will now join China’s ambitious New Silk Road commercial plan, which is estimated to be worth US$ 900 billion. The project looks to connect Europe, Asia, and the Middle East in a monumental economic road and maritime chain that will include 60 countries, 75 percent of the world’s energy reserves, and 70 percent of its population. Venezuela is the second Latin American country to sign up for the project with the world largest oil reserves, following Uruguay earlier this year. [5] China-Venezuela economic partnership builds confidence in the Maduro administration recent reforms.

Concluding thoughts

It is important to remember that classic economics talks about the determination of prices based on supply and demand. But in practice, geopolitical factors may have more relevance in determining prices. In its worse case, the situation occurs when undue control over the economy is exercised from another country for political reasons, to such an extent that speculation and abuses on the part of consumers and producers alike become the norm. 

Venezuela has a major challenge: the U.S. determination for regime change against all international covenants. The U.S. government is doing so by implementing unilateral punitive actions based on uncorroborated human rights violations, humanitarian crisis and migration crisis. All these accusations have been disproved at the highest international instances.

The Organization of American States (OAS) overall has restrained itself from condemning Venezuela, except for its Secretary General that seems to be pursuing a personal vendetta with calls to military intervention in Venezuela, against the mandate required by his position.

Venezuela has been subjected to an economic war well demonstrated by economist Pasqualina Curcio in her book, which is orchestrated outside the country and therefore out of its control. For instance, the currency values that are published daily in web pages and disseminated in social networks do not respond to any economic criteria or economic reality. They respond instead to a political intention seeking destabilization through the distortion of the markets and of the Venezuelan economy in general.

The Maduro administration has responded to all economic impacts with policies that protect the population, as well as with unique programs that aim to a recovery and a prosperous future. A strict control of the implementation of the plan by all economic players is necessary. Even neoliberal policies enforce tight controls on the economy. The IMF and World Bank are typical examples. The real issue is to what ends the policies and controls are practiced and whom are they meant to benefit.

More importantly, the Venezuelan government has constantly invited the private sector and the political opposition to partake of the new opportunities.

However, there is also a clear message that the foreign “visible hand” of the market will meet the “hard hand” of the State if necessary.

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Nino Pagliccia is an activist and writer based in Vancouver, Canada. He is a Venezuelan-Canadian who writes about international relations with a focus on the Americas. He is editor of the book “Cuba Solidarity in Canada – Five Decades of People-to-People Foreign Relations” http://www.cubasolidarityincanada.ca. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Notes

[1] A PDF file can be download from https://bibliotecadaluta.files.wordpress.com/2017/08/the-visible-hand-of-the-market-economic-warfare-in-venezuela-pasqualina-curcio-c.pdf

[2] I have also benefitted from enlightening conversations on the topic with Wilfredo Perez Bianco, Consul General of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela in Vancouver, Canada, to whom I am very grateful.

[3] http://www.mppef.gob.ve/nuevo-convenio-cambiario-vs-bloqueo-y-desabastecimiento/

[4] https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Venezuelas-Monetary-Revolution-Vis-a-Vis-Economic-Sanctions-20180808-0023.html

[5] https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/14056 

Featured image is from PravdaReport.

There are battlefields in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, but given the state of corporate media, perhaps the most consequential battle now being fought is for our minds, says Patrick Lawrence.

After reading The New York Times piece “The Plot to Subvert an Election” I put the paper down with a single question.

Why, after two years of allegations, indictments, and claims to proof of this, that, and the other did the newspaper of record—well, once the newspaper of record—see any need to publish such a piece? My answer is simple: The orthodox account of Russia-gate has not taken hold: It has failed in its effort to establish a consensus of certainty among Americans. My conclusion matches this observation: The orthodox narrative is never going to achieve this objective. There are too many holes in it.

Screengrab from The New York Times

“The information age is actually a media age,” John Pilger, the noted British–Australian journalist, remarked during a symposium four years ago, when the Ukraine crisis was at its peak. “We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media—a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.”

Pilger revisited the theme in a piece last week on Consortium News, arguing that once-tolerated, dissenting opinion has in recent years “regressed into a metaphoric underground.”

There are battlefields in Syria, Ukraine, Yemen, and elsewhere, but perhaps the most consequential battle now being fought is for our minds.

Those who dispense with honest intellectual inquiry, healthy skepticism of all media, and an insistence that assertions require supporting evidence should not win this war. The Times piece by Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti—two of the paper’s top-tier reporters—is a case in point: If the Russia-gate narrative were so widely accepted as their report purports, there would have been no need to publish such a piece at this late date.

Many orthodox narratives are widely accepted however among a public that is not always paying attention. The public too often participates in the manufactured consent. Usually it take years for the truth to be widely understood. Sometimes it comes when the U.S. admits it decades later, such as the role of the CIA in the coups in Iran and Chile. Other times it comes through admissions by former U.S. officials, such as former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara about the Vietnam War.

Even Recent Narratives are Fraying

There are more recent examples of official narratives quickly fraying if not starting to fall apart, though Establishment media continues to push them.

For instance, there are serious doubts about who was responsible for alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria. The most significant was in Eastern Ghouta in August 2013 followed by attacks in Khan Sheikhoun (April 2017) and Douma (April 2018).

The corporate media accounts of each of these attacks have been countered with persuasive evidence against the prevailing view that the government of Bashar al–Assad was to blame. It has been provided journalists (Seymour Hersh), a scientist (Theodore Postol), and on-the-ground correspondents and local witnesses. These reports are subject to further verification. But by no means do official narratives stand without challenge.

There is also the case of Malaysian Flight MH–17, shot down over Ukrainian territory in June 2014. The official report, issued a year later, concluded that the plane was downed by Ukrainian rebels using a Russian-supplied missile. The report was faulty from the first: Investigators never visited the site , some evidence was based on a report produced by Bellingcat , an open-source web site affiliated with the vigorously anti–Russian Atlantic Council, and Ukraine was given the right to approve the report before it was issued.

Last week the Russian military disclosed evidence that serial numbers found in the debris at the MH–17 crash site indicate the missile that downed the plane was produced at a Soviet military-production plant in 1986 owned by Ukraine. Let us see further verification of this evidence (although I seriously doubt any Western correspondent will seek any). The official report of 2015 noted the serial numbers, so we know they are authentic, but it did not use them to trace the missile’s provenance.

There is also the seriously muddled case of the poisoning of the Skripals in Britain.  Why hasn’t the Western media dug into this story rather than accept at face value the pronouncements of the British government?

A month ago I lamented the damage Russia-gate has done to many of our most important institutions, the press not least among them. What is the corporate media thinking? That once President Trump is dumped, all will return to normal and professional standards will be restored? One can also argue the reverse: that adversarial journalism has returned to the White House beat largely out of personal animus towards Trump and that it will disappear again once a more “normal” president is in office.

As Pilger put it, “This is a seismic shift, with journalists policing the new ‘groupthink,’ as [Robert] Parry called it, dispensing myths and distractions, pursuing its enemies.”

In other words, Establishment journalism has shifted far afield from its traditional ideals of non-partisan, objective reporting and is instead vying for your mind to enlist it in its agenda to promote American interests abroad or one party or the other at home.

We can’t let them get away with it. Our minds are our own.

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

Synopsis

In The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? David Ray Griffin traces the trajectory of the American Empire from its founding through to the end of the 20th century. A prequel to Griffin’s Bush and Cheney, this book demonstrates with many examples the falsity of the claim for American exceptionalism, a secular version of the old idea that America has been divinely founded and guided.

The Introduction illustrates the claims for divine providence and American exceptionalism from George Washington to the book Exceptional by Dick and Liz Cheney. After pointing out that the idea that America is an empire is no longer controversial, it then contrasts those who consider it benign with those who consider it malign. The remainder of the book supports the latter point of view.

The American Trajectory contains many episodes that many readers will find surprising:

• That the sinking of the Lusitania was anticipated, both by Churchill and Wilson, as a means of inducing America’s entry into World War I;
• that the attack on Pearl Harbor was neither unprovoked nor a surprise;
• that during the “Good War” the US government plotted and played politics with a view to becoming the dominant empire;
• that there was no need to drop atomic bombs on Japan either to win the war or to save American lives;
• that US decisions were central to the inability of the League of Nations and the United Nations to prevent war;
• that the United States was more responsible than the Soviet Union for the Cold War;
• that the Vietnam War was far from the only US military adventure during the Cold War that killed great numbers of civilians;
• that the US government organized false flag attacks that deliberately killed Europeans;
• and that America’s military interventions after the dissolution of the Soviet Union taught some conservatives (such as Andrew Bacevich and Chalmers Johnson) that the US interventions during the Cold War were not primarily defensive.

The conclusion deals with the question of how knowledge by citizens of how the American Empire has behaved could make America better and how America, which had long thought of itself as the Redeemer Nation, might redeem itself.

Reviews

“David Ray Griffin is a master of the art of courageously, constructively and meticulously exposing and debunking dangerous disinfectant for brainwashed minds. Just as his previous book,Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, was essential reading to understand the world in which we now live,The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic? is essential reading to understand the true nature of the ‘exceptional’ role of the United States in world affairs—past, present and future.”

—John Whitbeck, International lawyer; author of The World According to Whitbeck

“This new book by David Ray Griffin is essential reading for anybody who wants to understand the dark side of US Imperialism in its global context.“

—Dr. Daniele Ganser, Director Swiss Institute for Peace and Energy Research; author of many books, including NATO’s Secret Armies.

“David Ray Griffin has done it again. His new book should be read as a prequel to the seminal Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World.

Supported by extensive research, Griffin thoroughly debunks the myth of an American Empire as a benign, exceptionalist, divinely ordained historical agent. Instead of Manifest Destiny, what reality-based Griffin charters is the ‘malign’ ways of US foreign policy since the 19th century; a trajectory founded by slavery and genocide of indigenous peoples and then imperially expanded, non-stop. ‘Malign’ happens to be a term currently very much in vogue across the Beltway—but always to designate US competitors Russia and China.

Griffin consistently challenges Beltway gospel, demonstrating that if the US had not entered WWI, there may have been no WWII. He unmasks the lies surrounding the true story of the Pearl Harbor attacks. He asks: If the US was really guided by God, how could it ‘choose’ to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki, knowing that ‘the atomic bombs were not necessary to end the war?’ Griffin also shows how the Cold War was actually conceptualized several years before the 1950 National Security Council paper 68 (NSC-68). He revisits the origins of irrational hatred of Iran; the demonization of Cuba; the lies surrounding the Vietnam debacle; the false flags across Europe via Operation Gladio; the destruction of Yugoslavia; the decades-long evisceration of Iraq; and the ramifications of the Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine.This sharp, concise history of the American Empire ultimately demonstrates, in Griffin’s analysis, the ‘fraud’ of endorsing self-praising American Exceptionalism. A must read.” 

—Pepe Escobar, Asia Times/Hong Kong;author of 2030 and Empire of Chaos

“Since the turn of the 20th century, through two global wars and numerous others to follow, including current ones raging in multiple theaters, America’s longstanding aim is to control planet earth, its resources and populations. Griffin explains it in lucid detail, America’s imperial history, rarely taught in US classrooms to the highest levels of higher education. Readers can get it all in Griffin’s important new book. It’s vital truth-telling, explaining the American way – responsible for inflicting enormous harm on countless millions at home and abroad.”

—Stephen Lendman

“David Ray Griffin, in book after book since the attacks of 11 September 2001, has meticulously exposed the underside of the American empire and its evil masters. His persistence in trying to reach people and to warn them of the horrors that have resulted is extraordinary. Excluding his philosophical and theological works, this is his fifteenth book since 2004 on these grave issues of life and death and the future of the world.

In this masterful book, he provides a powerful historical argument that right from the start with the arrival of the first European settlers, this country, despite all the rhetoric about it having been divinely founded and guided, has been “more malign that benign, more demonic than divine.” He chronologically presents this history, supported by meticulous documentation, to prove his thesis. 

— Edward Curtin

The American Trajectory: Divine or Demonic?

Author: David Ray Griffin

ISBN: 978-0-9986947-9-5

Click here to order.

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On Tuesday 25 July 2017, four protestors stopped a convoy of lorries going to a fracking site in Lancashire. Today, three of the activists were sentenced to custodial sentences.

Residents of Little Plumpton have been fighting Cuadrilla Resources’ plans for years. What started as a handful of local residents bemused that a new fossil fuel industry was about to start in their village escalated into a resistance of national symbolic importance.

Today’s ruling represents a trend of escalation between environmental protestors and the police — from mass arrests of Dakota Access pipeline protestors in the US, to UK police abusing their powers when going undercover in environmental movements, and mass online surveillance of fracking activists via Facebook.

Rich Loizou, Simon Roscoe Blevins, and Richard Roberts all spent between two and four days on top of the lorries that were making their way to the Preston New Road fracking site. All three were found guilty of a public nuisance offence by a jury on 22 August 2018. A fourth protestor, Julian Brock, pleaded guilty at a separate hearing so did not face trial.

DeSmog UK was reporting from the site on the day of the action. Breaking through a police convoy accompanying the lorries, they managed to climb on top vehicles as they passed the local anti-fracking camp at Maple Farm.

Blevins and Roberts were today sentenced to 16 months, while Loizou was jailed for 15 months. They are  to serve half of their sentences in jail, with the remainder on license. Brock, who pleaded guilty, received a 12 month suspended sentence.

DeSmog UK looks back on the day protesting against fracking became a jailable offence.

Source: Rob McEwen

Source: Mat Hope

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To be sure, on September 10th John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor, pushed all the thematic buttons that might beexpected of a luncheon speaker invitedto address the Federalist Society, long known asthe ideological home of rabid advocates of the so-called ‘new sovereignty.’ The hallmark of this pre-Trump neocon law bastion of Scalia worshippers was their role in the career nurturing of such jurisprudential embarrassments as John Yoo and Jack Goldsmith. Yoo the notorious author of the torture memos and Goldsmith the public servant usually give credit forcrafting an expert approval text validating ‘extreme rendition’ of CIA suspects to notorious ‘black sites,’ known around the world as safe havens for torture, surely acrude instance ofex parte criminal legalism. It should be noted that both of these individuals are senior faculty members at two of America’s finest law schools, UC Berkeley and Harvard, both of which exhibit institutional pride in the fact of treating legal ethics as integral part of professional education.

John Bolton was the safest of choices as a featured speaker, having earned his Federalist Society credentials many times over.  He seems perversely proud of leading the unprecedented effort on behalf of George W. Bush in 2002 to ‘unsign’ the Rome Statute, the treaty that brought the International Criminal Court (ICC) into force in 2002, and now has 123 sovereign states as parties, including all NATO members except the U.S. and Turkey.

At the talk, Bolton paused to boast of orchestrating this unusual move to highlight and underscore this repudiation of the ICC by the Bush presidency, and in the process, of the crusading success of a transnational civil society movement and a coalition of moderate governments around the world to institutionalize individual accountability of political leaders and military commanders for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It should be humiliating that such a global undertaking to strengthen international criminal law enforcement is regarded as posing a direct threat to Americans and governmental policy. It puts a preemptive twist on the previous reliance on ‘victors’ justice to ensure that none of the Allied crimes during World War II would be subjected to legal scrutiny while the crimes of German and Japanese political leaders and military commanders were being prosecuted.

Actually, even if Bush had not bothered to have the Clinton signature removed, the U.S. would never in this dark period of anti-internationalism have joined the ICC. To become a party to the treaty would have needed the additional step of ratification of the Rome Statute, and that would require an affirmative vote of 2/3rds of the U.S. Senate. A favorable outcome would have been even more unlikely than for Donald Trump to nominate Anita Hill or Robert Mueller as his next choices for the U.S. Supreme Court. In this sense, only the up tempo language of Bolton is notable for its willingness to denigrate and even smear the ICC.

Slick Willy Clinton had his own reservations about the treaty and never took the normal step following an official signature of a negotiated inter-governmental agreement of submitting it for ratification. Indeed, it is a technical violation of customary international law that imposes a good faith obligation on governments to seek formal adherence of signed treaties in accordance with constitutional procedures of the particular state. In other words, even the supposedly liberal side of American political life has opted out of its earlier tradition of supporting the institutional development of the Rule of Law on a global level as an aspect of its commitment to the role of law and institutions as essential ingredients of a peaceful and just world order.

Congress removed any doubt as to its hostility toward the ICC when in 2002 it passed the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, authorizing the President to use all necessary means, even force, to prevent prosecution at The Hague of Americans accused of war crimes or crimes against humanity. What is especially disturbing about such a slap at criminal accountability is the absence of slightest show of concern as to whether the allegations in a particular case were well grounded in evidence or not.  When Bolton alluded to this bit of ultra-nationalism he appropriately noted that the legislation enjoyed bipartisan support, which suggests that the American posture of claiming ‘lawless geopolitics’ for itself is a fixed feature of world order for the seeable future no matter who occupies the Oval Office. It is ironic that while criminality is ensured of impunity, the practice of impunity, a dubious encroachment on the logic of legality, is not only claimed but offered that most unusual feature of international enforcement.

Bolton implied that the problems of criminality in world affairs are associated with the leaders of the foreign adversaries of the United States, identifying such individuals as Saddam Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, and Qaddafi. His assertion implied that the good behavior of the United States and its allies was such as to be inherently benevolent and the bad behavior of its adversaries would require more than law to deter: “The hard men of history are not deterred by fantasies of international law such as the International Criminal Court.” We can only meekly ask, “Are the supposedly soft men  of history, such as Trump or G.W. Bush, any less undeterred?” “And why should we ever expect these hard men to be deterred if the ICC and international law are but ‘fantasies.’

Getting back to Bolton’s luncheon remarks, his own summary of his feverish assault on the audacity of the ICC to consider investigating Israel’s international crimes, and the alleged crimes of the Taliban and the United States in Afghanistan reads as follows:

 “This administration will fight back to protect American constitutionalism, our sovereignty, and our citizens. No committee of foreign nations will tell us how to govern ourselves and defend our freedom. We will stand up for the US constitution abroad, just as we do at home. And, as always, in every decision we make, we will put the interests of the American people first.”

These are predictable sentiments, given the occasion and taking into account Bolton’s long advocacy of a militarist foreign policy that disregards the restraints of law, morality, and political prudence. It isthe ethics and politics of this disregard that is Bolton’s real message. We should be attentive to this real message hidden within the fiery ‘sovereignty, first’ verbiage, which is that the geopolitical practices of the United States will not be subject to legal accountability no matter how flagrant the violation of fundamental norms might be in the future. Bolton may overstep the bounds of the liberal order when he attacks the ICC as an institution, which had not been previously treated as a threat to American foreign policy. Only recently did it dawn on Washington policymakers that the ICC might at some point actually challenge what the U.S. and its allies, most notably Israel, are doing in the world.

Previously, the U.S. was a supporter of criminal accountability of foreign leaders, especially if they were adversaries of the U.S. It should be remembered that even during the Bush presidency, the government sent dozens of government lawyers to Iraq to help prepare a war crimes prosecution of Saddam Hussein and his entourage after their capture. This capture occurred in the course of a war of aggression initiated against Iraq in 2003 without any prior provocation. The U.S. attack, regime change, and long intrusive occupation took place, it should be recalled, despite the failure of the U.S. Government to secure the support of the UN Security Council despite a feverish attempt to gain authorization.

In other words, so far as even the Boltons of this world are concerned, there is nothing wrong with criminal accountability of leaders and military personnel so long as the indictments, prosecutions, and punishments are confined to enemies of the United States. Such a self-serving geopolitical appropriation of international criminal law should not be confused with legitimate law, which presupposes that the rules, norms, and procedures apply to all relevant actors, the strong as well as the weak, the victors as well as the defeated, geopolitical wrongdoers as well their adversaries.

What is sad about the Bolton worldview, and indeed the new sovereignty ideologues that shape the public image of the Federalist Society, aside from its influence in the Trump Era, is that it completely misunderstands the relevance of international law in this period of global interdependence and planetary challenge. State-centric world order as beset by geopolitical rivalries is a blueprint for civilizational collapse in the 21^st century, and probably represents the worst possible way to uphold core sovereign rights and national interests over time.

What is still sadder is that the Bolton/Trump worldview, which seems so outlandish and anachronistic is not that extremist, compared to Democratic establishment approaches, when it comes to behavior. It represents a surreal rhetorical extension of the bipartisan consensus that is complacent about the failures of the neoliberal international order, including especially the destructive impacts of predatory globalization on democratic forms of governance, on safeguarding of social and economic rights, and on ecological sustainability.

As many have noted Hilary Clinton’s push toward a confrontation with Russia was more in keeping with Bolton’s preferred foreign policy than the more accommodationist proposals of Trump during his presidential campaign. It is against such a background that I reach the lamentable conclusion that when it comes world peace and global justice the Democratic Party establishment has little to offer when it comes to foreign policy, and may be more inclined to initiate wars and raise geopolitical tensions than even their reactionary and militarist Republican rivals. Bernie Sanders, although international affairs is not his strong suit, at least gestured toward a less militarist and dysfunctional  foreign policy. For the Democratic Party to generate enthusiasm upon American youth and the deeply discontented in the country it must reinvent itself by embracing progressive and forthcoming policies than in the recent past and positions that are more constructive and programmatic than even the Sanders foreign policy. Without such bold moves there will be a loud sigh of relief when Trump loses control of Congress in November, and even louder one when Trump leaves the White House, but the American ship of state will still resemble the maiden voyage of the Titantic.

As if to confirm the analysis above we should take account of Bolton past warmongering toward North Korea including advocating a preemptive strike, and recently articulating grossly unlawful threats of force directed at Iran. It should be appreciated that contemporary international law, as embodied in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter forbids threats as well as uses of aggressive force.

Such a prohibition underlines the criminality of Bolton’s recent formulations of military threats directed at Iran:

“I might imagine they [“the mullahs of Tehran”] would take me seriously when I assure them today: If you cross us, our allies, or our partners; if you harm our citizens; if you continue to lie, cheat and deceive, yes, there will indeed be hell to pay.”

Such chilling words must be understood in the context of Bolton’s past advocacy of bombing Iran and of the Trump approach to the region that can be summarized in a few words: ‘do what Netanyahu wants.’

Even if war and aggression do not actually occur, and we must pray that they do not, this kind of geopolitical bullying by a leading official of a country that has up to one thousand military bases spread around the world should be criminalized, and not just criticized as intemperate.

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A terrorist attack shook the southwestern city of Ahvaz in the Islamic Republic of Iran on Saturday September 22 morning of during a military parade in commemoration of the anniversary of the war with Saddam Hussein’s regime in the 1980s. 

A group of terrorists opened fire at the soldiers in the military parade and the crowd, which included women and children where at least 25 people were killed and 55 others wounded according to IRNA news agency.

According to Tasnim new agency, the terrorist group infiltrated the back position of the military parade and from that position fired shots at the ceremony.

The terrorists could not penetrate the ceremony but fired from a distance, where they initially targeted the memorial platform where high profile attendees were sitting and Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, fleeing after they opened fire.

Ali Hussein Zadeh, assistant of the head of political affairs in Khuzestan province, told Tasnim news agency that four terrorists carried out the attack, adding

“the number of martyrs is increasing and the condition of some of the wounded is critical”.

Meanwhile, the Iranian FARS news agency quoted an informed source as saying that two terrorists were killed and another wounded while a fourth was arrested by security forces during the terrorist attack in the city of Ahvaz.

President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Rouhani said on Sunday that the terrorists who carried out the Ahvaz terrorist attack on Saturday had received support from neighboring countries in the Persian Gulf, stressing that those involved in the terrorist attack will not escape punishment and that Iran’s retaliation will be crushing.

Rouhani said in a speech on Sunday that he would leave Tehran for New York to participate in the UN General Assembly, saying Iran will not go easy on the Ahvaz’s crime, pointing out that the US administration is behind these young mercenaries.

“We know who committed the crime of Ahvaz and who is behind them, and we will respond to the crime in accordance with the laws and interests of the country”, Rouhani reiterated.

While the international community condemned this act of terror against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the US administration and its regional gulf puppet Saudi Arabia and UAE kept silent. This muffled stance was in divergence to that of other nations, which offered their sympathies to the victims and condemnation of the attack, with several ambassadors in Tehran writing personal messages, while leaders such as Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Bashar Assad released official statements.

US, MEK and Ahwazia Coordination

The aggressors are a terrorist organization backed by Washington and Tel Aviv and funded by Saudi Arabia under the name of “Ahwazia”, an extremist ethnic terrorist organization that claims to defend the rights of Arab Iranians.  Iranian researcher Dr. Mohamed Sadiq al-Husseini wrote that according to Iranian intelligence sources revealed that the terrorist attack of Ahvaz city was conducted in coordination between the “People’s Mojahedin Organization” of Iran or the “Mojahedin-e Khalq” [MEK] and the “Ahwazia” an Arab-Iranian separatist group with alleged connections to Saudi Arabia, also known as the “Ahvaz National Resistance”.

This link would directly put the US on top of the list of suspects who most probably have incited these terrorist attacks against Iran.

Keeping in mind that that the MEK, an Iranian cult of highly suspicious funding which is beloved by Trump insiders like John Bolton and Rudolph Giuliani for its extremely vocal pro-regime change agenda, was removed from the US State Department’s list of designated terrorist organizations by none other than Hillary Rodham Clinton.  After its extensive lobbying campaign in Washington in 2012, Hillary Clinton de-listed the Iranian dissident MEK, from the State Department’s terror list.

The delisting happened despite NBC News’ report that the MEK has been murdering Iranian nuclear scientists in broad daylight.  The report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem cited US officials who said MEK members teamed up with “Israelis” to attach small magnetic bombs to the exterior of scientists’ cars before detonating them.  As a result, five nuclear scientists since 2007 have been killed so far. But apparently the State Department did not buy that report, as they told “The Washington Post” in September 2012 that the group has “renounced violence and turned over its weapons to US forces.”

In the current US administration, there are even much more aggressive support for the MEK represented by none other than the warmongering John Bolton. Bolton has also long backed the cult-like terrorist group despite the fact that the MEK has been held responsible for the murder of multiple American military personnel, a kidnapping attempt of a US Ambassador, and other violent attacks in Iran before the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The MEK was based in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein, who provided arms, financial assistance, and political support.  In 1997, it was among the first groups cited on the US list of foreign terrorist organizations.

However, as it was removed from that list by Hillary Clinton in 2012, Bolton has since spoke at an MEK rally in 2017, for the eighth time, in Paris.  Other speakers at MEK rallies have reportedly been paid tens of thousands of dollars for their appearances.

US President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about supporting the Iranian people has always been void, but promoting someone with Bolton’s views and connections to the highest level of government shows just how devious that rhetoric is. Whenever Bolton talks about supporting “the Iranian opposition,” these cultists are the people he’s talking about.  When he talks about regime change in Iran, he thinks these are the people should take over.

To date, no American MEK booster has risen as high in the government, but now the group will have an admirer advising the controversial US president on a daily basis.

Al-Saud Pay MEK’s Terrorism Bill

According to Dr. Mohamed Sadiq al-Husseini, an intelligence source specialized in Iranian affairs revealed to him the following details concerning the terrorist attack that took place on Saturday morning in Ahvaz:

1) The elements carrying out the armed terrorist attack on the military parade were trained in a Saudi camp southeast of Riyadh specialized for training members of the People’s Mujahideen MEK and other Iranian opposition groups.

2) The training is conducted by Jordanian and Saudi officers under the supervision of US Central Intelligence generals and “Israeli” generals.

3) All camp operations and needs are funded through the Saudi Ministry of Defense.  The funding includes the transfer of Iranian elements from European countries, especially from Albania to the Saudi run camp.

4) CIA and Mossad elements manage operational tasks, such as moving terrorists and weapons into Iran through commercial companies and non-governmental organizations located in Iraq’s Al-Basra city.

5) The CIA and Mossad assets in Al-Basra have nothing to do with training and their responsibilities are limited to logistics.

Recently, Beirut based Al-Manar TV channel revealed reports that training for the elements of the MEK is taking place in Western countries, “Israel” and in special camps inside Saudi Arabia, and terrorist cells are being moved to incite acts of terrorism against Iran through demonstrations and protests funded by intelligence agencies in those western countries.  According to these reports, leaders of MEK have met several times with “Israeli” security officials inside and outside “Israel”.

US officials, including the current national security adviser, have no illusions about the MEK’s disingenuous propaganda lines about seeking democracy or enjoying support inside Iran.  They know very well how despised the MEK is in that country.  Unlike other Iranian opposition groups, however, the MEK can mount military operations.  Its members are experienced in sabotage, assassinations, and terrorism, as well as in guerrilla and conventional warfare.

Hence, they possess qualities that are extremely useful for the US’s strategic objective to cause either regime change (by invasion) or regime collapse (by destabilization).

In other words, for Washington’s anti-Iran neocons, the MEK is not needed to replace the current government and Supreme leader in Iran; it just needs to assist its desired collapse with Saudi funding.  After all the losses incurred by the US foreign policy in the middle east due to incompetent regional allies, the US’s wishful thinking that ensuing chaos would weaken Iran and shift the regional balance of power toward US allies like “Israel” and Saudi Arabia, will only trigger a wave of more losses that will accelerate the demise of the US puppet regimes in the region.

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Following a strong, united Labour Party conference, the country now needs a General Election as soon as possible to allow this radical political force to negotiate a sensible Brexit deal with Europe. We need a reforming Government to replace the worn-out ‘May and Johnson’ sideshow that has done so much damage to our national economy and foreign relations, our currency, our defence and our National Health Service.

After this week’s rousing Labour conference, Jeremy Corbyn has now firmly established himself as the next Prime Minister with the impressive John McDonnell as Chancellor. Together they make an exceedingly strong team, not least to finalise the current failed Brexit negotiations with Europe.

Labour will take back the railways and utility companies into public ownership in order to provide a state-owned and operated, modern mass transport system for the 21st century and to regain state control of water, the vitally important natural resource for life. Both of these are integral parts of a new, radical approach to government that has been so obviously lacking within the current Conservative administration.

Democracy is government by the people and for the people – that means all the people not just the bankers, bond dealers, hedge-fund operators and currency gamblers in the City. Labour is now a party of integrity that has undertaken to work for everyone in this country who is entitled to vote. That alone is one of the principal differences from the current tired, out-of-touch administration.

A Labour Government will show the world that British goods and services, and British enterprise, are ready to compete with the best in the world. We are already the leaders in many fields and with a radical, reforming government that will bring in legislation to support industry and commerce and all those who work in companies and organisations throughout the United Kingdom, we will once again be proud to be British. Proud to develop new goods and new markets, worldwide.

But the country needs a General Election in order to move forward. Enough economic and political damage has already been done. Let’s put a stop to that, now! This is not a party political message – this is plain common sense.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst from the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

In the midst of a UN speech praising the Israeli government and their heavy-handed tactics against the Palestinian civilian population of the territory the Israeli military has been occupying since 1967, Donald Trump voiced support for the ‘two-state solution’ to the conflict. In response, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stated that, “Palestinians will never have a state” as long as he is in power.

After Trump and Netanyahu met on the sidelines of the United Nations Wednesday, he told reporters that even though Trump said that he favored a two-state solution for the Israelis and Palestinians,

“Everyone defines the term ‘state’ differently.”

However, since 1933, the Montevideo Convention has been the internationally-accepted definition for a state under international law. Adopted by the Seventh International Conference of American States, the convention stipulated that all states were equal sovereign units consisting of a permanent population, defined territorial boundaries, a government, and an ability to enter into agreements with other states.

Israel, although recognized as a state in 1948, has never defined its borders, and has, through the decades, encroached further and further onto Palestinian land, so that it now controls more than 80% of the land area of what was, until 1948, the land of Palestine.

Trump reportedly said to the reporters,

“In one way it’s more difficult, because it’s a real estate deal. But in another way it works better because you have people governing themselves.”

But Netanyahu criticized Trump’s statement, saying that Israel must permanently maintain its military occupation and control over the Palestinian civil population, with no Palestinian state that is both sovereign and self-deterined.

In response, the Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil Abu Rdainah, said:

“The two-state solution means to us that we have a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital. This is the only way to achieve peace.”

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Perhaps it is Donald Trump’s business background that leads him to believe that if you inflict enough economic pain on someone they will ultimately surrender and agree to do whatever you want. Though that approach might well work in New York real estate, it is not a certain path to success in international relations since countries are not as vulnerable to pressure as are individual investors or developers.

Washington’s latest foray into the world of sanctions, directed against China, is astonishing even when considering the low bar that has been set by previous presidents going back to Bill Clinton. Beijing has already been pushing back over US sanctions imposed last week on its government-run Equipment Development Department of the Chinese Central Military Commission and its director Li Shangfu for “engaging in significant transactions” with a Russian weapons manufacturer that is on a list of US sanctioned companies. The transactions included purchases of Russian Su-35 combat aircraft as well as equipment related to the advanced S-400 surface-to-air missile system. The sanctions include a ban on the director entering the United States and blocks all of his property or bank accounts within the US as well as freezing all local assets of the Equipment Development Department.

More important, the sanctions also forbid conducting any transactions that go through the US financial system. It is the most powerful weapon Washington has at its disposal, but it is being challenged as numerous countries are working to find ways around it. Currently however, as most international transactions are conducted in dollars and pass through American banks that means that it will be impossible for the Chinese government to make weapons purchases from many foreign sources. If foreign banks attempt to collaborate with China to evade the restrictions, they too will be sanctioned.

So in summary, Beijing bought weapons from Moscow and is being sanctioned by the United States for doing so because Washington does not approve of the Russian government. The sanctions on China are referred to as secondary sanctions in that they are derivative from the primary sanction on the foreign company or individual that is actually being punished. Secondary sanctions can be extended ad infinitum as transgressors linked sequentially to the initial transaction multiply the number of potential targets.

Not surprisingly, the US Ambassador has been summoned and Beijing has canceled several bilateral meetings with American defense department officials. The Chinese government has expressed “outrage” and has demanded the US cancel the measure.

According to media reports, the Chinese Department purchased the weapons from Rosoboronexport, Russia’s principal arms exporter. This violated a 2017 law passed by Congress named, characteristically, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, which sought to punish the Russian government and its various agencies for interfering in in the 2016 US election as well as its alleged involvement in Ukraine, Syria and its development of cyberwar capabilities. Iran and North Korea were also targeted in the legislation.

Explaining the new sanctions, US State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert issued a statement elaborating that the initial sanctions on Russia were enacted “to further impose costs on the Russian government in response to its malign activities.” She added that the US will “urge all countries to curtail relationships with Russia’s defense and intelligence sectors, both of which are linked to malign activities worldwide.”

As engaging in “malign activities” is a charge that should quite plausibly be leveled against Washington and its allies in the Middle East, it is not clear if anyone but the French and British poodles actually believes the rationalizations coming out of Washington to defend the indefensible. An act to “Counter America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions” is, even as the title implies, ridiculous. Washington is on a sanctions spree. Russia has been sanctioned repeatedly since the passage of the fraudulent Magnitsky Act, with no regard for Moscow’s legitimate protests that interfering in other countries’ internal politics is unacceptable. China is currently arguing reasonably enough that arms sales between countries is perfect legal and in line with international law.

Iran has been sanctioned even through it complied with an international agreement on its nuclear program and new sanctions were even piled on top of the old sanctions. And in about five weeks the US will be sanctioning ANYONE who buys oil from Iran, reportedly with no exceptions allowed. Venezuela is under US sanctions to punish its government, NATO member Turkey because it bought weapons from Russia and the Western Hemisphere perennial bad boy Cuba has had various embargoes in place since 1960.

It should be noted that sanctions earn a lot of ill-will and generally accomplish nothing. Cuba would likely be a fairly normal country but for the US restrictions and other pressure that gave its government the excuse to maintain a firm grip on power. The same might even apply to North Korea. And sanctions are even bad for the United States. Someday, when the US begins to lose its grip on the world economy all of those places being sanctioned will line up to get their revenge and it won’t be pretty.

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

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“Eventually you’ll have the implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you an answer.” – Larry Page, co-founder of Google

The Verge starts with a statement that has become commonplace, the compulsory nod to power one has come to expect when engaged with that whole mammoth enterprise known as Google.  “No technology company is arguably more responsible for shaping the modern internet, the modern life, than Google.”

The story of Google is all minted Silicon Valley: the modest research project birthed in computer lingo and networking, the serendipitous meeting of graduate students, and the finding of auspicious and enormously productive garage locations.  The names tell a story: fresh, childish but hopeful.  Alphabet spawned Google, and so forth.  These were the products of, scorned Jonathan Taplin in his sharp Move Fast and Break Things, spoiled, ignorant brats.

In a sense, the Google experiment is all homage to behavioural tendencies writ large, an attempt on the part of the founders less to control than predict. (This distinction, it must be said, has been lost.)  How do people search for what is important?  Who tells them?  The PageRank algorithm of Google is moderate blessing and heavily laden curse, reducing the conduct of human searches to a dimension of repetition and faux enlargement of knowledge.  But the paradox of such behaviour is not so much a broadening of mind as a reconfirmation of its narrowing. You are fed results you expect; in time, you are delivered the results you expect.  Variety is stifled within the very system that supposedly promotes a world of seamless access.

But there it is. The Google search engine commodifies and controls choice, thereby leaving you with little.  The impression of a world with abundance is essential, and draws out the curse of plenty:  your choice is pre-empted, and typing in a search term generates terms you might wish to pursue.  Even the traditional library is hard to retreat to in certain respects given that librarians are becoming allergic to matters of paper, covers and book spines, a catalogue outsourced beyond its walls. The modern library has become the product of such market management fetish as knowledge centres, which is far more in line with Google speak.

Google has also reduced us to phone-reaching idiocy, an impulsive dive into the creature of all knowing answers that lies in the pocket and is procured at a moment’s notice.  Few conversations go by these days without that nasty God of the search engine making its celebrated entry to dispel doubts and right wrongs.  Not knowing a “fact” is intrinsically linked to the rescue of finding out what Google will tell you.

Larry Page has made little secret of its all-conquering, cerebral mission manifested through the all-powerful search engine.  It verges on the creepily totalitarian, but more in the fashion of Brave New World seductiveness than 1984 torture and stomping.

“It will be included in people’s brains,” he explained to a veteran observer of the company, Steven Levy.  “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information.”

Similarly for fellow founder Sergey Brin, Google is viewed “as a way to augment your brain with the knowledge of the world.”

There is the other side: company concentration, exquisitely vast power that has wooed critics, and a self-assumed omniscience that crushes competition.  It is such characteristics that determine Google as a sovereign exception that seems to trounce the prerogative of many states: there are regulations made by elected officials, but these can, and will be subverted, if needed. But there is another side of the Google phenomenon: calculated compliance, and collaboration verging on the obsequious.  Business remains business, and having such a concentrated entity exerting dominion over the Internet and the market is the very thing that should trouble anti-trust specialists.

This very fact struck the Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry as relevant. If Google was to be dealt with in any feasible way, it would have to be through the traditional weaponry of the anti-trust suit (think, he reminds us, of Standard Oil 1910).

“This can’t be fixed legislatively,” suggested Landry to Baton Rouge’s The Advocate. “We need to go to court with an antitrust suit.”

The European Union has already taken up the matter, fining Google $5 billion for antitrust violations relating to its Android market dominance, notably its bundling of the search engine and Chrome apps into the operating system while also making “payments to certain large manufacturers and mobile network operators” to exclusively bundle the Google search app on handsets.

The suggestion for some form of antitrust action against Google and other technological giants in the US itself is now being lost in the political opportunism of the Trump Whitehouse.  On Tuesday, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions convened a gathering of various officials to consider “a growing concern” about how certain companies might “be hurting competition an intentionally stifling the free exchange of ideas on their platforms”.

The problem here is not the premise Sessions is pursuing.  What matters is the reason he is taking such an interest, pressed by the sledgehammer approach advocated by President Donald J. Trump.  That ever sensitive leader of the confused free world claims that the search engine has developed a bias against him, yet another rigged entity in action.

Trump’s critics also have issues with social media sites and Google’s search engine.  Like Hillary Rodham Clinton, they argue, conversely, that such entities promoted the forces of reaction.  Had they not been so easily susceptible to those wicked Russians in spreading misinformation during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump would never have gotten the keys to the White House.  That proposition has been given some academic ballast with Kathleen Hall Jamieson’s Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President – What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, though it remains qualified at best.

Reaching the age of 20 has certainly brought Google to the summit of criticism and a certain pervasive idolatry. There are those who feel erroneously slighted (Trump and Clinton); there are those who wish their records erased from the search engine in an effort to make their lives anew (the right to forget the foolish error); and then there are those who simply could not be bothered to do a bit more digging for something that is so effortlessly available.  “Google is the oracle of redirection,” claims James Gleick.  In due course, its own influence will, in time, require redirection, and the brats may have to be disciplined accordingly.

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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]

Observers shouldn’t read too deeply into the US withdrawing some anti-air missile systems from the Mideast because it’s motivated entirely by economic factors and has nothing to do with standing down in the face of Iran or Russia. 

The Wall Street Journal revealed that the US is pulling four Patriot anti-air missile systems from Bahrain, Jordan, and Kuwait, which happens to coincide with Iran’s recent surface-to-surface missile strike in Iraq and Russia’s decision to send S-300s to Syria. This has given rise to speculation that the American moves are tacitly in response to those latest developments, though nothing could be further from the truth. It should be remembered that Trump promised during his historic speech at the UN that the US will make the Gulf Kingdoms pay more for the security assistance that they receive from his country, a policy  pronouncement that wasn’t made off-the-cuff like he sometimes seems (key word) to do but was read off a script and was therefore preplanned. Thus, it’s most likely that the reason for this decision rests in America’s desire to squeeze more money out of its partners (“vassals”) than anything else. 

Interestingly, however, the very act of withdrawing these defensive systems might prove to be narratively counterproductive for the US because it suggests that the concerns about Iran’s missile program are just hyped-up fearmongering. After all, if this was such a serious security issue, then the US wouldn’t dare withdraw its defensive assets, nor risk doing anything that could even remotely send Iran a signal that it’s “backing down” and therefore “encourage” it. Some cynics might say that “tricking Iran” is one of the unstated strategic reasons for doing so, but that suggestion implies that there’s truth to the US’ accusations that the Islamic Republic is an aggressive regional menace that’s just waiting for the right moment to launch a larger war against its Gulf adversaries. It’s not, or at least in the conventional sense (unconventional means have been ongoing for decades, though it can be argued that they were in response to foreign aggression), and the US could still respond with overwhelming force even if it does. 

Considering this, the US’ Mideast missile pullout isn’t that big of a deal when one really takes the time to think about it. A small number of defensive systems are being removed from the theater, but they’re not going to have any significant effect on altering the balance of power there. While the US might hope that its partners will interpret this move as the beginning of a larger strategic rebalancing away from the region that can only be delayed or partially reversed by paying more money for “defense”, it’s also conceivable that they’ll perceive this as subtle confirmation that Washington doesn’t really believe that Iran is that imminent of a conventional (key word) “threat” if it’s casually removing some anti-missile units without thinking much of it. They probably realize this as it is and have only been pretending otherwise for self-interested reasons anyhow, but it still at the very least gives the public something to ponder and might make them reconsider the truthfulness of official narratives. 

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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.

Last year I wrote that Trump’s speech at the UN General Assembly was perhaps the worst speech ever delivered from that podium, certainly by a Western leader. This year he surpassed himself.

Why is there no rule to say that someone who openly

• violates the basic norms of the United Nations
• continuously threatens other countries in contravention of the UN Charter’s Article 2.4
• condemns internationalism and multilateralism
• advocates a narrow nationalism/patriotism (to make America great again)
• stops funding the UNESCO
• condemns the International Criminal Court (ICC) and threatens its officials
• withdraws from UNRWA
• withdraws from the Paris Climate Accord
• withdraws from the UN Human Rights Commission
• withdraws from the UN Security Council-based nuclear deal with Iran (JCPOA) etc.

– can not automatically expect to remain a member of the UN world body that is in charge of those organisations and advocates those principles on behalf of the world’s peoples?

His two favourite countries that he singled out as examples for other countries to follow are Saudi Arabia and Israel (if you think I am joking please listen to the speech again, see below), while he attacks Germany, Sweden, China, Iran, Syria and many other countries.

People laughed at his initial remarks when he said that his administration had achieved more than perhaps any other US administration, but they should have left the hall when he started to attack the UN and its organisations in the way he did, and openly declared war against two sovereign states, Iran and Syria, and economic war against China, Russia and others.

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Jan Oberg’s comments

1. And the German delegates shook their heads when he talked about total energy dependence on Russia.

2. President Trump also violates the UN Charter Article 2.4 which stipulates that “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

3. In this – disturbing – speech Trump also said: “The United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.”
So how then shall we interpret the US Empire’s policies for war and regime change, intervention, CIA and other foreign presence, blatant interference in other countries’ domestic affairs and elections, coup d’etats in dozens of countries since 1945. And who has threatened the sovereignty of the US?

4. If there is a speech that illustrates how the President – and thereby the US Administration at present – ca not possibly be trusted and is the singularly most dangerous to the world, this is it.

Below is the full speech and here is the highlight from the New York Times.

In their obsession for regime change, Ottawa is backing talk of an invasion of Venezuela. And the NDP is enabling Canada’s interventionist policy.

Last week 11 of the 14 member states of the anti-Venezuelan “Lima Group” backed a statement distancing the alliance from “any type of action or declaration that implies military intervention” after Organization of American States chief Luis Almagro stated:

“As for military intervention to overthrow the Nicolas Maduro regime, I think we should not rule out any option … diplomacy remains the first option but we can’t exclude any action.”

Canada, Guyana and Colombia refused to criticize the head of the OAS’ musings about an invasion of Venezuela.

In recent weeks there has been growing tension on the border between Colombia and Venezuela. Some believe Washington is pushing for a conflict via Colombia, which recently joined NATO.

Last summer Donald Trump threatened to invade Venezuela.

“We have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary,” the US President said.

Talk of an invasion encourages those seeking regime change. At the start of August drones armed with explosives flew toward Maduro during a military parade in what was probably an attempt to assassinate the Venezuelan president. Two weeks ago the New York Times reported that US officials recently met members of Venezuela’s military planning to oust Maduro. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson called for the military to oust Maduro in February and other leading Republican Party officials have made similar statements.

Alongside these aggressive measures, Canada has sought to weaken the Venezuelan government. Since last September Ottawa has imposed three rounds of sanctions on Venezuelan officials. In March the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the economic sanctions the US, Canada and EU have adopted against Venezuela while Caracas called Canada’s move a “blatant violation of the most fundamental rules of International Law.”

Over the past year and a half Canadian officials have campaigned aggressively against the Venezuelan government. Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland has prodded Caribbean countries to join the Lima Group’s anti-Venezuela efforts and made frequent statements critical of Caracas’ democratic legitimacy and human rights record. In June Freeland told the OAS General Assembly,

“we must act immediately on the situation in Venezuela to force the exit of the dictatorship.”

Ottawa has encouraged its diplomats to play up human rights violations and supported opposition groups inside Venezuela. A 27-page Global Affairs report uncovered by the Globe and Mail noted,

“Canada should maintain the embassy’s prominent position as a champion of human-rights defenders.”

Alluding to the hostility engendered by its interference in that country’s affairs, the partially redacted 2017 report recommended that Canadian officials also “develop and implement strategies to minimize the impact of attacks by the government in response to Canada’s human rights statements and activities.”

As part of its campaign against the elected government, Ottawa has amplified oppositional voices inside Venezuela. Over the past decade, for instance, the embassy has co-sponsored an annual Human Rights Award with the Centro para la Paz y los Derechos Humanos whose director, Raúl Herrera, has repeatedly denounced the Venezuelan government. In July the recipient of the 2018 prize, Francisco Valencia, spoke in Ottawa and was profiled by the Globe and Mail.

“Canada actually is, in my view, the country that denounced the most the violation of human rights in Venezuela … and was the most helpful with financing towards humanitarian issues,” explained Valencia, who also told that paper he was “the target of threats from the government.”

In another example of anti-government figures invited to Ottawa, the former mayor of metropolitan Caracas, Antonio Ledezma, called for “humanitarian intervention” before the Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development last week. He said:

“If the international community does not urgently activate the principle of humanitarian intervention for Venezuela — which developed the concept of the responsibility to protect — they will have to settle for sending Venezuelans a resolution of condolence with which we will not revive the thousands of human beings who will lose their lives in the middle of this genocide sponsored by Maduro.”

In November Ledezma escaped house arrest and fled the country.

The NDP’s foreign critic has stayed quiet regarding the US/Canadian campaign against Venezuela’s elected government. I found no criticism by Hélène Laverdière of US/OAS leaders’ musing about invading or the August assassination attempt on Maduro. Nor did I find any disapproval from the NDP’s foreign critic of Canadian sanctions or Ottawa’s role in the Lima Group of anti-Venezuelan foreign ministers. Laverdière has also failed to challenge Canada’s expulsion of Venezuelan diplomats and role in directly financing an often-unsavoury Venezuelan opposition.

Worse still, Laverdière has openly supported asphyxiating the left-wing government through other means. The 15-year Foreign Affairs diplomat has repeatedly found cause to criticize Venezuela and has called on Ottawa to do more to undermine Maduro’s government.

Is Canadian political culture so deformed that no party represented in the House of Commons will oppose talk of invading Venezuela? If so its not another country’s democracy that we should be concerned about.

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Featured image is from Radio Canada International.

How many more women await our discovery?

My question is not related to ongoing exposés of sexual abuse suffered by women under a culture of male privilege and dominance– the culture known by the trope #MeToo. What concerns me here is a seemingly unrelated silence and need for exposure, namely accomplishments of women scientists. This too is being newly addressed, although desultorily. 

Like millions of others I was alerted to the history of women in science after viewing Hidden Figures. This celebrated film features three African American women working in the 1950s U.S. space program. It’s based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, herself African American whose parents and neighbors were professionals working in the time and place of that story. So compelling were Shetterly’s revelations, the film was completed just two years after the book’s release.  While this film is making a profound social impact, to grasp the full context of African American scientists and women in general in the U.S. government’s pioneering space projects, read Shetterly’s full account. Book or film, Hidden Figures will propel more African Americans into the sciences while it impresses on all women the need for us to step out of the margins and into the center of public life.      

Human Computers of NASA (Source: margotleeshetterly.com)

Another ‘hidden figure’ is revealed with the recent award of the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics to British physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Had the monetary award not been $3. million, her story likely wouldn’t be featured in a major U.S. newspaper. (See this)  Nevertheless the article is an opportunity to learn, once again, how a brilliant student of physics, somehow, despite adversarial male and institutional attitudes, managed what many of us cannot: she remained at work, applied her genius and pursued her irrepressible love of science. Burnell persisted despite her Cambridge supervisor, not Burnell, winning a Nobel Prize for his research on pulsars, a discovery she had made. That interview provides an all too common narrative of how modesty allowed Burnell to demure to male colleagues, and be upstaged by her professor. In this account we hear more about her modesty than her professional history and ongoing work at Oxford. 

This review regrettably includes a flawed note on other ‘hidden figures’. It mentions the white scientist Rosalind Franklin and the celebrated film, but fails to name mathematicians Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson and engineer Mary Jackson featured there. When will we learn to know, repeat and apply these women’s names? Dorothy Vaughan; Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson; Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson; Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson. And add Margot Lee Shetterly to that deserving list.

Not long after perusing Shetterly’s highly readable and conscientiously researched book, browsing in my local library, I (by chance?) came across The Other Einstein. It’s an historical novel based on credible rumors regarding Mileva Marić-Einstein, a mathematician herself and first wife of the famous physicist. In The Other Einstein, published in 2016, author Marie Benedict explores rumors of a woman whom history not only marginalizes; it denies her any credit as a working scientist. 

A promising student of physics in Zurich, was a close companion of Albert Einstein in university, a member of his circle of aspiring scientists, and mother of his children. Benedict presents a story of Marić that’s debated by others; that is: she was Albert’s indispensable intellectual collaborator and contributor to his research reports—a tantalizing issue which physicist and writer Dennis Overbye mentions in his 2000 Einstein in Love, but leaves undeveloped (see this)  —  deserving of equal credit for his (sic) discovery of relativity. (Did he assign his Nobel prize money to Marić-Einstein as recompense for denying scholarly accreditation to her?) Benedict explores this possibility, offering a convincing portrayal of how Einstein may have exploited Marić’s brilliance and her trust in him, removing her name from publications of their shared scientific discoveries. (A very serious charge which must be thoroughly explored.)

Albert Einstein is so lionized a figure that it will take much more research to clarify Marić-Einstein’s real role in the history of physics. But the accounts by Overbye and Benedict are a start, just as Shetterly’s work is an essential opening act on women in U.S. pioneering research (see this).

Women everywhere struggle on mightily. In small snips we cut away the deep roots of misogyny in every culture. While progress is slow at the legal level, headway is being made by the slogging research work by our writers. Doubtless many more histories await our attention and when we uncover them we will find how many more predecessors broke barriers long before this modern era. Knowing women’s early scientific work, even absent of fanfare or awards, is still empowering to this and future generations.  

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This article was originally published on the author’s webpage: www.radiotahrir.org.

Aziz is a veteran anthropologist and radio journalist, also author of Heir to A Silent Song: Two Rebel Women of Nepal, published by Tribhuvan University, Nepal, and available through Barnes and Noble in the USA. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.

Featured image: Mileva Marić-Einstein (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Another agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea signed in Jedda, Saudi Arabia on September 16 represents a new page in the shifting political alignments in this area of East Africa.

Previously on July 9 a document was signed by the leaders of the Horn of Africa states in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. This most recent agreement is designed to expand the initial understanding between Addis Ababa and Asmara leading to greater cooperation in the efforts to put an end to the state of war which has lasted for twenty years.

Military conflict erupted in 1998 after a dispute over Badme on the border of the two countries resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians in several major battles over a period of two years. In 2000 the Algiers Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities was brokered by the-then Organization of African Unity (OAU, now the AU), the United Nations, European Union (EU) and the Algerian government. 

The Algiers Agreement established a Boundaries Commission and a Claims Commission aimed at working out the disagreement over Badme. Although the Ethiopia-Eritrea Boundaries Commission (EEBC) issued a ruling in 2003, the decision was rejected by the Ethiopian government. Although there was relative peace over the issue for the last decade-and-a-half, the overall situation remained tense until the diplomatic offensive which has been in the works since July.   

This latest accord is framed as a peace and friendship treaty which was brokered by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres and the African Union Commission Chairperson Moussa Faki Mahamat. As of July it appears as if Ethiopia has relinquished its claim to Badme.

A press release published by Asharq Al-Awsat praised the signing ceremony and noted the presence of the heads-of-state of Eritrea and Ethiopia as well as the top officials of the UN and the AU. A paragraph in the closing section of the document says that President Isaisis Afwerki and Prime Minister Abiy had praised the Saudi authorities for their role in the process. (See this)

An article written by Aaron Brooks which was published in the East African Monitor says of the accord that:

“The key aspect of the peace agreement remains the same since the initial deal was signed in Asmara in July. Article One states that the ‘state of war’ between the two countries is categorically over and the two nations have entered a new era of peace and cooperation. The second article states that Eritrea and Ethiopia will specifically cooperate in the political, security, defense, economic, trade, investments, cultural and social interests of both countries.” (See this)

This same report goes on explaining how:

“Articles five and six detail plans for the former enemies to work together in promoting regional peace and security in the Horn of Africa region. This includes combatting terrorism, human trafficking and the illegal sale of arms and drugs.

Finally, Article Seven states the two countries will establish a joint committee to oversee the implementation of the peace deal.” 

Unrest Flares Again in Ethiopia

With the ascendancy of Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to power in February the new leader of the ruling Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) has embarked upon a series of reforms which have serious implications for both domestic and foreign policy. 

These developments have created tensions within Ethiopia prompting ethnic clashes and mass demonstrations among those opposing the Abiy program and others who support the prime minister. As it pertains to the normalization of relations between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the regional organizations throughout the continent including the African Union (AU) have welcomed the peace agreement believing that this is the best insurance against the resumption of war.

Recent clashes taking place in the capital of Addis Ababa and surrounding areas were said to be sparked by the holding of demonstrations by the now unbanned and returning Oromo Liberation Front (OLF). Abiy who is from the Oromo group has been accused of not taking swift action against the violence. 

The unfurling of OLF flags proved to be provocative in the capital. The Oromo are the largest nationality in Ethiopia which is composed of 80 different ethnic groups.

There have been 28 reported deaths in connection with unrest. Some of the killings were carried out by police in response to demonstrations and street fighting. Over 1,200 people have been arrested by the authorities for engaging in violence and other purported illegal activities. 

Compounding the uncertainty as it relates to the heightening of domestic tensions inside Ethiopia, there is skepticism related to the role on a foreign policy level of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These Arab Gulf states are heavily armed by the United States and Britain and largely serve the regional interests of imperialism. 

Saudi Arabia and UAE have consistently fought against what is perceived as the burgeoning influence of the Islamic Republic of Iran throughout the Middle East. Iran has been a close ally of the government of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria while Riyadh and Abu Dhabi has supported opposition forces alongside Washington and London.

In Yemen the UAE and Saudi Arabia have led an intensive aerial bombing campaign and backed the ground forces of ousted President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi against the people of that impoverished nation since March 2015. Estimates indicate that over 60,000 people have died in Yemen as a direct result of the bombing and ground war by the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) as its allies. Altogether there have been approximately 100,000 airstrikes by the GCC against Yemen over the last three-and-one-half years. 

Many people have died from combat operations, the bombing of residential areas, schools, hospitals and government installations. Others have lost their lives to diseases and the lack of adequate infrastructure due to the targeting of essential services needed by civilians to survive. 

Yemen has experienced the worst cholera epidemic in the world today. Humanitarian organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) report that there have been one million cases of the dreaded infectious disease documented inside Yemen. Many children and adults have been affected by the outbreak leaving more than 2,000 dead and many others chronically ill. 

The rationale for the bombing of Yemen by Saudi Arabia, the UAE and their allies is that the Ansurallah Movement is backed by Tehran which is attempting to seize control of the strategically located country. Iran has denied its direct involvement although they politically defend the Ansurallah (also known as the Houthis) against the war of genocide being waged by the Arab Gulf monarchies.

This genocidal war is being carried out with the indispensable assistance of the Pentagon through the use of U.S.-manufactured war planes, ordnances, aerial coordinates and intelligence guidance and other support. The diplomatic hostility by successive U.S. administrations towards Iran fuels the perpetuation of war in Yemen as well as Syria.

Pan-Africanism and Anti-Imperialism

One of the main objectives of Pan-Africanism is the realization and continuation of peace among African states. Without peaceful relations between AU member-states there can be no genuine development across the continent.

Therefore the signing of these two peace agreements by Eritrea and Ethiopia are more than welcomed by progressive forces in Africa and throughout the Diaspora. The potential for economic and political development in the Horn of Africa is limitless due to its rich resources, productive labor force and important geo-political positioning in East Africa and proximity to the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Peninsula.

Nonetheless, the role of Saudi Arabia and the UAE in the process is bound to raise suspicions about the possible underlying aims of these states which are closely aligned with the imperialist policies of the U.S., Britain and the EU. The utilization of the Eritrean port at Assab by the UAE and Saudi Arabia for military purposes is well known.

A June 15 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) report on the offensive by the U.S.-backed GCC aimed at taking control of the Yemen port of Hodeida held by the Ansurallah said:

“Military sources here in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have told the BBC that a major force of Yemeni, UAE and Sudanese troops is on standby in Eritrea to take part in a final push to retake Hodeida port from Houthi rebels. The military campaign to drive out the Iranian-backed rebel militia from the key Red Sea port is being directed, funded and led by the UAE. Officials here have responded to international objections to the campaign by emphasizing that Hodeida port remains open and that maintaining the flow of aid is a top priority.” (See this)

The role of these Arab Gulf states in Yemen and Syria remain inimical to the long term interests not only of the masses of people in these countries notwithstanding the need for the development of cooperation between Africa and West Asia. Genocide in Yemen and Syria fostered by imperialism mirrors the historical plight of Africa from the periods of enslavement, colonialism and modern-day neo-colonialism. 

Genuine Pan-Africanism is inherently anti-imperialist. Without the elimination of western hegemony and its surrogates in Africa and West Asia there can be no lasting peace in these geo-political regions so vital to the future of humanity.   

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

The Russian military refused to buy Putin’s excuse for Israel’s intentional murder of 15 Russian Air Force personnel.  The Russian military knows precisely what happened and has not been hesitant to make completely clear Israel’s total betrayal of the Russian government’s naive and gullible trust in the criminal state of Israel. (See this)

One marvels at the foreign policy incompetence of Putin’s civilian advisers.  Apparently there is no Russian awareness that the ONLY REASON for Washington’s fake “war on terror” is to clear out of the Middle East all governments with foreign policies independent of Washington, governments that are in the way of Israel’s expansion. 

Israel is especially interested to annex southern Lebanon and wants the Hezbollah militia, which Israel has been unable to defeat, out of the way by using Washington to put Syria and Iran into the same chaos as Washington put Iraq and Libya.  Once Syria and Iran are in chaos, there is no one left to supply Hezbollah, and Israel can again march into Lebanon.

Does the Russian government not understand that the “terrorists” are Washington’s operatives?  Washington pretends that some of these “terrorists” are “democratic rebels” opposing the alleged “Syrian dictatorship.”  Washington pretends that others of its mercenaries are “terrorists,” whose presence is Washington’s justification for having US military forces in Syria illegally to “fight terrorism,” an excuse that has evaporated with Washington’s obvious and determined shielding of the remaining al Qaeda, al Nusra, and ISIS forces in Syria.  The American neoconservatives, most of whom are Zionists tightly allied with Netanyahu, formulated a doctrine of US world hegemony.  This ideological doctrine of “American exceptionalism” serves as a cloak to hide the fact that Washington is serving Israel’s interest in the Middle East.

These completely obvious, transparent facts are apparently over the head of Putin’s civilian advisors.

Nevertheless, the Israeli murder of the Russian airmen has forced Putin to finally honor his contract with Syria and to supply the S-300 air defense system that Syria paid for but Putin, in deference to the criminal state of Israel, refused to deliver.  The S-300 will be delivered in 2 weeks, said the Russian Ministry of Defense.  This air defense system will, I think, allow Syria to close its air space to Israeli, US, and NATO aggression without Putin having to declare a no fly zone, an obvious solution that Putin has avoided in dererence to “Russia’s American and Israeli partners.” 

In my opinion, provocations would have been avoided and lives saved, if the Russian government had established a de facto no-fly zone when Russia first came to Syria’s aid, and if Russia had stuck with the project to defeat Washington’s terrorists without premature withdrawals and ceasefires in the naive hope of obtaining some kind of agreement.  How could the Russian government possibly think that any agreement with Washington, Israel, or any of Washington’s EU puppets would mean anything?  All these Russian hesitations did was to permit Washington to figure out how to interject itself more firmly into Syrian territory. If Russia had acted more decisively and less hesitantly, the Russian airmen and a large number of other people would still be alive.

Is it conceiveable that the Russian government has not yet learned that an agreement with Washington is a fool’s errand?  Washington broke its word and moved NATO to Russia’s border, and all of Europe approved. Washington unilaterally pulled out of the ABM Treaty. Washington and Israel equipped and trained the Georgian military and sent it to kill Russian peacekeepers and attack South Ossetia and then blamed Russia for “aggression.” Washington worked against the success of the Sochi Olympics and used the occasion to spring on an unsuspecting Russian government a neo-nazi coup in Ukraine with the intention of evicting Russia from its Black Sea naval base.  When Crimea voted 97% to rejoint Russia, Washington and its EU puppets falsely alleged that “Russia invaded Ukraine.” When the Ukrainian government installed by Victoria Nuland shot down a Malaysian airliner, as soon as the airliner hit the ground, the blame was put on Russia, where it still lies. Washington unilaterally pulled out of the Iran nuclear agreement.  This list just scratches the surface of Washington’s betrayals of Russia.

And the Russian government thinks that an agreement with Washington is meaningful?! 

The only meaningful agreement the Russian government can make with Washington is to sign away Russian sovereignty and accept Russian status as a vassal of Washington.  How many black eyes does the Russian government need to receive before it can comprehend this basic and unalterable reality?

Even the belated, long overdue, step that the Russian government has taken to provide Syria with air defense in order to protect the Syrian/Russian gains in liberating Syria from Washington’s terrorists is too much for Russian “experts,” such as Nikolay Surkov, a senior researcher at the Moscow-based International Institute for World Economy and International Relations. Surkov assured RT that “Russia and Israel are partners, and neither side wishes to endanger this partnership.” (See this) So, why does the utter fool Surkov think Israel had the Russian airplane and its crew destroyed?  Is he an Israeli voice that accepts the false Israeli explanation? 

How can Surkov be considered an “expert” when he is so totally ignorant. Israel and Russia have no common interest whatsoever. Israel’s interest in the Middle East is chaos so that there are no organized states in the way of Israeli expansion.  Russia’s interest is to have stable governments with independent foreign policies that prevent Washington and Israel from siccing the terrorists on the Russian Federation.  If the Russian government does not understand this, it desperately needs a new intelligence agency.  But not one headed by Surkov.

As far as I can tell, neither the Russian government nor the Russian people understand that Washington, Israel, and their NATO vassals are Russia’s enemies, not Russia’s “partners.”  There is no doubt whatsoever that Washington and Israel are intent on Russia’s destruction.  Yet, Russia has “experts,” such as Surkov, who believe, or pretend to believe, that “Russia and Israel are partners.”

If this is the level of intelligence in Moscow, Russia and the rest of us are doomed.

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This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

At the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, U.S. President Donald Trump was laughed at by global leaders when he boasted about his accomplishments. He may feel insulted by the reception he got in New York, but a day earlier his administration saw a more tangible display of how much the international community opposes some of his policies.

On Monday, the European Union announced a decision to launch a “special purpose vehicle” with the mission of helping Iran blunt the impact of U.S. sanctions. Iran is still in compliance with its obligations under the 2015 nuclear deal, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the P5+1 signatories – aside from the U.S. – remain firmly in the deal. “We are not backing down [on the Iran nuclear agreement],” said a European diplomat, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The U.S. is nearly friendless in its quest to tear up the Iran nuclear deal, save for Saudi Arabia and Israel, and the EU’s initiative is intended to keep the accord alive. China and Russia offered their support for the new financing vehicle.

But, despite their support, Iran has been hit hard by U.S. sanctions as the world dials back on its purchases from Iran. The Iranian rial has plunged in value this year and oil exports are expected to continue to decline. Without the benefits of the nuclear deal, Iran has little incentive to remain in the accord and may eventually bow out.

“Mindful of the urgency and the need for tangible results, the participants welcomed practical proposals to maintain and develop payment channels, notably the initiative to establish a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) to facilitate payments related to Iran’s exports, including oil,” Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the EU announced in a joint statement. The goal is “to protect the freedom of their economic operators to pursue legitimate business with Iran.”

The EU’s plan consists of an entity setup for the sole purpose of processing payments for companies doing business with Iran. This would allow European companies to buy oil from Iran without fear of getting hit by U.S. sanctions. The trade would presumably take place in a currency other than the greenback because of U.S. sanctions on dollar transactions.

To be sure, the U.S. still wields unparalleled power over the fate of Iran’s oil exports, and has already succeeded in disrupting a larger share of Iranian supply than most analysts had predicted. Estimates from earlier this year pegged Iran’s losses at around 400,000-500,000 bpd, but more recent estimates put the losses at 1 million barrels per day (mb/d), or perhaps even more, by the end of the year. Iran’s oil exports fell to 3.584 mb/d in August, down 150,000 bpd from a month earlier.

The ability of the U.S. to demand compliance from so many countries is a testament to the power of the American-oriented international financial system and the strength of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. Still, there are those that believe the aggressive use of sanctions will backfire on the dollar in the long run. In the future, the effort by the P5+1 nations to setup an alternative payments system may be viewed as a turning point, a small but highly symbolic attempt at undermining dollar dominance.

In the short run, it is unclear if the effort will have an impact.

“The question is whether this will work, because of course the US will continue to exert colossal pressure on the European Union and, with a strong desire, can easily trample down any mechanism,” Vladimir Yermakov, director of the department for non-proliferation and arms control at the Russian foreign ministry, told reporters, according to the FT. “Everything depends on how far the Americans want to go and how far our European colleagues will allow them to go.”

It is not clear that European companies will be convinced to trust the “special purpose vehicle” setup by the EU or that buying Iranian oil will go unpunished by Washington. Already, Total SA has withdrawn from a major natural gas project in Iran, and other major European companies such as Peugeot, Renault and Siemens have also suspended their Iranian operations. There is little prospect of their return.

Refiners in Europe have dramatically cut their imports of Iranian oil, which has been an important factor in the decline of Iran’s oil exports. That also seems unlikely to change.

Without the decisions by individual private companies to continue to do business with Iran, the EU initiative could be rendered symbolic. Time will tell.

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Media giant Facebook recently announced (Reuters, 9/19/18) it would combat “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations founded and funded by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The social media platform was already working closely with the NATO-sponsored Atlantic Council think tank (FAIR.org, 5/21/18).

In a previous FAIR article (8/22/18), I noted that the “fake news” issue was being used as a pretext to attack the left and progressive news sites. Changes to Facebook’s algorithm have reduced traffic significantly for progressive outlets like Common Dreams (5/3/18), while the pages of Venezuelan government–backed TeleSur Englishand the independent Venezuelanalysis were shut down without warning, and only reinstated after a public outcry.

The Washington, DC–based NDI and IRI are staffed with senior Democratic and Republican politicians; the NDI is chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while the late Sen. John McCain was the longtime IRI chair. Both groups were created in 1983 as arms of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a Cold War enterprise backed by then–CIA director William Casey (Jacobin, 3/7/18). That these two US government creations, along with a NATO offshoot like the Atlantic Council, are used by Facebook to distinguish real from fake news is effectively state censorship.

Facebook’s collaboration with the NED organizations is particularly troubling, as both have aggressively pursued regime change against leftist governments overseas. The NDI undermined the Sandinista government of Nicaragua in the 1980s, and continues to do so to this day, while the IRI claimed a key role in the 2002 coup against leftist President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, announcing that it had

served as a bridge between the nation’s political parties and all civil society groups to help Venezuelans forge a new democratic future…. We stand ready to continue our partnership with the courageous Venezuelan people.

The Reuters report (9/19/18) mentioned that Facebook was anxious to better curate what Brazilians saw on their feeds in the run-up to their presidential elections, which pits far-right Jair Bolsonaro against leftist Fernando Haddad. The US government has a long history of undermining democracy in Brazil, from supporting a coup in 1964 against the progressive Goulart administration to continually spying on leftist President Dilma Rousseff (BBC, 7/4/15) in the run-up to the parliamentary coup against her in 2016 (CounterSpin, 6/2/17).

Soon after it partnered with the Atlantic Council, Facebook moved to delete accounts and pages connected with Iranian broadcasting channels (CNBC, 8/23/18), while The Intercept (12/30/17) reported that in 2017 the social media platform met with Israeli government officials to discuss which Palestinian voices it should censor. Ninety-five percent of Israeli government requests for deletion were granted. Thus the US government and its allies are effectively using the platform to silence dissenting opinion, both at home and on the world stage, controlling what Facebook‘s 2 billion users see and do not see.

Progressives should be deeply skeptical that these moves have anything to do with their stated objective of promoting democracy. Bloomberg Businessweek (9/29/17) reported that the far-right Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) party went to Facebookheadquarters for discussions with US companies about how it could use the platform for recruitment and micro-targeting in the 2017 elections. AfD tripled its previous vote share, becoming the third-largest party in Germany, the far right’s best showing since World War II.

Public trust in government is at 18 percent—an all-time low (Pew, 12/14/17). There is similar mistrust of Facebook, with only 20 percent of Americans agreeing social media sites do a good job separating fact from fiction. And yet, worldwide, Facebook is a crucial news source. Fifty-two percent of Brazilians, 61 percent of Mexicans, and 51 percent of Italians and Turks use the platform for news; 39 percent of the US gets their news from the site.

This means that, despite the fact that even its own public mistrusts it, the US government has effectively become the arbiter of what the world sees and hears, with the ability to marginalize or simply delete news from organizations or countries that do not share its opinions. This power could be used at sensitive times, like elections. This is not an idle threat. The US created an entire fake social network for Cubans that aimed to stir unrest and overthrow the Cuban government, according to the Guardian (4/3/14).

That a single corporation has such a monopoly over the flow of worldwide news is already problematic, but the increasing meshing of corporate and US government control over the means of communication is particularly worrying. All those who believe in free and open exchange of information should oppose Facebook becoming a tool of US foreign policy.

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Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) is a member of the Glasgow University Media Group. His latest book, Bad News From Venezuela: 20 Years of Fake News and Misreporting, was published by Routledge in April.

Featured image is from the author.

CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) are designed to economically grow meat-, milk- or egg-producing animals such as pigs, cattle or chickens by achieving maximum profitability by confining the suffering animals to unnatural, usually indoor facilities (for pigs and chickens) and not allowing them to graze like normal farm animals on healthful open fields. 

CAFOs require huge lagoons to store the fecal and urine waste material, which makes serious pollution of the soil, air and water (not only probable, but) inevitable. The lagoons are around 30 feet deep and the slaughterhouse waste contains a mixture of untreated feces, urine, blood, afterbirth tissue, stillborn pigs, bacteria, drugs and other chemicals. These lagoons commonly overflow when it rains or a hurricane hits. The confined animals usually drown in the worst-case scenarios. 

American CAFOs are already located in many American states and are owned and operated by huge environment-poisoning corporations such as Smithfield Foods, Tyson Foods, Swift & Company and Cargill (the four largest producers of animal meat in the US). 

Low wages are commonly paid to workers (many of whom are poor undocumented immigrants). Workers (and the confined animals) have to endure psychologically-traumatizing environments in addition to having to inhale toxic, disease-producing odors from fecal gases that include hydrogen sulfide (rotten egg smell), ammonia and the most toxic greenhouse gas on earth, methane. Anybody who has been to rural Iowa, where pig CAFOs abound, knows what I am talking about.

It is important to know that a private Chinese corporation purchased Smithfield Foods (the biggest pork producer in the world) for above-market prices in 2013. The deal amounted to 4.7 billion dollars. It allows a foreign nation to import some of its pork without having to endure the massive pollution and environmental degradation that accompanies the CAFO production process. 

A few years ago Wisconsin’s pro-corporate, anti-regulatory Republican Governor Scott Walker and his Republican administration seriously considered allowing a new pig farm/CAFO in an area of northern Wisconsin where effluents would flow towards Lake Superior. It was to be operated by a corporation from Iowa. Wisconsin already has CAFOs that are contaminating Lake Michigan, where fish kills, dead zones and algae blooms are common. Every CAFO require the construction of poisonous cesspool lagoons to store the farm animal waste. The proposed site was to be built in Wisconsin’s northern lakes area that so far have few, if any, dead zones.

Be aware that, in Minnesota, a number of foreign copper/nickel mining corporations that, just like the owners of the infamous CAFOs mentioned above, are close to being awarded permits to operate “experimental” sulfide mines in the water-rich northeast part of the state. 

Minnesota’s regulatory agencies and the business community are consciously ignoring the many catastrophic dangers of copper/nickel sulfide mines AND the massive earthen dam-contained waste storage lagoons that will contain billions of gallons of toxic waste tailings that will likely – at some time in the future – burst through the tall lagoon walls (in the case of the proposed PolyMet mine lagoon, up to 250 feet tall!) when the inevitable heavy rain occurs, allowing their eternally toxic contents to flow into previously pristine watersheds that ultimately drain into Lake Superior to the south and/or the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness Area to the north.

Below are some images of what happens to a state like North Carolina when it experiences a “100-year hurricane” like Florence (2018), Matthew (2016), Floyd (1999), Fran (1993) or some other catastrophic deluge that can easily happen even in the absence of a hurricane. To learn about the multitude of disastrous sulfide mining tailings lagoon failures around the world, click here.

Red dots represent one of the 2,100 Hog CAFOs in North Carolina. Note the concentration of the CAFOs in the Cape Fear estuary, which was hardest hit by Hurricane Florence (2018).

A North Carolina hog CAFO showing fecal and urine waste storage lagoons before Hurricane Matthew (2016).

For a powerful story in the Washington Post on Hurricane Matthew and North Carolina’s Hog Farm catastrophe after the disastrous flooding, click here.

Putrid sewage lagoons overflowing large CAFO lagoons after another North Carolinian flood.

A North Carolina CAFO after the flooding that made invisible the submerged lagoons with waste eventually entering rivers that drain into North Carolina’s Atlantic Ocean Dead Zone 

Two small North Carolina CAFOs after Hurricane Matthew (2016)

Submerged CAFO confinement buildings containing thousands of trapped, drowned and eventually rotting pigs that could not be rescued 

Some pigs that were released alive before they died drinking the poisoned, infectious, undrinkable water after finally being liberated from their horrid, life-long concentration camp existence. Most of their fellow pigs were trapped inside and drowned immediately

Cleaning up the rotting, bloated CAFO pig carcasses after another deluge. (Jobs, jobs, jobs)

Aerial view of the outlet of tiny Hazeltine Creek as it empties into Quesnel Lake (a once world-famous salmon fishery) at the head of the 600 mile-long Fraser River estuary that is now contaminated with 2.5 billion gallons of toxic sulfide mine waste (including sulfuric acid) that (was) disastrously discharged after heavy rains in 2014. The brown color represents the trunks of the huge trees that were up-rooted during the (flooding.) The diameter of some of the trees measured half the width of the original 6 foot-wide creek. The catastrophic event was British Colombia’s worst environmental disaster in its history.

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Dr Kohls, since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice, has been writing his Duty to Warn weekly column for the Duluth Reader, Minnesota’s premier alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which are re-published around the world, deal with the dangers of sulfide mining in northeast Minnesota, corporatism, militarism, racism, American Friendly Fascism, 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 the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are 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

All images in this article are from the author.

A Financial Action Task Force (FATF) report criticizing Saudi Arabia’s anti-money laundering and terrorism finance measures puts the kingdom on the spot 17 years after the 9/11 attacks and casts a shadow over its diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar on the grounds that the Gulf state supports militants.

In a nod to the kingdom, the international watchdog described as “understandable” the fact the kingdom’s “almost exclusive focus of authorities on domestic (terrorist financing) offences means the authorities are not prioritizing disruption of support for threats outside the kingdom.”

The 246-page report contrasted starkly with US President Donald J. Trump’s assessment expressed in his address to the United Nations general assembly.

“Following my trip to Saudi Arabia last year, the Gulf countries opened a new centre to target terrorist financing. They are enforcing new sanctions. They are working with us to identify and track terrorist networks and taking more responsibility for fighting terrorism and extremism in their own region”, Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Trump, by design or default, did not take into account the flow of substantial amounts of Saudi money to militants in the Pakistani province of Balochistan that borders on Iran. Mounting indications suggest that the Islamic republic’s detractors may be moving to stir unrest among Iran’s ethnic minorities in a bid to change the regime in Tehran.

The flow of funds leaves open the possibility that the kingdom’s laxity in cracking down on funds flowing to extremists beyond its frontiers may be deliberate.

To be sure, Saudi Arabia has been strengthening its anti-money laundering and terrorism finance regime ever since the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in which the perpetrators were primarily Saudi nationals and Al Qaeda attacks in the kingdom itself in 2003 and 2004.

Writing in Forbes, journalist Dominic Dudley noted that the FATF report may not have taken into account new anti-money laundering and terrorism finance-related laws adopted last year by Saudi Arabia.

“The new laws were coming in just as the FATF was conducting its research for this report and it is too soon to judge how effective they have been,” Mr. Dudley said.

Even so, it was only with the ascendancy to the throne of King Salman in 2015 and the rise of his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that the kingdom began to review its more than four decades long global funding of intolerant, anti-pluralistic, supremacist, ant-Shiite and anti-Iranian ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim groups and institutions.

While financing has been severely curtailed and funding vehicles like the Muslim World League have been refashioned to propagate moderation and inter-faith dialogue, the kingdom, as in the case of Balochistan, continues to support ultra-conservatives where it serves its geopolitical goals.

In what apparently reflected frustration with the kingdom’s progress in countering money laundering and terrorism, FATF did not mince its words in its report. “Saudi Arabia is not effectively investigating and prosecuting individuals involved in larger scale or professional (money laundering] activity” and is “not effectively confiscating the proceeds of crime,” the report said.

FATF suggested that the problem was the kingdom’s implementation of anti-money laundering and terrorism finance measures rather than its legal infrastructure.

“Saudi Arabia has a legal framework that provides it with an adequate basis to investigate and prosecute ML (money laundering) activities… Saudi Arabia is not effectively investigating and prosecuting individuals involved in larger scale or professional ML activity. Investigations are often reactive rather than proactive, and tend to be straightforward and single layered.,” the report said.

The report’s wording left the possibility open that poor implementation was the result of either a lack of political will or the fact that there is widespread criticism of Prince Mohammed’s reforms within the bureaucracy and the kingdom’s religious establishment despite a crackdown on any form of dissent.

That possibility gains currency given the fact that FATF acknowledges that

“Saudi Arabia has demonstrated an ability to respond to the dynamic terrorism threat it faces in country. Saudi Arabian authorities have demonstrated that they have the training, experience and willingness to pursue TF (terrorism finance) investigations in conjunction with and alongside terrorism cases.”

The report noted that Saudi Arabia seldom convicted funders of political violence who were not directly involved in attacks.

“This includes TF cases in relation to funds raised in the Saudi Arabia for support of individuals affiliated with terrorist entities outside the kingdom, particularly outside the Middle-East region, which remains a risk. Saudi Arabia’s overall strategy for fighting terrorist financing mainly focuses on using law enforcement measures to disrupt terrorist threats directed at the kingdom and its immediate vicinity,” the report said.

FATF’s criticism is embarrassing for a country that ever since the 9/11 attacks has been attempting to shed its image of having fuelled militancy, position itself as a leader in the struggle against militancy and extremism, and project itself as a 21^st century knowledge hub by liberalizing its strict social and cultural norms, including the recent lifting of the ban on women’s driving.

It is also awkward because the report puts Saudi Arabia in the position of the pot calling the kettle black when it comes to the 15-month-old Saudi-United Arab Emirates-led boycott of Qatar because it allegedly funds and supports militancy. Saudi Arabia’s failure to garner widespread international support for its boycott or force Qatar to concede heightens the awkwardness.

That is even more the case given that Saudi Arabia together with the UAE, Bahrain and Egypt is demanding among other things that Qatar “consent to monthly compliance audits in the first year after agreeing to the demands, followed by quarterly audits in the second year, and annual audits in the following 10 years” – something the kingdom would be unlikely to accept if hypothetically asked in the wake of the FATF report to submit to a similar regime.

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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

For those who follow major financial markets closely, the warning signs of the next major US financial market Tsunami are gaining more frequency daily. Some weeks ago attention was on so-called Emerging Markets, especially Turkey, Argentina, Indonesia, India or Mexico. What is rarely mentioned in the mainstream media is the relation of those events to the deliberate withdrawal of dollars from the global financial system by the “creator” of dollars, the US Federal Reserve. Now that process threatens to detonate a dramatic fall in not only US stocks but also in high-risk junk bonds, in US real estate debt, auto debt, credit card debt. The Trump hopes for continued economic success into the 2020 elections or even into the November mid-term elections may be smashed by the will of the Fed.

The interesting fact little-discussed outside professional financial circles is the fact that every major financial panic or crash since at least the Panic of 1893 in the USA has been orchestrated to the advantage of a dominant faction in finance at the expense of rivals. This was the case with the crash of 1907 where the “Federal Reserve” of that time, the faction in Wall Street around J.P. Morgan, triggered a panic to gain certain advantage over troublesome competitors. Since JP Morgan, the Rockefellers and banks of Wall Street manipulated the creation of the private Federal Reserve in 1913, it has been the Fed who engineers periodic market collapses after the same Fed policies created a speculative boom in assets previously.

The Great 1929 Crash on Wall Street was deliberately caused by Fed interest rate policies tied to pressure from Bank of England’s Montagu Norman after 1927 to lower US interest rates to encourage flow of gold into London. When US rates created a dangerous stock market bubble, the Fed moved rates higher in 1929 and burst the bubble, triggering the Great Crash and Great Depression. In the 1990s the Greenspan Fed deliberately encouraged another Wall Street speculative bubble known as the Dot.com bubble, as the Fed chairman gave speeches praising the “new economy,” and feeding a stock bubble with lowered interest rates before raising them again and popping the bubble in March 2000. After the dot.com crash the same Greenspan dramatically lowered rates again to a mere 1% in 2003, explicitly encouraging a real estate boom and praising the Wall Street creation of Mortgage-Backed Securities and “no interest loans.” When the same Greenspan began deliberately to raise Fed rates from 2006 to September 2007, a full-blown US sub-prime mortgage collapse was on. He conveniently resigned just before.

QT and the Coming Bubble Bust

Now the Fed is in the early stages of yet another interest rate tightening cycle, raising rates after an unprecedented ten years of zero rates and Quantitative Easing. In addition to raising rates, it is also unwinding the QE with what is known as Quantitative Tightening—selling off the Treasuries and other bonds it acquired during the past decade of QE, in effect reducing available bank credit. It began timidly in 2017 with ever-so-gradual Fed interest rate hikes from the zero levels of the past eight years. Now with a new Fed chairman, Jerome Powell, rates look set to rise significantly in coming months

It began timidly in 2017 with ever-so-gradual Fed interest rate hikes from the zero levels of the past eight years. Now with a new Fed chairman Jerome Powell, rates look set to rise significantly in coming months. At the same time the Fed has begun to reverse its purchase of some $4 trillion of US Treasury and corporate bonds and assets during the past decade. To date they have sold $231 billion of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, withdrawing the equivalent in banking system liquidity.

The combined impact of rising Fed rates and liquidation of its Treasury holdings from QE is creating a dollar liquidity squeeze worldwide. While the impact so far has first been felt in vulnerable emerging markets like Turkey or Argentina, in recent weeks it has begun to force domestic US interest rates higher and threatens to end the euphoric Wall Street stock bubble that began a decade ago. Since the onset of the crisis in 2008 the S&P 500 stock index has risen an unprecedented 387%, for reference.

Now if we add to the mix the fact that owing to the generous Trump tax cuts and a rise in military and other spending, the Federal US deficit is due to hit nearly $1 trillion this year, and remain at those levels for at least a decade, with Washington in a trade war with China, it’s largest creditor, as well as with Japan, events are primed for rising US interest rates even somewhat independent of the Fed.

A US Debt Bubble

A decade of the lowest Fed interest rates in history has created a grotesque distortion in borrowing in most every sector of the US economy from Federal government to corporations to households. The Federal government debt is presently a record $21 trillion, more than double what it was in 2008 when the Lehman crisis erupted. US corporate debt is an unprecedented $6.3 trillion and only sustainable so long as interest rates remained at record lows.

Debt of US households is more than $13.3 trillion, well above the 2008 peak. Of that most is again mortgage debt, at over $9 trillion, near the level of 2008. Of this debt of households an unprecedented $1.5 trillion is student loan debt. In 2008 that figure was less than half or $611 billion. Add another $1.25 in auto loans and record credit card debt and the stage is set for the US to get caught in a classic debt trap once rising Fed interest rates trigger domino-style bankruptcies as companies and home mortgage holders are unable to meet debt payments and defaults rise.

While it is not at all clear that rising Fed interest rates will trigger a stock market crash in time for the November mid-term elections, the stage is clearly set for the Fed to put the US economy into a severe recession or depression by the time of the 2020 elections. That would finish the Trump presidency should the Powers That Be decide another option is more useful to their global power agenda.

“We won’t be able to call it a recession, it’s going to be worse than the Great Depression,” said Peter Schiff, fund manager who anticipated the 2007 sub-prime crash. Schiff predicts a major economic downturn before the end of the Trump presidency’s first term. “The US economy is in so much worse shape than it was a decade ago.” Only this time the Fed is in a far weaker position than in 2008 and the total US debt is far beyond levels of a decade ago. The US economy and US Government is not as invincible as it appears to some. The question is what would replace it? The China-Russia-Iran Eurasia alternative, the most promising alternative needs to take far more consequent steps to isolate their economies from the dollar if they are to succeed.

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

Featured image is from the author.

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.

Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell MP has unveiled Labour’s plans for a new, publicly-owned water system, run by local councils, workers and customers and for “unprecedented openness and transparency” in how the industry will be managed. Building on Labour’s manifesto commitment to bring key utilities back into public ownership, for the first time McDonnell has outlined in detail how they would do it.

It comes as part of a package of measures to broaden ownership and control in the economy, including giving workers a third of seats on boards, billions of pounds for public services to be raised from Labour’s Inclusive Ownership Fund and a wide-ranging consultation on putting workers and service users in charge of running the water, energy, rail and mail industries which Labour will bring into public ownership. McDonnell also announced plans to launch a campaign against corporate tax avoidance and for Nobel laureate Professor Joseph Stiglitz to speak at the first meeting of a new ‘Bretton Woods’ international forum to reform global economic institutions.

Coming off the back of plans to set up a dedicated public ownership unit in the Treasury set out earlier this week, McDonnell said Labour were “planned, ready and prepared” to hand economic power back to workers, citizens and communities to a degree never seen before. He added that the Labour Party is ready “not just to fight another election campaign but to implement our programme when we win” and that “at the heart of our programme is the greatest extension of economic democratic rights that this country has ever seen.”

Extending Economic Democratic Rights

John McDonnell MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, said:

“Water bills have risen 40% in real terms since privatisation. Water companies receive more in tax credits than they pay in tax. Each day enough water to meet the needs of 20 million people is lost due to leakages.

“With figures like that, we can’t afford not to take them back. But let’s be clear, nationalisation will not be a return to the past.

“We don’t want to take power away from faceless directors only to centralise it all in a Whitehall office, to swap one remote manager for another.

“Today Rebecca Long Bailey and I are launching a large scale consultation on democracy in our public services. We are also setting out our plans for a new publicly-owned water system that puts this essential service back in the hands of local councils, workers and customers.

“There will be unprecedented openness and transparency in how the industry will be managed. We are ending the profiteering in dividends, vast executive salaries, and excessive interest payments. Surpluses will be reinvested in water infrastructure and staff, or used to reduce bills. Real investment will allow the highest environmental standards.”

On the Public and Community Ownership Unit

“It will bring in the external expertise we will need. Let me make it absolutely clear that the full weight of the Treasury will be used to take on any vested interests that try to thwart the will of the people.

“Some said our manifesto was a fantasy or a wish list, attractive but ultimately not deliverable. I’m telling you today that we are planned, ready and prepared. Not just to fight another election campaign but to implement our programme when we win.”

On the campaign against corporate tax avoidance

“We can’t trust the Tories on this but we shouldn’t just wait until we get into government. We should act now.

”One way is to mobilise shareholder power to demand companies uphold basic tax justice standards. Numerous institutions from churches to trade unions and pension funds have large scale shareholdings in many of the companies that avoid taxes. So today I’m announcing my intention to bring together these organisations to launch a shareholder campaign.

“We’ll be demanding companies sign up to the Fair Tax Mark standards, demonstrating transparently that they pay their fair share of taxes. So fair warning to the tax avoiders, we are coming for you.”

On global dialogue and the international economic forum

“Gordon Brown recently expressed his concern at the current weaknesses in global relationships to deal with any future economic crises. With major nations on the brink of a trade war, and with climate change accelerating, we can’t risk the kind of international breakdown that led to the Great Depression.

“Just as at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, there is an urgent need to work out if the current international system can cope with these threats. It isn’t working for the Western world, where stagnant wages have helped feed the rise of the racist right.

“And it isn’t working for the developing world, whose wealth is plundered by multinational corporations or stashed in Western banks.

“We will be convening in the spring an international social forum to bring together leading economists, politicians and civil society representatives, launching a dialogue on the common risks we face and the actions we need to take.

“I am pleased to announce that Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has agreed to lead this discussion for us.”

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Speech to Labour Conference 2018

John McDonnell MP

I want to start by thanking the Treasury Team: Peter Dowd, Shadow Chief Secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, Anneliese Dodds, Clive Lewis, Lyn Brown, Lord Dennis Tunnicliffe, Lord Bryan Davies and PPS Thelma Walker who won back Colne Valley from the Tories last year.

This month is the 10th anniversary of the financial crash. J.K.Galbraith in his book on the 1929 crash said sure you can try to create institutions to avoid crashes in the future but the best protection is memory. So it’s worth remembering. The causes of the crash were:

Yes, greed; yes, the deregulation that turned the City into a multibillion pound casino, but more importantly it was caused by the power of a small, financial elite who exercised too much power over our political system.

That power meant the bankers and speculators who caused the crisis wouldn’t be the ones who’d pay for it. It would be our families, working people, our businesses, our young people and especially the most vulnerable in our society.

It’s been 8 hard years of austerity and economic failure. In the 6th richest country in the world it cannot be right that 5000 of our fellow citizens are sleeping on our streets and that 4 million of our children are living in poverty, two thirds of them in households where someone is in work.

That tells you that wages are so low, still below 2010 levels. They are not sufficient to provide a decent life for many of our people. The Tories have created an age of insecurity where people have little if any power or control over their lives. It’s no wonder so many people voted for Brexit. They voted for any form of change. It was an anti-establishment vote.

So I believe it’s time. It’s time to shift the balance of power in our country. It’s time to give people back control over their lives.

Another Anniversary

You know, there’s another anniversary this year. One hundred years ago in 1918 the Labour Party adopted Clause Four as part of our party’s constitution. Let me remind you what it said: “to secure for the workers, by hand or by brain, the full fruits of their industry.”

I say the Clause 4 principles are as relevant today as they were back then. Fair, democratic, collective solutions to the challenges of the modern economy.

The Labour movement has always believed that democracy should not stop when we clock in at the factory gate, in the office lobby, or – like my Mum in BHS – behind the counter.

Democracy is at the heart of our socialism – and extending it should always be our goal. Our predecessors fought for democracy in Parliament, against the divine right of kings and the aristocracy. They fought for working people to get the franchise.

Our sisters fought for women’s suffrage in the teeth of ferocious opposition and our movement fought for workers to have a voice at work. The trade unions founded this party to take that democratic vision even further. So in 2018 I tell you that at the heart of our programme is the greatest extension of economic democratic rights that this country has ever seen.

It starts in the workplace.

It’s undeniable that the balance of power at work has been tipped against the worker. The result is long hours, low productivity, low pay and the insecurity of zero hour contracts.

I want to thank the IPPR for its recent report. It was a brilliant critique of the inequality embedded in today’s economy.

Archbishop Welby took some stick in the media and from some in the establishment for his support for the report. He wasn’t engaging in party politics. He was simply speaking the truth as a moral leader in our society. Just a few words of advice though Archbishop, when they get round to calling you a Marxist, I’ll give you some tips on how to handle it.

So let’s be certain. We will redress the balance of power at work. We will be proud to fulfil John Smith’s, our late leader’s promise, that workers will have trade union rights from day one whether in full time, part time or temporary work.

We’ll ban zero hours contracts. We will lift people out of poverty by setting a real living wage of £10 an hour. Wages will be determined by sectoral collective bargaining. And yes we will tackle the continuing scandal of the gender pay gap.

Corporate Governance

Real power comes from having the right to a collective say at work. Large corporations play a huge role in our lives, yet the decisions about running them are in the hands of a tiny few. Employees who create the wealth have no say in the key decisions that affect their future. After decades of talking about industrial democracy, Labour in government will legislate to implement it. As Jeremy announced yesterday, a third of the seats on company boards will be allocated to workers.

Power also comes from ownership. We believe that workers, who create the wealth of a company, should share in its ownership and, yes, in the returns that it makes.

Employee ownership increases a company’s productivity and encourages long term decision making. Let me thank the Co-op Party for its work on this and Gareth Thomas MP in particular for his ideas.

We will legislate for large companies to transfer shares into an “Inclusive Ownership Fund.” The shares will be held and managed collectively by the workers. The shareholding will give workers the same rights as other shareholders to have a say over the direction of their company. And dividend payments will be made directly to the workers from the fund. Payments could be up to £500 a year. That’s 11 million workers each with a greater say, and a greater stake, in the rewards of their labour.

Societal Dividend

But we all know it’s not just the employees of a company that create the profits it generates. It’s the collective investment in infrastructure, education and research and development that we as a society make that enables entrepreneurs to build and grow their businesses.

So we believe it’s right that society shares in the benefits that investment produces. That’s why a proportion of revenues generated by the ‘inclusive ownership funds’ will be transferred back to our public services as a social dividend. Over time, this will mobilise billions that could be spent supporting our public services and social security system.

Public Ownership

We are extending economic democracy even further by bringing water, energy, Royal Mail and rail into public ownership. Some press said the voters would be horrified. They couldn’t have been more wrong.

Public ownership has proved its popularity in opinion poll after opinion poll. It’s not surprising, look at the scandal of the privatisation of water. Water bills have risen 40% in real terms since privatisation. £18 billion has been paid out in dividends. Water companies receive more in tax credits than they pay in tax. Each day enough water to meet the needs of 20 million people is lost due to leakages. With figures like that, we can’t afford not to take them back.

But be clear, nationalisation will not be a return to the past. We don’t want to take power away from faceless directors to a Whitehall office, to swap one remote manager for another.

Today, Rebecca Long Bailey and I are launching a large scale consultation on democracy in our public services. We are also setting out our plans for a new publicly-owned water system that puts this essential service back in the hands of local councils, workers and customers.

There will be an unprecedented openness and transparency in how the industry will be managed. We are ending the profiteering in dividends, vast executive salaries and excessive interest payments.

Surpluses will be reinvested in water infrastructure and staff, or used to reduce bills. Real investment will allow the highest environmental standards.

Public and Community Ownership Unit

People have had enough of being ripped off by privatisation. That’s why we’ve said no more PFIs and we’ll bring the PFIs back in house. Through our public ownership programme we will set up a ‘Public and Community Ownership Unit’ in the Treasury. It will bring in the external expertise we will need.

Let me make it absolutely clear that the full weight of the Treasury will be used to take on any vested interests that try to thwart the will of the people. Some said our manifesto was a fantasy or a wish list, attractive but ultimately not deliverable. I’m telling you today that we are planned, ready and prepared.

Not just to fight another election campaign but to implement our programme when we win.

Green Book

For too long that establishment has used the Treasury as a barrier against putting power back into the hands of the people. So we will reprogram the Treasury, rewriting its rule books on how it makes decisions about what, when, and where to invest.

We will end the Treasury bias against investing the regions and nations. And we’ll make sure it assesses spending decisions against the need to tackle climate change, protect our environment, drive up productivity and meet the investment challenges of the 4th industrial revolution.

Fair Taxation

We need to exert some people power over our tax system. There are millions of businesses out there which deserve our respect and we will always support them. They are responsible, ethical entrepreneurs, who pay their taxes and support our community. They should know that we are proud of them.

But there is a minority that don’t live up to those standards. They avoid paying their taxes on an industrial scale. They are denying our hospitals, our schools and carers the resources they need.

The Tories record on tackling tax avoidance and money laundering has been a disgrace. We can’t trust the Tories on this but we shouldn’t just wait until we get into government. We should act now.

One way is to mobilise shareholder power to demand companies uphold basic tax justice standards. Numerous institutions from churches to trade unions and pension funds have large scale shareholdings in many of the companies that avoid taxes.

So today, I’m announcing my intention to bring together these organisations to launch a shareholder campaign. We’ll be demanding companies sign up to the Fair Tax Mark standards, demonstrating transparently that they pay their fair share of taxes.

So fair warning to the tax avoiders, we are coming for you.

Global Dialogue

Gordon Brown recently expressed his concern at the current weaknesses in global relationships to deal with any future economic crises. With major nations on the brink of a trade war, and with climate change accelerating, we can’t risk the kind of international breakdown that led to the Great Depression. Just as at the Bretton Woods conference in 1944, there is an urgent need to work out if the current international system can cope with these threats.

Over the past few decades that system has concentrated power in the hands of an international financial elite. Individuals, communities, and even nation states have been made increasingly powerless. It isn’t working for the Western world, where stagnant wages have helped feed the rise of the racist right. And it isn’t working for the developing world, whose wealth is plundered by multinational corporations or stashed in Western banks.

We will be convening in the spring an international social forum to bring together leading economists, politicians and civil society representatives, launching a dialogue on the common risks we face and the actions we need to take.

I am pleased to announce that Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz, has agreed to lead this discussion for us.

Brexit

This leads us inevitably to the urgent question of Brexit. I don’t have to repeat the criticisms we all have of the Tories’ behaviour over this echoed in the earlier conference debate. Their failures are in plain sight.

I just say to the Tories, in the interests of our country get out of the way and let us get on with securing a way forward. A way forward that will protect our economy, our jobs and standards of living for our people. If they won’t do that then, you know my preference, let’s have a general election.

We are keeping all the options for democratic engagement on the table. But look, I feel so strongly that these Tories should face the people. Face the people for the way they have recklessly put our country’s future at risk over the last two years.

On so many fronts you know the scale of the mess we will inherit from the Tories. A society whose social fabric has been run down to the point of dereliction. A struggling, mismanaged economy vulnerable to another crisis.

Past Shadow Chancellors have come to conference with warnings about how bad the situation is to reduce people’s expectations of what can be achieved when we go into government. This Shadow Chancellor is different.

Real Change

I want you to know that:

The greater the mess we inherit, the more radical we have to be; the greater the need for change, the greater the opportunity we have to create that change and we will.

The Tories’ austerity has been brutal. But what I have resented most is that they try to take away the dreams, the hope and optimism our people, especially our young people, that dream of building a better world.

But they fail to understand that we have an unwavering faith that together people can change the world. We will not settle for anything less.

Yesterday the press reported the Tories were drawing up secret plans for a quick general election. So the message from this conference is bring it on.

Whenever the general election comes, we are ready. Ready to campaign for victory, ready for Government, ready to build the future.

And you know, like Bill Shankly, we’ll be proud to call that future, socialism. Solidarity.

*

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“Marx was the most hated and slandered man of his time. The absolutist or republican governments deported him. “Bourgeois”, conservatives or democrats united against him”. Statement by Engels at the funeral of Marx.

In this bicentennial of the birth of Karl Marx, intervening in the middle of the period agitated by the debates and the controversies on emigration and exile, it is not useless to recall that the life of Karl Marx was marked by the forced exile, banishment, imprisonment, misery. 

The first years of his revolutionary activist life were peppered with persecutions, expulsions, prohibitions, convictions, and detention. First, faced with persecution in Germany, Karl Marx fled to Paris. Barely installed in the French capital, it is the subject of an order of expulsion on the request of the Prussian power. Then he finds exile in Belgium. Back in Germany, he is banished again immediately. He fled to Paris in 1848. He took part in the days of June. He is arrested and interned in Morbihan. He manages to escape, then crosses the Channel to go into exile permanently to London.

So, Marx was pursued, chased all over Europe. He ended up in exile in England, the only country without legislation for crimes of opinion. However, England, if she grants him the right of exile, she refuses him any right of work.

As socialist militant and historian Franz Mehring writes: 

“Woe to the independent and incorruptible genius that stands proudly against bourgeois society, who knows how to read in the workings of its inner workings the warning signs of its impending end and who forges the weapons that will give him the coup de grace. In such a genius, the bourgeois society reserves agony and tortures that may seem less barbaric than the easel of antiquity and the pyre of the Middle Ages, but which at bottom are all the more cruel“. 

Image on the right: Marx and Engels

Condemned to live in poverty, Marx, to be able to work on his work and the organization of the labor movement, owed his survival only to the financial support of his devoted friend Engels. Unlike the slanders spread over Marx, he never refused to work to better devote himself to the writing of his writings. In truth, it was by the will of the capitalist elites (bourgeoisie) to starve him that he found himself unemployed. Indeed, by his status as exiled and by his stature as “dangerous” revolutionary, Marx could not get a job at the height of his academic skills (Marx had a doctorate in philosophy and had a recognized competence in  journalism).

Clearly, the whole European bourgeoisie marched against Marx: out of the question to grant a job or a simple freelance in a newspaper in Marx. Nevertheless, he manages to be “recruited” as a journalist, but under a false identity, by “New York Daily Tribune” with which he collaborated a good ten years from 1851. With its 200,000 subscribers, the “Tribune” was then the most read and richest newspaper in the United States.

Thus, Marx has never been able to do a fixed job. This leads him to live in extreme poverty. Moreover, Marx writes ironically:

“I do not think we ever wrote about money while missing it so much“.  

Throughout his long life as exiled (from 1848 until his death in 1883), Marx lived in misery, as evidenced by his correspondence with Engels. Admittedly, the latter, also installed in England, provides him with regular financial support, but it barely allows the family of Marx to survive. In spite of this generous pecuniary aid, Marx and his family live in poverty: 

“My wife is sick, little Jenny is sick, Leni has a kind of nervous fever. I can not and I could not call the doctor for lack of money for drugs. For the past eight days I have been feeding the family with bread and potatoes, but I wonder if I could still get them today” (he wrote to Engels on September 4, 1852).

One of his children, Edgar, is dying of malnutrition. 

In fact, until his death, Marx led a life of anchorite. In London, Marx lived in a miserable two-room apartment, described by his family as a slum where anarchically stacked old furniture. 

In addition to the indigence in which Marx was reduced to living, he was also subjected throughout his life to odious calumnies by many authors.  In the aftermath of Marx’s death, the newspaper “The Universe” spreads, in an article where slander disputes it with lies, in a despicable diatribe. The newspaper writes March 19, 1883:

“Marx founded the International, terrible and vast plan, which realization would lead to a dictatorship of the workers and lead the world to “social liquidation”. Marx was Jewish, like his socialist comrade Lassalle. Thus he had to a high degree all the distinctive peculiarities of his race. He loved luxury, ostentation and material well-being, while raging indignantly against capital and the bourgeoisie. Always like Lassalle, husband of a German of princely origin, Marx managed to marry a noble and rich girl, sister of the count of Westphalen, the ultra-conservative Prussian minister of the reaction of 1850. Then the Jew could satisfy his tastes. He surrounded himself with all the luxury which the fortune of his wife allowed him. We had a nice hotel in London; in winter, villas were rented on the Riviera; in the spring, we would enjoy the delicious climate of the Isle of Wight; they settled at Ventnor, the former residence of the Empress of Austria; then in summer we looked for freshness in a chalet in Interlaken or Brunnen. While leading this broad life, Marx continued to make his greatest efforts to revolutionize the workers by exciting them to demand social liquidation. He was careful not to give the example of this liquidation. His generosity for the workers was all platonic. The Jew Marx drew his main ideas from the famous doctrines of Luther. “Do what you please, lie, parry, steal, kill the rich and the princes, just believe you did well. These infamous words, the founder of the International, were appropriate to them; he had arranged them according to the needs of the century.

The workers find fairness requires liquidation and everyone is king under the principles of national sovereignty.

Even today, there are similar slanderous slanders against Marx. 

However, reading the report of the Prussian police on the exile of Marx in London, little suspicious of political sympathy, we discover the truth. In this report, it is written:

“The leader of this party (the Communists) is Karl Marx; the other closest leaders are Friedrich Engels, who lives in Manchester and Freiligrath and Wolff “Lupus” in London, Heine in Paris, Weydemeyer and Cluss in the United States; Burgers and Daniels are in Cologne (Köln) and Weerth in Hamburg. But the active and creative spirit, the true soul of the party is Marx; So I want to talk to you about his personality … he wears a  beard; his eyes are big, fiery and penetrating, he has something sinister, demonic. However, it shows, at first sight, the look of a man of genius and energy. 

His intellectual superiority exerts an irresistible influence on those around him. His wife, the sister of the Prussian minister of Westphalen, is a cultivated and agreeable woman who, for the sake of her husband, has adapted to a gypsy life and now feels perfectly well in their environment, in this misery. He has two daughters and a boy, all very cute and the same intelligent eyes of the father … As a husband and father Marx, despite his agitated and violent character, is the most tender and gentle of men in the world. Marx lives in one of London’s worst neighborhoods and therefore one of the least expensive. His home consists of two rooms, the one facing the street and the Hall and the other is at the back and serves as a bedroom to sleep. In the whole house there is not a single piece of furniture that is clean and in good condition. 

Everything is ruined, chipped, worn, covered with a layer of dust the thickness of a finger; everywhere reigns the greatest disorder. In the middle of the room is a relic, a large table,covered with a layer of wax that has never been sanded. Here piled up manuscripts, books and journals of Marx, children’s toys, pieces for the use of women, tea cups with cracked, dirty edges, spoons, knives, forks, candlesticks, inkwells, Dutch porcelain pipes, tobacco ash: all piled up, stacked on this single table.When you enter  Marx’s house, coal and tobacco smoke are so dense that at first you have to grop as in a cave; then gradually the view becomes accustomed to the smoke and begins to see something, as in a fog.Everything is dirty and dusty, sitting down is really a dangerous business. Here, a chair that only holds three legs, Beyond the children play on another chair, Cooking by chance together. Of course all the snack is offered to the visitor, but the children hang in the middle of the kitchen waste, and you feel that you risk destroying your trousers by putting them on the said chair. But all this does not cause Marx and his wife the least embarrassment. The host is the friendliest in the world; Pipe, tobacco and all that can be found in the house is offered with the greatest cordiality. An intelligent and pleasant conversation overcomes the domestic deficiencies, making tolerable what in a first contact was just unpleasant. Then, at the end of the day, you find the atmosphere interesting and original. 

Obviously, during Marx’s lifetime, the bourgeoisie [capitalist elites] did everything possible to prevent him from acting by demonizing him, by persecuting him with their police arsenal. 

To read complete article click below (word doc)

[DOC]When the bourgeois Europe starved and slandered … – les 7 du quebec

This article was originally published on http://www.les7duquebec.com.

Virtually all politicians lie. The Clintons, Bush/Cheney, and Obama were serial liars.

They never let facts interfere with their domestic and geopolitical agendas, Trump a more congenital liar than his predecessors. 

Habitual or compulsive lying is part of his makeup. It’s so extreme he may be unable to distinguish between truth and falsehoods, especially since he relies on info fed him by hardline neocon advisors and Fox News, his favorite TV channel.

Nearly straightaway in his Tuesday UN address, he turned truth on its head claiming

“(i)n less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”

Laughter by attending world leaders and diplomats followed, then silence as DJT recited a litany of one Big Lie after another, along with taking credit for deplorable policies he called major achievements.

Source: White House

They include

• his war on humanity at home and abroad, extreme corporate favoritism,
• JCPOA pullout (breaching an international treaty),
• refusing to sign the Global Compact on migration,
• withdrawing from the UN Human Rights Council,
• unlawfully moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (a UN-declared international city), along with imposing greater hardships on long-suffering Palestinians he doesn’t care a hoot about, along with much more.

His disdain for ordinary people at home and abroad is undeniable, harming them to serve privileged interests exclusively, wanting social justice in America eliminated, his claims otherwise a gross distortion of reality.

His destructive record is indisputable. He lied claiming

“the United States is stronger, safer, and a richer country than it was when I assumed office two years ago.”

He lied saying

“(w)e are…standing up for our citizens and for peace loving people everywhere” his regime ruthlessly exploits and grievously harms.

He lied claiming he “honor(s) the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs and traditions,” adding:

“The United States will not tell you how to live, work, or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.”

Republicans and “undemocratic Dems” seek dominance over all other nations, pressuring, bullying and bribing allies to bend to their will, waging naked aggression on sovereign independent countries, wanting them transformed into US vassal states.

His outreach to North Korea is all about getting its government to comply with US demands in return for hollow promises – fooling no one in Pyongyang, why respecting its sovereignty, formally ending Harry Truman’s war, and stepping back from the brink on the peninsula is unattainable as it’s always been for nearly 70 years.

Claiming the Saudis and other despotic Gulf states are working with the US “to identify…track, and (combat regional) terrorist networks” ignores their support for this scourge, used as imperial proxies wherever their fighters are deployed.

Calling US/UK-orchestrated, Saudi-led naked aggression in Yemen “civil war” is a bald-faced lie.

So is saying the Saudis and allied Gulf states “pledged millions of dollars to aid the people of Syria and Yemen” – their funding and other aid going to ISIS, al-Nusra, and other ruthless terrorists alone, their terror-bombing and other destructive tactics harming ordinary people in these countries most of all.

Washington fundamentally opposes peace, stability, equity, and justice everywhere – notions Republicans and undemocratic Dems consider anathema.

Their record, especially since the rape of Yugoslavia, speaks for itself, endless war on humanity and all sovereign independent states, wanting all nations transformed into ruler-serf societies – unsafe and unfit to live in.

Like many times before, Trump turned truth on its head claiming credit for “driving…bloodthirsty killers known as ISIS…from the territory they once held in Iraq and Syria.”

Just the opposite is true. Washington and its imperial partners support the scourge of terrorism they pretend to oppose.

War on terrorism in Syria is waged by government forces, Russia, Hezbollah, and Iranian military advisors alone – a campaign Washington, NATO, Israel, the Saudis and UAE oppose.

Threatening Syria like many times before, Trump said “the United States will respond if chemical weapons are deployed by…Assad” – US-supported terrorists alone responsible for numerous CW attacks, no evidence government forces ever used them throughout years of war.

Trump focused his harshest venom on Iran, a nation supporting world peace and stability, involved in combating terrorism in Syria, a righteous mission.

Trump:

“Iran’s leaders sew (sic) chaos, death and disruption. They do not respect their neighbors, borders, or the sovereign rights of nations.”

“Instead, they plunder the nation’s resources to enrich themselves and to spread mayhem across the Middle East and far beyond.”

“The Iranian people are rightly outraged that their leaders have embezzled billions of dollars from the treasury, seized valuable portions and looted the religious endowments to line their own pockets and to send their proxies to wage war.”

“Iran’s neighbors have paid a heavy toll for the agenda of aggression and expansion.”

Fact: The above hostile remarks are a litany of bald-faced lies, fooling no world leaders and others in the General Assembly Hall, obvious to everyone hearing them, including savvy global audience viewers where Trump’s address was televised.

Fact: What Trump calls a “horrible 2015 Iran nuclear deal” is an international treaty.

It’s strongly supported by other signatory countries and the world community – other than Israel, the Saudis, and perhaps a few other despotic regimes hostile to sovereign Iran.

The Islamic Republic threatens no other nations. Its nuclear program is entirely legitimate.

It has no military component, repeatedly confirmed by the IAEA, along with stressing that Iran fully complies with JCPOA provisions.

The Trump regime’s pullout flagrantly breached international law, a US specialty time and again, respecting might over right alone, deploring what all just societies cherish most.

Ruthlessly dangerous hardliners in Washington want dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations.

They’re waging endless wars of aggression to achieve its aims, risking a nuclear holocaust if things are pushed too far.

The Trump regime’s pressure and  threats against other nations to support its hostile Iran agenda is a colossal failure. Russia strongly supports Iranian sovereignty.

China, Turkey and India intend to keep purchasing Iranian oil and/or gas. According to Oil Price.com:

“Given the mixed signals over compliance with Washington’s desire for India to cut Iranian oil and with Iran offering even more advantageous procurement incentives to Indian refiners, it appears that India will continue to buy Iranian oil above 2017 levels.”

China could buy all Iranian oil if it wishes. It currently buys about one-fourth of its oil exports. It rejected US demands to halt purchases. So did Turkey. Japan and South Korea may cut but not cease buying Iranian oil.

Trump:

“We cannot allow the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism to possess the planet’s most dangerous weapons.”

Fact: The dubious distinction applies to Washington, Israel, and their imperial partners, not Iran, forthrightly combating the scourge these countries support.

They represent humanity’s greatest threat, Trump a front man for dark forces infesting Washington.

His UN address was an affront to what responsible governance is all about, a notion he and regime hardliners reject.

They resemble what Iranian President Hassan Rouhani called “extremist nationalism and racism and through xenophobic tendencies resembling a Nazi disposition.”

Peace and freedom-loving people everywhere tremble because of potential horrors they may unleash next.

Their extremism risks nuclear armageddon.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

The only redeeming feature of Trump’s Tuesday UN address was not slamming Russia – other than urging Germany not to buy its oil and natural gas, calling on its government to “immediately change course,” a notion it rejects.

In his General Assembly remarks, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani minced no words, saying

“(u)nlawful unilateral sanctions in themselves constitute a form of economic terrorism and a breach of the ‘Right to Development,’ ” adding:

“The economic war that the United States has initiated under the rubric of new sanctions not only targets the Iranian people but also entails harmful repercussions for the people of other countries, and that war has caused a disruption in the state of global trade.”

“The Iranian people have demonstrated their unwavering resilience during the past forty years despite the difficulties and constraints caused by sanctions, and have shown that they can overcome this difficult phase as well.”

“The multi-millennial history of our country demonstrates that Iran and Iranians have never broken in the face of a storm of events — not even been bowed.”

Rouhani stressed his country’s commitment to world peace and cooperative relations with all other nations, notions the US, NATO, Israel and their imperial partners reject.

“The US understanding of international relations is authoritarian. In its estimation, might makes right,” Rouhani stressed, adding:

“Its understanding of power, not of legal and legitimate authority, is reflected in bullying and imposition.”

“No state and nation can be brought to the negotiating table by force, and if so, what follows is the accumulation in the ‘grapes of wrath’ of those nations, to be reaped later by the oppressors,” he stressed.

In 12 consecutive reports since implementation of the JCPOA, the IAEA affirmed full Iranian compliance.

Straightaway while Obama was still in office, he breached Washington’s Iran nuclear deal international treaty obligations. Trump abrogated them entirely.

Adopted UN Security Council resolutions are binding international law on all member states.

Unanimously adopted SC 2231 (July 2015) affirmed the JCPOA Iran nuclear deal. No nation may legally abrogate it.

Trump’s unilateral pullout made the US more of a pariah state than already – defying the world community, demanding all nations go along with its hegemonic agenda or else.

Longstanding US policy calls for regime change in Iran by whatever means it takes to achieve its objective.

As long as this aim remains unchanged, no amount of diplomacy will soften it. What Iran justifiably calls the “Great Satan” could embroil the entire Middle East and other regions in catastrophic conflict, risking humanity’s survival if things are pushed too far.

On Wednesday, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Political Affairs Abbas Araghchi said

“(w)e have been informed that the European members of Security Council all intend to support the nuclear deal and stress the need for remaining committed to its implementation,” adding:

“I am confident that the Wednesday’s meeting will proceed against Mr. Trump’s wishes, and this will only isolate the US more.”

“(T)here is no prospect” for responsible US actions because the country “has not reached maturity yet.”

On the sidelines of the General Assembly session, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said irresponsible Trump regime policies toward his country risk “total(ly) destr(oying)” four decades of gains in Sino/US relations, adding:

“China and the US can have competition, but they should not view others with a cold war mentality.”

“There are some forces in the US recently frequently smearing China and creating antagonistic sentiment, which has caused serious damage to China-US relations.”

Irreconcilable differences separate the agendas of both nations on trade and other key issues. Resolving them may be unattainable as long as hardliners control Washington’s geopolitical agenda.

The breach between both nations is widening, a dangerous situation politically, economically and potentially militarily.

US recklessness created greater China-Russia unity, together a powerful counterforce against Washington’s hegemonic agenda.

China’s Global Times (GT) slammed the Trump regime, saying it “sacrifices other countries’ interests” to serve its own.

It unilaterally imposes illegal sanctions on other countries, Trump more frequently than his predecessors.

DLT “withdr(ew) from multiple international organizations and agreements, which has resulted in increasing the cost for other countries to maintain the international order and common interests,” said GT.

His regime is “taking advantage of the rest of the world” while claiming otherwise.

“The US maximized its own interests by hegemony, which will objectively promote the inferiority and barbarization of international relations.”

“The ‘America First’ mindset is a negative approach, and the world is seeing this first hand.”

“(U)nilateral…winner-take-all strategy” is how Washington operates, “the opposite to multilateralism and win-win strategy…”

Russia was restrained in commenting on Trump’s Tuesday address because he refrained from unacceptably bashing the country.

Iran and China responded sharply, justifiably criticizing Washington’s dangerous hegemonic agenda.

It risks possible catastrophic global war, a doomsday scenario if launched and waged with nuclear weapons.

*

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

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected].

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.

Recently, I wrote an article entitled “Secret US 2006 Gov’t Document Reveals Plan To Destabilize Syria By Using Extremists, Muslim Brotherhood, Elections,” where I detailed the 2006 revelations made by TIME Magazine revealing a leaked two-page document circulated among key figures in the Bush administration that openly stated that the U.S. was “supporting regular meetings of internal and diaspora Syrian activists” in Europe. The document made no bones about expressing hope that “these meetings will facilitate a more coherent strategy and plan of actions for all anti-Assad activists.”

The document was a plan to destabilize the Syrian government by creating discord and distrust over the integrity of Syrian elections as well as by using extremists and Muslim Brotherhood activists to break the Syrian government apart and install a more “cooperative” regime in its place.

This document, however, dovetails with a report regarding classified documents released by WikiLeaks in 2011 which revealed a US State Department program of funding and operating anti-Syrian government television channels in order to sow the seeds of destabilization among the population long before the proxy war of Western-backed terrorists and open violence began to take shape in 2011.

Surprisingly, CBS News actually covered the revelation in an article by Craig Whitlock entitled “WikiLeaks: U.S. Secretly Backed Syrian Opposition.” In this article, Whitlock wrote,

The State Department has secretly financed Syrian political opposition groups and related projects, including a satellite TV channel that beams anti-government programming into the country, according to previously undisclosed diplomatic cables.

The London-based satellite channel, Barada TV, began broadcasting in April 2009 but has ramped up operations to cover the mass protests in Syria as part of a long-standing campaign to overthrow the country’s autocratic leader, Bashar al-Assad. Human rights groups say scores of people have been killed by Assad’s security forces since the demonstrations began March 18; Syria has blamed the violence on “armed gangs.”

Barada TV is closely affiliated with the Movement for Justice and Development, a London-based network of Syrian exiles. Classified U.S. diplomatic cables show that the State Department has funneled as much as $6 million to the group since 2006 to operate the satellite channel and finance other activities inside Syria. The channel is named after the Barada River, which courses through the heart of Damascus, the Syrian capital.

The funding, like the document referenced previously, was actually prepared and implemented under the Bush Administration, once again proving that the attempt to sabotage and overthrow the Syrian government was not merely an Obama administration plan but one that has been implemented through at least three American presidential administrations though attempts to overthrow and/or weaken the Syrian government go as far back as 1983.

Whitlock also wrote,

The U.S. money for Syrian opposition figures began flowing under President George W. Bush after he effectively froze political ties with Damascus in 2005. The financial backing has continued under President Obama, even as his administration sought to rebuild relations with Assad. In January, the White House posted an ambassador to Damascus for the first time in six years.

The cables, provided by the anti-secrecy Web site WikiLeaks, show that U.S. Embassy officials in Damascus became worried in 2009 when they learned that Syrian intelligence agents were raising questions about U.S. programs. Some embassy officials suggested that the State Department reconsider its involvement, arguing that it could put the Obama administration’s rapprochement with Damascus at risk.

Syrian authorities “would undoubtedly view any U.S. funds going to illegal political groups as tantamount to supporting regime change,” read an April 2009 cable signed by the top-ranking U.S. diplomat in Damascus at the time. “A reassessment of current U.S.-sponsored programming that supports anti-[government] factions, both inside and outside Syria, may prove productive,” the cable said.

It is unclear whether the State Department is still funding Syrian opposition groups, but the cables indicate money was set aside at least through September 2010. While some of that money has also supported programs and dissidents inside Syria, The Washington Post is withholding certain names and program details at the request of the State Department, which said disclosure could endanger the recipients’ personal safety.

Syria, a police state, has been ruled by Assad since 2000, when he took power after his father’s death. Although the White House has condemned the killing of protesters in Syria, it has not explicitly called for his ouster.

The State Department declined to comment on the authenticity of the cables or answer questions about its funding of Barada TV.

Tamara Wittes, a deputy assistant secretary of state who oversees the democracy and human rights portfolio in the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs, said the State Department does not endorse political parties or movements.

“We back a set of principles,” she said. “There are a lot of organizations in Syria and other countries that are seeking changes from their government. That’s an agenda that we believe in and we’re going to support.”

The State Department often funds programs around the world that promote democratic ideals and human rights, but it usually draws the line at giving money to political opposition groups.

In February 2006, when relations with Damascus were at a nadir, the Bush administration announced that it would award $5 million in grants to “accelerate the work of reformers in Syria.”

But no dissidents inside Syria were willing to take the money, for fear it would lead to their arrest or execution for treason, according to a 2006 cable from the U.S. Embassy, which reported that “no bona fide opposition member will be courageous enough to accept funding.”

Around the same time, Syrian exiles in Europe founded the Movement for Justice and Development. The group, which is banned in Syria, openly advocates for Assad’s removal. U.S. cables describe its leaders as “liberal, moderate Islamists” who are former members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Barada TV is, of course, at the center of the WikiKeaks report. Whitlock wrote,

It is unclear when the group began to receive U.S. funds, but cables show U.S. officials in 2007 raised the idea of helping to start an anti-Assad satellite channel.

People involved with the group and with Barada TV, however, would not acknowledge taking money from the U.S. government.

“I’m not aware of anything like that,” Malik al-Abdeh, Barada TV’s news director, said in a brief telephone interview from London.

Abdeh said the channel receives money from “independent Syrian businessmen” whom he declined to name. He also said there was no connection between Barada TV and the Movement for Justice and Development, although he confirmed that he serves on the political group’s board. The board is chaired by his brother, Anas.

“If your purpose is to smear Barada TV, I don’t want to continue this conversation,” Malik al-Abdeh said. “That’s all I’m going to give you.”

Other dissidents said that Barada TV has a growing audience in Syria but that its viewer share is tiny compared with other independent satellite news channels such as al-Jazeera and BBC Arabic. Although Barada TV broadcasts 24 hours a day, many of its programs are reruns. Some of the mainstay shows are “Towards Change,” a panel discussion about current events, and “First Step,” a program produced by a Syrian dissident group based in the United States.

Ausama Monajed, another Syrian exile in London, said he used to work as a producer for Barada TV and as media relations director for the Movement for Justice and Development but has not been “active” in either job for about a year. He said he now devotes all his energy to the Syrian revolutionary movement, distributing videos and protest updates to journalists.

He said he “could not confirm” any U.S. government support for the satellite channel, because he was not involved with its finances. “I didn’t receive a penny myself,” he said.

Several U.S. diplomatic cables from the embassy in Damascus reveal that the Syrian exiles received money from a State Department program called the Middle East Partnership Initiative. According to the cables, the State Department funneled money to the exile group via the Democracy Council, a Los Angeles-based nonprofit. According to its Web site, the council sponsors projects in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America to promote the “fundamental elements of stable societies.”

The council’s founder and president, James Prince, is a former congressional staff member and investment adviser for PricewaterhouseCoopers. Reached by telephone, Prince acknowledged that the council administers a grant from the Middle East Partnership Initiative but said that it was not “Syria-specific.”

Prince said he was “familiar with” Barada TV and the Syrian exile group in London, but he declined to comment further, saying he did not have approval from his board of directors. “We don’t really talk about anything like that,” he said.

The April 2009 cable from the U.S. Embassy in Damascus states that the Democracy Council received $6.3 million from the State Department to run a Syria-related program called the “Civil Society Strengthening Initiative.” That program is described as “a discrete collaborative effort between the Democracy Council and local partners” to produce, among other things, “various broadcast concepts.” Other cables make clear that one of those concepts was Barada TV.

It is notable that the “exiles” received much of their funding through the State Department funded Middle East Partnership Initiative, the same organization that was slated to be used for “election monitoring” in the 2006 document covered by TIME.

The question regarding the funding of Barada TV and other initiatives were confirmed by the cables and by the statements of State Department officials. The only real question regarding them, however, is their scale. Whitlock explained further when he wrote,

Edgar Vasquez, a State Department spokesman, said the Middle East Partnership Initiative has allocated $7.5 million for Syrian programs since 2005. A cable from the embassy in Damascus, however, pegged a much higher total — about $12 million — between 2005 and 2010.

The cables report persistent fears among U.S. diplomats that Syrian state security agents had uncovered the money trail from Washington.

A September 2009 cable reported that Syrian agents had interrogated a number of people about “MEPI operations in particular,” a reference to the Middle East Partnership Initiative.

“It is unclear to what extent [Syrian] intelligence services understand how USG money enters Syria and through which proxy organizations,” the cable stated, referring to funding from the U.S. government. “What is clear, however, is that security agents are increasingly focused on this issue.”

U.S. diplomats also warned that Syrian agents may have “penetrated” the Movement for Justice and Development by intercepting its communications.

A June 2009 cable listed the concerns under the heading “MJD: A Leaky Boat?” It reported that the group was “seeking to expand its base in Syria” but had been “initially lax in its security, often speaking about highly sensitive material on open lines.”

The cable cited evidence that the Syrian intelligence service was aware of the connection between the London exile group and the Democracy Council in Los Angeles. As a result, embassy officials fretted that the entire Syria assistance program had been compromised.

“Reporting in other channels suggest the Syrian [Mukhabarat] may already have penetrated the MJD and is using the MJD contacts to track U.S. democracy programming,” the cable stated. “If the [Syrian government] does know, but has chosen not to intervene openly, it raises the possibility that the [government] may be mounting a campaign to entrap democracy activists.”

Barada TV was also one of the staging grounds for the infamous attempt by Western governments to hijack the Syrian airwaves and broadcast filmed images of successful revolution across the screens of the Syrian people in order to break their will and convince them the “revolutionaries” had won before the battles had even gotten off the ground.

This plan was thoroughly exposed by Thierry Meyssan of Voltaire Net who described the plan as follows:

The first meeting assembled PSYOP officers, embedded in the satellite TV channels of Al-Arabiya, Al-Jazeera, BBC, CNN, Fox, France 24, Future TV and MTV. It is known that since 1998, the officers of the US Army Psychological Operations Unit (PSYOP) have been incorporated in CNN. Since then this practice has been extended by NATO to other strategic media as well.

They fabricated false information in advance, on the basis of a ‘story-telling’ script devised by Ben Rhodes’s team at the White House. A procedure of reciprocal validation was installed, with each media quoting the lies of the other media to render them plausible for TV spectators. The participants also decided not only to requisition the TV channels of the CIA for Syria and Lebanon (Barada, Future TV, MTV, Orient News, Syria Chaab, Syria Alghad) but also about 40 religious Wahhabi TV channels to call for confessional massacres to the cry of ‘Christians to Beyrouth, Alawites into the grave!’

The second meeting was held for engineers and technicians to fabricate fictitious images, mixing one part in an outdoor studio, the other part with computer generated images. During the past weeks, studios in Saudi Arabia have been set up to build replicas of the two presidential palaces in Syria and the main squares of Damascus, Aleppo and Homs. Studios of this type already exist in Doha (Qatar), but they are not sufficient.

The third meeting was held by General James B. Smith, the US ambassador, a representative of the UK, prince Bandar Bin Sultan (whom former U.S. president George Bush named his adopted son so that the U.S. press called him ‘Bandar Bush’). In this meeting the media actions were coordinated with those of the Free ‘Syrian’ Army, in which prince Bandar’s mercenaries play a decisive role.

This plan was, of course,  eerily familiar to the false broadcast of the Green Square in Tripoli, Libya which turned out to be faked film footage created on a film set in Qatar.

At the end of the day, the CBS report regarding American funding of anti-Syrian propaganda television networks only confirms the fact that the trail of documentation and the manner in which the overarching agenda of world hegemony on the behalf of corporate-financier interests has continued apace regardless of party and seamlessly through Republican and Democrat administrations serves to prove that changing parties and personalities do nothing to stop the onslaught of imperialism, war, and destruction being waged across the world today and in earnest ever since 2001. Indeed, such changes only make adjustments to the appearance and presentation of a much larger Communo-Fascist system that is entrenching itself by the day, particularly in the Western world.

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Brandon Turbeville writes for Activist Post – article archive here – He is the author of seven books, Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom, 7 Real Conspiracies, Five Sense Solutions and Dispatches From a Dissident, volume 1 and volume 2, The Road to Damascus: The Anglo-American Assault on Syria, The Difference it Makes: 36 Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President, and Resisting The Empire: The Plan To Destroy Syria And How The Future Of The World Depends On The Outcome. Turbeville has published over 1000 articles on a wide variety of subjects including health, economics, government corruption, and civil liberties. Brandon Turbeville’s radio show Truth on The Tracks can be found every Monday night 9 pm EST at UCYTV. His website is BrandonTurbeville.com He is available for radio and TV interviews. Please contact activistpost (at) gmail.com. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. 

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The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) will continue striking targets in Syria as previously despite the IL-20 incident and a Russian decision to supply S-300 systems to the Syrian military, the Israeli top leadership declared on September 26 following a special security cabinet meeting.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that the IDF is successfully working to prevent “Iran’s military buildup in Syria as well as its attempts to deliver lethal weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon”. Additionally, the prime minister once again blamed Syria for the IL-20 shootdown ignoring the Russian statements that it was a result of Israel’s “hostile actions”.

According to the Russian media, the Russian Armed Forces have started strengthening EW capabilities of its military group in Syria deploying additional EW systems. There are no details on type and number of the deployed systems. However, sources speculate that these are Krasukha-4 multifunctional jamming stations and R-330ZH Zhitel jamming cellular satellite communication stations.

Kommersant newspaper also reported that the Syrian Air Defense Forces will receive at least two regimental sets of the S-300 air defense system. The newspaper’s source speculated that this is only a first phase of the supplies and the number may grow to 4 or even 6-8 S-300 regimental sets.

According to the report, supplied systems will protect the Syrian coastal area as well as the country’s borders with Israel, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq.

The situation in the province of Idlib has remained relatively calm since the announcement of the demilitarization zone agreement. The main developments will likely take place closer to October 15, when the zone is set to be established de-facto.

The US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) continued their advance on ISIS near Hajin in the Euphrates Valley. The SDF reportedly captured Shajlah and advanced on ISIS positions in Safafinah.

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An oil price spike is starting to look increasingly possible, with a rerun of 2008 not entirely out of the question, according to a new report.

The outages from Iran are worse than most analysts expected, and bottlenecks in the U.S. shale patch could prevent non-OPEC supply from plugging the gap. To top it off, new regulations from the International Maritime Organization set to take effect in 2020 could significantly tighten supplies.

Put it all together, and “the likelihood of an oil spike and crash scenario akin to the one observed in 2008 has increased,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch wrote in a note. BofAML has a price target for Brent at $95 per barrel by the end of the second quarter 2019. In 2008, Brent spiked to nearly $150 per barrel.

The supply picture is looking increasingly worrying, with Venezuela and Iran the two principal factors driving up oil prices in the fourth quarter. Notably, the bank increased its estimate of supply losses from Iran 1 million barrels per day (mb/d), up from 500,000 bpd previously.

U.S. shale can partially make up the difference, but the explosive growth from shale drillers is starting to slowdown, in part because of pipeline bottlenecks. BofAML sees U.S. supply growth of 1.4 mb/d in 2018 but only 1 mb/d of growth in 2019.

That means that there isn’t the same upward pressure on WTI as there is on Brent, largely because infrastructure bottlenecks in the shale patch keep supplies somewhat stuck within the United States. And it isn’t just in West Texas where the constraints are causing problems. “[B]ottlenecks in the Permian basin could well extend to other areas such as the Bakken or the Niobrara, and we do not even rule out temporary export capacity constraints in the Gulf Coast as domestic output overwhelms logistics,” BofAML said in a note.

Meanwhile, the demand side of the equation is not as clear. For now, demand still looks strong. The IEA puts demand growth for 2018 at 1.4 mb/d, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch agrees. But BofAML says three important demand-side factors to watch, which could undermine the high price scenario.

First, the dollar is strong, which would likely prevent a run up in prices in the same way as in 2008. Second, higher debt levels in emerging markets means that many countries are in a weaker spot than they were in 2008. Third, capital could continue to flee emerging markets because of rising interest rates from the Federal Reserve, U.S. corporate tax cuts and U.S. tariffs.

Why the focus on emerging markets? Beyond the possibility of contagion, emerging markets represent the bulk of oil demand growth, so any faltering would upset the global demand picture. The strong dollar, higher debt and capital flight means that “significant [emerging market] oil demand destruction could follow if Brent crude oil spikes above $120/bbl,” Bank of America Merrill Lynch said.

Nevertheless, there are some ingredients in place that could lead to dramatic price spikes, even if the corresponding demand destruction makes the spike only temporary. BofAML puts total global supply outages at around 3 mb/d, only a bit lower than the recent peak of about 3.75 mb/d in 2014. And that doesn’t take into account the unfolding losses from Iran. In other words, if Iran loses around 1 mb/d of supply due to U.S. sanctions, as looks increasingly likely, total global supply outages could balloon to their highest in about two decades, not seen since the roughly 5 mb/d of outages during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War.

Finally, the 2020 IMO regulations will force marine fuels to lower sulfur content from 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent. This will lead to a sharp increase in demand for diesel and other low sulfur fuels as the deadline for implementation approaches. “[T]he transition to a lower sulfur fuel specification will not likely be smooth,” BofAML notes.

At a minimum, it appears that bearish sentiment from within the oil and gas industry has evaporated. Bloomberg notes that on the earnings calls of 22 major energy companies for the third quarter, not once was the phrase “lower for longer” mentioned, the first time since 2015 that was true. It wasn’t too long ago that blistering U.S. shale growth was thought to have permanently lowered the marginal price of production, which would lead to a period of lower oil prices for the foreseeable future.

That mantra seems to have been fleeting as a growing number of analysts see higher prices ahead with concerns about the possibility of triple-digits.

“The market does not have the supply response for a potential disappearance of 2 million barrels a day in the fourth quarter,” Mercuria Energy Group Ltd. co-founder Daniel Jaeggi said in a speech at the S&P Global Platts Asia Pacific Petroleum Conference, according to Bloomberg. “In my view, that makes it conceivable to see a price spike north of $100 a barrel.” Meanwhile, the co-head of oil trading at Trafigura, another top oil trader, said that $100 oil was possible by the end of the year.

One of the key factors that will determine whether this happens or not is how Saudi Arabia responds.

“Our plan is to meet demand,” said Saudi Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih. “The reason Saudi Arabia didn’t increase more is because all of our customers are receiving all of the barrels they want.” His comments came after the OPEC+, which ended with no plans to increase output.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Saudi Aramco has told its customers that might be running short on Arab light crude in October, and that in the long run, it won’t be able to meet demand if Iran is knocked offline.

“[W]e are heading to a price spike, likely $90 to $100” an oil trader told the WSJ. “It’s not just Iran that will suffer. It’s going to have a boomerang effect with rising gasoline prices” in the U.S.

Worse, Saudi Arabia has officially said that it could cover for Iran’s losses, even if most of Iran’s production goes offline. In the past, Saudi officials have suggested that they could produce up to 12.0-12.5 mb/d if it the market needed it. But Saudi sources told the WSJ that producing “11 million is already a stretch, even for just a few months.” With output already up to about 10.4 mb/d, that leaves a significantly smaller pile of spare capacity than is commonly thought.

“It’s tearing higher,” said Ole Hansen, head of commodities strategy at Saxo Bank A/S, according to Bloomberg. “Technicals and fundamentals seem to be pointing in the right direction at the moment and that can be quite a potent cocktail.”

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“It is rare to find a normal child, even among kindergarteners. Both at home and at school; words like surrender, warplane, shoot, enemy, kill, and Kalashnikov are often heard as children play together.” — Yemeni social worker Asma Juhaff.

September is the month when students around the world head back to school and, despite enduring years of brutal war, Yemen’s children are no exception. In the Khulah School in the northern city of Sadaa, fifth-grader Saleem Ahmed Mutaher sits on the floor with about 70 other students, his mind distracted by the pain of sitting on a hard, dusty floor as well as the strong winds that enter from the classroom’s broken windows.

Ahmed Mutaher is one of millions of students in Yemen relegated to attending class inside of schools destroyed or damaged by years of incessant bombing. Once modest, yet bustling with activity and stocked with just enough to get by, Yemen’s schools have been transformed into terrifying places. Like other sectors in the country, Yemen’s system of education is deteriorating thanks to the ongoing U.S.-backed coalition’s war on the country, a conflict that shows no sign of abating.

Yemen’s Ministry of Education, based in Sanaa, estimates that the Saudi-led coalition has destroyed at least 3,000 schools and partially damaged 1,300 others. In the province of Taiz alone 371 schools have been destroyed or damaged, and in Sadaa 252 schools have suffered damage or have been destroyed as a result of the war.

A further 802 schools have been directly affected by the war, most converted into makeshift shelters to house refugees fleeing from the conflict. The report also states that 680 schools have been closed since the war began. Yemen once boasted 9,517 primary schools and 2,811 high schools. Today, the inability to pay teachers and staff combined with the systematic destruction of Yemen’s civilian infrastructure may lead to the shutdown of the country’s remaining schools.

According to the United Nations:

More than 2,500 schools are out of use; 66 percent of them damaged by airstrikes and ground fighting, 27 percent of them closed, and 7 percent used by armed groups or as shelters by displaced populations.”

Schools that have managed to remain open are at risk of being targeted by coalition bombs, caught amidst armed clashes, or closed due to the fear of disease that is now rampant in Yemen. The UN estimates that “at least 2.9 million Yemeni children have been forced out of school since the start of the war on March 26, 2015.”

Education in Yemen was not in the best of health before the war the began. A lack of equipment, unqualified teachers, and a shortage of textbooks plagued the country’s schools. Now, the ongoing Saudi-led war against Yemen has significantly accelerated the deterioration of an already struggling education system.

Bombs outside the classroom window

Like many children, Saleem Ahmed Mutaher sometimes gets distracted while sitting in class. But while most children are occupied by thoughts of their peers or after-school plans, Ahmed Mutaher’s mind is filled with the pressing fear of an incoming airstrike. While some schools have remained open, they operate under the constant threat of becoming one of the routine targets of coalition airstrikes, exacting a heavy emotional toll on students and staff alike.

On August 13, 2016, students at an elementary school in northern Sadaa were targeted by two consecutive airstrikes while they were busy taking a test. Over 20 students were killed or injured in the attack. As Amnesty International has reported several times, Saudi coalition forces have routinely carried out airstrikes on schools while they were in session, disrupting or shutting down education for thousands of Yemen’s children.

Moreover, simply traveling to school has become an activity fraught with danger, as even school buses have not been immune to the torrent of coalition airstrikes. Last month the coalition targeted a school bus full of children aged six to 11 who were on a field trip in Dhahian city in northern Yemen. Forty children and 11 adults were killed in the attack. Fearing for their children’s safety, many parents have simply opted to keep their children at home this year.

Turning dedicated teachers into desperate mercenaries

For two years, Yemen’s teachers have not received a paycheck — perhaps a minor issue to those funneling American taxpayer dollars into replenishing Saudi Arabia’s ever-expanding arsenal. The shortage of educators has led 4.5 million children to miss out on an education, as teachers are unable to eke out a living due to the ongoing war against a country with a 70 percent rate of illiteracy.

Many teachers have been displaced or are simply unable to reach their schools; and when they can, tight budgets and a dangerous environment often result in reduced teaching hours, severely undermining the quality of education.

As teacher Lutf al-Mutawakkil noted:

This job is the sole source of income for us. It would not be fair to work unpaid for numerous months while our families have no food.”

According to Yemeni Teachers Syndicate, there are some 166,000 school teachers in Yemen, many of them the sole breadwinners for their families.

Last month UNICEF reported that in Yemen, mainly in the northern provinces, 2 million children are not in school and close to 4 million others are at risk of losing access to education because about 67 percent of public school teachers across the country have not been paid for nearly two years.

Two years ago, when the war was in its infancy, state employees — including teachers — had their salaries frozen after Yemen’s Central Bank was moved to Aden, which was under the control of the Saudi coalition-backed government.  At the time, al-Mutawakkil, like other teachers, was hopeful that the cessation of salaries was temporary and that coalition-backed forces in Aden would soon resume issuing paychecks to teachers and other state workers. But as time went by and teachers did their best to provide what education they could with no funding and no pay, hope began to fade. As al-Mutawakkil recounts, “before the war, I did not think that one day I would be forced to stay home with no salary.”

Before the war began, al-Mutawakkil taught at Thula City’s al-Fateh school, 50 km south of Sana’a. A graduate ot Sana’a University, the 49-year-old has been teaching for 16 years, leaving him short on both the skills and options needed to find other avenues of employment.

Like al-Mutawakkil, many teachers will not be found in their classrooms this year as they look elsewhere for a means to feed themselves and their families. Many, also like al-Mutawakkil, will resort to taking up arms and heading to the battlefield in hopes of receiving a salary from any side that is willing to pay it.

Battle, terrorist cells, and early marriage come calling

Teachers are not the only ones whose desperation has driven them to the battlefield. As fifth-grader Ahmed Mutaher told MintPress News:

When you have a school destroyed and teachers refuse to teach you, then it becomes necessary to join the battlefield or to work.”

Ahmed Mutaher, like many school-aged children in Yemen, will likely forgo trying to get an education this year and instead either head to the front lines or seek a living elsewhere in the labor market.

Child labor in Yemen is a deeply rooted issue which was a problem well before the onset of war. In a 2013 study, the ILO, the Social Development Fund, and UNICEF reported that more than 1.3 million children were involved in child labor in Yemen.

Even more alarming is the fact that al-Qaeda and ISIS have taken full advantage of the desperation to lure students who left school to join their ranks. With the rise of poverty, their unfettered access to social media, and a pool of young men with few other options, recruiting into extremist groups has become easier than ever in Yemen.

Last week, the United Nations reiterated the importance of education, warning that children who cannot go to school in a country like Yemen face a bleak future and are early targets for military recruiters. At least 2,635 boys have been recruited and are being used by armed groups across Yemen.

The lack of access to education has also pushed desperate families to dangerous alternatives, including early marriage. A 2016 survey in six governorates revealed that close to three-quarters of women were married before the age of 18 and 44.5 percent before the age of 15. Children without access to education often become illiterate and never develop the skills needed to raise successful children, transmitting poverty to the next generation.

As 16-year-old Samiah al Matri told MintPress:

Unlike my older sisters, who dropped out of school to get married, I have received a lot of support from my father, but that was before the war. Now, my father has the idea of marriage again.

Samiah’s father is a government official who — like many parents — has not received a salary and is unable to afford a private education.

Enduring psychological trauma

For those fortunate enough to escape death, injury or forced conscription, the haunting specter of psychological trauma still awaits.

Ebrahim AbdulKareem recounted to MintPress the toll the war has taken on his son, fourth-grader AbdulKareem.

Every night since last year, AbdulKareem wakes up in the middle of the night crying and calling out in fear as the sounds of airplanes and explosions engulf the capital and our home every night. The psychological effects of war on our son are severe.”

AbdulKareem survived an airstrike that targeted his family’s home in 2015. He lives with his family in the al-Rwadhah zone near the city’s international airport, an area that has come under severe and continuous bombardment since the war began.

As UNICEF said last month, “more than 70,000 children are receiving psychosocial support. More than 131 schools have been rehabilitated; others are currently being rehabilitated.” But, ultimately, many of Yemen’s children will carry the emotional burden of this war for the rest of their lives.

Asma Juhaff, a social worker who works with children, told MintPress:

It is rare to find a normal child, even among kindergarteners. Both at home and at school; words like surrender, warplane, shoot, enemy, kill, and Kalashnikov are often heard as children play together.”

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Ahmed AbdulKareem is a Yemeni journalist. He covers the war in Yemen for MintPress News as well as local Yemeni media.

Featured image is from Felton Davis | CC BY 2.0.

U.S. President Donald Trump praised right-wing and authoritarian governments around the world including Saudi Arabia, Israel, the right-wing Modi government of India, while promoting his economic war of sanctions against Venezuela and Iran, and bragging about his administration’s push for more military spending, furthering neo-liberal policies, trade war with China, crackdown on immigration, as well as rejecting the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court.

“We have passed the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history. We have started the construction of a major border wall, and we have greatly strengthened border security. We have secured record funding for the military — $700 billion this year, and $716 billion next year. Our military will soon be more powerful than it has ever been before,” Trump said.

His comments on more military spending, at the very organization that was founded to promote peace in the world after World War Two, came before he bragged about cutting funds to countries and organizations that do not align with his government’s policies. In recent months, Washington cut funds to several U.N. organizations including those helping Palestinian refugees and proposing human and women’s rights.

Trump also attacked the International Criminal Court, in which a lawsuit is being processed against U.S. crimes in Afghanistan and said that the court did not have “legitimacy, jurisdiction or authority” over the world, and that “we will never surrender America’s sovereignty to an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.”

Trump also used his speech to attack the leaders of the Iranian government, just days after a terrorist attack took place in the capital.

“Iran’s leaders sow chaos, death and destruction,” Trump told the annual gathering. “They do not respect their neighbors or borders or the sovereign rights of nations,” while praising Saudi Arabia and Israel despite their proven pro-war policies in Syria and Yemen, and Palestine.

Trump called for international trade reforms and insisted that his main objective as president is to protect American sovereignty. He called on OPEC to stop raising oil prices and criticized China’s trade practices.

Trump also prompted murmurs from the crowd of world leaders and diplomats when he declared that he had accomplished more as president than almost any other administration in history. “I didn’t expect that reaction, but that’s okay,” he said.

Trump praised North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday for his courage in taking some steps to disarm, but said much work needed to be done and sanctions must remain in place on North Korea until it denuclearizes.

“The missiles and rockets are no longer flying in every direction, nuclear testing has stopped, some military facilities are already being dismantled,” Trump said in his speech to the annual United Nations General Assembly.

“I would like to thank Chairman Kim for his courage and for the steps he has taken, though much work remains to be done,” Trump said. “The sanctions will stay in place until denuclearization occurs.”

Trump’s remarks on North Korea were dramatically different to those in his speech last year at the U.N. assembly, when he threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea and mocked the North Korean leader as a “Rocket Man” on a “suicide mission.”

António Guterres opens the UN General Assembly with an appeal against war, inequality and racism. pic.twitter.com/hWMdmKOiui

— teleSUR English (@telesurenglish) September 25, 2018

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Video: Syrian Military to Get S-300 Systems, Other Assistance From Russia

By South Front, September 25, 2018

Russia has announced a batch of measures, which will be employed in response to the shootdown of the IL-20 military plane as a result of hostile actions by Israeli F-16 off the Syrian coast.

Breaking: Russia Establishes No-fly Zone Over Latakia Province – Diplomat

By Leith Aboufadel, September 25, 2018

The Russian military has established a no-fly zone over the Latakia province of western Syria, Russian Senator and former Air Force commander Viktor Bondarev stated on Monday.

US and Israel Warn Russia Against Supplying Syria with S-300 Air Defense Systems

By Stephen Lendman, September 25, 2018

Installing electronic countermeasures along Syria’s coastline to jam satellite navigation, aerial radar systems, and communications of hostile aircraft will significantly bolster Syrian defenses as well.

Bolton Warns Russian S-300 Missile Sale to Syria Would be “Significant Escalation”

By Zero Hedge, September 25, 2018

U.S. National Security Adviser John Bolton said on Monday that the Russian plans to supply Syria with a S-300 missile system would be a “significant escalation” by Moscow and hopes it will reconsider.

Before Pointing its Finger at Russia and Syria, the U.S. Should Answer for Its Own Chemical and Biological Weapons Record

By Brian Kalman, September 24, 2018

It is important to note that nowhere in this law is there a legal commitment made by the United States itself, to eliminate its own chemical and biological weapons capabilities.

A Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysis released today highlights the significant health risks posed to military families and communities by a class of synthetic chemicals found in firefighting foam, nonstick cookware and other products.

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are long-lasting compounds known to accumulate in the human body and environment, including water supplies. Exposure to these chemicals is associated with a range of detrimental health effects including kidney and testicular cancer, liver damage, and decreased immunological response.

Military installations and adjacent communities are especially at risk because the sites use PFAS-containing firefighting foam in their trainings and operations. These chemicals have seeped into the ground and waterways near military sites, and in turn contaminated groundwater and the drinking water that serves the bases and nearby homes.

In light of a new scientific assessment by the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), an office within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, UCS found that the threats facing military families and nearby communities is worse than previously thought. The ATSDR draft report suggests that the safe level of PFAS in drinking water should be seven to 10 times lower than the current, non-enforceable federal guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This means that thousands of families living on or near current or former military installations face potential risks from levels of PFAS once deemed safe, and some might not even know it.

“The EPA is not doing nearly enough to protect families, especially military families, from PFAS contamination of their water,” said Genna Reed, the UCS analyst who reviewed the evidence of PFAS contamination. “These chemicals can have serious health consequences, but their manufacturers have downplayed the risks for decades, putting profits ahead of public health.”

“This report reaffirms what concerned Granite Staters already know – urgent federal action is needed to address PFAS contamination at military bases and communities across the country,” said Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. “I’m glad to be participating in the first-ever Senate hearing on PFAS this week, but we have far more work to do to protect Granite Staters and Americans from contamination in their drinking water. I’ll keep working across party lines to ensure that all of our people have the quality and safe drinking water they need to thrive.”

The draft ATSDR report is the same one that political appointees within the Trump Administration attempted to suppress. In documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by UCS, one White House official called the ATSDR draft a potential “public relations nightmare.” It was only after a robust public outcry and bipartisan congressional oversight that the assessment was finally released.

“Families like mine who lived on or near military bases deserve reliable information about the risks they face,” said Charise Johnson, a research analyst at UCS. “The Trump administration owes it to them to tell the truth and help reduce the risks. It’s no wonder that a White House official referred to the report as a potential ‘public relations nightmare.’”

The UCS analysis, which mapped 131 military sites across 37 states at which PFAS levels have been detected in drinking water and groundwater, found:

• Of the 32 sites with direct drinking water contamination, more than half had PFAS concentrations that were at least 10 times higher than the risk level established by the ATSDR.
• More than 90 percent of the military sites, 118, had PFAS concentrations at least 10 times higher than the threshold identified by the ATSDR report.
• Nearly two-thirds of the sites, 87, had PFAS concentrations at least 100 times higher than the risk level identified in the ATSDR report.
• The ten sites with the highest detected PFAS levels in groundwater include bases in California, Florida, Delaware, Virginia and Texas, as well as former base sites in Louisiana, South Carolina and Illinois. These sites have PFAS levels in groundwater more than 100,000 times higher than the suggested threshold.
• The number of military sites with PFAS contamination is likely even higher since the Pentagon used the EPA’s drinking water health advisory of 70 ppt as the PFAS detection level and only tested for the two most common compounds.

“We need immediate action to reduce the risk to military families from PFAS contamination,” Reed said. “The federal government must limit the future use of PFAS chemicals, set an enforceable standard for PFAS contamination in drinking water, mandate reporting of PFAS releases, and provide support to clean up contaminated sites. Servicemembers, their families and nearby communities deserve better.”

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There’s more bad news for glyphosate, the active ingredient of Roundup, with a recent study suggesting the widely used weed-killer might be contributing to the death of honey bees and native bees around the world.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Austin in the US say honey bees exposed to the organophosphorus compound, the active ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup, the world’s biggest selling weed-killer, lose some of the beneficial bacteria in their guts and are more susceptible to infection and death from harmful bacteria.

“We need better guidelines for glyphosate use, especially regarding bee exposure, because right now the guidelines assume bees are not harmed by the herbicide,” says research co-leader Erick Motta. “Our study shows that’s not true.”

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers exposed honey bees to glyphosate at levels known to occur in crop fields, yards and roadsides. Three days later they observed that the insects had significantly reduced gut microbiotas.

Of eight dominant species of healthy bacteria in the exposed bees, four were found to be less abundant. The hardest hit species, Snodgrassella alvi, is a critical microbe that helps bees process food and defend against pathogens.

Native bumble bees have microbiomes similar to those of honey bees, and the researchers say it’s likely that they would be affected in the same way.

“It’s not the only thing causing all these bee deaths, but it is definitely something people should worry about because glyphosate is used everywhere,” says Motta.

The compound is increasingly controversial and newsworthy around the world, with calls for it to be banned – primarily because of alleged links to cancer – alongside pleas not to do so by those determined to keep using their current approach to weed control.

There is particular interest in the possible flow on from recent US court decisions to award a former school groundsman $289 million after finding that Roundup was a substantial contributor to his non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The court also refused to hear further arguments from Monsanto in relation to a determination that glyphosate is a carcinogen.

However, just this month a Brazilian court lifted a ban on glyphosate and the French National Assembly rejected onefor the second time.

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Nick Carne is a science journalist based in Adelaide.

Featured image is from Greenpeace.

The announcement that Time magazine would be bought by software CEO Marc Benioff highlighted the growing trend of billionaires buying up media outlets. While media moguls have always been wealthy—with press barons (Rupert Murdoch, Michael Bloomberg, Donald Newhouse, etc.) still well-represented on Forbes’ running list of the world’s billionaires—what distinguishes this new breed of press magnate is that they bought their media properties with fortunes made in other industries.

Some, like Benioff, come out of the tech industry; tech tycoons like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, eBay’s Pierre Omidyar and Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs have profited from a tech boom (or bubble) that gives them plenty of cash to spend. Others come out of the financial sector, which has doubled its share of the US economy over the past 70 years. Real estate developer Mort Zuckerman—who owned The Atlantic from 1980–1999, the Daily News from 1993–2017, and still owns US News & World Report, which he bought in 1984—was a harbinger of non-media money coming into the media sector.

Wherever their money comes from, the new moguls’ interest in buying up outlets is generally less the direct profit involved—media profits are typically declining as the old local monopoly model erodes—and more the power that comes with control of the public conversation. Being a latter-day Citizen Kane is a personal ego boost, to be sure, and provides a platform for an individual ideology—whether it’s Philip Anschutz’s social conservatism or Omidyar’s civil libertarianism.

But it also can be a tool to advance more personal interests: Sheldon Adelson is a fervent supporter of Israel and its Likud Party, but he bought a Las Vegas paper when it was running critical coverage of a lawsuit that threatened to shut him out of the gambling business. Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Postinstantly made him the most powerful media figure in the nation’s capital—a handy position to be in when your company is seeking multi-billion-dollar government contracts.

Whatever the motivation, billionaires buying up media is another step toward oligarchy, as a handful of super-wealthy individuals assume power over crucial news outlets, both locally and nationally.

Research: John McCullough

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Featured image is from  James Duncan Davidson.

The Tory press is apoplectic in their fear of public utilities and the railways being taken back into state ownership and the consequent loss of huge dividend payments to already wealthy investors.

Labour’s shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, in his speech at the Labour Party conference in Liverpool detailed plans to renationalise the water companies and sack their current executives before re-advertising their jobs with dramatically reduced salaries.

Sources within the Labour Party confirmed that such action would apply to all utility sectors taken back into public ownership and that the huge dividends currently paid out to private and other shareholders would instead be reinvested in the companies themselves.

There is little doubt that the electorate as a whole is sickened by the profiteering of the water, power and electricity companies since privatisation that has seen utilities bills double and treble since being sold to the private sector in a move that has made billionaires out of the sale and resale of these national assets often to foreign investors.

Now that it seems more than likely that there will be a Labour government, the moneyed classes are already making plans to move their assets and themselves abroad. The United Kingdom government under Labour will in future work for the people as a whole and not merely to enrich the city bankers and hedge fund operators.

The Institute of Directors (IOD) and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) are incandescent with rage and impotent in their fury in the face of the anticipated reforming Labour government that will replace eight years of Tory rule.

Now Britain looks forward to a new technological age where railways are super efficient with up to date rolling stock and well maintained track, that enables trains to run on time and where utility bills reflect the true cost of provision and not of dividends to fat cat investors.

A country where British national assets are returned to public ownership and control and where Thatcherism is recalled as just another failed Conservative party policy that served to enrich its own supporters whilst impoverishing the rest of us.

Those days will soon be long gone.

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Hans Stehling (pen name) is an analyst based in the UK. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Last month, a U.S. Africa Command spokesperson confirmed in a Task & Purpose report that Marine Corps Raiders were involved in a fierce battle in 2017 in an unnamed North African country, where they fought beside partner forces against militants of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AFRICOM acknowledged that two Marines received citations for valor but withheld certain details, such as the location—undisclosed due to “classification considerations, force protection, and diplomatic sensitivities.”

The command also said the Marine Special Operations unit was engaged while on a three-day train, advise and assist operation. However, subsequent research and analysis strongly suggest U.S. involvement runs much deeper. In fact, the dramatic events described in the award citations obtained by Task & Purpose align with those that took place in Tunisia, which has been combatting a low-level insurgency in its western borderlands for the past seven years. Evidence indicates the battle occurred at Mount Semmama, a mountain range in the Kasserine governorate, near the Algerian border. There, the United States sustained its first casualty in action in Tunisia since World War II.

While not of the same magnitude, the events that AFRICOM confirmed took place on Feb. 28, 2017, echo a disastrous ambush less than seven months later in the village of Tongo Tongo, Niger. In that battle, members of the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara killed four Army Special Forces soldiers and four Nigerien partners. U.S. partner forces engaged militants of AQIM’s Tunisian branch, the Uqba ibn Nafaa Battalion (KUBN) in a firefight, which resulted in the killing of one militant. The engagement also necessitated a request for air support to rout the militants. The jihadis then attempted to flank the joint U.S.-Tunisian force from the rear, forcing the Marines to return fire.

While engaged on the ground, U.S. forces were also part of the air-support component. When a Tunisian soldier manning an M60 machine gun aboard a helicopter sustained wounds after being shot twice by militants returning accurate fire, a U.S. Marine Raider took control of the machine gun to maintain suppressive fire against the militants and simultaneously treated the wounded Tunisian soldier. The Marine Raider unit and their Tunisian partner force each sustained one casualty in the battle, both of whom recovered from their wounds. At the time, local media reported the incident without alluding to any U.S. participation.

Eventually, Tunisian forces secured the site of the battle and seized an Austrian Steyr AUG rifle, ammunition, and other supplies. Two jihadis were killed in action: a Tunisian and an Algerian. The latter was a veteran insurgent who was wounded a decade earlier by a U.S. airstrike while fighting under the banner of Al Qaeda in Iraq, according to a biographical note published by Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate. However, any U.S. involvement in connection to his death was never mentioned.

The United States has maintained a military presence in Tunisia for at least four-and-a-half years, rendering it unlikely that the events of Mount Semmama were an isolated incident limited to a mere advisory role, as the AFRICOM spokesperson claimed. The battle involving U.S. troops occurred amid an intense campaign aimed at dislodging militants from their mountain stronghold. Eleven days before the jointly conducted U.S.-Tunisia operation, another operation had taken place at a nearby location at Mount Semmama, also resulting in the killing of two militants. It is presently unknown whether U.S. troops participated in the preceding operation. It remains an open question as to whether the knowledge of the U.S. encounter in Kasserine would have eventually surfaced had Task & Purpose not filed a Freedom of Information Act request. It was that request which prompted AFRICOM’s release of the partially redacted commendations for valor awarded to two Marine Raiders for their actions at Mount Semmama.

Since its 2010 revolution, Tunisia has carried a burden of expectations as a regional model for democracy, challenged with building political consensus, a staggering economy, a population yearning for progress, and rising security challenges . In this context, the United States has sought to sustain Tunisia’s shaky democratic transition primarily by shoring up its military, which received steadily increasing security assistance from 2014 to 2017. Tunisia now receives more U.S. defense aid than any other country in North Africa and the Sahel region, except for Egypt.

The U.S. military presence has been continuous since February 2014 , when the Pentagon deployed a team of several dozen special operations troops to a remote base in western Tunisia. Tunisian soldiers accompanied by U.S. military advisors have on at least one occasion discovered and observed a populated militant camp in Kasserine. In the years since, the Air Force component of AFRICOM has frequently flown intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions across Tunisia from bases in Sigonella and Pantelleria, Italy. In the wake of the March 2015 terrorist attack at the Bardo Museum in Tunis, U.S. forces provided operational assistance to a counterterrorism operation targeting core members of KUBN in the town of Sidi Aich, Gafsa. U.S. staff and drones have also operated out of the Sidi Ahmed Air Base in Bizerte.

The U.S.-Tunisia partnership in the military and security domain is multifaceted. It is composed of defense capacity-building, strengthening border security , and as is so often emphasized, training partner forces in counterterrorism strategies and tactics. However, the questions of U.S. troops and drones operated out of Tunisia have been a source of polemic and its sensitivity should not be underestimated. American foreign policy is generally unpopular and unfavorable attitudes toward the United States are widespread in Tunisian society. For instance, in 2012 protesters outraged by an anti-Islamic short film ransacked the U.S. embassy and set fire to a nearby American school in the capital of Tunis. More recently, the U.S. decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital triggered a wave of protests across Tunisia.

The issue of U.S. military presence has also sparked controversy, being the subject of heated debates at the Assembly of the Representatives of the People, Tunisia’s parliament. On numerous occasions, there has been pressure on President Béji Caid Essebsi and Prime Minister Youssef Chahed on the matter of national sovereignty. Furthermore, the revelation of the clash in Kasserine eighteen months ago testifies to a deeper level U.S. involvement on the ground than AFRICOM is willing to admit. The details of the 2017 battle at Mount Semmama contribute to a slowly growing public understanding of the expansion of covert and overt military action on the African continent, where the United States is secretly at war .

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Héni Nsaibia is a researcher at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED). He is also the founder of Menastream, a risk consultancy providing intelligence analysis. Follow him on Twitter: @MENASTREAM .

Russia has announced a batch of measures, which will be employed in response to the shootdown of the IL-20 military plane as a result of hostile actions by Israeli F-16 off the Syrian coast.

According to a September 24 statement by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, Russia will provide an S-300 air defense system to the Syrian military within the next two weeks. The Russians will also equip all HQs of the Syrian Air Defense Forces (SADF) with automated process-control systems thus providing the SADF with better intelligence and targeting information and integrating it with the Russian military group deployed in the war torn country. Furthermore, the Russian EW system will suppress communications, radars and satellite navigation of combat aviation involved in any attacks on Syria from the eastern Mediterranean.

Local sources and international observers already noted an increase in the activity of transport aviation at Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base in Lattakia. Reports also appeared that at least 8 Su-30SM and Su-35 fighter jets had been deployed allegedly to carry out combat missions in Syrian airspace.

The Russian Defense Ministry also once again mocked the Israeli version of the IL-20 incident during a press conference held on September 24. The defense ministry released a data captured by the S-400 air defense system deployed at Khmeimim Air Base, which shows how an Israeli F-16 used the IL-20 plane as cover against Syrian air defense fire.

“Today’s data no longer suggests, but clearly proves that the blame for the tragedy with the Russian Il-20 aircraft lies entirely with the Israeli air force and with those who authorized this kind of activity,” military spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov stated during the press briefing.

Earlier, the Israeli military had claimed that its F-16 jets were in Israeli airspace when the IL-20 was accidentally shot down by a Syrian S-200 missile.

The decision to supply Syria with the S-300 system already triggered fire and fury in the US and Israeli media. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned Russian President Vladimir Putin asking him not to supply the system.

“The transfer of advanced weapons systems into irresponsible hands will increase the dangers in the region,” Netanyahu told Putin, according to Israeli media. The prime minister also claimed that “Israel will continue to defend its security and its interests.” On September 25, top Israeli leadership held a security cabinet meeting on the matter.

First reports about a possible decision to deliver S-300 systems to Syria appeared in in April 2018 following a missile  strike by the US-led  bloc on facilities of the Damascus government. Then, Israeli Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman threatened that Israeli forces would wipe out these systems if they were employed.

On September 24, US National Security Adviser John Bolton also commented on the S-300 delivery to Syria claiming that it’s a “significant escalation” and accusing Iran of the IL-20 incident.

“There shouldn’t be any misunderstanding here … The party responsible for the attacks in Syria and Lebanon and really the party responsible for the shooting down of the Russian plane is Iran,” Bolton told media.

It’s interesting to note how in an attempt to avoid consequences the US-Israeli bloc blames everybody, including Iran, for the incident, which happened during an Israeli aggression against Syria and as a result of the hostile approach employed by the Israeli military toward a Russian air group.

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Federal safeguards for greater Yellowstone ecosystem grizzly bears were reinstated today after a judge ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to strip Endangered Species Act protections from the population was illegal.

The decision spares the grizzlies from a planned trophy hunt scheduled to begin this fall in Wyoming and Idaho. Earthjustice, representing the Northern Cheyenne tribe, Sierra Club, Center for Biological Diversity and National Park Conservation Association, argued for restoring protections to Yellowstone grizzly bears.

“The grizzly is a big part of why the Yellowstone region remains among our nation’s last great wild places,” said Earthjustice attorney Tim Preso, who argued the case. “This is a victory for the bears and for people from all walks of life who come to this region to see the grizzly in its natural place in the world.”

“The Northern Cheyenne Nation views the grizzly bear as a relative entitled to our respect and protection from harm,” said Lawrence Killsback, president of the Northern Cheyenne Nation. “We have a responsibility to speak for the bears, who cannot speak for themselves. Today we celebrate this victory and will continue to advocate on behalf of the Yellowstone grizzly bears until the population is recovered, including within the Tribe’s ancestral homeland in Montana and other states.”

“We’re glad the court sided with science instead of states bent on reducing the Yellowstone grizzly population and subjecting these beloved bears to a trophy hunt,” said Bonnie Rice, senior representative for Sierra Club’s Our Wild America Campaign. “Changing food sources, isolation, inadequate state management plans and other threats that grizzly bears continue to face warrant strong protections until they reach full recovery.”

“People around the world will applaud the decision to again protect Yellowstone’s beloved grizzly bears under the Endangered Species Act,” said Andrea Santarsiere, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “Facing ongoing threats and occupying a fraction of their historic range, grizzly bears are nowhere near recovery. These beautiful and beleaguered animals certainly shouldn’t be shot for cheap thrills or a bearskin rug.”

“Grizzly bears that call Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks home will no longer be threatened by an aggressive hunt that was planned this fall on lands bordering the national parks, thanks to the court’s ruling,” said Bart Melton, Northern Rockies regional director for National Parks Conservation Association. “The Department of the Interior can now go back to the drawing board to hopefully consider what research, such as the long-term impacts of climate change on the population, must be considered to ensure a healthy long-term future for Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzlies.”

Background

In August 2017, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the Yellowstone-region grizzly bear population from the federal endangered and threatened species list, even though the area’s grizzly population has suffered high levels of human-caused deaths in recent years.

This fall, for the first time in more than 40 years, the states of Wyoming and Idaho announced grizzly hunts that would have allowed for up to 23 bears to be killed outside of Yellowstone National Park. Today’s court ruling blocked the hunts.

The Northern Cheyenne tribe and conservation groups challenged the Fish and Wildlife Service’s disregard of bear deaths following the bears’ recent shift to a more heavily meat-based diet following the loss of other foods.

The tribe and groups also faulted the Service for carving out and delisting the isolated Yellowstone grizzly population instead of focusing on a broader, more durable grizzly recovery in the West. They further challenged the Service’s decision to disallow public input on changes to its management framework for grizzlies, which weakened protections. The court had previously issued an extended a temporary restraining order to prevent the hunt from proceeding while the judge finalized his decision.

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On Tuesday, President Trump will make his second appearance at the annual opening of the United Nations General Assembly, where he will reportedly use the international spotlight to deliver a speech that centers on favoring U.S. “sovereignty” over our commitments to the global community.

The world has now witnessed the human costs of Trump’s self-defeating “America First” policies: the inhumanity of family separation, the ruined lives from repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and the suffering caused by slashing the numbers of refugees allowed to enter the U.S., to name just a few.

By pushing xenophobic policies that defy international law, the Trump administration is pitting the United States against the very system of multilateralism that our country worked so hard to create in the years after World War II. This system was designed to benefit the entire world — including the U.S. — by promoting peace, security, and human rights while deterring chaos and violence. That’s why undermining it is harmful to everyone, including Americans.

Here are five examples from the past year where the Trump administration has threatened or attempted to weaken multilateralism and international human rights bodies:

1. Threatening the staff of the International Criminal Court

Earlier this month, National Security Advisor John Bolton made outrageous threats against the International Criminal Court, which holds people accountable for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Bolton went so far as to threaten the court’s judges and prosecutors with U.S. criminal prosecution as well as a travel ban and financial sanctions. The White House has said that its threats are related to the potential of a full ICC investigation into U.S. involvement with war crimes in Afghanistan, such as torture.

2. Pulling out of the U.N. Human Rights Council

U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley announced in June that the U.S. was leaving the U.N. Human Rights Council. The United States is the first nation to ever withdraw from the council and one of only four nations in the world that does not participate in its proceedings. And last month, National Security Advisor John Bolton threatened to cut U.S. funding to the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which monitors rights violations around the world and supports the work of independent human rights experts. That includes the work of Professor Philip Alston, who was attacked by Ambassador Haley for daring to write a report on poverty in America.

3. Withdrawing from negotiations on the Global Compact for Migration

In December, the U.S. chose to leave negotiations for the Global Compact on Migration, an international agreement on managing safe, orderly, and regular migration around the globe. The final text of the Global Compact, which will formally be adopted in Morocco later this year, contains a commitment from 192 states to work to end child immigration detention. The Trump administration deemed these worthy objectives as incompatible to its immigration policies and an infringement on U.S. sovereignty.

4. Leaving UNESCO

The Trump administration declared its plan in October 2017 to withdraw from membership in the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization by January 2019 and move it to permanent observer status. While the Trump administration claims the decision was based on the U.N. body’s bias towards Israel, it is doubtful this was the only motivation to pull out, thereby harming critical global work deemed antithetical to Trump’s agenda. In addition to promoting democracy and freedom of the press, UNESCO advances literacy and science education, reports on the negative impacts of climate change, and runs projects on Holocaust awareness and anti-Semitism.

5. Defunding the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency

Last month, the Trump administration said that it would no longer provide aid to the U.N. Reliefs and Works Agency, which is the primary organization dedicated to supporting and advocating for displaced Palestinian refugees. The U.S. was the agency’s largest funder, giving it over $350 million annually. Now it’s left with a budget deficit of over $270 million.

We can plainly see Trump’s hostility towards the international community. But the public has a right to full transparency about how exactly these unprecedented and hugely damaging actions are coming about. To get some answers, the ACLU has filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the administration demanding records on these counterproductive decisions.

We previously filed FOIA requests about U.S. withdrawals from the U.N. Human Rights Council and UNESCO, as well as its moves to defund international human rights bodies and leave treaties.

Today we’re filing a new FOIA request demanding answers about the administration’s policy toward the International Criminal Court. Does the Justice Department actually believe that it can charge ICC judges with violating U.S. laws? Or were Bolton’s threats just baseless grandstanding in a craven attempt to evade consequences for U.S. torture in Afghanistan?

No one should stand by idly in the face of Trump’s assault on human rights and the international institutions in place to defend them.

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Maya Finoh is Legal Administrative Assistant, ACLU Human Rights Program.

Featured image is from The White House/Flickr.

The Metropolitan Police made one statement in the Skripal case which is plainly untrue; they claimed not to know on what kind of visa Boshirov and Petrov were travelling. As they knew the passports they used, and had footage of them coming through the airport, that is impossible. The Border Force could tell them in 30 seconds flat.

To get a UK visa Boshirov and Petrov would have had to attend the UK Visa Application Centre in Moscow. There not only would their photographs be taken, but their fingerprints would have been taken and, if in the last few years, their irises scanned. The Metropolitan Police would naturally have obtained their fingerprints from the Visa Application.

One thing of which we can be certain is that their fingerprints are not on the perfume bottle or packaging found in Charlie Rowley’s home. We can be certain of that because no charges have been brought against the two in relation to the death of Dawn Sturgess, and we know the police have their fingerprints. The fact of there being no credible evidence, according to either the Metropolitan Police or the Crown Prosecution Service, to link them to the Amesbury poisoning, has profound implications.

Why the Metropolitan Police were so coy about telling us what kind of visa the pair held, points to a wider mystery. Why were they given the visas in the first place, and what story did they tell to get them? It is not easy for a Russian citizen, particularly an economically active male, to get past the UK Border Agency. The visa application process is very intrusive. They have to produce evidence of family and professional circumstances, including employment and address, evidence of funds, including at least three months of bank statements, and evidence of the purpose of the visit. These details are then actively checked out by the Visa Department.

If they had told the story to the visa section they told to Russia Today, that they were freelance traders in fitness products wanting to visit Salisbury Cathedral, they would have been refused a visa as being candidates for overstaying. They would have been judged not to have sufficiently stable employment in Russia to ensure they would return. So what story did Petrov and Boshirov give on their visa application, why were they given a visa, and what kind of visa? And why do the British authorities not want us to know the answer to these questions?

Which brings us to the claims of neo-conservative propaganda website Bellingcat. They claim together with the Russian Insider website to have obtained documentary evidence that Petrov and Boshirov’s passports were of a series issued only to Russian spies, and that their applications listed GRU headquarters as their address.

There are some problems with Bellingcat’s analysis. The first is that they also quote Russian website fontanka.ru as a source, but fontanka.ru actually say the precise opposite of what Bellingcat claim – that the passport number series is indeed a civilian one and civilians do have passports in that series.

Fontanka also state it is not unusual for the two to have close passport numbers – it merely means they applied together. On other points, fontanka.ru do confirm Bellingcat’s account of another suspected GRU officer having serial numbers close to those of Boshirov and Petrov.

But there is a bigger question of the authenticity of the documents themselves. Fontanka.ru is a blind alley – they are not the source of the documents, just commenting on them, and Bellingcat are just attempting the old trick of setting up a circular “confirmation”. Russian Insider is neither Russian nor an Insider. Its name is a false claim and it consists of a combination of western “experts” writing on Russia, and reprints from the Russian media. It has no track record of inside access to Russian government secrets or documents, and nor does Bellingcat.

What Bellingcat does have is a track record of shilling for the security services. Bellingcat claims its purpose is to clear up fake news, yet has been entirely opaque about the real source of its so-called documents.

MI6 have almost 40 officers in Russia, running hundreds of agents. The CIA has a multiple of that. They pool their information. Both the UK and US have large visa sections whose major function is the analysis of Russian passports, their types and numbers and what they tell about the individual.

We are to believe that Boshirov and Petrov were GRU agents whose identity was plainly obvious from their passports, who had no believable cover identities, but that neither the visa department nor MI6 (which two cooperate closely and all the time) knew they were giving visas to GRU agents. Yet this information was readily available to Bellingcat?

I do not know if the two are agents or just tourists. But the claimed evidence they were agents is, if genuine, so obvious that the two would have been under close surveillance throughout their stay in the UK. If the official story is true, then the failures of the UK visa department and MI6 are abject and shameful. As is the failure to take simple precautions for the Skripals’ security, like the inexplicable absence of CCTV covering the house of Sergei Skripal, an important ex-agent and defector supposedly under British protection.

A further thought. We are informed that Boshirov and Petrov left a trace of novichok in their hotel bedroom. How likely is it, really, that, the day before the professional assassination attempt, which involved handling an agent with which any contact could kill you, Boshirov and Petrov would prepare, not by resting, but by an all night drugs and sex session? Would you really not want the steadiest possible hand the next day? Would you really invite a prostitute into the room with the novichok perfume in it, and behave in a way that led to complaints and could have brought you to official notice?

Is it not astonishing that nobody in the corporate and state media has written that this behaviour is at all unlikely, while scores of “journalists” have written that visiting Salisbury as a tourist, and returning the next day because the visit was ruined by snow, would be highly unlikely?

To me, even more conclusively, we were informed by cold war propagandists like ex White House staffer Dan Kaszeta that the reason the Skripals were not killed is that novichok is degraded by water. To quote Kaszeta “Soap and water is quite good at decontaminating nerve agents”.

In which case it is extremely improbable that the agents handling the novichok, who allegedly had the novichok in their bedroom, would choose a hotel room which did not have an en suite bathroom. If I spilt some novichok on myself I would not want to be queuing in the corridor for the shower. The GRU may not be big on health and safety, but the idea that their agents chose not to have basic washing facilities available while handling the novichok is wildly improbable.

The only link of Boshirov and Petrov to the novichok is the trace in the hotel room. The identification there of a microscopic trace of novichok came from a single swab, all other swabs were negative, and the test could not be repeated even on the original positive sample. For other reasons given above, I absolutely doubt these two had novichok in that bedroom. Who they really are, and how much the security services knew about them, remain open questions.

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