Global Research

« Das Bild ist wirklich apokalyptisch. Es sieht so aus, als sei eine Bombe auf diesen Straßenabschnitt gefallen, der eine Hauptschlagader ist” – so beschrieb ein Journalist die Morandi-Brücke in Genua kurz nach ihrem Einsturz, der das Leben von Dutzenden Menschen zerstörte [1].

Diese Worte erinnern an andere Bilder, die von etwa 40 serbischen Brücken, die 1999 durch NATO-Bombenangriffe zerstört wurden – darunter die Brücke über die Morava in Südserbien, wo zwei Raketen einen Zug trafen und die Passagiere massakrierten. 78 Tage lang starteten 1.100 Flugzeuge, hauptsächlich von italienischen Stützpunkten, die von der Regierung D’Alema geliefert wurden, 38.000 Einsätze und zündeten 23.000 Bomben und Raketen. Sie zerstörten systematisch serbische Strukturen und Infrastrukturen und forderten Tausende von zivilen Opfern. 54 italienische Flugzeuge nahmen an den Angriffen teil, wobei 1.378 Einsätze und Angriffsziele vom US-Kommando angegeben wurden.

“In Anbetracht der Anzahl der beteiligten Flugzeuge waren wir nach den Vereinigten Staaten an zweiter Stelle. Italien ist ein bedeutendes Land, und es sollte keine Überraschung sein, dass wir uns in diesem Krieg engagieren”, erklärte D’Alema.

Im selben Jahr, in dem sie an der endgültigen Zerstörung des jugoslawischen Staates beteiligt war, hat die Regierung D’Alema das öffentliche Eigentum der Società Autostrade (auch Manager der Morandi-Brücke) abgebaut, indem sie einen Teil davon an eine Gruppe von Aktionären übergab und den Rest an der Börse notierte. Die Morandi-Brücke ist unter der Verantwortung eines auf Profit ausgerichteten Systems zusammengebrochen, dasselbe System, das im Zentrum der mächtigen Interessen der NATO steht.

Der Vergleich zwischen den Bildern der eingestürzten Morandi-Brücke und den bombardierten serbischen Brücken, der auf den ersten Blick erzwungen erscheinen mag, ist im Gegenteil sehr begründet.

Erstens sollte die schreckliche Szene der Opfer, die durch den Zusammenbruch unter den Trümmern begraben wurden, uns über die schreckliche Realität des Krieges nachdenken lassen, die uns die großen Medien als eine Art “Kriegsspiel” präsentieren, wobei der Pilot auf die Brücke zielt und die ferngesteuerte Bombe sie in Stücke reißt.

Zweitens sollten wir uns daran erinnern, dass die Europäische Kommission am 28. März einen Aktionsplan vorgelegt hat, der die Instandsetzung und Instandhaltung der EU-Strukturen, einschließlich der Brücken, vorwegnimmt, aber nicht, um sie für die zivile Mobilität sicherer, sondern für die militärische Mobilität effizienter zu machen [2].

In Wirklichkeit wurde dieser Plan vom Pentagon und von der NATO beschlossen, die die EU aufforderten, “die zivilen Infrastrukturen zu verbessern, damit sie besser an die militärischen Erfordernisse angepasst werden können” – mit anderen Worten, Panzer, selbstfahrende Kanonen und andere schwere Militärfahrzeuge so schnell wie möglich von einem europäischen Land in ein anderes zu verlegen, um gegen die “russische Aggression” vorzugehen. Zum Beispiel – wenn eine Brücke das Gewicht einer Panzerkolonne nicht tragen kann, muss sie verstärkt oder umgebaut werden.

Wir könnten glauben, dass die Brücke in diesem Fall, wenn sie verstärkt wird, auch für zivile Fahrzeuge sicherer wird. Aber die Frage ist nicht so einfach.

Diese Änderungen werden nur für die militärische Mobilität auf den wichtigsten Landverbindungen vorgenommen, und die enormen Ausgaben werden vom jeweiligen Land übernommen, das genötigt sein wird, die Kosten von seinen Ressourcen für die allgemeine Verbesserung seiner Infrastrukturen abzuziehen.

Ein finanzieller Beitrag der EU ist in Höhe von 6,5 Milliarden Euro vorgesehen, aber – laut Federica Mogherini, die für die “Sicherheitspolitik” der EU zuständig ist – nur, um “sicherzustellen, dass Infrastrukturen von strategischer Bedeutung den militärischen Erfordernissen angepasst werden”.

Aber die Zeit vergeht schnell – bis September muss der Europäische Rat (im Auftrag der NATO) die Liste der Infrastrukturen festlegen, die für die militärische Mobilität in Frage kommen. Wird die Morandi-Brücke aufgelistet und wieder aufgebaut werden, damit die Panzer der USA und der NATO sicher über die Köpfe der Bevölkerung von Genua fahren können?

Manlio Dinucci

Übersetzung
K. R.
Quelle
Il Manifesto (Italien)

Ponti crollati e ponti bombardati

VIDEO – L’Arte della Guerra – Ponti crollati e ponti bombardati

[1] Die Morandi-Brücke, ein wichtiger Autobahnviadukt in Genua, der von einem privaten Unternehmen verwaltet wird, brach am 14. August zusammen und forderte mehr als 40 Opfer. Die wahrscheinliche Ursache ist ein struktureller Zusammenbruch, dessen Anzeichen jedoch jahrelang ignoriert wurden. (Anmerkung der Redaktion).

[2] “UE, Area Schengen per le forze NATO” (Die Militarisierung der Europäischen Union: Schengen-Raum an US-NATO-Streitkräfte übergeben), di Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto (Italia) , Rete Voltaire, 6 aprile 2018.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

As a transplanted New Yorker living in what I call ‘Death Valley USA’ or Daytona Beach, Florida, I like to keep up with my old sports town. The only NYC paper that is easy to obtain and does have an extensive sports section is the New York Post, sold at my local Publix Supermarket. On Thursday August 30th I finished the sports section and decided to scroll through the rest of this rag paper. I came upon page 35 to something called the HOME section.

The headline was ‘Where to Live Cheap: New York City’s Top Affordable Neighborhoods’. I noticed the little box advertising the Windsor Terrace neighborhood in my old borough of Brooklyn. Now, Windsor Terrace, back in the day, at least up until I left the NYC area in the early 90s, was a working class neighborhood made up of a mix of mostly Irish, some Italian, some Black and Puerto Rican folks. You know, many city workers and blue and white collar folks who rode the subway into the city each morning to work. Well, read this from page 35:

“Tucked away at the southwestern end of Prospect Park, this tranquil spot feels more like a sleepy Hudson River village than the middle of Brooklyn…. Prices remain relatively low compared to prime Brooklyn ‘hoods… Townhomes run from around $1.5 million to $3 million, while in Park Slope they typically start in the $2 million to $3 million range and can run to $20 million… It’s a wonderful quaint, beautifully charming neighborhood.”

Let’s see. Even if a blue collar or white collar working stiff from Brooklyn was able to sell a home they have had for a generation, and it wasn’t for $ 1.5 to $ 3 million…maybe even if it was now worth one million dollars… how in the hell could he or she afford a $500k to $1.5 million dollar mortgage? You know the answer. They couldn’t!

With Labor Day Weekend upon us the audacity of the super wealthy is amplified. Channel surfing this morning I came across the old ’empire reliable’ C-Span morning journal show, or whatever in the hell they named it. Guess who was the guest on this Sunday of the Labor Day weekend? They had this attorney representing some ‘Right to Work’ defense organization. He was on the air to trumpet the fact, in his organization’s mind, that we don’t really need unions. He claimed that the government, local and federal, has plenty of laws on the books to protect workers. Imagine the utter gall to suggest that workers shouldn’t worry about how the boss treats them… the government has laws to protect them! Just like working stiffs should not be worried or offended that the super wealthy among us now earn so much that townhomes which sold for $50k in the 1960s in working stiff neighborhoods like Windsor Park, Brooklyn now go for millions! So tell me, where can a city or state worker reside on the $40K to $80K a year they earn? Where do any working stiffs who punch in the time clock go to live in Brooklyn? Oh, duh, if they don ‘t already own a home or condo, bought years ago, then they rent. And we know how  high rents are if properties like those mentioned above go for that much? Been there, done that most of my life renting from the almighty Land Lord. The Land Lord (a term right out of Feudalism) will do as little in repairs and improvements as they can get away with. Sad but true.

To this writer the strength (or weakness)  of a union movement is correlated with the obscene super wealth of those among us. Back in the 1960s for instance, when unions were much stronger, the owners and bosses representing capital made out pretty damn good, but not anything like now. Today we have Fortune 500 company CEOs earning over 300 times what their average employee earns. In those days these super wealthy earned maybe 15 or 20 times that of their average employee. And, the super wealthy were taxed at a top rate of … ready for this… 90%! Now, they did not pay taxes at 90%, maybe 40 or 50 percent. Today, as Mitt Romney admitted, super wealthy Americans are taxed at less than 39%, and usually pay anywhere from 15 to 20 percent. That is why $1.5 to $5 million homes in Brooklyn are no problem. Get it? When will more of our working stiffs out there realize the correlation between weak or no unions and the uptick of personal wealth? Go to Windsor Park in Brooklyn and see how real affordable neighborhoods are becoming a thing of the past.

*

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].

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above

For almost seventeen years, Global Research, together with partner independent media organizations, has sought Truth in Media with a view to eventually “disarming” the corporate media’s disinformation crusade.

To reverse the tide, we call upon our readers to participate in an important endeavor.

Global Research has over 50,000 subscribers to our Newsletter.

Our objective is to recruit one thousand committed “volunteers” among our 50,000 Newsletter subscribers to support the distribution of Global Research articles (email lists, social media, crossposts). 

Do not send us money. Under Plan A, we call upon our readers to donate 5 minutes a day to Global Research.

Global Research Volunteer Members can contact us at [email protected] for consultations and guidelines.

If, however, you are pressed for time in the course of a busy day, consider Plan B, Consider Making a Donation and/or becoming a Global Research Member. 

*     *     *

Mr. Trump, You Cannot Erase the Palestinian Right to Return

By James J. Zogby, September 03, 2018

First, the Trump Administration “took Jerusalem off the table.” Now, in an especially dangerous display of recklessness, they have announced their intention to do the same for the Palestinian “right of return.”

EU Vows to Keep Backing UNRWA After Trump Scraps US Financial Aid for Palestine Refugees

By Middle East Eye, September 03, 2018

he 28-nation European Union, the biggest collective contributor to UNWRA, said on Saturday it will continue its support after the Trump administration’s decision to cut its funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

US Cuts to UNRWA Point to the Dark Future Being Readied for the Palestinians

By Jonathan Cook, September 03, 2018

The Trump administration’s decision to scrap all future aid payments to the main agency helping Palestinian refugees marks a new – and most likely disastrous – chapter in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Trump’s Position on Palestinian Refugees Is Dead Wrong

By Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, September 03, 2018

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) opposes US President Donald Trump’s decision to cease all funding to the UN aid agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). The Trump administration declared Friday that it was cutting all funding to UNRWA, calling the organization an “irredeemably flawed operation,” and seeking to reduce the number of Palestinians recognized as “refugees” under the UN system.

Freezing Humanitarian Support to Palestine: Trump Administration Pressuring Nations to Stop Funding The UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)

By Stephen Lendman, September 02, 2018

They want their fundamental rights denied, including continued occupation and land theft, self-determination in name only, along with East Jerusalem as their exclusive capital and right of return for diaspora Palestinians denied.

Israel’s Criminal Blockade of Gaza: Day 30 – Israeli Military Has Still Not Released 114 Boxes of Medical Supplies for Gaza

By Freedom Flotilla Coalition, August 31, 2018

t is 30 days since the Israeli military stopped the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ship Al Awda and took control of the medical supplies for Gaza… For one month the Freedom Flotilla Coalition has demanded the immediate release of the 114 boxes and thousands of people from around the world have called Israeli embassies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in their countries demanding the release.

US Envoy Haley: Palestinian Right of Return Should be ‘Off the Table’

By Middle East Monitor, August 31, 2018

Commenting at an appearance at the Foundation for the Defence of Democracies, a pro-Israel think tank based in Washington DC, Haley suggested on Tuesday that the Trump administration would consider an official rejection of the Palestinian demand that all refugees who were displaced as a result of the Nakba (Catastrophe) and their descendants, be allowed to return to their ancestral homeland following a peace deal with Israel.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

Over 200 drones have been sent from Turkey to two regions controlled by Tahrir al-Sham Hay’at (the Levant Liberation Board or the Al-Nusra Front) terrorists in preparation for the upcoming war against the Syrian Army in Idlib, a Russian media outlet reported on Saturday.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

First, the Trump Administration “took Jerusalem off the table.” Now, in an especially dangerous display of recklessness, they have announced their intention to do the same for the Palestinian “right of return.”  

The first indication that this was in the works came  with the administration’s announcement that they would be suspending all US assistance to UNWRA, the UN agency created to address the humanitarian needs of the Palestinians who were forced to flee from their homes in 1948 and again in 1967. More recently, the administration supported by some Republican members of Congress, launched an effort to limit “refugee” status to only those Palestinians who were victims of the 1948 expulsions. [In a future article I will address the devastating humanitarian and political consequences that will result from crippling the work of UNWRA.]

Because Israel has always rejected its culpability for the Palestinian refugee crisis and has consistently refused to acknowledge that those who fled in 1948 had any rights to repatriation, the US intent to take the refugee issue “off the table” was described by one Israeli writer as a “dream come true.” And a minister in Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government celebrated the US move as “finally speaking the truth to the Arab lie that has been marketed all over the world for decades…There is no reason for [Palestinians] to dream of returning.”

Israel claims that they have no responsibility for Palestinian refugees. As is their practice, the Israelis have attempted to exonerate themselves by creating “alternate facts”—that Palestinians voluntarily left their homes or that they were ordered to leave by advancing Arab armies. However, an examination of the historical record establishes that the Zionist political leadership executed a deliberate plan to “cleanse” entire areas of their Arab inhabitants in order to create a state that would be larger than what was provided by the UN partition, with fewer Arabs.

They are indicted by their own words:

Yigal Allon (leader of the Palmach – the official Zionist military):

“We saw the need to clean the upper Galilee and to create…Jewish continuity in the entire area of the upper Galilee…We, therefore, tried a tactic…which worked miraculously well. I gathered all of the Jewish Mukhtars, who have contact with the Arabs in  the different villages, and asked them to whisper in the ears of the Arabs that a large Jewish reinforcement has arrived in Galilee and that it is going to burn all the villages in the Huleh. They should suggest to these Arabs, as their friends, to escape while they had time to flee. The flight numbered in the myriads. The tactic reached its goal completely.”

David Ben Gurion (speaking of “Plan D,” the operation designed to expand the size of the “Jewish State” and to reduce the number of Arabs within it):

“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting them on fire, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those population centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside of them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the border of the state.”

Yigal Allon:

“There is a need for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about timing, place, and those we hit. If we accuse a family – we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective operation. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between the guilty and the not guilty.”

Menachem Begin (leader of the Irgun):

“Arabs throughout the country, induced to believe wild tales of ‘Irgun butchery’, were seized with limitless panic and started to flee for their lives. The mass flight soon developed into a maddened uncontrolled stampede. Of the almost 800,000 who lived in the present territory of the State of Israel, only 165,000 remain. The political and economic significance of this development can hardly be overestimated.”

In the aftermath of the war, during which thousands of Palestinians were murdered and another 700,000 were forced into exile, Ben Gurion celebrated what he termed “a double miracle”—an Israel with more land and less Arabs.

After its establishment, Israel compounded its crimes against the Palestinians by passing a series of Orwellian laws which enabled the new state to seize Arab-owned land (over 2 million acres were taken—including businesses, homes, orchards, and farmland) and demolish 385 Arab villages—all done in the effort to physically erase any evidence of the prior Palestinian presence.

I spent time in Palestinian camps in 1971 collecting the nightmarish personal stories of those who were expelled, perusing their family photo albums of the homes they had left behind, and being shown the keys they still carried -which had become a sacred symbol representing what they had lost and hoped to regain. One said to me “the Jews said they remembered for 2,000 years. For me, it has only been 23 years, how can I forget?”

In the face of this, the actions of the Trump Administration are not only dangerous and reckless, they are cruel and insensitive, and violations of international law and covenants.

While some conservatives love to cherry pick the celebrated 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights—citing their favorite, Article 18, which guarantees freedom of religion and belief—they willfully ignore other relevant articles:

Article 9: “No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.”

Article 13/2: “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.”

Article 17/2: “no one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.”

In addition, there is the 1948 UN resolution declaring “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes”—a  resolution which has been regularly and overwhelmingly passed by the UN General Assembly.

When in the face of this incontrovertible history of Israeli “ethnic cleansing” and international conventions on the rights of refugees, I cringe when I hear of the Trump Administration’s intention to take the refugee issue “off the table.” What they are, in fact, taking off the table is so much more. At stake is: the lives and fortunes of innocent Palestinians and their families; the rule of law; simple human justice; and the possibility of peace. The more than 5 million Palestinians living under occupation and in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria cannot be erased and in their attempt to do so, it is not only the Israelis who are guilty of the war crime of ethnic cleansing. The Trump Administration is making itself complicit in this crime.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

On Friday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued a statement ahead of the imminent Syrian government and Russian campaign to liberate Idlib from jihadist control.

Pompeo said via Twitter:

“The 3 million Syrians, who have already been forced out of their homes and are now in Idlib, will suffer from this aggression. Not good. The world is watching.”

Both Washington and the mainstream networks are gearing up for a possible final US-Damascus-Russia confrontation in response to Assad’s military action in Idlib, representing the northwest province as “the last rebel stronghold” where Damascus simply seeks to “massacre civilians”.

But Washington officials often contradict their own past positions, and this is glaringly clear in the case of Idlib, where Brett McGurk — the White House appointed anti-ISIS envoy who essentially acts as the president’s personal diplomat in Iraq and Syria — previously described the true situation on the ground in unusually frank comments:

IMPORTANT message from The #US Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL- Brett McGurk- on the situation in #Idlib #Syria:

''Idlib Province is the largest ALQaeda safe haven since 9/11, tied directly to Ayman al Zawahri (current #ALQaeda leader) & this is a HUGE problem'' pic.twitter.com/99ulOLpZwi

— Brasco_Aad (@Brasco_Aad) August 22, 2018

Special US envoy McGurk accurately described:

“Idlib provice is the largest al-Qaeda safe-have since 9/11, tied to directly to Ayman al Zawahiri, this is a huge problem.”

The rare, honest assessment was spoken a little over a year ago on July 27, 2017 at a Washington D.C. event in which McGurk was a panelist hosted by the Middle East Institute.

During the panel discussion, McGurk posed: 

“But we have to ask a question; why and how is Ayman al-Zawahiri’s deputy finding his way to Idlib Province. Why is this happening? How are they getting there? They are not paratroopers…”

Yes, we’ve long wondered the same thing, especially when it was US intelligence directly assisting the al-Qaeda coalition Army of Islam (now morphed into Hayat Tahrir al-Sham) from an “operations room” in Turkey.

At the time, McGurk’s comments were aimed at NATO ally Turkey, which he accused of facilitating jihadist entry into northern Syria to displace the US-backed Syrian Kurdish SDF.

“The approach by some of our partners to send in tens of thousands of tons of weapons, and look the other way as these foreign fighters come into Syria may not have been the best approach,” McGurk continued during his 2017 comments.

He added that al-Qaeda has taken “full advantage” of Turkey allowing for the free flow of arms and jihadists across its lengthy border with Syria.

Of course McGurk neglected to mention that the United States was a willing partner in all of this throughout most of the entirety of the Syrian war, which sought regime change in Damascus. The Turkish foreign ministry condemned his statements at the time.

The State Department would of course hope that the American public forgets these words were ever spoken.

Meanwhile Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned the West not to interfere in Syrian and Russian forces engaged in anti-terror actions in Idlib:

 “I hope our Western partners will not give in to [rebel] provocations and will not obstruct an antiterror operation,” he said.

It appears that the State Department circa 2017 actually agreed with Lavrov’s calling the Idlib militants terrorists even in the State Department in 2018 does not. Or it’s also just Washington contradicting itself as usual for the sake of yet more nefarious foreign policy goals in the Middle East.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

This week another damning report from UNHCR on the atrocious conditions and treatment of refugees on the Greek islands. A few days earlier another about Lesvos. My computer is full of reports about refugees in Greece and on Samos. There seems no end to the flow.

We have some simple questions to ask of all those organisations and individuals who write and research these reports.

Firstly, why do you bother?

From where we are on Samos I can tell you that not one report has made any difference to the lives and well being of refugees here. Of course over the past decade there have been changes but these have been influenced mainly by the refugee flows to the island. Every month is bad it is just that some are worse than others.

We now wait for the reports that will tell us again, as they do year in and year out that winter preparations are virtually non existent and refugees are once more going to face even more intolerable conditions due to the winter weather. Be assured nothing much will happen. Just like last year and all preceding years.

Are those involved in these reports ignorant? Do they seriously believe that their work is going to make a difference when all before them have failed utterly to change things for the refugees? Surely they ought to know that their reports make no difference.

And just how much money is spent in these efforts? Money which we would argue could be much better used to improve the lives of those who are the subjects of their reports.

Secondly Why do so many reports fail to ask why nothing changes?

The failure to ask this question suggests a combination of factors all of which point to deeply rooted flaws in many of the sponsoring bodies. Is it the case that some of the organisations involved have as part of their funding agreements an obligation to churn out reports? Is this churning connected to their sense that this is what they do. Turn out reports? They may feel that this looks good and justifies their existence. That so few of the reports seem to have any follow up to assess their impact would suggest that they are not interested in whether they make any difference.

Not often, but occasionally I look into some of these organisations behind the Reports. Delusional is the word that most commonly comes to my mind. They tell us without shame that they seek to influence key policy makers and their organisations to bring about positive change. Do they seriously expect us to accept that such people don’t know what is going on in places such as Samos? As one organisation told me “ we aim to bring the lived experiences of refugees and displaced people in Europe directly to policy makers themselves.” Who no doubt are all ears and all too ready to act on the evidence! They also tell me of the seminars and conferences they attend to speak about their findings. And few fail to mention their intent to shape public opinion and media coverage. There is invariably a void when it comes to reporting on how their work has made life better for refugees. It is a void which speaks volumes about their ineffectiveness.

In many ways the vast majority of this activity seem to be no more than another dimension to the ‘refugee business’ – ”there’s gold in them hills”. Gold which pays for their wages, flies them into Samos or Lesvos …….. pays for their rental car and hotel and gets them back home again at the end. To stay in this business it does not pay to ask the most important questions nor even to consider that the way in which they have conceived their inquiries might be incorrect.

A Crime Against Humanity

This is what is occurring on Greece’s frontier islands and beyond. It is a crime. If the refugees were horses or dogs there would be prosecutions. Key perpetrators would be at least named and identified and some punished. But when it comes to refugees, nobody ever seems to be held to account whether it is the social worker who demands sexual favours in return for a positive asylum report; the police officers who are violent and attack refugees; the doctors who give nothing more than a paracetamol tablet for every condition they confront; the hotspot manager who does nothing about the swarms of rats in the camps; the police chief responsible for the outrageously cruel detention facilities in police stations; the people responsible for arming police with tear gas and authorising its use against refugees. The list is endless. Yes, it is a system but it is not faceless. To treat it as such creates the perfect environment for the cruel and vicious to flourish with impunity. And this is what the refugees face and have faced for years now on places like Samos and elsewhere.

I was told by one organisation that they could understand my frustration that nothing has changed despite the many reports over the past decade. But it is anger not frustration that I and many on Samos feel. It is common knowledge that the situation is shit upon shit. The case has been made. We don’t need or want more reports telling us.

Instead we need and demand reports that ask the right questions about why nothing changes. Where does the money go? Who makes key decisions? What are their names? We need to see people held to account for their unlawful behaviours.

Enough of this madness.

*

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Samos Chronicles. 

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

This August 30th marks the International Day of the Disappeared, initiated by the Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of the Detained-Disappeared, FEDEFAM, an organization founded in 1981 at the height of US-backed state terrorism throughout Latin America. On this day, SOA Watch salutes the thousands of families who continue their unwavering search for their disappeared and celebrates the trials that continue to take place in spite of a legacy of terror and impunity that seeks to silence the demands for justice. Today is a day we are reminded to confront silence, complicity and impunity with memory as resistance.

Disappearances as a systematic practice occured throughout all of Latin America under the National Security Doctrine implemented during the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. We uplift the voices of the people of Latin America and the Caribbean and echo their clamor for justice, and we continue to denounce the role of the School of the Americas for its responsibility in the disappearance of thousands of people between 1960 and today.We also echo the call for the appearance, alive, of the disappeared and remember that disappearances as a systematic practice continue to this day, and this crime against humanity is perpetuated every day a person does not appear.

Source: School of Americas Watch

In Guatemala, relatives continue to demand justice for their more than 45,000 disappeared, both in the streets and in the courts; in Argentina, after 41 years, Grandmothers and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo keep marching, wearing their white handkerchiefs, demanding the right to truth and justice; in Uruguay and Chile, the demands for truth and justice continue, and the people of Chile now fight for the end of jail privileges for the few military officers serving time in the Punta Peuco prison; in Mexico, where one person is disappeared every two hours, the historic demand “they were taken alive, we want them back alive” continues, and the people who continue to walk alongside the families of the 43 students from Ayotzinapa, also demand the appearance of the more than 37,000 people disappeared since the beginning of the US-backed War on Drugs in 2007, and maintain the memory of the more than 70 thousand migrants and refugees disappeared since 2005 as a consequence of US-Border Imperialism strategies; and in Honduras, the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared, COFADEH, as they carry out work in promotion and defense of human rights, also continues the struggle for theirs detained and disappeared.

Let us commemorate the love and courage with which our brothers and sisters searched for their loved ones – and the struggle of women in particular – even during the worst moments of the dictatorships and state terrorism, held up photographs of their disappeared and resisted – and continue to resist – oblivion. We uplift these memories of struggle and resistance of the various collectives and movements of relatives of our disappeared throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

The 28-nation European Union, the biggest collective contributor to UNWRA, said on Saturday it will continue its support after the Trump administration’s decision to cut its funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).

This implied the EU may increase funding to the agency if deemed necessary, according to Israeli newspaper Haaretz. Deutsche Welle said Germany plans to significantly increase its funding for UNRWA, citing a letter from Foreign Minister Heiko Maas to other EU foreign ministers.

The EU said in a statement it will discuss with its international partners “how to ensure sustainable, continued and effective assistance to the Palestinians, including through UNRWA,” in the run-up to the UN General Assembly later this month.

The statement stressed the importance of continued international support for UNWRA, which runs schools for hundreds of Palestinian children across the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria.

“The EU will continue to engage with the US and its other regional and international partners to work towards that common goal.”

#Germany pledges to significantly increase its funding for the #UN agency @UNRWA supporting Palestinian refugees, following US cuts.https://t.co/RwNxFotGcy

— Lotte Leicht (@LotteLeicht1) August 31, 2018

It also urged the US to reconsider the decision to halt funding for the United Nations relief and works agency for Palestinian refugees.

“The regrettable decision of the US to no longer be part of this international and multilateral effort leaves a substantial gap,” the EU said, adding: “We hope that the US can reconsider their decision.”

Washington has long been UNRWA’s biggest single donor but is “no longer willing to shoulder the very disproportionate share of the burden,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement on Friday.

Nauert said there would be no additional contributions beyond a $60m dollar payment made in January, drawing condemnation from both the Palestinians and UNRWA but a welcome from Israel.

Nauert called UNWRA an “irredeemably flawed operation”. She said the agency’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years”.

UNRWA provides services to about five million Palestinian refugees.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their land in the events leading to the establishment of the state of Israel. Surviving refugees and their descendants still live in camps in neighbouring Arab countries, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As part of its decision, the US is also calling for a sharp decrease in the number of Palestinians who are recognised as refugees, reducing the current five million figure to fewer than a tenth of that number, an official familiar with the decision told the Washington Post.

An anonymous official in the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, told the AFP news agency on Saturday that Israel supported the US decision to cut funding from UNWRA.

“Consolidating the refugee status of Palestinians is one of the problems that perpetuate the conflict,” the official said.

Palestinian Ambassador to the US Husam Zomlot said Washington does not have the authority to define the status of Palestinian refugees.

“By endorsing the most extreme Israeli narrative on all issues including the rights of more than 5 million Palestinian refugees, the US administration has lost its status as peacemaker and is damaging not only an already volatile situation but the prospects for future peace in the Middle East,” Zomlot said in a statement.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

On Thursday, the U.S.-led coalition targeting Daesh (ISIS) published a casualty report that has drawn criticism and consternation from independent watchdogs and human-rights groups for severely underestimating the number of civilians killed by coalition airstrikes in Syria and Iraq since operations began in 2014.

According to the “official” figures made public by the coalition – officially known as the Combined Joint Task Force of Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) — “at least 1,061 civilians have been unintentionally killed by coalition strike since the start of Operation Inherent Resolve” four years ago.

The recently released figures count only reports of civilian deaths deemed “credible” by the coalition. The coalition has often been accused of rejecting the vast majority of reports in order to make the civilian death toll appear lower. Indeed, 15 of the last 18 reports reviewed by the coalition were deemed “not credible,” as only three were accepted.

Notably, the three accepted reports had the lowest civilian death tolls – one dead civilian each – of the 18 recently reviewed reports. In addition, 216 reports of civilian casualties are currently pending and thus were not included in the official figures.

However, the civilian casualty figures released by the coalition are significantly lower than estimates made by independent groups, such as the U.K.-based watchdog AirWars, which has estimated that a minimum of between 6,575 and 9,968 civilians have died as a result of civilian airstrikes. AirWars has also noted that the overall total of alleged civilian deaths resulting from coalition strikes ranges between 17,674 and 26,224.

The stark differences in calculated death tolls are particularly clear in last month’s figures, where AirWars reported that between 75 and 119 civilians were likely killed by the coalition strikes while the coalition has claimed that only three were likely killed.

Thousands of bodies still in Raqqa rubble

The clear disparity between estimates is nothing new, as prominent human-rights groups like Amnesty International had recently rejected the coalition’s reported figures on civilian deaths, stating that the coalition is “deeply in denial” about the “large number of civilians killed and injured by [coalition] strikes.” Amnesty International has also previously claimed that the coalition’s “monthly reports on civilian casualties across Iraq and Syria rely on vague descriptions and dismiss the vast majority of allegations as ‘non-credible’.”

Back in June, the human-rights group had impugned the coalition’s claims of using “precision” air strikes with minimal civilian casualties in its campaign to “liberate” Raqqa in Syria as inaccurate, stating that this narrative did “not stand up to scrutiny.” A year after the coalition “liberated” Raqqa from Daesh, human remains are still being exhumed on a daily basis and thousands of bodies are still believed to be lying in the rubble that saw 90 percent of the city’s buildings obliterated by coalition strikes.

From August 2014 to the end of this past July, the U.S.-led coalition has conducted a total of 29,920 “precision” strikes against alleged Daesh targets in Syria and Iraq. While strikes in Iraq are coordinated with the Iraqi military, the coalition’s actions in Syria are considered illegal by the Syrian government and have not been authorized by the UN Security Council. Coalition strikes have also targeted Syrian military and allied forces engaged in fighting Daesh on several occasions, including earlier this year in the Syria-Iraq border city of Abu Kamal.

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Marco Rubio reminds us that he is a reflexive military interventionist with appalling judgment:

“I believe that the Armed Forces of the United States are only used in the event of a threat to national security. I believe that there is a very strong argument that can be made at this time that Venezuela and the Maduro regime has become a threat to the region and even to the United States.”

Conditions in Venezuela are very serious, and the country is experiencing a man-made humanitarian catastrophe. Over a million and half people have fled the country in the last few years. The crisis there has the potential to destabilize Venezuela’s neighbors, but that is no reason to contemplate military intervention. It is ludicrous to describe Venezuela as a threat to the United States. None of Venezuela’s neighbors wants U.S. intervention, no regional government would support it if the U.S. attacked, and attacking Venezuela would only exacerbate the country’s severe economic and political problems. The U.S. would be condemned by most of our neighbors for waging an unnecessary war, and our military would find itself bogged down in another thankless mission of policing a country where the presence of our soldiers would be deeply resented. As usual, Rubio is completely wrong.

Unfortunately, Rubio’s views on this could have significant influence on U.S. policy. As we know, the president was entertaining the idea of invading Venezuela last year, and it took the concerted opposition of regional governments and his Cabinet to make him drop it. Politico reported last week on several Rubio allies working on U.S. policy in Latin America at the National Security Council:

All have close ties to Rubio, who’s playing a central role in setting U.S. policy in Latin America as chair of the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Rubio has a close relationship with Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who successfully pushed for tougher Venezuela sanctions Rubio had been calling for — including penalties that target a Venezuelan official implicated in an assassination plot against the senator.

The Trump White House is likely to be receptive to Rubio’s horrible ideas, and we know that the president’s first instinct was to consider military intervention. Congress and the public need to make it known now that they reject an attack on Venezuela, and Congress needs to make clear that the president has no authority to start a war against the Venezuelan government on his own.

*

Featured image is from Gage Skidmore/Flickr.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Hawks inside and outside the Trump administration have not been afraid to threaten the nuclear option when it comes to the re-imposition of sanctions on Iran. From threats to sanction European central banks and SWIFT’s board of directors to threats against foreign government officials facilitating trade with Iran, U.S. hawks have adopted the madman theory to undermine international adherence to the Iran nuclear accord (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA) and to deflate the confidence of those resisting the U.S.’s withdrawal from the agreement and its re-imposition of sanctions.

But now U.S. hawks are signaling their intent to attack more directly the very foundations of the nuclear accord, including in ways that undermine core U.S. nuclear non-proliferation objectives. Their willingness to do so is ultimately illustrative of their intent, which—contrary to their feigned concern over Iran’s nuclear program—is to create the conditions for war with Iran.

Few items have better crystallized U.S. hawks’ ultimate objectives vis-à-vis Iran than a Foreign Policy article published this week by Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) Senior Advisor Richard Goldberg and FDD Visiting Fellow Jacob Nagel. Goldberg and Nagel argue that the Trump administration should use its sanctions authorities to target foreign governments, as well as their agencies and officials, engaged in activities authorized under the JCPOA. This includes, in particular, those very activities that seek to reduce the proliferation capabilities of Iran’s nuclear program. For instance, Goldberg and Nagel state that foreign governments involved in the re-design and re-build of Iran’s Arak nuclear reactor—which, nuclear experts agree, would ultimately reduce the plutonium-producing capabilities of that reactor ten-fold—should be targeted for U.S. sanctions.

Moreover, Goldberg and Nagel argue that those parties establishing research or business ties with U.S.-designated entities—which, come November, will include the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran—should be subject to U.S. secondary sanctions. Since the JCPOA required Iran to convert its Fordo uranium enrichment facility into a nuclear, physics, and technology center at which “international collaboration, including in the form of scientific joint partnerships, [would] be established in agreed areas of research,” foreign parties—including foreign governments, agencies, and officials—engaged in such international collaboration consistent with the express terms of the JCPOA would nonetheless be subject to U.S. secondary sanctions for engaging in transactions with a U.S.-designated entity—i.e., the AEOI.

Current U.S. sanctions authorities would indeed permit the Trump administration to target foreign governments for their scientific collaboration with Iran to reduce latent proliferation risks. In the upside-down world of U.S. hawks, the Trump administration could determine that foreign parties, including foreign governments, engaged in activities to reduce nuclear proliferation risks in Iran consistent with the JCPOA—such as the reconfiguration of the Arak nuclear reactor—are instead engaged in activities that materially contribute to or pose a risk of contributing to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and are thus engaged in sanctionable activities pursuant to Executive Order 13382. Similarly, upon the re-listing of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran on OFAC’s SDN List, foreign parties that provide any financial, material, technological, or other support to the AEOI would meet the criteria for designation under E.O. 13382, even if such support takes the form of efforts to reduce the proliferation capabilities of Iran’s nuclear reactor. Parties designated under E.O. 13382 would have all property that is or comes within U.S. jurisdiction frozen and would likely be subject to U.S. secondary sanctions.

Not satisfied with targeting foreign governments engaged in non-proliferation work with Iran, Goldberg and Nagel further argue that the Trump administration should threaten to cut funding to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) if the agency continues to provide technical assistance to Iran and to host seminars and conferences in Iran. Further, Goldberg and Nagel claim that U.S. funding to the IAEA should be predicated on its removal of all Iranian employees.

The JCPOA provides that the IAEA will engage in all kinds of technical cooperation projects with and technical assistance to Iran. For instance, the nuclear accord requires the Joint Commission to “support assistance to Iran, including through IAEA technical cooperation projects” and notes that the Arak modernization project, described above, would involve significant IAEA support. Annex III of the JCPOA describes a long list of civil nuclear cooperation between Iran and the other JCPOA participants—all of which is ultimately reliant on the IAEA’s technical assistance.

Goldberg and Nagel’s proposal seeks to entirely sever the IAEA from engaging in this work. But perhaps the most obvious and distressing consequence of Goldberg and Nagel’s scheme is that if the IAEA were to terminate all technical assistance projects with Iran and to discriminate against Iranian national employees at the agency, Iran would have little choice but to kick the IAEA out of the country and withdraw entirely from the agency’s oversight. The world would thus lose the unprecedented oversight of Iran’s nuclear program that the JCPOA had provided.

That may be a feature, rather than a bug, of Goldberg and Nagel’s proposal. If the ultimate objective of U.S. hawks is not to restrain Iran’s nuclear program and reduce its latent proliferation risks but instead is to create the conditions for war with Iran, then undermining the nuclear accord and ensuring the re-constitution and re-invigoration of Iran’s nuclear program—absent international oversight—may prove the means to doing so.

U.S. hawks have choreographed a well-developed scheme for undermining the JCPOA—first, successfully targeting the JCPOA’s promised economic dividend to Iran and now the JCPOA’s civil nuclear cooperation with Iran. Sanctioning foreign governments and international agencies engaged in the tough but fruitful work of reducing the proliferation risks inherent in Iran’s nuclear program appears a price that U.S. hawks are willing to pay to achieve their malign objectives.

*

Tyler Cullis is a recent graduate of the Boston University School of Law, where he specialized in international law. His writings focus on U.S. foreign policy, the politics of the Middle East, and developments in international law. His work has been featured at CNN’s Global Public Square, Muftah, Opinio Juris, and his personal blog, News From The Gutter. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured image is from Wall Street International Magazine.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Pope Francis’ two-day visit to Ireland on the 25^th and 26^th of August 2018 comes at a time when people need hope. The Irish Church has been devastated by the abuse scandals, which have never been properly dealt with. The victims and survivors of church abuse have told their stories and knocked on doors trying to get a hearing, and meet those who would listen to the terrible injustices perpetrated on them by some Catholic clergy and religious institutions.  It is only in the last few years that it has been recognized by the Catholic hierarchy that clerical abuse has taken place. The pain, frustration and anger of so many victims have been allowed to fester and perpetrators of these abuses in the past often protected for fear of damage to the institution. As with all corruption, unless we go to the root of the problem and take positive action to root it out completely,   we can never have a true healing. It was into such a situation of pain and suffering of victims of clerical sexual abuse that Pope Francis arrived in Ireland.   The Pope’s plea for forgiveness for the abuse scandals was long overdue.

The Pope’s call for forgiveness and firm and decisive action will be followed closely by many.  I would support the victims call for a tribunal to be set up by the Pope to judge the bishops action and make and hold the perpetrators of the abuse to full account, so demonstrating and a commitment to full transparency and accountability.

So too on the question of reform in the church.  Renewal and Reform of the Catholic Church is necessary and can no longer be delayed. The renewal of the church will not be easy, but it can begin immediately with a holding of the Vatican Council III in which, through respectful listening and deep dialogue, solutions to the urgent issues of today can be found and put into place.  The abuse scandal in Ireland is only the tip of the iceberg, as indeed in many countries human dignity is being destroyed with the abuse of children, women and men, as they are deprived of the basic needs to enable them to live fully human and dignified lives (and know what it is to be poor and live in an unjust world where the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer). The basic right of freedom of conscience for people – to be allowed to choose how to live their lives – must be upheld. It was very symbolic that Pope Francis spoke from the Marion Shrine at Knock where the message of peace and nonviolence needs to be proclaimed   strongly.   In Ireland, and indeed the world’s people, are looking for moral and spiritual Leadership, and Pope Francis, gives hope when he speaks out against war, nuclear weapons and for peace and disarmament.

In 1978, Betty Williams and I had the privilege of a 30-minute private conversation with Pope John Paul II in the Vatican. Coming out of a violent conflict in N. Ireland, we appealed to the Pope to reject the “Just War” theory and to bring forward a theology of nonviolence and peace for the Catholic Church. When Pope John Paul visited Ireland the following year he appealed to people to reject violence and build peace. However, we still await from the Vatican an encyclical on Christian nonviolence and a rejection of “Just War” theology.  Pope Francis in his papacy has given spiritual leadership and called for the total abolition of nuclear weapons and peace making. His visit to Knock, whilst rightly focusing on church’s abuse scandals, was a missed opportunity to call for nonviolence, and the abolition of militarism and war.

I believe Christ’s message of nonviolence,  has been betrayed and  perverted by the theology of ‘Just war’ which has led to the blessing of armies, armaments, militarism and wars in which Christians  feel they can justifiably play a  leading role.  The ‘Just war’ theology has also been used by those waging ‘armed struggles’ invasions, and military occupations.  However, if we have not as a Christian community taught nonviolence in our education systems, in our theological colleges, in our homes, in our churches, how are we to make the choice between violence and nonviolence? How are we to prevent abuse, violence, or politically driven deprivation when their root, the concept of a ‘Just War’ retains any credibility? I believe that when the church chooses to reject “Just War” theology and replaces it with a theology of nonviolence,  then other things  in the church will change.

I am grateful for the visit of Pope Francis as I believe  his humility and love in speaking to the suffering of the victims and survivors, has begun a healing process, and  raised  hope for a new beginning for many people.

I am also grateful for the Pope’s call this August to continue working for peace and in support of the Peace Process. In his speeches Pope Francis reminded us of our duty to protect the children from abuse and teach peace.  I believe the greatest abuse to millions of children is that of guns, militarism and wars, and that we are challenged to work for complete disarmament and end to violence and war.

In my opinion an Encyclical on Nonviolence and Disarmament from Pope Francis would give hope and encourage us all to take up our responsibility–which is and always has been–to build peace in Ireland and Peace in the World.

*

Mairead Corrigan Maguire, co-founder of Peace People, is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment. She won the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for her work for peace in Northern Ireland. Her book The Vision of Peace (edited by John Dear, with a foreword by Desmond Tutu and a preface by the Dalai Lama) is available from www.wipfandstock.com. She lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland. See: www.peacepeople.com. Mairead Corrigan Maguire is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Featured image: An aerial shot of the Pantex Plant, where US nuclear weapons are assembled and taken apart. Government photo, undated.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board—which oversees and reports on safety practices in the US nuclear weapons complex—is under siege. Congress created the board almost 30 years ago to address years of lax safety practices. Now, the Energy Department is seeking to block the board’s access to safety information, excluding the board from overseeing worker protection at dozens of facilities and blocking board staff from interacting with contractors that operate the department’s nuclear sites. At the same time, the board is undergoing an internal crisis that affects staff morale and, ultimately, its critical role in ensuring the safety of the government’s largest high-hazard research and industrial enterprise.

Largely unknown to the general public, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is a small organization, but it has played a critical role in dragging the US nuclear weapons complex away from decades of operating outside the mainstream of nuclear safety practice. With an annual budget of $31 million, the board oversees safety at 10 Energy Department sites that employ 110,000 people and occupy a land base larger than the states of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. These sites store and handle some of the world largest and potentially most dangerous inventories of nuclear materials. Since its inception the board has been largely responsible, among other things, for:

• Removing and safely packaging large amounts of unsafe nuclear explosive materials from several sites.
• Reducing explosion and fire hazards, a dominant concern.
• Increasing emergency planning and response to major nuclear accidents.
• Upgrading antiquated safety systems at nuclear facilities.

Despite this record of achievement, the board now faces difficulties that include the actions of some if its own members, who either don’t want or can’t seem to execute its mission. Last year, Sean Sullivan, the acting chairman installed at the request of Senate Republicans, tried to secretly convince the Trump White House to get rid of the board entirely, claiming it was “a relic of the Cold-War era defense-establishment.” Sullivan failed and was compelled to resign after his effort was revealed to the public.

As he attempted to eliminate the safety board, Sullivan also created a “secondary proposal” that would impose deep staffing cuts; outlined in a letter to the Office of Management and Budget, this fallback proposal was meant to go into effect if efforts to terminate the board went nowhere. The new acting chair of the safety board, Bruce Hamilton (also selected by Senate Republicans), unveiled the secondary proposal on August 15. The plan would “restructure by reducing the size of the workforce and relocating most of the technical staff to defense nuclear sites. This restructuring would reduce agency employees by at least 32 percent, down to 82 from the current 120.”

In a 3-1 vote, the Board endorsed Hamilton’s restructuring plan, but board member Joyce Connery, in a strongly-worded dissent, wrote:

“the board was established to be a collegial body. I find it neither collegial nor in keeping with the spirit of the statute for the acting chairman to propose sweeping changes to the organization without so much as a discussion with his fellow board members nor a justification for the move and in contradiction to several board votes.”

Although the restructuring plan has some positive elements—notably an addition of inspectors in the field—the deep budget and staff cut could disrupt and cripple the safety board’s effectiveness. Contention among board members is a symptom of crisis that has led to a loss of staff morale and high turnover. More than 60 percent of its technical staffers have left in less than the last four years. In May, the inspector general who oversees the safety board reported that it was ranked last by employees of 28 small federal agencies in terms a being a desirable place to work. According to the inspector general, more than a third of the safety staff surveyed in 2017 planned to leave, largely because of a “stark disagreement among board members, on how and when [safety] reporting requirements should be issued.” According to the inspector general,

“two board members [Sullivan and Hamilton] routinely disapproved staff reports that included reporting requirements and instead proposed amendments to remove the reporting requirements.”

The restructuring plan cannot be considered in isolation from the Trump administration’s aggressive dismantlement of oversight across the government, especially in light of the Energy Department’s constantly stumbling efforts to build new nuclear weapons at its antiquated facilities. The Congressional Budget Office has estimated that US nuclear weapons laboratories and supporting activities will cost $261 billion over the next three decades. The board’s restructuring plan is expected to begin by October 18 of this year and follows the Trump administration’s playbook of slashing safety oversight in federal agencies, as has happened with the Chemical Safety Board, responsible for investigating industrial chemical accidents. Unless Congress intervenes, the restructuring of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board will proceed.

Safety and conflict in the nuclear weapons complex. Unlike the commercial nuclear power industry, which consists of a relatively small number of reactor designs, the nuclear weapons complex includes a host of one-of-a-kind facilities, many built 50 to 70-plus years ago. Over the decades, each Energy Department site in the complex has created its own unique culture, shaped by secrecy, isolation, and demands of the Cold War nuclear arms race. Since making the most dangerous weapons in the world involves working with some of the world’s most dangerous materials, the employees in the nuclear weapons complex need a high degree of protection against workplace exposure to radiation and toxic materials. The United States is already paying a stiff price for the harm caused to the workers who made nuclear weapons through the 1980s. To date, 120,599 deceased and sick nuclear weapons workers have been paid $15.37 billion in compensation and medical care.

Via a semi-autonomous subunit known as the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Energy Department manages the US nuclear weapons complex in an unusual manner. In the complex, private contractors control at least 10 times more employees than federal managers. And unlike the rest of the government, the Energy Department self-regulates its workplace safety performance, primarily through a system of “orders” that are not on their own legally binding, but rather are enforced as requirements in contracts with private companies. With its origins in what the US Governmental Accountability Office has described as an “undocumented policy of blind faith in its contractor’s performance,” this regime is largely dependent on an honor system, in which contractors are expected to self-report their safety problems.

Because the sites in the weapons complex operate under cost-plus contracts, the Energy Department must pay the additional costs of compliance with safety orders, a troubling recipe for conflicting interests. Energy Department orders can be changed, reducing safety requirements at individual sites, without public or even (as I learned while working in the Energy Department) headquarters knowing of the change. So orders for safety practices involving highly radioactive and/or toxic materials can be watered down for any number of financial reasons—if schedules slip, if costs are exceeded, or, sometimes, if a contractor simply stands to lose out on a bonus. (By contrast, Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates the safety of US commercial nuclear reactor fleet, has a well-developed system of formal regulations that have the force of law, are subject to the transparency requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act, and are issued to licensees as mandatory obligations.)

The acrimony that now roils the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board is fairly recent in genesis and does not reflect decades of board members’ consensus in favor of higher safety standards in the nuclear weapons complex, going back to the safety board’s beginnings. Led in large part by Sen. John Glenn, an Ohio Democrat, Congress created the safety board in the aftermath of the April 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. Even before Chernobyl, there were serious safety concerns about the US nuclear weapons industry, which operated antiquated facilities immune for decades from independent safety regulation. But shortly after the Chernobyl catastrophe, a House subcommittee revealed that the Energy Department had instructed its nuclear safety experts to avoid comparing US weapons production reactors with those at Chernobyl—even though the US reactors also lacked the kind of containments required of modern commercial power reactors to limit the escape of radioactivity, should a major accident occur. The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board was established in legislation signed in September 1988, as the Energy Department launched its first candid safety assessments, which were followed by the National Academy of Sciences, as requested by Congress.

Although the board does not have the power of a regulator, its recommendations do legally require the energy secretary and, if necessary, the president, to respond, subject to congressional oversight. Most important, the board’s reports have opened a window for the public to see what the nuclear weapons program, is, or is not, doing to protect the safety of the public and workers.

Reporting that causes a stir. Unhappy with public access to the board’s weekly staff reports, Frank Klotz, then administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, proposed making them secret last year, with board member Hamilton’s active support, claiming the reports interfered with the agency’s mission. The proposal was withdrawn in the wake of news reports on safety problems in the nuclear complex.

The board’s recommendations have sometimes been controversial, and the Energy Department has been known to respond to them at a glacial pace. For instance, after the board flagged several disturbing safety violations in 1994, the Energy Department was compelled to stand down its main highly enriched uranium processing plant in Oak Ridge, Tenn.—for 12 years. The plant required a $500 million upgrade before it could restart.

In recent years, the board has been at odds with the NNSA over potential nuclear explosion dangers at the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas, where nuclear weapons are taken apart and assembled. An accidental nuclear explosion is, obviously, the most devastating threat the weapons complex poses; even so, NNSA management spurned numerous safety assessments by the site’s own Nuclear Explosive Safety group.

The NNSA and its contractor managers reacted with such hostility to requests to fix longstanding deficiencies that eight of 10 members of the Nuclear Explosive Safety group told the safety board that they felt their careers were threatened. After the board aired these problems in 2013, senior NNSA officials were forced to concede that nuclear explosive safety at Pantex was being compromised. Pantex remains a safety outlier in the weapons complex; it has yet to adopt the Energy Department’s legally binding occupational radiation protection standard—more the 20 years after its adoption by the rest of the complex.

Recently, the board’s staff has raised concerns that involve tens of tons of plutonium from dismantled weapons stored on an “interim basis” in facilities at Pantex. The storage magazines that hold the plutonium were built more than 50 years ago and were never intended to indefinitely store one of the largest (and growing) nuclear explosive inventories in the world. In 2010 and 2017, heavy rains, predicted to occur only once every 2000 years, flooded a major plutonium storage area with several inches of water, which shut down the plant and affected about 1,000 containers of plutonium. Now, some containers affected by the flood are showing signs of corrosion. Given the NNSA’s reluctance to build a state-of-the art nuclear explosive facility, tens of tons of plutonium are likely to remain in these antiquated structures, awaiting further floods and posing a continuing danger.

A problem at Los Alamos and beyond. One of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s biggest challenges involves the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the Trump Administration hopes to make dozens of plutonium weapons components, known as “pits,” necessary to ignite a nuclear explosion. Despite repeated recommendations by the board, Los Alamos refuses to reduce the approximately five tons of plutonium stored onsite, in facilities that could release it to the environment.

By 2012, in a decisive act of no confidence, nearly all the safety experts responsible for preventing nuclear criticality accidents at Los Alamos resigned in protest over what has been described as the “cowboy culture” at the lab. The NNSA couldn’t ignore the mass protest, which led to a four-year closure of the lab’s plutonium processing facility, known as “PF-4.” Now, however, the Trump administration is aggressively pushing to restart nuclear weapons production on an industrial scale, giving Los Alamos a green light to make plutonium pits in much greater numbers at an antiquated facility that is unable to demonstrate it can meet safety requirements.

Currently, about half of the contractor employees with skills critical to maintaining the US nuclear weapons stockpile are close to retirement. The safety board needs to make sure that staff cuts and loss of staff morale do not similarly diminish its institutional expertise. At the same time, Congress should step in and strengthen the board’s presence at and access to nuclear weapons complex sites and its powers of access. Congress also needs to provide adequate funding and to prevent the Energy Department from curtailing safety board activities that have been so critical to protecting workers and the public alike.

Though the Cold War is long over, the Energy Department’s antiquated, contractor-dominated management system—in which safety goal posts are easily moved behind closed doors—continues to endure and, in some cases, thrive. Without the meaningful oversight of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, the nuclear weapons complex will predictably march back to a time, in the not-so-distant past, when public and worker safety was an afterthought—with serious consequences.

*

A senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

California’s net neutrality bill, S.B. 822 has received a majority of votes in the Senate and is heading to the governor’s desk. In this fight, ISPs with millions of dollars to spend lost to the voice of the majority of Americans who support net neutrality. This is a victory that can be replicated.

ISPs like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast hated this bill. S.B. 822 bans blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization, classic ways that companies have violated net neutrality principles. It also incorporates much of what the FCC learned and incorporated into the 2015 Open Internet Order, preventing new assaults on the free and open Internet. This includes making sure companies can’t circumvent net neutrality at the point of interconnection within the state of California. It also prevents companies from using zero rating—the practice of not counting certain apps or services against a data limit—in a discriminatory way. That is to say that, say, there could be a plan where all media streaming services were zero-rated, but not one where just one was. One that had either paid for the privilege or one owned by the service provider. In that respect, it’s a practice much like discriminatory paid prioritization, where ISPs create fast lanes for those who can pay or for other companies they own.

ISPs and their surrogates waged a war of misinformation on this bill. They argued that net neutrality made it impossible to invest in expanding and upgrading their service, even though they make plenty of money. Lobbying groups sent out robocalls that didn’t mention net neutrality—which remains overwhelmingly popular—merely mentioned the bill’s number and claimed, with no evidence, that it would force ISPs to raise their prices by $30. And they argued against the zero-rating provision when we know those practices disproportionately affect lower-income consumers [pdf].

There was a brief moment in this fight when it looked like the ISPs had won. Amendments offered in the Assembly Committee on Communication and Conveyance after the bill had passed the California Senate mostly intact gutted the bill. But you made your voices heardagain and again until the bill’s strength was restored and we turned opponents into supporters in the legislature.

In the middle of all of this, the story broke that Verizon had throttled the service of a fire department in California during a wildfire. During the largest wildfire in California history, the Santa Clara fire department found that its “unlimited” data plan was being throttled by Verizon and, when contacted, the ISP told the fire department they needed to pay more for a better plan. Under the 2015 Open Internet Order, the FCC would have been able to investigate Verizon’s actions. But since that order’s been repealed, Verizon might escape meaningful punishment for its actions.

The story underscored the importance of FCC oversight and its public safety implications. On August 30, S.B. 822 passed the California Assembly and then, on August 31, it received enough Senate votes to continue to the governor. With the governor’s signature, California will have passed a model net neutrality bill.

California’s fight is a microcosm of the nation’s. Net neutrality is popular across the country. The same large ISPs that led the fight against it in California are the ones that serve the rest of the country, a majority of which don’t have a choice of provider. The arguments that they made in California are the same ones they made to the FCC to get the Open Internet Order repealed. The only thing preventing what happened to California’s firefighters from happening elsewhere is Verizon saying it won’t.

We need to net neutrality protections on as many levels as we can get them. And Congress can still vote to restore the FCC’s 2015 Open Internet Order. In fact, the Senate already did. So contact your member of the House of Representatives and tell them to vote for the Congressional Review Act and save national net neutrality protections.

*

Featured image is from the author.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Three-and-a-half years of US orchestrated, Saudi/UAE aggression in Yemen were punctuated by repeated massacres of defenseless civilians, along with other horrendous human rights abuses.

Both sides committed war crimes. Ones by Houthi fighters pale in comparison to genocidal criminality by the Saudis and UAE -supported by the US, UK and France.

They include mass slaughter of civilians and vast destruction, torture at secret black sites,  suffocating blockade, and naked aggression. They’re responsible for killing a nation, creating the world’s severest humanitarian crisis.

Most often the Saudis and UAE deny their horrific high crimes, at times later admitting involvement in incidents causing scores of casualties – calling premeditated mass murder “mistakes.”

On August 2, Saudi/UAE terror-bombing massacred over 55 civilians in Hodeidah, Yemen’s port city, over 100 others injured.

Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, president of the Houthis-led Revolutionary Committee, tweeted:

This incident “confirms for the thousand(th) time that the leaders of the aggression reject peace.”

After initially denying responsibility for terror-bombing a funeral on October 15, 2016, massacring at least 140 civilians, injuring over 500 others, Riyadh turned truth on its head, blaming the incident on “wrong information” – supplied by an unnamed source (likely US or UK intelligence), claiming the funeral was a legitimate target, a bald-faced lie.

The incident was a horrific war crime.

The war is a bonanza for the Western arms and munitions producers including US, France, Britain and Canada.

The US, UK and France are complicit in years of mass slaughter and destruction throughout the Middle East, supplying the most arms – the Saudis, Egypt and UAE the leading buyers.

Nearly half of US arms exports go to the region, supplying about one-third of all arms worldwide, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

America, Britain, France, and other EU nations supply 98% of weapons sold to the Saudis. Other regional countries buy most of their arms from the same sources.

Arms to the region are mostly for warmaking, not defense. The Middle East is by far the largest regional market for weapons – oil rich states buying huge amounts.

Billions of dollars Washington gives Israel annually almost entirely go for arms and related technology purchases – used for state-terror and aggression on Palestinians, along with terror-bombing Syrian targets.

In early August, Saudi warplanes terror-bombed a school bus in Houthi-controlled northern Saada province’s Dahyan city, killing dozens, including at least 29 young children under age-10, injuring a reported 77 others, according to the ICRC.

Sanaa-based Yemeni journalist Hussain al-Bukhaiti blasted Saudi/UAE terror-bombing saying:

“Since the beginning of this war, they have committed many crimes, and they only regret or release…a statement…if that crime has been covered widely (i)n the media.”

Initially the Saudis claimed Houthi officials were on the school bus – a bald-faced lie.  In response to the school bus massacre, a pathetic Saudi state news agency statement said:

“The Joint Forces Command of the Coalition expresses regret over the mistakes, extends its sympathies, condolences and solidarity to the families of the victims.”

In response to the premeditated massacre, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres pathetically called for an independent investigation – certain to whitewash the high crime if conducted.

He was silent about US orchestrated/Saudi-led naked aggression in Yemen, supporting Washington’s imperial agenda by failing to condemn it.

On Thursday, another Saudi-led terror-bombing incident massacred nearly two dozen children and four women in Ad Durayhimi, around 12 miles from Hodeidah.

Ad Durayhimi head of security Col. Omar al-Hashibari said Saudi-led warplanes continued flying over the attack site, preventing Yemeni Red Crescent paramedics from evacuating injured civilians.

A UAE statement falsely blamed Houthis for the atrocity. They continue repeatedly in Yemen – a genocidal war getting scant media attention.

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

Today, a U.S. District Court judge granted wildlife advocates’ motion for a temporary restraining order to block planned grizzly bear trophy hunts in Idaho and Wyoming for at least 14 days. This came after a hearing regarding a high-profile case over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services’ 2017 decision to strip grizzly bears in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem of vital Endangered Species Act protections, and provides the court time to deliberate on the merits of the case.

“We’re profoundly relieved the grizzly bears got a stay of execution today,” said Bethany Cotton with WildEarth Guardians. “We look forward to the judge’s thorough findings on all of the myriad flaws in the government’s approach to grizzly bear management in Greater Yellowstone.”

In the order, the court wrote that the plaintiffs’ arguments raise “serious questions going to the merits.” At minimum, the current issue is extremely similar to that recently presented in Humane Society of the United States v. Zinke, 865 F.3d 585 (D.C. Cir. 2017), in which the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals held that Fish and Wildlife Service violated the Administrative Procedure Act and the Endangered Species Act when it isolated and delisted a distinct population segment without considering the legal and functional impact on the remainder of the species.

“We applaud Judge Christensen’s decision to hit the pause button,” said Matthew Bishop, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center. “There is simply no need to rush into a grizzly bear hunt, with potentially devastating consequences for this iconic species, when the merits of that hunt are being reviewed in federal court.”

Grizzlies in the Yellowstone region remain threatened by dwindling food sources, climate change, small population size, isolation, habitat loss and fragmentation, and high levels of human-caused mortality. The Yellowstone population is isolated and has yet to connect to bears elsewhere in the U.S., including to bears in and around Glacier National Park. Grizzlies also have yet to reclaim key historic habitats, including the Bitterroot Range along the Montana-Idaho border.

Hunted, trapped, and poisoned to near extinction, grizzly bear populations in the contiguous U.S. declined drastically from nearly 50,000 bears to only a few hundred by the 1930s. In response to the decline, the Service designated the species as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1975, a move that likely saved them from extinction. The species has since struggled to hang on, with only roughly 1,800 currently surviving in the lower 48 states. Grizzlies remain absent from nearly 98 percent of their historic range. Last year (2017) marked the highest mortality for the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem’s grizzlies since their ESA listing.

Grizzly bear mortality in 2018 is proceeding at a record pace, even without the added mortalities from trophy hunting which would have claimed up to 22 more. At last count, approximately 690 grizzly bears resided in the Greater Yellowstone region, down from 2015’s count of 717 bears. The last three years had near record-breaking grizzly mortality, with at least 41 bears killed in 2017, and an additional 15 listed as probable mortalities. Of this, at least 32 were killed by humans, and humans were responsible for at least 9 of the 15 probable deaths. As of this writing, 34 grizzlies are on the 2018 known and probable mortalities list for the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, far outpacing previous years’ rates.

Bomb attacks, ambushes, mysterious illnesses — militant leaders in eastern Ukraine often die in violent and dramatic ways, even far away from the frontline. And now, Alexander Zakharchenko has died in a bomb blast.

Rebels in Ukraine are still reeling from the assassination of the head of the self-proclaimed “Donetsk People’s Republic,” Alexander Zakharchenko, who was killed by a bomb blast on August 31 while sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Donetsk. The entity’s “finance minister” and a youth leader were injured in the attack. The rebels say they captured “Ukrainian operatives” after the bombing.

However, 42-year-old Zakharchenko is only the latest in a line of rebel commanders who have died in dramatic ways. Another Donetsk leader, Vladimir Makovich, briefly served as the “vice speaker” of the rebel assembly in 2014 before fading into the background of the rebel administration. He died in 2017, with the official cause of death being a brain tumor. He was 54-years-old.

Shot during an ambush

Just a few months before Makovich’s passing, battalion commander Mikhail Tolstykh was killed when someone fired an incendiary rocket at his office outside Donetsk. Tolstykh, better known by his nom de guerre “Givi,” was 36 at the time.

In 2016, top militant leader Arsen Pavlov, also know as “Motorola,” was killed when a bomb was placed in an elevator of his apartment building. The Russian-born warlord was 33, and the commander of the so-called “Sparta” battalion. Rebel officials blamed both of the commanders’ deaths on “Ukrainian operatives.” Kyiv denied any involvement and pointed the finger at Moscow, describing such attacks as Russia-sponsored “purges.”

Heart attack at 46

All in all, nearly a dozen high-ranking militants were killed in the last three years. Others faced unexpected diseases.

To read complete article by Deutsche Welle, click here

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) opposes US President Donald Trump’s decision to cease all funding to the UN aid agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). The Trump administration declared Friday that it was cutting all funding to UNRWA, calling the organization an “irredeemably flawed operation,” and seeking to reduce the number of Palestinians recognized as “refugees” under the UN system. Nevertheless, CJPME points out that it is the UN which defines which individuals are considered refugees, and that UNRWA adheres to international norms in defining the population of Palestinian refugees that it serves. “This is a sad ploy by Trump to further disempower Palestinians, to the political advantage of the US’ ally Israel,” declared Thomas Woodley, president of CJPME.

It is extremely unlikely that the UN would suddenly revamp its definition of what constitutes a refugee just to suit the Trump administration’s agenda on Israel-Palestine. CJPME notes that the world has addressed refugee crises for decades according to fair and humanitarian principles, and has successfully resolved dozens of refugee crises. “Canada must follow the example of Germany and Japan, and commit to greater funding to UNRWA to offset the US decision,” asserts Woodley. Canada’s current funding constitutes less than 2% of UNWRA’s overall funds. Canada, as gavel-holder for the Refugee Working Group, should also step in to fill the gap left by the US’ dearth of legitimate leadership on the issue.

The question of Palestinian refugees has long been considered a “final status” issue, to be determined only as part of a final peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Just like the situation with Jerusalem, the Trump administration has sought to predefine a solution to the conflict, without bringing the two sides to any mutual compromise. In response to accusations that the existence of UNWRA impedes a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said,

“It is not UNRWA that perpetuates the conflict, it is the conflict that perpetuates UNRWA; it is the failure of the political parties through negotiations to produce an overall peace agreement and thereby resolve the refugee crisis.”

UNRWA serves around 5 million Palestinian refugees living mostly in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and Gaza. The bulk of its funds support education and health care to the Palestinian refugees under its care. It is supported by dozens of different international donor organizations, who view it as a key to the stability and development of the Palestine refugee population. UNRWA began operations in 1950 to serve the 700,000 Palestinians displaced through the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel. If UNWRA were to cease operations, the refugees under its care would fall under the care of the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR.)

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

US President Donald Trump has joined a Chief Rabbi and a mendacious media in condemning 5 million Palestinians to starvation in their own land as allegations of antisemitism are used as a weapon in UK politics to try to prevent a Labour government taking power under Jeremy Corbyn.

The Trump White House has now acceded to Israeli demands by Binyamin Netanyahu to end nearly $300m of US funding for a UN relief program to Palestinian refugees already denied electricity and essential supplies for over 10 years in a classic attempt at ethnic cleansing.

The BBC and Channel 4 stand out as two UK media outlets to report honestly to the British public when 90% of Conservative-owned newspapers print daily misinformation in order to try to ensure Labour is kept out of government in order to avoid new legislation governing press behaviour and the re-nationalisation of public utilities, and the national rail network.

Allegations of antisemitism, rife in Conservative circles, are used as a daily weapon to delegitimise the British Labour Party. Print media is used to sway public opinion by publishing damaging pictures and inflammatory stories every day against the Labour Party executive in attempt to keep Tories in power for another 20 years.

The British media is allowed to print fake news without any penalty in a blatant attempt to sway public opinion against Labour with outrageous lies and ever increasing misinformation.

Britain now follows America in ditching democracy in favour of big money, powerful lobbyists paid by foreign embassies and political propaganda driven by unlimited funds from both Christian and Jewish Zionists in Washington and hard-Right Tory, pro-Israel evangelists in the United Kingdom.

*

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

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

The United States has reportedly drawn up a preliminary list of facilities in Syria that could be targeted in case of a false flag chemical weapons attack in the war-torn country.

Several US officials told CNN on Friday that American intelligence and military targeting experts had already compiled the list, but a decision to launch the strike has not been made.

One of the officials said that the US military “could respond very quickly” to an alleged gas attack in Syria and that the initial targeting data would give the Pentagon a head start if President Donald Trump orders assault.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States views the Syrian government military assault on terrorist-held Idlib as an escalation of the Syrian conflict.

The Syrian province of Idlib and surrounding areas are the last major enclave held by terrorists.

“The US sees this as an escalation of an already dangerous conflict,” Pompeo said in a post on Twitter in which he also blasted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov for defending the operation.

Damascus and Moscow have warned that the US, along with Britain and France, is gearing up for a new military attack against Syria as the army prepares for a liberation operation in Idlib.

Syria and Russia also obtained evidence revealing yet another plot by Takfiri terrorists to carry out a chemical attack in Idlib and pin the blame on Damascus with the aim of justifying an ensuing Western act of aggression.

On April 14, the US, Britain and France launched a coordinated missile strike against sites and research facilities near Damascus and Homs with the purported goal of paralyzing the Syrian government’s capability to produce chemicals.

The strike came one week after an alleged gas attack hit the Damascus suburb town of Douma, just as the Syrian army was about to win the battle against the militants there.

Western states blamed the Syrian government for the incident, but Damascus firmly rejected the accusation.

On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told Western states not to “play with fire” in Idlib.

“It’s well known that the progress of Syrian resolution, humanitarian solutions and fight against terrorism is not to everyone’s liking,” he said.

The Pentagon claimed in response that Moscow “is seeking to plant false lies about the use of chemical weapons” in Syria.

Elsewhere in their remarks, American officials told CNN that the Russians may have engaged in the buildup of naval warships ahead of a possible US strike.

“By having so many ships there, the Russians can attempt to use their shipborne radars to blanket that area and ‘see’ any potential US Tomahawk missiles coming,” an official said, warning that Russian shipborne radars could cue S-400 missile systems in Syria and try to shoot US missiles down.

‘Syria resolved to liberate Idlib’

Syria’s deputy foreign minister on Friday stressed that his country is determined to end the presence of terror outfits in Idlib, noting that certain Western countries continue to support militants through circulating “lies” on the use of chemical weapons.

In an interview with the Syrian TV, Faisal Mekdad censured a media misleading campaign regarding Syria’s planned counter-terrorism operation in Idlib.

“If the Western forces take any reckless step, Syria will retaliate and will be not be subjugated and it will practice its self-defense right which is guaranteed by all the international laws,” he said.

Mikdad further reiterated that terrorists are the ones who use chemical weapons in Syria.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The Iranian rial: crash. The Turkish lira: crash. The Argentine peso: crash. The Brazilian real: crash. There are multiple, complex, parallel vectors at play in this wilderness of crashing currencies. Turkey’s case is heavily influenced by the bubble of easy credit created by European banks.

Argentina’s problem is mostly to do with the neoliberal austerity of President Mauricio Macri’s government admitting it won’t be able to fulfill payment targets agreed with the IMF less than three months ago.

Iran’s has to do with harsh United States sanctions imposed after the Trump administration’s unilateral pullout from the Iran nuclear deal.

Brazil’s has to do with what the Goddess of the Market considers anathema: a victory by the imprisoned Lula (former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva) or his appointed candidate in the presidential election next October.

This is a serious currency crisis affecting key emerging markets. Three of these – Brazil, Argentina and Turkey – are G20 members, and Iran, absent external pressure, would have everything to qualify as a member. Two – Iran and Turkey – are under US sanctions while the other two, at least for the moment, are firmly within Washington’s orbit.

Now, compare it with currencies that are gaining against the US dollar: the Ukrainian hryvnia, the Georgian lari and the Colombian peso. Not exactly G20 heavyweights – and all of them also inside Washington’s influence.

Behold the axis of gold

Independent analysts from Russia and Turkey to Brazil and Iran largely agree that the overwhelming factor in the current currency crisis is a reversing of the US Federal Reserve quantitative easing (QE) policy.

As investment banker and risk manager Jim Rickards noted, QE for all practical purposes represented the Fed declaring a currency war against the whole planet – printing US dollars at will on a trillion-dollar scale. That meant mounting US debt was devalued so foreign creditors were paid back with cheaper US dollars.

Now, the Fed has dramatically reversed course and is all-out invested in quantitative tightening (QT).

No more liquid dollars flooding emerging markets such as Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, Indonesia or India. US interest rates are up. The Fed stopped buying new bonds. The US Treasury is issuing new bond debt. Thus QT, combined with a global, targeted trade war against major emerging markets, spells out the new normal: the weaponization of the US dollar.

It’s no wonder that Russia, China, Turkey, Iran – nearly every major regional player invested in Eurasia integration – is buying gold with the aim of progressively getting out of US dollar hegemony. As JP Morgan himself coined it over a century ago, “Gold is money. All else is credit.”

Every currency war though is not about gold; it’s about the US dollar. Yet the US dollar now is like an inscrutable visitor from outer space, dependent on massive leverage; a galaxy of dodgy derivatives; the QE printing scheme; and gold not being awarded its true importance.

That is about to change. Russia and China are heavily invested in buying gold. Russia has dumped US Treasuries en masse. And what the BRICS had been discussing since the mid-2000s is now in motion; the drive to build alternative payment systems to the US dollar-subordinated SWIFT.

Germany appears to be coming around to the idea. If that does happen, it could possibly lead the way towards Europe redefining itself geopolitically in terms of its military and strategic independence.

When and if that happens, arguably at some point in the next decade, US foreign policy configured as an avalanche of sanctions may be effectively neutralized.

It will be a long, protracted affair – but some elements are already visible, as in China using US trading markets to help the emergence of a wider platform transference. After all key emerging markets cannot wiggle out of the US dollar system without full yuan convertibility.

And then there are nations contemplating the creation of their own cryptocurrencies. Digital finance is the way to go.

Some nations, for instance, could use a cryptocurrency denominated in SDRs (special drawing rights) – which is, in practice, the world money as designated by the IMF. They could back their new digital coins with gold.

Mired-in-crisis Venezuela is at least showing the way. The “sovereign bolivar” started circulating last week – pegged to a new cryptocurrency, the petro, which is worth 3,600 sovereign bolivars.

The new cryptocurrency is already posing a fascinating question: “Is the petro a forward sale of oil or an external debt backed by oil?” After all, BRICS members are buying a large chunk of the 100 million petros – confident that they are backed by a surefire reserve, the Ayacucho block of the Orinoco Oil Belt.

Venezuelan economist Tony Boza nailed it when he stressed the peg between the petro and international oil prices: “We are not going to be subject to the value of our currency being determined by a website, the oil market will determine it.”

A Persian cryptocurrency?

And that brings us to the key question of the US economic war on Iran. Persian Gulf traders are virtually unanimous: the global oil market is tightening, fast, and it will run short in the next two months.

Iran oil exports will likely drop to just over 2 million barrels a day in August. Compare it to a peak of 3.1 million barrels a day in April.

It looks like a lot of players are folding even before Trump’s oil sanctions kick in.

It also looks like the mood in Tehran is “we will survive,” but it’s not exactly clear the Iranian leadership is really aware of the nature of the incoming tempest.

The latest Oxford Economics report seems pretty realistic:

“We expect the sanctions to tip the economy back into recession, with GDP now seen contracting by 3.7% in 2019, the worst economic performance in six years. For 2020, we see growth of 0.5%, driven by a modest recovery in private consumption and net exports.”

The authors of the report, Mohamed Bardastani and Maya Senussi, say

“the other signatories to the original deal [the JCPOA, especially the EU-3] have yet to spell out a clear strategy that would allow them to circumvent US sanctions and continue importing Iranian oil.”

The report also admits the obvious: there will be no internal push in Iran for regime change (that’s a thing only happening in warped US neocon minds) while “both reformers and conservatives are united in defying the sanctions.”

But defying how? Tehran has not come up with a win-win roadmap capable of being sold to anyone – from JCPOA members to energy importers such as Japan, South Korea and Turkey. That would represent true Eurasia integration. Just having Ayatollah Khamenei saying Iran is ready to pull out of the JCPOA is not good enough.

What about a Persian cryptocurrency?

*

Featured image is from iStock.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Today we’re joined by Mick Harrison (and David Meiswinkle) of the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry to discuss their recent petition to the U. S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York to convene a special grand jury into the unprosecuted federal crimes relating to the destruction of three World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. We talk about the committee and its formation, the nature and powers of a special grand jury, and what legal options remain for those seeking justice for 9/11.

.

.

*

Featured image is from the author.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Ten years ago, there was panic in Washington, DC, New York City and financial centers around the world as the United States was in the midst of an economic collapse. The crash became the focus of the presidential campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain and was followed by protests that created a popular movement, which continues to this day.

Banks: Bailed Out; The People: Sold Out

On the campaign trail, in March 2008, Obama blamed mismanagement of the economy on both Democrats and Republicans for rewarding financial manipulation rather than economic productivity. He called for funds to protect homeowners from foreclosure and to stabilize local governments and urged a 21st Century regulation of the financial system. John McCain opposed federal intervention, saying the country should not bail out banks or homeowners who knowingly took financial risks.

By September 2008, McCain and Obama met with President George W. Bush and together they called for a $700 billion bailout of the banks, not the people. Obama and McCain issued a joint statement that called the bank bailout plan “flawed,” but said, “the effort to protect the American economy must not fail.” Obama expressed “outrage” at the “crisis,” which was “a direct result of the greed and irresponsibility that has dominated Washington and Wall Street for years.”

By October 2008, the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), or bank bailout, had recapitalized the banks, the Treasury had stabilized money market mutual funds and the FDIC had guaranteed the bank debts. The Federal Reserve began flowing money to banks, which would ultimately total almost twice the $16 trillion claimed in a federal audit. Researchers at the University of Missouri found that the Federal Reserve gave over $29 trillion to the banks.

This did not stop the loss of nine million jobs, more than four million foreclosures and the deep reduction in wealth among the poor, working and middle classes. A complete banking collapse was averted, but a deep recession for most people was not.

The New Yorker described the 2008 crash as years in the making, writing:

“…the crisis took years to emerge. It was caused by reckless lending practices, Wall Street greed, outright fraud, lax government oversight in the George W. Bush years, and deregulation of the financial sector in the Bill Clinton years. The deepest source, going back decades, was rising inequality. In good times and bad, no matter which party held power, the squeezed middle class sank ever further into debt.”

Before his inauguration, Obama proposed an economic stimulus plan, but, as Paul Krugman wrote,

“Obama’s prescription doesn’t live up to his diagnosis. The economic plan he’s offering isn’t as strong as his language about the economic threat.”

In the end, the stimulus was even smaller than what Obama proposed. Economist Dean Baker explained that it may have created 2 million jobs, but we needed 12 million. It was $300 billion in 2009, about the same in 2010, and the remaining $100 billion followed over several years — too small to offset the $1.4 trillion in annual lost spending.

New York Magazine reports the stimulus was “a spending stimulus bigger, by some measures than the entire New Deal.” But unlike the New Deal, which benefited people at the bottom and built a foundation for a long-term economy, the bi-partisan post-2008 stimulus bailed out Wall Street and left Main Street behind.

Wall Street executives were not prosecuted even though the financial crisis was in large part caused by their fraud. Bankers were given fines costing dimes on the dollar without being required to admit guilt or having their cases referred for prosecution. The fines were paid by shareholders, not the perpetrators.

Protest near Union Square in New York, April, 2010. Popular Resistance.

Still at Risk

Many of the root causes of the crisis remain today, making another economic downturn or collapse possible. The New Yorker reports that little has changed since 2008, with Wall Street banks returning to risky behavior and the inadequate regulation of Dodd-Frank being weakened. Big finance is more concentrated and dominant than it was before the crash. Inequality and debt have expanded, and despite the capital class getting wealthier in a record stock market with corporate profits soaring, real wages are stuck at pre-crisis levels.

People are economically insecure in the US and live with growing despair, as measured by reports on well-being. The Federal Reserve reported in 2017 that “two in five Americans don’t have enough savings to cover a $400 emergency expense.” Further, “more than one in five said they weren’t able to pay the current month’s bills in full, and more than one in four said they skipped necessary medical care last year because they couldn’t afford it.”

Positive Money writes:

 “Ten years on, big banks are still behaving in reckless, unfair and neglectful ways. The structural problems with our money and banking system still haven’t been fixed. And many experts fear that if we don’t change things soon, we’re going to sleepwalk into another crash.”

William Cohen, a former mergers and acquisitions banker on Wall Street, writes that the fundamentals of US economy are still flawed. The Economist describes the current situation: “The patient is in remission, not cured.”

From Occupy Washington DC at Freedom Plaza.

The Response Of the Popular Movement

Larry Eliott wrote in the Guardian,

“Capitalism’s near-death experience with the banking crisis was a golden opportunity for progressives.”

But the movement in the United States was not yet in a position to take advantage of it.

There were immediate protests. Democratic Party-aligned groups such as USAction, True Majority and others organized nationwide actions. Over 1,000 people demonstrated on Wall Street and phones in Congress were ringing wildly. While there was opposition to the bailout, there was a lack of national consensus over what to do.

Protests continued to grow. In late 2009, a “Move Your Money” campaign was started that urged people to take their money out of the big banks and put it in community banks and credit unions. The most visible anti-establishment rage in response to the bailout arose later in the Tea Party and Occupy movements. Both groups shared a consensus that we live in a rigged economy created by a corrupt political establishment. It was evident that the US is an oligarchy, which serves the interests of the wealthy while ignoring the necessities of the people.

The anti-establishment consensus continues to grow and showed itself in the 2016 presidential campaigns of Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. They were two sides of the same coin of populist anger that defeated Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Across the political spectrum, there is a political crisis with both mainstream, Wall Street-funded political parties being unpopular but staying in power due to a calcified political system that protects the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans.

Occupy Wall Street 2011.

Preparing for the Next Collapse

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Featured image: A girl child taking extra class in the summer in Damascus

My friend, a senior UN official based in Amman, Jordan, recently received a newsletter from an Israeli institution – “IMPACT-se”. Their report was called, ‘modestly’, “Reformulating School Textbooks During the Civil War”.

It is full of analyses of the Syrian curriculum. 

Interesting stuff, without any doubt: Manipulative, negative, but interesting. It made it to many other places in the Middle East; to Lebanon, for instance, where even the word “Israel” is hardly ever pronounced.

Predictably, being compiled in Israel, the report trashes Syria, its ideology, and the determined anti-imperialist stand of President al-Assad. 

However, that may backfire. Excerpts that are quoted from the Syrian curriculum would impress both education experts, as well as the general public, if they were to get their hands and eyes on them. And I am trying to facilitate precisely that, in this essay.

What the report found outrageous and deplorable, others could find very reasonable and positive. Let’s read, here is what the “IMPACT-se” is quoting, while ringing alarm bells:

“Saddam Hussein took power, and his period witnessed a number of wars in the Arab Gulf area. The first was with Iran, called the First Gulf War (1980–88), which occurred through incitement by the US, in order to weaken both countries. History, Grade 12, 2017–18, p. 105.”

Well put, isn’t it? But it gets much better, philosophically. Imagine, this brilliant intellectual stuff is actually served to all Syrian children in their public schools, while in Europe and North America; kids are fed with neo-colonialist mainstream propaganda. No wonder that Syrian children are much better versed in what is happening in the world. No wonder that millions of Syrian refugees are now ready to return home, after the abuse they received abroad, and after realizing how indoctrinated and brainwashed by Western propaganda, the people all over the world are. 

“IMPACT-se” continues quoting the Syrian curriculum, naively thinking that the words engraved there, will terrify the entire world:

“This competition and struggle worsened as the capitalist system developed and new occupying forces such as the US, took control over international politics. It exploited its scientific, technological, economic and military supremacy in order to expand its influence and [gain] control over the capabilities of the peoples of the world. This was done in cooperation with its allies, to increase its presence in the international arena as the only undisputed superpower. National Education, Grade 8, 2017–18, p. 81.(The US) strives to maintain its supremacy by monopolizing developing technology, controlling wealth and energy sources in the world, most importantly oil, and forcing its hegemony on the international community. National Education, Grade 8, 2017–18, p. 82.

This could be easily written by the progressive economist Peter Koenig, by the international lawyer Christopher Black, or, why not, by myself. 

Children in Damascus taking summer programme

The people, who worked on the Syrian curriculum, combined two things brilliantly: 1) indisputable facts, 2) elegant simplicity! Actually, this curriculum should be offered not only to the Middle East kids, but all over the world.

Look how skillfully and honestly it summarizes modern history:

“After the disappearance of international balance and unipolar hegemony took control of the world, the US began searching for excuses to justify its intervention in other countries. It occupied Afghanistan in 2002, under the pretext of fighting against “terrorism” in order to realize its political and economic goals. One of the goals was to build an advanced military base close to countries which the US considers to be dangerous (Russia, China, India, Iran and North Korea). In addition, Afghanistan had many assets (such as iron ore and gas). In 2003, the US—helped by a group of countries—declared war on Iraq under the pretext that Iraq was holding weapons of mass destruction and aiding terrorism. The occupation came after an unjust siege and air strikes over Iraqi cities and institutions, without authorization from the UN general assembly and the Security Council. National Education, Grade 8, 2017–18, p. 82

Making the world become one form, one structure and one model, which is the most powerful model now controlling the world, economically and militarily—the American model. The hegemony of the capitalist system . . . turning the world into a consumer market for Western products and ideas, while stripping the nation of its principles, customs and traditions, abolishing its personality and identity, first diluting and then gradually eliminating nations and cultures. National Education, Grade 12, 2017–18, p. 31.”

According to “IMPACT-se”, this is supposed to scare random readers, providing proof how evil the ‘regime in Damascus’ is!

The opposite is true.

An international (non-Western) educator, who is presently based in the Middle East, explained to me over a cup of coffee. I think that this statement is actually a good summary of what many others that are studying the Syrian curriculum really feel:

“Education reflects the vision of a given society.  The heart of what a society expects from its citizens is in the curriculum.  Having carefully read the analysis of the new Syrian curriculum and textbooks reinforces my strong conviction of how great a society Syria really is.”

*

Let us see the ‘other side’; those who are critical of Syrian education, those who are making a living from such criticism and from antagonizing the system.

ESCWA (United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia), based in Beirut, Lebanon, has an initiative defined as ‘the future of Syria for the peace-building phase’. This ‘process’ involves Syrian experts from all walks of life.

But who are these experts? In 2018, during the expert’s meeting on education, the list included these specialists:

– Former professors (education and law) of Aleppo University

– Former professor of Damascus University

– Head of an education NGO in Lebanon

– Academics and researchers now based in Turkey and Germany

– Independent consultants

Clearly, if at this meeting any participants were Syrians, they were ‘former some things’. Meaning exiles, anti-government cadres, and mostly pegged to some Western organization (predominantly the organizations based in France or Germany). Not one person from the legitimate government of Syria was invited! A typical Western approach: “about them, without them”.

With or without textbooks children flock to school in newly liberated Aleppo, January 2017

And these people who are serving Western interests, are supposed to help to define a component on education which is considered vital to “reconciliation and social cohesion in post-war Syria”.

Predictably, instead of promoting reconciliation, the speeches were full of hate, bitter and aggressive, anti-Syrian and pro-Western. ‘Experts’ used terminology such as: ‘Hegemony of the Syrian regime’, ‘The Ba’ath Party is only concerned about ideology, never giving Syrians an identity’ (they were actually demanding that religions would serve as ‘identity’, replacing the presently secular Syrian state), ‘We need to talk about the truth of what happened in 2011, what led to the war in 2011. Without that nothing makes sense’ (but the ‘truth about 2011’ in their minds has definitely nothing to do with the fact that the West encouraged the anti-government rebellion, injected jihadi cadres and triggered the brutal civil war aimed at overthrowing a social state).

Their main point seems to be: ‘The war has strengthened the culture of hatred’.

Correct, but not because of the Syrian state, but, because of people like those ‘experts’!

What do they really want? Religion instead of secularism, capitalism instead of socialism, and of course, the Western perception of ‘democracy’, instead of a patriotic and pan-Arab independent vision of the state.

*

No matter how one turns it, the Syrian education system, including its curriculum, appears to be greatly superior to those in the neighboring countries. Perhaps that is why it is being placed under scrutiny and under attack.

After all, wasn’t the main goal of the West, in 2011 and after, to destroy yet another socialist, internationalist state that was primarily serving its people?

And the state of Israel? What is “IMPACT-se” mainly complaining about? What is irking it most, in the Syrian curriculum? Perhaps this, in its own words and analyses:

“The Syrian curriculum bases Syrian national identity on the principles of a continued struggle to realize one Arab Nation that includes all Arab states, constituting one country, the “Arab Homeland.” The textbooks present the borders dividing the Arab states as artificial, having been imposed by European colonialism.”

For most of us, this is actually, not bad, is it?

Or possibly this:

“The current borders are political ones, drawn through the policy of the colonial powers that had controlled the region, especially France and Britain. They do not overlap the natural borders that used to separate the Arab Homeland from the neighboring countries. So, important changes took place in these borders to the benefit of those countries and to the detriment of the Arab land. Geography of the Arab Homeland and the World, Grade 12, 2017–2018, p. 13.”

What is incredibly impressive, is, how the Syrian curriculum addresses the Soviet period of its close ally – Russia:

“We shall become acquainted with the reality of Russia prior to the Communist Revolution, and the causes which led to its political, economic, social and intellectual renaissance, from World War I until the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Russian Federation in 1991. History, Grade 8, 2017–18, p. 98. 

The Socialist Revolution in Russia broke out in order to confront the imperial regime. It declared the establishment of the first socialist country in 1917. [The Revolution] was based on the rule of the workers and the peasants, and it had a global impact, as it supported national liberation movements. History of the Modern and Contemporary World, Grade 11, 2017–18, p. 168.

Gorbachev took over the leadership of the state and party in 1988, and aspired to implement a plan of economic, social and ideological reconstruction. However, the imperialistic countries conspired against the destiny of the Soviet Union and took advantage of the administrative corruption and the circumstances of multiple nationalities, leading to its dissolution in 1991 and the establishment of the Russian Federation in its place. History, Grade 8, 2017–18, pp. 99–100”

Actually, if I could, if I were to be allowed to, I’d love my publishing house (Badak Merah) to publish the Syrian curriculum, or at least its part on history and politics, for everyone outside Syria to read.

What the Israeli “IMPACT-se” sees as alarming or negative, most people all over the world and particularly in the Arab region, would definitely perceive as truthful, optimistic and worth fighting for.

Are the experts from “IMPACT-se” so naïve that they do not realize it? Or is there something else going on? Perhaps we will never find out. 

No matter what: thank you for reminding us of the great Syrian curriculum! It clearly shows how great a nation Syria is!

*

This article was originally published on New Eastern Outlook.

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

All images in this article are from Yayoi Segi.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

“Every notion of progress is refuted by the existence of the Iliad.” – Roberto Calasso, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony

“The spectacle is the nightmare of imprisoned modern society which ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of sleep.” – Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

It’s still the same old story.  The best propaganda places individual stories within a larger framework.  The individual is extolled or damned in the service of the controlling myth.

Senator John McCain is a case in point.  As an individual, he is not important, except as the glorified stories about him and his own confabulations about himself can be used to enhance the controlling myth.  American history is replete with such bloodthirsty, war-mongering individuals, whose lives and stories serve to enhance the American myth of being “God’s New Israel” and Americans being God’s chosen people whose mission is to spread “freedom” and “democracy” around the world with our “terrible swift swords.”  

As Bob Dylan put it,

“But I learned to accept it/Accept it with pride/For you don’t count the dead/When God’s on your side.”

Myths are the invisible narrative skeletons of our outward lives. They are limited in number and keep getting reused in different forms.   All we do hangs upon their bones.  This is true for nations and for individuals.  Myths are what people take for granted and do not question.  Our lives are telling stories, and myth means story.  

We tell our lives by living stories.  Then others tell those stories about us when we are dead.  

Of course, some control freaks try to manage their myths from the grave, as did McCain, who knew how the game is played, and who got his brothers-in-arms, George W. Bush and Barack Obama to polish his myth as he lay silent before them.  

“We Lost a Good One,” blared the New York Times, as McCain was lying in state, and liars of state, Bush and Obama, were preparing to shill for him as they shilled for war and the overthrow of foreign governments for their masters.  Another member of the Club, Joseph Biden, had done his part in the mythologizing a few days earlier when he shed his famous “regular guy” tears as he spoke of his dear friend.  For those outside such a small circle of friends – the millions of passive TV spectators in the society of the spectacle – tears seal the deal, set the myth into an emotional space that just feels right. In mythmaking, feeling is all; facts don’t matter. And the military and religious symbolism, the pageantry and the majesty of the setting, make the eulogies resound more loudly.  

It is through symbols, not just words, that the “people” are brought together to celebrate their mythic uniqueness, for the word symbol comes from the Greek, meaning to throw together, and for the in-crowd that is what they do.  We are in this together, one nation under God….while outside, as McCain, Bush, Obama, et al. never failed to remind us “folks,” there lurks the diabolic (to throw apart) devils from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, Libya, Russia, etc. ready to divide us from within and attack us from without.  We are the good “insiders,” they are the evil “outsiders.”  Such verbiage constitutes the essence of cultural myth creation and the core of American Exceptionalism.  It is practiced by the politicians and mainstream corporate media every day.

In speaking about McCain, Bush and Obama did so from within the frame of this great American Myth of Exceptionalism and God’s Chosen People.  McCain, who is a small piece of a much larger myth, was just another name added to the Pantheon.  Bush once said, “Like generations before us, we have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.”  And Obama once confessed, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being.”  One can easily understand why McCain chose them.

Bush eulogized McCain thus:

“In one epic life was written the courage and greatness of our country.”

Wasn’t it great to kill millions of Vietnamese and Iraqis?  Only the courageous from the home of the brave can perform such honorable duties, especially from the air. 

“He respected the dignity inherent in every life, a dignity that does not stop at borders and cannot be erased by dictators,” said Bush, adding: 

Whatever the cause, it was this combination of courage and decency that defined John’s calling, and so closely paralleled the calling of his country. It’s this combination of courage and decency that makes the American military something new in history, an unrivaled power for good.”

Moreover, Obama intoned with such eloquence:

And finally while John and I disagreed on all kinds of foreign policy issues, we stood together on America’s role as the one nation, believing that with great power and great blessings comes great responsibility…But John understood that our security and our influence was won not just by our military might, not just by our wealth, not just by our ability to bend others to our will, but from our capacity to inspire others with our adherence to a set of universal values. Like rule of law and human rights and insistence on the God-given dignity of every human being.

Now I wonder what John’s and Barack’s dead victims in Libya and Syria would have to say about their “universal values” and respect for the “rule of law”?  Can the dead laugh sardonically?

The recent spectacle over John McCain’s death is a perfect example of myth creation.  McCain is, however, a metaphor for the larger ongoing narrative that has been going on for centuries and seems to have no end.  

McCain’s apotheosis is a made for TV American hero movie, one that he first helped create and one that John Wayne would envy, as blatantly jingoistic and racist as Wayne was in “The Green Berets,” a movie released in 1968, the year after our hero McCain’s dubious involvement in the tragedy of the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier that killed 137 sailors, his being shot down while bombing North Viet Nam, and his subsequent years in captivity.  No doubt Sydney Schanberg’s devastating expose of McCain’s explanation of his years as a POW will play no part in today’s mythologizing.

If only Wilfred Owen’s words could have been piped into the National Cathedral during the funeral ceremony, maybe the mythmaking would have ceased and truth revealed.  

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

But that is wishful thinking in this land of make-believe, where such poetic obscenities are not allowed in the Cathedral of God’s People.  

*

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The Ontario labour movement is in deep crisis. Some impressive struggles aside, it has been staggering since the end of the great mobilizations of the 1990s. Given the labour movement’s historic role in leading and supporting progressive change, its current disorientation should be a matter of alarm to its members of course, but also to anyone concerned with countering the insatiable greed and social destructiveness of capitalism.

There is a tendency within the Canadian labour movement – reinforced as we head into Labour Day – to reduce this crisis to a lack of unity. But the content of ‘unity’ matters and is inseparable from the question of direction. Battles over jurisdictional claims are certainly destructive. However, in the absence of political struggle, calls for unity can also be used to silence criticism and block difficult debates over vision and strategy. It is the lack of such crucial debates – which inevitably come with some divisions along the way – that is perhaps most disturbing about the state of today’s labour movement.

Consider. In the 1930s, the great breakthrough in the American labour movement, which also shaped the Canadian movement, was the birth of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) and its principle of unionization across skills. But it only came alongside a difficult but necessary exit from the craft-based AFL (American Federation of Labor), a tectonic break that represented profound ideological and strategic differences. When the AFL and CIO came together again in the mid-1950s the ‘harmony’ it brought didn’t bring a stronger, more solidaristic movement. Rather, the newly unified federation, the AFL-CIO, oversaw four decades of stagnation and decline in U.S. unions accompanied by some of the most shameful undermining of working class struggles abroad.

Conservatives on the Attack

With the election of the Progressive Conservatives led by Doug Ford, the threat of further, more damaging defeats as austerity gains traction is clear enough. Low-wage workers have already seen a freeze on the planned increases in minimum wages even as top executive compensation has increased by 50 per cent over the past decade. Very modest proposed increases in welfare benefits are also being cut, though income support benefits are lower today than a quarter of a century ago. And the already thin democracy in the administration of Toronto is about to get thinner with the radical unilateral trimming of the size of city council.

Coming soon are deep cuts to public spending in Ontario, which may well be much larger than anything attempted by the Conservative government of Mike Harris in the late 1990s. A combination of 4 per cent planned spending cuts, $7.5-billion in revenue cuts and $6-billion lost in accounting changes leaves a minimum of $22-billion to be hacked from public services by year three of the Conservative’s mandate.

Detailed reviews underway of government spending will set the stage for a massive attack on Ontario’s public sector. CUPE anticipates that in the hospital sector alone, 3,500 hospital beds and 16,500 staff would have to be cut to meet the target of eliminating $22-billion. In announcing a ‘line by line’ review of provincial spending the Conservatives referred to a commitment, not mentioned during the election, to reduce the province’s $315-billion debt. To significantly reduce Ontario’s debt, even over 20 years, would mean amputating public services.

Yet – and this is the most immediate sign of the crisis in labour – as the Conservatives prepare an onslaught of cutbacks, labour has been all but silent about how, beyond lamentations of another government turning to austerity, it will respond as a class. If that passivity continues, Ford’s Conservative government can be expected to read that as an invitation to go further and faster.

The challenge posed by the Conservative’s class agenda – tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, funded by cuts to public spending for working people – is to mobilize the working class in its own defense and in defense of the unemployed, the poor, the disabled, the young and the elderly, all of whom will be victims of the Conservative’s attack. Right-wing populism can only be defeated by exposing it and winning the support of the broadly defined working class, thereby deconstructing the Conservative base and forcing the Conservatives to retreat.

An obvious reference point here is the ‘Days of Action’, the dramatic class response that emerged in Ontario in the mid-90s to the radical neoliberal policies of Harris, when labour faced a comparable threat to the Ford cuts of today. Many young activists have little knowledge of the remarkable mobilizations undertaken by labour and its allies in that period. This makes it important to recall, by way of a brief overview, this suppressed historical memory.

Days of Action, Days of Possibilities

The Days of Action were a series of one-day city-wide protests, including one-day general strikes (by their very nature political strikes) that began in late 1995 and ultimately came to eleven Ontario communities over a two-and-a-half-year time span. The Toronto protest alone involved an estimated crowd of over 250,000.

In the 1990s, popular reaction against the ‘neoliberal’ undermining of social programs and attacks on the labour movement intensified across the core capitalist countries. In response, many European countries elected social democratic governments. The election of the NDP in Ontario, in 1990, preceded all of them. As elsewhere, this didn’t turn out as hoped. With the economy in recession, the NDP retreated from promises like socialized auto insurance and used state power to open and roll back public sector union contracts. The demoralization in the labour movement over this betrayal contributed to the election in 1995 of the hard-right Conservative government led by Mike Harris.

Harris acted quickly to implement his so-called ‘Common Sense Revolution’. One wing of the labour movement argued that there was no choice but to wait for the next election. This wasn’t convincing. The next election was far off and a good deal of damage, much of it seeming irreversible, would occur in the interim. In any case, the NDP’s performance in office had left it discredited even among former strong supporters – its’ vote had fallen by over 40% in 1995 and there was little enthusiasm for placing all of labour’s trust in the NDP again.

Against this, some labour and community militants called for a ‘general strike’. This had even less traction across the movement. The labour leadership’s strong aversion to this especially uncertain terrain was reinforced by an awareness that the kind of unity such a strategy demanded was simply absent. More important, since a good number of union members had for various reasons supported Harris, the labour movement could hardly claim a mandate for such a radical step.

In that sense, the strategy behind the Days of Action reflected the weakness of the labour movement as much as its strength. Nevertheless, the response brokered by the Ontario Federation of Labour (OFL) among its often-fractious unions demonstrated the kinds of organizing capacities the labour movement still retained.

The OFL assigned key staff to work on the Days of Action full-time and to coordinate bringing both paid and voluntary organizers into each community well in advance of their actual day of action. Committed unions put their own staff and local activists to work reaching their members, some of whom grasped the threat and were quite ready to protest, but many who were unconvinced about either the issues or the tactics. Efforts to get members on side ranged from leafletting plants to training activists for one-on-one conversations, and in some cases carrying out mini-protests on specific issues to generate momentum. The preparations culminated in mass membership meetings in every workplace or local to get clear mandates for one-day strikes.

At the same time, OFL organizers and local union leaders began discussions at the community level with social movements, NGOs, and church groups around the core issues, with special concern to overcome long-standing suspicions of the union movement. This led to the formation of local coalitions, co-chaired by a trade unionist and someone from the movements (at least one of whom was to be a woman). The coalitions spoke to local groups and the media, wrote op-eds, bought radio ads, and also leafletted door-door (130,000 such leaflets were distributed in London, where the first Day of Action occurred).

Workplaces were shut down by workers, reinforced by cross-picketing (i.e. workers left their own work-sites to picket other workplaces, in part because shutting down your own workplace was illegal – though such legalities were in any case largely ignored). Schools were generally closed, not so much because of the teacher unions – whose attitudes were mixed – but by parents keeping their kids out, and by high school students themselves generally organizing the closing of their schools. At Oakwood Collegiate, for example, students went from classroom to classroom and got permission from each teacher to have some time to explain what the issues were and why a dramatic response was necessary. Thousands of workers were bussed in from nearby, and often distant, communities and mass marches took place, lined by hundreds of marshals to keep the march peaceful (and in Toronto by dozens of bands and singers along the route). The marches led into packed meetings in the largest spaces in the community, brimming with collective confidence and a newfound sense of social power.

To a degree not fully grasped at the time, even by those advocating the approach, the plan that labour had more or less stumbled into was strategically impressive and, given the defeat of the NDP and the absence of their support for extra-parliamentary political actions, politically bold.

• It allowed the unions supporting the action to focus their limited but solid core of organizers on one community at a time (something a general strike could not do).
• The announcements of the shutdowns a few months in advance resulted in a media frenzy warning of coming chaos in the community; this led workers to spontaneously and widely discuss the merits of the strategy.
• Because workers lost a day’s pay, they would only join the protest if won over to its necessity. That forced unions to convince their members to participate.
• Spreading the protests over an extended period of time kept the issue of the Harris cuts alive over a long stretch of time. This was something that waiting for the next election or pushing for a general strike (which at the time was likely to be short-lived) could not.
• The emphasis on shutting down workplaces for a day served the educational function of linking the Harris program to the corporate sector’s backing of the Harris assault on the poor, public services and union rights. It was also hoped that, fearing further workplace disruption, the corporations might push Harris to soften his agenda.
• Because the Days of Action were illegal walkouts any worker picketing her workplace could be fired. Unions therefore cross-picketed with, for example, postal workers shutting down auto plants and vice-versa. This created new worker solidarities at the very base of the working class movement.
• It brought community organizations, which had been very active at that time, into the mobilizations. This added significantly to the legitimacy of the protests and undermined charges that the Days were a self-serving union protest. As a gesture towards inclusiveness, the co-chairs of the broad coalitions in each community included one person from labour and one from the movements, with at least one co-chair having to be a woman. The mobilizations brought labour and social movements together, and within the social movements, provided a measure of coherence and strategic focus to its array of otherwise energetic but dispersed activities.
• The strategy could be effective even if not all unions participated. With municipal services interrupted, bus drivers shutting down transit, post offices and other government offices closed, and the most important manufacturing industry in the province, automotive, committed to the shutdowns, the message of broad and growing militant opposition within the labour movement was powerfully delivered. (That schools were also closed in spite of the vacillation of the teachers’ unions added to the sense of general community paralysis).

Three aspects of the Days of Action were especially noteworthy. First, though the protests against Harris had begun among the social movements, the centrality of the labour movement to social protest was confirmed. Only labour could effectively interrupt the daily functioning of workplaces and cities and the OFL proved especially adept at organizing these shutdowns. Second, this didn’t mean that the labour leadership could simply dictate the workplace shutdowns. Workers would only follow if they could be convinced that there were solid reasons to protest, that there was a credible plan of action with some possibility of success, and if they knew they wouldn’t be alone. Third, the Days were a reminder of the radical potentials of rank and file workers.

In this regard, the politicization of workers through the protests and strikes was repeatedly demonstrated. Workers moved organically toward larger more ambitious political perspectives: posing what kind of society they wanted to live in; consolidating a sense of solidarity across the working class; and recognizing that class is expressed in the community not just at the workplace. Workers were, often tentatively, sometimes with greater confidence, moving to a practice that might fit the label ‘class struggle unionism’.

But Was it Successful?

In measuring the outcome of the Days of Action, it’s useful to step back and look closer at the nature of unionized labour. Unions are organizations structured – ideologically and practically – around representing particular groups of workers within capitalism as they bargain with their employer or lobby the state. Though the boundaries of how unions do this get stretched from time to time this primary function has, over time, decisively shaped union cultures and practices.

To the extent that unions basically see themselves as ‘transactional’ – mediating a deal between workers and employers or the state – this has profound implications. For one, the fact that labour is not inherently a commodity but an expression of human creativity gets lost. For another, the focus is primarily on improvements in individual bargaining units, not the larger society and so the working class remains fragmented. And it is the immediate which dominates, not a seemingly remote vision. In good times, unions have proven able to make gains for their members through such a narrow unionism. But in bad times, this orientation leaves workers vulnerable as unions turn defensively inward. Neoliberalism has reinforced such inclinations within labour, as the drive to individualize and marketize tends to turn workers into consumers and unions into business-like institutions competing in labour markets.

Without a social vision, larger class perspective, or strategy for addressing the power of the state and not just the power of their particular employer, the reach and potential power of workers is restricted. Hence the defeats the union movement has experienced across a few generations now. This is the basis for American union organizer Jane McAlevey’s call for the fundamental importance of re-establishing a commitment among unions to ‘deep organizing’.

It was of course always naïve to expect that this kind of labour movement could suddenly burst through its structures and accumulated baggage and suddenly prove capable of defeating a recently elected anti-labour, anti-social government. The key issues in assessing the Days of Action and drawing future lessons therefore revolve around whether the Days gave workers confidence that fighting back – as opposed to passive acceptance – makes a difference, and whether they opened the door to building a stronger movement.

The answer is yes, they did. The Days of Action didn’t force the Harris government to fully reverse course but they did blunt his agenda. The threat to remove the right to strike in the public sector was stopped; likewise the attack on the interest arbitration system was halted, in the face of an illegal strike threatened by hospital workers; and social expenditures, which saw severe cuts at the beginning of the government’s term, were stabilized and in some cases reversed. In health care, for example, by 1997 expenditures in Ontario were growing significantly faster than they had been historically and far faster than they were in the final two years of the preceding NDP government. All this was significant and seen by the working class as victories.

Even more important, the Days introduced a new generation of workers and activists to organizing and politics. Suddenly, the union movement was a place to be, introducing young workers to the thrill of solidarity and exciting them with engagement in the larger questions of society. Slowly and unevenly and with varying degrees of clarity and confidence, this raised expectations and generated probing questions about what a different kind of labour movement might be.

But as the Days of Action ran out of steam, so did the other possible trajectories come to an end. Ultimately, the intimations of a revolution in trade union structures, culture, and strategies didn’t materialize. This was highlighted in two particular ways.

One was that after the demands of the labour movement were largely satisfied (for the time being at least) with respect to public sector spending and collective bargaining, the tents were folded up, even though the attack on other sections of society, like the poor and the disabled continued. The other was that no consideration was given to a plan that looked beyond the shutdowns. To take just one example: as the organizers left one community and moved to another, no organizational presence was sustained in the communities evacuated and typically no creative attempt was made to build new structures to carry on the battle in new ways.

This wasn’t just a failure of the labour leadership, though they certainly carry a good share of the responsibility. The members, on their own, didn’t grasp the importance of – or simply lacked the confidence and capacities to pursue – addressing the longer-term direction of their own and other unions.

Nor was the socialist left, in spite of its constant emphasis on transforming unions, able to do so. Once the labour leadership unilaterally decided to end the shutdowns, the left criticized the lack of democracy and broad consultation in how this decision was made and pressed for a step-up in militancy. But the left was itself far too disorganized and wedded to unproductive formulas to be able to use the opening created by the Days of Action to establish new connections to the working class, recruit activists to a larger vision, and effectively pose the transformation of unions as a condition for effecting and sustaining a more radical movement.

The sense in which the Days of Action ‘failed’ didn’t therefore lie in the fact that the Harris regime’s reforms laid the basis for the neoliberal politics that the Liberals sustained – defeating it totally was not possible – but that openings had occurred and the labour movement and its allies failed to build on them.

What has Changed in the Union Movement as we Face the Ford Regime’s Assaults?

History is a good teacher but former blueprints can’t simply be repeated. In drawing on the lessons of earlier experiences, sensitivity to what has changed is imperative. Four such changes seem especially significant with respect to the Ontario labour movement.

The first and most obvious is that even if the labour movement was not as strong then as often recalled, the defeats since have left unions in Ontario even more demoralized and disoriented and, moreover, more divided than ever. It will take some time and much effort to get the labour movement into active collective struggle.

A second difference lies in the pivotal role of the CAW (Canadian Auto Workers – the predecessor of Unifor). This involved the union’s presence in the key auto sector and its readiness and capacity to shut the industry down in the 1990s, and especially its role then in easing tensions between public and private sector unions. This critical union division revolved around the NDP’s intervention in public sector collective agreements. The CAW’s decision to maintain solidarity with the public sector ameliorated that split (though it made for sharp antagonisms between the CAW and some of the private sector unions who staunchly defended the NDP), and kept the public sector unions from being dangerously isolated by the rest of the labour movement.

Today, however, the leadership of Unifor is as distant from the public sector leaders as from those in the private sector, a division highlighted by, but extending beyond, Unifor’s departure from the Canadian Labour Congress (CLC), Canada’s central labour body. Moreover, its economic clout and militancy has been eroded alongside the decline of Ontario’s manufacturing base as well as the union’s own response to that economic reality. This matters a great deal as there seems today to be no union ready and able to fill the strategic role the CAW played earlier. Reflecting the more general malaise in the labour movement today, where the OFL earlier rose to the occasion and became a place for debate and movement building, it seems to have drifted into operating more like a space where strategic discussion is laid to rest.

A third difference is that through the 1990s there was still an active growing complex of social movements leading a range of creative struggles. Today, however, with a few significant exceptions, this is no longer the case. But the popular frustrations that currently exist, especially among young people, are profound and potentially bursting into new political movements. As we’ve seen with regards to Sanders in the U.S. and Corbyn in the UK, in the right mix of circumstances and struggles, the energy and creativity of alienated young people can become a major political force even with barely developed institutional bases.

A fourth change is that the NDP, largely discredited when the Days of Action were initiated, has more momentum today. In their alignment with ‘third way’ politics in the 1990s, NDP leaders and functionaries looked with suspicion on the protests, seeing them as encouraging an alternative to electoral politics and also expecting that, if the party were to identify with and support the Days, this would hurt them electorally. Today, in contrast, sections of the party – having observed developments elsewhere – are less closed to positive engagement with any new round of protests. Indeed, given the fortunes of European social democracy, such alignments are seen by some (within limits of course) as necessary to survive electorally.

The point here, given the state of the Ontario labour movement, is to avoid framing the coming debate in the movement simply in electoral versus non-electoral terms. Electoral politics are clearly essential to struggles over the direction and ultimate transformation of the state. The issue is the vital importance of the labour movement not limiting itself to expressing its politics through the NDP and insisting on the need to include, in its overall strategy, the independent organizing and mobilizing of the working class.

As with the Days of Action, a strategy of waiting for the next election can simply encourage the government to hit harder and bring changes that may be extremely difficult to turn back. As experience in Ontario has shown, leaving politics to the politicians not only hurts electoral outcomes – elections depend on organizing informed grassroots activism well before any election campaign proper starts – but also removes a crucial check on what social democratic parties will do when elected.

What Now?

Socialist parties were once seen as distinct from other parties not just in their policies, but especially in their commitment to developing the capacities of the working class. Their emphasis was on education and cultivating among workers the ability to analyze, organize, debate, strategize and act collectively. In the absence of such a party, the weight for addressing this now falls on the unions. Whether they can take up this challenge is a central question to address in any sustained effort to take on the Ford government.

The reality of the current moment is that solidarity pacts or joint strategic discussions between unions are all too rare in Ontario and Canada today. In the context of the current divisions in the labour movement, with unified working class action a number of steps away, a starting point would be for unions to start addressing their own members. Internal plans should be developed – now – to disseminate information on the Ford government cuts and employer attacks and to, establish fight-back committees and train cadre to lead multiple discussions at every level of the union. Such discussions would include how to address what might be done to win workers over in our own workplaces (since not all are with us) much as is done in traditional unionization drives. This process could be extended to the community and begin to raise what kind of larger strategies seem necessary.

It is only out of such worker engagement within each union, and the ferment stimulated by trying to figure out how to overcome individual and workplace isolation and build effective resistance, that there is any chance for the inklings of solidarity across unions to start emerging and coalescing into something larger that might revitalize the overall labour movement.

Moving beyond such essential initial steps demands a strategic orientation that is now largely absent in each union. In the public sector, that orientation is clear. Public sector unions need to meaningfully re-establish their credibility in the general fight for social services. Public sector workers know what the impact of the cuts on services will be, and know how services can be improved and expanded. Public sector unions must back this by fully committing – whether in terms of resources, bargaining, campaigning or industrial action (work slowdowns, stoppages, work-ins, and the like) – to the defense, improvement, and expansion of public services and supporting any social groups joining that struggle. Only out of such creative and bold struggles will it become clear how vital it is for the public sector unions to go beyond their own struggles and come together in a common fight for public services and greater democratic control.

In the private sector, the issues are more complicated, since influencing individual jobs, levels of employment and security requires having some direct control over investment, capital flows and trade – issues that extend well beyond provincial jurisdiction (though this should not preclude workers acting more aggressively to block workplace closures or to argue for their socialization and conversion). An initial focus for forming the basis for such anti-neoliberal reforms might begin by taking advantage of new opportunities for major breakthroughs in unionization.

As the province reduces the number of inspectors and the regulation of workplace standards, and as corporations respond to legislated increases – like the substantial gains in minimum wages so inspiringly won through the Workers’ Action Center – by trying to recoup their costs through reducing worker benefits, forcing even greater speed-up, or manipulating the existing rules, the necessity of unionization increasingly surfaces. The message to the workers is straightforward: if you want higher standards, even ones you’re supposed to legally have, the only way to get and protect those standards is to unionize. The message to the labour movement itself is that – particularly in organizing the growing marginalized and precarious workforce – unionization must be understood as building the working class as a whole, not as an exclusive competition among unions for dues-paying members.

This implies not just a commitment of more resources, but a solidaristic strategy and must be insisted on as the only orientation to organizing that can meet the class attack that is coming from the Ford government. For example, in organizing franchise workers such as those at Tim Horton’s, where popular sympathies generally stand with the workers after the craven corporate counter-response to the increase in minimum wages, why wouldn’t every community with such a franchise should set up a community-based committee with organizers from every local union, gather contacts from union members with relatives or friends in the sector and move toward a province-wide unionization of the workers?

Other responses will depend on the pattern of Ford’s program of cuts and the government’s response to specific bargaining rounds. As that unfolds and particular unions act to challenge Ford’s attacks, it will be essential to recognize the strategic importance of these struggles to all coming struggles and organize solidaristic picket lines and whatever else might be demanded to advance the struggle.

All this is crucial in itself and also because it sets the stage for a strategy which, if not identical to the Days of Action, is based on the same systematic, gradually escalating, and comprehensive spirit of organizing political strikes that build momentum community by community.

Building for the Future

Building for the future can’t be postponed to ‘the future’. If people had, during the hectic and exciting Days of Action, raised the need for transforming our unions and creating new forms of permanent working class organizations in the community, this would no doubt have been treated as an abstract diversion. Too many more pressing issues were at hand. Yet it is that stubborn insistence on what is immediate – even if understandable at any particular moment – that has condemned the working class in Ontario (and Canada) to the exhausting treadmill of defensive battles. That legacy of repeatedly ignoring larger issues now sees workers and communities facing yet another round of assaults, this time even less prepared to respond.

Workers and unions desperately need to think larger and more long-term. This cannot be reduced to calls for ‘more militancy’, as important as that is. It begs the question: Militancy for what? What kind of society do we want, and what is our strategy for getting there? What kind of collective capacities and institutions do we need to build? And what does this all mean for transforming our unions?

The stakes couldn’t be higher. The wave of harsh austerity we will soon face may be more punitive than even the Harris government’s cutbacks. What was so important in resisting Harris and will now again be central is to recognize that we are under attack as a class and must think, strategize and fight back as a class. To be effective this must include preparing, organizing and mobilizing for political strikes – the attack is that significant.

Without the Ontario labour movement asserting a leadership role in fighting for dignity, equality, and social solidarity, it will continue to fade as a relevant social force. Without a vibrant labour movement, it is hard to imagine sustaining any mass, disciplined, and strategic fight-back; and without that, not only the distant future, but also tomorrow, looks grim. Unless the trade union movement rises to this challenge – not just in rhetoric, not just to defend its particular interests, but as a social force with a vision of a future that escapes the crippling mean-ness and inequality of capitalism, all working people will suffer.

Only the most serious commitment to organizing and mobilizing the working class in response brings the possibility of union revival (attend meeting in Toronto). And only that kind of ambition, with the class consciousness it brings and the grounded unity and class struggle it rests on, carries the antidote to the neoliberalism which has yoked us for decades.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

It’s called diplomatic give-and-take for a reason.

The United States cannot get some of what it wants without giving North Korea some of what it wants. Yet that is precisely what Washington has been trying to do—and predictably getting nowhere, as President Trump acknowledged by postponing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s latest mission to Pyongyang. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis tried to increase pressure on the North by announcing, “We have no plans at this time to suspend any more exercises.” While he clarified that no decision had yet been made, he also noted, “We are going to see how the negotiations go, and then we will calculate the future, how we go forward.”

Washington is insisting that Pyongyang fulfill its commitment at the Singapore Summit to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” without addressing its own commitments at that summit “to establish new U.S.-DPRK relations,” and “to build a lasting and stable peace regime on the Korean peninsula.” Policymakers opposed to negotiations have disclosed intelligence that North Korea is continuing to produce fissile material and missiles, as if it is obliged to stop without any deal.

While the Trump administration demanded that the North move first, reportedly by providing a complete inventory of its nuclear material and production facilities, the North countered with the demand that Washington join South Korea in declaring an end to the Korean War. The declaration would commit to initiating a peace process that would include military confidence building measures to reduce the risk of deadly clashes in the contested waters of the West (Yellow) Sea and the Demilitarized Zone and culminate in a formal peace treaty.

The administration contends that the North wants the peace declaration before taking steps to denuclearize, but as North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told ASEAN foreign ministers in early August,

“We believe that a method involving the balanced, simultaneous, step-by-step implementation of all terms in the Joint Statement, preceded by the establishment of trust, is the only realistic means of achieving success.”

He emphasized the North’s “unswerving resolution and commitment to responsible, good-faith implementation of the Joint Statement,” and the “unacceptability of a situation in which we alone are the first to move unilaterally.”

His statement is just the latest indication that a deal is possible if the United States is prepared to accept a peace declaration. Seeking a nuclear inventory in return will only initiate a long period of uncertainty, however, with little benefit to the US and allied security while Washington tries to verify that inventory and while North Korean manufacture of fissile material and missiles runs free. A better starting point for Washington to seek is a suspension of the production of plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and intercontinental- and intermediate-range missiles, along with a declaration of the locations of related production sites.

Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula depends less on maintaining maximum pressure than on addressing what Kim Jong Un wants in negotiations. Contrary to the conventional wisdom about the end of the US alliance with South Korea, the abandonment of the nuclear umbrella, the withdrawal of US forces, a Marshall Plan, or even written security assurances, what Kim wants is an end to US enmity—what the North Koreans call the US “hostile policy”—and reconciliation. Based on what North Korean diplomats have been telling US officials and ex-officials for years, this entails the normalization of political and economic relations, a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula, and ultimately, an alliance like the one the United States has with the ROK, one that would be backed by a continuing US troop presence on the peninsula.

Most experts assume that the North has no intention of giving up its nuclear weapons. That is mere speculation. There is no way to know for sure whether or not Kim is willing to keep his pledge to disarm and what he will want in return. Diplomatic give-and-take with concrete proposals for reciprocal steps is the only way to find out. Dismantling production facilities and verifying disarmament will take years. So will convincing steps toward reconciliation. Only then will Kim reveal his willingness to give up his weapons.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

South Korea has recently refused an official request by Israeli President Reuven Rivlin to visit Seoul over the coming months, Israeli media reported.

Israel’s Ynet news site reported that Tel Aviv’s Ambassador in South Korea, Chaim Choshen, had proposed the visit on behalf of the Foreign Ministry and in coordination with the president’s office”.

The site added that South Korea did not disclose why it refused the visit, but its refusal was clear.

According to the site, some Israeli circles believe that Seoul’s refusal stems from a growing frustration with Israel’s continued refusal to purchase military equipments from Korea.

Others have said that the decision was made because Israel did not congratulate the country following the historic meeting held between South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean ruler Kim Jong-un in April this year.

It has also been suggested that South Korea has been evading signing a free trade agreement with Israel although the deal has been approved and has been awaiting Korea’s signature for over a year.

South Korea voted in the United Nations against US President Donald Trump’s decision to transfer the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

In 2016, Amazon Web Services released Rekognition, a service that lets users analyze digital imagery in order to identify objects, including faces, based on a machine-learning algorithm.

The company has touted uses for this product that include identifying triggering content in images, determining emotions in an image, cashier-less grocery stores (which they have implemented in Amazon Go) — and, most worrisome, “public safety.”

The implications of this technology are eerily dystopian. The software is designed to identify up to 100 faces in an image or video, and can identify the emotions and actions of subjects. In the hands of the police, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) or the National Security Agency (NSA), this poses an existential risk to privacy, oppressed groups, left organizations and any other targeted person.

And the unfortunate truth is that it is already being licensed to police departments. As an ACLU report reveals, police departments in Orlando, Florida, and Washington County, Oregon, are already using it. If legal restrictions are overcome, this could easily be licensed to a company like Axon to be used in police body cameras in numerous cities.

Even scarier, consider if ICE were able to license this technology. It could use it to hunt down any undocumented immigrant it has a photo of. Even worse, it could cross-list any photo to which it has access against a database of identification images — and mark anyone who isn’t in its system for tracking and detention.

The ACLU only listed agencies to which it submitted public records requests. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has specially tailored contracts for federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the IRS, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy, and many others.

The truth is, we don’t know which of these groups might be using Rekognition. It took a year from when Orlando’s police department began using Rekognition before the ACLU found out through a public-records request.

This doesn’t even account for agencies like the CIA and NSA, which presumably would remain unreported if they were to use AWS technologies.

Given the NSA’s $10.8 billion budget in 2013 (its usually confidential budget was leaked for the year of 2013) and its primary function of surveillance, we might expect that it has either contracted Rekognition technology or built its own even better surveillance algorithms. And we might expect the deployment of similar technology by the CIA, with its leaked 2013 budget of $14.7 billion.

An Amazon Rekognition interface records information about the faces of shoppers (Source: SocialistWorker.org)

*

Where does this leave us? Are we doomed to a world dominated by a ubiquitous surveillance state that until a few years ago was beyond our wildest fears? Is privacy dead?

Machine learning has gone through astronomical growth over the last few years. From Google’s self-driving cars to medical research, machine learning has the potential for spectacular good. And while it remains largely a buzzword in society — to the extent it is even discussed — tech companies large and small are investing billions in it.

Interviewing people in the tech community, many tech workers were convinced that this technology is inevitable. If Amazon, Google, Facebook and others weren’t pushing it forward, other companies or the NSA would be. But this doesn’t justify the resignation that society will inevitably have indiscriminate surveillance.

Under capitalism, the government relies on the military-industrial complex to refine the means to exploit people at home and abroad. While the government would presumably continue to work on this technology in any case, contracting the work to private-sector corporations helps to secure the support of the richest people in our society, who ultimately have massive political influence over the government because of their wealth.

Therefore, examples such as Google employees’ victory in forcing the company not to renew its Maven contract with the defense department for drone technology should be viewed as a substantial victory. Similarly, boycott, divestment and sanction (BDS) movements against Israel (and similar historical movements against South Africa) have the potential to destabilize oppressive states.

But this can be taken a step further. Military and security organizations don’t exist in a bubble. They depend on hundreds of thousands of workers. From electricians who wire up CIA buildings to coders who build surveillance software, we find laborers capable of literally shutting down the system when organized collectively.

And we’ve also seen individual attempts from the inside to reveal and destabilize the state’s undemocratic surveillance by the likes of Edward Snowden. While these actions are admirable and at least brought the issue to public light, they haven’t measurably slowed the trend towards increasing surveillance.

*

All this provides some insight into how workers at Amazon could respond to Rekognition.

Beyond achieving the temporary victory of stopping this one corporation’s licensing of surveillance technology (and thereby slowing down its spread), such struggles broaden awareness of the extent to which this technology is being applied and help to develop a working-class consciousness more aware of its own power in fighting back.

In doing so, tech workers’ struggles can contribute to a culture that is safer for government workers to fight back (just as protests in the U.S. against the war in Vietnam preceded soldiers’ resistance against officers in Vietnam).

Unfortunately, the tech sector has scant history of labor organizing, which has only begun to change recently. Earlier this year, tech workers at Lanetix surprised many by voting to unionize. The company responded by firing its entire engineering staff. At other tech companies, this idea of unionizing is only a distant hope of labor organizers.

Part of the difficulty in organizing tech workers lies in the fact that most of society and a sizeable portion of the left do not view engineers as part of the working class.

But like the rest of the working class, tech workers sell their labor for a wage, and in exchange, produce a commodity, which their employers sells for a profit — i.e., more than the employer had to lay out for wages, raw materials and other costs — in contrast to those who receive a salary for managing others or who passively acquire income due to their existing ownership of wealth.

As in other industries, we observe that technology firms constantly seek to extract as much labor from employees as possible (by getting workers to put in as many hours as possible as efficiently as possible) while making costs as low as possible (by pushing down wages, benefits and working conditions).

While the level of education required and the scarcity of those seeking tech work means firms are compelled to offer higher salaries, tech workers are, like other workers, exploited in the production process.

There’s also a drive to de-skill tech work — just as has happened in other industries. Examples of this de-skilling include the simplification of coding languages, the standardization of coding practices, and the automation of software maintenance.

Although software coders may earn higher wages than many other workers, they still have the same relationship to the means of production, which implies a shared interest in fighting exploitation that will only become more pronounced as software production becomes further deskilled over time.

*

Thus, it’s reasonable to think that tech workers, given their incentive to fight back against their exploitation under capitalism, might even embrace the strike weapon. At this time, though, the strike seems distant from the current consciousness in tech.

Furthermore, generating labor struggle in response to Rekognition presents the added challenge of relating to a broader working-class and social concern, rather than a workplace issue. Broader community organizing, therefore, seems essential in sparking opposition to Amazon’s licensing of Rekognition.

Fortunately, this has already begun — witness the press conference about Rekognition outside of Amazon led by ACLU of Washington, Council on American-Islamic Relations WA, and several others. Community organizing in Washington County, Oregon, and Orlando against their police departments’ use of this technology could add helpful pressure.

Despite these challenges, some aspects of tech offer unique organizing advantages. Many tech companies originated in an economic situation that promised high profit margins, given the newness of products and the automation of services done via manual labor. These high profit margins implied a flexibility that allowed companies to achieve immense success without the bad PR that accompanies cutting corners.

This is emphasized by Google’s moto “Don’t be evil,” which it not-so-coincidentally abandoned in 2016. The idea of making lots of money while making the world a better place fused the counter-culture of the 1960s with a frontier business ethos that has been labeled “the Californian Ideology.”

However, as competition between tech companies increases and their profit margins decrease, the contradictions of this philosophy have come to the surface. Companies are being forced to choose between profits and morals, a choice that unsurprisingly favors the former.

Google’s don’t-be-evil mantra, though formally abandoned, was still enough to give employees leverage to challenge the military drone development in Project Maven. Google workers organized thousands of employees to express their anger at the project, and a dozen employees resigned over the issue.

In doing so, they were able to create enough bad PR for Google to force it to come to terms with this contradiction. Ultimately, Google had to cancel the drone contract. While this PR may seem insignificant — it seems unlikely that people are going to stop using Google search based on this — Google’s management has other concerns: in particular, employee recruitment and retention.

Many tech workers have invested themselves in the idea that their work should make the world a better place, and Google worried about losing talent if they didn’t address the outcry.

Analyzing the value of Google’s brand from an employee recruitment perspective is difficult to measure, but given that the Maven contract only promised Google $9 million per year, it is no surprise that they chose to abandon it rather than risk losing more employees over this issue.

*

The prospect for Amazon employees to scuttle Rekognition may not be as rosy. Google promoted itself as an ethical corporation; Amazon has never held itself up to such standards.

It has had its share of negative media coverage — from the New York Times coverage of its cutthroat corporate culture in corporate jobs to poor working conditions at Amazon warehouses. Amazon has similarly demonstrated steadfast resistance to union drives.

Related to this is the fact that a majority of Amazon’s 566,000 employees are not in corporate or software jobs, but instead working in warehouses and logistics. So the subset of Amazon employees who bought into this “Californian Ideology” is smaller than at Google. Lastly, in the retail market, the likes of Walmart set a low bar for Amazon to match in terms of labor standards.

Another source of added difficulty at Amazon is the sheer value of surveillance contracts with government agencies. The Rekognition website details pricesranging from $.0004 to $.001 per image processed (it is cheaper for larger contracts), and $.10 per minute of video processed for facial recognition purposes.

Considering the billions of images and billions of minutes of video that governments might eventually license for, the numbers quickly add up. Remembering the NSA’s multibillion-dollar budget, surveillance is big business. Forcing Amazon to cancel these contracts will require far more than it took to get Google to cancel their $9 million-per-year drone contract.

Finally, there’s the issue that Rekognition still isn’t familiar to many at Amazon. When I asked Amazon workers what they thought of Amazon’s licensing of Rekognition to police, the majority of Amazon employees said they had not heard of the service.

In an effort to spread knowledge of Rekognition and its risks, while simultaneously putting pressure on Amazon, employees began internally circulating a letter to Jeff Bezos modeled on the Google employees’ letter about Project Maven.

It remains to be seen how much traction this letter might get, but the fact that it’s now public knowledge that workers at Amazon have begun such a discussion is an encouraging sign about the future prospects for resistance by tech workers.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

In a post-capitalistic world that seems very specifically and violently designed to rip off the poor for the benefit of the rich, spending money is complicated. But at least, until recently, you could live without fear that some multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley giant would buy up your banking data in order to serve you more effective ads. Based on new details about an apparent arrangement between Google and Mastercard, those days are over.

Bloomberg reports that, after four years of negotiations, Google purchases a trove of credit card transaction data from Mastercard, allegedly for “millions of dollars.” Google then reportedly used that data to provide select advertisers with a tool called “store sales measurement” that the company quietly announced in a blog post last year, though it failed to mention the inclusion of Mastercard data in the workflow. The tool can track how online ads lead to real-world purchases, and that extra data is designed to make Google’s ad products more appealing to advertisers. (Read: everybody makes more money this way.) The public was not informed of the reported Mastercard deal, though advertisers have had access to the transaction data for at least a year, according to Bloomberg.

This is a hell of a bombshell, when you think about it. Thanks in part to heavy government regulation, your credit card and banking data has long been private. If you wanted to spend $98 at Sephora on a Tuesday afternoon, that transaction was between you, your bank, and Sephora. It now appears that Google has found a way to weasel its way into the data pipeline that connects consumers and their purchases. If you clicked on a Sephora ad while logged in to Google in the past year and then bought stuff at Sephora with a Mastercard in the past year, there’s a chance Google knows about that, at least on some level, and uses that data help its advertisers stuff their coffers.

But when you consider everything else that Google knows about you, the proposition becomes more Orwellian. Google told Gizmodo in a statement, also shared with Bloomberg, that it encrypts and anonymizes the credit card transaction data that it’s using with the new ad tool. There’s no getting around the fact that Google becomes a more powerful, all-seeing ad engine when it can see specific details about people’s spending habits, even if they’re anonymized and used in aggregate, as Google says the data it gets from Mastercard is. This future—one where your email, your search history, your social connections, and now, your spending habits—is one that we should really be scared of, say privacy advocates.

….

Read Complete article on Gizmodo

Clarification: Google tells Gizmodo that the financial data it uses is to inform advertisers about the effectiveness of their advertising and that it does not use this data in ad targeting. We’ve updated the story with this new information and clarified this distinction.

*

Adam Clark Estes is Senior editor at Gizmodo.

Featured image is from the author.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Both  Trump and Netanyahu want the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) eliminated – pretending millions of Palestinian refugees don’t exist.

Established in 1949, it provides healthcare, education and other vital social services for millions of displaced Palestinians – in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) provides similar services for refugees elsewhere.

Netanyahu  accused UNWRA of “incitement against Israel” – the same blame game his regime uses against anyone criticizing Israel.

He, Trump, and hardliners want vital aid for millions of Palestinian refugees ended.

They want their fundamental rights denied, including continued occupation and land theft, self-determination in name only, along with East Jerusalem as their exclusive capital and right of return for diaspora Palestinians denied.

They want refugee status for millions of dispossessed Palestinians and UNWRA providing them vital humanitarian aid abolished – part of their scheme to impose Trump’s no-peace/peace plan “deal of the century” on Palestinians, forcing them to abandon all rights.

After cutting $200 million in humanitarian aid to Palestinians and ending all US aid to UNWRA, the Trump regime began pressuring other countries to cease funding the agency next year, according to Israel’s Hadashot TV, citing senior Netanyahu regime officials.

They want to “close down UNWRA altogether,” according to the report. They falsely claim only 500,000 Palestinians exist, only 20,000 abroad, not over five million as defined by the UN and under international law.

They pressured Jordanian King Abdullah to take over for UNWRA. He rejected the scheme so far.

On August 31, the State Department said the US will no longer  “make…contributions to UNWRA,” calling the agency and its humanitarian operations “irredeemably flawed,” wanting it shut down.

The US provided about one-third of its funding. Eliminating it created a major budget shortfall.

On Saturday, in response to Trump policy, an EU statement pledged increased funding support for UNWRA, saying it’s

“committed to secure the continuation and sustainability of the agency’s work which is vital for stability and security in the region,” adding:

“(M)any others in the international community, including many Arab states, have pledged their support to the continuity of the work that UNRWA is doing.”

A Palestinian Authority (PA) statement denounced Trump’s action. So did Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri, calling its move a scheme “to wipe out the right of return…a grave US escalation against the Palestinian people.”

“US leadership is the enemy of our people and of our nation, and we will not surrender before such unjust decisions.”

Palestinian refugees are unlike other displaced people. They have no homeland to return to – 78% of it stolen by Israel in 1948, the rest in June 1967.

In July 1980, Israel’s Jerusalem Law annexed the city as its exclusive capital, ignoring Security Council Resolution 465 (March 1980), fundamental international law, stating:

“(A)ll measures taken by Israel to change the physical character, demographic composition, institutional structure or status of the Palestinian and other Arab territories occupied since 1967, including Jerusalem, or any part thereof, have no legal validity…”

In July 2004, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled that “Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territory, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and an obstacle to peace and to economic and social development (and) have been established in breach of international law.”

As long as Washington supports Israeli actions, no matter how harmful to Palestinians and others, it can do what it pleases unaccountably.

Settlements keep expanding exponentially. Gaza remains oppressively blockaded, solely for political reasons unrelated to security.

The Trump and Netanyahu regimes are waging war on Palestinians without declaring it.

On Saturday, UNWRA head Pierre Krahenbuhl said

“I wish to convey – with confidence and steadfast determination – to Palestine refugees in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, in Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, that our operations will continue and our agency prevail,” adding:

“The funding decision of (America) will not modify or impact the energy and passion with which we approach our role and responsibility towards Palestine refugees. It will only strengthen our resolve.”

“All staff will be at their duty stations, and will keep our installations open and safe. It is crucial to project the strongest sense of unity and purpose.”

Keeping UNWRA operating and viable depends on the world community making up for the funding shortfall created by the Trump regime’s action – rejecting its  demand to end all agency funding next year and shut it down.

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

On August 31, Aleksandr Zakharchenko, president of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in southeast Ukraine’s Donbass region was assassinated. 

DPR and the Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) broke away from Ukraine after the Obama regime’s coup, replacing democratic governance with Nazi-infested fascist tyranny.

Was it an extrajudicial assassination ordered by Trump hardliners, which took Zakharchenko’s life, murdered by a blast in central Donetsk?

His bodyguard was also killed, nine others injured, including DPR Finance Minister Alexander Timofeev, reportedly in grave condition.

Acting DPR Prime Minister Dmitry Trapeznikov replaced Zakharchenko. According to the deceased president’s advisor Alexander Kazalov, a number of suspects were detained.

A state of emergency was declared, border checkpoints closed. Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova blamed Kiev for the incident, saying:

“Instead of implementing the Minsk agreements and looking for means to settle the internal conflict, Kiev’s party of war is implementing a terrorist scenario and is aggravating the already difficult situation in the region. Without fulfilling its peace promises, they decided to launch a bloody slaughter.”

Undermining the Minsk Peace Agreement

Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called Zakharchenko’s murder a well-planned “blatant provocation aimed at (further) undermining implementation of the Minsk Agreement in eastern Ukraine … Given the current situation, it’s impossible to talk about the nearest meetings in the Normandy format (involving Russia, Germany, France and Ukraine) like many of our European partners would have wanted. It is a serious situation that must be analyzed. We are doing it right now.”

Minsk was dead on arrival like earlier ceasefire agreements – not worth the paper it’s written on because Washington wants endless conflict, not resolution – ongoing for over four years. Russia and Donbass alone fully observed Minsk principles.

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) spokeswoman Elena Gitlyanskaya said Kiev had nothing to do with it.

Putin called Zakharchenko a true people’s leader, a brave and resolute person, a patriot of Donbass,” adding:

“The vile murder of Alexander Zakharchenko is another evidence: those who chose the path of terror, violence, intimidation, do not want to seek a peaceful, political solution to the conflict, do not want to conduct a real dialogue with the inhabitants of the southeast.”

“They make a dangerous bet on the destabilization of the situation, to put the people of Donbass on their knees. This is not going to work.”

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

GR Editor’s Note:

“How could killing humans have been fun? Can God forgive me?” is not a quote from John McCain, it is from a Vietnam War veteran (quoted by the author)  “who  came back with medals. He didn’t seem to consider himself a ‘hero’.”

***

Obit scribblers are calling John McCain a war “hero.” Well, I have to concede that unlike so many warmongering chickenhawks such as Karl Rove, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Kagan and most other neocons, McCain did actually serve in the military. But the same could be said for nearly all top Nazis including Hitler and Goering; they fought in a war and they loved war. They were destructive persons who learned nothing positive from their military experience.

Of course few of the pundits and politicians who are eulogizing McCain would wish to include Nazis in their hall of fame, nor would most of them care to designate most neocons as anything less than patriots. So what is it that might qualify someone as a hero, or as a war criminal? Having been in the military, I sometimes think about that. These are some thoughts that come to mind.

Heroism is sort of like morality, it’s usually defined by the powers that be. And a lot of it has to do with being in the right place at the right time. An example of that would be the five Marines in the famous photo of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima. What made them more heroic than the many thousands of other GIs who fought on that and other islands in the Pacific, you might ask. And the answer is: time & place, plus a photographer to take their picture. So they were in a dramatic photo, and that was at a time when the government needed heroes to sell war bonds.

Military discipline is such that soldiers tend to do as told, even under fire. It’s a military axiom that soldiers fear their sergeants more then they fear the enemy’s bullets, and I think there’s a huge amount of truth in that. Even though a sergeant may not be particularly fearsome, there’s a huge power structure behind him. Individual soldiers become part of the military machine.

My friend Van Dale Todd was in Vietnam and came back with medals. He didn’t seem to consider himself a “hero,” what he emphasized was that he’d been through an experience. “You don’t know what it’s like to see your buddies die!” he often said, and then one night he killed himself in front of me. That was in San Francisco, in 1972. In his diary he’d written, “How could killing humans have been fun? Can God forgive me?”

Many Vietnam veterans suffered from PTSD. Many died before their time, some shortly after coming home, others years or even decades later, in their 30s or even in their 50s, not necessarily from physical injuries, but often from invisible damage they’d incurred during the war. I never met any who considered themselves “heroes.”

War criminals? Van never spoke of himself as being a “war criminal,” but he’d been trained to enjoy killing “the enemy,” and I think it bothered him immensely that he had enjoyed it. That, I think, was a major factor in his suicide. Certainly not the only factor. He took part in antiwar actions, and it shocked him to find nobody representing the power structure (news reporters or judges) would hear what he had to say. Of course, the corporate media makes a big show of honoring military personnel and veterans — but only as long as we go along with the bullshit, buy into their narrative and regurgitate propaganda. During the Vietnam War, media pundits used to tell us that the U.S. was there to defend democracy, and to back it up they’d say, “Ask a GI!” implying that people who’d been in the military believed in the war and would speak in support of it. Well, you probably know the rest of that story.

I often think of the characters in the Iliad and the Odyssey, wondering how those guys could be considered heroes. Socrates apparently thought they were; he held Achilles up as an inspiring example of a man who stood by his principles. That strikes me as really strange. In my view, Achilles was the archetypal spoiled brat who just wanted to have his own way. Then there was Odysseus, a notorious liar, who got tangled up in his own lies, and that’s basically what brought about the loss of his ships and the deaths of his crews on the way back to Ithaca. The leader of it all was King Agamemnon, a rather poor general, also a poor father who sacrificed his own daughter, and on returning to his home at the end of the war he was killed by his wife, which is about what he deserved. Those “heroes” were made of rather poor stuff, and a couple of their gods, Zeus and Athena, both of then deceitful schemers, weren’t too great either. The only person in the Iliad who comes off as genuinely heroic is Hector. It’s interesting that Homer, presumably a Greek himself, would present their enemy’s champion and other Trojans as being about the only decent persons in the whole story.

Achilles, Odysseus, Agamemnon and all the rest of them. Those were the men who fought the Trojan War, the elite officer class, that is. Homer called them heroes and sang their praises, but tongue in cheek, while carefully letting us know who those guys really were.

*

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Daniel’s Free Speech Zone.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The Australian press have been in a state of drooling ecstasy.  Part of it is because Australia can be relevant, however negative it might be, to their monster cousin, defender and protector known as the United States.  This time, its cultural – in the legal sense.  Erin Brockovich has found herself doing the media rounds on yet another legal project, this time against the Australian Defence forces in Katherine in the Northern Territory.  “Australia’s Defence has left Katharine hanging out there like a sitting duck.” Central to this are the dangers of using per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a long time favourite of the ADF. The nagging question is not new: Do they cause various diseases, including cancer?

Brockovich and her legal outfit Shine Lawyers have smell legal briefs in the offing.  Lawsuits have been launched against the Defence Department in Katherine, and Oakey in Queensland. The firm is hungry, searching out potential sites of contamination in Western Australian and Victoria.

For Brockovich, there is a sense of environmental redux in all of this: contamination of local water supplies and the environment, the sort that made her case in Hinkley, California, famous.  (Julia Roberts did the rest in her 2000 portrayal.)  Then it was hexavalent chromium and its illegal dumping by Pacific Gas and Electric Company; now it is PFAS chemicals and Australia’s glorious defenders of the realm who have done everything to terrify and console inhabitants.

“People in Katherine,” notes Brockovich, “are receiving bottled water from their government, they are receiving advisories not to eat fish and some food yet they say it doesn’t harm your health.”

The Department of Defence, for its part, has been less than reassuring, issuing potted missives and disclaimers. It insists that a “national program to review, investigate and implement a comprehensive approach to manage” PFAS substances “on, and in the vicinity of, some of its bases around Australia” is being undertaken.  In the comatose, dulling tones characteristic of that deparment, it speaks of being “proactive” in this regard, and claims to be entirely “open and transparent in making the verified test results available to the local community”.

The effort on the part of the Australian government has been a muddling one serving to inspire suspicion rather than meek acceptance on the issue of PFAS. The Chair of the PFAS Expert Health Panel, Professor Nick Buckley, was quizzed about his expertise in the area in July, a point that was rebuffed by suggesting that it was good to have someone “without any preconceived views on PFAS itself.”

The letter from Buckley to editors of the Newcastle Herald and Sydney Morning Herald, which was intended to be a corrective to the reports circulating on this discrepancy, was formulaic and sterile.

“The conclusions of the panel on the evidence are in agreement with international agency reports and systematic reviews.  These reviews (and ours) consistently note that there are likely biological effects, and express concerns about possible health effects.”

But doubt had to be factored in the assessments (this panel is, after all, aligned with the auspices of the Department of Defence, yet another example of independence in action), as “they also all agree that, despite there being many studies, there is not consistent evidence that any human disease definitely increased as a result of exposure.”  The meanness of this is evident in that concerns about “likely” biological effects are registered, but that the evidence does not stack up conclusively.

This is also a point that is reiterated through other government channels.  The New South Wales government’s information sheet from last year documents concerns covering PFAS substances noting, firstly, their pervasive use for decades, meaning that they can be “found widely in the land and water environments around the world” and that food remains “the most important source of exposure”.  But having painted a nightmarish scenario, one of disease and human demise, the tone changes.  Don your scientific hats, everybody; there is no “consistent evidence that exposure [to PFASs] causes adverse human health effects.” But evidence gathered from animal studies suggests otherwise, meaning that “potential health effects cannot be excluded.”

It is precisely such grounds of qualification that pique Brockovich’s interest.  And she is welcome in certain circles as a legal marauder, a useful David to have a battle with Goliath.  The standing ovation (or written ovations) she receives when spending time in Australia vary in levels of gush, the legal saint come to right the wrongs of the large and unscrupulous.   She is seen as edgy, and plays up to the image.

“I can drive better here than I can in the United States.  Cause remember, its backwards for us.  That’s how I work.”

Arrestingly cute, and does wonders to boost the ambitious girl across the pond image. The hack for The Sydney Morning Herald was certainly won over by her striking height, “with blonde hair coiffed”.  She strides (good to know), and then repairs to lunch at Otto.  Brussels sprouts and risotto follows.  “Because I learned in a certain way, I was perceived different. (American illiteracy can be fashionable.) And then because you’re different, society wants to tell you you’re inferior.  I had to learn their way or it was the highway.”

Brockovich returns the favour, telling her Australian clients through her Shine Lawyers profile how they are “laid back, [have a] good work ethic and have a wicked/demented sense of humour which I love.”  Environmental stalwarts such as the Great Barrier Reef, the Daintree, and koalas (she claims to love them) are also noted.

Such profiles must, however, bear fruit.  As the legal proceedings gain traction, the Australian government has stepped up its activity in terms of “managing” PFAS, another box ticking venture that hopes to pacify the suspicious and throw off critics.  In August, the first round of recipients for the cash laid aside for the Australian Research Council’s Special Research Initiative PFAS Remediation Research Program was announced.  The press release announcing the venture was so loud with praise it can only be questioned: “Some of Australia’s best scientists and researchers will commence ground-breaking work to address PFAS contamination in the environment”.  Time for the lawyers step in.

*

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]

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The nasty slur campaign against Jeremy Corbyn has just plumbed new depths with a hark-back to 1968 and the Rivers of Blood speech by Enoch Powell. It seems to have been prompted by a remark Corbyn made in 2013 that British Zionists had two problems:

“One is they don’t want to study history and, secondly, having lived in this country for a very long time, probably all their lives, they don’t understand English irony.”

In anti-Semitism terms that’s a flogging offence, even when it might be true. The former chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, immediately took umbrage saying that Corbyn’s criticism of British Zionists was the most offensive statement made by a senior politician since Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech. Sacks told the New Statesman:

“It was divisive, hateful and, like Powell’s speech, it undermines the existence of an entire group of British citizens by depicting them as essentially alien.”

He said Corbyn had implied “Jews are not fully British” and that he was “using the language of classic pre-war European anti-Semitism”, adding that Corbyn was an anti-Semite who “defiles our politics and demeans the country we love”. He had “given support to racists, terrorists and dealers of hate who want to kill Jews and remove Israel from the map”.

Lost irony

Sacks’s words could equally be taken to mean those who align themselves with Israeli hate and the wish to kill Palestinians and wipe Palestine from the map – which they have already done quite literally. And if Corbyn defiles our politics so does the Israel lobby. But the irony must have escaped him.

Just how righteous is the moralising Lord Sacks? In a House of Lords debate in 2014 on the Middle East in general and the question of formal recognition of Palestine by the UK in particular, the former chief rabbi got up and made a speech that was more like a pro-Israel rant. After a long winded spiel about the history of Israel and Jerusalem – from the Jewish angle of course – he went on to demonise Hamas and Hezbollah in the manner recommended by Israel’s hasbara handbook and all the more absurd when Israel’s hands are so unclean. Everyone knows that Hamas has agreed to a long-term truce with Israel provided it ends the illegal occupation, gets back behind its 1967 borders and accepts the refugees’ right of return – all as per UN resolutions and subject to a Palestinian referendum. And Hezbollah, as Sacks knows perfectly well, was formed to resist the Israeli occupation of Lebanon after the 1982 war. 

Israel, said Sacks, is the place where his people were born almost 4,000 years ago. As an ardent promoter of the Jewish religion, the Jewish state and the idea that God gave Jews exclusive title to Jerusalem, he seemed oblivious to the irony of his speech, especially where he said:

Where does he get his information? Israel won’t define its boundaries, leaving them fluid for endless expansion, and does a first-class job of delegitimising itself by its defiance of international law and utter contempt for norms of human decency and obligations under the UN Charter and other agreements.

Distorting history and religion

Zionists distort the scriptures to claim Jerusalem is theirs by divine right, but it was already 2,000 years old and an established, fortified city when King David captured it. The Jews lost Jerusalem to the Babylonians, recaptured it, then lost it again to the Roman Empire in 63 BC. When they rebelled Hadrian threw them out in 135. Until the present illegal occupation the Jews had only controlled Jerusalem for some 500 years, small beer compared to the 1,277 years it was subsequently ruled by Muslims and the 2,000 years, or thereabouts, it originally belonged to the Canaanites.

Jerusalem was also a Christian city. The 4th century saw the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Persians came and went. Then, after the Islamic conquest in 690, two major shrines were constructed over the ruins of the earlier temples – the Dome of the Rock from which Muhammad is said to have ascended to Heaven, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Crusaders retook Jerusalem in 1099 and the Temple Mount became the headquarters of the Knights Templar. In 1187 Saladin ended the Crusader Kingdom and restored the city to Islam while allowing Jews and Christians to remain if they wished.

As the saying goes, “None has claim. All have claim!”

Nowhere in his speech did Lord Sacks address the main question of British recognition of Palestinian statehood. Nowhere did he recommend the jackboot of oppression be immediately lifted and the Palestinians granted their human rights and their freedom. That would surely have been the Christian position and, I imagine, the true Jewish one. 

It is what the rabbi failed to say on this important occasion that makes me wonder whether he’s an instrument of God or just another preacher of Israeli hasbara. I read somewhere that Lord Sacks is of Polish/Lithuanian extraction. Most Palestinians can demonstrate ancestral ties to the ancient Holy Land. Can he?

“Jeremy Corbyn moved the rock and the anti-Semites crawled out” 

Corbyn is also in trouble over a remark he made in 2010 at a meeting of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign suggesting that MPs who took part in a parliamentary debate on the Middle East had their comments prepared for them by the Israeli ambassador. I’d say that was fair comment, although the scriptwriters were more likely to have been Mark Regev’s propaganda team in Tel Aviv. Regev, a propaganda expert from the dark side, is now Israel’s ambassador in London. Oh, the irony (again).

And a few days ago we heard that Jews are preparing to quit Britain because they fear Jeremy Corbyn taking power, according to former chairman of the Conservative Party Lord Feldman. So says The Times.

Feldman wrote an open letter to Corbyn telling him that Jewish people were making contingency plans to emigrate because Labour had become a hotbed of anti-Jewish feeling.

“Many Jewish people in the United Kingdom are seriously contemplating their future here in the event of you becoming prime minister. Quietly, discreetly and extremely reluctantly, they are making contingency plans.” 

One of these is Mark Lewis, a prominent solicitor and a former director of lawfare firm UK Lawyers for Israel, who is emigrating to Israel with his partner, Mandy Blumenthal. It is believed she is National Director of Likud-Herut UK, an affiliate of the Zionist Federation and whose website is full of preposterous ideas such as:

“We believe that terms like ‘illegal occupation’ should never go unchallenged…” and “Such criticism as we may have [of Israel] should never be expressed publicly…”

Lewis, who describes himself as an “unapologetic Zionist”, said: “Jeremy Corbyn moved the rock and the anti-Semites crawled out from underneath.” And he told the Evening Standard: “I don’t feel welcome in this country anymore.” So he’s off to that hotbed of racism and apartheid, Israel.

Being unwelcome is not a happy feeling. I know this from my trips to Israel, what with their rudeness, threatening behaviour, intrusive searches, hostile questioning and unforgivably vile treatment of our Palestinian friends. It’s not as if we want to be in Israel – we are forced to divert there on account of Israel’s illegal military occupation. And when we eventually reach Palestine we have to put up with the presence of arrogant Israeli gunslingers strutting the streets, setting up hundreds of roadblocks, using obstructive tactics with brutish behaviour, creating endless queues and interfering with Palestinian life at every level.

And if we try traveling to Palestine direct, like the humanitarian aid boats Al-Awda and Freedom last month, we get violently and unlawfully assaulted on the high seas, beaten up, thrown in a stinking Israeli jail and have our belongings and money stolen by the Israeli military desperate to maintain their illegal blockade of Gaza.

So, if Messrs Feldman, Lewis and Blumenthal feel more comfortable with those criminals they’d better join them. 

In answer to the babble put out by Zio-propagandists, church leaders in the Holy Land issued their 2006 Jerusalem Declaration saying:

This still stands. And as the declaration also points out, “discriminative actions [by the occupation] are turning Palestine into impoverished ghettos surrounded by exclusive Israeli settlements. The establishment of the illegal settlements and the construction of the Separation Wall on confiscated Palestinian land undermines the viability of a Palestinian state as well as peace and security in the entire region.”

That comes from genuine churchmen working in the front line against armed Zio-thugs whose vicious day-to-day persecution of the Christian and Muslim communities in the Holy Land makes a nonsense of accusations of anti-Semitism in the UK.

I think we can deduce from all this that Zionism is a menace. Nothing has changed for the better; it has got steadily worse.

“We want our Jerusalem back, and our state”

In 2010 Father Manuel Musallam, a gritty Catholic priest with long experience of Israel’s cruel and illegal occupation, told members of the Irish government:

Archbishop Theodosius Hanna (Greek Orthodox Church) told them: 

Corbyn should remind his tormentors of all this and take no lectures from those who support Zionism and adore the racist state it spawned.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above 

Monopoly media news fabricators would have us believe that false flags are conspiracy theories.  In the real world, however, false flag terrorism is military doctrine. [1]

Western-supported al Qaeda terrorists [2] in Syria have a long history of conducting false flag terror operations, largely because they serve imperial agendas of advancing terrorist interests. 

In the following video, Father Gerges Rizk describes 2011 false flag tactics, committed by terrorists in Daraa, Syria, to displace peaceful protestors, and to falsely blame the Syrian government.  

Interview by Eva Bartlett

Prof. Tim Anderson explains the complicity of “Western Liberal Media” in advancing false flag agendas:

“Even after Syrian nun Mother Agnes Mariam had denounced ‘false flag’ crimes and reported on the recycling of photos of dead bodies (SANA 2011), and after western journalist Nir Rosen (2012) reported that the Islamist ‘rebels’ were dressing up their own casualties as ‘civilians,’ the WLM stuck to its jihadist-linked sources, reporting that the Syrian Army was constantly targeting ‘civilians.’ [3]

The entire cycle of false flag attack, followed by media complicity, followed by escalated military “interventions” based upon false pretexts, is entirely illegal according to international law. 

US National Security Adviser John Bolton’s recent threat, which basically telegraphed an upcoming false flag chemical weapons attack, is criminal.  The threat itself, explains international lawyer Christopher Black, “is an act of aggression meant to terrorise the people of Syria.” Additionally, Black asserts that “any military action against Syria will be an act of aggression and a war crime.” [4]

In light of an anticipated criminal aggression against Syria, based upon a predicted false flag attack, the Global Network for Syria made the following statement:

“We therefore urge the US, UK and French governments to consider the following points before embarking on any military intervention:

• In the cases of three of the previous incidents cited in the 21 August statement (Ltamenah, Khan Sheykhoun, Saraqib) OPCW inspectors were not able to secure from the militants who controlled these areas security guarantees to enable them to visit the sites, yet still based their findings on evidence provided by militants.
• In the case of Douma, also cited, the interim report of OPCW inspectors dated 6 July based on a visit to the site concluded that no evidence was found of the use of chemical weapons and that evidence for the use of chlorine as a weapon was inconclusive.
• Western governments themselves acknowledge that Idlib is controlled by radical Islamist extremists. The British government in its statement on 20 August justified its curtailment of aid programmes in Idlib on the grounds that conditions had become too difficult. Any action by the Syrian government would not be directed at harming civilians, but at removing these radical elements.
• Any military intervention without a mandate from the United Nations would be illegal.
• Any military intervention would risk confrontation with a nuclear armed comember of the Security Council, as well as with the Islamic Republic of Iran, with consequent ramifications for regional as well as global security.
• There is no plan in place to contain chaos in the event of sudden government collapse in Syria, such as might occur in the contingency of command and control centres being targeted. Heavy military intervention could result in the recrudescence of terrorist groups, genocide against the Alawite, Christian, Druze, Ismaili, Shiite and Armenian communities, and a tsunami of refugees into neighbouring countries and Europe. “ [5]

Now that Syria is on the cusp of total victory, the West is scrambling to engineer yet another disastrous false flag. 

*

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

Notes

1. Washington’s Blog,” Fifty-eight « Admitted » False Flag Attacks

Presidents, Prime Ministers, Congressmen, Generals, Spooks, Soldiers and Police ADMIT to False Flag Terror.” Mondalisation.ca, 3 February. 2016/Washington’s Blog, 2 February, 2016. (https://www.mondialisation.ca/fifty-eight-admitted-false-flag-attacks/5505411) Accessed 1 September, 2018.

2. The “War on Terror” itself is a false flag in the sense that the West positions al Qaeda et al. as enemies when they are in fact proxies.

3. Prof. Tim Anderson, “Watchdogs to Attack Dogs: Western Liberal Media Failures on Syria.” telesur, 25 March 2016. (https://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/Watchdogs-to-Attack-Dogs-Western-Liberal-Media-Fails-Syria-20160325-0015.html) Accessed 01 Sept. 2018.

4. Christopher Black, Facebook commentary, 31 August, 2018.

5. Prof. Tim Anderson, Baroness Cox, and Peter Ford, “Statement on Impending US, UK and French Military Intervention in Syria.” Global Research, August 31, 2018/ Global Network for Syria, 31 August, 2018. (https://www.globalresearch.ca/statement-on-impending-us-uk-and-french-military-intervention-in-syria/5652472) Accessed 01 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 

Click to order

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Amid a worsening in U.S.-Russian relations that renowned scholar and left-wing journalist Stephen Cohen has recently characterized as being worse than during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a veritable onslaught of intense and unrelenting anti-Russian sentiment has been unleashed in the U.S.

The supposed rationale for this initiative is hostility toward President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, though it’s surely possible to discover other grounds for the first’s opponents to criticize him, and the anti-Russian venom is by no means limited to the nation’s government.

Unlike its prototype that began shortly after World War II, however, this time it’s not being spearheaded by an array of rock-ribbed conservatives, leaders of traditional religious groups, immigrants from Eastern Europe and the broader military-industrial complex but by a coalition of media personalities (a disproportionate amount of whom are comedians and late-night television hosts), Hollywood celebrities, prominent Democrat elected politicians, former intelligence agents and directors, webzine journalists and others who during the years of the George W. Bush presidency were known as neoconservatives. As a whole this somewhat ragtag assembly consists of people who describe themselves as liberals, progressives and leftists.

The initial rallying cry for this xenophobic crusade was signaled by Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election campaign when, among other illiberal and unsubstantiated claims, she denounced her then-opponent Donald Trump as someone Russian President Vladimir Putin would “have as a puppet” (1) and routinely slandered Julian Assange and Wikileaks as being under Russian control (2). In her exact words, “there’s no difference.”

The drumbeat of Russophobia intensified in the final days of the campaign and rather than dissipating, only increased after the election, soon taking center stage in American political discourse, with the “Russian hacking” of state voting systems having been decided upon as a strategy for invalidating the election result. The topic has been resurrected in recent days, notably by former Clinton Administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich, in calling for annulling the election of Donald Trump, though the earlier accusation of tampering with voting machines and systems, now largely refuted, is no longer alluded to.

As all such politically-motivated initiatives aimed at the lower emotions and in this case at a several-decades-long history of deeply (perhaps ineradicably) ingrained anti-Russian fear and animus, this one has swept caution, healthy scepticism, moderation and decency aside.

Immediately after the election, filmmaker Michael Moore (who’s made a lucrative career out of straddling the divide between liberals and progressives) made inflammatory statements appealing to “patriotic generals” and praising the role of the Central Intelligence Agency, both in clear reference to saving the republic from President Trump.

Hollywood veteran Rob Reiner and the newly-created Committee to Investigate Russia produced a video in which actor Morgan Freeman menacingly intones:

“We have been attacked. We are at war.” (3)

In recent days late-night TV host and comedian Bill Maher fawned over ex-CIA director John Brennan in a manner more befitting an aspiring poet flattering a Roman emperor on his HBO show. Maher, who has used the word before, coaxed a by no means reluctant Brennan into acknowledging the charge of treason against Trump for having met with Russian President Putin in Helsinki in July. (4)

As writer Michael McCaffrey put it, only in a highly-charged politically environment like that obtaining in the U.S. currently could “a former CIA director who has committed crimes and war crimes such as implementing and covering up Bush’s rendition and torture regime, spying on the US Senate, and masterminding Obama’s deadly drone program, get a delirious ovation from those on the left.”

With the death of Senator John McCain on August 25, the quintessential imperialist who spent a disproportionate amount of the days in each year traveling the world inciting insurrections and wars – more than any other American official, and politician of any nationality, in history that I can think of – became the new icon of the American liberal-left self-styled resistance. He has been lionized, canonized, practically deified as a sterling example of what an American political leader should be, an Ahura Mazda to Trump’s Ahriman in the Zoroastrian scheme.

The current liberal-progressive (its own nomenclature) dispensation has traveled a long way from denouncing Joseph McCarthy‘s red hunt – a sign at a recent anti-Trump march read “Joe McCarthy, where are you when we need you?” – and organizing to prevent the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to clamoring for the 21st-century equivalents of both.

*

Notes

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVrDjJixbSc

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBdK4L2RdKE

3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB9FDl1siS4

4) https://youtu.be/1Tv7-sIRwMg

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan says his country will procure Russia’s S-400 air defense missile system “in the shortest time,” paying no heed to warnings issued by the US, a NATO partner.

“Turkey needs S-400s and its deal has been done,” Erdogan said at a graduation ceremony for military officers in the western city of Balikesir on Friday.

“God willing, we will buy them in the shortest time,” he stressed.

On April 3, Erdogan and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin said in the Turkish capital Ankara that they had agreed to expedite the delivery of S-400 missile systems. The delivery had previously been scheduled for late 2019 and early 2020.

The S-400 system, whose full name is the Triumf Mobile Multiple Anti-Aircraft Missile System (AAMS), is an advanced Russian missile system designed to detect, track, and destroy planes, drones, or missiles as far as 402 kilometers away. It has previously been sold only to China and India.

Washington and NATO officials strive to prevent the sophisticated Russian-built anti-aircraft weapon system from collecting information about the US-made all-weather stealth multirole warplanes, technically known as the Lockheed Martin F-35 fighters, just as they are gaining a foothold in Europe.

Interview with Prof. Michel Chossudovsky (starts at 0’45” )

US Secretary of Defense James Mattis on August 28 said his country is concerned about Turkey’s intent to purchase the S-400s, adding that Washington does “not recommend” it.

Washington warned that any such acquisition would inevitably affect the prospects for Turkish military-industrial cooperation with the US.

However, Erdogan on Friday said that Ankara “needed cooperation with other countries as much as that with Europe and America.”

The purchase of the Russian missile system comes amid rising tensions between Ankara and the US over the detention of Andrew Brunson, an American pastor, in Turkey over terror-related charges.

Brunson was indicted by a Turkish court on charges of having links with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) militant group and the movement of the US-based opposition cleric Fethullah Gulen. Ankara accuses Gulen of having masterminded the July 2016 coup attempt against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The spat has hit trade ties between the US and Turkey hard and affected the Turkish economy. The lira has already lost about 30 percent of its value against the US dollar since the beginning of August.

Turkey and the US also disagree over their military interventions in the Syria war and the US conviction of a Turkish state bank executive on sanctions-busting charges in January.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

UPDATE: I find people need more explanation than I realised. The UK is bound by a common position under EU common foreign policy (third pillar). So until Brexit the official line must still be always given that the UK is not considering moving its Embassy. Post Brexit that restriction is lifted. What my source is saying is that secret contingency planning for a post Brexit move to Jerusalem is underway in the FCO. What I have been pressing the FCO for is an admission that planning is taking place. Obviously this is not something they would want to be public knowledge at present.

My source stated that the move is partly ideological, and partly to sweeten relationships with the USA in seeking a trade deal. My own observation is that the Tories probably think this would cause more trouble between Corbyn and the Parliamentary Labour Party, and that the Westminster classes are totally out of touch with real public opinion on Palestine, as they seldom meet anybody who does not share their extreme zionism.

***

This information about planning being carried out in great secrecy came to me from an FCO source I had no previous contact with, so I do not know the reliability. It might even be a hoax to make me look foolish. Therefore I decided to check the story with the FCO Press Department, but I can’t get any response out of them. Not answering questions appears to be the standard British state response to independent journalists now. If this is nonsense, it would have taken the FCO two minutes just to tell me so.

So I am posting this here with the caveat that the information is not verified yet. There is much to be said on motive, both from what I was told by the source and from my own gloss, but I shall leave that until we can make more progress on validation. Obviously, I hope the posting may spur the FCO to respond, or others to corroborate the leak.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Earlier this year, the Trump regime cut over $300 million in UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) aid, providing vital services for millions of Palestinian refugees.

On August 29, remaining US funding for UNWRA was halted entirely, the Trump regime in cahoots with Israeli harshness on defenseless Palestinians, pressuring, bullying and intimidating PA leadership to bow to their will.

They want Palestinians to accept a no-peace/peace plan, abandoning fundamental rights dear to everyone everywhere, including self-determination, the right of return, and freedom from illegal occupation harshness.

A Trump regime official said a  statement on halting all US UNWRA funding will be announced in the coming weeks.

On August 24, Trump regime hardliners cut another $200 million in humanitarian aid to Palestinians – funds to be used for so-called “high priority projects elsewhere,” according to the State Department.

The Trump and Netanyahu regimes are suffocating millions of Palestinians, holding them hostage to their demands.

UNWRA spokesman Christopher Gunness said

“(w)e have been given to understand that certainly for this year, we should not expect any US funding, and we have built zero US funding into our planning assumptions for next year,” adding:

Depriving millions of “hungry, angry, under-educated” Palestinians of essential humanitarian aid, fuels conflict instead of ending it.

“We have robustly gone after non-US funding among traditional donors and emerging markets. And we have been unprecedentedly successful,” Gunness explained, adding:

“In just seven months, we have raised 238 million dollars – $50 million from Saudi Arabia, $50 million from the UAE,” along with generous Russian and Turkish contributions. (W)e still have a deficit for this year of $217 million” along with considerable funding needed for next year.

Separately, Germany pledged to significantly increase its UNWRA funding for Palestinian refugees, Foreign Minister Heiko Mass saying it won’t make up for the agency’s shortfall entirely, adding:

It’s important for EU countries “jointly (to) undertake further efforts. The loss of this organization could unleash an uncontrollable chain reaction.”

An appeal to Arab League countries was made to fund what the Trump regime halted. Last year, Washington supplied $365 million to UNWRA, about one-third of its $1.2 billion budget, a significant shortfall to make up with all US funding to the agency halted.

Part of Trump regime policy is getting denying diaspora Palestinians their legitimate right of return to their homeland – what no government can legally deny them.

On Wednesday, Ziofascist US UN envoy Nikki Haley said the Trump regime took the Palestinians’ right of return “off the table” in future peace talks – largely by pretending only around half a million Palestinian refugees exist, not five million, including their descendants, the legitimate number.

Trump and Netanyahu want UNWRA abolished, its humanitarian aid to millions of Palestinian refugees ended.

They want fundamental Palestinian rights denied – the notion of Palestine as their legitimate homeland abandoned.

It’s part of longstanding US/Israeli collective punishment on Palestinians, an unaccountable high crime against humanity, toughened since Trump took office.

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The Russian Government and President Putin are coming under pressure not from US sanctions, which are very good for Russia as they force Russia into independence, but from Russian patriots who are tiring of Putin’s non-confrontational responses to Washington’s never-ending insults and military provocations. Russian patriots don’t want war, but they do want their country’s honor defended, and they believe Putin is failing in this job. Some of them are saying that Putin himself is a West-worshipping Atlanticist Integrationist.

This disillusinonment with Putin, together with Putin’s endorsement of raising the retirement age for pensions, a trap set for him by Russia’s neoliberal economists, have hurt Putin’s approval ratings at the precise time that he will again be tested by Washington in Syria.

In many columns I have defended Putin from the charge that he is not sufficiently Russian. Putin wants to avoid war, because he knows it would be nuclear, the consequences of which would be dire. He knows that the US and its militarily impotent NATO allies cannot possibly conduct conventional warfare against Russia or China, much less against both. Putin also undersrtands that the sanctions are damaging Washington’s European vassals and could eventually force the European vassal states into independence that would constrain Washington’s belligerence. Even with Russia’s new super weapons, which probably give Putin the capability of destroying the entirety of the Western World with little or no damage to Russia, Putin sees no point in so much destruction, especially as the consequences are unknown. There could be nuclear winter or other results that would put the planet into decline as a life-sustaining entity.

So, as I have suggested in many columns Putin is acting intelligently. He is in the game for the long term while protecting the world from dangerous war.

Whereas I endorse Putin’s strategy and admire his coolness as a person who never lets emotion lead him, there is nevertheless a problem. The people in the West with whom he is dealing are idiots who do not appreciate his statesmanship. Consequently, each time Putin turns the other cheek, so to speak, the insults and the provocations ratchet upward.

Consider Syria. The Syrian Army with the help of a tiny part of the Russian Air Force has cleared all areas of Syria but one of the American-instigated-financed-and-equiped forces sent by Washington to overthrow the Syrian government.

The remaining US proxy force is about to be eliminated. In order to save it, and to keep a Washington foothold that could permit a restart of the war, Washington has arranged yet another false flag “chemical attack” that the presstitute and obiedient Western media will blame on Assad. President Trump’s National Security Adviser, a crazed, perhaps insane, Neoconservative, has told Russia that Washington will take a dim view of the Syrian/Russian use of chemical weapons against “Assad’s own people.”

The Russians are fully aware that any chemical attack will be a false flag attack orchestrated by Washington using the elements it sent to Syria to overthrow the government. Indeed, Russia’s ambassador to the US explained it all yesterday to the US government.

Clearly, Putin hopes to avoid Washington’s orchestrated attack by having his ambassador explain the orchestration to the American officials who are orchestrating it. (See this)

This strategy implies that Putin thinks US government officials are capable of shame and integrity. They most certainly are not. I spent 25 years with them. They don’t even know what the words mean.

What if, instead, Putin had declared publicly for the entire world to hear that any forces, wherever located, responsible for an attack on Syria would be annihiliated? My view and that of Russian patriot Bogdasarov is that such an ultimatum from the leader of the country capable of delivering it would cool the jets of Russophobic Washington. There would be no attack on Syria.

Bogdasarov and I might be wrong. The Russian forces deployed around Syria with their hypersonic missiles are more than a match for the US forces assembled to attack Syria. However, American hubris can certainly prevail over facts, in which case Putin would have to destroy the sources of the attack. By not committing in advance, Putin retains flexibility. Washington’s attack, like its previous attack on Syria, might be a face-saver, not a real attack. Nevertheless, sooner or later Russia will have to deliver a firmer response to provocations.

I am an American. I am not a Russian, much less a Russian nationalist. I do not want US military personnel to be casualties of Washington’s fatal desire for world hegemony, much less to be casualties of Washington serving Israel’s interests in the Middle East. The reason I think Putin needs to do a better job of standing up to Washington is that I think, based on history, that appeasement encourages more provocations, and it comes to a point when you have to surrender or fight. It is much better to stop this process in its tracks before it reaches that dangerous point.

Andrei Martyanov, whose book I recently reviewed on my website, recently defended Putin, as The Saker and I have done in the past, from claims that Putin is too passive in the face of assaults. (See this) As I have made the same points, I can only applaud Martyanov and The Saker. Where we might differ is in recognizing that endlessly accepting insults and provocations encourages their increase until the only alternative is surrender or war.

So, the questions for Andrei Martyanov, The Saker, and for Putin and the Russian government is: How long does turning your other cheek work? Do you turn your other cheek so long as to allow your opponent to neutralize your advantage in a confrontation? Do you turn your other cheek so long that you lose the support of the patriotic population for your failure to defend the country’s honor? Do you turn your other cheek so long that you are eventually forced into war or submission? Do you turn your other cheek so long that the result is nuclear war?

I think that Martyanov and The Saker agree that my question is a valid one. Both emphazise in their highly informative writings that the court historians misrepresent wars in the interest of victors. Let’s give this a moment’s thought. Both Napoleon and Hitler stood at their apogee, their success unmitigated by any military defeat. Then they marched into Russia and were utterly destroyed. Why did they do this? They did it because their success had given them massive arogance and belief in their “exceptionalism,” the dangerous word that encapsulates Washington’s belief in its hegemony.

The zionist neoconsevatives who rule in Washington are capable of the same mistake that Napoleon and Hitler made. They believe in “the end of history,” that the Soviet collapse means history has chosen America as the model for the future. Their hubris actually exceeds that of Napoleon and Hitler.

When confronted with such deluded and ideological force, does turning the other cheek work or does it encourage more provocation?

This is the question before the Russian government.

Perhaps the Russian government will understand the meaning of the orchestrated eulogies for John McCain. It is not normal for a US senator to be eulogized in this way, especially one with such an undistinguished record. What is being eulogized is McCain’s hatred of Russia and his record as a warmonger. What Washington is eulogizing is its own committment to war.

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Make no mistake: the Trump loyalist or “Trump base” will always be that whether Mr. Trump remains president or not; whether he suddenly quits to play golf in Scotland; whether he secretly flies to Moscow to take sanctuary from the legal guns about to charge him with money laundering, bank fraud, embezzlement or treason; or whether he is kidnapped by space aliens, all of whom will be characterized by the “alt-Right” and select Fox News extremists as Godless liberals, secularists and the violent left.

The Trump loyalist, in his absence, will seek and demand another in his stead. And the “movement”, to which money and reputations are intimately linked, will supply one.

It is altogether clear that the dilemma now crystallized and embodied in the figure of Donald J. Trump is actually one within the very lifeblood of the American electorate – in numbers from one-third to almost one-half of them. Such zeal. Such iconoclastic passions. Such preference for lawlessness and immorality, yet justified with religious overtones. One might call the whole legion a “Fifth Column”, which is exactly what those who undermine government, legality, and democratic institutions are called.

There is one catch in Mr. Trump’s jagged, mercurial, half-diminished mind that bears watching and it might be the very thing that collapses everything from within: he might make a BIG MISTAKE. By mistake I don’t mean shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, starting a nuclear exchange or provoking a confused loon to blow-up CNN (those acts he’ll escape from).

To illustrate: How many “on the fence” Trump-Republicans have now doubted their loyalty after he embarrassed the Office of the President through continued open hostility to Sen. John McCain (on the deathbed)? But this was only one daily mistake. But one each day equates to thousands in time and with each falls away another Trump supporter. There will be no mad rush out of Trump’s ensnaring vineyard of delusions. That’s a pipe-dream (another delusion). But drain the swamp he will – of his own kind through misadventure, high-stakes gambling, and delusions of invincibility of such fervor the patient gods of destiny will finally answer back with Almighty karma. And if for some reason he gets away with all of it – if for some reason – there is always St. Peter waiting on the other side of the veil.

Through and through, piece by piece, section by section, Mr. Trump has prevailed in eliminating opposition (so thinks he) until the time will arrive when only his “base” remains. Then … God help him if he accidentally slips. What if he – through inadvertence or a sudden psychotic break – insults, belittles, verbally assaults, humiliates or threatens one or more in the “base”? Talks trash on Mike Pence’s Rapture? Such are BIG MISTAKES that result from taking risks larger than the last to appease a narcissistic and commanding ego. Self-delusions of invincibility always keep raising the bar until proven utterly fraudulent.

No, dead or alive, impeached or exonerated, Mr. Trump will remain the chosen one to his God-fearing evangelicals and the one man who fooled almost all Republicans almost all of the time.

The GOP-Trump gambit was to elicit support from the most authoritarian portions of the populace. From the large pool of Republican-leaning church goers who listen more to the pulpit than their own pulse, he secured votes to accelerate the decimation of the safety nets; turn the New Testament on its head by dividing bread instead of multiplying it; suffered the “little children” in concentration camps; erected tables for money changers to bull-drive markets; convinced the elderly to support candidates who would vote away the security of government health care from not only themselves, but also from their children and grandchildren. Trump is permitted to throw the first stones because he is “God’s Will” for America, say the faithful.

For workers-at-large – unaided by education in their historic role in fighting and gaining employee rights and a living wage – a decades-long inculcation by Republican leaders, media demagogues, and Christian-right evangelicals reached fruition in the Trump era. By reverse engineering the proletariat revolutions of the last century, this one didn’t seek to overturn the Czar and the forces of oppression in order to build a “worker’s paradise”, but to convince the workers to overturn themselves and side with their historic nemesis. They believed their defenders were the “bosses”. Did they think they would share in unbridled profiteering now accruing to the wealthiest? Did they believe to gain by the plundering of worker protections earned over the last one-hundred years through the blood, sweat and tears of their working grandparents and great-grandparents? Did they think they and their families would be immune to climate-change and polluted air and water enabled through Mr. Trump’s deregulations and eliminations of environmental protections? Or were they motivated by pure unadulterated hate instilled in them by these same agents for the sole benefit of same?

History will unravel the threads that led here and the ones that will lead away. But Mr. Trump is not the problem; he is a symptom of it.

Whatever political changes result from the mid-term elections, the battles will continue (more fiercely) for the simple reason that each opponent – the Trump base and the opposition – are more emboldened today than before.

Such a play as this has several more acts to divulge before we can cross the turbulent waters safely; before we can read from the same page; before we can weigh what is lost against what is gained. Any assessment is best after the fact, not before. We can’t see the whole film now because we are in one of its frames.

Nearing the end will come a time to collectively answer what now is being collectively asked: Who are we? What is America? What are American values? What does America stand for? Because I have shown partisanship in this writing, I am not one to supply these answers, but others exist who can help lead the way to those answers.

All roads point to this ending because this battle began there. And having begun there it will end only when collective agreement is reached. And despite the pain, conflict and losses incurred throughout the travel, America will have grown.

This I believe.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

On August 20, the Economist ran an article on Venezuela saying that “forced migration from the country might surpass the Syria crisis.” The magazine reported:

The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that at the end of 2017 approximately 1.6 million Venezuelans were living outside their country. Today that number is likely to be far higher: as of June 2018 there were nearly 1 million Venezuelan migrants in Colombia alone. The UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, has recorded 135,000 asylum applications from Venezuelans during the first seven months of 2018, already 20 percent more than for the whole of 2017. The total number of displaced Venezuelans may already have reached 4 million, out of a population of some 30 million. The outflow could eventually surpass the 6 million people who have fled the Syrian civil war.

The UN’s International Organization for Migration estimates that, by July of 2018, 2.3 million Venezuelans were living abroad (which includes hundreds of thousands who have spent decades abroad).  Why does the Economist say it “may already” be 4 million? A good guess is that they are relying on the estimates of Tomas Paez, a vehemently anti-government Venezuelan academic who has long been a favorite source for corporate journalists (FAIR.org, 2/18/18). Paez has estimated that 1.6 million people left Venezuela from 1999–2015, about five times more than UN Population Division estimates for that period.

No doubt as Venezuela’s economy entered what could fairly be called a “collapse” starting in 2015, migration began to skyrocket, and it is indeed likely to get worse, thanks to illegal economic sanctions that Trump enacted in August 2017.

What about the Economist‘s Syria comparison? First of all, Syria’s civil war has not just created a massive “outflow” of refugees. It also created an enormous population of internally displaced people, as wars typically do. As of 2017, Syria had 6 million people forcibly displaced within its borders. Another 5 million refugees were still living in three bordering countries (Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey). That brings the total of those forcibly displaced by Syria’s civil war to nearly 11 million—almost seven times larger than the most credible estimate of the numbers displaced (so far) by Venezuela’s economic crisis.

Syria had a population of about 21 million in 2011 when the civil war began. It has now been estimated to be about 18 million. So more than half of Syria’s 2011 population are now refugees, either internally or externally—a far cry from the 13 percent of the Venezuelan population claimed by Paez (and hinted at by the Economist), or the 5 percent (1.6 million) estimated by the UN’s International Organization for Migration to have left since 2015.

In absolute terms, Colombia’s population of internally displaced is even larger than Syria’s. As of March 2018, the UNHCR estimated it at 7.7 million out of total population of about 50 million, or more than one in seven. Of course, relative to population, Syria’s internally displaced population is vastly larger than Colombia’s. Still, 7.7 million internally displaced is a hell of a disaster to sweep under the rug, but those are the benefits of being a government in the good graces of the US and its allies.

The Economist doesn’t mention that US policy (backed by the entire Western establishment) is to use harsh and illegal economic sanctions to deliberately make Venezuela’s economic crisis worse, which will help drive more people to leave the country. US economist Mark Weisbrot, who was recently given a very rare bit of space to state this fact, noted afterwards that

Brian Ellsworth, a journalist for Reuters who reports from Venezuela, has joined the latest avalanche of trolls, bots and blowhards who swarmed me because I dared to mention on BBC World TV, on Friday night, that Trump’s financial embargo against Venezuela makes it more difficult for any government to stabilize the economy—a fact that no economist would dispute. Indeed, that is the purpose of the embargo.

The Western establishment includes prominent human rights groups, who often express the same imperial perspective one finds in the Economist.  By citing these outfits, corporate media seem to provide critical assessments that are independent of Western officialdom. Don’t buy it. Amnesty International has refused to oppose US economic sanctions on Venezuela, and has also refused to denounce flagrant efforts by US officials to incite a military coup. Amnesty’s Americas director Erika Guevara-Rosas tweeted the dubious Economist article comparing Venezuela to Syria.

Guevara-Rosas also tweeted out an article praising John McCain. McCain’s death has been a real “teachable moment,” showing how tiny the ideological differences are between corporate media and the human rights industry. Four different Human Rights Watch (HRW) officials used their Twitter accounts to spread praise for McCain. In 2011, McCain tried to have Venezuela placed on the US “sponsors of terrorism” list—not scary at all, coming from a man who joked about bombing Iran. McCain dutifully echoed theVenezuelan opposition’s line (also the Western media line, andHRW’s line) that the country is a “dictatorship.”

Ken Roth (HRW’s executive director) said McCain “will be remembered for his firm, principled opposition to torture, especially by Bush, a member of his own party.” Jose Miguel Vivanco saidMcCain was “a giant in North America politics and an ally in the defense of human rights.” Sarah Margon, HRW’s Washington director, said that McCain’s death ”feels exceptionally tough for those of us who have fought for human decency and basic rights alongside and with him.” Dinah PoKempner, HRW’s general counsel, spread an article that called McCain a “war hero.”

HRW followed up with an official statement saying McCain “was for decades a compassionate voice for US foreign and national security policy.”

And, of course, the Economist’s obituary (8/30/18) similarly laid the praise on thick, casting McCain as part of a heroic Republican “resistance” to Donald Trump: “The talk was never straighter, the stance never more upright, than when he called on his fellow Republicans not just to endure, but to resist.” McCain voted with Trump 83 percent of the time, according to the FiveThirtyEight website.

The victims of empire are never more invisible than when it is time to whitewash a departed warmonger. McCain’s “war hero” credibility stems from being a direct perpetrator of, and not simply a cheerleader for, the mass slaughter in Vietnam that took the lives of millions of people—or “gooks,” as McCain unapologetically preferred to call them. It is left to independent voices like Max Blumenthal (Consortium News, 8/27/18), to review McCain’s bloodthirsty record:

McCain did not simply thunder for every major intervention of the post-Cold War era from the Senate floor, while pushing for sanctions and assorted campaigns of subterfuge on the side. He was uniquely ruthless when it came to advancing imperial goals, barnstorming from one conflict zone to another to personally recruit far-right fanatics as American proxies.

In Libya and Syria, he cultivated affiliates of Al Qaeda as allies, and in Ukraine, McCain courted actual, sig-heiling neo-Nazis.

While McCain’s Senate office functioned as a clubhouse for arms industry lobbyists and neocon operatives, his fascistic allies waged a campaign of human devastation that will continue until long after the flowers dry up on his grave.

Unless there is radical change—real “resistance”—that transforms the organizations that people rely on to be ”informed” (media and NGOs included), Donald Trump, like Nixon, Reagan and George W. Bush, will eventually be whitewashed as well.

*

Joe Emerberger is a writer based in Canada whose work has appeared in Telesur English, ZNet and Counterpunch.

Featured image is from the author.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The eulogies for the recently deceased John McCain, a US Senator for Arizona, have been plentiful, and so far as the American mainstream media is concerned, they have verged on the hagiographic. He has been variously described as a “patriot”, a “war hero” and a “defender of freedom”. Most perplexingly, McCain was lauded as a “warrior for peace”.

But while praise for McCain has been dutifully administered in reverential terms by both liberal and conservative figures, the truth is that there is widespread dissent about McCain’s legacy as a man, as a military officer, as well as a politician. Perhaps, most worrisome is the construction of McCain’s legacy as one of the resolutely principled maverick and insatiable peaceseeker.

On the contrary, McCain operated at the highest echelons of the American Establishment, a closeted world of vested interests comprising a network geared towards the enrichment of the American elite. He was a captive of the defence industry and an unceasingly aggressive spokesperson for the post-Cold War era militarism that has compromised the United States and brought it down low in the eyes of the global community of nations.

So why the almost uncritical eulogising of a controversial life beset by allegations of incompetence, corruption and disloyalty?

Perhaps it is the tradition of the people of the United States to venerate their warriors. From the highest serving general to the lowest level footsoldier, Americans have a penchant for what might be termed ‘soldier worship’. There is also a tendency for disparate groups of people to pull together behind someone when confronted by an idea or by a person to whom they feel repugnance. It is certainly the case that the transition from life to death brings out the sentimental in people whether such death is sudden or prolonged. And, of course, as with most cultures, Americans are cautious about speaking ill of the dead.

Each of these have doubtlessly played a part in the positive reviews of the life of John McCain since his passing. John Sidney McCain III was born into a family of naval servicemen, two of who reached the rank of admiral. He served as a naval aviator during the Vietnam War and later retired as a captain. McCain also engaged in a well-publicised, long-running feud with Donald Trump who as a polarising figure has succeeded in arraigning different strands of his countrymen against his presidency. His demise, caused by the effects of a malignant brain tumour, was a cruel one. Glioblastoma is the most aggressive form of cancer.

But there is much to question about McCain.

McCain joined the US Navy following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. Each man had reached the pinnacle of service and became the first father and son pair to achieve the rank of four-star admiral. When he retired in 1981, McCain had been the recipient of a Silver Star and Purple Heart. He had also received a Distinguished Flying Cross for his “exceptional courage, superb airmanship, and total devotion to duty” during a bombing raid over Hanoi in 1967, and had been awarded the Legion of Merit with Combat “V” award “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding services to the Government of the United States while interned as a Prisoner of War in North Vietnam from October 1967 to March 1973.”

But the competence of the future senator as an aviator has been consistently questioned. For instance, in 1960 while on a training exercise, he crashed his plane into Corpus Christi Bay, in the process shearing the skin off its wings. The following year, while serving with an aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean theatre, he flew through electrical wires in southern Spain causing a power failure in the surrounding area. And in 1965, while en route to Philadelphia for the Army-Navy football game, he crashed a T-2 trainer jet in Virginia.

These incidents, caused by a carefree attitude described as “cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits”, led to rebukes by the naval authorities. They also explain a great deal about the allegations surrounding his responsibility for two more serious incidents.

Sarcastically dubbed ‘Ace McCain’ by his commanders, McCain’s career as an aviator was, nonetheless, allowed to continue. Although the official inquiry into the catastrophic fire onboard the USS Forrestal in July 1967 was officially blamed on the accidental firing of a rocket caused by an electrical power surge during preparations for a strike against a target in North Vietnam, the claim that the disaster, which killed 134 sailors while injuring another 161, was caused by McCain ‘wet-starting’ his jet has refused to die. ‘Wet-starting’ refers to where pilots flood the combustion chamber of their craft with extra fuel before ignition in order to create either a loud bang or a plume of flame.

McCain is claimed by some to have done this and that the ensuing concatenation of maladies are traceable to his reckless act.  That he avoided the consequences of his actions is said to be due to the seniority and influence of his high-ranking father who some, including Admiral Thomas Moorer, a former Chief of Naval Operations and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, allege was at the time cooperating with the coverup pertaining to the deliberate attack on the USS Liberty by the armed forces of the state of Israel, which had occurred the previous month. Three months later, McCain was shot down while conducting a bombing sortie over North Vietnam.

No official blame has ever been attached to McCain for his shooting down. But as his aircraft was lost behind enemy lines, its remains were not subjected to the same sort of forensic analysis as had occurred after the earlier mishaps while in control of the cockpit. In all three incidents, McCain’s skill and judgment had been called into question.

Aviators like McCain had been trained to stay at altitudes of 4,000 to 10,000 feet in environments where there were heavy deployments of surface-to-air missile launchers. They had equipment which warned the pilot that they were being tracked and also when a missile locked on them. These missiles were relatively easy to out-manoeuvre up to a point. This changed when there were multiple launches of between 6 and 12 missiles. McCain claimed in his autobiography that 22 missiles were fired at his squadron that day and that one blew off his right wing. He had been flying at an altitude of 3,000 feet above Hanoi.

It is McCain’s conduct as a prisoner of war which has brought him the most public scrutiny. Officially, he is a hero for withstanding torture: beatings, the withholding of medical treatment and a lengthy spell in solitary confinement, although he wilted and made at least one propaganda broadcast for North Vietnamese radio in which he pronounced himself guilty of “crimes against the Vietnamese country and people.”

The United States military Code of Conduct prohibits prisoners of war from accepting parole or other favours from the enemy, although during the Vietnam War, latitude was generally given to those who were seriously ill or injured.

McCain, who sustained two broken arms and a broken leg when ejecting from his plane, has been accused by some fellow veterans who were held at the same camps as he, as one who sold out his fellow prisoners and other servicemen by cooperating with his captors in order to be the beneficiary of a cushy captivity. His detractors accuse him of making broadcasts designed to infringe upon the morale of his fellow servicemen and of giving up military secrets such as that related to his flight, rescue ships and the order of attacks.

And while they allow that McCain refused an offer of early repatriation unless all prisoners were released, some allege that he was given special treatment with two other ‘defectors’ for cooperating. In fact, they argue that McCain’s refusal was an easy one given that he knew that his future prospects in the military and any public office would have been ruined. Many veterans claimed that those who were granted early release in three sets of releases in 1968 were collaborators who they dubbed ‘the slipperies’, ‘the slimies’ and ‘sleazies’, and that McCain had acknowledged this.

To be sure, several of McCain’s co-prisoners have spoken on his behalf over the years. Men like George Day and Orson Swindle confirm that torture was regularly administered and that they were forced to talk, although they attempted to mislead their captors by telling untruths. In McCain’s case, he claims his response to questions asking him about future bombing runs was simply to give those that had already taken place. He also claims to have given the names of the offensive line up of the Green Bay Packers football team as members of his squadron.

Render Crayton, McCain’s co-prisoner for one year (1971-1972) at the camp referred to as the  ‘Hanoi Hilton’, has often spoken up on behalf of McCain and claims that McCain “gave hell to his captors”. An example of this was deciding one morning to loudly sing the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem. The penalty for this insubordination was to be removed from a “big room” to “smaller cell rooms”.

This does not impress those veterans against McCain who assert that no one witnessed the series of tortures he claimed to have endured. In his autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, McCain admitted that he felt guilty throughout his captivity because he knew that he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs owing to the fact that he was the son of the commander-in-chief of all US forces in the Pacific region, including Vietnam. His captors referred to him as the ‘Crown Prince’.

They also point to the tremendous lengths McCain went towards blocking the release of classified documents during the 1991-1993 Senate Committee hearings on Prisoners of War and those Missing in Action as evidence of his having a personal interest in suppressing information which would discredit him. Through McCain’s efforts, documents such as related to all the Pentagon debriefings of returned prisoners were classified by legislation. A ‘Truth Bill’, which had been twice introduced to ensure transparency over missing men was bitterly opposed by McCain who then sponsored a new bill which sought to create a bureaucratic maze ensuring that only a few non-descript documents could be released. It was passed into law.

His rationale that the sealing of these files was for reasons of privacy and preventing the reviving of painful memories were not accepted by those who point to the fact that debriefings from returning Korean War prisoners of war are available to the public, and, as was the case with Korea, could have provided useful leads in so far as the fate of those who were missing in action in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

Those who opposed McCain were often subjected to vitriolic abuse by a man who developed a renowned temper. He referred to individuals and groups campaigning for information on MIAs as “hoaxers”, “charlatans” and “conspiracy theorists”. They retorted by dubbing him the ‘Manchurian Candidate’. In fact many of them along with the veterans against McCain often refer to his conduct while in captivity as having been nothing less than treachery.

Claims that McCain was on a list of 33 American prisoners of war earmarked to be executed for treason cannot be corroborated. But possible retribution against him by hardline military officers was rendered impossible by the US Defense Department whose officials had adopted a general policy of “honour-and-forgive” for returning prisoners of war. One specific element of this policy was not to prosecute any prisoners of war for making pro-North Vietnamese propaganda statements while in captivity. And to back this up, a move in 1973 by an Air Force colonel charging seven enlisted men of collaborating with the enemy while they were held as prisoners of war by North Vietnam was dismissed by the secretaries of the Army and Navy for lack of evidence and the mitigating circumstances of the “long hardship” they endured while in captivity.

While McCain is perceived by his detractors as having escaped punishment for his ‘disloyalty’ while in uniform, some point to his treatment of his first wife as evidence of his capacity for betrayal. A beautiful divorcee who he had married in 1965, Carol McCain had remained loyal to her husband during the period of his captivity. However, in 1969, she was badly injured in a motor accident and had to undergo numerous operations. She lost several inches in height and gained weight. McCain confessed that he returned home to a wife who appeared to be a different woman. He admitted to philandering and eventually divorced her to marry a woman who was 18 years younger than him.

His critics make the case that McCain lost interest in spouse who was no longer the ‘trophy wife’ he had married and replaced her with an extremely attractive woman whose family were very wealthy and well-connected in the state of Arizona, where he would begin his political career. His critics cite this as evidence of McCain’s ruthless and calculating streak, which was guided neither by virtue nor by principle.

As a politician, McCain has been lauded as having been guided by a code of “honour, courage, integrity and duty.” His maverick reputation is seen as evidence of his ability to eschew the narrow confines of partisan politics. But his tenure as a senator was beset by allegations of corrupt practices, of being a pork-barrel politico in the thrall of the military industry and Israel lobby, and of being a warmonger who supported America’s recent wars, which has led to the destruction of whole countries and of countless innocent casualties.

As a new senator in the early 1990s, McCain was involved in a corruption scandal after he and four senators from the Democratic Party were accused of trying to intimidate regulators on behalf of a campaign donor who was eventually imprisoned for corrupt management practices. He escaped with a reprimand for having “exercised poor judgment”, but with the accompanying judgment that his actions “were not improper”.

In August 2006, McCain was captured in a photograph going onboard a luxury yacht rented by the Italian con-man Raffaello Follieri in Montenegro. It was here that McCain met the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska for a second time, after their initial meeting in Davos. Both meetings had been arranged by Rick Davis, who like Paul Manafort has been a long-time conduit between American big shots and the Russian ultra-rich. Nathaniel Rothschild, who has large business interests in Montenegro, a country that granted him citizenship in 2013, also met with McCain.

Events unfolded to reveal that McCain had been part of an elaborate scheme which enabled Western financiers to buy up Montenegro and bribe influential members of the country’s elite who would be pliable to the idea of prising Montenegro away from Serbia. The long-term goal was for Montenegro to declare its independence and pave the way for its accession to membership of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), an objective that came to fruition in 2017.

McCain’s scheming in regard to Montenegro highlights his connections to the wealthy interests who control Western politicians, both of who work hand-in-hand in advancing Western geopolitical interests. The co-opting of Montenegro into the Western financial sphere and its membership of (NATO) were manoeuvres calculated to injure Russia’s commercial and military interests.

First of all, the oil and gas explorations subsequently embarked upon in the outlying Adriatic Sea is designed to create a market which aims to undercut or totally nullify Russian ambitions to supply oil and gas to countries in the region via a South Stream pipeline project. Secondly, transforming its military status from one of neutrality to being part of the Atlantic Alliance is in keeping with NATO’s post-Cold War eastward expansion, a policy which is designed to intimidate Russia, and which is in defiance of the agreement reached at the end of the Cold War between the leaders of the West and the former Soviet Union, that Germany reunification was predicated on the condition that NATO would not expand eastwards.

John McCain, by words and deeds, demonstrated his support for the anti-Russian sentiment that has permeated corridors of power in the United States since the coming to power of Vladimir Putin, a nationalist who brought to an end the mass plunder of Russia’s resources by Western interests during the government led by Boris Yeltsin. Indeed, no politician better embodied the twin doctrines that encapsulate the militarism pursued by the United States in the aftermath of the US-Soviet Cold War than McCain. These are philosophies espoused by Paul Wolfowitz and Zbigniew Brzezinski. The former provided that American policy was to ensure that after the fall of the Soviet Union, no other power should be permitted to rise and compete with the United States for global influence, while the latter was fixated on militarily intimidating Russia while seeking its dismemberment and relegation to a region designed to serve the energy needs of the West.

His dismissal of Russia as a “gas station masquerading as a country” and his forthright comment that Montenegro’s accession to NATO was “vital for regional stability and the joint effort of the Western allies to resist a resurgent Russia”, provided clear evidence of his position.

McCain’s anti-Russian posture ensured an enduring animus between himself and Vladimir Putin. Although McCain claimed that the Russo-Georgian War of 2008 was “a mistake” initiated by Mikheil Saakashvili, then president of Georgia, Putin accused the United States of fomenting the conflict in order to strengthen McCain’s bid for the White House. “The suspicion arises”, Putin claimed, “that someone in the United States especially created this conflict to make the situation more tense and create a competitive advantage for one of the candidates fighting for the post of US president.”

While Putin’s allegations were pooh-poohed by the White House as “patently false” and by the state department as “ludicrous”, events in Ukraine in 2014 clearly demonstrated McCain’s involvement in the American-sponsored overthrow of the elected government led by Viktor Yanukovytch. This was made possible by utilising the street muscle of ultranationalist groups such as Pravy Sektor. McCain was repeatedly photographed with Oleh Tyahnybok, the leader of the far right Svoboda Party which has been accused of being neo-Nazi in ideology while being vocally Russophobic and anti-Jewish.

McCain, who wielded a great deal of power as a long-term senator, allegedly chaired an important CIA meeting in Cairo that was pivotal in fomenting the so-called Arab Spring. And just as he met with political extremists in Kiev prior to the US-backed coup, in 2011 he was seen walking the streets of Benghazi where he was photographed meeting anti-Gaddafi rebels who embraced the Islamist creed of al-Qaeda, the alleged perpetrators of the September 11th attacks on the United States. He called the rebels “heroic” and lobbied for US military intervention weeks before NATO began its bombardment and training of the al-Qaeda-affiliated Libyan Islamic Fighting Force (LIFG). And given his vocal support for overthrowing the government of Gaddafi and his ‘fact-finding’ tour, he was also likely to have been influential in paving the way for President Barack Obama’s decision to authorise the use of predator drones. McCain would later be pictured with Senators Lindsey Graham and Blumenthal giving an award to Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the now disbanded LIFG.

The Libyan intervention, enabled by the United Nations resolution based on the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ doctrine, of course ended in human disaster. Gaddafi was toppled, but a nation which was once Africa’s most prosperous country soon degenerated into a failed state composed of warring militias, Islamist strongholds that have imposed rule by Sharia, and the establishment of slave markets composed of human chattel of Black African origin. The removal of Gaddafi which McCain cheered on has led to a deterioration of security beyond Libya as Islamist terror groups situated in the Maghreb (Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) and further down in the Lake Chad Basin (Boko Haram) have been strengthened because of the availability of large quantities of arms and munitions previously owned by the fallen Libyan army.

McCain’s dallying with extremists also extended to illegally entering into Syrian territory in 2013 and meeting with anti-government rebels who he described as “brave fighters who are risking their lives for freedom”, but who most neutral observers would classify as terrorists.

McCain’s support respectively for the Iraq War which overthrew Saddam Hussein, the Western-backed insurgencies in Libya and Syria, NATO expansion and confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia clearly mark him out as a supporter of American militarism, a geopolitical policy that has caused tremendous harm to American prestige among the community of nations, caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, caused large-scale human displacement and a refugee crisis, and which has persistently kept NATO and Russia at loggerheads. It makes a mockery of Congressman John Lewis’s attempt to eulogise him as a “warrior for peace”. Indeed, it was no surprise that the arms giant Lockheed Martin, which has profited from the wars supported by McCain, issued a tribute after his death.

That he sympathised with the neoconservative ideology and was beholden to the objectives of the Israel lobby is beyond doubt. His support for American interventions in the Arab world targeting secular governments perceived as not towing the line with Israel was apparent in his role in fomenting insurgencies in Libya and Syria, the latter in regard to which he unceasingly promoted a more direct form of US involvement.

It is also confirmed by his long-term attitude of belligerence towards Iran, which he consistently denounced during his presidential campaign in 2008. While on the hustings, he notoriously broke out in song by substituting the lyrics of the Beach Boys hit Barbara Ann with “Bomb Iran”. His statements tended to indicate that he would have been in favour of attacking Iran at the behest of Israel and its US-based lobby groups, an action that was strongly resisted by Barack Obama. McCain, not surprisingly was dismissive of the Obama administration’s deal with Iran over its nuclear strategy, which he derisively referred to as a “feckless” approach to foreign policy.

McCain was despite his maverick label an establishment man adept at manoeuvering between the public spotlight and the shadowy, largely unseen world of what many now understand to be the ‘Deep State’. He was almost certainly a key player in the machinations of America’s ‘double government’ and its formulation of national security policy which, as Professor Michael Glennon pointed out in a lengthy research paper, has essentially remained unchanged from successive administrations starting with George W. Bush, through to the one headed by Barack Obama, and now that of Donald Trump.

Far from the mainstream narrative that he was a beloved figure, McCain has gone to his grave leaving a great number disgruntled for various reasons. For many veterans, he will forever be ‘Johnny Songbird’ of ‘Hanoi Hilton’ infamy; like his father, a man of the establishment who covered up many unflattering secrets of the state including that pertaining to the sinking of the USS Liberty which he never sought to redress.

To his former Vietnamese foes he remains the celebrity captive, the admiral’s son immortalised as an ‘air pirate’ depicted in a statute bent on his knees next to the lake from where he was retrieved after parachuting from his downed aircraft.

To white nationalists he is a ‘race traitor’ who supported successive amnesties for illegal immigrants and to the anti-war segment of the political left, he does not deserve praise for participating in a colonial war of aggression against the Vietnamese people, while the isolationist segment of the political right decried his persistent support for foreign wars of intervention.

John McCain was not a straightforward hero. Nor was he an exceptional politician. The unbridled facts of his life and career in the military and as a public figure embody much of what is dysfunctional about the American republic. To succumb to the blatant myth-making and obfuscation of his life represents a failure of the nation to properly reflect and critically examine itself.

That cannot bode well for the future.

*

This article was originally published on the author’s blog site: Adeyinka Makinde.

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

An organised expose by the Syrian and Russian governments over a 3 day period starting 27^th August may have thwarted a British backed plan to stage a “false flag” chemical weapons attack in Idlib province that would have forced the US to launch a missile and air assault on Syria.

According to Russian Defence Ministry spokesperson, Igor Konashenkov, a militant group [affiliated to al Qaeda] , Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, was going to be the conduit for this false flag operation. It would foment an attack targeting innocent citizens of Idlib and then put the blame upon the Syrian government. Eight chlorine tanks were delivered to Jisr al-Shughur town for this purpose. Militants “trained in handling poisonous substances under the supervision of specialists from the private British military company Oliva arrived in the town a day earlier. The militants had the task of simulating the rescue of the victims of the chemical weapons attack dressed in the clothes of the famous White Helmets.”  Konashenkov accused British special services of being “actively involved “in the “provocation” which will “serve as another reason for the US, the UK and France to hit Syrian government targets with air strikes.”     

False flag operations of this sort have happened a number of times before in Syria. In April 2018, the White Helmets staged such an operation as admitted by some of the so-called “victims” themselves. A year before that, in April 2017, a fake chemical attack became the excuse for US missile strikes against Syrian military installations in Syayrat Airbase It will be recalled that in  August 2013, a fabricated chemical weapons attack was the rationale for a full-scale military assault on Syria ordered by President Barack Obama which was averted at the eleventh hour partly because of the mobilisation of mass public opinion and partly because of some sane voices in the top brass of the US military itself. 

The 2013 episode like other false flag operations in Syria from 2011 to the end of 2016 had a singular underlying goal: the ouster of President Bashar al-Assad. Whatever the justifications provided, there was a convergence of motives among those who sought Bashar’s overthrow. For the leaders of the US, Britain, France and Israel, Bashar especially through his links with Iran and Hezbollah was a formidable obstacle to their agenda for hegemonic control over West Asia.

For the Saudi political elite it was his association with Iran — the elite’s rival for regional influence — that was the problem. For the Saudi religious elite, on the other hand, what was unacceptable was Bashar’s affiliation to a minor Shia sub-sect. The Qatari elite was incensed by Bashar’s opposition to the construction of a massive inter-state gas pipe-line starting from the tiny state that would have had far-reaching geo-economic and geopolitical consequences. The elite in Ankara with its connection to the Muslim Brotherhood failed to persuade Bashar to incorporate Brotherhood elements and ideology into Damascus’s governing power structure. For all these different reasons, Bashar became the common target for regime change.

But by early 2017 it was clear that Bashar could not be ousted. Apart from the solid support of a wide spectrum of his own society, he has the backing of Russia, Iran and the Hezbollah. He has now regained control of most of Syria. The militants, whose acts of terror have alienated the vast majority of Syrians, are totally isolated. Besides, Donald Trump who assumed the US presidency in January 2017 is not interested in regime change in Syria. In fact, now that the militants have been vanquished he is more inclined towards withdrawing from Syria. There are indications that he wants to work with Russian President, Vladimir Putin, to restore peace and stability in Syria. 

This is anathema to the ‘Deep State’ in the US. Cooperating with Putin or withdrawing from Syria, from the perspective of those elements in the intelligence and security services, the military, the Congress, the media, some of the lobbies and special interest groups that constitute the Deep State, would spell the end of US hegemony and dominance of West Asia.  For the advocates of hegemony, it means surrendering to Russia whose power and influence in the region is growing. It would also facilitate the entrenchment of Iranian and Hezbollah influence in Syria. This, the Deep State argues, will weaken Israel’s position and increase its vulnerability. US’s other allies in the region such as Saudi Arabia, other Gulf monarchies, Egypt and Jordan will also feel threatened. It explains why Deep State elements are insisting that the US retains a foothold in Syria.

It is in this context that Idlib assumes added significance. The British plan to launch a “false flag “chemical weapons attack may yet happen. And it may yet lead to a US helmed assault upon Syria.

*

Dr. Chandra Muzaffar is the President of the International Movement for a Just World (JUST). He is Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

Nicaragua just defeated a U.S.-backed violent coup attempt, and no one cares.

Well, let me revise that: Very few care. English teachers may care because they may find it fascinating the phrase “violent coup” is one of the only English phrases often introduced with the prefix “U.S.-backed.”

But I can tell you for certain the mainstream media don’t want you to care. They don’t even want you to know it happened. And they certainly don’t want you to know that it followed a simple formula for U.S.-backed coups in leftist and anti-imperialist nations throughout Latin America, a formula our military intelligence apparatus has implemented in numerous countries tirelessly, like an overused football play.

On the corporate airwaves you won’t hear about U.S.-backed anything. If the U.S. military backed up a truck, CNN wouldn’t mention it, NPR would tell you the truck was dealing with an “organic internal protest movement” and Fox News would blame a black person.

Back to Latin America. The U.S. has lomg had a policy of undermining, infiltrating and bringing down any Latin American government that doesn’t line up with our unfettered capitalistic neoliberal policies. If a leader says, “Hey, let’s live a different way in which everyone is taken care of and we help out our brothers and sisters,” then the U.S. will make sure he or she ends up wearing cement shoes at the bottom of a lake somewhere. (And those cement shoes won’t even be crafted by union cement workers because all the unions have been destroyed. So you’ve got freelance underpaid children making the shoes—probably part of the “gig economy” with some sort of cement shoe appthat tricks cement layers into working for pennies because they don’t understand the algorithm is screwing them hard!)

Anyway, Nicaragua is the latest U.S.-backed attempted coup. So, this seems like a good time to present: How to Create a U.S.-Backed Government Coup!

You can play along at home—especially if your home is in Nicaragua or Venezuela.

STEP ONE: Create a strong U.S.-backed “fifth column.”

Don’t tell me you don’t know what a “fifth column” is. How could you be so naive! (This is the part where I mock you for lacking knowledge that I myself learned only last week.)

As smart person Peter Koenig explains,

“A Fifth Column is a group of people who undermine the government of a country in support of the enemy. They can be both covert and open.”

There are various ways to create fifth columns. We here in the U.S. like to create ours with a good, wholesome front: nonprofit organizations. Our two favorites are USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). What is the NED? Well, as Editor of Consortium News Robert Parry put it,

In 1983, NED essentially took over the CIA’s role of influencing electoral outcomes and destabilizing governments that got in the way of U.S. interests, except that NED carried out those functions in a quasi-overt fashion while the CIA did them covertly. NED also serves as a sort of slush fund for neocons. …

(When I picture a neocon slush fund, I picture Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell and Bill Kristol naked in a small bathtub filled with the vomit of all their victims. Yes, it’s gross. But it’s less gross than what a neocon slush fund really is.)

So we use NED and USAID to destabilize countries. Keep in mind, though it may not sound like much, there are consequences to destabilizing countries. By doing it, we indirectly kill a lot of people, or at least ruin their lives, leaving them poor or destitute. But to create a successful coup, it’s important you don’t care about any of that stuff. Leave that for the nerds with their pencils and their statistics. If babies die because they can’t get the medical treatment they need, not your problem. You’ve got other stuff to do—like wipe bird shit off your $1,200 loafers.

STEP TWO: Undermine the country’s economy.

This can be done via sanctions, as we are currently doing in Venezuela and Iran. Simultaneously, use the fifth column and the obedient American media hacks (CNN, Fox News, MSNBC) to convince the people of said country that their economic troubles are the fault of only their president.

“It’s the Venezuelan president’s fault you don’t have toilet paper! He’s hoarding all the toilet paper. He’s sitting up there on a throne made of Angel Soft triple ply! His anus is singing ‘Joy to the World’ right now!”

But, what our corporate media really don’t want you to know is the truth. Peter Koenig, who was also an international observer for the Presidential Economic Advisory Commission (showoff), stated,

… It is absolutely clear who is behind the food and medicine boycotts (empty supermarket shelves), and the induced internal violence [in Venezuela]. It is a carbon copy of what the CIA under Kissinger’s command did in Chile in 1973 which led to the murder of the legitimate and democratically elected President Allende and to the Pinochet military coup. …

So you create economic troubles, which make people hungry and angry, and that leads to …

STEP THREE: Wait for internal protests and/or create them.

Basically, there were legitimate protests in Nicaragua because what country doesn’t have protests now and again? But then the U.S. and our front groups threw kerosene on the situation. The NED-funded publication Global Americans actually bragged about the kerosene it threw. In an article titled “Laying the groundwork for insurrection: A closer look at the U.S. role in Nicaragua’s social unrest,” it said, “… the NED has funded 54 projects in Nicaragua between 2014 and 2017.”

So various U.S.-backed groups redirected the protests against the Daniel Ortega government. Some protesting students were even flown to the United States for further instruction from Freedom House, which has deep ties to the CIA. Once here, the students posed for photos with none other than U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.

If there’s one thing I trust, it’s people who are proud to meet Marco Rubio. I mean, even Marco Rubio’s kids tell people that Joe Biden is their father.

So as with Syria, after genuine protests began in Nicaragua, the U.S. used the fifth column to exacerbate the tension and channel the protests toward a violent showdown.

STEP FOUR: Get violent while accusing the government of getting violent.

We’ve seen this tactic in Nicaragua and Venezuela. There was violence on both sides of the protests, but far more on the U.S.-backed sides, sometimes with help from the CIA or alumni from our military training facilities like The School of the Americas. But because of media propaganda, many believe there is primarily violence on the government side, when in fact it’s the opposite.

STEP FIVE: If steps 1 through 4 don’t work, kidnap or assassinate.

The time may come when you’ve exhausted other options and simply must whack a dude. Don’t feel bad. It happens to the best of us.

Or, if you’re feeling generous, you can put said target on a U.S. military plane and fly him to Africa against his will—as happened in 2004 to the president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He was kidnapped by our military and taken on one of the most awkward 14-hour flights one can imagine.

There is an endless number of examples. Want some more? How about the 1973 CIA-backed overthrow and killing of socialist President Salvador Allende in Chile? But have no fear, he was replaced by murderous dictator Augusto Pinochet, whom the U.S. liked A LOT better. (We shared the same taste in death squads.)

Ecuadorean President Jaime Roldos Aguilera died in an airplane “accident” in 1981 after going forward with a plan to reorganize Ecuador’s fossil fuel industry, which U.S. interests were very much against. His airplane fell out of the sky after coming down with a bad case of the CIA.

Even NBC has recounted the bizarre CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro in Cuba, some of them involving exploding cigars. To be honest, I can’t look down on that because it is the funniest way to kill someone. So as long as it gets a laugh, I approve.

And a few weeks ago, we saw an attempt to kill President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela with a small explosive drone. While there’s no indication the U.S. military was directly involved, that’s not really how it rolls. The military prefers to fund front groups so it looks like the U.S. had nothing to do with it. And keep in mind there WAS a U.S.-backed coup against Hugo Chavez, Maduro’s predecessor, in 2002. So taking out the Chavez-Maduro government has been a long-term goal of the U.S. deep state.

There you have it—thanks for playing How to Create a U.S.-Backed Government Coup!

Join us next week for How to Create a U.S.-Backed Cholera Outbreak! … starring Saudi Arabia! … And definitely NOT starring MSNBC. It has no idea what you’re talking about.

*

Lee Camp is an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor and activist. Camp is the host of the weekly comedy news TV show “Redacted Tonight With Lee Camp” on RT America. He is a former comedy writer for the Onion and the Huffington Post and has been a touring stand-up comic for 20 years.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The United States on Friday cut funding to the UN agency that supports Palestinian refugees, saying its business model and fiscal practices were an “irredeemably flawed operation”.

“The administration has carefully reviewed the issue and determined that the United States will not make additional contributions to UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency),” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement.

She said the agency’s “endlessly and exponentially expanding community of entitled beneficiaries is simply unsustainable and has been in crisis mode for many years”.

UNRWA provides services to about five million Palestinian refugees.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their land in the events leading to the establishment of the state of Israel. Surviving refugees and their descendants still live in camps in neighbouring Arab countries, the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

As part of its decision, the US will also call for a sharp decrease in the number of Palestinians who are recognised as refugees, reducing the current five million figure to fewer than a tenth of that number, an official familiar with the decision told the Washington Post.

An anonymous official in the office of Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, told the AFP news agency on Saturday that Israel supported the US decision to cut funding from UNWRA.

“Consolidating the refugee status of Palestinians is one of the problems that perpetuate the conflict,” the official said.

Palestinian Ambassador to the US Husam Zomlot said Washington does not have the authority to define the status of Palestinian refugees.

“By endorsing the most extreme Israeli narrative on all issues including the rights of more than 5 million Palestinian refugees, the US administration has lost its status as peacemaker and is damaging not only an already volatile situation but the prospects for future peace in the Middle East,” Zomlot said in a statement.

The decision came after the US State Department announced in January it was cutting its funding for UNRWA by more than half, withholding $65m out of a previously earmarked $125m aid package.

The cuts have fuelled despair and protests over recent months in Gaza, the Palestinian enclave besieged for 11 years, where 1.3 million people out of two million residents are refugees, and 80 per cent of the population is dependent on aid.

In July, after 125 local UNRWA staff members lost their jobs and 800 more had their contracts downgraded in the wake of the cuts, a Palestinian aid worker attempted to set himself on fire during a demonstration.

“UNRWA has thrown my family and I onto the street. The street will not be able to sustain us,” Nidal Wishah, the aid worker, wrote in a column published by MEE.

For nearly 70 years, the agency offered registered Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria access to education, health care and social services in addition to providing support to purchase food.

US President Donald Trump has argued that the US, which has been the largest donor to the agency for decades, is paying too much without getting “appreciation or respect”.

“With Palestinians no longer willing to talk peace, why should we make any of these massive future payments to them?” he tweeted in January.

Many Palestinians, however, say the US is cutting the aid to pressure them into going along with the Trump administration’s so-called “deal of the century” peace plan, and to strip the majority of Palestinians of their refugee status, erasing the issue of the right of return altogether.

Earlier this week, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley said:

“We will be a donor if it [UNRWA] reforms what it does … if they actually change the number of refugees to accurate account, we will look back at partnering them.”

One former US Agency for International Development official told Foreign Policy, which first reported the story earlier this week, that the US decision to cut all funds was “dangerous”.

“An immediate and capricious cut off of UNRWA funding … risks collapsing the Palestinian Authority, empowering Hamas, and shifting the responsibility of health, education, and ultimately security services to the Israelis,” Dave Harden was quoted as saying.

“The decision is dangerous, with unpredictable consequences.”

In an opinion piece for MEE on Friday, journalist Ben White wrote that the halting of aid to UNRWA is only the latest in a series of US policy moves to “defeat the Palestinian struggle”.

“In the context of Israel’s ‘Jewish nation-state’ law, the US recognition of Jerusalem, and moves towards annexation of West Bank territory,” White wrote, “those seeking the elimination of UNRWA envisage its demise to be a crucial part of the consolidation of an apartheid, single state, and the defeat of the Palestinian struggle.”

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

The Russian Navy will hold drills in the Mediterranean Sea, near Syria, in the period from September 1 to September 8, the Russian Defense Ministry announced on August 30. The drills will involve 25 warships led by the Marshal Ustinov missile cruiser and 30 aircraft, including the strategic Tu-160 missile-carrying bombers, the Tu-142MK and Il-38 anti-submarine warfare planes, Su-33 fighter jets and Su-30SM aircraft of naval aviation. The defense ministry said that “the grouping will practice a set of tasks of air defense, anti-submarine and anti-sabotage warfare and also mine counter-measures support”.

According to Syrian experts, these drills are a response to the growing threat of a new round of US missile strikes on government facilities in Syria.

On August 30, the Russian Foreign Ministry announced that the US currently has some 70 delivery vehicles with about 380 cruise missiles in the Middle East and is capable of preparing a missile-strike group for an attack against Syria in just 24 hours.

The US rejects all reports that it is beforehand preparing for an attack on Syria, but says that it’s ready to act if the Assad government uses “chemical weapons”.

Meanwhile, Syrian Foreign Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Walid Muallem stated that the White Helmets had kidnapped 44 children in Idlib to use in a staged chemical weapons attack in the militant-held part of the province. The minister also emphasized that the Syrian military does not possess chemical weapons and there is no need for the Syrian army to use any kind of such weapons to defeat terrorists in the country.

In the area of al-Safa in southern Syria, the Syrian Army captured positions between the hill of Abu Ghanim and the and the area of Umm Marzakh thus splitting the ISIS-held pocket into two parts. Clashes are ongoing.

Warplanes of the US-led coalition carried out airstrikes on several ISIS positions on the eastern bank of the Euphrates River, including the area of the al-Azraq oil field. These airstrikes are most likely a US response to the recent series of ISIS attacks on the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.

However, while the ISIS-held pocket of Hajin on the eastern bank of the Euphrates is not cleared, these attacks can hardly be stopped any time soon. The key question is why are the US-led coalition and the SDF not hurrying up to deal with ISIS terrorists there?

*

If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront, 

BTC: 3Gbs4rjcVUtQd8p3CiFUCxPLZwRqurezRZ,

BCH:qpf2cphc5dkuclkqur7lhj2yuqq9pk3hmukle77vhq,

ETH: 0x9f4cda013e354b8fc285bf4b9a60460cee7f7ea9

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

On Friday, Brazil’s Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) overruled a UN Human Rights Council (HRC) panel of independent experts. 

In August, it ruled for former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s right to run for reelection in October – even though he’s imprisoned on trumped up corruption charges he and his legal team strongly deny.

The HRC panel called on Brazil’s ruling authorities “not to prevent him from standing for election in the 2018 presidential elections, until his appeals before the courts have been completed in fair judicial proceedings,” adding:

“Lula can enjoy and exercise his political rights while in prison, as candidate in the 2018 presidential elections.”

“This includes having appropriate access to the media and members of his political party.”

On Friday, the TSE ruled against Lula’s legitimate right to seek reelection by a 6 – 1 majority vote. Panel member Edson Fachin, supporting Lula’s electoral right, called the HRC’s ruling legally binding.

Anti-Lula judge Luis Barroso voted against his legitimate right, claiming he acted according to Brazil’s constitution and its so-called “clean slate” law.

It bars anyone convicted of serious crimes, corruption, or removed from office by impeachment, from seeking election, Barroso adding:

Lula’s guilt or innocence doesn’t matter, only his conviction, even if unjust, enough to bar him from seeking reelection, he claimed.

Lula’s legal team vowed to appeal the ruling in the nation’s Supreme Court. So did his Brazilian Workers Party, a statement saying:

“We will present all appeals before the courts for the recognition of the rights of Lula provided by law and international treaties ratified by Brazil. (W)e will defend Lula in the streets, with the people.”

A “Lula on the ballot box” for president Twitter campaign was launched. If unsuccessful, his Workers Party vice presidential candidate Fernando Haddad (a former academic and Sao Paulo mayor) may seek Brazil’s presidency in his stead.

On Friday, he tweeted:

“What is in play is the foundation of democracy. The right of the people to choose their president.”

US dirty hands are involved in Latin American politics and most elsewhere, meddling in the internal affairs of numerous countries worldwide, seeking imposition of its will.

The Obama regime was involved in Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment and ouster from office – on trumped up budget-manipulation charges.

She committed no crimes. Nothing justified her removal. Allegations against her were fabricated. Lula was imprisoned on false charges – to assure US-supported fascist tyranny remains in charge.

A US-orchestrated parliamentary coup ousted Rousseff (Lula’s successor) from power in August 2016 – Lula targeted a similar way on fabricated corruption charges.

Imprisoning him was all about wanting him barred from seeking reelection, almost certain to win if allowed to run.

Supported by Washington, Brazilian fascists want nothing standing in their way of retaining power in October.

If Haddad replaces Lula on the ballot, their scheme may fail.

*

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.

Note to readers: please click the share buttons above  

An aggressive sign of an affluent society can usually be gauged by its invidious misuse of its privilege.  Poverty is deemed necessary, and the rich must try to understand it.  To be privileged is to be guilty, a tickling of the conscience as the pennies pile up and the assets grow; and from that premise, efforts must be made to give shape to the forgotten, and, in most cases, the invisible.

To be guilty is a spur for works that supposedly highlight those nagging reasons for feeling guilty.  You might supply donations.  You can become a philanthropist.  You can join a charity.  Obscenely, you can become a creature of mocking persuasion, a person of pantomime: you can assume the position of a poor person, a homeless person, and pretend to be him.  And let it be filmed.

“When I was given the opportunity to spend 10 days experiencing different forms of homelessness for an SBS documentary, I jumped at the chance to understand more about a crisis that now sees more than 116,000 Australians homeless on any given night.”

So go the words of veteran thespian Cameron Daddo, a person who never explains how understanding Sydney’s poverty leads to results, other than spending time on the screen and proving rather awkward to boot.

The individuals involved in the tawdry Australian spectacle Filthy Rich & Homeless have various reasons for participating.  They have a chance, not merely to appear before the cameras, but to explore another part of Sydney.  What matters for Skye Leckie is the anger of authenticity.  Socialite that she is, she does not believe that her participation in the venture is “poverty porn” despite being the very same creature who benefits from having a good quotient of poor around.

“Those who say it’s stunt TV are being totally ignorant to the homeless situation out there.”

This is a delicious way of self-justification, a positioned blow to excuse how her exploitation of a social condition is entirely justified by a mysterious, holy insight.  Her pantomime, in other words, is heralded as genuine.

Benjamin Law, author and very much an identity beacon (those things help these days), played the cool cat.  In such ensembles, it’s always good to have the confidently composed, the person who won’t fall for the pathos of the show.

“I went to Filthy Rich and Homeless being adamant that it was only 10 days, and that I wasn’t going to cry – I felt it’d almost be insulting to people who were actually homeless.”

So goes his justification for actually participating in the project: he would hold firm, stay calm, keep his tear ducts dry.

“But when it’s demonstrated that this could easily be a family member, and someone you love, I couldn’t not be affected.”

The show is sugary fodder for social media masturbation, an ever so prodding tease for those who feel pangs of stirring guilt. Nonsense about “genuine compassion” and “empathy” whirl through the chattersphere, with a disconcerting gurgle of approval at the program.  The implication is clear: like true porn, it produces a release, an orgiastic sensation.  The poor are sociological wank fodder.  In the aftermath is the little death, or should be.  Such programs float on the froth of sentiment, and last longer than they should.

There are shades of the carnivalesque, as Michael Bakhtin called it, in this exercise.  The tradition of the carnival, he explained, suggested alternate worlds, inverted ones where social orders might, just temporarily, be suspended.  The performer, and the audience, would become one.  Communal dialogue might emerge.  But the participants will eventually go home; the nobility will revert to their high standing, and the poor will undress and return to their squalid, putrid existence.

Feudalism and tribalism may have made their official exit in the historical textbooks, but we still find stirrings of old custom in the media industry.  The poor are there to be mocked; the vulnerable are there to be, in some form, exploited.  Gone is the exaggerated chivalric code, as meagre as it was (keeping people in place), and the presumption of charity.  In its place is the clawing, scraping urge of the media moguls and networks keen to capitalise upon a condition, a disability, a drawback.  Poverty is visual and lucrative for all – except the impoverished.

An obvious flaw in this project – several wealthy members of society burying themselves in the poor underbelly – is contrived anonymity. The monarchs supposedly travel incognito amongst the slums.  The participants supposedly become unknown for a time.  The King and Queen scrap around the hovels.  But who recognises them?  Presumably everybody.  Not having a home, or living in indigence, doesn’t mean not having access to the saturation coverage called the World Wide Web.  The camera crews might be a giveaway, the very reality of which produces distortions in the interviews.

The grotesque scene uncovers itself, and the tears, spilling on cue, supply catharsis.

“Most interesting,” noted the Sydney Morning Herald, “is just how little time on the street it takes for them to be reduced to tears.”

To be fair, they only had ten days, so the performance clock was ticking.  The filthy rich feel justified – they acknowledged pain and desperation.  The poor, their role achieved, can simply go on living.

*

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]

First published by Global Research on January 3, 2018

In 2007, the late Prof. Jules Dufour raised concerns about US global deployment of military personnel and its network of military bases. The US views the world, he said, “as a vast territory to conquer, occupy and exploit.” “Humanity is being controlled and enslaved” he argued by this network.

The US is dividing the world into geographic command units, like US Northcom or US Southcom, proved the US focus on global control.

Dufour mentions the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases (No Bases Network) as essential in achieving a cohesive, coordinated front against US global control. The No Bases Network, born at the conference in Ecuador (March 2007), was concerned about the expansion of US Network of bases, and specifically about the plan for renewal of permission of the US Military base in Manta. Rafael Correa, then president of Ecuador, was invited and he expressed there his decision to not renew permission for the base, a position that will be later included in Ecuador’s new Constitution, approved by referendum in 2008, which specifically prohibits foreign military bases on Ecuador’s soil. The Manta base was closed in September 2009. (1, 2)

This year the Conference of the International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases will take place in Baltimore, US (Jan. 12 to 14).  It will have three keynote speakers: Mr. Ajamu Baraka, 2016 US Green Party candidate for vice president and current President of the Black Alliance for Peace; Ms. Ann Wright, Retired US Army Colonel and leading member of Veterans for Peace and CODEPINK; and, Mr. David Vine, Associate Professor of Anthropology, American University in Washington DC, and author of the 2015 book “Base Nation. How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and The World.” (3)

The conference can increase awareness about organizing for peace. Since 9/11 we live ongoing conflicts and today the menace of war escalating into nuclear madness is higher and the US refuses to be rational provoking countries with nuclear capabilities like North Korea -Korean War ended in 1953 with a truce, no peace agreement has been signed. Propaganda, irrational thinking and permanent war seem acceptable, even normal. The US network of bases overseas has a life of its own and favor war rather than diplomacy. Politicians show lack of maturity, even common sense while in the press there is growing obsession with North Korea and Russia. Nuclear war means human annihilation; still, STRATCOM recommends irrationality and vindictiveness as proper strategy.

From Forts to Bases Overseas

“Since the end of WWII, the idea that our country should have a large collection of bases and hundreds of thousands of troops permanently stationed overseas has been quasi religious dictum of US foreign and national security policy.” The policy underlying such belief is called “forward strategy.” Prof. Vine argues that in the minds of policy makers the need for overseas bases and troops is a given. They are expensive, up to 120 billion (Afghanistan and Iraq in 2012 raised the costs to U$S 170 billion), taxpayers pay on average U$S 10-40 000 more per year to station a member of the military abroad than in the US. (4)

There are costs beyond financial too. The families of military personnel suffer separation and frequent moves; one in 3 service women are now assaulted (sexually) and a huge number of these assaults take place overseas. Outside base gates there is prostitution relying on human trafficking, as in South Korea, and rapes against local population, as in Okinawa (Japan). There is also widespread environmental damage. US bases are built by displacing local population, as in Greenland and Diego Garcia; and they are 21 century colonialism, like Guam and Puerto Rico. US bases are often located in undemocratic countries, like Qatar and Bahrain; some are connected to mafia organizations, like in Italy; and some are linked to torture and imprisonment, like Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib. (4)

The network of US bases facilitates wars that cost millions of lives. They contribute to increasing tensions, rather than stabilize dangerous regions, and discourage diplomatic solutions to conflicts. The network maintains the US in a state of permanent war, with an economy and government constantly preparing for battle. Notably, having bases and troops overseas is rooted in US history of frontier forts, crucial for western expansion and overtaking of Native-American lands. Fort Harmar was first (1785), soon others followed in what are Ohio and Indiana today. Each fort helped waves of US settlers move into Native American lands. In 1830 Andrew Jackson created the Indian Removal Policy forcing Natives to give up their lands east of the Mississippi River; this was to be the “very western edge of civilization” and the “permanent Indian frontier,” but soon after (1832-34) the Santa Fe and Oregon trails started and conquest continued. Expansion moved beyond, taking Mexican land (California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and the Republic of Texas) and Oregon from Great Britain after 1846. By 1878 there was a network of 90 forts throughout the US. (4)

Outside the US, bases emerged in Guantanamo (Cuba) and Panama. In 1939 Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed an interest in getting new island bases in the Caribbean and by the time the U.S. entered WWII there were new bases in 20 countries. Commercial and military planning developed together; “Pan Am Airways secretly acquired basing right for the military throughout Latin America.” Thus, new bases flourished in the war while Pan Am ensured for itself and US airlines a useful advantage when war ended. But, the end of WWII favored the rights of people, requiring a more cautious approach in showing power. Installations and periodic displays of “military might” ensured economic and political advantages for the US. It was a “global economic access without colonies.”  (4)

In the 1980s under Carter there was build up in the Middle East. Later, the fall of the Soviet Union pressed the US to close about 60% of its bases bringing home 300 000 troops. But, in 1991 the Gulf War in Iraq, and in 2001-2003 the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, were excuse for renewing US overseas bases. Its format changed, “Little Americas” were substituted by smaller, strategic, and at times secretive sites called “Lily pads.” As forts worked in taking over Indian land, bases worked maintaining US power around the world. They are “the global cavalry of the 21C,” says Vine. As the number of giant Cold War-era bases shrunk, the smaller ones proliferated giving the US greater geographic scope. (4)

Costly Strategy: Displacement, Toxic Environments, Democracy, People and Money

A good argument against US bases overseas is cost, including more than money. They do not favor stability or security, but undermine both, displace local populations at a high cost to them, cause environmental damage and favor alliances with dictators and the mafia contributing to spreading oppressive/repressive regimes rather than democracy. They favor prostitution, rape, the sexual abuse of women, a distorted view of masculinity and hurt US image abroad and people abroad and at home.

Displacement

The “strategic island concept” was the basis for growth and required small islands with good anchorage (for airstrips) and insulated from locals. The islands were under UK sovereignty and had to have “negligible” population. Chagos Islands fit both criteria; Diego Garcia was approved as a site. Local population was deported in stages in 1973 in cargo ships, most of them sleeping above guano (bird shit), and later abandoned on the docks of Mauritius and the Seychelles. Some compare these conditions to conditions in slave ships. Chagossians are people of color who two years after their removal still lived in abject poverty; the Washington Post named them true victims of an “act of mass kidnapping.” Similar things happened to the indigenous population of the Bikini islands, the island Culebra in Puerto Rico and to Viequeños, displaced to the center of their island. The US Army is familiar with displacing indigenous people; it has done its share in the US for more than 100 years. Indigenous people at home ended also traumatized and impoverished. (4)

Toxic Environments

Although the US military have been concerned about their environmental footprint, most bases cause profound environmental damage and significant risk to humans and the natural environment because of their activities. Bases store weapons and explosives containing toxic chemicals. There is pollution in the form of toxic leaks, accidental detonations and other accidents. Their carbon footprint is large for the number of people living and working there. Bases use massive amounts of fuel, oil, lubricants and other petroleum products for training and exercises, and war time activities are even worse. Military bases are high consumers of heat, air conditioning and power. The US armed forces consume more oil everyday than the entire country of Sweden. (4)

Victim of Agent Orange

There is contamination in South Korea due to chemical, fuel and other toxic waste leaks and spills, and in some cases deliberate burial from US bases. In Diego Garcia the US military destroyed the island´s reef with explosives removing tons of coral to build a runway, thousands of trees were clear cut and Agent Orange was used to clear jungle foliage, and, US naval vessels dumped waste and treated human sewage into the island protected coral lagoon for 30 years. In Okinawa 80 barrels containing dioxin and other contaminants were discovered buried under a soccer field close to two schools while Agent Orange was stored and buried at the base during the Vietnam War. In Philippines, when the US military left in 1992, there was unexploded ordnance, asbestos, heavy metals and leaking fuel tanks and dangerous pesticides. In Panamá there were 100 000 unexploded ordnance while mustard gas bombs were found in San Jose. Places under colonial or semi colonial rule faced some of the worst environmental damages from US bases. (4)

Democracy – Befriending dictators and in bed with the Mob

A large scale study of US bases since 1898 confirmed that autocratic states have been consistently attractive as base hosts while democratic ones have not. US military interventions to protect US economic interests took place in Honduras, Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Panama. The term “banana republic,” coined by short story writer O. Henry, describes weak, marginally independent countries facing economic and political domination, a colony but in name. In 1954 the CIA used a banana plantation in Honduras to train a US backed mercenary army to overthrow the elected government of Guatemala because it had threatened the banana monopoly of the United Fruit Co, “Chiquita.” In the 1980s The Tripartite, an unholy alliance created to support the Contras against the Sandinistas, had Honduras providing them sanctuary, Argentina being a “front” to hide US involvement while the US paid (from secret sales of weapons to Iran), and Israelis and Chileans trained them. The human costs were more than 270 disappeared in Honduras, 50 000 dead in Nicaragua, 75000 dead in El Salvador and 240 000 dead or disappeared in Guatemala –genocide. (4)

The US has been consistently attracted by dictators; Vine believes it is because they provide access and sustainability for their bases. But dictators do more than this and are often put in place by the US itself when their ideological interests are in sync. After WWII caution was required in expressing power so empire building discourse changed. Seventy three million people had died because of fascism, including military and civilians from Allied and Axis powers.  Before WWII British empire building was direct offering no apologies. President Taft was similar:

“The day is not far distant when…the whole hemisphere will be ours in fact as by virtue of our superiority as a race, it already is ours morally.”

But after WWII such strategy was untenable. Still, the goals were the same, so someone had to complete dirty deeds when needed. Dictators and mobsters are good at this and asked few questions; discarding them when expired is easier because they work against the Law and are not liked by many. (4, 5, 6)

In Italy “proliferation of US and NATO bases helped strengthen the political and economic power of criminal organizations.”  A relationship between the US military and the Camorra (Naples mafia) is not an aberration, Vine says, but a strategy the military used to keep cost manageable, military contracts encouraged cutting corners. The US base in Sicily is closely linked to the mafia since WWII when Sicilian born Lucky Luciano transformed it into a powerful and wealthy national crime syndicate in the US (commanding over drugs, prostitution and other criminal activities). Luciano was jailed, but released to help Navy officers to “protect” New York from Axis spies and saboteurs during WWII. After WWII he got clemency from NY governor and returned to Italy. His business in the US went to Vito Genovese, who came from Naples where he had been working with the US Army. The “exchange” worked well for both of them. (4)

In Naples the mafia receives military contracts in construction. In Sicily firms controlled by the Cosa Nostra gained similar contracts for the Comiso base, now closed. In the 1990s three major janitorial, grounds keeping and maintenance contractors at Sicily´s Sigonella naval base were shown to have mafia ties. “Ties between the military and the Mafia may not have been simply the result of questionable oversight, but a deliberate decision,” argues Vine. Gricignano and surrounding areas where Navy personnel live are at the center of the Camorra illegal dumping of garbage and toxic waste since the 1980s –a U$S 20 billion a year illicit business. The Camorra solves the waste disposal problems of northern Italy businesses disposing of hazardous waste cheaply -burying refuse in illegal dumps, pumping chemicals into underground ditches and burning trash in secluded areas. The area is called “triangle of death” because of elevated levels of radiation, nitrates, bacteria, arsenic. Chemicals used in cleaning solvents have been found in the water, air and soil. The Navy is concerned; the Gricignano base prohibits sailors from using tap water and Italian produce is labeled by origin to avoid contaminants. (4)

People – Prostitution, Rape, Militarized Masculinity and Perks

Commercial sex zones developed around US bases worldwide looking similarly: liquor stores, fast food outlets, tattoo parlors, bars, clubs and prostitution. Baumholder and Kaiserlautern (Germany), Kadena and Kin Town (Okinawa), even domestic ones like Fort Bragg (North Carolina) have red light districts. Overseas is worse. In South Korea “camptowns” are a critical part of the economy, male officials strategizing for GIs to spend their money there, and affect politics and culture. “Our government was one big pimp for the US military,” says a former sex worker. Filipina women fill most of the bars and clubs in South Korea today; they come from a poorer country and need to send money home. Military contractors are involved as in Bosnia (1998) where DynCorp employees talked openly of buying women and the company leadership had connections with the mafia and took their employees to the brothels. A rape videotaped was never investigated; Kathryn Bolkovac, a Dyncorp employee part of UN police force, testified to stories of women trafficked from the east, forced into prostitution to pay debts, some terrified, she suspected beaten and tortured. (4)

In addition to “camptown” prostitution there is pervasive objectification of women in the military which plays a role in the victimization of locals, women in the military and at home partners and others. Environmental health expert, H. Patricia Hynes notes that sexual objectification shapes the epidemic of sexual assault and harassment so common in the military today. Pornography contributes and it is pervasive. Around two thirds of incidents of unwanted sexual contact take place in military installations while overseas bases are particularly dangerous. Much of the military leadership fails to grasp the nature of the problem, take steps to protect female troops and enforce its own laws. In the military rape is pandemic because females are considered inferior, often reduced to sex objects, while men are trained to enact a masculinity based on dominance over others considered inferior, weaker and deserving being dominated and abused. Men who spent time in the US military are more likely than their civilian counterparts to be imprisoned for sexual offences. A disproportionate number of men in the military have been victims of violence too, which makes them more likely to become abusers themselves. Beyond sexual abuse the rates of domestic violence in the military may be about 5 times the civilian rates. (4)

“Bases add facilities, fancier food, and recreational amenities: steak and lobster, flat screen TVs, Internet Connections…the military refer to these comforts collectively as “ice cream.” Right now…there is no ice cream at small outposts…but eventually…it is a building block process.”

Perks for military personnel are tempting but basic; but, perks at overseas bases are greater for the generals and the admirals, who often enjoy personal assistants, chefs, vehicles, and private planes. There are cases, like African Command commander General William Ward were multiple forms of misconduct were found, free meals, tickets to musicals, including billing the government for hundreds of thousands of dollars of personal travel and more. (4)

Money matters

The costs of overseas bases are high; they include from airplane tickets for family members and shipping of belongings, to housing, costs of living allowances, temporary accommodations, meals, per diems, and the building of schools, clinics, churches and more. The average cost of running an overseas Air Base without personnel is U$S 200 million, twice the cost of running it in the US.  Air Force personnel overseas cost U$S 40 000 more per person than in the US. The military ship tens of thousands of vehicles to and from bases overseas, costing about U$S 200 million/year. The Pentagon Overseas Cost Summary for 2012 was U$S 22.7 billion. But Anita Dancs, an economist, estimated the cost much higher in 2009 at US$ 250 billion. Vine decided working a conservative estimate including costs the Pentagon did not include and reached U$S 71.7 billion per year. When he added costs from the War Budget (U$S 96.9 billion) the total estimate was close to US$ 170 billion, a bit closer to Dancs’ and much higher than the Pentagon’s. (4)

Every base built overseas is a theft from American society, Vine argues. The costs to host countries are also high; and, there are financial expenses like money spent cleaning the environmental damage caused but also soundproofing homes and paying damages for crimes committed by US troops. There are also the Costs of Rising Hostility, the damage done by US bases to the US international reputation and its standing in the world. Only some benefit: contractors. KBR (latest incarnation of Brown & Roots) received contracts for more than U$S 44 billion while the Supreme Group (transporting/serving meals) received contracts for U$S 9 billion –the Pentagon now says Supreme overbilled them. Agility Logistics with contracts for U$S 9 billion was indicted on criminal charges for U$S 6 billion in false claims and price manipulation. Furthermore, even though contractors enjoyed billions in taxpayer funds many used legal and illegal means to minimize US taxes paid on profits, using offshore subsidiaries for this. (4)

The Threat of Nuclear War or When “Crazy” Rules

The risk of using nuclear weapons increases with increasing aggressiveness and war. John LaForge points to headlines in American newspapers giving the impression that using nuclear weapons can be legal. They are not, he says: any use of nuclear weapons would be indiscriminate and illegal by definition. International covenants, treaties, and protocols forbid indiscriminate destruction, attacks that are disproportionate to a military objective, and weapons’ effects that “treacherously wound,” harm neutral states, or do long-term damage to the environment. There is a huge difference between conventional and nuclear weapons he argues. The later cannot be used without committing war crimes:

“Any government which adopts a defense policy implying such an attack is therefore inciting its own forces to commit war crimes on a gigantic and suicidal scale.”

John E. Hyten (Source: Wkimedia Commons)

John E Hyten, the US (STRATCOM) Strategic Command Chief general, was in the news discussing the use of nuclear weapons; he would be in charge of nuclear forces in a war. (7)

A 1995 STRATCOM report mentioned as detrimental for the US to portray itself as “too rational” recommending instead projecting an “irrational and vindictive” national persona with some “potentially ‘out of control’” elements. I guess we are there now. The hegemonic principle in place means the US and its allies “should possess an offensive nuclear capacity to destroy their enemies denied to other nations, and can flout international law and their foreign obligations on a whim.”  As Joshua Cho argues, the US has unleashed far more violence and aggression abroad and the latest international poll found that “the US is considered the greatest threat to world peace, beating out all other competitors—including North Korea—by decisive margins.” He adds, “A casual examination of the United States’ record abroad can yield similar damning conclusions: the United States is the world’s nuclear menace, not North Korea.” (8) Thus, we are looking at the monster in the mirror: it is us! That is the US and its Western allies, including Canada.

Notes

1. The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases, Prof. Jules Dufour, Global Research, https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-worldwide-network-of-us-military-bases/5564

2. US Closes Military Post in Ecuador, Gonzalo Solano, AP (September 19, 2009).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091803407.html

3. Conference on US Military Bases, Baltimore, Maryland. noforeignbases.org

4. Vine, David (2015) “Base Nation How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and The world,” Metropolitan Books, New York.

5. Morris, James (1979) “Farewell The Trumpets, An Imperial Retreat,” Penguin Books, London.

6. WWII, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II

7. What Kind of Nuclear Attack Would be Legal? John LaForge, Counterpunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/07/what-kind-of-nuclear-attack-would-be-legal-2/

8. The World’s Real Nuclear Menace Isn’t North Korea, Joshua Cho, Counterpunch, https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/12/29/the-worlds-real-nuclear-menace-isnt-north-korea/

This article was first published in June 2011

Prisoners earning 23 cents an hour in U.S. federal prisons are manufacturing high-tech electronic components for Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles, launchers for TOW (Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided) anti-tank missiles, and other guided missile systems. A March article by journalist and financial researcher Justin Rohrlich of World in Review is worth a closer look at the full implications of this ominous development. (minyanville.com)

The expanding use of prison industries, which pay slave wages, as a way to increase profits for giant military corporations, is a frontal attack on the rights of all workers.

Prison labor — with no union protection, overtime pay, vacation days, pensions, benefits, health and safety protection, or Social Security withholding — also makes complex components for McDonnell Douglas/Boeing’s F-15 fighter aircraft, the General Dynamics/Lockheed Martin F-16, and Bell/Textron’s Cobra helicopter. Prison labor produces night-vision goggles, body armor, camouflage uniforms, radio and communication devices, and lighting systems and components for 30-mm to 300-mm battleship anti-aircraft guns, along with land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment for the BAE Systems Bradley Fighting Vehicle’s laser rangefinder. Prisoners recycle toxic electronic equipment and overhaul military vehicles.

Labor in federal prisons is contracted out by UNICOR, previously known as Federal Prison Industries, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation run by the Bureau of Prisons. In 14 prison factories, more than 3,000 prisoners manufacture electronic equipment for land, sea and airborne communication. UNICOR is now the U.S. government’s 39th largest contractor, with 110 factories at 79 federal penitentiaries.

The majority of UNICOR’s products and services are on contract to orders from the Department of Defense. Giant multinational corporations purchase parts assembled at some of the lowest labor rates in the world, then resell the finished weapons components at the highest rates of profit. For example, Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation subcontract components, then assemble and sell advanced weapons systems to the Pentagon.

Increased profits, unhealthy workplaces

However, the Pentagon is not the only buyer. U.S. corporations are the world’s largest arms dealers, while weapons and aircraft are the largest U.S. export. The U.S. State Department, Department of Defense and diplomats pressure NATO members and dependent countries around the world into multibillion-dollar weapons purchases that generate further corporate profits, often leaving many countries mired in enormous debt.

But the fact that the capitalist state has found yet another way to drastically undercut union workers’ wages and ensure still higher profits to military corporations — whose weapons wreak such havoc around the world — is an ominous development.

According to CNN Money, the U.S. highly skilled and well-paid “aerospace workforce has shrunk by 40 percent in the past 20 years. Like many other industries, the defense sector has been quietly outsourcing production (and jobs) to cheaper labor markets overseas.” (Feb. 24) It seems that with prison labor, these jobs are also being outsourced domestically.

Meanwhile, dividends and options to a handful of top stockholders and CEO compensation packages at top military corporations exceed the total payment of wages to the more than 23,000 imprisoned workers who produce UNICOR parts.

The prison work is often dangerous, toxic and unprotected. At FCC Victorville, a federal prison located at an old U.S. airbase, prisoners clean, overhaul and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat and coated in toxic spent ammunition, depleted uranium dust and chemicals.

A federal lawsuit by prisoners, food service workers and family members at FCI Marianna, a minimum security women’s prison in Florida, cited that toxic dust containing lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic poisoned those who worked at UNICOR’s computer and electronic recycling factory.

Prisoners there worked covered in dust, without safety equipment, protective gear, air filtration or masks. The suit explained that the toxic dust caused severe damage to nervous and reproductive systems, lung damage, bone disease, kidney failure, blood clots, cancers, anxiety, headaches, fatigue, memory lapses, skin lesions, and circulatory and respiratory problems. This is one of eight federal prison recycling facilities — employing 1,200 prisoners — run by UNICOR.

After years of complaints the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General and the Federal Occupational Health Service concurred in October 2008 that UNICOR has jeopardized the lives and safety of untold numbers of prisoners and staff. (Prison Legal News, Feb. 17, 2009)

Racism & U.S. prisons

The U.S. imprisons more people per capita than any country in the world. With less than 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. imprisons more than 25 percent of all people imprisoned in the world.

There are more than 2.3 million prisoners in federal, state and local prisons in the U.S. Twice as many people are under probation and parole. Many tens of thousands of other prisoners include undocumented immigrants facing deportation, prisoners awaiting sentencing and youthful offenders in categories considered reform or detention.

The racism that pervades every aspect of life in capitalist society — from jobs, income and housing to education and opportunity — is most brutally reflected by who is caught up in the U.S. prison system.

More than 60 percent of U.S. prisoners are people of color. Seventy percent of those being sentenced under the three strikes law in California — which requires mandatory sentences of 25 years to life after three felony convictions — are people of color. Nationally, 39 percent of African-American men in their 20s are in prison, on probation or on parole. The U.S. imprisons more people than South Africa did under apartheid. (Linn Washington, “Incarceration Nation”)

The U.S. prison population is not only the largest in the world — it is relentlessly growing. The U.S. prison population is more than five times what it was 30 years ago.

In 1980, when Ronald Reagan became president, there were 400,000 prisoners in the U.S. Today the number exceeds 2.3 million. In California the prison population soared from 23,264 in 1980 to 170,000 in 2010. The Pennsylvania prison population climbed from 8,243 to 51,487 in those same years. There are now more African-American men in prison, on probation or on parole than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began, according to Law Professor Michelle Alexander in the book “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Today a staggering 1-in-100 adults in the U.S. are living behind bars. But this crime, which breaks families and destroys lives, is not evenly distributed. In major urban areas one-half of Black men have criminal records. This means life-long, legalized discrimination in student loans, financial assistance, access to public housing, mortgages, the right to vote and, of course, the possibility of being hired for a job.

State Prisons contracting slave labor

It is not only federal prisons that contract out prison labor to top corporations. State prisons that used forced prison labor in plantations, laundries and highway chain gangs increasingly seek to sell prison labor to corporations trolling the globe in search of the cheapest possible labor.

One agency asks: “Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the costs of employee benefits? Unhappy with out-of-state or offshore suppliers? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your workforce? Thinking about expansion space? Then Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you.” (educate-yourself.org, July 25, 2005)

Major corporations profiting from the slave labor of prisoners include Motorola, Compaq, Honeywell, Microsoft, Boeing, Revlon, Chevron, TWA, Victoria’s Secret and Eddie Bauer.

IBM, Texas Instruments and Dell get circuit boards made by Texas prisoners. Tennessee inmates sew jeans for Kmart and JCPenney. Tens of thousands of youth flipping hamburgers for minimum wages at McDonald’s wear uniforms sewn by prison workers, who are forced to work for much less.

In California, as in many states, prisoners who refuse to work are moved to disciplinary housing and lose canteen privileges as well as “good time” credit, which slices hard time off their sentences.

Systematic abuse, beatings, prolonged isolation and sensory deprivation, and lack of medical care make U.S. prison conditions among the worst in the world. Ironically, working under grueling conditions for pennies an hour is treated as a “perk” for good behavior.

In December, Georgia inmates went on strike and refused to leave their cells at six prisons for more than a week. In one of the largest prison protests in U.S. history, prisoners spoke of being forced to work seven days a week for no pay. Prisoners were beaten if they refused to work.

Private prisons for profit

In the ruthless search to maximize profits and grab hold of every possible source of income, almost every public agency and social service is being outsourced to private for-profit contractors.

In the U.S. military this means there are now more private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan than there are U.S. or NATO soldiers.

In cities and states across the U.S., hospitals, medical care facilities, schools, cafeterias, road maintenance, water supply services, sewage departments, sanitation, airports and tens of thousands of social programs that receive public funding are being contracted out to for-profit corporations. Anything publicly owned and paid for by generations of past workers’ taxes — from libraries to concert halls and parks — is being sold or leased at fire sale prices.

All this is motivated and lobbied for by right-wing think tanks like that set up by Koch Industries and their owners, Charles and David Koch, as a way to cut costs, lower wages and pensions, and undercut public service unions.

The most gruesome privatizations are the hundreds of for-profit prisons being established.

The inmate population in private for-profit prisons tripled between 1987 and 2007. By 2007 there were 264 such prison facilities, housing almost 99,000 adult prisoners. (house.leg.state.mn.us, Feb. 24, 2009) Companies operating such facilities include the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group Inc. and Community Education Centers.

Prison bonds provide a lucrative return for capitalist investors such as Merrill-Lynch, Shearson Lehman, American Express and Allstate. Prisoners are traded from one state to another based on the most profitable arrangements.

Militarism and prisons

Hand in hand with the military-industrial complex, U.S. imperialism has created a massive prison-industrial complex that generates billions of dollars annually for businesses and industries profiting from mass incarceration.

For decades workers in the U.S. have been assured that they also benefit from imperialist looting by the giant multinational corporations. But today more than half the federal budget is absorbed by the costs of maintaining the military machine and the corporations who are guaranteed profits for equipping the Pentagon. That is the only budget category in federal spending that is guaranteed to increase by at least 5 percent a year — at a time when every social program is being cut to the bone.

The sheer economic weight of militarism seeps into the fabric of society at every level. It fuels racism and reaction. The political influence of the Pentagon and the giant military and oil corporations — with their thousands of high-paid lobbyists, media pundits and network of links into every police force in the country — fuels growing repression and an expanding prison population.

The military, oil and banking conglomerates, interlinked with the police and prisons, have a stranglehold on the U.S. capitalist economy and reins of political power, regardless of who is president or what political party is in office. The very survival of these global corporations is based on immediate maximization of profits. They are driven to seize every resource and source of potential profits.

Thoroughly rational solutions are proposed whenever the human and economic cost of militarism and repression is discussed. The billions spent for war and fantastically destructive weapons systems could provide five to seven times more jobs if spent on desperately needed social services, education and rebuilding essential infrastructure. Or it could provide free university education, considering the fact that it costs far more to imprison people than to educate them.

Why aren’t such reasonable solutions ever chosen? Because military contracts generate far larger guaranteed profits to the military and the oil industries, which have a decisive influence on the U.S. economy.

The prison-industrial complex — including the prison system, prison labor, private prisons, police and repressive apparatus, and their continuing expansion — are a greater source of profit and are reinforced by the climate of racism and reaction. Most rational and socially useful solutions are not considered viable options.

Firsr published by Global Research on April 3, 2016

The proportion of deaths due to cancer around the world increased from 12 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 2013. Globally, cancer is already the second-leading cause of death after cardiovascular diseases.

In India, government data indicates that cancer showed a 5 percent increase in prevalence between 2012 and 2014 with the number of new cases doubling between 1990 and 2013. The incidence of cancer for some major organs in India is the highest in the world. Reports have also drawn attention to rising rates of breast cancer in urban areas, and, in 2009, there was a reported increase in cancer rates in Tamil Nadu’s textile belt, possibly due to chemically contaminated water.

The increase in prevalence of diabetes is also worrying. By 2030, the number of diabetes patients in India is likely to rise to 101 million (World Health Organisation estimate). The number doubled to 63 million in 2013 from 32 million in 2000. Almost 8.2 percent of the adult male population in India has diabetes. The figure is 6.8 percent for women.

In India, almost 76,000 men and 52,000 women in the 30-69 age group died due to diabetes in 2015, according to the WHO. The organisation reports South-East Asia had a diabetic population of around 47 million, which is expected to reach 119 million by 2030.

A new study in The Lancet has found that India and China continue to have the largest number of underweight people in the world; however, both countries have broken into the top five in terms of obesity.

India leads the world in terms of underweight people. Some 102 million men and 101 million women are underweight, which makes the country home to over 40 percent of the global underweight population.

Contrast this with India’s surge in obesity. In 1975, the country had 0.4 million obese men or 1.3 percent of the global obese men’s population. In 2014, it was in fifth position globally with 9.8 million obese men or 3.7 percent of the global obese men’s population. Among women, India is globally ranked third, with 20 million obese women or 5.3 percent of global population.

Although almost half the nation’s under-5s are underweight, the prevalence of underweight children in India is among the highest in the world; at the same time, the country is fast becoming the diabetes and heart disease capital of the world.

Many social and economic factors, including environmental pollution, poor working and living conditions, tobacco smoking, lack of income and economic distress, lack of access to healthcare and poverty, contribute to ill health and disease. However, conditions like cardiovascular disease and obesity have among other things been linked to sedentary lifestyles and/or certain types of diet, not least modern Western-style convenience food (discussed later).

Western junk food aside, it will be shown that even when we have access to sufficient calorific intake or seemingly nutritious and wholesome traditional diets, there is little doubt that due to the processes involved in growing and processing the food we eat, diet can be a (major) contributory factor in causing certain conditions and illnesses.

The junk food revolution, ‘free’ trade and poor health

The impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement and the subsequent flood of cheap US processed food into the country has adversely affected the health of ordinary people. Western ‘convenience’ (junk) food has displaced more traditional-based diets and is now readily available in every neighbourhood. Increasing rates of diabetes, obesity and other health issues have followed. This report by GRAIN describes how US agribusiness and retailers have captured the market south of the border and outlines the subsequent impact on the health of Mexican people.

In Europe, due to the ‘harmonisation’ of food regulatory standards, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could seriously impact the health of Europeans. Washington wants Europe to eliminate all restrictions on imports of food from the US and to adopt a US-style food supply regulatory regime, stripped of the precautionary principle. US corporations want to make it difficult for European consumers to identify whether what they’re eating is food that was produced using health-damaging practices that EU consumers are against, like GMOs, chlorine-washed chicken and meat from animals treated with growth hormone.

These types of trade agreements represent little more than economic plunder by transnational corporations. They use their massive political clout to author the texts of these agreements with the aim of eradicating all restrictions and regulations that would impede greater profits.

Western agribusiness, food processing companies and retail concerns are gaining wider entry into India and through various strategic trade deals are looking to gain a more significant footprint within the country. The Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture and the ongoing India-EU free trade agreement (like TTIP, both are secretive and largely authored by powerful corporations above the heads of ordinary people) talks have raised serious concerns about the stranglehold that transnational corporations could have on the agriculture and food sectors, including the subsequent impact on the livelihoods of hundreds of millions and not least the health of the public.

Western style fast-food outlets have already been soaring in number throughout the country. Pizza Hut now operates in 46 Indian cities with 181 restaurants and 132 home delivery locations, a 67 percent increase in the last five years). KFC is now in 73 cities with 296 restaurants, a 770 percent increase. McDonalds is in 61 Indian cities with 242 restaurants as compared to 126 restaurants five years back, a 92 percent increase). According to a study published in the Indian Journal of Applied Research, the Indian fast food market is growing at the rate of 30-35 percent per annum (see this).

Heart disease, liver damage, stroke, obesity and diabetes are just some of the diseases linked to diets revolving around fast-food. Frequent consumption of fast food has been associated with increased body mass index as well as higher intakes of fat, sodium, added sugars and sugar-sweetened beverages and lower intakes of fruits, vegetables, fibre and milk in children, adolescents and adults. Fast food also tends to have higher energy densities and poorer nutritional quality than foods prepared at home and in comparison with dietary recommendations (see this).

To further appreciate just how unhealthy even seemingly healthy food can be in well-stocked supermarkets, this report in The Guardian reveals the cocktails of additives, colourants and preservatives that the modern food industry adds to our food.

Moreover, in many regions across the globe industrialised factory farming has replaced traditional livestock agriculture. Animals are thrown together in cramped conditions to scale up production and maximise output at minimum cost. For example, just 40 years ago the Philippines’ entire population was fed on native eggs and chickens produced by family farmers. Now, most of those farmers are out of business. And because world trade rules encourage nations from imposing tariffs on subsidised imported products, they are forced to allow cheap, factory-farmed US meat into the country. These products are then sold at lower prices than domestic meat. There is therefore pressure for local producers to scale up and industrialise to compete.

Factory farms increase the risk of pathogens like E coli and salmonella that cause food-borne illness in people. Overuse of antibiotics can fuel the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the use of arsenic and growth hormones can increase the risk of cancer in people and crowded conditions can be a breeding ground for disease. And genetically modified animal feed is also a serious issue, leading to concerns about the impact on both animal and human health.

The green revolution, micronutrient deficient soil and human health

We often hear unsubstantiated claims about the green revolution having saved hundreds of millions of lives, but any short-term gains have been offset. This high-input petro-chemical paradigm helped the drive towards greater monocropping and has resulted in less diverse diets and less nutritious foods. Its long-term impact has led to soil degradation and mineral imbalances, which in turn have adversely affected human health (see this report on India by botanist Stuart Newton – p 9 onward).

Adding weight to this argument, the authors of this paper from the International Journal of Environmental and Rural Development state:

“Cropping systems promoted by the green revolution have increased the food production but also resulted in reduced food-crop diversity and decreased availability of micronutrients (Welch, 2002; Stein et al., 2007). Micronutrient malnutrition is causing increased rates of chronic diseases (cancer, heart diseases, stroke, diabetes and osteoporosis) in many developing nations; more than 3 billion people are directly affected by the micronutrient deficiencies (Cakmak et al., 1999; Welch, 2002; WHO, 2002; Welch and Graham, 2004). Unbalanced use of mineral fertilizers and a decrease in the use of organic manure are the main causes of the nutrient deficiency in the regions where the cropping intensity is high (Prasad, 1984; Welch, 1993, 2005).”

The authors imply that the link between micronutrient deficiency in soil and human nutrition is increasingly regarded as important:

“Moreover, agricultural intensification requires an increased nutrient flow towards and greater uptake of nutrients by crops. Until now, micronutrient deficiency has mostly been addressed as a soil and, to a smaller extent, plant problem. Currently, it is being addressed as a human nutrition problem as well. Increasingly, soils and food systems are affected by micronutrients disorders, leading to reduced crop production and malnutrition and diseases in humans and plants (Welch et al., 1982; Welch and Graham, 2004). Conventionally, agriculture is taken as a food-production discipline and was considered a source of human nutrition; hence, in recent years many efforts (Rengel and Graham, 1995a, b; Cakmak et al., 1999; Frossard et al., 2000; Welch and Graham, 2005; Stein et al., 2007) have been made to improve the quality of food for the growing world population, particularly in the developing nations.”

Pesticides, the environment, food and health

Hand in hand with the practices outlined above has been the growth of the widespread intensive use of chemical pesticides. There are currently 34,000 pesticides registered for use in the US. Drinking water is often contaminated by pesticides and more babies are being born with preventable birth defects due to pesticide exposure. Illnesses are on the rise too, including asthma, autism and learning disabilities, birth defects and reproductive dysfunction, diabetes, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases and several types of cancer. The association with pesticide exposure is becoming stronger with each new study.

In Punjab, pesticide run-offs into water sources have turned the state into a ‘cancer epicentre‘, and Indian soils are being depleted as a result of the application of green revolution ideology and chemical inputs. India is losing 5,334 million tonnes of soil every year due to soil erosion because of the indiscreet and excessive use of fertilisers, insecticides and pesticides. The Indian Council of Agricultural Research reports that soil is become deficient in nutrients and fertility.

India is one of the world’s largest users of pesticides and a profitable market for the corporations that manufacture them. Ladyfinger, cabbage, tomato and cauliflower in particular may contain dangerously high levels because farmers tend to harvest them almost immediately after spraying. Fruit and vegetables are sprayed and tampered with to make them more colourful, and harmful fungicides are sprayed on fruit to ripen them in order to rush them off to market.

Consider that if you live in India, the next time you serve up a good old ‘wholesome’ meal of rice and various vegetables, you could take in half a milligram of pesticide also. That would be much more than what an average North American person would consume.

Research by the School of Natural Sciences and Engineering (SNSE) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore has indicated disturbing trends in the increased use of pesticide. In 2008, it reported that many crops for export had been rejected internationally due to high pesticide residues. Moreover, India is one of the largest users of World Health Organization (WHO) class 1A pesticides, including phorate, phosphorus, phosphamidon and fenthion that are extremely hazardous.

Kasargod in Kerala is notorious for the indiscriminate spraying of endosulfan. The government-owned Plantation Corporation of Kerala aerially sprayed the harmful pesticide on cashews for a period of over 20 years. Consequently, it got into rivers, streams and drinking water. Families and their children have been living with physical deformities, cancers and disorders of the central nervous system ever since.

Officials and the pesticide companies benefited from the spraying. At the time, cashew was grown without pesticides throughout Kerala, but the government-run plantation invested millions of rupees of public money in spraying the deadly pesticide. Endosulfen poisoning cases also emerged elsewhere, including Karnataka.

The SNSE notes that pesticide use across India has greatly increased over the years. This not only impacts the health of consumers but also the health of agricultural workers who are subject to pesticide drift and spaying, especially as they tend to wear little or no protection. Research by SNSE shows farmers use a cocktail of pesticides and often use three to four times the recommended amounts (see this).

Forced-fed development: who benefits?

If there are any beneficiaries in all of this, it is the pesticide manufacturers, the healthcare sector, especially private clinics and drug companies, and the transnational food and agribusiness companies, which now see their main growth markets in Asia, Africa and South America, where traditionally people have tended to eat food from their own farms or markets that sell locally-produced foods.

Of course, the commodification and privatisation of seeds by corporate entities, the manufacturing and selling of more and more chemicals to spray on them, the opening up fast food outlets and the selling of pharmaceuticals or the expansion of private hospitals to address the health impacts of the modern junk food system (in India, the healthcare sector is projected to grow by 16 percent a year) all amounts to the holy grail of neoliberal capitalism, GDP growth; which increasingly means a system defined by jobless growth, greater personal and public debt and massive profits for large corporations and banks.

While there are calls for taxes on unhealthy food and emphasis is placed on encouraging individual ‘lifestyle changes’ and ‘healthy eating’, it would be better to call to account the corporations that profit from the growing and production of health-damaging food in the first place and to get agriculture off the chemical treadmill.

Part of the solution entails restoring degraded soils. It also includes moving towards healthier and more nutritious organic agriculture, encouraging localised rural and urban food economies that are shielded from the effects of rigged trade and international markets and shying away from the need for unhealthy food-processing practices, unnatural preservatives and harmful additives.

In India, it also involves calling a halt to the programmed dismantling of local rural economies and indigenous agriculture under the guise of ‘globalisation’ for the benefit of transnational agribusiness and food retail corporations. And it entails placing less emphasis on a headlong rush towards urbanisation (and the subsequent distortion of agricultural production), while putting greater emphasis on localisation.

First published on Global Research on June 8, 2018

In 2015, ninety-two American missile officers were suspended because they had been cheating, taking drugs, or sleeping in the missile silos. These men are employed to guard and to operate 150 nuclear missiles at F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming which constitutes one-third of the 400 Minuteman 3 missiles that stand “on hair trigger alert” 24 hours a day in silos which are scattered across the northern Great Plains.

Two officers aged between 22 and 27 are in charge of each missile silo, and each man is armed with a pistol to shoot the other if one shows signs of deviant behaviour.

The missile silos are equipped with antiquated equipment including floppy disks and telephones that often don’t work. Each Minuteman 3 missile contains three hydrogen bombs, almost 50 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb. The officers in charge of these deadly weapons are clearly expected to follow strict behavioural standards at all times.

During the investigation, fourteen airmen had allegedly been using cocaine. Other drugs involved were ecstasy, cocaine, LSD and  marijuana.  All in all roughly one hundred officers were involved in the cheating scandal in 2015 and 2016.

Airman 1st Class Nickolos A. Harris, said to be the leader of the drug ring, testified that he had no trouble obtaining  LSD and other drugs from civilian sources and he pleaded guilty to using and distributing LSD plus ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana.

A side note – because LSD had showed up so infrequently in drug tests across the military, in December 2006 the Pentagon eliminated LSD screening from standard drug-testing procedures.

In more episodes of gross malfeasance, 2013 Vice Admiral Timothy Giardina, the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, was sacked for illegal gambling while Major General Michael Carey, a man in charge of all of the 450 intercontinental ballistic missile silos, was dismissed after a visit to Moscow when he became inebriated and insisted on singing in Russian night clubs, while cavorting with inappropriate women.

Considering all of these facts among many others, it is amazing to me that we are still here having not been incinerated in a global nuclear holocaust. Suffice it to say, we are in the hands of fallible men armed to the teeth with missiles and hydrogen bombs.