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The Trump administration has made the Chinese industrial transformation strategy, “Made in China: 2025,” or simply China 2025 the explicit target of its current trade war offensive against the Peoples’ Republic. Western industrial leading countries, including Germany, are understandably alarmed. Only they are ten years late, and until now have foolishly refused to collaborate with China in key developments, including of the new economic Silk Road or Belt Road Initiative. Here I want to briefly indicate what China is doing. In future reports I will discuss some fundamental flaws in their industrial strategy. Here it is important to understand what China 2025 signals to Western industrial domination.
When he took office, China President Xi Jinping moved to propose what is now the Belt and Road Initiative, a comprehensive network of new infrastructure projects going from China across Asia and Eurasia to the Middle East and the European Union. Xi proposed the BRI at a meeting in Kazakhstan in 2013. Then in 2015, after little more than two years in office, Xi Jinping endorsed a comprehensive national industrial strategy, Made in China: 2025. China 2025 replaced an earlier document that had been formulated with the World Bank and the USA under Robert Zoellick.
One quality I’ve come to appreciate from first hand observation over the course of numerous visits and discussions across China since 2008 is the remarkable determination of Chinese institutions and people, once a national strategy consensus is agreed, to realize that with almost a ruthless determination. Mistakes have been made, in the rush to go from one of the world’s most impoverished peasant economies to the world’s largest industrial producer. Quality control often has been secondary priority. However, step by step since Deng’s 1979 “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” policy turn, China has emerged to become the literal workshop of the world. Until now it has been producing on license for Western multinationals such as VW or Buick GM cars, iPhones or MacBooks, or countless other products for Western multinationals.
“Rejuvenating Chinese manufacturing”
Now China is changing that. Much as Japan did after 1952 then later South Korea embracing the Japanese example, and more relevantly Germany after 1871, China is going to what they describe as “rejuvenating Chinese manufacturing.” This, translated, means instead of being the workshop assembling components for foreign giants like Apple, China will develop its own Apple, or BMW or G5. They have begun a new phase in development of their own world leading industry. Now as China 2025 says, the national industry and government institutions supporting that is undergoing a “transformation from Made in China to Created in China, from China Speed to China Quality, and from Chinese products to Chinese brands.” The broad concept for China 2025 has been modelled on the German “Industry 4.0” strategy which some call the 4th Industrial Revolution. It aims to utilize technological advances in key technologies such as artificial intelligence, internet of things, machine learning, cloud systems, cybersecurity, adaptive robotics to cause radical changes in the business processes of organizations. China has now made such concepts national strategic priority in its economic future development. It is no minor deal. And that is precisely why Trump advisers with their trade war actions are targeting precisely the key vulnerabilities and links to western technologies such as those of China telecom giants Huawei or ZTE Telecommunications which are still dependent on US chips and other sensitive technologies.
‘Post Industrial’ USA
Beginning in the 1970’s there was a deliberate strategy among major US multinational companies to move their manufacture abroad in search of cheap labor, low costs. US think tanks and journals praised the nonsensical idea that the West had entered a “post-industrial era,” a promised nirvana where instead of “dirty” industrial jobs in steel, autos and such, the future would be a services economy. In reality it was outsourcing of America’s manufacturing base.
Beginning especially in the 1990’s with China’s negotiations to join the Western industrial “club” by negotiating for WTO membership, corporate America and their bankers flooded into China, the world’s most populous country with some of the lowest wages. For more than three decades, US companies from GE to Nike to Apple have banked huge profits based on that China production, a fact conveniently ignored today by Washington.
China has used that foreign input to build the world’s largest industrial goliath. However, as they state, one in urgent need of serious transformation if China is to become a “world competitor” and no longer merely a screw-driver assembly for Western or Japanese multinationals. As the official preface to China 2025 states, “Chinese manufacturing is facing new challenges. With resource and environmental constraints growing, costs of labor and
production inputs rising, and investment and export growth slowing, a resource and intensive development model that is driven by expansion cannot be sustained.
We must immediately adjust the development structure and raise the quality of development. Manufacturing is the engine that will drive the new Chinese economy.”
As the policy document correctly points out, “Since the beginning of industrial civilization in the Middle of the 18th century, it has been proven repeatedly by the rise and fall of world powers that without strong manufacturing, there is no national prosperity.” The conclusion they draw is that, “Building internationally competitive manufacturing is the only way China can enhance its strength, protect state security and become a world power.”
The China State Council policy blueprint correctly points to a major transformation of global manufacturing after the financial crisis of 2008 where giant Western corporations are revolutionizing manufacture with developments including 3D printing, cloud computing, big data, bio-engineering, and new materials, intelligent manufacturing, such as plants based on cyber-physical systems. This is what China 2025 is all about, to as the official policy document states, “capture the manufacturing high ground in the new competitive landscape.”
They are frank about their present capabilities in manufacture: “Chinese manufacturing is large but not yet strong. The capability for independent innovation is weak and external dependence for key technologies and advanced equipment is high. Enterprise-led manufacturing innovation systems have yet to be perfected. Product quality is not high and China has few world-famous brands. Resource and energy efficiency remains low, while environmental pollution is severe. The industrial structure and industry services remain immature.”
This is how Beijing describes its present challenge. They will not remain a quasi-colonial industrial assembly platform for foreign companies. They now are building their own version, made in China, to compete as world class industry competitors. This is what has set alarm bells ringing all across the West.
The three steps
They lay out three clear steps: by 2025, by 2035 and by the centennial of creation of the Peoples’ Republic of China in 2049. By 2025 China plans to be a “major manufacturing power,” ten years after onset of China 2025. For that the plan is that China will have consolidated its manufacturing power, increased manufacturing digitalization, master core technologies and become competitive in areas such as high-speed rail or other areas where China is already a global leader, while improving production quality. Energy use and pollutant levels will reach that of advanced industrial countries.
Step 2 by 2035 sees China manufacturing reach an “intermediate level among world manufacturing powers,” with greatly improved innovation ability to make key breakthroughs and “significantly increase overall competitiveness.”
Then in Step 3, by the 100-year anniversary in 2049, China expects to “become the leader among the world’s manufacturing powers. We will have the capability to lead innovation and possess competitive advantages in major manufacturing areas, and will develop advanced technology and industrial systems.”
And they mean it. What the 38 page blueprint lays out is a complex of supporting agencies and funding entities that is dedicated to making this national priority happen. For more than four decades the elites of China have sent their sons and daughters to study at the finest engineering and science universities in the USA and Europe. Now the graduate PhDs in science, IT, engineering are returning to China where the promise of major industrial transformation is far greater than anything they find in the US or EU today.
The state is creating the support system to make China 2025 happen. It includes supporting priority research through support research through the National Science and Technology
Plan; building “innovation coalitions” between government, production, education, research and operations. Further they are creating Industrial Technology Research Bases to do basic research and training in key areas as “next generation IT, intelligent manufacturing, additive manufacturing, new materials, and bio-medicine.”
By 2020 there will be 15 such Industrial Technology Research Bases, and 40 such centers around the nation by 2025. These centers are to develop such key components of the industrial transformation as “high-end, digitally controlled machine tools, industrial robots and additive manufacturing equipment, which feature depth perception, intelligent decision-making, and automation.”
As the national plan states,
“By 2025, major manufacturing areas will become fully digitalized. Operation costs of pilot demonstration projects will decrease by 50%. Production cycle will decrease by 50% and faulty product rates will decrease by 50%.”
And the entire transformation is tied to development of China’s ambitious New Silk Road or Belt and Road Initiative.
In short, China is serious about transforming itself from assembling for Western companies who re-export back to North America or Europe to exporting their own products, “made in China.”
Basic Washington geopolitics, as admitted clearly by the late Zbigniew Brzezinski back two decades ago when the USA was unchallenged as sole superpower, is to prevent the rise of a Eurasian economic challenge. He wrote,
“it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
As Brzezinski stated in his Grand Chess Board book in 1997,
“A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions… control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania (Australia) geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”
Current Washington strategy is to target both the growing cooperation between China, Russia and Iran, ironically a result of inept US geopolitics since the past decade, and most especially target the great industrial “rejuvenation” of Chinese manufacturing. The problem is that China 2025 is the very basis of China’s strategy for future existence. Beijing does not see it as an option but rather as the plan.
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F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was originally published.
Featured image is from the author.
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
Special Price: $18.00
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
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Featured image: While conducting search and rescue in the mountains of Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria in September of 2017, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) Air and Marine Operations Black Hawk located a home with HELP painted on its roof. (Photo: U.S. CBP/Wikimedia)
As temperatures bust heat records across the globe and wildfires rage from California to the Arctic, a new report produced annually by more than 500 scientists worldwide found that last year, the carbon dioxide concentrations in the Earth’s atmosphere reached the highest levels “in the modern atmospheric measurement record and in ice core records dating back as far as 800,000 years.”
While the most significant jump was the global average for carbon dioxide (CO2)—which, at 405.0 parts per million (ppm), saw a 2.2 ppm increase from the previous year—concentrations of other dominant planet-warming greenhouse gases, methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O), also hit “record highs,” according to State of the Climate in 2017 (pdf) released Wednesday.
Considering those rates, Greg Johnson, an oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, warned that even if humanity “stopped the greenhouse gases at their current concentrations today, the atmosphere would still continue to warm for next couple decades to maybe a century.”
The 332-page report—which was overseen by NOAA and published as a special supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society—also notes that 2017 is among the three hottest years ever, taking the top spot for warmest non-El Niño year since scientists began measuring in the 1800s. However, NOAA data released last weekend shows that 2018 is on track to set a new record.
The report details how “much-warmer-than-average conditions” across much of the world’s lands and oceans has meant three years of “unprecedented” coral bleaching, Arctic air temperatures that are “warming at a pace that was twice the rate of the rest of the world,” rapidly melting glaciers and ice sheets, and devastating tropical storms—such as Hurricanes Irma and Maria—that reflect “the very active state of the Atlantic basin.”
In its regional analyses, the report notes that “the United States was impacted by 16 weather and climate events that each caused over $1 billion (U.S. dollars) in damages. Since records began in 1980, 2017 is tied with 2011 for the greatest number of billion-dollar disasters. Included in this total are the western U.S. wildfire season and Hurricanes Harvey, Maria, and Irma. Tornado activity in the United States in 2017 was above average for the first time since 2011, with 1,400 confirmed tornadoes.”
It also features a map that highlights notable climate anomalies and events across the globe during 2017. The graphic points out that both Argentina and Uruguay experienced their warmest years on record while Russia experienced its second wettest, and five of six observatories in Alaska documented record high permafrost temperatures.
Permafrost is a layer of soil, rock, or sediment that remains frozen and contains massive amounts of carbon dioxide and methane. Climate scientists are growing increasingly concerned that “as the global thermostat rises, permafrost, rather than storing carbon, could become a significant source of planet-heating emissions.”
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Featured image: Roundup’s active ingredient, glyphosate, is the most heavily-used agricultural chemical in history. (Photo: Mike Mozart/Flickr/cc)
Are you being lied to or misled? Environmentalist Dr Rosemary Mason certainly thinks so and has provided much supporting evidence. She has been campaigning against the agrochemical industry for many years (all her work can be accessed here) and has borne witness to the destruction of her own nature reserve in South Wales, which she argues is due to the widespread spraying of glyphosate in the area.
In 2016, she wrote an open letter to journalists at The Guardian newspaper in the UK outlining how the media is failing the public by not properly reporting on the regulatory delinquency relating to the harmful chemicals being applied to crops (read it here). Her assertion was that not only humans and the environment are silently being poisoned by thousands of untested and unmonitored chemicals, but that the UK media are silent about the agrochemical industry’s role in this.
It has been sent to the editors-in-chief of The Times, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, the London Evening Standard and The Independent as well as the director general of the BBC and its senior executives. Channel 4 News (UK) reporters have also been sent the document, including senior presenter Jon Snow, and a number of prominent UK government agencies and ministers.
The document discusses the lawsuits that have recently been brought against agrochemical and seed giant Monsanto, issues surrounding the renewal of the licence for glyphosate (key ingredient in Monsanto’s multi-billion-dollar, money-spinning herbicide Roundup) in the EU, rising rates of illness and disease (linked to glyphosate and other agrochemicals), the increasing use of pesticides and the lack of adequate testing and epidemiological studies pertaining to the cocktail of chemicals sprayed on crops.
Mason feels the media should be holding officials and the industry to account. Instead, there seems to be an agenda to confuse the public or to push the issue to one side. For instance, she has in the past argued that too many journalists are reinforcing the pesticides industry’s assertion that cancers are caused by alcohol use and that the catalogue of diseases now affecting modern society comes down to individual choice and lifestyle decisions. The media constantly link alcohol consumption with various cancers and this ‘fact’ is endlessly reinforced until people believe it to be true.
This, Mason argues, neatly diverts attention from the strong links between the increasing amounts of chemicals used in food and agriculture and serious diseases, including cancers.
In her various documents, Mason has over the years highlighted how international and national health and food safety agencies have dismissed key studies and findings in their assessments of the herbicide glyphosate, and she has provided much evidence that the chemical industry has created a toxic (political and natural) environment which affects us all. She argues that these agencies are guilty of regulatory delinquency due to conflicts of interest and have effectively been co-opted, enabling companies to dodge effective regulation.
Mason has gone to great lengths to show how a combination of propaganda disseminated by industry front groups and conflicts of interest allow dangerous chemicals into the food chain and serve to keep the public in the dark about what is taking place and the impacts on their health.
Aside from the subversion of democratic procedures, the result is rivers, streams and oceans polluted with agrochemical run-offs, spiralling rates of illness among the public and the destruction of wildlife and biodiversity.
By writing to major news outlets, Mason is pressing for at least one to take up this issue and finally begin holding public officials and agrochemical companies to account. To its credit, the French newspaper Le Monde has on occasion been unafraid to report on the activities of this industry.
Regardless of industry propaganda, it is not that we need the model of agriculture that these companies profit from. The increasingly globalized industrial food regime that transnational agribusiness is integral to is not feeding the world. It is, moreover, responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises.
So, isn’t it about time integrity and public health took precedence over profit and vested interest?
The UN special rapporteur on the right to food Hilal Elver says:
“The power of the corporations over governments and over the scientific community is extremely important. If you want to deal with pesticides, you have to deal with the companies.”
When speaking truth to power, however, perhaps for many well-paid media personnel with careers to protect it is easier to stay silent.
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Colin Todhunter is a frequent contributor to Global Research and Asia-Pacific Research.
Seeds of Destruction: Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation
Author Name: F. William Engdahl
ISBN Number: 978-0-937147-2-2
Year: 2007
Pages: 341 pages with complete index
List Price: $25.95
Special Price: $18.00
This skilfully researched book focuses on how a small socio-political American elite seeks to establish control over the very basis of human survival: the provision of our daily bread. “Control the food and you control the people.”
This is no ordinary book about the perils of GMO. Engdahl takes the reader inside the corridors of power, into the backrooms of the science labs, behind closed doors in the corporate boardrooms.
The author cogently reveals a diabolical world of profit-driven political intrigue, government corruption and coercion, where genetic manipulation and the patenting of life forms are used to gain worldwide control over food production. If the book often reads as a crime story, that should come as no surprise. For that is what it is.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above
The last leg of the journey of al-Awda (the boat of return) was scheduled to reach Gaza on 29 July 2018. We were on target to reach Gaza that evening. There are 22 on board including crew with USD 15,000 of antibiotics and bandages for Gaza. At 12.31 pm we received a missed call from a number beginning with +81… Mikkel was steering the boat at that time. The phone rang again with the message that we were trespassing into Israeli waters. Mikkel replied that we were in international waters and had right of innocent passage according to maritime laws. The accusation of trespassing was repeated again and again with Mikkel repeating the message that we were sailing in international waters. This carried on for about half an hour, while Awda was 42 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza.
Prior to the beginning of this last leg, we had spent 2 days learning non-violent actions and had prepared ourselves in anticipation of Israeli invasion of our boat. Vulnerable individuals especially those with medical conditions were to sit at the rear of the top deck with their hands on the deck table. The leader of this group was Gerd, a 75 year old elite Norwegian athlete and she had the help of Lucia a Spanish nurse in her group.
The people who were to provide non-violent barrier to the Israelis coming on deck and taking over the boat formed 3 rows – two rows of threes and the third row of 2 persons blocking the wheel house door to protect the wheel house for as long as possible. There were runners between the wheel house and the rear of the deck. The leader of the boat Zohar and I were at the two ends of the toilets corridor where we looked out at the horizon and inform all of any sightings of armed boats. I laughed at Zohar and said we are the Toilet Brigade, but I think Zohar did not find it very funny. It was probably bad taste under the circumstances. I also would be able to help as a runner and will have accessibility to all parts of the deck in view of being the doctor on board.
Soon we saw at least three large Israeli warships on the horizon with 5 or more speed boats (zodiacs) zooming towards us. As the Zodiacs approached I saw that they carried soldiers with machine guns and there was on board the boats large machine guns mounted on a stand pointing at our boat. From my lookout point the first Israeli soldier climbed on board to the cabin level and climbed up the boat ladder to the top deck. His face was masked with a white cloth and following him were many others, all masked. They were all armed with machine guns and small cameras on their chests.
They immediately made to the wheel house overcoming the first row by twisting the arms of the participants, lifting Sarah up and throwing her away. Joergen the chef was large to be manhandled so he was tasered before being lifted up. They attacked the second row by picking on Emelia the Spanish nurse and removed her thus breaking the line. They then approach the door of the wheel house and tasered Charlie the first mate and Mike Treen who were obstructing their entry to the wheel house. Charlie was beaten up as well. Mike did not give way with being tasered in his lower limbs so he was tasered in his neck and face. Later on I saw bleeding on the left side of Mike’s face. He was semi-conscious when I examined him.
They broke into the wheel house by cutting the lock, forced the engine to be switched off and took down the Palestine flag before taking down the Norwegian flag and trampling on it.
They then cleared all people from the front half of the boat around the wheel house and moved them by force and coercion, throwing them to the rear of the deck. All were forced to sit on the floor at the back, except Gerd, Lucy and the vulnerable people who were seated around the table on wooden benches around her. Israeli soldiers then formed a line sealing off people from the back and preventing them from coming to the front of the boat again.
As we entered the back of the deck we were all body searched and ordered to surrender our mobile phones or else they will take it by force. This part of search and confiscation was under the command of a woman soldier. Apart from mobile phones – medicines and wallets were also removed. No one as of today (4 August 2018) got our mobile phones back.
I went to examine Mike and Charlie. Charlie had recovered consciousness and his wrists were tied together with plastic cable ties. Mike was bleeding from the side of his face, still not fully conscious. His hands were very tightly tied together with cable ties and the circulation to his fingers was cut off and his fingers and palm were beginning to swell. At this stage the entire people seated on the floor shouted demanding that the cable ties be cut. It was about half an hour later before the ties were finally cut off from both of them.
Around this time Charlie the first mate received the Norwegian flag. He was visibly upset telling all of us that the Norwegian flag had been trampled on. Charlie reacted more to the trampling of the Norwegian flag than to his own being beaten and tasered.
The soldiers then started asking for the captain of the boat. The boys then started to reply that they were all the captain. Eventually the Israelis figured out that Herman was the captain and demanded to take him to the wheel house. Herman asked for someone to come with him, and I offered to do so. But as we approached the wheel house, I was pushed away and Herman forced into the wheel house on his own. Divina, the well known Swedish singer, had meanwhile broken free from the back and went to the front to look through the window of the wheel house. She started to shout and cry “Stop –stop they are beating Herman, they are hurting him”. We could not see what Divina saw, but knew that it was something very disturbing. Later on, when Divina and I were sharing a prison cell, she told me they were throwing Herman against the wall of the wheel house and punching his chest. Divina was forcibly removed and her neck was twisted by the soldiers who took her back to the rear of the deck.
I was pushed back to the rear of the boat again. After a while the boat engine started. I was told later by Gerd who was able to hear Herman tell the story to the Norwegian Consul in prison that the Israelis wanted Herman to start the engine, and threatened to kill him if he would not do so. But what they did not understand was that with this boat, once the engine stopped it can only be restarted manually in the engine room in the cabin level below. Arne the engineer refused to restart the engine, so the Israelis brought Herman down and hit him in front of Arne making it clear that they will continue to hit Herman if Arne would not start the engine. Arne is 70 years old, and when he saw Herman’s face went ash colour, he gave in and started the engine manually. Gerd broke into tears when she was narrating this part of the story. The Israelis then took charge of the boat and drove it to Ashdod.
Once the boat was on course, the Israeli soldiers brought Herman to the medical desk. I looked at Herman and saw that he was in great pain, silent but conscious, breathing spontaneously but shallow breathing. The Israeli Army doctor was trying to persuade Herman to take some medicine for pain. Herman was refusing the medicine. The Israeli doctor explained to me that what he was offering Herman was not army medicine but his personal medicine. He gave me the medicine from his hand so that I could check it. It was a small brown glass bottle and I figured that it was some kind of liquid morphine preparation probably the equivalent of oromorph or fentanyl. I asked Herman to take it and the doctor asked him to take 12 drops after which Herman was carried off and slumped on a mattress at the back of the deck. He was watched over by people around him and fell asleep. From my station I saw he was breathing better.
With Herman settled I concentrated on Larry Commodore, the Native American leader and an environmental activist. He had been voted Chief of his tribe twice. Larry has labile asthma and with the stress all around my fear was that he might get a nasty attack, and needed adrenaline injection. I was taking Larry through deep breathing exercises. However Larry was not heading for an asthmatic attack, but was engaging an Israeli who covered his face with a black cloth in conversation. This man was obviously in charge.
I asked for the Israeli man with black mask his name and he called himself Field Marshall Ro…..Larry misheard him and jumped to conclusion that he called himself Field Marshall Rommel and shouted how can he an Israeli take a Nazi name. Field Marshall objected and introduced himself as Field Marshall? Ronan. As I spelt out Ronan he quickly corrected me that his name is Ronen, and he Field Marshall Ronen was in charge.
The Israeli soldiers all wore body cameras and were filming us all the time. A box of sandwiches and pears were brought on deck for us. None of us took any of their food as we had decided we do not accept Israeli hypocrisy and charity. Our chef Joergen had already prepared high calorie high protein delicious brownie with nuts and chocolate, wrapped up in tin foil to be consume when captured, as we know it was going to be a long day and night. Joergen called it food for the journey. Unfortunately when I needed it most, the Israelis took away my food and threw it away. They just told me ”It is forbidden” I had nothing to eat for 24 hours, refusing Israeli Army food and had no food of my own.
As we sailed towards Israel we could see the coast of Gaza in total darkness. There were 3 oil /gas rigs in the northern sea of Gaza. The brightly burning oil flames contrasted with the total darkness the owners of the fuel were forced to live in. Just off the shore of Gaza are the largest deposit of natural gas ever discovered and the natural gas belonging to the Palestinians were already being siphoned off by Israel.
As we approached Israel, Zohar our boat leader suggested that we should start saying goodbye to each other. We were probably 2-3 hours from Ashdod. We thanked our boat leader, our Captain, the crew, our dear chef, and encouraged each other that we will continue to do all we can to free Gaza and also bring justice to Palestine. Herman our Captain, who managed to sit up now, gave a most moving talk and some of us were in tears.
We knew that in Ashdod there will be the Israeli media and film crews. We will not enter Ashdod as a people who had lost hope as we were taken captive. So we came off the boat chanting “Free Free Palestine” all the way as we came off. Mike Treen the union man had by then recovered from his heavy tasering and led the chanting with his mega-voice and we filled the night sky of Israel with Free Free Palestine as we approached. We did this the whole way down the boat into Ashdod.
We came directly into a closed military zone in Ashdod. It was a sealed off area with many stations. It was specially prepared for the 22 of us.
It began with a security x-ray area. I did not realise they retained my money belt as I came out of the x-ray station. The next station was strip search, and it was when I was gathering up my belongings after being stripped when I realised my money belt was no longer with me. I knew I had about a couple hundred Euros and they were trying to steal it. I demanded its return and refused to leave the station until it was produced. I was shouting for the first time. I was glad I did that as some other people were parted from their cash. The journalist from Al Jazeera Abdul had all his credit cards and USD 1,800 taken from him, as well as his watch, satellite phone, his personal mobile, his ID. He thought his possessions were kept with his passport but when he was released for deportation he learnt bitterly that he only got his passport back. All cash and valuables were never found. They simply vanished.
We were passed from station to station in this closed military zone, stripped searched several times, possessions taken away until in the end all we had was the clothes we were wearing with nothing else except a wrist band with a number on it. All shoe laces were removed as well. Some of us were given receipts for items taken away, but I had no receipts for anything. We were photographed several times and saw two doctors. At this point I learnt that Larry was pushed down the gangway and injured his foot and sent off to Israeli hospital for check-up. His blood was on the floor.
I was cold and hungry, wearing only one teeshirt and pants by the time they were through with me. My food was taken away; water was taken away, all belongings including reading glasses taken away. My bladder was about to explode but I am not allowed to go to the toilet. In this state I was brought out to two vehicles – Black Maria painted gray. On the ground next to it were a great heap of ruqsacks and suit cases. I found mine and was horrified that they had broken into my baggage and took almost everything from it – all clothes clean and dirty, my camera, my second mobile, my books, my Bible, all the medicines I brought for the participants and myself, my toiletries. The suitcase was partially broken. My ruqsack was completely empty too. I got back two empty cases except for two dirty large man size teeshirts which obviously belonged to someone else. They also left my Freedom Flotilla teeshirt. I figured out that they did not steal the Flotilla teeshirt as they thought no Israeli would want to wear that teeshirt in Israel. They had not met Zohar and Yonatan who were proudly wearing theirs. That was a shock as I was not expecting the Israeli Army to be petty thieves as well. So what had become the glorious Israeli Army of the Six Day War which the world so admired?
I was still not allowed to go to the toilet, but was pushed into the Maria van, joined by Lucia the Spanish nurse and after some wait taken to Givon Prison. I could feel myself shivering uncontrollably on the journey.
The first thing our guards did in Givon Prison was to order me to go to the toilet to relieve myself. It was interesting to see that they knew I needed to go desperately but had prevented me for hours to! By the time we were re-x-rayed and searched again it must be about 5 – 6 am. Lucia and I were then put in a cell where Gerd, Divina, Sarah and Emelia were already asleep. There were three double decker bunk beds – all rusty and dusty.
Divina did not get the proper dose of her medicines; Lucia was refused her own medicine and given an Israeli substitute which she refused to take. Divina and Emelia went straight on to hunger strike. The jailors were very hostile using simple things like refusal of toilet paper and constant slamming of the prison iron door, keeping the light of the cell permanently on, and forcing us to drink rusty water from the tap, screaming and shouting at us constantly to vent their anger at us.
The guards addressed me as “China” and treated me with utter contempt. On the morning of 30 July 2018, the British Vice Consul visited me. Some kind person had called them about my whereabouts. That was a blessing as after that I was called “England” and there was a massive improvement in the way England was treated compared to the way China was treated. It crossed my mind that “Palestine” would be trampled over, and probably killed.
At 6.30am 31 July 2018, we heard Larry yelling from the men’s cell across the corridor that he needed a doctor. He was obviously in great pain and crying. We women responded by asking the wardens to allow me to go across to see Larry as I might be able to help. We shouted “We have a doctor” and used our metal spoons to hit the iron cell gate get their attention. They lied and said their doctor will be over in an hour. We did not believe them and started again. The doctor actually turned up at 4 pm, about 10 hours later and Larry was sent straight to hospital.
Meanwhile to punish the women for supporting Larry’s demand, they brought hand cuffs for Sarah and took Divina and me to another cell to separate us from the rest. We were told we were not going to be allowed out for our 30 minutes fresh air break and a drink of clean water in the yard. I heard Gerd saying “Big deal”
Suddenly Divina was taken out with me to the courtyard and Divina given 4 cigarettes at which point she broke down and cried. Divina had worked long hours at the wheel house steering the boat. She had seen what happened to Herman. The prison had refused to give her one of her medicines and given her only half the dose of the other. She was still on hunger strike to protest our kidnapping in international waters. It was heart-breaking to see Divina cry. One of the wardens who called himself Michael started talking to us about how he will have to protect his family against those who want to drive the Israelis out. And how the Palestinians did not want to live in peace…and it was not Israel’s fault. But things suddenly changed with the arrival of an Israeli Judge and we were all treated with some decency even though he only saw a few of us personally. His job was to tell us that a Tribunal will be convened the following day and each prisoner had been allocated a time to appear, and we must have our lawyer with us when we appear.
Divina by the end of the day became very giddy and very unwell so I persuaded her to come out of hunger strike, and also she agreed to sign a deportation order. Shortly after that possibly at 6 pm since we had no watches and mobile phones, we were told Lucia, Joergen, Herman, Arne, Abdul from Al Jazeera and I would be deported within 24 hours and we would be taken to be imprisoned in the deportation prison in Ramle near Ben Gurion airport immediately to wait there. It was going to
be the same Ramle Prison from which I was deported in 2014. I saw the same five strong old palm trees still standing up proud and tall. They are the only survivors of the Palestinian village destroyed in 1948.
When we arrived at Ramle prison Abdul found to his horror that he his money, his credit cards, his watch, his satellite phone, his own mobile phone, his ID card were all missing – he was entirely destitute. We had a whip round and raised around a hundred Euros as a contribution towards his taxi fare from the airport to home. How can the Israeli Army be so corrupt and heartless to rob someone of everything?
Conclusion
We, the six women on board al-Awda had learnt that they tried to completely humiliate and dehumanise us in every way possible. We were also shocked at the behaviour of the Israeli Army especially petty theft and their treatment of international women prisoners. Men jailors regularly entered the women’s cell without giving us decent notice to put our clothes on.
They also tried to remind us of our vulnerability at every stage. We know they would have preferred to kill us but of course the publicity incurred in so doing might be unfavourable to the international image of Israel.
If we were Palestinians it would be much worse with physical assaults and probably loss of lives. The situation is therefore dire for the Palestinians.
As to international waters, it looks as though there is no such thing for the Israeli Navy. They can hijack and abduct boats and persons in international water and get away with it. They acted as though they own the Mediterranean Sea. They can abduct any boat and kidnap any passengers, put them in prison and criminalise them.
We cannot accept this. We have to speak up, stand up against this lawlessness, oppression and brutality. We were completely unarmed. Our only crime according to them is we are friends of the Palestinians and wanted to bring medical aid to them. We wanted to brave the military blockade to do this. This is not a crime. In the week we were sailing to Gaza, they had shot dead 7 Palestinians and wounded more than 90 with life bullets in Gaza. They had further shut down fuel and food to Gaza. Two million Palestinians in Gaza live without clean water, with only 2-4 hours of electricity, in homes destroyed by Israeli bombs, in a prison blockaded by land, air and sea for 12 years. The hospitals of Gaza since the 30 March had treated more than 9,071 wounded persons, 4,348 shot by machine guns from a hundred Israeli snipers while they were mounting peaceful demonstrations inside the borders of Gaza on their own land. Most of the gun-shot wounds were to the lower limbs and with depleted treatment facilities the limbs will suffer amputation. In this period more than 165 Palestinians had been shot dead by the same snipers, including medics and journalists, children and women. The chronic military blockade of Gaza has depleted the hospitals of all surgical and medical supplies. This massive attack on an unarmed Freedom Flotilla bringing friends and some medical relief is an attempt to crush all hope for Gaza. As I write I learnt that our sister Flotilla, Freedom, has also been kidnapped by the Israeli Navy while in international waters.
BUT we will not stop, we must continue to be strong to bring hope and justice to the Palestinians and be prepared to pay the price, and to be worthy of the Palestinians. As long as I survive I will exist to resist.
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Featured image: Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has survived an apparent attack on his life during a military parade. | Photo: AVN
“They have tried to assassinate me today, and everything points to the Venezuelan ultra-right and the Colombian ultra-right,” President Nicolas Maduro said.
Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro has survived an apparent attack on his life during a military parade celebrating the 81st anniversary of the Bolivarian National Guard in the capital, Caracas.
In a televised national address late Saturday, Maduro said he was fine and laid blame for the attack firmly at the feet of “right-wing imperial forces” who he said had hired the would-be assassins.
“They have tried to assassinate me today, and everything points to the Venezuelan ultra-right and the Colombian ultra-right, and the name of Juan Manuel Santos is behind this attack,” he said.
“I must inform that they have been captured – those who attempted to take my life – and they are being processed. I won’t say more, but the investigation is very advanced.
“I tell the Venezuelan opposition that I guarantee you can live in this country peacefully. If something happens to me, you will have to face millions of Campesinos and humble people making justice with their own hands.
“I am alive, and I can tell you that after this attempt, I am even more determined to fight for the revolution.
“The preliminary investigation indicates that many of those responsible for the attack, the financiers and planners, live in the United States in the state of Florida.
“I hope the Trump administration is willing to fight terrorist groups that commit attacks in peaceful countries in our continent, in this case, Venezuela.”
Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez had confirmed the attack – involving several drones packed with explosives – at a press conference earlier Saturday, shortly after video of the incident began surfacing on social media.
[#VIDEO] En cadena nacional, se observó el momento en que el Jefe de Estado y la primera Dama, Cilia Flores, reaccionan a la explosión y luego aparecen las imágenes de todos los militares en formación que corren ante el hecho irregular. #4Agohttps://t.co/C3rMw9ujshpic.twitter.com/gxHiCPqWHt
“President Nicolas Maduro asked me to inform the country about what is happening and extend peace to everyone,” Rodriguez said.
“When we were at the military parade 81st anniversary, at the end of the event in Bolivar Avenue in Caracas, at 5:41 p.m. there was an explosion.
“An investigation has already been launched. Several flying objects, like drones, containing explosives were detonated close to the presidential platform and in some locations along the parade.
“The investigation has already produced evidence that this was an attempt against the life of President Nicolas Maduro, but he is completely unharmed.”
Seven military personnel were reportedly injured in the explosion, but Maduro “has already returned to his normal job,” Rodriguez said, adding:
“They have failed and they will continue to fail.”
Maduro’ speech was cut short during the event on Saturday and soldiers were seen running before the televised transmission was cut off.
While Maduro was speaking about Venezuela’s economy, the audio suddenly went. He and others on the podium suddenly looked up, startled.
The camera then panned to scores of soldiers who started running, before the transmission was cut.
Bolivian President Evo Morales later posted a message of support to the victims of the attack. Writing on Twitter, he said:
“We strongly repudiate a new aggression and cowardly attack on Nicolas Maduro and the Bolivarian people.
“After the failure in his attempt to overthrow him democratically, economically, politically, and militarily, now the empire and its servants threaten his life.”
Repudiamos enérgicamente una nueva agresión y cobarde atentado contra el Hno. Pdte. @NicolasMaduro y el pueblo bolivariano. Después del fracaso en su intento por derrocarlo democrática, económica, política y militarmente, ahora el imperio y sus sirvientes atentan contra su vida.
“My film itself is essentially… was tracking the neocon influence and how the neoconservatives from the Bush era that pushed the Iraq war, that constructed the blueprints for the Iraq war, how they also were the earliest pioneers pushing this Russiagate Cold War 2.0 mentality.” – Robbie Martin, from this week’s program.
Robert Kagan. William Kristol. Paul Wolfowitz. Richard Perle. John Bolton. Elliott Abrams. Gary Schmitt. These are a few of the names generally associated with a strain of far-right political thought called neoconservatism. [1][2]
Politically, the neocons favour a world in which the United States adopts a much more aggressive military posture, and utilizes its military might to not only contain terrorist and related threats to its security, but force regime change in regions like the Middle East. They further take on the task of ‘nation-building’ all in the name of creating a safer world for ‘democracy.’ It was the neocons who promoted the stratagem of pre-emptive military action. [3]
The neocons enjoyed a robust period of influence under the Bush-Cheney administration. The 9/11 attacks and the triggering of a ‘war on terrorism’ enabled a series of foreign policy choices, most notably the War on Afghanistan and the War on Iraq, which aligned with the aims and aspirations of the group once referred to by President George Bush Sr. as the ‘crazies in the basement.'[4]
The neocons did not vanish with the departure of the Bush Republicans from office, and the rise of Obama. Indeed, the clout of this group and their grip on power is arguably as strong as ever. Not only did they continue to shape the U.S. foreign policy establishment, but they have managed to alter what constitutes acceptable public and media discourse within the world’s remaining superpower. The trajectory of neocon influence in Washington is explored in depth in the documentary series, A Very Heavy Agenda, by independent journalist and film-maker Robbie Martin.
In part one of a special two part interview by Global Research News Hour guest contributor Scott Price, Martin describes the inspiration behind making the film, the post 9/11 atmosphere in which the neocons flourished, and the neocons’ role in fostering the new Cold War mentality which contributed to the smearing of his better-known sister, former RT host Abby Martin.
This feature is followed by an interview with writer, ecological campaigner, and Deep State researcher Mark Robinowitz. Originally recorded and aired in January 2018, Robinowitz helps delineate the factions of power shaping the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, as well as the players within the National Security State, including the neocons, that appear to be manipulating him and his presidency, possibly maneuvering him towards an impeachment within the next year.
Robbie Martin is a journalist, musician and documentary film-maker. He is co-host with his sister Abby Martin of Media Roots Radio. A Very Heavy Agenda can be streamed or purchased here. Soundtrack for Film and music for these series from Fluorescent Grey (Robbie Martin).
Mark Robinowitz is a writer, political activist, ecological campaigner and permaculture practitioner and publisher of oilempire.us as well as jfkmoon.org. He is based in Eugene, Oregon.
Transcript – Interview with Robbie Martin, July 2018
Global Research: Through the late 20th and early 21st century, the neoconservatives loomed large in American foreign policy…the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the Bush administration. In 2018, it may seem that their power and influence has waned, but in fact, many of these neoconservatives still hold influence, and their legacy has had a much larger impact on politics and society.
In this Global Research News Hour special, we talk with journalist, filmmaker, and musician Robbie Martin on his 3-part documentary, A Very heavy Agenda. This film series covers the rise and continued influence of the neoconservatives. In Part 1, Robbie talks about the artistic and political influence for A Very Heavy Agenda and some of the early history of the war on terror.
Talking more broadly about the documentary, what was.. sort of the genesis of the idea for A Very Heavy Agenda? The documentary has a very distinct style and you don’t do a lot of editorializing. So what was the inspiration for all that? And why did you choose the kind of… this topic and the kind of technique that you were using for this documentary film?
Robbie Martin: I think I probably should give a shout out to filmmaker Adam Curtis right off the top, because I don’t give him enough credit when I talk about the inspiration for this film. As you may know, or if you’re not familiar with it…but he made a film series called The Power of Nightmares during the Bush administration that was sort of charting the neoconservative influence in the Bush administration and before, and how they’ve sort of mirrored the Wahhabist, Islamic, you know, fundamentalists and Al Qaeda figures by using what Adam Curtis described as the Power of Nightmares, that by concocting these nightmare fantasy scenarios, you could gain power, and people like Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were able to do that by spinning these hysterical fear-mongering tales about, oh, what would happen if a bio-terrorist attack happened? You know what would happen if terrorists attacked the World Trade Centers?
That was a big inspiration for me during the Bush administration. It sort of helped me become more politically aware. It made me question a lot of things after 9/11 and having to do with the Iraq war. But over time, i just became sort of just, oh the neocons, they’re the people who were mainly behind the Iraq war. They’re sort of an evil class of foreign policy makers in DC who really want war at every opportunity. And that’s just how I thought of them throughout the years.
It wasn’t until my sister, Abby Martin, and for those listening who aren’t aware of this, my sister actually had a show on the Russian-owned television channel, Russia Today America out of DC from the years around 2012 to, I think, early 2015.
So she had a show on RT for about three years, and while she was there, I remember having a conversation with her very early on saying, you know, we have to be ready for when the U.S.government decides that they’re going to get mad at what this channel’s doing. because when she started working there in 2012, it didn’t seem like there was any attention whatsoever to RT, this idea of Russian meddling, this idea of Russian propaganda, no one cared about it.
In fact, U.S. officials at the time marginalized it and even one of my characters in my film, Victoria Nuland, says it has a very tiny audience. She actually marginalized it during a Brookings panel in DC. Now, that was the attitude back when my sister first started working there, but over time, we started seeing early signs of what appeared to be an information war being waged against the Russian government by shady actors inside the United States.
And that may sound a little bit ironic, considering the way that we see everything through this lens now of Russian meddling, that everyone in the U.S. would describe RT as a form of information war now. You know, that’s how everybody would describe it now, but back then it was such a small channel…it…barely anybody watched it, I mean that was kind of more true what they were saying back then, U.S. officials marginalizing it…that was more of the true narrative. It was a small channel and had very little influence.
But yet maybe just a year or two into her working there, maybe a year and a half, we really started to notice something strange happening in the United States where there was all this focus starting to accumulate towards Putin and Russia and why Russia was so bad. And it started more subtly, kind of in the background. The Sochi Olympics, however, was sort of when we noticed — it was almost like all these coordinated narratives started to really flood out of U.S. media channels, and all this awareness all of a sudden about the Russian gay law, which as someone who’s very adamantly pro gay rights, I was bothered by it as well, but I mean even at the time I remember thinking, now this is an odd amount of focus towards the Russian gay law when yet Saudi Arabia actually executes gays still, and there’s hardly any talk about that in the U.S. media. What’s actually happening here?
So there was some early signs and sort of like what…me just sort of my gut reaction and my sister’s gut reaction to that climate at the time wondering what was going on. And of course, right after the Sochi Olympics, is when the Euromaidan protest in Ukraine, it kind of boiled over to the point where there were, you know, walls of flaming tires all over Euromaidan – basically a war zone. And of course the Ukrainian government fell due to a coup which many believe, including myself, was partially U.S. sponsored by the U.S. State Department.
And then things from there, Scott, just started to spiral out of control, and from the period between 2014 to 2018, it was like an exponentially rising climate of propaganda against Russia coming from the U.S. media, and when I made my film series, I didn’t…I made it before the election, so I didn’t realize how hysterical it was going to get after the election, and frankly, I had no idea it was going to get this bad, to the point that it’s got now.
i know that doesn’t quite answer your question about my inspiration, but it’s…kind of a long answer to your question is…my film itself is essentially.. was tracking the neocon influence and how the neoconservatives from the Bush era that pushed the Iraq war, that constructed the blueprints to the Iraq war, how they also were the earliest pioneers pushing this Russiagate Cold War 2.0 mentality.
And how it only took. you know. certain nudges and pushes and policy papers, and here we are. They essentially got their way, and Russia has never been more demonized since the fall of communism and the Berlin wall and the Soviet Union. So that’s…I don’t know if that was too long of an answer for your question, but that’s what was sort of my inspiration for how I made it. My sister was also kind of a part of the story because some of these neocons actually tried to smear her while she was working for RT.
GR: Right…yeah
RM: And that’s maybe a more literal answer to your question is – that was the key inspiration for me like, oh, wait these neocons are still around, they’re waging some kind of cutting edge information war against Russia at the Obama administration doesn’t seem to care about, and they’re out there trying to ruin my sister. So all those factors combined, sort of coalesced at once, and I’m like, I have to do something about this because no one else is talking about this push, what I saw as a propaganda push to try to push us into kind of a war-footing with Russia. Whether you want to call it World War III or an ideological confrontation.
GR: Right, yeah, and I mean, some of the more, the details of some of these things we’ll get into. I mean, I don’t want to get too far into it, because I want people to to to watch your.. the documentary, because I think it’s so great. And especially…I’m 31 so I kind of, the 9/11 thing really shaped myself and my generation in so many ways. But even in watching this, there’s so many things that I forgot about or didn’t even know about? You know like we kind of form these narratives and we don’t really think about it or you know who’s controlling this stuff and for what purposes. But I think you give a good summation of that.
But one of the things too about the film itself is you use a lot of footage of these people… if it’s one of the Kagans or Bill Kristol or whomever… I mean, obviously this was a conscious decision to use their own words, so could you talk a little bit about why you decided to do it that way? Because I think in watching the how many hours it is over the three parts, you get, you kind of see the same themes coming up again, but it’s from these people themselves that are saying this stuff. Could you talk about the power of that and why you decided to do that?
RM: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think at first, I was really fascinated by the psychology of these key neoconservatives. I was watching, at first I didn’t even know I was going to make a film. I was kind of in this weird place mentally, my sister had just been put through the wringer, she had over 200 basically hit piece stories written about her within the span of a week, and I was just in this kind of depressed place checking in with her making sure she was doing okay, and not basically getting too stressed out from all this media pressure and this barrage of negative stories. So I was just watching these videos basically from the neocon think-tank that I believe was behind the smear campaign against her.
So I was watching videos from this think tank, they were called the Foreign Policy Initiative, and I quickly learned maybe over 48 hour period, oh, the Foreign Policy Initiative is actually a re-branded, reopened version of the Project for The New American Century think tank, which was the most infamous neocon think tank that was behind the Iraq War. Once I realized that, then I just…then I was obsessed with watching these videos. I watched probably every single video on their YouTube channel, and the majority of them were incredibly boring, very dry. And I was already in a depressed place, so, you know, it was kind of just putting me into this weird state where I was watching nothing but these dry foreign policy think tank videos for weeks on end.
Finally I got to Robert Kagan. And I was listening to him, and it struck me differently from the way that most other neoconservatives would talk, because I perceived him as being more candid about the way American foreign policy has actually conducted itself, and also more clever with the way that I perceived him as, re-branding, repackaging neocon rhetoric for the Obama era. Once I saw this, I became fascinated with his psychology. And I was already sort of fascinated with Bill Kristol’s psychology, you know, going back to when I was a young man when I would watch Fox News you know during the Iraq War, I would watch Bill Kristol, and I found him fascinating back then because he seemed on a different level than most other, you know, war hawks that would go on Fox News.
But it was really Robert Kagan though that made me think, you know, his own words are so fascinating and so candid and so revealing without adding any editorial content that I wonder if this will work, if I present it just simply in his own words.
And then the other reason, if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t feel confident at the time to actually add any of my own editorial narration. I kind of cringe sometimes at movies that do that too much, especially political documentaries. Without naming names or crapping on anyone, let’s just say I watched a political documentary that had the word wars in the title. And I felt that the filmmaker himself was…made himself the main character, and while the content of the film was great, he talked about Yemen, Somalia all these… how do I say it without revealing the film maker? All these wars, hidden wars, happening in all these other countries, the filmmaker made himself the main character, and I cringe so much at that I kind of was in this position where I was like, I don’t even know how to enter my own editorial point of view into this other than my editing and the way I’m presenting all this footage.
So when I made Part 1, it was out of necessity, mostly because I didn’t know how to do that yet, and I didn’t feel confident enough to do it, but then also the footage I was grabbing was so compelling to me on its own, I felt that maybe this could work just on its own. Like I wasn’t… When I was originally making it it didn’t even cross my mind to add narration. It was only until later when I was like, I need to release this and show people that I actually decided to add narration. But as you’re saying Part 1, I think you’re mostly talking about Part 1, has no narration whatsoever. And it’s just… It’s mostly just a collage of footage of these neoconservatives talking, and conversing and revealing sort of how they truly think.
GR: Yeah, so in talking about it like how they, the neocons, think and what their worldview really is… I think a lot of listeners of CKUW and the Global Research News Hour would be familiar when you say neocons and Project for a New American Century, but I think the overriding perception is that they’re a thing of the past. They were kind of, they had their time with the Bush and through the 2000s and then they’re gone. So why should people still be paying attention to the neocons in 2018?
RM: Great question. I mean… and you’re right to say that. The general perception is that they kind of got shamed out of existence based on the failure… “the failure” of the Iraq War and the amount of public pressure against that, and how most people have come to the belief that it was a disaster. And the neocons are largely associated with that military invasion and frankly, that massacre that was done completely for no logical reason whatsoever…unless we’re talking about imperialistic games. The WMDs argument is complete BS and everyone knows that now.
So their names were largely associated with the worst lies of the Bush administration, and that was my perception of it too until I started working on this documentary film, is that they had gone away and they weren’t really a problem anymore. And even when I started to see some of the same faces pop up talking about Russia and how evil Putin was back in like 2014, I didn’t personally think it was that big of a deal because I thought, well these people are super marginalized. Who’s really listening to them anymore? Obama is clearly not listening to them. But that actually turned out not to be true. The Obama part… He actually was listening to them as described in my film.
But I think one way to describe why they’re so important and they’re still so influential is because they managed to, a very small handful of them, maybe less than a dozen figures, managed to convince the rest of, what people describe as the DC blob, the sort of foreign policy consensus in DC overall, the neocons managed to rebrand themselves, massage their rhetoric, and make themselves seem less crazy in order to influence the larger DC foreign policy community into basically accepting and going along with almost all their foreign policy platforms, with the exception of overtly wanting to invade Iran which… arguably that is the neocon prize but see, a lot of these smarter neocons like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol, and a lot of these neocons who managed to convince the blob, they have hidden, and not been open about the fact that they want to overthrow the regime of Iran.
That’s one of their foreign policy platforms they’ve sort of brushed under the rug, because that’s one of… The reason I’m giving that example is because that’s how they have managed to cross the aisle, so to speak, in DC and put a hand out to the neoliberal think tanks and say, hey we’re kind of on the same side in this, and we all think Putin’s bad, and let’s really go after him. Let’s overthrow Assad. So these are things that the neocons managed to essentially convince and influence the rest of the DC foreign policy community to believe.
So yes, it’s true that there are not that many actual literal neocons, but a lot of people now who are sort of anti-war, do work in anti-war or do foreign policy critique, they don’t see much of a difference any more between sort of the neoliberal foreign policy group in DC, which is most of it, and the actual neocons anymore. Because they have essentially merged in a non-partisan fashion, and it’s been very surreal to watch, especially after the 2016 election when you actually saw neocons saying well you should vote for Hillary. For the first time ever they all said that you shouldn’t vote for a Republican.
That’s… so I don’t know that fully answers your question, but I think to sum it up it’s because the neocons have influenced everybody. So now that they’ve been able to do that you don’t really need that many of them around you know making that much trouble because everybody is carrying out their agenda essentially. In this DC foreign policy think-tank.
GR: Yeah…I think the way you kind of describe it in… maybe it’s… I don’t know if you personally describe it, but I wrote it down in my notes about how neoconservatism is almost like a species and it kind of evolved over the last 20 years in a way? So I think what you’re talking about how there’s a shift to Hillary, and, but I mean that shift is more that the neoconservative line really became the mainstream line, whereas, you know, maybe in the early 2000s, like, there was a larger perception, yes, they were in the White House, but these people are also crazy, whereas now is kind of like the mainstream, which is quite scary. Which is something I think we’ll talk about in a little bit. But kind of what I was talking about a bit before what I referenced was that I was a teenager when 9/11 happened, and it really shaped my generation and the world that I’m living in now
But as I was watching the 3-part documentary, there were several things that I was like kind of blown away by how these things kind of just went down the memory hole, and I want to talk about those things because several of these things I vaguely kind of remember now but for some odd reason I had totally forgotten about them, and they’re not really within the wider narrative of 9/11 and the war on terror.
So the first one is that how right after 9/11, several of these neocons, I think it’s Don and Fred Kagan, went on TV and radio kind of immediately after for at least a 24-hour 48-hour period after 9/11 and basically blamed Palestinians for the attack, and were basically outright calling for the U.S. to attack Palestine. And even saying that they had no evidence but we should just go and attack them. So could you talk about what happened there, and what was the effect there? Everyone kind of forgets about this but what happened there, and what do you think the effect of that was?
RM: You just opened up a really big can of worms with that question. Well, to fully answer that it would require a totally separate interview, but I’ll do my best to answer it in this short time that we have. What you’re describing is, what I would say, is the neocons flipping up and revealing too much of an early iteration of their script, than the rest of the consensus was ready to reveal or get on board with. And perhaps, even, they jumped ahead with something that the rest of the neocons already decided, we can’t go there. Because, and this is important to know, that Don Kagan is one of the only three authors credited as writing Rebuilding America’s Defenses, the infamous paper that PNAC released that says we need a new Pearl Harbor, a catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor.
Don Kagan is someone who just, mostly an obscure figure in this, but I’d like to believe that if he was saying that on the radio within 24 hours of 9/11, that it was something being heavily discussed within that community behind the scenes. And he and his son Fred Kagan are two of the most intellectual, influential neoconservatives in DC. Fred Kagan is behind the Iraq surge, he is also behind the Afghanistan surge for Obama, directly working under David Petraeus. So these are not just like random neocons. It’s important to stress that they are some of the most influential neocon brain-trust type people in DC even though they’re so relatively obscure… They’re not household names.
So to hear both of them saying that we need to clean out Palestine with the U.S. Delta Force raids and the full panoply of U.S. military tools and arsenal, it’s a very shocking thing to hear. Even though I’ve long believed that neocons are some of the most evil people on the planet, that was even surprising for me to hear. That they went ahead and openly said that the U.S. military should do that, and actually, in their broadcast they make it clear that they don’t even care who’s behind 9/11. Which is strange. They say that if we run around tracing the actual perpetrators, we’re just going to be wasting our time and we won’t get anywhere. So what they are saying is that we should just go attack all these countries anyways because even if they’re behind it or not, they hate us and want to kill us.
And Palestine was one of their primary targets to retaliate against in response to 9/11. Now that’s very strange when you look at the day of 9/11, and I’ve actually done a podcast on this, I call it the Palestinian Frame-up, on 9/11, there were four separate incidences that were run throughout U.S. media throughout the day of 9/11 that were attempting to blame Palestinians for the attacks before Bin Laden became the primary culprit that the U.S. media latched on to. So I find that very strange.
And I’m not going to try to explain it here during this interview, but you can look into that. It’s all documented. The news media played footage of Palestinians allegedly celebrating the attacks in the middle of a national emergency at 12 p.m. while thousands of people were still missing during the World Trade Center attacks. So this is the kind of stuff that U.S. media was doing.
So it’s very interesting for me to see neocons actually piggy-backing on that and saying we should attack Palestine. And that’s a rare thing, I think, to find neocons slipping up that badly. And I guess I find that clip particularly fascinating because it’s really one of the only ones like that out there, and to my knowledge, I’m the first one to find it by combing through all these archives. I’ve never heard of it before, never even heard of any neocons saying that before on record.
And then also something else interesting Don Kagan brings up in the recording, and maybe you were going to mention this next, but I’ll just say it because it’s so weird, as he says what would have happened, and keep in mind this is 9/12-01, one day after 9/11. He says, what would have happened if the terrorists had Anthrax on that plane?
GR: Right. Yeah.
RM: And on October 5, weaponized anthrax was sent through the U.S. mail. While the Bush Administration was already inoculated with Cipro. the antibiotic taken to prevent Anthrax infection. So there’s a lot of interesting and very scary questions that are raised just by that single clip. and I’m…to this day it’s still a mystery to me.
GR: That was Part 1 of the Global Research News Hour special with Robbie Martin on his documentary series, A Very Heavy Agenda that explores the rise and continued influence of the neoconservatives. Part 2 will air next week where we will explore the anthrax attacks, the role of Vice in spreading U.S. propaganda. You can buy or stream A Very Heavy Agenda at averyheavyagenda.com. Music for this special provided by Fluorescent Grey, AKA Robbie Martin. For the Global Research News Hour, I’m Scott Price.
-end of transcript-
Global Research News Hour Summer 2018 Series Part 5
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This incisive and carefully documented article was first published by Global Research in July 2011
In Africa, access to water is one of the most critical aspects of human survival. Today, about one third of the total population lack access to water. Constituting 300 million people and about 313 million people lack proper sanitation. (World Water Council 2006). As result, many riparian countries surrounding the Nile river basin have expressed direct stake in the water resources hitherto seldom expressed in the past.
In this paper, I argue that due to the lack of consensus over the use of the Nile basin regarding whether or not “water sharing” or “benefit sharing” has a tendency to escalate the situation in to transboundary conflict involving emerging dominant states such as the tension between Ethiopia-Egypt over the Nile river basin. At the same time, this paper further contributes to the Collier- Hoeffler conflict model in order to analyze the transboundary challenges, and Egypt’s position as the hegemonic power in the horn of Africa contested by Ethiopia. Collier- Hoeffler model is used to predict the occurrence of conflicts as a result of empirical economic variables in African states given the sporadic civil strife in many parts of Africa. In order to simplify my argument and analysis, I focused on Ethiopia and Egypt to explicate the extent of water crisis in the North Eastern part of Africa.
One may question why Ethiopia? My answers are grounded in three main assumptions. The first is based on the failed Anglo-Ethiopia treaty in 1902 which never materialized. The second assumption is based on the exclusion of Ethiopia, since 1902 and the subsequent water agreement of 1929 between Britain and Egypt and the 1959 water agreement between Egypt and Sudan after the later became independent in 1956. The final assumption is the emergence of Ethiopia as a powerful and influential nation in the horn of Africa because of its military power in the sub region.
Ethiopia has pushed forward her demand to develop water resources through hydroelectric power along the Nile. However, for several decades, Egypt has denied other riparian countries complete access to water resources along the Nile, and for that matter has exercised her hegemonic powers over the development and control of the use of water resources in the Nile river basin for many decades. The Nile river basin has survived centuries, and for many years has served as Egypt’s economic hub, political power and growth since ancient times. The water resources in the Nile basins have also served as economic, political, social and cultural achievements of Egypt’s influence in the sub region1.
The water resources in the past were used as trade routes which enhanced Egypt’s mobile communication and international relations for centuries. In which many earlier contacts of Egypt described Egypt as “the gift of the Nile” This hegemonic status enjoyed, since the beginning of earlier civilizations of the ancient kingdoms of Egyptian civilization compelled the ancient philosopher Herodotus to describe this civilization as “Egypt is the Nile and the Nile is Egypt.” This again coincides the period of Egyptian economic boom and its political dominion. What has further entrenched Egypt’s position in the past, which ultimately contributed to Egypt’s power over other riparian countries in the Nile river basin is the 1929 water treaty agreement signed between Egypt and Britain2. Britain, then in charge of many riparian countries as colonies negotiated with Egypt on behalf of its colonies, thereby, giving Egypt an urge over other riparian countries in the use and access to water resources in the river basin.
However, with the attainment of independence by these countries, high population growth, global warming, global economic crisis natural disasters, political development, pollution and resource depletion, industrialization as well as urbanization, high capital cost of water drilling, poor rural electricity for pumping underground water have impelled these riparian countries to engage Egypt’s control in order to re-negotiate earlier water treaties and to abrogate all attempt by Egypt to control the use and development of water resources over the Nile3. Egypt has been in control of the Nile Rivers for a long time and has emerged as the major country that has complete access to the Nile. The shortages of water and water resources in Ethiopia and of course Sudan has prompted those countries to take a second look at Egypt’s access to the Nile, most especially Ethiopia’s attempt to confront Egypt in the Nile river. Berman and Paul concluded that the tension between Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile is likely to escalate to a war in the future. Due to Ethiopia’s rapidly growing population, in consequence, Ethiopia’s water demand has almost doubled in the last decade4.
Nile River Basin and Declining Water Resources
The Nile river basin comprises of ten countries namely, Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda. These countries are known as the ten riparian countries due to their proximity to the Nile river basin5. It is the longest river in the world constituting about 6700 km or 4100 miles long and drains almost all ten aforementioned countries. The flow of the Nile as a naturally endowed commodity has benefited North Eastern countries’ economic activities through agricultural and tourism. About 90% of Egypt’s land mark is desert and therefore, many populations have concentrated along the Nile river basin, due the economic opportunities available along the Nile river basin couple with irrigation activity for landscape farming and animal rearing.6
The complete dependence of water resources over the centuries have caused the Nile river basin to deplete, especially of essential material resources causing high rate of unemployment, diseases and hunger in the countries depending on the water resources. Declan et al, argue that the resource depletion in the Nile river basin is due to three spatial factors, namely global green house effect, regional (through land use) and river basin (land management). This assertion is also consistent with Oxfam studies in Askum region and the drought that has engulfed the entire country. In a brief quote Oxfam indicated the situation in Ethiopia and said:
“Climate variability in Ethiopia is not new – but now, in addition to the usual struggles, Ethiopians living in poverty are additionally suffering the effects of climate change – both more variable climate and more extreme weather events. People who are already poor and marginalized are struggling with the added burden of climate variability. For now, this means that the little that they have goes to dealing with the current unpredictable weather because their livelihoods are so dependent on it. When selling off assets becomes a mean to cope, there is little left to plan for the future. Thus, communities are faced with simultaneously increasing climate variability, and with it increasing risk and vulnerability.7”
Global warming due to climatic conditions and green house emission effect according to Declan et al is one of the contributing factors for the recent water resource decline in the Nile river basin8. They argued that high temperature couple with underground water reduction in the Blue Rivers in Egypt and Sudan is undergoing drastic impact of global warming. As a result, development along the Nile River has led to water resource pollutions by many riparian countries.9
For example, the Ethiopian and Eritrean wars in the late 1990s polluted a substantial part of the river basin with military accoutrements and missile deposits into the Nile Rivers. This pollution activity is further exacerbated by the huge population growth concentrated in the river basin. This populations growth according to the world water council 2006 have double in the last two decades, and continues to rise amidst migrations to the Nile river basins.10
The impact of population pressures and the resource decline in the river basins is also consistent with Aston’s argument that the southern and the northern portions get less rainfall than their equatorial neighboring countries.11 For example the Nile has two confluent tributaries connecting the White Nile and the Blue Nile, the Blue Nile which is considered the most fertile for crop production flows from Lake Tanna in Ethiopia through to Sudan from the South East.12 The Blue and White river basins also coincide with the division of upstream and downstream riparian, and their source of water. While the upstream mainly benefit on water rainfall, the down streams such as the blue river basins enjoys physical flow of water.
Braune, and Youngxin argue that the demand for allocation of water resources has witnessed several treaties and pointed out that “in the past 60 years there have been over 200 international treaties on water and only 37 cases reported on violence between countries.13.” These magnitude of the problem resulted in lack of adequate resolution in resource allocation of water resources.
The impact of Industrialization and mechanization has played a significant role as a result of expansion projects along the Nile river basin. In 2004, the Ethiopian minister for trade accused Egypt of using undiplomatic strategies to control Ethiopia’s development projects on the Nile. Said, “Egypt has been pressuring international financial institutions to desist from assisting Ethiopia in carrying out development projects in the Nile basin.14.”
Farming along the Nile is one of the major sources of livelihood for communities living along the concentrated Nile river basins, but the ensuing drought, famine, population growth and land degradation have impacted the water resources in the Nile river basin. The Environmental Protection Agency in its 2010 report also argued that land degradation and deforestation in the river basin due to excessive burning for land cultivation in many parts of the Nile River has virtually eroded the oasis making it extremely tough for cultivation and water conservation.15
Thus before the 1950s, there were fewer resentments on the Nile water resources by riparian countries, however with changing circumstances such as declining water resources, hunger, and diseases, riparian countries have decided to renegotiate themselves in order to access the Nile. Kenya together with Ethiopia are pioneering this process as seen in the cessionary address to parliament by the Member of Parliament for Kenya Paul Muite in 2004 who remarked “Kenyans are today importing agricultural produce from Egypt as a result of their use of the Nile water.” In a similar statement, Moses Wetangula, the assistant minister for foreign affairs remarked “Kenya will not accept any restriction on use of lake Victoria or the river Nile” and stated “ it however does not wish to be alone ranger in deciding how to use the waters, and has consequently sought the involvement of involved countries.”16
Methodology
Conflict Theory and the Collier-Hoeffler Model
Kofi Anan reiterated that “Unsustainable practices are woven deeply in to the fabric of modern life. Land degradation threatens food security. Forest destruction threatens biodiversity. Water pollution threatens public health, and fierce competition for fresh water may well become a source of conflicts and wars in the future.’’
This statement by Kofi Anan is buttressed by Amery when he alluded to the Egyptian Member of Parliament’s assertion that Egypt’s “national security should not only be viewed in military terms, but also in terms of wars over waters17.” The horn of Africa has been bedeviled by conflicts, both interstate and civil wars for several years now. These conflicts are mainly concentrated on the north east and central Africa. While many of these conflicts have been disputes over land occupation in mainly oil rich areas of the Congo, others have been the issue of diverting water resources. This paper examines the water scarcity in the North East with an attempt to focus on Egypt and Ethiopia through the Collier-Hoefer model of theory of civil wars in order to construct the model on water scarcity with an attempt to reconcile the tensions over water resources and its effects on the people of the north East African people.
There have been several applications and interpretations of the earlier conflict theorists propounded by earlier scholars such as Karl Marx, Lenin, and Weber. Collier-Hoeffer, also known as the C-H model is one of such interpretation of recent times. Their analyses on conflict is based on the framework of many variables such as tribes, identities, economics, religion and social status in Africa, and subjecting the data to a regression analysis and concluded that of the many variables identified in Africa and the examination of the 78 five year increments(1960-1999) in which conflicts occur, and of five year 1, 600 inputs in which no conflicts occur, concluded that based on the data set that economic factors rather than ethnic, or religious, identities are the bane of conflicts in Africa. In complementing this model with the earlier conflict theory propounded by Karl Marx, Marx, recognized the significance of the social and interactions within a given society. These interactions according Karl Max are characterized by conflicts. Hence, the conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie of the capitalist system forms a synthesis of the forces of the interaction within the system.18
Marx, again reiterated the fact that these social and human interactions is dialectical in the sense that when a dominant nation seeks to control dependent nations or peripheral countries what yields in consequence is the tension to rebel against the oppressor by dependent states in order to agitate for equitable and fair share of national resources. This point is consistent with the C-H model when they argued with empirical data on the causes of conflicts in Africa, and concluded that economic factors are the significant predictor of conflict in many parts of the African continent. Therefore, according to C-H, economic reasons contributed to a large extent the greater portion of conflicts in Africa19. While these economic reasons are varied and numerous due to the resources available in a given region and the allocation of resource whether naturally endowed or man-made, any form of competition to control these resources or allocation of resources will naturally generate two outcomes: tension and potential conflict, and cooperation. In this case, Egypt’s sole access to the Nile for centuries now has invariably gratified itself as the sole control of the Nile water resources.
As a result of the 1929 mandate that gave Egypt absolute control of water resources in the Nile, she has worked to sabotage many riparian countries through other diplomatic and international treaties. Ethiopia has vowed to engage Egypt over the control of water resources in the Nile valley basin. This is exemplified in many water agreement initiated by Ethiopia and the other riparian countries to abrogate all previous agreement hitherto entered by Egypt. Consequently, Stars argues that the looming tension between Egypt and the riparian countries initiated by Ethiopia is a recipe for conflict in the North Eastern Africa20. For instance, these tensions are exemplified in Egypt’s response to Kenya’s assistant foreign affairs minister’s statement when Mohammed Abu Zeid, Egypt’s minister for water resources remarked that Kenya’s statements were a “a declaration of war” against Egypt and subsequently threatened Kenya of economic and political embargo.21
This looming tension among riparian countries is further worsened by Kenya’s continuing threat of engagement. In 2002, a senior Kenyan minister Raila Odinga, called for the review and renegotiation of the 1929 treaty which gave Egypt the right to veto construction projects on the Nile river basin, and said “it was signed on behalf of governments which were not in existence at that time.” This paper’s argument is further rooted in the idea that there are emerging players such as Kenya and Ethiopia in the horn of Africa as major hydro-political powers to engage Egypt’s hydro-hegemonic status. Prior to the Nile basin initiative in February 1999, Wondwosen, argues that there have been several similar water treaties such as the 1993 Technical Committee to promote development cooperation among riparian countries. Also, in 1995 the Nile Basin Action Plan was launched, and in 1997, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) through collaborations with the World Bank attempted to foster cooperation among riparian countries to promote dialogue.22
This initiative including earlier treaties already mentioned shows the magnitude of the problem in the Nile basin, and of course the consensus necessary to equitably allocate water resources and thereby encourage development projects along the Nile. In 2010, for instance, Ethiopia announced that it was initiating a hydro-electric development projects in order to improve its country’s electric and energy needs. This announcement few days later saw resentment by Egypt and Egypt attempt to veto any such policy along the Nile. While Ethiopia is poised to making this project reality, Egypt has begun galvanizing international support in order to prevent Ethiopia from undertaking such projects.
Cascao, argued that the asymmetrical flow of water resources in the Nile river basin and the access to physical flow of the blue Nile by Egypt and Sudan in the downstream has extremely heighten hydro-political tension over the Nile. These tensions have attracted the United Nations organizations interventions and other international organization on matters concerning the distribution and allocation of water resources in the Nile river basin and in which compensation are offered to other riparian countries unequal access to the distribution of water resources, especially those on the upstream who only benefit rainfall.23
Thus in 1999, nine riparian countries met in Dar Es Salem, Tanzania by the Council of Minister of Water Affairs of Nile River Basin Countries and agreed to cooperate in solidarity for equitable allocation of water resources in the Nile basin as well as for economic integration through sustainable development.24
This economic solidarity through cooperation is declared in the Nile Basin Initiative as the shared vision by riparian countries to promote cooperation and economic well being, while at the same time “to achieve sustainable socio-economic development through the equitable utilization of, & benefit from, the common Nile Basin water resources25.” This Nile Basin Initiative is the first attempt by riparian countries to push demand for equal access to the Nile, and at the time promoting economic cooperation. Egypt’s defiance of the NBI and its lack of participation in the NBI’s initial attempt to convene such a cooperation agreement is a crucial aspect of the NBI’s objective to consolidate through cooperation in the negotiation for equitable distribution. The subsequent institutional mechanism for policy guidelines for riparian countries to agree to follow is set forth by NBI in order to stimulate cooperation rather than intimidation in the allocation of water resources.
The following objectives in February 1999 were set up by the NBI as follows:26
• To develop the Nile Basin water resources in a sustainable and equitable way to ensure
• prosperity, security, and peace for all its peoples
• To ensure efficient water management and the optimal use of the resources
• To ensure cooperation and joint action between the riparian countries, seeking win-win gains
• To target poverty eradication and promote economic integration
• To ensure that the program results in a move from planning to action.
Thus among the NBI’s core functions include among others to promote water resource management, water resource development and capacity building enhanced through cooperation. These initiative have proven worthwhile, in preventing a escalating a major conflict in the region, although there are still tensions among riparian countries along the Nile. Egypt still exercises hydro hegemonic powers in the region because of her absolute control of the Nile basin, Egypt has participated and is willing to cooperate with other riparian countries in bringing lasting solutions to the increasing demand of water resources on the Nile river basin. When it comes down to water resource allocation and distribution, it has always been sidelined and not considered a significant issue in the solution to the Nile problem.
Africa’s interstate conflicts in the past have been on a number of issues such as ethnic and tribal as well as land disputes and acquisitions. The discovery of oil however has proven to be a blessing in disguise in many of the oil regions of Africa. In the Congo for instance, there have been several conflicts with rebels over the control of oil regions of the Brazzaville. This area has not been spared of violence and mayhem for several decades now. In Nigeria for example, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) has created havoc and tensions culminating in violence and attacks on oil expatriates in the Niger Delta region. These oil regions in Africa today are bedeviled with conflicts, violent attacks and conflicts in order to control oil resources. The least said about the diamond and gold areas of sub Saharan Africa the better. Similarly, and in consistent with the paradigm this paper takes is the assertion that water conflicts like many of the natural endowed assets bestowed on the African continent is a bane for the continent’s development. In the cases of the Nile, although there is no any imminent conflict, scholars are predicting that the lack of concrete and up-to-date resolution on the water policy regarding the distribution of water resources on the Nile is a recipe for conflict in the region.
Relations of Power
As already mentioned and by extension Herodotus comments on Egypt as “the gift of the Nile,” has been extrapolated by Egypt in order to exercise hydro-political power in the Nile river basin for several decades. This status Egypt has enjoyed for some time now without allowing any riparian countries along the Nile to negotiate any form of control on water resources and development projects such as hydro electric power by neighboring countries. The asymmetrical flow of water resources in the Nile has also afforded Egypt a position of dominance compared to other riparian countries who are situated upstream on the Nile. The Nile’s downstream is currently housed by Egypt and Sudan, consequently, Sudan’s attempt to renegotiate Egypt’s unilateral control on the Nile27.
In 1959, a water agreement signed between Egypt and Sudan gave Egypt 55bcm and 18bcm to Sudan. Again this uneven allocation of resource points to asymmetrical power relations of riparian countries ability to negotiate Egypt to access water resources28. Cascao, provides a theoretical understanding on this hydro power hegemony of Egypt in controlling water resources. And indicated that the hegemonic power of Egypt is due to many factors in the horn of Africa, but argues that this hegemonic status is about to end as counter hydro hegemonic powers are beginning to emerge in order to contest Egypt’s long standing hegemony in the region. I totally agree with Cascoa, and in fact her analysis is in line with my argument that the position Egypt finds herself is about to change due to first the declining rate of water resources in the Nile.
This is because in the past when life was booming riparian countries made no mention of inequity if water resources however, with the emergence global water crisis due to global warming these riparian countries are beginning to contest power relation on the access to the Nile. Cascao points to “apparent consent” to illustrate the apparent lackadaisical attitudes of consent by riparian countries. This apparent consent, Cascoa argues was latent consents by riparian countries along the Nile on many agreements that were signed as far back in 1902. Ethiopia is a case in point. In many of these water treaties Reginald points to about 60 water agreements since the first one in 1902 which either ignored Ethiopia or Ethiopia decided to apparently consent to by keeping mute to the issue. But what is significant is a looming civil war among riparian countries. There have been scuffles between Sudan and Burundi, also Ethiopia and Eritrea and Rwanda and Somalia in the past several decades without totally engaging Egypt’s hydro-hegemonic power in the region, given the emerging hydro political configuration that is beginning to unravel29.
In order to understand the relations of power and dominance in regards to the situation in the Nile river basin it is prudent to again invoke Cascao analysis of power and dominance as they significantly hinges on the Ethiopia’s counter hegemonic strategy in the Nile river basin for some time now. Cascao begins by citing Gramsci’s definition of hegemony as “political power that flows from intellectual and moral leadership, authority, or consensus as distinguished from armed force30” she continues to argue “power is relational and the outcome of hegemonic power relations is determined by the interaction of diverse actors” diverse actors for me seem meaningful and significant here in terms of the power relations here. It can be recalled that there are ten riparian countries each diverse with varied needs and demands in regard to the fair allocation of water resources in the Nile. This diversity is yet galvanized for a common interest as seen in the Nile basin initiative put forth by the nine riparian countries.
Once gain the significant portion Egypt occupies comes under a counter hegemonic truce by riparian countries to renegotiate earlier treaties concerning the Nile river allocation of resource which is consistent with Cascao assertion that “power relations are not static or immutable” and points to a dialectical thesis of challenging the status thereby bringing in new status quo with alternatives. This dialectics is one earlier propounded by Marx and Lenin in their conflict theories regarding the suppression of groups and their simultaneous revolt of the existing status quo. In the case of the river basin, these riparian countries see themselves as having asymmetrical power relations with Egypt, and because Egypt’s consistent dominance in both economic and hegemonic political relations in the sub region, there is an attempt to contest existing status quo as seen in the earlier water treaties and allocation of resources in the Nile basin.
Based on the accusations and counter accusations on the allocation of water resources along the Nile, Ethiopia like Egypt have both galvanized for support in terms of international diplomacy and legitimacy over the use of resources in the Nile. While Egypt continues to maintain its legitimacy based of the earlier water agreements and proclamations that exclusively gave Egypt dominance with right to veto any development projects, Ethiopia has taken its stands to engage Egypt on talks to renegotiate Ethiopia’s position of the Nile resources. When it comes to international funding on the Nile river basin, the IMF and the World Bank has withhold funds for development along the Nile because of the looming tension between the riparian countries and has promised not to get itself tangled on the water crisis along the Nile river basin.31
“Water sharing” or “benefit sharing”
The debate as to whether “water sharing” or “benefit sharing” has dominated many scholarly discourse on the Nile issue. According to Teshome, benefit sharing is “the distribution of benefits through cooperation” and argues furthermore that “benefit sharing gives riparian states the chance to share the benefits derived from the use of water rather than the physical distribution of water itself32.” Teshome’s analysis regarding benefit sharing through cooperation sounds a laudable alternative to riparian countries capacity to cooperate in order to tap water resources, but this argument is idealistic given the power relations along the Nile, and the asymmetrical flow of water resources in the upstream and downstream countries could be difficult to ascertain. I offer the following reason to buttress my argument.
Most significantly, the lack of political will to cooperate by riparian countries is the number one reason benefit sharing could be difficult to achieve. Several water agreement have been launched since the 1929 Anglo Egyptian water agreement that gave Egypt the exclusive power to monitor development activities along the Nile. The lack of political will is clearly demonstrated by Ethiopia’s “apparent consent” to many water treaties that has been passed. The most recent treaty the Nile Basin Cooperative Frame Work Agreement launched in (1997-2007) shows the nature of participation by riparian countries to cooperate to achieving common goals and the allocation of water resources. This lack of political will is also consistent with Teshome argument that the lack of political leadership has exacerbated the situation to the extent that at present there is no international treaty or agreement that binds riparian countries together. Although the many cooperative agreements between upstream and downstream riparian have sidelined issues bordering benefit sharing in their agenda33.
In addition, problem in benefit sharing cooperative agreement is the fact that many riparian countries comes from different political and socio-cultural backgrounds and are therefore prone to series of political and civil upheavals that will endanger any attempt by riparian countries to cooperate for mutual benefit sharing. The most significant one is the Ethiopia Eritrea conflict that has rocked the region for several years, also the Somalia civil conflicts, the Rwanda Burundi and many others in Sudan has worked to prevent many cooperative agreement to realize its potential. Although mutual benefit is essential its implementation to a full potential is unattainable.
This argument is also supported by Cascao when she argued that cooperative agreement can be a “battle ground for opposing tendencies” (p24) Not only that but, also Egypt’s power and international diplomacy over the region. It is indeed important to acknowledge the role of Egypt’s diplomatic relations in the past that has ushered its dominance over the Nile. The strategic position of Egypt on the Suez Canal has been a strategic location for British involvement in Egypt and for British access to India through the canal. This important location of Egypt was advanced by British interest in India34. Benefit sharing or cooperative agreement by upstream and downstream countries have been in opposing terms for quite some time now. The recent National Basin Initiative (NBI) has been used as a platform by Ethiopia to get the 1959 water agreement between Egypt and Sudan annulled, since Ethiopia was excluded, and for that matter the other seven riparian countries in order to enact a comprehensive water policy that will promote the advancement of cooperative water sharing without hostilities.
Also, significant factor that hampers any cooperative agreement on benefit sharing is Egypt’s diplomatic influence on the region. If all riparian countries agree to benefit share these cooperative agreement maybe lopsided and for that matter benefit Egypt more than the other riparian because of Egypt diplomacy with Britain and US, and the international organizations including the Arab league. This point is argued in Teshome when he said “Egypt has been pressuring international institutions to desist from assisting Ethiopia in carrying out development projects in the Nile basin …it has used its influence to persuade the Arab world not to provide Ethiopia with any loans or grants for Nile water development.”
My final alternative is that several water sharing agreements have been adopted by riparian countries at least since the 1959 between Sudan and Egypt in terms of allocation of water resources. This allocation which earmarked 18 BCM to Sudan and 55BCM to Egypt is seen by Sudan as an unfair deal and have since pushed forward for renegotiation on the allocation of water resources that has given Egypt an unfair proportional distribution of resources and for development projects on the Nile. This last alternative could be dangerous in if physical allocation of water resources are to be shared among riparian countries through demarcation, this is because land demarcation and allocation of resources have been one of the dangerous recipe for conflicts currently ongoing on the continent, to physically allocate recourses is nothing but to add more insult to injuries. With emerging hydro-political powers in the region, Ethiopia and Egypt could dominate other countries and for that matter wage physical wars in order to control water resources.
On the basis of the above discussions, it can be safely concluded that the nature of tension in North Eastern Africa most, especially the Nile riparian countries are on a brink of conflict over the control and use of Nile water resources. As already pointed out, and by extension Collier-Hoeffler’s economic analysis of conflicts in Africa did not cite the potential trigger of conflict as a result of the Nile, what is significant about his model is the paradigmatic nature upon which his theory of analysis are based. And since water is a vital part of the economic resources of Africa, this papers concludes that the water resources just as any other economic resource has a full potential of tension and conflict over the Nile river basin by riparian states.
Notes
1.Wonddwossen Teshome B. “Transboundary Water cooperation in Africa: The case of the Nile Basin Initiative.” Turkish Journal of International Relations winter Vol. 7.4 2008 pp34-43
Also see Flintan, F. & Tamarat,I Spilling Blood Over Water? The case of Ethiopia, in Scarcity and Surfeit, The Ecology of Africa’s Conflict. Lind &J.& Sturman K.(eds) Institute for Security Studies, Johannesburg (2002)
2.Ibid
3.Ashton, Peter J. “Avoiding Conflicts over Africa’s Resources” Royal Swedish Academy of Science. Vol.31.3, 2002 pp236-242
4.Berman and Paul, “The New Water Politics of the Middle East. Strategic Review, Summer 1999. 21-28
5.Wonddwossen Teshome B. “Transboundary Water cooperation in Africa: The case of the Nile Basin Initiative.” Turkish Journal of International Relations winter 2008 Vol. 7.4 pp34-43
6.Alcamo, J., Hulme, M., Conway, D., & Krol, M. “Future availability of water in Egypt: The interaction of global, regional and basin scale driving forces in the Nile basin”. AMBIO – A Journal of the Human Environment, 25(5), (1996). 336.
7.Oxfam 2009 report
8.Kim, U., & Kaluarachchi, J. J. “Climate change impacts on water resources in the upper Blue Nile river basin, Ethiopia.” Journal of the American Water Resources Association, 45(6), (2009). 1361-1378.
9. ibid
10.World Water Council Report 2006
11.ibid
12.Wonddwossen Teshome B. “Transboundary Water cooperation in Africa: The case of the Nile Basin Initiative.” Turkish Journal of International Relations winter 2008 Vol. 7.4 pp34-43
14.Braune, Eberhard and Youngxin Xu2. “The role of Ground Water in the Sub Saharan Africa.” Vol. 48.2 March 2010, pp229-238
16.Cam McGrath and Sonny Baraj “Water Wars Loom along the Nile” 2004 news 24.com
17.EPA North East Africa 2010 report
18.Ibid
19.UN Secretary General Kofi Anan
20.Karl Marx. “Capital” A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Avelling Ed. F.Engels 1887
21.Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler. “Economic Causes of Civil War.” Oxford Economic Papers Vol50.4 1998, pp563-573. Also in Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler Greed and Grievance in Civil War. World Bank Policy Research—Working papers number 2355 May 2000
22.J.R. Stars “Water Wars” Foreign Policy Issue 82 991pp17-20
BBC 12 DEC 2003 also see AL-Ahram, 26 February 2004
23.Ibid also see Ana Elisa Cascao “Ethiopia- Challenges to Egyptian hegemony in the Nile Basin” Water Policy 10 supplement 2 (2008)
24.Ana Elisa Cascao “Ethiopia- Challenges to Egyptian hegemony in the Nile Basin” Water Policy 10 supplement 2 (2008)
25.Ana Elisa Cascao “Ethiopia- Challenges to Egyptian hegemony in the Nile Basin” Water Policy 10 supplement 2 (2008)
26.The Nile Basin Initiative NBI
27.Ibid NBI
28.ibid
29.ibid
30.ibid
31.Gramci 1971 cite in Cascao (2008) p.18
32.World water council report 2009
33.ibid
34.ibid
35.Cascao “water policy” document No. 10
Majeed A. Rahman is Professor of African Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milawaukee.
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“Turkey’s Erdogan Wants to Crush the Kurds and Recreate the Ottoman World”
It’s true, with Western propagandistic headlines like this, who needs NATO, who really needs them as even friends. Perhaps the barrage of such vitriol has caused two vital allies of Washington, Ankara and Islamabad, to be fare more cautious from here on out.
It was bad before in previous decades, but headlines like this – NOT in right wing cheerleaders of empire like Fox News – but in virtually all of the “Liberal media” (who consider themselves more sophisticated and nuanced), we see one ridiculous (and dangerous) headline after the next.
It’s not Erdogan or Imran Khan per se who bother Western elites.
It is what they represent: the de-centering of the West, the re-orienting of the world order, and the profound crisis and rapidly collapsing world system of the 500 year project of coloniality.
The Erdogans, Khans, etc., In a nutshell, represent the irresolvable crises of ‘whiteness’ (in a world that is finally beginning to mentally decolonize from prostrating before the Western “White Man” – used here as a political category rather than merely a racial one).
It is a crisis of that white supremacist world order, and a crisis of the post-WWII liberal international order that Western hegemony thought it could dominate endlessly – all culminating now in the relative structural decline of the Western plutocracies.
Of course, the leading American politicos and financiers fully grasp this situation but keep getting convinced by the warmongering neocons and Zionists in Washington DC that the Empire can reverse its decline by reckless threats and flexing its military muscle. Or, if that doesn’t work, learn from the German and Italian leaders of the 1930s about how to deal with the ‘Muslim Question’.
Indeed, headlines like this infantile one reflect that. They have become indistinguishable from any utter nonsense one may expect from many one-man, one-party, and one-media kind of states (many of which are close allies of Washington), something to be reflexively dismissed because everyone knows it’s pure state propaganda.
And in the headline referred to here, the mythology we are expected to swallow is just too insulting to our intelligence. Erdogan and the AKP were the first forces ever to make overtures to the Kurds, to both integrate them and grant them autonomy. In fact, Turkey’s worst crimes against the Kurds peaked in the 1990s with complete military and political support from Washington. A decade ago, Erdogan and the AKP were ‘NATO’s Islamists’ and promoted as a model for the Muslim world, repeated ad nauseum by every Western think tank.
So yes, the Kurds have been treated horribly by the state of Turkey, but that is a long history of secular military repression long preceding Erdogan and the AKP party that initially tried to ameliorate the conflict.
The fact of the matter is that the Gulf petro autocrats, their best friend the Zionist Israeli regime, and Washington never can tolerate any leader – from the global South and especially if s/he happens to be Muslim – getting too big for their boots…
The Saudis in particular are aching to punish Erdogan since he made sure that the Saudis would not just run roughshod and take over Qatar, since Turkey sent its troops immediately to defend Qatar from the Saudi invasion.
After all, the House of Saud believes that the GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) and indeed all Muslim nations exist to serve them and their interests alone. They are – or at least claim to be – the custodians of the two holy mosques and Islam more generally, so the House of Saud expects a default genuflection to its tyranny by all Muslims of the world.
Fortunately, that is the fictitious fantasy land of the ‘reformer’ Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman (MBS), whose wet dreams undoubtedly are instigated by the smile on his face knowing Yemenis, Gazans, etc. are being butchered.
MBS should know not let his feelings get hurt by the fact that overwhelming majority of the Muslims throughout the world only care to visit or even think of Saudi Arabia when it comes to performing their mandatory religious ritual of Hajj (pilgrimage). Other than that, they see the House of Saud as the curse upon the Muslim world that it is, always on the side of oppression and subjugation, and ingratiating itself with its protectors in Washington at whatever price demanded. The Emiratis play the exact same game.
It is incredulous that in light of the criminal wars and humanitarian catastrophes in Yemen, Gaza, and at the US-Mexico border where entire families are being ripped apart, the Western plutocracies and their media are involved in the most vulgar hypocrisy imaginable – when it comes the ‘non-West,’ the ‘non-White,’ and especially, the Muslim.
Nevertheless, we must never forget the courage of the many in the West resisting the creeping fascism that their elites are trying to impose on them and the world.
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Junaid S. Ahmad is a PhD Candidate in Decolonial Thought, School of Sociology, University of Leeds, a Research Fellow, Center for Islam and Global Affairs (CIGA), Istanbul, and Director of the Center for Global Studies, School of Advanced Studies, UMT, Lahore, Pakistan.
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At 20:06 (CEST) we lost contact with the sailing vessel Freedom, sailing under a Swedish flag, which is on a mission to break the illegal Israeli blockade of the Palestinian people of Gaza. We have reason to presume that the Israeli Occupation Forces has now begun to attack it and that it has been surrounded in International Waters. The latest reported position was approximately 40 nautical miles from the coast of Gaza.
Based on what happened on Sunday, we anticipate that the Israeli Occupation Forces has now cut all communications with Freedom, so it can begin an undocumented attack.
Freedom is a gift for the Palestinian fishers of Gaza and is carrying a cargo of medical supplies, including #Gauze4Gaza. On board are 10 participants and two journalists from five countries. Details of all of the participants are here. The last news that we had from Freedom was that she was maintaining her course towards Gaza and the ‘conscience of humanity’.
The Israeli Occupation Forces claims that our civilian boats – including our 100% wind-powered boat – are breaking international law and threatens that they will use ‘any measures necessary’ to stop us. We assert the right of ‘innocent passage’ guaranteed under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea 1982 and call upon international authorities to protect our small yacht. The only ‘necessary measures’ are to end the illegal blockade of Gaza and to restore freedom of movement for all Palestinians.
Last Sunday, the Israeli Occupation Forces cut all communications and then violently attacked our lead boat (‘Al Awda) in international waters, pulled down its Norwegian flag and trampled upon it. According to many testimonies that we have, including Yonatan Shapira, a former Israeli Air Force officer who was a participant aboard ‘Al Awda’, they then beat up and tasered several people and stole most of the participants’ property.
Four boats left Scandinavia in mid-May and have since stopped in 28 ports building support for a ‘Just Future for Palestine’. We demand that Israel ends its ongoing breaches of international law, including the collective punishment of a twelve-year blockade of Gaza, thereby enabling the only closed port in the Mediterranean to open and that people have their universal right to freedom of movement.
“The Freedom Flotilla Coalition calls on the Swedish Government, the national governments of those aboard Freedom, other national governments, and relevant international organizations to act immediately.” said Dror Feiler of Ship to Gaza Sweden, part of the Freedom Flotilla Coalition. “We demand that the Israeli Occupation Forces not interfere with our unarmed yacht, as we continue our voyage to Gaza to deliver our gift of much-needed medical supplies”.
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A bipartisan Senate contingent has introduced what Republican Lindsey Graham has called the “sanctions bill from hell,” targeting Russia and President Vladimir Putin.
The legislation, which was introduced just as senators were departing for a shortened August recess on Wednesday, targets Russian oligarchs and Putin family members for additional sanctions, and it would seek to require a two-thirds vote of the Senate for any attempt by the U.S. to abandon NATO.
“We must confront this challenge — not as Republicans or Democrats, but as Americans. Because ultimately, Putin’s true aim is to undermine all of us — our country, our freedom, and all that America stands for,” said Armed Services Chairman John McCainof Arizona, who has joined in the Graham-led legislation.
Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, teamed up with Foreign Relations ranking Democrat Robert Menendezof New Jersey in leading the latest legislative push.
Menendez noted in his statement that President Donald Trump and his administration has not used all of the tools at its disposal to counter Russian efforts to interfere in American democracy.
“The Kremlin continues to attack our democracy, support a war criminal in Syria and violate Ukraine’s sovereignty,” Menendez said. “With the passage of this legislation, Congress will once again act to establish a clear U.S. policy to hold Russia accountable with one clear message: Kremlin aggression will be met with consequences that will shake Putin’s regime to its foundation.”
The introduction of the bill, which was previewed last week, comes after disclosures by Facebook that the social media company, which also owns Instagram, had removed numerous pages of memes and events that were fraudulent in nature. The phony accounts are widely believed to be connected to Russian intelligence.
The Senate Intelligence Committee held a hearing on Wednesday with outside experts on the covert use of social media platforms by the Russians, highlighting the ongoing concern about efforts to increase divisions in the U.S., both between and within political parties.
Republican Sen. Cory Gardnerof Colorado also signed on to the bill. He has been pushing a separate effort to require the State Department to determine whether Russia should be designated a state sponsor of terror. That provision has now been included in the Graham-Menendez legislation.
“Unless Russia fundamentally changes its behavior, we must not repeat the mistakes of past administrations of trying to normalize relations with a nation that continues to pose a serious threat to the United States and our allies,” Gardner said in a statement.
Despite the level of fervor among senators about Russia’s use of active measures and the introduction of several pieces of legislation (also including a proposal from Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland and Republican Sen. Marco Rubioof Florida that’s supposed to provide for deterrence and retaliation), the Senate left for recess without passing any specific bills on the subject.
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“Attempting to control rural areas in Afghanistan always eventually ends up boiling down to personal survival.” – Evan McAllister, former Marine staff sergeant, New York Times, July 28, 2018
It genuinely doesn’t matter how the security boffins within the Pentagon frame it: the Taliban have fought the United States, through sheer will of force and mania, to the negotiating table – at least in a fashion. Ever since a vengeful US took to the field in Afghanistan in an effort to redraw the political landscape in its favour, the country has been true to its historical record: drawing, draining and dispersing the manpower and material of an empire.
Washington’s longest war has taken the lives of 2,400 Americans and 30,000 Afghan civilians, a bloody sore that never dries. The US has 14,000 troops stationed in an effort to bolster a flabby, unconvincing Afghan military which is suffering weekly losses at a horrendous rate. The bloodletting has had its necessary demoralising effect, with the number of Afghan soldiers, police, pilots and security personnel dropping by five percent (18,000 fewer individuals) since last year.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has become a regular font for bad news, at least for those punters backing the regime in Kabul. The Taliban and various other insurgent groups have been industriously committed, making gains exceeding those of January 2016.
Within Afghanistan lie 407 districts, with the government holding or influencing 229. The Taliban have a seemingly modest 59. What is significant is where the rest fall: the so-called “contested” category.
The strategy adopted against a thriving Taliban force is a tried and failed one. Even since the Soviet Union discovered that it could never genuinely control the rural areas with any conviction, let alone purpose, peppering areas of low population density with beleaguered military outposts, retreat to the urban areas has become the norm.
The current push from US planners is strikingly unvaried in imitation, insisting that Afghan troops do the same. First came the redux Soviet strategy adopted by the Bush administration: guarding outposts intent on re-establishing control and taking the battle to the Taliban in rural areas. By 2009, the focus had shifted: remote areas would no longer feature; the focus was, as a Pentagon document went, “protecting and developing the major population centres” in eastern Afghanistan.
Retired two-star Army General Paul Eaton, whose previous brief was to train Iraqi forces following the calamitous 2003 invasion of that country, has more than let the cat out of the bag: the US has run out of military solutions amidst the “significant loss of life, and blood and treasure.” It is “time to say that we need a political outcome.”
The basis of such a political outcome will involve encouraging the Afghan military to leave unpopulated areas with a focus on more heavily populated ones, seen by Eaton as “a rational approach to secure the cities, and provide the Afghanistan government the political opportunity to work with the Taliban.” Again, this is reminiscent of the prodding by the Obama administration in 2015 to convince Afghan commanders that various remote checkpoints were simply not worth defending, let alone reclaiming and holding.
The denials that this is the case have been forthcoming. Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s ambassador to the United States, is well versed enough in spin to suggest that the approach has nothing to do with conceding ground to the enterprising Taliban and surrendering rural areas to their control; the focus, rather, is to secure urban areas with a future aim on re-engaging rural communities.
This treacly deception ignores the point that a retreat from remote Afghanistan is a de facto defeat for the Afghan and US forces. The police forces left in place will become fodder for Taliban attacks; in some instances, negotiations are taking place between the local police and the Taliban. Survival is the aim.
True to erratic form, the Trump administration is attempting to adjust old and stubborn positions. The President had preferred a swift withdrawal and termination of the conflict but Defence Secretary Jim Mattis got to his ear, preferring a more conventional topping up of forces – an additional 4,000 troops in a last hurrah for a victory that never came.
Instead, new talks with the Taliban are being proposed. A few preliminary ones have already taken place in Qatar. In their aftermath, State Department spokeswoman Stephanie R. Newmanpreferred a modest assessment.
“Any negotiations over the political future of Afghanistan will be between the Taliban and the Afghan government.”
The giant is being humbled.
The Taliban remain an indigenous force, nigh impossible to dislodge. Its unsavoury brand of Islam will not fly in cosmopolitan circles, but that hardly matters. In the game of crude politics, they have survived and become a reality impossible to ignore, let alone defeat. Swords may, in time, be sheathed, and guns holstered – if only temporarily.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]
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The US has targeted Nicaragua for regime change. Some former supporters of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista party echo the US talking points: Ortega’s “entire government has been, in essence, neoliberal. Then it becomes authoritarian, repressive.”
One would think that a neoliberal regime, especially if it were authoritarian and repressive, would be just the ticket to curry favour with Washington.
‘Threat of a Good Example’
In Noam Chomsky’s words, Nicaragua poses a threat of a good example to the US empire. Since Ortega’s return election victory in 2006, Nicaragua had achieved the following, according to NSCAG, despite being the second poorest country in the hemisphere:
Second highest economic growth rates and most stable economy in Central America.
Only country in the region producing 90% of the food it consumes.
Poverty and extreme poverty halved; country with the greatest reduction of extreme poverty.
Reaching the UN Millennium Development Goal of cutting malnutrition by half.
Free basic healthcare and education.
Illiteracy virtually eliminated, down from 36% in 2006.
Average economic growth of 5.2% for the past 5 years (IMF and the World Bank).
Safest country in Central America (UN Development Program) with one of the lowest crime rates in Latin America.
Highest level of gender equality in the Americas (World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Report 2017).
Did not contribute to the migrant exodus to the US, unlike neighbouring Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.
Unlike its neighbours, kept out the drug cartels and pioneered community policing.
The World Bank, IMF, and EU countries have certified Nicaragua for its effective use of international loans and grants. Funds were spent for the purposes they were given, not syphoned off into corruption.
Before April 18, Nicaragua was among the most peaceful and stable countries in the region. The otherwise inexplicable violence that has suddenly engulfed Nicaragua should be understood in the context of it being targeted by the US for regime change.
Nicaragua has provoked the ire of the US for the good things it’s done, not the bad.
Besides being a “threat” of a good example, Nicaragua is in the anti-imperialist ALBA alliance with Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, and others. The attack on Nicaragua is part of a larger strategy by the US to tear apart regional alliances of resistance to the empire.
Nicaragua regularly votes against the US in international forums such as challenging retrograde US policies on climate change. An inter-ocean canal through Nicaragua is being considered, which would contend with the Panama Canal. Russia and China invest in Nicaragua, competing with US capital.
The NICA Act, passed by the US House of Representatives and now before the Senate, would initiate economic warfare designed to attack living conditions in Nicaragua through economic sanctions, as well as intensify US intelligence intervention. The ultimate purpose is to depose the democratically-elected Ortega government.
Meanwhile, USAID announced an additional $1.5 million “to support freedom and democracy in Nicaragua” through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to overthrow the government and “make this truly a hemisphere of freedom.” That is, freedom for the US empire.
Alternatives to Ortega Would Be Worse
Those on the left who also call for Ortega’s removal need to accept responsibility for what comes after. Here the lesson of Libya is instructive, where the replacement of Gadaffi has resulted in a far worse situation for the Libyan people.
Any replacement of Ortega would be more, not less, neoliberal, oppressive, and authoritarian. When the Nicaraguan people, held hostage to the US-backed Contra war, first voted Ortega out of office in 1990, the incoming US-backed Violeta Chamorro government brought neoliberal structural adjustment and a moribund economy.
“Dictators don’t win fair elections by growing margins,” notes longtime solidarity activist Chuck Kaufman, citing Ortega’s 2006 comeback win with a 38% plurality, followed in 2011 with 63%, and 72.5% in 2016. The Organization of American States officially accompanied and certified the votes.
The dissident Sandinistas who splintered off from the official party after the party’s election defeat and formed the MRS (Sandinista Renovation Movement) are not a progressive alternative. They are now comfortably ensconced in US-funded NGOs, regularly making junkets to Washington to pay homage to the likes of Representative Iliana Ros-Lehtinen and Senator Marco Rubio to lobby in favour of the NICA Act. Nor do they represent a popular force, garnering less than 2% in national elections.
When the MRS left the Sandinista party, they took with them almost all those who were better educated, came from more privileged backgrounds, and who spoke English. These formerly left dissidents now turned to the right in their hatred of Ortega, have many ties with North American activists, which explains some of the confusion today over Nicaragua.
Most Progressive Country in Central America
The world, not just Ortega, has changed since the 1980s when the Soviet Union and its allies served as a countervailing force to US bullying. What was possible then is not the same in today’s more constrained international arena.
Nicaragua is the most progressive country in Central America with no close rival. There is a disconnect between urging Nicaraguans to replace Ortega with new elections and advocacy against US imperialist depredations. Unconstitutional elections in Nicaragua would further destabilize a profoundly destabilized situation. Given the unpopularity and disunity of the opposition and the unity and organizational strength of the Sandinistas, Ortega would likely win.
Most important, the key role of Northern American solidarity activists is to end US interference in Nicaragua so that the Nicaraguans can solve their own problems.
The rightwing violence since April in Nicaragua should be understood as a coup attempt. A significant portion of the Nicaraguan people has rallied around their elected government as seen in the massive demonstrations commemorating the Sandinista revolution on July 19.
For now, the rightwing tranques (blockades) have been dismantled and citizens can again freely circulate without being shaken down and threatened. In the aftermath, though, Nicaragua has suffered unacceptable human deaths, massive public property damage, and a wounded economy with the debilitating NICA Act threatening to pass the US Senate.
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Roger Harrisis on the board of the Task Force on the Americas, a 32-year-old anti-imperialist human rights organization.
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The Trump administration’s approval to use toxic pesticides and genetically modified crops is an insult to our national wildlife refuges and the wildlife that rely on them. – Jamie Rappaport Clark, president and CEO
The Trump administration has reversed an Obama administration ban on the use of neonicotinoid pesticides and genetically engineered crops on national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted, threatening pollinators like bees and butterflies along with a suite of other wildlife species that depend on healthy, natural refuge habitats.
This abrupt change in policy, announced via a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) internal memorandum, revokes the agency’s 2014 policy prohibiting the use of toxic “neonic” insecticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on refuges. The 2014 ban was promulgated in response to a series of lawsuits challenging the use of genetically modified seed and broad-scale application of toxic pesticides on refuges for violating environmental laws.
Jamie Rappaport Clark, President and CEO of Defenders of Wildlife, issued the following statement:
“Industrial agriculture has no place on public lands dedicated to conservation of biological diversity and the protection of our most vulnerable species, including pollinators like bumble bees and monarch butterflies. The Trump administration’s approval to use toxic pesticides and genetically modified crops is an insult to our national wildlife refuges and the wildlife that rely on them.”
Background
The new memorandum, signed yesterday by Greg Sheehan, the Service’s Principal Deputy Director, will require refuge managers to consider application of neonicotinoids and GMO seed on a case-by-case basis, in compliance with relevant laws including the National Environmental Policy Act and refuge policies. Not only does this place an undue burden on already understaffed refuges, but it disregards numerous scientific findings on the dangers of neonicotinoids and GMOs to wildlife and conflicts with Congressional mandates to maintain the biological diversity, integrity and environmental health of the National Wildlife Refuge System.
Genetically modified crops are engineered to resist insects and herbicides, allowing for increased use of the latter to control undesirable vegetation. Intensive use of herbicides can kill native vegetation and significantly increase toxicity in natural systems, affecting birds, fish, mollusks, amphibians and insects. While the Service previously determined that the use of genetically modified crops was unnecessary for achieving refuge purposes, the new memorandum attempts to justify their use by claiming they may be necessary to provide additional feed for waterfowl and migratory birds and counter the loss of private farm land nationwide.
Neither of these justifications is based on reality, science or professional wildlife management principles. The wildlife-first mission of the Refuge System includes all species, not just ducks, geese and other game animals (which are otherwise faring well without intensive agriculture on national wildlife refuges). The claim that the federal government needs to facilitate farming on refuges to compensate for lost farmland elsewhere is without merit and contrary to the long-established purpose of the System. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in February that 910 million acres are managed for agriculture. In comparison, approximately 100,000 acres of the Refuge System were farmed in 2017.
Neonicotinoid Pesticides Harm Refuge Species and Habitats
Application of neonicotinoids on national wildlife refuges is even more dangerous than GMOs. Neonics are a class of pesticides implicated in declining pollinator populations around the world. Farmers spray this systemic nerve poison directly onto their crops or treat the seeds with the pesticide, which is absorbed throughout the entire plant. When pollinators, birds and other small animals are exposed it can lead to paralysis and death. These highly potent chemicals have been linked to devastating declines in bee populations, widespread contamination of streams and rivers across entire regions, and threaten amphibians, fish, birds and other wildlife. A growing body of scientific research suggests that neonics are one of the most persistent, prevalent and potentially toxic pesticides since DDT, which was banned in the U.S. in 1972.
The new memorandum provides no justification for allowing the consideration of this poisonous pesticide on national wildlife refuges. Its use would harm a variety of species and violate a fundamental purpose of the Refuge System to conserve biodiversity.
Farming on National Wildlife Refuges
Farming is only allowed on national wildlife refuges when it supports specific conservation objectives for waterfowl and other wildlife that the Service cannot meet through the maintenance, management or mimicking of natural ecosystem processes in other ways, or where authorized in refuge establishment authorities. Cooperative agriculture agreements – where the Service partners with farmers to meet wildlife management goals – permit farmers to grow crops on a refuge to produce more food for wildlife or improve habitat.
Prior to 2014, neonicotinoids and genetically engineered crops were regularly used in refuge farming programs. However, the Service banned these harmful industrial agriculture practices because they interfered with naturally functioning ecosystems and healthy wildlife populations the Refuge System was established to protect, until yesterday’s policy reversal.
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Featured image: Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old Gaza medic killed by an Israeli sniper on June 1, treating an injured man, undated photo from Palestine Live on twitter.
The 1948 Genocide Convention clearly states that one instance of genocide is “the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction of a people in whole or in part.” No matter whether this happens at a fast rate, or in “slow motion.” That is what has been done to Gaza since the imposition of the blockade by Israel, and the subsequent massacres which led to the death of more than 4000 Palestinians in three successive genocidal wars.
Palestinians of Gaza live an ongoing, illegal, crippling Israeli siege that has shattered all spheres of life, prompting the former UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights, Richard Falk, to describe it as “a prelude to genocide”. In 2009, the UN Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, headed by the highly respected South African judge, Richard Goldstone, found Israel guilty of “war crimes and possible crimes against humanity,” as did major international human rights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. The Goldstone report, for example, concludes that Israel’s war on Gaza was “designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”
The same scenario was repeated in 2012, and a worse one in 2014 only because Israel feels that it can carry on its war crimes with full impunity. And last week Israel has decided to tighten the siege by closing the only commercial crossing, even to increase its attacks by targeting peaceful protesters demanding the implementation of UN resolutions, and an end to this deadly, hermetic siege.
In her visit to Gaza, Professor Sara Roy, an expert on Gaza, describes the Strip as “a land ripped apart and scarred, the lives of its people blighted. Gaza is decaying under the weight of continued devastation, unable to function normally…” Professor Roy concludes that
“[T]he decline and disablement of Gaza’s economy and society have been deliberate, the result of state policy–consciously planned, implemented and enforced… And just as Gaza’s demise has been consciously orchestrated, so have the obstacles preventing its recovery.”
In addition to Israel’s daily attacks and air strikes, Gazans also suffer from the contamination of water, air and soil, since the sewage system is unable to function due to power cuts necessitated by lack of fuel to the main generators of the Gaza power grid. Medical conditions due to injuries from internationally prohibited butterfly bullets and other illegal Israeli weapons as well as from water contamination cannot be treated because of the siege. In addition to the ban on building materials, Israel also prevents many other necessities from being imported: lights bulbs, candles, matches, books, refrigerators, shoes, clothing, mattresses, sheets, blankets, tea, coffee, sausages, flour, cows, pasta, cigarettes, fuel, pencils, pens, paper… etc. In Gaza, people are wondering whether the current Israeli government, the most fascist in the county’s history, might even discuss a ban on Oxygen! Add to this the punitive measure taken by the PA, and the drastic cuts endorsed by UNRWA, not to mention the constant closure of the Rafah crossing–the only exit Gaza has to the external world– leading to one of the highest unemployment rates and poverty on the face of earth.
In fact, the conclusion Gazans have reached is that Israel is intent on destroying Gaza because world official bodies and leaders choose to say and do absolutely nothing. The brazen refusal of Israel to cooperate with the decision of the International Community to re-construct Gaza, for which several billions of dollars were pledged in Sharm El-Sheikh, should not be tolerated. Israel’s attacks have damaged or completely destroyed many public buildings and have according to the UN’s own Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reports severely damaged or completely destroyed some thousands of family dwellings, schools, universities and factories. Many other Palestinians who have spent the past several winters and summers in tents and caravans have also been promised the means to rebuild homes and schools, though to date nothing has been done to alleviate their suffering.
The practice of wanton willful killing of civilians exemplified in the extra-judicial sniping of non-violent protesters at the eastern fence of the Gaza Strip is not an isolated incident. It is part and parcel of an ongoing, comprehensive policy targeting the civilian Palestinians of the Gaza strip and systematically denying them their rights to movement, work, medical care, study, livelihood and increasingly life itself. But it is also a reflection of the nature of the state of Israel.i. e., a settler-colony. Israel’s leading, anti-Zionist historian, Ilan Pappe, sheds light on the driving ideology behind this genocidal policy:
Zionism is, in essence, a settler colonial movement, which was interested in having as much of the land of Palestine with as few Palestinians on it as possible. As the late scholar of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, has put it; the encounter between the settlers and the indigenous population triggered ‘the logic of the elimination of the native’. In some places, such as North America, annihilation was literally a genocide of the native; in Palestine it was a different kind of elimination, obtained through segregation, ethnic cleansing and enclavement
In spite of Israel’s alleged unilateral withdrawal from the Strip in 2005, it still maintains a permanent military presence in Gaza’s territorial waters and controls the movement of people and goods onto the strip by land and water in addition to movement within the strip through targeting anyone entering the “no go” zone designated by the Israeli military. Israel also continues to control Gaza’s population registry. Yet, Israel claims that it is no longer the occupying power in the Gaza strip and uses this excuse, in addition to the results of 2006 democratic elections, to intensify its policy of siege and lethal attacks on Gaza’s civilians.
And now, Israel has decided to become openly an apartheid state by legalizing racial discrimination. I have tried very hard to find out whether there are constitutions or laws in the world similar to Israel’s “new” Nation-State Basic Law which aims to establish a legal basis for Jewish supremacy and racism against indigenous Palestinians, including those living in what has become the largest open-air prison on earth; only South Africa under apartheid and America in the eras of slavery and segregation.
So, what to do?!
In a piece published in MEE, Gideon Levy asks
“Israel, where is your outrage at the legislation of Apartheid?”
Actually, we are not expecting a settler-colonial community to act against its own racism. The outside world has to intervene. Hence our call for #BDS. But, in Palestine, we are in urgent need of serious discussions about a program of radical political transformation, what with the disastrous failure of the existing programs, right and left, a program that divorces itself from the racist two-state solution, one that endorses a more inclusive program that guarantees the rights of all segments of the Palestinian people.
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Haidar Eid is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Postmodern Literature at Gaza’s al-Aqsa University. He has written widely on the Arab-Israeli conflict, including articles published at Znet, Electronic Intifada, Palestine Chronicle, and Open Democracy. He has published papers on cultural Studies and literature in a number of journals, including Nebula, Journal of American Studies in Turkey, Cultural Logic, and the Journal of Comparative Literature.
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On August 2, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) claimed that warplanes of the Israeli Air Force had bombed several fighters of the ISIS-affiliated Khalid ibn al-Walid Army near the occupied Golan Heights. Seven militants were killed in the strikes according to the Israeli media.
This was the second attack by the IDF on the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army during the last two weeks. On July 26, Israeli warplanes destroyed a rocket launcher allegedly belonging to the group in southwestern Syria.
An official of the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF) announced that members of the Khalid ibn al-Walid Army are attempting to cross the border from Syria. According to him, the JAF’s 10th Border Guard Battalion clashed with the terrorists in the Yarmouk Valley killing a number of them.
According to Syrian sources, some number of terrorist group members are still hiding near the Golan Heights and at the border between Syria and Jordan. They are attempting to flee the area in order to hide from the ongoing security operation by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA).
During the operation in southwestern Syria, the SAA and its allies liberated 3,332km2 and 146 settlements, the head of the Russian General Staff Col. Gen. Sergei Rudskoi said during a press briefing. 50 of them were liberated by peaceful means after negotiations.
Militants in the area surrendered over 650 pieces of military equipment, including 39 battle tanks, 28 infantry fighting vehicles and armoured personnel carriers, 10 Shilka self-propelled anti-aircraft guns, 35 anti-aircraft guns, 17 multiple launch rocket systems, 60 machine guns and 23 anti-tank missile launchers. A total of 4,927 members of militant groups and 5,355 their supporters left the area towards the province of Idlib via an open corridor in the framework of the reached surrender agreement.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) conducted its first patrol along the separation line between Syrian and Israeli forces. The Russian Military Police established eight observation posts in front of the UNDOF in order to prevent provocations in the area.
As soon as the situation in southwestern Syria is stabilized, the SAA will be able to re-deploy most of its forces to other frontlines and to start another round of combating terrorism in the country.
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Featured image: Zimbabwe MDC-A instigated violence on August 1, 2018 in Harare
National harmonized parliamentary and presidential elections in the Southern African state of Zimbabwe were held on July 30.
Over 70 percent of the electorate participated in the voting where some 23 presidential candidates and dozens of political parties were on the ballot.
This is the first election since the resignation of former President Robert Mugabe during late November 2017. His predecessor, President Emmerson Mnangagwa, has attempted to set the stage for improving the national economy through reforms aimed at lifting sanctions imposed nearly two decades ago by western imperialist states.
The Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) ruling party won two-thirds of the seats in the legislative branch of the republic. Results announced by the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) Chairperson Justice Priscilla Chigumba said that Mnangagwa won 50.8 percent of the vote while his closest rival, Nelson Chamisa of the opposition Movement for Democratic Change Alliance (MDC-A), garnered 44.3 percent. Other smaller parties combined made up the remaining 4.9 percent of the votes.
Zimbabwe electoral laws mandate that if any leading candidate for president acquires less than 50 percent of the votes there will be a runoff contest between the two top candidates in a matter of weeks. Mnangagwa tallied over 50 percent and was therefore declared the victor.
Zimbabwe President Emmerson Mnangawa at ZANU-PF gathering in Harare.
Numerous international monitoring teams came into Zimbabwe for the run-up and actual voting. This has been a tradition for many years although after 2000, a number of teams, particularly those from states which have imposed sanctions on the country, were barred from participation.
Election monitors from the African Union (AU), Southern African Development Community (SADC), Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), United Nations, European Union (EU), the United States, Commonwealth of Nations, People’s Republic of China, among many others were on the ground in Zimbabwe to assess whether the poll was free and fair along with making a determination about the accuracy of the outcome.
Veronica Gwaze wrote on the regional view of the July 30 elections in an article published by the state-owned Zimbabwe Herald noting that:
“The Electoral Commissions Forum of SADC countries (ECF- SADC) has congratulated Zimbabwe and its various political parties on the manner in which they conducted themselves during the 2018 electoral period. In its preliminary report, ECF-SADC head Justice Semistocles Kaijage said a spirit of tolerance and restraint was prevalent during the campaign period. On polling day, the mission reported, most polling stations allowed for smooth flow of voters and the secrecy of the vote was safeguarded.”
During the day of the voting there were no reported incidents of violence across the vast nation which borders South Africa, Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi and Botswana. Reports from the monitoring teams and the media indicated that the process was conducted in a calm, transparent and efficient manner.
Despite the claims of vote rigging by the opposition MDC-A, there was no specific evidence cited which could substantiate these allegations. The terms of the elections were agreed upon by all parties involved which allowed observers to verify the counting and tabulation.
A key trading partner and decades-long political ally of Zimbabwe, the People’s Republic of China’s head of its monitoring group reported that the electoral system was working properly and approved of the results. Zimbabwe Herald reporter Ishemunyoro Chingwere interviewed Liu Guijin of the Chinese team noting:
“[A]s a good friend of Zimbabwe, China had been very helpful in the past with Zimbabwe’s development process and was definitely going to continue on the same path after the elections. The peaceful and democratic elections, he said, will also send a positive signal to the Chinese investors, whom he said should up their investments in the country. He also urged the Zimbabwean private sector to take advantage of Chinese entrepreneurs and business counterparts who will be coming into the country in search of business opportunities.” (Aug. 2)
MDC-A Sparks Violence on August 1: Six People Confirmed Dead
Nonetheless, the MDC-A continued throughout the counting, verification and tabulation process to make claims through both social media and the international press that the ZEC was rigging the outcome. By the conclusion of the voting on July 30, Chamisa was already claiming that he had won the elections prior to any significant number of the votes having been counted.
When the ZEC announced the results of the parliamentary voting on August 1 giving the ruling ZANU-PF Party an overwhelming majority, it was denounced by the MDC-A as fraudulent. Hundreds of opposition supporters began staging a demonstration in the capital of Harare demanding that Chamisa and MDC-A be declared as the winners.
Both police and military units were deployed in response to the demonstration which soon turned violent. Dozens of vehicles were vandalized and set alight. Later government and ZANU-PF offices were physically attacked by demonstrators throwing bricks and other missiles at the buildings.
Tires were left burning in the streets while protesters went on a rampage. Early reports said that three people died in the melee. The following day on August 2, the Zimbabwe police confirmed the deaths of six people directly related to the disturbances.
Various elements within Zimbabwe society as well as the government placed blame for the destruction and death on the MDC-A supporters. Some said the riot was staged in order to cast aspersions on the ZANU-PF government tainting the electoral process and providing a rationale for the continued embargo by the West against Zimbabwe.
Dr. Obert Mpofu, the Minister of Home Affairs and Cultural Heritage, wrote in an editorial on August 3 emphasizing:
“We condemn in the strongest terms these acts of violence which have reared their ugly face in Harare CBD (Central Business District) and we attribute to the MDC Alliance. The Government of Zimbabwe places full responsibility for the violence, destruction of property, injury and loss of life on the MDC-Alliance which has continuously and persistently churned out hate speech, inflammatory language and displayed propensity for violence since February 2018. MDC-Alliance’s political leadership has over the past three months heightened and psyched up their members to commit violence at political rallies, addressing Press conferences and even on social media.” (Herald)
International Dimensions of the Zimbabwe Situation
The attitude of the MDC-A is not surprising to anyone who has followed their political trajectory since 2000. Every election held during this time period in which they did not win has been denounced as illegitimate.
This current MDC-A configuration is actually an alliance of seven different parties which are by no means united even among themselves. Certain elements in the alliance of convenience objected to the tactics utilized on August 1 which resulted in the deaths and unwarranted destruction of government and private property. The MDC-A, as well as its previous iterations, are supported both politically and financially by interests in the western countries which have maintained draconian sanctions on Zimbabwe for nearly two decades. Obviously there is a concerted attempt to continue their economic war against the state in an effort to overthrow ZANU-PF as the ruling party.
It will be up to the ZANU-PF government and political leadership to develop a strategy for moving forward in regard to their relationship with the United States, Britain and the EU since these countries hold the key to the lifting of sanctions. Zimbabwe under the previous leadership of President Mugabe adopted a “Look East” policy where priority was placed on cultivating trade and joint economic projects with governments within the Global South.
China has demonstrated historically its commitment to expressing solidarity with Zimbabwe through partnerships and investment. Neighboring Republic of South Africa has rejected calls by the imperialist states to engage in a blockade against Zimbabwe. President Mnangagwa has gone out of his way to mend relations with the world capitalist nations which continue to impose sanctions on the country. All of these western governments were allowed to send observers into Zimbabwe for the elections.
The entire SADC region recognizes that Zimbabwe must be supported in order to guarantee stability and progress throughout the sub-continent. This holds true as well for the AU. With the ongoing combined efforts of the progressive forces inside the country and the international community Zimbabwe will survive.
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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The US government and the presstitutes that serve it continue to lie to us about everything. Today the Bureau of Labor Statistics told us that the unemployment rate was 3.9%. How can this be when the BLS also reports that the labor force participation rate has declined for a decade throughout the length of the alleged economic recovery and there is no upward pressure on wages from full employment. When jobs are plentiful, people enter the labor force to take advantage of the work opportunities. This raises the labor force participation rate. When employment is full—which is what a 3.9% unempoyment rate means—wages are bid up as employers compete for scarce labor. Full employment with no wage pressure and no rise in the labor force participation rate is impossible.
The 3.9% unemployment rate is not due to employment. It results from not counting discouraged workers who have ceased to search for jobs because there are no jobs to be had. If an unemployed person is not actively searching for a job, he is not counted as being in the labor force. The way the unemployment rate is measured makes it a hoax.
The government tells us that there is essentially no inflation despite the fact that prices have been rising strongly—the price of food, the price of home repairs, the price of drugs, the price of almost everything. Two years ago the American Association of Retired People’s Public Policy Institute reported that the average retail drug price has been increasing at a worrying pace of 10 percent a year, and about 20 drugs have astoundingly had their prices quadruple since just December. Sixty drugs doubled over the same period. Turing Pharmaceuticals, headed by Martin Shkreli, is one of the most pronounced examples of this kind of behavior. The company bought a lifesaving cancer medication only to increase its price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. (See this)
Incomes, of course, have not doubled. In real terms incomes have declined. Moreover, expenditures on medicines are a huge percentage of the budgets of the elderly and those on Medicare. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average annual cost of prescription medicines for the elderly accounts for three-fourths of the average Social Security pension and for about half of the median income of peope who receive Medicare benefits. (See this)
Real jobs have also declined. The jobs that the financial presstitutes report to be unfilled are not jobs that provide a living. The BLS reported that the number of Americans working multiple jobs rose in July by 453,000, bringing the number of Americans who hold multiple part-time jobs to 8,072,000.
Looking at July’s payroll jobs report again we see the Third World complexion of the US work force. The alleged new jobs are concentrated in lowly paid domestic services: temporary help services, health care and social assistance, waitresses and bartenders.
There is scant sign of a vibrant economy, but high debt is everywhere. Debt is growing faster than the income needed to support it. The US government is on course for another $1 trillion annual budget deficit. The federal, state, and local tax base has been decimated by the global corporatons’ export of high productivity high value-added manufacturing and professional skill jobs. In the name of “free trade” the tax base for Social Security, Medicare, and public pensions has been given away to China and other Asian countries where labor costs are low. The US global corporations make higher profits by shrinking the US tax base. Neoliberal economists defend this absurdity as “free trade” that benefits Americans.
The millions of Americans whose jobs were given away to foreigners know full well that they have not benefited. They know the story told by neoliberal economists and financial presstitutes is a lie.
The lies, of course, go far beyond the economic ones. Russiagate, which has dominated the print and TV media and NPR since the last presidential campaign is a massive lie that continues day after day. On August 3 the NPR presstitutes, for example, were smacking their lips over the prospect that Paul Manafort was on trial and might give special Russiagate prosecutor Robert Mueller a conviction that could lead to Trump’s removal from the White House. The presstitutes speculated that a convicted Manafort would tell on Trump in exchange for a lighter sentence.
The NPR presstitutes did not reveal that Manafort was not on trial for anything related in any way to Russiagate. Manafort is being tried on income tax evasion charges dating from a decade ago when he was a consultant to Ukrainian politicians. There is no doubt but that these are false charges whose purpose is to coerce Manafort into protecting himself by making false charges against Trump. If Manafort is convicted it will not be on the basis of any evidence. Manafort will be convicted by the presstitute media which will convince jurors that Manafort is “one of those rich who don’t pay taxes.”
That President Trump permits this witch-hunt to continue, a witch-hunt that far oversteps Mueller’s Russiagate mandate for which not a shred of evidence has been found, shows how the presstitutes working hand-in-hand with the military/security complex and DNC have disempowered the President of the United States. While Americans sit there sucking their thumbs, the coup against the President proceeds before their eyes.
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This article was originally published on Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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For what could be the first time ever, post-revolutionary Iran might not back out of competing against “Israel” in an international sporting event because of the serious damage that this stunt could do to its already strained relations with Russia if it refuses to play against its foe in the field medicine challenge that they’re both scheduled to participate in during the International Army Games that their shared partner is hosting.
It probably sounds unbelievable to those who are indoctrinated with Alt-Media dogma, but there’s a good chance that Iran might make an exception to its hitherto post-revolutionary position of refusing to compete against “Israel” in international sporting events and actually participate in the field medicine challenge that they’re both scheduled to partake in during this year’s International Army Games in Russia. The Jerusalem Post was the first media outlet to draw attention this, albeit in a very casual manner, when it wrote that:
“Israel will be participating in three competitions, all on Russian soil: the military rally, a field kitchen cook-off and a field medicine rally. It will be competing against Russia in all three, against Iran only in field medicine – although Tehran is participating in 17 of the 28 contests – and not against Syria in any of them.”
It also noted the following:
“The tank biathlon, one of the central parts of the games, saw the participation of 23 countries including Algeria, Egypt, Kuwait, Iran, Morocco, Syria and Sudan. Each team consists of 21 soldiers divided into four crews and tests the crews’ driving skills traversing over some 15 km. in the shortest time possible while firing at various targets such as models of other tanks, helicopters and rocket-propelled grenade-launcher crews.
While Israel did not participate in the biathlon, a spokesman from the IDF told The Jerusalem Post that officers were sent to watch and learn from countries who did participate. Israel’s flag was nonetheless posted next to the Iranian flag on the games’ official website as participating – since Israel immediately precedes Iran in Russian alphabetical order.”
Not only is “Israel” poised to compete with Iran in what might be their first-ever post-1979 sporting event, but its military officials were also allowed to watch the Iranian tank crew carry out complicated maneuvers in real time. In addition, by an alphabetical coincidence, the two rivals’ flags were also posted next to each other. The symbolism behind all of this couldn’t be stronger because it shows that Russia is trying to bring these foes together as it attempts to manage their proxy war in Syria.
So that skeptical readers don’t dismiss this outright as “Zionist propaganda”, here’s a screenshot from the official website of Russia’s 2018 International Army Games showing both parties’ flags as described and proving that they’re each slated to compete in the same field medicine challenge:
Having confirmed the accuracy of The Jerusalem Post’s report, the question now becomes one of whether Iran will actually go through with the scheduled event and compete with its hated nemesis for what might be the first time ever since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranian sportspeople always boycott participating in any kind of matches against “Israelis” because they believe that doing so grants legitimacy to the settler entity that their government doesn’t officially recognize, but this time they might actually go through with it for three reasons.
The first is that the Iranians won’t necessarily be competing with the “Israelis” face-to-face because, as the author understands it, the individual and group runs are conducted separately from other teams, meaning that each goes through the course independently on their own and then just has their final times compared with everyone else’s. If that’s the case, then Iran might not consider that it’s “compromising” on its principled stance regarding the ethics of its sportspeople competing against “Israelis”, thereby making it acceptable to go ahead with the challenge.
As for the second, Russian-Iranian relations are severely strained right now because of their unofficial but widely speculated disagreements about Syria’s post-Daesh future, which the author touched upon in his most recent article on the topic titled “It’s Official, ‘Israel’ Is Now A Joint Russian-American Protectorate”. Because “Russia Is Already ‘Balancing’ Iran In The Mideast”, Tehran is unlikely to want to cause a scene by dramatically pulling out of the field medicine challenge just to protest Tel Aviv’s participation in it and risk embarrassing Moscow to the point where it feels compelled to toughen its stance in order to “save face”.
Finally, the last reason why Iran might be reluctant to drop out of that event is because it’s getting used to how Russia has gradually normalized indirect interactions between it and “Israel”. Not only is Moscow doing this on the military front in southwestern Syria, but it’s also quietly doing the same on the economic one through its plans to clinch Free Trade Agreements with both Iran and “Israel” and consequently serve as the commercial bridge between them, just like the author wrote earlier this year in his piece about how “The Resumption Of Russian-‘Israeli’ Free Trade Talks Proves Ties Are Fantastic”.
Bearing these three points in mind, there’s a high likelihood that Iran will remain in the field medicine challenge and indirectly compete with “Israel” even though tensions between the two are at one of their highest points in history and they’re still engaged in a simmering proxy war against one another in Syria. Russia’s symbolic “balancing” of both parties through what might be their successful participation in the same International Army Games event could bode well for regional stability, however, because it would prove that Moscow is capable of doing what had previously been written off as the politically impossible.
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This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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In the current multipolar world in which we live, economic and military factors are decisive in guaranteeing countries their sovereignty. Russia and China seem to be taking this very seriously, committed to the de-dollarization of their economies and the accelerated development of hypersonic weapons.
The transition phase we are going through, passing from a unipolar global order to a multipolar one, calls for careful observation. It is important to analyze the actions taken by two world powers, China and Russia, in defending and consolidating their sovereignty over the long term. Observing decisions taken by these two countries in recent years, we can discern a twofold strategy. One is economic, the other purely military. In both cases we observe strong cooperation between Moscow and Beijing. The merit of this alliance is paradoxically attributed to the attitude of various US administrations, from George Bush Senior through to Obama. The special relationship between Moscow and Beijing has been forged by a shared experience of Washington’s pressure over the last 25 years. Their shared mission now seems to be to contain the US’s declining imperial power and to shepherd the world from a unipolar world order, with Washington at the center of international relations, to a multipolar world order, with at least three global powers playing a major role in international relations.
The Sino-Russian strategy has shown itself over the last two decades to consist of two parts: economic clout on the one hand, and military strength on the other, the latter to ward off reckless American behavior. Both Eurasian powers have their respective strengths and weaknesses in this regard. If Russia’s economy can hardly be compared to China’s, China plays second fiddle to Russia’s conventional and nuclear deterrents, and is quite some way behind Moscow in terms of hypersonic weapons. The cooperation between Moscow and Beijing aims to synergize their respective strengths.
Economic sovereignty
Both de-dollarization and the development of hypersonic weapons serve the purpose of defending both countries’ sovereignty. Economic sovereignty entails, among other things, elimination of dependence on the US dollar, the abandonment of an international banking system based on the SWIFT payment system, the inclusion and increase in the share of the yuan in the basket of international currencies, the reduction of dollar-denominated public debt, the constant accumulation of gold, and, of course, the elimination of any residual debt with international institutions that are part of the world governance model controlled and manipulated by Washington for its own interests.
Beijing, rather than seeking to replace the central role of the United States, seeks instead to expand its influence in existing organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization (WTO).
From an economic point of view, the international order is very similar to a duopoly rather than anything multipolar, without forgetting that the European Union has an important role to play should it regain some form of sovereignty by freeing itself from dependence on Washington. For Moscow and Beijing, reducing public debt is one of the best ways of achieving strong economic sovereignty. The Russian Federation has reduced its public debt in relation to GDP from 92% at the beginning of 2000 to 12.9% today. The People’s Republic of China, over 20 years, has increased its public debt from 20% of GDP to around 48%. Compared to the public debt of European countries (Italy and Greece are over 120%, France 100%, the EU average is 85%), Japan (240%) and the United States (110%), Beijing and Moscow have paid particular attention to keeping their accounts in order. Another important strategy involves the steady accumulation of gold in the reserves of these two countries.
China and Russia are once again trending in an opposite direction to that of the West. Since 2005, Russia and China have accumulated huge amounts of gold, with the clear intention of diversifying their reserves. Both Moscow and Beijing are among the top 10 countries in terms of gold reserves, with an exponential increase over recent years.
Thanks to a limited public debt, huge quantities of gold, and a progressive reduction in the amount of US government bonds held, Moscow and Beijing have embarked on the path of full economic sovereignty, independent of the US dollar system and strongly protecting themselves against any future financial crises. In this respect, the creation of international financial bodies, to be added to those already existing, has the clear purpose of diluting Washington’s institutional influence over the economic affairs of the world.
A decided acceleration in this general direction was made following the exclusion of the Islamic Republic of Iran from the SWIFT system, a ringing alarm bell for the Eurasian duo. Despite their reduction of public debt and significant de-dollarization, both countries remain dependent on, and therefore vulnerable to, an economic and financial system that orbits around Washington and London. The workaround has therefore been to create two alternative bank-payment systems to SWIFT. In the case of Russia, there is the so-called system for the transfer of financial messages (SPFS), and in China, the Cross-Border Inter-Bank Payments System (CIPS). Initially conceived as a fallback in the event of exclusion from the SWIFT system, the SPFS and CIPS projects currently strongly intertwine with the energy agreements reached in 2015. Moscow’s selling of liquid natural gas (LNG) to Beijing takes place through an international payment system based on Chinese renminbi that is immediately converted into gold thanks through the innovative mechanism inaugurated at the Shanghai Gold Exchange. It is not excluded that these operations could not directly occur through the SPFS or CIPS systems in the future. Never mind the petrodollar system that is one of the main problems that China and Russia face when dealing with the international financial system. Efforts to progressively switch from USD to Yuan in paying oil commodities have been in place for years especially by Beijing.
This is an example of how countries like Russia and China have found ways of circumventing the means used to limit their sovereignty. The inclusion of the yuan in the IMF basket of world reserve currencies is associated with the Chinese strategy of supporting the renminbi for export, reducing the share of the US dollar. The strategy adopted by Moscow and Beijing seems to leave Washington unable to stop the protective measures of these two Eurasian powers.
In practice, we are already beginning to see the effects of this alternative economic world order. The sanctions imposed by Washington and her satraps on Moscow and Tehran are easily circumvented by Russia and Iran, with exchanges denominated in currencies other than the dollar (often gold), or simply through bartering.
China and Russia, with strongly diversified economies, with treasuries chock full of gold, and with minimal public debt, leave very little room for international speculators to have an effect on their domestic economies with actions that amount to financial terrorism.
Being able to minimize the impacts and risks of a new financial crisis, or resist the threats and blackmail of the international bodies steered largely by Washington and London, are the key means of being able to chart an economically independent course and ensure national sovereignty.
The military is the definitive guarantor of sovereignty
Without a clear and inviolable military sovereignty, the economic measures implemented can become ineffective in the event of war. For this reason, China and Russia continue to implement nuclear-weapons strategies, the ultimate and definitive deterrent. Moscow is at least equal to Washington in this regard, just as Beijing is at least equal to Washington in the economic field. China and the United States have an interconnected economy, but in the event of total war, Washington would suffer the greatest damage. The transfer to China of almost all American industry has a cost, and in the case of a complete rupture in relations between the two countries, Washington is well aware of its economic vulnerability to China.
In military terms, the strategy for ensuring territorial sovereignty focuses on certain key areas, namely the defense of airspace and maritime borders, and the ability to discourage any nuclear attack by guaranteeing a second-strike capability.
I have written about this in the past, noting that Russia and China have implemented complex and advanced systems in recent years to close the technological gap with the West, Moscow being at least equal to Washington in this regard, and sharing with Beijing some of its most important innovations. The sale of S-400s to China paves the way for a future joint defense of Eurasian airspace. As the process of union and cooperation between the two countries increases, their respective militaries will have the task of discouraging outside attempts to destabilize the region. This is the reason why the United States sees the sale of the S-400 systems (to Turkey, for example) as a red line not to be crossed. The ability to prevent access to one’s airspace upsets one of Washington’s principal doctrines of war. Without air supremacy and the ability to operate in an uncontested airspace, the American way of war is severely hobbled, it becoming practically impossible for the United States to impose its will militarily.
The second military focus for the Eurasians concerns the defense of their maritime borders, reflecting Moscow and Beijing’s need to keep the US Navy a good distance from their shores. The development of anti-ship weapons has been a priority for Beijing in recent years, as has been the development of islets in the South China Sea to ensure a constant protection of its borders, given the aggressive presence of the US Navy. Beijing aims to create areas of denial for the US military. Initially keeping US forces about 180 miles from their coast, the future intention is to push them even further back, to a distance of about 700 miles, thus obtaining an effective anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) space that prevents any amphibious assault or a maritime blockade of China’s sea lines of communication.
In the same way that de-dollarization represents an economic nuclear weapon in the hands of Russia and China, the development of hypersonic weapons is the linchpin of the Sino-Russian alliance’s ability to defend its territorial sovereignty. I wrote two very detailed articles on these amazing weapons, and so did my colleagues at the Strategic Culture Foundation. It is an exciting topic because for the first time in years, Washington has faced the accomplished fact of its geopolitical adversary’s impressive technological progress. Hypersonic weapons have no present weaknesses, and Moscow is the only country in the world capable of producing and using them. With this new capability, the range of action of the Russian Federation reaches unprecedented levels.
Hypersonic weapons have the crucial advantage of being able to hit mobile or fixed targets with unprecedented speed and power. The ability to obliterate in a matter of minutes a US Navy carrier group or ABM systems in Romania and Poland undoubtedly has a sobering effect on the US military. This is to leave aside the fact that the future S-500 system will have anti-satellite capabilities as well as ballistic-missile defense, and the new SS-28 Sarmat will not be able to be stopped by any current or future ABM system.
With the use of hypersonic weapons (some already operational) and the sophisticated S-400 and S-500 systems, US naval and air power is being strongly challenged. With nuclear weapons, even the Russian first- and second-strike capabilities become impossible for the US to overcome.
It is only a matter of time before hypersonic technology is brought to bear by the People’s Republic of China, probably with Moscow’s crucial assistance. The level of mutual trust and cooperation has never been so high between the two countries, and it is natural for them to collaborate militarily and economically, spurred by their common opponent.
Conclusion
The challenge for Russia and China is complex and ongoing. The transition from a unipolar to a multipolar world order is occurring as we speak, enabled by economic and military sovereignty. The challenge for these two Eurasian countries will be to increase their military and economic power, and correct the obvious imbalances in the current world order, without destroying it.
If this strategy proves successful, it will only be natural to start offering other countries the opportunity to hop onto the Eurasian train, enabling those willing to shift their military, economic and diplomatic leaning from the Atlantic to the Eurasian world. Given the momentous significance of India and Pakistan’s accession to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as permanent members, it would seem that Moscow and Beijing are on track to eliminating the central role of the United States in international relations in favor of a multilateralism that will benefit everyone.
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Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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I don’t know about you out there, but whenever I drive around my city and surrounding area of perhaps 250k people, I notice the increased congestion and near crazy drivers. It keeps getting worse and some of the blame has to be pointed at the uncertainty of our times. You don’t have to be an accounting genius or a historical scholar to realize when you’re on the receiving end of the shaft.
The facts are out there, even though the embedded mainstream media does its best to keep them from you. We live in an empire whereupon over half of our hard earned federal tax money goes down the rabbit hole of military spending. That’s the first gorilla in the room. It sits there smiling at you, because it knows that its appetite is being satisfied… as your needed safety net is shredded to bits.
How many out there understand that this first gorilla needs over $ 700 billion each and every year?
Some researchers have that figure at a cool trillion dollars. Imagine if even a quarter of that money went to establish a National Health Service to dwarf even the one the Brits have had for decades? Imagine going to any doctor you wanted and having any surgery you needed , along with saving your teeth with comprehensive dental care. With $ 180 billion going into that kitty, imagine how little it would cost you and me to pay for such care? Oh no, the gorilla is growling and pounding his giant paws!
The second gorilla is also very content now. He knows that his super rich existence is safe, because Uncle Sam is in his pocket. How many of you realize that the super rich had a top federal tax bracket of 90% to deal with in the 50s and 60s? During the 1970s the top bracket never went below 70%. In 1981, under Reagan, the top rate dropped to 50%. Now it is at 37% for incomes over $ 400,000 +. That does not mean that anyone actually pays that amount. No, with a good accountant and plenty of deductions, even multi millionaire
Mitt Romney acknowledged that he paid at around 15%. Get it? Plus the fact that someone earning , let us say $ 500k a year, is put in the same bracket as a Romney or a Bill Gates. Thus, the mega millionaire and billionaire gorilla are happier than a pig in ****. Meanwhile, back at the (prison) ranch you and me and all the millions of working stiffs out there (who make up most of the 99+ %) have to subsidize this government spending with our sweat and tears (maybe some blood added to the mix?). Every dollar we earn is taxed at the Payroll Tax rate of over 7.5 %, the same for what the super rich must contribute. Plus, the social security tax stops at incomes of $ 128k a year. So, the Fat Cats and wannabee Fat Cats can earn ‘the sky’s the limit’ and are only responsible for $ 128k of income. Imagine if that ceiling was extended all the way up to the sky, how much added revenue our Treasury would have? This could be used to secure and expand that safety net. Another idea is to create a ‘Mega Millionaire Flat Surtax’ of let us say 50% of any income over one million dollars a year, leaving the first million to be taxed at the current rate. This would include bonuses and all stock and bond income as soon as either is cashed in. Translated: Jeff Bezos, a multi billionaire, only makes less than $ 100k a year in salary. His stock is worth billions! So, when Jeff one day decides to cash in or transfer his holdings to someone else, the flat surtax kicks in.
What could occur if our nation was a mix of socialism and capitalism? Well, all major industries that are vital to the public’s health and well being would be nationalized. Imagine if Banking, Energy, Pharma, Health care, Defense, Real Estate were owned and operated by the citizens through local and federal government.
No more excess profits from our taxes going for mortgages, residential and commercial real estate rentals, doctor visits and medicines, home heating and electric, surgeries, dental care, weapons systems and military needs… all working at non profit or low profit. Socialism and ‘ Adam Smith capitalism’ would see a nurturing of Main Street small businesses. It can happen if first we can get rid of those two smelly 500 lb. gorillas! Imagine for a minute if all small businesses with less than 100 employees (for argument sake) had a moratorium on the Payroll Tax contributions from both employee and employer for the first $ 20k of employee wages… with companies over 100 employees just having the moratorium on employee contributions. Think how A) $ 1500-$ 1600 a year tax free can be useful for the worker and his or her boss; and B) this would get rid of most of the ‘off the books’ employment that many Mom and Pop businesses are forced to utilize to stay above water. Ditto for the workers.
With our own government running the weapons and military equipment industries, the trumpet for more phony wars and occupations would be muffled a great deal. All those private Pentagon influenced lobbyists would need to go out and get a real job! We could use that money wasted on the profits of the few to be used as I mentioned above. Think about that. And with local community nonprofit mortgage banks, imagine how many current renters would be able to afford a home or apartment of their own… at rates that only translate into overhead costs. You want real economic stimulus, well with more new homes and apartments needed, the housing and materials market would be overflowing with energy… and plenty of needed jobs.
Who needs the super rich? I don’t. Do you?
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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].
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Air strikes thought to be conducted by the Saudi-led coalition have hit a hospital’s entrance, fishing port and fish market in the Yemeni city of Hodeidah, killing scores.
A source at Hodeidah’s health office told Middle East Eye that 55 people were killed in the strikes, with more than 100 wounded. Both figures are likely to rise as the situation becomes clearer.
The International Committee of the Red Cross said on Twitter it was sending medical equipment to al-Thawra Hospital to treat those in critical condition following the attack.
The hospital said in a tweet that a strike targeted its main gate, leaving dozens of casualties, while Houthi-run Saba news agency said 40 were killed in the hospital strike.
“It is a very painful sight, parts of bodies are everywhere around the hospital gates,” an eyewitness told Reuters.
Staff working for Save the Children, which runs a diphtheria treatment centre in the hospital, described the situation aftert the strikes as “chaos”.
“A bomb exploded just outside the hospital, on the street,” one staff member said. “Then there was another explosion towards the back. I saw people running and bodies in the street.”
Despite the Houthis’ lack of an air force, the Saudi-led coalition laid the blame at the rebels’ door, and insisted it was not behind the strike.
“The coalition did not carry out any operations in Hodeidah today,” the coalition spokesman, Colonel Turki al-Malki, told Al-Arabiya television. “The Houthi militia are behind killing of civilians in Hodeidah on Thursday,” he said.
“The coalition follows a strict and transparent approach based on the international law. We pursue any allegations and if there is any responsibility we will hold it transparently,” he added.
Pro-Yemeni government activists and media accused the Houthis of targeting the civilians with ballistic missiles, but residents in the rebel-held city told MEE that they heard the buzzing of warplanes.
Meanwhile, the United Nations said it will invite the parties involved in Yemen’s conflict for talks on 6 September.
UN Special Envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths told the UN Security Council that “a political solution” to end the war in Yemen is “available” and urged world powers to support the new push for peace negotiations.
“These consultations will provide the opportunity for the parties, among other things, to discuss the framework for negotiations, relevant confidence-building measures and specific plans for moving the process forward,” said Griffiths.
Strategic port city
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Sunni Muslim allies have been fighting in Yemen with Western backing for more than three years against the Iran-aligned Houthis.
The Houthis control much of north Yemen including the capital Sanaa and drove its Saudi-backed government into exile in 2014.
On Tuesday, the Houthis said they were unilaterally halting attacks in the Red Sea for two weeks to support peace efforts.
This came a few days after Saudi Arabia suspended oil exports through a strategic Red Sea channel, amid Houthi attacks on crude tankers on 25 July.
About 70 percent of Yemen’s food imports flow through Hodeidah port; about 8.4 million Yemenis are said by aid workers to be on the verge of starvation.
On 13 June, Saudi Arabia and its allies in a pro-government coalition launched a major offensive to retake Hodeidah. Fighting around the port has raised UN fears of a new humanitarian catastrophe in a country already at the brink of famine and a deadly cholera epidemic.
The Houthis have offered to hand over management of the port to the world body, according to the United Nations, but the coalition says the group must quit the western coast.
On Friday, the UN’s World Health Organisation said Yemen may be on the brink of a new cholera epidemic, with greater chance of a high death rate due to widespread malnutrition.
“We’re calling on all parties to the conflict … for three full days of tranquility and to lay down arms to allow us to vaccinate the civilian population for cholera,” WHO emergency response chief Peter Salama said.
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China’s ambassador to Damascus has reportedly told Syrian media that Beijing is prepared to aid the government’s push to retake territory throughout the country.
Speaking to Syrian pro-government daily Al-Watan, the envoy, Qi Qianjin, expressed China’s support for what he referred to as Syria’s war against terrorists, according to a dispatch from the Middle East Media Research Institute.
Qi said he regretted that Chinese Uyghurs had participated in fighting against the government of President Bashar al-Assad, adding that the Chinese military was hoping to enhance relations with the Syrian military.
“Asked about the possibility that his country would take part in the Syrian Arab Army’s upcoming campaign against the terrorists in Idlib, especially in light of the presence of Uyghur fighters [there], [Qi] replied that China ‘is following the situation in Syria, in particular after the victory in southern [Syria], and its military is willing to participate in some way alongside the Syrian army that is fighting the terrorists in Idlib and in any other part of Syria,” the article from Al-Watan was translated as saying.
When asked about Chinese participation in the campaign, military attaché Wong Roy Chang said
“‘the military cooperation between the Syrian and Chinese armies is ongoing. We have good relations and we maintain this cooperation in order to serve the security, integrity and stability of our countries. We – China and its military – wish to develop our relations with the Syrian Army. As for participating in the Idlib operation, it requires a political decision.’ He denied that there were military advisers or special Chinese forces in Syria today.”
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Featured image is from Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
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A detailed study of the death toll that has been recorded in Nicaragua since a violent campaign to remove President Daniel Ortega and his Sandinista government shows that at least as many Sandinista supporters were killed as opposition members. The study, “Monopolizing Death,” demonstrates how partisan local NGOs conflated all deaths that occurred since April, including accidents and the murders of Sandinistas, with killings by government forces. Washington has seized on the bogus death count to drive the case for sanctions and intensify pressure for regime change.
The manipulated death toll was the centerpiece of a July 25 harangue by Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on the House floor. While drumming up support for a bipartisan resolution condemning Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega for supposedly ordering the massacre of demonstrators, Ros-Lehtinen declared,
“Mr. Speaker, four hundred and fifty! That is how many Nicaraguans have been killed by the Ortega regime and its thugs since April of this year.”
The congresswoman’s portrayal of a dictatorial regime gunning down peaceful protesters like helpless quails in a canned hunt was designed to generate pressure for an attack on the Nicaraguan economy in the form of sanctions packages like the Nica Act. Her narrative was reinforced by Vice President Mike Pence, who condemned Nicaragua’s government for “350+ dead at the hands of the regime,” and by Ken Roth, the long-serving executive director of Human Rights Watch, who also suggested that Ortega had personally ordered the killing of “300 demonstrators against his corrupt and repressive rule.”
Throughout the past two weeks, I have been in Nicaragua interviewing scores of victims of the US-backed Nicaraguan opposition. I have met police officials who saw their colleagues gunned down by well armed elements while being ordered to stay in their stations, Sandinista union leaders whose homes were burned down, and average citizens who were kidnapped at tranque roadblocks and pulled out of their homes to be beaten and tortured, sometimes with the assent of Catholic priests. It was clear to me that the Nicaraguan opposition was anything peaceful in its bid for regime change.
And it was also clear that many Sandinistas had been killed since the chaos began in April. The opposition’s victims include Gabriel de Jesus Vado, a police officer from Jinotepe, who was kidnapped, dragged from a moving car, and burned alive on video at the tranque in Monimbo this month, a neighborhood in Masaya that the opposition had violently occupied for weeks.
Opposition militants burn Jinotepe police officer Gabriel de Jesus Vado alive at a Masaya roadblock after brutally torturing him. A local Catholic priest, Harvin Padilla, was recorded offering his verbal consent for the heinous killing.
But according to the logic employed by Congress and the White House, which holds the government responsible for every single death that occurred between April and June in Nicaragua, the killing of Vado and as many as twenty other members of Nicaragua’s national police never took place — nor did the deaths of anyone killed by opposition paramilitaries. This is what you have to believe if you blame the Sandinista government for one hundred percent of the deaths.
The manipulation of the death toll by Congress and Western soft power NGOs is exposed in meticulous detail “Monopolizing Death.”
The author of this forensic study, independent Nicaraguan researcher Enrique Hendrix, describes his analysis as “evidence of a campaign that, in the absence of a just cause, uses the death of every citizen as a motive to manipulate the emotions of the population in order to counterpose ‘the government’ against ‘the people.’”
Hendrix told me that he initiated his study, “Monopolizing Death,” two weeks after the anti-Sandinista protests began.
“All the opposition media channels started claiming all these deaths were taking place [at the hands of government forces], and I was having a lot of uncertainties,” he said. “So I started researching the lists of the human rights organizations and really trying to figure out if these death counts consisted only of students, as opposition media was reporting.”
The complete text of Hendrix’s study, translated into English by the Tortilla con Sal journalism collective, is embedded at the end of this article, along with a spreadsheet analyzing (in Spanish) each death in detail.
Partisan human rights NGOs as a regime change weapon
Hendrix’s study surveys the deaths recorded by the three main Nicaraguan human rights organizations. They are the Nicaraguan Center for Human Rights (CENIDH), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (CIDH), whose involvement was requested by the government of Nicaragua on May 13th; and the Nicaraguan Association for Human Rights (ANPDH).
These are the organizations that Congress, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and international soft power organizations like Human Rights Watch have relied on for their understanding of the violence that has gripped Nicaragua.
While in Nicaragua, I learned how members of CENIDH and ANPDH actively participated in the campaign to remove the Sandinista government. For instance, I was told by three separate students of the public university UNAN that CENIDH legal advisor Gonzalo Carrion was present with opposition students and militants when they took over the campus and that Carrion was even a bystander to their violence.
Ramon Avellan, the police commissioner of Masaya, related to me how staffers of ANPDH repeatedly appeared at his police station alongside opposition activists to beseech him to surrender. This act that would have resulted in the total takeover of the city by the armed opposition, which according to Avellan, included strong representation from local criminal cartels.
ANPDH was founded in Miami, the true base of Nicaragua’s right-wing opposition, and was funded in the 1980’s by the US government’s National Endowment for Democracy to paint the Contras as victims of communist brutality. Today, the group remains a political weapon of choice against the Sandinista movement.
How anti-Sandinista “human rights” NGOs and Washington cooked the books
Hendrix found that the three main self-proclaimed human rights groups in Nicaragua had removed the contexts of the deaths they recorded in order to conflate every unnatural death that occurred across the country between April 19 and June 25 with killings by Nicaraguan pro-government forces.
He found that seven categories of deaths were included in the human rights reports. All categories except for one were totally unrelated to government violence.
They are as follows:
Duplicated names
Deaths unrelated to protests
People murdered by the opposition
Opposition activists, including those involved in the violent tranques
Innocent bystanders
Names without significant data to determine the cause of death
Deaths omitted from each list
According to Hendrix, reports by CENIDH, CIDH, and ANPDH were padded with the deaths of “victims of traffic accidents, altercations between gangs, murders by robbery, those killed by accidental firing of a firearm and even more absurdly, a suicide.”
CIDH’s study includes a whopping nine duplicated names, while all three organizations larded their reports with 97 deaths that were unrelated to the protests. The causes of 77 deaths recorded in the three reports remain unknown.
While the Nicaraguan opposition has howled about genocide-level massacres of students, Hendrix found in his own research that out of the approximately 60 deaths among anti-Sandinista elements at the hands of government-aligned forces, only 16 or 17 were actual students.
Most shockingly, Hendrix’s forensic research demonstrated that the opposition killed at least the same number of Sandinista supporters and police officers as they lost at the hands of the government. This fact flies directly in the face of the US-centric narrative of a dictator mowing down peaceful protesters.
It would be easy for anyone familiar with the situation that unfolded on the ground over the past three months to see why so many had been killed on the Sandinista side.
In late April, Ortega ordered his police forces to stay in their stations as a condition of the national dialogue he initiated with the opposition. The order meant that for about 55 days, Sandinista supporters were left to fend off a national crusade of lethal blood vengeance. Countless citizens were beaten or faced property destruction at the hands of the opposition solely because they belonged to the Sandinista front.
Among the killings of Sandinistas detailed in Hendrix’s report was a 25 month old baby, the child of Gabriella Maria Aguirre, who died on June 13 in Masatepe of bronchoaspiration when her ambulance was held up at an opposition roadblock.
Meanwhile, in cities like Masaya and Jinotepe, police found themselves under virtual siege, cut off for weeks from regular food and medical supplies, and wound up waging a pitched battle with the opposition militants that had encircled them.
Armed opposition militants hold the police station in Sebaco under siege, attacking it with grenades and rifles.
The deaths of those within opposition ranks who were killed by accident or as a result of fratricidal violence has also been decontextualized in these reports, and are therefore unacknowledged by Washington and international legal bodies. They include Guatemalan journalistEduardo Spiegler, who was crushed by a “tree of life” street decoration toppled by opposition protesters as he was covering their spree of vandalism.
Opposition demonstrators topple a “tree of life” atop Eduardo Spiegler, a Honduran journalist covering their rampage, then dance on it in celebration.
From anti-Sandinista NGOs to international bodies, with no scrutiny in between
The Nicaraguan government has appointed its own commission comprised of independent experts to investigate the deaths that have occurred since April. According to Hendrix, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has refused to accept data from the official Nicaraguan investigation, relying instead on ANDPH.
This means that the main international body responsible for drawing conclusions about the violence in Nicaragua has relied largely on a partisan NGO with a decidedly anti-Sandinista bent and has done no independent work.
In Washington, meanwhile, members of Congress like Ros-Lehtinen have not only relied on the opposition’s flawed narrative, they have exaggerated the death toll to drum up the case for a deepened attack on Nicaragua’s economy.
Hendrix emphasized that because local human rights NGOs like ANDPH relied so heavily on highly partisan opposition media to tabulate their death counts, “it is impossible to verify in so many cases if they are even telling the truth.”
He wondered if “we could be seeing an even greater manipulation than we know.”
The same thing seems to be going on with Twitter. And again, conservatives are complaining.
But who is to decide what is “fake news”? Who will be Facebook and Google’s sources for real news?
In 2013 the U.S. Senate considered a new a shield law to protect journalists. In the lawmakers’ attempts to narrow the definition of a journalist, some Senators including Sen. Dianne Feinstein only wanted to include reporters with “professional qualifications.”
“Professional” publications such as the New York Times, the “Paper of Record,” would apparently be protected.
So one can conclude that the New York Times can be a source of “real” news for Facebook or Google, despite all the Times‘ errors, screw-ups, and corrections, right?
During the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign, there were collusions between then-CNN contributor and DNC operative Donna Brazile, who was outed by WikiLeaks in her giving candidate Hillary Clinton questions in advance for a CNN Town Hall.
Other emails that were leaked to WikiLeaks informed us that reporters obediently followed instructions from the Hillary Clinton campaign on how to cover the campaign. These include reporters from the New York Times such as Maggie Haberman who said the campaign would “tee up stories for us,” and Mark Leibovich, who would email Clinton flunky Jennifer Palmieri for editing recommendations.
And Politico reporter Glenn Thrushasked Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta for approval of stories on Clinton. Thrush was then hired by the New York Times. After Thrush was then suspended from NYT over allegations of sexual misconduct, the Timesended the suspension, stating that while Thrush had “acted offensively,” he would be trained to behave himself. Hmm.
But all this from the 2016 campaign reminded me of the “JournoLists,” the group of news journalists who participated in a private forum online from 2007-2010. The forum was to enable news reporters to discuss news reporting and political issues in private and with candor, but also, it was revealed, to discuss ways to suppress negative news on then-2008 presidential candidate Barack Obama.
For instance, according to the Daily Caller, some members of the group discussed their criticism of a 2008 debate in which Obama was questioned on his association with the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The Nation‘s Richard Kim wrote that George Stephanopoulos was “being a disgusting little rat snake.” The Guardian‘s Michael Tomasky wrote that “we all have to do what we can to kill ABC and this idiocy.”
Spencer Ackerman, then with the Washington Independent and now of the Daily Beast, wrote,
“If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead, take one of them — Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.”
The Nation‘s Chris Hayes wrote,
“Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians — men, women, children, the infirmed — on its hands. You’ll forgive me if I just can’t quite dredge up the requisite amount of outrage over Barack Obama’s pastor.”
In an open letter, according to the Daily Caller, several of the JournoList members called the ABC debate a “revolting descent into tabloid journalism,” because of the moderators’ legitimate questions on Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
So, in today’s Bizarro World, objectively questioning a candidate on a controversial issue is now “tabloid journalism,” but making things up like “Trump-Russia collusions” and repeating the propaganda over and over – that’s not “tabloid journalism.”
The JournoLists also included reporters from Time, the Baltimore Sun, the New Republic, Politico, and Huffington Post.
Now, are those the sources of “real news” that Facebook, Google and Twitter want to rely upon to combat “fake news”?
And who exactly were the “JournoLists” promoting? Obama?
Regarding Obama’s own crackdown on actual journalism, Fox News reporter James Rosen was accused by the feds of being a “co-conspirator” with State Department leaker Stephen Jin-Woo Kim in violating the Espionage Act. Rosen’s correspondences with Kim were seized by Obama’s FBI, along with Rosen’s personal email and phone records. The FBI also used records to track Rosen’s visits to the State Department.
Apparently, then-attorney general Eric Holder went “judge-shopping” to find a judge who would approve subpoenaing Rosen’s private records, after two judges rejected the request.
Commenting on James Rosen and the FBI’s abuse of powers, Judge Andrew Napolitanoobserved that
“this is the first time that the federal government has moved to this level of taking ordinary, reasonable, traditional, lawful reporter skills and claiming they constitute criminal behavior.”
And there was the Obama administration’s going after then-CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson, possibly for her reporting on Benghazi and Fast and Furious. Attkisson finally resigned from CBS news out of frustration with the company’s alleged pro-Obama bias and with CBS’s apparently not airing her subsequent reports.
In 2013 CBS News confirmed that Attkisson’s computers had been “accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions.” In 2015 Attkisson sued the Obama administration, claiming to have evidence which proves the computer intrusions were connected to the Obama DOJ.
In Attkisson’s latest lawsuit update, after her computer was returned to her following the DOJ Inspector General’s investigation, her forensics team now believes her computer’s hard drive was replaced by a different one.
Now back to “fake news.”
After Donald Trump locked up the Republican Presidential nomination in May, 2016, there were significant events in the next two months. Fusion GPS and former British spy Christopher Steele colluded to get opposition research on behalf of Hillary Clinton, the FBI applied for FISA warrant to spy on Trump campaign associates, and Donald Trump, Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner had a possibly set-up meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower.
Also within that same period, the DNC claimed that its computers were hacked but the DNC wouldn’t let FBI investigate. The Washington Post published an article claiming, with no evidence presented, that “Russian government hackers” took DNC opposition research on Trump.
It was very shortly after the November, 2016 Presidential election that the Washington Post published an article on a “Russian propaganda effort to spread ‘fake news’ during the election.” To escalate the media’s censorship campaign perhaps?
The campaign against “fake news” coincided with Obama minions at FBI, DOJ and CIA apparently panicking over a possible Trump presidency and their allegedly abusing their powers to attempt to take down Trump.
So the news media seem to be on a crusade to fabricate “Trump-Russia collusions” and repeat it over and over, and to vilify, ignore and squash actual investigative research and reporting on what exactly the FBI and DOJ bureaucrats have been doing. Call such real investigative reporting “fake news,” “conspiracy theory,” and so forth.
In the end, Facebook, Twitter and Google might want to reconsider relying on the mainstream news media led by the New York Times, the Washington Post and CNN, and instead include citizen journalists and non-government-sycophant media to provide news and information.
UCLA law professorEugene Volokhhas noted that the Founders generally viewed the freedom of the Press to apply to every citizen to print, publish or express accounts of events. We really need to highlight that kind of old-fashioned, honest journalism.
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Scott Lazarowitz is a libertarian writer and commentator. Please visit his blog.
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Data is rarely inert. It moves, finds itself diverting, adjusting and adapting to users and distributors. Ultimately, as unspectacular and banal as it might be, data sells, pushing the price in various markets whoever wishes to access it. Medical data, given its abundance, can do very nicely in such domains as the Dark Web. With governments attempting to find the optimum level of storing, monitoring and identifying the medical health of citizens, the issue of security has become pressingly urgent.
Britain’s National Health Service is a case in point. Last year, that venerable, perennially criticised body of health provision received the full attention of the WananCry virus. Much of this was occasioned by carelessness: a good number of organisations were running on out-of-date Windows XP software. The principle of insecurity was, however, affirmed.
Last month, the Singaporean government faced the grim reality that 1.5 million health records had been accessed by hackers including, audaciously, the records of Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. This well landed blow riled all the more for that state’s heralded insistence on the merits of its own cybersecurity. In the words of the government statement,
“Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack.”
Lee, in an obvious effort to reassure, perhaps more himself than anybody else, claimed that his data had nothing of value. (If a thief takes your goods, make sure they are worthless.)
“My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but there is nothing alarming in it.”
Obtaining medical data enables a stealthy plotting for the attacker, hoarding information clandestinely then deploying it with maximum effect.
“Patients who have had their medical information stolen,” goes Aatif Sulleyman for The Independent, “might not realise it’s even happened until the attackers have already set their plans in motion.”
Patient profiles can be built, with credentials mustered for reasons of impersonation to obtain health services. Medical equipment and drugs can be duly purchased, and claims with insurers lodged. That prospect is somewhat bleaker than one whose credit card details have been pinched; the bank, at the very least, might be able to put a halt on transactions with immediate effect.
Such excitement turns in anticipation and worried focus to the My Health Record proposition of the Australian government, which, it must be said, belies the usual blissful ignorance about what such an invitation tends to be. Here, information utopia is paraded and extolled: to have such material in one spot, rather than diffused and intangible; to have the picture of one’s medical being in one location for those providing health care services.
Australia’s political representatives and bureaucrats have assumed a certain cockiness far exceeding health providers in other jurisdictions, making the My Health Record scheme a pinnacle of insecurity in medical care. A pervasive sense exists that privacy concerns will simply vanish in a bout of extended apathy. The scheme is astounding for the scope it enables prying of medical data that would otherwise be deemed private.
Deficiencies were spotted early on. Far from being clinically-reliable as a record, it is dated and far from comprehensive. Any such record would be, at worse, a distraction in an emergency. Nor is there a track on who has seen it, except institutions en bloc.
If Australians do not opt out of the centralised medical scheme by October 15, a record by default will created, stored and used. This will mean that those in the healthcare provision business, be it pharmacists, nurses or podiatrists, not to mention a whole string of unknown providers, will have automatic access to the medical record without patient consent. The notions of express and fully informed consent have been given a dramatic, contemptuous heave ho, with a focus on the patient’s volition to avoid the scheme altogether. The Australian government’s refusal to engage the public in any meaningful way, be it through a sustained advertising or information campaign, has been patchy, and, in some instances, entirely absent.
Such an approach flies in the face of such recommendations as those made by the UK Information Governance Review from 2013 acknowledging “an appropriate balance between the protection of the patient user’s information, and the use and sharing of such information to improve care”. This balance was struck on principles derived in the 1997 Review of the Uses of Patient-Identifiable Information, chaired by Dame Fiona Caldicott. While admitting that information governance might at stages have to give way to sharing confidential patient information for the sake of that patient’s welfare, the principles of data security remain fundamental.
A skirt through the My Health Record system yields the extent of its shabbiness, and the level of its aspiration. The My Health Record privacy policy is hardly glowing, acknowledging the problems with having such a database in the first place.
“In any online platform, including the My Health Record system, there are inherent risks when transmitting and storing personal information.”
Then comes the mandatory, if hollow reassurance:
“Despite this, we are committed to protecting your personal information, and ensuring its privacy, accuracy and security.”
A rich opportunity for the prying and the pilfering await.
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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Email: [email protected]
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Banned from promoting his dangerous Islamic agenda across the European Union, Turkish President Erdogan is now seeking to use his growing influence in the Balkans against the Western countries. Erdogan’s aggressive return to the Balkans increased concerns among critics in southeastern Europe—the region where he is pursuing more assertive policies and strategically spreading his brand of Islamist nationalism through a network of mosques and religious institutions.
The EU countries have come to realize the danger emanating from his Islamic scheme. As a result, Austria, the Netherlands, and Germany banned Erdogan from organizing electoral campaigns. Furthermore, two months ago, Austria’s Chancellor Sebastian Kurz ordered the closing of seven mosques and expelled Turkish-funded Imams while placing under tight scrutiny dozens more Turkish Imams.
“Parallel societies, politicized Islam or radical tendencies have no place in our country,” Kurz said as was reported by the New York Times.
Austria’s move to close mosques prompted a furious reaction from Erdogan, who condemned the decision, labeling it Islamophobic and promising to retaliate against them. He used the rally in Bosnia to underline his proclivity for challenging the Western countries. He declared in front of a crowd of more than 12,000 supporters that
“At a time when the glorious European countries that claim to be the cradle of democracy failed, Bosnia and Herzegovina proved to be not ostensibly, but truly democratic by giving us the opportunity to gather here.”
Many corrupt politicians, Imams, representatives of NGOs, and members of academia in the Balkans remain united in their resolve to campaign on Erdogan’s behalf, as they have been enjoying over the years the largess and comfort that Erdogan provides to his loyalists. This is how Erdogan succeeded in winning hearts and minds, especially among the region’s Muslim population.
Albanian politician Grida Duma, representing the Democratic Party, the second-largest group in the parliament, said to us that,
“For Rama, the Albanian Prime Minister’s challenge to the EU by appeasing Erdogan is dangerous… and would create serious consequences… as the closeness between Rama and Erdogan does not serve Albania’s geostrategic interests.”
Journalists and civil society representatives from Balkan countries are deeply concerned about what may come next, notably following the amendment to the Turkish constitution and Erdogan’s reelection, which granted him unprecedented powers.
Andi Bushati, a journalist and publisher from Albania, affirms Duma’s observation and suggested that
“This closeness manifests itself not only by symbolic acts, such as Rama’s applause to Erdogan’s statement that ‘Kosovo is Turkey and Turkey is Kosovo,’ but also politically, for example, by endorsing Erdogan’s condemnation of Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.”
To express their admiration of this authoritarian leader, Serbian, Macedonian, Kosovar, Albanian, and Bosnian leaders hailed Erdogan’s re-election and attended his inauguration in a show of solidarity.
Meanwhile, Kosovo’s acquiescence to Erdogan’s Islamic agenda is becoming increasingly transparent. A few weeks ago, hundreds of Kosovars marched in support of “Turkish democracy” led by the Turkish Ambassador in Kosovo, Kıvılcım Kılıç.
Bekim Kupina, a seasoned journalist from Kosovo, said that Kosovo’s leaders must not allow Erdogan to use their country as a springboard to Europe.
“Kosovo needs schools, kindergartens, and job opportunities, and not religious institutions that Turkey is building.”
As the EU seeks to increase its influence in the Balkans, Russia and Turkey have been working hard to strengthen their own ties to the region. The EU’s renewed interest in its southern backyard has also been prompted by fears of Moscow’s mounting influence in the Balkans.
Jelena Milic, director of the Center for Euro-Atlantic Studies in Belgrade, confirms that Erdogan and Serbian president Aleksandar Vucic are developing increasingly strong ties.
“Erdogan’s track record is not criticized by Serbia’s government-controlled media. Erdogan and Vucic visited Sandzak, a Bosnian Muslim populated province of Serbia, but Erdogan was very cautious to highlight only economic ties and investment opportunities”, says Milic.
According to her, Turkey’s influence in the region is growing at an alarming speed.
Former Bosnian diplomat Zlatko Dizdarević, who served as ambassador to Jordan, Croatia, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, describes Turkish meddling in Bosnia as a “threat” which further weakens the country by deepening internal divisions.
On the night of Erdogan’s re-election, Bosniak member of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bakir Izetbegović, congratulated Erdogan on his victory, stating
“Mr. President, you are not only the president of Turkey, you are the president of all of us.”
Sead Numanovic, Bosnian journalist, said that such statement further encourages Erdogan to intensify his interference in Bosnia, which has recently opened an AKP office in Sarajevo.
“Erdogan made a public promise to build a highway and speed road between Sarajevo- Novi Pazar and Belgrade. The cost of these two projects alone is over 3 billion euros”, says Numanovic.
He believes that the recent election’s outcome in Turkey has emboldened Erdogan, who will use his power and prestige to increase his political influence in the Balkans.
Erdogan is bent on doing so through financial means and investments, and there is little that can stop him because he believes he can lock horns with the EU without chancing much.
Conversely, Duma said that
“While the main projects were given to Turkish companies, there is no American company that has invested recently in Albania.”
There is no doubt about the closeness between Albanian Prime Minister Rama and Erdogan. Beside their friendly relations, they also support each other electorally.
To be sure, Erdogan has made his unprincipled position clear to Western powers, stressing that Turkey will become as powerful and influential as the Ottoman Empire was during its heyday. Erdogan’s ambition to reconstitute elements of the Ottoman era should have a chilling effect on any country with which Erdogan seeks active bilateral relations.
There are always insidious intentions behind his overtures, especially now that most of the countries in the Balkans are in the process of negotiating entry into the European Union, especially Serbia and Macedonia, who are recognized candidates for accession.
The Balkans now are Erdogan’s trump card against Europe, especially after he was barred by EU countries from expanding his Islamic agenda and particularly because the door for Turkey to become an EU member has, for all intents and purposes, been shut.
Since the Western Balkan countries have been seeking long-lasting relations with the EU, the EU should further strengthen its relations with the Balkan states by providing financial support and investing in major projects, while continuing to encourage social, political, and economic reforms.
That said, despite the preoccupation with Brexit, immigration, and violent extremism, the EU must maintain steady progress toward integration of the Western Balkan nations. By commencing accession negotiations with Macedonia and Albania, which according to the European commission are ready to join, the EU will send a clear message to the rest of the Balkan states of its seriousness about their prospective membership.
This will send a cautionary note to the Balkan leaders that the path to EU membership is open, but of necessity requires that they not cozy up to Erdogan, who has betrayed the EU’s founding principles and is obsessed with luring the Balkans to join his Islamist nationalistic orbit.
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Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com
Arbana Xharra authored a series of investigative reports on religious extremists and Turkey’s Islamic agenda operating in the Balkans. She has won numerous awards for her reporting, and was a 2015 recipient of the International Women of Courage Award from the US State Department.
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Launched by professors at Princeton University and signed by experts on both sides of the Atlantic, this declaration calls for a break with the policy of unconditional support for the Likud government in Israel by US president Donald Trump, and an engagement with the region toward its denuclearization, including the signing by Israel of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
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The Middle East is in turmoil now, possibly again on the verge of a major war that could draw in the United States and Russia. President Donald Trump has pulled the United States out of the six nation nuclear agreement with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA. Although a few of his advisers counseled against leaving the agreement, he has brought into his cabinet advisers who are known to be hawkish toward the Middle East and prefer regime change in that area to regime reform. The most notable of these advisers is John Bolton, appointed as director of the National Security Agency. His policies align well with those of the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who condemned the nuclear accord with Iran from the outset.
On May 14 of this year Israel celebrated the seventieth anniversary of its existence. It has enjoyed extraordinary military successes against its Arab neighbors in 1948, 1956, and 1967, and after suffering a setback at the outset of the 1973 war with Egypt and Syria, the Israel Defense Force crossed the Suez Canal and was in a position to threaten the capitals of Egypt and Syria and their many population centers. Yet, in spite of its unmatched military capabilities in the Middle East, its strong cultural institutions, its technological capacities, and its high standards of living with respect to the other states in the region, Israel has negotiated peace agreements only with Egypt and Jordan.
The United States government has provided immense financial and military support to Israel as have American citizens and American corporations. The American-Israeli Political Action Committee is one of the strongest pressure groups in the United States on a par with corporate lobbies and the National Rifle Association. The recent decision of the American government to move its embassy to Jerusalem, done without extracting any concessions from the government of Israel and with no support from its European allies, makes clear the American government’s support for the state of Israel.
Equally important and distinctly related, perhaps as severe as the tensions between Iran and Israel, is the presence of Israel’s soldiers on the west bank of the Jordan River, with its heavy Palestinian population. The Israel Defense Force has been in military occupation of that region for five decades, making it one of the longest military occupations of modern times. The Israeli state has used its power in that area to deny statehood to the Palestinians, to oppress the Palestinian population, to dispossess Palestinians of houses and land, and has established a substantial settler population, strongly committed to annexing these territories. American political decision makers, as well as Israeli political leaders, need to rethink their political, military, economic, and cultural policies in the region. If Israel maintains its army in the West Bank and continues, with Egypt, to isolate Gaza from the outside world, surely Israel will be seen as responsible for the well-being of the Palestinian populations. It will take on apartheid-like policies.
American and Korean political elites have contemplated a denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Would not such a policy, namely the denuclearization of the Middle East, be a worthwhile development and a major first step toward resolving the rising tensions in the area? To this day, the Israelis, possessing, according to some sources, 150 nuclear warheads and refusing to sign the non-nuclear proliferation accord or to allow the International Atomic Energy Agency to conduct inspections of its facilities, claim that Israel will never be the first to introduce nuclear weapons in the region. Although the Iranians have not claimed that their nuclear program was a response to the presence of nuclear weapons in Israel, surely that must be a factor.
It is time that those of us interested in the Middle East and world peace make our voices heard. We call on others to endorse policies that favor denuclearization of the Middle East and a just and fair resolution of the Arab-Israeli dispute.
This statement originated at Princeton University through conversations involving Arno J. Mayer,Stanley J. Stein, and Robert L. Tignor, all retired faculty from the history department of Princeton University.
It was agreed to and signed by Abdel Aziz Ezz el-Arab (American University in Cairo), Joel Beinin (Stanford University), Noam Chomsky (MIT), Richard Falk (Princeton University and the University of California, Santa Barbara), Khaled Fahmy (University of Cambridge), James Gelvin (UCLA), Israel Gershoni (Tel Aviv University), Molly Greene (Princeton University), Alain Gresh (former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique and general editor of Orient XXI), Chris Hedges (former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times); Yoram Meital (Ben Gurion University in the Negev; Ralph Nader (public citizen), Ilan Pappe (University of Exeter), Vijay Prashad (Director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research); Roger Owen (Harvard University), Cyrus Schayegh (University of Geneva), Taqadum al-Khatib (Free University of Berlin), Michael Wood (Princeton University) and Juan Cole (University of Michigan). Most of the signers do research and teach courses on the modern Middle East.
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As most of the participants and crew from Al Awda (The Return) are being deported from their unlawful detention at Givon prison in Israel, we now have a clearer picture of just how much violence was used by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in their attack on the first Freedom Flotilla ship on Sunday. Some participants were repeatedly tasered, including in the head. Others were punched or had their head beaten against a wall by IOF soldiers. Zip-cuffs were used in a manner which cut off circulation. That any of this should happen to any civilian is an outrage. That the Israeli military would deliberately hurt a frail, 69 year old, slightly built surgeon and an Indigenous elder is even more outrageous.
The official IOF story of a ‘uneventful arrival’ is clearly false and masks a seriously disproportionate reaction: there was no need to deploy 12 military vessels with hundreds of armed soldiers against one unarmed former fishing boat full of peaceful participants committed to non-violence. At least two of our unlawfully detained participants began hunger strikes in prison to protest the way they were kidnapped at sea and the unhealthy conditions under which they are being held. Yes international response has been muted.
“There is a noticeable similarity with the capture of the Arctic Sunrise by Russian forces in 2013,” observes Phil Ball, British activist and climber who on board the Greenpeace vessel in 2013 and subsequently imprisoned in Russia for two months. “But in our case the international outcry led to some measure of justice. Here we have another unarmed civilian vessel, this time carrying medical supplies, which was aggressively boarded in international waters, and the world community isn’t upholding the same level of accountability.”
Of particular concern is the fate of the two Al Jazeera journalists from Al Awda, who are among the last still held in unlawful detention at Givon prison in Israel. They have had their professional equipment, documents, personal property and money stolen while held by Israeli forces. Press freedoms are under attack by the Israel authorities and require our international support, so we must all #DemandPressFreedom
Given that our next Flotilla vessel, the Swedish-flagged sailboat Freedom, is due to reach Gaza soon with more boxes of much-needed medical supplies (including #Gauze4Gaza), it is even more important to affirm the internationally recognized right to innocent passage on the high seas. We call on all national governments and international organizations to demand that Israeli forces respect the personal integrity of all on board the sailing vessel #Freedom and we #DemandPressFreedom for journalists on board, their equipment and their stories.
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President Donald Trumpis threatening to take away the security clearances of a number of former senior intelligence and security officers who have been extremely critical of him. Most Americans were unaware that any ex-officials continued to hold clearances after they retired and the controversy has inevitably raised the question why that should be so. Unfortunately, there is no simple answer.
A security clearance is granted to a person but it is also linked to “need to know” in terms of what kind of information should or could be accessed, which means that when you are no longer working as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency you don’t necessarily need to know anything about China’s spying on the United States. Or do you? If you transition into a directorship or staff position of a major intelligence or security contractor, which many retirees do, you might need to retain the qualification for your job, which makes the clearance an essential component in the notorious revolving door whereby government officials transit to the private sector and then directly lobby their former colleagues to keep the flow of cash coming.
At top levels among the beltway bandit companies, where little work is actually done, some make the case that you have to remain “well informed” to function properly. The fact is that many top-level bureaucrats do retain their clearances for those nebulous reasons and also sometimes as a courtesy. Some have even received regular briefings from the CIA and the office of the Director of National intelligence even though they hold no government positions. A few very senior ex-officials have also been recalled by congress or the White House to provide testimony on particular areas of expertise or on past operations, which can legitimately require a clearance, though it such cases one can be granted on a temporary basis to cover a specific issue.
The problem arises when former officials use their clearances as bona fides to enhance their marketability for non-clearance jobs in the media or corporate world, particularly when those individuals are criticizing current government policies and behaving in a partisan fashion regarding specific candidates for office. Donald Trump was especially assailed by former officials John Brennan,James Clapper, Michael Hayden and Michael Morell before the 2016 election, all of whom continue to attack him currently, most particularly for the recent meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the 2016 campaign, Morell, who openly supportedHillary Clinton and is the designated intelligence on-air contributor for CBS news, deliberately linked the fact that he was ex-CIA Acting Director to his assertion that Trump was somehow an “unwitting agent of the Russian Federation” to establish his credibility. That type of activity should be considered abusive and an exploitation of one’s former office.
Morell left CIA in June 2013 and by November was a senior counselor with Beacon Global Strategies. According to the firm’s website, Beacon Global Strategies is a government and private sector consulting group that specializes in matters of international policy, foreign affairs, national defense, cyber, intelligence, and homeland security. Morell may know little about those issues as they have evolved in the past five years, but citing his clearance gives him credibility for knowledge that he might not really possess and also gives him direct access to former colleagues that he can lobby to obtain government contracts.
Former CIA Director John Brennan, who famously voted for the Communist Party candidate for US president in 1976, has also profited greatly from his government service, becoming rich from his board memberships. He sits on the board of directors of SecureAuth + CORE Security and also on the board of The Analysis Corporation. More important in terms of his public profile, he is the “Intelligence Consultant” for NBC News and MSNBC and appears regularly.
Last week Senator Rand Paul met with President Trump and recommended that Brennan’s security clearance be revoked. He argued that Brennan, Trump’s most aggressive critic, has been using his credentials to provide credibility when he calls meeting with Russia’s president “treasonous” and describes the president as “wholly in the pocket of Putin.” Clearance holders also more generally use their privileged access to “secret information” to leverage speaking and television network pundit fees. In other words, Brennan and the others are using their security clearances to enhance their incomes, monetizing their access to classified information to enhance their value.
It is by no means clear whether Trump will revoke the clearances of Clapper, Brennan, Morell and Hayden. As he is the legal source of all government clearances he has the power to do so. An equitable solution on the clearance issue more generally speaking would be to cancel all security clearances on the day when one leaves government service unless there is a direct and immediate transition to a private sector position that absolutely requires such a qualification. That would be fair to lower level employees seeking a second source of income and it would also eliminate many of those who are merely cashing in on their presumed access. As it is a rational solution it is very unlikely that it will be entertained by either the White House or by Congress.
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Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
Dr. Giraldi is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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In October, America’s war in Afghanistan will turn 17. At that point, it will be old enough to go and fight in itself—and there is no end in sight. The United States escalated the war in 2018 by increasing the number of its troops and airstrikes, and this year is bringing a record-high number of civilian deaths. Afghanistan has the worst rate of infant mortality in the world and ranks 175 out of 186 countries on the Human Development Index. Millions of Afghans live in severe poverty, unemployment is high, 41 percent of Afghan children under the age of five are stunted and 33 percent of the population is food insecure. While the U.S-led efforts to pacify the country have often been rationalized on the grounds that they will supposedly lead to the emancipation of Afghan women, just 8.8 percent of adult women have reached secondary school (compared to 35.4 percent of men), and the Afghan government—which the United States is fighting to keep in power—is ignoring violence against women. Torture under that government is widespread and on the rise, with a quarter of the victims under the age of 18.
These are the conditions that prevail under U.S occupation.
Since the 2001 invasion, the United States and its partners have carried out spectacular crimes in Afghanistan. Less than a month into the war, the United States scattered cluster bombs over a civilian village, and bombed a mosque and a hospital. A 2007 U.S-NATO bombing in Helmand province’s Gereshk district killed manycivilians, possibly more than 100. A year later, a U.S-led coalition airstrike in Nangahar province killed 47 Afghan civilians at a wedding. The next month, an American bombing in Herat killed 90 civilians. An Amnesty International report examines 10 cases from 2009 to 2013 where “mainly U.S. forces were responsible for civilian deaths, mostly through air strikes or night raids. At least 140 civilians were killed in these incidents, including pregnant women and at least 50 children.”
No one has ever been held accountable for these atrocities. In October 2015, a Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) trauma center in Kunduz was destroyed by a sustained bombing campaign by U.S.-led coalition forces that killed at least 42 patients, 14 staff and 4 caretakers. The United States claims that this was an accident, but MSF says it gave the hospital’s GPS coordinates to the coalition four days before the attack. MSF reports,
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building.”
Deadly U.S. bombings continue to the present. Less than two weeks ago, a U.S. bombing killed 14 Afghan civilians, three of them children, in Kunduz. That’s not an exhaustive list of U.S crimes in Afghanistan, but as long as the United States and its partners are bombing Afghanistan, more horrors can be expected.
The United Nations finds that anti-government elements such as the Taliban and daesh (the so-called “Islamic State”) are behind the majority of the attacks that have killed civilians so far in 2018. But it also notes “a sharp increase in civilian casualties” from airstrikes carried out by pro-government forces, a coalition in which America is a central player, with 1,047 civilians killed by this side of the war thus far in 2018. There’s good reason to believe that the U.S-led coalition is responsible for a greater portion of the civilian deaths than the UN report suggest. Civilian casualty tracking in Afghanistan, conducted by the U.S. and Afghan governments, is grossly inadequate—hardly a surprise given that the perpetrators are in charge of determining their own guilt.
The United States and its partners also share blame for Afghan civilian deaths caused by anti-government forces. According to the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg conducted after World War II, a war of aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” What this means is that whoever starts a war is responsible for all the atrocities that occur in that war. The 2001 U.S-led invasion of Afghanistan was a war of aggression. The attack was not authorized by the United Nations, which means it was illegal. Nor is the argument that the United States had to invade because of the September 11, 2001 massacre tenable. In the early days of the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the Afghan government offered to discuss turning over Osama bin Laden if the United States stopped its airstrikes. But the Bush administration called this “non-negotiable,” opting to wage more war and to replace the oppressive, misogynistic Taliban with the Northern Alliance, an outfit, in the words of Robert Fisk, wrought with “gangsters,” and “well-known rapists and murders” of Afghan civilians.
That the United States and its partners are culpable for “the accumulated evil of the whole” in Afghanistan is even clearer in view of the longer-term history. America’s assault on the country did not really begin in 2001. As the journalist Robert Dreyfuss shows in Devil’s Game, it dates to the early 1970s when the United States and its partners—particularly Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—conspired to handcuff Afghanistan’s progressives, nationalists and leftists—all of whom were strong at the time. These policies undermined Afghanistan’s hopes for a democratic society, never mind one with any degree of socio-economic equality. The U.S-led alliance’s policy reached its apotheosis later that decade when it empowered an insurgency of violent arch-reactionaries, unleashing a devastating war and the emergence of the U.S-backed Taliban government in the 1990s.
Apirations of the ruling class
To understand America’s nearly 50 years of violent intervention in Afghanistan, it is necessary to evaluate the efforts of the U.S. ruling class to secure political and economic primacy, a process that necessary includes keeping potential challengers at bay. Afghanistan is rich with natural gas, and Afghanistan has oil reserves that in 2010 were discovered to be substantially larger than previously thought. Afghanistan has an estimated $1 to $3 trillion in mineral wealth that the Trump administration has ogled. This includes gold, copper, iron, mercury, lead, uranium, chromium, lithium and an array of rare metals, resources that are used in cell phones, computers and military goods.
As a result of the current war, the United States undertook supervision of the privatization segments of the Afghan economy. A 2010 U.S State Department report notes that Afghanistan has “taken significant steps toward fostering a business-friendly environment for both foreign and domestic investment.” Scholar Michael Skinner’s research leads him to conclude that the
war in Afghanistan is “being used by the U.S.-led Empire of Capital as a bridgehead to open all [of] Eurasia to global free trade while simultaneously containing the aspirations of potential challengers.”
Afghanistan shared a border with the Soviet Union and shares one with China, a competitor of the U.S ruling class, and another with Iran, at present one of U.S. elites’ most hated adversaries. The value of this real estate is laid bare by Chinese and Iranian infrastructure projects in Afghanistan—in addition to those of India—which are crucial for determining the trade routes that will be required to export Afghanistan’s resources. As Adam Hanieh of the University of London points out, the Afghanistan-Pakistan region is at the intersection of the Gulf and Central Asia, forming “the crossroads of these two energy-rich areas.” This may go a long way to explaining the military bases the United States has constructed in Afghanistan, some of which are massive, suggesting America may be intending to stay in the country and use it as a launching pad for attacks within and possibly beyond Afghanistan’s borders.
The degree to which the U.S ruling class has succeeded in its pursuit of these goals remains an open question, but it’s difficult to imagine that the U.S economic and foreign policy establishment does not value having a military presence and allied government in such a strategic neighborhood. Zbigniew Brzezinski, a chief architect of the Carter administration’s plan to arm the mujahedeen and later an advisor to President Obama, was frank about this in 1997, writing that “the distribution of power on the Eurasian landmass will be of decisive importance to America’s global primacy.”
Getting out of Afghanistan
Ending the war is the precondition for Afghans to be able to have even minimal physical safety and access to social services, let alone any loftier political aspirations beyond that. Danielle Bell, human rights chief for the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, notes that conflict-related violence is eroding the rights of children to education, healthcare, freedom of movement, family life, playing outdoors and otherwise enjoying a childhood free of the “brutal effects of war.” The war displaced 437,907 people in 2017 alone, and internally-displaced people lack adequate housing, food, water, health care and opportunities to pursue education and employment. As the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs puts it,
“Afghanistan has been in protracted conflict for almost thirty five years, which has seriously hampered poverty reduction and development, strained the fabric of society and depleted its coping mechanisms.”
These are among “the accumulated evil of the whole” wrought by America’s war on Afghanistan.
After nearly a half century, the jury is in: Afghanistan will not be safe or free under U.S tutelage. It’s time for the war to end and a central requirement of that is that America get out.
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Greg Shupak writes fiction, non-fiction and book reviews. He teaches Media Studies at the University of Guelph.
In this new and expanded edition of Michel Chossudovsky’s 2002 best seller, the author blows away the smokescreen put up by the mainstream media, that 9/11 was an attack on America by “Islamic terrorists”. Through meticulous research, the author uncovers a military-intelligence ploy behind the September 11 attacks, and the cover-up and complicity of key members of the Bush Administration.
The expanded edition, which includes twelve new chapters focuses on the use of 9/11 as a pretext for the invasion and illegal occupation of Iraq, the militarisation of justice and law enforcement and the repeal of democracy.
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
September 11, 2001 provides a justification for waging a war without borders. Washington’s agenda consists in extending the frontiers of the American Empire to facilitate complete U.S. corporate control, while installing within America the institutions of the Homeland Security State.
August 2nd, 2018 by Center For Biological Diversity
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Featured image: Western bumblebee photo by Steve Amus, USDA.
Four commonly used neonicotinoid pesticides can harm bees and other pollinators, according to a new analysis by California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation. The study found that current approved uses of the “neonics” on crops like tomatoes, berries, almonds, corn and oranges exposes bees to levels of the pesticides known to cause harm.
“The more we learn about the toxicity of neonics, the more apparent it is that pretty much any plant with nectar or pollen sprayed with these poisons is unsafe for bees,” said Nathan Donley, a senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This important analysis is further proof that it’s time to ban all outdoor use of these harmful pesticides on crops.”
Recent analyses by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency identified harms to bees and pollinators from neonics used on cotton, citrus and several other fruits. But California’s analysis indicates neonics can cause much broader harm, including to pollinators commonly found on many types of vegetables, cereal grains, tree nuts, fruits and tobacco.
One of the most important findings of the new California analysis is the discovery of the high risk to bees posed by use of two neonicotinoids, thiamethoxam and clothianidin, on cereal grains like corn, wheat, rice and barley. Late last year the U.S. EPA announced it would consider an application from Syngenta to spray thiamethoxam directly on 165 million acres of wheat, barley, corn, sorghum, alfalfa, rice and potato.
Earlier this year California announced that it would no longer consider any applications by pesticide companies that would expand the use of bee-killing neonicotinoid pesticides in the state.
“At the same time California is wisely prohibiting new uses of neonics, the U.S. EPA is considering approving the spraying of a neonic known to be harmful to pollinators on an area nearly the size of Texas,” said Donley. “It’s dangerous and it doesn’t make any sense.”
Background
Earlier this year, the European Union banned neonicotinoids for outdoor uses in agriculture. Europe’s decision came after Canada’s pesticide regulatory agency recommended banning imidacloprid, the most widely used neonicotinoid, based on demonstrated harms to aquatic ecosystems.
As other developed nations further restrict the use of these poisons, the U.S. EPA has largely ignored the risks. Last year a rule that would have placed limited restrictions on neonics when commercial honeybees were present in fields was changed from mandatory to voluntary.
The U.S. EPA is currently in the process of reanalyzing neonic impacts to humans and the environment and is expected to re-approve the pesticides by the end of 2018.
California’s pesticide office is in the process of identifying mitigation measures to reduce the risk of neonics to bees, which the agency says will be finalized in the next two years.
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Russia is pursuing a remarkably balanced naval strategy in the Afro-Bengal Ocean (Indian Ocean) that strives to maintain equal relations with its Pakistani and Indian counterparts, being drawn to the region not just because of its desire to maintain strategic stability between these two rivals through “military diplomacy”, but also to protect forthcoming offshore energy investments and participate in the game of prestige that all Great Powers are presently playing in this crucial body of water.
The Russian Navy isn’t usually the first branch of the Armed Forces that comes to mind when thinking about the country’s military, but it nevertheless has taken on a heightened strategic importance over the past few years following its participation in the anti-terrorist campaign in Syria, most notably through the launching of its Kalibr cruise missiles from positions in the Caspian and Eastern Mediterranean Seas. President Putin also announced over the weekend during the Navy Day celebrations in Saint Petersburg that his country’s flotilla will receive 26 new ships by the end of the year, further emphasizing the significance of naval assets for Russia’s grand strategy.
There are plenty of uses that Russia’s five existing fleets (Baltic, Black, Caspian, Northern, and Pacific) can have in advancing Moscow’s defensive designs across the 21st century, but this piece proposes that the country’s navy might begin expanding its scope of operations to the Afro-Bengal Ocean (still popularly known by its colonial-era name as the “Indian Ocean”). There was already a very minor presence here during the last decade in the Gulf of Aden in order to support the international mission against piracy in the region, but two recent developments point to a more pronounced shift towards this highly strategic southern body of water.
“Military Diplomacy”
The first is that Pakistan’s Vice Chief of Naval Staff visited Saint Petersburg last weekend and signed a Memorandum of Understand (MoU) with the Russian Navy, which coincided not just with Russia’s Navy Day celebrations, but also the first-ever visit of the Pakistani Navy to the Baltic Sea. Shortly afterwards, news reports circulated that Russia had earlier proposed a LEMOA-like logistics agreement with India, though one that supposedly has to do more with servicing equipment than using the host country’s facilities for de-facto forward-operating purposes like the Americans have in mind. Taken together, it’s clear that Russia is trying to “balance” Pakistan and India in the Afro-Bengal Ocean.
At this point, it’s important to comment on Russia’s strategy of “military diplomacy”, which seeks to maintain the balance of power between multiple pairs of rival states through arms shipments and other forms of military cooperation with both. In the relevant context, this explains why Russia continues to export billions of dollars of weaponry to India while expanding its anti-terrorist military cooperation with Pakistan to the naval realm. Keeping this nuanced policy in mind, it wouldn’t be surprising if Russia’s offer to sell its Kalibr-armed Karakurt corvettes to India, Vietnam, and China was broadened to also include Pakistan one day in order to maintain the greatest degree of “balance” in the Afro-Pacific.
After all, the India-China and Vietnam-China pairs of rivaling states form the basis of Russia’s “balancing act” in Asia, especially its military component, but relentless American and “Israeli” inroads into India’s military-industrial complex in recent years have chipped away at Moscow’s former dominance of this sphere and compelled it to diversify its Asian arms portfolio. This is one of the many reasons why Russia is engaging in unprecedented levels of military cooperation with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan as part of its “Ummah Pivot”, so it would follow that naval sales to Pakistan might eventually become a part of this larger strategy, especially if India rebuffs Russia’s LEMOA-like proposal because of American pressure.
“Energy Diplomacy” And Prestige
Looking beyond the indirect regional presence established through “military diplomacy”, Russia will soon have other reasons to directly involve itself in the Afro-Bengal Ocean if its prospective offshore Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline is ever built. All Great Powers have an interest in defending such multibillion-dollar investments, and Russia is no different. It could also be drawn closer to this body of water through any forthcoming energy cooperation with India and Myanmar, and especially if it acquires a foothold in the LNG-rich countries of Tanzania and Mozambique as part of its plan to become one of Africa’s main energy partners. Through these means, Russia’s “energy diplomacy” could actually drive its “military diplomacy”.
Fielding a flotilla in the Afro-Bengal Ocean isn’t just about simple pragmatism and the tangible defense of one’s national interests, but is also increasingly taking on a very influential prestige component whereby all emerging and established powers are feeling compelled to have a presence in this region simply by inertia of everyone else seemingly doing so too. This dynamic was first put on full display during the pre-“Scramble for Africa” of the 21st century that saw many countries dispatching naval forces to the Gulf of Aden to combat piracy, where most of them continued to remain in one capacity or another following the climax of that crisis.
From Sudan To Pakistan
Great Powers such as Italy and Japan, who aren’t normally associated with the Afro-Bengal Ocean, actually have bases in Djibouti that allow them to maintain a position in this strategic region, and even landlocked Ethiopia has plans to build a navy, proving just how far the prestige game is going in this part of the world. To that end, Russia might seriously consider taking Sudan up on its offer to build a naval facility in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan, from where it could simultaneously exert influence along the Sahelian-Saharan Silk Road inside the African hinterland through its terminal port and also into the Afro-Bengal Ocean beyond the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden.
Bearing in mind that Pakistan also has a developing interest in expanding its all-around connectivity with Africa in order to benefit from China’s increasing trade with the continent through CPEC, it would make sense for its navy to conceptualize a strategy for the Arabian Sea-Gulf of Aden (ASGA) region as a first step to advancing this vision. The overlap of naval interests between Russia and Pakistan could possibly even see the pairing of their proposed naval facilities in Port Sudan with Gwadar through a LEMOA-like logistics agreement between these two Great Powers, thereby facilitating the Russian Navy’s defensive patrols of the IPI pipeline and the Pakistani ones of CPEC’s Sea Lines Of Communication (SLOC).
Concluding Thoughts
It shouldn’t be forgotten that none of these possible long-term plans are aimed against any country, especially India and the US vis-à-vis Russia and Pakistan’s motivations respectively, but that the abovementioned ideas are intended to epitomize win-win cooperation in the emerging Multipolar World Order. Russia’s recently reported efforts to clinch a LEMOA-like deal with India are proof of its desire to preemptively quash any externally manipulated “security dilemma” between these two historic partners and signal that its fast-moving “military diplomacy” with Pakistan isn’t meant to disrupt the regional balance like the US’ moves with India are.
Given the enormity of energy investments that Russia is making in the Mideast, South Asia, and Southeast Asia (with reference off the Myanmar coast), and the plans that it has to expand its extraction operations into Africa (with a particular focus on Mozambique), it only makes sense that Moscow would begin preparing well in advance to field its navy in the Afro-Bengal Ocean just like it did during the Soviet period, albeit for entirely different reasons during the present era. The game of Great Power prestige also has something to do with it as well, so be that as it may, Russia has plenty of reasons to resume its naval activity in this strategic space.
*
This article was originally published on Eurasia Future.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China’s One Belt One Road global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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You may recall the fuss Theresa May made about getting rid of the Islamist preacher Abu Qatada.
In the end it took 11 years of legal wrangling to get this fanatic, with his very nasty opinions, out of the country.
Without her personal intervention at the end, he would probably still be here.
Why, then, is the British Government seriously considering welcoming into this country an unknown number of men who have been – I put this at its mildest – closely associated for several years with an armed faction linked to Al Qaeda, or with others perhaps even worse?
Was all the fuss about Abu Qatada just a public relations front? Or does the right hand just not know what the left hand is doing?
Here’s what is going on. Last week the new Foreign Secretary, Jeremy Hunt, put his name to a very odd statement about a very odd event.
I think the nicest thing to say here is that Mr Hunt is a bit inexperienced. The statement said that Britain would be ‘protecting’ a group of ‘White Helmets’, supposedly civil defence workers from Syria. That’s what they call themselves, anyway.
The 400 people involved (a quarter of them said to be ‘White Helmets’) had been caught by the sudden collapse of Islamist jihadi rebel forces in a southern corner of Syria next to the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights.
And, despite the defeated rebels being Islamist jihadi fanatics, they were mysteriously allowed to cross into Israel so that they could escape to Jordan.
Israel? Such people normally regard Israel with violent hatred, a feeling Israel returns with interest.
As far as I can discover, other defeated groups of Syrian rebels and their hangers-on have been bussed under safe conducts to the rebel-held north of Syria, under Turkish and Russian supervision. Why not this time?
Later, the Jordanian government revealed that some of them would now be resettled in Britain. Its spokesman announced that Britain, Germany and Canada made a ‘legally binding undertaking’ to resettle them ‘within a specified period of time’ due to ‘a risk to their lives’. Legally binding, eh?
What was this risk? What were they so worried about? Why do they need to come to Britain when the whole Arab Muslim world must presumably long to welcome these glorious, self-sacrificing heroes?
For, according to the Foreign Office, and many others, the ‘White Helmets’ are the good guys.
They like them so much they have so far spent £38.4million of your money and mine on supporting them.
The FO is in a mess over this. It has for years been backing the Islamist rebels against the Syrian government, a policy which involves supporting exactly the sort of people we would arrest if we found them in Birmingham.
Perhaps that is why it claims the ‘White Helmets’ are ‘volunteers’ (they are often paid) and that they have ‘saved over 115,000 lives during the Syrian conflict’ and done ‘brave and selfless work’ to ‘save Syrians on all sides of the conflict.’
When I asked them to provide independent, checkable evidence for these assertions, they came up empty after three days of searching.
This is not surprising, as the ‘White Helmets’ generally operate only in areas controlled by unlovely bodies such as the Al-Nusra Front, until recently an affiliate of Al Qaeda, and the equally charming Jaish al-Islam (Army of Islam), famous for putting captured Syrian Army soldiers in cages and using them as human shields.
Independent Western observers, whether they are diplomats or journalists, can’t really go to these zones, because they are quite likely to end up very dead and probably headless.
So you can choose whether to believe the ‘White Helmets’ and their flattering picture of their own goodness, or wonder why exactly they are in such need of protection that these much-feted and saintly humanitarians are willing to be evacuated through a country that most Arab Muslims loathe and despise, rather than rely on the mercy of their own countrymen.
Is it possible (I only ask) that, while undoubtedly brilliant at public relations, and at making slick videos showing themselves rescuing wounded children, the ‘White Helmets’ are not quite as nice as they say they are?
Even the USA, which has for years (like us) helped the Syrian rebels, refused entry to the leader of the ‘White Helmets’, Raed Saleh, when he arrived at Washington’s Dulles Airport in 2016. They won’t say why.
The FO tells me that the Home Office, not them, will be vetting those chosen to come here. I hope they are careful when they do so. I am sure that future Home Secretaries will not be grateful if any of the new arrivals turns out to have the same opinions as Abu Qatada.
In any case, it is time the British Government came clean about who it has been helping in Syria.
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Republic of South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa hosted the 10thBRICS Summit where strong opposition to the burgeoning trade and currency wars initiated by the United States administration of President Donald Trump was assailed.
There was a time when the contamination of drinking water constituted a punishable crime. Nowadays those who willfully ignore or promote the destruction of the Earth’s atmosphere and ocean acidification through the rise in emission of carbon gases (2014 ~36.08 billion ton CO2/year ; 2017 ~36.79 billion ton CO2/year), hold major sway in the world.
Trump is now desperate to deflect criticism away from his much-criticized summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump knows that a war — conducted with the right spin — could help the GOP in the midterm elections. And Israel, the United States’ closest ally, has been gunning for regime change in Iran, which Israel considers to be an existential threat.
The Indian OceanNewsletterreports that French intelligence warned Yoweri Museveni that Kagame was plotting to have his plane shot down over Rwanda, causing him to cancel a flight from Uganda to Burundi for a summit. If said plot had come to fruition, it would have been Kagame’s second presidential assassination by plane shoot-down over Rwanda. In 1994, his men shot down the plane carrying Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian Hutu President Cyprien Ntaryamira from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. That shoot-down triggered the infamous hundred days of ethnic massacres known as the Rwandan Genocide.
So President Donald Trump reckoned on Monday that the United States Intelligence Community (IC) just might be wrong in its assessment that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election but then decided on Tuesday that he misspoke and had the greatest confidence in the IC and now agrees that they were correct in their judgment.
South Korean peace and justice activists have been writing to us at Popular Resistance complaining that the United States is not responding to the positive steps being taken by North Korea before and after the meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim. They have sent us information about protests they are organizing in South Korea aginst the United States as well as in Washington, DC.
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Israel’s Defence Ministry announced on Thursday it was banning gas and fuel from entering Gaza via the Kerem Shalom crossing, the main point of entry of international aid into the besieged strip.
Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the decision aims to stop Palestinians from using kites and balloons set on fire and flown over the fence to cause damage in Israel.
“The decision has been taken in view of the continued terror of incendiary balloons and friction along the fence,” a statement by Lieberman’s office said.
Palestinians say the balloons are a modest and legitimate means of resistance against Israel’s deadly violence and blockade of Gaza.
Israel has stepped up its crippling sanctions on Gaza as Palestinians continue to regularly demonstrate along the fence separating Gaza from Israel as part of the Great March of Return.
The protest campaign calls for an end to the 11-year Israeli blockade on Gaza and for Palestinian refugees’ right of return to the lands that their families fled during the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948.
Since the demonstrations began on 30 March, the Israeli army has killed at least 155 Palestinian protesters, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Israel had closed the Kerem Shalom crossing and reopened it partially last week after warnings from UN officials that emergency fuel supplies are running low in the Gaza Strip.
Fuel shortages and power cuts have created a dire situation for hospitals and water sanitation systems.
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After nearly 18 months of sittings and questioning witnesses, parliament’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee (DCMS) has finally released an interim report on “fake news.”
“Evidence” has been selected and manipulated to justify the committee’s demand to ramp-up the UK ruling elite’s anti-Russia campaign.
On the pretext of combating fake news from Russia, the report calls for immediate steps to crack down on the democratic rights of individuals and political organisations, censor social media and close down alternative media sources that expose the plans of the imperialist powers.
A related purpose of the report is to use allegations of Russian political interference to halt or reverse the Brexit vote.
The select committee investigation was launched in January 2017, tasked with investigating “fake news” and centring on accusations of “foreign interference” in the June 2016 referendum on UK membership of the European Union and the June 2017 general election. It was formed in tandem with the Democratic Party’s campaign against the victory of Donald Trump in the US presidential election which has also centred on allegations of Russian interference.
The DCMS summary states,
“There are many potential threats to our democracy and our values,” including ‘fake news,’ created for profit or other gain, disseminated through state-sponsored programmes, or spread through the deliberate distortion of facts, by groups with a particular agenda, including the desire to affect political elections.”
“Such has been the impact of this agenda, the focus of our inquiry moved from understanding the phenomenon of ‘fake news,’ distributed largely through social media, to issues concerning the very future of democracy. Arguably, more invasive than obviously false information is the relentless targeting of hyper-partisan views, which play to the fears and prejudices of people, in order to influence their voting plans and their behaviour.”
The DCMS identifies Russia as the puppet master able to influence the thoughts and very actions of millions of people all over the world:
“In particular, we heard evidence of Russian state-sponsored attempts to influence elections in the US and the UK through social media, of the efforts of private companies to do the same, and of law-breaking by certain Leave campaign groups in the UK’s EU Referendum in their use of social media.”
The DCMS calls on the term “fake news” to be discarded by the government as there is “no clear idea of what it means, or agreed definition.” Instead, the government should put forward “an agreed definition of the words ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation,’” that “can be used as the basis of regulation and enforcement.”
Why the DMCS, consisting of five Conservatives, five Labourites and a Scottish National Party representative would feel it necessary to discard the term “fake news” is clear. These are representatives of a right-wing political and corporate set-up that is universally despised. This same parliament voted to take Britain to war in Iraq based on lies that Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction.” The most infamous “fake news” document of the 21st century, the “dodgy dossier,” was used in 2003 to justify the US/UK led invasion that resulted in over a million deaths.
Russia or “Russian” is mentioned 134 times in the report, an average of 1.5 mentions per page. It states that, “The evidence led us to the role of Russia specifically, in supporting organisations that create and disseminate disinformation, false and hyper-partisan content, with the purpose of undermining public confidence and of destabilising democratic states. This activity we are describing as ‘disinformation’ and it is an active threat.”
When it comes to quantifying the “active threat,” the DCMS offers nothing of substance. It castigates Facebook who “told us that the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) had bought only three adverts for $0.97 in the days before the Brexit vote.” It adds, “According to evidence that Facebook submitted to Congress, and later released publicly, Russian anti-immigrant adverts were placed in October 2015 targeting the UK, as well as Germany and France. These amounted to 5,514.85 roubles (around £66).”
Asked by the DMCS to provide details on all political advertising paid for by Russian agencies targeting UK Facebook users from October 2015 to date, Facebook replied in June this year, “Looking further back over the activity of the IRA accounts from as early as January 2015 (including the period of over a year before the start of the regulated referendum period), the total spend on impressions delivered to the UK is approximately $463.”
In order words, the “meddling” in British politics since 2015 by Russia consists of paying $463 in Facebook adverts!
This didn’t suit the objectives of the DCMC, who describe Facebook’s response as “obfuscation.”
After stating it has received “disturbing evidence,” of hacking, disinformation and voter suppression in elections since 2010, it notes that some of this remains unpublished.
The report seeks to link the Leave campaign with Russian interference, stating in bolded text that businessman and UK Independence Party funder “Arron Banks is believed to have donated £8.4 million to the Leave campaign, the largest political donation in British politics, but it is unclear from where he obtained that amount of money.”
Banks is estimated to be worth anything up to £250 million. Without revealing any of it, the report states,
“we have evidence of… Banks’ discussions with Russian Embassy contacts, including the Russian Ambassador, over potential gold and diamond deals, and the passing of confidential information by… Banks.”
The DCMS campaign was given the imprimatur of the mouthpiece of the Remain campaign and leading voice demanding an anti-Russian agenda, the Guardian. It hailed the “plucky little committee,” editorialising that its report has “the potential to reshape the political landscape,” as it “deals with issues demanding essential action. For this is subject-matter on which neutrality is not an option.”
Citing “Russian dirty tricks and destabilisation, Facebook’s consistent refusals to acknowledge its practical, moral or legal responsibilities, and the reckless audacity and contempt with which groups like SCL Elections, Cambridge Analytica, Global Science Research and Aggregate IQ—as well as the Vote Leave and Leave.EU campaigns—defied the regulatory authorities and the whole idea of the rule of law in politics,” it complains, “It is not impossible that this superior ruthlessness, audacity and defiance enabled the leave side to win the 2016 referendum…”
This must be combated by a huge assault on democratic rights, with the DCMS stating, “In this rapidly changing digital world, our existing legal framework is no longer fit for purpose.”
In a measure aimed at censoring web sites that oppose official lies, it states that government should “initiate a working group of experts to create a credible annotation of standards, so that people can see, at a glance, the level of verification of a site.”
A “new category of tech company” should be developed, “which is not necessarily either a ‘platform’ or ‘publisher.’” These companies should have a “clear legal liability” to “act against harmful and illegal content.”
This would be the basis for a dragnet to delete masses of social media content.
The liability should “include both content that has been referred to them for takedown by their users, and other content that should have been easy for the tech companies to identify for themselves. In these cases, failure to act on behalf of the tech companies could leave them open to legal proceedings launched either by a public regulator, and/or by individuals or organisations who have suffered as a result of this content being freely disseminated on a social media platform.”
It recommends, “ Paid-for political advertising data on social media platforms, particularly in relation to political adverts,” should identify their “source, explaining who uploaded it, who sponsored it, and its country of origin.”
A ban on micro-targeted political advertising to similar audiences and “a minimum limit for the number of voters sent individual political messages should be agreed, at a national level. ”
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Featured image: Syrian government forces arrive at Quneitra crossing in Syrian Golan to resume control (Source: Tikun Olam)
Just as Russia doused a potential conflagration over stationing of Iranian forces in the Syrian Golan, Bibi Netanyahulit sparks in the south over a Houthi rocket attack on a Saudi oil tanker. For months, Israel has cajoled and threatened Russia into restraining Iran from stationing its forces in the Syrian Golan. As a result, the Russians have just successfully completed a meeting with Iran and Turkey, which guaranteed that Iranian forces and their Shiite militias will withdraw to 85 kilometers from the Golan armistice line. In exchange, Israel has been forced to accept the return of Syrian forces to this zone and the return of government control. Previously, the Golan had been controlled by Israeli Islamist allies, al-Nusra, which is affiliated with al Qaeda.
Israel had demanded that the Iranians withdraw completely from Syria, though this clearly was a non-starter. Later, it suggested the Iranians stay within 100 miles of the ceasefire line. It remains to be seen whether this will bring the desired quiet to this volatile front. Israel has mounted hundreds of air attacks on Iranian and Hezbollah positions inside the country. If it doesn’t cease these assaults, then it could draw the Iranians back across the 85km line in response.
Netanyahu, whose premiership seems built upon the premise of constant war or threat of war, today turned to his southern flank. He told a military ceremony that if Iran’s Houthi allies continued to threaten shipping in the Bab al Mandab waterway separating Yemen from the Horn of Africa, the IDF would join or lead a Sunni coalition which would break such a blockade and counter-attack against Iran. This is precisely the response Israel’s Saudi allies expected when Houthi forces fired a missile at a Saudi oil tanker headed to Egypt.
It seems to me that we are now in a pre-WWI situation in the Middle East. There are primary enemies (Iran, Saudi Arabia and Israel) and there are secondary states allied with one side or the other: Yemen, Syria, Iraq vs. Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states, Egypt, Jordan and Israel. Not only can war break out due to a direct conflict between the primary parties; even an inadvertent provocation by one of the secondary allies could launch a major conflagration. This is precisely how WWI commenced with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists.
Imagine that Houthi missile actually blowing up the ship and its 2-million gallons of oil. Or imagine the assassination of a major figure in any of these countries. All it will take is a single spark to light this fuse. Unlike Donald Trump thus far, Netanyahu has shown himself ready and willing to take his country to war. At least twice earlier in his reign, he pressured his security cabinet to attack Iran. Both times, his military and security chiefs rose up and objected to such plans, and both times Netanyahu backed down. But clearly, he’s itching to give Iran a bloody nose.
Of course the problem with this is that the result could be far worse than a bloody nose. In fact, the result could be rivers of blood: both Iranian and Israeli.
Today, The Intercept revealed that former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson nearly single-handedly talked the Saudi leadership out of invading Qatar shortly after it declared a blockade on the Gulf kingdom, which the Saudis saw as betraying their Sunni allegiance by sidling up to Iran over oil and gas deals. Until Tillerson intervened to prevent such an escalation, Pres. Trump seemed only to happy not just to side with the Saudis in the conflict, but to permit a major military invasion of Qatar. It was only after his secretary of state’s efforts bore fruit and the Saudis stood down from launching their war plans that Trump switched gears and toned down his anti-Qatar rhetoric.
If there had been such a war, it’s entirely possible that Iran would have sided with Qatar. Turkey too supported the Qataris in this episode. Would either or both of them have provided military support or even troops to support the Qataris? Even if the Saudis had succeeded initially in taking over Qatar, it’s unlikely this would have been the end of things. The Qataris would have continued to resist foreign occupation. Their allies would provide logistical and military support. At that point, the Saudis would have had two huge headaches on their hands: Yemen, where they’ve killed over 50,000 Yemenis; and Qatar. These are just the sorts of misadventures which are likely to lead to full-scale region-wide military conflict.
Someone has to be the adult in this situation and hold up their hand and say: Stop! Luckily for us, Tillerson was that person. For his troubles, the Saudis and UAE ganged up on him and demanded that Trump fire him, which he later dutifully did. Given the largess that these two states have thrown around Washington during the Trump administration, I have little doubt that a backroom deal involving consulting contracts and other forms of largesse greased the skids on the Tillerson firing. It remains for Bob Mueller and enterprising journalists to offer us further revelations on this score.
Speculate for a second what might have happened if, instead of Rex Tillerson and H.R. McMaster running the show, it had been Mike Pompeo and John Bolton. Given Pompeo and Bolton’s hankering for regime change in Iran, there is no chance they would have pursued the path the fired secretary of state did. If anything, they would have piled fuel on the fire and given their blessings to yet another Saudi military adventure-intervention. God help us if it comes to this again. There will be war in the region and we will be partners in the slaughter.
It would be unthinkable for an American opposition party run openly out of Moscow to compete in American elections. It would be even more unthinkable for the Russian government to declare US elections illegitimate for disallowing a Moscow-backed party from running in American elections.
Yet this is precisely what the US and the European Union have attempted to do in the wake of Cambodia’s recent elections regarding an opposition party created by Washington and whose leadership calls Washington a second home.
US-EU Seek to Undermine Cambodian Election Results
Critics have called the vote a sham as the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP), which narrowly lost the last election, has been dissolved.
The US said the poll was “flawed”.
“We are profoundly disappointed in the government’s choice to disenfranchise millions of voters, who are rightly proud of their country’s development over the past 25 years,” a statement from the White House said.
The US will consider placing visa restrictions on more government officials, it added. The EU has said it is considering economic sanctions.
However, the BBC never explains why the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) was dissolved.
Had it, Washington and Brussels’ statements would have been immediately rendered hypocritical and Cambodia’s decision to dissolve CNRP more than warranted. This is because CNRP is openly run out of Washington, with US support, for the expressed aim of undermining and eventually overthrowing the current Cambodian government.
Cambodia’s Opposition is Run From Washington
Kem Sokha who had led CNRP until its dissolution had traveled to Washington annually since as early as 1993 to seek support from the US. He also repeatedly announced receiving direct US support, as well as plans for subverting the Cambodian government with US backing.
Sokha says he has visited the US at the government’s request every year since 1993 to learn about the “democratisation process” and that “they decided” he should step aside from politics to create change in Cambodia.
“They said if we want to change the leadership, we cannot fight the top. Before changing the top level, we need to uproot the lower one. We need to change the lower level first. It is a political strategy in a democratic country,” he said.
Regarding US assistance, Kem Sokha would reveal:
“And, the USA that has assisted me, they asked me to take the model from Yugoslavia, Serbia, where they can changed the dictator Slobodan Milosevic,” he continues, referring to the former Serbian and Yugoslavian leader who resigned amid popular protests following disputed elections, and died while on trial for war crimes.
“You know Milosevic had a huge numbers of tanks. But they changed things by using this strategy, and they take this experience for me to implement in Cambodia. But no one knew about this.”
“However, since we are now reaching at this stage, today I must tell you about this strategy. We will have more to continue and we will succeed.”
Kem Sokha would elaborate even further, claiming:
“I do not do anything at my own will. Their experts, professors at universities in Washington, DC, Montreal, Canada, hired by the Americans in order to advise me on the strategy to change the dictator leader in Cambodia.”
Kem Sokha’s daughter, Kem Monovithya, has also openly worked with the US to seek the overthrow of the Cambodian government.
When Cambodia began its crackdown on both CNRP and the US-funded organisations supporting it, the US threatened sanctions and other punitive measures. Kem Monovithya would play a central role in promoting these punitive measures in Washington.
…in Washington, a panel of “witnesses” convened by the House Foreign Affairs Committee – including Kem Sokha’s daughter, Kem Monovithya – called for additional action in response to the political crackdown. In a statement, Monovithya urged targeted financial sanctions against government officials responsible for undermining democracy. She also called on the US to suspend “any and all assistance for the central Cambodian Government”, while “continuing democracy assistance programs for civil society, particularly those engaged in election-related matters”.
Kem Sokha, a former Cambodian senator and official, heads the Cambodian Center for Human Rights, which is supported by U.S. government funds. The center has held public forums to hear complaints about conditions in Cambodia.
Regarding Kem Monovithya herself, the Washington Post would note:
Monovitha Kem, a business school graduate and aspiring lawyer, said she would lobby U.S. and international institutions to fight Hun Sen’s decision.
“I would like to see the charges dropped not just for my father, but for all other activists,” she said in an interview Monday. “I hope they will amend the defamation law.”
Monovitha Kem has met with officials at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the U.S. Agency for International Development and major human rights groups.
The National Democratic Institute (NDI) and International Republican Institute (IRI) are both subsidiaries of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) which, together with the US government itself, have supported myriad subversive activities within Cambodia for years.
This includes a number of organisations cited in a May 2018 Washington Post article attempting to deny claims of US meddling by citing almost exclusively US-funded fronts operating in Cambodia.
This includes Licadho, which is funded by both the UK government and the US via USAID. It also includes Radio Free Asia and Voice of America, both of which are funded by the US government and overseen by the Broadcasting Board of Governors chaired by US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo himself. There is also the Cambodian Center for Independent Media, funded by NED subsidiaries Freedom House and IRI as well as the British Embassy and convicted financial criminal George Soros’ Open Society Foundation.
Literally decades of US meddling in Cambodia’s politics, including the creation of both Kem Sokha’s opposition party and organisations created and funded by the US government to support it, along with plans to overthrow the current Cambodian government to install CNRP into power, represents in reality political meddling many times worse than even the most imaginative accusations made against Russia in regards to meddling in US and European politics.
US Meddling Seeks Chinese Encirclement
US interests in Cambodia go beyond merely controlling the nation’s people and resources, it stems primarily from a much wider and long-term plan to encircle China with client states serving Washington’s vision of perpetual American primacy in Asia.
Along with allegations from US-European leadership and their respective media conglomerations attempting to condemn Cambodia’s recent elections as “illegitimate,” US-European media made little effort to hide equal condemnation regarding China’s inroads into Cambodia recently.
China announced a major infrastructure project in Cambodia midway through its election campaign and denounced proposed economic sanctions by the European Union on the Southeast Asian nation.
China’s ambassador in Phnom Penh also attended a ruling party rally in the Cambodian capital, according to a media report.
The flurry of moves during the three-week campaign shows China is leaving nothing to chance to ensure its most loyal ally in Southeast Asia, Cambodia’s long-time ruler Hun Sen, comfortably wins Sunday’s poll, political analysts said.
Thus, while many may be tempted to defend US meddling in Cambodia as they have similar US meddling elsewhere as merely “promoting democracy” and “human rights,” it is clear that US meddling in Cambodia sought to prevent China from building constructive ties with a friendly government by creating a client state that would spur Beijing in favour of Washington.
Reuters complains that Cambodia has supported Beijing over Washington amid ongoing South China Sea tensions. Reuters even obliquely suggests that infrastructure deals made between China and Cambodia during the election campaign constituted some form of political meddling. No mention of overt US meddling in Cambodian politics, including the creation and sponsorship of the main opposition party, CNRP is made in Reuters’ article.
While Reuters claims Cambodian relations with the West includes “decades of diplomatic effort and billions of dollars of aid and investment,” Cambodia has very little to show for it. Claims that the West “bristled at human rights violations and electoral irregularities in Cambodia” opened the door for closer Chinese-Cambodian ties begs belief considering no such human rights-based “bristling” occurs in regards to Western ties with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the current government in Ukraine.
It is clear that the US and Europe attempted to reassert control over Cambodia through the co-opting of its government and institutions and that much of the West’s supposed “investments” in Cambodia were directed into this political meddling. Conversely, China is proposing actual infrastructure projects like motorways, airports and electricity distribution networks, all areas Cambodia is critically lacking in, even after “billions of dollars of aid and investment” from the West.
Cambodia, through its ties with China and its own straightforward approach to uprooting foreign meddling in its internal affairs has averted the latest attempt by the US and Europe to destabilise the nation and exert control over its future from Washington and Brussels. Other nations in the region, including neighbouring Thailand and Malaysia, still face extensive US-European meddling including persistent street movements and large networks of US-funded media platforms, legal firms and even political parties seeking to destabilise, and if possible, overthrow local governments and independent institutions.
Only through fully recognising the threat and working together can Southeast Asia ensure the age of American-European colonisation has ended for good and a new era of multipolarism and self-determination can begin.
Joseph Thomas is chief editor of Thailand-based geopolitical journal, The New Atlas and contributor to the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook” where this article was first published.
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Republic of South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa hosted the 10th BRICS Summit where strong opposition to the burgeoning trade and currency wars initiated by the United States administration of President Donald Trump was assailed.
Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) want to expand international cooperation and seek avenues of development independent of the western industrialized states.
The gathering comes at a time of rising acrimony prompted by the imposition of tariffs by the U.S. against Canada, the European Union and the People’s Republic of China. Although Trump said he was amending some of his measures during a meeting with EU President Jean-Claude Juncker on July 25 at the White House, it was not clear what the actual outcome of the putative truce would involve.
On May 23 Trump ordered an investigation by the Department of Commerce under Section 232 on whether the importation of vehicles was a threat to national security. A conference of non-U.S. auto producers took place on July 31 in Geneva, Switzerland where a possible strategy to counter the Trump policy was discussed.
Attending the gathering in Geneva were the deputy trade ministers of the EU, Canada, Mexico, Japan and South Korea. Altogether these nations account for approximately $1 trillion in auto exports to the international market.
However, in South Africa the tone of the discussion was quite different. The 10th BRICS Summit was convened under the theme “BRICS in Africa: Collaboration for Inclusive Growth and Shared Prosperity in the Fourth Industrial Revolution”.
The bloc of member-nations and observers represent the so-called rapidly expanding “emerging economies.” These states have been marked by phenomenal economic growth over the last decade although they are facing profound challenges from the Western industrialized governments who are obviously threatened by the potential erosion of their global power.
A statement from the South African presidency said of the gathering that:
“The Summit is focused on the need to strengthen the relationship between BRICS and Africa. In this regard BRICS leaders will also interact with African leaders on how best to bring about inclusive growth and shared prosperity through heightened collaboration. In this context, leaders of the Republics of Namibia, Gabon, Angola, Senegal, Uganda, Togo and Rwanda will participate in the BRICS-Africa Outreach session.”
Prior to the summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited for the first times the West African state of Senegal and Rwanda in the eastern region of the continent. Discussions with Senegalese President Macky Sall and Rwandan leader Paul Kagame resulted in the deepening of economic relations between these African Union member-states and China. Following the BRICS Summit, President Xi stopped over in Mauritius where he held talks with Prime Minister Pravind Kumar Jugnauth.
In a media advisory issued by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs it says:
“The visits will promote the further deepening of political mutual trust, mutual development assistance, mutual learning on each other’s concepts between China and Africa and the building of a closer China-Africa community of common destiny. They will jointly witness the signing of a series of cooperation agreements to elevate China-Rwanda practical cooperation to new highs.”
BRICS African participants, July 2018
Outcomes of the Summit
At the conclusion of the meeting, there was a 102-point declaration issued by the participants addressing a wide range of concerns from the role of the United Nations Security Council, the World Trade Organization (WTO), along with encouraging international cooperation in the fields of cinema, sports, culture, peacekeeping and economic development. The scope of the declaration is so broad that it encompasses the various political characteristics of the member-states and observers. (See this)
Although the final document does not directly criticize the protectionist and hostile economic posture of the U.S., it is obvious that the general tone of the proceedings poses a rebuttal to the efforts by the Trump administration to reclaim an uncontested dominant role for Washington and Wall Street in the present world situation. Ruling class interests in the U.S. clearly views the role of the Russian Federation and China as imperiling the existing international division of labor and financial power, where the leading imperialist nation is responding with threats of trade and currency wars which could easily lead to intensified military conflict over the control of the land, resources and waterways of the planet.
“We are meeting here, ladies and gentlemen, at a time when the multilateral trading system is facing unprecedented challenges. We are concerned by the rise in unilateral measures that are incompatible with World Trade Organization rules, and we are worried about the impact of these measures, especially as they impact on developing countries and economies. These developments call for thorough discussion on the role of trade in growing and promoting sustainable development, particularly in inclusive growth.”
President Xi spoke after his South African counterpart sounding a similar alarm stressing the need to oppose the Trump administration’s unilateralism. China, by far the largest economy among the BRICS grouping, and the second only to the U.S., is seeking to build a different type of inter-regional coalition aimed at countering U.S. influence.
The Chinese president said of the contemporary crisis in international relations related to Washington and the rest of the world that:
“Unilateralism and protectionism are mounting, dealing a severe blow to multilateralism and the multilateral trading regime. We are facing a choice between cooperation and confrontation, between [an] opening up and a closed doors policy, between future benefits and the beggar-thy-neighbor approach. The international community has indeed reached a new crossroads.”
New Avenues of Cooperation and Development
BRICS has established a New Development Bank whose aim is to establish an alternative to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Its goal is the accumulation of $100 billion in capital to disperse among member-states and others in the global south. By the end of 2018, the NDB will have loaned $7.5 billion to various countries.
South Africa has received $180 million toward the state-controlled ESKOM Holdings SOC Ltd. for a renewable energy project. Another loan of $200 million has been allocated for the reconstruction of the Durban container terminal.
China on its own announced during the BRICS Summit that it is willing to invest $14.7 billion into ESKOM which has suffered immensely over the last few years. This is part and parcel of a policy by Ramaphosa to attract $100 billion in new investment into South Africa over the next five years.
Beijing pledged to support a planned investment summit in South Africa scheduled for October of this year. On a continental level, another Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) will take place in China during September.
A preliminary meeting of scholars from AU member-states and China met in Beijing on July 3-4 to determine ways in which cooperation can be enhanced.The convening of The Seventh Meeting of the China-Africa Think Tanks Forum brought together three hundred scholars from China and Africa. (See this)
According to an article published by Xinhua news agency in June:
“Dazzling achievements in China during the past four decades of reform and opening-up set an invaluable example for growth-hungry African countries, African experts have told Xinhua. They believed that China’s rise to one of the world’s economic powerhouses results from a carefully pursued strategy over the four decades. They argued that China’s development path of reform and opening-up, without sacrificing core ideological principles or its independence, holds many of the critical elements that can help Africans harness its vast human and natural resources to build the continent into an economic and political powerhouse.” (See this)
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Abayomi Azikiwe is the editor of Pan-African News Wire. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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There was a time when the contamination of drinking water constituted a punishable crime. Nowadays those who willfully ignore or promote the destruction of the Earth’s atmosphere and ocean acidification through the rise in emission of carbon gases (2014 ~36.08 billion ton CO2/year ; 2017 ~36.79 billion ton CO2/year), hold major sway in the world.
Consequently the rise rate of atmospheric CO2 at 2 ppm/year (from 408.84 ppm in June 2014 to 410.79 ppm in June 2018) is the fastest observed in the geological record since 66 million years ago, when an asteroid hit the Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs.(See this). The hapless residents of planet Earth are torn between survival in several parts of the world and sport circuses in other parts, while some of their representatives are playing with chunks of coal in their parliament.
The consequences in terms of heat waves, fires, droughts, storms, floods, human lives and devastation of nature are everywhere. From Japan to Sweden, Oman to Texas and California, a global heat wave is setting records, igniting wildfires, and killing hundreds. (See this)
The south-central region is home to the highest temperatures in the U.S. this week, with nearly 35 million people living under excessive heat warnings issued by the National Weather Service. Temperatures are expected to be in the triple digits across Texas this weekend, marking the most severe heat wave in the state since 2011. The Texas heat has already led to record-breaking days for the Texas power grid twice this week. Things aren’t any better elsewhere in the region, with heat indexes in Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Louisiana reaching up to 110 degrees.
Dozens are dead in Japan from record-setting, long duration extreme heat event. Across the globe in Kyoto, Japan, Thursday marked the seventh straight day of temperatures that exceeded 100 degrees, breaking all known records for the ancient capital city. At least 30 people have died in Japan during the heat wave, which has complicated rescue efforts following floods and landslides that killed more than 200 in western Japan earlier this month. On Thursday alone ten people died and 2,605 people were sent to hospitals in Tokyo due to heat, the Japan Times reports. The day before, Tokyo rescue workers set a record by responding to more than 3,000 emergency calls.
In Sweden, the Arctic Circle is on fire. High temperatures and a prolonged drought have caused 49 fires to ignite across Sweden, with temperatures reaching 90 degrees as far north as the Arctic Circle this week. According to the Washington Post, temperatures in Scandinavia typically settle in the 60s and 70s this time of year, meaning the current heat wave is making things around 20 degrees hotter than normal. In Quebec, more than 90 people were killed by extreme heat in early July. An Algerian city earlier this month broke the record for the highest temperature ever in Africa when it hit 124.3 degrees.
The current heatwave has been caused by an extraordinary stalling of the jet stream wind, which usually funnels cool Atlantic weather over the continent. This has left hot, dry air in place for two months – far longer than usual. The stalling of the northern hemisphere jet stream is being increasingly firmly linked to global warming, in particular to the rapid heating of the Arctic and resulting loss of sea ice.
Extensive reports in the mainstream media hardly mention the term “climate change”, thus covering up on the underlying factors for these events.
“This is the face of climate change … We literally would not have seen these extremes in the absence of climate change … The impacts of climate change are no longer subtle … We are seeing them play out in real time and what is happening this summer is a perfect example of that … We are seeing our predictions come true …Mann points out that the link between smoking tobacco and lung cancer is a statistical one, which does not prove every cancer was caused by smoking, but epidemiologists know that smoking greatly increases the risk. “That is enough to say that, for all practical purposes, there is a causal connection between smoking cigarettes and lung cancer and it is the same with climate change,”
Australia, emitting 138 million tons of CO2e in 2017 and exporting in 2017 200 million tonnes thermal coal and 172 million tons metallurgical coal, is currently suffering major consequences in terms of draughtin New South Wales, north-west Victoria and eastern South Australia. (See this). The factors, as explained by Blair Trewin of the Bureau of Meteorology, include:
“a stronger than usual sub-tropical ridge over southern Australia. That means that frontal systems that would normally start affecting southern Australia more generally during the winter are instead mostly passing south of the continent, really only affecting Tasmania and perhaps southern Victoria.”
Although the polar-ward migration of climate zones pushed southward by the tropical Hadley Cell constitutes an integral feature of global climate change, rarely does the term “climate change” appear in relevant government and farmers’ statements. Orwellian Newspeak has won the day once again, where talk about the “National energy guarantee” appears to divert attention from the global climate crisis to power prices, in a country where the sky is the limit for alternative clean energy—solar, wind and tide.
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Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, Australia National University (ANU) School of Anthropology and Archaeology, ANU Planetary Science Institute, ANU Climate Change Institute, Honorary Associate Professor, Geothermal Energy Centre of Excellence, University of Queensland.
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Donald Trump’s all-caps tweet threatening Iran with “CONSEQUENCES THE LIKES OF WHICH FEW THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAVE EVER SUFFERED BEFORE” sounds much like his warning last fall that North Korea would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Will Trump deliver on his threats against Iran, but not against North Korea? There is a striking disconnect between his policies toward the two countries.
“Trump has rejected a detailed pact that kept Iran out of the nuclear weapons business for a decade, while embracing a vague communiqué that allows North Korea to keep its nuclear weapons for years, and possibly forever,” said Richard N. Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, offering his assessment of Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal last May.
Under the nuclear deal negotiated by the Obama administration, Iran and five other countries, Iran had gotten rid of all of its highly enriched uranium, eliminated 99 percent of its low-enriched uranium and shut down a main nuclear reactor. Iran had fully complied with all of the requests of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, which had affirmed eight times that Iran was in compliance with the nuclear deal.
Trump is now desperate to deflect criticism away from his much-criticized summit with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Trump knows that a war — conducted with the right spin — could help the GOP in the midterm elections. And Israel, the United States’ closest ally, has been gunning for regime change in Iran, which Israel considers to be an existential threat.
Trump Is Desperate to Change the Subject Away From Russia
Trump is likely threatening Iran to distract from the widespread outrage at his adoption of Putin’s denial that Russia interfered in the 2016 election. In siding with Putin, Trump rejected the conclusion of the US intelligence agencies that Russia tampered with the election.
“Other people who know Mr. Trump said his decision to respond [to Iran] in such fiery terms was driven almost entirely by his search for a distraction from questions about Russia,” according to New York Times reporter Mark Landler.
Landler identifies three reasons Trump will not likely follow the same strategy with North Korea and Iran: 1) Iran’s leadership is not as monolithic as North Korea’s, with Kim Jong Un as a one-man state; 2) the strong Israel lobby opposes diplomacy with Iran; and 3) Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal provides Iran with little incentive to negotiate, particularly because the other parties to the deal — Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia — continue to abide by the pact.
Moreover, Trump is playing to his base. Christopher R. Hill, who worked as a diplomat in both Republican and Democratic administrations, said Trump’s rhetoric against Iran is “raw meat” for his base, as well as “an effort to shift the subject” away from his summit with Putin.
Trump Responds to Israeli Pressure on Iran
Although Israel has enjoyed the unwavering support of successive US administrations, Trump has taken that support to a new and disturbing level.
Israel strongly opposed the Iran nuclear deal and pushed for the United States to bomb Iran. Trump pulled out of the deal, leaving Iran free to build its nuclear program.
Trump then capitulated to Israeli pressure, declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel, in spite of Security Council resolutions mandating that the status of Jerusalem be agreed upon by the parties through negotiation. Trump’s declaration led to predictable outrage around the world.
A Full-Court Press Against Iran
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Adviser John Bolton have also been rattling the sabers against Iran.
In a speech to the Heritage Foundation, Pompeo listed 12 demands Iran must meet, including cessation of uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes, which is allowed under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
“The demands would constitute a complete transformation by Iran’s government, and they hardened the perception that what Trump’s administration really seeks is a change in the Iranian regime,” according to The Associated Press.
Bolton, who has long advocated overthrowing Iran’s government, promises regime change in Iran by the end of 2018.
The United States has also mounted a disinformation campaign intended to undermine Iran’s government.
“The Trump administration has launched an offensive of speeches and online communications meant to foment unrest and help pressure Iran to end its nuclear program and its support of militant groups, US officials familiar with the matter said,” according to the Jerusalem Post. “The current and former officials said the campaign paints Iranian leaders in a harsh light, at times using information that is exaggerated or contradicts other official pronouncements, including comments by previous administrations.”
Trump Plans Air War Against Iran; House Says Not Without Our Consent
The Trump administration is moving toward war with Iran. Eric Margolis, veteran war correspondent in the Middle East, reports that the Pentagon has drawn up plans for an air attack on Iran:
The Pentagon has planned a high-intensity air war against Iran that Israel and the Saudis might very well join. The plan calls for over 2,300 air strikes against Iranian strategic targets: airfields and naval bases, arms and petroleum, oil and lubricant depots, telecommunication nodes, radar, factories, military headquarters, ports, water works, airports, missile bases and units of the Revolutionary Guards.
Likewise, senior officials in the Australian government told ABC they think the United States plans to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, maybe as soon as next month.
But the House of Representatives just passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2019, which includes an amendment stating that “nothing in this Act may be construed to authorize the use of forces against Iran” and an attached statement indicating “the conferees are not aware of any information that would justify the use of military force against Iran under any other statutory authority.”
Even if the Senate approves that amendment, Trump won’t necessarily follow Congress’s mandate. He might say he’s going after suspected Iranian “terrorists” inside Iran or anywhere on his global battlefield. We will then see if there is any congressional pushback.
At the same time, however, Trump is talking about making a deal with Iran.
“We’re ready to make a real deal,” he declared. Trump said he is willing to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani with “no preconditions.”
But the Iran deal Trump renounced took years of painstaking negotiations.
Meanwhile, Russia is allied with Iran and would oppose US military intervention. On July 12, Putin met with Ali Akbar Velayati, foreign policy adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, outside Moscow.
Feigning Concern for the Iranian People
Trump claims to care about the people in Iran, but the economic sanctions he reinstituted while pulling out of the Iran deal will hurt the Iranian people. As CODEPINK co-director Medea Benjaminwrote:
Many Iranians we talk to desperately want to change their government, but not with U.S. intervention. They look around the region in horror, seeing how U.S. militarism has contributed to massive chaos, misery, and death in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Palestine. They believe their best option is internal reform.
There is another glaring difference between the situations in Iran and North Korea. While Iran does not have nuclear weapons, North Korea does. That is North Korea’s insurance policy against US military aggression.
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of Veterans for Peace. An updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was recently published. She is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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.
August 2nd, 2018 by Green Party Peace Action Committee
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All of humanity is being put at risk by the duopoly of Democrats and Republicans opposition to dialogue with Russia. The combination of Russophobia and the Democratic Party’s compulsion to criticize Trump’s every action, even when he accidentally does something sensible, is preventing the two largest nuclear powers, with the two most advanced militaries in the world, from working together to create a safer and more secure world.
President Donald Trump and President Vladimir Putin finally met for a lengthy meeting. Not much was accomplished, but it might be the beginning of an important dialogue, which could have significant positive impacts.
Russia and the United States are involved in many conflicts where de-escalation is possible if a working relationship is established. There are global crisis situations that could be reduced if the two nations work together, and bring other nations with them, to confront those problems.
Unfortunately, the reaction by members of the political duopoly and media to the Trump and Putin meeting is preventing progress urgently needed by the world. Hurdles are being created to prevent continued dialogue. For example, Russiagate delayed this first meeting and is making detente difficult to achieve.
There are too many potential conflicts that could lead to war and too many crisis situations impacting millions for the United States and Russia not to be talking. Presidents Trump and Putin should meet again. Before their next meeting the two governments should negotiate progress on at least the following issues so their talks will be meaningful:
Stop the escalation in Iran, develop a framework that will avoid war, end sanctions and allow Iran to rejoin the world economy.
Negotiating a peace agreement in Korea that all the nations who signed the Korean War truce can sign, i.e. the United States, Russia, China, and North Korea as well as South Korea.
These are seven top priorities for diplomacy between the United States and Russia. There are many other crisis issues that the world is facing that a positive relationship between Russia and the US could ameliorate if not resolve — imagine the potential of a world where peace broke-out.
One great hurdle to achieving this progress is the bipartisan view in Congress that favors conflict with Russia rather than a working relationship. Russophobia has been embraced across the spectrum from conservative Republicans like Senator Lindsey Graham(R-NC) to liberals like independent Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who is in the leadership of the Democratic Caucus.
Both parties have shown their extreme militarism by passing an irresponsible bipartisan record-breaking military budget. President Trump has shown his desire to glorify militarism with a military parade. We are working with dozens of organizations to stop the military parade and if it proceeds, we will be part of a mass protest to show the world that the people of the United States want peace.
It is an imperative for US foreign policy to seek cooperation between Russia and the US to make a more safe, healthy and secure world. To accomplish that the stranglehold of the duopoly war parties must be broken.
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“Dissidents say Kagame shuttered houses of worship because they were the last spaces in Rwanda where people felt safe from his totalitarian grip.”
He’s the President of Rwanda and the current President of the African Union, feted by the Brookings Institute , one of the most venerable ideological pillars of US capital interests. So why is Paul Kagame manifesting more and more signs of paranoia? Let’s consider just a few possibilities:
Assassination rumors
The Indian OceanNewsletterreports that French intelligence warned Yoweri Museveni that Kagame was plotting to have his plane shot down over Rwanda, causing him to cancel a flight from Uganda to Burundi for a summit. If said plot had come to fruition, it would have been Kagame’s second presidential assassination by plane shoot-down over Rwanda. In 1994, his men shot down the plane carrying Rwandan Hutu President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundian Hutu President Cyprien Ntaryamira from Arusha, Tanzania, to Kigali, Rwanda. That shoot-down triggered the infamous hundred days of ethnic massacres known as the Rwandan Genocide.
Is the claim credible? No hard evidence has been proffered. The Indian Ocean Newsletter is one of several regional reports included in Africa Intelligence Report, an online journal that describes itself as “the first information site on Africa for a professional audience” and charges substantial fees for all site access or per-article access. Credible or no, Kagame has his online attack dogs busy denying it.
“Kagame has been kidnapping or assassinating Rwandan refugees in Uganda.”
Are relations between Kagame and Museveni tense? No doubt about that. The two have been both partners and competitors in crime for many years, with recent emphasis on the competition. The most notorious moment of this partnership occurred in 2000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where invading Rwandan and Ugandan forces fought each other over the gold and diamond smuggling trade.
More recently Kagame has been in the habit of kidnapping or assassinating Rwandan refugees in Uganda whom he considers his political enemies, triggering Museveni’s recent crackdown on Rwandan spies. He’s also been trying to force Rwandans who’ve crossed into Uganda fleeing famine to return home. He knows from firsthand experience that significant numbers of refugees outside Rwanda may return as an insurgency, maybe even an insurgency backed by Uganda, like his own.
Speaking of insurgencies
An armed insurgency against Kagame has been reported. All the Rwandan exiles that I know seem to believe this, but no one knows or wants to say how serious it might be. My own guess is that an insurgency could succeed only if significant numbers of Kagame’s own troops turned against him. He has been seen wearing a bulletproof vest in Rwanda. A video identified as Rwandan insurgents in training appeared on Facebook, where it was shared 237 [263 NOW] times.
Political prisoner Victoire Ingabire in peril
According to her political party, the United Democratic Forces of Rwanda, internationally celebrated Rwandan political prisoner Victoire Ingabire was moved into a cell with a former military officer whom she feared would kill her. The party said that the threatening cellmate has been removed for now. Ingabire attempted to run against Kagame in the 2010 presidential election but went to prison instead. The African Union’s highest court, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ruled that Ingabire should be freed because Rwanda denied her the rights guaranteed by the Rwandan Constitution, but the current President of the African Union scorns its highest court. In 2010, Victoire Ingabire’s courage radically changed international perception of the Kagame regime, exposing him as a totalitarian military ruler and war criminal. Congolese historian and activist Bénédicte Kumbi Njoko calls her African sister “a force of nature.”
One hundred twenty-three religious leaders have gone missing, pastors have been imprisoned, and Human Rights Watch has been expelled from the country—again. Rwanda’s population of 12 million is roughly 60% Roman Catholic, 26% Protestant, 11% Seventh-day Adventist, and 3% Muslim, so it’s safe to say that the vast majority of those targeted are Christians of one sort or another.
This has caused shock around the world, and in the US Senate and State Department, making it one of Kagame’s most puzzling paranoid expressions yet.
Last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo appeared in the Senate, where Arizona Senator Jeff Flake asked him,
“The country of Rwanda, right now, and you may be familiar with this because of this week’s focus on religious freedom, has indicated a move towards severe restrictions on religious freedom, particularly from outside groups. What are the plans of the State Department to let them know that that is not in their interest or ours?”
Pompeo responded,
“Senator, I share your concerns. I’ll need to get back to you in terms of what actions we think will fit. I know we’ll call it out. I know we’ll label it for what it is. We do need to see. It is tragic and anyway, I share your concerns. It’s a huge challenge for us.”
Indeed. Rwanda has been a longstanding US ally, military proxy, and geostrategic lynchpin in East Africa, Central Africa, and the rest of the African continent.
“Didn’t Kagame know that even his staunchest defenders couldn’t give this a positive spin?”
How will Christians and Christian Zionists react to this? Paul Kagame’s Rwanda has been hand in glove with Israel ever since he seized power in 1994.Both claim victim’s license to invade their neighbors—Congo and Palestine—and the US has staunchly supported that license politically, militarily, and financially. The US is Rwanda’s top bilateral donor .
Mike Pompeo attended last week’s Christian persecution exhibition in Washington, DC, which prominently featured the case of Rwanda, alongside those of Iraq, Syria, Iran, Turkey, Libya, Sudan, Nigeria, and Pakistan. So did Sam Brownback, the Trump Administration official assigned to look after the interests of Christians around the world, although his actual title is “Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom.” The Kansas Republican extremist is the first Catholic to hold the position. He is also a prominent member of “The Fellowship,” aka “The Family,” which was the subject of Jeff Sharlet’s book The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power. Sharlet characterized Brownback himself as “God’s Senator” in a frightening 2006 Rolling Stoneprofile.
“Paul Kagame’s Rwanda has been hand in glove with Israel ever since he seized power in 1994.”
David Himbara, former economic advisor to Paul Kagame, and Justin Bahunga, Spokesman for the Rwandan Democratic Forces, and others say that Kagame shut down the churches, using building code violations as an excuse, because they were the last spaces in Rwanda where people felt safe from his totalitarian grip.
Wasn’t this an extraordinarily stupid move, especially given the theocratic tendencies of the Trump Administration? Didn’t Kagame know that even his staunchest defenders, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, couldn’t give this a positive spin? I asked David Himbara, who responded,
“Totalitarian regimes aren’t always smart. They tend to shoot first and ask questions after.”
It’s hard to imagine the State Department and the Pentagon cutting Kagame loose while he’s still of greater use than not, but how much longer will that be? And what will it take to tip the balance?
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So President Donald Trump reckoned on Monday that the United States Intelligence Community (IC) just might be wrong in its assessment that Russia had sought to interfere in the 2016 U.S. election but then decided on Tuesday that he misspoke and had the greatest confidence in the IC and now agrees that they were correct in their judgment. But Donald Trump, interestingly, added something about there being “others” that also had been involved in the election in an attempt to subvert it, though he was not specific and the national media has chosen not to pursue the admittedly cryptic comment. He was almost certainly referring to China both due to possible motive and the possession of the necessary resources to carry out such an operation. Indeed, there are reports that China hacked the 30,000 Hillary Clinton emails that are apparently still missing.
Just how one interferes in an election in a large country with diverse sources of information and numerous polling stations located in different states using different systems is, of course, problematical. The United States has interfered in elections everywhere, including in Russia under Boris Yeltsin. It engaged in regime change in Iran, Chile, and Guatemala by supporting conservative elements in the military which obligingly staged coups. In Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. forces invaded and overthrew the governments while in Libya the change in regime was largely brought about by encouraging rebels while bombing government forces. The same model has been applied in Syria, though without much success because Damascus actually was bold enough to resist.
So how do the Chinese “others” bring about “change” short of a full-scale invasion by the People’s Liberation Army? I do not know anything about actual Chinese plans to interfere in future American elections and gain influence over the resulting newly elected government but would like to speculate on just how they might go about that onerous task.
Image on the right: Source is The Daily Beast
First, I would build up an infrastructure in the United States that would have access to the media and be able to lobby and corrupt the political class. That would be kind of tricky as it would require getting around the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA), which requires representatives of foreign governments operating in the United States to register and have their finances subject to review by the Department of the Treasury. Most recently, several Russian news agencies that are funded by the Putin government have been required to do so, including RT International and Sputnik radio and television.
The way to avoid the FARA registration requirement is to have all funding come through Chinese-American sources that are not directly connected with the government in Beijing. Further, the foundations and other organizations should be set up as having an educational purpose rather than a political agenda. You might want to call your principal lobbying group something like the American Chinese Political Action Committee or ACPAC as an acronym when one is referring to it shorthand.
Once established, ACPAC will hire and send hundreds of Chinese-American lobbyists to Capitol Hill when Congress is in session. They will be carefully selected to come from as many states and congressional districts as possible to maximize access to legislative offices. They will have with them position papers prepared by the ACPAC central office that explain why a close and uncritical relationship with Beijing is not only the right thing to do, it is also a good thing for the United States.
As part of the process, new Congressmen will benefit from free trips to China paid for by an educational foundation set up for that purpose. They will be able to walk on the Great Wall and speak to genuine representative Chinese who will tell them how wonderful everything is in the People’s Republic.
Congressmen who nevertheless appear to be resistant to the lobbying and the emoluments will be confronted with a whole battery of alternative reasons why they should be filo-Chinese, including the thinly veiled threat that to behave otherwise could be construed as politically damaging anti-Orientalist racism. For those who persist in their obduracy, the ultimate weapon will be citation of the horrors of the Second World War Rape of Nanking. No one wants to be accused of being a Rape of Nanking denier.
The second phase of converting Congress is to set up a bunch of Political Action Committees (PACs). They will have innocuous names like Rocky Mountain Sheep Herders Association, but they will all really be about China. When the money begins to flow into the campaign coffers of legislators any concerns about what China is doing in the world will cease. The same PACs can be use to fund billboards and voter outreach in some districts, allowing China to have a say in the elections without actually having to surface or be explicit about whom it supports. Other PACs can work hard at inserting material into social websites, similar to what the Russians have been accused of doing.
And then there is the mass media. Using the same Chinese-American conduit, you would simply buy up controlling interests in newspapers and other media outlets. And you would begin staffing those outlets with earnest young Chinese-Americans who will be highly protective of Chinese interests and never write a story critical of the government in Beijing or the Chinese people. That way the American public will eventually become so heavily propagandized by the prevailing narrative that they will never question anything that China does, ideally beginning to refer to it as the “only democracy in Asia” and “America’s best friend in the whole wide world.” Once the indoctrination process is completed, the Chinese leadership might even crush demonstrators with tanks in Tiananmen Square or line up snipers to pick off protest leaders and no congressman or newspaper would dare say nay.
When the political classes and media are sufficiently under control, it would then be time to move to the final objective: the dismantling of the United States Constitution. In particularly, there is that pesky Bill of Rights and the First Amendment guaranteeing Free Speech. That would definitely have to go, so you round up your tame Congress critters and you elect a president who is also in your pocket, putting everything in place for the “slam-dunk.” You pass a battery of laws making any criticism of China both racist and felonious, with punitive fines and prison sentences attached. After that success, you can begin to dismantle the rest of the Bill of Rights and no one will be able to say a word against what you are doing because the First Amendment will by then be a dead duck. When the Constitution is in shreds and Chinese lobbyists are firmly in control of corrupted legislators, Beijing will have won a bloodless victory against the United States and it all began with just a little interference in America’s politics alluded to by Donald Trump.
Image below: Youtube via The American Conservative
Of course, dear reader, all of the above might be true but for the fact that I am not talking about China at all and am only using that country as a metaphor. Beijing may have spied on the U.S. elections but it otherwise has evidenced little interest in manipulating elections or controlling any aspect of the U.S. government. And even though I am sure that Donald Trump was not referring to Israel when he made his offhand comment about “others,” the shoe perfectly fits that country’s subjugation of many of the foreign and national security policy mechanisms in the United States over the past fifty years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently boasted about how he controls Trump and convinced him to pull out of the Iran nuclear agreement.
The real mystery, if there is one, is why no American politician has either the guts or the integrity or perhaps the necessary intelligence to substitute Tel Aviv for Moscow and to call Israel out like we are currently calling out Russia for actions that pale in comparison to what Netanyahu has been up to.
To be specific, there is no evidence that Russia ever asked for favors from Trump’s campaign staff and transition team but Israel did so over a vote on its illegal settlements at the United Nations. Is Special Counsel Robert Mueller or Congress interested? No. Is the media interested? No.
Israel, relying on Jewish power and money to do the heavy lifting, has completely corrupted many aspects of American government and, in particular, its foreign policy by aggressive lobbying and buying politicians. All new members of Congress and spouses are taken to Israel on generously funded “fact finding” tours after being elected to make sure they get their bearings straight right from the git-go. Israel’s nearly total control over the message on the Middle East coming out of the U.S. mainstream is aided and abetted by the numerous Jewish editors and journalists who are prepared to pump the party line. The money to do all this comes from Jewish billionaires like Haim Saban and Sheldon Adelson, who have their hooks deep into both political parties. Meanwhile, the ability of America’s most powerful foreign policy lobby AIPAC to avoid registration as a foreign agent is completely due to the exercise of Jewish power in the United States which means in practice that Israel and its advocates will never be sanctioned in any way.
Israel is eager to have the United States fight Iran on its behalf, even though Washington has no real interest in doing so, and all indications are that it will be successful. Though it is a rich country, it receives a multi-billion-dollar handout from the U.S. Treasury every year. When its war criminal prime minister comes to town he receives 26 standing ovations from a completely sycophantic congress and now the United States has even stationed soldiers in Israel who are “prepared to die” for Israel even though there is no treaty of any kind between the two countries and the potential victims have likely never been consulted regarding dying for a foreign country. All of this takes place without the public ever voting on or even discussing the relationship, a tribute to the fact that both major parties and the media have been completely co-opted.
And now there is the assault on the First Amendment, with legislation currently in Congress making it a crime either to criticize Israel or support a boycott of it in support of Palestinian rights. When those bills become law, which they will, we are finished as a country where fundamental rights are respected.
And what has Russia done in comparison to all this? Hardly anything even if all the claims about its alleged interference are true. So when will Mueller and all the Republican and Democratic baying dogs say a single word about Israel’s interference in our elections and political processes? If past behavior is anything to go by, it will never happen.
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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
Dr. Giraldi is a frequent contributor to Global Research.
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“If Trump decides to ‘throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.’”
With the outrageous decision by the Trump White House to bar a CNN propagandist posing as a reporter, more people are now starting to make the connection between press freedom and the issue of the “right to know” and of unimpeded information. But we have to ask once again, where was this concern when Democrats under Obama were using the espionage act to jail whistleblowers and prosecuting journalists? Why no outrage on the eve of the Ecuadorian government turning over Julian Assange to be prosecuted by Western intelligence for the crime of publishing accounts of their nefarious actions? Where were these objective defenders of the right to information when the state was collaborating with private corporations like Google, Twitter, and Facebook to alter and limit political speech and information?
“Where was this concern when Democrats under Obama were using the espionage act to jail whistleblowers and prosecuting journalists?”
For some, attempting within the context of the ongoing and intensifying ideological struggle to move the focus and analysis away from an opportunistic and simplistic framework that focuses on personalities and individualized psychologies to material interests, structures and class interests can open one up to charges of not being sufficiently anti-Trump enough, or strangely “pro-Trump.” But it wasn’t Trump but Obama and both capitalist parties that inserted the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” into the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act during the last few days of his administration. An act that establishes a propaganda center in the State Department that objectively has been coordinating psychological operations (psyops) in the U.S. in conjunction with private corporations and intelligence agencies.
Muted opposition or outright support for these efforts from liberal Democrats is not just a case of hypocrisy. It is a willful ideological position that affirms that certain speech and information is acceptable and others isn’t. In an era in which capitalist concentration has resulted in six corporations now controlling over 90% of mainstream news content , the narrow range of reporting and “newsworthy” content should not be a surprise to anyone still capable of critical thinking. These liberal Democrats are complicit in sustaining the lie that the capitalist press represents a non-partisan, objective world-view.
“We must demand the unimpeded, free flow of information.”
The editorial orientation and bias of news outlets from Russian Television (RT) and the New York Times to the BBC and Fox News are quite obvious, and no one should be allowed to claim a universalist position on the “truth.” However, we must demand the unimpeded, free flow of information, especially information from non-corporate, non-state sectors. Defending this democratic and human right is not a capitulation to bourgeois sensibilities. It recognizes that defending this “democratic” right is an objective necessity for radical forces in the context of this moment when the state and corporate sector are collaborating on restricting speech and information.
The open authoritarianism of the Trump administration and the forces it represents is an opportunity for progressives to shift the political discourse. The obfuscation of the one-sided class warfare waged against the working class, the poor, and people of color in the U.S. over the last four decades disarmed and confused radical opposition. But the impact of the 2007-8 crisis exposed the systemic, irreconcilable contradictions of the neoliberal capitalist project for all to see, even if most didn’t have the theoretical tools to correctly understand their lived realities. The agenda of the oligarchy and the systematic assaults on individual and collective human rights to realize that agenda could no longer be disguised.
“Liberal Democrats are complicit in sustaining the lie that the capitalist press represents a non-partisan, objective world-view.”
However, it was believed that with correct perception management, the hard edges of the assault could be softened, even as the state continued to strengthen its repressive capacities. U.S. based transnational finance capital assigned that function to Barack Obama.
The Obama administration collaborated with the courts and Congress to dismantle democratic rights and strengthen the state’s repressive apparatus, including the murder of U.S. citizens. Journalist James Risen only escaped imprisonment because he worked for New York Times. Meanwhile, whistleblowers like John Kiriakou, who exposed the Bush torture program, were sent to prison along with Chelsea Manning, who was given a 35-year jail sentence for exposing evidence of war crimes by U.S. forces in Iraq. Even in light of these clear assaults on press freedom, bourgeois journalists can only mutter irrational hatred for Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
“The impact of the 2007-8 crisis exposed the systemic, irreconcilable contradictions of the neoliberal capitalist project for all to see.”
Expanding NSA surveillance and charging journalists with espionage for whistle-blowing are systematic attacks on press freedom that pale in comparison to the theatrics of Trump’s rants against the press. But according to James Risen if Trump decides to “throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.”
This is the objective reality that we confront. It requires clear thinking free from emotionalism, elitist petit-bourgeois moralism, and liberal propaganda distractions that undermine our ability to see and understand that the national military-intelligence state is an enemy of us all because it serves the interests of the ruling class as a whole.
Trump, Sanders, Obama, Mueller, and CNN are mere ideological distractions meant to dull our perceptions and prevent us from coming to terms with the awesome reality of our systemic domination. Fascism represents a specific form of capitalist decay. That is why even though the proto-fascism of Trump represents a dangerous tendency, avoiding the political and ideological dead-end of anti-Trumpism demands that we keep the focus of our analysis and agitation on the ongoing structures of the white supremacist, colonial/capitalist patriarchy and not individuals and personalities if we want to avoid doing the ideological dirty work of the ruling class.
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Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. His latest publications include contributions to Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi. He can be reached at: Ajamubaraka.com
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South Korean peace and justice activists have been writing to us at Popular Resistance complaining that the United States is not responding to the positive steps being taken by North Korea before and after the meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim. They have sent us information about protests they are organizing in South Korea aginst the United States as well as in Washington, DC.
Their views show a great divide between the United States and the calls for a permanent peace which includes removal of US troops as just last week the Congress passed a National Defense Authorization Act which forbids removal of US troops from Korea. The John S. McCain Act states the “significant removal” of US troops is “a non-negotiable item as it relates to the complete, verifiable, and irreversible denuclearization” of North Korea.
South Korean ‘Youth Resistance’ protests at the US embassy in Seoul demanding a permanent peace treaty and normalizing relations with North Korea. (Source: Popular Resistance)
The activists argue that the temporary halt in war games which practice nuclear and other military attacks on North Korea are insufficient. They want to see movement toward a real peace treaty and removal of economic sanctions, especially allowing South Korea and North Korea to normalize relations. And, they want US military forces out of Korea, permanently.
On July 27, in a protest in front of the White House, South Korean activists claimed the June 12 agreement between North Korea and the United States called for normalizing relations between North Korea and the US and establishing a permanent and solid peace regime in Korea. They believe that to conclude North Korea-US peace treaty includes withdrawal of the US military from Korea as the core. They call on the Trump administration to fully implement the June 12 declaration and immediately withdraw US troops from South Korea. They pledge all-out national resistance against the United States, to advance the realization of the world where US troops are withdrawn, the Korean people are masters of their country, and the nation is reunified.
They report on a protest held at the US embassy in South Korea on July 29th. Two members of Youth Resistance, “a democratic peace group of patriotic youths formed in October last year for anti-war, peace and national independence,” strongly condemned the United States for its continued military presence in South Korea. This was the ninth protest they have held at the US Embassy in Gwanghwamun next to the Seoul Museum of History.
In the protest, Seo Hyeong-hoon and Min Ji-won rushed toward the US embassy shouting slogans demanding the United States to get out of South Korea. They unfurled a banner that said “Permanently Withdraw United States Forces in Korea” and threw leaflets into the air. Police violently responded, Seo Hyung-hoon head was pushed onto the ground, his arm held backward, and his face slammed to the ground by the police. Allies at the protest witnessed the violence and took photos and video. Theey report that these events were witnessed by many foreign tourists in the area.
The two peace advocates were taken into custody and brought to the Jongno Police Station. They and their allies are protesting against violent suppression of legitimate demonstrations. The two protesters condemned the US for failing to fulfill the June 12th Singapore Declaration signed by President Trump and Chairman Kim. Protests were held throughout the night to get them released from custody.
Seo Hyung-hoon wrote,
“North Korea has not carried out nuclear tests and missile launches in the past nine months. They have abandoned the Punggye-rie nuclear test center and released three American criminals. In contrast, the US has done very little beyond the temporary and conditional interruption of war exercises. No action has taken place on the threat of US nuclear missile attacks. The US is preventing progress on substantive dialogue with their excuse that a denuclearization timetable is needed. Trump’s actions show he did not genuinely engage in this dialogue, as the sanctions for North Korea have been extended for another year.
“The United States has made a military colony in South Korea and established a puppet regime. We seek peace for our nation and the people of Korea. We want a peace treaty that will last and defeat US imperialism. We understand these high-level talks will not develop on their own and the people must take action. We seek peace because we will be the first to be hit by a US military attack. Our destiny should not be controlled by the presidents of the other countries. We are our own masters and must struggle with our voices and actions to achieve a lasting peace. There is no peace without a peace agreement that includes US military forces leaving the country!”
They argue that the US must convert the unstable armistice agreement to a stable peace treaty. Under Clause 60 of Article 4 of the Armistice Agreement that was signed on July 27th, 1953, it says that within three months a conference of both sides will “settle through negotiation the questions of the withdrawal of all foreign forces from Korea, the peaceful settlement” of issues between the countries. Instead, on October 1st, the US signed a mutual defense treaty with the South Korean government which neutralized the armistice agreement and institutionalized the long-term presence of the US military.
After the embassy protest, Youth Resistance member of the Min Ji-won said,
“It has been a month since the meeting between President Trump and Chairman Kim in Sentosa Island, Singapore, but there is still tension with the United States. We strive for the promise of a new relationship, a permanent and solid peace regime. North Korea has canceled the Punggye-rie nuclear test site and returned US military soldiers remains. What is the US doing in return?
“In 1945, when the Korean people enjoyed the joy of liberation from Japan, the United States entered our land as an occupying military force. Since then, their unilateral occupation has continued. The United States joined the armistice agreement, which was signed on July 27, 65 years ago. As long as US forces remain on this land, the pain of the war will not disappear and our people cannot achieve justice. The Koreans are no longer deceived by the United States, which is pouring cold water into the atmosphere of peace and unity.
“It is US soldiers who undermine our independence and democracy which are the long-time desires of the Korean people. US military abuses are not being overlooked by Koreans, no matter how much they try to hide their aggression and violations of human rights. Our people are no longer deceived by the United States. Now that the people’s aspirations for unification are swelling up, US forces must leave the country. It is time to write a new history that will mark the end of the 73-year-long history of the United States trampling on Korea. Youth Resistance is on the path of glorious struggle to demolish US forces and open the horizons of self-reliance, democracy, and unification. Youth activism reveals the light of the nation and our passion shows the pulse of the nation to rise against US militarism.”
On July 27, at dawn, Lee-Jeok who is the permanent representative of Peace Treaty Movement Headquarters and others held a candlelight ceremony of the General MacArthur statue. The Korean people rage against MacArthur as he came to South Korea as the occupier in 1945, divided Korea, and threatened a nuclear attack in the Korean War. Following the ceremony, a coalition of groups held a rally in front of the US Embassy to demand the immediate signing of a Peace Treaty and permanent withdrawal of US military forces.
At protests are occurring in South Korea, the Democratic People’s Party (Welfare Party for Democracy) has been conducting demonstrations for 122 days in front of the White House and at the US Embassy. The Democratic Party’s chairman Lee Sang-hoon said,
“The Max Thunder war games must permanently be suspended. The peace agreement with the United States must be concluded!. The US Army must leave Korea”
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Kevin Zeese co-directs Popular Resistance where this article was originally published.
ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-5-3
Year: 2012
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Michel Chossudovsky is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), which hosts the critically acclaimed website www.globalresearch.ca . He is a contributor to the Encyclopedia Britannica. His writings have been translated into more than 20 languages.
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“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” -Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations
Michel Chossudovsky exposes the insanity of our privatized war machine. Iran is being targeted with nuclear weapons as part of a war agenda built on distortions and lies for the purpose of private profit. The real aims are oil, financial hegemony and global control. The price could be nuclear holocaust. When weapons become the hottest export of the world’s only superpower, and diplomats work as salesmen for the defense industry, the whole world is recklessly endangered. If we must have a military, it belongs entirely in the public sector. No one should profit from mass death and destruction. –Ellen Brown, author of ‘Web of Debt’ and president of the Public Banking Institute
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August 1st, 2018 by Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
As drums beat again for war — this time on Iran—-the VIPS’ warning is again being disregarded as it was before the Iraq debacle and this time VIPS fear the consequences will be all-caps CATASTROPHIC.
MEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
SUBJECT: Intelligence on Iran Fails the Smell Test
Mr. President:
As the George W. Bush administration revved up to attack Iraq 15 years ago, we could see no compelling reason for war. We decided, though, to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt on the chance he had been sandbagged by Vice President Dick Cheney and others. We chose to allow for the possibility that he actually believed the “intelligence” that Colin Powell presented to the UN as providing “irrefutable and undeniable” proof of WMD in Iraq and a “sinister nexus” between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.
To us in VIPS it was clear, however, that the “intelligence” Powell adduced was bogus. Thus, that same afternoon (Feb. 5, 2003) we prepared and sent to President Bush a Memorandum like this one, urging him to seek counsel beyond the “circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.”
We take no satisfaction at having been correct — though disregarded — in predicting the political and humanitarian disaster in Iraq. Most Americans have been told the intelligence was “mistaken.” It was not; it was out-and-out fraud, in which, sadly, some of our former colleagues took part.
Five years after Powell’s speech, the Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee minced few words in announcing the main bipartisan finding of a five-year investigation. He said: “In making the case for war, the Administration repeatedly presented intelligence as fact when in reality it was unsubstantiated, contradicted, or even non-existent. As a result, the American people were led to believe that the threat from Iraq was much greater than actually existed.”
Iran Now in Gunsight
As drums beat again for a military attack — this time on Iran, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and other experienced, objective analysts are, by all appearances, being disregarded again. And, this time, we fear the consequences will be all-caps CATASTROPHIC — in comparison with the catastrophe of Iraq.
In memoranda to you over the past year and a half we have pointed out that (1) Iran’s current support for international terrorism is far short of what it was decades ago; and (2) that you are being played by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claims about Iran’ they are based on intelligence exposed as fraudulent several years ago. Tellingly, Netanyahu waited for your new national security adviser to be in place for three weeks before performing his April 30 slide show alleging that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program. On the chance that our analysis of Netanyahu’s show-and-tell failed to reach you, please know that the Israeli prime minister was recycling information from proven forgeries, which we reported in a Memorandum to you early last spring.
If our Memorandum of May 7 fell through some cracks in the West Wing, here are its main findings:
The evidence displayed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on April 30 in what he called his “Iranian atomic archive” showed blatant signs of fabrication. That evidence is linked to documents presented by the Bush Administration more than a decade earlier as “proof” of a covert Iran nuclear weapons program. Those documents were clearly fabricated, as well.
In our May 7, 2018 Memorandum we also asserted: “We can prove that the actual documents originally came not from Iran but from Israel. Moreover, the documents were never authenticated by the CIA or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).”
Iran: Almost Targeted in 2008
There was a close brush with war with Iran a decade ago. Bush and Cheney, in close consultation with Israel, were planning to attack Iran in 2008, their last year in office. Fortunately, an honest National Intelligence Estimate of November 2007 concluded that Iran had stopped working on a nuclear weapon in 2003, and that key judgment was made public. Abruptly, that NIE stuck an iron rod into the wheels of the juggernaut then speeding downhill to war.
The key judgment that Iran had stopped work on a nuclear weapon was the result of the painstakingly deliberative process that was customarily used, back in the day, to produce an NIE. After that process — which took a full year — the Nov. 2007 NIE was was approved unanimously by all U.S. intelligence agencies.
(In other words, it was decidedly NOT a rump “assessment” like the one cobbled together in a couple of weeks by “handpicked” analysts from three selected, agenda-laden agencies regarding Russian meddling. We refer, of course, to the evidence-impoverished and deceptively labeled “Intelligence Community Assessment” that the directors of the FBI, CIA, and NSA gave you on January 6, 2017. The Defense Intelligence Agency and the State Department intelligence bureau were among the other 13 agencies excluded from that “Intelligence Community Assessment.”)
As for the Bush/Cheney plans for attacking Iran in 2008, President George W. Bush, in his autobiography, Decision Points, recorded his chagrin at what he called the NIE’s “eye-popping” intelligence finding debunking the conventional wisdom that Iran was on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon. Bush added plaintively, “How could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?”
Mr. President, we do not know whether a fresh National Intelligence Estimate has been produced on Iran and nuclear weapons — or, if one has been produced, whether it is as honest as the NIE of Nov. 2007, which helped prevent the launch of another unnecessary war the following year. We stand on our record. In sum, if you believe that there is credible evidence that Iran has an active secret nuclear weapons program, we believe you have been misled. And if you base decisions on misleading “intelligence” on Iran, the inevitable result will be a great deal worse than the Bush/Cheney debacle in Iraq.
For the Steering Group
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
William Binney, former NSA Technical Director for World Geopolitical & Military Analysis; Co-founder of NSA’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center (ret.)
Sen. Richard H. Black, 13th District of Virginia; Colonel US Army (ret.); former Chief, Criminal Law Division, Office of the Judge Advocate General, Pentagon (associate VIPS)
Kathleen Christison, Senior Analyst on Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Bogdan Dzakovic, former Team Leader of Federal Air Marshals and Red Team, FAA Security (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Larry C. Johnson, former CIA and State Department Counter-terrorism officer
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, Wing Commander, RAAF (ret.); Intelligence Officer & ex-Master SERE Instructor
Linda Lewis, WMD preparedness policy analyst, USDA (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Edward Loomis, NSA Cryptologic Computer Scientist (ret.)
David MacMichael, Capt., USMC (ret.); former Senior Estimates Officer, National Intelligence Council
Ray McGovern, former US Army Infantry/Intelligence Officer & CIA analyst; CIA Presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East, National Intelligence Council & CIA political analyst (ret.)
Todd E. Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Gareth Porter, author/journalist (associate VIPS)
Coleen Rowley, FBI Special Agent and former Minneapolis Division Legal Counsel (ret.)
Robert Wing, former Foreign Service Officer (associate VIPS)
Ann Wright, Colonel,US Army (ret.); Foreign Service Officer (resigned in opposition to the war on Iraq)
The housing market is now apparently turning down. Consumer incomes are limited by jobs offshoring and the ability of employers to hold down wages and salaries. The Federal Reserve seems committed to higher interest rates—in my view to protect the exchange value of the US dollar on which Washington’s power is based. The officials in Washington, with whom I spent a quarter century, have, with their bellicosity and sanctions, encouraged nations with independent foreign and economic policies to drop the use of the dollar. This takes some time to accomplish, but Russia, China, Iran, and India are apparently committed to dropping or reducing the use of the US dollar.
A drop in the world demand for dollars can be destabilizing of the dollar’s value unless the central banks of Japan, UK, and EU continue to support the dollar’s exchange value, either by purchasing dollars with their currencies or by printing offsetting amounts of their currencies to keep the dollar’s value stable. So far they have been willing to do both. However, Trump’s criticisms of Europe has soured Europe against Trump, with a corresponding weakening of the willingness to cover for the US. Japan’s colonial status viv-a-vis the US since the Second World War is being stressed by the hostility that Washington is introducing into Japan’s part of the world. The orchestrated Washington tensions with North Korea and China do not serve Japan, and those Japanese politicians who are not heavily on the US payroll are aware that Japan is being put on the line for American, not Japanese interests.
If all this leads, as is likely, to the rise of more independence among Washington’s vassals, the vassals are likely to protect themselves from the cost of their independence by removing themselves from the dollar and payments mechanisms associated with the dollar as world currency. This means a drop in the value of the dollar that the Federal Reserve would have to prevent by raising interest rates on dollar investments in order to keep the demand for dollars up sufficiently to protect its value.
As every realtor knows, housing prices boom when interest rates are low, because the lower the rate the higher the price of the house that the person with the mortgage can afford. But when interest rates rise, the lower the price of the house that a buyer can afford.
If we are going into an era of higher interest rates, home prices and sales are going to decline.
The “on the other hand” to this analysis is that if the Federal Reserve loses control of the situation and the debts associated with the current value of the US dollar become a problem that can collapse the system, the Federal Reserve is likely to pump out enough new money to preserve the debt by driving interest rates back to zero or negative.
Would this save or revive the housing market? Not if the debt-burdened American people have no substantial increases in their real income. Where are these increases likely to come from? Robotics are about to take away the jobs not already lost to jobs offshoring. Indeed, despite President Trump’s emphasis on “bringing the jobs back,” Ford Motor Corp. has just announced that it is moving the production of the Ford Focus from Michigan to China.
Apparently it never occurs to the executives running America’s offshored corporations that potential customers in America working in part time jobs stocking shelves in Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s, etc., will not have enough money to purchase a Ford. Unlike Henry Ford, who had the intelligence to pay workers good wages so they could buy Fords, the executives of American companies today sacrifice their domestic market and the American economy to their short-term “performance bonuses” based on low foreign labor costs.
What is about to happen in America today is that the middle class, or rather those who were part of it as children and expected to join it, are going to be driven into manufactured “double-wide homes” or single trailers. The MacMansions will be cut up into tenements. Even the high-priced rentals along the Florida coast will find a drop in demand as real incomes continue to fall. The $5,000-$20,000 weekly summer rental rate along Florida’s panhandle 30A will not be sustainable. The speculators who are in over their heads in this arena are due for a future shock.
For years I have reported on the monthly payroll jobs statistics. The vast majority of new jobs are in lowly paid nontradable domestic services, such as waitresses and bartenders, retail clerks, and ambulatory health care services. In the payroll jobs report for June, for example, the new jobs, if they actually exist, are concentrated in these sectors: administrative and waste services, health care and social assistance, accommodation and food services, and local government.
High productivity, high value-added manufactured jobs shrink in the US as they are offshored to Asia. High productivity, high value-added professional service jobs, such as research, design, software engineering, accounting, legal research, are being filled by offshoring or by foreigners brought into the US on work visas with the fabricated and false excuse that there are no Americans qualified for the jobs.
America is a country hollowed out by the short-term greed of the ruling class and its shills in the economics profession and in Congress. Capitalism only works for the few. It no longer works for the many.
On national security grounds Trump should respond to Ford’s announcement of offshoring the production of Ford Focus to China by nationalizing Ford. Michigan’s payrolls and tax base will decline and employment in China will rise. We are witnessing a major US corporation enabling China’s rise over the United States. Among the external costs of Ford’s contribution to China’s GDP is Trump’s increased US military budget to counter the rise in China’s power.
Trump should also nationalize Apple, Nike, Levi, and all the rest of the offshored US global corporations who have put the interest of a few people above the interests of the American work force and the US economy. There is no other way to get the jobs back. Of course, if Trump did this, he would be assassinated.
America is ruled by a tiny percentage of people who constitute a treasonous class. These people have the money to purchase the government, the media, and the economics profession that shills for them. This greedy traitorous interest group must be dealt with or the United States of America and the entirety of its peoples are lost.
These manipulations are used to enable the looting of countries such as Greece and Portugal by the large German and Dutch banks and the enrichment via inflated financial asset prices of shareholders at the expense of the general population.
One would think that repeated financial crises would undermine the power of financial interests, but the facts are otherwise. As long ago as November 21, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote to Col. House that
“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the larger centers has owned the Government ever since the days of Andrew Jackson.”
Thomas Jefferson said that “banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies” and that “if the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks…will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” The shrinkage of the US middle class is evidence that Jefferson’s prediction is coming true.
On July 31, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and its allies established full control of southwestern Syria after government troops eliminated ISIS in the villages of Beit Irah, Qusayr and Kowaya thus liberating the entire Yarmouk Valley.
According to pro-government sources, about 100 ISIS members surrendered to government troops in the final stage of the operation. Some sources say that about 25 of them were executed by locals and ex-members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) that were participating in the SAA operation. However, these reports still have to be confirmed.
The total death toll of ISIS during the battle for the Yarmouk Valley remains unclear, but according to some local sources, over 1,000 terrorists were killed.
Now, the SAA will have to focus on employing additional security measures in the liberated area in order to prevent terrorist attacks from ISIS cells hiding among civilians.
According to some pro-government sources, some SAA units, which were involved in the southwestern Syria operation, started redeploying from the Yarmouk Valley to eastern al-Suwayda where they will participate in an effort to purge ISIS cells responsible for the recent terrorist attacks there.
Early on August 1, reports appeared that clashes erupted between the SAA and members of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (formerly Jabhat al-Nura, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda) and other militant groups in northern Latakia. The clashes were reportedly accompanied by intense artillery strikes from the Syrian military.
Some pro-government media outlets claimed that this was the start of the long-expected SAA advance in the area, but this is unlikely. The Syrian military command still has to re-deploy its elite units from southwestern Syria to the area if it wants to take any kind of large-scale military actions.
However, at least a limited military operation by the SAA in northern Latakia and southern Idlib has become very likely to take place soon.
During a new round of the Astana-format talks on Syria, which were held in the Russian city of Sochi on July 30-31, Syrian envoy to the UN Bashar Jaafari slammed Turkish actions in the province of Idlib and said that Damascus will kick out Turkish forces from the Syrian territory. The Syrian diplomat emphasized that Turkey is the only country of the guarantor states of the de-escalation agreement [two others: Russia and Iran] that has violated its obligations meaning that Ankara has contributed no efforts to combat Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in the province.
Earlier, Syrian President Bashar Assad officially announced that the province of Idlib will be among the main targets in the upcoming operations of government troops.
“And when they found our shadows (grouped ‘round the TV sets), they ran down every lead; they repeated every test; they checked out all the data in their lists. And then the alien anthropologists admitted they were still perplexed, but on eliminating every other reason for our sad demise they logged the only explanation left: This species has amused itself to death.” – Roger Waters
“Apathy and indifference are nurtured in the modern age as most peoples’ free time is frittered away with worthless trivia like ball games, computer games, movies and soaps, and fiddling with their mobile phones. These distractions might be fun, but after most of them you’ve learnt nothing of any value, and remain ignorant, malleable and suggestible, which is just how the elites want you.” – Clive Maund
“A truth’s initial commotion is directly proportional to how deeply the lie was believed… When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker, a raving lunatic.” – Dresden James
“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.” – Winston Churchill
***
30 years ago (1985) Neil Postman (a professor of communications arts and sciences at New York University – until his death in 2003) wrote the best-selling book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”. The book exposed, among other things, the subtle but profound dangers to the developing mind from the mesmerizing (and addictive) commercial television industry.
The lessons from that book have essentially been ignored by the amoral and corrupted sociopathic capitalist system that says “damn the torpedoes/full steam ahead” and blindly and greedily promotes unlimited growth no matter what the costs and who or what gets hurt long–term in the resource-extractive, exploitive and permanently polluting processes.
But Postman’s thesis applies even more strongly today to the current internet/computer/age- inappropriate pornographic sex and pornographic violence- saturated/ televangelist/ political- contaminated media reality with which the prophetic Postman was properly alarmed.
SOMA, the Drug That Predicted Prozac by 50 Years
In the classic “Brave New World” (1932) Aldous Huxley wrote about the new form of totalitarianism that has now come to pass in the developed world, thanks to the privatized profit-driven, drug, medical and psychiatric corporations whose practitioners were once (naively or altruistically?) mainly concerned with relieving human suffering and trying to holistically and permanently cure their distressed patients’ ailments (rather than lucratively “managing” said “clients” as permanently paying consumers of unaffordable prescription drugs). Nearly 30 years after he wrote the book, Huxley said
“And it seems to me perfectly in the cards that there will be within the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods.”
Neil Postman’s very last sentence of his book concerned the prescription drug-infested victims of the new form of totalitarianism that Huxley had described in “Brave New World”.
Of course, Huxley’s book was all about his imaginary psychotropic drug SOMA that Prozac’s makers and promoters in the late 1980s to falsely claim to make its swallowers “feel better than well”. One of the characters in Brave New World said:
“And if ever, by some unlucky chance, anything unpleasant should somehow happen, why, there’s always Soma to give you a holiday from the facts. And there’s always Soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training. Now, you swallow two or three half-gramme tablets, and there you are. Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears; that’s what Soma is.”
Postman ended his book by writing: “what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.”
A couple of years after the publication of Postman’s book, Roger Waters (of “Pink Floyd’s The Wall” fame) released a “concept” album that was inspired by the book. He titled the album “Amused to Death”. The lyrics of the title track are as follows:
“Amused To Death”
by Roger Waters
Doctor Doctor what’s wrong with me
This supermarket life is getting long
What is the heart life of a colour TV?
What is the shelf life of a teenage
queen?
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
News hound sniffs the air
When Jessica Hahn goes down
He latches on to that symbol of
detachment
Attracted by the peeling away of
feeling
The celebrity of the abused shell
of the belle
Ooh western woman
Ooh western girl
And the children of Melrose strut
their stuff
Is absolute zero cold enough?
And out in the valley warm and clean
The little ones sit by their TV screens
No thoughts to think
No tears to cry
All sucked dry down to the very
last breath.
Bartender what is wrong with me
Why I am so out of breath
The captain said excuse me ma’am
This species has amused itself to death
We watched the tragedy unfold
We did as we were told
We bought and sold
It was the greatest show on earth
But then it was over
We oohed and aahed
We drove our racing cars
We ate our last few jars of caviar
And somewhere out there in the stars
A keen-eyed look-out
Spied a flickering light
Our last hurrah.
And when they found our shadows
Grouped ‘round the TV sets
They ran down every lead
They repeated every test
They checked out all the data in
their lists
And then the alien anthropologists
Admitted they were still perplexed.
But on eliminating every other reason
For our sad demise
They logged the only explanation left
This species has amused itself to death
No tears to cry
No feelings left
This species has amused itself to
death…
And here are pertinent lyrics to some of Waters’ other songs that have to do with the media-generated propaganda and brain-washing that is now so effortlessly accomplished in America’s prescription drug-intoxicated, brain-malnourishing, corporate-controlled and media-dominated technocratic age.
“The Bravery Of Being Out Of Range”
You have a natural tendency
To squeeze off a shot
You’re good fun at parties
You wear the right masks
You’re old but you still
Like a laugh in the locker room
You can’t abide change
You’re at home on the range
You opened your suitcase…
To show off the magnum
You deafened the canyon
A comfort a friend
Only upstaged in the end
By the Uzi machine gun
Does the recoil remind you
Remind you of sex
Old man what the hell you gonna
kill next?
Old-timer who you gonna kill next?
I looked over Jordan and what did
I see
Saw a U.S. Marine in a pile of debris
I swam in your pools
And lay under your palm trees…
And through the range finder over
the hill
I saw the frontline boys popping their
pills
Sick of the mess they find
On their desert stage
And the bravery of being out of range
Yeah the question is vexed
Old man what the hell you gonna
kill next?
Old-timer who you gonna kill next?
Hey bartender over here
Two more shots
And two more beers
Sir turn up the TV sound
The war has started on the ground
Just love those laser guided bombs
They’re really great
For righting wrongs
You hit the target
And win the game
From bars 3,000 miles away
3,000 miles away we play the game
With the bravery of being out of range
We zap and maim
With the bravery of being out of range
We strafe the train
With the bravery of being out of range
We gained terrain
With the bravery of being out of range
We play the game
With the bravery of being out of
range.
“It’s A Miracle”
Miraculous you call it babe
You ain’t seen nothing yet
They’ve got Pepsi in the Andes
McDonalds in Tibet
Yosemite’s been turned into
A golf course for the Japs
The Dead Sea is alive with rap
Between the Tigris and Euphrates
There’s a leisure centre now
They’ve got all kinds of sports
They’ve got Bermuda shorts
They had sex in Pennsylvania
A Brazilian grew a tree
A doctor in Manhattan
Saved a dying man for free
It’s a miracle
Another miracle
By the grace of God Almighty
And pressures of the marketplace
The human race has civilized itself
It’s a miracle
We’ve got a warehouse of butter
We’ve got oceans of wine
We’ve got famine when we need it
And we’ve got designer crime
We’ve got Mercedes
We’ve got Porsche
Ferrari and Rolls Royce
We’ve got a choice…
An honest man
Finally reaped what he had sown
And a farmer in Ohio has just repaid
a loan
It’s a miracle
Another miracle
By the grace of God Almighty
And pressures of the marketplace
The human race has civilized itself
It’s a miracle
We cower in our shelters
With our hands over our ears
Lloyd-Webber’s awful stuff
Runs for years and years and years
An earthquake hits the theatre
But the operetta lingers
Then the piano lid comes down
And breaks his frigging fingers
It’s a miracle
It All Makes Sense
…And the Germans killed the Jews
And the Jews killed the Arabs
And Arabs killed the hostages
And that is the news…
…Hi everybody I’m Marv Albert
And welcome to our telecast
Coming to you live from Memorial
Stadium
It’s a beautiful day
And today we accept a sensational
matchup
Bur first our global anthem
Can’t you see
It all makes perfect sense?
Expressed in dollars and cents
Pounds, shillings and pence
Can’t you see?
It all makes perfect sense…
Late Night Home Tonight – Part 1
But the cockpit’s techno glow
Behind the Ray Ban shine
The kid from Cleveland
In the comfort of routine
Scans his dials and smiles
Secure in the beauty of military life
There is no right or wrong
Only tin cans and cordite and white
cliffs
And blue skies and flight
The beauty of military life
No questions only orders and flight
only flight
What a beautiful sight in his wild blue
dream
The eternal child leafs through his
war magazine
And his kind Uncle Sam feeds ten
trillion in change
Into the total entertainment combat
video game
And up here in the stands
The fans are goin’ wild…
But that’s okay see the children bleed
It’ll look great on TV…
“Too Much Rope”
…And last night on TV
A Vietnam vet
Takes his beard and his pain
And his alienation
Twenty years back to Asia again
Sees the monsters they made
In formaldehyde floating ‘round
Meets a gook on a bike
A good little tyke
A nice enough guy
With the same soldier’s eyes
Tears burn my eyes
What does it mean?
This tear-jerking scene
Beamed into my home
That it moves me so much?
Why all the fuss?
It’s only two humans being
It’s only two humans being
Tears burn my eyes
What does it mean?
This tender TV
This tear-jerking scene
Beamed into my home
You don’t have to be a Jew
To disapprove my murder
Tears burn my eyes
Moslem or Christian, Mullah or Pope
Preachers or poet who was it that
wrote?
Give any one species too much rope
And they’ll fuck it up
And from a song from an earlier Roger Waters album:
“The Powers That Be”
Game shows, rodeos, star wars, TV
They’re the powers that be
If you see them come,
You better run
You better run on home…
The powers that be
They like treats, tricks, carrots and
sticks
They like fear and loathing, they like
sheep’s clothing
And blacked-out vans
Blacked-out vans, contingency plans
They like death or glory, they love a
good story
They love a good story
Sisters of mercy better join with your
brothers
Put a stop to the soap opera state
They say the toothless get ruthless
Run home before its too late.
Dr Gary G. Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, the area’s alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns deal with the dangers of American fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, malnutrition, Big Pharma’s psychiatric drugging and over-vaccination regimens, and other movements that threaten the environment, prosperity, democracy, civility and the health and longevity of the planet and the populace. Many of his columns are archived here, here, and here.
Dr. Kohls is a frequent contributor to Global Research
The United States has the highest incarceration rates in the world. The US not only has a far higher percentage of its population in prison than allegedly “authoritarian” governments, but also has a larger total number of citizens imprisoned than China, a country with four times the US population. The US is by far the largest prison camp in the world.
The conditions, such as solitary confinement, in which many US prisoners are kept are strictly illegal under international law, but that means nothing to “freedom and democracy America.” Solitary confinement, especially confinement inside tiny cells, is like being buried alive. Yet, “freedom and democracy America” is subjecting more than 100,000 citizens to this horror as I write. We hear so much about “America’s moral conscience,” but where is this conscience?
Other prisoners are used as a cheap work force for US military and consumer industries. Prison labor and the privatization of prisons have created an enormous demand for prisoners. American citizens are shoveled into the profit-making prison system regardless of innocence or guilt.
There is no doubt that a large percentage of US prisoners are innocent or imprisoned for victimless crimes, such as drug use. According to official US government statistics, 97 percent of all felonies are settled with plea bargains. Consequently, the police evidence and prosecutor’s case is never tested in court. Not even the innocent want a trial, because the jurors are brainwashed and biased against everyone charged, and the punishments that result from trial conviction are much harsher than those given to a compliant defendant who agrees to a plea bargain. Despite the US Constitution’s prohibition of self-incrimination, the US prison population consists of people coerced into self-incrimination. There is no justice whatsoever in the US criminal justice (sic) system.
“Law and order conservatives” have fantasy ideas about US prisoners lounging around watching TV all day, playing sports in the open air, and studying in prison libraries for law degrees—a life of leisure at public expense. Soren Korsgaard, editor of a crime journal, tells us what life inside an American prison is really like.
Paul Craig Roberts
The United States Criminal Justice System Violates Human Rights
Søren Korsgaard
The US criminal justice system has a long history, continuing to this day, of systematically violating prisoners’ human rights and, hence, international law. Although it has moved away from executions of those who committed their crimes as minors, the justice system still condones wrongful executions as evidenced by a study from 2014, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in which it was concluded, conservatively, that at least 1 in 25 of US death row inmates is innocent of the crime for which they were sentenced to death. Even though this figure, along with facts related to dubious executions, are readily available for public consumption, a massive 55-60% of the US population still supports the death penalty.
Considering that such polls are conducted, it is safe to say that most have given the death penalty some thought; however, the conditions of US prisons are evidently a rare topic of reflection or conversation, except that most informed citizens are, at least, somewhat acquainted with the practices associated with the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and other so-called ‘black sites.’ These practices, of course, include detention without charge or trial, various methods of torture, isolation, and indefinite imprisonment of minors in flagrant violation of international law. What is less known is that equally criminal human rights abuses take place in US maximum security facilities, so-called supermax prisons, and it is therefore essential that the conditions of these are put into the spotlight. In fact, as will be shown in this article, these supermax prisons have been specifically built for torture in the form of prolonged solitary confinement, which goes by many names including isolation, administrative segregation, management control units, protective custody, restrictive housing, and special needs units.
What is solitary confinement? It is typically defined as the physical and social isolation of individuals who are confined to their cells for 22 to 24 hours per day. According to a detailed report by Amnesty International, the US “stands virtually alone in the world in incarcerating thousands of prisoners in long-term or indefinite solitary confinement,” as more than 40 states operate supermax facilities, collectively housing over 25,000 inmates that are kept in near-constant solitary confinement. In other prisons, an additional 80,000 inmates are at any time kept in isolation for variable periods. Solitary confinement has become the first resort in many prisons, and it has been shown that even absurdities can lead to years in isolation. For example, men and women have been placed in isolation for “months or years not only for violent acts but for possessing contraband, testing positive for drug use, ignoring orders, or using profanity ….. or report rape or abuse by prison officials.” Perhaps the most absurd example concerns a group of Rastafarian men who were placed in solitary confinement, some for more than a decade, for refusing to cut their hair as it was fundamental to their faith.
The international community has for a long time discouraged nations from using solitary confinement. For example, when UN’s Special Rapporteur on torture and other inhuman punishment, Juan E. Méndez, delivered his report before the UN’s General Assembly about solitary confinement, he absolutely condemned the use of prolonged isolation and equated it with torture. He added that it should only be used under “exceptional circumstances, for as short a time as possible.” After citing various scientific studies, which showed that “lasting mental damage” can result from even a “few days of social isolation,” he stated that “indefinite and prolonged solitary confinement” should be absolutely prohibited. Méndez also urged nations to end the practice of solitary confinement in pre-trial detention. Méndez’s recommendations were later codified in the United Nations Standard Minimum Rules on the Treatment of Prisoners, known as the “Mandela Rules.”
Extremely harsh sentences and absurdities leading to isolation have also not gone unnoticed by the UN, especially in the context of underage offenders. Among others, Méndez has scolded the US for “being the only country in the world that continues to sentence children to life in prison without parole,” a practice which violates international law as it is considered a “cruel and inhumane punishment” in accordance with article 37(a) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which states that “no child [below 18 years of age] shall be subjected to … capital punishment nor life imprisonment without possibility of release ….”
During the production of the report on torture and isolation, US officials had openly opposed Méndez’s investigation by restricting his access to prisons and various types of documentation; for example, the number of prisoners in solitary confinement is an estimate as such documentation is not available to the public or even the UN. ADX, a supermax, was one of the prisons that US authorities did not want Mendez to inspect and scrutinize. It is located in Florence, Colorado, and has gained a notorious reputation, even internationally, and it is guarded by secrecy and censorship. The former warden has described it as a “clean version of hell,” and that “it’s far much worse than death.”
Pursuant to Amnesty International’s report, “Entombed: Isolation in the US Federal Prison System,” the vast majority of ADX prisoners are kept in their cells for 22-24 hours per day “in conditions of severe physical and social isolation.” The designers of ADX (as well as other supermax prisons) had that specific purpose in mind as thick steel-reinforced concrete walls prevent inmates from having contact with those in adjacent cells, and “most cells have an interior barred door as well as a solid outer door, compounding the sense of isolation.” When prisoners are not confined to their cells for 24 hours per day due to understaffing and other issues, they can leave their cells for a few hours per week to “exercise” in a “bare interior room or in small individual yards or cages, with no view of the natural world.” Cells are equipped with a shower and toilet, minimizing the need for leaving them. The inmates are almost invariably separated from other humans, and even “checks by medical and mental health staff, take place at the cell door and medical and psychiatric consultations are sometimes conducted remotely, through tele-conferencing.”
It is no surprise that under these conditions, suicide attempts, self-mutilations, and acute psychoses are rampant among the inmates. Amnesty International concludes that “the conditions of isolation at ADX breach international standards for humane treatment and, especially when applied for a prolonged period or indefinitely, amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in violation of international law.”
According to the official policy of the Bureau of Prisons, mentally ill inmates are not kept in isolation. It has, however, been profusely documented that inmates with serious psychiatric disorders are kept in isolation and many inmates with no diagnosis have become seriously mentally deranged. Many of these instances have been detailed in various lawsuits. In one lawsuit against ADX, it was detailed that many inmates “suffer from chronic mental illness and some routinely smear themselves and their cells with their own [feces], howl or shriek continuously or bang their metal showers at all hours of the day or night.” This lawsuit also detailed several specific instances of inmates deteriorating mentally during solitary confinement at ADX, one of whom was John Powers.
He was originally placed in the Control Unit (the most isolated part of ADX) to serve a 60-month sentence, but he was frequently transferred to the federal medical facility at Springfield after numerous incidents of self-mutilation. Upon being ‘stabilized’ with various pharmaceuticals, he was promptly returned to the CU at ADX. His medical records showed that he had lacerated his scrotum, bit off his finger, inserted staples into his forehead, and slashed his wrists. Originally, he was ordered to serve 60 months in the Control Unit, but because he did not comply with the behavioral requirements, he spent an unfathomable ten years and five months in that unit before finally being transferred to the lesser restricted General Population Unit (GPU). In the GPU, officials continued to deprive him of mental health care, and subsequently he sliced off his earlobes, sawed through his Achilles tendon, and mutilated his genitals. In 2013, he was transferred to another high-security facility and reportedly “rammed his head into an exposed piece of metal in his cell, causing a skull fracture and brain injury …. [later he was found inserting] metal into his brain cavity through the hole that remain[ed] in his skull.”
The psychological effects of solitary confinement have been well-known for decades and are not even controversial; for instance, in the early 1990s, Dr. Stuart Grassian conducted extensive interviews with people held in restricted housing in the Pelican Bay State Prison, the only supermax in California. Dr. Grassian discovered that solitary confinement “induces a psychiatric disorder characterized by hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucinations, panic attacks, cognitive deficits, obsessive thinking, paranoia, and a litany of other physical and psychological problems. Psychological assessments of men in solitary at Pelican Bay indicated high rates of anxiety, nervousness, obsessive ruminations, anger, violent fantasies, nightmares, trouble sleeping, as well as dizziness, perspiring hands, and heart palpitations.” Considering the humanitarian aspects and that prolonged solitary confinement is a breach of international law, it is striking that the US continues to enforce it upon its convicts as well as those awaiting trial. It appears that inmates are perceived as objects that need to be dealt with in the most efficient way possible for prison staff regardless of international regulations and recommendations.
Søren Korsgaard, author of America’s Jack the Ripper: The Crimes and Psychology of the Zodiac Killer, is the editor-in-chief of Radians & Inches: The Journal of Crime. He may be contacted via [email protected].
On July 14, 2018, Cuba’s new president Miguel Díaz-Canel addressed the closing session of the Union of Cuban Journalists’ (UPEC, Union de Periodistas de Cuba) 10th Congress. He dealt with a variety of issues. However, one of his comments is creating some controversy in Cuba and outside the island, for example in the English-speaking world alone in the U.S., Canada, Austraila and the UK. What did he say? It was concerning the “new revolutionaries” appearing in some media outlets. Thus. I am reproducing his entire speech. This is followed by the publication of the full ironic article by Cuban journalist Manuel H. Lagarde which is quoted as you see below by Díaz-Canel. Both appeared in Granma, the Cuban Communist Party official daily.
The most important point in my view with regards to the “new revolutionaries” is the content of, in the words of Díaz-Canel, the “war that is being waged against us.” However, it is the very “new revolutionaries” themselves who came out in the open – and still do so –to defend themselves, feeling that they were being targeted and proving once again that “If the Shoe Fits, Wear It!”
Other “new revolutionaries” or their supporters remain in the shadows, hoping to ride out this controversy in the futile hope that it will dissipate itself. Thus, they desire to avoid the public embarrassment of siding with those who covertly oppose the Cuban Revolution.
Neither Cuban Public Media Nor Its Journalists Are For Sale
Speech by Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, President of the Councils of State and Ministers, at the closing of the 10th Congress of the Union of Cuban Journalists, in Havana’s International Conference Center, July 14, 2018, Year 60 of the Revolution.
Well, to begin to comply with the mandates of the Congress, and support Ronquillo and the new leadership, before December, I’ll be on Twitter (Applause and exclamations).
Compañeros of the Party, state and government leadership here present;
Esteemed National Journalism Prize winners;
Dear journalists:
Following our most recent tours through several provinces and the days of this Congress, two scenarios that allow us to more closely share experiences and meditations with the national press, I have better understood why Fidel once asked you to consider him one of your own.
Cuban journalists have the indisputable merit of having upheld the voice of the nation in the most adverse circumstances and moments, with admirable loyalty, a great sense of responsibility, talent, intelligence, and contagious enthusiasm that always generates interesting proposals.
No less was and is expected of those who are proud to belong to a guild ennobled from its beginnings by intellectuals of the statue of José Martí, Fidel Castro, and the most brilliant leaders of the Revolution, from 1868 to the present day.
Today, after long and tiring years under the simultaneous siege of the most severe material shortages and the unacceptable lack of appreciation of some of our own sources, it is legitimate to recognize that the majority of you have had to struggle very hard to practice with dignity a trade that demands not only talent and effort, but also very elevated ideals, to reject – in the midst of great economic sacrifices – the offers of relatively “generous” payments that the lucrative industry of the campaigns against Cuba opportunistically and cynically makes available to those who have a price, or naively believe in the false libertarian discourse of market apologists.
We could say that the media landscape was never so challenging and demanding, but we would be unjust to the history of a Revolution that has known no respite in its arduous efforts to gain all justice and that, from the first day, as Fidel’s phrase that has presided this Congress recalls, understood the central role of journalism in defense of a besieged fortress.
How to imagine the rapid advance of the Rebel Army without the numerous clandestine and guerilla press or Radio Rebelde? What would have become of the nascent Revolution without the brilliant “Operation Truth?” Wasn’t the media war – that stole the name of the Apostle, broadcasting from an airplane – overcome with technologies and new journalistic projects that revolutionized radio and television at the time and still today?
Thanks to the understanding that its truth needs journalism, Cuba was able to build a public media system whose main strength is you, the journalists, more efficient the more authentic, original and creative you are on telling the nation and the world the truth that “needs you.”
What we can say now is that although the ICT revolution, the Internet era, and the tyranny of companies engaged in the communications business present us with increasingly greater challenges as an underdeveloped economy, the country has not submitted to the rules of its enemy, nor ceded its sovereignty in the name of swift modernity.
And that, no matter how many attempts we face to return us to the past of sensationalism and private press under new masks, neither Cuban public media nor its journalists are for sale.
I do not accuse unjustly. I point to the open war that is being waged against us from media outlets that, under the umbrella of better times in the always fragile relations with the powerful neighbor that despises us, have been escalating the attack on what unites us – the Party – and what defends us – our press – constantly discrediting both and attempting to fracture and separate what comes from the same roots and sprouts from the same trunk.
Alluding to the type of mission that these media outlets attempt to fulfill with surprising coordination, that belies their supposed freedom, M. H. Lagarde has depicted with irony but without euphemisms, the new class of leaders that are sold to us from these spaces. I recommend the complete reading of “The New Revolutionaries” of whom Lagarde affirms:
“… The new revolutionaries swear over and over again that they are not hirelings of official thought, but they accept scholarships in universities of the United States, or receive journalism courses in Holland, where surely they teach them to defend socialism in Cuba. We must assume that such courses and scholarships are free.
“The new revolutionaries call for disobedience when unity is most needed. For them, experts also in politics, the ‘judicial’ persecution of leftist leaders in Latin America, the soft coup and invasion attempts in Venezuela and Nicaragua, have nothing to do with Cuba.
“The new revolutionaries are democratic and respectful of opposing views, which is why those who do not share their positions are: submissive, sheep, obedient, mediocre, Taliban, Khmer Rouge, Stalinists, pro-government, and repressive.
“The main mission, therefore, of the new revolutionaries is to divide something that, without a doubt, they sometimes achieve.”
Lagarde’s text is just a little longer, but these ideas are enough, as they define the most urgent challenge of this era in this part of the world.
I know that the theoretical documents and debates of the Congress, without ignoring, forgetting or dismissing internal pressing needs, which, when all is said and done, are also strategic, have pointed to the centrality of this ceaseless battle between the selfish and exclusionary logic of capital, and our socialist and martiana, fidelista, solidary, and generous logic.
Because, although they sell us another version of the facts, the stubborn reality is too obvious, taking its painful toll on those who believed the wolf was a sheep.
It either is to be or not to be, since the times of Shakespeare.
Of course, the Congress has been much more than this central debate and we are glad. Firstly, it is worth celebrating that we arrive at this tenth edition with the Social Communications Policy, a document that defines, at last, the access to information, communications and knowledge as a citizens’ right and as a public good; that grants the highest authority to press executives; that cross-cuts society and establishes obligations in this sense for institutions, bodies, authorities; that defends the values and symbols of the nation and mandates respect for the diversity that we are. That declares communications a strategic resource of the state and government leadership, and defines the public nature of broadcasting and communications services, and recognizes only two types of ownership of the mass media: state and social.
UPEC and the Faculty of Communications of the University of Havana have been an active part of the drafting of this policy and its adjustment and adaptation to the current times. Virtually the entire guild has participated in fundamental discussions for its subsequent application. There is enthusiasm in the Congress for the doors that open to historic and recent concerns of the sector, such as the management systems that grant greater autonomy to media outlets and their strengthening, ordering, technological renovation. I understand that those who are not invited to the analysis, as they are not part of UPEC, nor of the Cuban society that won with sacrifice and efforts the exclusive right to discuss how to design the future, are furious.
And, of course, we are not surprised that the hirelings of global monolithic thinking, in their Creole or foreign version, have begun to launch rivers of intrigue against the Party and the country’s media system. What did they expect? What do they suggest? Perhaps that we surrender, for example, our news agencies into the arms of the market, and their journalists to the street? Well no. Our Télam will not be bled. The International Monetary Fund doesn’t rule in Cuba.
According to the reports I have received from the first days of the Congress, this has been a successful event, with shorter reports and solid and contributing proposals, based on the experience of the grassroots of the organization in the media and academia. I believe this is because UPEC has not ceased to function over recent years, not even in the most disconcerting and harsh, when you lost you natural and formal leader, brother Moltó, as I know you like to call him, for the spirit of camaraderie that he left as a work style and his special relationship with the rank and file at any level.
His brilliant definition of what UPEC is for, his battle to sign up youth in any fight Cuba faced, and even his ability to promote the computerization drive, the use of social media, and the concentrated use of the contributions of the Faculty, leave a roadmap along which the renewed national committee will travel from today, without breaking continuity.
The summaries of the commission will be a useful working tool to assume new media spaces, unafraid, creatively on the offensive, overcoming the technological advantages of the colonizing platforms with the talent and creativity that our fighting nature and the cultural and political heritage that Fidel left us, that Raúl and his compañeros of the historic generation continue to offer us.
I don’t forget the strongest demands you have made: salaries, insufficient and anchored in old resolutions that must be discarded; the precarious material situation of the media and journalists, an issue where light is already beginning to appear at the end of the tunnel of our eternal scarcities, at least in the provinces, where the needs of journalists and their media have been taken into account with the use of 1% of the territorial contribution (local income).
No one is better prepared than you to understand that what is pending is much more than the need of a guild. It is the need of a people, noble and hardworking, whose human, heroic and moving stories are yet to be fully told. As the country that our media shows is to better resemble the country that we are. Material resources may be lacking, but never the moral resources and revolutionary ethics, which you contribute daily, that which Víctor Joaquín and Aroldo defend.
By defending these values, we are Cuba!
As I have asked you to consider me one of your own, I also feel a great responsibility in the great task that lies ahead of you and of us, the Party, the state and the government, to settle our numerous debts with past and recent history, which at the same time are with the future.
Yes, the truth needs you. And as the Revolution, Martí and Fidel taught us, the truth is bigger than ourselves.
We will be seeing each other on the path to that horizon that we owe ourselves.
Message to Abu Dhabi, Riyadh and Tel Aviv: Not to worry, US President Donald J. Trump has no intention of meeting his Iranian counterpart, Hassan Rouhani, unconditionally.
The announcement took many by surprise and threatened to reinforce the impression, even among America’s closest friends in the Middle East, that Mr. Trump was a supportive but unpredictable and unreliable ally.
He published his plan, drafted at the request of Mr. Trump’s then strategic advisor, Steve Bannon, in August of last year after he had lost hope of presenting it to the president in person.
The plan meticulously lays out the arguments Mr. Trump employed to justify the withdrawal from the nuclear agreement and steps the United States should take to garner international support for the sanctions regime.
“Iran is not likely to seek further negotiations once the JCPOA is abrogated, but the Administration may wish to consider rhetorically leaving that possibility open in order to demonstrate Iran’s actual underlying intention to develop deliverable nuclear weapons, an intention that has never flagged,” the plan said. JCPOA is the acronym for the nuclear accord’s official designation, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.
Mr. Trump’s surprise announcement hardly proves the allegation that Iran intends to develop a military nuclear capability, but it does constitute an attempt to gain the moral high ground and weaken European, Russian and Chinese support for the agreement by demonstrating that Iran is recalcitrant and unwilling to come to the table.
The president’s offer puts Iran in a bind. Refusal to talk serves Mr. Trump’s purpose. An agreement to engage would have increased domestic hardline pressure on the Iranian president and involved him in discussions that given US policy had little chance of success.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Rouhani advisor Hamid Aboutalebi said as much in separate statements in the wake of Mr. Trump’s offer.
“If the Iranians demonstrate a commitment to make fundamental changes in how they treat their own people, reduce their malign behaviour, can agree that it’s worthwhile to enter in a nuclear agreement that actually prevents proliferation, then the president said he’s prepared to sit down and have a conversation with him,” Mr. Pompeo clarified.
Mr Aboutalebi was probably referring not only to Mr. Trump’s long-standing anti-Iranian bluster as well as his withdrawal from the agreement and re-imposition of sanctions, but also to Mr. Bolton’s plan that appears to embody the guidelines of the president’s policy.
“With Israel and selected others, we will discuss military options. With others in the Gulf region, we can also discuss means to address their concerns from Iran’s menacing behaviour,” the plan suggests.
Few believe that either the United States or Iran wants a direct military confrontation.
So has Saudi Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former head of the kingdom’s intelligence service and past ambassador to Britain and the United States, who is believed to often echo views that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman prefers not to voice himself.
Mr. Bolton’s plan contains building blocks for attempts to destabilize Iran not only by squeezing it economically but also by spurring insurgencies among the country’s ethnic minorities.
The plan envisions official US support “for the democratic Iranian opposition,” “Kurdish national aspirations in Iran, Iraq and Syria,” and assistance for Baloch in the Pakistani province of Balochistan and Iran’s neighbouring Sistan and Balochistan province as well as Iranian Arabs in the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan. It also suggests expedited delivery of bunker-buster bombs to US allies.
A Saudi think tank, believed to be backed by Prince Mohammed, called last year in a study for Saudi support for a low-level Baloch insurgency in Iran.
Pakistani militants have claimed that Saudi Arabia has stepped up funding of militant madrassas or religious seminaries in Balochistan that allegedly serve as havens for anti-Iranian fighters.
Said Iran scholar Ahmad Majidyar: “Iran’s south-eastern and north-western regions – home to marginalized ethnic and religious minorities – have seen an uptick in violence by separatist and militant groups… Sistan and Baluchestan can be a breeding ground for local militant and separatist movements as well regional and international terrorist groups.”
The Yes Minister series portraying the skulduggery of Whitehall during the Thatcher years throws up a salient reminder how certain things do not mix. Should the art portfolio be slotted alongside television? Probably not, but politics is politics. Civil servants will intrigue and seek to influence the minister of the day for their own advancement. The minister either resists or is duly house trained.
The idea that Australia’s Channel Nine network should be consuming the longstanding press entity that is Fairfax Media in an incongruous commercial merger raises a similarly awkward question. Not that Channel Nine doesn’t do journalism. It does, just of a frightful, ambulance chasing sort.
The deal would see the creation of a media behemoth in what is already one of the world’s most concentrated media landscapes. Nine’s free-to-air television network would be linked with the ongoing concern of Fairfax’s The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, its radio assets (Sydney’s 2GB and Melbourne’s 3AW), the streaming video platform Stan and the real estate portal Domain.
Reassurances given about the continued independence and quality of that press entity are meaningless. Nine chief executive Hugh Marks is undeterred. “We just needed to reassure the creators and journalists that their world wasn’t going to change. It’s all about how a bigger scale company can take their work and generate more revenue.”
Marks, in slanting the emphasis towards generating revenue, ignores the actual practice of meaningful, investigative journalism. Head entities with the dominant running concern have a habit of heaping their values upon subordinates. Cross-pollination, of the more sordid kind, is bound to happen, and it is the very sort that is bound to be lethal to a certain species of effective scribbling.
The marketing fraternity simply see promotions and deals, the empty hum that comes with entertainment platforms. Former Australian treasurer Peter Costello and Nine Entertainment chairman advances the most crude of corporate lines: “This is the opportunity to build a media company for the digital age, growing revenue with complementary streams and in a position to create growth opportunities for both sets of shareholders.”
Forget the informative, hard-hitting journalism; this is brand appeal, an issue centred on “data solutions”, “premium content” and stock value. The role of the Fourth Estate here is singularly less important than that of the commercial estate, of which Nine has been inhabiting with some discomfort of late.
David Waller of the University of Sydney sees the prospects of cross promotion. “By combining different media – TV, print and online – they’ve got a greater scope to get more people to see the message.” He further sees the emergence of various hybrid progeny: existing stars will branch out; day time television specialists may find their way into radio, and radio shock jocks into television. It does not seem to bother Waller that quality might well be the most conspicuous casualty.
Australia’s media and press landscape has had a problem with diversity for years, stuck in concentrated monochrome. Even praise for Fairfax has to be qualified. While there are excellent pockets of striving reporters with tenacious burrowing skills, there are the recyclers and the plodders. “For the most part,” notes Stephen Harrington of the Queensland University of Technology, “we have seen a real evacuation of hard-hitting political journalism from TV in the last 20 years or so.
Such a merger supplies another crude nail to the coffin of Fourth Estate activities. The state’s democratic health, opines former Fairfax journalist Andrea Carson, “relies on more than a A$4 billion merger that delivers video streaming services like Stan, a lucrative real estate advertising website like Domain, and a high-rating television program like Love Island.”
Former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating, in giving the proposed merger a generous rubbishing, was sharper than ever about the implications. Channel Nine, he warned, had “never other than displayed the opportunism and ethics of an alley cat.”
Had Australia a viable, operable protection of free speech enshrined in its constitution (it has, as it were, an anaemic variant called an implied right to communication on political subjects), such a merger would be legally damned as an affront that would actually restrict rather than expand discussion on public interest matters affecting the country. But such issues ride poorly in such quarters as that of Channel Nine, where what is supposedly interesting to the public has preferment over what is in the public interest.
In light of this merger, gritty, informed reporting can go hang, and those unwilling to go along with the management line are bound to either adapt or leave the arena. The focus will be on other papers and outlets, those considered resolute outliers, to gather the principled survivors.
The optimist may venture another less likely prediction: that Fairfax’s investigative vigour might find its way into Nine’s moribund programs that qualify as foot-in-the-door journalism. Imagine 60 Minutes moving beyond lamentable gossip and suburban rumour? Or the content skimpy A Current Affair adjusting from bread-and-circuses horror stories of entertainment to matters of intellectual substance? All terribly unlikely, but some will dare to dream.
Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University,Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
The Syrian army is ending the battle in the last 2% of the Qunietra province that remains under the control of the “Islamic State” (ISIS) terrorist group. This will free tens of thousands of troops of the Syrian army and its allies from the burden of fighting in the south of the country and will mark a real turn in the seven years of war imposed on the Levant. The whole of Syria has been liberated from the territorial control of all militias and jihadists. What remains is under the control of two countries: the US and Turkey in the north of the country. However, this doesn’t seem sustainable, particularly when the Kurds, controlling 23% of Syria, have decided to respond to the Syrian President’s call to either start dialogue or face war. The US has no chance of staying over the long run, but will find a way to leave with some dignity, very soon.
The US presence in Syria had several aims:
– To divide Syria and make sure the north is called Rojava, a Kurdish State under US governorate and “protection”, similar to Kurdistan Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s era. The US was not against a Kurdish state that includes Syria and Iraq. However, the Iraqi Kurdistan, under Masood Barzani, burned the bridge towards independence and refused to follow the advice of the US to postpone such a decision for 18 months. Barzani’s decision was confronted with a strong reaction from Baghdad troops, who took control of Kurdistan’s borders and resources.
– To leave the rest of Syria in an endless bloody war between Salafi-Takfiri jihadists and all the other groups. This would have ended with ISIS being in control, whose objective was not the US (a far away enemy, even if it is at its doorstep), but a nearer enemy: Lebanon, Jordan, and the rest of the Middle East. This would have been detrimental to the “Axis of Resistance” (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah) or would have at least interrupted the flow of weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah would have been cornered into the south of Lebanon, a Shia enclave surrounded by Israel on one side and a hostile government or Takfiri rule in the other parts of the country.
The US came to Syria not exclusively to control part of its oil but to serve the purpose of Israel by eliminating its enemy. However, the war in Syria did not go as planned and today the Syrian President, or at least the government of Damascus, controls the entire Syrian territory with the exception of the north. This is regardless of ISIS’ insurgency, which can continue to be operational not only in Syria, but also in any other part of the Middle East and North Africa (Egypt is the best example where the state is well established but suffers from continuous terrorist attacks).
Moreover, the Putin-Trump meeting in Helsinki gave confidence to both Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, where Moscow promised to protect the borders with Israel. The Russian President argued that Assad had kept his borders with the occupied Golan heights for over 40 years without any incident. Therefore, the presence of Assad in power, and the Russian military police on the borders in addition to the UNDOF (UN Disengagement Forces established by the UNSC resolution 350 in May 1974 to monitor the ceasefire between Israel and Syria) all represent security for Israel. When this objective is met, there will be no reason for the US forces to stay and occupy the al-Tanf Iraq-Syria crossing and al-Hasaka province where the Kurdish forces are based.
Moreover, the confident Assad launched his ultimatum to the Kurds: “either negotiate, or you will face war”. The reason why the Syrian president said this because he is aware that Idlib, the north-western city under Turkish control, will not capitulate without fighting.
The military operation has started in rural Latakia to distance the danger from the coastal province, where jihadists sporadically attack Syrian positions and other villages in the area. Moreover, several armed drones were launched from the area against the Russian military base in Hmeymim and were shot down by the Russian air defences inside the base before they reached their target.
In Idlib, the head of the UN’s humanitarian task force for Syria Jan Egeland said “there are two million people including the Internally Displaced Refugees” and beyond 40,000 jihadists and their allies (Jabhat al-Nusra aka Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, Hurras el-Deen, Jund al-Aqsa, Ahrar al-Sham and many others) who will refuse to put down their weapons without a fight.
Sources in Damascus confirmed the battle of Idlib will happen most probably in September. “When the air force and artillery start pounding jihadists positions, Idlib will be under fire. The Syrian army has studied and established several safe corridors for civilians to leave Idlib either north or south of the city and its rural area to avoid civilian casualties”.
Turkey is aware that the Syrian government is no longer stoppable. Therefore, it needs to determine its withdrawal and will have to accept letting go of jihadists in the north because Assad is determined to liberate all of Syria by all means.
Turkey’s primary concern is to stop the Kurds from having their state. This coincides with Assad’s objective to prevent the partition of Syria. Thus, a Kurdish delegation visited Damascus to initiate dialogue with the central government, with the consensus of the US leadership.
In all three Kurdish enclaves (Afrin, Kobani, and Jazeera), there was a “Democratic Autonomous administration” under the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its armed branch, the People’s Protection Units (YPG). With the loss of Afrin to Turkey, the remaining two enclaves become connected to each other and host several US military bases and airports.
The central Kurdish city is Qamishli (in al-Jazeera canton), is still hosting to-date a large Syrian Army force. The Kurds never clashed with the Syrian army (a few small incidents were registered years ago) and are not willing to separate from Syria but look for a decentralised canton. The Kurdish delegation asked Damascus to take up its responsibility as a central government and thus be responsible for the Euphrates Dam and its upkeep and restoration (following the severe damage inflicted during the battle with ISIS), the distribution of drinkable water, the electricity supply, and the reconstruction of houses, schools, and hospitals.
The Syrian government responded by saying that the Constitution had been amended in 2012, in which articles 130 and 131 called for “decentralisation and financial and administrative independence of local governance structures”, paired with the legislative Decree 107 of October 2011.
The Kurds agreed on Decree 107 but contested the way it was implemented and the lack of authority given to local representatives and the appointed governor. They also contested the power given to the Minister in charge of overseeing all provinces and their administration.
It is the interpretation of the existing laws, as well as their implementation and power that were discussed between the two delegations. Moreover, the distribution of wealth (mainly gas and oil) was discussed, and it was agreed to resume discussion on all suspended points in the future meetings that will soon follow.
Damascus considers that the meeting was successful, indicating the will of the Kurds to remain under the umbrella of the central government in one country. They also accept Russia as a guarantor of both the deal and the political solution in the country.
The Kurds offered to place a substantial amount of their forces under the service of the Syrian Army in order to help and assist any war against terrorists and jihadists, particularly those that remain from ISIS and al-Qaeda and their allies in the north of the country. Damascus welcomes the initiative and will undoubtedly benefit from the offer.
It is too early to talk about a final deal between Damascus and Qamishli. However, it is clear that it has started well and is on the right track. The Kurds have accepted that the US will not be around forever to protect them and therefore they need to protect themselves by returning to the arms of the central government, where they belong.
With the end of the war in the south and the Kurdish initiative, it is only a matter of time and circumstances before the US finds a quiet way out of Syria, ending their occupation and accepting that their “regime change” has failed miserably.
It could very well be that the US would like to see from the vicinities how Syria and Russia will deal with Idlib. Nevertheless, there is no doubt about the outcome of the battle: Syria is walking towards the end of its long and bloody war.
Last week, mid-July, Trump threatened $500 billion in tariffs on China imports, escalating his prior threat to impose $200 billion on China. He then threatened hundreds of billion in tariffs on world auto parts imports, targeting Europe. But Trump’s threats and announcements do not constitute a trade war. Threats and even announcements of tariffs are one thing; the actual implementation of tariffs another. But even the current scope of tariff implementations do not yet represent a trade war. Bona fide trade wars occur when tariff fights spill over to currency devaluations and generate currency wars.
To date, only $34 billion in tariffs on China industrial imports to the US has been actually implemented, plus another $2-$3 billion in intermediate steel and aluminum products. In response, China has so far imposed an equivalent $36 billion in tariffs on imported US agricultural goods, targeting US soybeans, port, cotton and other grains produced in Trump’s political base of the US Midwest agricultural belt.
Elsewhere around the globe, earlier in July Trump threatened to escalate a trade conflict with the European Union, threatening to impose $200 billion on Europe and global auto part imports to the US. But to date there’s only been US tariffs implemented on Europe steel and aluminum imports. And the response from Europe has been a mere $3 billion in counter tariffs on US imports. Ditto for trade with Mexico-Canada. US steel-aluminum tariffs on imports from Mexico-Canada have elicited a token response of $15.8 billion in Mexican and Canadian tariffs on US imports.
Total actually implemented US import tariffs to date—mostly levied against China—amount to only $72 billion, or 2.3% of a total of $3.06 trillion imports into the US annually. US trading partners have responded measuredly in kind, with their own 2.3% in tariffs on US exports on the total $2.58 trillion US exports worldwide. Tariffs of 2.3% hardly represent a tariff war, let alone a trade war. Bona fide trade wars are never limited to tariffs. Trade wars involve not only tariffs but also non-tariff barriers to trade. Even more important, bona fide trade wars occur when tariff spats escalate and precipitate currency devaluations.
Should Trump follow through with threats of $200-$500 billion more tariffs on China imports, the US and China will likely slip into a currency war as China allows its currency, the Yuan, to devalue further. And that devaluation will almost certainly quickly go global— given the current significant decline in currency exchange rates already taking place throughout various throughout key emerging market economies (Argentina, Turkey, India, etc.). Other emerging market economies will have no choice but to follow China’s devaluation lead. Nor will advanced economies like Japan and Europe be immune from having to devalue, as they to offset Trump tariffs in order to maintain their share of global trade that Trump policies are clearly attacking.
Trump’s Dual Track Trade War
Trump apparently believes he can control the response of US trading partners to his threats and intimidations, and that he can conclude token trade deals, if necessary, to avoid falling over the trade cliff of currency devaluations. While he might be able to backtrack and quickly close trade deals with NAFTA partners and Europe—just as he settled a quick, token deal with South Korea early this year—the settling of a quick trade deal with China may not prove so easy. And the longer the tariff conflict with China continues, and escalates, as appears likely, the greater the likelihood or the current US-China tariff spat descending into a currency war.
A Trump two track trade policy has been underway since early 2018. One track is with US trading allies. Here Trump will prove flexible and eventually settle for minor adjustments in trade terms, just as he did with the South Korea trade pact earlier this year. Trump will then exaggerate and misrepresent the dimensions of the deals with allies, selling it all as great achievements benefitting his domestic US political base and confirming his US ‘economic nationalism’ policy that proved so politically valuable to him in the 2016 elections. Much of the trade war with allies is really about US domestic politics and the upcoming US November midterm elections.
US-Mexico Deal Imminent
Unlike China, where trade negotiations are currently frozen and no discussions are underway, both Europe and Mexico in recent weeks have been signaling they are amenable to a quick deal with Trump if he will settle for relatively minor concessions. Mexico president elect, Lopez Obrador, sent his trade negotiator to Washington DC this past week to explore concessions with Trump. A deal was negotiated last spring by US and Mexican trade representatives but was subsequently scuttled by Trump. Trump introduced a new demand in US-Mexico negotiations that any trade deal would have to ‘sunset’ and be renegotiated every five years. Trump did not want a deal too early. Trump wants a deal closer to the US November elections so that he can tout it to his domestic political base as proof his ‘economic nationalism’ policy works. The current differences between the US and Mexican positions in negotiations currently are otherwise not significant; should Trump drop his sunset demand, which he will do when the timing for his domestic politics is appropriate—that is, just before or soon after the US midterm elections—a deal with Mexico (and thereafter similarly with Canada) will be concluded quickly. And according to US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, just last week, an agreement between the US and Mexico will soon be announced.
Hiatus in Trump ‘War of Words’ with Europe
The same Trump flexible approach was evident in the just announced ‘deal’ with European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, who also came to Washington this past week. Juncker’s goal was to get Trump to back off his threats to impose tariffs on Europe auto part imports. Not actual tariffs, in other words, but to get Trump to retract his threat to perhaps introduce them. Trump and Juncker then announced a ‘deal’. The so-called deal is merely verbal and indicate objectives the parties, US and Europe, hope to maybe achieve, at some point undefined in the future. It was not actually a trade agreement. Just a mutual statement they would negotiate toward a deal. Trump backtracked from his threat to impose tariffs on autos. In exchange, Juncker offered to buy more US soybeans and US natural gas at some point in the future. In terms of actual tariffs, or any other ‘trade’ measure, the Trump-Juncker announcement was mostly a public relations stunt for both parties designed to placate their domestic critics.
The US trade war with Europe is just a war of words, as it has been thus far with NAFTA. What exists in fact is just a couple billion dollars of actual tariffs on steel and aluminum imposed by the US on Europe and a similar amount of token tariffs implemented by Europe on select US imports to Europe. The so-called trade war with NAFTA and Europe is still phony. Not so the case, however, with China. And while negotiations continue with NAFTA and Europe, no further discussions are underway with China and will likely not occur soon.
What the US Wants from China—And Won’t Get
Unlike NAFTA and Europe, a quick settlement with China is not in the works. The US wants concessions from China that it is not demanding from NAFTA, Europe and other allies. The US wants concessions in three areas from China: more access to China markets by US banks and multinational corporations, including 51% and then 100% US corporate ownership of their operations there. Second, the US wants China to purchase at least $100 billion more in US goods, mostly from Midwest US agribusiness and manufacturing. Third, it is demanding stringent limits and reductions in China’s current policy requiring US nextgen technology transfer from US businesses operating in China. What has the US defense and intelligence establishment especially worried is China plans to leapfrog the US in nextgen technologies like 5G wireless, Artificial Intelligence, and Cybersecurity. These represent not only the source of industries of the future, but threaten a quantum leap in China military capabilities. The US refers to the nextgen technologies as ‘intellectual property’ since they are fundamentally software based. But what the US really means is nextgen military-capable software intellectual property.
When negotiations opened with China this past spring, China cleverly offered major concessions to the US. It announced it would grant 51% ownership rights for US multinational corporations doing business in China, and signaled it could agree to 100% as well. That delighted US bankers and multinational corporations. Their representative on the US trade negotiating team, US Treasury Secretary, Steve Mnuchin, publicly declared a deal with China was therefore imminent. China also signaled it could purchase $100 billion more a year in US agricultural products. But it would not budge on the tech transfer issue. A deal was close but was then upended by US defense-intelligence-war industries US negotiating faction. Through their friends in Congress, they aborted any prospective trade deal with China. Trump then followed up by threatening to impose an additional $200 billion of tariffs on China in response to China matching US tariffs on China imports by implementing an equivalent $34 billion on US exports to China, especially targeting US soybeans, pork and other grains. And when China declared it would match the US further threat of another $200 billion in tariffs, Trump doubled down by threatening a further $500 billion on China imports. While Trump’s threats of more tariffs and intimidation tactics have proven successful eliciting the response he wants from Europe and NAFTA partners, it has not to date proved similarly effective with China. Nor will it likely.
While China will allow significant US corporate access to its markets, and will agree to purchase hundreds of billions more of US exports, especially agricultural, China shows no signs of bending on its technology development objectives. And while US bankers, multinational corporations, and agribusiness-farmers appear willing to cut a trade deal on market access and US exports purchases, it appears that the US defense establishment (Pentagon, Intelligence agencies, defense contractors), together with its friends in Congress, will not allow a deal with China without major concessions by China on technology.
From Tariff Spats to Currency Wars
Trump believes his intimidation tactics—thus far proving successful with NAFTA and Europe—will work as well with China. He believes he can close token deals quickly when he chooses with the former two, which is true. But he can’t do so similarly with China. And the longer the tariff spat with China drags on, and deteriorates, the more likely a US-China tariff war will escalate into a bona fide trade war involving currencies and US dollar-Yuan exchange rates. And that is the prospect US and global business interests are particularly worried about.
A currency war between the US and China will reverberate across the global economy that already shows signs of slowing and, in some key sectors, is already descending into recession. Tariff spats involve two trading partners and may affect their mutual economies, but currency wars quickly spread across all economies in a chain-like contagion of devaluations.
This potential scenario is approaching, as Europe’s economy is slowing rapidly and tending toward stagnation once again. Japan is already in another recession. A growing number of emerging market economies are contracting—the worst case scenarios being Argentina, now in a 5.8% economic contraction, but Brazil, South Africa, and others are continuing to slip further deeper into recession. Turkey’s currency is now collapsing rapidly, a harbinger of real economic contraction on the near horizon. Meanwhile, India and other south Asian currencies and economies are also growing more unstable. In short, the global economy is growing more fragile in terms of both trade and production. A trade war involving currency instability between China and US will almost certainly tip the balance.
But Trump clearly believes China’s economy can be destabilized by the US trade offensive. That China has more to lose than the US, since it has benefitted from US trade more than the US has from China trade. But this is a naïve and simplistic analysis, typical of Trump and his advisors. Typical of a financial speculator mentality, Trump believes that so long as the US stock markets are doing well, the real economy is strong and can weather an intensification of a tariff war. For Trump, ‘tariffs are great’. Just raise them further to intimidate trading partners and force concessions from them to the benefit of US corporate interests and the economies of his domestic political US base.
China has already begun to ‘dig in’, however, in anticipation of a longer, protracted contest with the US over tariffs and their economics effects, and US demands to restrict China technology development. It has just announced another major fiscal-monetary stimulus to its economy this past week, in anticipation of slower growth from exports and trade with the US. A massive money injection to spur bank lending, tax cuts, and more government investment are planned to offset any export slowdown. It is also aggressively pursuing other trade deals with Europe and other economies to offset any decline in US trade. China also has various measures it can employ in a Trump trade war escalation. It can slow its purchase of US Treasury bonds. It can impose more non-tariff administrative barriers on US companies in China and those exporting to China. It can launch a boycott of US made goods among China consumers. These are likely measures of last resort, however. More likely is China may allow its currency, the Yuan, to devalue against the dollar—thus even offsetting any Trump tariff effects. And ironically somewhat, the devaluation of China’s currency will be allowed to occur due to market forces, not any China official declaration of devaluation, since the US policy is already causing a devaluation of the Yuan.
Trump’s trillion dollar annual US budget deficits have resulted in the US Federal Reserve central bank raising interest rates. The Fed must raise rates to finance Trump’s now estimated annual trillion dollar deficits for the next decade (caused by Trump’s $3 trillion in tax cuts and trillion dollar hikes in defense spending; with trillions more tax cuts and defense spending in the Congressional pipeline before year end 2018).
To pay for the multi-trillion dollar deficits, the US central bank, the Fed, is rapidly raising interest rates. Rising interest rates are driving up the value of the US dollar. That dollar appreciation in turn is causing an inverse decline in the value of emerging market economy currencies—and that includes China’s Yuan currency. The Yuan has devalued by 10% since the US tax cuts, deficits, and interest rate hikes in 2018. A seven percent Yuan devaluation in just the last three months. The Yuan is now at the edge of its trading band at 6.8 to the dollar. Should it slip further, which is inevitable as US interest rates and the dollar continue to rise, a devaluing Yuan will set off a chain reaction of devaluations throughout the global economy—i.e. a currency war will have arrived. And as currencies devalue, Trump’s tariffs will have been offset, neutralized, negated.
Trump has declared ‘tariffs are great’. But Trump’s tariffs will have been negated in turn by a currency war set in motion by Trump’s own domestic fiscal and monetary policies that are causing the US dollar to rapidly appreciate worldwide. Trump is betting his intimidation approach can produce quick results before his tariff war precipitates a currency war and a severe global economic contraction. He is rolling the economic dice. He and his advisors clearly believe if it gets too serious, he can call off the tariff disputes with NAFTA, Europe and other trading allies quickly. He probably can, by backing off and getting token agreements which he’ll misrepresent and exaggerate. But the scenario for a quick resolution is quite different with China. It will not back off so easily. The US-China dispute is far different than the US-trading allies (NAFTA, Europe) trade war of words.
Some Conclusions
Thus far, Trump’s trade wars with allies are phony. A NAFTA deal is imminent. A hiatus even in the trade war of words with Europe has been declared. And a further escalation with China has not yet occurred. Trump will announce token and fake deals with Mexico and Canada before the US November elections for purposes of touting the success of his ‘economic nationalism’ to his US domestic political base. He will likely make more outrageous threats to China while perhaps trying to lure them back to negotiations with sweet-talk about China President, Xi, and possibilities of a deal . But China knows his game by now, and most likely will not negotiate until it sees what happens with the US November elections and the Mueller investigation of Trump.
At some point China and the US will negotiate. When they do, the key to whether a real trade war emerges thereafter—and that will only be with China—will depend whether Trump follows through with his threats to impose another $200 billion in tariffs on China imports to the US and whether the Pentagon and US defense industry lobby agrees to soften its demands on US technology transfer. US-China negotiations have already reached tacit agreement on China purchases of US exports and more US banker-corporate access to China markets in the future. How China will respond to more US tariffs and technology transfer is the crux of any US-China trade agreement—or trade war.
Trump and his advisors believe China cannot match tit-for-tat an equal $200 billion since it doesn’t import that magnitude of goods from the US. They think therefore they have the advantage in a dispute with China. The US has a bigger ‘tariff stick’ than China has is the thinking. But that view is naïve. China has other measures, which it has signaled it is prepared to employ (without yet revealing the details). A devaluation of its currency would be high on its agenda of possible responses should Trump implement $200 billion more in tariffs. China’s currency is already pushing the edge of its band, at 6.8 to 6.9 to the dollar. China thus far has been intervening in money markets to keep it there. All it needs to do, however, is stop intervening and let the Yuan devalue beyond the band, driven by market forces. It doesn’t even need to declare a devaluation. As the dollar rise, as it will continue to do so as the Fed raises interest rates further, the Yuan will devalue without China intervening to prevent it. (In other words, US policy is ultimately driving the Yuan devaluation). A Yuan devaluation will allow China to offset Trump tariff costs by an equivalent amount, thus negating Trump’s tariff actions. Contrary to Trump’s bombast, of ‘Tariffs Are Great’, he will find that tariff wars typically fail.
At that point the skirmish on tariffs between the US and China will morph into a currency war and signal that a true trade war will have begun. It will be a China-US trade war—with significant repercussions for other global currencies as a contagion effect of currency devaluations follow. Global currency exchange rates will adjust downward even lower than they have to date already throughout emerging markets, as well as in Europe and Japan. The general competitive devaluations will sharply slow global trade and, in turn, global economic growth.
Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression’, Clarity Press, August 2017, and the forthcoming, ‘The Scourge of Neoliberalism: US Policy from Reagan to Trump’, also by Clarity Press. He blogs at jackrasmus.com and tweets @drjackrasmus.
How can Palestine escape from the misery imposed on it by the Israeli state? Here eminent historian Ilan Pappé makes the case for a one-state solution to the crisis; arguing that a new generation of Palestinians and their supporters are taking up the call as the only way out of the cycle of Israeli oppression.
In April this year, a new initiative was launched in Israel-Palestine entitled the ‘Campaign for a One Democratic State’. It was a Palestinian initiative supported by progressive Israeli Jews. The aim of the initiative is to try and organise under one umbrella all the groups and individuals who support the idea inside and outside historical Palestine.
Background
The idea of a one democratic state as the only solution for the conflict in historical Palestine is not a new one. After the 1948 catastrophe, it took the Palestinian national movement a few years to re-emerge as a modern day anti-colonialist liberation movement. In the 1960s, the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chartered a clear vision for the future. In its 1968 covenant, the PLO called for the establishment of a secular democratic state all over historical Palestine. That vision called for the right of return for Palestinians to their pre-1948 homelands that were now under occupation. In the early 1970s—under pressure from changing realities on the ground—the PLO began to rethink the way forward and adapted its strategy. It began, alongside the armed struggle, a successful diplomatic campaign which led it to endorse the creation of Palestinian state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, next to Israel, as a first stage for full liberation. The commitment to a two-states solution was further cemented in the Declaration of Independence that was adopted in November 1988 by the PLO.
In many ways, the 1988 declaration was forced on the PLO as a pre-condition of entering as a partner in a new Pax-Americana framework that so far has ended disastrously for the Palestinian people. This PLO move was a direct consequence of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 which forced the organisation’s headquarters to move to Tunis and weakened the Palestinian national movement, deepening its already existing fragmentation. This process culminated in the Oslo accord of 1993.
The fall of the Soviet Union, and Yasser Arafat’s support for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, undermined considerably the PLO’s international standing and limited its strategic options. This is why—despite warnings from some of his best friends and colleagues—Arafat accepted the Oslo framework, which was conceived and constructed in Israel. Its Israeli architects were looking for a formula that would enable them to have control of the land from the river to the sea without incorporating the population living there as citizens. They sold it to the world and to the Palestinians as a two-state solution (although the final documents of the Oslo accord do not mention the establishment of an independent Palestinian state next to Israel). If you have the territory and not the people, you can remain a ‘Jewish democratic state’. Indeed, Oslo was just one more ploy in the attempt by liberal Zionism to square the circle, this time with Palestinian legitimisation.
The Two-State Solution
Zionism is, in essence, a settler colonial movement, which was interested in having as much of the land of Palestine with as few Palestinians on it as possible. As the late scholar of settler colonialism, Patrick Wolfe, has put it; the encounter between the settlers and the indigenous population triggered ‘the logic of the elimination of the native’. In some places, such as North America, annihilation was literally a genocide of the native; in Palestine it was a different kind of elimination, obtained through segregation, ethnic cleansing and enclavement.
Zionist and later Israeli policies towards the Palestinians wherever they are, are guided by this logic. The vision is the same, the means change according to the historical circumstances. In 1948, the Zionist movement attempted a massive expulsion of the native Palestinians and succeeded in uprooting half of Palestine’s population and in taking over 78% of historical Palestine. The Palestinians who remained in Israel were put under a harsh military rule that robbed them of their basic human and civil rights. This military rule was transferred to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip when Israel occupied them (the remaining 22% of historical Palestine). With the new territory, additional Palestinian population was incorporated and posed a new demographic challenge to the settler state. There was a strategic consensus among the leaders of Israel that the West Bank and the Gaza Strip should be under their control. Tactically, there were debates of how best to achieve it, but the world was fooled to see these tactical debates as a clash between a ‘peace’ (the left) and the ‘war’ (the right) camps. The right wing in Israel wished to annex the territories and either cause the local population to leave or restrain it through an official Apartheid system. The left wished to create two Bantustans, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which would allow Israel to control them indirectly and was hoping to convince both the Palestinians and the world that this could be the basis for a peace process. This is the backdrop to the Oslo accord.
The accord, therefore, was based on a thoroughly Israeli interpretation of the two states solution; the establishment of two Palestinian Bantustans in return for an end of conflict. It is possible that the PLO hoped to achieve more through the Oslo process, but on the ground the process provided Israel immunity to continue with the colonisation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. When the Palestinian resistance to the Oslo accord grew with the eruption of the second Intifada in 2000, the Israeli leadership decided to forsake the settlements in the Gaza Strip and control it by enclaving it from the outside. The vacuum in Gaza was filled by Hamas who took over the Strip in 2006, exposing the real intent behind Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in the process. The Gaza Strip could either be run like a typical Palestinian authority area or it would be punished by a siege and naval blockade until the people there are forced to change their democratic choice. When Hamas reacted with its own armed struggle to the strangulation policy, the Israeli retaliation was brutal leading to what I termed elsewhere as an ‘incremental genocide’ of the people through military assaults and siege—a situation that led the UN to predict that the Strip will be unsustainable in a few years.
Since Israel only occupied 78% of Palestine in 1948 and half of the population remained in its homeland, the means for implementing the vision of the settler state changed with time, but the aim was the same; to have as much of Palestine as possible with as few Palestinian as possible. Until 1967, it imposed military rule on the Palestinian citizens in Israel and transferred this regime to the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip after the June 1967 war. The various Israeli plans, some branded as peace proposals, were meant to resolve the contradiction between the wish to take over the land (22% remaining of historical Palestine) while not incorporating the millions of Palestinians living there so as not to undermine the demographic balance of the enlarged Jewish State. Any Palestinian resistance was brutally crushed. Neither the Oslo accord of 1993, nor the unilateral withdrawal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza strip in 2005, changed this reality. In fact, what was broadcast as steps towards peace, made life even more difficult for the Palestinians.
Nonetheless, and despite these tragic developments, the outfits that represent the Palestinian national movement—be it the PLO, the Palestinian Authority or the Palestinian parties in Israel—still adhere to the two-states solutions as the only way forward. As long as this is the official Palestinian position it will be very difficult to offer alternative views including ones based on the PLO’s original plan and vision.
A New Departure?
And yet, there is one factor that enabled Palestinian alternative thinking to evolve despite the fragmentation and the hesitation of the leadership to move beyond the two-states’ solution. And this is the fact that Palestinian society is one of the youngest in the world and these young people are still waiting to make their impact (they are hardly represented in the bodies leading the Palestinian national movement today). This younger generation is very active in the cyber space. They have one big advantage over the previous generation of Palestinian activists; they can easily communicate with each other and overcome the physical fragmentation Zionism has imposed on the Palestinian people. This may explain their support for the one-state vision and their scepticism towards the two-states solution.
On the ground, in Israel, these young Palestinians have been busy with what one can call cultural resistance, as Antonio Gramsci defined it; both as a grand rehearsal for a political resistance and a substitute for such a resistance when the circumstances do not allow it. This cultural resistance is focused on the 1948 Nakba as a formative event that is still going on today. They visit destroyed villages of 1948, reconstruct them as they had been in the past, and build models of how they will look when the Palestinian right of return will be implemented. They joined the young people of the Gaza Strip who were demonstrating on the fence that has strangulated them since 1994, demanding the lifting of the siege and the right to return to their villages on the other side of the fence. At the same time—as it coincided with the calendric commemoration of the Nakba—ceremonies and demonstrations took place in the Palestinian areas in Israel, linking the assault of Gaza with the 1948 massacres.
Some of these young Palestinians have now joined the campaign for a one-state solution. The updated version of a one-state solution is based on a very different perception of the conflict from the one underlying the two-states solution. The two-states solution assumes that the conflict in Palestine is between two national movements with equal claim to the land. It also refers to 1967 as the departure point for any discussion about the future. Hence, Palestine is reduced to the areas Israel occupied in the June 1967 war and the Palestinians are only those living in those areas. Two important Palestinian groups are excluded from this perception: those living in Israel and the Palestinian refugees. Moreover, this solution excluded 78% of historical Palestine from the peace equation.
Palestinians who support the two-state solution make the following arguments. Firstly, why forsake a solution accepted by the world at large? Secondly, it will ensure the end of Israeli military occupation. Thirdly, a small nation state is better than nothing. But it may be worth noting that fifty years of support for the idea did not only fail to produce a solution but made things much worse on the ground. Lastly, the only interpretation of the two-state solution that can work is that insisted upon by Israel and that interpretation will not bring an end to Israeli military presence in the West Bank or the siege on the Gaza Strip.
However, it would very difficult to push forward the alternative one-state solution as long as this disunity continues on the Palestinian side. The initiative to push forward the discourse on the one-state solution, and the efforts to establish a popular movement on the ground continue despite this predicament. Three developments are noteworthy in the context. The BDS (the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement), the One State Conferences and the various One Democratic State movements.
Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
The BDS movement emerged in response to calls from Palestinian civil society on the international community to act more vigorously against Israeli policy in Palestine. It circumvented successfully the disarray in the official Palestinian position and representation by focusing on three essential rights that Israel violates with regard to the Palestinians. The right of the Palestinian refugees to return. The right of the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip to live freely and not under military oppression and the right of the Palestinian minority inside Israel for equal citizenship.
This movement is growing and has been very effective in galvanizing world public opinion to the extent that it is regarded as a strategic threat by Israel. The BDS campaign gave the pro-Palestinian activists an orientation and a vision, even if it is not provided as yet by the Palestinian national movement. It refers to all the Palestinians as deserving our solidarity and support; those living in Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the refugees.
It also contributes to a new thinking and vision as it is modelled on the boycott campaign against Apartheid South Africa. That means that the situation in Palestine is framed as one similar to that in Apartheid South Africa which encouraged students around the world to organise annually the Israel Apartheid Week, where most of the activities point to the need to liberate Palestine as a whole.
Various groups have appeared over the years vowing to push forward the idea of a one democratic state solution in Palestine. They produced first a discourse on one state that punctured, as Gramsci would put it, the hegemonic discourse on peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The production of an alternative discourse is not enough, of course, to change reality on the ground. However, it helps to clarify the end game, through analysis of the problem’s origins. This was helped by the emergence of academic centres devoted to Palestine studies. This is a new phenomenon; until recently it was difficult to legitimise the study of Palestine as a distinct academic project as it was either included in the Arab-Israeli conflict or in Israel studies. These safe spaces for scholarly work deepened our understanding of the origins of the conflict, a clash between a settler colonial movement and the native people of Palestine that in other places ended in the elimination of the native (North America for instance); or the departure of the settlers (in Algeria) and in a rare case in a reconciliation between the settled and the indigenous people (in South Africa). Palestine is unique as the means thought for removal—namely ethnic cleansing—only succeed partly. Because of that, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine continues. The Palestinians call it al-Nakba al-Mustamera—the on-going catastrophe.
A New Initiative
The research under taken by supporters of this project, and the numerous conferences on the one-state solution, helped the movements on the ground that support the idea to highlight the link between the nature of the conflict in Palestine and the only viable solution to the problem. The analysis points clearly to the conflict as a struggle between a settler state and the indigenous population. An accurate diagnosis is the first step on the way to a successful prognosis. The research juxtaposed constructively the various models that are on offer for a one state solution; a secular democratic state, a bi-national one, an Islamic state or a socialist one.
The new initiative reported in the beginning of this article is now looking for the points of agreement between its various members in order to create a ‘broad church’ among those who believe in this vision. This is not an easy enterprise, but it is a necessary one and the initial attempts so far have been very encouraging. Another challenge for building the movement on the ground is how to involve more women and young people in leading it. It is a long journey ahead, but finally the direction seems to be the right one.
According to Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), universal healthcare in America would save about $500 billion annually – by eliminating insurer middlemen and the bureaucratic nightmare it creates for physicians and hospitals.
Individuals wanting coverage this way could still get it.
Under a single-payer system, a public or quasi-public agency would administer healthcare coverage and financing, while delivering it would remain private, patients free to choose their providers.
Because of insurer middlemen, along with lack of regulatory restraint on drug companies and large hospital chains, healthcare in America cost twice as much as in other developed countries.
Most nations have some form of universal coverage, not America under marketplace medicine – except for eligible Medicare and Medicaid recipients.
Hundreds of billions of dollars are wasted annually, unrelated to patient care – including insurers’ overhead, underwriting, billing, sales and marketing departments, as well as huge profits and exorbitant executive pay.
Doctors and hospitals must maintain costly administrative staffs to deal with the bureaucracy, amounting to nearly one-third of annual healthcare costs.
No one ever visited an insurer to receive treatment for what ails them. Eliminating them would be a major cost savings.
Universal healthcare could provide everyone in America with all vital services – including medical and dental; prescription drugs and medical supplies; mental health and reproductive care, vision and optical services, hospitalization and preventive care, along with long-term care for the elderly, infirm and disabled.
Deductibles and co-pays would be eliminated, while coverage of this fundamental human right would improve, especially for the nation’s most disadvantaged.
Lack of insurance and underinsurance for unaffordability reasons would no longer exist.
Healthcare rationing based on the ability to pay would disappear. Millions in America are uninsured or way underinsured under Obamacare. Trumpcare if enacted into law would be much worse.
When I finished graduate school in 1960, healthcare in America was 5.1% of GDP. Last year it was 18%, heading toward around 20% in 2020.
Since 1960, annual per capita healthcare spending in America increased a shocking 75-fold – from $147 to an estimated $11,193 in 2018.
In inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars, it rose from $1,082 to the above estimated figure, around a 10-fold increase, still an enormous amount, making proper care unaffordable for millions of Americans.
According to a study by George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, a libertarian policy research think tank, Medicare for all would save about $2 trillion over the next decade – a conservative estimate.
Likely triple this amount would likely be saved, yet $2 trillion alone is a compelling argument for how healthcare in America should be provided – everyone in, no one left out, by eliminating bureaucracy, providing care to no one.
The Mercatus Center report explains the enormous administrative cost savings from a single-payer system, enabling far less costly first-class healthcare for everyone in America.
Citizens of the world’s richest country deserve no less.
In the 1960s before his state-sponsored assassination, Martin Luther King said: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”
Healthcare is a fundamental human right, essential to life and well-being.
It’s not a commodity to be sold like toothpaste – based on the ability to pay.
Universal single-payer coverage would transform America’s dysfunctional system into an equitable and just one – prioritizing human health over profits.
