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There’s no better moment than now for Mexico to embrace multipolarity by teaming up with China and possibly constructing a Pacific-Caribbean rail corridor across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, but such a project has its limitations and isn’t anything to get too excited about at this time, let alone blindly jump into just for the sake of satisfying a campaign promise.

AMLO’s Ambitions

The crushing victory that Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, popularly known by his initials as AMLO, dealt to the Institutional Revolutionary Party that has ruled Mexico almost continuously for close to a century proves that the people are tired of The Establishment and eagerly craving the leftist nationalist-populism that this political outsider campaigned on. One of his many platforms included a pledge to double down on infrastructure spending in an attempt to pull his country of nearly 130 million out of the cycle of crime, poverty, and migration that many of its citizens have fallen into, and it’s with this in mind that the Financial Times (FT) wrote about his ambitious plan for what they termed to be a “Mexican Silk Road” (article behind a paywall but available for free at this partnered site).

This initiative calls for reviving the early 20^th-century plans for an overland rail corridor connecting the Pacific Ocean with the Caribbean Sea across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in Mexico’s very impoverished southern region, and the FT quotes one of AMLO’s economic advisors as saying that “I can see us perfectly well approaching the Chinese, above all. It’s the type of project they will certainly want to invest in, because they are long-term infrastructure projects with clearly positive returns.” On the surface, the Mexican Silk Road would appear to be a win-win for both parties because it would provide China with an intermodal alternative to the Panama Canal while bringing jobs and development to southern Mexico, but things aren’t always as they initially seem and this project isn’t anything for people to get too excited about at this time.

The Siren Song Of The Silk Road

Before addressing the possible shortcomings of this initiative, it’s better to speak to the perceived advantages that it could bring in order to make the contrast even clearer for all readers.

Mexican Multipolarity:

China’s grand strategy in the region is to make Mexico multipolar so that it can have the same function towards the US as America’s newest military-strategic partner India has vis-à-vis China, ultimately enabling Beijing to establish influence on its Great Power rival’s Caribbean doorstep in a similar manner as Washington has done in the South China Sea. If successful in this endeavor, then China might be able to finally “balance” the US and keep it in check, though it’s certain that Washington wouldn’t ever let Beijing’s plans get anywhere near that point without offering up heavy resistance in one way or another. In any case, the first step that China would need to make in this direction is to involve Mexico in its One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity, which is where the Tehuantepec Corridor comes into relevance.

Nixing The Nicaraguan Canal:

This project could become the flagship of China’s North American infrastructural investments and powerfully symbolize Mexico’s new multipolar future after AMLO’s commitment to this model of global reform. Moreover, it would also provide a much-needed solution for replacing the stalled plans to construct a Nicaraguan Canal, a long-delayed project funded by a private Chinese entrepreneur but which appears to have been dealt a deathblow once and for all after the Nicaraguan government’s latest decree last week. Managua surprised the world by giving 10 different militaries the right to train on its territory for “humanitarian purposes”, and while multipolar ones like Russia, Venezuela, and Cuba are included in this new law, so too are the US and even Taiwan, China’s enemy. Considering the latter’s forthcoming military presence in Nicaragua, there’s no way that Beijing could rely on the country as the route of its regional Silk Road.

Hybrid War-embattled President Ortega’s de-facto strategic capitulation to the US by indirectly killing the Nicaraguan Canal after allowing US and Taiwanese troops to “train” in his country for “humanitarian” reasons provides a powerful impetus for China to replace this costly maritime corridor with a more economically efficient intermodal one across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that it’ll be built, or that it’ll have its intended win-win effect.

Geostrategic Offsets

The Panamanian Pivot & TORR:

For starters, the rapid development of Chinese-Panamanian ties over the past decade saw the Central American country abandoning its recognition of Taipei in favor of Beijing last year, which was considered to be a diplomatic coup carried out right under the US’ nose. While there’s no doubt that Panama largely remains a powerless American client state subject to the mercy of American military pressure in the event that Washington’s New Cold War with China ever turns hot, that’s unlikely to deter the People’s Republic from continuing to use this trade route due to its more economical nature in costing less than creating a brand new intermodal one in spite of the strategic risk involved. After all, with the successful completion of the Transoceanic Railroad (TORR) in South America sometime in the future, China won’t have to transit the Central American isthmus to trade with Brazil when the Mercosur giant can just ship its goods across mountainous Bolivia to Peru’s Pacific port of Ilo.

Wartime Uselessness:

Not only that, but China’s trade with the US is much more important than its trade with any Latin American country, to say nothing of the Caribbean, and is expected to remain so despite the so-called “trade war”. This means that the scenario of the US shutting down the Panama Canal to Chinese ships or indirectly using Hybrid War techniques to disrupt whatever alternative Beijing may have built through Nicaragua or Mexico wouldn’t even matter much to China because its driving Silk Road interest in North America is to streamline connectivity between its own Pacific ports and the US’ in the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. These would be off limits to China anyhow in the event that it and its rival go to war with one another, so OBOR projects in this part of the world shouldn’t be taken as seriously as in the Eastern Hemisphere. Even if China and Mexico decide to pursue the Tehuantepec Corridor, their plans might not materialize as expected.

The Limits Of Win-Win Cooperation

Supposing that both parties are serious about the Mexican Silk Road, each of them will still have considerable obstacles to surmount in order to make it as viable as envisioned.

Mexico’s Military-Economic Moves:

Before this project can even get off the ground, Mexico needs to ensure the security of all those who will use this Silk Road corridor, thus requiring it to “get its house in order” first by cleansing the military of its many corrupt and cartel-infiltrated recruits while simultaneously resolving the drug violence that makes this part of the country extremely unsafe. This is a lot easier said than done, to put it nicely, and it might ultimately be a “lost cause” that necessitates the presence of “private military contractors” (PMCs, “mercenaries”) instead, though with all of the attendant risks that the introduction of this variable would bring to such an already chaotic situation. Without credibly guaranteeing security for Chinese transshipments and isthmus value-added investments, Beijing will probably never agree to build, let alone use, the Tehuantepec Corridor.

Relatedly, even if proper security is provided, AMLO must have a comprehensive plan for turning this project into more than just an overland Chinese-US toll road in order to deliver on his promise of bringing wealth to this impoverished region of Mexico. An initial suggestion would be to establish special economic zones (SEZ) astride this corridor and in each of its terminal ports, but in doing so, the government would need to ensure that jobs aren’t taken by any immigrants from nearby Central American countries. AMLO considers migration to be a “human right”, but it might be politically unwise for him to spend billions in taxpayer funds for constructing a megaproject that his own citizens don’t even end up using because much cheaper migrant workers are employed there instead due to their president-elect’s sympathy with their cause.

China’s “Trade War” Concerns:

As for China, it might simply lose interest in the Tehuantepec Corridor if its “trade war” with the US continues and exports to that marketplace drop, no matter how significant they’ll likely remain in the overall sense. A contributing factor to this probable scenario is Trump successfully renegotiating NAFTA or outright withdrawing from it in order to secure the American marketplace from China’s “backdoor” entry to it via economic transshipment outposts in Mexico that abuse this trade deal’s terms through various “legal workarounds”. China’s focus could therefore shift from America to the domestic Mexican marketplace (although it won’t soon come anywhere near replacing it), but this would mean that Beijing would have more of a motive for building infrastructure elsewhere in the country for connecting to its more profitable and already economically developed regions than pioneering what might at that point be the strategically defunct Tehuantepec Corridor.

Even if these “trade war” concerns lead to China believing that the costs of this project outweigh its benefits (especially when considering that it could just use the Panama Canal as a much cheaper transit route to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean per the analysis’ previously mentioned reasons), there’s a chance that the Tehuantepec Corridor could still be built, but only because of both parties’ cynical and separate self-interests involved. China might come to reconceptualize this initiative as more of a financial investment than a commercial one, thereby relying on high-interest loans or other financial means instead of trade in order to reap a profit, while AMLO might for whatever (possibly ideologically misguided) reason want to build a Hambantota-like “white elephant” to show off to the masses. In that case, the confluence of Chinese-Mexican “interests” could make the project possible, though it would lose its original Silk Road purpose.

Concluding Thoughts

AMLO’s stunning victory has excitedly enabled Mexico to enter a completely new era, and the leftist populist-nationalist has an indisputable mandate to reshape the country according to his promised vision, which crucially includes a heavy infrastructural investment component. The logic of “spending one’s way out of poverty” through public works projects has been tried and tested by the USSR after World War I and the subsequent Civil War, while the US did the same during the Great Depression. While the merits of this policy are controversial because its visible successes in both aforementioned cases may be attributable more to situational factors that extend beyond the reach of economics and into the political (centralized “authoritarian” state model) and military (wartime domestic industrial revival) realms respectively, the concept was apparently convincing enough to tens of millions of Mexicans that they voted for AMLO partially because of it.

That being the case, the president-elect is expected to seriously entertain the Tehuantepec Corridor megaproject that formed a key part of his campaign platform, though this initiative needs to be soberly assessed by both his country and its Chinese partners to see whether it’s worth the risk of investing billions of dollars into at this time. It’s not to say that the Mexican Silk Road can’t become a game-changing development in the New Cold War by bringing multipolarity to the US’ southern shores, but just that it isn’t as clear-cut of a win-win idea as it’s been made out to be. Upon closer consideration, it might not even have any real strategic purpose, and even if it’s determined to, then the costs might outweigh the benefits. The last thing that Mexico needs right now is a “white elephant”, but if it isn’t careful, then that might be exactly what it gets.

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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.

President Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton was in Moscow last week organizing what promises to be an historic summit meeting between his boss and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bolton, who has for years demanded that the US inflict “pain” on Russia and on Putin specifically, was tasked by Trump to change his tune. He was forced to shed some of his neoconservative skin and get involved in peacemaking. Trump surely deserves some credit for that!

As could be expected given the current political climate in the US, the neoconservatives have joined up with the anti-Trump forces on the Left — and US client states overseas — to vigorously oppose any movement toward peace with Russia. The mainstream media is, as also to be expected, amplifying every objection to any step away from a confrontation with Russia.

Bolton had hardly left Moscow when the media began its attacks. US allies are “nervous” over the planned summit, reported Reuters. They did not quote any US ally claiming to be nervous, but they did speculate that both the UK and Ukraine would not be happy were the US and Russia to improve relations. But why is that? The current Ukrainian government is only in power because the Obama Administration launched a coup against its democratically-elected president to put US puppets in charge. They’re right to be nervous. And the British government is also right to be worried. They swore that Russia was behind the “poisoning” of the Skripals without providing any evidence to back up their claims. Hundreds of Russian diplomats were expelled from Western countries on their word alone. And over the past couple of months, each of their claims has fallen short.

At the extreme of the reaction to Bolton’s Russia trip was the US-funded think tank, the Atlantic Council, which is stuck in a 1950s time warp. Its resident Russia “expert,” Anders Åslund, Tweeted that long-time Russia hawk Bolton had been “captured by the Kremlin” and must now be considered a Russian agent for having helped set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. Do they really prefer nuclear war?

The “experts” are usually wrong when it comes to peacemaking. They rely on having “official enemies” for their very livelihood. In 1985, national security “expert” Zbigniew Brzezinski attacked the idea of a summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was “demeaning” and “tactically unwise,” he said as reported at the time by the Washington Times. Such a meeting would only “elevate” Gorbachev and make him “first among equals,” he said. Thankfully, Reagan did engage Gorbachev in several summits and the rest is history. Brzezinski was wrong and peacemakers were right.

President Trump should understand that any move toward better relations with Russia has been already pre-approved by the American people. His position on Russia was well known. He campaigned very clearly on the idea that the US should end the hostility toward Russia that characterized the Obama Administration and find a way to work together. Voters knew his position and they chose him over Hillary Clinton, who was also very clear on Russia: more confrontation and more aggression.

President Trump would be wise to ignore the neocon talking heads and think tank “experts” paid by defense contractors. He should ignore the “never Trumpers” who have yet to make a coherent policy argument opposing the president. The extent of their opposition to Trump seems to be “he’s mean and rude.” Let us hope that a Trump/Putin meeting begins a move toward real reconciliation and away from the threat of nuclear war.

Throughout its entire post-WW II history, US hostility persisted against North Korea – solely for its sovereign independence, not for any threat the country poses.

Chances for sustainable improved bilateral relations following Kim Jong-un/Trump summit talks are virtually nil – perhaps what was accomplished already starting to unravel.

On Friday in Japan on the final leg of his East Asia tour, US war secretary Mattis vowed to continue treating North Korea as an adversary, not an ally, saying Washington and its regional partners intend to maintain a “strong collaborative defensive stance” on the DPRK.

The Trump regime will deal with its leadership “from a position of unquestioned strength.” The Pentagon will continue “maintaining the current US force levels on the Korean peninsula” and region overall.

On Friday, NBC News cited unnamed US intelligence officials, saying Pyongyang increased enrichment of uranium for nuclear fuel at secret sites – attempting to refute Trump’s claim about the DPRK “no longer (posing) a nuclear threat…”

According to one unnamed US official quoted,

“(t)here is absolutely unequivocal evidence that they are trying to deceive the US.”

“Work is ongoing to deceive us on the number of facilities, the number of weapons, the number of missiles…We are watching closely.”

The NBC report was planted by US dark forces, wanting no chance of improved relations with North Korea.

Its leadership and military were never a regional or US threat, its nuclear program for defense alone because of genuine fears about possible US aggression.

Throughout its history, the DPRK never attacked another country. In June 1950, its forces responded to US-orchestrated South Korean aggression, not the other way around.

38 North provides “analysis of events in and around the DPRK.” It’s a pro-Western Johns Hopkins University Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies US-Korea Institute program – managed by former State Department official Joel Wit and USKI assistant director Jenny Town.

On June 26, it claimed “improvements to the infrastructure at North Korea’s Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center are continuing at a rapid pace,” according to alleged satellite imagery, adding:

“Continued work at the Yongbyon facility should not be seen as having any relationship to North Korea’s pledge to denuclearize. The North’s nuclear cadre can be expected to proceed with business as usual until specific orders are issued from Pyongyang.”

The monitoring group said it can’t confirm if the above work continued after the June 12 Kim/Trump summit.

On Sunday, the neocon/CIA house organ Washington Post claimed “newly obtained (post-Kim/Trump summit) evidence” shows Pyongyang “does not intend to fully surrender its nuclear stockpile, and instead is considering ways to conceal the number of weapons it has and secret production facilities,” citing unnamed US officials, adding:

“(A) new, previously undisclosed Defense Intelligence Agency estimate (said) North Korea is unlikely to denuclearize.”

“(T)he DIA has concluded that North Korean officials are exploring ways to deceive Washington about the number of nuclear warheads and missiles, and the types and numbers of facilities they have, believing that the United States is not aware of the full range of their activities.”

All indications are that the DPRK is committed to denuclearize as long as its security is guaranteed – by America and China most of all.

Its other demands are reasonable, wanting a formal end to the 1950s war, unacceptably harsh sanctions lifted, its sovereign independence respected, and a durable peace replacing threatened war on the peninsula.

If all of the above are achieved, its nuclear deterrent no longer is needed.

Given Washington’s rage for global hegemony, its longterm hostility toward the DPRK, its aim to transform all sovereign independent nations into US vassal states, and its deplorable history of reneging on promises, it’s pure fantasy to believe this time is different going forward in bilateral relations.

Washington’s deplorable record speaks for itself. US hostility toward Pyongyang remains unchanged as long as hardline neocon extremists are in charge of geopolitical policymaking.

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Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

Featured image: MV Cape Ray in the Persian Gulf during Operation Nautical Horizon, June 24, 2018. Image source: Stars and Stripes 

Multiple Russian and Middle East news sources are reporting new accusations by the Iranian military that that a US ship carrying chemical weapons has recently anchored in the Persian Gulf and in engaged in a “dangerous plot”, though not naming the particular “Gulf state” territorial waters at which the ship docked. 

The accusation comes just as a major seven week US military exercise, Operation Nautical Horizon, has concluded in the Persian Gulf which involved the same military transport ship that decommissioned Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpiles. 

In all Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or AMLO’s, party swept over 91 percent of all legislative districts and won a landslide of municipal elections.

Consumers of left-wing media are well aware that America is an oligarchy, not a democracy. Everyone with a functioning cerebrum, in fact, should be aware of it by now: even mainstream political scientists recognize it, as shown by a famous 2014 study by Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page. Nevertheless, it is important to continue to publicize the oligarchical character of the United States, in order to delegitimize the institutions that have destroyed democracy (insofar as it ever existed) and inspire people to take action to restore it. Ron Formisano’s book American Oligarchy: The Permanent Political Class (2017) is a valuable contribution to this collective project.

“American Oligarchy has been written,” Formisano says, “not to propose a path out of the New Gilded Age, but to discredit the political class by raking its muck between covers in black and white.”

Formisano certainly achieves his goal: the “political class” comes out stinking of, yes, a swamp, a putrid moral bog. This “networked layer of high-income people and those striving for wealth including many politicians in and out of office, lobbyists, consultants, appointed bureaucrats, pollsters, television celebrity journalists (but not investigative reporters), and the politically connected in the nation’s capital and in the states” calls to mind in its hedonism, corruption, money-worship, and giddy myopia the decadent Senate-attached aristocracy of the late Roman Republic, greedy beyond the dreams of avarice.

The term ‘aristocracy’ is apt, for Formisano argues convincingly that the U.S. is headed beyond oligarchy to an aristocracy of inherited wealth, complete with all the ideological and cultural trappings of aristocracy. Our exalted rentiers and their service-providers have the usual attitudes of aristocratic entitlement to all good things in this world (and exclusion of the non-rich), sputtering rage at the occasional prospect of losing a particle of their preferential tax treatment, and the valorization of nepotism as first among the virtues. “The rampant nepotism of the political class fuels the galloping socioeconomic inequality of the twenty-first century.” The main differences between the American aristocracy of today and, say, the French aristocracy of the eighteenth century seem to be that the former has incomparably lower cultural (and architectural) tastes than the latter and is incomparably more destructive of society and the natural environment.

The circles in which the nation’s political leaders and their thousands of well-heeled minions travel are indeed reminiscent of some enormous eighteenth-century court. Over half the members of Congress are millionaires, with a total worth in 2013 of $4.3 billion; but even the ones whose income is of a mere six figures are able to live like millionaires. The reason is that the gears of Washington are greased by a “gift economy,” which, to quote ex-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, amounts to “a system of legalized bribery. All of it is bribery, every bit of it.” 

In 2007 Congress passed a law prohibiting lobbyists from giving gifts to representatives, but, as Abramoff says, in effect “they just reshuffled the deck… They’re still playing the same game.” Campaign committees and “Leadership PACs” pay for the many luxurious trips legislators take around the world, as do lobbyists and donors. Golf outings, lavish “conferences,” fishing in the Florida Keys, skiing in Colorado, trips to Paris or Vienna or Hawaii, innumerable expensive parties and receptions and breakfasts with lobbyists and donors—all are paid for by either tax dollars or various committees, lobbying firms, corporate interests, etc. Aside from the obviously corrupting influence of all this legalized bribery, it matters a great deal that “politicians have no experience of poverty.” In fact, from 1998 to 2008 only 13 members of Congress came from blue-collar backgrounds, and they had long ago left behind that experience. No wonder policy almost never favors the working class.

Meanwhile, while in 1970 only 3 percent of members leaving Congress moved into lobbying, now well over half do. As do thousands of congressional aides. In addition to reinforcing the insularity and chumminess of the Beltway culture, this “accelerating exodus of staffers to K Street…has had the effect of increasing the power of lobbyists by shortening the overall tenure of staffers.” As the latter group becomes younger and less experienced, lobbyists take on an ever-greater role in crafting legislation—increasingly byzantine legislation that is difficult even for staffers to understand, which further enhances the power of lobbyists.

Source: Sarah Rogers/The Daily Beast

Formisano documents with admirable thoroughness the fact that the foremost concern of politicians and the politically connected in both the nation’s capital and the states is to look out “for me and mine.” The most obvious and common means of doing so is to monetize one’s public service, but almost as common is the practice of nepotism. “[T]he political class practices nepotism routinely, brazenly, and shamelessly, giving their ‘nephews’ plum jobs, promotions, a place at the head of the line.” Donald Trump may (unsurprisingly) be even more shameless than most, with his political use of his daughter, his son-in-law, and his sons—one of whom has remarked candidly that nepotism “is a beautiful thing.” But the second Bush administration took nepotism to a high art, given, for example, the important roles of Liz Cheney, her husband, and her son-in-law; the Mehlman brothers, the McLellans, the Powells, and Ted Cruz and his wife; the Martins, the Ackerlys, and the Ullmans, etc. The Obama administration was hardly innocent either, though it didn’t go to quite the extremes of its predecessor. Children of governors and members of Congress fare well too, whether serving in politics, in law firms, in businesses that benefit from political connections, or as lobbyists.

The media are almost as riddled with nepotism as politics. When her mother was Secretary of State, Chelsea Clinton was hired by NBC as a television journalist, making $600,000 a year ($26,724 for every minute she was televised). CNN’s Andrea Koppel, Anderson Cooper, Jeffrey Toobin, and Chris Cuomo are beneficiaries of nepotism, as are (at other channels and publications) Douglas Kennedy, Chris Wallace, Mark Halperin, Mika Brzezinski, Bill Kristol, Ronan Farrow, Luke Russert, Meghan McCain, Jenna Bush, Jackie Kucinich, and others. Formisano concludes,

“Whether the field is literature, television, entertainment, or politics, the hallmark of this New Gilded Age of Inequality is ‘naked, unabashed favoritism,’ and the shameless effrontery of those who give and receive it.”

American Oligarchy also contains long discussions of the nonprofit world, specifically of its contributions to rising income inequality. The nonprofit sector employs 10 percent of the U.S. workforce, and in 2010 corporations, government, and individuals donated $300 billion to charitable enterprises. At least $40 billion every year is lost to “fraud, theft, personal enrichment of executives, and misappropriation.” In general, the culture of large nonprofits is approximately that of the permanent political class in Washington. 

University presidents and hospital CEOs, for instance, can make millions of dollars a year, and that doesn’t include such perks as bonuses, deferred compensation, auto allowances, and financial planning. In the same years as student debt has soared and state funding has declined, university foundations have been used as slush funds for big payouts and personal expenses for presidents and other administrators. Even more egregiously, nonprofit hospitals have initiated hundreds of lawsuits against patients who couldn’t pay and have routinely had arrest warrants issued and jailed debtors. Conversely, lawsuits have been filed against hundreds of hospitals in seventeen states for gouging the poor.

In other cases, nonprofits have in effect become allies of the forces they’re supposed to be challenging. A particularly outrageous instance is that of The Nature Conservancy, “by far the wealthiest green group with well over $6 billion in assets.” On its governing board and advisory committees sit executives of oil and chemical companies, mining and logging businesses, auto manufacturers, and coal-burning electric utilities, who have influence over the group’s policies. Even while preserving millions of acres, The Nature Conservancy has logged forests, drilled for natural gas under the last breeding ground of an endangered bird species, invested millions in energy companies, cultivated relationships with such polluters as ExxonMobil and BP, and sold its name and logo to companies that then claim undeserved credit for being green. Similarly, the World Wildlife Federation has close relationships with both Monsanto and the rainforest-destroying palm oil company Wilmer.

At any rate, the evidence Formisano amasses proves that the moral corruption of the American aristocracy has utterly polluted the ostensibly selfless and charitable world of nonprofits. From museums, public libraries, and human rights organizations to symphony orchestras, veterans’ groups, and environmental organizations, excessive executive compensation, corporate ties, and outright corruption have perverted the public mission of nonprofits. 

American Oligarchy is not an uplifting read. Its chapter on Kentucky, a case-study of political corruption in a poor state, is, despite the detached analytical tone, at times wrenching, in particular when you reflect on all the human suffering that is the corollary of the aristocracy’s venality and greed. On the one hand are profits for Purdue Pharma in the billions of dollars, and power and money for a complicit political class; on the other hand are numberless opioid deaths and lives ruined by addiction. 

But books such as this are indispensable in their bleakness, since we live in bleak times that call for unstinting exposés. Perhaps as the backlash against Donald Trump grows, American Oligarchy and books like it will acquire a wide readership and so contribute to the radicalization of a generation.

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Chris Wright has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and is the author of Notes of an Underground Humanist, Worker Cooperatives and Revolution: History and Possibilities in the United States, and Finding Our Compass: Reflections on a World in Crisis. His website is www.wrightswriting.com.

News that a meeting has been arranged between Presidents Trump and Putin on 16 July was greeted with displeasure in many sectors of the western world, and especially by the military-industrial complex, the cabal of war-profiteering US and European oligarchs whose interests lie solely in maintaining their lucrative arms manufacturing empires. Trade is most important to them — but peace and friendship come way down their page of priorities, because it is enmity and distrust that lead to lucrative sales of weapons.

UK newspapers reacted predictably to the news, with the right wing Daily Mail stating

 “Fears are mounting that Donald Trump wants a ‘peace deal’ with Vladimir Putin that could fatally undermine NATO. Ministers are becoming increasingly alarmed that the US president could offer the Russian president deep concessions such as withdrawing forces from Europe.”

The Times of London recorded that

“One [UK government] minister told the Times: ‘What we’re nervous of is some kind of Putin-Trump ‘peace deal’ suddenly being announced. We could see Trump and Putin saying, Why do we have all this military hardware in Europe? and agreeing to jointly remove that. ‘It’s hard to be against peace, but would it be real peace?’”

Yes, it would be real peace, because what Russia wants is amicable relations and trade. Trade with the US and the EU and China and every country that wants to trade — including, most importantly, the Baltic States that have been encouraged by the Pentagon-Brussels NATO High Command to imagine that Russia is poised to invade them.

The US defence secretary, General James Mattis, told Estonia’s minister of defence that “Russia is trying to change international borders by force” and at meetings in May with Lithuania’s president and Baltic defence ministers “reassured US allies in the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia of American solidarity with them and of US determination to defend Baltic and other NATO territory against any aggression.”

Of all the absurd concoctions swinging round the Western propaganda world at the moment, the notion that Russia wants to invade Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania is probably the least believable and most laughable. The Russian government fully realises that such action would inevitably result in wider conflict; and that there could be escalation to a shattering nuclear war. Even if it didn’t result in global catastrophe, the occupation of any one of these countries by Russian forces would be cripplingly costly in every way and simply doesn’t make sense.

In the context of the impending US-Russia presidential talks, not a single Western media outlet mentioned that, as detailed in the 2018 World Report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI),

“In 2017 the USA spent more on its military [$610 billion] than the next seven highest-spending countries combined… at $66.3 billion, Russia’s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016.”

It would be awkward and indeed embarrassing for the Western media to give prominence to SIPRI’s indisputable statement that in 2016 “NATO’s collective military expenditure rose to $881 billion” while “European NATO members spent $254 billion in 2016 — over 3 times more than Russia.”

Russia is reducing its expenditure on defence while the US-NATO military alliance, as noted by Radio Free Europe, agreed on 7 June to “reinforce NATO’s presence in a potential European crisis with the deployment of 30 troop battalions, 30 squadrons of aircraft, and 30 warships within 30 days — the so-called ‘Four 30s’ plan.” This, said the Secretary General of the US-NATO military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, presumably with a straight face, is not “about setting up or deploying new forces — it is about boosting the readiness of existing forces across each and every ally.”

Then the BBC reported that Stoltenberg had put the best face he could on the unwelcome news of reduced tension and possible friendship. He said that

“dialogue is a sign of strength… We don’t want a new Cold War, we don’t want to isolate Russia, we want to strive for a better relationship with Russia.”

This is the man who declared in March 2018 that the US-NATO military grouping is increasing its numbers of confrontational deployments. He is proud of the fact that at the end of 2017 there were more than 23,000 troops involved in NATO operations, an increase of over 5,000 since 2014. This is a most peculiar way of striving for a “better relationship” with Russia, whose borders and shores are constantly menaced by NATO’s attack and electronic warfare aircraft, missile-equipped ships and tank-heavy troop manoeuvres.

In June, immediately before the start of the World Cup football tournament in Russia the US-NATO alliance (plus Israel) conducted a two-week military exercise in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. 18,000 troops took part in the manoeuvres which, according to the Pentagon’s HQ in Europe, were “not a provocation of Russia.” At the very time that citizens of countless countries were preparing to travel to Russia to enjoy a major sporting jamboree, the Pentagon-Brussels pressure group did its best to confront the country whose defence budget is one third of Europe’s and a tenth of America’s and whose President declared that his overwhelming priority is reduction of poverty and “the well-being of the people and the prosperity of Russian families.”

It is deeply ironical that while the US-NATO military fandangos were in full swing in the Baltic States, it was reported that

“Russia on Wednesday [6 June] successfully launched its Soyuz MS-09 spacecraft carrying three crew members to the International Space Station (ISS)…”

The spacecraft carried three astronauts: Serena Aunon-Chancellor of the US, Germany’s Alexander Gerst and Russia’s Sergei Prokopyev.

The spacecraft zoomed away in international harmony two days before US Senator Ben Sasse grouched that

“Putin is not our friend and he is not the president’s buddy. He is a thug using Soviet-style aggression to wage a shadow war against America, and our leaders should act like it.”

With that sort of attitude, widespread in the Congress, it’s going to be difficult to realise Trump’s desire to “get along with Russia” which he observes would be “good for the world, it’s good for us, it’s good for everybody.”

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

Trump is the most erratic president the US has ever known. He ricochets from malevolent tweeting to spiteful speeches, and is now distrusted by almost every foreign leader of stature. It is difficult to disagree with the opinion of Iran’s foreign minister that he is “impulsive and illogical” but — and it is a very big ‘but’ — at the moment he presents the best chance for rapprochement and amity with Russia. The fact that Washington’s warmongers so violently oppose his forthcoming talks with President Putin is evidence enough that he is on the right track. Let’s hope that President Putin can keep him on the rails that lead to peace, trade and friendship.

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Brian Cloughley is a British and Australian armies’ veteran, former deputy head of the UN military mission in Kashmir and Australian defense attaché in Pakistan.

On June 28th, PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers) came out with their listing of “Global Top 100 companies (2018): Ranking of the top 100 global companies by market capitalisation”, and reported:

“The increase in China’s market capitalisation has been close to that of the US this year. … China’s contribution to the top 100 market capitalisation increased by 57%, to $2,822bn. … European companies have never fully recovered from the 2009 financial crisis. Europe is now represented by just 23 companies (down from 31 in 2009) and accounts for only 17% of the top 100 market capitalisation (compared to 27% in 2009).”

How much more can Europe’s wealth shrink? 

Europe is shrinking as an international place to invest, even while it is exploding as an international place to receive refugees from the nations where the U.S. regime bomb and destroy the infrastructure, and leave hell for the residents, who thus flee, mainly to nearby Europe, and so cause the refugee-crisis there. Usually, the U.S. isn’t the only invader: it solicits any allies it can muster — mainly fundamentalist-Sunni Arab regimes, plus the apartheid theocracy of Israel, but also a few regimes in Europe — to join in this creation of hell for the escapees, and of immigrants to Europe. But, as Barack Obama put it,

“The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”

The U.S. aristocracy intend to keep things that way, and their allies just tag along.

The U.S. regime is solidly neoconservative, or imperialistic; and the way that it grows its wealth and its power now is at Europe’s expense. The data show this.

During recent centuries, Europe had led the world, but now the U.S. does, and at Europe’s expense, but especially at the expense of the people who live where we bomb. This is just a fact, but what are Europeans doing about it? Thus far, nothing. Is that about to change? Maybe things are finally getting bad enough.

On page 31 of the PwC report, is shown that whereas in 2009 the U.S. had 42% of the “Top 100” companies, that figure in 2018 is 54% — 54 firms, instead of the previous 42.

China has 12 instead of the former 9.

But most of Europe has seen declines, instead of rises.

UK now has 5 instead of the former 9.

France now has 4 instead of the former 7.

Germany now has 4 instead of the former 5.

Russia has been hit particularly hard by U.S. sanctions; it now has 0, instead of the former 2.

Three European countries had 1 in 2009 and now have 0 — none at all — and these three are: Italy, Norway, Finland.

No one can reasonably deny, in light of these data, that the U.S. aristocracy — the individuals who control America’s international corporations and U.S. Government and America’s ‘news’ media (to control the public) — have continued to win against Europe’s aristocracies (the U.S. counterparts in the European subcontinent).

What’s amazing is that Europe’s aristocrats are not fighting back — except (some of them) against the refugees from America’s invasions and coups (and opposing those refugees isn’t dealing with the source of Europe’s economic problem). Even if the publics in Europe are powerless, the billionaires who still remain there are not. How much longer will they continue to be sitting ducks for America’s billionaires to target and eat?

Europe’s power in the world could shrink to almost nothing, unless foreign affairs in Europe soon reverse 180 degrees, and turn against the U.S. and its allies, instead of stay with those regime-change fanatics — and against themselves.

Europe is not declining on account of some failure by Europeans, except a failure to fight back in an intelligent way, which means, above all: against the real source of Europe’s decline. America, after all, definitely is not a democracy.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Like the many unwinnable wars (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria) started by two previous US presidents, president Trump’s war of his own choosing against China is also unwinnable not just because China is a formidable “economic partner” and has the capacity to retaliate massively, but also because China itself is too big a market for the US-based business and it can hurt the US without having to impose new tariffs.

While by the end of 2017, the US investment in China totaled US$14 billion compared to China’s US$ 29 billion in the US, in terms of stocks however, US companies had “significantly more historical investment” in China, estimated at about US$256 billion, than Chinese firms had in the US, according to a report by the National Committee on United States-China Relations and Rhodium Group in April. And China imported some US$140 billion worth of US products last year, and it would have no compunction about putting different hurdles in the way of every US company, including the General Motors which has been outselling other motor companies like Honda, BMW and Mercedes Benz in China, operating in China. While there is no doubt that, as the US president’s various announcements tell us, the US can hurt as much as US$450 billion worth of Chinese goods, a number of US companies operating in China would equally start facing a crisis that, if the past is any guide to future, may eventually have to wrap things up.

For instance, in 2016, when the Philippines decided to take the case of South China Sea Islands to the Hague for arbitration, China did retaliate in an unprovoked manner by simply issuing a notice of non-compliance on Philippine bananas, saying that they had detected a pest called Dysmicoccus neobrevipes in a shipment to Shenzhen, a major entry point for Philippine bananas to China. The Philippines exported nearly 450,000 tonnes of bananas to China in 2016 worth US$157.5 million. After the incident, China destroyed 35 tonnes of bananas and suspended 27 exporters. Such an incident had also occurred in 2012 when a standoff took place between China and Philippines over the Scarborough Shoals, which began on April 8 when the Philippines sent its navy to confront Chinese vessels fishing in the area, forcing China into taking measures that hit the Philippines economy by slowing down its inceptions of imports from the Philippines such as papayas, mangoes, coconuts and pineapples, thus forcing the Philippine authorities to search for other markets in the Middle East and other regions.

As far as the US is concerned, its trade war with China will hurt a lot private US business companies operating in China. While US tariff would hurt Chinese companies as well, these companies are state-owned and are unlikely to put pressure on their government to end the war.

As of 2018, McDonalds has about 2500 outlets in China. Currently it is planning to increase the number of outlets to 4500 by 2022. Starbuck is also opening a new outlet in China every 15 hours and expecting to add more 2,000 more by 2021. If this trade war gets serious and both sides start retaliating, both of these companies may have to revisit their plans. The General Motors, which delivered more than 1.1 million vehicles to China in 2016 as compared to the 202000 it delivered in the US, would also have to do the same and look for other markets as well. Reportedly, other US-based companies such as Apple are already starting to feel the pressure and Apple’s Tim Cook told Trump in April that trade war with China, where Apple has 41 stores (most in a single region outside the US) and where its sales have already declined, wasn’t a good thing.

War will expand to other markets

One crucial factor that is going to hurt the US more is that its tariff policy is not going to hurt China alone. On the one hand, these tariffs will hurt its economic relations with other countries, and on the other, any decline in Chinese exports to the US will leave a major impact on a number of Asian economies, which act as a supplier of products, such as smart-phone chips, to China which China uses to produce things that it exports to the US.

The US imposed tariffs have already started another trade-war between the US and its erstwhile ally in Asia, India. When Trump recently mentioned India at G7 and threatened additional tariff, Delhi was not amused. Now India says it is planning to raise customs duty by 50 percent on a revised list of 30 US products including motorbikes, lentils and some steel goods. India has also decided to increase import duties to counter the impact of higher US tariffs on certain steel and aluminium products which would have implications of around $240 million on India.

That India did this as a retaliation is evident from the notification it sent to WTO stating that the duties imposed and concessions suspended “are substantially equivalent to the amount of trade affected by the measures imposed by the US.”

This economic tension has already led China to forge better ties with India in a way that might enable both of these countries to counter the trade challenge thrown by Trump. Ahead of Modi-Xi summit in April, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said that “the world is now faced with rampant unilateralism as well as the rising protectionism in the process of globalisation. All these trends have been closely followed and debated.” “So against such backdrop, China and India have a lot to discuss. We are newly emerging markets as well as developing countries with big populations, so we believe the two countries will continue to uphold the globalisation so that it is more inclusive”, Lu added further.

In a way, this trade war has largely helped India and China to submerge the Doklam standoff and re-configure their relations in the changing global economic context. The US, therefore, is unwittingly driving a country away from its axis that it not so long ago was courting as its bulwark against China in Asia for the next 100 years, but now has been forced to postpone its 2+2 strategic dialogue, an outcome of strained economic relations.

There is, therefore, every likelihood of the US imposed trade war backfiring on the US itself not just in economic terms, but also in geo-strategic, giving the US enough reasons to review its ‘war strategy’ and equally giving reasons to the president Trump to revisit his stance to avoid ending up as yet another president failing to win yet another self-imposed war.

*

Salman Rafi Sheikh is a research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Featured image is from the author.

The Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the Tiger Forces and their allies are about to achieve a stunning and rapid victory in their battle against Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and their allies in southern Syria.

Over the past few days, government forces have liberated over 15 settlements in the eastern and western countryside of Daraa and forces some groups of militants to accept a surrender agreements.

According to the Syrian state media, at least 10 villages – Tisiyah, Maaraba, al-Samaqiyat, Smad, Samj, Abu Khatula, Elemtaih, al-Taebah, al-Nada and Jamrin – almost signed the reconciliation agreement and militants started preparing for surrender.

Militants in the town of Bosra al-Sham already started surrendering weapons. At the same time, the so-called moderate opposition in the town of Tafas and have pledged allegiance to the ISIS-linked Khalid al-Walid Army.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have deployed additional armoured and artillery forces, including battle tanks, in the occupied Golan Heights, near the contact line with Syria.

Israel claimed the additional forces were deployed solely to “respond” to potential incidents and that “the IDF will continue to insist on the principle of non-involvement in what is happening in Syria”.

Meanwhile in reality, Israeli forces have repeatedly targeted forces of the Damascus government in southern and central Syria describing these strikes as a defensive measure.

It’s interesting to note that many of these strikes took place during important battles between the SAA and terrorist groups.

Syrian and local sources say that the IDF is preparing for carrying out more strikes amid the ongoing SAA anti-terrorist operation in the provinces of Daraa and Quneitra. While such strikes cause a new round of the Syrian-Israeli tensions, they will not likely influence in any way the strategic situation in these provinces because militants’ defense has already collapsed.

If Israeli forces continue striking SAA troops attacking the Khalid al-Walid Army near the occupied Golan Heights, the international audience will easily find out that Israel is encouraging ISIS in the area and using the terrorist group to create a buffer zone there.

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Mass protests against the Trump regime’s unlawful agenda toward unwanted aliens are very much warranted and vital. Yet they’re way short of what’s most needed.

Upholding justice under law for everyone, along with strictly observing the letter and spirit of rule of law principles, are global issues – one above others in America way inadequate, especially when issues more important than others are ignored or get short shrift.

Nothing approaches the importance of challenging Washington’s imperial war agenda, smashing one country after another, responsible for countless millions of casualties – responsible parties free to commit high crimes of war and against humanity with impunity.

Where’s the mass outrage, including about countless trillions of dollars spent for mass slaughter and destruction, vital homeland needs left begging, including the erosion of important social programs to help pay for naked aggression and global dominance.

Most Americans don’t realize how greatly they’re harmed by endless US imperial wars.

The spirited Vietnam era anti-war movement greatly helped getting US combat troops out of Southeast Asia – though not easily or quickly.

In 1971 testimony before Congress, a young John Kerry Vietnam veteran explained high crimes committed by US soldiers, including highly decorated ones.

They included massacring and raping Vietnamese women, chopping off heads, cutting off ears for souvenirs, electro-shocking genitals, random shootings, “raz(ing) villages (like) Genghis Khan,” shooting livestock and pets “for fun, poison(ing) food stocks,” and much more.

“We saw firsthand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime…We rationalized destroying villages…to save them.”

“We saw America lose her sense of morality (by accepting) a My Lai” massacre and many others like it. “We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of orientals.”

Kerry explained the above, later becoming part of the dirty system in Congress and as secretary of state – his morality and soul sold for wealth, power and privilege, atrocities in US war theaters today as horrendous or worse than earlier, suppressed by media scoundrels.

Current US policymakers place a cheapness on lives everywhere, at home and abroad, committing daily high crimes of war, against humanity and genocide – vital public outrage absent.

Without it, US Nuremberg-level high crimes continue endlessly, along with police state harshness at home and serving privileged interests exclusively at the expense of fast eroding social justice, heading toward disappearing altogether.

The public spirit of that earlier era is gone, why America gets away with mass murder and much more, why thirdworldizing the country continues, why most people are mindless about growing tyranny posing as democracy, disdained from the nation’s inception, today as well under one-party rule with two right wings – hostile to virtually everything just societies hold dear.

Widespread anti-war fervor of a bygone time no longer exists. Anti-Trump protests are suspect.

During and after the presidential campaign, dark forces in Washington and other centers of power manipulated Americans to turn out in large numbers against him.

It’s part of a plot to delegitimize and undermine him, including by falsely claiming Russian US electing meddling helped him triumph over Hillary, a bald-faced lie still resonating.

Unknown numbers were paid to protest earlier. Were weekend crowds assembled the same way to demonstrate against Trump’s hostility toward unwanted aliens?

Most Americans are easy marks to manipulate and fool – no matter how many times they were had before. The late Studs Terkel and Gore Vidal both called the nation “the United States of amnesia.”

I and others call the US a plutocracy, not a democracy. Since the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, America became increasing neoliberal, hardline and belligerent – a warrior state more than ever post-9/11.

Trump exceeds the ruthlessness of his predecessors at home and geopolitically – unacceptable hostility toward unwanted aliens one of many illegal and immoral policies.

All are important, some more than others, none more than mass opposition to imperial wars, along with mass activism against police state injustice, harming America’s poor and most disadvantaged, and a nation serving privileged interests exclusively.

Where’s the outrage against all of the above? Selective indignation, especially if manipulated, not grassroots, doesn’t pass the smell test.

It’s not how true blue activism operates, too few in numbers domestically, at most a shadow of its long ago peak.

*

Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the CRG, Correspondent of Global Research based in Chicago.

The US Air Force has tested the B61-12 nuclear bomb by dropping a dud from a B-2 Spirit stealth bomber over Nevada, as part of an ambitious project to extend the service life of the bomb, introduced in 1968, by another 20 years.

 To grasp what is going on in the world right now, we need to reflect on two things. One is that we are in a phase of trial runs. The other is that what is being trialled is fascism – a word that should be used carefully but not shirked when it is so clearly on the horizon. Forget “post-fascist” – what we are living with is pre-fascism.

Moral boundaries

But when you’ve done all this, there is a crucial next step, usually the trickiest of all. You have to undermine moral boundaries, inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.

People have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group

It is this next step that is being test-marketed now. It is being done in Italy by the far-right leader and minister for the interior Matteo Salvini. How would it go down if we turn away boatloads of refugees? Let’s do a screening of the rough-cut of registering all the Roma and see what buttons the audience will press. And it has been trialled by Trump: let’s see how my fans feel about crying babies in cages. I wonder how it will go down with Rupert Murdoch.

To see, as most commentary has done, the deliberate traumatisation of migrant children as a “mistake” by Trump is culpable naivety. It is a trial run – and the trial has been a huge success. Trump’s claim last week that immigrants “infest” the US is a test-marketing of whether his fans are ready for the next step-up in language, which is of course “vermin”. And the generation of images of toddlers being dragged from their parents is a test of whether those words can be turned into sounds and pictures. It was always an experiment – it ended (but only in part) because the results were in.

‘Devious’ infants

And the results are quite satisfactory. There is good news on two fronts. First, Rupert Murdoch is happy with it – his Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors. They went the whole swinish hog: even the brown babies are liars. Those sobs of anguish are typical of the manipulative behaviour of the strangers coming to infest us – should we not fear a race whose very infants can be so devious? Second, the hardcore fans loved it: 58 per cent of Republicans are in favour of this brutality. Trump’s overall approval ratings are up to 42.5 per cent.

Fox News mouthpieces outdid themselves in barbaric crassness: making animal noises at the mention of a Down syndrome child, describing crying children as actors

This is greatly encouraging for the pre-fascist agenda. The blooding process has begun within the democratic world. The muscles that the propaganda machines need for defending the indefensible are being toned up. Millions and millions of Europeans and Americans are learning to think the unthinkable. So what if those black people drown in the sea? So what if those brown toddlers are scarred for life? They have already, in their minds, crossed the boundaries of morality. They are, like Macbeth, “yet but young in deed”. But the tests will be refined, the results analysed, the methods perfected, the messages sharpened. And then the deeds can follow.

Several hundred thousand people turned out on Saturday for rallies across the United States to denounce the Trump administration’s policy of persecuting immigrants and asylum seekers. Protests took place in more than 700 locations, with the biggest crowds in Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and New York City.

The protests were particularly directed at the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents, carried out as a consequence of Trump’s “zero tolerance” directive requiring the arrest of anyone suspected of entering the United States illegally.

The biggest demonstration was in Los Angeles, home to the largest immigrant population in the United States. More than 75,000 people surrounded City Hall in a crowd so dense it was difficult to move through it. By contrast, only 20 people showed for a miserable pro-Trump counterprotest that was given undue attention by the local news media.

Protesters, outraged by videos of young children crying after being forcibly separated from their parents, continued arriving at the demonstration in a continuous stream throughout the course of the day. There was widespread support for placing Trump, Stephen Miller, Jeff Sessions and other cabinet figures on trial for crimes against humanity. Others called for the abolition of Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other repressive instruments of the anti-immigrant dragnet. “Human Rights should have no border” was a common slogan on placards throughout the rally.

Celebrity entertainers and Democratic Party politicians dominated the platform and sought to direct the outrage over the abuse of immigrants and separation of parents and children into support for the Democratic Party in the November congressional elections. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke about the need for ICE and immigration officials to simply “follow the law.” Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom spoke of the rich history of diversity in California, while pledging to do nothing whatsoever to protest Trump’s anti-immigrant policies.

Source: NPR

In one of the largest demonstrations, over 50,000 rallied in Chicago, according to crowd estimates by the city police department. Braving intense and dangerous heat, wide layers of the population—high school and college students; immigrants and their families; teachers, nurses, and state workers; sections of the middle and even upper-middle class—turned out to express their opposition to the Trump administration’s barbaric anti-immigrant policies.

There was a similar turnout in New York City, with marches in both Manhattan and Brooklyn. A crowd of demonstrators filled Brooklyn Bridge from end to end for more than two hours as they marched across the East River.

Some 15,000 people gathered at Government Center in Boston, where the speakers platform was dominated by Democratic politicians, including senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey and Representative Joe Kennedy, all promoting a vote for the Democrats in November. The Massachusetts Secretary of State office had a table set up to register people to vote.

There were sizeable protests in many regional centers, such as Atlanta, Denver and Dallas, where five people were arrested outside an ICE facility; at mid-size cities like Pittsburgh, New Orleans, Albuquerque and Salt Lake City; and even in small interior towns such as Redding, California, and Huntington, West Virginia.

In El Paso, Texas, a large crowd blocked the bridge across the Rio Grande to Juarez, Mexico. There were organized protests in all 50 states.

At what was billed as the main national rally, in Washington DC, the march organizers, from MoveOn.org, the American Civil Liberties Union and the AFL-CIO-backed National Domestic Workers Alliance, made the decision to have the “vote in November” argument made exclusively by entertainers, ministers and activists representing various “identities”—black, Hispanic, Asian, female, etc.—rather than having any leading Democrats on the platform.

This was done in part out of concern that the crowd might not react favorably to such figures and in part because top Democrats did not want to associate themselves in so public a way with the defense of immigrants. But the absence of Democratic politicians from the platform in Washington did not change the message, as speakers repeatedly led the crowd in chants of “vote them out.” Not one speaker criticized the role of the Obama administration in carrying out mass deportations—more than any previous government—and setting the stage for the brutal escalation of attacks by Trump.

The speakers list in Washington aimed to reinforce the efforts of the Democratic Party and its pseudo-left supporters to split the working class along the lines of race, religion, ethnicity and gender. Not a single speaker claimed to represent the working class or speak in the name of the vast majority of Americans who are united as part of that class.

Protesters carry signs and chant slogans in front of Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles on Tuesday (Source: Long Beach Press-Telegram)

The reactionary ideology behind this lineup was given voice by one speaker in particular, Rev. Traci Blackmon of the United Church of Christ, an African-American pastor from St. Louis. She presented the entire history of the United States as one of white oppressors ripping children away from nonwhite parents: from enslaved black women to Native American families, Japanese-Americans in World War II and parents locked up in the prison system, whom she called “predominantly black and brown,” despite the fact that working-class whites make up a large proportion of those in jail.

This presentation was explicitly racialist, as the preacher spoke of breaking through the “iron curtains of white nationalism” and claimed the motivation for the attacks on immigrants was that “The false god of whiteness is threatened.” There were no protests from the platform against this type of language, nor any attempt to assert the unity of white, black and other minority working people in a common struggle.

While the speakers in Washington and in other major cities covered up the role of the Obama administration and sought to turn the defense of immigrants into an electoral campaign for the Democrats, those attending the rallies were extremely receptive to a socialist alternative.

Supporters and members of the Socialist Equality Party intervened at many of the rallies around the country and found enormous support for the SEP’s call to unite the working class against all the politicians of the capitalist class, whether Trump and the Republicans or the Democrats, who serve as the second line of attack against immigrants.

SEP supporters distributed thousands of copies of the statement addressed by the party to the rallies, under the headline, “Mobilize the working class against the bipartisan attack on immigrants!”

At some of the smaller rallies, where the platform was less strictly controlled by groups affiliated with the Democratic Party, SEP members were able to speak and declare the party’s support for open borders, the freedom of all workers to live and work where they choose, and against the subordination of the working class to big-business politicians and parties.

In those cases there was a warm response to the policies advocated by the SEP and clear indications that working people are increasingly interested in a socialist perspective and eager to discuss it.

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Featured image is from CNBC.

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Massive Victory for Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexican Elections

By Rafael Azul, July 02, 2018

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leader of the Movement for National Reconstruction (Morena), was elected President of Mexico yesterday by a massive margin amid high voter turnout. His two main opponents, José Antonio Meade (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) and Ricardo Anaya (Together for México coalition, which includes the National Action Party, PAN, and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) conceded early yesterday evening.

America Is “One Dollar One Vote”, Not Really “One Person One Vote”

By Eric Zuesse, July 02, 2018

The basic problem in America, therefore, isn’t Democratic versus Republican; it is instead democracy versus dictatorship. And this problem exists within each Party: each Party is controlled by its billionaires, not by its voting-public.

Nationwide Protests: Pro-Immigrant or Anti-Trump?

By Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers, July 02, 2018

Over the past weeks, there has been a series of major protests against the mistreatment of immigrants. Hundreds were arrested after blocking DC streets and sitting-in at a Senate office building.  Two weeks ago, there were #FamiliesTogether rallies across the United States that forced Trump to end child separation and return to the Obama-era policy of incarcerating immigrant families. People are taking action for immigrant rights and protesting the separation of children from their families as well as the indefinite detention of immigrant families.

In Upholding the “Muslim Ban”, the Supreme Court Ignored International Law

By Prof. Marjorie Cohn, July 02, 2018

Under the guise of deferring to the president on matters of national security, the 5-4 majority disregarded a litany of Trump’s anti-Muslim statements and held that the ban does not violate the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, which forbids the government from preferring one religion over another. Neither the majority nor the dissenting opinions even mentions the US’s legal obligations under international human rights law.

GMO Agriculture and the Narrative of Choice

By Colin Todhunter, July 02, 2018

GM agriculture is not ‘feeding the world’, nor has it been designed to do so: the companies that push GM are located firmly within the paradigm of industrial agriculture and associated power relations that shape a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy resulting in strategic surpluses and scarcities across the globe. The choice for farmers between a technology that is so often based on broken promises and non-GMO agriculture offers little more than a false choice.

Canada: Let’s Not be Distracted by Stephen Harper. We Have Chrystia Freeland to Contend With

By Nino Pagliccia, July 02, 2018

Canadian foreign policy has experienced a striking shift toward the political right in the last thirty years with both Liberal and Conservative governments at the helm. Following the world trend on globalization, Canada has moved from a perceived peace promoting position on the world stage to an outright recognized wars and uprisings supporter, and weapons exporter that rivals very closely with the Trump administration.

Featured image: Members of the “Champions Team” from the Palestine Amputee Football Association at training (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

When he was just nine years old, Ibrahim Khattab lost his left leg during Israel’s 2014 “Protective Edge” military operation against Gaza. The 50-day assault left over 2,100 Palestinians dead, most of them civilians.

Now 13-year-old Khattab is the youngest member of Gaza’s first amputee football team, established in March this year.

“The past four years were harsh. It was not easy for me to cope with my new condition, but now I am proud that I play with all these men who are much older than me,” he said.

Image on the right: Ibrahim Khattab says he is “proud that I play with all these men who are much older than me and yet I sometimes manage to compete with them” (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

Khattab said that what he went through in the aftermath of the Israeli attack was “unbearable”.

He and his friends were playing football in front of his home in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip when he was hit by an Israeli drone. He immediately fainted and was transferred to the nearest hospital. When he woke up a few hours later, he found out he had lost his left leg.

“The explosion was massive, and it happened before I could run,” he recalled. “I did not realise what was happening, I just remember that I saw my leg bleeding then I slept and woke up in the hospital a few hours later.”

Khattab was nervous about going back to school at first.

“I was afraid my friends would not accept me anymore,” he said. “I used to run and play on the street all day. Now my parents are always afraid something bad will happen to me if I run or hang out alone.”

But Khattab has come a long way since then. He says that Monday, the day the team meets for training, has become his favourite day of the week.

“I get to meet my new friends here. Joining the team has made me confident about my body and abilities again. I love the support my coach and friends give me.”

Ibrahim Khattab says Monday are his favourite day of the week because it is the day the team meets for training (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

He said he dreams of travelling to represent Palestine in international games.

The football team of 13 amputees, dubbed “the Champions Team,” meets once a week for a three-hour training session.

They aim to compete in international championships by challenging their current situations and breaking common stereotypes about the disabled.

Ten of the 13 members on the team suffered amputations due to injuries sustained from Israel’s three military operations targeting the Gaza Strip between 2008-14. Others were victims of shelling incidents that have occurred sporadically since the beginning of the blockade Israel imposed on the strip in 2007.

For Noaman Abushamla, the association’s manager, the initiative is a resistance tool for Palestinians to challenge the occupation (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

As a result of Israel’s “Operation Protective Edge” in the summer of 2014 alone, 1,100 people have been left with permanent disabilities, including 100 amputations.

More recently, since the beginning of the Great Return March protests, Gaza doctors have performed 32 amputations, 27 of which were on lower limbs, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Tensions have soared in Gaza since 30 March, when Israel met largely peaceful mass protests near the fence separating Israel from Gaza with lethal force, killing at least 133 Palestinians. There have been no Israeli fatalities.

Gaza has been suffering a humanitarian crisis as a result of the Israeli-imposed blockade. According to the World Health Organisation, 1.2 million people lack adequate access to healthcare.

Common goals

Wahid Rabah, the oldest member of the team, lost his right leg during an Israeli military operation in 2006 dubbed “Summer Rain,” which was launched after an Israeli soldier was captured and taken into Gaza. The attack left more than 240 Palestinians dead, including 48 children.

Over the years, the 42-year-old has tried to find different ways of coping with his disability and in March he received a call from the founder of the Palestine Amputee Football Association (PAFA) – founded that same month – asking whether or not he would be interested in joining the first amputee football team in Gaza.

“It took me three years to start coping by enrolling myself in local sport clubs and playing different sports, like sitting volleyball and football. Then the founder of this association called me and suggested that I join the team, and I said, why not?” he explained.

Image below: Islam Amoun has not let the loss of his arm stop him from playing football (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

In July 2006, Rabah, a national security officer at the time, said he was hit by an Israeli drone, while he was on duty in the Bureij refugee camp.

“I can never forget the date, 19 July,” Rabah said. “I got injured and lay on the ground. When my colleague took off his shirt and tied it on my leg, I knew at that moment that I was going to lose it forever,” he recalled.

Rabah’s right leg was amputated due to severe damage to his bones and tissue. He usually uses a prosthetic leg but does without it on the football pitch to abide by the association’s rules, which allow players to use only crutches, since not all amputee players have prosthetic legs. The goal keeper must have a disbaility in his upper limbs while the rest of the players must have a disability in the lower limbs, among other rules.

Rabah believes his decision to join the team helped him realise that there are others that suffer similar disabilities to him and that he was not so different.

“Losing part of your body is not easy,” he said. “But getting to know people whose cases are similar to yours is very encouraging. This is why I have decided to stay with this team.”

A level playing field

A familiar figure on the sidelines of the pitch is Fouad Abu Ghalioun, the founder and chairman of PAFA, who supervises the team’s weekly training session.

Abu Ghalioun said he decided to create the amputee football team in Gaza after being inspired by the spirit shown by players in the European Amputee Football Championship (EAFF) in October 2017. 

“[I] thought to myself, if the idea is implemented in Europe where amputees have access to proper medical treatment and enjoy all their rights, then it is a must to start it in Gaza where victims of Israeli attacks are forgotten and left with no hope,” Abu Ghalioun told Middle East Eye.

“I immediately called some friends and proposed the idea. They supported the initiative and started gathering information on what is needed to form such teams, who can join, and the kind of crutches used by players.”

Abu Ghalioun spent five months working to bring the idea to life and said it is always a challenge to initiate such projects in Gaza. 

The first obstacle was a lack of resources needed to fund the project, which included securing a football pitch and buying special crutches for the players.

Though the players do not have enough resources or equipment yet, they meet weekly for training (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

“It was also hard to convince the amputees, the majority of which did not accept their condition, to [accept] their disabilities and play football using only one leg,” he said.

The Deir al-Balah Municipality opens its pitch for the team to practise once a week, however, the players should practise at least twice a week in a fully equipped football pitch, which must include bleachers, dressing rooms and toilets.

According to Abu Ghalioun, the players require special sturdy crutches that cost at least $100 each. There are other costs as well, such as renting a football pitch and the cost of transporting the players who come from different areas in Gaza to the pitch in the central Gaza Strip, all of which may total an estimated $10,000 a year in running expenses for the club.

Big dreams

Image on the right: Naji Naji lost his leg when he was 15 years old, after stepping on an explosive device in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp (MEE/Mohammed Asaad)

The 13 players hope to one day make it to the international Paralympic Games.

“It would be a dream come true, not only for the team, but for all persons with disabilities in Gaza, if we manage to represent our country in international games,” said 26-year-old Naji Naji, as he took a break from practice. He lost his leg when he was 15 years old, after stepping on an explosive device in the Deir al-Balah refugee camp.

“I was walking in the street when an explosion suddenly struck. I immediately fell on the ground and my left leg was gone,” Naji recalled.

“You can see these crutches we are using are not made for sport. They bend and break most of the time. We do not have enough resources and equipment for training, but we are confident that we can make it despite everything.”

Notwithstanding the lack of resources, Naji wishes this project had been initiated a long time ago.

“The coaches are teaching us to run as fast as we can when we were afraid to even walk alone,” Naji said. “I hope we can train every day. It makes me feel alive.”

Abu Ghalioun says he hopes to form an additional four amputee teams from different governorates in the Gaza Strip within the next few months so they can compete with one another. In this way they can form a national team that will be able to compete at the international level. In these teams, he is also aiming to include players who also lost their limbs while participating in the Great Return March.

“We already have two teams that will start training in the next two weeks, including one for children with disabilities entitled ‘Hope and Future’ that will be given special training to help children cope with their condition,” he said.

Resistance tools

Mahmoud al-Naouq, the administrative manager of PAFA, lost both of his legs in two different incidents during the 2014 Israeli attack on Gaza.

According to al-Naouq, after an Israeli warplane targeted his home in Deir al-Balah, he was immediately transferred to the Shuhada al-Aqsa Hospital near his home, where doctors had to amputate his left leg as shrapnel completely damaged his bones. A few days later, al-Naouq says he lost his other leg after Israeli warplanes targeted the hospital where he was recovering.

According to al-Naouq, the first training session took place on Land Day, which coincided with the beginning of the Great Return March protests. Land Day commemorates the day when Israeli forces killed six Palestinians during protests against land confiscation in 1976.

“While the occupation usually portrays Palestinians as advocates for violence and death, this initiative came to reflect our desire to live rather than get killed,” al-Naouq said.

“The amputee team has given the players another chance to feel normal again,” said al-Naouq. “After feeling left out for years, this initiative teaches them how to play football with only one leg, but also helps them live with their disabilities.”

For Noaman Abushamla, the association’s manager, such initiatives are resistance tools for the Palestinians in the besieged enclave to “challenge the occupation and prove they still exist despite all attempts to marginalise them”.

“Our message is to voice these victims’ demands,” Abushamla said. “You see they are clinging to life, and it is our duty to show the world what they are capable of doing, instead of what they cannot do.”

In this article, we have attempted to identify the most censored stories of modern times in Britain. We have asked the opinions of one of the most famous and celebrated journalists and documentary film-makers of our time, a high-profile former Mi5 intelligence officer, an investigative journalist with one of the most well-known climate-change organisations, a veteran journalist of the Iraq war, an ex-army officer, along with the head of one of the worlds largest charities working against injustice.

One comment from our eclectic group of experts said;

“the UK has the most legally protected and least accountable intelligence agencies in the western world so even in just that field competition is fierce, let alone all the other cover-ups.”

So true have we found this statement to be that we’ve had to split this article into two categories – military and non-military, with a view that we may well categorise surveillance and privacy on its own another time.

Without further ado – here are the most non-military censored stories in Britain since the 1980s, in no particular order. Do bear in mind that for those with inquisitive minds, some of these stories you will have read something about somewhere – but to the majority of citizens, these stories will read like conspiracy theories.

Consequences of American corporate influence over British welfare reforms

The demolition of the welfare state was first suggested in 1982 by the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. Using neoliberal politics, every UK government since 1982 has covertly worked towards that goal. It is also the political thinking used as justification for the welfare reforms of the New Labour government, which introduced the use of the Work Capability Assessment (WCA) for all out-of-work disability benefit claimants. Neoliberal politics also justified additional austerity measures introduced by the Coalition government since 2010, and the Conservative government(s) since 2015, which were destined to cause preventable harm when disregarding the human consequences. Much of this is known and in the public domain.

However, what is less known is a story the government have tried very hard to gag. The American healthcare insurance system of disability denial was adopted, as was the involvement of a US healthcare company to distance the government from the preventable harm created by its use.  The private sector was introduced on a wide scale in many areas of welfare and social policy as New Labour adopted American social and labour market policies – and the gravity of its effects cannot be understated.

The result? In one 11 month study 10,600 deaths were attributed to the government disability denial system of screening, with 2,200 people dying before the ESA assessment was even completed. Between May 2010 and February 2014, an astonishing total of 40,680 people died within 12 months of going through a government Work Capability Assessment. The government department responsible has since refused to publish updated mortality totals.

This political and social scandal has been censored, with the author of THIS truly damning report in trouble with the government for publishing it.

Climate Change, what a British oil giant knew all along

For decades, tobacco companies buried evidence that smoking was deadly, the same goes for the fossil fuel industry. As early as 1981, big oil company Shell was aware of the causes and catastrophic dangers of climate change. In the 1980s it was acknowledging with its own research that anthropogenic global warming was a fact. Then, as the scientific consensus became more and more clear, it started introducing doubt and giving weight to a “significant minority” of “alternative viewpoints” as the full implications for the company’s business model became clear.

By the mid-90s, the company started talking about “distinguished scientists” that cast aspersions of the seriousness of climate change. THIS REPORT provides proof of Shell’s documentation including emails of what they knew and what they were hiding from the public domain. One document in 1988 confirms that:

“By the time the global warming becomes detectable it could be too late to take effective countermeasures to reduce the effects or even stabilise the situation.”

It was not until 2007 that scientific research eventually took a grip of the problem and proved what was known all along. However, as Shell did say – it’s probably too late to take effective countermeasures now anyway. There is still persistent quoting of climate science deniers by the fossil fuel industries.

Government Surveillance

In 2016, the UK was identified as the most extreme surveillance state in the Western world. However, legislation really only came about to legalise its use because of the Edward Snowden revelations in 2013. Prior to that, the British government had created a secret 360-degree mass surveillance architecture that no-one, including most members of parliament, knew anything about. And much of it has since been deemed illegal by the highest courts in both Britain and the European Union.

From operation Optic Nerve which took millions of sexually explicit images of an unknowing public through their devices to a hacking operation called Gemalto – where GCHQ stole the keys to a global encryption system with 700 million subscribers. The unaccountable spymasters of the UK have undertaken breathtaking operations of illegality with absolute impunity.

Some other programmes included; Three Smurfs – an operation to turn on any mobile device so it could listen to or activate the camera covertly on mobile phones. XKeyScore was basically a Google search engine for spies to find any data about anyone. Upstream and Tempora hacked into the worlds main cable highway, intercepting everything and anything globally with a leaked presentation slide from GCHQ on this programme expressly stating they were intent on “Mastering the Internet”. Royal Concierge identified diplomatic hotel reservations so GCHQ could organise a surveillance operation against dignitaries either domestic or foreign, in advance.

In truth, Britain is classed as an endemic surveillance state and right now, we only know what has been uncovered by whistleblowers. This is why people like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and others are nothing less than political prisoners of Western governments. They don’t want you to know what they know about you. They also don’t want you to know about them, which is why the architecture is there in the first place. It is not for catching terrorists because if it was the courts would not deem these surveillance systems as illegal.

Evidence-Based Medical Studies

Over the last few years, medical professionals have come forward to share a truth that, for many people, proves difficult to swallow. One such authority is Dr. Richard Horton, the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world.

Dr. Horton recently released a statement declaring that a lot of published medical research is in fact unreliable at best, if not completely false.

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

Across the pond,  Dr Marcia Angell, a physician and longtime Editor-in-Chief of the New England Medical Journal (NEMJ), which is also considered another one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals in the world, makes her view of the subject quite plain:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines.  I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of the New England Journal of Medicine”.

Many newspapers in Britain take the opportunity to indulge in some shameless click baiting and report completely false stories simply to gain visitor numbers onto their website – as in this example by the Mail Online HERE  or  HERE.

The Skripal poisoning and Pablo Millar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

D-notice’s (Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice) are used by the British state to censor the publication of potentially damaging news stories. They are issued to the mainstream media to withhold publication of damaging information. One such case was the widespread use of D-notices regarding the British ex-spy deeply involved in the Skripal/Novichok poisoning case in Salisbury.

(Here are the official D-Notices to the Skripal Affair)

Mainstream journalists, the press and broadcast media were issued with D-notices in respect of a former British intelligence officer called Pablo Miller. Miller was an associate of Christopher Steele, first in espionage operations in Russia and more recently in the activities of Steele’s private intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence.

Steele was responsible for compiling the Trump–Russia dossier, comprising 17 memos written in 2016 alleging misconduct and conspiracy between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Putin administration. The dossier paid for by the Democratic Party, claimed that Trump was compromised by evidence of his sexual proclivities (golden shower anyone?) in Russia’s possession. Steele was the subject of an earlier D-notice, which unsuccessfully attempted to keep his identity as the author of the dossier a secret.

Millar is reported to be Skripal’s handler in Salisbury and if Miller and by extension, Skripal himself were involved in Orbis’ work on the highly-suspect Steele-Trump dossier, which is thought to be the case (for all sorts of reasons – including these D-notices) alongside representatives of British and possibly US intelligence, then the motivations for the attempted assassination on the ex-Russian double agent was very wide at best. As it turned out, blame could not be pinned on Russia’s intelligence service, the FSB, no matter how hard the government tried. This particular part of the Skripal poisoning story remains buried by the mainstream media.

The City of London – A global crime scene

For over a hundred years the Labour party tried in vain to abolish the City of London and its accompanying financial corruption. In 1917, Labour’s new rising star Herbert Morrison, the grandfather of Peter Mandelson made a stand and failed, calling it the “devilry of modern finance.” And although attempt after attempt was made throughout the following decades, it was Margaret Thatcher who succeeded by abolishing its opponent, the Greater London Council in 1986.

Tony Blair went about it another way and offered to reform the City of London in what turned out to be a gift from God. He effectively gave the vote to corporations which swayed the balance of democratic power away from residents and workers. It was received by its opponents as the greatest retrograde step since the peace treaty of 1215, Magna Carta. The City won its rights through debt financing in 1067, when William the Conqueror acceded to it and ever since governments have allowed the continuation of its ancient rights above all others.

The consequence? It now stands as money launderer of the world, the capital of global crime scene with Britain referred to by the global criminal fraternity to be the most corrupt country in the world.

A ‘watchman’ sits at the high table of parliament and is its official lobbyist sitting in the seat of power right next to the Speaker of the House who is “charged with ensuring that its established rights are safeguarded.” The job is to seek out political dissent that might arise against the City.

The City of London has its own private funding and will ‘buy-off’ any attempt to erode its powers – any scrutiny of its financial affairs are put beyond external inspection or audit. It has it’s own police force – and laws. Its dark and shadowy client list includes; terrorists, drug barons, arms dealers, despots, dictators, shady politicians, corporations, millionaires and billionaires  – most with something to hide. The shocking Panama Papers, Paradise Papers and Lux Leaks barely scratching the surface even with their almost unbelievable revelations of criminality.

Keith Bristow, Director-General of the UK’s National Crime Agency said in June 2015 that the sheer scale of crime and its subsequent money laundering operations was “a serious strategic threat to Britain.” And whilst much of this activity is indeed published – the scale of it is not. It is now believed by many investigative journalists that the City of London is managing “trillions in ill-gotten gains” – not billions as we have all been told.

State propaganda – manipulating minds, controlling the internet

Reading this you would think this was the stuff of a conspiracy theory – sadly, it’s not. The government, through its spying agent GCHQ developed its own set of software tools to infiltrate the internet to shape what people see, hear and read, with the ability to rig online polls and psychologically manipulate people on social media. This was what Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept confirmed through the Snowden files in 2014. It was not about surveillance but about manipulating public opinion in ever more Orwellian ways.

These ‘tools’ now constitute some of the most startling methods of propaganda delivery systems and internet deception programmes known to mankind. What the Snowden files show are that the government can change the outcome of online polls (codenamed Underpass), send mass delivery of emails or SMS messages (Warpath) at will, disrupt video-based websites (Silverlord) and have tools to permanently disable PC accounts. They can amplify a given message to push a chosen narrative (GESTATOR), increase traffic to any given website” (GATEWAY) and have the ability to inflate page views on websites (SLIPSTREAM). They can crash any website (PREDATORS FACE), reduce page views and distort public responses, spoof any email account and telephone calls they like. Visitors to WikiLeaks are tracked and monitored as if an inquiring mind is now against the law.

Don’t forget, the government has asked no-one for permission to do any of this and none of this has been debated in parliament where representative democracy is supposed to be taking place. There is no protective legislation for the general public and no-one is talking about or debating these illegal programmes that taxpayers have been given no choice to fund – costing billions. This is government sponsored fake news and public manipulation programmes on a monumental scale.

Chris Huhne, a former cabinet minister and member of the national security council until 2012 said –

 “when it comes to the secret world of GCHQ, the depth of my ‘privileged information’ has been dwarfed by the information provided by Edward Snowden to The Guardian.”

The Guardian’s offices were then visited by MI5 and the Snowden files were ordered to be destroyed under threats that if they didn’t, it would be closed down – a sign of British heavy-handedness reminiscent of the East-German Stasi.

Censorship – Spycatcher

‘Spycatcher’ was a truly candid autobiography of a Senior Intelligence Officer published in 1987. Written by Peter Wright, a former MI5 officer, it was published first in Australia after being banned by the British government in 1985. Its allegations proved too much for the authorities to allow it to be in the public domain.

In an interesting twist of irony, the UK government attempted to halt the book’s Australian publication. Malcolm Turnbull, current Prime Minister of Australia, was a lawyer at the time and represented the publisher that defeated the British government’s suppression orders against Spycatcher in Australia in September 1987, and again on appeal in June 1988. This is the same man that refuses to assist Julian Assange, an Australian citizen, from his hellhole existence in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.

The book details plans of the MI6 plot to assassinate Egyptian President Nasser during the Suez Crisis; of joint MI5-CIA plotting against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and of MI5’s eavesdropping on high-level Commonwealth conferences. Wright also highlights the methods and ethics of the spying business.

Newspapers printed in England, attempting proper reportage of Spycatcher’s principal allegations were served gag orders. If they continued, they were tried for contempt of court. However, the book proved so popular many copies were smuggled into England. In 1987, the Law Lords again barred reportage of Wright’s allegations or sale of books.

The ruling was then overturned, but Wright was barred from receiving royalties from the sale of the book in the United Kingdom. In November 1991, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the British government had breached the European Convention of Human Rights in gagging its own newspapers. The book has sold more than two million copies. In 1995, Wright died a millionaire from proceeds of his book.

Censorship – The Internet

To the inquisitive and knowledgeable, censorship of the internet by the British government is not news. In addition, there have been many reports, especially from independent outlets complaining about search engines and social media platforms censoring oppositional and dissenting voices.

Already described earlier in this article is the involvement of the authorities in strategies to manipulate public opinion and disseminate false narratives in their aims for control of the internet itself.

A few months ago, the government changed the law to block online content deemed as either pornographic or of an extremist nature to protect those under 16 years of age. It was anticipated that approximately 50 websites would be banned altogether. What subsequently happened was that thousands of websites disappeared from the internet with no court orders, injunctions, notices or justification. Even finding out which websites are on that list is a secret.

Over time, like many pieces of legislation that has been abused by the state, websites and online content that the government of the day does not like will have the perfect tool to simply press the ‘delete’ button, pretty much as they have already started doing.

On another, but related matter, just last week, The Independent had the headline: “Today’s vote will change the face of the internet forever, from an open platform to a place where anything can be removed without warning.” The articles first line reads; “The idea of instituting a regime of petty everyday censorship, that randomly and unfairly damages campaigns, artists and the denizens of the Internet, ought to fill you with rage.” This is how the state slowly takes control of what you read, see and hear.

In the meantime, Britain’s current Prime Minister has refused to rule out censoring the internet like China in future.

Dark Money Taking Power

Soon after the Second World War, some of America’s richest people began setting up a network of thinktanks to promote their interests. These purport to offer dispassionate opinions on public affairs. But they are more like corporate lobbyists, working on behalf of those who founded and fund them. These are the organisations now running much of the Trump administration. These same groups are now running much of Britain. Liam Fox and what was the Atlantic Bridge and the Adam Smith Institute are good examples.

They have control of the Conservative party and are largely responsible for years of work that steered Britain through the EU referendum that ended with Brexit. Tens of £millions have been spent, mostly undisclosed on making this dream to exploit Britain and its people a reality. In fact, almost everything in this article is about such organisations. Those hugely powerful individuals that own search engines and social media platforms along with the banking industry, the pharmaceutical and medical business, the fossil fuel and arms industries – they have reached a pinnacle of unprecedented corporate power.

Some of those fully censored stories pushed below the radar by these corporations include; how over 100,000 EU citizens die every year because of lobbying against workplace carcinogens, how corporate profits and taxes are hidden, the Tory-Trump plan to kill food safety with Brexit – to name but a few. And don’t forget the corporate media who are complicit. There are a handful of offshore billionaires that have the ability to decide what millions should read or see.

The Adam Smith Institute referred to earlier is a good example. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing extreme neoliberal capitalists. With a turnover of over £130 million and an operating profit of nearly £17 million, it has received millions of pounds in UK government funding. That is taxpayers money being used against taxpayers because the ASI does not believe in the likes of the NHS or civil society in general.

Talking of Dark Money – Brexit and the climate deniers

We recently reported about a transatlantic network of lobbyists pushing against action on climate change and (latterly) for Brexit? This group are all based out of one building around the corner from the Palace of Westminster.

What is much less known is that more recently, these groups have lobbied for a Hard Brexit, hoping the UK’s withdrawal from the EU will lead to a weakening of those environmental regulations that hinder future profits. These same groups are also behind the Tory-DUP pact, currently keeping Theresa May in her job while allowing hard-line Northern Irish social conservatives to dictate significant parts of the UK’s political agenda, themselves climate change deniers.

These are just some of Britain’s most censored stories. There are so many of them that we have had to categorise them, which says something about how democracy, free speech, civil liberty and human rights are performing in Britain right now.

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Featured image is from TruePublica.

Last year Richard Bruce, who has suffered severely for many years following exposure to pesticides in the course of his work, sent news of research into links between diabetes and exposure to organophosphate, the most frequently and largely applied insecticide in the world, undertaken by a team from Madurai Kamaraj University, published in Genome Biology. It is accessible to all readers and may be accessed here.

He now draws attention to the Hindu’s report of a food poisoning incident in Navi Mumbai which led to the death of three children and 40 people falling ill (200 according to the Hindustan Times).

Dr. Ajit Gawli, Raigad district civil surgeon, said

“The serum test reports of two patients indicated presence of organophosphate compound in the food. The cholinesterase enzyme level was found to be around 800, which ideally should be around 1,200. It does confirm the presence of organophosphate compound found in insecticides and pesticides. After the reports of the serum of the deceased come in, we can confirm the saturation of the compound and what exactly the chemical was.” The food samples have been sent to a forensic science laboratory at Kalina and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for further analysis.”

An American campaign

Richard earlier sent news of a press release issued from Portland, Oregon, by the Center for Biological Diversity, a national, non-profit conservation organization with more than 990,000 members and online activists dedicated to the protection of endangered species and wild places.

It reported that group of farmworkers, child-safety and environmental advocates sent a letter to the government’s Environmental Protection Agency urging it to ban seven organophosphate pesticides, currently under review, that are used on crops such as corn, cotton, watermelon and wheat. It was submitted in response to the EPA’s request for public comments on new releases of human-health and ecological risk assessments for organophosphate insecticides.

“Every spring season, children around the U.S. are facing low-dose exposure to this dangerous chemical,” says a Minnesota mother who was sickened, along with her infant son, by chlorpyrifos. “It is in the air they breathe, the water they drink, and the food they eat,” she adds. “By leaving this chemical on the market, we are gambling with the lives of children. It is stealing their futures from them and increasing the amount of health care dollars they will need for treatment.”

Chemical & Engineering News reported that no ban was imposed; there was ‘pushback’ from Dow Sciences and others in the chemical industry.

Leonardo Trasande, an internationally renowned authority on children’s environmental health, in a study published in 2017 writes:

“A regulatory ban was proposed, but actions to end the use of one such pesticide, chlorpyrifos, in agriculture were recently stopped by the Environmental Protection Agency under false scientific pretenses”.

“Strong evidence now supports the notion that organophosphate pesticides damage the fetal brain and produce cognitive and behavioral dysfunction through multiple mechanisms, including thyroid disruption.”

Israel is in the process of enacting laws that would allow it to formally annex parts of the occupied West Bank, in serious violation of international law, a United Nations expert said on Friday, according to WAFA.

UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory, Michael Lynk, said, after a fact-finding tour of the region, that he was gravely alarmed about the deterioration of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), saying that reports received during his visit to the region, this week, painted the most dispiriting picture yet, of the situation on the ground.

“After years of creeping Israeli de facto annexation of the large swathes of the West Bank through settlement expansion, the creation of closed military zones and other measures, Israel appears to be getting closer to enacting legislation that will formally annex parts of the West Bank,” he said. “This would amount to a profound violation of international law, and the impact of ongoing settlement expansion on human rights must not be ignored.”

Lynk travelled to Amman, Jordan, this week, where he met with Palestinian civil society, government officials and UN representatives, after Israel prevented him from entering the OPT. His mission was to collect information for his next report, to be presented to the 73rd session of the General Assembly, in October of 2018.

“This is my third mission to the region since I assumed the mandate in May 2016, and the reports I received this week have painted the bleakest picture yet of the human rights situation in the OPT,” he said.

“Palestinians in the West Bank face daily indignities, as they pass through Israeli checkpoints, face night raids of their homes, and are unable to build or expand their homes or work to develop their communities due to the complex system which makes building permits nearly impossible to obtain from the Israeli authorities,” the Special Rapporteur said.

Lynk cited the situation of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin community near Jerusalem, which is at imminent risk of forcible transfer after the Israeli High Court of Justice upheld a demolition order for all structures in the community.

“Its residents are living in a coercive environment that may lead to forcible transfer, not knowing where they may find themselves in the coming months and not knowing if they will be living in a place where they are able to continue their traditional way of life,” he said.

Lynk further stated that the situation in Gaza has continued to worsen, highlighting that the electricity crisis, for example, which became acute last June, had not been alleviated.

“Residents are deprived of their most basic rights, including the rights to health, to education, and most recently, in attempting to exercise their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly, they were deprived of the right to life,” Lynk said, in reference to the recent demonstrations along the fence during which Israeli security forces killed more than 140 and wounded thousands of Palestinian protesters.

He also expressed concern about the impact of significant cuts to the funding of UNRWA, the UN agency that helps Palestinian refugees, noting its crucial role in providing health, protection and education services as well as employment in Gaza and the West Bank.

The Special Rapporteur heard eloquent testimony of the challenges facing the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, and expressed concern at information he received, recently, stating that the Israeli government and the West Jerusalem municipality have been advancing plans which risk denial of the residency rights of 120,000 Palestinians in the municipality, as part of a larger policy to maintain an Israeli Jewish majority in Jerusalem.

The Rapporteur was particularly concerned at information he received, this week, which indicated that many human rights organizations and human rights defenders – Israeli, Palestinian, and international – are facing increasing attacks aimed not only at their delegitimization, but at their ability to operate.

He is particularly concerned that these attacks are gaining traction with members of the international community.

“The incredible, and extremely difficult work that these human rights organizations do is essential to preventing a further deterioration of the human rights situation in the OPT, and any effort to undermine this work only serves to weaken human rights in the OPT, and in the broader world.”

*

Featured image is from IMEMC.

Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the leader of the Movement for National Reconstruction (Morena), was elected President of Mexico yesterday by a massive margin amid high voter turnout. His two main opponents, José Antonio Meade (Institutional Revolutionary Party, PRI) and Ricardo Anaya (Together for México coalition, which includes the National Action Party, PAN, and the Party of the Democratic Revolution, PRD) conceded early yesterday evening.

Though full results will not be known until later on Monday, exit polls give López Obrador between 43 and 49 percent of the vote, ahead of Meade, who obtained between 22 and 26 percent of the vote, and Anaya with 23 to 27 percent of the vote. Other exit polls have López Obrador winning over 50 percent.

Other Morena candidates also appear likely to win, including Claudia Sheinbaum, the Morena candidate for Mayor of Mexico City, ending 21 years of PRD control. Morena also reportedly will win the governorships of the states of Morelia, Tabasco and Chiapas.

A record number of voters cast their ballots. Voters waited for hours at their polling stations and by noon over fifty percent of those eligible had already voted. By the end of the electoral process, seventy percent had voted, a historic turnout.

The results show a collapse in support for the main parties of the Mexican bourgeoisie in the face of widespread hostility to inequality, state-sanctioned violence, the militarization of society, and the xenophobic policies of US President Donald Trump. The PRI and PRD were devastated by the results.

Exit polls from the legislative elections show the Morena-led alliance, which also includes the Christian right-wing Social Encounter Party (PES) and the Workers Party (PT), with above 50 percent of federal deputies. According to unofficial exit poll results, the PT won between 64 and 75 seats—nearly double the PRI’s expected total (between 37 and 47 seats). The PAN won between 63 and 76 seats, and the PRD between 33 and 43 seats. Morena is expected to win between 127 and 142 seats. If these results hold, the PRI will have lost three-quarters of its current seats in the chamber of deputies.

The projected results of the PT—a party with Maoist origins—would be particularly notable if they hold. The PT currently has zero seats in the chamber of deputies (though it has 19 of 128 seats in the Senate). In a statement yesterday, López Obrador said he cast his presidential vote symbolically for Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, former candidate for the Pabloite Workers Revolutionary Party (PRT) and now a PT member.

The candidates of the parties opposing Morena and López Obrador were conciliatory in their concession speeches, indicating an intention on the part of the ruling class to accept López Obrador’s election. The bourgeois press has lauded the election as “a victory for democracy.”

Nevertheless, the vote was marred with several hundred incidents of violence and disappearances.

As the polls were about to open, Flora Reséndiz González, 49, an activist of the PT, was assassinated at her home in Contepec, Michoacán. Reséndiz died in the hospital at 6:30 a.m. Her death added to the 138 candidates killed during the election campaign in Mexico. PT leader Alberto Anaya Gutiérrez condemned the killing and called for an investigation: “We are profoundly saddened by the death of our beloved comrade,” declared Anaya, adding that this and other killings are symptoms of “social decomposition.”

The killing of candidates has been a feature of this campaign. It is blamed on local drug gangs that get to decide with impunity which candidate is not acceptable to them. On the day of the election there were also reports from the states of Chiapas, Veracruz and Mexico of the destruction of polling stations, armed gunmen in the open forcing voters to vote and instructing them on how to vote. In Veracruz, in an incident seemingly unrelated to the voting, two men waiting in line were kidnapped and whisked away.

Polls opened at 7:00 a.m. National Election Electoral Institute head Lorenzo Córdova indicated that there were 156,807 polling stations around the country and that only 4 would not open. Some 89 million voters were eligible to vote, half of which are under forty years old. Thirteen million are first-time voters.

All in all, more than 3,400 posts are being determined by the vote. In addition to electing a president, Mexican voters also voted to fill 500 seats in the lower house of Congress, and 128 senatorial seats.

The massive turnout reflects the anger and frustration of the Mexican working class. In addition to outrage over two hundred thousand killings and tens of thousands of disappearances over the last twelve years, there is mass anger over the interrelated issues of increasing poverty, inequality, and widespread government corruption and impunity for criminal acts.

A business elite, allied with the ruling PRI, in league with the PAN and PRD, is widely hated. The collapse of the PRI is particularly significant, as the party has exercised its domination over the country’s political system for nearly a century, with the exception of two PAN presidencies from 2000-2012.

Popular anger has fed support for López Obrador, particularly among young voters, who have repeatedly shown that they have no confidence in the traditional parties. An estimate based on social media gives López Obrador 51 percent of the youth vote, followed by 24 percent for the PRI’s Meade and 14 percent for Anaya of the PAN coalition.

Protest rallies took place at special voting stations, set up for those voters that could not get to their assigned locations. Many of them ran out of ballots, as voters demanded their democratic right to vote.

López Obrador, long depicted as a “leftist,” who fell short of winning the presidency in his 2006 and 2012 elections, ran a pro-corporate campaign. Its main purpose was to convince the Mexican and American ruling classes that his election would not impinge upon private profit or capitalist property relations.

The only comprehensive and scientific study which has ever been done of whether the U.S. is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, was published in 2014. It studied the period during 1981 through 2002, and it found that, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”

And this is quoting now directly from the study itself:

“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

A study published two years later (in 2016) reviewed the entire relevant scientific literature and found that “responsiveness [to the American public’s preferences] seems to have declined during the late twentieth century” and might be getting worse yet than that: “The picture appears to be even more ominous — that is, opinion and policy are negatively related — on highly salient issues that attract media attention.” (Consequently: the more media-attention, the less that the Government’s policy will reflect the public’s preferences on the given issue. This is indirect proof that the media which the public are being exposed to are controlled by the aristocracy and thus focus on and propagandize for, whatever the aristocracy most want to fool the public about.) This scientific report stated, in its “Conclusions,” that, “the trends seem to be moving in the wrong direction from the standpoint of democratic theory — that is, people seem less and less likely to get what they say they want from government.” This, if it is true, proves the aristocracy’s success, against the public. It proves that the aristocracy are still in control and therefore are increasingly getting their way, against the public — that America is increasingly an aristocracy (sometimes called instead an “oligarchy” but meaning the same thing: the billionaires rule) and not a democracy.

The basic problem in America, therefore, isn’t Democratic versus Republican; it is instead democracy versus dictatorship. And this problem exists within each Party: each Party is controlled by its billionaires, not by its voting-public.

The best videos that I’ve seen explaining how, in local politics, the aristocracy controls America, are the following two:

First which is actually a series of three video reports on corruption in Georgia.

Second where Nomi Konst explains N.Y. politics via big-money control — the aristocracy’s control via corruption — against and over the public.

Here is a libertarian arguing for this corrupt control by the aristocracy to continue and to increase:

The libertarian presentation reflects refusal to see, or understand, systemic issues — the very issues that the operation by the aristocracy are being hired and paid to master. Consequently: libertarianism is the aristocracy’s ideology to fool the public into submission. In effect: it’s the aristocratic religion, the aristocratic faith, and so it is funded massively by the aristocracy.

The best video explaining the study which proved that corruption rules America, is:

To call a country like that a ‘democracy’ is to insult democracy. Any honest libertarian despises democracy. (Dishonest ones try to deceive the public to think that libertarianism supports democracy. But that’s merely adding deception to deception, as if the dishonest ideology isn’t already bad enough.)

Incidentally: If billionaires (and perhaps a few of the centi-millionaires) have almost entirely been controlling the U.S. Government, then they should be almost entirely funding (by their taxes and fees) the U.S. Government. If the rest of the public haven’t had any significant control of the Government, then the rest of the public shouldn’t pay any signficiant percentage of the Government’s costs. And any of the federal debt that has been engendered and accumulated, should likewise be charged proportionately — and not charged, to any sigificant extent, against the public. This would certainly be the democratic solution to the federal debt.

This article is being submitted to all U.S. news-media, and may be freely published by any of them — and will presumably be published by any of them that want the U.S. public to have access to the information and documentation that are provided in it. Of course, any that wish to hide this information and documentation will not publish it, even though they may freely do so — they would rather pay their hirees and selected contributors, instead. Freedom of the press (at least in the United States) means freedom of the owners of the press — it has nothing to do with democracy, which concerns freedom of the public, against any type of dictatorship (including aristocracy or “oligarchy”).

*

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of  CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity. He is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Featured image is from Vox.

As NATO’s role in the new Cold War between Russia and the West is being discussed, U.S. President Donald Trump is further drawing away from his European allies. Trump defends that NATO’s entire financial burden is on the U.S.’s shoulders. Trump had shocked his allies when he said, “NATO is worse than NAFTA,” at the G-7 Summit in Canada. According to him, the European Union is also worse than China, for Trump’s trade wars severely harmed relations with EU countries. Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton went to Moscow and met with Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the meeting, a decision was made immediately after the NATO Summit between Trump and Putin to hold a summit in Helsinki. Trump said that Russia needs to be readmitted into the G-7. Collectively taking all these developments into consideration, it seems like the NATO summit is going to be extremely tense.

Meanwhile, U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis is trying to fix Trump’s damaged trust relations with his European allies. U.S. military officials, on the other hand, are calming allies saying,

“Take our actions into consideration, not Trump’s tweets.”

One other development that concerns Europeans was Mike Pompeo, who is known for his hawk views, and John Bolton taking up the positions vacated after Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and National Security Adviser Gen. McMaster resigned. Thus, the only actors left in Trump’s inner cabinet to calm the Europeans are Mattis and White House Secretary-General Gen. John Kelly.

However, according to information leaked to U.S. media, Mattis and Kelly are not as effective as they used to be in Trump’s inner cabinet. As a matter of fact, behind the scenes it is being said that Kelly is soon going to resign and, Hope Hicks, who previously resigned while communications director, is going to fill his position. Hicks is known as a figure loyal to Trump’s political agenda. It is also said that the communications director position is going to be filled by Trump’s political ally, Fox News’s former Chair Bill Shine who had quit in May 2017 due to harassment scandals. U.S. Vice President Mike Pence’s assistant Nick Ayers and White House Administration and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney are also among the names likely to replace Kelly. It is said that Kelly will be leaving this week or after the NATO Summit.

Mattis is going to become further isolated with Kelly gone. When Pompeo was CIA chief, he used to spend more time with Trump than Mattis. After becoming secretary of state, this shift further increased. Pompeo was also the architect of the summit between Korean leader Kim Jong-un and Trump in Singapore. Looking at hearsays, Mattis found out about Trump’s decision to postpone joint military drills with South Korea afterward. Trump also thinks that U.S. soldiers need to withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria. But Mattis is not on the same page as Trump regarding this matter. Despite having backtracked with respect to both matters, Trump is yet to give up. The question is: “How much longer can Mattis restrain Trump?” Trump also wants to establish a “Space Military Force” that is said will bring hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of trade volume. This fantastical project is going to bring an additional burden to U.S. taxpayers as well. Neither Mattis nor the Air Forces are pleased with this idea. When Trump gave the order to launch preparations to establish the “Space Force,” he did not speak to Mattis. This order was a surprise for both the Pentagon and Mattis.

It is said that Mattis, who could not prevent Bolton and Pompeo’s appointment to critical positions, may remain in his post as long as he refrains from criticizing Trump in public. Trump and Mattis are also known not to see eye-to-eye on the withdrawal from the Iran Nuclear Deal and moving the U.S.’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. It is stated that Trump is tired of Mattis and Kelly’s attempts to restrain him. In conclusion, the Trump-Mattis relations seems to be stuck in a tight spot. It is only a matter of time before this tension erupts.

Mexicans are attending polls this Sunday to elect the new president and both chambers of the legislative branch at a federal level. As expected, fraud accusations have been rolling in for days and reports on vote buying, stealing ballots and violence are increasing.

The attorney’s office, which specializes in electoral crimes, registered 1,106 complaints since Thursday. According to Hector Diaz Santana, head of the office, this elections’ staple has been violence, but that’s something the public security authorities have to deal with.

Regarding the common electoral crimes, Diaz Santana said only about 324 complaints had been received by 2:00 p.m. local time and at least 17 people were arrested. Among the most common crimes are vote buying and the stealing of IDs used to vote.

A group of 60 social organizations known together as Citizen Action Against Poverty (ACFP), reported the price for vote buying skyrocketed from US$25 in May up to US$500 ($10,000 Mexican pesos) a couple of days before Sunday’s election.

Voters are also offered provision boxes, household appliances, electronic wallets, construction materials, or are receiving threats about losing their jobs or social benefits if such candidate loses.

Vecinos y representantes del partido Vía Radical denunciaron la entrega de despensas y artículos de construcción en Valle de Bravo, Edomex, para favorecer, presuntamente, al alcalde priista Mauricio Osorio Domínguez, que busca reelegirse https://t.co/jBVgwZVQye pic.twitter.com/rYUkYj8qtk

— AnimalPolitico.com (@Pajaropolitico) June 30, 2018

“Neighbors and representatives of the Radical Path party denounced handing of provision boxes and construction materials in Valle de Bravo, State of Mexico, to supposedly benefit the PRI mayor Mauricio Osorio Dominguez, who’s aiming for reelection.”

Similar cases have been reported in several municipalities, especially coming from the ruling Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) and its satellite organizations. However, reports have been filed against every electoral coalition with no exceptions, according to the ACFP.

Unfortunately, this is a normal electoral day in Mexico. Every time there are multiple reports of vote buying, stealing ballot boxes, or threatening people to vote for a certain candidate. Things are calmer now. Decades ago, it was normal to have armed groups attacking polling stations or people in the streets. Now, these reports are few and more people trust the electoral system, even though many remain critical and vigilant.

Another common problem is that of the special polling stations located in several cities across Mexico. Citizens must vote in their place of residence registered on their national IDs, but if they move from city or state and don’t inform the electoral authorities, they still have the chance to vote in one of these special stations. However, the ballots sent to this stations have proven to be insufficient.

Reports across the country say voters in several special stations are growing desperate due to the lack of ballots, some waiting for hours in the line only to find out they will not be able to vote.

#Elecciones2018 | En la casilla especial ubicada en el Parque 5 de Mayo de Tuxtla Gutiérrez, ciudadanía exclama "queremos votar" debido a que las 750 boletas presentadas ya fueron utilizadas pic.twitter.com/EqQXTGQ5Fg

— Andrés Domínguez (Compa Telex) (@andresreportero) July 1, 2018

“#Elections2018 In the special polling station in the 5 de Mayo Park in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the people is shouting “we want to vote” because the available 750 ballots were already used.”

The electoral authorities announced there would be a limited number of 750 ballots in every special polling station. This was agreed on by every party with no complaint, and the measure was announced in advance. But many voters claim the number of special ballots is way below the needed, especially in Mexico City and surrounding areas where there’s a high rate of internal migration.

Votantes en #Ecatepec exigen mas boletas porque dicen que ya no hay boletas especiales para la presidencia. Gritan corruptos y queremos boletas. Llevan 4 horas esperando. Hay confusión total #EleccionesPresidenciales2018 #EleccionesMexico pic.twitter.com/pa885kW4N5

— Andalalucha (@Andalalucha) July 1, 2018

“Voters in #Ecatepec are demanding more ballots because the special ballots for the presidency ran out. They’re shouting “corruption” and “we want ballots.” They’ve been waiting for 4 hours. There’s total confusion. #PresidentialElections2018 #MexicoElections”

As an alternative method, people in special polling stations are designing their own ballots, but the electoral authorities already said this won’t be valid.

In Sevina, state of Michoacan, the local electoral authorities decided to take away the special station to avoid further violence, as neighboring communities were boycotting the process.

The authorities refrained from installing polling stations in several communities in the state of Jalisco, mostly wixarika Indigenous communities, due to their boycott of the electoral process.

Also, a video recorded by a woman in Iztapalapa, in Mexico City, shows that the indelible ink used to mark citizens’ thumbs after voting can be perfectly cleaned with a little bit of hands soap.

Violence is another of Mexico’s greatest problems during the electoral days. In the Santiago el Pinar municipality, state of Chiapas, an armed group opened fire against polling station officials, injuring 15. Authorities report things under control, but the elections were temporarily suspended in the municipality.

In Coatzintla, state of Veracruz, the local electoral authorities decided to temporarily close down the stations due to the presence of armed groups moving around it.

On August 17, 1988, the then President of Pakistan General Zia Ul Haq died in an air crash. It was termed as an accident then. But was it really an accident? A very important person of the time Johan Gunther Dean, the then Ambassador of the US to India did not agree. Is he suggesting that Zia was killed? Who killed Zia then?

With this suspense the book unfolds the sequence of events and analyses the opinion of various key figures about the Indo-Pak relations, the role of Russia, US and goes on to conclude that it was just not an accident. A larger conspiracy was behind it, which largely remained at bay from common knowledge.

“Dean blamed Israel for the crash…what was important for him was the events of 1988 that could have been avoided if a better plan was followed regarding Afghanistan’s future and Pakistan’s nuclear ambitions…”

The Johan Gunther Dean’s papers stored in the Jimmy Carter Presidential library forms the basis of the book.

The fateful day

At 4.30 pm on August 17, 1988, the President and a powerful elite including some top generals and US Ambassador to Pakistan boarded the “Pak One”aircraft took off from Bahawalpur airport. The group had gone there to a firing range to witness the field tests of a US made tank which the Army was evaluating to induct to the defenseforce. Just after take off, the VVIP aircraft malfunctioned and hit the ground after staying in the air for a few minutes. There was near-total destruction of the bodies of all onboard. The chief opponent of Zia, Benazir Bhutto called it a “Wrath of God”!

Ronen Sen, the powerful joint secretary in the PMO handling sensitive intelligence and communications, first gave the information about the crash to Dean before the World could know it. The news of the plane crash, felt Dean, could immediately trigger another India-Pakistan war as the relationship between countries has been tensed for some time. And a war of vengeance could quickly turn nuclear. Tension was also high in the PMO in India lest situation is exploited by the Pakistan Army to declare a war against India. Though eventually nothing of sort happened.

“Dean felt that US was responsible for Zia’s death. The US had been working for three years to avoid such a situation in South Asia…aborted the mission midway…”…

Afghanistan as flashpoint of the cold war

To deal with the internal conflicts in Afghanistan, which started in the 70s, the Soviet Union intervened militarily [at the request of the Kabul government] and the troops reached Afghanistan in 1979. After the intervention of Moscow, Pakistan also got involved in the Afghanistan crisis. Pakistan [ in liaison with Washington] sponsored a jihad war against the Kabul government supported by the Soviet Union. Eventually America’s secret war in Afghanistan began and “by 1980, Afghanistan became a flashpoint in the cold war”.

India had to play role in the crisis as the involvement of Pakistan meant flow of weapons from CIA.

Eventually, to resolve the crisis Ronald Regan and Rajiv Gandhi began their secret dialogue. America expected India to play a role in convincing the Soviet leadership for troop withdrawal.

Dean was a personal friend of Rajiv Gandhi. He was instrumental in promoting Indo-US technological cooperation. During his stint in New Delhi, the US, India and Pakistan attempted to rearrange the affairs in South Asia. The US, India and Pakistan worked on a peace plan for Afghanistan which did not take off due to differences. And on the other side, India was unhappy with the arming of Pakistan with American weapons. The letters of exchange between Rajiv Gandhi and the then US President Ronald Reagan showed that it had hit a roadblock. Gandhi felt that India is not getting any benefits on Pakistan and Afghanistan from US.

UN Secretary General’s special envoy Diego Cordovez started talks with all groups concerned and developed a peace formula. Cordovez’ formula of creating a national government in Afghanistan failed as Zia rebelled with American support…

“Everyone seems to betray everyone else. An air crash and explosions were probably not unthinkable in such circumstance.” Expounds the book.

…

The book contains six chapters. One chapter is fully dedicated to the description of the larger situation, which would have led to the assassination of Zia.

A full chapter deals with Dean and his role in the Indo-US relationship and the south Asian affairs. Other chapters exclusively dwell on Rajiv’s western affinities, role of Moscow, and finally the happenings in the month when Zia was killed.

The author of the book, Kallol Bhattacherjee is a senior assistant editor of “The Hindu”. The book is an interesting reading like a novel unraveling a deep-seated conspiracy. It’s relevant for the current day’s Indo-Pak relationshipfor it provides a lot of background information.

*

The author is a freelance journalist based in New Delhi. He can be reached through e mail: [email protected]

Over the past weeks, there has been a series of major protests against the mistreatment of immigrants. Hundreds were arrested after blocking DC streets and sitting-in at a Senate office building.  Two weeks ago, there were #FamiliesTogether rallies across the United States that forced Trump to end child separation and return to the Obama-era policy of incarcerating immigrant families. People are taking action for immigrant rights and protesting the separation of children from their families as well as the indefinite detention of immigrant families.

Protesters are holding policymakers personally accountable. This includes protests against Homeland Security director, Kirstjen Nielsen, outside her home playing tapes of immigrant children as well as in a restaurant. The White House staffer, Stephen Miller, who is behind many of Trump’s most racist policies was also protested at a Mexican restaurant and outside his condo in Washington, DC. Popular Resistance believes in holding individuals accountable with carefully planned protests as an essential activist tool.

The occupation of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices by mothers and children, holding that agency specifically responsible for abusive law enforcement practices, and the burgeoning #OcccupyICE protests, beginning in Portland, are putting pressure on ICE. Microsoft workers called for Microsoft to cancel contracts with ICE. And, people marched on tent city prison camps where children and immigrant families are being held. These build on efforts in court to hold ICE accountable.

Many cities have chosen to be sanctuary cities by refusing to use their law enforcement to do the work of ICE. Cities that welcome immigrants and have non-discrimination policies have fewer deportations and less insecurity. This is also having the result of making those cities safer in general because immigrants have less fear of reporting crimes.

While sanctuary and humane treatment of immigrants bring security, raids on immigrants leave misery and broken communities. Here is one account of the terror and hardship caused by an ICE raid on a business last month in Ohio. And the issue of racist and violent policing is still a problem because some cities make a distinction between protecting “law-abiding” immigrants versus those who break a law, as determined by racist police.

There are divisions over immigration within the enforcement community. In March, an ICE spokesperson resigned rather than continue to put out false information about immigrants. This week, top leaders of Homeland Security enforcement wrote a letter that was made public claiming ICE is making their job of protecting the country from real threats more difficult. Calls for abolition of ICE are now being made by activists and the list of Democrats calling for the abolition of ICE is rapidly growing.

Thousands march across the Brooklyn Bridge on June 30, 2018 by Carolyn Cole for the Los Angeles Times.

Are The Protests Pro-Immigrant or Anti-Trump?

The protests against immigration policies in the Trump-era are different than protests against abusive immigration policies in the Obama-era. There were mass protests against Obama’s immigration policies, which led to deportations at levels that Trump has still not approached, but in the Obama-era, the protests were organized and led primarily by immigrants. In the Trump era, there are protests by immigrants, especially around protecting the Dreamers, but they are also being organized by non-immigrant protesters with a focus against President Trump. These protests began almost immediately with the election of Trump and focused on his policies of stopping immigration at airports, Trump’s Muslim ban.

The protests remind us of the immense anti-war protests during the George W. Bush presidency, which turned out in hindsight to be more anti-Bush than anti-war as they dissipated when President Obama was elected. The Bush wars continued under Obama, as did coups and other efforts to reverse the pink tide in Latin America. President Obama expanded militarism using robotic-drone warfare, new military troops and bases throughout Africa and mass destruction and slaughter in Libya, yet there were no mass anti-war protests against him as were seen in the Bush era.

Democratic Party-aligned groups used the anti-war sentiment to stir up their voter base in opposition to President Bush and the Republicans, but were noticeably silent during the Obama administration in order to protect the Democrats. Is immigration being used similarly as an issue to elect Democrats? It appears to be the case.

Democratic Party-aligned groups like MoveOn and the Women’s March have led some of the organizing efforts. MoveOn reported on the mass protests yesterday, writing in an email:

In Washington, D.C., today, 35,000 demonstrators braved 96-degree temperatures to march on the White House and send a crystal-clear message: Families Belong Together. There were 30,000 participants in New York, 60,000 in Chicago, more than 70,000 in Los Angeles, and huge turnouts from Orlando, Florida, to Austin, Texas, to Boise, Idaho. We were everywhere.

Here’s the eye-popping map of all the protests, one dot per demonstration, spanning all 50 states, as hundreds of thousands of us gathered in cities from Antler, North Dakota, to Lake Worth, Florida:

More than 750 cities. One message. This is what it looks like when a nation speaks with one voice.

While abuse of immigrant families and their children are important reasons to protest, it is critical to be non-partisan or the pro-immigrant movement risks going the way of the anti-war movement, which is still struggling to rebuild. If the protests are framed as anti-Trump, then voters may conclude that electing Democrats will solve the problem. Both major political parties have failed immigrants in the US. We need to build national consensus for pro-immigrant policies that hold whomever is in power accountable.

Facing the Roots of Abusive Immigration Policies: Racism and Profit

The connection between immigration policies and racism and profit-seeking is being exposed. Stirring up racist hatred against immigrants benefits the ruling elites by keeping people focused on fighting each other while the rich get richer. The federal government has spent $4 billion since the start of 2017 fiscal year on contracts and grants for private prisons, security firms, the tech industry and child “protective” agencies and non-profits, as well as the budgets of federal agencies including Homeland Security, ICE and the US military, which is building prison camps for 120,000 immigrants. Abusing immigrants means high profits for some and plays on the divide-and-rule racism politicians use to control people.

The broader context is that today’s immigration policies of separating and mistreating families have deep roots. The colonizing founding of the United States treated imported African slaves in brutal ways, including family separation. There has been a similar mistreatment of Indigenous peoples, separating families and putting children into brainwashing, abusive boarding schools. And, racist-based mass incarceration results in fathers and mothers being removed from their families and communities, particularly for black and brown people.

The duopoly parties ignore the root causes of mass migration, which are due in large part to US economic policies including the injustice of corporate trade agreements on behalf of transnational corporations that abuse people and steal resources throughout the world, as well as US empire policies of militarism, regime change, and imperialism. We wrote two weeks ago about how to protect the human rights of immigrants, the US must end the policies that drive migration.

Immigrants Are Welcome Here. From Overpass Light Brigade twitter.

The United States Needs A Pro-Immigration Policy To Correct Abusive Treatment of Immigrants

The beginnings of a pro-immigration policy in the United States is developing. Indeed, that word “pro-immigration” needs to become part of the political dialogue. We heard the call for a pro-immigrant policy at the Maryland State Green Party meeting this weekend. It was a phrase we had not heard in the political dialogue, but we are pleased to see it brought out into the open.

A critical area of information that has been suppressed is the positive impact of immigration on the economy. Research shows that the presence of immigrant workers has a small positive impact for US-born workers. Immigrants tend to work in different sectors or hold different jobs within the same sector than US-born workers. They also make significant contributions through taxes. Mapping shows how immigration has helped build the economy across the United States.

The US needs to recognize the positive impacts of policies that protect the human rights of people to move across borders. Research published this week shows that free movement of people could expand the global economy by $78 trillion.

It is time to end the failed policies of abusive immigration policy, militarized law enforcement and a militarized border and build a positive approach to immigration that protects human rights and builds the economy from the foundation up by using the best of each person who comes to the United States or who already live here.

If the $4 billion spent on abusive immigration enforcement in the last year had been used to build the foundation of the US economy with a positive approach to immigration, we would all be better off. A positive immigration policy will increase security and build the economy for all people.

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Kevin Zeese and Margaret Flowers are co-directors of Popular Resistance.

A recent opinion piece by Michael Harris in iPolitics titled “Harper’s willingness to appease Trump should scare all Canadians” comments on the fact that former Conservative PM Stephen Harper “is back representing Canada on the world stage.” In fact he is making a full-fledged public appearance with a new book coming out soon and a big splash in the news speculating about his visit to Washington on July 2. [1] No one, and that includes the Canadian government, seems to know the reason for the visit, which is private. Therefore he is not really representing Canada. Not that he has ever really represented the popular will of most Canadians. Disdain is the most descriptive characteristic that can be associated with his behaviour.

It was simply a matter of time before Harper would surface again. And surely, as Harris suggests, Canadians should be concerned since he is still capable of causing some political damage. But should Canadians be less concerned if Harper was not in the news? Harper will continue being Harper both in and out of public life. No surprises there. It’s old news. But the fact that we have a Trudeau turned into a Harper, that should scare the hell out of most Canadians.

The article uses Harper’s reported view that “the world would just have to get used to the new world order Donald Trump is trying to impose on everyone” as an excuse to really justify an attack on Trump. Harris uses several paragraphs to highlight all the bad policies that the Trump administration is implementing. We certainly do not disagree with Harris, especially when he refers to “Trump’s fascist impulses.”

However, Trump will continue being Trump. That again is old news. US-Americans should be concerned about that and should act on it if they care. In Canada, as in the rest of the world willing to resist the US imperial dominance, we should be more scared at the blind spot that the Liberal government is attempting to create vis-à-vis “Trump’s fascist impulses.”

Harris asks the valid question “Will anything survive Trump’s presidency?” But that is a passive question. I would like to ask a pro-active one: What is Canada doing to offset the dismal implication of the question?

My short answer is, not much. On the contrary, the Liberal government continues to have a foreign policy fully aligned with that of the US, despite some recent political bickering on trade. There is nothing Harper can do to make it worse.

Canadian foreign policy has experienced a striking shift toward the political right in the last thirty years with both Liberal and Conservative governments at the helm. Following the world trend on globalization, Canada has moved from a perceived peace promoting position on the world stage to an outright recognized wars and uprisings supporter, and weapons exporter that rivals very closely with the Trump administration. The most dramatic examples of policy changes in international relations have occurred during Chrystia Freeland tenure as Minister of International Trade of Canada (2015–2017) and as Canada’s Minister of Foreign Relations since January 2017. 

The Hill Times recently reported an increase of 44% in Canadian military exports in 2017 with almost half of the exports going to Saudi Arabia. [2] The aggressive military involvement of Saudi Arabia in the Middle East, not to mention the human rights abuses domestically, does not bode well for the often-upheld Canadian values. This is a typical example of trade priorities over more humane considerations.

Closer to home, Chrystia Freeland has tacitly and actively supported regime changes in Latin America. In the case of Venezuela she has taken on the infamous leadership role – together with the US and EU governments – to subvert the constitutional order there. She has done so by promoting and supporting a violent opposition and calling the military to a rebellion, by heading the so-called Lima Group – a splinter group of a dozen nations outside the more formal Organization of American States – pushing the Nicolas Maduro government to a crisis, and by sanctioning Venezuelan high-ranking officials. This extremely aggressive interference can only be explained as a defense of Canada’s corporate mining interests in Venezuela and other Latin American countries.

There are more examples that Chrystia Freeland is imposing a personal ideology on Canada’s foreign policy. “Canada supports the most extreme form of sectarianism” in Syria. [3] She chooses to ignore the neo-Nazi surge in Ukraine and even more “Ms Freeland appears to be less the foreign minister of Canada and more the foreign minister of Ukraine.” [4] She has also manifested an old Cold War attitude towards Russia that seems to be more subjectively than politically motivated.

Stephen Harper is likely quite proud of the current foreign minister and Canada’s foreign policy. Michael Harris warns Canadians about citizen Harper but he does not warn Canadians about the Trudeau government as represented internationally by Freeland.  Considering Freeland’s recent speech in Washington, Harris should consider a follow up article titled “Freeland’s willingness to appease Trump should scare all Canadians.” [5][6]

Canada should detach itself from the grip of an old unipolar US-centered world and accept a shared multipolar world. It should stop imposing its own ideological authoritarianism blaming the victims when they exercise their sovereign rights. We need to gain the trust of other nations by sincerely seeking peace and mediating for peace, especially in the Americas. We would benefit from welcoming the genuine trade connectivity expansion coming from China. We should support the war-deterrent balancing role that Russia is exerting in the Middle East. 

By moving forward with these strategies Ms Freeland would help gain respect for Canada (and herself) from Canadians and the rest of the world, and contribute to world peace.

*

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

Notes

[1] https://ipolitics.ca/2018/06/28/harpers-willingness-to-appease-trump-should-scare-all-canadians/ 

[2] https://www.hilltimes.com/2018/06/27/arms-export-top-1-billion-saudi-sales-spike/149240 

[3] https://www.globalresearch.ca/global-affairs-canada-statement-represents-a-complete-disconnect-from-realities-on-the-ground-in-syria-tacit-endorsement-of-al-qaeda/5645944 

[4] https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-ukraine-issue-and-canadas-foreign-minister-chrystia-freeland/5637600

[5] https://www.globalresearch.ca/chrystia-freeland-fails-to-see-that-it-is-a-multipolar-world-on-the-march-not-authoritarianism/5644436 

[6] http://rabble.ca/columnists/2018/06/canadas-diplomat-year-fails-torture-test 

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Featured image: Ambassador Richard Grenell with German President Frank Walter Steinmeier. Image credit: usbotschaftberlin/ flickr

Ambassadors have existed since the time of the ancient Greeks. They were from the beginning granted a special immunity which enabled them to talk to enemy spokesmen to attempt to resolve issues without resort to arms. In the modern context, Ambassadors are sent to reside in foreign capitals to provide some measure of protection for traveling citizens and also to defend other perceived national interests. Ambassadors are not soldiers, nor are they necessarily the parties of government that ultimately make decisions on what to do when dealing with a foreign nation. They are there to provide a mechanism for exchanging views to create a dialogue while at the same time working with foreign governments to avoid conflict, whether over trade or politics.

There has been a great deal of discussion in the European press about the new American Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell. Grenell, a protégé of National Security Adviser John Bolton who doesn’t speak German, would seem to have enough on his plate defending the unpopular Trump Administration decisions on climate change, the Iran nuclear deal and on tariffs directed against European Union exports, but he has apparently gone out of his way to make the bilateral relationship with a key ally even worse. After the White House withdrew from the Iran agreement, Grenell tweeted that German businesses should “wind down operations immediately” in Iran. The ineptly worded advice was inevitably taken by the Germans as a threat. He has also celebrated anti-immigration sentiment in Europe, a slap at German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and breached protocol by meeting with Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on a state visit.

Nils Schmid, a German Social Democratic Party foreign policy spokesman, goes so far as to say that

“He does not understand what the role of an ambassador should be. An ambassador is a bridge-builder who explains how American politics works, how the American government works, and at the same time explains to America how Germany sees things.” Grenell has, however, “defined his role for himself, and it is not the traditional role of an ambassador. … He will work as a propagandist [for Donald Trump]”

To be sure, Grenell is not unique. There is a long history of incompetent or unwelcome U.S. Ambassadors, particularly in the prestige posts like Paris or London, which have long since been awarded to political cronys and campaign donors. One recalls passionate Irish nationalist Joe Kennedy being sent to London by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938. Kennedy took every opportunity to offend his British hosts, particularly over their relationship with Germany. He opposed financial and military aid to London after war broke out and was greatly disliked. FDR finally had to recall him in 1940.

More recently, some U.S. Administrations have sought to use Ambassadors to interfere openly in local politics, which goes well beyond acceptable exchanges of points of view that are part and parcel of diplomatic relations. In particular, a number of American Ambassadors have been sent overseas to confront the existing government and to “promote democracy,” that infinitely flexible concept that can be used whenever Washington is seeking to bully a foreign government.

Syria is a prime example of U.S. interference-by-ambassador. Syria-phobia goes back to the George W. Bush Administration in December 2003, when Congress passed the Syria Accountability Act, House Resolution 1828. Damascus at that time was already in the crosshairs of two principal American so-called allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both were actively working to destabilize the regime.

The drive to “get” Syria has remained a constant in American Foreign Policy to this day. In 2010, when the U.S. still had an Embassy in Damascus, President Barack Obama maladroitly sent as Ambassador Robert Ford. Ford actively supported the large demonstrations by anti-regime Syrians inspired by the Arab Spring who were opposed to the al-Assad government and he might even have openly advocated an armed uprising, a bizarre interpretation of what Ambassadors are supposed to do in a foreign country. He once stated absurdly that if the U.S. had armed opponents of the regime, al-Qaeda groups would have been “unable to compete.” Ford was recalled a year later, after being pelted by tomatoes and eggs, over concerns that his remaining in country might not be safe, but the damage had been done and normal diplomatic relations between Damascus and Washington have never been restored.

And then there is the case of Russia. The neoconservatives and their neoliberal allies have both long been dreaming of regime change for Moscow, either because it is perceived as a threat or as an unacceptable autocracy. The Obama era 2010 appointment of Stanford Academic and Russia expert Michael McFaul as Ambassador was intended to “reset” the bilateral relationship while also pushing the democracy promotion agenda and confronting various aspects of the domestic policies of the Vladimir Putin government that were considered unacceptable, to include the treatment of homosexuals. Pursuing that end, McFaul made a point of meeting with the political opposition in Russia. He thereby antagonized the officials in the government that he should have been working with and his term of office was an embarrassing failure.

Finally, there is Ambassador David Friedman in Israel, who represents the Israeli government more than that of the United States. He recently told journalists to “shut their mouths” when they dared to criticize the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. Friedman is a passionate supporter of the Israeli settlers’ movement, which is considered illegal by everyone but Israel, and has succeeded in changing the U.S. government language used to describe the Israeli control over the Palestinian West Bank from “occupied” to “disputed.”

Friedman is backed up by the reliably pro-Israel Nikki Haley, whom I have discussed in some detail. She is the preferred presidential-candidate-in-waiting of the neoconservatives, so, unfortunately, we Americans will have to suffer more of her in the future.

Beyond the Ambassadors themselves, America’s roving mischief makers have included the State Department’s Victoria Nuland in Ukraine and various Senators named McCain and Graham who have showed up regularly in troubled regions to harass the local authorities.

To put it mildly, clueless and agenda-driven Ambassadors are not what U.S. diplomacy should be all about. An Embassy serves as a two-way channel to exchange views and protect interests. It is part of a process whereby no one wins everything while no one loses completely, producing a result that everyone can live with. It is not about “We are right. Take it or leave it” but rather “We have to coexist, so let’s work something out.”

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This article was originally published on American Herald Tribune.

Philip M. Giraldi is a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer who served nineteen years overseas in Turkey, Italy, Germany, and Spain. He was the CIA Chief of Base for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and was one of the first Americans to enter Afghanistan in December 2001. Phil is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a Washington-based advocacy group that seeks to encourage and promote a U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East that is consistent with American values and interests.

Children as young as three years old are being forced to hold their own in deportation proceedings in federal court, judges have reported, further confirming how the cruelties of the U.S. immigrant enforcement regime have been largely unhindered by the local and global controversy it’s provoked.

The practice began under former President Barack Obama, but has widened under President Trump to encompass an ever-larger group of youth — who are often toddlers, unable to understand the dire circumstances that they’re in.

Speaking to Texas Tribune, Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles executive director Lindsay Toczylowski said:

We were representing a 3-year-old in court recently who had been separated from the parents. And the child — in the middle of the hearing — started climbing up on the table … It really highlighted the absurdity of what we’re doing with these kids.”

Continuing, she noted that the children are scarcely able to put into words the conditions – frequently violent – that force the families to leave their homes and make the treacherous journey to the north:

The parent might be the only one who knows why they fled from the home country, and the child is in a disadvantageous position to defend themselves.

The kids don’t understand the intricacies that are involved with deportation and immigration court … They do understand that they have been separated from their parents, and the primary goal is to get back with people they love.”

Over 2,000 children are slated to face the proceedings in the absence of their parents, who alone have the vocabulary and the knowledge to properly explain to authorities what the context was that drove them to seek asylum or enter the United States.

While a federal judge ruled earlier this week that the reuniting of separated families must be a priority for the Trump administration, immigration lawyers are saying that this won’t help those parents who have already been sent home while their children languish in U.S. detention facilities. The lawyers also note that no actual model for such a reunification exists yet.

The revelation is just the latest indication of the enormous human costs of Trump’s stepped-up and “zero tolerance” immigration enforcement, mass confinement and deportation regime.

Confusion reigns but the war on migrants must continue

Now the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency has signaled that it will cease handing parents over to authorities until the administration can figure out how to make good on their prosecution without ripping their children from their arms.

Such a move would, in effect, be tantamount to the “catch and release” program opposed by Trump, which saw unauthorized migrants being released and told to return to face a judge in the future.

The government has been unable to cope with the demands placed on its detention and concentration camp facilities, leading to a crisis of overcrowding, rights abuses, and even calls by President Trump to suspend due process and asylum-protection rights for unauthorized immigrants.

Tweeting on Sunday, Trump said:

We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came [sic].”

“Cannot accept all of the people trying to break into our Country. Strong Borders, No Crime!”

The CBP move also comes shortly after the Department of Defense confirmed that it had been tasked by the administration to hold migrants in camps within 45 days as an initial step toward managing the encampment of a migrant “family population of up to 12,000 people.”

If facilities are not available then camps meant to contain around 4,000 people each will be built at three separate locations, according to the Pentagon.

Trump appears to be faced with no good options, as the anger and outcry over his policies continues to build. The existing laws and restraints on the immigration enforcement regime that he inherited from past administrations have been a mere inconvenience for the president as he pursues this latest escalated war on migrants.

Northwest Immigrant Rights Project head Jorge Baron told Reuters:

Here, I think he is making it clear, he just doesn’t want anybody here. He wants people to just be sent back, no matter what.”

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

On what plane of reality is it possible that two of the world’s most morally bankrupt corporations, Bayer and Monsanto, can be permitted to join forces in what promises to be the next stage in the takeover of the world’s agricultural and medicinal supplies?

Warning, plot spoiler: There is no Mr. Hyde side in this horror story of epic proportions; it’s all Dr. Jekyll. Like a script from a David Lynch creeper, Bayer AG of poison gas fame has finalized its $66 billion (£50bn) purchase of Monsanto, the agrochemical corporation that should be pleading the Fifth in the dock on Guantanamo Bay instead of enjoying what amounts to corporate asylum and immunity from crimes against humanity. Such are the special privileges that come from being an above-the-law transnational corporation.

Unsurprisingly, the first thing Bayer did after taking on Monsanto, saddled as it is with the extra baggage of ethic improprieties, was to initiate a rebrand campaign. Like a Hollywood villain falling into a crucible of molten steel only to turn up later in some altered state, Monsanto has been subsumed under the Orwellian-sounding ‘Bayer Crop Science’ division, whose motto is: “Science for a better life.”

Yet Bayer itself provides little protective cover for Monsanto considering its own patchy history of corporate malfeasance. Far beyond its widely known business of peddling pain relief for headaches, the German-based company played a significant role in the introduction of poison gas on the battlefields of World War I.

Despite a Hague Convention ban on the use of chemical weapons since 1907, Bayer CEO Carl Duisberg, who sat on a special commission set up by the German Ministry of War, knew a business opportunity when he saw one.

Duisberg witnessed early tests of poison gas and had nothing but glowing reports on the horrific new weapon:

“The enemy won’t even know when an area has been sprayed with it and will remain quietly in place until the consequences occur.”

Bayer, which built a department specifically for the research and development of gas agents, went on to develop increasingly lethal chemical weapons, such as phosgene and mustard gas.

“This phosgene is the meanest weapon I know,” Duisberg remarked with a stunning disregard for life, as if he were speaking about the latest bug spray. “I strongly recommend that we not let the opportunity of this war pass without also testing gas grenades.”

Duisberg got his demonic wish. The opportunity to use the battlefield as a testing ground and soldiers as guinea pigs came in the spring of 1915 as Bayer supplied some 700 tons of chemical weapons to the war front. On April 22, 1915, it has been estimated that around 170 tons of chlorine gas were used for the first time on a battlefield in Ypres, Belgium against French troops. Up to 1,000 soldiers perished in the attack, and many more thousands injured.

In total, an estimated 60,000 people died as a result of the chemical warfare started by Germany in the First World War and supplied by the Leverkusen-based company.

According to Axel Koehler-Schnura from the Coalition against BAYER Dangers:

“The name BAYER particularly stands for the development and production of poison gas. Nevertheless the company has not come to terms with its involvement in the atrocities of the First World War. BAYER has not even distanced itself from Carl Duisberg’s crimes.”

The criminal-like behavior has continued right up until modern times. Mike Papantonio, a US attorney and television presenter discussed one of the more heinous acts committed by this chemical company on Thomas Hartmann’s program, The Big Picture:

“They produced a clotting agent for hemophiliacs, in the 1980s, called Factor VIII. This blood-clotting agent was tainted with HIV, and then, after the government told them they couldn’t sell it here, they shipped it all over the world, infecting people all over the world. That’s just part of the Bayer story.”

Papantonio, citing Bayer’s 2014 annual report, said the company is facing 32 different liability lawsuits around the world. For the 2018 Bayer liability report, click here.

Before flushing your Bayer products down the toilet, you may want to put aside an aspirin or two because the story gets worse.

One of the direct consequences of the ‘Baysanto’ monster will be a major hike in prices for farmers, already suffering a direct hit to their livelihood from unsustainable prices.

“Farmers have already experienced a 300% price increase in recent years, on everything from seeds to fertilizer, all of which are controlled by Monsanto,” Papantonio told Hartmann. “And every forecaster is predicting that these prices are going to climb even higher because of this merger.”

Yet it’s hard to imagine the situation getting any worse for the American farmer, who is now facing the highest suicide rate of any profession in the country. The suicide rate for Americans engaged in the field of farming, fishing and forestry is 84.5 per 100,000 people – more than five times that of the broader population.

This tragic trend echoes that of India, where about a decade ago millions of Indian farmers began switching from farming with traditional farming techniques to using Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds instead. In the past, following a millennia-old tradition, farmers saved seeds from one harvest and replanted them the following year. Those days of wisely following the rhythms and patterns of the natural world are almost over. Today, Monsanto GMO seeds are bred to contain ‘terminator technology’, with the resulting crops ‘programmed’ not to produce seeds of their own. In other words, the seed company is literally playing God with nature and our lives. Thus, Indian farmers are forced to buy a new batch of seeds – together with Monsanto pesticide Round Up – each year and at a very prohibitive cost. Hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers

But should the world have expected anything different from the very same company that was involved in the production of Agent Orange for military use during the Vietnam War (1961-1971)? More than 4.8 million Vietnamese suffered adverse effects from the defoliant, which was sprayed over vast tracts of agricultural land during the war, destroying the fertility of the land and Vietnam’s food supply. About 400,000 Vietnamese died as a result of the US military’s use of Agent Orange, while millions more suffered from hunger, crippling disabilities and birth defects.

This is the company that we have allowed, together with Bayer, to control about one-quarter of the world’s food supply. This begs the question: Who is more nuts? Bayer and Monsanto, or We the People?

It’s important to mention that the Bayer – Monsanto convergence is not occurring in a corporate vacuum. It is all part of a race on the part of the global agrochemical companies to stake off the world’s food supplies. ChemChina has bought out Switzerland’s Syngenta for $43 billion, for example, while Dow and DuPont have forged their own $130 billion empire.

However, none of those companies carry the same bloodstained reputations as Bayer and Monsanto, a match made in hell that threatens all life on earth.

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Robert Bridge is an American writer and journalist. 

Featured image is from the author.

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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.

The US President’s personal lawyer and ex-New York mayor Rudy Giuliani visited a rally held by the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) in Paris where he said that Iran’s “regime” will collapse soon and “democratic” representatives of the NCRI have to take power in the country.

“The mullahs must go, the ayatollah must go, and they must be replaced by a democratic government which Madam Rajavi represents. Freedom is right around the corner… Next year I want to have this convention in Tehran!” Giuliani claimed adding that tighter sanctions will be imposed on Iran facilitating the ouster of the country’s government.

“When the greatest economic power stops doing business with you, then you collapse… and the sanctions will become greater, greater and greater.”

Furthermore, he called for “a campaign to shame the European governments who are unwilling to support freedom and democracy” and urged to boycott companies “that continually do business with this [Iranian] regime.”

Meanwhile, the Iranian government is already preparing for possible sanctions to prevent their negative impact.

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

Michel Chossudovsky

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

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

Year: 2015

Pages: 240 Pages

List Price: $22.95

Special Price: $15.00

Click here to order.

Is it time to completely rethink how we design the goals of conservation programs? Some scientists say it is.

In a paper published last week in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, a team of Australian researchers argue that we need to shift conservation goals to focus on diverse and ambitious “nature retention targets” if we’re to truly safeguard the environment, biodiversity, and humanity.

The researchers, who are affiliated with Australia’s University of Queensland (UQ) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), make a distinction between targets aimed at retaining natural systems and the current model that seeks to achieve targets for setting aside land as protected areas.

Whereas targets aimed at retaining nature can be determined by measuring what is needed to achieve conservation goals like preserving water quality, carbon sequestration, or biodiversity levels, protected area targets are “blind to what is needed” and don’t have a clear end goal, paper co-author James Watson of UQ and WCS told Mongabay.

For instance, Aichi Target 11, established by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2010, calls for at least 17 percent of terrestrial and inland water areas and 10 percent of coastal and marine areas around the world be gazetted as protected areas by 2020. But that may not be sufficient to guarantee the ecological functions humans and biodiversity require, according to Watson and his colleagues.

“Right now, there is no clear endgame and we don’t know what victory looks like on a map and who needs to do what,” Watson said. “The targets set today are often incoherent and unmeasurable and don’t speak to each other or a bigger plan. They also don’t speak to other environmental agendas” such as halting global climate change or meeting the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he added.

Even if we were to fully meet the goals of Aichi Target 11, that still leaves 83 percent of Earth’s land area and 90 percent of its oceans unprotected, the researchers note in the paper. In other words,

“Most evolutionary processes, ecological functions and biota are, and probably will always be, beyond the boundaries of nationally gazetted protected areas,” they write. “This means that most of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies will be provided predominantly by areas that are not officially protected. Achieving the objectives reflected in the other Aichi Targets, and the SDGs, depends heavily on what happens in that 83-90%.”

Giraffe roaming the plains in a protected area in Ruaha, Tanzania. Photo Credit: The University of Queensland.

While strict protected areas that are off-limits to human activities are necessary, the researchers contend that they are not sufficient for ensuring a functioning planet in the future because they are not designed to protect all of the natural systems that sustain life on Earth.

“Only a multi-faceted approach that includes protected areas, but does not exclusively rely on them, can achieve the many different goals of sustaining nature,” they state in the paper.

The authors note that protected area networks are “rarely designed to maximize their contribution to the overall retention of nature.” These networks usually aim to be “comprehensive, adequate and representative: in other words, to conserve examples of the full range of types of biota within a network that contains both strict protected areas and regions that are less focussed on conservation objectives (called ‘other effective area-based conservation Measures ’). Such networks cannot preserve all biodiversity, let alone provide the much broader range of benefits we want from nature.”

Rather than simply setting a certain amount of the planet’s land and seas aside, nature retention targets would establish the baseline levels of natural system functions that we need to preserve in order to ensure the health of ecosystems and the services they provide. The paper’s lead author, UQ’s Martine Maron, explains that nature retention targets are essentially “limits to what we are prepared to lose.” Mankind relies on nature for many things that we require to survive, from a stable global climate to the provision of clean water and healthy soils for food production.

“Yet the destruction of nature continues apace — and is often irreversible,” Maron told Mongabay. “It is incredibly irresponsible for this to continue with no end point in sight — we risk losing the nature we, and all other species, rely upon.”

Maron said that she and her co-authors believe that nature retention targets must be quantitative and determined on a state-by-state basis.

“That is, rather than a target like ‘reduce the rate of loss,’ we need to say just how much nature — of different kinds, and in particular places — we must keep on the planet if we are to continue enjoying its benefits.”

The researchers set out three criteria for nature retention targets in the paper:

“they relate to a quantified target state, not a target rate of change; they act as a framework designed to enable and support the achievement of multiple nature conservation goals; and, as a result, the headline target must be high.”

In designing retention targets to support the multiple goals of nature conservation and human well-being, they add,

“a series of area-based, quality-specific sub-targets should be set to ensure adequate provision of key ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and watershed protection, as well as biodiversity conservation and wilderness protection.”

The researchers write that more ambitious and area-specific targets for preserving key ecosystems can help achieve multiple goals, such as biodiversity conservation, wilderness retention, carbon storage, water regulation, soil stabilisation, avoided desertification, and fisheries maintenance. These targets would, they say, benefit humanity as much as the environment and wildlife.

“You can map what is needed and then add it up,” Watson said. “By doing this, you don’t have to worry about whether it is for people (or not). It’s for both! It makes the entire question of whether conservation is for nature or for people irrelevant.”

Even calls to protect half of the world’s natural systems, such as those made by the Half-Earth Initiative and Nature Needs Half, which are certainly ambitious proposals, may still fall short, the researchers say.

“If by protecting half the Earth, we imply we can lose all nature from the other half, it may not be enough,” Maron said. “A much higher target for well-sited and well-managed protected areas is crucial for the protection of biodiversity and will help maintain the provision of many ecosystem services — but on its own, it may not be enough to provide all we need from nature.”

That doesn’t mean that Maron and team think more than half the Earth must fall within traditional protected areas, but she said they do propose

“that the areas we must protect to conserve the planet’s biodiversity, the areas of crucial water catchments, carbon stores, irreplaceable wilderness areas, places for urban populations to interact with nature, and so on, are likely to add to even more than half the Earth.”

“We need a big, bold plan. There is no doubt that when we add up the different environmental goals to halt biodiversity loss, stabilize run-away climate change and to ensure other critical ecosystems services such as pollination and clean water are maintained, we will need far more than 50 percent of the earth’s natural systems to remain intact,” Watson said in a statement. “And we must remember that most nations have committed to this in various environmental treaties. It is time for nations to embrace a diverse set of bold retention targets to limit the ongoing erosion of the nature humanity relies upon.”

The researchers propose nature retention targets as a framework for the post-2020 strategy of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

“As we approach the deadline for achieving the 20 Aichi Targets under the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity, the world is working toward a new set of targets,” Maron told Mongabay. “A global approach is important because key ecosystem services are global in nature, and their preservation needs global coordination. But retention targets are sensible for any level of government to consider, across its jurisdiction, how to avoid losing too much nature and, where necessary, to restore in places that have already gone too far. Many places continue to see nature destroyed year on year with no end in sight — a completely unsustainable model.”

*

Source

Maron, M., Simmonds, J. S., & Watson, J. E. (2018). Bold nature retention targets are essential for the global environment agenda. Nature ecology & evolution, 1. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0595-2

The pro-GMO lobby claim critics of the technology ‘deny farmers choice’. They say that farmers should have access to a range of tools and technologies. It is all about maximising choice and options. Taken at face value, who would want to deny choice?

At the same time, however, we do not want to end up offering a false choice (rolling out technologies that have little value and only serve to benefit those who control the technology), to unleash an innovation that has an adverse impact on those who do not use it or to manipulate a situation whereby only one option is available because other options have been deliberately made unavailable or less attractive. And we would certainly not wish to roll out a technology that traps farmers on a treadmill that they find difficult to get off.

When discussing choice, it is can be very convenient to focus on end processes (choices made available – or denied – to farmers at the farm level), while ignoring the procedures and decisions that were made in corporate boardrooms, by government agencies and by regulatory bodies which result in the shaping and roll-out of options.

Where GMOs are concerned, Steven Druker argues that the decision to commercialise GM seeds and food in the US was based on regulatory delinquency. Druker indicates that if the US Food and Drug Administration had heeded its own experts’ advice and publicly acknowledged their warnings about risk, the GM venture would have imploded and would have never gained traction.

It is fine to talk about choice while ignoring what amounts to a subversion of democratic processes, which could result in (and arguably is resulting in) changing the genetic core of the world’s food. Whose ‘choice’ was it to do this? Was the choice given to the US public, the consumers of GM food? Did ordinary people choose for GM food to appear on their supermarket shelves?

No, that choice was denied. The decision was carried out above their heads, ultimately to benefit Monsanto’s bottom line and to gain strategic leverage over global agriculture. And, now that GM food is on the market, can they choose whether to buy it? Again, the answer is no. The massive lobbying firepower of GMO agritech and food corporations have ensured this food is unlabelled and the public has been denied the right to choose.

Of course, let’s not also forget that the GMO venture, like the original Green Revolution, often works with bio-pirated germplasm: little more than theft from the Global South to be tweaked and sold back as hybrid or patented GM seeds to the Global South (read The Great Seed Piracy).

But any serious discussion about the corporate capture of agriculture, seed patenting, the role of the WTO or World Bank, or issues concerning dependency, development and ensuring genuine food security by addressing the dynamics of neoliberal capitalism (globalisation), are often shouted down by pro-GMO scientists and their supporters with accusations of ‘conspiracy theory’. Based on my own personal experience, this even occurs when referring to the work of respected academics who are sneered at as non-scientists and whose PhDs and the peer-reviewed journals their work appear in are somehow unworthy of recognition.

Yet, aside from the issues mentioned above which need to be addressed if we are to achieve equitable global food security (issues the pro-GMO lobby and its prominent scientists in academia seem to not want to discuss – for them, the ‘conspiracy’ slur will suffice), the fact is that the industry has placed GM on the market fraudulently, is complicit in seed piracy and has fought hard to deny consumer choice by using its political and financial clout along the way to undermine democratic processes. Issues that are highly relevant to any discussion about ‘choice’.

(For the sake of brevity, Monsanto’s subversion of science and issues emerging from the ‘Monsanto Papers’ will be put to one side, as this has been presented on numerous occasions elsewhere.)

What are critics denying?

So, just what is it that critics are said to be denying farmers when it comes to the right to choose?

Pro-GMO activists say that GM crops can increase yields, reduce the use of agrochemicals and are required if we are to feed the world. To date, however, the track record of GMOs is unimpressive.

Image on the right: Bt cotton

In India and Burkina Faso, for example, Bt cotton has hardly been a success. And although critics are blamed for Golden Rice not being on the market, this is a convenient smokescreen that attempts to hide the reality that after two decades problems remain with the technology.

Moreover, a largely non-GMO Europe tends to outperform the US, which largely relies on GM crops. In general, “GM crops have not consistently increased yields or farmer incomes, or reduced pesticide use in North America or in the Global South (Benbrook, 2012; Gurian-Sherman, 2009)” (from the report ‘Persistent narratives, persistent failure’).

GM agriculture is not ‘feeding the world’, nor has it been designed to do so: the companies that push GM are located firmly within the paradigm of industrial agriculture and associated power relations that shape a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy resulting in strategic surpluses and scarcities across the globe. The choice for farmers between a technology that is so often based on broken promises and non-GMO agriculture offers little more than a false choice.

“Currently available GM crops would not lead to major yield gains in Europe,” says Matin Qaim, a researcher at Georg-August-University of Göttingen, Germany.

Consider too that once the genetic genie is out of the bottle, there may be no way of going back. For instance, Roger Levett, specialist in sustainable development, argues (‘Choice: Less can be more, in Food Ethics, Vol. 3, No. 3, Autumn 2008):

“If some people are allowed to choose to grow, sell and consume GMO foods, soon nobody will be able to choose food, or a biosphere, free of GMOs. It’s a one-way choice… once it’s made, it can’t be reversed.”

There is much evidence showing that GM and non-GM crops cannot co-exist. Indeed, contamination seems to be part of a cynical industry strategy. For instance, GM food crops are already illegally growing in India.

And if we turn our attention to India, recent reports indicate that herbicide tolerant (HT) cotton seeds are now available in certain states. Bt cotton (designed to be pest resistant) is the only legally sanctioned GM crop in India. HT crops are not only illegal in India but have led to serious problems in countries where they are used. The Supreme Court-appointed TEC Committee said that such crops are wholly inappropriate for India.

It seems that, however, according to reports, many farmers are ‘choosing’ to buy these seeds.  And this is where the pro-GMO activists jump in and yell their mantra about offering choice to farmers.

Regardless of the laws of the country being violated, things are not that simple.

Manufacturing ‘choice’

Professor Glenn Stone has conducted extensive field research concerning India’s cotton farmers. By employing the concept of technology treadmills as well as environmental, social and didactic learning, he can help us understand the ‘choices’ that farmers make.

Stone has noted where Bt cotton has been concerned, any decision by farmers to plant GM seeds was not necessarily based on objective decision-making. There was no experimentation or the testing of seeds within agroecological contexts by farmers as has been the case traditionally.

On the back of a national media campaign about the miracle wonder seeds and a push by Monsanto to get Bt cotton into India in the 1990s, farmers eventually found themselves at the mercy of seed vendors who sold whatever seed they had in stock, regardless of what the farmers wanted. Without agricultural support services from trusted non-governmental organisations, farmers had to depend on local shopkeepers. They believed they were buying the latest and best seeds and created a rush on whatever supplies were available.

The upshot is that traditional knowledge, testing and evaluations by farmers in the field was undermined or broke down and, in many respects, gave way to an unregulated industry-orchestrated free for all. ‘Environmental learning’ gave way to ‘social learning’ (farmers merely emulated one another).

However, in agriculture, environmental learning has gone on for thousands of years. Farmers experimented with different plant and animal specimens acquired through migration, trading networks, gift exchanges or accidental diffusion. By learning and doing, trial and error, new knowledge was blended with older, traditional knowledge systems.

Farmers took measures to manage drought, grow cereals with long stalks that can be used as fodder, engage in cropping practices that promote biodiversity, ethno-engineer soil and water conservation, use self-provisioning systems on farm recycling and use collective sharing systems such as managing common resource properties. In short, farmers knew their micro-environment.

To get farmers onto a corporate technology treadmill, environmental learning pathways have to be broken, and Stone offers good insight into how this occurred with Bt cotton and is now happening with HT cotton. He describes how traditional ‘double-lining’ ox ploughing is breaking down due to ‘didactic learning’ under the promise of increased productivity. After having adopted ‘single-lining’ ploughing (as advocated by didactic ‘teachers’), this promise does not seem to have materialised. However, the farmer is now faced with more weeds.

So, who could blame the farmer for being attracted towards HT cotton and the purchasing of herbicides as a perceived easy fix when faced with an increase in weeds and government policies that have inadvertently increased farm labour costs?

The breaking with traditional practices (or pathways) to implement fresh approaches (which fail deliver much benefit) can be regarded as part of the process of nudging farmers towards seeking out alternative options to deal with the new problems that arise (the beginning of the treadmill).

It is highly convenient that illegal HT seeds now seem widely available. It dovetails with Monsanto’s stated plan to boost herbicide sales in India (which it regards as a potentially massive growth market). And if farmers demand these seeds, (farmers are a huge vote bank for politicians), Monsanto (now Bayer) might eventually achieve what is has been pushing for all along: India embracing GM agriculture.

In effect, Stone (with his colleague Andrew Flachs) helps us to understand how ‘didactic learning’ (which Monsanto has been undertaking with Indian farmers since the 1990s) can result in driving farmers towards the very option and very choice Monsanto wants them to make. Stone and Flachs also make it clear that once farmers are on an agrochemical/agritech treadmill, it is very difficult for them to get off, even when they are aware it is failing.

A question of power

When the pro-GMO lobby uses ‘choice’ as a stick to hit critics with, it fails to acknowledge these processes, which powerful agritech players are cynically manipulating for their own ends. In other words, ‘choices’ or options must be understood within the broader context of power.

Choice is also about the options that could be made available, but which have been closed off or are not even considered. Take the case of Andhra Pradesh in India. The state government is committed to scaling up zero budget natural farming to six million farmers by 2024. In Ethiopia, agroecology has been scaled up across the entire Tigray region. These types of initiatives are succeeding because of enlightened political leaders and the commitment of key institutions.

However, in places where global agribusiness/agritech corporations have levered themselves into strategic positions, their interests prevail. From the overall narrative that industrial agriculture is necessary to feed the world to providing lavish research grants and the capture of important policy-making institutions, these firms have secured a perceived thick legitimacy within policymakers’ mindsets and mainstream discourse. As a result, agroecological approaches are marginalised and receive scant attention and support.

This perceived legitimacy allows these corporations to devise and implement policies on national and international levels. For example, it was Monsanto that had a leading role in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies. The global food processing industry wrote the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures. Whether it involves Codex or the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring Indian agriculture, the powerful agribusiness/food lobby has secured privileged access to policy makers.

So how can the pro-GMO lobby assert with any degree of credibility that it is a bunch of activists curtailing or defining choice when it has been powerless to prevent any of this, either at ‘field level’ in places like India or within governments and international bodies?

As Stone and Flachs describe, it is Monsanto – a Fortune 500 company with all its influence and wealth (not ‘anti-GMO activists’) – that has taken its brand of corporate activism (imperialism) to farmers to expand its influence and boost its bottom line:

“Beginning with 500 farmer programs in 2007, Monsanto India targeted a range of farmers through an herbicide research program… They also conducted more than 10,000 farm demonstrations directed at small and large farmers in 2012 to raise awareness of Roundup® and discourage knockoff products… These efforts build on Monsanto’s didactic activities since the late 1990s. For instance, in Andhra Pradesh the Meekosam Project placed Monsanto employees in villages to demonstrate products and promote hybrid seeds and chemical inputs…”

From the World Bank’s ‘enabling the business of agriculture’ to the Gates Foundation’s role in opening up African agriculture to the global food and agribusiness oligopolies, democratic procedures at sovereign state levels are being bypassed to impose seed monopolies and proprietary inputs on farmers and to incorporate them into a global supply chain dominated by powerful corporations.

Whether it involves the destruction of indigenous agriculture in Africa or the ongoing dismantling of Indian agriculture at the behest of transnational agribusiness, where is the democratic ‘choice’?

Ukraine’s agriculture sector is being opened up to Monsanto. Iraq’s seed laws were changed to facilitate the entry of Monsanto. India’s edible oils sector was undermined to facilitate the entry of Cargill. And Bayer’s hand is possibly behind the ongoing strategy behind GM mustard in India. Through secretive trade deals, strings-attached loans and outright duplicity, the global food and agribusiness conglomerates have scant regard for democracy, let alone choice.

As Michel Chossudovsky outlines in his book ‘The Globalization of Poverty’ (2003), the ongoing aim is to displace localised, indigenous methods of food production and allow transnational companies to take over, thereby tying farmers and regions into a system of neoliberal globalization. Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies or what we are currently seeing in India, the agenda is clear.

In finishing, one final point should be noted. In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate-inspired PR, many government officials, scientists and journalists take as given that (corrupt) profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. There is the premise that water, seeds, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

These natural assets (‘the commons’) should be under common stewardship and managed in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf because that’s the bottom line where genuine choice is concerned.

And how can we move towards this? It is already happening: we should take inspiration from the many successful agroecological projects around the world.

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

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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.

This article was first posted on GR in January 2016

Our guest this week is Swiss historian Dr. Daniele Ganser, author of the seminal book NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe, who joins us for a fascinating (though at times unsettling) conversation on the subject of Operation GLADIO.

Shortly after WWII a Europe-wide network of secret armies was organised under the aegis of NATO, tasked with providing military and intelligence resistance in the event of a feared Soviet invasion. Modelled on the resistance movements of the war years, many of these “stay behind” units remained faithful to their original mandate. But by the early 1960s – under the pressures of anti-communist politicking and flirtations with the Far Right – some of these groups began to morph into something more sinister, linking up with extreme right-wingers who carried out acts of false-flag terrorism, harassment of left-wing parties and coups d’état.

But was this morphing simply an unforseen consequence of the unaccountability and instability of the network itself? Or was it, at least in part, engineered by the very Anglo-American establishment which gave birth to the project in the first place? And to what extent, therefore, can such acts of terror be seen as manifestations of ‘the strategy of tension’, carried out by the State against its own citizens for the purposes of control at home and geopolitical gain abroad? (We also discuss: Operation Northwoods, the so-called War on Terror, 9/11 and the recent Charlie Hebdo attacks.)

Original Audio  Notes                                                                                                         

Transcribed by Sarah Brand & Julian Charles

Julian Charles:  Hello everybody, this is Julian Charles of TheMindRenewed.com, coming to you, as usual, from the depths of the Lancashire countryside here in the UK. Today is the 27th of January 2015, and I am very privileged to be able to welcome to the programme Dr. Daniele Ganser, who is author of the seminal book,NATO’s Secret Armies : Operation GLADIO and Terrorism in Western Europe. Dr. Ganser is a Swiss historian specialising in contemporary history since 1945 and international politics, whose research centres in peace studies, geostrategy, covert warfare, resource wars and economic policy. He teaches at the University of St. Galen and the University of Basel, and is also founder and Director of the Swiss Institute for Peace and Energy Research, which is also in Basel. Dr. Ganser, thank you for joining us.

Daniele Ganser:  Thanks very much for having me.

JC:  It’s great to be speaking to you at long last. I’ve given very cryptic information about you in my opening remark, so could you give us a fuller impression of the work that you do?

DG:  Yes, the information you provided is correct. I am forty-two years old, have two kids, and live in Switzerland. I research secret warfare, looking at resource wars, special operation forces, secret services, and I’m interested in peace research and in human rights. So, I’m an activist academic, one of those academics who feel it’s not right that we’re stuck in this world of violence.

JC:  Now, we’re going to be discussing the specific issue of Operation Gladio (as it’s normally called), and we’re going to be centring in your research that led up to your book, NATO’s Secret Armies. I understand that your book was based on your PhD studies, so what prompted you to get interested in this subject in the first place?

DG:  I did my studies here in Switzerland and wrote my first book before my PhD. Every student of history here in Switzerland – and I guess it’s the same all over the world – has to search for a topic for his Master’s thesis. So, I looked into the subject of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the CIA and the Bay of Pigs Invasion that took place in the 1960s when the Americans tried to overthrow Fidel Castro. That was a really fascinating, because throughout my time in Swiss high schools we never learned anything about secret warfare; our history teachers never broached the subject. Even when I pursued my University degrees, the subject never came up. It was only at the end of my studies, while doing my Master’s, that I had my first glimpse into secret warfare: that secret services exist; that the United Nations, and its Security Council, and governments lie to each other. I was baffled. I was twenty-five years old at the time, and I thought, “This is interesting; I want to know more.”

JC:  It is interesting. We’re brought up to have faith in our governments. I think that’s understandable, but along with that goes this kind of assumption: “Well, they would never lie to us.”

DG:  That’s right. Whilst researching the CIA’s secret Bay of Pigs operation, the invasion of Cuba in April 1961 aimed at toppling the Government of Fidel Castro, I read the UN Security Council documents covering that period and found the content actually quite surreal. These official transcripts revealed a conversation between the Cuban representative and representatives of the five member countries of the UN Security Council: France, England, the US, Russia and China. The Cuban representative tells them: “Cuba is being attacked by the CIA who are trying to overthrow the Government”, to which the American Ambassador responds: “This is all nonsense! This is probably false information.” Then the Cuban representative says: “No, no! We are being bombed right now; it’s not fake.” Then the American Ambassador says: “Ah yes, you are being bombed, but according to my sources that’s probably disaffected pilots from the Cuban Air Force dropping bombs on their own country before leaving in protest against Fidel Castro’s dictatorship.” It’s hilarious, but that’s actually in the records. Then to add to the hilarity, the British and French Ambassadors in the UN say: “If my colleague from the US says this, then we believe him, totally.” And the Chinese and the Soviets go mad: “It’s all nonsense!” So that really was the start of my interest in secret warfare.

JC:  And that led to your research into Gladio itself. How easy did you find that research? Did you find that governments were open in revealing their information?

DG: It was really my interest that guided my steps. I tried first to establish whether it was a fact that NATO had secret armies. So I went back to the records and looked at the November 22nd 1990 Resolution of the European Parliament, which I have here, and which states: “The European Union Parliament protests vigorously at the assumption by certain US military personnel at SHAPE (Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe) and in NATO of the right to encourage the establishment in Europe of a clandestine intelligence and operations network.” By this I understood there was a secret network in Europe against which the European Union was protesting, and NATO was declining to respond. So it was like a fight between the big guys: the European Union on the one hand and NATO on the other.

I found this very interesting, so I looked further into the details and discovered that the Italian Prime Minister, Giulio Andreotti, had confirmed the existence of a secret army in Italy. And it was very funny, because the French President at the time, FranÇois Mitterand, said: “No, we didn’t have a secret army.” Then Andreotti said: “Oh yes, very much so, there was a meeting in 1990 and the French were part of it.” So, Paris was really embarrassed, because they had to retract their denial and admit that they had a stay-behind army. It was a scandal with countries contradicting each other. Suffice to say that in the end I had enough solid data to confirm absolutely and beyond any doubt that NATO had secret armies, called Gladio in Italy and stay-behind in other countries.

JC:  I can imagine that it must have been difficult to pick through all the claims, counter-claims and propaganda, and decide what’s the truth in this. Anyway, I want to ask you to explain what Gladio is.  I suspect many people will know what it was, but there will be some people who will have never heard of it before. So, could you give as an idea of what Gladio basically was?

DG:  Yes, gladio is the word for a short double-edged sword, a weapon used by gladiators in ancient Rome. During the Cold War the Italian military secret service,Servizio Informazione Sicurezza Militare, had a branch called Gladio, a top-secret part of the Italian Secret Service. It was preparing to fight for two things, and that’s where it all becomes rather delicate. One: In the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe – so we’re talking about Italy, France, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, etc. – this secret network of soldiers would have fought as a guerrilla army behind enemy lines with  explosives, weapons, ammunition, communication gear, and so forth. For example, in the case of a NATO pilot being shot down above, say, Soviet-occupied France, the secret network would inform Governments of unoccupied territories – probably the UK or US, – about the shot-down pilot. So, it was very much along this idea of resistance. That was one branch.

JC:  Was it actually inspired by the resistance movements of WWII?

DG:  Yes, very much so. In fact I’ve had a few people from Norway say to me: “We don’t want to be labelled as either Gladiators or Secret Soldiers, because that would somehow link us to acts of terrorism that tried to destabilise European democracies. In fact we did the opposite. We were occupied by the Germans during WWII, and when that was over in 1945 our aim was to prepare for a new war with the Soviet Union, which required not only a regular army under a country’s Defence Department, but a secret army that would continue resisting even after the regular army had declared defeat. So, we were Resistance Fighters doing an honourable job.” Indeed, I believe that the NATO secret armies included people who were in no way extremists, but who just wanted to defend their countries against occupation. So we must not lump them all together; it’s important to keep these two things apart.

JC:  Absolutely. How many countries had these stay-behind armies?

DG:  Oh, many countries. The scandal broke in Italy and was initially treated as yet another Italian mess, because there’s always a scandal in Italy! But then it went further: the Belgian Defence Minister happened to be in Italy, and he found out from a newspaper that Belgium also had a secret army. Naturally, as Defence Minister, he was dismayed. So, upon his return to Belgium he called in the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – the highest Officer of the Belgian Military – and asked him if what he had read was true. And the Chairman said, “Yes, that’s right”, to which the Defence Minister responded, “That’s strange; I’m the Defence Minister, and yet I know nothing about it!” The Chairman’s answer to that was: “We are military officers who dedicate our whole lives to military service; you are merely a temporary Defence Minister, and a socialist to boot. Governments come and go, and we are not going to tell every Defence Minister about our secret operations.”

Subsequently, the Belgian Parliament conducted an investigation, and found that it had a secret army under the aegis of its secret service. But this structure was not limited to Italy and Belgium: secret stay-behind armies also existed in Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Turkey, and also in neutral countries like Finland, Austria and Sweden. So, basically, you could say that all of Western Europe was covered with a network of NATO stay-behind armies, designed to become operative in the case of a Soviet invasion. Obviously we now know that this Soviet invasion never came, but at the time when these networks were set up in the late ’40s and early ’50s, people weren’t so sure.

JC:  And you say that certain politicians, certain Ministers, were given information that these stay-behind armies existed, but many of them weren’t. How was that decision made?

DG:  I think NATO, Washington and London feared that giving sensitive information to a socialist/communist Minister – say, Minister of the Interior, or Defence, or even a Prime Minister – could lead to that secret being passed on to Moscow. NATO did not feel that all European governments and media organisations could be trusted with such secrets. You see, strictly speaking, you can’t have a secret army in a democracy. You can have a police force, a security service and an army, but they must all be accountable to parliament. It’s unthinkable that parliaments should be unaware of entire networks of secret armies, and yet that was the case, so there was a failure of democratic control.

I looked at the situation here in Switzerland, and the supposed reason why parliamentarians were kept in the dark was because it was felt they were incapable of keeping a secret, which no doubt is true, but withholding secrets from Government can be problematic. In Switzerland it was the Untergruppe Nachrichtendienst und Abwehr, the Swiss Military Defence which cooperates very closely with British MI6, and together they were training these secret networks. Some members of the Executive Branch knew about it, but the public at large had never heard of it, so I imagine many of your listeners have probably never heard of it either.

When I was doing my PhD, I studied for a while in London, and I talked to professors of Political Science at the London School of Economics. These guys were trained in international politics, had written books and knew a lot about it, but when I asked them: “Do you know anything about NATO’s secret armies?”, they responded vaguely: “Uh, wait a moment. Yes, there was something, but what was it exactly?” Just imagine if you asked: “Do you know anything about the Vietnam War?”, and they said: “Wait a moment. Vietnam War? Never heard of it. What was that?”  We’re talking here about that level of information gap.

JC:  It’s incredible, isn’t it? You mentioned MI6. Is it right that these stay-behind armies – right from the beginning – were an Anglo-American set-up?

DG:  Yes.

JC:  Is it right that the British Special Operations Executive and the Office of Strategic Services (the forerunner to the CIA) were hand-in-hand organising this?

DG:  That is correct, because during WWII (1939 – 1945) the Special Operations Executive (the British branch of this secret effort) was operating behind enemy lines and trying to fight the Germans with unorthodox warfare, while the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, the American branch) was pretty much doing the same thing. For instance, in Italy they were co-operating with the communists because they wanted them to grow stronger so as to defeat Mussolini (the WWII Italian dictator). But as the war came to an end, the OSS realised that if they continued to support the Italian communist resistance, then Italian communists would end up in power at the end of the war, and they didn’t want that at all.

So they had to do two things. First, the SOE and OSS stopped arming and co-operating with this resistance network. Second, the CIA rigged the 1948 Italian elections. (That was the very first thing the CIA did. Today we talk about CIA torture and other issues, but  people forget about the past.) Their job was to make sure that no communist gained a dominant position in the Italian Parliament, otherwise Italy could not have become a member of NATO in 1949. So, first there was the vote, and then it was rigged, manipulated. And it worked! In ’49, Italy was brought into NATO, but the CIA and MI6 made sure that through this network of stay-behind soldiers they maintained secret control of all NATO countries.

JC:  This anticommunist impetus was a major reason why this organisation morphed into something much more sinister, with substantial links to terrorism in some cases. What was that shift? And why did it take place?

DG:  Yes, that is the very difficult part of my research. You have to keep in mind that this stay-behind network was not discovered by accident; it was discovered by an Italian magistrate, a judge, who was investigating a 1972 terrorist attack in Peteano, a small village in Northern Italy. An anonymous telephone call summoned the police to investigate an abandoned car in the village, and when they opened the door the car exploded killing three police officers. Right after that, someone telephoned claiming that the Red Brigades (an Italian terrorist group of the extreme left) were responsible. This was later supported by a police explosives ‘expert’, who told the investigators that the explosive was very clearly one used by the Red Brigades. This official story stood for a long time, until an Italian judge, Felice Casson, looked again at the attack, and found that the facts must have been falsified and manipulated; it was a sea of lies. Subsequently he discovered that the attack had not been carried out by the extreme Left, but by the extreme Right, and that a terrorist named Vincente Vinciguerra had carried it out, an extreme right-wing member of Ordine Nuovo, a neo-Fascist group in Italy. Vinciguerra openly admitted this, saying: “Yes, it’s true, but I’m being protected by a network of secret services. Furthermore, there’s a secret network all over Europe coordinated by NATO.” That’s what he said.

Remember, that was in the 1980s. Many people in Italy simply thought, “This man is mad; a secret NATO army is just impossible!” But this Italian judge was determined to discover the truth, so he pressed Italian Prime Minister Guilio Andreotti to give him access to the Italian Military Secret Service’s archives. Strange to say – and I admit I can’t explain this – he obtained access. Imagine that! Suppose I, an historian, were given access to the archives of the CIA, MI6, Mossad, or the Italian Secret Service: needless to say, I would discover most revealing things too!

So, this Italian judge gets access to the archives, and there – only there – he finds the documents which state very clearly that Operation Gladio was designed to fight two enemies. First, a Soviet invasion (that never happened); and Second, a domestic enemy. The second idea goes like this: first, you carry out a terrorist attack – (usually terrorist attacks shock everybody and make them fearful) – and then you blame it on your enemy. During the Cold War it would have been the communists; today it is the Muslims. Thus, your enemy is totally discredited, even if they didn’t do it, and that is called a false-flag Strategy of Tension. The judge, Felice Casson, came to realise that the Strategy of Tension was actually used to shock Italy into a very strong fear of communist terrorism. So, really, it was fabricated. Today, when we try to put the pieces together, NATO declines to comment, as do the CIA and MI6; it’s all a bit tricky. But what we know today is that these terrorist attacks were carried out, and many of them were false-flag strategies of tension. We were being lied to.

JC:  So, in this case, you have an extreme right-winger, Vinciguerra, a member of Ordine Nuovo, carrying out a false-flag attack; that’s one strategy. But wasn’t there also another strategy of infiltrating left-wing groups and getting them to commit acts of terror?

DG:  That’s true; that’s another idea. Simply infiltrate a left-wing group that you think is not sufficiently violent, and push it to do something violent, such as to kill somebody. Then you have created a so-called domestic emergency that you can exploit by saying: “We need more money for the military and NATO, and more power for the Secret Service to guarantee your freedom and liberty. We have proof that these communists are evil and dreadful.” In 2000, the Italian Senate (one branch of the Italian Parliament) investigated the spate of terrorist attacks in Italy, and published their conclusions in a report. Let me quote this one sentence. The Italian Parliament writes:

Those massacres, those bombs, those military actions had been organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian State Institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of the United States Intelligence.

That is a very revealing quote. (And just to be clear, the terrorist attacks in Italy –  Straggia, as they’re called in Italy – such as Bologna, Piazza Fontana and Peteano, are undisputed and well-established facts of the Cold War.) So, here we have the Italian Senate admitting, some fifteen years ago, that men inside Italian State institutions – such as the Italian Defence Ministry and Military Intelligence units (the secret services) – were linked to these attacks. Furthermore, people from the American secret services – such as the CIA, and possibly the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) – were also linked to these acts of terrorism. It is very saddening to realise that your taxes (which are already hard enough to pay) are being used so that your country’s own defence department and its secret services can attack, kill and maim their own citizens. When I discuss this with people, they react with disbelief: “Oh no, that’s impossible”, and I reply: “No, it is possible; look at the data.” I’ve another quote for you, if I may?

JC:  Please do, yes.

DG:  Vincente Vinciguerra, the perpetrator of the 1972 Peteano terrorist attack, who later confessed and was found guilty of terrorist attacks in Europe, explained it like this:

“You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game.”

So, basically, you just kill anybody, say, in a railway station.

The reason was quite simple. They were supposed to force these people, the Italian public, to turn to the state to ask for greater security. This is the political logic that lies behind all the massacres and the bombings which remain unpunished, because the state cannot convict itself or declare itself responsible for what happened.

So, basically, what we have here is a terrorist saying: “I was protected by the State, because the State wanted acts of terrorism so that it could argue for more power, surveillance technology and money.” Many things are granted after a terrorist attack that would otherwise be rejected. Suppose you asked people to stay at home after 8 o’clock on a sunny summer’s day when there’s no sign of a terrorist threat, people would understandably protest; they would prefer to enjoy the pleasant evening outdoors. But suppose there’s a terrorist attack, and then the pubic is ordered to stay home after 8 o’clock: everybody complies. This is the shift of power. What people don’t understand is that terrorism can be used as a tool to steer people in certain directions.

JC:  The question inevitably comes up mind: To what extent is this really a NATO organization? I mean, you’ve talked about these connections and the allegations made by Vinciguerra, but how much of this can be substantiated?

DG:  One thing is solid. We know for sure that these secret stay-behind armies were co-ordinated by NATO, because Italian Generals, who directed the secret armies, openly admitted that NATO had two branches that secretly co-ordinated those networks, the Allied Clandestine Committee and the Clandestine Planning Committee. These are substructures within NATO. People don’t understand that NATO is not a transparent organization. They think they can just call NATO and ask about Gladio, and the Press Officer will give them the information. That’s not the case; NATO is a military organization, and it guards its secrets very well. Here’s another point. On November 5, 1990, a NATO spokesman told an inquisitive press:

“NATO has never contemplated guerrilla war or clandestine operations.”

So, in 1990 when the scandal broke, NATO at first denied having any link to Operation Gladio. However, the following day NATO officials admitted that the previous day’s denial had been false, adding, however, that the alliance would not comment on matters of military secrecy. So, basically, NATO denied the existence of the stay-behind units, and then when enough countries said otherwise, they said: “Ah yes, but we can’t comment; it’s Top Secret.” Actually the CIA and MI6 did the same thing. When we (that is, our network of researchers who study secret warfare) asked NATO, the CIA and MI6: “Are you linked with terrorism?”, they replied: “No, we have nothing to do with terrorism. If anyone in the stay-behind network were linked to terrorism, that person would be a rogue agent with, perhaps, alcohol, moral or sexual problems.”

JC:  I suppose they can also hide behind a technicality: there’s ‘proper’ NATO and ‘hidden’ NATO, but since “NATO” refers only to ‘proper’ NATO, that means NATO has nothing to do with any of this; there’s no need for comment.

DG:  That’s it; that’s a good way of putting it. NATO ‘proper’ has nothing to do with terrorism, and ‘hidden’ NATO might be involved with terrorism. This is insane. Today, NATO says it’s fighting terrorism, but looking at NATO’s history since 1949, as an historian I have to say it’s not very clear. It looks as if NATO itself was linked to terrorism, and they don’t want to talk about it. So, the question remains: Is NATO still today linked to acts of terrorism? Do we have data to substantiate this? What are the facts? Because, there’s another story which I want to share with you about a French terrorist attack. Do we have time for this?

JC:  I wanted to ask you about that at the end, but please do tell us now.

DG:  In 1985 there was a terrorist attack carried out by the French. The French were carrying out atomic tests in the Pacific, and Greenpeace (the environmental NGO) was protesting by sailing their ship, Rainbow Warrior, right into the area where the French Ministry of Defence planned to explode their atomic weapons.

Unamused by this defiance, Paris decided to take retaliatory action and sent a group of agents from the French Military Secret Service (the DGSE, Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure, a secret service within the Defence Ministry able to carry out covert operations) to New Zealand where the ship was moored to blow it up. One Greenpeace member died in the attack. Once the story broke, Admiral Pierre Lacoste, then Director of the DGSE, was forced to step down, and since it was he who directed this terrorist operation one might call him a terrorist, although not in the sense we normally think.

Lacoste then claimed that, during the time that NATO’s stay-behind network operated in the ’60s and ’70s, terrorist action against then French President De Gaulle and his Algerian Peace Plan had been carried out by groups that included, and I quote, “a limited number of people from the French stay-behind network”. That is a very sensitive statement, because that means that a section of a country’s military or secret service can turn against its own Government. De Gaulle was intent on granting Algeria independence, to which the French military was opposed on the grounds that this could be seen as a humiliation, especially given their defeat in Vietnam and German occupation of France during WWII. So, they turned against De Gaulle with terrorism. Thus the problem was not limited to Italy. It’s intriguing to think that even within France there were rogue element conspiring to overthrow the Government.

JC:  Yes, the blowing up of Rainbow Warrior brings to mind Operation Northwoods. This morphing of Gladio (I’m saying ‘Gladio’ as a shorthand for this whole network) seems roughly to have coincided with the appointment of General Lyman Lemnitzer to the role of Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in 1963. Lemnitzer had served as Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff during the time when they submitted Operation Northwoods to President Kennedy, who thankfully rejected it. Do you think Northwoods has anything to tell us about this morphing of Gladio?

DG:  Oh yes, that is a very important and interesting point. Anyone not familiar with Operation Northwoods should search for it on the Internet and familiarise themselves with it, otherwise you simply cannot understand secret warfare. This goes back to the beginning of our conversation where we talked about the war between Washington and Havana.

As we said before, the CIA wanted to overthrow Fidel Castro with the so-called Bay of Pigs invasion in April of 1961. When that failed, Kennedy turned to the Pentagon to ask for a better plan to be rid of Castro. The Pentagon generals then sat down together and drew up a plan and now, more than fifty years later, we have this original document. At the time it was Top Secret, but today it is available. Lyman Lemnitzer was at the time the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

(For those not familiar with military hierarchies, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is the highest-ranking officer in the entire military, the boss as it were of the Pentagon, the US Defence Ministry. Above him is the Defence Minister, but he’s not an officer, he’s a civilian, and above him is the Vice-President and the President. That’s the chain of command.)

If you look at the ideas Lemnitzer came up with, then it is clear (despite some people’s disbelief) that military officers sometimes contemplate manipulating terrorism to achieve their ends. The document is dated March 13, 1962, and the Generals suggest:

A “Remember the Maine” incident could be arranged in several forms: We could blow up a US ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba.

Guantanamo is the US base where suspected Islamic terrorists are incarcerated today and about which there is this torture debate. But at that time they had American ships there, and they were saying: “We ourselves, could blow up a US ship and then say Fidel did it.” This sort of deviant thinking is false-flag, strategy-of-tension terror. Here’s another of their ideas:

We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington… exploding a few plastic bombs in carefully chosen spots, the arrest of Cuban agents and the release of prepared documents substantiating Cuban involvement also would be helpful in projecting the idea of an irresponsible government.

Let me just spell out the implications. This proves that Pentagon Generals planned to carry out terrorist attacks in Florida, in Washington and in Miami, and then blame them on Fidel Castro. (It’s not clear if people would have been killed in these attacks, but they suggest the events.) They then recommend arresting so-called Cuban ‘agents’, or whoever, claiming: “You did it”, followed by the release of fake documents, prepared and planted in advance,   to substantiate their claims.

JC:  And wasn’t there another suggestion about downing a passenger aircraft and then playing on people’s sympathies by saying: “Oh, it was full of young people on their way to do voluntary work, or something”?

DG:  Yes, true indeed; it’s on another page of the same document. It actually suggests flying a drone – an unnamed aircraft – over Cuba and detonating the bomb it’s carrying by remote control. Nobody would die, but they could claim it was a civilian aircraft full of young American women flying to Peru to help the undernourished poor, and that it had been downed by Fidel Castro. It would be a very emotional story. That is a vital component of false-flag terrorism: to shock the public, so that they become emotionally incapable of questioning the official narrative. After all, who would then say: “That’s probably a drone, blown up by remote control by the Pentagon”?

JC:  That, of course would be a ‘conspiracy theory’.

DG:  Oh yes, exactly, a ‘conspiracy theory’. And historians like me who research it would be called ‘conspiracy nuts’.

JC:  That’s right; but when the actual document comes out it’s a bit harder to say that.

DG:  It’s very hard; but then it’s fifty years on and who cares whether the ‘nuts’ are right or not?

JC:  Returning to Lemnitzer, he’s in charge of the group that suggests this, and then he becomes Head of NATO around the same time when these stay-behind armies start to morph into something much more hideous.

DG:  Yes, that’s right, and we must thank JFK that when he learned of Operation Northwoods, he rejected it. However, he then had the problem of what to do with this top general Lemnitzer, who was clearly nuts (in the sense that he planned terrorism in the US). Kennedy now suspected that the military-industrial-complex was more dangerous than he had realised, so he judged that he needed to move Lemnitzer sideways to another high position (maybe slightly lower) so that it wouldn’t look like a demotion. He came up with the idea of NATO Commander in Europe. A year later, in 1963, Kennedy was assassinated. Although it’s still unclear who killed him, we do know that he tried to confront what Eisenhower, in his farewell address, called the military-industrial-complex. (It’s no hoax, as some people think; the military-industrial-complex exists, and the documents of Operation Northwoods prove that it plans fabricated terrorist attacks.)

JC:  But it’s a piece of circumstantial evidence; it’s very suggestive, but it doesn’t amount to proof. It doesn’t actually prove NATO/PENTAGON/MI6/CIA involvement in the terror aspect of this. Do you agree?

DG:  We have to keep it apart. However, we do know for a fact that they were planning to carry out terrorism in the US in order to confront Cuba.

(I often have conversations with Europeans who say things like: “Well, I know US intelligence did nasty things in Iran to overthrow Mosaddegh in 1953, and in Chile to otherthrow Allende in 1973; but we’re talking here about the Persian Gulf and Latin America. Who cares about them? They’re all barbarians. The Americans would never do anything like that in Europe.”)

In addition, we also have General Giandelio Maletti, former head of the Italian counter-intelligence unit, who said at the Piazza Fontana trial in 2001 that American terrorism is a reality in Europe. He said this:

The CIA, following the directives of its government, wanted to create an Italian nationalism, capable of halting what it saw as a slide to the left, and, for this purpose, it may have made use of right-wing terrorism.

That’s his quote, and it’s scary. Maletti was a member of the Italian Secret Service. He was actually accused by fellow Italians of carrying out terrorism on his home ground against Italy’s own – mothers, children, the elderly. There were calls for him to be locked up. So, Maletti countered this by explaining that he was not to blame, because he was only acting on the orders of a global network. He also said that US President Nixon may have used of right-wing terrorism as a tool to fight communism. That’s what Maletti claimed. But for very hard for us, as historians, to establish the truth about this. In 1969, when this terrorist attack occurred, I wasn’t even born, so I just have to look at the data and ask the right questions.

JC:  Not all of the stay-behind armies were associated with terrorism. You list Turkey, Spain, Greece and Germany, but you say that some of the others stayed loyal to the original intention, quietly preparing for a possible Soviet invasion.

DG:  That’s true. For instance, there were no terrorist attacks in Norway, Switzerland or Austria. There was one, however, in Munich (Germany) in 1980. In fact there’s a huge debate going on right now in 2015. The Generalbundesanwalt [Public Prosecutor General] is re-examining the attack; he has re-opened the case that was abruptly closed by the death of the so-called “lone gunman” blowing himself up.

JC:  [Chuckles] That sounds familiar.

DG:  Familiar indeed. Where have we heard that before? Is it, perhaps, a bit like the two crazy guys who committed that crime in Paris, but who are now dead so they can’t be questioned? Whatever. What I wanted to say about the 1980 Munich affair was that the name of the lone gunman who blew himself up was Gundolf Köhler. And the interesting thing is that, at that time, Germany also had a secret stay-behind army. However, in 1981, a huge cache of armaments was unearthed, and some right-wing extremists claimed that they obtained the explosives for the Munich attack from this arms cache. (Explosives were a necessary part of a stay-behind army’s arsenal, needed for guerrilla warfare and blowing up key installations, etc.)

JC:  Presumably they need to be hidden somewhere, but in such a way that they can be accessed when necessary. But where’s the control over that?

DG:  That’s it; that’s exactly the point. Within a democratic system, you don’t want unaccountable caches of weapons and ammunition, and yet these were necessary components of the secret networks. Furthermore, in Germany, the intriguing thing is that NATO and the CIA recruited former Nazis into stay-behind army units as they were deemed suited to the job due to their hatred of the Russians. I think it was quite common.

JC:  Yes, incredible; I noticed that in the Francovich documentary, and I was astonished when the man in the film testified that this had actually happened.

DG:  My students are often puzzled by this. They find it difficult to understand that we should first fight the fascists and try them at Nuremberg, hanging some and persuading others to see the error or their ways, and then subsequently use them in this new war against communism. I have to concur.

JC:  And the answer is: because they were useful.

DG:  Yes, that’s the bottom line; they were useful. One of the more interesting ex-Nazis was General Reinhard Gehlen. He fought under Hitler, but at the end of the war, when he realised Hitler was losing, Gehlen switched to the Americans. Knowing him to have been an important general, the Americans then flew him to Washington where he met with US President Truman. There Gehlen was able, not only to ingratiate himself with the Americans by pulling the anti-Soviet card, but he was able to present himself as indispensable due to his in-depth knowledge of Germany. In fact he so impressed the Americans that they appointed him Director of the post-war German Secret Service, theBundesnachrichtendienst. It’s insane when you think about it. As a student when you first learn this, you wonder how it all adds up. First the allies defeat the Nazis, and then they promote them to top positions like head of the Secret Service. As you rightly point out, it boils down to utility; this happened because they were strategically usefulness.

JC:  It’s horrendous, but in an odd way it’s also funny. It reminds me of those James Bond films in which somebody says, “No, don’t kill them, they might be useful to us.” Ironically, it turns out to be true!

DG:  Yes! As a kid, I used to watch James Bond films; I thought they were wonderful. (I do have this fascination with special forces and secret services.) When you watch a Bond film and then switch to the BBC news, you think the two are worlds apart. In fact, however, everything in a Bond film is drawn from reality. There are differences though: for one thing, the story doesn’t square with real political analysis; for another, the idea that NATO is always the ‘good guy’ isn’t necessarily true, despite what we might like to think. The narrative lures us into thinking that we’re the ‘good guys’ and that the Soviets, or the Muslims, are ‘bad’, but sometimes it’s exactly the opposite; but people don’t like to hear that.

JC:  Much of what you say seems reminiscent of Operation Paperclip. Are you describing a similar policy here?

DG:  I don’t know much about that I’m afraid, so I can’t comment upon it.

JC:  I would like, finally, to ask you about is the strange organisation called the Propaganda Due Lodge, or the P2 Lodge, and this man called Licio Gelli. These seem to provide a window onto some of the control mechanisms that were in place at the time.

DG:  Yes, that brings us back to Italian politics. Licio Gelli was head of this Propaganda Due, and the odd things about it was that it’s members were people from the Italian Parliament, the Media, banking and industry. They met in secret, and essentially functioned as a parallel Government, controlling events in such a way as to ensure that the  communists never came to power. They would threaten journalists with the loss of their jobs should they ever print reports at variance with the P2’s agenda, or they might link up with criminals, or the Mafia, and get them to do their dirty work. Even Berlusconi was part of P2. Theirs is not the text-book democracy we are taught to believe, in which elected parliamentary representatives carry out the people’s wishes, the Executive Branch carries out the laws of Parliament, and, should anything go amiss, the Press is there to report on it and lay bare the facts before the people. I say, “Dream on; that’s for the birds!” If you look at history – real history – you very often find that power is abused by a very small minority who project the illusion that the people have a free press and a part in the power structure, whereas in fact you are dealing with an oligarchy. Oligoi is the Greek word for ‘just a few’, and I think that’s still true today. Those that control the international power game are the Few; and the Many – you, I and the listeners – may try to look behind the Curtain every now and again, but it will always be the Few that call the shots.

JC:   This organisation – which I understand was a Masonic lodge, although I’m not sure how it was related to the rest of Freemasonry –  was presumably also like the Mafia in some respects: manipulating people, blackmailing and so forth.

DG:  Yes, very corrupt.

JC:  Let me quote from your book. You describe Gladio as a “US-funded anti-Communist parallel government.” What evidence do we have that it was US-funded?

DG:  We do know that the Propaganda Due was US-funded, and we do know that Operation Gladio received US funding. The funny thing that’s apparent from these Italian documents is that the British offered to train these secret forces in guerrilla tactics, à la James Bond, on condition that the Italians buy British weapons. And then the cunning Italians, seeking to profit from both sides, argued that they should get their armaments from the Americans because they were free, but their training from the British because the quality was better. Many documents substantiate that throughout the Cold War Washington and London were determined to keep Italy solidly within the NATO camp. That meant keeping the Communist Party – which was very strong, and which controlled a fair proportion of the Italian Parliament – out of the government. Thus, when the Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro proposed bringing the Italian communists into the government, he was assassinated.

So, this whole idea that Europe was once unstable and violent, but since 1945 it has all been peace and transparency, is not exactly true. There were many terrorist incidents in Europe during the Cold War: politicians assassinated; right-wing dictatorships in Spain and Portugal; a military coup d’état in Greece; three military coupsin Turkey; terrorist attacks in Germany, Italy, France and Belgium. So, it’s rather superficial to view the European Union as a totally peaceful territory from 1945 onwards.

JC:  Yes. Let me return to the Propaganda Due Lodge and this interesting character Licio Gelli. In your book you say that he was well-respected by the Establishment, certainly in the US; and yet he also had a Nazi past.

DG:  Yes, he was like Gehlen: useful. If you think about it, Germany and Italy not only had Hitler and Mussolini as leaders, each had millions who supported them. So, obviously, after 1945 there were people who were still convinced that Mussolini and Hitler were right, and some of these people were considered useful and invited to the US and England to fight against the communists in Italy, Germany and other countries. Licio Gelli was invited by US Presidents, including Reagan; he played on a very high level, and nobody thought to say: “History shows this man to be directly linked to fascism.”

JC:  Yes, you have a few paragraphs linking some amazing facts about him. You say that he fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil war; he became a Sergeant Major in the SS under Hermann Goering; and yet (according to evidence you present) it seems that General Hague and Henry Kissinger authorised him in 1969 to recruit four hundred high-ranking Italian and NATO officers into this P2 Lodge.

DG:  Yes. If you still have the mindset that Washington would never co-operate with fascists, then obviously it’s difficult to wrap your mind around this. But once you abandon that belief, it’s easier to see the reality: geostrategic interests were key, and with communism as the new enemy it was considered necessary for American and British Secret Services to co-operate with fascists after 1945 in Germany, Italy and other countries. That’s basically the data that I have gleaned from my research into NATO’s secret armies. You’re absolutely right, though. If, today, you said to NATO, “I have a few questions for you: Did you ever cooperate with fascists? Were you linked to terrorism? Why did you set up secret armies without telling the populations?”, the NATO spokesman would just say: “That’s all conspiracy theory; we don’t respond to that.” NATO is not a transparent organization.

JC:  Earlier you mentioned Turkey. This fascinates me, because Sibel Edmonds maintains that Turkey was always a very important aspect of this. Indeed, I think she says that Turkey was the most important centre for Gladio-like operations. She characterises the Turkish paramilitary as being linked with the Turkish Mafia, heavily involved in drug smuggling, that it received training from NATO, and that it carried out false-flag attacks. Do you agree with that? Do you think that Turkey was perhaps even more important than the Italian Gladio scene?

DG:  I think Sibel Edmonds has done some good research on that. (I’ve never met her, I admit, but I’ve seen some of her YouTube videos.) The simple fact is, every researcher is limited by language barriers, and since she speaks Turkish, she is in a much better position to judge the situation in Turkey than I. However, we do know that during the Cold War Turkey had three military coups, and that the secret armies seem to have been involved.

Even with the Cold War over, there was still conflict within Turkey against the Kurds. Groups from the Grey Wolves and other groups from the Extreme Right were actively warring against part of the Turkish population, resulting in much loss of life. So yes, Turkey prompts a number of questions: What was NATO’s secret army doing in Turkey? Were they involved in the coups d’état? After all, with Turkey there is always this balance: it’s a member of a NATO, but it’s also a Muslim country. (People often forget this fact.) Turkey borders on Europe, the Middle East and Asia; so, historically-speaking, it has always been situated in two worlds.  It was therefore in NATO’s interests to have a strong Turkish military in charge there, and this military engaged at times in secret operations, which Sibel Edmonds correctly criticises.

I mean, consider the Susurluk incident. Members of the Turkish stay-behind and members of a drug cartel were discovered to have been travelling together in the same car when it was involved in an accident. As a result of this scandal breaking in the Media, it was felt that the Turkish military was out-of-control, and there was much debate about the so-called Deep State (the uncontrolled military-industrial-complex) in Turkey, which they call Ergenekon (although they other names for it too). So, this shows that they tried to discover if the military had links to false-flag terrorism. So yes, Turkey is a whole new chapter, and certainly an important one.

JC:  And Sibel Edmonds opens the “chapter” with the “heading” Gladio B, which I understand to be a kind of shift from false-flag activities with respect to left-wing groups in Western Europe, towards the manipulation of groups like the Mujahideen and Al-Qaeda. Do you think that’s a reasonable hypothesis?

DG:  It is a reasonably hypothesis. During the Cold War, Gladio was tasked with fighting communism, but with the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 this requirement was relegated to the history books. (Nobody’s fighting communism today. China’s a communist country [in name], but it has adapted magnificently to capitalism. Nobody cares much about North Korea, and Cuba is in transition. So, communism is no longer an issue today.) But what we do have today is Resource Wars: wars for oil and gas; and, obviously, the biggest resources – oil and gas – are in Muslim countries. If you look at Saudi Arabia – a Muslim country – it has huge oil resources. If you look at Iraq, which was attacked in 2003 (under the false pretext of having weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist), you have to ask: Why was that attack carried out? To my mind, it was because of its oil. So, maybe Sibel Edmonds is right. Maybe we now have false-flag Muslim terrorism, for the purposes of discrediting and justifying the bombing of Muslim countries. Maybe Western secret services support certain militant Muslims to carry out their attacks, because it helps to shock Europeans and Americans into a fear of Muslims.

If we consider together the Northwoods documents and the Gladio history, and project this modus operandi forward to our present day, we must ask: “Do we now live in an age in which Muslim terrorists are being supported by Western secret services? Are governments framing Muslims in order to justify NATO’s bombing of Muslim countries, as they once intended to frame the communists with Operation Northwoods?” (I can’t prove this, but I think it’s important for us to investigate.) To allow, cause, or support the premises behind such attacks, would be a State crime. Maybe that’s the situation we’re in; I don’t know.

JC:  So we might consider this Strategy of Tension as going hand-in-hand with the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine: first, you cause chaos through manipulating various groups; then, as a result of the humanitarian crisis, you claim justification for intervention, in order to ‘protect’ the people.

DG:  Yes, that’s one way of doing it. Another way is to create a demonstration in the public square, and then shoot and kill some of the demonstrators in order to blame the Government, with the sole purpose of toppling it. That was done in the Ukraine on February 21st, 2014 – something we all witnessed barely twelve months ago. Obviously, the question is: Who were the snipers? Today, thanks to researchers into secret warfare, we know that those snipers on the Maidan in Kiev killed both demonstrators and police.  Now, that’s strange. Researchers like me have to ask: Why would the acting President have his own policemen shot? (I don’t believe that; usually, they don’t do that.) And then, on that very day, the Government of Yanukovitch (the Moscow-friendly dictator or oligarch) fell, and was replaced by the new Government of Poroschenko (the Washington-friendly dictator or oligarch). These things are not in the distant past; they concern us today. Secret warfare has not stopped; it’s something we need to take into account most seriously when we consider international politics.

JC:  You mentioned in passing the Charlie Hebdo attack. Do you think that could reasonably be interpreted as a Gladio-like operation? Paul Craig Roberts has grave suspicions about it, although he not prepared to say that it was. What’s your reaction to it?

DG:  My reaction is that I have a lot of doubts. This terrorist attack was in two parts: One, the Charlie Hebdo offices; Two, the Jewish supermarket. (I’ll just address Charlie Hebdo, for the sake of clarity.) The official story is that two guys, who are masked so you can’t see who they are, kill twelve people and drive away. OK, it’s a simple story so far. But then (according to Swiss Media reports) they stop, change cars, and one of the killers leaves his identity card behind in the abandoned car. When I heard that I thought: “What a stupid mistake! That’s incredibly unprofessional.” It was claimed that the card belonged to Saïd Kouachi, one of two brothers, and so the Media immediately assumed that the second killer had to be his brother [Chérif Kouachi]. That’s a pretty flimsy conclusion. Saïd’s picture was then all over the news within twenty-four hours, being watched by people all over the world. As a consequence, the idea that Muslims are bad was reinforced, even though details of the attack were sketchy, simply on the basis of an ID. (Of course, Muslims, as a group, are not a bad people; nor are Christians, Jews, Hindus or atheists. Rather, the truth is that each religious group has criminals within it.) But now, with this attack in Paris, people have become suspicious of Muslims as a group  – without really understanding what happened – all because of the supposed evidence of this ID card. Then people can become emotional and say, “They killed twelve people! That’s insane!” [And it is], but we must also remember 2011, when NATO bombed Libya and killed thirty-thousand people. The majority of those were Muslims. Isn’t it amazing how people in Europe can rightly cry over one group, yet say of the other: “Oh yes, thirty-thousand people; that’s not a big deal”?

JC:  Yes, I find it difficult to take this ID business seriously. In fact, I was reminded of that scene in the film Minority Report in which incriminating photographs are implausibly spread across a bed for anyone to find easily, and it’s described as an “orgy of evidence”. This seems like another “orgy of evidence”, rather like the passport that “miraculously” escaped from the Twin Towers.

DG:  Yes, these are difficult topics for any researcher to cover. For instance, the 9/11 attack happened over thirteen years ago, and you would expect historians by this time to have reached a consensus as to what really happened. It was 9/11 that started this whole so-called War on Terror. It started this angry, fearful period in which we unfortunately live, with this idea that Muslims are terrorists, or dictators with weapons of mass destruction, who are out to kill us all. So, obviously, people such as I, who specialise in secret warfare, must look seriously into 9/11.

And when I did look into 9/11, I found that the collapse of the Third Tower, Building 7 [WTC7], is absolutely mysterious. People simply remember 9/11 as that moment when two airplanes crashed into high buildings in New York. I have many friends who say they even remember where they were on that day. I mean, it’s very rare in history that people should remember where they were.

JC:  I often consider 9/11, historically-speaking, to be the beginning of the 21st Century; perhaps a deep-state coup; the beginning of all these troubles; a step change into this new era. Do you see it as a deep-state coup?

DG:  It might well be, but I’m not sure what really happened. I can only speak from what I have observed. I know that this picture of two planes hitting these two building and the buildings coming down is incomplete. All those who have never bothered to look into 9/11, should consider seriously the fact that three buildings collapsed on that day in New York. (I know that some people say they are tired with hearing about 9/11, but this is important to consider.) Three skyscrapers went down when there were only two planes involved. How can two planes topple three buildings? Then, when you find out that WTC7 was never hit by a plane, you start to wonder: “Why, then, did it collapse?” Then you hear people from NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US, saying: “Well, it was fire that brought the building down.”

So, while I was working at ETH, a Swiss University, I asked experts in building construction and safety what they thought: “Do you believe that WTC7 was brought down by fires?” They replied: “Let’s see the evidence.” So, we discussed it. When they heard that WTC7 had eighty-one, really solid, steel columns, and that the NIST report claimed that Column 79 was destabilised by fire, they said: “That’s complete nonsense.”

JC:  Yes, we’ve had Kevin Ryan and Tony Szamboti on the programme, and they both insisted that NIST’s explanation is not technically feasible. Tony Szamboti even said that crucial elements were left out of the reports. [external PDF]

DG:  That’s it; and that troubles us as historians. I’m always trying to impress upon people that we historians work for the public, in the interests of the public; and we try to find out what happened on 9/11. First we had Bush and Cheney giving their version of events; but they’re politicians who lie a lot, so we can’t trust them. Then we had the 600-page-long 9/11 Commission Report which came out in 2004; but WTC7 doesn’t even get a mention, so we can’t use that either. So, then you have to consider the structure of the buildings and their safety features, and talk to architects and engineers. And then you discover that something is really wrong about 9/11. Now, while this rational intuition of wrongness is powerful, it doesn’t allow us to say for sure what sort of historical period we’re in. However, it does urge peace researchers to consider very seriously the subjects of false-flag terrorism and the manipulation of populations through fear.

JC:  Yes, indeed. In fact, people do seem to be becoming more aware of the term ‘false flag’. About the time of the Boston Marathon bombing, I think, a Google analysis suggested that people were searching for that term more than ever before. I see that as a positive sign that awareness on this matter is growing.

DG:  True indeed. People need the right language to enter new [conceptual] spaces. That’s been understood for a long time. If you don’t have the language to grasp a phenomenon, you’ll never understand it. If you only have the term ‘terrorism’, that will not get you very far; you need the term ‘false-flag terrorism’, which comes from the idea of raising your enemy’s flag in order to deceive. You also need the term ‘strategy of tension’, which means that it’s not only the murdered and injured who are victims of terrorism, but also those who observe the carnage and who are left in shock. They have tension inside them, which is actually the aim of the terrorist attack. After all, you can’t do much with the dead, but you can make those who witness terror, and who are in a state of shock, more willing to sacrifice their civil liberties.

JC:  Yes, it’s not just a combat operation; it’s also a psychological operation.

DG:  It is in essence a psychological operation, because that allows the authorities to say: “We need more money for defence, or to fight a war in Syria, or to bomb Libya or Iraq.” And people start to think: “Yes, maybe that’s a good idea because evil people live there”. This is war propaganda, and it has always followed this maxim: Enter the mind of the Home Front; because, ultimately, it’s the taxpayers who decide whether to leave or stay in NATO, or whether NATO should be enlarged, and other such questions.

JC:  Or if NATO should be audited (if that were even possible).

DG: Yes, that’s a good idea.

JC: Anyway, we’ve been talking about many dark things here, so let me ask: Do you see hope in this growth of public awareness about issues like this?

DG:  Yes, very much so. I’m glad you brought that up. When I teach my students, I always tell them that secret warfare is a very fascinating subject. However, when we consider the spiral of violence, it is only a very small minority of the world’s population that’s actively engaged in torture, terrorist attacks, and bombing other countries, etc. If you lump together all the people who are fighting in Ukraine, the Islamic State, the terrorists in Paris and New York, they are really very few in number, and yet they manage to keep us all worrying.

What I want to stress is this: My personal belief is that human beings are wonderful. Normal human beings are not about to kill you, behead you or blow you up. Not at all. Check among your friends. Who do you know who has raped somebody, or shot someone in the head? Who would find satisfaction in bombing or torturing somebody? When we think about our network of friends and family network, the vast majority of us will find nobody like this. The overwhelming majority of people simply want to get on with their lives, earn some money, listen to music, fall in love, lie on a beach. Humans beings are friendly. (We’re rather lazy actually; we like to relax!) Then they go and ruin it all, by shocking us with these terrorist attacks.

JC:  Yes, the element of shock is key to all this; and that’s produced through the manipulation of information. That being so, if people could gradually become more aware that these events are being manipulated by the Media, then we would be better able to say to ourselves: “No, I refuse to believe that this evil is characteristic of the whole world. OK, there’s been an atrocity, but I must remember that I may well be subject to manipulation too.” If enough people could become conscious of this, maybe its power might eventually disappear.

DG:  Yes, because we’re in the middle of a fight for our minds and hearts. So long as it’s possible to shock people into hate and fear, you can ask them: “Give me 5% of GDP for defence.” But with greater awareness people would be able to say: “No, I need money for my kids’ education, and I want better schools.” No doubt they would then say: “You can’t have better schools, because the terrorists are out there, and they’re going to kill you.” Then you would have the mental freedom to respond: “No, I don’t believe you. I won’t give money to the military-industrial-complex which has bombed Afghanistan for fourteen years. What good have you done there? Show me your record. What good have you done in Libya? It’s a total mess. Look at Iraq! That’s another mess.” So, I think people are waking up and using their heads. But the problem is, the mainstream media is not good at taking a critical look at NATO and manipulated terrorism. Unfortunately, they usually offer a very superficial narrative; and that’s quite scary.

JC:  Well, thank heavens we have the alternative media, and I’m very glad that you’ve been able to come on today to talk on this very small corner of the alternative media, Dr. Ganser. It’s been great to have you on. I’ve been looking forward to this interview for quite some time, because unfortunately we had to postpone it a number of times for one reason or another.

DG:  Yes, it’s been so busy. But now we’ve taken the time, and I think we managed to cover the subject in considerable detail. So, I hope your that listeners will profit from it, and that they will read more about it, while keeping an open and peaceful mind. And remember, the world is not an evil place.

JC:  Yes, it’s been a wonderful interview, you’ve given us masses of information, and, to echo what you say, I do hope people will follow up on this. So, finally, thank you very much indeed for agreeing to spend your valuable time with us today.

DG:  Thank you, Julian Charles. Good luck to you.

JC:  Thank you.

DG:  Ciao Julian!

JC:  Bye-bye.

Images:

• “Andreotti 1991.jpg” [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons
• “Office of Strategic Services Insignia.svg.jpg” [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons; “Stragedibologna-2.jpg” by Beppe Briguglio, Patrizia Pulga, Medardo Pedrini, Marco Vaccari (www.stragi.it/) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] via Wikimedia Commons
• “RainbowWarriorAmsterdam1981.jpg” by Hans van Dijk (ANEFO) (GaHetNa (Nationaal Archief NL)) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
• “Lyman_L._Lemnitzer.jpg” [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons
• “Reinhard_Gehlen_1945.jpg” by US Army, Signal Corps ([1] [2]) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
• “Licio_Gelli_in_paramenti.jpg” [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons (see page for author)
• “Saïd Kouachi.jpg” [public domain] via Wikimedia Commons

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

Our shoddy thinking about the brain has deep historical roots, but the invention of computers in the 1940s got us especially confused. For more than half a century now, psychologists, linguists, neuroscientists and other experts on human behaviour have been asserting that the human brain works like a computer.

To see how vacuous this idea is, consider the brains of babies. Thanks to evolution, human neonates, like the newborns of all other mammalian species, enter the world prepared to interact with it effectively. A baby’s vision is blurry, but it pays special attention to faces, and is quickly able to identify its mother’s. It prefers the sound of voices to non-speech sounds, and can distinguish one basic speech sound from another. We are, without doubt, built to make social connections.

A healthy newborn is also equipped with more than a dozen reflexes – ready-made reactions to certain stimuli that are important for its survival. It turns its head in the direction of something that brushes its cheek and then sucks whatever enters its mouth. It holds its breath when submerged in water. It grasps things placed in its hands so strongly it can nearly support its own weight. Perhaps most important, newborns come equipped with powerful learning mechanisms that allow them to change rapidly so they can interact increasingly effectively with their world, even if that world is unlike the one their distant ancestors faced.

Senses, reflexes and learning mechanisms – this is what we start with, and it is quite a lot, when you think about it. If we lacked any of these capabilities at birth, we would probably have trouble surviving.

But here is what we are not born with: information, data, rules, software, knowledge, lexicons, representations, algorithms, programs, models, memories, images, processors, subroutines, encoders, decoders, symbols, or buffers – design elements that allow digital computers to behave somewhat intelligently. Not only are we not born with such things, we also don’t develop them – ever.

We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don’t create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don’t retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

Computers, quite literally, process information – numbers, letters, words, formulas, images. The information first has to be encoded into a format computers can use, which means patterns of ones and zeroes (‘bits’) organised into small chunks (‘bytes’). On my computer, each byte contains 8 bits, and a certain pattern of those bits stands for the letter d, another for the letter o, and another for the letter g. Side by side, those three bytes form the word dog. One single image – say, the photograph of my cat Henry on my desktop – is represented by a very specific pattern of a million of these bytes (‘one megabyte’), surrounded by some special characters that tell the computer to expect an image, not a word.

Computers, quite literally, move these patterns from place to place in different physical storage areas etched into electronic components. Sometimes they also copy the patterns, and sometimes they transform them in various ways – say, when we are correcting errors in a manuscript or when we are touching up a photograph. The rules computers follow for moving, copying and operating on these arrays of data are also stored inside the computer. Together, a set of rules is called a ‘program’ or an ‘algorithm’. A group of algorithms that work together to help us do something (like buy stocks or find a date online) is called an ‘application’ – what most people now call an ‘app’.

Forgive me for this introduction to computing, but I need to be clear: computers really do operate on symbolic representations of the world. They really store and retrieve. They really process. They really have physical memories. They really are guided in everything they do, without exception, by algorithms.

Humans, on the other hand, do not – never did, never will. Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?

In his book In Our Own Image (2015), the artificial intelligence expert George Zarkadakis describes six different metaphors people have employed over the past 2,000 years to try to explain human intelligence.

In the earliest one, eventually preserved in the Bible, humans were formed from clay or dirt, which an intelligent god then infused with its spirit. That spirit ‘explained’ our intelligence – grammatically, at least.

The invention of hydraulic engineering in the 3rd century BCE led to the popularity of a hydraulic model of human intelligence, the idea that the flow of different fluids in the body – the ‘humours’ – accounted for both our physical and mental functioning. The hydraulic metaphor persisted for more than 1,600 years, handicapping medical practice all the while.

By the 1500s, automata powered by springs and gears had been devised, eventually inspiring leading thinkers such as René Descartes to assert that humans are complex machines. In the 1600s, the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical motions in the brain. By the 1700s, discoveries about electricity and chemistry led to new theories of human intelligence – again, largely metaphorical in nature. In the mid-1800s, inspired by recent advances in communications, the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared the brain to a telegraph.

The mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’, drawing parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain

Each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of the era that spawned it. Predictably, just a few years after the dawn of computer technology in the 1940s, the brain was said to operate like a computer, with the role of physical hardware played by the brain itself and our thoughts serving as software. The landmark event that launched what is now broadly called ‘cognitive science’ was the publication of Language and Communication (1951) by the psychologist George Miller. Miller proposed that the mental world could be studied rigorously using concepts from information theory, computation and linguistics.

This kind of thinking was taken to its ultimate expression in the short book The Computer and the Brain (1958), in which the mathematician John von Neumann stated flatly that the function of the human nervous system is ‘prima facie digital’. Although he acknowledged that little was actually known about the role the brain played in human reasoning and memory, he drew parallel after parallel between the components of the computing machines of the day and the components of the human brain.

Propelled by subsequent advances in both computer technology and brain research, an ambitious multidisciplinary effort to understand human intelligence gradually developed, firmly rooted in the idea that humans are, like computers, information processors. This effort now involves thousands of researchers, consumes billions of dollars in funding, and has generated a vast literature consisting of both technical and mainstream articles and books. Ray Kurzweil’s book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed (2013), exemplifies this perspective, speculating about the ‘algorithms’ of the brain, how the brain ‘processes data’, and even how it superficially resembles integrated circuits in its structure.

The information processing (IP) metaphor of human intelligence now dominates human thinking, both on the street and in the sciences. There is virtually no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour that proceeds without employing this metaphor, just as no form of discourse about intelligent human behaviour could proceed in certain eras and cultures without reference to a spirit or deity. The validity of the IP metaphor in today’s world is generally assumed without question.

But the IP metaphor is, after all, just another metaphor – a story we tell to make sense of something we don’t actually understand. And like all the metaphors that preceded it, it will certainly be cast aside at some point – either replaced by another metaphor or, in the end, replaced by actual knowledge.

Just over a year ago, on a visit to one of the world’s most prestigious research institutes, I challenged researchers there to account for intelligent human behaviour without reference to any aspect of the IP metaphor. They couldn’t do it, and when I politely raised the issue in subsequent email communications, they still had nothing to offer months later. They saw the problem. They didn’t dismiss the challenge as trivial. But they couldn’t offer an alternative. In other words, the IP metaphor is ‘sticky’. It encumbers our thinking with language and ideas that are so powerful we have trouble thinking around them.

The faulty logic of the IP metaphor is easy enough to state. It is based on a faulty syllogism – one with two reasonable premises and a faulty conclusion. Reasonable premise #1: all computers are capable of behaving intelligently. Reasonable premise #2: all computers are information processors. Faulty conclusion: all entities that are capable of behaving intelligently are information processors.

Setting aside the formal language, the idea that humans must be information processors just because computers are information processors is just plain silly, and when, some day, the IP metaphor is finally abandoned, it will almost certainly be seen that way by historians, just as we now view the hydraulic and mechanical metaphors to be silly.

If the IP metaphor is so silly, why is it so sticky? What is stopping us from brushing it aside, just as we might brush aside a branch that was blocking our path? Is there a way to understand human intelligence without leaning on a flimsy intellectual crutch? And what price have we paid for leaning so heavily on this particular crutch for so long? The IP metaphor, after all, has been guiding the writing and thinking of a large number of researchers in multiple fields for decades. At what cost?

In a classroom exercise I have conducted many times over the years, I begin by recruiting a student to draw a detailed picture of a dollar bill – ‘as detailed as possible’, I say – on the blackboard in front of the room. When the student has finished, I cover the drawing with a sheet of paper, remove a dollar bill from my wallet, tape it to the board, and ask the student to repeat the task. When he or she is done, I remove the cover from the first drawing, and the class comments on the differences.

Because you might never have seen a demonstration like this, or because you might have trouble imagining the outcome, I have asked Jinny Hyun, one of the student interns at the institute where I conduct my research, to make the two drawings. Here is her drawing ‘from memory’ (notice the metaphor):

And here is the drawing she subsequently made with a dollar bill present:

Jinny was as surprised by the outcome as you probably are, but it is typical. As you can see, the drawing made in the absence of the dollar bill is horrible compared with the drawing made from an exemplar, even though Jinny has seen a dollar bill thousands of times.

What is the problem? Don’t we have a ‘representation’ of the dollar bill ‘stored’ in a ‘memory register’ in our brains? Can’t we just ‘retrieve’ it and use it to make our drawing?

Obviously not, and a thousand years of neuroscience will never locate a representation of a dollar bill stored inside the human brain for the simple reason that it is not there to be found.

The idea that memories are stored in individual neurons is preposterous: how and where is the memory stored in the cell?

A wealth of brain studies tells us, in fact, that multiple and sometimes large areas of the brain are often involved in even the most mundane memory tasks. When strong emotions are involved, millions of neurons can become more active. In a 2016 study of survivors of a plane crash by the University of Toronto neuropsychologist Brian Levine and others, recalling the crash increased neural activity in ‘the amygdala, medial temporal lobe, anterior and posterior midline, and visual cortex’ of the passengers.

The idea, advanced by several scientists, that specific memories are somehow stored in individual neurons is preposterous; if anything, that assertion just pushes the problem of memory to an even more challenging level: how and where, after all, is the memory stored in the cell?

So what is occurring when Jinny draws the dollar bill in its absence? If Jinny had never seen a dollar bill before, her first drawing would probably have not resembled the second drawing at all. Having seen dollar bills before, she was changed in some way. Specifically, her brain was changed in a way that allowed her to visualise a dollar bill – that is, to re-experience seeing a dollar bill, at least to some extent.

The difference between the two diagrams reminds us that visualising something (that is, seeing something in its absence) is far less accurate than seeing something in its presence. This is why we’re much better at recognising than recalling. When we re-member something (from the Latin re, ‘again’, and memorari, ‘be mindful of’), we have to try to relive an experience; but when we recognise something, we must merely be conscious of the fact that we have had this perceptual experience before.

Perhaps you will object to this demonstration. Jinny had seen dollar bills before, but she hadn’t made a deliberate effort to ‘memorise’ the details. Had she done so, you might argue, she could presumably have drawn the second image without the bill being present. Even in this case, though, no image of the dollar bill has in any sense been ‘stored’ in Jinny’s brain. She has simply become better prepared to draw it accurately, just as, through practice, a pianist becomes more skilled in playing a concerto without somehow inhaling a copy of the sheet music.

From this simple exercise, we can begin to build the framework of a metaphor-free theory of intelligent human behaviour – one in which the brain isn’t completely empty, but is at least empty of the baggage of the IP metaphor.

As we navigate through the world, we are changed by a variety of experiences. Of special note are experiences of three types: (1) we observewhat is happening around us (other people behaving, sounds of music, instructions directed at us, words on pages, images on screens); (2) we are exposed to the pairing of unimportant stimuli (such as sirens) with important stimuli (such as the appearance of police cars); (3) we are punished or rewarded for behaving in certain ways.

We become more effective in our lives if we change in ways that are consistent with these experiences – if we can now recite a poem or sing a song, if we are able to follow the instructions we are given, if we respond to the unimportant stimuli more like we do to the important stimuli, if we refrain from behaving in ways that were punished, if we behave more frequently in ways that were rewarded.

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

A few years ago, I asked the neuroscientist Eric Kandel of Columbia University – winner of a Nobel Prize for identifying some of the chemical changes that take place in the neuronal synapses of the Aplysia (a marine snail) after it learns something – how long he thought it would take us to understand how human memory works. He quickly replied: ‘A hundred years.’ I didn’t think to ask him whether he thought the IP metaphor was slowing down neuroscience, but some neuroscientists are indeed beginning to think the unthinkable – that the metaphor is not indispensable.

A few cognitive scientists – notably Anthony Chemero of the University of Cincinnati, the author of Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (2009) – now completely reject the view that the human brain works like a computer. The mainstream view is that we, like computers, make sense of the world by performing computations on mental representations of it, but Chemero and others describe another way of understanding intelligent behaviour – as a direct interaction between organisms and their world.

My favourite example of the dramatic difference between the IP perspective and what some now call the ‘anti-representational’ view of human functioning involves two different ways of explaining how a baseball player manages to catch a fly ball – beautifully explicated by Michael McBeath, now at Arizona State University, and his colleagues in a 1995 paper in Science. The IP perspective requires the player to formulate an estimate of various initial conditions of the ball’s flight – the force of the impact, the angle of the trajectory, that kind of thing – then to create and analyse an internal model of the path along which the ball will likely move, then to use that model to guide and adjust motor movements continuously in time in order to intercept the ball.

That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.

We will never have to worry about a human mind going amok in cyberspace, and we will never achieve immortality through downloading

Two determined psychology professors at Leeds Beckett University in the UK – Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka – include the baseball example among many others that can be looked at simply and sensibly outside the IP framework. They have been blogging for years about what they call a ‘more coherent, naturalised approach to the scientific study of human behaviour… at odds with the dominant cognitive neuroscience approach’. This is far from a movement, however; the mainstream cognitive sciences continue to wallow uncritically in the IP metaphor, and some of the world’s most influential thinkers have made grand predictions about humanity’s future that depend on the validity of the metaphor.

One prediction – made by the futurist Kurzweil, the physicist Stephen Hawking and the neuroscientist Randal Koene, among others – is that, because human consciousness is supposedly like computer software, it will soon be possible to download human minds to a computer, in the circuits of which we will become immensely powerful intellectually and, quite possibly, immortal. This concept drove the plot of the dystopian movie Transcendence (2014) starring Johnny Depp as the Kurzweil-like scientist whose mind was downloaded to the internet – with disastrous results for humanity.

Fortunately, because the IP metaphor is not even slightly valid, we will never have to worry about a human mind going amok in cyberspace; alas, we will also never achieve immortality through downloading. This is not only because of the absence of consciousness software in the brain; there is a deeper problem here – let’s call it the uniqueness problem – which is both inspirational and depressing.

Because neither ‘memory banks’ nor ‘representations’ of stimuli exist in the brain, and because all that is required for us to function in the world is for the brain to change in an orderly way as a result of our experiences, there is no reason to believe that any two of us are changed the same way by the same experience. If you and I attend the same concert, the changes that occur in my brain when I listen to Beethoven’s 5th will almost certainly be completely different from the changes that occur in your brain. Those changes, whatever they are, are built on the unique neural structure that already exists, each structure having developed over a lifetime of unique experiences.

This is why, as Sir Frederic Bartlett demonstrated in his book Remembering(1932), no two people will repeat a story they have heard the same way and why, over time, their recitations of the story will diverge more and more. No ‘copy’ of the story is ever made; rather, each individual, upon hearing the story, changes to some extent – enough so that when asked about the story later (in some cases, days, months or even years after Bartlett first read them the story) – they can re-experience hearing the story to some extent, although not very well (see the first drawing of the dollar bill, above).

This is inspirational, I suppose, because it means that each of us is truly unique, not just in our genetic makeup, but even in the way our brains change over time. It is also depressing, because it makes the task of the neuroscientist daunting almost beyond imagination. For any given experience, orderly change could involve a thousand neurons, a million neurons or even the entire brain, with the pattern of change different in every brain.

Worse still, even if we had the ability to take a snapshot of all of the brain’s 86 billion neurons and then to simulate the state of those neurons in a computer, that vast pattern would mean nothing outside the body of the brain that produced it. This is perhaps the most egregious way in which the IP metaphor has distorted our thinking about human functioning. Whereas computers do store exact copies of data – copies that can persist unchanged for long periods of time, even if the power has been turned off – the brain maintains our intellect only as long as it remains alive. There is no on-off switch. Either the brain keeps functioning, or we disappear. What’s more, as the neurobiologist Steven Rose pointed out in The Future of the Brain (2005), a snapshot of the brain’s current state might also be meaningless unless we knew the entire life history of that brain’s owner – perhaps even about the social context in which he or she was raised.

Think how difficult this problem is. To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, the neuroscientist Kenneth Miller suggested it will take ‘centuries’ just to figure out basic neuronal connectivity.)

Meanwhile, vast sums of money are being raised for brain research, based in some cases on faulty ideas and promises that cannot be kept. The most blatant instance of neuroscience gone awry, documented recently in a report in Scientific American, concerns the $1.3 billion Human Brain Project launched by the European Union in 2013. Convinced by the charismatic Henry Markram that he could create a simulation of the entire human brain on a supercomputer by the year 2023, and that such a model would revolutionise the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease and other disorders, EU officials funded his project with virtually no restrictions. Less than two years into it, the project turned into a ‘brain wreck’, and Markram was asked to step down.

We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage. The IP metaphor has had a half-century run, producing few, if any, insights along the way. The time has come to hit the DELETE key.

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Robert Epstein is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California. He is the author of 15 books, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. 

“In Goodbye, Europe? Michael Springmann shows his grasp of how American military, economic, diplomatic, cultural, surveillance, technological, and vast “intelligence” resources comprise an integrated colossus using false flag ops, Trojan Horse fronts, incessant propaganda campaigns, and overt strong-arming.” – Barrie Zwicker [1]

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According to its June 25th, 2018 report, the United Nations Refugee Agency recorded the following sobering statistics.

• By the end of 2017, 68.5 million persons had been forcibly displaced worldwide as a result of persecution, conflict, or generalized violence, a record high and an increase of 2.9 million over 2016.
• In 2017, more than two-thirds (68 per cent) of all refugees worldwide came from just five countries: Syrian Arab Republic (6.3 million), Afghanistan (2.6 million), South Sudan (2.4 million), Myanmar (1.2 million), and Somalia (986,400)
• Since 2007, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide increased by over 50 per cent.
• Refugee movements to Germany in 2015 and 2016 resulted in a dramatic increase in Germany;s refugee population in 2017 (45 per cent.)
• Turkey hosts the largest number of refugees world-wide, with its refugee population having increased by 21 per cent to 3.5 million (overwhelmingly from the Syrian Arab Republic).
• Germany, has been the main European destination for asylum seekers since 2015. With a jump from 173,100 in 2014 to 441,900 in 2015, and then another giant leap to 722,400 in 2016.

The international community has been sensitized to the plight of these migrants, particularly in the wake of shocking humanitarian tragedies of failed voyages across the Mediterranean Sea to points of harbour in Europe.

The determination to provide sanctuary to such vulnerable populations is understandable, and responsible. But it is also arguably destabilizing, as host countries struggle to provide social services to those who, at least temporarily, require housing, language services, health care (including trauma treatment) and some form of basic income for populations not compliant with the skills to land lucrative employment.

A backlash against these migrants is becoming apparent across Europe, and the rise of right wing anti-immigrant sentiment is manifesting in the rise of formerly marginal right wing parties.

J Michael Springmann is the author of Good-Bye Europe? Hello Chaos? Merkel’s Migrant Bomb. In this book, published a year ago, Springmann postulates that the explosion of migrants over the last decade is not only a predictable consequence of America’s Global War on Terrorism (GWOT), it is also a deliberate strategy of destabilization to fulfill political and economic ends.

The Global Research News Hour dedicates this program, the last of its regular season, to this alternative perspective on the Europe’s migrant and refugee challenges.

In advance of our exclusive interview with Springmann, the Global Research News Hour also interviews frequent guest Barrie Zwicker, who authored a review article of Springmann’s book. Zwicker helps introduce both Springmann and the main theme of the book as he sees it.

J Michael Springmann is a former U.S. State Department official having served as a diplomat in the Foreign Service with postings in Germany, India, and Saudi Arabia. He previously authored , Visas for Al Qaeda: CIA Handouts That Rocked the World: An Insider’s View recounting his experiences observing officials granting travel visas to unqualified individuals. He currently practices law in the Washington D.C. Area.

Barrie Zwicker is a veteran broadcast and print journalist and media critic based in the Toronto area. He is the author of the 2006 book Towers of Deception: The Media Cover-up of 9/11. He is also the author of a 2017 review of Springmann’s latest book for Truth and Shadows.

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

Community Radio Stations carrying the Global Research News Hour:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes:

1. https://www.globalresearch.ca/refugee-crisis-manufactured-migrants-are-tools-in-u-s-empires-grand-chessboard/5596706

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Title: Goodbye, Europe? Hello, Chaos?: Merkel’s Migrant Bomb

Author: J. Michael Springmann

Publisher: Daena Publications LLC; 1 edition (May 31, 2017)

Publication Date: May 31, 2017

ISBN: 0990926222

List Price: $20.00

Click here to order.

The UN Security Council selected, unelected but anointed Libyan government in Tripoli (the GNA) rejects the elected parliament in Tobruk’s decision announced by Field Marshall Haftar, to now keep funds of oil sales and not send such funds to Tripoli, after the victory of Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in retaking the oil crescent. 

When will the West stop interfering in Libya?

While Mexico’s romance with neoliberalism has lasted for almost 40 years, some think Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, better known as AMLO for his initials, who will very likely win Mexico’s upcoming presidential elections on July 1, represents the possibility for an alternative economic model. A much-needed alternative given Mexico’s entrenched inequality.

Lopez Obrador’s perceived anti-neoliberalism is rooted in the fact that he has promised voters to halt the wave of privatization unleashed by Enrique Peña Nieto’s Energy Reform.

“We will fight to put an end on the privatization of Pemex, the electric industry and our cultural patrimony,” AMLO political program reads.

In 2014, Peña Nieto’s reform ended almost over seven decades of state ownership over Mexico’s mineral and oil resources. Instead of bringing about an increase in fuel production, by 2016 Mexico became a net importer of United States-produced gasoline, leading to fuel prices increase and nationwide protests erupted.

Civil society organizations denounced the energy reform for hampering access to information and participation, highlighting that the Mexican government’s profits from the state-owned company would now go to private companies.

The reform had other dire effects. Just in 2015, Pemex fired almost 15,000 workers.

Lopez Obrador has vowed not only to stop bidding processes but also to review big infrastructure contracts with the commitment to reverse them in cases where corruption can be proved.

In a recent political rally in Merida, capital of the coastal province of Yucatan, which relies heavily on tourism, AMLO told his followers

“we will no longer open bidding processes, we will not hand out… the sea on the Peninsula of Yucatan. We will issue licenses on the coast and the sea of Yucatan.”

Mexico’s neoliberal tale is defined by waves of privatization and adherence to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the late eighties and the infamous North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in the mid-nineties.

For over three decades, every president after Miguel de la Madrid (1982 – 1988) has applied neoliberal economic policies, furthering the liberalization of financial markets and trade, and promoting the privatization of almost every important economic sector, from the iron and steel industry and banking in the eighties and nineties, to the most recent Energy Reform.

These policies have not translated into better living conditions for the many, but rather higher concentration of wealth that benefits for the few. According to Oxfam, in 2015,

“the 10 richest people in the country [Mexico] accumulate the same wealth as the poorest 50 percent.”

In this scenario, Mexicans will choose between candidates Ricardo Anaya and Jose Antonio Meade, who represent a continuation of an unchecked neoliberal model and AMLO, who is willing to put a stop to the privatizing mania that has ruled Mexico for decades.

Although not revolutionary, AMLO’s political platform puts forth specific reforms in social policy and a greater role of the state in strategic economic sectors. He has vowed to increase the minimum wage to levels that guarantee access to the basic basket, and supports the establishment of a universal public health and education system.

Obrador has also vowed to respect the San Andres Accords signed between the Zapatista Army of National Liberation and the Mexican government in 1996. The accords guarantee Indigenous peoples their right to control and manage their territories and resources and to be consulted on big infrastructure projects that could affect them.

He has also publicly opposed Peña Nieto’s controversial Law of Internal Security, which human rights advocates could lead to more state violence and crimes by giving military forces a role over internal, civilian security in a country where state security forces are directly linked to massacres, rapes and disappearances.

However, there are legitimate doubts about Lopez Obrador’s capacity to undermine the break with Mexico’s four decades of neoliberal dogma.

This January Royal Dutch Shell won nine licenses in the Gulf of Mexico. In February, AMLO’s top business adviser and future chief of staff, Alfonso Romo, assured Bloomberg news

“there won’t be any legal violation or anything else that would disrupt investor confidence… What we’ve seen from the bidding process is that they’re very good for the country, they’re well done, and up until today we have no complaints.”

Also, critics point to Carlos Urzua, AMLO’s pick for secretary of finance and public credit, who has tried to appease investors and insurance companies, affirming that AMLO will respect the autonomy of Mexico’s Central Bank.

AMLO has also announced he will appoint a former World Bank and World Trade Organization economist as head of the team renegotiating NAFTA.

Despite causes for concern, Lopez Obrador has nevertheless promised to end tax privileges that “deepen social inequality.” AMLO’s program clearly states:

“Big corporations and the country’s wealthy must pay more.”

Other left-leaning voters complain that AMLO has avoided issues like the legalization of abortion and marriage equality. When asked about this, he has answered saying he would call for public referendums so the people of Mexico can decide on these issues, which continue to stir controversy in the Central American country.

He has also been criticized for forging an electoral alliance with a socially conservative evangelical Christian party, Social Encounter Party.

However, there is hope that an AMLO government paired with vital social movements could help Mexico fight neoliberal predominance.

In a recent interview with teleSUR, professor and social movements expert Massimo Modonesi explained that the only possibility to combat the dominance of right-wing neoliberal dogma in Mexico’s current political scenario is a “reformist government in terms of not excessively neoliberal capitalism with a reactivation of anti-capitalist social and popular movements.”

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Featured image is from Myzikk International.

Among the ruling interests in the US, one interest even more powerful than the Israel Lobby—the Deep State of the military/security complex— there is enormous fear that an uncontrollable President Trump at the upcoming Putin/Trump summit will make an agreement that will bring to an end the demonizing of Russia that serves to protect the enormous budget and power of the military-security complex.

You can see the Deep State’s fear in the editorials that the Deep State handed to the Washington Post (June 29) and New York Times (June 29), two of the Deep State’s megaphones, but no longer believed by the vast majority of the American people.  The two editorials share the same points and phrases.  They repeat the disproven lies about Russia as if blatant, obvious lies are hard facts.

Both accuse President Trump of “kowtowing to the Kremlin.”  Kowtowing, of course, is not a Donald Trump characteristic.  But once again fact doesn’t get in the way of the propaganda spewed by the WaPo and NYT, two megaphones of Deep State lies.

The Deep State editorial handed to the WaPo reads:

“THE REASONS for the tension between the United States and Russia are well-established. Russia seized Crimea from Ukraine, instigated a war in eastern Ukraine, intervened to save the dictatorship of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, interfered in the U.S. presidential election campaign to harm Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, poisoned a former intelligence officer on British soil and continues to meddle in the elections of other democracies.”

The WaPo’s opening paragraph is a collection of all the blatant lies assembled by the Deep State for its Propaganda Ministry.  There have been many books written about the CIA’s infiltration of the US media.  There is no doubt about it.  I remember my orientation as Staff Associate, House Defense Appropriation Subcommittee, when I was informed that the Washington Post is a CIA asset.  This was in 1975. Today the Post is owned by a person with government contracts that many believe sustain his front business.

And don’t forget Udo Ulfkotte, an editor of the  Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, who wrote in his best seller, Bought Journalism, that there was not a significant journalist in Europe who was not on the CIA’s payroll. The English language edition of Ulfkotte’s book has been suppressed and prevented from publication.

The New York Times, which last told the truth in the 1970s when it published the leaked Pentagon Papers and had the fortitude to stand up for its First Amendment rights, repeats the lies about Putin’s “seizure of Crimea and attack on Ukraine” along with all the totally unstantiated BS about Russia interferring in the US president election and electing Trump, who now kowtows to Putin in order to serve Russia instead of the US. The editorial handed to the NYT insinuates that Trump is a threat to the national security of America and its allies (vassals). The problem, the NYT declares, is that Trump is not listening to his advisors.

Shades of President John F. Kennedy, who did not listen to the CIA and Joint Chiefs of Staff about invading Cuba, nuking the Soviet Union, and using the false flag attack on America of the Joint Chiefs’ Northwoods Project (look it up online).  Is the New York Times setting up Trump for assassination on the grounds that he is lovely-dovey with Russia and sacrificing US national interests?

I would bet on it.

While the Washington Post and New York Times are telling us that if Trump meets with Putin, Trump will sell out US national security, The Saker says that Putin finds himself in a similar box, only it doesn’t come from the national security interest, but from the Russian Fifth Column, the Atlanticist Integrationists whose front man is the Russian Prime Minister Medvedev, who represents the rich Russian elite whose wealth is based on stolen assets during the Yeltsin years enabled by Washington.  These elites, The Saker concludes, impose constraints on Putin that put Russian sovereignty at risk. Economically, it is more important to these elites for financial reasons to be part of Washington’s empire than to be a sovereign country.

I find The Saker’s explanation the best I have read of the constraints on Putin that limit his ability to represent Russian national interests.

I have often wondered why Putin didn’t have the security force round up these Russian traitors and execute them.  The answer is that Putin believes in the rule of law, and he knows that Russia’s US financed and supported Fifth Column cannot be eliminated without bloodshed that is inconsistent with the rule of law.  For Putin, the rule of law is as important as Russia.  So, Russia hangs in the balance.  It is my view that the Russian Fifth Column could care less about the rule of law.  They only care about money.

As challenged as Putin might be, Chris Hedges, one of the surviving great American journalists, who is not always right but when he is he is incisive, explains the situation faced by the American people.  It is beyond correction.  American civil liberties and prosperity appear to be lost.

In my opinion, Hedges leftwing leanings caused him to focus on Reagan’s rhetoric rather that on Reagan’s achievements—the two greatest of our time—the end of stagflation, which benefited the American people, and the end of the Cold War, which removed the theat of nuclear war.  I think Hedges also does not appreciate Trump’s sincerety about normalizing relations with Russia, relations destroyed by the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes, and Trump’s sincerety about bringing offshored jobs home to American workers. Trump’s agenda puts him up against the two most powerful interest groups in the United States.  A president willing to take on these powerful groups should be appreciated and supported, as Hedges acknowledges the dispossessed majority do.  If I might point out to Chris, whom I admire, it is not like Chris Hedges to align against the choice of the people.  How can democracy work if people don’t rule?

Hedges writes, correctly,

“The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we [the American people] don’t count.”

Hedges is absolutely correct.

It is impossible not to admire a journalist like Hedges who can describe our plight with such succinctness:

“We now live in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowlege, the press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and banks destroy the economy.”

Read The Saker’s explanation of Russian politics.  Possibly Putin will collapse under pressure from the powerful Fifth Column in his government.  Read Chris Hedges analysis of American collapse. There is much truth in it.  What happens if the Russian people rise up against the Russian Fifth Column and if the oppressed American people rise up against the extractions of the military/security complex? What happens if neither population rises up?

Who sets off the first nuclear weapon?

Our time on earth is not just limited by our threescore and ten years, but also humanity’s time on earth, and that of every other species, is limited by the use of nuclear weapons.

It is long past the time when governments, and if not them, humanity, should ask why nuclear weapons exist when they cannot be used without destroying life on earth.

Why isn’t this the question of our time, instead of, for example, transgender toilet facilities, and the large variety of fake issues on which the presstitute media focuses?

The articles by The Saker and Chris Hedges, two astute people, report that neither superpower is capable of making good decisions, decisions that are determined by democracy instead of by oligarchs, against whom neither elected government can stand.

If this is the case, humanity is finished.

Here are the Washington Post and New York Times editorials:

Washington Post
June 29, 2018
Editorial
Trump is kowtowing to the Kremlin again. Why?
Ahead of a summit with Putin, Trump is siding with the Russian leader, with dangerous results. 

Screenshot from Washington Post

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New York Times
June 29, 2018
Editorial
Trump and Putin’s Too-Friendly Summit
It’s good to meet with adversaries. But when Mr. Trump sits down with Mr. Putin, it will be a meeting of kindred spirits. That’s a problem.

Screenshot from New York Times

 

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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.

It is as clear as day that President Trump is obsessed with regime change in Iran.  What is not made clear is how much his gambit is damaging to Americans and American interests.

Without cause or justification, Mr. Trump  pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), striking a hard blow to America’s European allies – and its own credibility.  Moreover, he threatened European countries with secondary sanctions should they continue to trade with Iran.

To top it all, in his latest move, he has called for all Iranian oil exports to be cut off by November. Or in practical terms, he is imposing an economic blockade on Iran.  This is a similar scenario that was played out by the British in 1951 against Iran and Dr. Mossadegh – who was later overthrown in the 1953 British-US coup. But today, the IR of Iran is not the Iran of 1953, and the brunt of American demands and actions will not be borne by Iran alone.   

Demanding that no country purchase oil from Iran is in fact an economic blockade.  It is an illegitimate use of power to force a sovereign nation to surrender.  It must be made clear however, that it is not just Iran that is the target here.  The Trump administration’s demands are an offensive exercise of extraterritorial authority with no regard for sovereign equality between states. All states involved in trade with Iran will either have to cower to his demands or be punished.  

But there is more than state sovereignty and indignation that is involved. These actions will have a dire effect on the economy of allies, and they will hit Americans in the wallet – hard.   If Mr. Trump is giving a November deadline, he hopes to postpone the impact this will have on the November elections.  He wants total rule over America before totally bankrupting it.

To fully appreciate how Mr. Trump intends to make ‘America great again’ where his policy regarding Iranian oil is concerned, one must take a look at some numbers and empirical evidence.

The oil strikes leading up to the toppling of Iran’s Shah were felt around the world.  During the 1978-79 revolution, Iranian oil production dropped 3.8 million barrels per day for 3 months.  Although outside production increased by 1.8 million barrels to make up for the loss, the net loss to the world was 150 million barrels of oil.  However, the compounding results of the production loss were significant around the globe. 

Many Americans may recall the lines at the fuel pumps, but that was just what met the eyes.  The increase in oil prices impacted farming, production, transportation of goods and services, and so on.  At that time, China, currently the second biggest oil consumer behind America, was a net exporter of oil.  The loss to U.S. economy was estimated at many billions of dollars in 1979 and 1980 (Deese and Nye 308-309)[i].  

More recent studies show that Iranian oil has a major impact on the U.S. economy even though America does not import a single barrel of oil from Iran.  In 2008, economists Dean DeRosa and Gary Hufbauer presented a paper in which they claimed that if the United States lifted sanctions on Iran, the world price of oil could fall by 10 percent which would translate into an annual savings of $38-76 billion for the United States[ii].

But sanctions alone were not responsible for oil price hikes in 2008 and beyond.  In July 2008, oil had reached a peak of $142.05/bbl (see chart HERE).   This price hike came on the heels of some important events.  In May, President Bush sent a ‘warning message’ to Iran on the same day that additional aircraft carriers with guided-missile destroyers were sent to the Persian Gulf.

In June of the same year, the New York Times reported that:

“Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

In July, then presidential candidate Barack Obama asked for tougher sanctions to be imposed on Iran. 

It was not until September 2008 when President Bush declined to help Israel attack Iran that oil prices started to relax.  They hit a low of just over $53 /bbl in December 2008. 

Oil prices continued to rise again under Obama’s sanctions and reached well past the $100 mark.   The prices climbed down once again during the JCPOA negotiations reaching an all time low of $30.24/bbl in January 2016 – after the signing of the JCPOA. 

Today, oil prices stands at $74.30/bbl.  A fact not lost on any American who has filled up his/her gas tank lately– and paid for groceries.   The deadline for Iran oil cut off is yet months away, but the impact has started.

Given that other countries may step in to compensate for some of the Iranian oil loss, other factors which effect prices must be considered – the most important of which is the security of the Strait of Hormuz.  As mentioned previously, the British oil blockade scenario of 1951 will have far different consequences in 2018 should America impose an economic blockade or oil embargo.

In the 1950’s, Iran did not have the military might to retaliate to the oil embargo and the naval blockade was aimed at crushing the economy in order to bring about regime change.   This economic blockade, should it be allowed to happen, would crush the economy of much of the world.

“The blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, even temporarily, could lead to substantial increases in total energy costs.”  Today, Iran not only has the military might to block the Strait of Hormuz in retaliation, but it also has the legal right.

Even if Iran simply chooses to merely delay the passage of tankers by exercising its right to inspect every hostile oil tanker that passes through the Strait of Hormuz, such inspections and subsequent delays would contribute to higher oil prices.

The Strait of Hormuz separates Iran to the north and the Musandam Governorate of Oman and the United Arab Emirates to the south. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

No doubt, the Iranian navy is no match for the formidable US navy.  However, the shallow, narrow waters of Hormuz do not allow for the maneuvering of US battleships.  The very presence of warships can lead to incidents.  At its narrowest point, the Strait of Hormuz is 21 miles wide – hardly wide enough for a naval battle to take place and allow the passage of oil tankers at the same time. In recent years (2012), the USS Porter, a US navy destroyer, collided with an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz.   The collision left a big whole in the navy destroyer.

American officials and oil companies have attempted to assuage the concern of over oil shortages by stating that America is one of the top oil producers.  Some fact checking is in order.

According to EIA’s latest available data, America’s total exports in 2018 (thousands of barrels/month) was 7,730 bbl in April.  The same governmental body stated that total imports for the same month was 310,295.    According to the EIA:

“In 2017, the United States produced about 15.4 million barrels of petroleum per day (MMb/d), and it consumed about 19.9 MMb/d. Imports from other countries help to supply demand for petroleum.” (Click HERE for explanation of imports and exports).

These facts do not stop the spread of such news.  As recently as June 4, 2018, Offshore Technology announced America is marching toward being the biggest oil producer.  Important factors to bear in mind are that 1.  America is the largest oil consumer and continues to have a deficit, and 2. Shale oil production is up thanks to higher oil prices. 

While environmentalists objected to shale oil production, oil companies halted the extraction of oil when prices dropped. Anything above $50/bbl makes shale oil production feasible – which also makes it more expensive of the consumer.  Although Mr. Trump and his administration have no regard for the environment, many states and countries have banned shale oil production (see LINK for list as of December 2017).  

So the American people (and much of the rest of the world) is left with a stark choice.  Either cave in to Mr. Trump’s demands, accept loss of business, pay much higher oil prices at the pump and for consumer goods, prepare for a potential war, and sacrifice the environment – especially water, and mortgage the future of the earth more than we already have, or, don’t heed Trump’s demands – even if means a short term loss.

Either way, messing with Iran’s oil exports is not an alternative that the world can afford.  It may well be that Mr. Trump is beholden to Mr. Netanyahu.   He may well feel comfortable enough to subject the American people – and their allies to financial hardship; but the question is will Americans and the rest of the world sacrifice themselves at the Trump-Netanyahu altar?  

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Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich is an independent researcher and writer with a focus on U.S. foreign policy and the role of lobby groups in influencing US foreign policy. 

Notes

A grenade went off shortly after Prime Minister Abiy was done addressing a huge crowd of supporters in central Addis Ababa, killing at least two people and injuring dozens. The country’s leader sharply condemned the attack and vowed that the perpetrators won’t succeed in destabilizing Africa’s second-most populous state and its fastest-growing economy.  It’s not yet known exactly what forces are responsible for what happened, but an educated inference would suggest that they’re political radicals fiercely opposed to Prime Minister Abiy’s whirlwind reforms of the past couple of months.

Since assuming office in late March, the premier has done his utmost to calm tensions between the Oromo ethnic group that he’s a part of and the rest of their Ethiopian compatriots, thereby miraculously offsetting what had seemed to many observers to be an inevitable descent into an intensified civil conflict. Some of the signals that Prime Minister Abiy has sent, such as continuing to release what had officially been termed as “terrorist suspects” but internationally regarded by some as “political prisoners”, hint that he might be contemplating the actual “decentralization” of the nominal federation in order to give the country’s ethnically based administrative regions broader political rights.

This in and of itself is thought to threaten the presumably disproportionate influence that the Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) wields over the rest of Ethiopia through its crucial political role in the post-civil war governing coalition of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) and the heavy sway that it holds over the security services. With this in mind, Prime Minister Abiy’s surprise announcement earlier this month that Ethiopia will abide by a 2002 international court ruling and withdraw from the disputed town of Badme in the Tigray Region that was at the center of the 1998-2000 war with Eritrea must have certainly incensed some members of this “deep state” faction.

So as not to be misunderstood, all of the aforementioned is purely circumstantial, but when considering that Prime Minister Abiy’s policies challenge the entrenched interests of the TPLF, it’s natural to wonder whether a few of its most radical affiliates might have “gone rogue” and wanted to send him a message just like the institutional enemies of his fellow socio-political revolutionary Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman might have tried to do during the confusing events of late April that some people interpreted as a failed coup attempt. Whether in Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, or even the US, visionary leaders appear to be under attack by their “deep state” foes, with the prevalence of high-level but largely unseen intra-state conflicts forming an inextricable part of the New Cold War.

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This article was originally published on Oriental Review.

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.

Featured image: The Deepwater Horizon oil spill, found to be partially caused by lax safety regulations, killed 11 people and injured 16. (Photo: Florida Sea Grant/Flickr/cc)

Researchers at the University of Southern Mississippi have studied the microbes found on several shipwrecks in the vicinity of the Deepwater Horizon, the oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico that exploded in 2010, killing 11 workers and spewing an estimated 4 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf. Their research, published June 28 in the journal Scientific Reports, claims the oil residue has caused fundamental changes in those microbes, which play an important role in carbon dioxide absorption by the oceans and are essential building blocks in the food chain for marine life.

“At the sites closest to the spill, biodiversity was flattened,” Leila Hamdan, a microbial ecologist at the University of Southern Mississippi and lead author of the study, tells The Guardian. “There were fewer types of microbes. This is a cold, dark environment and anything you put down there will be longer lasting than oil on a beach in Florida. It’s premature to imagine that all the effects of the spill are over and remediated.”

In fact, that is exactly the story that BP, the owner of the Deepwater Horizon, is spinning.

“Nothing to see here, move along. Nothing to see here, move along.”

Hamdan says the impact the oil has had on microbes could prove even more significant than the loss of tourism due to fouling of beaches along the Gulf coast.

“We rely heavily on the ocean and we could be looking at potential effects to the food supply down the road. Deep sea microbes regulate carbon in the atmosphere and recycle nutrients. I’m concerned there will be larger consequences from this sort of event.”

The new study is especially relevant as the alleged president takes a sledgehammer to environmental regulations put in place by the Obama administration to prevent similar disasters from occurring in the future. On June 19, Trump issued an executive order dismantling virtually all of those regulations. In his usual fashion, he described his action as “rolling back excessive bureaucracy created by the previous administration” and taking the shackles off companies involved with America’s energy security.

The administration has begun to couch everything it does in terms of national security, hoping that by wrapping its desperate agenda to boost fossil fuel companies in the flag, it can divert attention from the outrageous damage its policies will inflict on the environment. It should be intuitively obvious to the most casual observer that tipping the world over into a full scale climate emergency will do more damage to America’s national security than taking reasonable and rational steps to rein in the “business as usual” attitude of oil companies, who think raping and pillaging the Earth is perfectly OK just as long as shareholder value is increased and fat bonuses are paid to company executives. For more on this subject, see Greg Pilast’s searing book, Vultures’ Picnic, which is available in pdf format.

Industry representatives cheered the executive order but conservationists and environmental activists are appalled. Christy Goldfuss, a former environmental adviser to Obama, said Trump is waging an “all-out war on America’s oceans. Trump is trying to wash his hands of responsibility for the real and urgent threats facing America’s coastal communities — namely, the impacts of climate change,” said Goldfuss, who is now at the Center for American Progress.

“In the absence of a president who is willing to lead, it is now more important than ever that coastal governors, tribal leaders, state legislatures, and local communities take up the mantle of leadership and work together to defend and restore the health of America’s oceans.”

The Trumpies are all for state’s rights, except when it means someone in Colorado might smoke a joint, California refuses to turn its police into ICE agents, a woman in Massachusetts wants an abortion, or some state tries to prevent a tourist from Texas walking around with a loaded firearm 1,000 miles from home. Then federal power must be brought to bear in the most heavy-handed way imaginable.

The Trump executive order was created with full knowledge that many states are now controlled by Republican governors and Republican controlled legislatures and that neither will take the risk of offending the fossil fuel companies who are so generous with campaign cash. It’s just another example of how America is now run like a criminal enterprise, with Donald Trump as the capo di tuti capi.

In the overall scheme of things, nobody cares a flying fig leaf about microbes in the Gulf of Mexico or the marine life that ingests them. The study will hardly get a passing notice after today. In the minds of Trump apologists, Nature will take care of itself and nothing humans do could possibly have a lasting effect on the environment. The Earth is here for us to plunder. End of story.

The end of humanity as we know it is exactly what is looming on the horizon, but no one cares, because — you know — Hillary’s e-mails!

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Steve Hanley writes about the interface between technology and sustainability from his home in Rhode Island and anywhere else the Singularity may take him. His muse is Charles Kuralt — “I see the road ahead is turning. I wonder what’s around the bend?” You can follow him on Google + and on Twitter.

Why does Palestine matter? It’s a question I ask myself nearly every day. Another way to put it is, “Is the devotion of major attention to the plight of the Palestinians an obsession worthy of suspicion or an appropriate response to a grave historic and continuing injustice?

No one will be surprised when I reply that major attention is an appropriate response. Palestine matters and should matter. I will try to explain why.

First, perhaps most basically, the sheer cruelty — the scope of the violation of human, i.e., natural individual, rights — of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians warrants the concern of all who favor freedom and other (classical) liberal values: justice, social cooperation, free exchange, and peace.

Let’s start with the Occupied Palestinian Territories. As B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, says front and center on its website:

“Israel’s regime of occupation is inextricably bound up in human rights violations.”

No one who sheds the blinders of the Official Narrative can help but feel pain over the institutional barriers to normal life, not to mention the literal destruction of life, that are regular features of Israel’s rule in the West Bank (with nearly 3 million Palestinians), East Jerusalem (over 300,000), and Gaza Strip (nearly 2 million). It is no exaggeration to describe the system as an instance of apartheid, which is the word used by Israeli human-rights organizations and former government officials. (Then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin used the word in a warning as far back is 1976. So did Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, when he was out of office after the 1967 war.)

The West Bank and East Jerusalem

The Palestinians in the first two places have lived under harsh military rule for over half a century. This rule consists of “low-level” repression such as checkpoints (even for ambulances), travel permits, and Jewish-only roads that subject Palestinians to daily humiliation, disruption, and the arbitrary whim of soldiers charged with the task of controlling an occupied population.

Imagine trying to live a normal life — making a living, caring for your children — when you don’t know how long you will be delayed en route from Point A to Point B because you are stopped, questioned, and searched by unaccountable, heavily armed government officers who don’t like you because of your race, ethnicity, or religion or who are suspicious of people who naturally resent being dominated. Imagine, further, a life of poverty in which water (in the arid Middle East!), electricity, and education are scarce and unreliable simply because the government providers of those services favor subsidized, comfortable Jewish settlers (many from America) living nearby. The juxtaposition of water shortages for Palestinians with swimming pools for Jews is too obvious an outrage to require comment.

This daily mistreatment is frequently accentuated by outright violence at the hands of the military rulers: bone-breaking beatings, torture, killings, house demolitions for reasons of collective punishment and ethnic cleansing, indefinite detention without charge or trial, and the like. These measures are intensified whenever Palestinians stage largely nonviolent intifadas (uprisings) and mass civil disobedience. Any of this would be regarded (one hopes) as intolerable in America or anywhere else in the West.

Add to this Israel’s continuing de facto annexation of the West Bank (East Jerusalem has been annexed de jure) through the expansion of illegal (by international law) Jewish-only settlements and a wall that snakes through the West Bank, isolating Palestinian towns, separating communities from each other and their farmland, and making a mockery of the “two-state solution.” (Not that Israel’s leaders ever intended to vacate the lands conquered in 1967 during an expansionist war of choice against four Arab nations during which the Israeli air force also attacked the US intelligence ship USS Liberty, killing 34 sailors and wounding more than 170.)

The Gaza Strip

Great March of Return (Source: Green Left Weekly)

But that horror doesn’t begin to describe how the nearly two million people, more than half of them children, in the densely populated Gaza Strip live every day. Their territory has been described — even by Israelis — as an open-air prison. Israel’s defenders claim that the Jewish State “withdrew” from Gaza more than a decade ago without any resulting peace dividend, but this is misleading. Yes, the military left, and the settlers went with them. But that is like cheering guards for withdrawing from a prison to positions just outside the walls. Under the decade-old blockade the state determines who and what can enter and leave Gaza. As Norman Finkelstein points out in his exhaustive research on Gaza, even toys, chocolate, and potato chips are barred. Drinking water is contaminated because of the blockade on items needed to repair facilities destroyed by the Israeli military.

Palestinians who get too close to the fence along the Gaza-Israel border risk being shot by soldiers. Peaceful demonstrators far from the fence face the same risk. Israel controls Gaza’s Mediterranean coast as well, including the crucial ability to fish beyond a certain point. Closer in the fish are likely to be contaminated by sewage for the reason noted above.

This daily hardship (to use a grossly mild noun) is underscored by periodic massacres — indistinguishable from terrorism according to international law — committed by Israeli warplanes, drones, and ground troops, incredibly brutal assaults that have left many civilians (including children) dead and maimed, tens of thousands of homes destroyed, and ton and tons of rubble in their wake. These regular violent onslaughts against the people of Gaza — a level of brutality that shocks even people who have been in the worst war zones — serve two purposes: to demonstrate Israel’s deterrent power to others (after humiliating defeats by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon) and to “mow the lawn,” that is, to maintain the people at a certain low level of nutrition and morale, thereby limiting in their ability to resist even nonviolently.

“Israel’s evolving modus operandi for restoring its deterrence capacity,” Finkelstein writes, “described a curve steadily regressing into barbarism.”

With many experts predicting that Gaza will soon be “unliveable,” this is a campaign of genocidal proportions.

“But Hamas…” is no counterargument to the foregoing. Israel helped nurture Muslim Hamas in the 1980s in a divide-and-conquer move, that is, as a rival to the secular Fatah and PLO, which had already recognized Israel as a state, thereby conceding 78 percent of historic Palestine to the Zionists. Hamas’s influence is a direct result of Israel’s refusal to talk to the moderate Palestinian leadership in good faith. In other words, Hamas is a “threat” of Israel’s own making.

Moreover, Israel on several occasions violated ceasefires that Hamas had been honoring. When Hamas responded with what are misleadingly called “rockets,” Israel has responded with monstrous force, killing many noncombatants, including children and leaving Gaza buried in rubble.

Further, the Palestinians in Gaza, sick of the West Bank Palestinian leadership’s corruption and fecklessness, elected Hamas in a monitored and fair election during the George W. Bush years (2006), for which the Gazans were punished with harsh US and European Union sanctions and a US-backed failed coup attempt by the Palestinian Authority, Israel’s subcontractor for internal security in the Occupied Territories. (The bankrupt PLO leadership took on that lucrative quisling assignment under the deceptive Oslo Accord.)

Bush officials had demanded an election in Gaza, then regretted it when they saw the results. Indeed, Bush critic Sen. Hillary Clinton commented after the balloting,

“I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.” (Emphasis added. What’s that she now says about alleged Russian meddling to keep her from winning presidency?)

But most crucial, Hamas has changed its inflammatory charter to accept, unlike successive Israeli governments, Israel’s 1967 borders, i.e., the two-state solution, which entails a complete Israeli withdrawal — settlements and separation wall — from the West Bank and Gaza in accordance with international law. But no matter. Hamas has been too convenient an excuse for Israel to claim it has no unified partner for peace. But when Hamas has joined with the West Bank Palestinian administration, Israel then claims it can’t talk to anyone who would partner with Hamas — even though the partner has conceded 78 percent of Palestine to Israel, as the PLO did 30 years ago. (Israel has built settlements for 600,000 Jews on and otherwise directly controls more than half of the remaining 22 percent the Palestinians were willing to settle for.)

At any rate, Hamas must be judged against the larger context: namely, the Israeli occupation and de facto annexation of Palestinian property and the total subjugation of the Palestinian people. Killing noncombatants is of course immoral, but Israel, which routinely targets civilian neighborhoods in Gaza and the West Bank, hardly has clean hands in that regard.

Inside Israel

The 1.5 million Palestinian “citizens” inside Israel (20 percent of the citizen population) have it better than their counterparts in the Occupied Territories, but only somewhat. After being under military rule from 1948 to 1966, the Palestinians inside Israel settled into second- or rather third-class citizenship. As the self-proclaimed State of the Jewish People (everywhere in the world), Israel does not treat non-Jewish citizens the way it treats Jewish citizens. (This is an ethno-national, rather than a religious, designation, although there is no Jewish ethnicity or race.) Although Palestinians (i.e., those who managed to survive the ethnic cleansing of 1947-48) can vote, form political parties, and hold office, they nevertheless may not change Israel into a democratic republic for all its citizens. A recent attempt in the Knesset to do that was quashed without debate or vote. Nor can they end the systemic discrimination against Palestinians in access to land (most land is off limits to non-Jews) and in the allocation of government-provided services like utilities and schooling. In addition, Palestinians driven from their homes in 1947-48, the Nakba, may not return, yet anyone born anywhere and living anywhere who has a Jewish mother or who was converted by an approved rabbi can become an Israeli citizen automatically no matter where he was born or is now living.

In light of all this, note the significance of the recent Israeli demand that the Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza recognize Israel not just as a legitimatestate, but as a Jewish State. Such a concession would betray the non-Jewish citizens of Israel.

America the Enabler

The second reason why Palestine matters is that American taxpayers are forced to underwrite this system of injustice and repression. The US government gives Israel, the Middle East’s only nuclear state, over $3 billion a year in military aid on the most favorable terms. Even the allegedly anti-Israel Obama administration set records in giving military aid to Israel, which violates US law (and international law) by using the weapons to repress the Palestinians and to wage offensive war against civilians. Obama never once penalized Israel for expanding West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements even though the US government has always officially regarded them as in violation of international law.

President Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in New York on Sept. 18, 2017. (Screenshot from Whitehouse.gov)

Some justify this unstinting and unique support for Israel on grounds that Israel is an American “strategic asset,” and Israeli leaders cynically talk in those terms. But this makes no sense. For one thing, as many American political and military leaders have acknowledged since 9/11, rather than being an asset, Israel has been a liability. A big reason for the Muslim terrorism directed at Americans is precisely the unconditional US assistance to, not to mention diplomatic support of, Israel. What goes a long way toward explaining the huge sums given to Israel each year — over $10 million a day — is the influential Israel Lobby, which brags about its power over US politicians. (See this article by former American Israel Public Affairs Committee staffer M. J. Rosenberg.) AIPAC and other organizations have created an environment in which criticism of Israel or Zionism is smeared as anti-Semitism, although this baseless association has finally begun to wear thin. It’s worth pointing out that the first most and incisive anti-Zionists were Jewish.

Would things change drastically if US aid ended? It’s hard to say; ending the aid would be a big blow to the pocketbook, but the ideological commitment to keeping the Palestinians down is strong. Nevertheless, Americans’ forced complicity in the injustice must end.

A Wider War

The third reason I want to point to is the threat of a wider war, one that could reach beyond Palestine and Israel and even beyond the Middle East. Analysts have long warned that the region could be a flashpoint for a war involving Iran, a long-standing regional power, and Russia. We need only look at Syria, where Russian and Iran have intervened on behalf of their ally President Bashar Assad, and the US and Israel are trying to undermine Assad — and necessarily assisting groups related to al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. It is not far-fetched to envision a clash between US and Russian forces in that country. Moreover, the US and Israel have conducted covert warfare and sponsored terrorist acts against Iran, which Israeli politicians have found useful for distracting attention from their oppression of the Palestinians. A US war against Iran, which would be virtually inevitable should Israel attack the Islamic Republic, would be a regional if not larger catastrophe.

The Trump administration’s so-called peace initiative, led by his patently unqualified and biased son-in-law Jared Kushner and other unabashedly pro-Israel figures, has shaped up as nothing more than an effort to unite Israel and the Arab countries (especially the illiberal regimes in Saudi Arabia and Egypt) against Iran — with the Palestinians being sacrificed in the process. The Saudis are expected to “deliver the Palestinians,” a phrase that drips with condescension, for a deal that essentially enshrines Israel’s domination and crushes Palestinian hopes for self-determination. (See details here, here, and here.)

The attempt to subordinate the Palestinians’ grievances to the reckless anti-Iran campaign will only make things worse, both by provoking Iran, which is surrounded by US military facilities, and dashing any remaining hope that the Palestinians will at last see some justice. Even on pragmatic grounds, why leave it to Iran alone to champion the long-suffering Palestinians.

Not So Complicated

In light of my personal background, it has not been easy for me to write this; it’s been enervating and even painful. But as Finkelstein shows in heavily documented books and YouTube lectures (e.g., this one), the Palestine-Israel “conflict” is really not complicated. Contrary to those solemn pundits who, seeking to discourage people from looking at the matter closely, write about the “clash of civilizations,” the ancient religious feud, and other such rubbish, widespread agreement exists among historians (including Israelis) that Palestinian enmity toward Zionists was based on a justified fear of land theft and that Israel was founded through ethnic cleansing — what can the establishment of a Jewish (majority) State entail if not the removal of the majority non-Jews? Before the rise of Zionism, Arabs got along reasonably well with Jews, far better than the European Christians did.

Israeli historians reported on the incriminating official documents more than 30 years ago. The leader in this effort was Benny Morris, who acknowledges and documents the wholesale removal and killing of Palestinians while approving of it. Indeed, he writes, “The fear of territorial displacement and dispossession was to be the chief motor of Arab antagonism to Zionism.” Morris also wrote that “transfer [of the Palestinians out of Palestine] was inevitable and inbuilt into Zionism — because it sought to transform a land which was ‘Arab’ into a ‘Jewish’ state and a Jewish state could not have arisen without a major displacement of Arab population….” This is from a defender of Israel’s founding, one who laments that the ethnic cleansing was incomplete.

The point is that the facts are not seriously disputed.

Further, unanimous agreement exists among all respected human-rights organizations (including Israeli organizations) that since the state’s founding, Israel has routinely treated the Palestinians brutally and discriminatorily, with the most egregious cases being the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, which were acquired by war contrary to international law. Still further, the International Court of Justice has ruled (14-1, with the one “dissenter,” (who did not call his opinion a dissent, agreeing with much of the majority position) that the separation wall in the West Bank is illegal because the occupation of and settlements in the West Bank are illegal.

So where is the controversy among people who bother to study the matter? On every major moral and legal question, it doesn’t exist. Contrary to what some Israel defenders suggest, the same moral and legal principles that identify the Nazi Holocaust as unspeakably evil also apply to Jews. (A few political controversies, such as whether the right of return for the Palestinian refugees is feasible, remain.)

The reasonable minimal steps toward a just remediation therefore follow: complete Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, including dismantling of the settlements, removal of the wall, and compensation for those whose property was damaged by its construction, and the liberation of Gaza, permitting the Palestinians full “self-government” (alas, libertarianism isn’t on the menu today), the right of return for Palestinian refugees driven from their homes 70 years ago (though monetary compensation may figure in lieu of this), and full rights for the Palestinian citizens of Israel.

This sounds like the famous two-state solution, but an alternative focusing on one democratic state with equal rights for all citizens has gained prominence. (This is what PLO chief Yasser Arafat called for in his UN General Assembly address 44 years ago.) It comes down to a debate over what is realistically achievable in the near term.

On one side are those who say it’s too late for two states because since 1967, a de facto single state has existed between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan. Thus, the only remaining question, they argue, is what kind of state shall this be: democratic or apartheid?

After all, this side adds, when the UN General Assembly in 1947 recommended partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states — the UN never partitioned Palestine and did not have the power to do so — the Jews were assigned 56 percent of the territory, the Arabs 44 percent, even though the Arab Muslims and Christians were the overwhelming majority and Jewish land purchases amounted to only about less than 7 percent of Palestine (much of that of dubious legitimacy because of Ottoman feudalism). But after the ethnic-cleansing and after the neighboring Arab governments feebly attempted to defend the overrun Palestinians (the so-called War of Independence), Israel had expanded into nearly 80 percent. (The Palestinians had rejected the partition recommendation; from the time that Great Britain first contemplated ruling the Middle East and then conquered Palestine during World War I, the Palestinians were deemed unworthy of consultation about the fate of their own land.)

Then, when the Occupied Territories were acquired in 1967, Israel methodically established “facts on the grounds” —  Jewish-only settlements, roads, the separation wall, etc. — precisely to guarantee that the Territories would never have to be given up. The Palestinian state thus shrunk from the original 44 percent to 11 percent, which consists of communities cut off from each other, plus Gaza miles away. What kind of state is that, ask the advocates of a single democratic state? Better, they say, to declare equal rights for all throughout Israel-Palestine and let reforms flow from the new democratic environment.

The two-state advocates respond that it will be much easier (however difficult) to persuade Israel to withdraw from the Territories than to persuade it to change from a Jewish state to a secular liberal democratic state in which Jews would soon be the minority. (In the whole of Israel-Palestine today the population split is roughly 50-50.)

As tempting as it is to weigh in on this debate, I think Norman Finkelstein put it best in 2014:

I don’t advocate anything. It’s not my place to advocate. First of all, I’m not a Palestinian. Second of all, I’m not Israeli…. I don’t live anywhere near the affected regions…. Anyone who’s involved in politics knows that politics is not about personal preferences. If you ask my personal preference, I would say that I don’t believe in two states; I don’t believe in one state; I happen not to believe in any states. I’m an old-fashioned leftist in that regard. But politics is not about what you prefer; it’s not about what I prefer. Politics is about a realistic assessment of the balances of forces in the world.

I would add, as Finkelstein has on many occasions, that the best we can do is to work to build broad public support for a solution rooted in justice, liberty, and peace for all, enlisting sound moral intuitions and established liberal legal principles in the service of reasonably achievable ends.

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Sheldon Richman is Executive editor of The Libertarian Institute; keeper of the blog Free Association; former editor of The Freeman.

Imagine a county sheriff that took a suspected drug-law violator into custody more than 10 years ago. Since then, the man has been held in jail without being accorded a trial. The district attorney and the sheriff promise to give the man a trial sometime in the future but they’re just not sure when. Meanwhile the man sits in jail indefinitely just waiting for his trial to begin.

Difficult to imagine, right? That’s because most everyone would assume that a judge would never permit such a thing to happen. The man’s lawyer would file a petition for writ of habeas corpus. A judge would order the sheriff to produce the prisoner and show cause why the prisoner shouldn’t immediately be released from custody. At the habeas corpus hearing, the judge would either order the release of the prisoner based on the violation of his right to a speedy trial or he would order the state to either try him or release him.

The same principle would apply on the federal level to, say, DEA agents who had been holding some suspected drug lord in jail for ten years without according him a trial. A federal judge would proceed to handle a petition for habeas corpus in the same manner that the state judge would. It is a virtual certainty that the federal judge would either order the prisoner’s release or order the DEA to “try him or release him.”

In either case, the judicial branch’s order would be supreme over the sheriff and the DEA. They would be expected to comply with the judge’s order. If they refused to do so, the judge would cite the sheriff or DEA officials with contempt and order them incarcerated until they complied with his order. The contempt order would be carried out by state law-enforcement personnel or by deputy U.S. Marshalls.

Not so, however, with the national-security establishment, specifically the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA. As Michael Glennon, professor of law at Tufts University, points out in his book National Security and Double Government, the national-security establishment has become the most powerful part of the federal government, one to which the judicial branch (as well as the other two branches) inevitably defers in matters that are critically important to the Pentagon, the CIA, or the NSA.

An excellent example of this phenomenon is the Pentagon’s prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. When the Pentagon initially established Gitmo as a prison camp after the 9/11 attacks, it did so with the intent that it would be totally independent of any interference or control by the federal judiciary. That’s why it chose Cuba for the location of its prison — so that it could argue that the U.S. Constitution did not apply and the Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction to interfere with its operations. (It was an ironic position given the oath that all military personnel take to support and defend the Constitution.)

Maintaining the veneer of control, however, the Supreme Court ultimately held that it did in fact have jurisdiction over Guantanamo. But as a practical matter, the Court deferred to the ultimate power of the Pentagon, as manifested by the fact that there are prisoners at Guantanamo who have been incarcerated for more than a decade without being accorded a trial.

In other words, what the judiciary would never permit to happen under a local sheriff or the DEA has been permitted to happen under the Pentagon. That’s because the judiciary knows that given the overwhelming power of the Pentagon (and the CIA and NSA), there is no way that some federal judge would be able to enforce a contempt order with some deputy U.S. Marshalls confronting, say, the 82nd Airborne Division.

Sure, the federal judiciary has issued habeas corpus releases on some prisoners at Guantanamo and the Pentagon has consented to complying with them. But that’s all just for appearance sake, to maintain the veneer that everything is operating “normally.” Federal judges know that whenever the Pentagon says “No more,” that’s the way it’s going to be.

How do we know this? How do we know that the Pentagon, not the federal judiciary, is ultimately in charge and that when push comes to shove the judiciary will defer to the power of the military? We know it by virtue of the fact that there are some prisoners at Guantanamo who have been incarcerated for more than a decade without being accorded a trial. We know that judges would never permit that sort of thing to happen with a sheriff or the DEA.

There is another way we can recognize the supreme power of the Pentagon vis a vis the Supreme Court. After the Court took jurisdiction over Guantanamo, the Pentagon established its own “judicial” system to try terrorist suspects. I place the word “judicial” in quotation marks because it really isn’t a judicial system in the way that we think of judicial systems here in the United States. The Pentagon’s “judicial” system more closely resembles the “judicial” system that the communist regime in Cuba employs than the judicial system that exists here in the United States.

For example, trial is by military commission rather than trial by jury. Evidence acquired by torture is admissible. The accused is presumed guilty and can be tortured into making admissions and confessions. Hearsay evidence is admissible. Lawyer-client conversations can be monitored by military authorities, a grave breach of the attorney-client privilege that is recognized here in the United States. There is obviously no right to a speedy trial. In fact, the entire “trial,” when it finally is permitted, is nothing more than what is called a “show trial” in communist countries. That’s because a guilty verdict is preordained but is made to look like it has been arrived at fairly and justly.

There is one big thing to note about the Pentagon’s “judicial” system at Gitmo: There is nothing in the Constitution that permits the Pentagon to establish and operate such a “judicial” system. The Constitution, which is meant to control the entire federal government, establishes one and only one judicial system to try terrorist suspects and other people accused of federal crimes. That system is the U.S. federal court system that the Constitution authorized the federal government to establish when the federal government was initially called into existence.

Thus, when the Supreme Court assumed jurisdiction over Guantanamo, it had the legal duty to immediately declare the Pentagon’s “judicial” system in Cuba unconstitutional. After all, if a local sheriff or the DEA established a new independent “judicial” system to try drug-war violators, federal judges wouldn’t hesitate to declare it illegal under our form of government. But this is the Pentagon that we are dealing with. The Supreme Court knows that the Pentagon will permit the judicial branch to go only so far when it comes to interfering with its operations.

In 1961, President Eisenhower issued a stark warning to the American people. He said that the military-industrial complex, which, as he pointed out, was a relatively new feature in American life, posed a grave threat to the freedom and democratic processes of the American people. The Pentagon’s prison camp, torture center, and “judicial” system at Guantanamo Bay confirms how right Eisenhower was.

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Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics.

In May 2017, President Donald Trump visited Saudi Arabia to finalize a massive $110 billion sale of “American-made” weapons. The deal was part of his America First initiative. “That was a tremendous day,” Trump said. “Hundreds of billions of dollars of investments into the United States and jobs, jobs, jobs.”

The Trump administration hopes to expand this effort via arms export deregulation.

“We want to see those guys, the commercial and military attachés, unfettered to be salesmen for this stuff, to be promoters,” a senior administration official told Reuters.

Every president promotes the sale of U.S. weapons. But Trump’s push is especially vigorous and is based on a misleading claim that increased sales will create thousands of jobs in the United States. The truth, however, is that the jobs generated from selling weapons won’t be U.S. jobs but Saudi ones. As William Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, explains,

“This will be no different than with the F-35 program, where final assembly of aircraft sold to Europe and Asia will occur in Italy and Japan, respectively.”

Nevertheless, defense contractors in the U.S. will make a literal and figurative killing. Not counting this Saudi deal, the U.S. has sold close to $200 billion in arms since 2002. We are the top provider in the global weapons market, responsible for a third of total worldwide arms exports, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Many think American arms dominance is not just a source of revenue but important to our geopolitical hegemony. According to this view, losing our supremacy would jeopardize our security and reduce U.S. gross domestic product. But this theory was challenged and debunked by George Mason University economists Christopher Coyne and Abigail Hall in a 2013 working paper. Their main takeaway was that the risk of negative foreign policy consequences, such as powerful U.S. weapons being used to kill large numbers of civilians abroad, far outweigh any economic benefits.

As SIPRI explains,

“The USA delivered major weapons to at least 96 states in 2011–15, a significantly higher number of export destinations than any other supplier.” How do we assess whether all of these countries are safe bets? A recent study by the Cato Institute provides compelling evidence that the U.S. is actually quite careless about whom it sells to. Authors A. Trevor Thrall and Caroline Dorminey produced an index of the overall riskiness of arms trade deals since 2002 that shows the United States does not discriminate between high- and low-risk customers. “The average sales to the riskiest nations are higher than those to the least risky nations,” they write. “The 22 countries coded as ‘highest risk’ on the Global Terrorism Index bought an average of $1.91 billion worth of American weapons. The 28 countries in active, high-level conflicts bought an average of $2.94 billion worth of arms.”

Selling weapons to unstable states is dangerous, but so is selling to countries like Saudi Arabia, the leading buyer of American arms according to SIPRI. The precision-guided munitions the Saudis purchased from the U.S., for example, have been used to kill hundreds of civilians in Yemen. For the sake of enriching military contractors and paying lip service to “Made in America,” we too often enable autocrats to commit murder. And as Cato’s risk assessment demonstrates, we’re also arguably sowing seeds of destabilization and conflict.

The inherent cronyism is problematic as well.

“The business of buying weapons that takes place in the Pentagon is a corrupt business,” retired Air Force Col. James Burton wrote in his 1993 book The Pentagon Wars, “ethically and morally corrupt from top to bottom.

The process is dominated by advocacy, with few if any checks and balances.” As Thrall and Dorminey report, banking on arms sales inevitably means offering long-term subsidies to private companies. That taxpayer money could be put to much better use.

*

Veronique de Rugy, Ph.D., is a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a monthly columnist for the print edition of Reason.

Featured image is from Defense One.

The Trump administration further spelled out this week the draconian sanctions it intends to enforce on Iran. A senior State Department official told the media the US would take measures against any country that failed to reduce its oil imports from Iran to “zero” by November 4.

Companies that fail to meet the deadline face the prospect of being excluded from the US financial system. While not completely ruling out waivers, the US official said there were unlikely to be any exemptions for corporations buying oil from Iran. The predisposition of the Trump administration, the official said, is: “No, we’re not going to do waivers.”

The announcement follows Trump’s decision on May 8 to unilaterally pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran. Known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), it was signed with the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia. Under the JCPOA, Tehran agreed to drastic curbs on its nuclear programs in return for a step-by-step easing of international sanctions.

Despite the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) repeatedly verifying that Iran kept its side of the bargain, the Trump administration tore up the deal. Washington wants to force Iran to fall into line with US policy throughout the Middle East, and end its nuclear and missile programs.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo warned last month that Iran would face “the strongest sanctions in history” if it did not bow to Washington’s demands. He also strongly hinted at regime change, suggesting that the Iranian public could take matters into its own hands.

Prior to Tuesday, Washington had already foreshadowed punitive measures to come into force in August. It plans to re-impose curbs on Iran’s ability to buy US dollars, along with any global trading in Iranian gold, coal, steel, cars, currency and debt. Ultimately the US sanctions will hit every aspect of Iran’s economy, although agricultural products, medicines and medical devices are supposedly exempted.

The US announcements have pushed up world oil prices and hit the Iranian economy hard. Oil sales generate 60 percent of Iran’s export income and underpin the government’s finances. The country’s currency, the rial, has plunged by 40 percent against the US dollar since last month, forcing the government to take emergency measures. These include the allocation of hard currency largely to importers and basic commodities, and bans on hundreds of imported goods, including cars.

The developing economic crisis inside Iran is generating sharp differences within the regime and prompted days of protests in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar by traders and shoppers against the government’s economic measures.

The Washington-based Brookings Institution published a paper yesterday entitled “Trump tightens the screws on Iran’s oil. Is the US aiming for regime collapse?” It commented:

“The Trump administration is deploying US sanctions on Iran as a bludgeon rather than a scalpel in the hopes of wreaking maximum havoc on Iran as quickly as possible.”

US actions, however, are likely to wreak havoc around the globe. The latest round of economic thuggery has compounded the international tensions generated by US trade war measures. The White House is using sanctions legislation put in place by the Obama administration to force Tehran to sign the nuclear deal. Unlike Obama, however, Trump does not have the support of major allies, let alone China and Russia.

The European Union (EU) opposed Trump’s decision to pull out of the JCPOA and has been seeking ways to maintain the deal, even without US participation. The US actions threaten to sabotage billions of dollars worth of European trade and investment that has developed since 2015.

Last month, EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced that the bloc planned to reactivate a law that would prevent European companies from complying with any sanctions the US might reintroduce against Iran. On June 6, the EU Commission adopted an update of the 1996 “blocking statute.” It requires European companies to refrain from complying “whether directly or through a subsidiary or other intermediary person, or by deliberate omission,” with US sanctions on Iran.

European refiners and banks appear to be cutting back on purchases of Iranian oil. Reuters reported yesterday that the Swiss lender Banque de Commerce et de Placements (BCP) would stop financing Iranian oil cargoes by June 30. France’s Total, Greece’s Hellenic Petroleum and Litasco, the Geneva-based arm of the Russian company Lukoil, are among the customers using BCP banking services.

The Brookings Institution article explained that since the US withdrew from the JCPOA deal, “companies have been rushing to exit Iran, mammoth contracts for hundreds of new airplanes have been scuttled, and nearly all of the signature investments by European and Asian firms have already shifted to wind-down mode.”

The Wall Street Journal reported this week:

“Top administration officials from the State and Treasury departments have jetted around the world in recent days to persuade other countries to cut use of Iranian crude and warn them that any companies, banks or traders that handle Iranian oil face US penalties, including the risk of being frozen out of US markets.”

US allies in Europe and Asia have already been warned, and White House trips are due to take place to China, India and Turkey, where the Trump administration also faces opposition to its sanctions.

All three countries, however, have indicated they will not fully comply with US demands for “zero” imports of Iranian oil. A Chinese foreign ministry spokesman this week described China’s relations with Iran as “friendly” and its economic and energy ties as “beyond reproach.”

Sunjay Sudhir, joint secretary for international cooperation at India’s petroleum ministry, told CNNMoney earlier this week:

“India does not recognise unilateral sanctions, but only sanctions by the United Nations.”

India is the second largest purchaser of Iranian oil after China.

The US official who announced the November deadline for ending purchases of Iranian oil warned that Washington was not “kidding about this.” China and India “will be subject to the same sanctions as everybody else if they engage in those sectors of the economy.”

*

Featured image is from Iran Review.

Global Affairs Canada made the following announcement on behalf of the Government of Canada: 

Statement

June 29, 2018 – Ottawa, Ontario – Global Affairs Canada

Global Affairs Canada today released the following statement regarding the ongoing situation in southwest Syria:

“Canada is gravely concerned by the Syrian regime’s offensive in southwest Syria and unequivocally condemns attacks on civilians, including airstrikes on hospitals.

“The regime’s actions and those of its ally—Russia—are having a catastrophic impact on civilians, including the displacement of tens of thousands of people.

“Canada calls on the Syrian regime to immediately end the violence and to allow for rapid and unimpeded humanitarian access, and urges all parties to the conflict to respect their obligations under international humanitarian law. Canada also calls on Russia to uphold the commitments it made to help maintain a de-escalation zone in the area. 

“Canada continues to pursue accountability for those responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Syria.

“We will also continue to provide humanitarian assistance for the most vulnerable people of Syria.’’

The statement speaks volumes.  What it says is this.  It says that Canada supports the most extreme form of sectarianism.  The terrorists in southwest Syria include al Qaeda and ISIS. Terrorists destroy Christian churches and Shia mosques in terrorist-controlled areas of Syria.  Christians are killed or they flee.

 The international brigades in Syria are al Qaeda and al Qaeda- affiliates, including ISIS.  Syrians call them Daesh.  All of the terrorists slaughter civilians, and there are no “moderate terrorists”. 

Terrorists slaughtered about 11,000 civilians in Damascus, including 2,500 children, and about 13,000 civilians in Aleppo.  Countless civilians were wounded and crippled, about 30,000 in Damascus alone. Mortars are mortars and bombs are bombs.  They are never moderate.

The statement intimates that the government of Canada supports the “opposition rebels”. What it fails to acknowledge is that those (Al Qaeda, ISIS) rebels are involved in misogyny, sex slavery, torture, kidnapping, murder, the “disappearing” of children, organ harvesting, public executions and extremist interpretations of Sharia law. Women in terrorist-occupied areas dress in black from head to toe. Terrorists in occupied areas engage in the aforementioned criminality, and more. Testimonies from freed civilians and evidence from formerly occupied hospitals cum sharia courts testify to the truth of these described and witnessed crimes. 

The statement casually blames the Syria government for the crimes committed by Al Qaeda and ISIS. The statement of Global Affairs Canada is based on sources of information from terrorist-held areas.

The statement says that Syrians themselves should have no say in their future, despite the evidence on the ground, the democratic governance in government-secured areas, and the mass expressions of joy from liberated citizens who rush to greet their SAA liberators.

Finally, the statement shouts out that we as Canadian citizens are duty-bound to share the truth for the benefit of humanity. 

Reverend Ashdown’s video, “The Syrian conflict in context: Restoring hope in a mosaic society” serves as an example of how an accurate narrative about Syria, supported by evidence, contradicts the fabricated news stories that are staples for Western audiences. 

*

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

---

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Arctic ice breakdown

As extreme temperatures, the rate of sea ice melt, the collapse of Greenland glaciers, the thawing of Siberian and Canadian permafrost and increased evaporation in the Arctic drive cold snow storms into Europe and North America, and as hurricanes and wild fires affect tropical and semi-tropical parts of the globe, it is becoming clear Earth is entering a period of uncontrollable climate tipping points consequent on the shift in composition and thereby the state of the atmosphere-ocean system. Analogies with geological methane-release events such as the 56 million years-old Paleocene-Eocene boundary thermal maximum and mass extinction (PETM) event, and even with the 251 Million years-old Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary and mass extinction event when some 95 percent of species were obliterated, are becoming more likely.

As is well known to students of the history of the climate, once a temperature threshold is breached, abrupt events follow as a consequence of amplifying feedbacks, often within short time frameworks, examples being (1) stadial[i] freeze events which followed temperature peaks during past interglacial peaks due to cooling of ocean regions adjacent to melting ice sheets, such as the north Atlantic Ocean[ii] and Antarctica[iii]; (2) the intra-glacial Dansgaard–Oeschger (D-O)~1400 years-long warming events[iv] during the last glacial period; (3) the Younger dryas stadial freeze (12,800–11,600 years- ago[v]) and the Laurentian stadial freeze[vi] (8200 years-ago). In some instances it only took a temperature rise of about 1-2 degrees Celsius to trigger extensive ice melt, a flow of cold melt water into the oceans and thereby a regional to global freeze event, over periods ranging from a millennium to a few centuries. The abrupt transitions into and from stadial conditions could occur over a few decades and even few years[vii]

Lenton (2012) in an article titled “Arctic climate tipping points“[viii] wrote

“There is widespread concern that anthropogenic global warming will trigger Arctic climate tipping points. The Arctic has a long history of natural, abrupt climate changes, which together with current observations and model projections, can help us to identify which parts of the Arctic climate system might pass future tipping points … Looking ahead, a range of potential tipping phenomena are described.”

The last significant Arctic ice loss occurred in the Eemian interglacial around 125 thousand years ago when summer insolation in the Arctic climate increased by 11–13% causing a seasonal loss of Arctic sea-ice, northward advance of tree lines on land, and a substantial of the Greenland ice sheet (Brigham-Grette 2009[ix]). During the last ice age (110 – 11.7×10³ years-ago) the effects of warming events such as the Heinrich and D-O events led to influx of cold ice-melt water into the North Atlantic, manifested by sedimentary debris discharged from icebergs[x],[xi]. Large regions of North America and Eurasia became colder and drier.  A southward shift of the tropical rain belt caused drier conditions in the Northern Hemisphere while moistening many parts of the Southern Hemisphere These climate anomalies are consistent with a slowdown of the thermohaline circulation and reduced ocean heat transport into the northern high latitudes.

Arctic climate tipping points are manifest in the present, as indicated below

1. As temperature rise has exceeded 1.2 degrees Celsius above 1880 temperatures (Figure 1), sharp reductions of Arctic sea ice are taking place including a reduction of thick ice cover from 45 percent in 1985 to 21 percent in 2017[xii], when the ice cover was 8.5 percent lower than the average of 1981-2010[xiii] (Figures 2 and 3). The number of winter warming events rose from about 3 during 1980 to 20 in 2012[xiv]
2. As the ice melts the near-total reflection (high albedo) of solar radiation from the ice is replaced by absorption of infrared radiation by open water;
3. The flow of ice-melt water from the Greenland glaciers creates a large pool of cold water in the North Atlantic Ocean (Figure 4); By contrast the Antarctica sea ice displays marked positive and negative fluctuations[xv].
4. The cold water region south of Greenland (Figure 4) slows-down to aborts northward flow of the thermohaline Atlantic Meridional Ocean Circulation (AMOC), leading to cooling of the North Atlantic and adjacent North America and Europe[xvi];
5. Increased evaporation over the warming Arctic Ocean results in build-up of masses of cold vapor-laden air, intermittently penetrating into lower latitudes; Weakening of the boundary between the high-altitude polar vortex and mid-latitude stratosphere allows penetration of snow storms southward through Siberia and North America[xvii].
6. These transient regional cooling to freezing events, which severely damage agriculture over large regions of Europe[xviii] and North America, may become more frequent with time, heralding longer regional freeze events, while the continuing accumulation of CO₂ in the atmosphere warms other parts of the Earth.
7. The slow-down to collapse of the northward flow of warm water pools in tropical regions, such as the Gulf of Mexico, results in further ocean warming of these pools, producing temperature polarities with cool northern ocean regions. This ensues in storms and hurricanes in regions such as the Caribbean islands and the southwest Pacific Ocean.

Figure 1. 1880-2018 annual mean temperatures and 5-years smoothing.

Figure 2. Average daily temperature north of the 80^th parallel in 2018

Figure 3. Arctic Sea ice extent between November 2017 and March 2018 (areas of ocean have at least 15% ice)

Figure 4. The decline in the extent of Arctic Sea ice cover between 1979 and 2017.

 

Figure 5. 2017 temperatures (in Fahrenheit) relative to 1884

Hudson (2011)[xix] estimates the increase in absorbed radiation due to total removal of Arctic summer sea ice as 0.7 Watt/m², equal to about 1.05^o Celsius. This means the global effect of Arctic melting, which in itself constitutes a feedback from CO₂-driven global warming, is close to the warming effect of the rise in atmospheric CO₂ from 280 ppm to 407 ppm since the onset of the industrial age.

Along with thawing and breakdown of Arctic Sea ice the Greenland ice sheet has been melting at an accelerating rate[xx]. In 2006, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets experienced a combined mass loss of 475±158 Gt/yr (billion ton/yr), equivalent to 1.3±0.4 mm/yr sea level rise. The acceleration in ice sheet loss over the last 18 years was 21.9±1 Gt/yr² for Greenland and 14.5 ± 2 Gt/yr² for Antarctica, for a combined total of 36.3±2 Gt/yr². This acceleration is 3 times larger than for mountain glaciers and ice caps (12 ± 6 Gt/yr²). If this trend continues, ice sheets will be the dominant contributor to sea level rise in the 21st century.

The warming of large parts of the permafrost of the Siberian and Canadian Tundra is leading to the release of large amounts of methane from frozen organic matter stored in the soil, from methane clathrates (CH₄·5.75H₂O) in lake and sea and from shallow sediments. This has already raised atmospheric methane levels from ~1600 ppb (1960) to 1860 ppb in 2017[xxi]. i.e. at a mean rate of ~4.5 ppb/year, and higher at El-Nino years. Already the bubbling of methane from thawing permafrost is manifest through much of Siberia, northern Scandinavia and Canada[xxii], locally leading to collapse and cratering (Figure 6)[xxiii]. The total mass of methane on land of ~2050 GtC (billion tons) and methane hydrates at sea of ~16,000 GtC (Figure 7), exceeds the >600 GtC released by anthropogenic emissions since the industrial age by a factor of near 30. As the Arctic sea ice and the Siberian and Canadian permafrost thaws, even a release of 10 percent of their stored carbon would raise atmospheric greenhouse levels by a factor of about 3, leading to extreme warming, as modelled for the Eocene-Paleocene boundary[xxiv](56 Ma-ago) and Permian-Triassic boundary[xxv](251 Ma-ago) thermal events.

The Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) warming,triggered by rapid release of ¹³C-depleted carbon of organic origin, led to an increase in global temperature of about 5-8^oC within a few thousand years and ocean acidification, leading to a mass extinction of benthic foraminifera and migration of tropical species toward the poles. It is suggested the carbon was released from circum-Arctic and Antarctic permafrost addingthousands of GtC of carbon to the atmosphere–ocean system[xxvi]over periods of about 20×10³ years, with effects lasting for about 200×10³ years[xxvii].

The Permian-Triassic (PT) boundary mass extinction of some 95 percent of species is the most severe biotic crisis in the fossil record. Its occurrence has been attributed to increased CO₂ levels derived from massive Siberian volcanism[xxviii], warming of the oceans leading to loss of oxygen and an anoxic state, acidification and release of methane from methane hydrates. Sharp decline in δ¹³C at the P-T boundary is explained by methane release related to mass mortality.With warming, anaerobic microbial reactions leading to emission of poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas has been invoked as a major cause for the major cause for the PT mass extinction[xxix]

The warming of Earth, manifest in the Arctic Sea, polar ice sheets, injection of cold storms into mid-latitudes, permafrost thaw, hurricanes and wildfires, and the total rise in extreme weather events (Figure 8) represents an existential threat to humanity and much of nature. Apart from sharp reduction in carbon emissions, there appears to be only one chance to save the biosphere as we know it, namely CO₂ down-draw using every available method (cf. basalt rock dust farming[xxx], biochar, air streaming through basalt, extensive sea weed farms, “sodium trees”) which would require funds on the $trillions-scale currently allocated for the military and for wars.

The willful ignorance of the powers to be in promoting carbon emissions,presiding over the devastation of large parts of the habitable biosphere, will not be lost on future generations of those who survive the ongoing calamity[xxxi].

Figure 6. Batagaika Crater, northeast Siberia, formed by melting of permafrost. NASA

Figure 7. Vulnerable carbon sinks. ( a ) Land: Permafrost – 600 GtC; High-latitude peatlands – 400 GtC; tropical peatlands – 100 GtC; vegetation subject to fi re and/or deforestation – 650 GtC; ( b ) Oceans: Methane hydrates – 10,000 GtC; Solubility pump – 2700 GtC; Biological pump – 3300 GtC (After Canadell et al. 2007 GCTE-IGBP Book series; The Global carbon cycle; UNESCOSCOPE policy briefs; Vol. 2. Courtesy P. Canadell)

Figure 8. The rise in extreme weather events between 1980-2015. Munich Re. [xxxii]

*

Dr Andrew Glikson, Earth and Paleo-climate science, 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.

Notes

[i] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stadial

[ii] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2007PA001457/abstract

[iii] https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/03/05/1281907/-The-Antarctic-Half-of-the-Global-Thermohaline-Circulation-is-Collapsing

[iv] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Heinrich%20and%20Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger%20Events

[v] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/01ad/700320c4c34c94798ad4325fa1a42d5db379.pdf

[vi] https://www.britannica.com/science/Younger-Dryas-climate-interval

[vii] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0012821X17303205

[viii] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22270703

[ix] https://works.bepress.com/julie_brigham_grette/20/

[x] http://globalwarming.berrens.nl/globalwarming.htm

[xi] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature21069

[xi] ftp://ftp.oar.noaa.gov/arctic/documents/ArcticReportCard_full_report2017.pdf

[xii] https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/sites/default/files/december-2017-global-significant-events-map.png

[xiii] https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/thumbnails/image/image5figures5.jpg

[xiv] https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global-snow/201801

[xv] https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/bibliography/related_files/td0802.pdf

[xvi] https://phys.org/news/2017-09-winter-cold-extremes-linked-high-altitude.html

[xvii] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-weather-italy/freeze-engulfs-europe-rare-rome-snow-disrupts-flights-idUSKCN1GA1KL

[xviii] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011JD015804/pdf

[xix] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2011GL046583/abstract

[xx] https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends_ch4/

[xxi] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/18072017/arctic-permafrost-melting-methane-emissions-geologic-sources-study

[xxii] http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170223-in-siberia-there-is-a-huge-crater-and-it-is-getting-bigger

[xxiii] http://www.pnas.org/content/113/43/12059

[xxiv] http://www.pnas.org/content/111/15/5462

[xxv] https://people.earth.yale.edu/paleoceneeocene-thermal-maximum

[xxvi] https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-earth-040610-133431

[xxvii] http://www.pnas.org/content/99/7/4172

[xxviii] https://psmag.com/news/suffocating-the-ocean ; https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/11/031104063957.htm ; https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_ward_on_mass_extinctions/transcript

[xxix] http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2018/20180221_RockDustInFarmingRedux.pdf

[xxx] https://countercurrents.org/2016/11/14/a-dangerous-zero-sum-game-donald-trump-vs-the-planet/

[xxxi] https://www.munichre.com/topics-online/en/2017/topics-geo/overview-natural-catastrophe-2016

Well, as a baby boomer who has seen lots of instances of the empire using MY flag as their own private property, this newest one ‘takes the cake’. I mean, my generation went through the whole ‘America, love it or leave it’ rhetoric during the Vietnam debacle. Many of us, either old or new to activism just tossed that aside as Bullshit! Yet, a majority of my friends and neighbors unfortunately bought into the hype and spin that the flag, and our national anthem, were to be sacrosanct… beyond reproach.

Many anti war demonstrations actually had our flag burned, which this writer did disagree with as a tactic of protest. The more powerful and thought provoking protest was to turn the flag upside down to reveal the upside down manner of this empire. As with Alice in Wonderland, the opposite was usually correct in most instances. How it sickened me and many others when we turned on the boob tube to watch Bob Hope entertaining our soldiers in the Nam… as if this was WW2 all over again.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) he has that scene, reminiscent of those Bob Hope ‘ visiting the troops with lots of tits and ass’, which revealed the perverted sense of what phony wars do to the soldiers.

Ever since the Cheney/Bush gang (yes, we who ‘knew better’ realized that Cheney was the controller and Junior the ‘idiot emperor’ with no clothes) lied and deceived us into this new ‘War on Terror’ , they held our flag hostage.

They had the suckers, saps and lollipops hang it over garage doors in my neighborhood, or on their cars and trucks (lots of pickups in Bushland), making it the phony symbol of patriotism. How many dead or wounded for life soldiers, and how many of the same, by a factor of 10times, Iraqi and Afghan civilians before our foolish neighbors realized the truth? Sadly, most of them never did! Thus, this phony ‘War of Terror’ goes on and on, always with new and more dangerous enemies… as THEIR flag waves on. This empire is so ‘smoothly diabolical’.

This coming July 4th, one again celebrating our ‘independence’ from Britain, is really counterfeit on many fronts. Researchers like Dean Henderson (whom I interviewed last week) can give interesting and concise accounts of how our nation never was freed from the influence of England and its infamous ‘City of London’, which together with Wall Street constitutes the banking bandit center of the world. His The Federal Reserve Cartel (2014) covers most of this information.

The second counterfeit point is that the celebration of not only our flag but our military in this current climate of empire is actually unpatriotic! No, to really celebrate our great flag and our military is to have this empire pulled back and save our nation from the fiscal and moral bankruptcy that is approaching.

To paraphrase the great Malcolm X, from one of his fine speeches, many of my good and decent friends and neighbors have been “bamboozled, conned and lead astray!”  A true ‘Independence Day’ would be a great awakening from the greedy and evil ones who run this empire.. and the many who serve it!

*

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

The vast expanse of Central and Eastern Europe stretching between the Adriatic, Baltic, and Black Seas has turned into a massive zone of serious competition for the US and Russia. 

 The “Intermarium” 

Most observers missed it, but one of the most immediate post-Brexit geopolitical consequences for the EU was the hosting of the first-ever “Three Seas Initiative” (TSI) summit in the Croatian port city of Dubrovnik in August 2016 that brought together the bloc’s 11 other Central and Eastern European members. The TSI is a Warsaw-led transregional “bloc-within-a-bloc” that represents the modern-day manifestation of Polish interwar strongman Józef Piłsudski’s vision for the “Intermarium”, which he conceived of as being a collection of states between Germany and Russia that were intended to form a so-called “cordon sanitaire”.

This organization is more than just a symbolic ego boost for the Polish elite but forms the basis for one of the most serious strategic threats that Russia will face along its western flank in the coming years if all 12 countries comprehensively deepen their integration with one another and function as an American “firewall” for preventing a Russian-German rapprochement. It should be remembered that Trump visited Warsaw in July 2017 during the TSI’s second summit and even delivered a keynote speech at the event where he spoke very highly about this organization and lauded its promising prospects, thereby bestowing the US’ formal support for the incipient creation of this new power center in Europe.

Although it still has a way to go before its reform-minded countries are capable of effectively challenging Germany’s dominance of the continent and getting the EU to decentralize into a collection of sovereignty-focused nation states, the TSI shouldn’t be ignored by Russian analysts because its “New Europe” members have received the US’ blessing to replace “Old Europe” in the economic, energy, military, political, and ultimately strategic spheres of American policy towards Western Eurasia. It’s with this long-term threat in mind that Russia has begun to counter the US’ moves in this massive space.

From One To Three 

Before explaining the Russian-American competition for influence in the “Three Seas” region, one needs to recognize that this “bloc-within-a-bloc” is actually three in one and comprises internal spheres of influence that can be described as the “Neo-Commonwealth” of Poland and the Baltic States; the “Neo-Austro-Hungarian Empire” of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia; and the “Black Sea Bloc” of Romania and Bulgaria. The “Neo-Czechoslovakia” of those two eponymous states straddles the “Neo-Commonwealth” and the “Neo-Austro-Hungarian Empire”, not clearly being within the sphere of influence of either given their membership in the Visegrad Group that counts Poland and Hungary as the leaders of the aforementioned blocs.

Looked at another way, the TSI is really just about integrating several historic sub-blocs within Central and Eastern Europe so that they could all more successfully lobby the EU’s much larger and powerful organizational leaders in order to promote their respective national interests, which for the most part overlap with one another when it comes to “domestic” EU politics such as responding to the Migrant Crisis in particular and strengthening national sovereignty more generally. Nevertheless, it’s their “extra-bloc” policies vis-à-vis energy security and military affairs where the TSI’s members diverge with one another and which has accordingly allowed the US and Russia to stake out their own spheres of influence within this organization.

Bloc-By-Bloc Breakdown 

The “Neo-Commonwealth” despises Russia for historical reasons and is therefore strongly in favor of an enhanced NATO military presence on its eastern neighbor’s borders. In addition, its members have fallen for the American-influenced infowar narrative that the Russian-German Nord Stream pipelines represent a “21^st-Century Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact”, preferring to pay for costlier LNG from halfway across the world in the US than rely on cheaper gas from nearby Russia. This state of affairs places the northern four members of the TSI – and especially its largest and most influential Polish member – solidly in the American camp.

The “Neo-Austro-Hungarian Empire”, however, is much more pragmatic towards Russia, with President Putin having even visited Budapest, Ljubljana, and soon Vienna in spite of the New Cold War tensions that came to the fore of European geopolitics ever since the 2014 spree of US-backed urban terrorism commonly referred to as “EuroMaidan” succeeded in overthrowing the Ukrainian government. The Russian leader was also recently invited to visit Zagreb too, and his country is currently in the middle of a fast-moving rapprochement with Croatia. This southwestern quarter of the TSI can therefore be said to be Russian-friendly.

When it comes to the “Black Sea Bloc”, however, only one of its two members shows any signs of interest in pragmatic relations with Russia, and that’s Moscow’s civilizational cousins in Bulgaria which recently invited President Putin to visit the country and also said that they’d like to revive the failed South Stream pipeline project through a new one tentatively called “Bulgarian Stream”. Romania, meanwhile, has always harbored distrust towards Russia for similar historical reasons as the four northern TSI members and specifically related to Moldova, so it can be considered very pro-American while Bulgaria is by comparison Russian-friendly just like the countries of the “Neo-Austro-Hungarian Empire”.

Concerning “Neo-Czechoslovakia”, neither of these two states is important enough to warrant any serious Russian-American rivalry, though their shift in favor of one or the other would certainly be appreciated by either Great Power, especially Moscow because it could help “balance” out its country-by-country influence in the bloc with Washington’s. In any case, despite being strategically located between two blocs and somewhat both an object of friendly competition between them but simultaneously a unifying bond as well (given their shared Visegrad Group membership), their landlocked geographies and comparatively small sizes make them less likely to be “fought over” than the other 10 states.

Influence Isn’t What It Used To Be 

This observation draws attention to the larger point of how the nature of influence itself has changed from the Old Cold War into the New Cold War, with military alliances and organizational membership being less important to almost half of the TIS’ 11 NATO members and its 12 EU ones than energy ties with Russia and the desire to “multi-align” or “balance” between Moscow, Washington, and Berlin. Interestingly, Russia and the US are also on the “same side” when it comes to the TSI’s “domestic” objective of strengthening their sovereignty and decentralizing the EU, though they of course differ over its “extra-bloc” approach towards energy and military affairs.

All told, the Russian-American competition for influence in the EU’s “Three Seas” region is underway and has already produced impressive gains for both Great Powers, though the end result is that their respective achievements run the risk of fracturing the bloc along anti-Russian and Russian-friendly fault lines. This works against American interests because the US would like to see the creation of a formidable “cordon sanitaire” against Moscow, though this division in and of itself is obviously advantageous for Russia because it greatly assists the country in breaking through the American “firewall” that’s designed to “contain” its influence from Europe in the New Cold War.

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This article was originally published on InfoRos.

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

Featured image is from Visegrad Post.

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Gardasil vaccine manufacturer, Merck, announced earlier this month (June, 2018) that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has granted them a “Priority Review” to approve the dangerous and controversial Gardasil 9 vaccine to women and men, ages 27 to 45.

The Gardasil vaccine is currently approved for girls and boys, ages 9 through 26.

The request by Merck to expand its market to women and men, ages 27 to 45, and the FDA’s approval to grant it a Priority Review by October 6, 2018, follows 10 years after the FDA struck down a similar request to expand the older version of Gardasil to the same age group.

FiercePharma, the marketing publication for pharmaceutical drugs, reports:

Back in 2008, after agreeing to a faster review in the age group, the FDA decided against Merck’s case for an additional Gardasil approval in females 27 to 45. The agency in 2009 issued a second complete response letter for that application, demanding Merck to provide longer-term efficacy data in the age group.

That set of data apparently didn’t turn things around for Merck. In both Gardasil’s and Gardasil 9’s current labels, information about a study on 3,253 women 27 through 45 years of age states that there was “no statistically significant efficacy” demonstrated by the vaccine in preventing high-grade cervical lesions or cervical cancer.

So what has changed that Merck now wants the FDA to act on their request again? According to FiercePharma:

Observational and clinical data over the past decade demonstrate that women 27 to 45 are also at risk of acquiring new HPV infections, Merck spokeswoman Pamela Eisele told FiercePharma.

Even though many people have already been exposed to HPV at an younger age, they have not been exposed to all nine HPV types targeted by Gardasil 9.

Besides, a follow-up of the long-term study with Gardasil in women ages 27-45 showed no additional cases of HPV disease for at least 10 years following vaccination, a result that can be extended to Gardasil 9, she said.

Will the FDA Look at Published Data on Gardasil Side-effects?

Besides the hundreds of stories of young women being injured or even killed by the Gardasil vaccine, as well as the lawsuits mounting in countries outside the U.S., the published data regarding Gardasil just keeps getting worse.

Will the FDA consider these studies in determining if Gardasil should be expanded to a larger population? Shouldn’t the FDA instead be determining if Gardasil should even stay in the market, as other countries are beginning to ask?

Two recent studies published this year (2018) on the Gardasil vaccine should put an immediate halt on increasing the vaccine’s market, and should, instead, prompt investigations into the safety of this dangerous vaccine and whether or not it should remain on the market.

A study published earlier this month (June, 2018) in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Health looked at declining fertility rates among eight million U.S. women, aged 25 to 29, during a 7-year period.

The title of study, published by Gayle DeLong, Ph.D., from the Department of Economics and Finance, Baruch College/City University of New York, is “A lowered probability of pregnancy in females in the USA aged 25–29 who received a human papillomavirus vaccine injection.”

From the abstract:

This study analyzed information gathered in National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which represented 8 million 25-to-29-year-old women residing in the United States between 2007 and 2014.

Approximately 60% of women who did not receive the HPV vaccine had been pregnant at least once, whereas only 35% of women who were exposed to the vaccine had conceived.

Using logistic regression to analyze the data, the probability of having been pregnant was estimated for females who received an HPV vaccine compared with females who did not receive the shot.

Results suggest that females who received the HPV shot were less likely to have ever been pregnant than women in the same age group who did not receive the shot. If 100% of females in this study had received the HPV vaccine, data suggest the number of women having ever conceived would have fallen by 2 million. (emphasis added)

We did not find a single corporate-sponsored “mainstream” media report on this study, and based on previous studies shedding a negative light on Gardasil, one wonders if this study will remain published or eventually be retracted due to pressure from outside influences.

Given the fact that many women in the U.S. are waiting longer to begin a family and conceive children, the expansion of Gardasil to this older age group could have even more devastating consequences to fertility rates. Learn more about this study:

Another study published earlier this year in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics examined cervical cancer rates among women in Sweden and discovered a link between increased cervical cancer rates among women, aged 20-49, during a two-year period between 2014 and 2015, corresponding to increased HPV vaccination rates in this population group, years earlier, when mass HPV vaccinations started in Sweden.

The study has been retracted subsequent to being published, due to the fact that the study author claimed his life was in danger for publishing such a study and had to use a pseudonym, but in publishing the retraction, the Journal affirmed the validity of the data and study conclusion:

Further we reconfirmed the reviewers’ conclusions: that the article used publicly available data with a simple statistical method; made a fair attempt to report a possible association of the increased incidence of carcinoma cervix with HPV vaccination; and suggested more research. We felt that the data and analysis could be scientifically appreciated and critiqued without reference to the author.

The data that this study examines is obviously very important when considering whether or not to expand the Gardasil vaccine to ages 27 – 45, as that is the same age group of the study subjects in Sweden, and it suggests that Gardasil not only does not prevent cervical cancer in that age group, but might, in fact, increase their risk of cervical cancer. See:

The U.S. FDA Should Follow Japan’s Example of Questioning the Risk of the Gardasil Vaccine Versus Perceived Benefits

We recently published an investigative report written by Vera Sharav of the Alliance for Human Research Protection, titled:

Japan Leading the World in Exposing Fraud with Gardasil HPV Vaccine Injuries and Deaths

Sharav showed how the Japanese Government does not have strong ties with pharmaceutical companies producing HPV vaccines and is, therefore, more prone to conduct honest investigations into the dangers of the HPV vaccines. Japan has not only rescinded its recommendation for the Gardasil vaccine, it has actually helped facilitate clinics to deal with Garsasil vaccine injuries:

In Japan, young women and girls suffering from severe chronic generalized pain following vaccination with Merck’s Gardasil® or GSK’s Cervarix®, have organized and are speaking out.

The issues are being debated at public hearings, at which scientific presentations have been made by independent medical experts who validated the women’s suffering with documented evidence of the severe nature of the pain related to the HPV vaccine.

The opposing view, presented by scientists aligned with the vaccine establishment, disregarded the scientific plausibility of the evidence and declared the pain was a “psychosomatic reaction.”

Such public debates do not take place where vaccine stakeholders are in full control of vaccine safety information. (Like in the U.S., for example.)

Following a public hearing (February 2014), at which scientific evidence was presented by independent scientists, the Japanese government, not only rescinded its recommendation that girls receive the HPV vaccine, but established guidelines and special clinics for evaluating and treating illnesses caused by the vaccine.

It is a scenario that Merck, GSK, and vaccine stakeholders globally are extremely anxious to suppress.

The Merck-commissioned, CSIS report, co-authored by Dr. Larson, paints a picture of an all-out war over media coverage – not over the high rate of serious adverse reactions.

Read the full article here.

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Featured image is from the author.

I frequently write about global politics following an interest in US foreign policy as it tends to strive towards global hegemony by one means or another.  Included in that are commentaries on Canada, my home country, and how we run double standards at home and abroad as willing followers of those same policies.  

This commentary is a departure from that.  I also read many science works ranging from basic natural history through many other branches of interest.  One of these branches has been very instructive concerning the family of man and how we are all essentially one big family.  Certainly a big squabbling family but in the modern human age, estimated between 150 to 200 000 years of existence, family none the less.  

I am not sure it provides hope for the future, but given the human tendency for self aggrandizement, it is instructive to be aware of how much we have in common, how much we have to lose, and raises the big question:  If we are as smart as we think we are, why are we doing what we are doing to ourselves and our planet, our only planet? 

Grandparents

To start with the most proximate part of a biological regression for examining the family of man, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and on is the easiest part to understand.  Taken purely mathematically we all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, 16 great-great-grandparents and so on.  If the generations are followed back twenty-six times (using twenty years as a generation, thus 520 years) we – at least those of European descent – have  great/…/grandparents enough to equal the whole population of Europe at that time.  [1] I had not thought this out beforehand, but for reference that happens to be 1498, the decade the European “Doctrine of Discovery” began its treacherous voyages to the ‘New World’.  

Basically the European “we” are all related and all have ancestry that includes both the best and the worst of European politicians philosophers, explorers, scientists, merchants, craftsmen and farmers (hmm, probably listed in reverse order of importance).  “We” are all cousins if not philosophically brothers and sisters of one another.  

Races

But humanity is much older than just the European line of descent, although current events might make one think otherwise.  Regardless, there are a variety of human races that have developed over the millennia and most have mixed and mingled in some form or another at different times.  Superficially there are significant differences, and this has created many of our global problems with European racism against all coloured people being one of them (not exclusively, just predominantly for the current era).  

Underneath those superficial differences lies a strong genetic similarity.   Without getting into the details of the genetics it can be illustrated with a black and white colour illustration (verbally).  If a white person is sitting between two black people, according to regressive genetic analysis, the white person is more closely related to the two black people on either side of them than the two black people are to each other.   Obviously this is simplified, made black and white for simplicity, but the main point is that through the various migrations of humanity around the world – out of Africa – there is more significant genetic differences between people still residing in Africa than between all those who have left Africa by whatever means or process.   

In short, racial differences  while real, are superficial, mostly artifacts of culture except for the obvious physical colour differences, while the underlying similarities of humanity greatly exceed and – if we are truly a sapient superior being – should overwhelm the colour differences.  According to the genetic record modern humanity appears  to have left Africa in two waves, from a very constricted and narrow (E. O. Wilson uses the term bottleneck) population that was lucky to survive when all of our early hominid ancestors died out.  From that small base, one group expanded mostly towards other parts of Asia and further into the Americas and Australasia, and the second group moved more westward through the Levant into Europe.  

We – the human we – are a single species, all closely related, a large family of 7.5 billion people trying to live on our one habitable planet.   Yet we endanger/threaten both ourselves and most of the rest of the planet with extinction in spite of our supposed intelligence and technological wizardry that has helped produce the recent spectacular increase in both the human population and the degradation of the environment.  

Meet your great/…./grandmother….

I will go one step further back along this long (by human terms) journey.  Inside all human cells requiring energy (almost all of them) resides an organelle called the mitochondria.  It contains its own genetic structure and is transferred from mother to mother only and thus represents a matrilineal line of descent.  Using that line of regression takes humanity all the way back to our original matriarch: your great/…./grandmother, known scientifically as “Mitochondrial Eve”,  a black woman living in southern Africa some 150 to 200 thousand years ago (range varies by source).  

Obviously there had to be a great/…./grandfather, but I find the vision of a matriarchal genetic lineage more compelling than the usual white male dominated image created by those of European ancestry.  

Global awareness

So where do we go from here?  Our current lifestyle – at least that of the competitive consumer oriented societies of the world – does not tend to create a long term outlook for our species.  Our Mitochondrial Eve ancestor nurtured her family; our Mother Earth may decide that she has had enough of nurturing us if we do not act to the best of our capacity as we like to perceive ourselves capable of doing.   Sometime probably all too soon, we will discover whether we as a species will do ourselves in or somehow manage to rework our human systems in order to survive along with a healthy planet for the long term.  

Books currently sitting on my bookshelf:

Coyne, Jerry. A.  Why Evolution is True.  Penguin Books, London.  2010. 

Mukherjee, Siddartha.  The Gene – An Intimate History.  Scribner, New York.  2016.

Ridley, Matt. Genome – The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters.  Harper Perennial Edition, New York. 2000.

Wilson, Edward O.  The Diversity of Life.  W. H. Norton & Company, New York.  1999.

Zimmer, Carl.  Evolution – The Triumph of an Idea.  Harper Perennial Edition, New York.  2006. 

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Jim Miles is a frequent contributor to Global Research.

Note

[1] All figures rounded as reasonable approximations.