Global Research

Featured image: Abbas Thaher (Photo: Jaclynn Ashly)

Palestinians in Bethlehem’s Aida refugee camp have expressed their mounting anxiety over a US decision to slash funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

Earlier this month, the US State Department informed UNRWA that it would be withholding over $100 million from the organization. Heather Nauert, the department’s spokesperson, said that the funds “will be held for future consideration. It’s money that’s being frozen at this time.” The US wants to “see some revisions made in how UNRWA operates,” she said.

She added that the decision was “not aimed at punishing anyone.”

Palestinians in Aida refugee camp disagree, telling Mondoweiss that the cuts are a continuation of US policies aimed at strangling the lifeline of Palestinian refugees.

UNRWA was established in 1949 to provide services to some 750,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and lands during Israel’s creation in 1948.

The UNRWA refugee status is passed down to children via their fathers; the number of Palestinian refugees under UNRWA’s responsibility is now more than five million — all of whom are scattered across Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip.

‘Erosion of services’

Aida refugee camp is located adjacent to Israel’s separation wall and an Israeli military tower in northern Bethlehem city. On the roof of some homes, an illegal Israeli settlement can be seen beyond the cement wall that snakes around the camp.

The camp is the site of frequent Israeli military raids and a recent study conducted by UC Berkeley School of Law concluded that the camp was the most tear-gassed area in the world.

The some 3,150 residents of Aida are dependent on UNRWA to provide food and cash programs to vulnerable refugees, school and healthcare.

Sajida Allan (image on the right), a 24-year-old who volunteers at the Aida-based NGO al-Rowwad, told Mondoweiss that

“we already face so many hardships in the camp. Cutting this aid will only make our lives more difficult.”

Chris Gunness, UNRWA’s spokesperson, said that owing to US cuts the agency is facing the “worst financial crisis in its 70-year history” with a $440 million deficit — at least $250 million of which was expected to originate from the US. The agency has reportedly begun laying off dozens of its workers since the US announcement.

Camp residents noted that concern over the future of UNRWA services has been swelling years before these most recent cuts.

According to residents, for the past decade UNRWA services have been steadily reduced. UNRWA’s shrinking budget coupled with austerity measures has shifted some of the financial burdens on Palestinian refugee families.

Gunness told Mondoweiss that UNRWA has experienced a “slow erosion of its services” owing to a prolonged financial crisis.

He said that UNRWA’s teachers and doctors are “working against all odds because the infrastructure that supports them is crumbling.”

Former construction worker Abbas Thaher, 67, remembers when UNRWA covered 100 percent of healthcare costs, school supplies and stationeries for Palestinian students at UNRWA schools, and even distributed free clothes to refugees twice a year.

Now, however, he says that UNRWA does not cover school expenses and clinics often lack various medications, forcing families to buy medicine and seek treatment outside UNRWA facilities. In 2016, UNRWA reformed their healthcare system to require refugees pay five to 20 percent of their secondary healthcare costs.

Thaher pays 4,000 shekels ($1,172) a month on treatment for his ill wife. He says that UNRWA does not assist him with the costs.

“I’m not worried about losing UNRWA services,” Thaher said, frustrated. “Because they barely provide any as it is.”

But at the same time, he acknowledged that Palestinians “need UNRWA just to have a basic life.”

‘UNRWA is all we have’

Camp resident Jaida Abu Srour (image on the left), 22, told Mondoweiss that UNRWA’s Cash for Work program is central for the livelihoods of Palestinian refugees. The program hires refugees on a temporary basis to provide them financial support.

According to Aida residents, even this program has been peeled back. Abu Srour’s uncle suffers from health complications that prevent him from being employed. The Cash for Work program is often a lifeline for sick or disabled refugees who cannot find alternative employment.

“He has been unemployed for two years now. And he is not getting help from UNRWA,” she said, adding that as services continue to be cut amid the West Bank’s soaring unemployment rates refugees are becoming “desperate” to land temporary work with UNRWA.

Many residents fear that the program will be further scaled down owing to US funding cuts, which could leave scores of refugees without a livelihood, Abu Srour told Mondoweiss.

According to Gunness, 60,000 Palestinians are currently participating in UNRWA’s Cash for Work program in the West Bank. Meanwhile, the agency provides food and cash programs to an additional 1.7 million Palestinian refugees throughout the Middle East.

He added that “well over 95 percent” of UNRWA’s some 30,000 employees are Palestinian refugees.

“When you start disturbing an institution that is so deeply-rooted in these communities the consequences are likely to be profound and unpredictable,” Gunness said. “Who knows what kind of consequences this US reduction will have.”

The US cuts to UNRWA came two weeks after Trump threatened to cut US aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the wake of a US decision to officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, prompting Palestinian leaders to boycott Trump’s so-called “peace process.”

“This is just a continuation of US policies that were happening before Trump,” Allan explained to Mondoweiss. “They are recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, threatening to cut funding to the PA and then slashing their support to UNRWA. These policies have a goal: squeeze us into a corner and make our lives so miserable that we just give up our rights.”

Ahmad Abu Salem (image on the right), 59, owns a small shop in Aida camp. He says he is most concerned about the schooling and healthcare provided by UNRWA, noting that these are the most basic service provisions needed in the camps to prevent dangerous social consequences.

“UNRWA is all we have. We don’t have any alternatives if they continue cutting services. Without UNRWA we have nothing,” he said, adding that the PA is not financially capable of making up the gaps in services.

Abu Salem expressed fear that the slow collapse of UNRWA would create a vacuum of unemployment, prompting Palestinians to turn to crime to make ends meet.

“We would have no jobs and nowhere to go. If these cuts continue the situation here could explode,” he said.

Refugee Identity

For Palestinians in Aida camp, the most important aspect of UNRWA is its “confirmation of the refugee identity.”

“The camp itself is like my passport,” Thaher told Mondoweiss. “It shows the world that I am a refugee and that I had a home I was expelled from.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for UNRWA to be dismantled and has alleged that the agency “incites” against Israel. He has referred to Palestinians expelled from their homes during Israel’s creation as “fictitious refugees.”

“When I call myself a refugee, people are sympathetic to me and my story,” Allan said. “But if they take that label away from us, it will be easier for Israel to paint us as terrorists, erase our history and dehumanize us.”

While residents noted that UNRWA does not directly help with fulfilling the Right of Return — upheld by UN Resolution 194 which supports the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes in what is now Israel, its continued existence is crucial to maintaining the historical narrative of this displacement.

UNRWA is connected to the status of Palestinian refugees so much so that Allan believes the gradual reduction of the agency’s services represents “the slow erasing of the refugee identity.”

“The US and Israel want to force UNRWA to continue reducing their services to Palestinian refugees, so that we have to find services elsewhere,” Allan explained. “Once fewer and fewer refugees rely on the agency, they can more easily close it down. And with it, our dreams of returning home.”

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Jaclynn Ashly is a journalist based in Bethlehem, Palestine. You can find her on twitter @jaclynnashly.

The gambit is a well-known opening move in the chess game. The player makes a sacrifice, typically a pawn, for the sake of a compensating advantage. Emmanuel Macron metaphorically did that in the first six months of his presidency. In the run-up to the presidential election, the political neophyte introduced himself as neither left-wing nor right-wing, but rather as left-wing and right-wing. It was a bold attempt to supersede the deeply entrenched left-right divide in French politics, and to take from both camps “what works best.” In so doing, Macron was able, for a short period of time, to defy political gravity and position himself as an ideal centrist candidate.

What’s more, the 39-year old candidate was untested politically, a young bright figure with a liberal profile and background. In this respect, Macron likes to remind everyone that he was once the editorial assistant to renowned French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Indeed, Macron is keen to be seen as the first “intellectual president” since François Mitterrand.

If Macron was a breath of fresh air in the run-up to the election, his political honeymoon with the voters did not last long. His first actions in power have marked the end of an original realignment of French politics. His economic policy blatantly leans to the right and is of a neoliberal nature. Both sides say so. Les Républicains, the party launched by former president Nicolas Sarkozy, has been remarkably silent since the start of the Macron presidency. They are unable to mount any significant challenge because, as some Republicans privately argue, Macron has stolen most of their policies. In short, they have virtually nothing to oppose and nowhere to go.

For political observers of French politics, Macron’s shift to the right was no major surprise. Backed by a strong 60-seat majority in the National Assembly, Macron had made no secret that, should he be elected, he would dramatically reshape France’s labour market. While running for president, Macron said that France needed “a shock of trust, a real acceleration.” He has all the constitutional power to pass any legislation he wishes to put forward. From a constitutional point of view, the French president, even called a “republican Monarch,” is the most powerful of any Western democracy (including the U.S).

The reform of the French Labour Code (Code du Travail) was hastily passed in September. Macron’s reform goes much further than the El Khomri voted by the Socialist government in 2016. While the French labour market had been traditionally protective of workers’ rights, the new law has dramatically shifted the power into the employers’ and business’ hands.

The French president chose a rather controversial way to push through the labour reform: he asked the deputies of his party, La République En Marche, which controls the National Assembly, to give the government the right to pass rulings, instead of letting the parliament debate and vote legislation. Macron wanted to reform the Labour Code quickly and decisively. Given the depth and importance of the reforms, his critics have argued that Macron showed contempt for parliamentary representation on this occasion.

Macron promised that the reforms would bring more freedom and more equality of opportunity for employees and job seekers. The issue is that a majority of workers saw these measures as market deregulation, rather than market modernization. Some of the more controversial measures include: the role of industrial tribunals being largely reduced; the number of working days paid after a lay-off being cut down; and the issues that were previously set by the law, such as contract details, being now negotiable within the company. Negotiations with employers would also be possible without the presence of a union.

And yet, Macron implemented this flagship reform without encountering any significant opposition: The Front National has been mute following Marine Le Pen’s disastrous second round of the presidential election. The Republicans have been in crisis since François Fillon’s abysmal result in the first round of the same election. The Socialists are leaderless, have no program, are losing members and officials in droves, and are still wondering whether they should oppose Macron’s policy. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the self-appointed main opponent to Macron, has indeed been a more robust opponent. A former socialist official. Mélenchon created a new movement called La France Insoumise (Unbowed France). The leftist Mélenchon has given up on the notions of socialism or the left. In true populist fashion, his aim is to “federate the people” against an “oligarchy” in order to recapture a “lost [political and economic] sovereignty.” Mélenchon has called Macron’s labour law reforms a “social coup d’état” and organized several street protests against the law, which failed to mobilise. Furthermore, Mélenchon’s tactical disagreements with the unions further demoralized protesters. The left was easily defeated and Macron won the first round of his battle after a successful Blitzkrieg.

Macron is also pushing through severe public service cuts, such as 150,000 government-subsidized fixed-term contract jobs in schools. Macron’s economic agenda is increasingly regarded as a Thatcherite-style attack on social rights in France. This is his political gambit: he has no major opponent to his right and to his center-left. He therefore remains convinced that he occupies a central and pivotal position in a fast-changing political landscape. On this count, he seems to be right. Despite a temporary slump in popularity following the passing his labour law reforms, he largely dominates French politics.

The labour law reform may be largely responsible for breaking the spell with the public, at least with moderate center-left voters. But there is more to it than economics. After all, there may still be significant cross-party support for his neoliberal agenda. People are also taken aback by Macron’s oratory style and his obvious “class contempt.” He, above all, seems to display no empathy for the worst-off. His comments on his political opponents often sound patronizing, if not scornful. In early September, days before a union-led protest against his overhaul of labour laws, the French president said in a speech that he would not back down “to slackers, cynics, and extremists.”

Critics have called him a “powdered marquis, a megalomaniac with royal pretensions, a rich man’s president or a communicator without a cause.” Macron could not care less. He has retreated into the Élysée Palace, and tightened presidential communication. Unlike Sarkozy and Hollande, who commented on day-to-day affairs, Macron stands back and intervenes little. He thinks that power is best exercised when wrapped in a cloud of mystery. Aloof and haughty, Macron has labelled his presidency “Jupetarian”—a formal and strong presidency with all the pomp of the 5th Republic à la de Gaulle or Mitterrand.

Macron has not been particularly liberal from a political or cultural viewpoint. The government’s treatment of migrants and refugees is as harsh and heavy-handed as the previous government. So far, he has stayed away from the main controversies on national identity, which inevitably revolve around Muslims. Racial tensions run high in France, and the country could do with a more inclusive and multicultural approach to the question of citizenship. On Europe, he has sought to position himself as the leader who can fix the European Union’s political and economic crisis, but he gave few details on how he is going to do so.

Macron is no doubt the new strong man of French politics. His embrace of the political center ground, followed by a shift to the neoliberal right, has disarmed the center-left and the conservative right. However, the young president should bear in mind that his position of strength derives not so much of his actions, but rather of the weakness of his opponents.

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Philippe Marlière is a Professor of French and European Politics at University College London (UK). Twitter: @PhMarliere

First published by Global Research in January 2017

In early November 2016, without warning, the Indian government declared the two largest denomination bills invalid, abolishing over 80 percent of circulating cash by value. Amidst all the commotion and outrage this caused, nobody seems to have taken note of the decisive role that Washington played in this. That is surprising, as Washington’s role has been disguised only very superficially.

The prophets and forecasters for the coming year have already set out their global vision ranging from rising economies to catastrophic global wars.

I want to argue from a different perspective, focusing on the increasing subdivision of markets, the deepening autonomy of political action from economic development, the greater threat of military interventions and increasing political accommodation.  I believe that we will experience a radical making and remaking of political and economic integration, East and West, within and without nations states.  ‘States Rights’ will re-emerge as an antidote to globalization.  Big countries will compete in regional wars with limited commitments but with global goals.

Professor  James Petras

Catastrophic developments are unlikely but radical incremental changes will be frequent and have cumulative consequences.

To understand these important trends, it is important to analyze and discuss the major national actors in this panorama – starting with the United States.

Trends in the US

The present and near future of the US is and is not about the Trump Presidency and its domestic opposition.

The struggles between the Congress and the President have not produced major changes in the global position of the United States.  The US continues to impose sanctions on Russia, Iran and Venezuela.  Its trade with China grows.  The military exercises and threats against North Korea raise the specter of nuclear war.  In other words, incremental and inconsequential activity accompany the fiery rhetoric. Corporate economic policies benefit from the state’s largesse, but are divorced from everyday politics. What is most significant, ‘markets’ have fragmented or disconnected: Stocks rise, but productivity stagnates. Corporate debt skyrockets, but high tech profits boom. Exports and imports move in opposite directions. Jobs increase and wages decrease.

There are one, two, many markets, each operating on similar principles, all deepening the concentration of wealth and the interlock of corporate directorates.

Just as there are several markets, there are multiple centers of political leadership. Specifically, the US is a multi-polar ‘Presidency’. For all the talk about ‘Trump’, policy and strategy are defined, promoted and opposed in many centers of decision making. In general terms, the intelligence, military, media, financial, legislative, trade and international policy elites are mired in rivalries as well as temporary alliances, making strange bed-fellows. Moreover, new international power configurations have entered and appropriated positions of power.

Rulership

Who rules America?  This question should be rephrased to take into account the plurality of authoritarian self-serving elites totally divorced from the majority of the manipulated public.

Nominal ‘President’ Trump shifts foreign policy decisions according to the interests of multiple domestic and overseas power centers. Trump argues against and is opposed to multilateral trade agreements while favoring unilateral, US-centered pacts. Despite his rhetoric, nothing of the sort has emerged. Trade with Asia, Europe and Latin America has increased. China, Japan, India, Germany, Korea, Canada and Mexico remain centers for US exports and imports. Bankers, multinational corporations, Silicon Valley billionaires continue to over-ride Trump’s stated agenda.

Trump argued for reconciliation with Russia and was threatened with impeachment. The Congress, the intelligence agencies, the legislature and NATO contradict, reverse and redirect the US both toward and away from nuclear confrontations.

Trump proposes to renegotiate trade with Asia, particularly with South Korea, Japan and China.

Instead, the Pentagon, the media, the neo-cons and the Japanese militarist elite dictate nuclear confrontation with North Korea and threats against China. (Japan’s Prime Minister Abe is the grandson of the ‘Butcher of Manchuria’ Kishi Nobusuke.) The business, financial and Silicon Valley elite challenge the ‘America First’ ideologues, the Pentagon and local US manufacturers over China.  Meanwhile thousands of container ships carry raw materials and merchandise between China and the US, their captains waving to the handful of US warships patrolling a few piles of rocks in the South China Seas.

Trump flourishes his threats against the European Union and the World Trade Organization and then hops on his jet to Davos to socialize with the German, French, British and American ‘Free-Traders’.

The big decisions are the non-decisions. The continuities of policies and the elites, at best simply deepening the prior policies that promote financial markets, depress wages and multiply local wars and military confrontations. The decisive decisions of 2018 are those which are not made by Trump, but by his allies and adversaries at home and abroad.

Trump’s Marginal America First

A close-up of the marginal decision-making, bypassing Washington would include: the North-South Korea conciliation; Russia-China agreement over US sanctions; Israel ’s overt power grab against the Palestinians; Iran’s challenge to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia; and the Pakistan-Taliban ‘covert’ alliance.

Washington ’s marginalization is evident in the economic spheres. The US stock market booms but productivity declines; profits surge but worker life expectancy drops; immense concentration of wealth parallels a rise in maternal and infant mortality; American youth have the highest chance of dying before adulthood among all industrialized countries. Mortality has replaced mobility.

Washington is the center of intense warfare over inconsequential issues.

Beyond US marginalization, new regional power centers have emerged and successfully annihilated or neutralized US clients. Turkey is a striking example. Ankara has attacked and undermined the Pentagon’s plans for an armed Kurdish client force controlling Northern Syria. Iraq has over-run the US-Israeli backed Kurdish militias under the Barzani warlords in Kirkuk. The Taliban are moving from the Afghan countryside and mountains and staging almost daily uprisings in the urban centers and capital Kabul. The Venezuelan government has effectively defeated the US-backed uprisings in Caracas and other cities. The US puppet regime in Kiev has failed to conquer the ethnic Russian separatist enclaves in the Donbass region where a de facto government operates with Russian support.

Let us recognize that marginality, retreats and defeats do not spell the ‘end of Empire’; but let us also admit that the competing sectors of the US economy (stocks, bonds, technology and profits) are in a dynamic phase, even if they are heading for a major correction. The probable reason is because the economy operates independent of the political system, the turmoil in Washington and the US marginality abroad.

The mass media-propagates domestic partisan conflicts thru scandal-mongering. Its vision of an impending collapse and demise of Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China have not a whisper of influence on the real dynamics of global market forces. China grows by 7% and all the major US-EU economic players from Airbus to Amazon, fight to join Beijing’s multi-polar markets. Markets ignore, if not flourish with, government shutdowns. Markets ignore the latest eruptions from the Pentagon, ‘The New Military Strategy’ against China and Russia. South Korean businesses embrace US markets while seeking to secure access to North Korea’s skilled labor force.

Washington’s decisions to deny the reality that the future requires increasing productivity via a skilled, healthy and well-paid domestic labor force dooms the US to a downward spiral of political marginality, military futility and robust bombast. The media, the pundits and political elite ignore the fragmentation of US power and the separation of military and market forces – each going its own way. Class inequalities and rising working class mortality rates may encourage immigration but it also undermines the foundation of American influence. A ruling class rules by linking a unified state to a dynamic market, producers to the consumers, importers to exporters and increasing wealth to rising wages.

Trump and anti-Trump antics are irrelevant at best and a destructive sideshow at worst. The foundations of the US state and its markets are substantial but crumbling. What is important is not the status quo, but its direction and structures.

Prolonged wars at the margins of state power or Secretary of Defense Mattis’ threats of global conflicts with world powers, like Russia and China, to ‘protect the US standard of living’ will inevitably and inexorably lead to deeper fissure between the US economy and the militarist state. US political institutions, President or Congress, utterly fail to come to terms with the real economic dynamics of the existing world market.

They still confuse rising stock prices and profits with the long-term factors of growth and stability. Let’s think about ‘death on the installment plan!’

In 1948, The New Yorker published what would become one of the most famous short stories in American literature. This was The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, which told the tale of a community that, once every year, selected a citizen to be stoned to death in order to ensure a good harvest.

Jackson was flooded with hate mail after her story was published. Some readers thought the story represented a real situation and others were offended that anyone could imagine such a scenario. Although the story was meant to depict only the idea of mindless violence and apathy in human society, in the 21^st century it has become a reflection of the general attitude toward terrorism.

Consider the crimes of 9/11. As in The Lottery, on a bright, summer day, people were selected to die by means of their presence at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and on the hijacked flights. They weren’t stoned to death but they were killed by willful ignorance. That’s because much of the public never wanted to know the truth about previous terrorist incidents and simply accepted dubious government accounts.

For example, neither the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing nor the tragedy of the USS Cole in October 2000 have been examined closely by most people. The mindless acceptance of the official accounts for these events led to the crimes of 9/11, after which the indifference to facts was taken to the next level. What facts were ignored after 9/11? The list would be endless but here are a few examples.

1. Insider trading related to 9/11 was ignored and the suspects were not even questioned by the FBI or the 9/11 Commission.
2. The third skyscraper that fell that day, in an obvious demolition event (WTC Building 7), was simply not mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.
3. Eyewitness testimony was hidden from the public for years and later ignored. This included the testimony of firefighters who said that explosives were going off throughout the WTC towers.
4. Building construction codes were not changed as a result of the root causes cited by the government for destruction of the WTC buildings, meaning the government explanation was effectively ignored by the building construction community.
5. Everyone agrees that the public was lied to about the failure of the national air defenses that day. The question avoided is whether to believe the government story that the U.S. military lied repeatedly for years to make itself look bad, or the much simpler explanation that the 9/11 Commission lied in its final report to divert attention away from the whole matter.
6. The government reports on the destruction of the WTC buildings ignored basic laws of science and would have failed peer review. Meanwhile the only actual peer-reviewed science on the subject, for example this, and this, and this, and this, went unheeded.

By ignoring the facts related to 9/11, the public has prepared itself to be terrorized on a regular basis. Recurring acts of terrorism follow a formula that is transparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence beyond simply accepting corporate media reports.

An outstanding example is the San Bernardino shooting of December 2015. The Los Angeles Times reported that, a year after the San Bernardino shooting, “federal officials acknowledge they still don’t have answers to some of the critical questions.” San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan said, “We never established the motive. The best we can do is theorize.”

This was a mass shooting in which most of the evidence was ignored in favor of an official account that accused a brown-skinned, Muslim husband and wife. Contrary to the unchallenged accusation, the evidence suggests that the attackers were three white men who appeared to be special operations soldiers.

At the time of the attack, a Los Angeles television station stated: “Police looking for 3 white males dressed in military gear.” The only eyewitness to the shootings said the perpetrators were three tall, athletic, white men in combat-style gear. The witnesses to the getaway said they saw three men in black masks fleeing the scene with rifles in hand. Another said it was three white men in military gear. The attackers got into a black SUV with tinted windows and “calmly” left the scene.

Although a black SUV was later found shot up badly, no convincing evidence was ever produced showing how the accused were driving or shooting from the SUV. Moreover, the attorney representing the family said the accused appear to have been handcuffed and lying face down in the vehicle when found. As with 9/11, the accused were conveniently dead.

The fourteen people killed in San Bernardino were just like the nearly 3,000 killed on 9/11. They were sacrificial lottery winners, murdered not simply by the perpetrators of the crime but by fellow citizens who continue to ignore the facts about terrorist events. The lack of objective examination of terrorist acts suggests that we might as well stone to death future victims because it is the public’s apathy that allows terrorism to continue.

Who will be next? As with Shirley Jackson’s novel we are all in the lottery of terrorism. Unless we take action to investigate and communicate the facts about terrorist events our names will remain in the pool to be selected at random. Only a concerted and persistent effort to question each new terrorist act, as well as those of the last few decades, will remove our names from the list.

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This article was originally published by Dig Within.

O Nuclear Posture Review 2018, que é o relatório do Pentágono sobre a estratégia nuclear dos Estados Unidos, está atualmente em fase de revisão na Casa Branca. À espera de ser publicada a versão definitiva aprovada pelo presidente Trump, vazou (mais exatamente, o Pentágono fez vazar) o esboço do documento de 64 páginas.

O documento descreve um mundo em que os Estados Unidos têm pela frente “uma gama de ameaças sem precedentes”, provenientes de Estados e entes não estatais. Enquanto os EUA continuaram a reduzir as suas forças nucleares – afirma o Pentágono – a Rússia e a China baseiam as suas estratégias em forças nucleares dotadas de novas capacidades e assumem “um comportamento sempre mais agressivo tanto no espaço externo como no cyberespaço”.

A Coreia do Norte continua ilicitamente a dotar-se de armas nucleares. O Irã, apesar de ter aceitado o plano que o impede de desenvolver um programa nuclear militar, mantém “a capacidade tecnológica de construir uma arma nuclear no prazo de um ano”.

Falsificando uma série de dados, o Pentágono busca demonstrar que as forças nucleares dos Estados Unidos estão em grande parte obsoletas e necessitam de uma radical reestruturação. Não diz que os EUA já aviaram em 2014, ainda na administração Obama, o maior programa de rearmamento nuclear desde o fim da guerra fria ao custo de mais de um trilhão de dólares.

“O programa de modernização das forças nucleares dos EUA – documenta Hans Kristensen, da Federação dos Cientistas Americanos – já permitiu realizar novas tecnologias revolucionárias que triplicam a capacidade destrutiva dos mísseis balísticos estadunidenses”.

Na realidade, o escopo da projetada reestruturação é o de adquirir “capacidades nucleares flexíveis”, desenvolvendo “armas nucleares de baixa potência”, utilizáveis também em conflitos regionais ou para reesponder a um ataque (verdadeiro ou presumido) de hacker aos sistemas informáticos.

A principal arma deste tipo é a bomba nuclear B61-12 que, confirma o relatório, “estará disponível em 2020”. A bomba B61-12, que substituirá a atual B-61 instalada pelos EUA na Itália, Alemanha, Bélgica, Holanda e Turquia, representam – segundo as palavras do Pentágono – “um claro sinal de dissuasão a qualquer potencial adversário, de que os Estados Unidos possuem a capacidade de responder à escalada desde bases avançadas”.

Como documenta a Federação dos Cientistas Americanos, a bomba que o Pentágono instalará nas “bases avançadas” na Itália e outros países da Europa não é somente uma versão modernizada da B61, mas uma nova arma com uma ogiva nuclear e quatro opções de potência selecionáveis, um sistema de controle remoto que permite lançá-la à distância do alvo, com capacidade de penetrar no terreno para destruir as casamatas dos centros de comando.

A partir de 2021 – especifica o Pentágono – as bombas B61-12 estarão disponíveis também para os caças dos aliados, entre os quais os Tornado italianos PA-200 do 6° Destacamento aéreo de Ghedi. Mas para guiá-los ao alvo e explorar sua capacidade de atacar casamatas, são necessários os caças F-35A.

“Os caças de nova geração F-35A – sublinha o relatório do Pentágono – manterão a força de dissuasão da Otan e a nossa capacidade de instalar armas nucleares em posições avançadas, se necessário para a segurança”. O Pentágono anuncia, portanto, o plano de instalar os F-35A, armados com as bombas B61-12, perto da Rússia. Obviamente para a “segurança” da Europa.

No relatório do Pentágono, que o senador democrata Edward Markey define como “roteiro para a guerra nuclear”, a Itália está na primeira fila. Isto interessa a algum candidato às eleições italianas?

Manlio Dinucci

Artigo original em italiano :

L’Italia nel piano nucleare del Pentagono, L’arte della guerra

il manifesto, 23 de Janeiro de 2018

Tradução de José Reinaldo Carvalho para o Resistência.

Manlio Dinucci é geógrafo e jornalista.

This timely article by philosophy Professor John Kozy was first published by Global Research in January 2013

The United States of America was conceived and nurtured by violence.

Americans not only engage in violence, they are entertained by it.

Killing takes place in America at an average of 87 times each day. Going to war in Afghanistan is less dangerous than living in Chicago.

The Romans went to the Coliseum to watch people being killed. In major cities, Americans just look out their windows. Baseball, once America’s national game, a benign, soporific sport, has been replaced by football which is so violent it destroys the brains of those who play it. Violent films, euphemized as action flicks, dominate our motion picture theatres and television sets. Our children play killing video games.

So do you really believe that gun control will miraculously make America into a tranquil nation? Do you really believe that outlawing products and practices will make Americans peace loving? A culture cannot be changed by laws, change requires a sustained effort over several generations. Are Americans  up to the task?

Carry Amelia Moore Nation was born on November 25, 1846. She became a radical member of the temperance movement which opposed the consumption of alcohol. She described herself as “a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus, barking at what He doesn’t like,” and claimed a divine ordination to promote temperance by destroying bars. She began her temperance work in Medicine Lodge, Kansas by starting a local branch of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and campaigning for the enforcement of Kansas’ ban on the sales of liquor. She became infamous by vandalizing taverns. Often accompanied by hymn-singing women and musicians, she would march into a bar and sing and pray while smashing bar fixtures and stock with a hatchet. Between 1900 and 1910 she was arrested around 30 times for “hatchetations,” as she called them. She died on June 9, 1911 and was buried in an unmarked grave in Belton, Missouri. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union later erected a stone inscribed “Faithful to the Cause of Prohibition, She Hath Done What She Could.” Had she lived just eight years longer, she would have seen prohibition become the law of the land.

But, of course, it didn’t last. Prohibition was repealed on December 5, 1933. It lasted a mere 14 years. It had absolutely no beneficial effects on society. In fact, it helped establish organized crime in America.

Yet Americans do not give up easily. In this anti-intellectual society where people are told more scientists are needed, unscientific practices prevail. What is shown not to work is repeated over and over again. So in 1971, the Nixon administration declared war on drugs. Now, almost 50 years later, the walls of the trenches are beginning to collapse. This long effort at prohibition too has just not worked, and it too has had absolutely no beneficial effects on society. In fact, it has resulted in the deaths of thousands in America and abroad, has ruined countless lives of young people, and squandered vast amounts of money. Just as Prohibition did, it has fostered the creation of international criminal cartels. What people with a scientific bent would have abandoned as ineffective, Americans have put into practice with greater and greater vigor. One would think that someone would recognize the folly. But no, the crowd is again clamoring. Now it’s about guns.

Don’t misread this piece. I own no guns; I can think of no reason why people living in a civilized state should need guns. Guns have one purpose and one purpose alone—to kill! People in a civilized state should have no need or reason to do that. If guns are needed for self-protection, the state has failed in its primary function of insuring domestic tranquility. (Read your Constitution!) A nation that cannot provide even that has thoroughly failed. And the fact that there are those in America who insist on owning guns says more about them and the nation’s failure than it says about guns.

But another attempt at prohibition is nothing but an emotional attempt to do something even if it is something that won’t have any significant effect on the level of violence in America. Some have referred to gun control laws as “feel good” acts. Perhaps, but feel good acts are better than feel bad acts, and I know of no good reason to oppose gun control. What I object to is the Pollyanna belief that gun control will significantly reduce violence in American society. Guns are not the cause of this violence; the violent nature of American society is the cause of the American love affair with guns.

The United States of America was conceived and nurtured by violence. The Europeans who colonized America were neither tolerant or enlightened; they were the dregs of society, and they even despised each other. The totally impure Puritans of Massachusetts despised the Quakers of Pennsylvania and the Catholics of Maryland. In the Pequot War, English colonists commanded by John Mason, launched a night attack on a large Pequot village on the Mystic River and burned the inhabitants in their homes and killed all survivors. By conservative estimates, the population of the United states prior to European colonization was greater than 12 million. Four centuries later, the count has been reduced to 237,000. Four centuries of continuous violence against native Americans, and the violence persists.

Abraham Lincoln, enshrined as the great emancipator, freed the slaves by inciting a war that killed somewhere around 750,000 Americans. Emancipation came to the slaves by previously unheard of violence. In contrast and at about the same time in history, the autocratic Tsar Alexander II of Russia emancipated more than 23 million serfs without killing a single person. Oh, those horrid Russian Tsars!

After the Civil War, Americans pushed the frontiers of America all the way to the Pacific Ocean. They did it with the gun. The Winchester Model 1873 repeating rifle and Colt Peacemaker revolver of 1873 are colloquially known as “The Guns that Won the West” for their predominant roles in the hands of Western settlers. Americans shot their way from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

American foreign policy for decades has consisted primarily of military misadventures—foreign policy through the barrel of a gun! Today, the gun has become the drone and the bullet, the hellfire missile. General Smedley Butler (1881-1940), one of only two Americans to win the Medal of Honor on two separate occasions, wrote:

“I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. . . . I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.” Now, of course, we’re using the gun to make the Middle East and Southeast Asia “safe for democracy.”

But the attempt isn’t faring very well.

Violence pervades this culture. Americans not only engage in violence, they are entertained by it. Killing takes place in America more often than the Sun rises, currently at an average of 87 times each day. Going to war in Afghanistan is less dangerous than living in Chicago. The Romans went to the Coliseum to watch people being killed. In major cities, Americans just look out their windows. Baseball, once America’s national game, a benign, soporific sport, has been replaced by football which is so violent it destroys the brains of those who play it. Violent films, euphemized as action flicks, dominate our motion picture theatres and television sets. Our children play killing video games.

So do you really believe that gun control will miraculously make America into a tranquil nation? Do you really believe that outlawing products and practices will make Americans peace loving? A culture cannot be changed by laws; the only function of law is to justify vengeance. No law in all of recorded history has been enacted that eliminated the practices it was meant to reduce. The oldest profession has been outlawed since the dawn of recorded history. It still is carried on. The truth of the matter is that a society based on law is a lawless society.

American society is violent not because of guns but because of the attitudes of Americans. When Europeans first came to the Americas, they thought that they had discovered a new world. Instead they found a land already inhabited by people with their own ways of life. Christian intolerance required the use of violence. Just as the Romans took the parts of Europe they wanted, these Europeans took the Americas. Violence was in their souls. Current day Americans have inherited it.

Wayne LaPierre, a National Rifle Association spokesman, has said, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” Someone should tell him that many consider him to be a bad guy with a gun.

So sure, enact legislation to control the proliferation of guns, but don’t get sanguine about it. Such legislation may help, but don’t count on it. Unless you can change the American character, our violent nature will endure until we exterminate ourselves. Live by the. . . . Oh, you know how that goes. Cultures are extremely difficult to change; changing them requires a sustained effort over several generations. I doubt that Americans are up to the task.

John Kozy is a retired professor of philosophy and logic who writes on social, political, and economic issues. After serving in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, he spent 20 years as a university professor and another 20 years working as a writer. He has published a textbook in formal logic commercially, in academic journals and a small number of commercial magazines, and has written a number of guest editorials for newspapers. His on-line pieces can be found on http://www.jkozy.com/ and he can be emailed from that site’s homepage.

This incisive analysis of America’s War State was first  published by Global Research in May 2003, in the immediate wake of the invasion and occupation of Iraq. 

“It is easy. All you have to do is tell the people they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.” -Hermann Goering

Genocide used to be a crime without a name. Although the most heinous of all crimes, the concept was not introduced into international language until after World War 2. Until then, military invasion and destruction of other peoples and cultures masqueraded under such slogans as progress and spreading civilisation.

I was shocked many years ago when I heard Noam Chomsky say that genocide was America’s defining political tradition. Then I realised that the United States (like Canada to a much lesser extent) was based on destroying the lives and cultures of the 25 million or so first peoples who had lived in America for millennia. In the case of the U.S., the story continued with the forcible seizure of Texas in 1845 from Mexican farmers and indigenous peoples, and Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, California and other state territories shortly afterward in 1849. U.S. troops under the slave-owning General Zachary Taylor unilaterally invaded its southern neighbour under the false pretext of avenging American blood, and General Taylor soon vaulted into the White House as a presidential war hero. Even though a young Congressman, Abraham Lincoln, exposed the pretext, and connected it to a Anglo-British business strategy to impose free trade on the regions by financing the prior president, James Polk, into the White House as General Taylor’s commander.

In 1898, once again under the false pretext of self-defence (when the U.S.S. Maine sank from an internal explosion), the Philippines, Guam, Cuba in part, and Puerto Rico were seized from their peoples by another unilaterally provoked war. This war of aggression and occupation, like so many U.S. interventions since, was preceded by a media campaign of whipping up public hysteria and war fever. Media baron Randolf Hearst made the famous remark, “You furnish the pictures, I’ll furnish the war,” not unlike the U.S. cable and network media daily drum-beat in recent months for war on Iraq. War is a major violence entertainment, and in close partnership with the Pentagon it can go on for months to divert the masses.

The tradition of misleading the American people by false pretexts for aggressive wars is an old one in U.S. history, but since the fascist interregnum war criminal invasions of other countries have not been accepted by public opinion. The U.S. under the control of the corporate war party now seeks to reverse this trend. By dint of the permitted 9-11 plane attacks on the World Trade Centre, an open presidential blank-cheque has been granted by Congress for attacking third-world countries so as to occupy their countries and control their resources. The now known blueprint of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and others written in September of 2001 as the Project for the New American Century is clear on the plan to shape the international security order in line with American principles and interests. Armed domination of the Gulf region transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

Oil looms large in this plan to rule the world for American interests. According to a report sponsored by oil corporations from the Washington Centre for Strategic and International Studies, oil is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of the traditional supply and demand balances, but a determinant of national security and international power.

The U.S. state military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in under two years are expressions of this new supra-market policy. Before we pass over the pattern of facts at work as merely realpolitik, we should note that this armed-state project resembles fascism: not only in war criminal attacks on other countries in violation of international law, but in repudiating market relations to seize others valuable goods by armed force.

Facing Facts

As demagogic glorification of genocidal invasion once again escapes naming by a flood of falsehoods and projections onto the latest U.S. Enemy, we need to remind ourselves of facts that no mass medium once discussed [the period] from October of 2002 to March of 2003. As we lay bare the ruling deceptions here, we should keep in mind the unifying principle which is not seen. U.S. state justifications always project onto the designated Enemy what the U.S. security state is doing itself. If it loudly condemns another weaker states weapons of mass destruction, chemical and biological weapons, violation of international laws, or attempts to impose its will on the world by terror, then we can deduce that this is exactly what the U.S. is planning more of, but is diverting attention from by accusing others. Test this underlying principle with every international accusation the U.S. makes next, and you will find that it is invariable confirmed.

The tactic works wonderfully with a lapdog press and political class who are excited into a kind of collective delirium by choral denunciations of the foreign demon who is the designated Enemy of the Day. (I will explain why in my analysis ahead of the ruling group-mind.) So exactly does the U.S. security state project its own violent policies onto others that one can tell what vicious policy it is about to escalate next by by the intensity with which the Other is accused of the crime. This is how we can best understand the endless accusation of the Soviet Union of a plot to rule the worldbefore 1991, and how we can best make sense of the official U.S. fixation on global terrorism today. Both predications disclose the inner logic of the U.S. war states own pattern of behaviour. I sometimes wonder whether this is a deliberate strategic tactic of diversion, or a structure of paranoid delusion built into the mind-set of U.S. culture.

Let us in this light examine the principal claims and concealments of the Bush Jr. administration in its pursuit of Iraq:

The Bush administration has tirelessly claimed to be upholding international law in its pressuring of the Security Council into action regarding Iraq’s violation of U.N. resolutions and international law. In fact, since its entry into office the Bush Jr. administration has sabotaged laws, covenants and monitoring protocols to protect individuals and peoples against nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, landmines, small arms, international ballistic missiles, torture, racism, discrimination against women, arbitrary seizure and imprisonment, mistreatment of prisoners, crimes against humanity and war crimes, military weather distortions, biodiversity loss, and international climate destabilisation. Its latest overriding of international law and due process has been the forcible usurpation of the Security Council inspections of Iraq. No rogue state in modern history has remotely matched this continuous and systematic violation of international law and procedures to implement international law.

The Bush administration’s preparation and threat of military invasion against a country thousands of miles from its borders is unequivocally a war crime under international law, including Principles 1, 2 and 6(a)1of the Nuremberg Charter and Article 54 of the Geneva Convention. The fact that this war crime of preparing for and planning an invasion of Iraq by U.S.-led armed forces whatever the UN decides has never been openly discussed promoted the very aggression which the U.N. is constituted to prevent.

It is not as if there were any doubt about the Bush administration’s clear intention to put itself above the law as it incessantly accused Iraq of doing so. It declared from the beginning that it would go it alone with whoever was willing, and yet not a word of this declared threat to international peace and security issued from any U.N. ambassador, including Canadas Bill Graham, that this was a lawless intention and plan.

The effect on Iraqi citizens of the long-planned U.S. war of aggression against Iraq is said to be their liberation. The targeted victims since the first war on Iraq have, however, been most of all infants and children. The Bush administration’s planned Operation Shock and Awe is a self-imagery of Godlike power which is more blind in hubris than in 1991 when the U.S. military assault caused mass infectious disease, child dysentery and birth mutilation by deliberate bombing of civilian electricity sources, sewage and water treatment facilities and by the deployment of nuclear waste in shells and weapons. Over 500,000 children in Iraq have already died as a consequence of the last war according to UNICEF-a figure predicted in 1991 by the New England Journal of Medicine, and substantiated in 1999 by the leading British medical research, Lancet.

Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction about which the Bush regime has most pervasively trumpeted its concern were sold to Saddam at great profit by the U.S., Britain and other Security Council members. This is why Bush officials took the original Iraq report to the U.N. from the Council chair (then the military client state, Colombia), and deleted all the pages documenting these military sales before distributing the text to non-permanent members. Secretary Rumsfeld, meanwhile, has refused to work with the relevant Senate committees to expose and ensure against continued military sales to Iraq or its middlemen by U.S. armament manufacturers.

U.S. demands for Iraq’s compliance with U.N. resolutions are not and have not been its true concern since far more U.N. resolutions over far more years have been ignored by the U.S. military partner, Israel. Thus continuing war crimes and crimes against humanity by Israeli administrations are still perpetrated with impunity in the illegally occupied territories of Palestine-for example, by land and property seizures and continuous enlargement of the illegal occupation, collective punishments of the population, increasing assassinations, and destruction of civilian infrastructure and homes. Twelve to eighteen UN resolutions prior to the inspections were said to have been violated by Iraq during its years of living with militarily enforced destruction of its society. Israel before, and since, has violated 64 UN resolutions with impunity. No double standard of international law has been so long-term, blatant and systematic, except by the U.S. itself.

The regime change all along demanded by the Bush administration cannot benefit the Iraqi people as promised because the projected U.S. military occupation has not been about getting rid of Saddam (who the U.S. armed and supported into power), but has ever more directly been the forced takeover of Iraq’s publicly owned and controlled oil reserves. These reserves since the 1950’s have (despite Saddams U.S.-supported coup detat) financed the most advanced social infrastructure in the Arab world, free education, and universal health care. During the demonization of Iraq over the last 6 months, its public oil revenues have enabled a government program of guaranteed food for all citizens by a publicly run distribution system which the U.N. World Food Program described as the most efficient in the world. With oil as with all else, the greatest enemy to this empire is the civil commons of publicly owned resources which obstructs corporate market control. That the Iraqi government has, moreover, put a run on the U.S. dollar by converting its oil revenues into Euros instead of dollars is another unspeakable fact which is blocked out of all corporate media reports.

Watching the War Crime Unfold

The ultimate target of the U.S. war party has long been the greatest and most accessible high-quality oil reserves on the planet. The Bush oil party has long coveted it, and U.S. military invasion has been the favoured blitzkrieg method for getting it over years of planning – with no response by the Security Council. But world public opinion has not covered its eyes like governments and the corporate media. Turkey’s people were 96% against invasion of Iraq as its government considered large bribes, and Spain’s people were over 90% opposed as its Falangist prime minister joined Tony the War Poodle in barking for the invasion. Over 30 million citizens from across the world demonstrated against a U.S.-led invasion in one weekend, an historically unprecedented event.

The U.S. president’s response to all this has been revealing. He has told the world throughout that the U.N. itself is on trial, with him as God’s judge. The Security Council has been told for months that it either agrees to a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, or it is irrelevant. If it fails, the Bush administration will take the law into its own hands and invade distant and weak Iraq as America’s sovereign right. Try to remember when you heard this kind of demagoguery and defiance of international law before.

The difference has been most clearly in the use of the U.N. Pervasive aerial and ground inspections of Iraq’s territory, soften-up bombings of defences in the North and South, and successful commands to destroy short-range missiles which together had largely stripped Iraqs meagre defences by mid-March. During this process, U.S. and allied demands merely escalated from immediate abolition of weapons of mass destruction to-without any media noticing-demands for total disarmament. Best to have a helpless victim. Has history ever witnessed such a corruptly one-sided scheme to destroy and loot a defenceless country?

The Ruling Group-Mind

As I watched the Security Council Meeting on March 19 after military inspections of Iraq were forcibly terminated by the Bush Jr. administration’s decision to take the law into its own hands, I was struck by the intimidation of the Council members. They were in thrall to a ceremony of avoidance. The hard fact that the U.S. administration had just stopped the U.N.’s due process by its decision for lawless armed attack of Iraq was blocked out of view as if it had not been decided. That this massive armed military invasion was a grave violation of international law, the supreme international crime under the Nuremberg Charter, was never mentioned. The ritual of sacrifice prevailed instead as if in collective submission to the implacable ordinance of Fate.

Formal pieties and aversion of the facts ruled. The Secretary-General was congratulated for removing the inspection teams on the instruction of the U.S. adminstration so that they would not be harmed by its illegal invasion. The inspectors were again and again praised for inspecting Iraq’s military possessions before the full-scale illegal invasion forcibly prevented the completion of their work. Much angst was displayed for the humanitarian catastrophe about to unfold, with none mentioning that the lawless usurpation of U.N. process by the blitkrieg invasion of a suffering poor country would cause the mass terror. The long genocide was diplomatically sanitised by abstractions. In the case of the U.S., Britain and Spain, Saddam Hussein was held solely responsible.

Repeated ritual mantras of concern for international peace and security, alleged Iraq government violations not substantiated by the inspectors, official regrets, collective self- blaming, and much talk of rebuilding the society about to be destroyed were limned in a sleepwalk of official euphemisms. The theme that bound them all was the silence on the U.S. planned war-criminal attack in violation of the will and the legal process of the U.N. Security Council itself. Kofi Annan almost spoke out when he advised that a belligerent country is responsible under law for the costs of occupation. But the U.N. and Canada were soon ready to pay for picking up the pieces of another mass destruction of a poor society by U.S.-led forces.

I remembered all the history and accounts I had read of the Third Reich and the cowardice of official appeasement that enabled every step. The appeasement now was on the level of the mind itself. No-one dared to say what was happening. Threats and bribes by the U.S. had for months saturated the proceedings of the Council’s judgement, but there were to their great credit few takers of the blood money. The Security Council had repudiated the U.S.-led war by an overwhelming rejection of any motion for it. For the U.S. now to still lead an invasion was self-evidently against the Security Council’s will and decision, and thus wholly illegal. Yet there was a strange refusal to name the crime, the supreme international crime of a war of aggression against another state. One listened in vain for one explicit reference to the violation of the U.N. Charter, of the Nuremberg Charter, of international criminal law, of the Secretary-General’s own previous statement that a U.S. attack without Security Council support would be illegal, and of the usurpation of the will and process of the U.N. Security Council itself.

On the contrary, Iraq was being held accountable to obey the Council’s every demand to strip its meagre defences as huge U.S. and British armed forces formed on its borders. Ever louder U.S. threats of armed invasion outside the law and against Security Council vote was left to proceed as if it was a natural event. Everywhere in the media, the inevitable war was bowed before as an ordinance of destiny. It was only now a question of viewers watching U.S. forces destroy a society at will and with impunity, an ideal mass market site for the entertainment of lawless power. No-one thought to notice from within the Security Council Chamber and official global culture that every step of the mass terror against an essentially defenceless people was planned, chosen and executed in defiance of all international law by a sitting member state.

The monstrous construction had no author. Responsibility fell only on the victim. The U.S. became another onlooker at the inevitable war. Once it invaded, it became magnanimous in assigning the costs to others to pay for its mass destruction. It was now ready to co-operate with its international partners in the rebuilding of the country that it destroyed. No-one inside official society outside thought to hold the U.S. accountable for what it did. There is “no alternative” took another meaning. Now the no-alternative world the U.S. rules means criminal war invasion as an act of God.

The New Fundamentalism: America is God

As you observe the criminal war invasion of Iraq, the round-the-clock commentary and pictures, and the aftermath, watch for a silent general fact. There will no end of detailed discussion of the military operations of attack and occupation of a country rendered defenceless by Security Council demands, with much admiration and vicarious self- congratulation at the new weapons and strategic moves of the American Superpower. There will be no end of experts and commentators communicating adoringly to audiences about the high-tech assault instruments which are being tested on a third-world people to see how they work. Its a little like a high-school science experiment, advised the Pentagon Joint Chief of Staff to the militarily embedded CNN medium of public news.

The fact at the centre of the whole conflict and long in dispute will, however, soon be put down the memory hole with no one noticing. No one in the media or government will point out that the biological and chemical weapons that Iraq was declared to be hiding are not used, and did not in fact exist. No one will think to notice that this, the main justification of the war, the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of Saddam, was from start to finish a vast and criminal big lie. No one will wonder at their own cowardly complicity in the long train of destructive deceit and war crime even as the invading armies sweep across the country and the 3000 sorties of bombs fall with no hint of a chemical or biological weapon or nuclear device. Least of all will servelings of the ruling group-mind connect back to the Third Reich’s prototype of aggressive war. It is the Formula. Blame terrorists as the cause of the country’s police state measures. Accuse every country attacked of being an imminent threat to it to justify the invasion. Denounce all resistance as unpatriotic. Attack and occupy the weak country with total weaponry. The formula repeats as long as it is not called out.

The group-mind cannot compute what does not fit its fixed presuppositions. So predictable outcomes follow as if prescribed by the laws of nature. The inevitable war occurs like el Nino. Only the terrible infliction of damages are thought worth perceiving or talking about. The moral debate is silenced, left to the world’s peoples in the streets where only passing painted signs can speak. The co-ordinates of international law and the rogue war party in control of the White House are blocked of every discussion as if they did not exist. There will, in particular, be no discussion of this administration’s illegal presidency, its ever more ruinous failure to govern effectively at any level of the U.S. economy, the environmental meltdown which it leads, or the unprecedentedly pervasive corruption of its lead corporate gang-from all of which the latest orchestrated war is the ongoing system of violent diversion. The distraction and attack rhythm of one war after another will, if it is not seen through, continue to succeed with the Formula until the world is subjugated across its civilisations. As long as the self-evident can be denied, there is nothing to stop it. Discharges of condemnation of Saddam Hussein can occupy the mind instead, until the next Enemy is wheeled into the war theatre to extend the U.S. war states rule.

In Canada, the CBC and its retinue of U.S. explainers and apologists will report the world to us so we cannot see the meaning of what is happening. The local academy will occasionally provide the choral affirmation on cue. Thus Janice Stein of the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre will reassure us on CBC News coverage on March 20, the day that the U.S. crime against peace began, that We are targeting Iraq’s leadership and not its civilians. All are one in Americas view of the world as itself. What cannot be discussed is the U.S. war crime itself, even to deny it. It is unspeakable – so long as the ruling group-mind remains the invisible prison of our collective life.

The moral syntax of the American group-mind is the inner logic of the problem. In this era, the group-mind is American. All its principles are presupposed as the way that God is presupposed by the religious fundamentalist – an all-powerful, all-knowing and jealous ruler of the world, which none may doubt without social opprobrium and attack. U.S. witch-hunts of those who oppose the religion of America is the creed’s fanatical mode. But the creed is not confined to expression within America’s church of self-adoration. It is on a crusade across the world’s continents, with ruinous destabilization or armed attack of those who do not submit to its will for freedom.

The God of America is primitive. It worships itself. But there are a set of silently regulating principles at work through all the phenomena of its rule which together constitute the ruling group-mind which has imprisoned global culture within its premises since 9-11 .

Presupposition 1 of this ruling group-mind is that the U.S. national security state is America.

This assertion is never directly stated because that would reveal the absurdity of the equation. But the assumption nevertheless underlies every statement that has proceeded from U.S. government offices since 9-11. This preconscious equation explains, for example, why even the U.S. government’s official opposition, the Democratic Party, has abdicated from political responsibility in its fear of appearing to oppose unjustified wars against essentially defenceless third-world societies in Afghanistan and Iraq. They are incarcerated within the ruling structure of mind, more paralysed than 1930 Germans in their dread of being named as unpatriotic. This is a fear that can only be explained by the equation of the state military command and its apparatus with America. Beneath the surface phenomena of party politics rules the instituted group-mind in terms of which perception itself is constructed.

Thus the equation of America to its armed state apparatus is never publicly challenged in the official culture of the West because the equation is assumed a priori across the official leaderships of American allies. No-one who houses the false equation can tell them apart. They cannot see the demonstrable falsehoods of the war state, the overthrow of the Republic’s democratic traditions, and least of all the safety of millions of innocent civilians in other countries: because they assume America and its national security apparatus are one and the same. Since they love America, and America is it, they cannot distinguish their beloved country from the criminal gang institutions of the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the CIA. As these rogue secret societies rule across the world by the force of armed terror, mass disinformation, secret narco-links and political bribery and coercion at every level, lovers of America are obliged to defend this criminal global domination as America. This absurd equation obliges them to be, in short, blind dupes. It then further misleads them into supposing that anyone who opposes a gangster state rule of the world is anti-American. One absurdity builds onto another. The disorder ends as a paranoid mass cult characterised as patriotism, just as in the 1930’s with the worlds most powerful industrial state. It is in this false equation at the baseline of the group-mind that we find the kernel of the worlds problem – America’s self- definition as absolutist armed force unbound by fact or international law.

Presupposition 2 is that America is the ultimate source and moving line of the world’s freedom and goodness, God’s material embodiment on earth.

This assumption too is presupposed as true by definition, the prime article of faith of a fanatic religion. Full-spectrum dominance and pre-emptive attack of threats before they appear are not merely clinically paranoid delusions of power and persecution. They follow from the underlying and increasingly absolute assumption that America is God, the source of all Freedom and Goodness on the planet. The expressions of this deranged presupposition are evident in every speech of the former alcohol and cocaine addict occupying the White House, and there is no evident opposition from the parishioners of U.S. official culture.

Any indirect questioning or challenge of this first moral premise of the group-mind is attacked as a betrayal of the country and what it holds dear. American freedom comes to mean, then, only what establishes and maximizes the absolute right of the U.S. to command the world – specifically, to command as inevitable that all societies adopt an American-style market, American values and culture, and American military dominance in all areas of the globe as its vital interests. How do we test the rule of this fanatic basis of thought? It is expressed in Bush Doctrine policy documents throughout. But we can more easily discover its ruling principle at work by asking whether there is any limit placed anywhere on what the U.S. and vassal corporate states have the right to demand of other peoples and societies – including unconditional support of full-scale war against destitute societies over ten thousand miles from American borders.

Anything may go in the way of attack-dog journalism, but one hint of question of this ruling assumption that America is the moving line of the world’s freedom is heresy. The assumption is thus internalised prior to censorship. Self-censorship is this regime’s centre of gravity, and holds the group-mind in its prison. Those who oppose it hate freedom. Loyalty to this ultimate premise of social and political thought is what regulates the mind at a preconscious level prior to statement. It is the identity structure of the mob-mind across the world.

Principle 3 follows as a logical consequent from Principle 2. America is always and necessarily right in all conflicts with other nations or peoples or social forces.

This is not a truth which facts can disprove, because it is true by definition in the ruling group-mind. Disproving facts are irrelevant or of no consequence, even if by some chance they make it through the gates of the corporate media. This third regulating assumption explains why even the hardest facts soon disappear from sight if they throw doubt on America’s infallible moral superiority in cases of international conflict – for example the conviction of the U.S. by the International Court for its war criminal actions against Nicaragua, along with the $13.2 billion damages which were never paid.

Beneath the selection and exclusion of facts and perspectives which regulate editorial offices and policies, this third principle of the ruling group-mind too regulates perception and conversation beneath direct control. Before an exposing word is spoken, it is ruled out from within. It is an intersubjective operation, like the thought-field of playing a game. Any fact or argument which calls into question America’s moral superiority to any adversary is known to be hostile to freedom and the good in advance of consideration.

Principles 4 and 5 follow suit as ultimate moral imperatives for all Americans and their allies.

Any people or nation or social force which does not side with or opposes the U.S. government is evil (Principle 4), and so must, as an Enemy of world freedom and justice, be attacked by all means available-including pre-emptive armed force before the Enemy presents a threat (Principle 5).

Principles 4 and 5 have sharpened into patriotic absolutes with the Bush Jr. regime. Not even fabricated evidence – like the Gulf of Tonkin attack off Vietnam or the electricity cut-off of infant incubators in Iraq in 1991 – are thought any longer essential necessary to justify a military attack on another people’s territory and society. As George Bush Jr. said to a West Point audience this year: “If we wait for threats to materialise, we will have waited too long.” There is, therefore, no need for the threat to be real. Threats only need to be declared. That is is why the attack on Iraq by U.S. and British armed forces did not require anyone else to confirm that there was, in fact, a threat from Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction being used by terrorists against America. The evil is known, as with witchcraft, by the accusation itself. Once accused, the Enemy becomes such by definition – because materialisation by fact is too late. Those who question the designation side with the Enemy. You are with us, or for the terrorists. Bush’s rage against French opposition to the war of aggression against Iraq thus follows necessarily. The logic of the ruling group- mind prescribes reality prior to its construction.

A self-evident baseline of entitlement is thus instituted for the rest of the world which is not spoken. America can go to war against accused enemies as it chooses on the basis of the self-propelling operations of its ruling group-mind alone. All one has to do is trigger the known stimuli which activate its value-set and its attendant emotions of rage. Since 9- 11, majority opinion support for Americas New War in any form follows from this lockstep of the group-mind. It is predictable so long as it remains unexposed to view.

After 15 years of repudiating claims that the invasion of Iraq was only initiated to seize Iraqi resources, large oil corporations fronted by former architects of the war who vacated to the private sector are flagrantly advertising their contracts for exploration and production of Iraqi oil fields to potential investors.

The British oil and gas company BP won the contract to operate the Rumaila Oil Field back in 2009, and now proudly boast of its new drilling capabilities on Twitter. Rumaila is simply huge; by some measures it is the third largest reserve of crude oil on the planet, and is currently extracting 100 million dollars worth of oil every day – enough to cover the annual health budget of Iraq under the wartime rule of the US coalition every five days.

One of the board members of BP at present is Sir John Sawers, the former Chief of MI6 from 2009 to 2014 who acted as UK special representative to Iraq during the occupation. He cashed in a few favours and joined BP as an Independent Non-Executive Director in 2015, one year after he departed MI6 and two years after BP had been handed a licence to exploit one of the most valuable pools of liquid gold on the planet. There was seemingly no regulatory oversight of this very British oligarchy.

In March 2003, just before Britain went to war, BP denounced reports that it had held talks with Downing Street about Iraqi oil as “highly inaccurate” and denied that it had any “strategic interest” in Iraq, while Tony Blair described “the oil conspiracy theory” as “the most absurd”.

However, memos disclosed by The Independent in 2011 tell a very different story. In a series of meetings in 2003, BP revealed that they had approached Labour Peer Lady Symons to lobby the Blair government into demanding a share of spoils from the Iraq War in return for UK military support.

Minutes of a meeting with BP, Shell and BG (formerly British Gas) on 31 October 2002 read:

“Baroness Symons agreed that it would be difficult to justify British companies losing out in Iraq in that way if the UK had itself been a conspicuous supporter of the US government throughout the crisis.”

The minister then promised to “report back to the companies before Christmas” on her lobbying efforts.

The Foreign Office also invited BP in on 6 November 2002 to talk about opportunities in Iraq “post regime change”. Its minutes state:

“Iraq is the big oil prospect. BP is desperate to get in there and anxious that political deals should not deny them the opportunity.”

Not for the first time in their history (see the 1953 Iranian coup d’etat) BP succeeded in convincing the UK government to forcibly seize the resources of a sovereign foreign nation to bolster the share prices of large corporations like themselves. Cronies who endlessly spin around the revolving door between military/government positions like Sir John Sawers no doubt made a fair few quid in dividends and obscene salaries; in fact, Sawers is now a regular feature at Bilderberg conferences, rubbing shoulders with Hillary Clinton and George Bush. I imagine they got on famously.

The only cost was more than 100,000 Iraqi civilian lives.

At least now we can say conclusively that, yes, the Iraq War was about oil.

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All images in this article are from the author.

The Syrian Kurds are exploiting Damascus’ strong sense of patriotism in order to provoke it into the dilemma of either entering into a confrontation with Ankara or risk falling victim to slanderous accusations that it “sold them out” to the Turks, with this entire manipulation being carried out with the grand strategic intent of prompting Moscow to diplomatically intervene in safeguarding the PYD’s desired “decentralization” dreams in the region and inadvertently furthering the American-Israeli vision for a Kurdish corridor to the sea.

A Plea For Help

The news recently broke that the Syrian Kurds in Afrin have requested that the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) urgently intervene in their northwestern region in order to halt the military advance by Turkey and its FSA proxies, with Sputnik reporting that the PYD-YPG’s official statement included the following appeal:

“We call on the Syrian state to carry out its sovereign obligations towards Afrin and protect its borders with Turkey from attacks of the Turkish occupier … and deploy its Syrian Armed Forces to secure the borders of the Afrin area.”

RT translated another key passage from the “federal” Kurds that saw them boast of their ‘patriotic’ credentials against a supposed Turkish plot to undermine Syria’s “territorial integrity”:

“’We reaffirm that the Afrin region is an integral part of Syria and that our forces are the people’s protection units,’ it wrote in a statement, arguing that the Turkish military operation in Afrin ‘threatens the territorial integrity of Syria and the security and lives of the civilians.’”

A casual observer’s prima facie response might be to sympathize with the Syrian Kurds after they apparently seemed to have learned their lesson and are now virtue signaling their commitment to national unity, but such a reaction would be naïve for a few reasons.

Debunking The Kurdish Narrative

Firstly, the Neo-Marxist PYD-YPG never intended to formally separate from Syria but instead endeavored to carry out a “federal” regime change in the country as openly expressed in their 2015 hate–filled manifesto.

Despite the Alt-Media fake news propaganda to the contrary, Turkey does not want to “annex” any piece of Syrian territory but does desire to establish a sphere of influence by replacing the YPG with pro-Ankara proxy groups and formalizing its interests via a forthcoming “decentralization”.

Therefore, neither the Syrian Kurds nor the Turks are threatening the country’s territorial integrity in any official way, but it can certainly be argued that their shared objective in “decentralizing” the state could easily lead Syria down the path of “Identity Federalism” and subsequent “Bosnification” into a checkerboard of quasi-independent statelets.

It’s ironic then that the Turks and Kurds are both accusing one another of endangering Syria’s territorial integrity when they’re essentially pursuing the same ends though for completely different strategic reasons, but in all objectivity the creation of a de-facto “Kurdistan” in northern Syria is much more of a regionally destabilizing factor than whatever local “solution” the Turks have in mind for their proxies.

Another factor to keep in mind is that the PYD-YPG Kurds are very close Americanand Israeli allies while Turkey has been progressively drifting towards the Multipolar World Order since the failed 2016 pro-American coup against President Erdogan, so if Syria’s “decentralization” along the lines of the Russian-written “draft constitution” is inevitable (possibly even as early as after the upcoming “Syrian National Dialogue Congress” in Sochi), then it’s “better” for it to be Turkish-led than Kurdish-led.

Damascus’ Dilemma

The Syrian Kurds keenly understand the power dynamics at play, as well as the “open secret” that it was most likely due to Damascus’ passive complicity via Moscow’s mediating efforts that Ankara was able to commence its operation in Afrin, hence why they’re deviously seeking to exploit this fact and the “politically inconvenient” contradiction that it reveals between the government’s public “patriotic” statements and private “pragmatic” deals in order to apply pressure against President Assad in getting him to “stand up” to his Turkish counterpart or risk being “discredited”.

Source: author

To elaborate, Syrians of all ethnicities and confessions are among the most sincerely patriotic people on earth due to the deep attachment that they collectively feel to their millennia-old civilization, yet Damascus has been compelled to “compromise” time and again in the face of overwhelming odds such as the ones presented before it on the cusp of the speculatively Russian-facilitated Turkish intervention.

By openly asking the SAA to ‘save’ them, the Syrian Kurds are hoping to put Damascus on the spot by forcing into a dilemma – if the military rushes to their ‘rescue’, then it risks breaking the “gentlemen’s agreements” that it reached with Moscow and Ankara while functionally recognizing the PYD-YPG as a “patriotic” force “worthy” of a seat at the Astana and Sochi conferences, but if it refuses to do so then it risks weaponized infowar accusations that it “sold out” “the only Syrians fighting the Turks” in order to please Ankara at Moscow’s behest.

This Catch-22 puts enormous pressure on President Assad because it could pose a lose-lose outcome unless he and his government are extremely careful, but of the two options available, the worst would be if he orders the SAA to assist the Syrian Kurds.

Sitting back and allowing President Erdogan to crush the “federalists” might lead to the infowar reaction that was predicted, but it’ll nevertheless be considerably muted because Ankara could order its proxies and their international backers (particularly the popular Al Jazeera media outlet owned by his Qatari allies) to downplay the Syrian Kurds’ “backstabbing” accusations against President Assad and possibly even creatively engineer an effective counter-narrative that further exposes the PYD-YPG as American-Israeli pawns for playing this role.

On the other hand, apart from the dangerous state-to-state war scenario that could suddenly transpire if the SAA began to clash with the Turks in defense of the Syrian Kurds, the most likely eventuality would be that Russia would be forced to diplomatically intervene between its two national allies to the benefit of its presumed non-state ones in essentially turning Afrin into Moscow’s military “protectorate” and therefore advancing the PYD-YPG’s “decentralized” “solution”.

The Suicidal Scenario

Predictably, having provoked a frenzy of Syrian patriotism after tricking the SAA into confronting the Turks on their behalf and thus triggering a decisive Russian diplomatic response in their favor, the wily Syrian Kurds would then be in an ideal position to exploit the country’s long-standing dreams of liberating the former Syrian Province of Iskenderun that has been under Turkish control as the Province of Hatay since 1939.

The Syrian Kurds are far from being actual Syrian patriots since all that they care about is Neo-Marxism, “federalization”, and “Kurdistan”, but they might come to believe that they have the perfect moment to promote all three of their interlinked ideologies if they could seize the moment to make the “patriotic” case for militantly pressing Damascus’ claims to Iskenderun/Hatay in order to take advantage of the SAA as their “cat’s paw” for carving out their cherished corridor to the sea.

The SAA is incapable of conquering Iskenderun/Hatay since it can’t even liberate the entirety of its internationally recognized borders from the Kurdish occupation of the energy- and agriculturally-rich northeastern one-third of the country and remove the 10 American bases that are there, so there’s no way that it can handle the Turkish Armed Forces on their opponent’s mountainous “home turf” and dismantle the instruments of its statehood there.

Not only that, but Russia and the rest of the world would consider this to be a Saddam-like 1991 “war of aggression” in invading Turkey’s internationally recognized borders despite the arguable legitimacy of the offensive party’s historical claims there, and it’s all but guaranteed that Moscow would be tasked by the UNSC to put an immediate stop to Damascus’ operation.

In any case, it’s doubtful that the SAA would allow themselves to be tricked by the Kurds into falling for this suicidal scenario, but they and even Russia might not be able to fully stop emboldened “volunteers” – whether Kurds, “Social-Nationalists”, Arabs, or otherwise – from attacking Iskenderun/Hatay from their Afrin “safe haven”, which could in and of itself trigger a cross-border Turkish military response or even a problematic internal one between the SAA-Russia and the Syrian nationals carrying out these raids.

All of these aforementioned reasons are why the SAA needs to carefully consider the pros and cons of rushing to the PYD-YPG’s assistance after their heavily publicized plea for help, as surrendering to the knee-jerk reaction of “patriotism” would amount to nothing more than Damascus being played like a fiddle by the Syrian Kurds, thereby jeopardizing all of its hard-fought gains over the past 7 years and inadvertently laying the strategic basis for the American-Israeli Kurdish corridor to the sea.

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

On January 25, ISIS units attacked positions of the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) in the villages of Kishmah and Ghuraybah in the province of Deir Ezzor. According to the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq, ISIS killed several army soldiers and destroyed two battle tanks with anti-tank guided missiles.

However, the terrorist group did not overrun the SAA defense and was forced to retreat. According to the Syrian state-run media, 25 ISIS members were killed and several vehicles were destroyed in the clashes.

ISIS seeks to seize some area in the Euphrates Valley in order to lift the siege from its members besieged in the Homs desert.

The Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) and the Turkish-backed Free Syrian Army (TFSA) captured 7 members of the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) during clashes in the Afrin area, according to Turkish media. In turn, the YPG claimed that it had captured 16 Turkish service members. However, these persons are likely just members of the TFSA.

The YPG also said that it has lost 18 members in the clashes so far while the TAF claims that over 300 YPG members have been killed. The both sides provide contradicting reports about the casualties and the situation in the Afrin area. The propaganda is an important part of the Turkish-Kurdish standoff in Afrin.

According to Deputy Chief of General Staff of the TFSA Haitham Afeisi, a 10,000-strong force is already prepared for a military operation against Kurdish forces in the city of Manbij. Afeisi said that the Manbij operation will be started after the TFSA and the TAF finish their operation against YPG/YPJ forces in Afrin.

“Manbij is not the final destination; we won’t stop until Hasakah, Ayn Issa, Ayn al-Arab, Ras al-Ayn, Al-Malikiyah, and Tal Abyad are purged of terror,” he said.

This statement clearly follows the official rhetoric of the Turkish leadership. President Erdogan and others have repeatedly noted that Manbij may become a target of the Turkish military operation.

The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria in Afrin area released an official statement in which it called on the SAA to counter the TAF attack on Afrin and to defend the Syrian border. The statement clearly contradicts previous statements of Kurdish officials and may indicate some shift in the YPG attitude towards the Damascus government.

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Poisoned toothpaste that takes a month to end its target’s life. Armed drones. Exploding cell phones. Spare tires with remote-control bombs. Assassinating enemy scientists and discovering the secret lovers of Islamic holy men. A new book chronicles these techniques and asserts that Israel has carried out at least 2,700 assassination operations in its 70 years of existence. While many failed, they add up to far more than any other Western country, the book says.

Ronen Bergman, the intelligence correspondent for Yediot Aharonot newspaper, persuaded many agents of Mossad, Shin Bet and the military to tell their stories, some using their real names. The result is the first comprehensive look at Israel’s use of state-sponsored killings.

Based on 1,000 interviews and thousands of documents, and running more than 600 pages, Rise and Kill First makes the case that Israel has used assassination in the place of war, killing half a dozen Iranian nuclear scientists, for instance, rather than launching a military attack. It also strongly suggests that Israel used radiation poisoning to kill Yasser Arafat, the longtime Palestinian leader, an act its officials have consistently denied.

Bergman writes that Arafat’s death in 2004 fits a pattern and had advocates. But he steps back from flatly asserting what happened, saying that Israeli military censorship prevents him from revealing what – or if – he knows.

The book’s title, Rise and Kill First, comes from the ancient Jewish Talmud admonition, “If someone comes to kill you, rise up and kill him first.” Bergman says a huge percentage of the people he interviewed cited that passage as justification for their work. So does an opinion by the military’s lawyer declaring such operations to be legitimate acts of war.

Despite the many interviews, including with former prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, Bergman, the author of several books, says the Israeli secret services sought to interfere with his work, holding a meeting in 2010 on how to disrupt his research and warning former Mossad employees not to speak with him.

He says that while the U.S. has tighter constraints on its agents than does Israel, President George W. Bush adopted many Israeli techniques after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and President Barack Obama launched several hundred targeted killings.

“The command-and-control systems, the war rooms, the methods of information gathering and the technology of the pilotless aircraft, or drones, that now serve the Americans and their allies were all in large part developed in Israel,” Bergman writes.

The book gives a textured history of the personalities and tactics of the various secret services. In the 1970s, a new head of operations for Mossad opened hundreds of commercial companies overseas with the idea that they might be useful one day. For example, Mossad created a Middle Eastern shipping business that, years later, came in handy in providing cover for a team in the waters off Yemen.

There have been plenty of failures. After a Palestinian armed group killed Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, Israel sent agents to kill the perpetrators – and shot more than one misidentified man. There were also successful operations that did more harm than good to Israel’s policy goals, Bergman notes.

Bergman raises moral and legal concerns provoked by state-sponsored killing, including the existence of separate legal systems for secret agents and the rest of Israel. But he presents the operations, for the most part, as achieving their aims. While many credit the barrier Israel built along and inside the West Bank with stopping assaults on Israeli citizens in the early 2000s, he argues that what made the difference was “a massive number of targeted killings of [enemy] operatives.”

One of Bergman’s most important sources was Meir Dagan, a recent head of Mossad for eight years who died in early 2016. Toward the end of his career, Dagan fell out with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu partly over launching a military attack on Iran. Netanyahu said intelligence techniques such as selling the country faulty parts for its reactors – which Israel and the U.S. were doing – weren’t enough.

Dagan argued that these techniques, especially assassinations, would do the job. As Bergman quotes him saying, “In a car, there are 25,000 parts on average. Imagine if 100 of them are missing. It would be very hard to make it go. On the other hand, sometimes it’s most effective to kill the driver, and that’s that.”

Mahatma Gandhi was born in 1869.

As is of course very well known, he opposed colonialism, oppression, and exploitation.

Gandhi is also well known for advocating and practicing satyagraha, which in his own translation of his 1909 book on Indian Self Rule, he renders as “soul force” or “love force” in English (for instance in this chapter).

Of this concept, Gandhi wrote:

“When I refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to my conscience, I use soul-force” (chapter 17, “Passive Resistance“).

In that same text, which he wrote in 1909, he provides many perspectives upon the reason that soul force is superior to brute force — perhaps most succinctly when he says:

To use brute force, to use gunpowder, is contrary to passive resistance, for it means that we want our opponent to do by force that which we desire but he does not. And if such a use of force is justifiable, surely he is entitled to do likewise by us. 17.

But just because he subscribed to the principle of nonviolent or peaceful resistance does not mean that he believed in allowing oppression, exploitation, and colonialism to continue — quite the contrary. In the same 1909 text, he proclaims:

“You may keep the riches that you have drained away from this land, but you may not drain riches henceforth. [ . . . ] We cease to play the part of the ruled” (chapter 20, “Conclusion“).

Mahatma Gandhi realized and acknowledged that those who had turned his country into a colony had superior military power. He says as much in the same concluding chapter just cited, but then notes that it is only by the cooperation of the governed that those who have been oppressing and exploiting the people are able to do so, when he declares:

You may, if you like, cut us to pieces. You may shatter us at the cannon’s mouth. If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.

This insight, that “without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward,” is crucial to understanding the power of Gandhi’s satyagraha. At another point in the same tract, he declares that without those who collaborate with the colonizers, the country could never have been enslaved: “It is we, the English-speaking Indians, who have enslaved India. The curse of the nation will rest not upon the English but upon us” (chapter 16, “Education“).

Without such collaboration, the oppressors would be stymied. This fact is the key to the effectiveness of the nonviolent resistance which Gandhi demonstrated and advocated.

The colonialist powers used brute force to try to coerce collaboration, or to give an excuse to those who collaborated — enabling them to rationalize their collaboration by saying, “What else can I do? They have all the firepower.” By demonstrating that the occupiers had no power without such collaboration, Gandhi removed that rationalization.

When that which belongs by right to all men and women is siphoned-away for the benefit of a small group at the expense of everyone else, the only way this can happen is if the vast majority of the people (who will intuitively realize that a wrong is being committed) allow it to happen, usually due to their fear of the threat of violence, and also due to their lack of awareness that they already possess the means to bring that misappropriation to a stop. Gandhi’s teaching and his example addressed both of these obstacles.

Colonialism, by its very definition, has at its core the seizing of that which belongs to all men and women in a nation by a very few (some of them from another nation, but requiring the cooperation of collaborators from the colonized populace as well). We may delude ourselves into thinking that such imperialism came to an end around the world many decades ago, but in fact today’s neoliberalism operates on the very same principles, having at its core the privatization of resources which belong to the public, on a vast scale — including mineral resources such as oil and natural gas and ores and metals and rare earth elements, public utilities, ports, airports, railroads, forests, aquifers, pensions belonging to retirees, and even rivers.

Almost everyone knows without even having to be taught that the seizing of such gifts of the gods for the benefit of the few at the expense of everyone else is inherently wrong. Gandhi’s teaching should open our eyes to the fact that without our cooperation, such unjustifiable exploitation could not take place.

His remedy was both simple and at the same time powerfully effective: do not cooperate with it. Refuse to do a thing that is repugnant to your conscience.

That this methodology is greatly feared by those few who rely on the cooperation of the many in order to drain away the riches that belong to all men and women is evidenced by the fact that Mahatma Gandhi was brutally assassinated on January 30, 1948. Just over twenty years later, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. — who was implementing the very same conscience-driven nonviolent approach — was also brutally assassinated. John Lennon was advocating and practicing much the same soul-force or love-force.

The actions and example of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King brought about incredible changes. They demonstrate that soul force is indeed more powerful than brute force.

They knew that violence could not stop their message: but it is up to us to continue to proclaim it and live it.

Near the very end of the conclusion of the text by Gandhi cited above, Gandhi urges us not to wait for anyone else in our application of the principle of satyagraha. To ask when everyone will be ready to join us in this refusal to cooperate with oppression and exploitation, he says, is to make a mistake.

Seventy years after the departure of Mahatma Gandhi from this incarnation, his message and example live on, as urgently needed today as ever in the past.

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David W. Mathisen is the author of seven books about the connections of the world’s ancient myths to the stars. His website can be found at www.starmythworld.com.

Featured image is from Wikimedia Commons.

It also reminds us of the six million dispossessed Arabs and the brutal occupation of former Palestine, today in January 2018. These two atrocities are not of proportionate equivalence but one can lead to the ultimate evil of the other.

Today, millions live with little or no electricity; with heavily restricted freedom of movement and under a 10 year illegal blockade of essential goods that ensures that Palestinians are forced to live at or under subsistence level by a brutalising Israeli government armed and supported by an American President and a compliant British Prime Minister.

Holocaust Day 2018 serves to remind us of how power corrupts not only governments but also the minds of ordinary people who in 1942 watched and waited as millions were murdered and in 2018 now watch and wait as millions are kept in servitude under an occupation so brutal that it kills unarmed civilians including women and children under the pretext of ‘defence’ by an occupying state that is also one of the major exporters of guns, bombs and killing machines to regimes around the world.

An occupying state that holds the United Nations in contempt as it flagrantly violates UN resolutions and is the only undeclared nuclear weapon state in existence. A state that is estimated to control an arsenal of up to 400 nuclear warheads – enough to wipe-out half the world.

This then is the extraordinarily perverse stance of the British and American governments of Theresa May and Donald Trump as they conspire to consolidate the illegal occupation and settlement of Arab lands in blatant violation of UN Resolution 2334.

The principles of freedom and democracy in 2018 must include:

1. The acceptance that all men are born equal

2. Respect for human life and human and civil rights

3. The outlawing of corruption in government

4. The respect for the right to worship in the religion of one’s choice

5. The support for family life and family values

6. The opposition to racial, ethnic and religious prejudice

7. The limitation on the manufacture of arms to allow for the legitimate defence of the nation only and the express prohibition of the export of bombs, guns and killing machines to other countries

8. The close monitoring of the nuclear capability of every individual nation state by the United Nations and the implementation of severe trade restrictions against any state that violates the agreement

9. Enacting legislation to strictly limit the conduct of international political lobbies who currently influence elected legislative assemblies in the United States and Britain. This is an absolutely essential prerequisite in order to regain democratic government and to conform to the will of the ordinary citizen who comprises the electorate and the nation.

“American leadership” is one of a long list of vague, seemingly benign pseudo-concepts our media throw around to justify increased spending on soft power and military adventurism. It’s a difficult concept to pin down, but it’s almost always presented as something the United States is “failing” to do when it doesn’t “engage” the world with enough war, sanctions or arbitrarily applied human rights scolding.

Lamenting a “lack of American leadership” is, therefore, a time-honored Serious Person cliche for those operating at major US papers, and one Washington Post deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl phoned in Sunday with his op-ed “Genocide, Famine and a Democratic Retreat—All After One Year of US Inaction” (1/21/17).

The piece began with a bizarre inversion of reality:

Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but as the United States has retreated from international leadership in the past decade, several toxic global trends have gained momentum. Democracy is steadily retreating, according to Freedom House, whose annual study documents a decline for the 12th consecutive year. Famine is threatening more people than ever: Tens of millions are at risk of starvation in countries such as Yemen, South Sudan and Somalia.

It’s unclear exactly what “international leadership” is supposed to mean here, besides being inversely correlated with Bad Things happening. The piece is a broadside against both former President Obama and Donald Trump for “steadily retreating,” but the most serious Bad Thing he cites as a result of a lack of American leadership, the famine in Yemen, is a direct result of “American leadership.” Obama and Trump have logistically and politically supported the Saudi-led bombing and blockade of Yemen that caused the famine.

Washington Post‘s Jackson Diehl (1/21/18): “It’s getting easier for regimes to commit — and get away with — crimes against humanity.”

But Diehl’s not honestly engaging with the world as it is; his job is to advance the premise that the US has both the right and the moral duty to dictate the affairs of other countries. Diehl did the same cynical reality-inversion last June (FAIR.org, 6/26/17), when he not only ignored the US’s role in creating the Yemen famine, but painted them as the heroes coming to the rescue.

Similarly, Diehl cites “the tragedy of Syria” in Sunday’s piece as a result of a lack of American leadership, without mentioning the American leadership of the CIA—along with American leadership allies Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar—helped fund, train and arm groups in that conflict, thus fueling the “tragedy.” Also omitted was the ongoing role of “American Leadership” in bombing seven countries, its deadly drone program that has terrorized thousands of civilians in Yemen and Central Asia, its continued use of offshore penal colonies outside the scope of international law and a number of other bad things that result from the active exertion of “American leadership,” rather than its absence.

The rest of the piece is about the Trump administration’s “inaction” over ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Burma, but the setup is very telling. Diehl uses this ethnic catastrophe to browbeat the US for not doing enough, but really what he wants, as evidenced by his years of writing (see, e.g., FAIR.org, 5/2/06, 12/23/14, 5/17/16), is more meddling and intervention and bombing in general; the tragedy in Burma simply serves as a moral lubricant for an assertion of the US’s superiority. To national security boosters like Diehl,  “American leadership,” like military spending, is always in a state of inadequacy. There’s never enough, we always need more. The possibility that said “leadership” or military spending may be causing the problems—even the ones he himself cites as the most urgent—rather than being their solution is simply not an option.

*

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New US sanctions were imposed on 21 Russian and Ukrainian nationals, along with nine Russian companies – Power Machines among them, a global leader in its industry.

Other power and energy companies were targeted. In response, Russia’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement saying:

“Washington still cannot get rid of an illusion that we can be intimidated by US visa denials or trade restrictions, that we can be coerced into abandoning an independent stance on the international arena, defending our national interests,” adding:

“The time has come for strategists in Washington to realize that by continuing their senseless sanctions campaign, which has not given and will not give any results, and will only result in financial losses for US business, they demonstrate to the whole world their own impotence.”

“If the US authorities opt to break economic and other ties with Russia, it is their right, as we reserve our right to respond.”

Earlier, Moscow promised tit-for-tat measures in response to hostile US actions. Appropriate counter-measures are likely following new US sanctions.

On June 30, 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree “On the renewal of certain special economic measures to ensure the security of the Russian Federation.”

Earlier, Moscow responded appropriately to imposition of sanctions by Washington, Brussels and other countries. They remain in place, renewed through December 31, 2018.

Since September 2016, the list of sanctioned products was updated six times, new banned items added, some removed, permitting their importation.

Sanctions are counterproductive and ineffective. They’re imposed for punitive reasons, yet accomplish nothing other than harming ordinary people in targeted nations.

US sanctions on Russia’s economy failed. It grew in 2017, further growth expected this year.

Many years of sanctions on Iran and North Korea did nothing to change their policies, just the opposite. Both countries are determined to defend themselves against feared US aggression.

Despite US economic and political war on Venezuela, ruling United Venezuelan Socialist Party (PSUV) candidates won 308 of 335 municipal elections in December, a 92% triumph, including 21 of 23 state capitals and the Caracas Capital District.

President Nicolas Maduro triumphantly said

“we have won 19 governorates, including Zulia, which is the most populous state in the country.”

“We’re ready to compete” in next year’s presidential election. Control over most municipalities boosts Maduro’s chance for reelection.

Days earlier, he announced his candidacy, elections to be held by end of April. If mid-December PSUV trouncing of opposition candidates is indicative, he’s likely to win another term.

Punishing US sanctions won’t prevent it. Nor have they turned Iranians against their government.

Last November at the Valdai Discussion Club, Vladimir Putin explained illegal, unilaterally imposed US sanctions on Russia aim to oust the country “from European energy markets…compelling Europe to buy more expensive US-produced LNG although the scale of its production is still too small.”

Washington wants Russia prevented from developing new energy routes, notably its South Stream and Nord Stream projects.

While it’s natural for countries to have their own interests, “(t)he question is the means” they choose to pursue them, Putin stressed.

Russia rejects efforts by America and other nations to achieve their aims at the expense of others, stoking tensions, creating instability, leading to conflicts.

Washington wants Russia weakened politically and economically. Part of its strategy is imposing illegal punitive sanctions.

It’s an exercise in futility. Russia is strong, resilient and resourceful. Washington’s hostile agenda hasn’t worked.

*

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

Ukraine is an East European territory which was originally forming a western part of the Russian Empire from the mid-17^th century. That is a present-day independent state and separate ethnolinguistic nation as a typical example of Benedict Anderson’s theory-model of the “imagined community” – a self-constructed idea of the artificial ethnic and linguistic-cultural identity. Before 2014 Ukraine was a home of some 46 million inhabitants of whom, according to the official data, there were around 77 percent of those who declared themselves as the Ukrainians. Nevertheless, many Russians do not consider the Ukrainians or the Belarus as “foreign” but rather as the regional branches of the Russian nationality. It is a matter of fact that, differently to the Russian case, the national identity of the Belarus or the Ukrainians was never firmly fixed as it was always in the constant process of changing and evolving [on the Ukrainian self-identity construction, see: Karina V. Korostelina, Constructing the Narratives of Identity and Power: Self-Imagination in a Young Ukrainian Nation, Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2014].

The process of self-constructing identity of the Ukrainians after 1991 is basically oriented vis-à-vis Ukraine’s two most powerful neighbours: Poland and Russia. In the other words, the self-constructing Ukrainian identity (like the Montenegrin or the Belarus) is able so far just to claim that the Ukrainians are not both the Poles or the Russians but what they really are is of a great debate. Therefore, an existence of an independent state of Ukraine, nominally as a national state of the Ukrainians, is of a very doubt indeed from both perspectives: historical and ethnolinguistic.

The Slavonic term Ukraine, for instance, in the Serbo-Croat case Krajina, means in the English language a Borderland – a provincial territory situated on the border between at least two political entities: in this particular historical case, between the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as the Republic of Both Nations (1569−1795) and the Russian Empire. A German historical term for Ukraine would be a mark – a term for the state’s borderland which existed from the time of the Frankish Kingdom/Empire of Carl the Great . The term is mostly used from the time of the treaty (truce) of Andrussovo in 1667 between these two states.

In the other words, Ukraine and the Ukrainians as a natural objective-historical-cultural identity never existed as it was considered only as a geographic-political territory between two other natural-historical entities (Poland and Russia).

All (quasi)historiographical mentioning of this land and the people as Ukraine/Ukrainians referring to the period before the mid-17^th century are quite scientifically incorrect but in majority of cases politically inspired and coloured with the purpose to present them as something crucially different from the historical process of ethnic genesis of the Russians [for instance: Alfredas Bumblauskas, Genutė Kirkienė, Feliksas Šabuldo (sudarytojai), Ukraina: Lietuvos epocha, 1320−1569, Vilnius: Mokslo ir enciklopedijų leidybos centras, 2010].

Source: author

It was a Roman Catholic Vatican that was behand the process of creation of the “imagined community” of the “Ukrainian” national identity for the very political purpose to separate the people from this borderland territory from the Orthodox Russian Empire. Absolutely the same was done by Vatican’s client Austria-Hungary in regard to the national identity of Bosnian-Herzegovinian population when this province was administered by Vienna-Budapest from 1878 to 1918 as it was the Austria-Hungarian government who created totally artificial and very new ethnolinguistic identity – the “Bosnians”, just not to be the (Orthodox) Serbs (who were at that time a strong majority of the provincial population) [Лазо М. Костић, Наука утврђује народност Б-Х муслимана, Србиње−Нови Сад: Добрица књига, 2000.].

A creation of ethnolinguistically artificial Ukrainian national identity and later on a separate nationality was a part of a wider confessional-political project by Vatican in the Roman Catholic historical struggle against the eastern Orthodox Christianity (the eastern “schism”) and its Churches within the framework of Pope’s traditional proselytizing policy of reconversion of the “infidels”. One of the most successful instruments of a soft-way reconversion used by Vatican was to compel a part of the Orthodox population to sign with the Roman Catholic Church the Union Act recognizing at such a way a supreme power by the Pope and dogmatic filioque (“and from the Son” – the Holy Spirit proceeds and from the Father and from the Son).

Therefore, the ex-Orthodox believers who now became the Uniate Brothers or the Greek Orthodox believers became in a great number later on a pure Roman Catholics but as well as changed their original (from the Orthodox time) ethnolinguistic identity. It is, for instance, very clear in the case of the Orthodox Serbs in Zhumberak area of Croatia – from the Orthodox Serbs to the Greek Orthodox, later the Roman Catholics and finally today the Croats. Something similar occurred and in the case of Ukraine. On October 9^th, 1596 it was announced by Vatican a Brest Union with a part of the Orthodox population within the borders of the Roman Catholic Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth (today Ukraine) [Arūnas Gumuliauskas, Lietuvos istorija: Įvykiai ir datos, Šiauliai: Šiaures Lietuva, 2009, 44; Didysis istorijos atlasas mokyklai: Nuo pasaulio ir Lietuvos priešistorės iki naujausiųjų laikų, Vilnius: Leidykla Briedis, (without year of publishing) 108.]. The crucial issue in this matter is that today Ukraina’s Uniates and the Roman Catholics are most anti-Russian and of the Ukrainian national feelings. Basically, both the Ukrainian and the Belarus present-day ethnolinguistic and national identities are historically founded on the anti-Orthodox policy of Vatican within the territory of ex-Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that was in essence an anti-Russian one.

The Lithuanian historiography writing on the Church Union of Brest in 1596 clearly confirms that:

“… the Catholic Church more and more strongly penetrated the zone of the Orthodox Church, giving a new impetus to the idea, which had been cherished since the time of Jogaila and Vytautas and formulated in the principles of the Union of Florence in 1439, but never put into effect – the subordination of the GDL Orthodox Church to the Pope’s rule” [Zigmantas Kiaupa et al, The History of Lithuania Before 1795, Vilnius: Lithuanian Institute of History, 2000, 288].

In the other words, the rulers of the Roman Catholic Grand Duchy of Lithuania (the GDL) from the very time of Lithuania’s baptizing in 1387−1413 by Vatican had a plan to Catholicize all Orthodox believers of the GDL among whom overwhelming majority were the Slavs. As a consequence, the relations with Moscow became very hostile as Russia accepted a role of the protector of the Orthodox believers and faith and therefore the Church Union of Brest was seen as a criminal act by Rome and its client the Republic of Two Nations (Poland-Lithuania).

Religions in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573 (Catholics in yellow, Orthodox in green, Protestant in purple/gray)

Today, it is absolutely clear that the most pro-western and anti-Russian part of Ukraine is exactly the West Ukraine – the lands that was historically under the rule by the Roman Catholic ex-Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and the former Habsburg Monarchy. It is obvious, for instance, from the presidential voting results in 2010 as the pro-western regions voted for J. Tymoshenko while the pro-Russian regions do it for V. Yanukovych. It is a reflection of the post-Soviet Ukrainian identity dilemma between “Europe” and “Eurasia” – a dilemma that is of common nature for all Central and East European nations who historically played a role of a buffer zone between the German Mittel Europa project and the Russian project of a pan-Slavonic unity and reciprocity.

In general, the western territories of the present-day Ukraine are mainly populated by the Roman Catholics, the East Orthodox and the Uniates. This part of Ukraine is mostly nationalistic and pro-western oriented. The East Ukraine is in essence Russophone and subsequently “tends to look to closer relations with Russia” [John S. Dryzek, Leslie Templeman Holmes, Post-Communist Democratization: Political Discourses Across Thirteen Countries, Cambridge−New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 114].

*

Vladislav B. Satirovic is Founder & Director of the Private Research Centre “The Global Politics” (www.global-politics.eu), Ovsishte, Serbia. Personal web platform: www.global-politics.eu/sotirovic. Contact: [email protected].

Featured image is from the author.

The Washington Post headlined on January 26th, “Trump plans to ask for $716 billion for national defense in 2019 — a major increase”, and reported that when President Trump had entered the White House in January 2017, the ‘Defense’ budget was $521 billion, but that President Trump will propose in his upcoming State-of-the-Union speech, a 2019 ‘Defense’ budget of $716 billion, which, if it becomes law, would mean a 37% increase, above Obama’s last Pentagon budget (for 2017).

This is in line with President Trump’s recently announced strategic change, away from Obama’s military budget, which was focused mainly against radical Islamic terrorism, now to target, instead, mainly Russia and China, and, secondarily, Iran and North Korea. As CBS News summarized on January 20th, 

“There is a major change in U.S. military strategy. On Friday [January 19th], more than 16 years after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said terrorism is no longer the No. 1 priority. … Maintaining a military advantage over China and Russia is now Defense Secretary Mattis’ top priority.”

Mattis said, in introducing Trump’s January 18th document, National Defense Strategy 2018,

“China is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage. … Concurrently, Russia seeks veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic, and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor. … Rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran are destabilizing regions through their pursuit of nuclear weapons or sponsorship of terrorism.”

Trump’s National Defense Strategy 2018 document says,

“We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.”

The candidate, Trump, who ran for office criticizing his predecessor, Barack Obama, for not doing enough against “radical Islamic terrorism,” is soaring the ‘Defense’ budget in order to refocus away from that threat, to “Great Power competition,” especially against China and Russia.

Whereas even many Republicans had attacked candidate Trump during his campaign, mainly for being insufficiently neoconservative (imperialistic — such as his allegedly not being sufficiantly anti-Russia), President Trump is turning out to be actually more of a neocon than was his predecessor — not less, such as he had promised.

Millions of Americans who voted for Donald Trump because he promised to be less of a neocon than was his predecessor — and far less of one than was Hillary Clinton — are finding out that he might instead be even more of a neocon than she was.

As for the people who voted for Ms. Clinton, they might be pleasantly surprised that as the President, Trump is, at least on this most-basic strategic question, more like was candidate-Clinton, than was candidate-Trump. He doesn’t look like she; he doesn’t speak like she, but he might be outdoing her, as the President — at least on ‘national security’ affairs. 

Clearly, the Democratic Party won’t be in much of a position to criticize the Republican President much on ‘Defense’, because they won’t want to seem to have been insincere in their criticisms of him for not being insufficiently neoconservative. They’ll need to satisfy themselves with their Russiagate charges against him — that he colluded with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in order to win the U.S. White House.

Democrats are themselves in a strategically tough position, of leaving themselves vulnerable to accusations that they are, for the most part, similar to Republicans, only more hypocritical. (Trump derisively calls them “politically correct.”)

By Trump’s reorienting away from the cheaper military strategy of anti-terrorism, toward the really costly weapons, which carry nuclear warheads and entail huge missiles and trillion-dollar weapons-systems, Trump will more than earn his keep for America’s largest military contractors, such as Lockheed Martin, which rely solely or mainly upon the U.S. Government and its allies, as their market, rather than upon civilians. The strategic nuclear arsenals are immensely expensive and they were useless against Osama bin Laden and people such as that, but, are essential in order for America to conquer Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Now is probably a good time to invest in these firms, because President Trump and the Republican Congress are terrific for them. They had overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton, but Donald Trump is the person who’ll actually be delivering, to them, the gold.

Who can understand the ways of ‘democracy’? Trump might get a good chuckle at having fooled almost everyone. Perhaps he feels especially proud in such ways as he’d never publicly admit, maybe even despising his voters. But what choice did they have?

Whether or not this is American ‘democracy’, it’s clearly today’s American politics.

*

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.

Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) urges the Canadian government to follow the example of the German government vis-à-vis relations with Saudi Arabia. On January 19th, the German government announced that it will be suspending all arms sales to Saudi Arabia, due to the Saudi documented human rights violations in Yemen. CJPME applauds Germany’s principled position, and calls on the Canadian government to likewise suspend all arms sales to the Saudis.

Saudi Arabia has repeatedly ignored international condemnation of its military campaign in Yemen. Over the past two years, Saudi-led coalition strikes have killed over 4,000 Yemeni civilians, demonstrating reckless disregard for civilian casualties. Worse, a Saudi-led blockade of Yemen has restricted the flow of fuel, food, and basic medicine into Yemen, where over a million Yemenis are suffering from the outbreak of cholera. The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids the obstruction of medicines and supplies to civilians during times of armed conflict. The World Health Organization claims that 20 million Yemenis are in dire need of humanitarian assistance that is being restricted by the Saudi blockade. The UN, alongside multiple human rights organizations, has accused Saudi Arabia of committing breaches of international law, and even war crimes in Yemen.

CJPME calls on the Canadian government to cease arms sales to the Saudi Kingdom, and stand up for human rights. CJPME finds Canada’s decision to pledge $12 million in humanitarian aid to Yemen to be particularly cynical, given that Canada is profiting from $15 billion sales of light armoured vehicles to the Saudis. CJPME President Thomas Woodley argues,

“Aid to Yemen is fine, but the only way Canada can truly impact the situation in Yemen, is to stem the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia, and pressure the Kingdom to end its blockade.”

For years, CJPME and other human rights organizations have consistently called on the Canadian government to halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia. Even without the Saudi abuses in Yemen, CJPME was concerned by the video and photographic evidence showing Canadian-made light armoured vehicles committing human rights abuses against Saudi civilians. With Saudi Arabia’s track record as one of the world’s greatest human rights violators, CJPME urges the Canadians government to follow Germany’s lead and stop all weapons sales to Saudi Arabia.

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Russiagate is a scam. Special counsel Mueller never should have been appointed – his mission a witch-hunt, not a legitimate investigation.

His conflicts of interest should have disqualified him. He’s close to fired FBI director Comey. He sought reappointment as agency head, serving in the post for 10 years under Bush/Cheney and Obama.

Reportedly he interviewed for the job the day before being appointed special counsel.

The NYT broke the story about Trump allegedly wanting Mueller fired last June – appointed special counsel on May 17, 2017 by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

His witch-hunt investigation involves probing “any links and/or coordination between Russian government and individuals associated with the campaign of President Donald Trump, and any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

Not a shred of evidence suggests just cause for his investigation. After eight months on the job, he found nothing. Nor have House and Senate committees after over a year of fruitless work.

According to the Times,

“(a)fter receiving the president’s order to fire Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, refused to ask the Justice Department to dismiss the special counsel, saying he would quit instead,” according to unnamed sources.

Mueller learned about Trump’s intention before he backed down, the Times added. Reportedly he cited three Mueller conflicts of interest as justification for sacking him:

• a dispute over fees at Trump’s National Golf Club in Sterling, Va. involving Mueller;
• his work for the law firm that earlier represented his son-in-law Jared Kushner; and
• as explained above, he interviewed for FBI director after Trump fired Comey the day before his appointment as special counsel.

Mueller was appointed under 28 CFR 600.7. It states

“(t)he Special Counsel may be disciplined or removed from office only by the personal action of the Attorney General.”

“The Attorney General may remove a Special Counsel for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause, including violation of Departmental policies.”

Mueller’s conflicts of interest make him a potential witness in his own investigation – alone what should have disqualified him for the special counsel job. It warrants his dismissal – though sacking him would be politically disastrous.

It would give Trump opponents just cause for impeachment on obstruction of justice charges – despite the illegitimacy of Mueller’s witch-hunt investigation.

Appearances are everything in Washington. Dark forces want Trump ousted. So far, there’s no justification for removing him.

Sacking Mueller in the middle of his investigation could create one, undemocratic Dems and perhaps some Republicans jumping on the chance to call for his impeachment and removal from office.

Surely this was explained to Trump. He backed off to save his presidency, not because White House counsel Donald F. McGahn II threatened to quit – a minor issue compared to the main one.

*

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

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Contact at [email protected].

The Bureau of the Atomic Scientists maintained its Doomsday Clock since 1947 – the closer to midnight, the greater the risk of catastrophe from nuclear war or environmental disaster.

Its original setting was seven minutes during a more peaceful time than what preceded or followed the clock’s launching.

It’s been set forward and backward numerous times, once to 17 minutes to midnight, two minutes to midnight the closest to what the Atomic Scientists perceive as a potential doomsday scenario.

It’s been there only twice – in 1953 during the height of Cold War fears, and as of January 25, 2018 – over fear of Trump’s hostility toward North Korea, Iran and other sovereign independent countries.

Days after his January 20, 2017 inauguration, the Doomsday Clock was advanced to two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, the move attributed to “the words of a single person: Donald Trump, the new President of the United States.”

The clock was moved less than a full minute for the first time because he’d only been president a few days.

The Atomic Scientists expressed concern over his announced nuclear arsenal expansion, his strident nationalism, his dismissiveness about climate change, his “intemperate statements,” and questionable appointments, potentially “ma(king) a bad international security situation worse.”

His actions during his early days in office were cause for concern – far more worrisome after a year as president, his administration infested with hawkish generals and neocon extremists.

His and their rage for war and hostility toward sovereign independent states risk unthinkable nuclear war on his watch – perhaps confrontation with Russia and/or China going nuclear by accident or design.

In announcing today’s move, Atomic Scientists (AC) president Rachel Bronson said

“(i)t’s with considerable concern that we set the Doomsday Clock, as of today. It is two minutes to midnight.”

AC board members, including 15 Nobel laureates, believe

“the world is not only more dangerous now than it was a year ago. It is as threatening as it has been since World War II.”

Nuclear history expert Alex Wellerstein explained today’s heightened fear, saying

“(w)e have members of Congress, White House advisers, and even the president implying that they think war with a nuclear state is not only likely, but potentially desirable. That’s unusual and disturbing.”

Proliferation of nuclear weapons and Washington’s willingness to use them perhaps threatens humanity like never before.

A single detonation can turn major cities into smoldering rubble, their populations annihilated, their landscape and surrounding areas irradiated.

In response to the Doomsday Clock’s advance toward midnight, International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) executive director Beatrice Fihn issued a statement, saying:

“The actions and policies of the nuclear-armed states are winding the Doomsday Clock towards midnight.”

“We have been lucky to avoid conflict through intentional or accidental means, but recent posturing and the false alarms in Hawaii and Japan show our luck is about to run out if we don’t move quickly.”

“(S)ecurity based on luck is reckless and foolish. It’s exactly what the nuclear states have now. 122 nations voted for the nuclear ban Treaty and other nations need to join the process so we can stop flirting with our own destruction and destroy the Doomsday Clock once and for all.”

Because of US rage for global dominance, today is the most perilous time in world history.

Humanity destroying nuclear war could happen by accident or design. US imperial madness could doom us all.

A Final Comment

On January 25, a Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the following:

“In 2017, world leaders failed to respond effectively to the looming threats of nuclear war and climate change, making the world security situation more dangerous than it was a year ago – and as dangerous as it has been since World War II.”

“The greatest risks last year arose in the nuclear realm. North Korea’s nuclear weapons program appeared to make remarkable progress in 2017, increasing risks for itself, other countries in the region, and the United States.”

“Hyperbolic rhetoric and provocative actions on both sides have increased the possibility of nuclear war by accident or miscalculation.”

“On the climate change front, the danger may seem less immediate, but avoiding catastrophic temperature increases in the long run requires urgent attention now…The nations of the world will have to significantly decrease their greenhouse gas emissions to keep climate risks manageable, and so far, the global response has fallen far short of meeting this challenge.”

“(T)here has also been a breakdown in the international order that has been dangerously exacerbated by recent US actions. In 2017, the United States backed away from its longstanding leadership role in the world, reducing its commitment to seek common ground and undermining the overall effort toward solving pressing global governance challenges.”

“Neither allies nor adversaries have been able to reliably predict US actions or understand when US pronouncements are real, and when they are mere rhetoric. International diplomacy has been reduced to name-calling, giving it a surrealistic sense of unreality that makes the world security situation ever more threatening.”

Atomic Scientists made levelheaded recommendations for stepping back from the brink – ways of saving humanity from possible annihilation.

Bipartisan lunatics in Washington reject peace and ecosanity. Their agenda poses a greater threat to humanity than during the second war to end all future ones.

They rage dangerously out-of-control today. New conflicts loom – risking destruction of life on planet earth if a way isn’t found to stop them.

*

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

The incessant chatter of the observers of the whims of Trump, the litany of media about his “unpredictability” and “amateurism”, the permanent focus on his like for showing off, when one does not completely speculate on his mental health (as if the winner of a presidential election could be “half-stupid”)… To be short – the logorrhea that characterises ordinary Trumpology presents a big inconvenience: it dispenses its authors from engaging in real political analysis.

The recurring defect of the dominant commentary and psychological babble prevents seeing anything else in the policy of Trump but at best – just a tissue of inconsistencies, a mish-mash without a guideline; it does not allow one to detect the worst case scenario – just a suicidal tendency, as if America was running to its own loss under the guidance of a captain who flipped out.

The central question raised by the policy of Trump, however, is of another nature: beyond the whimsical personality – or so it seems to be – of the President, what are these policies a symptom of?

What does it tells us about the evolution of the United States and its role in the world?

In order to sketch an answer to this question, there is a need to start from the beginning. America has enjoyed since 1945 a privilege outside the norms, which was initiated by the confrontation with communism, and then restored in 1991 by the collapse of the USSR:

1. they occupy the centre of the world-economy and hold onto its money, their GDP is higher than that of other countries; their technology dominates the planet;
2. their military power, in the end, remains without rival. For the US elites, their exceptional status is in the order of things: it reflects all the more the “manifest destiny” of the nation, because it provides the “supplement of soul” to the rapacity of those same elites, authorising limitless predation in the rest of the world.

But since the failure of the intervention in Iraq (2003-2007) and the downfall of the ambitions of the “neocons”, everything suggests the collapse of this “order of things”.

Hit by adversity, the “manifest destiny” is slipping away, and the illusion of unlimited hegemony vanishes in time and space. By attributing the “American decline” to the messy haphazardness of the President elected in 2016, most observers, in reality, mix up the cause and the effect.

What made the US become unseated is not the policy of Trump. The relationship is exactly the opposite: if the policy of Trump is a policy of doodling, then, in fact, it is because the US loses ground.

We could multiply the number of examples. The Republican candidate was elected by firing red cannon balls at liberal globalisation.

But what could he do once he took the helm?

Throw away the globalisation of exchanges via which Wall Street built its insolent prosperity?

Renounce the model that Washington imposed for the benefit of its multinational corporations over the past half-century?

Besides the renunciation of the “Trans-Pacific Partnership” (TTP), the policy of the new administration was limited to statements of principle, sometimes with assorted threats addressed to Beijing, purely rhetorically, and does little to undermine the walls of the Forbidden City.

The White House knows that any reintroduction of protectionism would result in retaliatory measures that would penalise US companies. For a country whose federal debt held by foreign investors was literally blown away, playing with fire at such an abysmal level could be perilous, especially with regard to the US’ creditor country. The US economy is trapped at the bottom of the very globalisation that it once was the engine of enthusiasm and primary beneficiary of.

Obviously, the table has turned. But it is too late to change the rules of the game on the grounds that the others have learnt to win in their turn.

Concerning China, it continues its meteoric ascension, followed by India, which in 2018 will claim the rank of the 5th economic power of the planet, relegating France to 6th place.

Responding to the criticism of Trump, Beijing affords itself the luxury of singing the praises of free trade. It is true that China can afford to do this: it is the number 1 exporter in the world, when the US is the leading importer.

The US economy still has serious advantages, but its share in global GDP is decreasing. In 2025, China will claim 21%, and the US – 16%. In 2050, China will be at 33% and the US at 9%.

When the Chinese shadows darkened the horizon, the “American dream” takes on the overtones of a nightmare. Since the last 30 years, for every three workers in the US one worker was replaced by a robot, the second one by a Chinese worker, and the third one is afraid of ending up like the previous two. The election of Trump is the fruit of this concern, but it is clear that his policies will not be able to remedy it.

The question is not to know whether or not the US is going to cede first place: this is a certainty. It is also not about knowing when, because it is imminent.

The only question is: under what conditions will this inevitable transition take place.

The obvious unpredictability of Trump, his feverish agitation, and his histrionic behavior in sum are like a symptom of neurosis. It conveys the anguish of a superpower that feels the ground shifting beneath its feet, and which seeks to ward off the signs of its collapse by multiplying the protrusions.

Can the heavy trend that is the slow decline of material production “made in USA” be curbed by a geopolitical jump? Trump tries to take on this challenge, but he stumbles every time on objective limits. This helplessness unfailingly gives to his policies an air of déjà vu, even though he tries at any price to stand out from his predecessors and to finally restore the image of a Great America that is finally back.

For example, he claimed that he wanted to break the annoying habit of playing the rectifier of wrongs, but he continues nevertheless to preach to the whole planet.

Lashing out at Russia, China, Syria, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela, he perseveres with the path of interference in all its forms, multiplying the absurd accusations (“Iran supports terrorism”), and sterile provocations (“ban muslims”).

With him, the old still resurfaces under the new. He briskly invokes the “international community” and the law of the same name, but he offers the Zionist occupier a promised gift to Netanyahu, under the pressure of the lobby: the recognition of annexed Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. He exalts “human rights” to stigmatise the States that displease him, while at the same time securing an alliance with Riyadh to sign the death warrant of Yemeni children starved by a blockade and crushed under bombs. Under his reign, the formula of the Prince of Salina in “The Leopard“ applies perfectly to US diplomacy: “we must change everything so that nothing changes”.

Indeed, the Pentagon learned lessons from the double fiasco of Iraq-Afghanistan, and no large-scale military operation was started in over a year. Trump is not George W. Bush, and his relationship with the “neocons” is complex.

It is sometimes said in order to exculpate him that he would like to lead a different policy, but that the influence of the “Deep State” prevents this. This interpretation, if it was indeed true, would suppose disconcerting naivety being present in the current President.

Was he unaware of the weight of the structures of the “Deep State” before taking the reins of the US administration? Did he have any idea about the joint and sprawling influence of the military-industrial complex and security agencies? The direction of this great country being a balancing act seems to be more consistent with reality, where the “Deep State” contributes to essential decisions in leading spheres to the extent of its weight – which is exorbitant. Trump is not the involuntary hostage of an occult and all-powerful apparatus, but the most exposed collaborator of this apparatus, a designed representative of oligarchy, which the “Deep State” represents both the most influential and least transparent layer of.

Even if it experienced some incidents (such as the recent disgrace of Steve Bannon), this permeability of the Presidency under the influence of the “Deep State” explains the relative continuity of foreign policy from one presidency to the next on subjects of strategic interest. In Syria, for example, Washington continues to exercise its “nuisance value” using either the terrorist card [ISIS – ed] or the Kurdish card.

The Secretary of State Rex Tillerson just tried to justify the presence of the 2,000 military personnel in Syria to facilitate “the departure of Assad” and “to counter the influence of Iran”. This explicit reference to “regime change” is revealing, as is the hostility towards Iran, the hobbyhorse of Donald Trump. But there is little chance that this colonial expedition in miniature form will obtain the desired result. When the Syrian Army will have reduced the last pockets of takfiris, it will go to reconquest the Syrian East, and the yankees, as usual, will pack their bags. Washington wanted to destroy the State of Syria, but this is a resounding failure. Trump must swallow the bitter pill of defeat, and his policy has the look of a rear-guard action.

Under the pressure of the “Deep State”, the tenant of the “White House” provides the after-sales service of a policy that he cannot deny the premise of without giving the impression of surrender. Failing to use heavy artillery, he then sends the banderillas on everything that moves. Yesterday it was the takfiri conglomerate, today it is the “Syrian Democratic Forces”, even if it provokes the allied Turks, who entered the Afrin enclave to settle their account with the Kurdish militias armed by Washington.

The incredible factory of knots that is the policy of the US has definitely tried everything in Syria. After their proxies were eliminated one after the other, the US is now condemned to be a wallflower while Russia calls the shots. So they throw embers into a brazier, which others – Assad, Rouhani and Putin – will extinguish in order to promote the development of their countries, and not – like the US – to rot the lives of other nations. This is a fact: even though the Pentagon has a nice looking budget of $626 billion, the United States is emerging from the main confrontation of the decade defeated.

Molested by the Syrian issue, Donald Trump nevertheless tried, at the beginning of January, 2018, to exercise his nuisance value on another front. The protests in Iran, which offered him a new vantage point, were immediately exploited by the billionaire in the White House, mobilising all the resources of destabilisation and furiously tweeting his support for “regime change”, which thankfully fizzled out. Just like its obsession with North Korea, the Trump presidency’s obsession with Iran is doomed, indeed, to feed the same tensions and the same disappointments.

The Iranians have no intention of gutting themselves to give the tenant of the White House pleasure. As for the North Koreans, they have enough means to progress in the nuclear domain to threaten Washington and its allies with terrifying retaliation should there be any aggression. And as Trump is neither a fool nor a moron, we can reasonably think that his imprecations against Pyongyang are thankfully doomed to remain at the paltry stage of “flatum vocis” (a phrase that could be translated as “verbal farting”) instead of turning into an atomic mushroom.

Ultimately, we give this character too much merit by making him responsible for the decline, which he is nothing more than a symptom of. His rhetorical emphasis and his propensity for farce are effects of the causes that are found elsewhere. What condemns the tenant of the White House to a policy of doodling has nothing to do with his personal equation. This is the tilting of the world, and Trump can’t do anything (or no more than Hillary Clinton could in his position).

The problem of the current President, however, is that he promised something that he is unable to provide: a miracle remedy that defends the US against an irreversible decline. His paradox is that he criticises the globalisation that is ruining “America” by applying the same rules as those that he made his fortune under in the past half-century. He can try all he wants to multiply the sabotage operations and to stigmatise a scapegoat (Putin, Assad, the Democrats, the press, immigrants), but he merely verbalises his impotence. If Trump barks but does not bite and prefers imprecations to actions, then it means that he does not have the capacity to act in his own way. Like any President of the United States, he is a part of a system that demands rates of profit and military financing, and he will be judged by his ability to provide this.

Original article in French on mondialisation.ca:

Considérez Trump comme un symptôme, January 22, 2018

Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Said, stalkerzone.org

Letting slip exactly the kind of unscripted and potentially reckless utterance a legal team might fear, President Donald Trump told reporters late Wednesday that he would “love to” be interviewed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller‘s team and would so “under oath”—an offer his lawyer later appeared to pull back when he said Trump was “speaking hurriedly” and only meant that he would submit to an interview, but not necessarily under sworn oath or to the grand jury Mueller has convened.

“I would love to do it, and I would like to do it as soon as possible,” Trump said from the White House. “I would do it under oath, absolutely.”

With reports this week indicating Mueller’s team is now in serious talks with the president’s lawyers about setting a date to answer questions, Trump on Wednesday denied to reporters that he or his campaign team did anything wrong.

“There’s been no collusion whatsoever,” he said. “There’s no obstruction whatsoever, and I’m looking forward to [the interview].”

Here’s an extended portion of his remarks:

Pres. Trump told reporters he is "looking forward" to speaking with Robert Mueller and would be willing to do so under oath. https://t.co/o9B2eLgxLv pic.twitter.com/yAOmNQJokl

— ABC News (@ABC) January 25, 2018

During the exchange, Trump asks reporters whether or not Hillary Clinton testified under oath, though it’s not clear exactly what testimony of his 2016 campaign rival he’s referring to. However, according to the New York Times’ Maggie Habberman—the reporter who asked him about taking an oath—it was also unclear whether or not the president understands the possible stakes when he talks to Mueller:

Potus, obsessed with Clinton still, asked me in response to my q about under oath whether she did to the FBI. He doesn’t seem to know that lying to the FBI even without being under oath is a crime. Perhaps Flynn can tell him https://t.co/xwr24iXn8Z

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 24, 2018

According to the Washington Post:

Trump’s remarks took White House officials by surprise and came as his lawyers were negotiating with Mueller’s team on a potential interview. The president’s lawyers have repeatedly encouraged him not to post tweets or make comments about the investigation without their knowledge, saying such comments could damage him.

The president’s statements suggest that he sees an obstruction-of-justice investigation as an unfair attack on attempts by him or others to mount a defense. It is not a crime for the subject of a criminal probe to assert their innocence or provide additional information to exonerate themselves. However, if a person takes steps to impede or stop such an investigation, that can amount to obstruction of justice.

Of course, given that Trump is a documented serial liar, there was immediate reaction about what it would and wouldn’t mean for the president to say he would testify under oath:

I can't fathom why anyone would think it means anything that Trump said he is looking forward to talking to Mueller under oath. It means nothing. https://t.co/CFGlyq4pdJ

— Elizabeth de la Vega (@Delavegalaw) January 25, 2018

Trump made over 2,100 false or misleading statements last year according to the @washingtonpost. Now @realDonaldTrump will potentiality be placed under oath to answer questions about Flynn and Comey firings. https://t.co/3y0pP3lS5g

— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) January 23, 2018

Soon after Trump’s comments on Wednesday went public, his attorney Ty Cobb told the Times the president was speaking hurriedly and only intended to say he was willing to meet.

“He’s ready to meet with them, but he’ll be guided by the advice of his personal counsel,” Mr. Cobb said.

Writing for New York Magazine, columnist Jonathan Chait explained why Cobb and other members of Trump’s legal team might be concerned.

“The reason Trump’s lawyers have been hesitant to let him talk to Mueller, except under tightly controlled circumstances,” writes Chait, “is that he lies like crazy when he can be easily caught, and also occasionally blurts out admissions he shouldn’t make. His extemporaneous offer is good evidence of why the Trump legal team wants to keep him away from Mueller.”

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2018 is going to be a fun fun year. And to better prepare yourself for all the merrymaking here is a calendar of some of the more delightful things to look forward to.

February 16: The United States bans entry to the country of all people except white Christian and Jewish citizens of Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and Israel.

February 18: Congress passes a law that requires all new citizens to submit an essay – in excellent English – about how brilliant Donald J. Trump is, how devoted they are to him, what a huge success he’s been, how he’s going to make America great again, and how modest a man he is.

March 1: The Mueller Investigation announces the discovery of a citizen of Vladivostok, Russia who on July 16, 2016 wrote an email to his cousin in Baltimore expressing his dismay at all the violence that had been unleashed in the Middle East following the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, which, he wrote, was instigated by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. “Such interference in an American election will not be tolerated”, declared Mueller’s office.

March 6: The government of El Salvador is overthrown in a coup. The United States blames Russia.

March 15: Members of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi parties, which hold several high positions in the US-supported government, goose-step through the center of Kiev in full German Storm Trooper uniforms, carrying giant swastika flags, shouting “Heil Hitler”, and singing the Horst Wessel song. When left-wingers attempt to block them police intervene to arrest the left-wingers. Not a word of this appears in any American mainstream media. President Trump tweets “there are lots of bad people on both sides”.

March 26: The government of Paraguay is overthrown in a coup. The United States blames Russia.

April 1: Trump declares that the United States has never invaded another country nor has ever overthrown a foreign government. He adds that this is not an April Fools Day joke.

April 15: The government of Egypt is overthrown in a coup. The United States blames Russia.

April 28: A new Harvard study concludes that .00001 percent of the American population now possesses 99.999 percent of all financial assets.

May 10: Texas executes a 16-year-old girl for having an abortion.

May 12: The Republican Party calls for giving fetuses the vote.

June 3: US demands that Iran destroy all planes and bombs in their country, all pistols and rifles, all knives over 2 inches, and all baseball bats.

July 1: Vice President Pence is accused by nine women of having sexually abused them. A week-long nationwide protest demands that he resign. He finally does. President Trump appoints Harvey Weinstein to replace him.

July 14: Saudi Arabia executes for blasphemy 105 men by firing squad, and 42 by beheading, and subjects 60 others to 100 lashes each. The next day Trump angrily denounces “the communist government of Venezuela” for arresting six protesters.

August 15: Chelsea Manning is assassinated by a man named Oswald Harvey.

August 18: Oswald Harvey, while in solitary confinement and guarded round the clock by 200 policemen, is killed by a man named Ruby Jackson.

August 26: Ruby Jackson suddenly dies of a rare Asian disease heretofore unknown in the Western Hemisphere.

September 3: The Labor Department announces that Labor Day will become a celebration of America’s gratitude to its corporations, a day dedicated to the memory of J.P. Morgan and Pinkerton strike breakers killed in the line of duty.

September 6: Congress passes a law requiring that all persons arrested in anti-war demonstrations must be sterilized. President Trump says it is “a huge law”. Congressional Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi votes for the law but declares that she has misgivings because there’s no provision for a right of appeal.

September 8: Military junta overthrows President Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela. Washington decries the loss of democracy.

September 10: US recognizes the new Venezuelan military junta, offers it 50 jet fighters and 100 tanks.

September 12: Revolution breaks out in Venezuela endangering the military junta; 40,000 American marines land in Caracas to quell the uprising.

September 20: The Supreme Court rules that police may search anyone if they have reasonable grounds for believing that the person has pockets.

September 21: Two subway trains collide in Manhattan. The United States demands that Moscow explain why there was a Russian citizen in each of the trains.

October 1: The Democratic Party changes its name to the Republican Lite Party, and announces the opening of a joint bank account with the Republican Party so that corporate lobbyists need to make out only one check.

October 11: The Justice Department announces that six people have been arrested in New York in connection with a plan to bomb the United Nations, the Empire State Building, the Times Square subway station, Madison Square Garden, and Lincoln Center.

October 12: Charges are dropped against four of “The New York Six” when it is determined that they are FBI agents.

October 19: Cops the world over form a new association, Policemen’s International Governing Society. PIGS announces that its first goal will be to mount a campaign against the notion that a person is innocent until proven guilty, in those countries where the quaint notion still dwells.

October 22: The draft is reinstated for males and females, ages 16 to 45. Those who are missing a limb or are blind can apply for non-combat roles.

November 6: The turnout for the US presidential election is 9.6%. The voting ballots are all imprinted: “From one person, one vote, to one dollar, one vote.” The winner is “None of the above”.

November 10: ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, General Electric, General Motors, AT&T, Ford, and IBM merge to form “Free Enterprise, Inc.”

November 16: Free Enterprise, Inc. seeks to purchase Guatemala and Haiti. Citigroup refuses to sell.

November 18: Free Enterprise, Inc. purchases Citigroup.

November 25: The air in Los Angeles reaches so bad a pollution level that the rich begin to hire undocumented workers to breathe for them.

December 7: Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump engage in a debate at the United Nations on which of the two is more popular and beloved at home and around the world, whether American Exceptionalism beats North Korean Exceptionalism, and who has the bigger penis.

December 10: Trump fires his entire cabinet, the heads of all government agencies, and his wife. “I gave them all millions of dollars,” he declares, “but none of them gave me respect or loyalty. What a bunch of losers! Sad!”

December 14: Dick Cheney announces from his hospital bed that the United States has finally discovered caches of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – “So all those doubters can now just go ‘F’ themselves.” The former vice-president, however, refuses to provide any details of the find because, he says, to do so might reveal intelligence sources or methods.

So … best wishes for the new year to all my dear readers in the United States and around the world.

And may your name never appear on a Homeland Security “No-fly list”.

May your labor movement not be supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, nor your country’s elections.

May your country never experience a NATO or US humanitarian intervention, liberation, or involuntary suicide.

May the depleted uranium, cluster bombs, white phosphorous, and napalm which fall upon your land be as harmless or non-existent as the Pentagon says they are.

May you not fall sick while in the United States without health insurance.

May you not desire to go to an American university while being less than rich.

May you re-discover what the poor in 18th century France discovered, that rich people’s heads can be mechanically separated from their shoulders if they don’t listen to reason.

This article was originally published by William Blum. January 5, 2018

In the previous article I explained why bitcoin should be considered a reaction to US dollar hegemony and how other nations and central banks are facing the crisis of the dollar brought on by de-dollarization. In this article I will go into how we came to this point and what mechanisms helped to bring about a debt-based society. In the third and last article we will examine the nature of the future geopolitical and geo-financial transition as well as the signals we need look out for in the immediate future.

From Gold to Paper

To understand what is happening today we must look back to simpler times, back when people bartered with each other. The utility and availability of commodities determined their value. Gold in particular represented a finite good that was difficult to find and was useful in various fields. For this reason gold has always been considered the highest example of a valuable good, together with diamonds, platinum, silver and other elements that are difficult to find but have a common or daily use. For example, the importance of utility transformed uranium, an otherwise worthless element, into a valuable commodity following the discovery of atomic energy. Returning to gold, one can understand how in the era of barter, gold was the reference element with which to price the value of everything. Little by little, gold was joined by silver and then bronze in simplifying the exchange of goods and increasing convenience of use.

Gold had its own intrinsic value and was valid in every empire around the world; the same with silver and bronze. Gold had become not only a means of exchange and a measure of value but also a reservoir of value to be bequeathed to heirs. Above all it was a means of payment. When silver coins began to become scarce, payment with currency printed on leather was introduced. However, they were often refused due to lacking the basic principles that gave gold, silver and bronze their measure and reservoir of value. The skin of this currency could wear out, and though it was a means of payment, it was not as solid and trustworthy as precious metals.

The real revolution began in the 1700s when the French central bank began to take gold bars from its citizens in exchange for pieces of paper with the corresponding value written on it. This change would have enormous repercussions on the world economy over the next 300 years.

The most important aspect of this change was psychological, whereby the ordinary person is willing to deliver his physical gold to the French bank in exchange for a piece of paper indicating the amount of gold owned. There are two fundamental reasons that have led to this choice, both relating to human nature: the simplicity of use, and trust in the system. The French state, through its central bank, withdrew from the public gold, silver and bronze and exchanged it for physical paper currency without any intrinsic value. But the paper currency offered a high degree of portability and ease of use, aiding in its use as a means of payment and exchange of goods. Capitalism was thereby born and the transfer of wealth complete. The world was transitioning from a real economy based on intrinsic value, such as with that represented by gold, silver and bronze, to a fictitious one anchored to pieces of paper.

World Reserve Currency

The British Empire, and then the American one, have thrived enormously on this arrangement, thanks to the accumulation of gold in their central banks. The Bank of England had accumulated huge reserves of gold, and so was able to issue massive amounts of pounds, building up the concept of a world monetary reserve. The pound had slowly replaced the French currency as the main medium of exchange around the world, leaving Britain in a privileged position as a result of London’s central role in the global economy. Throughout history, the rise of major empires has coincided with their currency being the global reserve currency. Up until the British Empire, currency had always been a mix of valuable currencies and substitute currencies. But with sterling, gold was completely replaced with the pound, giving Britain and its colonies a disproportionate power to manipulate the global economy. To make the system sustainable, the obligation was to print currency only in relation to the quantity of gold actually owned. Each pound issued corresponded with a gold fee that was only borrowed from the British central bank. Each currency holder, first in France and now in England, could theoretically have asked for his gold back instead of sterling or French florins. This arrangement relied on the trust placed in central banks and the state, liberating the average citizen from having to transport and protect the precious coins.

At the end of the Second World War the United States emerged as the biggest winner in the West and Washington soon replaced London as the premier global power, with the dollar taking the place of the pound as a global reserve currency. The real negative change came when Nixon decided in 1971 to drop the dollar from the corresponding gold value that had been established at the Bretton Woods Agreement. The Fed was no longer required to have the gold price printed on its paper money. The 1973 oil crisis further fixed the value of the dollar as a result of this oil shock, bringing Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries to sign a secret agreement with Washington. This agreement provided that in exchange for Washington’s political and military protection, the OPEC countries would be required to sell oil only in dollars. The petrodollar was thus born, being a replacement for the gold-linked standard that existed prior to Nixon.

Over the space of a few years, the world economy experienced a dramatic and catastrophic shift. American military and economic power had prevailed, and the FED was free to print endless amounts of dollars without worrying about its sustainability or credibility, relying on war, the media and consumerism to prop up the facade. The world began to send consumer goods to the United States in exchange for waste paper with no relationship to gold. The scam of the century was now complete. It is a farce that relies on the collusion between banks, federal agencies, rating agencies and governments to create the illusion that US government bonds are the safest asset in the world, even more so than gold itself, which began to slowly disappear from the radar as a store of intrinsic value.

Fast forward to the end of the 1980s and the situation began to worsen with the transition to a digital reality regulated by Wall Street and financial speculation. Central banks could create money simply by transferring money to banks digitally.

This phenomenon brought about an enormous divergence between real assets and the value of currencies. Many countries lacking a certain level of international credibility could see inflation rise in a matter of hours as a result of strong financial speculation, devaluing the value of their currency with disastrous consequences for the real economy.

Twenty years later, the crack revealed by Lehman Brother suddenly amplified all the existing problems. The risk was that citizens would lose trust in the dollar or the euro, undermining the understanding that had existed since the 1700s, where citizens would exchange gold for paper safe in the knowledge that the integrity of this process was guaranteed by the central bank of their country. Rather than heal the financial system, the solution devised sought to increase the power of the banks and financial institutions, and to above all flood the market with money to save the banks that were too big to fail. The ordinary taxpayers all of a sudden found themselves saddled with an $800 billion debt with a simple mouse click, the Fed working through the night to create money from nothing in order to increase the liquidity of banks.

Thanks to a continuous stream of mainstream-media propaganda, the average citizen was little concerned by these actions and the global economy avoided going downhill. The central banks found themselves in an unprecedented situation, forcing them to admit that the only way to save the economy was to create more money out of thin air. Such an absurd situation has led Deutsche Bank in 2018 to accumulate such toxic financial instruments as derivatives worth approximately $46 trillion, twice the American economy. This is degenerating into meaningless madness, as we will see in the next and final article of the series.

In the next and last article of the series I will explain how cryptocurrency could save the whole financial system in the event of a new crisis and why this means the end of the unipolar moment for the USA.

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Federico Pieraccini is an independent freelance writer specialized in international affairs, conflicts, politics and strategies.

This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.

Featured image is from the author.

I am delighted that Sir Patrick Wright, former head of the Diplomatic Service, has confirmed that Margaret Thatcher did support apartheid. There has been a polite media airbrushing of this aspect of Tory history. For the first two years of my life in the FCO I spent every single day trying to undermine Thatcher’s support for apartheid. As I published last year of the FCO’s new official history:

Salmon acquits Thatcher of actually supporting apartheid. I would dispute this. I was only a Second Secretary but the South Africa (Political) desk was just me, and I knew exactly what was happening. My own view was that Thatcher was a strong believer in apartheid, but reluctantly accepted that in the face of international opposition, especially from the United States, it would have to be dismantled. Her hatred of Mandela and of the ANC was absolute. It is an undeniable statement that Thatcher hated the ANC and was highly sympathetic towards the apartheid regime.

By contrast the Tory FCO junior ministers at the time, including Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker, shared the absolute disgust at apartheid that is felt by any decent human being. The Foreign Secretary, Geoffrey Howe was somewhere between these two positions, but very anxious indeed not to anger Thatcher. South Africa was an issue in which Thatcher took an extreme interest and was very, very committed. Not in a good way.

British diplomats were almost banned from speaking to any black people at all. Thatcher favoured the Bantustan or Homelands policy, so an exception was made for Gatsha Buthelezi, the Zulu chief who was regarded as anti-ANC and prepared to oppose sanctions and be satisfied with a separate Zulu “homeland” for his Inkatha movement and essentially accept apartheid exclusions. That may be unfair on him, but it was the policy of the UK government to steer in that direction. Our Consulate General in Johannesburg was permitted to talk to black trades unionists, and that was our main angle in to the black resistance movement. These contacts were made by the excellent Tony Gooch and Stuart Gregson, and before them the equally excellent Terry Curran, then my immediate boss in London. Neither Terry nor Tony were “fast-track” public school diplomats. None of those talked to black South Africans at all.

I flew off the handle when I discovered, when dealing with the accounts of the Embassy in Pretoria/Capetown (a migratory capital), that the British Ambassador, Patrick Moberly, had entertained very few black people indeed in the Residence and the vast majority of Embassy social functions were whites only. In 1985 most of the black people who got in to the British Ambassador’s residence in South Africa were the servants. I recall distinctly the astonishment in the FCO that the quiet and mild-mannered young man at the side desk had suddenly lost his rag and got excited about something that seemed to them axiomatic. Black people as guests in the Residence in Pretoria? No, Craig, I was told, we speak with black people in Johannesburg. Different culture there.

Wright’s account collaborates mine both in general and in detail, eg on being banned from any contact with the ANC. Eventually we managed, as a tentative first step and unknown to No.10, to arrange a meeting, ostensibly by accident in the margins of a conference, between myself and a brilliant young man from the newly launched trades union federation named Cyril Ramaphosa. I wonder what happened to him? I was the recipient of his justified ire at Tory government policy.

Tories who actively supported apartheid are still very influential in the Tory party, notably the St Andrews Federation of Conservative Students originating group, including Michael Forsyth. Even David Cameron’s contacts with South Africa in this period are a very murky part of his cv. It is important the Tories are not allowed off the hook on this. The moral taint should rightly be with them for generations.

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Craig Murray is an author, broadcaster and human rights activist. He was British Ambassador to Uzbekistan from August 2002 to October 2004 and Rector of the University of Dundee from 2007 to 2010.

Featured image is from the author.

Israel is using several Free Syrian Army (FSA) groups in a three phases-plan to impose a 40km-deep ‘safe zone’ in southern Syria, the Intercept reported on January 23.

According to the report, Israel already accomplished the first phase of its plan and it is currently working with different Israeli and American NGOs to accomplish the second phase. The goal of this effort is to push Lebanese Hezbollah and the Iranian-backed forces 40km away from the Israeli border. An unnamed officer of the FSA told the Intercept that Israel is even willing to push these forces “as far back as Hama.”

A unnamed Syrian Arab Army (SAA) source revealed to the intercept that a small group of Israeli Army and intelligence personnel entered the western Dara countryside in July 2017 and met with commanders of the two FSA groups – Liwa Jaydour and Jaysh al-Ababil.

In September 2017, another meeting between Israeli representatives and commanders of Liwa Jaydour, the Golan Knights and the Syrian Revolutionaries Front took place in the border town of Rafid in the southern Quneitra countryside, according to the Intercept.

Abu Ahmad, a Syrian opposition activist, confirmed to the Intercept that several FSA groups in southern Syria are currently getting money and weapons from the Israeli side, especially after the US Military Operation Center (MOC) in Jordan had suspended its military support for FSA groups.

“Jordan stopped sending them weapons, so they turned to Israel instead,” Abu Ahmad told the Intercept.

The Intercept report also revealed that the Israeli Army started training and equipping a border police force of around 500 FSA fighters from the Golan Knights group as a part of the second phase of the Israeli safe zone plane. This border force is expected to patrol the separation of forces line from south of the government-held Druze town of Hadar through FSA-held towns of Jabata Khashab, Bir Ajam, Hamadiyah, and Quneitra, all the way to Rafid in the southern Quneitra countryside, according to the report.

This was not the first time when the coordination between Israel and FSA groups in southern Syria became public. On December 2, 2017 the Syrian pro-opposition news outlet Enab Baladi revealed that the FSA and the Israeli Army are preparing a joint attack on the ISIS-affiliated Khalid ibn al-Walid Army in the western Daraa countryside.

The FSA-Israeli joint attack may be launched in the end of January, according to several oppositions sources, and it’s possible that this effort is a part of Israeli’s safe zone plane.

Israel could indirectly control the FSA groups in southern Syria and eliminate the ISIS threat in the western Daraa countryside. Hwever, it will be much more complicated to establish a 40km-wide safe zone in southern Syria because the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) controls large parts of Daraa governorate, including more than half of the city of Daraa.

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Featured image is from South Front.

Under the cover of the pre-Winter Olympics thaw between North and South Korea and the momentary lull in the “fire and fury” rhetoric from the Trump White House, there are growing signs that the Pentagon and the CIA are pressing ahead with preparations for a preemptive war against North Korea, including the use of nuclear weapons.

There have been multiple reports in the American corporate media of behind-the-scenes discussions between the US military and intelligence apparatus and the Trump administration of the feasibility of a so-called “bloody nose” attack, involving US air strikes on North Korean nuclear facilities, with the expectation—however ill-founded—that they would not provoke a full-scale war.

In a rare public speech, CIA Director Mike Pompeo hinted obliquely at these plans. Speaking before the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute Tuesday, Pompeo warned that Pyongyang was a “handful of months” away from achieving the capability of staging a nuclear attack against the US mainland.

The CIA director said that Washington was “going to foreclose that risk” and “denuclearize permanently” North Korea.

While asserting that the Trump administration was committed to a “solution through diplomatic means”—a claim belied by Trump’s chiding of his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last October for “wasting his time” by seeking negotiations with the government of Kim Jung Un—Pompeo said that the CIA was working with the Pentagon to “prepare a series of options to make sure that we can deliver a range of things so the president will have the full suite of possibilities.”

He added that he would “leave to others to address the capacity or the wisdom of a preemptive strike.”

The issue of “capacity,” however, is already being decided through a series of ominous actions taken by the US military.

Earlier this month, the Air Force deployed six B-52H Stratofortress bombers along with 300 Airmen from Barksdale Air Base in Louisiana to Guam to replace six B-1B Lancer bombers. The positioning of the B-52s, which unlike the B-1B bombers are capable of delivering nuclear weapons, marks a major escalation.

The American threats against North Korea continue to mount and with them the threat of the genocide of the people of North Korea by the United States of America and its allies. The meeting of the USA, Canada and other nations that attacked North Korea in 1950 held in Vancouver, Canada, on January 16, which some hoped would lead to a political solution, instead took on the character of a meeting of criminals who by their presence, agreement and actions made them parties to a conspiracy to commit genocide, a crime under the statute of the International Criminal Court and the Genocide Convention of 1948.

The threats made against North Korea are due to one single fact: the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea refuses to accept the world hegemony of the American Empire. It has nothing to do with nuclear weapons. It has become a ritual now to state that all the permanent members of the Security Council are armed with nuclear weapons, that the United States has used them on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that they have continuously threatened to use them to intimidate other nations since 1945, that Pakistan, India, and Israel have them, that NATO members in Europe have them at their disposal under US direction, that North Korea is in violation of no international law in developing them to defend themselves, to ensure their security just as all those other nations have done, that North Korea threatens no one and seeks only to have a full and final peace with the United States.

The nuclear weapon issue is a simply the pretext that the United States is using to try to solidify its tyranny over Korea, over the world.

The threat to the world peace comes not from North Korea. It comes from the United States and its allies: the nations who have degraded themselves into subjugated vassal states ready to obey any criminal order of their masters of war in Washington.

In response to what in our considered opinion are criminal actions, Dr. Graeme MacQueen, Founder and former Director of the Centre For Peace Studies, at McMaster University, and I, felt it necessary to send the following Open Letter to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court on January 23.

Open Letter

Dear Madame Prosecutor:

Re: Threats of Genocide Made Against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

We, the undersigned, share the desire of the Canadian people to establish and preserve peace in the world. It is therefore necessary for us to ask you to open an investigative file on the action of governments allied to the United States, including Canada, its government ministers and officials active in the on-going crisis with the DPRK.

Embarrassment and shock at President Trump’s threats against North Korea have been widespread and have led to a serious discussion in the US as to whether Mr. Trump is mentally fit to govern. However, the threats of Mr. Trump and his secretary of defense go well beyond the US domestic sphere and have direct implications for other countries, including Canada.

Article 6 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court states that genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole of in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

(a) killing members of the group,

(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,

(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about the physical destruction, in whole or in part, of the group.

Conspiracy to commit genocide is understood in international law as a concerted agreement to commit genocide which may be inferred from the conduct of the conspirators. The evidence to support the charge of genocide can be based on circumstantial evidence as well as direct evidence. Further, the concerted or coordinated action of a group of individuals can constitute evidence of an agreement.

On August 8, 2017 Mr. Trump said that North Korean threats “will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” His secretary of defense, James Mattis, followed up on August 9 with the statement that,

“The DPRK should cease any consideration of actions that would lead to the end of its regime and the destruction of its people.”

Mr. Mattis added a further comment on September 3:

“We are not looking to the total annihilation of a country, namely North Korea, but as I said, we have many options to do so.“

During his maiden speech to the UN General Assembly on September 19, Mr. Trump said:

“The United States has great strength and patience, but if it is forced to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea.”

Finally, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, during an interview on January 17, 2018 at Stanford University with Condoleeza Rice, stated approvingly in reference to deaths aboard Korean fishing boats going out to sea in winter without necessary fuel:

“they [the North Koreans] are feeling the effect of our sanctions.”

This is direct evidence that the United States is intentionally creating conditions that will cause the death of Korean civilians on a large scale in order to achieve US objectives.

Rhetorical excess (“fire and fury”) is one thing, but this connected series of statements, including a threat of total destruction, constitutes a threat of genocide. Threatening genocide is, arguably, not a crime, but “public incitement to genocide” is explicitly included as a crime in the Genocide Convention to which the US is party. Already, therefore, by publicly and passionately promoting genocide as a policy option, Mr. Trump and Mr. Mattis have entered dangerous territory legally. Since the US is party to the Genocide Convention the provisions of the Convention have the status of US law.  

To successfully convict someone of genocide, proof of intention is required. The prosecution needs to show “intent to destroy”.  This is usually a challenge for the prosecution since perpetrators seldom telegraph their destructive intentions to the world in advance. But, as two genocide scholars have already argued in the Washington Post, the US leadership has done precisely this: it has telegraphed its intentions. If, they point out, Mr. Trump does what he has threatened, prosecuting him for genocide would take a straightforward path.

The country of the undersigned, Canada, is a member of the ICC and under its jurisdiction, and Canadian leaders and officials have individual responsibility for any crimes committed under the Statute. Since there is clear evidence that the crime of genocide is being discussed openly and that plans are being made to carry it out against the people of the DPRK by US leaders and since, in these circumstances and with full knowledge of these threats and plans, US allies, including Canada, are cooperating with the US government and meeting to discuss actions to be taken against North Korea, and since these allies of the US appear to be ignoring international law, the Charter of the United Nations and the Rome Statute, it is necessary that an investigation be conducted by your office to consider the evidence and to prosecute if there is evidence of a crime.

The United States of America is no longer a member of the ICC. However, it is bound by the Charter of the United Nations to keep the world peace, is party to the Genocide Convention, and was a sponsor of the International Criminal Court.  Moreover, the ICC has not only an investigative and prosecutorial role, but also the role of informing the world what criminal conduct is when it is happening; and it has a duty to make a public statement condemning it when it happens. It chose to do so with regard to Kenya for example. It should do so in the current crisis.

We ask that the Office of the Prosecutor open an investigative file in this matter and, in addition, use your voice as Prosecutor and the moral imperative your office claims to represent to avoid genocide and to condemn as grave violations of international criminal law the announced intentions and actions of the nations mentioned above.”

We urge others to do the same.

Christopher Black

Graeme MacQueen

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

Dr. Graeme MacQueen, Founder and former Director of the Centre For Peace Studies, at McMaster University, Hamilton

Featured image is from the author.

Illusion and Reality

It’s interesting reading comments on the essays I write that get published around the world on various websites (at least those that permit comments) regarding Jeremy Corbyn.

What appears to generate the most ire are my views on Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party as the alleged vehicle for radical, social transformation. It seems the man can do no wrong. He appears to have achieved some kind of saintly status amongst those on the left and amongst progressives in general, let alone the millions who voted for him. So is it any wonder that my decidedly unfashionable views provoke such negative reactions?

I suppose it’s also understandable given as how such ‘sanctified’ individuals are so rare amongst the professional political class, that actually having one who who appears to have principles is a wonder to behold. It would seem that the adage, ‘beggars can’t be choosers’, best describes the opinions of progressives on Corbyn.

However, I live in the real world, not one of make believe or wishful thinking and notwithstanding Corbyn’s long held progressive views (40 years or so) in the Labour Party as a back bencher[1] in successive Labour governments, firstly, what have been his actual achievements over four decades and what are his chances of bringing about actual, real progressive change utilising a Labour government as the vehicle?

Notwithstanding the successes of the 1945 postwar Keynesian Labour government, the National Health Service and so on, successive Labour governments have been for the most part examples of the vilest kind of backstabbing of its supporters and especially of its alleged allies on the left and of the working class in general, never mind its gung ho imperialism and neo-colonialism!

Indeed, one can argue that successive Labour governments opened the door for successive Tory governments’ attacks on the gains made by that 1945 Labour victory, culminating in the Blair victory in 1997. Policies that without Labour governments persuading its voters that ‘there was no alternative’, Tory governments would have had a great deal more difficulty in enacting their policies, proving that the Labour Party is no more than the ‘liberal wing’ of a de facto one-party state.

Thus the privatisation (rollback) that began under the Thatcher government of 1979 was made possible by the capitulation of prior Labour governments and their attacks on the organised working class and its structures, culminating in the complete adoption of so-called neoliberalsm by ‘New Labour’ in 1997.

So what’s going on here? How can we explain firstly, the survival of Corbyn for all these decades whilst all around reaction triumphed? How is it that a handful of leftish Labour MPs survived in a swamp of rightwing, pro-capitalist Labour MPs and for that matter, governments, when by rights they should been shown the door decades ago?

Could it be that they survived in name only, sitting comfortably on their backsides, sorry benches, making all the ‘right’ noises, turning up at all the ‘right’ demonstrations and protests, in order to justify their longtime survival as tokens of the Labour ‘left’? Not that this was a conscious process, just the inevitable outcome of generations of attempts at ‘reforming’ capitalism.

Secondly, and in a way even more importantly, doesn’t/didn’t their survival help create/maintain the illusion of political diversity in the otherwise politically monochrome world of the two-party system?

I suppose that at this point the supporters of Saint Corbyn can accuse me of cynical backstabbing, that in not giving my wholehearted support to what little power we have, I’m opening the door for the right.

Well all I can say is that credits me with a whole lot of power I don’t possess, I just try to assess the situation in the real world, not the one invented by wishful thinking and I think events over the past two years, since the rise of Corbyn bear me out.

Words Versus Deeds

We need only compare his draft Election Manifesto with the one finally adopted to see where Corbyn actually stands.

Source: Red Pepper

Firstly, his capitulation to the imperialists in the leadership of the Labour Party over NATO, nuclear weapons and the right to wage war on the planet in the name of democracy and ‘humanitarian intervention’.

[T]he concessions contained in Labour’s draft manifesto have since been revealed as only a staging post for Corbyn in what his shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, described as a “journey” towards accepting NATO and nuclear war.

The qualification on the use of the armed forces contained in the draft version, “That’s why we will never send them into harm’s way unless all other options have been exhausted,” is removed in the final manifesto. – ‘Labour’s manifesto amended to stress commitment to militarism and war‘ By Robert Stevens, WSWS, 19 May 2017.

Secondly, his capitulation over the Tory Austerity programme, led by his ‘ally’ Emily Thornberry (with friends like this, who needs enemies?), and currently touted as the ‘replacement’ for Corbyn in some future coup by the Right in the Labour Party.

The draft, produced by the team around Labour’s nominally left leader Jeremy Corbyn, was subject to ratification by the party’s top officials on May 11. It sought to marry a watery commitment to certain social reforms and a slight relaxation in the Conservatives’ austerity agenda with a raft of measures demanded by the Blairite right wing. (ibid]

So on two, fundamental issues of principle, about which so much hot air has been exhaled, before the war had even begun, the outcome had already been decided!

The means justifying the end or the end justifying the means?

Okay, let’s give Corbyn and his Labour Party supporters the benefit of the doubt and assume that his capitulation was no more than a ‘tactical retreat’, that once ‘in power’ he would reverse his position and for example, appeal to his voters to support him and overrule his majority rightwing Labour MPs over these critical issues of principle let alone tactics (lose the battle but win the war).

Remember he is/would be heading up a Labour government more than 90% virulently opposed to Corbyn ad his policies, never mind the entrenched state machine, the Civil Service, the corporate/state media, the military and security state, big business and of course NATO and the US, that ugly big bear in the living room.

But can we see Corbyn calling on hs supporters (I calculate maybe one third of the electorate) to take to the streets and back him should the Establishment move against him (as it most surely would)? This in the light of the fact that not a single thing has been done in the way of organising and preparing for extra-Parliamentary actions, beyond the odd demonstration over single issues eg, the NHS, and possibly the only issue that commands the support of the vast majority. Even here, the upcoming February 3, 2018 demonstration is no more than a flash in the pan. Compare our campaigns to the ones taking place in France over comparable attacks on the working class for example and you get an idea of just how pathetic left opposition is here and what a failure the Labour Party has been in this regard.

Add to that, the one concession to fighting a 21st century fight, Momentum (initiated, not by the Labour Party, well not actually, but by ‘entryists’ from the Socialist Workers Party), once the Labour bureaucracy saw the writing on the wall, they took it ‘in-house’. Goodbye Momentum, been nice knowing you! But actually, it just shows what can be done, once you step outside the Labour Party straightjacket! More’s the pity, those damn opportunists from the SWP chose to use the Labour Party as their vehicle (yet again)! Just remember folks, there is history behind all this. Momentum didn’t just appear overnight like mushrooms after the rain.

And the reasons for this contrast are quite clear; Corbyn has never developed a programme that excludes the Labour Party as the central, driving force for radical, social transformation (never mind that word, socialism) and replace it with grassroots activism and organisation. How can he, when he still sees the Labour Party as the exclusive vehicle for radical social change and Parliament as the road down which it would travel?

As I’ve said several times before, in fact I’m sick of repeating myself, Corbyn is joined at the hip to the Labour Party. As the pundits are always saying, the Labour Party is in his DNA. Ultimately therefore, Corbyn’s first allegiance is to the Labour Party and it informs and determines his every move.

And it’s this, more than anything else that has and is, determining the left’s divided loyalties over Corbyn, for as long as they see a ‘reformed’ Labour Party as the only vehicle for social transformation, not only will we fail in that objective, an entire generation of repoliticised people will be, once more, disabused of political change and the power of collective action by the failure of a Labour government to honour its commitments. They will, once more, retreat into individualised activities aka ‘charities’, single issue campaigns and such like. History shows that only collective actions achieve results, and in the year that (mistakenly[2]) celebrates the centenary of womens’ right to vote (they only got the full vote ten years later, in 1928), it behoves me to remind you of that fact.

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This article was originally published by Investigating Imperialism.

Notes

1. Back bencher is another way of saying that he played no part in formulating the Labour government’s policies over those 40 years. Sidelined would be a better description, held in reserve, should a ‘left’ voice be needed.

2. As a result of campaigns dating back to the mid-nineteenth century, some women were finally granted the vote in 1918. However, many women were still excluded from the franchise – the Representation of the People Act enfranchised all males and women over the age of 30 who already had the right to vote in local elections. 8,400,000 women were enfranchised. Universal franchise was finally granted with the Equal Franchise Act of 1928. – ‘The campaign for suffrage – a historical background‘, British Library.

The Operation Olive Branch in northern Syria started five days ago. Five days ago the Afrin region became a possible hotbed of a full-scale conflict between the Turkish troops aided by the armed fighters of the Free Syrian Army and the US-backed Kurdish units which had been dominating the area. The operation started with shellings and airstrikes of the Turkish artillery and AF and later grew into a full-blown invasion.

According to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one of the incentives for Ankara to invade Syria was a possible threat of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), characterized as a “terror army”, which could initiate an offensive on the territory of Turkey. Quite peculiar is that this army is armed with equipment supplied by Washington, and trained by American military instructors who still may be in the ranks of the SDF.

Recently, there emerged footages showing a downed Turkish helicopter and a damaged tank both hit with shots of US-made weapons.

Obviously, this brought to the agenda a possible direct confrontation between Ankara and Washington and urged the presidents of the two countries to exchange rather harsh statements regarding the crisis (1, 2).

But what do Turks think about the conflict and the US involvement in Kurdish support? As there have been no large polls conducted yet on this topic, a short analysis of online activity may shed the light upon the current trends in the Turkish society.

One of the best examples are comment sections to news or articles about the operation. They contain an outstanding amount of aggressive comments addressed to the United States. For instance, these ones were written under the same news piece on the US warning to stop supplies to Kurdish units:

“Americans should do the right thing after all the mistakes they have done”

“If they want to stay alive they should stop the supplies”

“No matter how many of you there are, come, what’s needed will be done. USA, come too”

Hurriyet readers express the same point of view:

“Not Turkey nor Syria matter to the US. They only want to secure their profit in the Middle East. Fight against terrorists must continue till none of them lives”

Posts on Twitter mostly represent the same negative attitude towards Washington’s policy.

“US statements on Afrin come one after the other. As I understood, they said they would stop supporting PYD but they never will! They dress PYD militants as civilians and make it look like Turkey kills civilian population”

“Here is the two-faced US. Yesterday: – We are against the Afrin operation. Today: If PYD enters Afrin we’ll cut the support. Hey, who are you trying to fool?”

And as for Facebook, one may come across such polls like this one:

What do you think about US aiding Kurdish terrorists?

• Washington supports terrorists all over the world!
• Our “ally” USA is not our friend. All ties with Washington must be disrupted.
• Such support must be stopped immediately!
• I support [it]. PYD/PKK are not terrorists

And they are followed by angry comments:

“A terrorist state supports terrorists”

As we can see, many Turks took quite an aggressive stance towards the US because of its Kurdish project. Nonetheless, there many who criticize Erdogan for kicking off the Olive Branch military operation and threatening the lives of quite a number of young Turks.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

The great GOP tax cut heist was never about boosting economic growth and jobs creation – entirely about transferring America’s wealth from ordinary people to corporate predators and super-rich households.

The huge windfall given corporate America is earmarked for higher executive pay and bonuses, along with greater investments in jobs killing robots and shifting work offshore to low-wage countries.

The Tax Policy Center explained corporate predators will get at least $2 trillion over the next decade – a bonanza handed them by Trump and GOP lawmakers.

Incentives in the GOP measure encourage companies to automate and eliminate jobs, not create them.

According to Professor of Economics Daron Acemoglu,

“(w)e are creating huge subsidies in our tax code for capital and encouraging employers to use machines instead of labor.”

“This is not the free market at work. We do not have a level playing field. The government clearly favors capital over labor.”

The measure’s “Full and Immediate Expensing” provision lets companies write off the cost of new assets right away, instead of depreciating them over time – an incentive to automate.

Machines are cheaper than people. They’re cost effective, don’t demand good wages and benefits, never strike, or otherwise complain about unfair treatment.

They boost productivity at the expense of jobs creation and labor rights. According to Tax Policy Center co-director William Gale,

“(t)he last 30 years of anemic wage growth (show) workers…left behind” to benefit management and bottom line performance.

A Ball State University study showed nearly 87% manufacturing job losses came from an increase in automation and better technology.

PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates 38% of US jobs will be lost to automation in the next 15 years. The great GOP tax cut heist may accelerate the time frame.

AFL-CIO policy director Damon Silver said

“(w)e’ve already seen that this bill is a job killer in terms of outsourcing, and these issues of timing around tax deductions for human capital versus physical capital seem likely to make it even more of a job killer.”

Comcast, AT&T, Walmart and now Kimberly-Clark announced large job cuts, KC intending to eliminate 13% of its workforce, around 5,500 workers to be let go.

According to its chief financial officer Maria Henry, the

GOP tax cut “provides us flexibility to continue to allocate significant capital to shareholders while we also fund increased capital spending and our restructuring program over the next few years.”

Expect other companies to adopt similar policies. Verizon and ExxonMobil said the tax cut windfall is earmarked for shareholders and (jobs killing) capital investments.

JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo announced wage hikes for workers – planned well before enactment of the GOP tax cut, the lion’s share of the windfall going to shareholders, corporate executives and capital investments.

JPMorgan will allocate roughly 1.8% of the tax cut benefit to workers, similar to pay increases for the last few years. Wells Fargo’s increase is about the same, a spokesman saying the increase is unrelated to the tax cut.

Other corporations are acting much the same way. Modest worker gains are offset by much greater losses – mainly through job cuts, machines replacing people.

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

The Republicans’ delay in releasing the summary of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russiagate investigation is giving weight to the media presstitutes’ claim that the report is not being released, because it is a hack attempt at a Trump cover-up that is not believable. Only Republicans are stupid enough to put themselves in such a situation. 

Readers ask me why the summary memo is not released if it is real. There must be some reasons besides the alleged “stupidity” of Republicans. Yes, that is so. Among the many reasons that might be blocking release are:  

1. Republicans are very national security conscious. They don’t want to provide precedents for the release of classified information.
2. Many Republican congressional districts host installations of the military/security complex. Upsetting a large employer and directing campaign financing to a challenger is a big consideration.
3. The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was a neoconservative regime. One consequence is that Republicans are influenced by neoconservatives who stress the alleged “Russian threat.”  
4. The Israel Lobby can unseat any member of the House and Senate. The Israel Lobby is allied with the neoconservatives and this alliance intends to keep the US militarily active against perceived threats to Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East and against Russia, which supports Syria and Iran, countries perceived as threats by Israel.
5. Many Republicans are themselves invested in false Russiagate allegations against Trump and would like to replace him with Pence. Other Republicans believe that Trump is undermining Washington’s expensively-purchased foreign alliances and, thereby, undermining US power.

Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted with is a coup conspiracy organized by top officials of the Obama Justice Department, FBI, CIA, the Hillary DNC, and the presstitute media to overturn the result of a democratic election and remove the president from office.

The basis of the coup is a fake dossier purchased for money that consists of unsupported allegations against Trump and that was used to obtain warrants from the FISA count to spy on Trump and various associates hoping to find something that can be used against Trump. Regardless, the false allegations could be fed to the CIA’s media assets and used to create a scandal requiring a special prosecutor to investigate Russiagate. Once the investigation was under way, the presstitutes kept the scandal alive hoping to convince enough Americans that Trump must have done something—“where there is smoke, there is fire”—that justifies his removal. It worked against Richard Nixon, but not against Ronald Reagan, and Trump is no Reagan.

If the highest reaches of the police state agencies can get away with an attempted or successful coup against the president of the United States, then that is the complete end of democracy and all accountability in government. The House, Senate, and Judiciary will become as powerless as the Roman Senate under the caesars. We will live under a dictatorship ruled by police state agencies.  

Many Americans say they don’t need the House Intelligence Report, because they don’t believe the Russiagate BS in the first place. They miss the point. They need the report, because those responsible for this attempt at a coup must be identified, charged, and prosecuted for their act of high treason.  

This is not minor stuff. This goes to the heart of whether any form of liberty will exist. We all know that the ability of the people to hold government accountable is not assured by democracy. However, there is no prospect of holding government accountable if it is a police state, a road that the US has been going down for some time. The audacious coup attempt against President Trump is our opportunity to stop the momentum to a police state.

Despite my recent postings, many people do not understand that the somewhat redacted FISA court document that has been declassified and released and explained by myself, William Binney, and former US Attorney Joe di Genova (see this) contains admissions by the FBI and DOJ that they improperly spied and obtained warrants from the court under false pretenses. In other words, we have it on the authority of the FISA court itself that the FBI and DOJ have admitted to the court their transgressions. When Department of Justice (sic) congressional liaison Stephen Boyd says the DOJ is “unaware of any wrongdoing,” he is lying through his teeth. The DOJ has already confessed its wrongdoing to the FISA court.

(See Lendman on Boyd’s claim that releasing the memo would harm national security and ongoing investigations.  This is always the claim made when government has to cover up its crimes.)

When Admiral Rodgers, director of the National Security Agency, discovered that the FBI and DOJ were misusing the spy system for partisan political reasons, he let it be known that he was going to inform the FISA court. This caused the FBI and DOJ to rush to the court in advance and confess to “mistakes” and to promise to tighten up procedures so as not to make mistakes in the future. It is these “mistakes” and corrections that the FISA court document reveals.

In other words, the information already exists in the pubic domain that proves that Russiagate was a conspiracy organized for the purpose of bringing down the elected president of the United States.

A case can be made that it would be just as well if the coup succeeds as it would bring an end to Washington’s cover as the government of a great democracy with liberty and justice for all.  Most other governments, and one would hope certainly the Russian and Chinese governments, would see the coup as America’s final transition into a police state and give up their utopian ideas of reaching accommodation with Washington.  The constraints on Washington’s ability to bully the world would be greatly strengthened by the universal perception that the government of the United States had devolved into a police state.

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This article was originally published by Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying. 

Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the United States, such as digital recordings of all landline and mobile telephone calls and copies in real time of all text messages and emails and banking, medical and legal records electronically stored or transmitted.

All this bulk surveillance had come about because the National Security Agency convinced federal judges meeting in secret that they should authorize it. Now Congress and the president have made it the law of the land.

This enactment came about notwithstanding the guarantee of the right to privacy — the right to be left alone — articulated in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and elsewhere. Though the surveillance expansion passed the Senate by just one vote, it apparently marks a public policy determination that the Constitution can be ignored or evaded by majority consent whenever it poses an obstacle to the government’s purposes.

The language of the Fourth Amendment is an intentional obstacle to the government in deference to human dignity and personal liberty. It reads:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

This specific language was expressly written to prevent the bulk suspicionless surveillance that the British government had used against the colonists. British courts in London issued general warrants to British soldiers in America, authorizing them to search wherever they wished and seize whatever they found. These warrants were not based on probable cause, and they did not describe the place to be searched or the people or things to be seized.

The Colonial reaction to the British use of general warrants was to take up arms and fight the American Revolution.

Last week, Congress and the president chose to ignore our history and the human values underlying the right to privacy. Those values recognize that the individual pursuit of happiness is best actualized in an atmosphere free from the government’s prying eyes. Stated differently, the authors and ratifiers of the Fourth Amendment recognized that a person is not fully happy when being watched all the time by the government.

Yet the constitutional values and timeless lessons of history were not only rejected by Congress but also rejected in ignorance, and the ignorance was knowingly facilitated by the members of the House Intelligence Committee.

Here is the back story.

The recent behavior of the leadership of the House Intelligence Committee constitutes incompetence at best and misconduct in office at worst. The leadership sat on knowledge of NSA and FBI surveillance abuses that some committee members have characterized as “career-ending,” “jaw-dropping” and “KGB-like,” while both houses of Congress — ignorant of what their 22 House Intelligence Committee colleagues knew — voted to expand NSA and FBI surveillance authorities.

Stated differently, the 22 members of the committee knowingly kept from their 500 or so congressional colleagues incendiary information that, had it been revealed in a timely manner, would certainly have affected the outcome of the vote — particularly in the Senate, where a switch of just one vote would have prevented passage of this expansion of bulk surveillance authorization.

Why were all members of Congress but the 22 on this committee kept in the dark about NSA and FBI lawlessness? Why didn’t the committee reveal to Congress what it claims is too shocking to discuss publicly before Congress voted on surveillance expansion? Where is the outrage that this information was known to a few in the House and kept from the remainder of Congress while it ignorantly voted to assault the right to privacy?

The new law places too much power in the hands of folks who even the drafters of it have now acknowledged are inherently unworthy of this trust. I argued last week that House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes was up to something when he publicly attacked the trustworthiness of the NSA and FBI folks whose secret powers he later inexplicably voted to expand. Now we know what he was talking about.

What can be done about this?

The House Intelligence Committee should publicly reveal the contents of its four-page report that summarizes the NSA and FBI abuses. If that fails, a courageous member of the committee should go to the floor of the House — as Sen. Dianne Feinstein once took the CIA torture report to the floor of the Senate — and reveal not just the four-page report but also the underlying data upon which the report is based. Members of Congress enjoy full immunity for anything said on the House or Senate floor, yet personal courage is often in short supply.

But there is a bigger picture here than House Intelligence Committee members sitting on valuable intelligence and keeping it from their colleagues. The American people are entitled to know how the government in whose hands we have reposed the Constitution for safekeeping has used and abused the powers we have given to it. The American people are also entitled to know who abused power and who knew about it and remained silent.

Does the government work for us, or do we work for the government? In theory, of course, the government works for us. In practice, it treats us as children. Why do we accept this from a government to which we have consented? Democracy dies in darkness. So does personal freedom.

Introduction

The link between capitalism and drugs reaches back to the middle of the 19th century, when the British Empire forced their surplus opium crop from their South Asian colonies into the Chinese market creating massive demand from millions of addicts. The Chinese government, which had banned the use and sale of opium, was alarmed at the growing social chaos created by mass addiction and went to war with the Western powers to halt the flood of drugs. Their defeat at the hands of the British and their Chinese drug lord allies opened China to massive exploitation and pillage for the next century. Chinese opium addicts were a tremendous obstacle to organizing national resistance. In essence, the British East India Company and its imperial protectors transformed China into the history’s largest ‘shithole’ – until an earth-shattering revolution broke the chains of addiction and degradation.

In the 21st century, a similar process of deterioration has been occurring internally in the United States. The ‘prescription opioid epidemic’ is ravaging American families, neighborhoods, communities, cities and states – shredding the entire fabric of US society, especially in rural, mining and former manufacturing ‘rust belt’ regions. Hundreds of thousands of mostly working class victims have died and millions of addicts, unable to resist the destruction of their futures, have replaced a once powerful labor force.

Official government studies estimate almost 700,000 deaths since 1999, based on the scattered and incomplete coroner reports and death certificates that characterize the state of vital statistics in the US. There is no uniformity in data collection and no interest in developing a uniform national system on which to formulate social policies. Most likely additional hundreds of thousands of drug deaths have gone un-recorded or attributed to ‘pre-existing’ medical conditions, suicides and accidents – despite clear evidence of over-prescription of narcotics and sedatives in the victims.

The US opioid epidemic accounts in large part for the ‘declining numbers of workforce participants among prime age workers’ according to Senate testimony by Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, an Obama appointee. An estimated 15% of US construction workers suffer from substance abuse. The escalating costs of ‘Suboxone’ and other forms of narcotic addiction treatment threaten to bankrupt the health plans of several building unions. Shortages of qualified American skilled building trade workers further allow employers to push for more immigrant labor to fill the gap.

For over 2 decades the escalating numbers of opioid overdose deaths were ignored by both political parties, as well as by writers and academics of the left and right. Doctors and hospital administrators were either actively complicit or in denial. But more important the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) continued to approve manufacture, marketing and prescribing of highly addictive narcotics and sedatives to tens of millions of American patients earning the pharmaceutical industry scores of billions in profits despite the devastation. Between 1999-2014 pharmaceutical manufacturers were earning $10 billion dollars each year in profits from the sale and distribution of opiates.

In the following section, we will discuss the larger picture, including the powerful socio-economic and political forces that have profited from the addiction and killing of millions of Americans – past and present. This deliberate policy, with strong neo-Malthusian overtones, has decimated a sector of the US working class, rendered ‘surplus’ or redundant by political-economic decisions of the American ruling elite. In its wake, the prescription addiction crisis has turned large swathes of the former manufacturing and mining sectors of the US into what the current President Donald Trump would characterize as domestic ‘shitholes’ and populated by what his rival, Hillary Clinton, callously derided as ‘deplorables’. In terms of rapid loss of life and social stability, this population devastation mirrors the patterns seen in countries subjected to US/EU neo-liberal economic dictates or to US/EU imperial invasions.

The Addiction Power Elite

Today there is a public frenzy among government officials clamoring for hearings and legislation to address the opioid addiction crisis – with the usual solutions of more imprisonment, expensive private addiction treatment centers, volunteer ‘support groups’, self-help courses and educational ‘Just Say No’ campaigns. No policy maker has dared suggest educating the victims about the socio-economic trends and elite decisions that devastated their lives and communities and sent them onto the death spiral of addiction.

Former FDA Administrator David Kessler

Recently a few leftist journalists have attacked the pharmaceutical industry, while others have cited the lack of oversight from the US-Federal Drug Administration, asking for a few tepid reforms. The former FDA Administrator David Kessler, who served under the Clinton Regime from 1990 to 1997, belatedly condemned his agency’s negligence over the mass destruction caused by unregulated prescription of powerful narcotics, which he admitted after 10 years of silence was ‘one of the biggest mistakes in the history of modern medicine’, (editorial NYT May 6, 2016).

While hundreds of thousands of Americans have been killed by opioids and hundreds more are dying every day (at least 65,000 in 2016), the US Left and the Democratic Party focus on narrow gender identity issues and cartoonish hearings over ‘Russiagate’ – Moscow ’s alleged plot to seize control of the US Presidential election. While touting her experience in health care reform, Candidate Hillary Clinton deliberately ignored the opioid addiction crisis during her campaign except to characterize its largely white lower class victims as ‘deplorables’ – ignorant racists and buffoons – whom she implied deserved their misery and shortened lives.

The ‘drug epidemic’ in the US is all about the current structure of power and social relations in an increasingly oligarchic state amidst growing class inequalities and immiseration. At its roots, American capitalism in the 21st Century has degraded, impoverished and exploited US workers and employees with increasing intensity over the past two decades. Workers have lost almost all collective influence in the workplace and in politics. Working conditions and safety have deteriorated – while capitalists hire and fire at will. Salaries, pensions, health care and death benefits have been slashed or disappeared.

The deterioration of working conditions is accompanied by a marked decline in social conditions: family, neighborhood and community life has been torn asunder. Anxiety and insecurity are rampant among workers and employees. In real terms, life expectancy in the affected areas has dropped. Youth and worker suicides are skyrocketing. Maternal and child mortality are up. American youth are 70% more likely to die before adulthood than their counterparts in other rich countries. In 2016, death rates for millennials (ages 25-34) rose to 129/100,000, with 35/100,000 deaths due to narcotic overdose. The carnage surpasses the height of the US AIDS epidemic in the 1980’s. Rural and small town child protective services are well beyond the breaking point with the neglected and orphaned children of addicts. Neonatal intensive care units are overwhelmed by the number of infants born into life threatening acute opiate withdrawal crises due to their mothers’ addiction. Despite this grim picture, taxes for the rich are being slashed and public services decimated.

Meanwhile, the income gap between the working class and the oligarchs has widened and a sharp class-defined health care and educational apartheid has emerged. Children of the upper 20% have exclusive, privileged access to elite universities based on family and ethnic ties. Elite families, who have no need for ‘health insurance’ have access to the most thorough and advanced medical services in the world. No physician would dream of irresponsibly prescribing narcotics to a family member of an oligarch.

These inequalities are deeply entrenched: Working people in the areas affected by the opioid epidemic receive only cursory and inadequate, if not incompetent, care from physician assistants and over-burdened nurses. They are subjected to long waits in deteriorating emergency rooms and rarely see a physician. Virtually none have regular family physicians. If they are injured or suffer from pain, they are prescribed long courses and large amounts of narcotic pain killers – opioids, instead of the safer, but more expensive physical therapy and non-addictive medications. This has occurred with the approval of the FDA. Even rural high school students with sports injuries would receive narcotics, despite the well-known increased susceptibility to addiction among youth. Politically powerful ‘pain lobbies’, funded by the giant pharmaceutical corporation, have pushed this trend for over two decades creating huge profits for the billionaire pharmaceutical executives.

The opioid killing fields of America have their origins and logic in the convergence of several inter-related features of US capitalism. This was due to the relentless pursuit of profits for the corporations and elite, while turning the deindustrialized and agricultural parts of the country into domestic ‘Third Worlds’.

First, the capitalist class cut the production costs by limiting access to quality health care for labor to increase their profits. In the US this has led to millions of workers depending on cheap and available prescription narcotics. Employer-provided insurance companies routinely deny more costly non-narcotic treatment for injured workers and insist on prescribing cheap opioids to get the workers back on the job. Cheap opioids were tolerated by union health plans in the beginning to save money, while union bosses looked the other way as thousands of workers became addicts.

Secondly, capitalists freely fire workers who are injured at work and seek treatment, forcing workers to avoid sick leave and to rely even more on opioids, like Oxy-Contin, which ‘Big Pharma’ falsely marketed as non-addictive.

Thirdly, capitalists profit immensely from the premature deaths by overdose and related preventable causes among older workers because this lowers pension costs and health insurance payments. Wall Street has brazenly celebrated the billions of dollars of pension and health care liabilities saved by the shortened life expectancy among US workers. The drop in life expectancy and rise in premature death in the US resembles the pattern seen in Russia during the first decades after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the rampant pillage by the US-backed mafia oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin.

Fourthly, capitalists are free to hire young replacement workers (eighteen to thirty years old) as temporary labor at lower wages and without any benefits. They are subject to the insecurities of contingent employment, as part of the ‘gig economy’ (outsourcing to ‘self-employed’ workers and employees). These overstressed workers, with no future, turn to opioids to overcome physical pain and emotional stress – until they drop out as slaves to addiction. This is the main reason for the declining numbers of young workers available in the US – despite relatively high employment levels.

Fifthly, and to add a morbid insult to injury, the opioid death epidemic has been a bonanza for the tissue and organ transplant industry, where ‘materials’ harvested from young overdose victims, including bones, skin, cornea, tendons, heart valves, teeth and blood vessels are worth tens of thousands of dollars per corpse. Organs harvested from brain-dead overdose victims are valued in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And harvest companies and tissue brokers hover around hospital emergency rooms like carrion birds waiting for news of new victims – often contacting next of kin before the authorities. This bizarre profiting from the completely preventable domestic deaths of US capitalism recalls Jonathan Swift’s satiric ‘Modest Proposal’ for British entrepreneurs to harvest the skin of the Irish Potato Famine victims to make commercial items, like ladies’ purses!

In sum, the structure and relations of contemporary US capitalism is the general cause and beneficiary of the opioid epidemic. The inevitable result is a rapid destruction of communities marginalized by capitalist decisions. This has benefited capital by culling the surplus, and potentially restive, population in a manner reminiscent of the British Empire during the famines in India in the previous two centuries. Social Darwinism and Neo-Malthusian rationales proliferate among the oligarchs, politicians, medical professionals and even seep into the language used by the public (‘survival of the fittest’) providing the ideological justification for the carnage.

Specific Operative Power Elites Driving the Epidemic

Multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical corporations manufacture and market narcotics and highly addictive sedatives. Their agents manipulate the medical community and lobby among the politicians for a ‘pain-free’ America.

The producer of the leading commercial ‘gateway’ into addiction, Oxy-Contin, is Purdue Pharmaceuticals. The company was founded and run entirely by the Sackler family under the leadership of the recently deceased Raymond Sackler and his brothers.  They started by manufacturing laxatives and ear wax, then introducing the highly addictive tranquilizer, Valium, to finally producing and pushing the most profitable prescription drug in history, Oxy-Contin in the 1990’s, during President Bill Clinton’s ‘health care reform’ administration.

The Sacklers set up an aggressive large-scale sales force to convince physicians that their product was not addictive. They paid physician-researchers to publish fraudulent data on the safety of Oxy-Contin. These experts-for- hire in the burgeoning pain industry received huge fees to peddle Sackler’s products. They peddled the notion of American patients enjoying a completely ‘pain free’ existence – touting the value of the highly subjective ‘pain scale’ as the fifth vital sign in the assessment of all patients. The ‘pain scale’ never caught on in other wealthy countries, where objective assessment remained the primary basis for diagnosis and therapy. Interestingly, the ‘pain scale’ has been less frequently used with African American and Hispanic patients, due largely to an inherent racism in US medicine that views minorities as potential addicts and unreliable with prescribed narcotics. As a result, African American and Hispanic patients were largely spared the prescription narcotic addiction epidemic – where over 95% of overdose deaths were white, mostly working class. It was also evident that African American patients presenting to emergency rooms in severe pain receive far less care than their white compatriots – even when their pain is a symptom of a serious life-threatening medical or surgical emergency.

The Sackler family’s net worth rose to over $14 billion dollars, according the Forbes billionaires listing, while Purdue Pharmaceuticals reaped over $35 billion dollars in profit from Oxy-Contin.

Meanwhile scores of thousands of prescription addicts died each year and millions sunk into addiction, ill health and degradation, dragging their communities with them.

Following Sackler’s example, other pharma billionaires joined in. Opioid pain medication was so cheap to produce and had created its own ever-expanding demand as teenagers raided grandmother’s medicine cabinet in search of narcotics and poor workers lined up at ‘pill mills’. Oxy-Contin and its siblings produced the highest profit margin in pharmaceutical history – far exceeding the so-called block-buster drugs.

The totally preventable and predictable devastation eventually led to Purdue Pharmaceuticals being fined $634.5 million dollars in 2007 for fraudulently covering up the addiction and overdose potential of Oxy-Contin. The political influence of the Sackler family protected their members from any accusation of misconduct or criminal conspiracy. Their influence in elite political and judicial circles was unparalleled.

Oxy-Contin and other addictive drugs are still being mass produced, massively prescribed and are contributing to the death of over 65,000 workers each year. In response to the recent crack-down on prescriptions of narcotics, millions of addicts have transitioned to cheap street heroin and the dangerously potent illegal fentanyl to feed their craving. Physicians provided the gateway to a life of street addiction, violence and eventually death – while authorities throughout the United States deliberately looked away.

The second operative power elite are the medical professionals who prescribed the drugs in an irresponsible and callous manner to millions of American over the past 2-3 decades. They too have been largely spared by the political and judicial system and even remain the ‘pillars’ of local communities ravaged by drug addiction.

For two thousand years, a guiding moral and professional principle in medicine had been to ‘first do no harm’ in the course of treating a patient. There has been a huge difference in the way working class and elite patients are treated in the US . Thousands of physicians and other medical professionals ignored the obvious addiction and deaths among their lower and middle class patients and succumbed to bribes and greed to promote opioids. Millions of patients and their family members have been betrayed by this grotesque failure to address the addiction crisis. The economic changes in medicine pressured many doctors in corporate medicine to rush patients in and out of their offices with only cursory examinations and prescriptions for multiple narcotics and sedatives. Physicians allowed the for-profit goals of their corporate employers to dictate how they served their patients – thereby betraying the sacred trust. Many physicians relied on poorly supervised and over-worked physician assistants and nurse practitioners to diagnose and treat patients – already addicted to narcotics. It is easier and cheaper to write a prescription than to thoroughly examine and properly treat a low income patient. All accepted the corporate and capitalist ideology that the addicts were the regrettable victims of their own inherent moral or genetic degeneracy.

The chain of causation went from systemic capitalist profiteering to billionaire pharmaceutical corporations to hospital enterprises to doctors and their poorly supervised staff.

The principal political accomplice of death by addiction is the federal government and elected representatives who accepted scores of millions of dollars in ‘donations’ from the pharmaceutical lobby.

The President and Congress, Democrats and Republicans ignored the epidemic because they were bought off by their campaign donor-owners at ‘Big Pharma’, the term used to describe the powerful pharmaceutical industry and its lobby. Over the past twenty years, the political elite received many millions of dollars in campaign funds from Big Pharma lobbies – including politicians from states ravaged by prescription narcotics.

The Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) allowed the overuse and distribution of narcotics and then ignored the terrible consequences for over 20 years. One cannot imagine US veterinarians and their regulators noting the drug deaths of 3,000 family pets without quickly identifying and correcting the situation, while the FDA, DEA and US elite ‘ignored’ the deaths of hundreds of thousands of poor and working class Americans.

Finally, after two decades, local politicians and state attorneys general saw a new potential source of revenue with lawsuits against the offending drug companies and major distributors. Some senators have sponsored hearings but no decisive action has been taken over the carnage among the poor civilian population. In 2010, the Pentagon and Senate Armed Services committee held hearings on the huge increase in prescription drug abuse overdose deaths among US military personnel and have taken some effective measures to address the issue. At that time, US senators in the hearings warned jokingly about the perils of upsetting ‘Big Pharma’. Clearly, unlike the generals who need healthy soldiers, US capitalist and politicians have had no interest in protecting working class citizens – given the overall profits their addiction and deaths bring to the elite.

Conclusion: What is to be Done?

The prescription narcotic and subsequent illegal narcotic addiction epidemic has become a million-person killing field – sowing havoc in the poor and marginalized, de-industrialized working class communities of the US. However the victims and their executioners, all have a name and location within the capitalist system. The logic and the consequences are clear.

Most victims are working class, poor and lower middle class, and overwhelmingly white: the low paid, young and old, the insecure and under employed, and especially those without adequate or competent health care.

Over 5 million are afflicted by prescription drug abuse or at least started on the road to addiction via prescription narcotics. This is a truly American Holocaust leaving multi-million family survivors. Scores of thousands of children are living with elderly relatives or swept up into foster homes and the over-burdened child welfare system.

The executioners and their accomplices have become rich, elite college-educated patrons of the most sophisticated arts and sciences. They receive the best health care services in the world; rely on docile but highly educated servants, nannies and cooks – many of whom are immigrant. Most of all, they enjoy immunity from public censor and prosecution. They are the politically well connected, perfectly dressed, manicured, be-knighted dealers of death and despair.

The addiction crisis is a part of the class war waged by the upper class against the middle and lower classes of this country. The real, if not stated, consequence of their trade has been to cull the population rendered superfluous by elite economic and political decisions and to destroy the capacity of millions of their victims, family members, neighbors and friends to understand, organize, unify and fight back against the onslaught for their own class interests. Here is where we find a basis to approach a solution.

There are historical precedents for the successful elimination of drug lords, both elite and criminal and for bringing addicts back to productive social life.

We begin with the case of China : After a century of British-imposed opium addiction, the Chinese revolution of 1949 took charge in arresting, prosecuting and executing the war-lord opium “entrepreneurs”. Millions of addicts were rehabilitated and returned to their communities, joining the workforce to build a new society.

Likewise, the 1959 Cuban revolution smashed the drug dens and brothels run by brutal Cuban gangster oligarchs and death squad-leaders, together with American mafia bosses, like Meyer Lansky. These thugs and parasites were forced to flee to Miami, Palermo and Tel Aviv.

The first step in an effective class-conscious drug war in the US would require the organization of mass movements, dedicated anti-drug lawyers, physicians, medical personnel and community organizers, as well as brave well-integrated educators and community leaders. A truly involved national Center for Disease Control, not a mouthpiece for the corporate elite, would be re-organized to collect quality national data on the scope and nature of the problem and provide further bases for reversing the trends of decreased life expectancy, increase child and maternal mortality and epidemic preventable-premature deaths among workers.

The second step would involve taking control of the prescription of narcotics limited to the narrow indications recognized in other industrialized countries (intractable cancer pain or short term post-operative pain management) and developing a national data base to track the prescription practice of physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants and others. Those unwilling to reform their practice would face arrest and severe prosecution. Heath care would be patient centered, not profit oriented and the dictum ‘Primum non nocere’ would replace callous Social-Darwinism and greed in medical practice.

The manufacturers and distributors, as well as the lobbyists and merchants of deadly opioids, would be forced to pay for the devastation and face prosecution.

The process of restoring viability to drug-ravaged domestic ‘shit-holes’ created by the US capitalist elite finally would require attacking and transforming the economic roots of the addiction crisis. It would require replacing a system that sows pain and suffering among the workers with one where the workers and their communities finally take control of their lives. Professionals and intellectuals, rather than viewing the victims from the point of view of the elite decision-makers, will have to fully integrate their interests with those of the masses.

Successful local struggles can build the political power base that transforms ‘studies’ and ‘critiques’ to direct action and electoral changes.

Outlawing this revolting source of profit and scourge of thousands of communities can weaken the power of the billionaire drug dealers and their political allies.

Millions of lives are at stake, they have their survival to win. Understanding the root of this class centered affliction and mobilizing to reverse this trend can have major consequences benefiting the widely dispersed imperial and capital induced shit-holes of the world!

The main question that prevailed in Greece till 2015, before the years of cynicism which started along with the rise of SYRIZA and the nationalistic right party of Independent Greeks in power, was whether the adjustment programs had succeeded or not.

The “denials” characterized them as inefficient and aimless, judging their effectiveness by the achievement of their nominal aims; Looking for example at the size of the public debt, the Greek rescue should be taught in student amphitheatres as an epic failure. Greek sovereign debt was 115% of GDP before the rescuers landed on Greek soil in May 2010 and now, a few months before the third program ends in August 2018, it has reached 181% of GDP.[1] In the preliminary report of Truth Committee on Public Debt (which was formed in the Greek Parliament in April 2015 and audited the sovereign debt and concluded that it must not be paid) we concluded that the priority of rescuing the private creditors and the neoliberal reforms had a negative effect on the debt sustainability.

Almost the same recipe is repeated in every program, by all the different governments and political parties which have undertaken the responsibility of this open-ended shock therapy since 2010. If it was a wrong direction, why didn’t they correct the route? Even the IMF has officially recognized the fallacies of this strategy.[2]

Simultaneously, the Greek economic and political elite (through the industrialists’ or the bankers’ union) never expressed objections or hesitations to the conditionalities which accompanied every Memorandum of Understanding (the agreements with the creditors) and the guidance of the midterm evaluations. It’s very characteristic that the conditionalities which have been agreed will remain many decades after the official end of the current program. For example: the primary budget surpluses will be held until 2060 and the Greek Privatisation and Investment Fund which have the aim to gather 50 bn. euros from privatisations will remain active for 98 more years.

If we want to check the success of the programs of economic adjustment we must turn our attention to the transformations they brought to the labour law and labour relations. What happened in Greece can be compared only to what happened in Eastern and Central Europe during the transition from the so-called existent socialism to the capitalism. In real terms, the political boundaries of “Eastern Europe”, countries in which the post-war achievements of the working-class movement have declined, have reached the Mediterranean Sea.

Absolute reduction of wages

The most obvious answer to the fundamental question about the success of the terms of the loan agreement is presented in the evolution of the wages. According to OECD, the 2016 annual average wage (25,124 US dollars) was lower than the 2000 wage (25,909 USD). Greek working class has thus returned to the 20^th century under the rule of the creditors! Knowing that all these years the wage and social inequality has increased sharply we can suppose, with no risk, that the social situation of the lower income group is much worse because the averages have become less representative. In the age of the extremes the averages are misleading.

The unprecedented reduction of real wages is depicted even in the Eurostat figures, where it is apparent that labour cost per hour in euros was reduced from 16.7 in 2008 to 14.2 in 2016.[3] In only one other country, Cyprus, the wages were reduced during the years of the Memoranda: from 16.7 euros in 2008 to 15.8 in 2016, but even there the reduction (-5.4%) was much lower than the Greek one (-15%). During the same years the wages steadily increasing in the EU and the Euro area from 21.5 to 25.4 and from 25.3 to 29.8, respectively.

Of course, someone could respond that in a sinking economy there is nothing more predictable than decreased incomes. Yes, but in this case, there is a difference: the wages did not decrease just because of the sinking economy, but because the laws where changed. In other words, the wage share was reduced in a greater rate than in comparison to the national product. The wage share as percentage of GDP was reduced from 61.1% in 2010 to 56.7% in 2015.[4] And the unemployment reached 27% of the labour force, the highest level in the EU. In other words, the crisis didn’t lead to a symmetrical reduction of salaries and earnings. The crisis, and more specifically the conditionalities of the rescue loans, altered the balance between the working class and the ruling class, deteriorating the position of the first.

This well synchronized squeeze wasn’t the result of a spontaneous reaction of the bosses. The second Memorandum which was signed in February 2012 by the appointed government of technocrats and the creditors, as a strict precondition for the restructuring of the sovereign debt, included (among many others) the reduction of basic salaries by 22% and for the youth under 25 years by 32%. In the same law, there are two articles which abolish the collective bargaining system between the government, employers’ associations and trade unions and prohibits any kind of wage increase until the unemployment rate reaches 10 % (20.5% in September of 2017). Between 2010 and 2012, other conditionalities had imposed the abolition of the 13^th (one salary during Christmas), of the 14^th (half a salary in Easter and half more in holidays) salary and of many extra bonuses which were given by the employers.

Average wages 2000 – 2016 (Source)

With voluntary payment, exploitation haven!

These official cuts gave a push to employers to implement a working regime that reminds of medieval years. The most striking: Even now, when the official data show a return to positive rates of growth, 1 in every 3 employees is not paid regularly; either he is not paid by no means, he is paid with a delay of a few months, or he is receiving a part of his wage and taking a promise for the remaining part. There are super market enterprises which are paying their personnel by coupons, necessitating them to return the salary, spending it into the firm.

The systematic and continuous degradation of the wage labour has appeared even in the figures of the relevant Ministry. Concretely, in September 2017, and when in the power there was a party which wanted to be called left-wing, there were 126.956 employees with a salary of under 100 euros, which means that they are being paid 5 euros a day when the cheapest cinema costs 7 euros, the cheapest theatre 15 and an espresso more than 2 euros.

Another form of deregulation of labour laws that adjustment programs brought is the undeclared work. According to ILO, from a share of 29.7% in 2010 it reached 40.5% of the labour force at the end of 2013, showing that the brutal neoliberal reforms were going hand by hand with the absolute deregulation of labour. Since then one minister after the other, along with the Troika, has declared war to undeclared work. It’s a war which remains in the documents and never takes a substantial, real form. The underlying problem is the permanent lack of personnel and resources in the state agencies that have the responsibility to check the laws.

The fact that the Memoranda were a turning point for the history of exploitation in Greece has also appeared in official figures were every kind of precarious job (part time, seasonal and temporary) has every month, quarter or year a larger share than the permanent jobs. That means that the majority of the hiring is flexible and under-paid, identical to working poverty!

They will prohibit the strikes!

Contrary to the climate of high expectations that the government is cultivating, the future is much gloomier. The IMF has requested, and the PM Alexis Tsipras accepted in a letter to IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde, dated in July of 2017, to change the terms for workers’ strike. As a result, and as a precondition for the closure of the current evaluation, the majority of the Greek parliament will vote that a sine qua non precondition for announcing a strike by a trade union will be the accordance of the absolute majority of its members. Everyone can imagine what would happen if this rule was applied in the elections for the European Parliament, where less and less people are voting and the last elections turnout was just 42.61%.[i] In addition, everyone can imagine what would happen in every parliament if this rule had been adopted: no laws would be voted! However, IMF and EU organize these democracy contests at the expense of the working class.

Instead of conclusion: Everyone knew what the IMF conditionalities meant for labour rights, but the experience revealed the EU to be even more aggressive than the IMF, often representing genuinely the interests of the Greek economic elite.

*

Notes

[1] According to the data of the budget for 2018, which were published in December 2017.

[2] The IMF and the Crisis in Greece, Ireland and Portugal, Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund, 2016. http://www.ieo-imf.org/ieo/fil…

[3] Hourly labour costs ranged from €4.4 to €42.0 across the EU Member States in 2016. Eurostat news release, 58/2017, 6 April 2017.

[4] Statistical Annex of European Economy, European Commission, Economic and Financial Affairs, Spring 2017. Wage costs. Adjusted wage share; total economy; as percentage of GDP at current factor cost, page 72.

While the Western Press mocks the Grand Mass of the Chinese Communist Party’s Congress, Alfredo Jalife is taking President Xi’s announcements very seriously. Far from comparing him to an emperor, Jalife sees him as one of the senior officials that have made China “millénaire”. Jalife observes how Xi is following through with the planned Silk Route and is demonstrating his willingness to partner Western investors through a dollar offering. He also comments on the reform of the military’s structure of command with a view to developing it.

*

A few days before beginning his important Asian tour, Donald Trump effusively congratulated Xi Jinping, who had just been enthroned “Supreme Leader” for a second five-year period during the 19th Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Trump flattered him, calling him a “king”.

Trump’s ignorance is legendary because in China’s six thousand year history, there has never been a position such as king; there have only been mandarins and emperors. According to the Washington Post, Trump praised Xi as “probably the most powerful leader” that China has had for a century. More so than Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping? Not yet….

I would be more inclined to qualify Xi Jinping as a mandarin. That said, he is today an “emperor on geo-economic matters”. This is because he holds the reins of the country which, according to the CIA’s World Factbook, has the highest real GDP in the world [1]. We expect that in terms of nominal GDP, towards 2020, China will overtake both the European Union and the USA, which are in first and second place respectively. China has the biggest currency reserves (3.1 billion dollars [2] compared to the EU’s 774,900 thousand dollars (four times less) and the US’s 117,300 thousand dollars (26 times less!) [3].

In the course of a week, The Economist, a global neoliberal journal, controlled by the Rothschild bankers, has erred in its biased classification. First, it classified the global emperor Xi as “the most powerful man in the world”, then it went on to label Vladimir Putin as “the new Tsar, one hundred years after the Communist Revolution of October 1917 [4]. For The Economist, the global emperor Xi “has more influence than Donald Trump” and so “the world should be wary”. The Economist judges this negatively, because Xi is not aligned to the interests of the treacherous Albion. Thus the Economist considers that we must not “expect Xi to change China or the world (sic) for the better” [5].

According to The Economist, the Chinese army pales in comparison to the US army”. Yet the problem this latter faces, even though it is the army of the most powerful country in the world, is that “its leader is rather weak domestically and less effective externally. In contrast, “Xi is the dominant motor of world growth”. With the Silk Route, The Economist warns that China is going to invest billions [6] of dollars abroad in railway lines, ports, electrical power plants and infrastructure [7].

In fact, Trump’s strategists, such as Henry Kissinger and Steve Bannon, know that investments in Chinese infrastructure are going to give Xi a winning hand in Eurasia, over the USA, which lacks economic clout [8].

But from the classic perspective of “trilateral geostrategic stability” between China, USA and Russia, Peking is the weakest link on the military front. This is why in the days following his military appointment, the geoeconomic Emperor Xi encouraged “building a strong army”, right in the middle of a new era of “Chinese socialism”.

In the Chinese liturgy, Xi was confirmed as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. In addition, he is the President and Symbolic Head of the Central Military Commission, which represents the true power behind its hierarchical structure. Accordingly, Xi has exhorted the armed forces to get ready to establish a world class army by the middle of the 21st century [9].

The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper, owned by Jack Ma, also the CEO of Alibaba, the famous Chinese internet sales company, reveals that Xi “has shaken the Chinese military command” to create a “more streamlined Commission directly under his command”, phase one in the accelerated modernization of the armed forces [10].

The USA, through its different presidents, Democrats and Republicans alike, has devoted itself to delivering wars in all four quarters of the world. Its motive is self-interest: increasing its prosperity through an “economy of war” and its all powerful military-industrial complex. Contrast this with China which promises development to countries that want it through a policy of stimulating infrastructure building. There are two prongs to this policy: the Silk Route and funding in the form of soft loans, offered by the outstanding AIIB [11].

Anja Manuel reporting in The Atlantic, considers that “China is in the process of calmly reshaping the world” though its “initiatives to encourage infrastructure building”. This boils down to the Silk Road (which has the potential to manage up to eight billion dollars [12] of investments: “China is rapidly growing into the most extensive commercial empire in the world [13]”. It suffices to make a comparison with the US’s 800 billion [14] dollar (in current value) Marshall Plan, with China’s formidable investments. China has already invested 300 billion and is proposing to invest a further billion over the next decade. Furthermore, China, single-handedly, has granted more loans to developing countries than the World Bank.

Some days after Trump’s official visit in China, for the first time in 10 years, Peking launched a two billion dollar bond issue (sic) on the Hong Kong stock exchange. This was a day after the CCP had entrusted a second five-year mandate to Xi [15]. The quantity is symbolic because the largest tranche of the Chinese bond issue is in renminbi.

This spectacular measure by China, of a dollar bond issue, relates to the Silk Route and constructing infrastructures in developing countries that are participating in its prosperity. The Chinese Vice-Minister of Finance, Shi Yaobin, has declared that this dollar bond issue must be a convincing sign that China wants to open its economy to all investments [16].

The new, more pragmatic team that supports Xi in executing his duties, is particularly important for the Chinese economy. According to Wang Xiangweil of South China Morning Post, this team (a dream team) is proposing an important shift towards market reforms (i.e. “supply side”) [17].

Li Qiaoyi and Song Shengxia of Global Times, assert that the XIX° Congress and Xi’s notable ascension pushes “China to opt for enhancing quality” and that “modernization will be reached 15 years prior to schedule” [18].

The 2020 – 2050 development plan will have two stages. Its aim “will no longer be to double the GDP” but “to choose to enhance the quality of growth”: to develop China into a great “modern socialist country” which will be “moderately prosperous from 2020”. “Modernization” will not stop with the vulgar economism of GDP growth but will entail “greater attention to social well-being, regional balance, national security (sic) and political cohesion” in the “Chinese way”.

The uncertainty they contemplate, that hovers on the horizon, rests on the degree of openness to global capital, which may denature and destabilize China.

The promises the Emperor Xi has made and in light of which history will hold him to account, consist in eradicating poverty by 2020 (already achieved), returning to unpolluted blue skies, and to making China a modern country by 2035.

He will be judged on his results.

*

Translated by Anoosha Boralessa, courtesy VoltaireNet

Alfredo Jalife-Rahme is social and political sciences Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). His columns on international politics feature regularly in the Mexican daily La Jornada. His latest book is China irrumpe en Latinoamérica: ¿dragón o panda? (Orfila, 2012).

Notes

[1] A distinction is drawn between real GDP (which takes into account currency fluctuations) and nominal GDP, calculated according to current prices.

[2] Translator’s Note 1 (“TN 1”): one billion = a 1,000,000 million not a 1,000 million.

[3] “Reserves of foreign exchange and gold”, World Factbook, CIA, 2017.

[4] “A tsar is born”, The Economist, October 26, 2017.

[5] “Xi Jinping has more clout than Donald Trump. The world should be wary”, The Economist, October 14, 2017.

[6] See Note 2.

[7] «La nueva ruta de la seda de China: ¿plan Marshall optimizado?», Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, La Jornada, 14 de mayo de 2017.

[8] «Kissinger y Bannon “forman proyecto de alarma contra China”», Alfredo Jalife-Rahme, La Jornada, 4 de octubre de 2017.

[9] “Xi calls for building a strong army”, Xinhua, October 27, 2017.

[10] “Xi Jinping shakes up China’s military leadership … what changes at the top mean for world’s biggest armed forces”, Liu Zhen, South China Morning Post, October 26, 2017.

[11] «El banco chino que sepulta Bretton Woods», Alfredo Jafile-Rahme, La Jornada, 22 de abril de 2015.

[12] See Note 2.

[13] «China Is Quietly Reshaping the World», Anja Manuel, The Atlantic, October 17, 2017.

[14] See Note 2.

[15] “China sells first dollar bond in more than a decade”, Gabriel Wildau, Financial Times, October 26, 2017.

[16] “First dollar bond sale since 2004 indicates more opening-up: Chinese Vice FinMin”, Xinhua, October 28, 2017.

[17] “What President Xi Jinping’s new leadership team means for China’s economy”, Wang Xiangwei, South China Morning Post, October 28, 2017.

[18] “China shifts to quality growth”, Li Qiaoyi & Song Shengxia, Global Times, October 27, 2017.

Only one year after Trump was inaugurated, the US has already suffered an alarming setback to its global leadership role and badly damaged its image. In short order, Trump managed to bewilder our friends and allies, intensify the enmity between us and our foes, and evoke fear, concerns, and unpredictability to the dismay of the international community. I cannot imagine how much further America’s reputation will decline as an increasing number of countries, including our allies, have resigned themselves to the lack of American leadership under Trump’s watch, which will have major adverse repercussions on our national interest and influence the world over.

Trump’s ‘America First’ notion, abandonment of our soft power, and reckless utterances have deeply troubled countries with strong ties to the US, enraged those who have been maligned by his reprehensible rhetoric, and delighted our adversaries, while leaving America increasingly isolated.

On the issue of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and anti-ballistic missiles, instead of engaging Pyongyang in quiet diplomacy to resolve the conflict, he resorted to bellicose rhetoric and threats that only heightened tensions and brought the US and North Korea ever closer to the unthinkable—nuclear war.

On the Iran deal, rather than trying to peacefully negotiate any changes, especially to the sunset provisions, Trump decertified the deal and threatened to resume old and impose new sanctions, which would torpedo it completely. He demanded that Congress modify the deal, even though the other five signatories to the accord vehemently reject any tampering of the deal because of Iran’s continued full adherence. Tehran rejects any changes, and threatened to withdraw from the deal and resume its nuclear program, which could lead to the proliferation of nuclear weapons and subject the region’s inhabitants to living in the shadows of nuclear conflagration.

On immigration, Trump’s racist attitude toward Muslims and people of color has severely undermined America’s unique image as a country of immigrants, which made America great in the first place. His reference to Africa, Haiti, and El Salvador as “shithole” countries provoked unprecedented international outrage.

Scores of American Ambassadors around the world were summoned to explain the inexplicable, which the Ambassadors themselves could not fathom. Why would a sitting US president utter such filth, in the White House no less? Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney put it succinctly when he said:

“What he [Trump] communicated caused racists to rejoice, minorities to weep, and the vast heart of America to mourn.”

As to international treaties and accords, Trump has completely disregarded our commitment to live up to such agreements. He insists on renegotiating the terms of NAFTA, and effectively withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (connecting the Americas with Asia and Australia). He pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord and withdrew from the United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), accusing it of having anti-Israel biases.

As a result, he acutely damaged America’s credibility, making many countries wary of entering into bilateral agreements with the US, as they can no longer trust his administration to live up to its commitments. This leaves a wide opening for our adversaries to fill the vacuum he created.

Trump has further shocked all democracies around the world with his incessant assault on the press. Though a few of his predecessors have occasionally ostracized the press, none has mounted such vile criticism. He accuses all media outlets (except for FOX News) of being the enemy of the people, claiming they are biased and spreading ‘Fake News’ to purposefully malign him and deride his policy initiatives.

Sadly, whereas America was seen as the beacon of freedom and democracy to be emulated, Trump is consciously undermining one of our central constitutional pillars—the free press—to the utter consternation of democracies around the world.

On the question of the US’ reliability, many countries who depend on America for their national security are worried about Trump’s real commitment to safeguarding their security. His criticism of NATO, which is the core of West European security, and his appeasement of Russia, which is viewed as the West’s staunchest enemy, raises questions as to where he would stand if they were threatened.

This concern is being expressed by our allies in the Middle East and Europe, which is further diminishing America’s role. Germany’s Chancellor Merkel expressed her misgivings, stating that:

“The times when we could fully rely on others have passed us by a bit… we Europeans must really take our destiny into our own hands… We have to know that we must fight for our future on our own, for our destiny as Europeans.”

The fact that Trump lies as often as he breathes deeply troubles countries around the world because they can no longer take his word for granted on issues of major importance to them.

Trump seems to be totally oblivious to the reality that without American global leadership, which spans over seven decades, the world will be even more chaotic than today. Trump has no end-strategy for Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, nor the focus or interest in stemming the widespread, destabilizing violent conflicts and human rights abuses around the world.

It is sad that in the most recent Gallup poll ‘Rating World Leaders’, the US is ranked third, behind Germany and China (and just ahead of Russia). The damage that Trump has caused to American credibility and moral global leadership will not be readily repaired after electing a new president. It will take time and a president who is stable, politically skilled, and intellectually competent with vision and understanding of America’s pivotal role in the international arena before America’s global leadership can be restored.

The Republican party has become complicit in Trump’s mischiefs and misguided policies. It is now up to the Democrats to get their act together, regain control of the House and Senate, and shackle Trump before he causes irreparable damage to America’s global role and responsibility.

*

Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a professor of international relations at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He teaches courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies. [email protected] Web: www.alonben-meir.com

On January 20th, CBS News bannered “Terrorism no longer the military’s top priority, Mattis says” and opened: “There is a major change in U.S. military strategy. On Friday, more than 16 years after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said terrorism is no longer the No. 1 priority.” The report said, “Maintaining a military advantage over China and Russia is now Defense Secretary Mattis’ top priority.”

On January 18th, the Trump Administration had issued its crucial document about how it will implement America’s national defense from now on. This document, the National Defense Strategy 2018, represents a continuation of U.S. President Barack Obama’s vision and intentions, but extends Obama’s hostility toward Russia, by adding Trump’s hostility toward China.

In December 2017, U.S. President Donald Trump had issued his National Security Strategy 2018 (the NSS2018); but, in keeping with his prior commitment to leaving to the generals the implementation of his national security policy, the Pentagon has now issued this National Defense Strategy 2018 (the NDS2018), which is signed only by Trump’s minister for war (Secretary of ‘Defense’), “Jim Mattis”; and it’s considerably more informative on what the practical meaning of NSS2018 will be. The meaning is: replacing hostility against “radical Islamic terrorism,” by hostility against Russia and China. This — building upon Obama’s imperial vision — is now Trump’s ‘Defense’ policy. Trump’s campaign talk had been against ‘radical Islamic terrorism’, but was merely bumper-sticker lying, to win votes, from an electorate that believed the differences between today’s Democratic and Republican Parties are more than bumper-sticker deep (which might once have been the case, but no longer really is). 

In continuation from Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015, which had accused Russia 18 times of “aggression,” Trump’s National Defense Strategy 2018 (NDS2018) effectively declares at least an economic war against Russia (as if economics were also in General Mattis’s portfolio), but it goes even further to include China as being now also America’s enemy. It thus officially restores, in effect, the Cold War — the war against communism — that had existed until U.S. President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, during 21 to 28 February 1972. It also intensifies the war against Russia, even now, 37 years after the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union and end of its Warsaw Pact and end of its communism, had ended the Cold War (but only on Russia’s side, not really on America’s). 

Trump’s new document (through his agent Mattis) says that non-state terrorism (Al Qaeda, etc.) is no longer the biggest threat to America’s security; these two “authoritarian” nations pose the biggest threat to America, says the NDS2018. This document asserts: “It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.” (“Authoritarian” is now what “communist” once was — the U.S. Government’s verbal bugaboo, and America’s official excuse, for invasions and coups.) It continues:

The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions. 

China is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage. As China continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy, it will continue to pursue a military modernization program that seeks Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United States to achieve global preeminence in the future. The most far-reaching objective of this defense strategy is to set the military relationship between our two countries on a path of transparency and non-aggression. 

Concurrently, Russia seeks veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic, and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor. The use of emerging technologies to discredit and subvert democratic processes in Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine is concern enough, but when coupled with its expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal the challenge is clear.

It then says,

“Rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran are destabilizing regions through their pursuit of nuclear weapons or sponsorship of terrorism.”

So: those four countries — China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran — are now the top targets for the U.S. military to defeat.

The NDS2018 document continues,

“Both revisionist powers and rogue regimes are competing across all dimensions of power. They have increased efforts short of armed conflict by expanding coercion to new fronts, violating principles of sovereignty, exploiting ambiguity, and deliberately blurring the lines between civil and military goals.”

Right now, the U.S. is militarily occupying, as an uninvited invading power violating the sovereignty of parts of the sovereign nation of Syria, whose internationally recognized (except by the U.S. and its vassal-states) Government is the one that had won internationally monitored elections in 2014, and whose incumbent President Bashar al-Assad won, in those elections, 89% of the vote throughout the entire country. Even independent Western-sponsored polling in Syria has repeatedly shown that Assad would easily win any national election in his country, and that 82% of Syrians blame the U.S. Government (not Assad) for having brought the tens of thousands of jihadists into their country and caused the Syrian war that destroyed the nation. On 31 October 2015, U.N. Secretary General Ban ki-Moon twice criticized U.S. President Barack Obama’s refusal to allow the Syrian people to determine whom their President would be. Ban said, “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people,” but the U.S. Government kept ignoring him on that; and U.S. President Trump’s minister of war now says that the way to defeat countries that are “violating principles of sovereignty” is to continue occupying countries that never invited them in.

Under the heading “Build a More Lethal Force,” the NDS2018 document says, “The surest way to prevent war is to be prepared to win one.” To do this, it will rely on “the Joint Force” (which the document fails to define) in this way:

Prioritize preparedness for war. Achieving peace through strength requires the Joint Force to deter conflict through preparedness for war. During normal day-to-day operations, the Joint Force will sustainably compete to: deter aggression in three key regions — the Indo-Pacific, Europe, and Middle East; degrade terrorist and WMD threats; and defend U.S. interests from challenges below the level of armed conflict. In wartime, the fully mobilized Joint Force will be capable of: defeating aggression by a major power; deterring opportunistic aggression elsewhere; and disrupting imminent terrorist and WMD threats. During peace or in war, the Joint Force will deter nuclear and non-nuclear strategic attacks and defend the homeland. To support these missions, the Joint Force must gain and maintain information superiority; and develop, strengthen, and sustain U.S. security relationships.

The document sub-heads “Strengthen Alliances and Attract New Partners,” and says, “By working together with allies and partners we amass the greatest possible strength for the long-term advancement of our interests, maintaining favorable balances of power that deter aggression and support the stability that generates economic growth.” This includes “Fortify the Trans-Atlantic NATO Alliance” but is global.

This document thus actually embodies, but in some ways extends and amplifies, U.S. President Barack Obama’s 28 May 2014 statement to America’s graduating class at the West Point Military Academy:

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. … Russia’s aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China’s economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us, and governments seek a greater say in global forums. … It will be your generation’s task to respond to this new world.

To Obama, all nations other than the U.S. — even America’s allies — are “dispensable”; only the U.S. is not. Hitler’s version was “Deutschland über alles”; and, like America’s version, it comes from the accepted popular culture, not from the imperialist’s own overheated imagination. In fact, Americans respect the military above all other institutions — more than all the rest of the Government — just like Germans did, leading up to Hitler. And, just like Donald Trump himself does; in his militarism, Trump unfortunately does authentically represent his nation’s values. Amerika isn’t Athens; it is Sparta.

As I had previously noted under the headline “Trump Continues Obama’s Wars Against Democracy”: “He was telling the military that America’s economic competition, against the BRICS nations, is a key matter for America’s military, and not only for America’s private corporations.”

However, even General Mattis has now acknowledged that one important component of achieving this global empire will be to “Strengthen Alliances and Attract New Partners,” which now seems less likely under Trump than it was under Obama.

Perhaps the Trump Administration will try to compensate for that area of increasing U.S. weakness, by increasing even more its weaponry and troop-numbers. Anything to win what all of these documents refer to as being, not America’s enmity, but America’s ‘competition’ — against Russia, China, and the other BRICS countries. However, when a military official talks of “competition,” the reference is actually to his enemies, which are to be either defeated or else killed — it’s not like an economist, referring to an entity that offers the same or better product or service but at a lower price, to some consumer — a third party to the relationship between those competitors. In military matters, an “ally” is no such third party, but is on one of the two sides — it’s part of one of the two sies. The verbiage that’s being borrowed from economics is simply intended to deceive the public, instead of to inform them. 

Here, to close, are highlights from Secretary Mattis’s speech, on January 19th, introducing NDS2018:

This defense strategy was framed … by President Trump’s National Security Strategy. … It is, as was noted by the dean, our nation’s first National Defense Strategy in 10 years. …

We will continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security. …

We face growing threats from revisionist powers as different as China and Russia are from each other, nations that do seek to create a world consistent with their authoritarian models, pursuing veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic and security decisions.

Rogue regimes like North Korea and Iran persist in taking outlaw actions that threaten regional and even global stability.  Oppressing their own people and shredding their own people’s dignity and human rights, they push their warped views outward. …

We’re going to build a more lethal force.  We will strengthen our traditional alliances and building [that ing-ending is his error, from Mattis — not added here] new partnerships with other nations. …

The second line of effort I noted was to strengthen alliances as we build new partnerships, as well. … History proves that nations with allies thrive.

He wants his audience to identify with ‘our’ team of billionaires, against ‘their’ team of billionaires.

He wants maximum “lethality” against ‘the other side’s’ people, and for ‘our side’s’ people. The opposite side are the ‘revisionist powers’ and ‘rogue regimes’; and ‘our’ side are — the ‘good’ people, who should coerce, or else kill, them.

Mattis’s speech said: “It is incumbent upon us to field a more lethal force if our nation is to retain the ability to defend ourselves and what we stand for.” That’s what ‘we’ will ‘stand for’, if we will stand for it.

Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric was more direct, less hypocritical. However, the result, this time around, could turn out to be even worse, because a war between the U.S. and Russia would constitute World War III and would be a nuclear war, which would destroy the entire world.

This might be what America’s billionaires are planning and preparing for. (Why are super-rich people now buying nuclear bunkers, such as here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here?

Are these people investors in ‘defense’ corporations such as Lockheed Martin?) But no public is. This is very much a super-rich person’s war ‘game’, which America’s ‘Defense’ Establishment is preparing for. No public is — not even a public that reveres its military Establishment more than it reveres any other of the nation’s institutions.

*

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.

This article was originally published by Strategic Culture Foundation.

What’s sometime referred to as ‘shadow bankers’ have been running the economy and drafting US domestic economic policy since Trump took office. ‘Shadow’ banks include such financial institutions as investment banks, private equity firms, hedge funds, insurance companies, finance companies, asset management companies, etc. They are outside the traditional commercial banking system (e.g. Chase, Bank of America, Wells, etc.) and virtually unregulated. Shadow banks globally now also control more investible liquid assets than do the world’s commercial banks.

It was the shadow banks–investment banks like Lehman, Bear Stearns, insurance giant AIG, GE credit and others that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis that then froze up the entire credit system and led to the 2008-09 collapse of the real, non-financial economy. None of the CEOs of the shadow bank system went to jail for their roles in the collapse. And now they are back–not only reaping record profits and asserting even greater influence over the US and global economy; but have penetrated the political institutions of control in the US and other advanced economies even more than they did pre-2008.

Shadow Bankers On the Inside

In the US, shadow bankers from Goldman Sachs, the giant investment bank, took over the drafting of US economic policy when Trump took office. (Trump himself, a commercial property speculator, is part of this shadow banker segment of the US capitalist elite). Running the US Treasury is ex-Goldman Sacher, Steve Mnuchin. On the ‘inside’ of the Trump administration is Gary Cohn, chair of Trump’s key advisory, ‘Economic Council’. Together the two are the original drafters (which was done in secret) of the recent Trump Tax cuts that will yield a $5 trillion windfall for US businesses, especially multinationals. (More on this in my forthcoming article, to be posted here subsequently).

Mnuchin is leading the charge for the Trump deregulation offensive, especially financial deregulation. Mnuchin recently took the offensive as well with public statements indicating it was US policy that US dollar exchange rates remain at record low levels. Why? To ensure US multinational corporations’ offshore profits are maximized when they convert their profits in local currencies back to the dollar, before they repatriate those profits back to the US at the new lower Trump tax rates (12% instead of 35% repatriation tax rate) and, even more lucratively, when they pay no taxes on offshore profits virtually at all starting 2019.

Goldman Sachs and the shadow banker crowd’s economic influence extends beyond the US Treasury and Economic Council. The New York Federal Reserve’s district president, Dudley, is also a former Goldman Sach employee. He announced he’ll be resigning this year. The New York Fed is the key district of the Fed responsible for US Treasury securities buying and selling. Watch for another Goldman Sacher to replace him, or some other former high level senior exec from private equity or hedge fund industry.(For my analysis of the rising global shadow banking sector and its destabilizing role, check out my 2016 book, ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy‘, Clarity Press, and specifically chapter 12, ‘Structural Change in Global Financial Markets’).

Shadow Bankers Will Run the Fed

Trump and fellow shadow bankers are about to further solidify their control of US economic policy at the Fed as well. The Fed’s chair will soon be Jerome Powell. But several Fed governor positions have been vacant for some time, as is the vice-chair of the Fed. Watch for appointees from the shadow banks here as well.

Fed governors are officially supposed to serve 14 year terms. (They, along with Fed district presidents constitute the important FOMC, Federal Open Market Committee, that make day to day decisions at the Fed on matters of short term interest rate changes and such). But the Fed governors in recent decades never remain the 14 years. In fact, recently they remain around 3-4 years, if that. They leave early to take senior positions in the banking and shadow banking world. It’s a ‘revolving door’ problem.

Bankers get appointed to Fed governor and Fed district president positions, make decisions beneficial to their former banker buddies, and then leave early to return to their banker roots, with highly remunerative positions once again (often ‘do-nothing’ sinecures). As former governors they also go on the speech circuit, speaking at banker and business conferences, for which they’re paid handsomely, in the tens of thousands of dollars for a 20 minute speech. (Former Fed chairpersons, like Ben Bernanke and soon Janet Yellen get even more generous handouts, paid in the several hundreds of thousands of dollars a speech. They also get nice book contracts as they leave, with prepayments in the millions of dollars upfront, with guaranteed book purchases by corporations, and the best promotional efforts by publishers).

Trump’s appointment, and recent approval by the US House and Senate, of Jerome Powell to head the Fed is only the beginning. The vice-chair and several open Fed governor positions will enable Trump and Mnuchin to stack the deck at the Fed with their appointees. That will solidify Trump’s, and the shadow banker community’s, control of the Fed and ensure its policy direction will reflect Trump’s economic objectives of boosting business incomes, especially multinational corporations.

Central Bank Independence–But from Whom?

Mainstream economists write incessantly about the need to ensure ‘central bank independence’ (Fed) from elected government representatives. But they miss the more fundamental fact that it is the bankers themselves (especially now shadow bankers) that ultimately control the Fed. While mainstream economists talk about independence from government representatives, they ignore the deeper control (often through those representatives) of the Fed, and all central banks, by the bankers themselves.

Are Mnuchin, Cohn, Dudley and others really government ‘representatives’? Or are they shadow bankers first and foremos, who have managed to capture key positions in the government apparatus? Do the ‘revolving door’ former Fed governors act independently? Or do they decide with a keen eye on a lucrative offer from the private banks after a few years in office during which they ‘prove’ their value to the bankers? Do the Fed chairs and vice-chairs make decisions solely in the public interest at all times? Or are they perhaps too aware of the opportunity to become quick multimillionaires themselves once they leave office, recompensed nicely in various ways once they leave? And why is it that at the 12 Fed districts, the district president selection committee of 9 district board directors are almost always ‘stacked’ by 5-6 former regional bankers or banker business friendly former CEOs?

In my just published book, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes’, Clarity Press, August 2017, I examine this ‘myth of central bank independence’ in detail, and show how central banks, including the Fed, from their very origins have always been dependent (not independent) on the private banks rather than from elected government representatives. Central banks emerged from the private banks and have always been an appendage of sorts of that private banking system. This fact is supported today more than ever by the fact that Fed and central banks’ policy since 2000, and especially since 2008, has been to ensure the subsidization of financial institutions’ profitability. It’s no longer just serving as ‘lender of last resort’ to bail out the private banks periodically when they get in trouble (which chronically occurs). Now it is permanent subsidization of the private banking system.

A Constitutional Amendment to Democratize the Fed

In the book I also propose in the addendum a constitutional amendment and enabling legislation that will sever the relationship of the central bank, the Fed, from the banking industry (and its government representatives) for good. (see the reviews and information re. the book,’Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes‘ on this blog, my website, kyklosproductions.com, and at Amazon books. See the book’s addendum for the amendment and enabling legislation).

The trend in banker control of the Fed–and thus US economic policy–is about to deepen as Trump fills the open governor, chair, and vice-chair positions at the Fed in coming months. This will begin immediately after Jerome Powell assumes the chair position from Janet Yellen in early February 2018.

Economic Consequences of a Trump Fed

The shadow bankers, who gave us the last financial crash in 2007-09, will then be in total control–at the Treasury, in the White House, at the New York Fed, and in a majority of the Fed governorships. They will support Treasury Secretary Mnuchin’s policies–keep US rates at levels to ensure that the US dollar’s exchange rate is low versus other key world currencies. That will ensure that US multinational corporations’ profits offshore are not threatened, as they bring back those profits in 2018 at lower tax rates, and then can bring back profits thereafter without paying taxes on offshore profits at all for the next nine years.

The next financial crisis and crash is coming. It is not more than two years away, and could come sooner. The Fed will be totally unprepared and unable to lower interest rates much in response. It will then re-introduce its massive free money injections into the banking system, as it did with ‘QE’ for seven years starting with 2009. The Fed and other central banks provided ‘free money’ in the amount of at least $25 trillion to bail out the private banks over the last 9 years. How much more will they give them next time? And will it be enough to stabilize the US and world financial system? And will the Fed and US government then legitimize and legalize the private banks’ taking the savings of average depositors and converting those savings to worthless bank stocks? UK and US government preparations are already underway for that last draconian measure. For even today, when one deposits one’s money in a bank, that money legally becomes ‘owned’ by the bank.

Trump’s imminent appointments of Fed chairs, vice-chairs, and governors may prove historically to be the first step in the total capture of the US central bank by the shadow banker element in the US economy–by the Goldman Sachers, the private equity firms, the hedge fund vultures, and the commercial real estate speculator that is Trump itself.

We now have government by the bankers unlike ever before in the US. And their policies will inevitably lead to another financial crisis. Only this next time, the rest of US will be even less prepared and able to endure–given the decade of stagnant wages, new record in household debt, collapsing savings rates, greater reliance on part time/temp/gig employment, decline of pensions, loss of social benefits and safety net, higher cost of healthcare, and all the rest of the economic decline that is afflicting more than 100 million households in the US today.

Meanwhile, Trump will soon go to Davos, Switzerland, to party with the rest of the World Economic Forum’s multimillionaire-billionaire class. They will celebrate and pat themselves on the back about how well they’ve done for themselves in 2017: record profits, record stock markets’ price appreciation, record dividend payouts to wealthy shareholders, new tax laws that mean they can keep more of those profits and capital gains, continuing austerity for the rest, further destruction of unions (called ‘labor market reform’), decline and co-optation of remaining social democratic parties, etc. At Davos Trump will bask his ego and give an ‘American First’ speech, largely for public consumption to his base in the US. ‘America First’ means Trump, and his more aggressive wing of US capital, are signalling they plan to squeeze the rest of the world’s capitalists for a US larger share. So they’ll have to take even more out of their workers with austerity, wage compression, social benefits reduction, and even more ‘labor market reform’.

The Davos crowd may think they are sitting on their mountain in Switzerland, but they are really partying on the Titanic, as they steam on oblivious to what’s coming, unable to foresee the approaching economic icebergs below the surface. And as their mainstream economists, asleep on the bridge, almost in unison declare ‘steam on’, all is well and getting better.

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Dr. Jack Rasmus is author of the recently published, ‘Central Bankers at the End of Their Ropes: Monetary Policy and the Coming Depression‘, August 2017, and ‘Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy‘, 2016, both by Clarity Press.

This article was originally published by Jack Rasmus.

A superficial reading of “Operation Olive Branch” indicates that it’s a Turkish-Kurdish war, but the details of who’s fighting make it look a lot more like a Daesh civil war in its opening stages, and that’s exactly what both Ankara and the YPG originally intended.

The commencement of Turkey’s “Operation Olive Branch” has led to a flurry of commentary about its true motives, with critics dismissing its official “anti-terrorist” premise on the grounds that Ankara is allegedly fielding Daesh fighters under the guise of being “Free Syrian Army” (FSA) militants. There’s no doubt that some of Turkey’s proxies are abominable figures, and this has already been established years ago through investigative reporting by some prominent Alt-Media journalists, but there’s more to President Erdogan exploiting them in the present moment than the rhetorical explanation that he’s “evil”.

People have warned for some time now that the scourge of terrorism will inevitably boomerang back against its patrons, and President Assad famously quipped that “terrorism is like a scorpion, if you put it in your pocket, it will sting you”, but for as much as some observers convinced themselves that President Erdogan was arrogantly ignoring this sound advice, he was actually taking it quite seriously. Instead of letting jihadists “retire” in Turkey and expectedly stir up trouble there with time, he prudently realized that he must always keep them busy fighting against other foes before they get “too comfortable”, and thus wisely came to the conclusion that he could conveniently “kill two birds with one stone” by pitting them against his hated PKK enemies and their Syrian YPG offshoot.

The same Machiavellian logic interestingly comes into play from the perspective of “Operation Olive Branch’s” Kurdish targets. Reports have come in that the YPG is releasing all Daesh prisoners in Afrin so long as they fight against their former Turkish patrons, which is believable when considering the accusations that the Syrian Kurds occasionally cut deals with Daesh in the “Race for Raqqa” and subsequent “Dash For Deir ez-Zor”. Not only that, but other sources claim that the YPG is directing its foreign (mostly Western-originating) fighters to wage war against the Turks in Afrin, which could simultaneously serve the purpose of killing some of them off and “thinning the heard” of unreliable non-state actors. This would in turn save their governments the hassle of having to monitor them when they return back home out of the fear that these majority-leftist-sympathizing “mercenaries” could turn into dangerous “Secular Wahhabi” terrorists.

The end result of this is that the Turks and Kurds are trying to rid themselves of the devilish long-term consequences of their Faustian deals with Daesh, essentially sending their one-time allies to their doom in the mountainous meat grinder of northwestern Syria in order to avoid being “stung” by their own “scorpions” first. From the cynical perspective of both primary participants in the Turkish-Kurdish war, it’s better for each of them that the opening stages of this conflict resemble a Daesh civil war than anything else at this point, but once this “bashi-bazouk” fighting force is depleted and the “real war” between the two sides begins, then the US has an interest in perpetuating it as long as possible and turning it into a 21^st-century iteration of the Iran-Iraq War so as to indefinitely manipulate the Mideast balance of power to its grand strategic favor.

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

All images in this article are from the author.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

A week-ago four-page memo described as explosive and shocking was released to House members – reportedly showing extensive FISA abuses.

A previous article explained it contains information about the Justice Department, the FBI and fake Trump dossier – prepared for Hillary Clinton and the DNC by former UK MI6 intelligence operative Christopher Steele.

It makes spurious accusations without evidence, alleging misconduct and collusion between Trump, his campaign team and Russia during the 2016 presidential campaign – including phony accusations of Russian US election interference.

It reveals alleged abusive tactics by high-level US officials. According to the Daily Beast, it names “FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, along with former FBI Director James Comey.”

Many GOP lawmakers are calling for the memo’s release, spearheaded by House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes.

Undemocratic Dems want its contents suppressed. The Daily Beast said it

“learned that Hill Republicans are gearing up to use an obscure parliamentary rule to release it.”

So-called Rule X, subsection 11(g) explains a process for releasing classified material even if the president objects.

It’s rarely invoked. Now’s the time to expose Russiagate wrongdoing and hold responsible parties accountable.

According to the Daily Beast,

“(u)nder the rule, if a clash occurs between the House intelligence committee and the executive branch over keeping something secret, the president gets five days to deliver objections that cite a danger to national security posed by disclosure.”

“Should the dispute persist, the committee can vote to take the matter to the full House of Representatives to consider. The full House’s debate is to occur in secret, with a public vote determining the outcome.”

“The president, however, can simply decide on his own to declassify anything. And in Trump’s case, his spokesperson is on the record supporting declassification.”

On Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said

“(w)e certainly support full transparency. We believe that’s at the House intel committee to make that decision at this point.”

“It sounds like there are some members in the House that have some real concern about what’s in that memo and feel very strongly that the American public should be privy to see it.”

The Trump Justice Department opposes release, its top congressional liaison Stephen Boyd saying:

“(I)t would be extraordinarily reckless for the Committee to disclose such information publicly without giving the Department and the FBI the opportunity to review the memorandum and to advise the (House intelligence committee) of the risk of harm to national security and to ongoing investigations that could come from public release,” adding:

The DOJ is “unaware of any wrongdoing,” a comment smacking of coverup. It’s unclear how many GOP House members read the memo, maybe all of them by now, several expressing outrage about its contents, calling for its release.

Under the hashtag #releasethememo, GOP House member Mark Meadows tweeted:

“I read the classified memo from House Intel, outlining stunning info on the last administration’s FISA and surveillance abuses that should NEVER happen in America. The public should be able to view the same memo I did.”

Another referred to Obamagate. On Facebook, actor Clint Eastwood remarked that

“(o)ne day we will realize that the Barack Obama presidency was the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American people.”

He’s partly right. They’re all dirty rotten scoundrels, with attribution to the film by the same name.

Russiagate is a colossal scam. There’s plenty about Trump to criticize. Nothing suggests illegal or improper behavior between him, his campaign team and Russia. No Russian election hacking occurred.

Most #Releasethememo tweets are from ordinary Americans wanting it released, calling for accountability if evidence proves wrongdoing by government officials.

Discrediting it by undemocratic Dems and other Trump opponents by claiming Russian trolls are behind it is part of the coverup effort.

The memo is a potential bombshell.

“Hill Democrats and former FBI officials say it’s a ploy to damage public confidence in the FBI and undermine Mueller’s investigation,” the Daily Beast reported, adding:

“Republicans, meanwhile, say the memo contains massively disturbing evidence of FBI wrongdoing.”

Given public disclosure about the memo’s existence and alleged wrongdoing it details, release isn’t certain but seems likely – either in full or redacted form.

*

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

In a letter Tuesday addressed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, Democrats Dianne Feinstein, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, demanded that the companies hand over information on accounts spreading the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo.

Coming just days after Twitter emailed hundreds of thousands of users warning them that they had liked, shared, or followed “Russian propaganda,” the letter is another step in the efforts by the Democratic Party, working with the major social media companies, to paint all social and political conflict in the United States as a product of Russian interference.

Schiff and Feinstein write that they are seeking the companies’ assistance “in our efforts to counter Russia’s continuing efforts to manipulate public opinion and undermine American democracy and the rule of law.”

The Democrats’ demands center around a letter authored by Republican Representative Devin Nunes, which alleges that the FBI carried out a FISA warrantless wiretap of the Trump campaign, possibly including Trump himself. While Trump has claimed that “Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” Democrats have insisted that no such wiretap occurred.

In recent days, right-wing media figures, including the pundit Sean Hannity, and Republican members of congress have initiated a campaign to release the memo as part of the deepening factional conflict within the ruling elite over the allegation that Trump “colluded” with Russia.

“The House must immediately make public the memo prepared by the Intelligence Committee regarding the FBI and the Department of Justice,” Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican from Florida, said. “The facts contained in this memo are jaw-dropping and demand full transparency.”

Whatever the source of the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign, Twitter and Facebook users have the right to read social media messages and express their opinion without fear that their information will be turned over to the government on the absurd charge that the campaign is being orchestrated from Moscow.

In their letter, Feinstein and Schiff argue that “public reports” indicate that the #ReleaseTheMemo campaign is being promoted by “social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations.” This claim is based entirely on one source: a supposed social media monitoring service called “Hamilton 68” operated by the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy.

To call this outfit dubious is an understatement. Its public spokesman is Clint Watts, a former FBI official and Army officer who has repeatedly argued for mass censorship in violation of the First Amendment. In a Senate hearing in late October, Watts declared that media outlets, which he called sources of “rebellion,” must be “silenced” on the grounds that America is in a state of “civil war.”

In arguing that calls for the release of the memo are being put forward by Russian agents, Feinstein and Schiff state that WikiLeaks has offered a reward for anyone who leaks the memo to them. This is in keeping with their argument that the organization, which has exposed more criminal wrongdoing by the US government than all the major US newspapers combined, is a “hostile non-state intelligence service.”

The Democratic lawmakers argue that “this latest example of Russian interference is in keeping with Moscow’s concerted, covert, and continuing campaign to manipulate American public opinion and erode trust in our law enforcement and intelligence institutions,” and demand that Facebook and Twitter take action.

They demand that these companies, within a span of days, submit a report detailing “whether and how many accounts linked to Russian influence operations are involved in this campaign,” the “frequency and volume of their postings on this topic,” and “how many legitimate Twitter and Facebook account holders have been exposed to this campaign.”

If the social media companies were to comply with this request, it would entail the compilation of a list of names based on users’ private reading habits, and their statements, both public and private, entirely without a court warrant, by companies acting as agents of the US government, in violation of the US constitution’s prohibition of “general warrants” and “unreasonable searches and seizures.”

The letter by Feinstein and Schiff is the latest move in an effort by Congressional Democrats, working with the US intelligence agencies, to criminalize the freedom of expression in the name of suppressing “extremist content” aimed at “polarizing” American politics. The major social media companies have been fully complicit in this drive, turning over lists of accounts to the congressional witch-hunters and working to block the propagation of dissenting opinion on social media.

The World Socialist Web Site is working to fight this drive toward dictatorship. We urge readers to watch our webinar, “Organizing Resistance to Internet Censorship,” read the open letter from the WSWS International Editorial Board, “For an international coalition to fight Internet censorship,” and contact us to take up this fight.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vow to return his kingdom to a moderate interpretation of Islam could be put to the test by a draft bill in the US Congress that would require the secretary of State to submit yearly reports about whether Saudi Arabia is living up to its promise to remove intolerant content from its educational materials.

The bill would also increase pressure on Saudi Arabia to introduce freedom of religion in a country that bans all worship except for those that adhere to its long-standing strand of ultra-conservative Sunni Muslim Islam.

The bi-partisan bill submitted by Republican House of Representatives member Ted Poe and Democrat Bill Keating reflects long-standing criticism of Saudi textbooks that use hateful and incendiary language; foster supremacism, intolerance, and anti-pluralism; and, according to many critics, incite violence.

The texts describe alternative strands of Islam such as Shiism and Sufism in derogatory terms and advise Muslims not to associate with Jews and Christians who are labelled kaffirs or unbelievers. They also justify the execution of ‘sorcerers.’ Saudi Arabia, moreover, has legally defined atheism as terrorism. The textbooks are used not only in Saudi schools but also in many educational and cultural institutions funded by the kingdom across the globe.

To be sure, Saudi Arabia has for more than a decade pledged to revise its educational materials and has made significant progress in doing so. The progress falls, however, short of a 2006 US-Saudi understanding that the kingdom would “within one to two years… ‘remove remaining intolerant references that disparage Muslims or non-Muslims or that promote hatred toward other religions or religious groups.’”

A Human Rights Watch survey of religion textbooks produced by the Saudi education ministry for the 2016-2017 school year, while acknowledging Saudi efforts, concluded that “as early as first grade, students in Saudi schools are being taught hatred toward all those perceived to be of a different faith or school of thought.” The survey was part of a larger study of hate speech adopted by Saudi officials and Islamic scholars.

Saudi revision of textbooks has taken on added significance with Prince Mohammed’s pledge last October to return Saudi Arabia to a vaguely defined form of “moderate” Islam. The pledge heightened expectations created by social reforms introduced by the crown prince that include lifting a ban on women’s driving, a residual of Bedouin rather than Muslim tradition; granting women access to male sporting events; allowing various forms of entertainment, including cinema, theatre and music; and stripping the religious police of its right to carry out arrests.

In outlining his vision, Prince Mohammed said Saudi ultra-conservatism had been an uninformed response to the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Even though Saudi association with ultra-conservatism harks back more than two centuries to the teachings of 18^th century Islamic scholar Mohammed ibn Abdul Wahhabi, Prince Mohammed asserted that

“we are simply reverting to what we followed – a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions.”

Among objectionable texts in schoolbooks, according to Human Rights Watch researcher Adam Coogle, are markers by which one can recognize the approach of the Day of Resurrection, that include the assertion that “the Hour will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews, and Muslims will kill the Jews.”

The assertion is not dissimilar from evangelist belief that Christ’s second coming is linked to the conversion of Jews to Christianity prior to the Day of Judgement and the prediction of a Holocaust for all those who refuse. Evangelist support for Israel and US President Donald J. Trump’s pro-Israel policy is rooted in that belief. Moreover, influential Premillennial Dispensationalists argue that Israel’s creation signalled the nearing of the end of days and that thousands of Jews will die on the Day of Armageddon.

Mr. Coogle noted that Prince Mohammed has remained conspicuously silent about hate speech in textbooks as well as its use by officials and Islamic scholars connected to the government.

The bill introduced by Messrs. Poe and Keating, dubbed The Saudi Educational Transparency and Reform Act, would increase pressure on Prince Mohammed to act more forcefully in a bid to halt mounting criticism in Congress of Saud Arabia that is driven by perceptions of linkages between Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism and political violence and the kingdom’s ill-fated invasion of Yemen. The bill could also persuade the crown prince to act in an effort to prevent further tarnishing of the kingdom’s image.

The bill further puts Saudi Arabia’s continued violations of freedom of religion in the spotlight. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has identified Saudi Arabia since 2004 as a “country of particular concern.” The designation constitutes the Commission’s harshest condemnation of violators of freedom of religion.

A 1998 law calls for the sanctioning of violators but allows the president to waive penalties if he decides that it would enhance the chances of achieving adherence or be in America’s interest. US presidents have issued a waiver for the past 12 years. Messrs. Poe and Keating’s bill would step up the pressure by requiring the secretary of State to regularly justify a waiver.

The bill, if passed, could push Prince Mohammed to clarify whether his call for a moderate form of Islam means a clean break with the teachings of Ibn Abdul Wahhab or whether he simply has a polishing of the rough edges of the scholar’s ultra-conservatism in mind.

Ironically, the model for an upgraded, more friendly form of Wahhabism, is Prince Mohammed’s nemesis, Qatar, the world’s only other Wahhabi state. Saudi Arabia leads an alliance that last June imposed a diplomatic and economic boycott on Qatar to force it adopt policies aligned with those of the kingdom.

The contrast between Qatar and Saudi Arabia could, however, not be starker. Prince Mohammed’s reforms such as women’s’ driving, entertainment, and freedom of religion have long been standard practice in Qatar.

That is not to say that Qatar does not have its share of supporters of ultra-conservatism and controversial clerics, including Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, one of the world’s most prominent living Islamic scholars, who spew hate speech and issue religious edicts that have justified suicide bombings.

Said former Qatari justice minister and prominent lawyer Najeeb al Nauimi, speaking some 16 years ago:

“Saudi Arabia has Mecca and Medina. We have Qaradawi — and all his daughters drive cars and work.”

*

Dr. James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, co-director of the University of Würzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and co-host of the New Books in Middle Eastern Studies podcast. James is the author of The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer blog, a book with the same title as well as Comparative Political Transitions between Southeast Asia and the Middle East and North Africa, co-authored with Dr. Teresita Cruz-Del Rosario,  Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa, and the forthcoming China and the Middle East: Venturing into the Maelstrom

This article was originally published by The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

Featured image is from the author.

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Federal Government Shutdown and the Duopoly System of Two-party Politics

By Abayomi Azikiwe, January 25, 2018

After three days of recriminations from both sides of the political aisles, the government was reopened on January 22. What is described as “essential services” were continued over the weekend of the closure.

Davos: “Zombie” TPP Trade Deal Threatens Our Fractured World

By Friends of the Earth International, January 24, 2018

Friends of the Earth International, the world’s largest grassroots environmental network, has warned that the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal could threaten people and planet if signed and ratified by national parliaments in March this year.

No Taxpayers’ Money Is Spared in Washington’s Military Adventures Worldwide. Trillions of Unauthorized Spending

By Martin Berger, January 24, 2018

According the director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, William Hartung most Americans would be amazed to learn that US Special Operations Forces have been deployed to three quarters of of the nations on the planet. Furthermore, according to this researcher there is little or no transparency as to what they are doing in these countries and whether their efforts are promoting security or provoking further tension and conflict.

A National Defense Strategy of Sowing Global Chaos

By Nicolas J. S. Davies, January 24, 2018

In the new U.S. National Defense Strategy, military planners bemoan the erosion of the U.S.’s “competitive edge,” but the reality is that they are strategizing to maintain the American Empire in a chaotic world, explains Nicolas J.S. Davies.

World Economic Forum Meets in Davos Under Shadow of Crisis and War

By Bill Van Auken, January 24, 2018

The gathering is overshadowed, however, by the accelerating fracturing of the global capitalist order, manifested in unprecedented levels of social inequality in every country, a sharp growth in trade war and the ever more immediate threat of an eruption of armed conflict, including nuclear war, between the major powers.

Richest One Percent Bagged 82 Percent of Global Wealth – Poorest Half of Humanity Got Nothing

By Oxfam International, January 23, 2018

Eighty two percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth, according to a new Oxfam report released today.  The report is being launched as political and business elites gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

The so-called “Pivot to Asia” initiated under the administration of US President Barack Obama as a means of reinvigorating US influence across Asia Pacific vis-à-vis China has resulted in a backlash against tired US policies predicated on “democracy promotion,” “rights advocacy” and increasingly meaningless economic and military ties between Washington and the nations of Southeast Asia.

From a “pivot” that was presented as a means to win over allies across Asia through economic trade and regional security underwritten by US military might, under the administration of current US President Donald Trump, US foreign policy has shifted decidedly toward a coercive and punitive posture to reestablish Washington’s influence.

It can be argued, however, that the “pivot” was from the beginning, merely window dressing for a policy that was little more than a highly focused effort to coerce and punish nations for moving out of Washington’s sphere of influence, and into Beijing’s.

In Cambodia, this backlash against US intentions has been particularly acute. The Cambodian government under Prime Minister Hun Sen has shuttered and expelled US State Department-funded fronts posing as nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) including media organisations, as well as arrested opposition leaders and disbanded the opposition’s political party.

US Strikes Back 

In turn, the US has imposed visa restrictions on individuals within the Cambodian government involved in the crackdown on US-backed political activity in the country.

Reuters in its article, “U.S. to deny visas to Cambodian officials over opposition crackdown,” would report:

The United States said on Wednesday it would restrict entry to people involved in the Cambodian government’s actions to undermine democracy, including the dissolution of the main opposition party and imprisonment of its leader. 

Reuters would also report:

 “We call on the Cambodian government to reverse course by reinstating the political opposition, releasing Kem Sokha, and allowing civil society and media to resume their constitutionally protected activities,” the State Department said in a statement.

Kem Sokha (third from foreground on left) meets with then US Secretary of State John Kerry. As the US has done elsewhere, it is carefully cultivating Sokha’s political party, assisting it into power to then serve US, not Cambodian interests. (Source: NEO)

The Cambodian opposition party in question is the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP). Its leader, Kem Sokha who was arrested on charges of treason, is not merely a victim of politically-motivated hyperbole, but faces serious charges based on Sokha’s long history of openly courting US support in what he himself characterised as a Serbian-style plot to overthrow the current Cambodian government.

The Phnom Penh Post quoted Sokha in its article, “Kem Sokha video producer closes Phnom Penh office in fear,” who said:

And, the USA that has assisted me, they asked me to take the model from Yugoslavia, Serbia, where they can changed the dictator Slobodan Milosevic.

You know Milosevic had a huge numbers of tanks. But they changed things by using this strategy, and they take this experience for me to implement in Cambodia. But no one knew about this.

In the 1970s neoconservative Irving Kristol aptly described the Republicans as “the stupid party.” We are seeing this today in the hesitation of the House Intelligence Committee to release to the American public the results of its investigation of Russiagate.

The committee has released a description of its findings to members of the House, and most Republicans who have read it are demanding that it be released to the public as it clearly proves that Russiagate was an orchestrated conspiracy between the Democratic National Committee, the FBI, and the Obama Department of Justice against Donald Trump.

Apparently, Republicans are not smart enough to understand that to announce that you have proof that turns Russiagate away from President Trump and toward its DNC, FBI, and DOJ originators and then to sit on the information gives the Democrats and the presstitutes time to discredit the information in advance of its release.

And that is exactly what we are witnessing. For example, Greg Sargent writing in the Washington Post, a long-time CIA asset, mischaracterizes the finding of the House Intelligence Committee as “the latest effort to delegitimize the Russia probe by painting it as born of partisan dirty tricks and an illegitimate abuse of power.”

Sargent goes on to allege that

“the campaign to discredit the Russia investigation continues unabated, and the Nunes memo [the House Intelligence Committee report] is at the center of it.”

Sargent dismisses the report, which he has not seen, as merely “a selective release of cherry-picked info that will give Republicans ammunition to shield Trump from accountability, secure in the knowledge that the full set of facts allowing us to gauge the memo’s accuracy will not be released.”

Note Sargent and the Washington Post’s assumption that Trump is guilty of some Russiagate accusation despite the absence of any evidence.

What Sargent, his editor, and the highly partisan Rep. Adam Schiff do not acknowledge is that proof that Russiagate is “born of partisan dirty tricks and an illegitimate abuse of power” already exists in public in the form of an official report by the FISA court. I posted it here on January 22.

Former US Attorney Joe diGenova explains it in detail here.

The FISA court lists the admitted violations of surveillance laws and their misuse against Trump by the FBI and DOJ and lists the corrections promised by the FBI and DOJ to prevent such illegality in the future.

If the House Republicans were intelligent, they would immediately have released the information, not announce that they might release it and then sit on it while the Democrats and presstitutes discredit it in advance. By the time the Republicans can bring themselves to release the damning information, assuming they ever do considering their idiotic “national security” concerns, it will have been discredited.

Meanwhile the Russiagate campaign against Trump continues. CNN Stephen Collinson tells us that

“a foreboding moment looms for Trump’s presidency and for the nation” as “inexorably, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has clawed all the way up to Donald Trump himself.”

If this is not sufficient to suggest Trump’s certain guilt and upcoming indictment, what about this:

“A stunning barrage of revelations on Tuesday suggested that at least one strand of Mueller’s Russia probe is racing toward its end game, emphasizing the gravity of the situation facing the White House and the potential vulnerability of the President.”

What is the “stunning barrage of revelations”? Mueller has interviewed Comey and Sessions, Trump asked an inappropriate question of McCabe, one of the FBI plotters against him, and Trump’s mistake as FBI director Chris Wray threatened to quit. Only for an axe-grinding presstitute would these constitute a “stunning barrage of revelations.”

Collinson writes that

Mueller “has a clear picture of where he is headed in what could turn into an obstruction of justice case, legal experts said.”

It is simply amazing that Collinson and “legal experts” are so incompetent that they do not understand that there cannot be an obstruction of justice case unless there is a crime. What crime was Mueller obstructed from finding?

The problem with Mueller’s investigation is that it has never been an investigation of a crime but an investigation seeking to find a crime. No crime that falls under the purpose of the investigation has been found. As William Binney, the former high level NSA official who designed the spy program, has said, if a crime existed, the NSA would have the evidence. No investigation would be necessary.

The only purpose of the Mueller “investigation” is to plant in the public’s mind that Trump and Putin conspired to steal the presidential election from Hillary.

Considering the extraordinary stupidity of Republicans, it is possible that having all the facts will do them no good as the presstitutes will have already established the explanation of the facts before they are released.

*

This article was originally published by Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy.

“Today, the United States Congress struck a significant blow against the basic human right to read, write, learn, and associate free of government’s prying eyes,” Electronic Frontier Foundation Executive Director Cindy Cohn wrote. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (FISA) Reauthorization Act of 2017, which Congress passed on January 19, poses a serious threat to the privacy of our internet communications.

Congress voted to extend Section 702 of FISA, with minimal changes, for six years. It permits the National Security Agency (NSA) to collect email and texts of foreigners abroad without a warrant, and also allows spying on Americans who communicate with people outside the United States. For example, the NSA can intercept the communications of a US citizen or permanent resident who attends an international conference on human rights or marches against climate change in another country.

In 2013, whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was using section 702 to spy on Americans through the PRISM internet surveillance program. The government is collecting private messages, without a warrant, from US companies including Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Skype, AOL, Apple and YouTube. It targets foreigners who are “reasonably believed” to be outside the US, even though the surveillance occurs on US soil. However, the communications of Americans can also be incidentally intercepted.

We cannot confine our criticism for this travesty to the GOP. In a vote of 65 to 34, 18 Senate Democrats joined many of their Republican colleagues to give the Trump administration vast spying authority. Although some Democratic senators, including Ron Wyden (D-Oregon), had suggested amendments that would require a court order to gain access to the communications of US persons, others quickly got behind the reauthorization.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is running for reelection this year, provided the deciding vote that prevented any debate on increased civil liberties protections.

“I would like to see more reforms in this program, and perhaps that is something those of us on the Intelligence Committee can strive for,” she said. “But I believe this is the best we are going to do at this time.”

It is no coincidence that Feinstein failed to stand up for our privacy. In 2013, when she was chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Feinstein defended the surveillance program while acknowledging she didn’t know how the data collected by the NSA was being utilized. At the time, journalist Glenn Greenwald noted in a tweet,

“The reason there are leakers is precisely because the govt is filled with people like Dianne Feinstein who do horrendous things in secret.”

“Instead of instituting much needed reforms and safeguards, Senators supported legislation that would give spying powers to an administration that has time and time again demonstrated its disregard for civil rights and civil liberties,” the ACLU tweeted after the Senate voted to reauthorize section 702 last week.

Demand Progress, an internet activist group with 2 million members, concurred, stating,

“This expanded surveillance power is particularly troubling in the hands of the Trump administration, which has made regular practice of cynical, politically-expedient and dangerous attacks on our country’s most targeted communities.”

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission.

Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and an advisory board member of ExposeFacts. The second, updated edition of her book, Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues, was published in November. Visit her website: MarjorieCohn.com. Follow her on Twitter: @MarjorieCohn.

As the Potemkin Village walls of The Left’s ‘Trump Collusion’ narrative crash and burn along with special counsel Mueller’s credibility, The New York Post’s Michael Goodwin sees far more wide-ranging problems ahead for America’s ‘intelligence’ agencies as the anti-Trump ‘secret society’ and lovers-texts-gate debacles threaten the core of the Deep State.

Goodwin writes that, during the financial crisis, the federal government bailed out banks it declared “too big to fail.” Fearing their bankruptcy might trigger economic Armageddon, the feds propped them up with taxpayer cash.

Something similar is happening now at the FBI, with the Washington wagons circling the agency to protect it from charges of corruption. This time, the appropriate tag line is “too big to believe.”

Yet each day brings credible reports suggesting there is a massive scandal involving the top ranks of America’s premier law enforcement agency. The reports, which feature talk among agents of a “secret society” and suddenly missing text messages, point to the existence both of a cabal dedicated to defeating Donald Trump in 2016 and of a plan to let Hillary Clinton skate free in the classified email probe.

If either one is true — and I believe both probably are — it would mean FBI leaders betrayed the nation by abusing their powers in a bid to pick the president.

More support for this view involves the FBI’s use of the Russian dossier on Trump that was paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It is almost certain that the FBI used the dossier to get FISA court warrants to spy on Trump associates, meaning it used the opposition research of the party in power to convince a court to let it spy on the candidate of the other party — likely without telling the court of the dossier’s political link.

Even worse, there is growing reason to believe someone in President Barack Obama’s administration turned over classified information about Trump to the Clinton campaign.

As one former federal prosecutor put it, “It doesn’t get worse than that.” That prosecutor, Joseph ­diGenova, believes Trump was correct when he claimed Obama aides wiretapped his phones at Trump Tower.

These and other elements combine to make a toxic brew that smells to high heaven, but most Americans don’t know much about it. Mainstream media coverage has been sparse and dismissive and there’s a blackout from the same Democrats obsessed with Russia, Russia, Russia.

Partisan motives aside, it’s as if a scandal of this magnitude is more than America can bear — so let’s pretend there’s nothing to see and move along.

But, thankfully the disgraceful episode won’t be washed away, thanks to a handful of congressional Republicans, led by California Rep. Devin Nunes, chairman of the House’s Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. After he accused the FBI of stonewalling in turning over records, the bureau relented, at least partially.

The result was clear evidence of bias against Trump by officials charged with investigating him and Clinton. Those same agents appear to have acted on that bias to tilt the election to Clinton.

In one text message, an agent suggests that Attorney General Loretta Lynch knew while the investigation was still going on that the FBI would not recommend charges against Clinton.

How could she know unless the fix was in?

All roads in the explosive developments lead to James Comey, whose Boy Scout image belied a sinister belief that he, like his infamous predecessor J. Edgar Hoover, was above the law.

It is why I named him J. Edgar Comey last year and wrote that he was “adept at using innuendo and leaks” to let everybody in Washington know they could be the next to be investigated.

It was in the office of Comey’s top deputy, Andrew McCabe, where agents discussed an “insurance policy” in the event that Trump won. Reports indicated that the Russia-collusion probe was that insurance policy.

The text was from Peter Strzok, the top investigator on the Trump case, and was sent to Lisa Page, an FBI lawyer and also his mistress.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way he gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk. It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40 . . . ” Strzok wrote.

It is frightening that Strzok, who called Trump “an idiot,” was the lead investigator on both the Clinton and Trump cases.

After these messages surfaced, special counsel Robert Mueller removed Strzok and Page from his probe, though both still work at the FBI.

Strzok, despite his talk of an “insurance policy” in 2016, wrote in May of 2017 that he was skeptical Mueller’s probe would find anything on Trump because “there’s no big there there.”

Talk about irony. While Dems and the left-wing media already found Trump guilty of collusion before Mueller was appointed, the real scandal might be the conduct of the probers themselves.

Suspicions are hardly allayed by the fact that the FBI says it can’t find five months of messages between Strzok and Page, who exchanged an estimated 50,000 messages overall. The missing period — Dec. 14, 2016 through May 17, 2017 — was a crucial time in Washington.

There were numerous leaks of classified material just before and after Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

And the president fired Comey last May 9, provoking an intense lobbying effort for a special counsel, which led to Mueller’s appointment on May 19.

Jeff Sessions, the attorney general, has emerged from his hidey hole to notice that the FBI has run amok, and said Monday he would “leave no stone unturned” to find the five months of missing texts.

Fine, but the House is racing ahead of him. Nunes has prepared a four-page memo, based on classified material that purportedly lays out what the FBI and others did to corrupt the election.

A movement to release the memo is gaining steam, but Congress says it might take weeks. Why wait? Americans can handle the truth, no matter how big it is.

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Featured image is from Zero Hedge.

Featured image: Image of Agni-V missile launch. (Source: Page 9 of this PIB file)

India’s successful test launch of the Agni 5 ICBM reignited the Asian missile race by disrupting the strategic balance with China & Pakistan and sparking a more pronounced security dilemma than before. Up until last week, it was doubtful that India could ever target China’s eastern seaboard cities in the event of a military confrontation, thus limiting any potential clash between the two to whichever border region or perhaps even maritime space that it breaks out in, but that state of affairs was just smashed after New Delhi proved that it could potentially strike deep into the People’s Republic if the order was given.

On the one hand, this promotes the concept of “mutually assured destruction” by somewhat equalizing the missile capabilities of these two Asian Great Powers and theoretically making war between them less likely, but on the other hand, that very same logic could be abused by India in a bid to keep China at bay if it ever engages in another conventional war with Pakistan. The surge of confidence that the successful Agni 5 launch has imbued India’s decision makers is causing fear throughout the region, especially since New Delhi made a highly publicized show of standing up to Beijing last summer over the Donglang/Doklam Plateau.

Suddenly confronted with a new strategic challenge, China might opt to invest in and ultimately deploy a missile defense shield to protect against this threat, as could Pakistan, both of which would in any case be following in India’s own footsteps to set up this technology. The problem, however, is that the US might interpret their moves as being a cover for fielding systems that could secretly have the dual purpose of restricting the American Air Force’s freedom of movement in the East & South China Seas and via the Pakistani corridor to Afghanistan and Central Asia.

The situation is exceptionally dangerous because all four countries involved are nuclear powers, but there are also other tangential consequences relating to the peripheral players of Iran, North Korea, and Japan. It’s natural to expect the US to help Japan improve its missile capabilities in response to any advances made by China in countering India, while Iran and North Korea’s relevant programs are already developing independently of the others’ but inadvertently provide a pretext for the US to position its global missile defense infrastructure near their borders.

Altogether, the basis for the Asian missile race was established long ago, but nowadays this competition is slated to heat up with unpredictably destabilizing results following the Agni 5’s successful test launch.

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

In 1991, US public health authorities began recommending that all infants get the hepatitis B (HepB) vaccine, stipulating that they receive three doses within the first six months of life, starting at birth. The World Health Organization (WHO) followed suit with its own recommendation in 1992, instructing countries to vaccinate from birth even where hepatitis B virus was uncommon. Two 2018 studies (one in the US and one in India) take a closer look at the outcomes and implications of these blanket prescriptions. Although the studies focus on different aspects of their countries’ respective vaccine programs, both are cautionary tales, highlighting the fact that one-size-fits-all vaccine recommendations frequently steamroll over important biological risks and immune system subtleties, thereby introducing troublesome unintended consequences.

U.S. children and taxpayers on the hook

Until the early 2000s, the HepB vaccine in the US contained organic ethylmercury in the form of the preservative thimerosal—totaling 37.5 micrograms across the three doses. Regulators have never bothered to set any safety standards for ethylmercury, but government researchers have shown that the toxicity mechanisms of ethyl- and methylmercury (the type of mercury found in fish) are similar, and some believe that even the tiniest amounts carry a risk of adverse neuropsychological outcomes.

Fixated on the sole indicator of increasing HepB vaccine coverage, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) bragged in 2002 about having achieved a 90% national coverage rate in young children. However, a 2018 cross-sectional study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health strongly suggests that the 1990s-era thimerosal-containing HepB vaccine had far less praiseworthy consequences, causing considerable harm to children and also exacting a high price from US taxpayers.

The researchers used National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) data to consider 1,192 boys aged 7-8 years—a sample statistically representative of over 24 million American boys. Building on their own and others’ prior research linking thimerosal to developmental disabilities, they considered boys who either did or did not receive three doses of thimerosal-containing (1994–2000) or thimerosal-reduced (2001–2007) HepB vaccine in infancy (the “exposure”), defining the outcome as increased long-term risk of receiving special education services. They restricted their sample to boys because of males’ greater susceptibility to mercury toxicity.

For the subgroup born between 1994 and 2000, boys who received three doses of thimerosal-containing HepB vaccine were at a more than nine-fold significantly higher risk of receiving special education services compared to boys receiving no doses of HepB vaccine. Extrapolating to the US population as a whole, this means that almost 1.3 million US boys born from 1994-2000 received special education services directly attributable to receiving three doses of thimerosal-containing HepB vaccine—costing taxpayers over $180 billion. An earlier study by some of the same authors found that in the decade from 1991–2001, exposure to thimerosal-containing HepB vaccines in the first six months of life resulted in an estimated 0.5–1 million US children being diagnosed with learning disabilities, representing lifetime costs in excess of $1 trillion.

Vaccine-induced versus natural immunity

As noted, the WHO has strongly promoted universal HepB vaccination and particularly the initial birth dose. However, in India, which introduced the HepB vaccine around 2006, approximately three-fifths (61%) of women deliver at home rather than in a health facility, making it next to impossible for health providers to administer newborn vaccines. In recognition of these realities, the Indian government’s two-pronged policy is to give HepB vaccine at birth to the 39% of babies born in institutional settings but to otherwise administer the first dose at six weeks. About 45% of Indian children receive the birth dose (although the WHO wants to double that number); irrespective of timing, 86% of Indian children reportedly receive all three HepB doses. However, India is home to an estimated one-third of the world’s unvaccinated children, meaning that many children still do not receive any HepB vaccine at all.

A 2018 study published in the Indian Journal of Pediatrics took advantage of these ready-made comparison groups. The multiregional study (2013–2015) recruited children 1-5 years of age who were already having blood drawn and whose parents consented to hepatitis B testing (N=2,671). Three-fifths (59%) of the children had received at least three doses of HepB vaccine, and just over half of these (880/1566) had their first dose at birth. The research team considered several intriguing questions:

1. Are there any differences in vaccine efficacy for the two HepB schedules (birth dose versus six-week dose)? After testing all samples for a marker of chronic hepatitis B infection, the investigators concluded that birth vaccination offered “no added protection”—lending support to the government’s “pragmatic” approach of waiting until six weeks to vaccinate babies born at home.
2. What are the levels of protective antibodies in fully HepB-vaccinated children, and do they change over time or according to birth dose? The researchers measured antibodies in a subset of 865 children who had received three doses of HepB vaccine. Seven in ten (70%) had protective levels of antibodies—but 30% of fully HepB-vaccinated children did not [emphasis added]. Moreover, when the researchers considered the children’s age, they found that vaccine-induced protection waned rapidly and significantly, falling from 82% of under-one-year-olds to 47% of five-year-olds. Receiving a birth dose made no difference.
3. What are the levels of protective antibodies in children who have not received any HepB vaccine? Finally, the researchers examined hepatitis B immunity in 370 children who had never received any HepB vaccine. Nearly half (45%) of non-HepB-vaccinated one-year-olds were naturally immune, and 29% still had antibody protection at age 5. The researchers credited these protective levels of antibodies to natural, passively acquired immunity from unvaccinated mothers.

Overzealous promotion

The results of the two hepatitis B studies touch on many facets of the vaccine debate that the public health community is rarely, if ever, willing to discuss. These largely ignored topics include:

• The ongoing, adverse neurodevelopmental impact of toxic vaccine ingredients such as aluminum adjuvants and thimerosal, which is still present in annual flu shots, some meningococcal meningitis vaccines and the Td (tetanus-diphtheria) booster;
• The fact that economic and political factors—rather than vaccine effectiveness—are often key drivers of decisions about vaccine timing and schedules;
• The failure of HepB (and other) vaccines to reliably generate protective antibody levels in all fully vaccinated individuals—this phenomenon of impaired immunogenicity is a widely known “Achilles’ heel” of many vaccines; and
• The corresponding (and vastly underestimated) importance of natural immunity.

Regarding this latter point, the authors of the Indian HepB research, led by Dr. Jacob Puliyel, call attention to the “surprising” persistence of passively acquired hepatitis B antibodies in their own study population and in other studies. Pointing to studies of measles immunity, they note that mothers in highly measles-vaccinated communities have lower antibody levels and, therefore, far less ability to confer passive protection to their babies. This is because the measles vaccine “induces lower antibody levels than does natural infection and the antibody levels of vaccinated cohorts are no longer boosted by exposure to wild-type infection.” A study in the Czech Republic that compared 18-29-year-olds who were vaccinated and unvaccinated for mumps found that only 19% of vaccinated individuals in that age group had acquired immunity versus almost half (48%) of the unvaccinated, leading to the conclusion that only natural infection can lead to “long-term persistence of antibodies.” A growing number of studies also are indicating that prior exposure to natural infections such as measles and mumps may be health-protective later in life.

Back in 2003, Dr. Puliyel wrote a letter to the editor that questioned other researchers’ overestimation of the benefits of hepatitis B vaccination in terms of vaccine efficacy and cost per life-year saved. The letter concluded with a caution to guard against “overzealous” vaccine promotion. In the current climate of an ever-expanding vaccine schedule and hundreds more vaccines in the pipeline, those words of warning seem timelier than ever.

Carillion’s failure has been compared to the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, but what the Lehman case shows is that you can engage in behaviour that puts millions out of work, and destroys the hopes of a generation, and not pay any price, or significantly change your behaviour. Lehman was emphatically not a ‘watershed’: no one has paid a significant price for the greed, irresponsibility and criminal behaviour that was exposed when Lehman went bust. The challenge is to ensure that the Carillion moment will be different: that the ideology that has led to companies like Carillion fleecing the public and jeopardizing livelihoods finally gives way to a new common sense about how Britain must be run.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers showed that financial capital was out of control and had gambled with the livelihoods of everyone in the world – and lost. What has the collapse of Carillion shown? It has certainly shown up the dangers and fallacies of outsourcing, and of the use of private finance initiative (PFI) for public infrastructure: the unbelievable greed of today’s company directors, and their often almost equally unbelievable incompetence; the incapacity, or reluctance, of the government and other public bodies to enforce the fulfillment of contracts, especially when it will show how irresponsible the government was to entrust essential services to any private company; the conflict of interest of corporate auditors, and their consequent complicity in corporate wrongdoing; the fact that risk remains in reality with the public, even though a large element in the cost of contracts is to allow the private provider to insure against risk; and so on.

But these are not the issues we should be focusing on if Carillion is to become a watershed. They can be dealt with by piecemeal reforms. After Carillion no one – perhaps not even Theresa May’s perilously weak government – will be keen to propose new PFI infrastructure projects; and even defenders of public service outsourcing agree (perhaps belatedly) that it needs to be drastically curtailed: it should only be done, they now say, if “there is a market in the service [i.e. there are enough providers competing to provide it]; the difference between good and bad performance can be measured; and the service isn’t integral to the purpose and reputation of government.”

Neoliberal Myths

And the Labour Party is joining in this sort of discussion, proposing that outsourcing of services should only occur if a public service has ‘failed’, and only after public consultations. But this buys into the world view of neoliberalism and its myths and dogmas. It was not because hospital catering services were failing that Margaret Thatcher forced the NHS to outsource them, and while privatizing them may have made them cheaper it has not made them better; and how many people still think public consultations are anything but formal rituals before the implementation of decisions already made?

Source: The Bullet

More seriously, this response implies a future in which we will still be contemplating privatizing public services, rather than resourcing them adequately, and making them democratically accountable. It misses the point about Carillion, and the opportunity: instead of making Carillion a watershed moment, debating it on this level means getting bogged down in arguments within the existing framework of neoliberal thinking.

The Carillion debacle needs instead to be seen not in its details but in its essence, as yet another predictable product of an entire, discredited political project that we must unambiguously move beyond. Not just outsourcing, not just PFI, but the whole doctrine of ‘the market knows best’, of the downsized state, of allowing only corporations to plan, of abandoning the boundary between the civil service and the private sector. Yet – and this is still more important – even a categorical rejection of all that will not make Carillion a watershed moment. People will not abandon the existing policy regime simply because it leads to even such massive disasters as Carillion (and the collapse of the care home provider Southern Cross, the PIP, Libor, and foreign exchange scandals and so many other failures and crimes). Our lives are now so intimately attuned to the neoliberal model that unless we are directly injured by its failures we are liable to shrug fatalistically – unless something clearly better is on offer.

Democratizing the State

That something else can only be a rebuilt, democratized state. Rebuilding the state means not only restoring its capacity to plan, which has itself been outsourced (to management consultancies and corporate-funded think tanks), but also its capacity to provide public services. And it means rebuilding not only central government, but also local government, and giving it significant resources and autonomy.

This will require more revenue. We are now among the lowest tax jurisdictions in the EU; UK tax revenues are just 33% of GDP, compared with 40-45% in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Italy, Norway, and Sweden (Germany and the Netherlands are 38 and 39% respectively). No wonder the performance of the UK state is a litany of failures. A state capable of reorganizing the UK economy, protecting people from damage by market forces and empowering them to rebuild wrecked communities, will cost money. Market forces do not produce decent societies. Decent societies can only be created by governments with serious resources and strong public support.

And strong public support can only be earned by democratizing the state. No one now seriously pretends that the UK state is democratic. There is strikingly wide agreement that this very fact has led to Brexit: people seized the only chance they felt they had ever had to actually influence policy, however much the result is likely to be yet another disaster. What replaces the defunct neoliberal model must above all rest on new forms of democratic input and accountability at every level of government.

All this doesn’t mean saying little or nothing about Carillion itself, but what is said needs linking to the new progressive project for government that Labour has to develop, and could even do some immediate good. For example the National Audit Office (NAO) has just pointed out that the cost of buying out existing PFI contracts would be prohibitive. But Labour could make it clear that under a Labour government corporate shareholders in existing PFI projects would get no further government contracts of any kind unless they were willing to renegotiate the existing contracts to make them less unfavourable to the public. As a study from the Centre for Health and the Public Interest notes, just eight companies have major equity stakes in 92% of all 125 NHS PFI projects: in other words, there are companies a large part of whose business is in public sector contracts. Serving notice that they will not have a future in this business unless they are willing to give up drawing excessive profits from it now might well lead to a change of attitude to renegotiation.

Labour could also make it clear that with some exceptions, such as in relation to national security, under Labour public service contracts will be published in full, and that providers will be subject to the Freedom of Information Act in respect of all aspects of their performance of the contract – i.e. they will be treated like public providers of public services. This sounds simple, but it is largely the lack of transparency and accountability that has made outsourcing profitable, at the expense of service quality and the pay and conditions of employees. When this immunity is removed, the alleged efficiencies of private provision are likely to look much less plausible.

But while such specifics might help clear a small path for the new, progressive governmental project that is needed, the work of fleshing it out has hardly begun. If Carillion is to become a historic watershed this is the urgent task.

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Colin Leys is an honorary professor at Goldsmiths University of London and Professor Emeritus at Queen’s University, Kingston. He is the author of Market Driven Politics: Neoliberal Democracy and the Public Interest and, with Stewart Player, The Plot Against the NHS (Merlin Press, 2011).

Featured image is from the author.

Em 11 de setembro de 2012, aniversário de 11 anos dos ataques de 2001 dentro dos Estados Unidos, Donald Trump tuitou:

“84% das tropas dos EUA feridas & 70% dos nossos valentes homens & mulheres mortos no Afeganistão, têm ocorrido com Obama. Hora de sair de lá”.

Assim que chegou a Casa Branca, tanto o discurso quanto a prática mudaram completamente já fazendo o magnata nova-iorquino, proporcionalmente, o maior lançador de bombas e assassino de inocentes no Afeganistão.

“Qualquer um que se sente na Casa Branca, continuará servindo ao um por cento e espalhará guerras por todo o mundo para manter a hegemonia dos Estados Unidos. Muitas corporações, fabricantes de armas e empregadores de mercenários beneficiam-se com a própria guerra, ou das enormes oportunidades de reconstrução da destruição criadas pela guerra”, diz após 16 anos de ocupação norte-americana ao Afeganistão a ativista local que se identifica apenas como Friba, líder e porta-voz da Associação das Mulheres Revolucionárias do Afeganistão (RAWA, na sigla em inglês), cujas mulheres-membros atuam, todas, no anonimato em território afegão.

Em palestra na Rússia em agosto de 2016, em plena campanha presidencial de Donald Trump, o general Michael Flynn afirmou, jogando ainda mais gasolina sobre o fogo da “Guerra ao Terror”:

“Estamos enfrentando outro ‘ismo’; como enfrentamos o nazismo, o fascismo, o imperialismo e o comunismo. E o Islamismo, câncer terrível no corpo de 1,7 bilhão de pessoas neste Planeta, deve ser extirpado”.

Assim que o magnata nova-iorquino assumiu a Presidência da melhor democracia que o dinheiro pode comprar, em 20 de janeiro de 2017 exatamente Flynn foi apontado conselheiro de Segurança Nacional por Trump.

O Bilionário Negócio das Megamortes Sistemáticas

Trump tem dado ímpar contribuição ao acirramento do ódio religioso contra islamitas e árabes em geral, especialmente através da proibição da entrada de cidadãos de diversos países de maioria muçulmana, além do drástico aumento dos bombardeios sobre o território afegão.

Enquanto questionava, em campanha presidencial de 2016 por que os Estados Unidos ainda guerreavam no Afeganistão, até outubro de 2017 o regime de Trump despejou nada menos que 3.554 bombas no país sul-asiático. Em 2016 haviam sido 1.337, e 947 em 2015. Em setembro do ano passado, o mandatário estadunidense enviou mais três mil tropas ao Afeganistão.

Ao mesmo tempo, o Taliban espalha-se ainda mais pelo país – em fevereiro de 2017 ocupava 11% doterritório afegão, e 13% em agosto, o que significa acréscimo de 700 mil vivendo sob o regime terrorista –, o Estados Islamita recém-surgido revigora-se, e o número de civis mortos – inclusive pelos bombardeios estadunidenses – aumenta. Tudo isso servindo como justificativa para maior militarização por parte dos Estados Unidos, apoiados na distorção midiática sobre a Guerra do Afeganistão.

Sobre isso, a ativista afegã garante:

“O aumento do número de tropas dos Estados Unidos não torna o país seguro, nem derrota as criações dos Estados Unidos, o Taliban e o Estado Islamita, pelo contrário, funciona como mostra do poder norte-americano aos rivais Rússia, China e Irã”.

Relatório da Unama (Missão de Assistência das Nações Unidas no Afeganistão, na sigla em inglês) publicado em julho do ano passado afirmou que em seis meses, o regime de Trump já havia assassinado civis no Afeganistão a um nível superior em 67% comparado ao mesmo período do ano anterior.

Os lucros apenas com a invasão ao Afeganistão, mais longa guerra da história dos Estados Unidos, confirmam a relação entre as afirmações de Friba, as de Flynn e os criminosos ditos e feitos de Trump: em agosto de 2017 Neta Crawford, co-diretora de Cost of Wars Project da Brown University, estimou que o total gasto com as guerras no Iraque, Afeganistão e Paquistão desde 2001, está próximo dos cinco trilhões de dólares – apenas no Afeganistão, o regime de Washington já “investiu” cerca de 2 trilhões de dólares.

O gráfico abaixo apresenta os gastos militares anuais dos Estados Unidos no Afeganistão, de 2001 a 2017:

‘Nova’ Estratégia para o Afeganistão: Brincando de Tom & Jerry

Em 21 de agosto, o magnata nova-iorquino apresentou o que qualificou de Nova Estratégia para o Afeganistão, que implica ocupação por tempo indefinido até que o país asiático encontre-se totalmente seguro, e um acréscimo – por enquanto – de mais de 10 mil militares norte-americanos em solo afegão.

Eis a milenar tática dos poderes opressores: criar problemas para vender solução no que o povo afegão tem sido uma das maiores vítimas do mundo, senão a maior, desde que as Torres Gêmeas ruíram em 11 de setembro de 2001.

Por outro lado, já não se recorda mais que o objetivo da invasão norte-americana era capturar Osama bin Laden – quem, além de oficialmente morto, sempre negou ter tido qualquer participação nos maiores atentados terroristas em solo estadunidense de toda a história.

Tampouco as sociedades globais, nem sequer a norte-americana lembra-se do próprio Tuíte de Trump em 11 de setembro de 2012, mencionado no início – devido, especialmente, à torrente de informações e completamente fora de contexto por parte da grande mídia de embaralhamento do entendimento coletivo.

Terroristas ‘Made in West’

Enquanto no Afeganistão, assim como em todos os países onde aplica a “Guerra ao Terror”, os maiores assassinos são as forças estadunidenses, dentro de casa a maior parte dos atos terroristas é, de longe, perpetrada por cidadãos norte-americanos brancos e protestantes. Em penúltimo lugar da lista do FBI, aparecem os islamitas.

“Apesar de todas as diferenças, o objetivo dos Estados Unidos e do Irã no Afeganistão coincidem em uma questão: na promoção da ideologia fundamentalista, e na continuação do apoio aos fundamentalistas mais reacionários, mentalidade retrógrada e criminosos”, denuncia Friba ao apresentar um cenário bastante familiar aos latino-americanos, especialmente quando o assunto é guerra suja de Tio Sam que inclui a formação de fantoches entre as elites locais, projetados como celebridades e até intelectuais pela grande mídia subserviente aos ditames de Washington.

“Enquanto os Estados Unidos mataram centenas de afegãos revolucionários e libertários através de seus fundamentalistas nos anos de 1980 e 90, Washington usa tais táticas para evitar a ascensão de personagens nacionalistas, libertários e independentes além de forças que resistiriam à ocupação e opressão”.

Imperialismo Cultural: Capitalismo Seduzindo Almas Afegãs

Sobre a “compra” da alma de jovens afegãos abordada nesta entrevista, Friba havia comentado o seguinte de modo particular, em outubro de 2017, em resposta às observações deste comunicador de que, no Brasil e na América Latina em geral, há evidências de financiamento de Washington a jovens lacaios que inclui dóceis recepções das embaixadas estadunidenses, em seus respectivos países:

“Temos muita experiência com este tipo de ‘gentileza’ e encontros da Embaixada dos Estados Unidos com afegãos. O imperialismo dos Estados Unidos não se solidariza com a juventude, com mulheres e com crianças, nem com as suas próprias.“Os Estados Unidos nunca atuam em um país visando sua melhoria, mas por seus próprios interesses e objetivos. Enquanto os latino-americanos têm sido, há muito tempo, vítimas das mudanças de regime por parte de Washington, o Afeganistão tem experimentado a ocupação”.

Nesta entrevista, Friba  aprofunda-se na questão e, entre outros programas de “ajuda” estadunidense em solo afegão, fala de deste: o Leadership Program International Visitor (Programa de Liderança do Visitante Internacional), “que reverbera os métodos de treinamento da CIA”.

Cursos de líderes realizados em território estadunidense, sonho de consumo de parte da juventude latino-americana, especialmente religiosa (cuja estrutura é bem menos transparente que a da própria política além, é claro e nem poderia ser diferente dentro disso, ferrenha defensora do sistema vigente em nome de Deus), também são bastante comuns na formação de indivíduos que acabam glorificando raivosamente os “iguais” (entenda quem quiser) no lado de cá do planeta, vale destacar.

Lá tal qual cá, atuam inclusive em universidades e ONGs de fachada a fim de impor no imaginário coletivo que a ocupação norte-americana é natural e necessária, neutralizando com isso o engajamento da sociedade por um país livre e soberano.

O sistema de ensino afegão, observa Friba, está moldado pelo poder imperialista para inculcar os jovens “a aceitar a ocupação como natural e necessária a fim de salvar nosso país, e em um sentido mais amplo evitar falar em política”: alguém no Brasil já ouviu o difundido lema que diz que política não se discute? Pois é.

E segue Friba no mesmo sentido: “Evitar falar contra o governo e, especialmente, discutir temas progressistas”: é também por terras tupiniquins que, de maneira inédita a nível global, tenta-se enfiar goela abaixo da sociedade uma tal de Escola sem Partido, que proíbe o professor de apresentar matérias de maneira crítica para além do livro didático, estabelecendo debates e até mesmo expondo suas próprias ideias.

Isso tudo além de meios de comunicação autoproclamados “livres” que, de acordo com Friba, “trabalham ativamente no controle da opinião pública, em favor da colonização dos Estados Unidos”.

Neste último caso, a mesma USAID (famosa mundialmente por se tratar de ONG de fachada da CIA) que passou a atuar no sistema de ensino brasileiro logo após o golpe militar de 1964 – e formou as milhões e milhões de figuras tupiniquins dos perfeitos idiotas que tão bem quanto desgraçadamente conhecemos –, é a maior doadora financeira da grande mídia afegã.

Em contraposição a isso tudo, todos os anos, entre 6 e 8 de outubro, centenas de cidadãos progressistas como as mulheres da RAWA, saem às ruas de Cabul para protestar contra a invasão norte-americana em 7 de outubro de 2001 que apenas acirrou a violência, e multiplicou a produção de ópio de cuja planta se produz a heroína, cujo contrabando é traçado pela CIA.

Uma minoria local que tem estado na linha de frente contra quatro fortes inimigos locais: os senhores da guerra, os talibãs, as forças de ocupação dos EUA/OTAN, e o Estado Islamita recém-surgido.

E contra um falido sistema capitalista que não está tirando o país sul-asiático da miséria nem da extrema violência, o que o capitalismo é incapaz de fazer. Pelo contrário: está afundando ainda mais o Afeganistão no lamaçal e na vergonha mundial, utilizando-se de todos os recursos para executar exatamente aquilo que garante sua sobrevivência mundo afora: comprar consciências, calar vozes mais covardes e propagandear um universo que não existe sequer nas imaginações mais ingênuas.

Narcotráfico Afegão Traçado pela CIA

 Gráfico das Nações Unidas mostra o meteórico crescimento da produção de ópio no Afeganistão após a invasão dos Estados Unidos, batendo recordes ano a ano atingindo a cifra de 224 mil hectares em 2016.

 Às vésperas de tal invasão, essa produção havia sido praticamente erradicada, encontrando-se na faixa das 8 mil hectares de ópio produzido em 2001, para logo no ano seguinte saltar para 74 mil.  “A produção de droga e do narcotráfico constituem-se a base da nossa economia, com milhões de viciados como seu sinistro resultado”, lamenta Friba.

Diante de tais números (nada divulgados pela grande mídia de manipulação das massas), vale ressaltar que a sociedade estadunidense é a maior consumidora de drogas do mundo. 

Pois o narcotráfico é tão comprovado quanto antigo financiamento aos empreendimentos imperialistas por todo o mundo – Irã-Contras foi um dos escândalos mais emblemáticos neste sentido, envolvendo diretamente Ronald Reagan e a própria CIA.

O Que a Grande Mídia Não Quer Ver

Tudo isso comenta na conversa a seguir a porta-voz das revolucionárias afegãs, como sempre de maneira muito aberta, contundente e precisa em cima de fatos, e dados estatísticos envolvendo a criminosa “Guerra ao Terror”.

Irmã siamesa da “Guerra às Drogas”, trata-se de empreendimento imperialista essencial no projeto de dominação global dos Estados Unidos sob precário verniz maniqueísta planejado, muito antes de 11 de setembro de 2001, para ser uma batalha sem fim atrás dos interesses econômicos e geoestratégicos do Império moribundo, o mais terrorista da história da humanidade que forma parceria de relativo sucesso com a grande mídia de imbecilização em massa e, de acordo com Friba, com os piores criminosos afegãos e regionais que, blindados por Washington, gozam do poder local e aterrorizam livremente a sociedade. *

Edu Montesanti: Fale do protesto do último dia 6 de outubro, em Cabul.

 RAWA: O protesto de 6 de outubro foi organizado Partido Solidariedade Afeganistão [SPA, na sigla em inglês], contra o 16^º aniversário da invasão dos Estados Unidos ao Afeganistão. O SPA é um partido nacionalista e progressista que defende a independência, a liberdade, a democracia, o secularismo e a igualdade.  Este protesto é realizado todos os anos, em outubro.

Os manifestantes exigiram o fim da ocupação e da intervenção dos Estados Unidos e seus aliados no Afeganistão, além de outros poderes regionais. Eles levaram cartazes expondo os terríveis crimes dos Estados Unidos no Afeganistão, e exigiram o fim da ocupação através de lemas como “Não à ocupação!”, “Não às bases militares dos EUA/OTAN no Afeganistão!”, ‘Com EUA/OTAN, paz e prosperidade são apenas miragens!”, entre outros.

O Partido também condenou os fantoches do governo afegão, compostos por criminosos fundamentalistas jihadistas, e o recente acordo de paz formalizado com Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

O SPA também organiza manifestações em 28 de abril, dia em que os fundamentalistas jihadistas criminosos tomaram o poder em Cabul, em 1992 – os mesmos jihadistas que formam o governo fantoche dos Estados Unidos hoje –, e em solidariedade aos movimentos libertários internacionais, tal como a luta curda.

Edu Montesanti: Particularmente, você tem me falado de muitos jovens afegãos “comprados” pelo regime de Washington. Eu mesmo, como já lhe disse, conheci alguns desses fantoches afegãos que receberam bolsas de estudo nos Estados Unidos e conquistaram espaço na mídia local, de maneira que pude comprovar a fanática agressividade diante de toda e qualquer crítica à ocupação norte-americana ao Afeganistão, claramente decorrente de um profundamente cérebro lavado. Detalhe isto, Friba.

RAWA: Há quarenta anos, os Estados Unidos começaram a trabalhar em seu projeto, investindo na juventude afegã a fim de torna-los seus quadros para os objetivos de longo no Afeganistão.

A CIA educou e treinou seus lacaios, política e militarmente, criando lacaios leais que constituiriam seu futuro governo fantoche após tomarem o pode no Afeganistão, e ajudou a realizar confortavelmente seus objetivos.

Entre seus primeiros recrutados, através de programas como Peace Corp e matrículas na Universidade Americana de Beirute, estavam Zalmai Khalilzad, Hamid Karzai, Ashraf Ghani, Farooq Wardak, Azizullah Ludin, Yousuf Pashtun, e Anwar Ahadi, que lideraram o governo afegão e outras posições-chave do poder desde 2001.

Período de educação norte-americana

2001 assistiu a uma nova onda de programas que treinaram a juventude para servir à ocupação dos Estados Unidos. Infelizmente, esses agentes educados e treinados pelos Estados Unidos têm crescido no Afeganistão, e continuam aumentando através de programas como Fulbright Program – o Afeganistão é o maior receptor deste programa de bolsas de estudo atualmente –, além de Leadership Program International Visitor, que reverbera os métodos de treinamento da CIA.

Além dos proeminentes títeres mencionados anteriormente, há novos quadros tais como Amrullah Saleh, Hanif Atmar, Nader Naderi, Javed Ludin, Asad Zamir, Wahid Omar, Siddique Siddiqui, Sima Samar, Dadfar Spanta, Saad Mohseni, Javad Tayyab, Azam Dadfar, Daud Muradyan, entre outros.

Após décadas de investimento, hoje os Estados Unidos têm uma quantidade suficiente de burocratas civis para formar várias gerações de traidores fantoches no Afeganistão.

É importante mencionar que décadas depois do colapso do propalado regime comunista de 1978 a 1992, das facções Khalqi e Parchami, muitos agentes afegãos da KGB e diversos outros lacaios juntaram-se aos círculos dos lacaios estadunidenses, isto é, os mercenários fundamentalistas islamitas enquanto eles tomavam o poder após 1992.

Hanif Atmar, um dos mais importantes personagens do atual governo, foi um cruel torturador e assassino de revolucionários e intelectuais durante o período de Khalq e Parcham. Farid Mazdak, Noor ul Haq Oloomi, Mohammad Gulabzoy, Dastgeer Panjsheri, Abdullah Shadan, Shahnawaz Tanai, que era ministro de durante o governo fantoche dos soviéticos mas deu as mãos aos infames senhores da guerra fundamentalistas, Gulbuddin em uma tentativa de golpe, Khalil Zimar, entre outros.

Escritores como Latif Pedram, Rahnaward Zaryab, Partaw Naderi, Wasif Bakhtari, entre outros, também seguiram o mesmo caminho e estão servindo ao governo fantoche dos Estados Unidos atualmente.

O número de ONGs no Afeganistão aumentou dramaticamente após a invasão dos Estados Unidos, outra ferramenta nas mãos de Washington para neutralizar nossa juventude da luta revolucionária contra os invasores estrangeiros, e seus lacaios locais.

Essas ONGs recebem enormes somas em dinheiro da Embaixada dos Estados Unidos e de infames organismos como USAID, também amplamente envolvida em criminosos projetos antipopulares na América Latina desde seu início, e criaram uma nova e falsa classe de jovens que are recebendo grandes somas em dinheiro, em troca de se colocar em prática os objetivos norte-americanos em nosso país.

A difusão desse “imperialismo cultural” tem sido sempre a função das ONGs financiadas pelos Estados Unidos em todo o mundo. A juventude dessas ONGs hoje só vê os interesses dos Estados Unidos no Afeganistão, e fazer propaganda para os Estados Unidos, não em favor de seu povo ou de seu país.

Esses jovens têm sofrido lavagem cerebral através de dinheiro e poder, além de promessas de uma confortável vida fora no exterior, distanciando-os da luta nacionalista e progressista pela independência e liberdade do país.

Grupos fundamentalistas de mentalidade retrógrada, tais como Jamiate Islahe Afghanistan, uma organização Salafi, são igualmente financiadas pelos dólares norte-americanos a fim de difundir a ideologia Ikhwai, e ideias retrógradas entre nossa juventude.

Esses novos recrutas não apenas ocupam posições de alto escalão no Estado, como são também os criadores e doadores da maioria das ONGs e da propalada mídia “livre” do Afeganistão. Esses meios de comunicação trabalham ativamente no controle da opinião pública, em favor da colonização dos Estados Unidos. A USAID é, também neste caso, a maior doadora desses órgãos no Afeganistão.

As Universidades, tanto particulares quanto públicas, também segue a programa de estudos e um método de ensino pró-imperialismo e pró-Estados Unidos, particularmente pró-ocupação estadunidense.

Os jovens são ensinados a aceitar a ocupação como natural e necessária a fim de salvar nosso país, e em um sentido mais amplo evitar de se falar em política, contra o governo e, especialmente, evitar discutir temas progressistas e revolucionários.

Quando o atual presidente, Ashraf Ghani, foi nomeado reitor da Universidade de Cabul em 2005, garantiu que nenhuma discussão nem atividades políticas fossem realizadas no campus.

Todos esses esforços ajudaram a evitar a emergência de uma força ativa anti-ocupação por parte da juventude.

O Irã tem tido grande sucesso no Afeganistão no sentido de espalhar influência cultural e política no Afeganistão também, talvez ainda mais que os próprios Estados Unidos.

Nas últimas três décadas, o regime teocrático iraniano investiu e atuou com seus agentes traidores afegãos, tanto militares quanto intelectuais, além de ter criado e financiado partidos e organizações islamitas fundamentalistas de sua própria espécie no Afeganistão, como o Partido Wahdate Islami, Ittelaf Milli, e Harkate Sheikh Mohseni.

Hoje, além de colaborar com o criminoso Taliban e comprar pessoas do governo – o ex-presidente Karzai admitiu que seu gabinete recebeu malas de dinheiro do Irã -, Teerã possui uns tantos propalados “intelectuais” à sua disposição, os quais são porta-vozes do regime fascista iraniano e atuam ativamente nos canais de TV e jornais financiados pelos iranianos a fim de espalhar o vírus iraniano Vilayat-e Faqih em nosso país, e educar e treinar a juventude com o mesmo propósito. Entre eles estão Kazim Kazimi, Husseini Mazari, Rizwani Bamyani, Noor Rahman Akhlaqi, Zikria Rahil, Jawad Mohseni, entre outros.

Exatamente como os Estados Unidos, o Irã também exerce suas atividades encobertas de inteligência e culturais em nosso país sob ditos populares como “ajuda humanitária”, além de propaladas organizações de caridade como a Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation. Essas atividades marcam a mais perigosa espécie de intervenção do regime iraniano.

Como disse um funcionário do governo de alto escalão ao Wall Street Journal em 2012, “O Irã exerce a verdadeira influência aqui. Com um estralar de dedos, eles podem mobilizar 20 mil afegãos. Isso é muito mais perigoso que os homens-bomba vindos do Paquistão”.

Apesar de todas as diferenças, o objetivo dos Estados Unidos e do Irã no Afeganistão coincidem em uma questão: na promoção da ideologia fundamentalista, e na continuação do apoio aos fundamentalistas mais reacionários, mentalidade retrógrada e criminosos. Essa é a razão pela qual os Estados Unidos não detêm tais atividades em nosso país.

Os Estados Unidos nunca atuam em um país visando sua melhoria, mas por seus próprios interesses e objetivos. Enquanto os Estados Unidos têm matado centenas de revolucionários e libertários afegãos através dos mercenários fundamentalistas nos anos de 1980 e 90, Washington usa tais táticas para evitar a ascensão de personagens nacionalistas, libertários e independentes além de forças que resistiriam à ocupação e opressão.

Edu Montesanti: Como você vê o Afeganistão desde que Donald Trump assumiu a Presidência em janeiro de 2017, em comparação aos anos do ex-presidente Obama? E qual sua visão, especialmente, da nova estratégia do presidente Trump para seu país?

RAWA: Apesar das diferenças em políticas domésticas, o que é absolutamente certo é que a política externa dos Estados Unidos não muda com novos presidentes. A situação do Afeganistão não mudou e nem mudará com Trump, em relação ao que foi com Obama.  As guerras de Trump, como as de Obama e de Bush, são guerras de conquista.

Qualquer um que se sente na Casa Branca, continuará servindo ao um por cento e espalhará guerras por todo o mundo para manter a hegemonia dos Estados Unidos. As corporações norte-americanas querem o petróleo e as riquezas naturais dos países ocupados, privatizar companhias estatais e vender produtos dos Estados Unidos nos novos mercados que a guerra abre a eles. Muitas corporações, fabricantes de armas e empregadores de mercenários beneficiam-se com a própria guerra, ou das enormes oportunidades de reconstrução da destruição criadas pela guerra.

O período de Trump, mais que qualquer outro antes, evidencia as rachaduras no sistema decadente e apodrecido dos Estados Unidos. O próprio fracasso continuado de Trump em montar seu gabinete e a equipe de governo, alegações de interferência russa nas eleições, os conflitos entre a Casa Branca e o Congresso, a guerra perdida na Síria, os atoleiros de guerra no Afeganistão e Iraque, e a overall deterioração da situação da própria sociedade estadunidense – aumento das desigualdades, precárias instalações sociais, tiroteios em massa, galopante racismo contra afro-americanos e outras minorias, entre outras inúmeras questões –, são apenas alguns problemas dos Estados Unidos.

Por sua vez, as enormes conquistas financeiras e econômicas de Rússia e China também freiam o poder e a arrogância de Washington. Os Estados Unidos têm negado sua derrota, e está desesperadamente s agarrando à última esperança em relação à dominação global através da ocupação do Afeganistão.

Os ataques com bombas MOAB [Massive Ordnance Air Blast, também conhecidas como a “Mãe de Todas as Bombas] e o aumento de tropas são demonstrações de poder aos seus rivais. Os Estados Unidos sabem que se deixarem o Afeganistão, repetir-se-á o pesadelo da Guerra do Vietnã, o que não pode ser permitido diante dos poderes emergentes que são Rússia e China.

Apesar da enorme cobertura midiática envolvendo a propalada “nova estratégia” anunciada por Trump, a estratégia, na verdade, não traz nada novo. É a continuação das políticas belicistas e  agressivas dos Estados Unidos, as quais afundarão nosso país na ocupação e nas sangrentas rivalidades dos poderes globais.

Os objetivos de longo prazo dos Estados Unidos em nosso país e na região, permanecem inalterados – ocupar o Afeganistão em nome de seus interesses geoestratégicos, de total dominação para superar rivais econômicos, Rússia e China.

A flutuação do número de tropas, que tem ocorrido nos últimos dezesseis anos, não muda e não tem mudado com essa estratégia. Só agora, os Estados Unidos planejam pilhar os minérios do Afeganistão, que valem bilhões de dólares, na tentativa de financiar seus novos custos de guerra. Trump mencionou seu interesse no assunto em uma conversa por telefone com Ashraf Ghani, e o presidente traidor aceitou o pedido imediatamente.

O aumento do número de tropas estadunidenses não torna o país seguro nem aniquila as criações dos Estados Unidos, o Taliban e o Estado Islamita, pelo contrário, servem para mostrar poder às rivais Rússia, China e Irã. O reforço do poder aéreo na nova estratégia matou dezenas de civis em bombardeios cegos, levados a cabo pelo criminoso exército dos Estados Unidos em diversas partes do Afeganistão em apenas poucas semanas.

As únicas pessoas que aplaudem esta “nova” estratégia são os líderes da máfia fantoche do governo do Afeganistão, e seus intelectuais lacaios pois seus mestres decidiram para prolongar a sua ameaçadora existência, estendendo sua estada em nosso país.

Não devemos nos deixar enganar ainda pela “pressão” dos Estados Unidos sobre o Paquistão. A história de ambos os países remonta a décadas, quando o imundo governo e o terrorista exército do Paquistão treinaram e exportaram os grupos mais sanguinários e reacionários do nosso país, de acordo com as ordens e os dólares da Casa Branca.

Os Estados Unidos estavam muito bem informados sobre o papel do Paquistão no empoderamento do Taliban nos últimos dezesseis anos, mas ainda assim forneceu bilhões de dólares e equipamento militar ao país pela proximidade ao governo fantoche de Cabul; o Ocidente precisa do Taliban para justificar sua presença militar no Afeganistão.

Basicamente, Trump attempted to drag o Paquistão e a Índia à guerra no Afeganistão, e advertiu o Paquistão pela crescente proximidade com Rússia e China, ao invés de realmente pressioná-los a deter o apoio ao Taliban e a outros grupos terroristas.

Edu Montesanti: O que você pode dizer hoje, em relação ao histórico narcotráfico em seu país traçado pela CIA?

RAWA: A CIA possui uma longa história de envolvimento com o tráfico global de drogas, em todas as partes do mundo sob controle dos Estados Unidos ou onde exerça considerável influência. Enquanto poucos casos tenham sido investigados e expostos por jornalistas, a questão continua debaixo das sombras.

A história da CIA com o comércio de drogas começou nos anos de 1980s. As drogas eram vistas como um meio rápido e fácil de financiar os CIA proxies e forças paramilitares, em diferentes países. Gary Webb, o corajoso jornalista que denunciou o escândalo do tráfico de drogas dos Contra Nicaraguense e que acabou sendo levado ao suicídio por causa de uma intensa campanha de desprestígio pela grande mídia, descreveu o processo desta maneira:

“Nós [a CIA] precisamos de dinheiro para uma operação secreta, e o mais rápido meio de levantá-lo é através da venda de cocaína; vocês a vendam em algum lugar, nós não sabemos de nada disso.”

Esta tática funcionou de maneira bastante exitosa no Afeganistão durante a Guerra Fria, quando as forças de mujahideen [combatentes] serviram os Estados Unidos foram financiados através das drogas.

Antes da invasão dos Estados Unidos em 2001, a produção de droga foi quase que completamente erradicada pelo Taliban. Logo após a invasão norte-americana [outubro de 2001], a produção de droga começou a crescer drasticamente e hoje o Afeganistão produz noventa por cento do ópio mundial, e à beira de tornar-se um narco-Estado. Há relatos de que forças estadunidenses admitiram que as drogas têm fluído do Afeganistão em aviões dos Estados Unidos.

Ahmad Wali Karzai, o hoje morto governador da província de Kandahar, foi em determinado período o maior traficante de drogas não apenas do Afeganistão, mas também da região. Durante todo o tempo, ele foi pago pela CIA. Tem havido até mesmo reconhecimentos de funcionários estadunidenses diretamente envolvidos com as operações da droga no Afeganistão, sobre o envolvimento da CIA.

Fonte: Nações Unidas

Edwrad Follis, agente da DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration] afirmou que a CIA “fechou um olho” ao comércio de drogas no Afeganistão. Mais recentemente, John Abbotsford, ex-analista da CIA e veterano de guerra que lutou no Afeganistão, confessou que a CIA desempenhou papel no narcotráfico.

Ainda que excluamos esses reconhecimentos e relatos, é difícil acreditar que uma superpotência que se jacta de sua moderna tecnologia em vigilância e em coleta de dados de inteligência, não seja capaz de encontrar campos de produção de ópio nem traçar rotas de suprimento dentro de um país que ocupa.

O fato de que oito bilhões de dólares tenham sido gastos em esforços na erradicação da droga na última década, mas a produção de ópio  tem aumentado meteoricamente, é por si só um indicador de que o negócio das drogas serve a determinados interesses dos Estados Unidos no Afeganistão, ou os norte-americanos poderiam tê-lo encerrado há muito.

Outros atores dos propalados esforços contranarcóticos são os contratistas privados dos Estados Unidos, que ganham milhões de dólares através dos contratos contranarcóticos. Um dos maiores beneficiários é a famosa companhia militar Blackwater, que de acordo com a RT obteve 569 milhões de dólares desses contratos.

Companhias particulares contratadas têm dividido enormes lucros com a guerra no Afeganistão, e essa fracassada guerra ás drogas resulta em enormes lucros para elas.

A produção de droga e do narcotráfico constituem-se a base da nossa economia, com milhões de viciados como seu sinistro resultado.

Artigo em inglês :

US Needs the Taliban to Justify Its Military Presence in Afghanistan, 11 de Janeiro de 2018

Featured image: Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei (Source: author)

Behind a façade of continuity, the deployment of U.S. armed forces in Syria for the purposes that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson described in a speech this week represents a departure from what such forces were originally sent to Syria to do. The Trump administration is having U.S. troops participate indefinitely in someone else’s civil war, for reasons that are quite different from the original stated objective of helping to quash the so-called caliphate of the Islamic State (ISIS or IS). The new reasons do not stand up to scrutiny in terms of defending any threatened U.S. interests. The administration has in effect made a decision to immerse the United States in yet another foreign war.

The territorial presence—the mini-state—that IS created in Iraq and Syria provided the occasion for the use of military force to go after the group. Many terrorist groups do not present good military targets. This one, because of the mini-state, did. But the mini-state is no more. Tillerson himself correctly said,

“Today, nearly all territory in Iraq and Syria once controlled by ISIS, or approximately 98 percent of all of that once United Kingdom-sized territory, has been liberated, and ISIS has not been able to regain one foot of that ground.”

IS can still cause trouble as a more traditional terrorist group and as an inspiration for jihadist violence. But as a military target, it has lost. The appropriate U.S. response to that defeat, given what was supposed to have been the mission of U.S. forces in Syria, would be to declare victory and go home.

Tillerson tried to make a case for an extended U.S. mission, partly by resurrecting the now-familiar assertion that the United States had made a “premature departure” of its troops from Iraq several years ago. As with the other times this assertion has come up, the secretary did not mention that the group that became IS did not exist prior to any U.S. troops entering Iraq, and that the group emerged as a direct result of the U.S. invasion and the ensuing internal war. Nor did Tillerson address how a continued modest troop presence could have done what an earlier U.S. military presence in Iraq of 160,000 troops could not do. Nor did he address how the George W. Bush administration, which negotiated the troop-withdrawal agreement, could have done anything substantially different in the face of strong Iraqi government resistance to extending the U.S. military presence.

Of course, the Syrian government has never agreed to the presence of the U.S. military. As the Russians never tire of reminding people, this makes the U.S. military presence different from that of Russia or Iran, and it means that the U.S. presence has no basis in international law.

Tillerson also tried to retain an IS-relevant basis for extending the U.S. presence by linking the Syrian regime to the group. It is true that in earlier stages of the Syrian civil war the regime was fighting less against IS than against other Syria opposition groups, mostly as a reflection of geography and of who posed an immediate threat to the more heavily populated regime-controlled areas in the western half of the country. And the regime was happy to make the propaganda point that it was a bulwark against such an abhorrent terrorist group.

But that was then, and now is something different. The Assad regime and IS are on the opposite ends of any political or religious spectrum imaginable. They are enemies. To the extent that IS still threatens to have an impact in Syria, the Syrian regime has at least as much of an incentive as anyone else to eliminate that threat.

The persistence of an IS threat in Syria will be less a function of a continued Assad regime than of a continued Syrian civil war. It was the war that gave IS a big boost a few years ago. It is the war that continues to breed the conditions that an extremist group—whether IS, al-Qaeda, or some other—can exploit. The U.S. policy course that Tillerson described, which includes not only the direct U.S. military presence but also the building up of a client militia, is a prescription for continuation of the war. The secretary said what one would expect the chief U.S. diplomat to say regarding the importance of resolving the conflict, but U.S. diplomacy has been playing at most a backseat role.

New Objectives

The U.S. military expedition in Syria is now, according to Tillerson’s own words, aiming at three things other than IS or terrorism. First, the notion of regime change lives on. Tillerson was explicit about that, saying that stability in Syria “requires post-Assad leadership” and that the United States will discourage every other nation from having any economic relationship with war-torn Syria until Assad has gone. Nowhere did the secretary explain why the end of a regime that, under Hafez as well as Bashar al-Assad, has been in power for 48 years should suddenly have become such a U.S. objective. Nor did he explain how, given that Assad, with the help of his Russian and Iranian supporters, has clearly shored up his regime’s position, what Tillerson prescribes will mean anything other than prolonged instability and confrontation in Syria.

Second, as with anything the Trump administration mentions about the Middle East, there is always the bogeyman of Iran. And as usual, Iran is described in general pejoratives—the lead adjective on the subject in Tillerson’s speech was “malignant”—without addressing exactly how Iran’s position in, and relationship with, Syria threatens any U.S. interests. Nor was there any recognition of the inconsistency of justifying a U.S. military intervention that was supposed to be about opposing IS by talking about malignancy on the part of a regional power that itself has been opposing IS, in Iraq and well as Syria.

Third, whenever there is a U.S. mention of Iran, the government of Israel cannot be far away. And indeed, Tillerson said,

“Iran seeks dominance in the Middle East and the destruction of our ally, Israel. As a destabilized nation and one bordering Israel, Syria presents an opportunity that Iran is all too eager to exploit.”

Of course, the United States and Israel have no mutual assistance security treaty. Nor did Tillerson suggest anything the United States would get out of doing Israel’s desired work in Syria. He also did not mention that Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East and that any thought of Iran trying to achieve the “destruction” of Israel, from Syria or anywhere else, is something between folly and fantasy.

Other Problems

Besides helping to prolong war and instability in Syria, the course Tillerson describes is a prescription for increased trouble within real alliances. He said, “We must have Turkey’s close cooperation in achieving a new future for Syria,” without mentioning how the client-arming scheme in northern Syria is anathema to the Turks. So now Syria may become the theater for a proxy war between two members of NATO.

The administration’s new policy is launched with disregard for the role of Congress in authorizing the overseas use of military force. For the past decade and a half, U.S. policy through three administrations has stretched the applicability of congressional resolutions centered on countering terrorism. Notwithstanding Tillerson’s words about a continued concern with IS, the new objectives in Syria turn the stretch into a break. The United States is putting its forces at war overseas to try to overthrow one Middle Eastern regime, to confront a second one, and to do the bidding of a third. None of those objectives involves combating terrorism, and none of them has been authorized as a mission for U.S. armed force by Congress.

It’s not clear exactly how this posture on Syria evolved and who had leading roles constructing it. But it is a far cry from the impression candidate Trump once gave that he favored contracting missions for U.S. armed force overseas rather than expanding them.

We should be questioning government more but we should also be challenging the mainstream sources of ‘news’ and ‘information,’ which are actually keeping people in the dark or, even worse, pulling the wool over our eyes.

Social and alternative media is very encouraging – this is where people should be getting more and more of their information, bypassing mainstream sources.

Documents

‘Memorandum of Conversation, “Summary of the President’s Telephone Conversation – Mrs. Margaret Thatcher, 28 December 1979’ (National Security Archive)

‘US embassy cables: Nato commander criticises British anti-drug strategy’ (US Embassy, Afghanistan, 6 April 2007)

‘US embassy cables: Karzai questions UK effectiveness’ (US Embassy, Afghanistan, 21 December 2008)

‘US embassy cables: UK “not up to task” of securing Helmand, says US’ (US Embassy, Afghanistan, 9 December 2008)

‘US embassy cables: Helmand governor criticises UK military strategy’ (US Embassy, Afghanistan, 20 January 2009)

‘US embassy cables: “UK military want to leave Sangin because of lack of popular support”’ (US Embassy, Afghanistan, 14 January 2009)

Articles

1980s – mujahideen

Mark Curtis, ‘Training in terrorism: The Afghan jihad’ (Extract from Secret Affairs, 2010)

‘Secret UK Papers on Afghanistan Reveal Parallels With Syria War Tactics’ (Sputnik News, 24 August 2016)

‘Afghan militants trained in a barn in rural Sussex’ (Telegraph, 4 September 2011)

‘UK discussed plans to help mujahideen weeks after Soviet invasion of Afghanistan’, (Guardian, 30 December 2010)

‘Britain agreed secret deal to back Mujahideen’ (Telegraph, 30 December 2010)

Since 2000

‘A Dubious History of Targeted Killings in Afghanistan’ (Der Spiegel, 28 December 2014)

‘A triumph over secret justice’ (Daily Mail, 19 October 2013)

‘WikiLeaks cables expose Afghan contempt for British military’ (Guardian, 2 December 2010)

‘Afghanistan war logs: 90,000 classified documents revealed by Wikileaks’ (Telegraph, 26 July 2010)

‘Afghanistan war logs: Civilians caught in firing line of British troops’ (Guardian, 25 July 2010)

‘Detainee-torture allegations spread to Britain’ (Globe & Mail, 19 April 2010)

‘Blair, Musharraf Pledge to Fight Terror’ (Associated Press, 28 September 2006)

Featured image: Pharmaceutical waste in Hyderabad, India by Christian Baars

Many of the world’s leading drug manufacturers may be leaking antibiotics from their factories into the environment according to a new report from a drug industry watchdog. This risks creating more superbugs.

The report surveyed household-name pharmaceutical giants like GSK, Novartis and Roche as well as generic companies which make non-branded products for the NHS and other health systems.

None of the 18 companies polled would reveal how much antibiotic discharge they release into the environment, according to the independent report from the not-for-profit body, the Access to Medicine Foundation. Only eight said they set limits for how much could be released in wastewater.

Only one disclosed the name of its suppliers – a move which is seen as important as it would make companies accountable for their environmental practices.

Commenting on the report, Dr Mark Holmes, a veterinary scientist at the University of Cambridge, said:

“Antibiotic resistance is complex but if we are to deal with this challenge every sector must do their bit. The pharmaceutical industry has been a key player in improving public health but a failure to address environmental impacts of antibiotic pollution could undo much of their good work.”

Changing Markets, an NGO which has campaigned on the issue of pharmaceutical waste, added:

“Pharmaceutical companies have a clear responsibility to tackle pollution in their supply chains, not least because of the considerable human health impacts associated with untreated waste from pharma manufacturing, prime among the creation of drug-resistant bacteria. From our own research in India and China, where most of the world’s generic drugs are made, we know this is an ongoing problem and that very little progress is happening on the ground.

“As the report also highlights, there is a crying lack of transparency about pharmaceutical supply chains which means that we know practically nothing about where our drugs are made. This is a scandal and pharmaceutical companies will face increasing calls to do something about it.”

Antibiotic waste from pharmaceutical manufacturing leaking into the environment is a neglected driver of antimicrobial resistance – or AMR – according to a global report published in 2016 by ex-finance minister Lord Jim O’Neill. This is because residues of antibiotics in the environment expose bacteria to levels of the drugs that fuel the emergence of resistance. The ‘superbugs’ that form as a result can spread all over the world. To tackle the problem, Lord O’Neill called for regulators to set minimum standards around the release of waste and for manufacturers to drive higher standards through their supply chains.

AMR has been described as one of the greatest health problems facing the world. Without effective antibiotics, infections become more difficult to treat and common medical procedures like joint replacements, C sections and chemotherapy care for cancer – which rely on the drugs to kill infection – could become too risky to carry out.

Last year the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported on a study which revealed ‘excessively high’ levels of antimicrobial drugs – as well as superbugs – in waste water from a major drug production hub in the Indian city of Hyderabad. The quantities found were strong enough to treat patients, scientists said. This followed an earlier report by the i and the Bureau of resistant bacteria in the wastewater of a factory there which supplies the NHS with antibiotics.

Table shows which pharmaceutical companies have a strategy to minimise the environmental impact of antibiotic discharge from manufacturing; whether they audit their own plants, third party suppliers or external waste treatment plants which they use to dispose of their waste; and whether they set limits for the amount of antibiotic discharge is released into wastewater (either at their own plants or across external suppliers and external waste treatment plants). It shows only eight companies have set limits for antibiotic discharge, and in the majority of cases these do not apply across their entire supply chains. Antimicrobial Resistance Benchmark Report 2018 by the Access to Medicines Foundation

The Antimicrobial Resistant Benchmark 2018 report – released today at the World Economic Forum conference in DAVOS – evaluated how a cross-section of the pharmaceutical industry are responding to the threat of AMR.

It found none disclosed their actual discharge levels – information the authors said is ‘valuable and vital’ as it could allow governments and researchers to understand the relationship between discharge and the development of superbugs.

Three generic drug companies – Cipla, Lupin and Sun Pharma – did not show any evidence of a strategy to minimise the impact of their antibiotic manufacturing on the environment, the report found, although Cipla promised to develop one this year.

Of particular concern were external companies that work for the main drug companies. Third-party companies manufacture and supply most drug firms with the key components of antibiotics, known as active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs); and external waste treatment plants, which many drug companies use to process their discharge from antibiotic manufacturing. Some companies have on-site wastewater-treatment.

Only eight companies set discharge limits for antibiotic waste, and for half the companies these limits only apply to their own sites, rather than their suppliers’ too. Only two companies  – GSK and Novartis – require their external waste treatment plants to follow their limits. Sanofi and Roche, for example, do not monitor the discharge made by their external waste treatment plants, the report notes.

The Medicines Company was the only one willing to identify its third-party manufacturers, a move the report said would enable governments and researchers to assess the impact of individual manufacturers on antibiotic resistance. The report notes that pharmaceutical companies that sell antibiotics “may be able to exert considerable influence over the environmental risk management of their suppliers.”

The large pharmaceuticals polled were GSK, Johnson and Johnson, Merck & Co, Novartis, Pfizer, Roche, Sanofi, Shinogi. The generic companies were Aspen, Aurobindo, Cipla, Dr Reddy’s, Fresenius Kabi, Lupin, Macleods, Mylan, Sun Pharma and Teva.

Access to Medicine is an Amsterdam-based NGO that receives funding from the UK Government, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

One thing can be said about the new Pentagon National Defense Strategy document just released under the name of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It is honest about what the target of US military policy is going forward. Washington military policy is explicitly aimed to keep China and Russia from developing any alternative counter-pole to unchallenged US military and political supremacy. The new document lays this out in no uncertain terms. The details are notable and show the disarray that is Washington today, as its once-firm grip on world power disintegrates.

The document is worth careful reading. In the declassified public version it states at the very introduction,

“Today we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order—creating a security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in US national security.”

To refer to the period as one of strategic atrophy is not entirely accurate for the power that has waged wars non-stop, direct and surrogate, from Asia to the Middle East to covert regime change operations around the world since it invaded Afghanistan in October 2001. Honest is the statement that the US strategic competitive military advantage has been eroding. This erosion, however is a direct consequence of the erosion of the US economy and the increasingly desperate efforts of Washington to dictate to the world according to their wishes and not respecting sovereignty of nations or peoples.

The key phrase is “Inter-state strategic competition, not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security.” What is this “inter-state strategic competition” that relegates the so-called war on terrorism to the back seat in priority? It is, simply said, the emergence of significant economic, technological and military powers and alliances that feel strong enough to assert their own national interest. For the Pentagon, which operates under the 1992 Wolfowitz Doctrine, strategic rivals to US sole superpower dominance, is not to be.

In 1992, Pentagon policy unofficially became what is called the Wolfowitz Doctrine. During the administration of President G.H.W. Bush as Washington was engaged in the looting and destruction of the former Soviet Union, using a CIA-asset named Boris Yeltsin as the vehicle, when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary, Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, authored the Defense Strategy for the 1990s. One of the original statements of that read:

“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere… to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.”

Undercutting the ‘Rules of the Road’

The new Mattis strategy document continues,

“China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system by exploiting its benefits while simultaneously undercutting its principles and ‘rules of the road.’”

This suggests that in the eyes of Washington for other nations to abide by the rules of the present system, including of the UN, to “exploit” its benefits for their gain, is a heinous or criminal act. The terminology suggests that Washington feels China and Russia are driving their role in the world today at a speed that is not to the liking of the Sole Superpower.

It gets even more interesting, as the US strategy paper calls China, “a strategic competitor using predatory economics to intimidate its neighbors while militarizing features in the South China Sea.” And for its part, it states,

“Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions of its neighbors.”

Mattis goes on to accuse China and Russia of wanting to, “shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.” The veto authority is clear reference to repeated China and Russia UN Security Council vetoes of US resolutions that would have long ago utterly destroyed Syria for purposes of a Washington re-carving the Middle East to its advantage. Mattis goes on to declare that,

“China is leveraging military modernization, influence operations, and predatory economics to coerce neighboring countries to reorder the Indo-Pacific region to their advantage.”

Predatory economics? The choice of adjective creates the emotional image without explanation. The Pentagon document omits the history of decades of Washington “predatory” economics in which the US wrote the international trade “rules of the road” for WTO, for finance, for competition to the unique advantage of US-based multinational corporations. That they call “free market.”

Then, in what is a clear reference to China’s major Belt, Road Initiative, its new Economic Silk Road, the Pentagon policy document attacks China as that country “continues its economic and military ascendance, asserting power through an all-of-nation long-term strategy.” It would be a major positive development were Washington itself to pursue a comparable infrastructure investment and an “all-of-nation long-term strategy.” That kind of national infrastructure investment to rebuild the huge deficit of lack of domestic USA investment does not seem to be on Washington’s agenda beyond the level of vague campaign promises about “making America great again.”

For its part, the Pentagon accuses Russia of seeking, “veto authority over nations on its periphery in terms of their governmental, economic, and diplomatic decisions, to shatter the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and change European and Middle East security and economic structures to its favor.” The Pentagon insists, “The use of emerging technologies to discredit and subvert democratic processes in Georgia, Crimea, and eastern Ukraine is concern enough, but when coupled with its expanding and modernizing nuclear arsenal the challenge is clear.

Conveniently omitted is the fact that it was Washington in 2014 that created what has been accurately called “the most blatant coup in US history” to install an anti-Russian regime of oligarchs and neo-Nazis in Ukraine and in Georgia, or that a citizen referendum in Crimea saw a vote of 93% to ask to become part of the Russian Federation, not of Ukraine. The idea Russia is out to “shatter” NATO conveniently omits the reality that Washington in 2003 broke solemn promises made in 1990 to the Russians that NATO would never expand eastwards towards Russia as a precondition for Moscow allowing German unification.

And it was Washington that in 2007 announced the destabilizing placement of US missiles in Poland and other NATO states aimed at Russia in what was euphemistically termed US “missile defense,” in reality preparation for a US nuclear First Strike potential aimed at Russia. Moreover the CIA and State Department created color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine in 2004 in a vain effort to bring NATO to the doorstep of Moscow.

In sum the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the Pentagon is a de facto declaration that the US superpower, bankrupt and ailing as it is, will do everything imaginable militarily to block the upbuilding of Eurasia around the peaceful emergence of the Russia-China economic cooperation in terms of energy, financial cooperation, infrastructure as well as defense cooperation and anti-terror activities.

The Mattis paper is honest in naming China and Russia by name as the central threat to a continued USA sole superpower hegemony. The consequences in terms of growing US military confrontation against both China and Russia, however, may present an economically-declining USA with the similar dilemma which the British Empire faced on the eve of World War I. US debt levels, deteriorated economic base and eroding support internationally for a President who acts like a petulant school brat, are not the most favorable backdrop to “make America great again.”

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

Featured image is from the author.

After the failure of the Republican and Democratic Senators to reach an agreement on a national budget, the federal government was shut down on January 19.

After three days of recriminations from both sides of the political aisles, the government was reopened on January 22. What is described as “essential services” were continued over the weekend of the closure.

Nonetheless, the character of the corporate and government-sponsored media in covering the shut down almost completely ignored the plight of federal employees and those who are recipients of their services. For example, amid a flu epidemic in dozens of states, workers at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would have been furloughed.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is ostensibly the last line of defense to ensure that people are not being subjected to unwarranted harm through actions carried out by corporations and governmental entities, would have been shuttered due to the legislative logjam. If there had not been a compromise on the third day of the shutdown, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), which during this period processes the tax returns of employees and business owners, those looking forward to a refund would have had to wait until the stalemate was resolved.

Democrats Abandon Immigrants and Working People

On day three of the crisis, the Democratic Party leadership in the Senate in essence capitulated to the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration and their Republican counterparts. Although the Republicans said they would continue the debate on the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA), where an estimated 800,000 people who came to the U.S. as children, remain undocumented.

The Trump administration is seeking funds for the construction of a supposed “security wall” along the border with Mexico. This was a key campaign propaganda plank of the current president during 2016. Not only would there be the building of a wall whereas the Mexican people would be forced to pay for the monumental project.

It does not appear at this time that the government of Mexico is going to assume the expenses of this security program initiated by the U.S. Just days prior to the temporary governmental closing Democratic Senators appeared to be willing to trade votes for funding the wall in exchange for a reprieve on the DACA residents.

Just one day after the Democrats signed on to an agreement to keep the government open for only another three weeks into early February, Senator Charles Schumer of New York said that he was withdrawing the offer on the border wall. Why would the Democratic Party, which has as its electoral base within the working class, middle class and nationally oppressed communities, approve funding for constructing a wall that is clearly a hostile act against neighboring Mexico as well as complete affront to people of Latin American descent residing in the U.S.? Moreover, the costs and labor associated with such a security wall is a complete waste of the tax dollars of working people as well as human resources. The astronomical funding needed for the wall could be utilized in rebuilding roads, healthcare infrastructure, bridges, schools, water systems, environmental safeguards, clean forms of energy, among other pressing needs.

This is a revelation for those who still consider the Democrats as a viable political alternative to the thoroughly ultra-right wing dominated GOP. The acceptance by Schumer and others of this compromise is not a political trade off. It is a betrayal of the constituencies who they will appeal to in the upcoming midterm elections aimed at winning enough seats to shift the balance of power between the two ruling class parties.

An article published by the CNBC television network on this subject noted that:

“Democrats said on Tuesday (Jan. 23) they had withdrawn an offer to fund U.S. President Donald Trump’s border wall, as tough negotiations over the future of young illegal immigrants known as “Dreamers” resumed in the Senate. A day after the end of a government shutdown linked to wrangling over immigration, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said he pulled the offer because of what he said was Trump’s failure to follow through on the outlines of an agreement the two men discussed on Friday (Jan. 19).”

However, will Schumer and the Democrats once again sell out the immigrant community, increase hostilities towards Mexico and other Central American states compounded with redirecting much needed funding for social programs, viable job creation and real infrastructural improvements to the wealthiest corporations? The U.S. Conference of Mayors refused to meet with Trump on January 24 after he threatened the major urban areas, which have declared themselves as sanctuaries for undocumented workers, making them targets for dragnets by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

ICE Raids on 7-11 stores in the United States 

These questions take on a broader significance as the impact of the recently passed tax bill engineered by Trump and the Republicans, providing a windfall of potential tax earnings from corporations to the public sector, right back into the coffers of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. Although some of these firms are saying that they will implement incremental increases in wages to its lowest paid workers, the cutting of social programs funded by the government will in fact cause greater harm to the majority of people.

Even the Democrats within the House of Representatives are also expressing their willingness to fund a border wall in exchange for what is considered favorable legislation on the “Dreamers.” One Illinois Congressman, Luis Gutierrez, who has been projected as a champion of the immigrant community, said:

“If that is what it is going to take to get 800,000 young men and women and give them a chance to live freely and openly in America, then I’ll roll up my sleeves, I’ll go down there with bricks and mortar and begin the wall.” (Chicago Tribune, Jan. 23 article by John Kass)

The author of this Chicago Tribune article goes on to emphasize:

“Unfortunately, Luis’ hands aren’t made for bricks and mortar. Yet even as he promised to help build Trump’s wall, I heard something in his voice: the sound of Democrats caving. And soon, the shutdown was over, the Dreamers felt betrayed, the hard left was livid, and Trump and the Republicans had an amazing victory in the immigration debate. Unfortunately, some in the Democratic Media Complex are having a difficult time dealing with this reality. Some are still in denial, pretending there were no winners and losers. Others clearly seek refuge in fantasy. Happily, most of us wake up from our dreams to live in the place where reality bites. And there it is: The Democrats caved, and Trump and the Republicans won.”

The Need for a Party of the Working Class and the Oppressed

These developments surrounding the debates over a national budget is indicative of the failure of the two party ruling class system in representing the majority of working class and nationally oppressed as it relates to immigration policy, racism, gender parity, the demand for higher wages and benefits within the workforce. During the administration of President Barack Obama the DHS deported more undocumented people than any previous government in U.S. history.

Today under Trump, the Democrats are projecting themselves as defenders of DACA while willingness to build a border wall is within the realm of possibility. Working class and People of Color communities need their own political party which can speak in the name of the majority within U.S. society.

Absent of a major break with the Democrats among their key constituencies and the formation of a mass party of the people, these compromises will continue. Despite the rise of the stock market to unprecedented levels and the prospects for larger profits among the mega-corporations, the plight of the working class, nationally oppressed and poor people in general will worsen.

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All images in this article are from the author.

Novak Djokovic, on returning to competitive tennis at the Australian Open, caused something of a stir that a revolt in the game was brewing.  Was it about ball boys or girls, or his smooth unblemished victory against the unfortunate Donald Young?  Umpires and adjudications?  Nothing of the sort.  It was tennis players, and the old issue of remuneration.

At the first press conference, journalists picked up a scent from the ATP Tour player council president, a particularly pongy one, on a potential insurrection.  It was supposedly taking various forms: players pondering a potential boycott of next year’s Australian Open or a breakaway player’s union that would supply muscle in future negotiations.  A meeting of various players, orchestrated by Djokovic, had supposedly involved a lawyer to clarify the finer points of Australian labour law.

“Some of you have written a story that has been a little bit exaggerated,” shot back the Serb at the post-match conference. “You’ve taken things out of context. I saw that you’ve portrayed me as someone who is very greedy, asks for more money and wants a boycott.”

It was not a hard thing to do.  Monte Carlo, his domicile, doesn’t burden its residents with tax.  He was also the first player to earn more than $100 million in prize money, hardly a sign of struggling penury or starvation. In terms of athletes raking in the fortunes, Djokovic ranks highly – very highly.  On that score, it is also worth nothing the promise by Australian Open director Craig Tiley to boost the tournament prize money from $55 million to $100 million over the next five years.

Players, however, seemed to be reading from a different scoresheet.  What seemed to be a closed gathering of up to 150 players turned out to be a conversation “about certain topics.  I don’t think there is anything unhealthy about that.”  Otherwise, “not of much of what you have [written] is true.”  The turning rumour mill was not helped by a request by Djokovic to Tiley, and all non-players, to leave the meeting room.

Leaving aside the incongruent symbolism – the man with money bags, getting together with those of equal stature – pontificating about wanting more revenue, the plausibility, let alone wisdom, of having a union is harder to dispel. 

“The problem with all of this,” claimed the first ranked player Rafael Nadal, “is when you talk about money.  At the end of the day is not about money.”

While not wanting to be drawn specifically on Djokovic’s intervention, Nadal’s broad support, in a manner of speaking, was clear. For him,

“at some point [it] is good that the players speak between each other about what we want or what we don’t want.”

Do not forget, he urged, the lower ranked players, for them to “have better money to survive.”

Tennis, in that sense, remains almost singular in being one of the top-tier sports of the world that lacks such a representative body for its players.  It is the golden goose that seemed to slip through the net, and sports officials are relieved to that end.

It would be a mistake, for instance, to attribute the characteristics of a union to the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), which doubles up as both player association and organiser of the entire competitive circuit bar the four grand slams.  As former slam winner Andy Roddick notes, it was simply not possible “for an entity to represent both sides of a negotiation.  I’m amazed it’s not talked about more.”

Andy Murray’s mother, Judy, chimed in:

“Totally agree.  What about an umbrella union that represents men and women?  That would give the players a much stronger voice to challenge the Slams and the joint ATP/WTA events. Better together.”

Support is certainly present for a move amongst players to a more standardised negotiation format.  This is probably unsurprising given the existence of collective bargaining agreements that undergird other codes.  The National Basketball Association has one which ensures a handsome distribution of 50 percent of the league’s revenue to players, along with 16 days off during the playing season.

In tennis, the return for players is a meagre 7 percent, certainly over the four grand slams (Australian, French, US Opens and Wimbledon), though these are managed by the International Tennis Federation and the respective national bodies in each host country,

As Braham Dabscheck notes, the professionalization of sports, the imposed restrictions on player mobility and ease of contracting, coupled with the phenomenon of sports broadcasting, altered the balance. 

“Beginning in the 1940s and ’50s, players increasingly formed associations and challenged employment rules in the courts.”

Dabscheck further notes that such player associations advance a whole suite of programs and policies, from community projects to advancing the welfare agenda of players once they have retired.  And while it is easy to muddle the stars and tennis aristocrats with the toiling plebs, the issue remains.  Tennis has yet to join that regulated side of sports, remaining the great, and for administrators, defiant outlier.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]