Global Research

In a blatant example of “do as I say, not as I do,” the US government is profiting handsomely by accepting marijuana cash in the payment of taxes while imposing huge penalties on banks for accepting it as deposits. Onerous reporting requirements are driving small local banks to sell out to Wall Street. Congress needs to harmonize federal with state law.

Thirty states and the District of Columbia currently have laws broadly legalizing marijuana in some form. The herb has been shown to have significant therapeutic value for a wide range of medical conditions, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, multiple sclerosis, epilepsy, glaucoma, lung disease, anxiety, muscle spasms, hepatitis C, inflammatory bowel disease, and arthritis pain. The community of Americans who rely on legal medical marijuana was estimated to be 2.6 million people in 2016 and includes a variety of mainstream constituency groups like veterans, senior citizens, cancer survivors, and parents of epileptic children. Unlike patented pharmaceuticals, which are now the leading cause of death from drug overdose, there have been no recorded deaths from marijuana overdose in the US. By comparison, alcohol causes 30,000 deaths annually, and prescription drugs taken as directed are estimated to kill 100,000 Americans per year.

Under federal law, however, marijuana remains a Schedule I Controlled Substance – a “deadly dangerous drug with no medical use and high potential for abuse” – and its possession remains a punishable offense. On the presidential campaign trail, Donald Trump said the issue of marijuana legalization “should be up to the states,” continuing the “hands off” policy established under President Obama. Under the 2013 Cole Memorandum, the Department of Justice said it would not prosecute individuals and companies complying with robust and well-enforced state legalization programs. But on January 4th, Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded that memo and gave federal prosecutors the authority to pursue marijuana cases at their own discretion, even in places where the herb is legal under state law. The action has made banks even more afraid to take marijuana cash, which can be prosecuted as illegal “money laundering,” an offense that can incur stiff criminal penalties.

The Government Has “Unclean Hands”

As explained by Dr. Richard Rahn, author of The End of Money and the Struggle for Financial Privacy:

Money laundering is generally understood to be the practice of taking ill-gotten gains and moving them through a sequence of bank accounts so they ultimately look like the profits from legitimate activity. Institutions, individuals, and even governments who are believed to be aiding and abetting the practice of money laundering can be indicted and convicted, even though they may be completely unaware that the money being transferred with their help was of criminal origin.

The law has focused on banks, but all sorts of businesses accept money without asking where it came from or being required to report “suspicious activity.” As Rahm observes, even governments can be indicted and convicted for money laundering. Strictly construed (as Attorney General Sessions insists when interpreting the law), that means the US government itself could be indicted. In fact the US government is the largest launderer of marijuana cash in the nation. The IRS accepts this tainted money in the payment of taxes, turning it into “clean” money; and it is not an unwitting accomplice to the crime. Estimates are that marijuana business owners across the U.S. will owe $2.8 billion in taxes to the federal government in 2018. The government makes a massive profit off the deal, snatching up to 70 percent of the proceeds of the reporting businesses, as opposed to the more typical rate of 30 percent. It does this by branding marijuana businesses criminal enterprises which are not entitled to deduct their costs when reporting their income. This is not only a clear case of the unequal protection of the laws but is a clear admission by the government that it is knowingly accepting illegal funds. The government is a principal beneficiary of a business the government itself has made illegal.

Under those circumstances, both marijuana businesses and banks should be able to raise the “unclean hands” defense. As summarized in Kendall-Jackson Winery, Ltd. v. Superior Court (1999), 76 Cal.App.4th 970, 978-79:

The defense of unclean hands arises from the maxim, “He who comes into Equity must come with clean hands.” The doctrine demands that a plaintiff act fairly in the matter for which he seeks a remedy. . . . The defense is available in legal as well as equitable actions. . . . The doctrine promotes justice by making a plaintiff answer for his own misconduct in the action. It prevents a wrongdoer from enjoying the fruits of his transgression.

The government is enjoying the fruits of money it considers “dirty.” It has unclean hands, a defense against prosecuting others for the same crime.

Should “Money Laundering” Even Be a Crime?

In an article titled “Why the War on Money Laundering Should Be Aborted,” Dr. Rahn asks whether money laundering should even be a crime. It became a criminal activity in the US only in 1986, and in many countries it still is not a crime. Banks operating in the US must now collect and verify customer-provided information, check names of customers against lists of known or suspected terrorists, determine risk levels posed by customers, and report suspicious persons, organizations and transactions. The reporting requirements are so burdensome and expensive that they have caused many smaller banks to sell out to larger banks or close their doors. According to Dr. Rahn:

[I]t has failed to produce the advertised results and, in fact, has not been cost effective, has resulted in wholesale violations of individual civil liberties (including privacy rights), has violated the rights of sovereign governments and peoples, has created new opportunities for criminal activity, and has actually lessened our ability to reduce crime.

. . . Banks are required to supply the government with not only Currency Transaction Reports but also Suspicious Activity Reports. These reports impose huge regulatory costs on banks and require bank employees to operate as police officers. As a result, the total public and private sector costs greatly exceed $10,000,000 per conviction. This whole effort not only does not make any economic sense, but is clearly incompatible with a free society. The anti-money laundering laws allow almost complete prosecutorial discretion.

One small banker complained that banks have been turned into spies secretly reporting to the federal government. If they fail to comply, they can face stiff enforcement actions, whether or not actual money-laundering crimes are alleged. In 2010, one small New Jersey bank pleaded guilty to conspiracy to violate the Bank Secrecy Act and was fined $5 million for failure to file suspicious-activity and cash-transaction reports. Another small New Jersey bank closed its doors after it was hit with $8 million in fines over its inadequate monitoring policies. The cost of compliance and threat of massive fines for not complying have been major factors in the collapse of the community banking sector. The number of community banks has fallen by 40 percent since 1994 and their share of U.S. banking assets has fallen by more than half, from 41 percent to 18 percent.

“Regulation is killing community banks,” Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin said at his confirmation hearing in January 2017. If the process is not reversed, he warned, we could “end up in a world where we have four big banks in this country.” That would be bad for both jobs and the economy.

“I think that we all appreciate the engine of growth is with small and medium-sized businesses,” said Mnuchin. “We’re losing the ability for small and medium-sized banks to make good loans to small and medium-sized businesses in the community, where they understand those credit risks better than anybody else.”

If the goal of the anti-money laundering statutes is to identify and deter criminal activity, strictly enforcing the law could actually backfire in the case of state-legalized marijuana businesses. As noted in a January 9 article in The Daily Beast:

Marijuana businesses have to register and incorporate in states and that puts them on the IRS radar. . . . Sky-high federal taxes on top of state taxes can make it almost impossible to operate a legal business. . . . If the government fails to cut businesses a break, legal marijuana could be sold on the black market to dodge taxes.

On the black market, cash proceeds can be dispersed in a way that avoids banks and makes the money hard either to trace or to tax.

Federal Law Needs to Be Changed

With more than half the states legalizing marijuana for medical purposes, Congress needs to acknowledge the will of the people and remove this natural herb from the Schedule I classification that says it is a deadly dangerous drug with no health benefits. The Tenth Amendment gives the federal government only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution, and regulating medical practice is not one of them. Federal courts have held that the federal Controlled Substances Act does not allow the federal government to usurp states’ exclusive rights (pursuant to their inherent police powers) to regulate the practice of medicine.

H.R. 1227, the Ending Federal Marijuana Prohibition Act, sponsored by Virginia Republican Thomas Garrett and 15 cosponsors, would remove marijuana from Schedule I and eliminate federal penalties for anyone engaged in marijuana activity in a state where it is legal. Congress just needs to pass it.

In its zeal for eliminating burdensome, costly and ineffective regulations, the Trump administration might also consider lightening the heavy reporting burden that is killing community banks and the local businesses that have traditionally relied on them for affordable credit. On Tuesday, January 16th, a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general sent a letter to leaders in Congress requesting advancement of legislation such as the Secure and Fair Enforcement (SAFE) Banking Act to “provide a safe harbor” for banks that provide financial products or services to state-legal marijuana businesses. If the government can accept marijuana money in the payment of taxes, banks should be able to accept it to keep track of it and prevent the crimes associated with storing and transporting large sums of cash.

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This article was originally published on Truthdig.org.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, chairman of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including Web of Debt and The Public Bank Solution. Her 300+ blog articles are posted at EllenBrown.com.

The Afrin operation of the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) has nothing to do with our country’s national interests. This operation is a new link of Justice and Development Party’s (AKP) interventions against the sovereignty of Syria.

Attacks of imperialist-sponsored reactionary forces have turned the country into a bloodbath and displaced millions of Syrian people since 2011. Although the jihadist gangs were largely repelled, the recent developments prove that all powers are the enemies of stability and peace in Syria.

Liquidation of the Islamic State is not enough; it is apparent that peace will not be achieved until the Syrian people take full control of the country and all foreign powers withdraw.

Turkey’s attack with the consent of the U.S.A. and Russia is illegitimate, reinforcing the partition of Syria in the service of imperialism. AKP’s anti-American discourse is completely demagogic.

Escalating nationalism and chauvinism go along with TSK’s intervention, while warmongering is rising and war is attempted to be legitimatised through a religious discourse. It is necessary to reject this policy that functions as divisive not only in Syria but also in Turkey.

Various entities supported by the U.S.A. are pointed out as a threat. All U.S. attempts are extremely serious threats for all peoples of the region, particularly for Syria and Turkey. All policies paving the way for imperialism are anti-people.

It is necessary to put an end to all foreign interventions in Syria immediately and unconditionally. Imperialism and all big powers should leave Syria alone, and the people should determine their future themselves.

We call on all neighbouring and peace-loving people to unite against imperialism and reaction.

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Featured image is from Peace Committee of Turkey.

The Donald Trump administration is planning to install a 30,000 strong armed “security force” in northern Syria along the borders with Turkey and Iraq. This presumably will tie together and support the remaining rag-tags of allegedly pro-democracy rebels and will fit in with existing and proposed U.S. bases. The maneuver is part of a broader plan to restructure Syria to suit the usual crop of neocon geniuses in Washington that have slithered their way back into the White House and National Security Council, to include renewed demands that the country’s President Bashar al-Assad “must go,” reiterated by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last Wednesday. He said 

“But let us be clear: The United States will maintain a military presence in Syria, focused on ensuring ISIS cannot re-emerge.”

Tillerson also claimed that remaining in Syria would prevent Iran from “reinforcing” its position inside Syria and would enable the eventual ouster of al-Assad, but he has also denied that Washington was creating a border force at all, yet another indication of the dysfunction in the White House.

A plan pulled together in Washington by people who should know better but seemingly don’t is hardly a blueprint for success, particularly as there is no path to anything approximating “victory” and no exit strategy. The Syrians have not been asked if they approve of an arrangement that will be put in place in their sovereign territory and the Turks have already bombed targets and sent troops and allied militias into the Afrin region, also a U.S. supported Kurdish enclave on the border. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has indicated clearly that Ankara will disrupt any U.S. devised border arrangement. From the Turkish point of view the border security force, which reportedly will largely consist of Kurdish militiamen, will inevitably work in cooperation with the Kurdish terrorist group PKK which is active on the Turkish side of the border, in seeking to create an autonomous Kurdish state, which Turkey reasonably enough regards as an existential threat.

And then there is one other little complication, which is that the United States presence in Syria is completely illegal both under international law and under the U.S. government’s War Powers Act. Syria is a sovereign state with a recognized government and there is no U.N. or Congressional mandate that permits Washington to station its soldiers, Marines and airmen within the country’s borders. The argument that the recent Authorizations to Use Military Force (AUMF) permitted the activity because groups linked to al-Qaeda were active there and the local government was unable to expel them is only thinly credible as the U.S. has also attacked Syrian Army forces and the militiamen linked to Syria’s ally Iran. That constitutes a war crime.

Senator Tim Kaine (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Trump can under the War Powers Act take military action to counter an imminent threat, which was never the case from Syria in any event, but after 60 days he has to cease or desist or go to Congress for authorization up to and possibly including a declaration of war. The military offensive against Syria began under President Barack Obama and it is far beyond that two-month window already, so egregiously in violation that some Congressmen are actually beginning to take notice. Democratic Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia has demanded that no military initiatives in Syria be undertaken without a Senate vote. He said on Thursday that

“I am deeply alarmed that yet again, the Trump administration continues to raise the risk of unnecessary war, disconnected from any firm policy objectives and core national security interests. To be clear, neither the 2001 or 2002 AUMFs provide authority to target Assad or Iranian proxies in Syria, and it is unacceptable for this action to be taken absent a vote and approval of Congress.”

The animus against Syria runs deep, to include questionable claims from generally hostile sources that al-Assad has deliberately massacred hundreds of thousands of his own people as well as dubious assertations about the use of chemical weapons that led to a U.S. cruise missile attack on a Syrian airbase in Shayrat. A perfect example of how brain dead the western media is over the issue was provided by last week’s article by David Brunnstrom of Reuters on the Tillerson speech, where he wrote

“U.S. forces in Syria have already faced direct threats from Syrian and Iranian-backed forces, leading to the shoot-down of Iranian drones and a Syrian jet last year, as well as to tensions with Russia.”

The uninformed reader would assume that Americans were the victims of an attack and aggression by Moscow whereas the reality is quite different. Iran and Russia are allies of the legitimate Syrian government that are in the country by invitation to help in its fight against groups that everyone acknowledges to be terrorists. The United States is there illegally and is as often as not using its proxies to fight the Syrian Army.

Syria-phobia goes back to the George W. Bush Administration in December 2003, when Congress passed the Syria Accountability Act, House Resolution 1828. Syria at that time was already in the cross-hairs of two principal American so-called allies in the region, Israel and Saudi Arabia. Both were actively working to destabilize the regime, though for different reasons. The Saudis were fearful of Iranian influence over Damascus but also had a religious agenda in that the secular Syrian regime was protective of religious minorities and was itself an offshoot of Shi’a Islam referred to as Alawites. The Saudis considered them to be heretics.

The Israelis for their part were enamored of the Yinon Plan of 1982 and the Clean Break proposals made in 1996 by a team of Jewish American neocons. Their intention was to transform most of Israel’s neighboring Arab states into warring tribes and ethnicities so they would no longer be a threat. Israeli leaders have stated openly that they would prefer continued chaos in Syria, which remains a prime target. Israel is, in fact, currently bombing Syrian Army positions, most recently near Damascus, while also supporting the ISIS and al-Nusra Front remnants.

The Syrian Accountability Act does indeed read at times like the completely bogus indictment of Saddam Hussein that had led to the invasion of Iraq earlier in 2003. It cites development of weapons of mass destruction and missiles, but its main focus is related to the alleged support of terrorist groups by Damascus. It

“Declares the sense of Congress that the Government of Syria should immediately and unconditionally halt support for terrorism, permanently and openly declare its total renunciation of all forms of terrorism, and close all terrorist offices and facilities in Syria, including the offices of Hamas, Hizballah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command.”

Eliot Engel (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

One might note that the groups cited by name are not identified as being a threat to the United States. Rather, they are organizations hostile to Israel, which suggests that the motivation for the bill was the usual dominant pro-Israeli sentiment in Congress. The bill’s sponsor was Eliot Engel of New York, a passionately pro-Israeli legislator.

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

The desire to bring about regime change in Damascus gathered considerable steam in 2011. Harsh government efforts to repress the demonstrations that did take place inevitably led to violence in both directions and the United States, Saudis and the Gulf States subsequently began to arm the rebels and support the formation of the Free Syrian Army, which Washington assured the American public consisted of only good people who wanted democracy and fundamental rights. To no one’s surprise many of the fledgling democrats accepted U.S. training and weapons before defecting to the al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra Front or to ISIS.

Currently, the reconstruction of Syria is proceeding. The Syrian Arab Army is wiping out the last few enclaves controlled by ISIS in Idlib Province and the so-called Syrian Civil War will soon be over but for the mopping up. Many internal refugees have returned to their homes after the government reasserted control and also thousands who fled overseas have reportedly come back. Note that they are returning to areas where the al-Assad government is firmly in charge, perhaps suggesting that, while there were legitimate grievances among the Syrian people, the propaganda insisting that most Syrians were opposed to the regime was grossly overstated. There is considerable evidence that Bashar al-Assad is actually supported by a large majority of the Syrian people, even among those who would welcome more democracy, because they know the alternative to him is chaos.

One would like to think that Syria might again be Syria but Washington is baying for blood and clearly would like to see a solution that involves a fragmentation of the state enabling containment and rollback of Iranian influence there while also satisfying both its clients Israel and the Saudis as well as creating a possible mini-state for the Kurds. The destruction of Syria and the Syrian people will just be regarded as collateral damage while building a new Middle East. Hopefully the Syrians, backed by Iran, Russia and China will prevent that from happening and as the U.S. did not directly engage in much of the hard fighting that destroyed ISIS, it thankfully has little leverage over what comes next.

Whether it is the Riyadh or Tel Aviv leading Washington by the nose is somehow irrelevant as the blame for what is taking place is squarely on the White House. The United States has no coherent policy, nor any actual national interest in remaining in Syria, but the strange political alignments that appear to be playing out in and around the Oval Office have generated a desire to destroy a country and people that in no way threaten the U.S. Someone should remind the president that similar scenarios did not turn out very well in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. No one should expect that Syria will be any different.

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Featured image is from the author.

At the beginning of 2017, the chief of US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) General Raymond Thomas while speaking in front of one of the Senate committees announced that:

We operate and fight in every corner of the world. Rather than a mere ‘break-glass-in-case-of-war’ force, we are now proactively engaged across the ‘battle space’ of the Geographic Combatant Commands… providing key integrating and enabling capabilities to support their campaigns and operations.

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.

This data is confirmed by the publication in the notorious Western alternative media source Tom Dispatch, that features a map showing the locations of 132 countries where America’s elite troops were deployed.

According to the International Business Times, the countless wars that the US government has been waging on other states ever since 9/11 resulted in the costs of 1.46 trillion dollars, which amounts to 250 million dollars a day for 16 years consecutively. According to various reports, even though Washington is allegedly still fighting a war on terror, two operations, namely Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011) and Operation Enduring Freedom (2001-2014) account for the vast majority of the costs suffered, amounting to more than 1.3 trillion dollars collectively. However, as it’s been noted by Zero Hedge, the final total does not include the “classified programs” that were not supervised by the Department of Defense, such as those conducted by the Central Intelligence Agency, which, as we know, has a significant budget of its own.

Further still, the Congressional Research Service states the only war in American history that would cost more than the so-called War on Terror is World War II, sitting at more than 4.1 trillion dollars in present dollars. Curiously enough, all of the war-related expenses from the Vietnam War won’t exceed 738 billion in today’s dollars.

However, a report released by Dr. Neta Crawford, professor of political science at Brown University, shows that by 2016 the total spending of the United States Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Veteran Affairs since 9/11 was even higher, reaching almost 5 trillion dollars.

However, yet another study conducted by the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University shows that Washington is trying to downplay actual figures, as they expenditures suffered by Washington in the course of its Middle Eastern and Asian operations alone since 9/11 reaches 5.6 trillion dollars. However, the study doesn’t cover the costs of African and European operations, so it’s safe to say that Washington tries to conceal actual figures in a bid to avoid public outrage. According to those figures, each American taxpayer has spent well over 23 thousand dollars over the same period of time to cover this kind of expenditures.

To carry on countless military conflicts across the globe, Washington is using a web of military facilities. According to the Stock Board Asset, America’s empire is built of 800 bases that can be found in more than 70 countries and territories abroad. It’s been noted that to maintain this global force, the US Senate approved a 700 billion dollars military bill this year. The amount eclipses 549 billion dollars military spending cap established by 2011 Budget Control Act. It shows that fund flows are increasing, as the narrative is being set with America’s next enemy in the crosshairs.

Further still, Washington provides military assistance to 36 dictatorship regimes out of 49 “officially registered” ones. In other words, more than 73% of the world’s dictators are currently being sponsored through the military assistance provided by US taxpayers.

It’s been noted that last year a Michigan State University economist Mark Skidmore managed to establish 21 trillion dollars in unauthorized spending in the departments of Defense and Housing and Urban Development for the years 1998-2015. Skidmore got involved when he heard Catherine Austin Fitts, former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development, refer to a report which indicated the Army had 6.5 trillion dollars in unsupported spending back in 2015. It’s curious that only 122 billion dollars were approved by the Congress, which meant that the Department of Defense spent 54 times more funds that it was allowed.

In his article penned for the Forbes, Skidmore announced the “gargantuan nature” of the undocumented federal spending that “should be a great concern to all taxpayers.” It looks that Washington spears no money in a bid to export “American-style Democracy” across the globe.

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Martin Berger is a freelance journalist and geopolitical analyst, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” 

All images in this article are from the author.

Last week, a four page memo detailing FBI abuse of FISA warrants against the Trump campaign was circulated within the US House of Representatives

Amid calls from several Congressional Republicans, the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo immediately went viral

In an effort to downplay genuine public concern, a “Russian propaganda” tracking website used primarily by Democrats and Neoconservatives has suggested that #ReleaseTheMemo went viral thanks to Russian bots

California Reps. Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff sent a letter to Facebook and Twitter CEO’s on Tuesday, asking that they take action against the Russian scourge

Meanwhile, Twitter’s internal analysis of the hashtag has thus far found that authentic American accounts, not Russians, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo, according to The Daily Beast

Despite 63 GOP lawmakers petitioning for the release of an explosive four-page memo detailing FISA warrant abuse against the Trump campaign, California Democrats Dianne Feinstein and Adam Schiff have fired off an embarrassing letter to the CEO’s of Twitter and Facebook, imploring the social media giants to take action against Russian bots pushing the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. (Feinstein, ironically, #ReleasedTheTranscripts of closed-door Congressional testimony by Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson in early January in an effort to influence public opinion).

Source: securingdemocracy.org

Using information gleaned from the “Alliance for Securing Democracy” propaganda website which supposedly tracks 600 Twitter accounts “linked to Russian influence operations” and counts Neocon Bill Kristol as an advisor – the letter from Feinstein and Schiff reads in part:

Dear Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Zuckerberg:

We seek your companies’ urgent assistance. Public reports indicate that accounts linked to the Russian government are again exploiting Twitter and Facebook platforms in an effort to manipulate Public opinion. These recent Russian efforts are intended to influence congressional action and undermine Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation… 

…we seek your assistance in our efforts to counter Russia’s continuing efforts to manipulate public opinion and undermine American democracy and the rule of law…

…Several Twitter hashtags, including #ReleaseTheMemo, calling for release of these talking points attacking the Mueller investigation were born in the hours after the Committee vote. According to the German Marshall Fund’s Alliance for Securing Democracy, this effort gained the immediate attention and assistance of social media accounts linked to Russian influence operations. By Friday, January 19, 2018, the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag was “the top trending hashtag among Twitter accounts believed to be operated by Kremlin-linked groups.” Its use had “increased by 286,700 percent” and was being used “100 times more than any other hashtag” by accounts linked to Russian influence campaigns. These accounts are also promoting an offer by WikiLeaks to pay up to $1 million to anyone who leaks this classified partisan memo.

If these reports are accurate, we are witnessing an ongoing attack by the Russian government through Kremlin-linked social media actors…

…We understand Facebook at Twitter have developed significant expertise in identifying inauthentic and malicious accounts. Further, your forensic investigations into Russian government exploitation of your platforms during the 2016 U.S. election have helped expose to the American public the vast extend of Russia’s covert influence efforts. We therefore request that your companies conduct an in-depth forensic examination of this real-time activity on your platforms…”

That said, contrary to the ASD’s Russophobic website, by The Daily Beast claims  that internal Twitter sources confirm that the #ReleaseTheMemo hashtag has been pushed by actual Americans.

a knowledgeable source says that Twitter’s internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo.There are no preliminary indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is either predominantly Russian.

In short, according to this source, who would not speak to The Daily Beast for attribution, the retweets are coming from inside the country.

And then there’s this:

Adam Schiff's office is now hanging up on citizens calling to say they are not Russian Bots.

— B (@B75434425) January 23, 2018

Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s reach must know no bounds – as GOP lawmakers have been fervently pushing for the release of said memo…

Earlier this morning, I examined the classified, four-page memo from @HouseIntelComm regarding the FBI, DOJ, and the so-called #RussianCollusion. To put it simply, “WOW.” I joined the call to #ReleaseTheMemo. Americans deserve truth and transparency. pic.twitter.com/r2RJnLNaUL

— Rep. Jody Hice (@CongressmanHice) January 19, 2018

Just read the classified doc @HPSCI re FISA abuse. I'm calling for its immediate public release w/relevant sourced material. The public must have access ASAP! #Transparency

— Lee Zeldin (@RepLeeZeldin) January 18, 2018

The classified report compiled by House Intelligence is deeply troubling and raises serious questions about the upper echelon of the Obama DOJ and Comey FBI as it relates to the so-called collusion investigation.

— Ron DeSantis (@RepDeSantis) January 18, 2018

While the report is classified as Top Secret, I believe the select committee should, pursuant to House rules, vote to make the report publicly available as soon as possible. This is a matter of national significance and the American people deserve the truth.

— Ron DeSantis (@RepDeSantis) January 18, 2018

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) nods his head *Yes* before conceding he can't talk specifics when Sean Hannity asks if Comey knew about FISA abuses. #ReleaseTheMemo pic.twitter.com/CyldDY4CuZ

— Josh Caplan (@joshdcaplan) January 19, 2018

In response to the Democrats’ latest attempt at diversion, people are mocking Feinstein and Schiff, as they should:

Schiff and Feinstein (who have done nothing but leak/obstruct) sent a letter to Twitter’s CEO Dorsey & Facebook CEO Zuckerberg demanding they investigate “Russian bots & trolls” surrounding the hashtag #ReleaseTheMemo. This is how desperate they’ve become. h/t @ByronYork pic.twitter.com/VNWpetKkhW

— Nick Short ?? (@PoliticalShort) January 23, 2018

#MondayMotivation is a Russian plot to destroy American democracy according to the ever ridiculous 'Hamiliton 68'. But don't worry, Senator Feinstein and Congressman Schiff will surely call for a Congressional investigation. https://t.co/Q1iCzGKx4W pic.twitter.com/G0mP3oPRAY

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) January 23, 2018

Pathetic indeed. The letter can be read in its entirety below:

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All images in this article are from the author unless otherwise stated.

Presenting the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States on Friday at the Johns Hopkins University, Secretary of Defense James Mattis painted a picture of a dangerous world in which U.S. power – and all of the supposed “good” that it does around the world – is on the decline.

“Our competitive edge has eroded in every domain of warfare – air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace,” he said. “And it is continually eroding.”

What he could have said instead is that the United States military is overextended in every domain, and that much of the chaos seen around the world is the direct result of past and current military adventurism. Further, he could have acknowledged, perhaps, that the erosion of U.S. influence has been the result of a series of self-inflicted blows to American credibility through foreign policy disasters such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

There were also two important words hidden between the lines, but never mentioned by name, in the new U.S. National Defense Strategy: “empire” and “imperialism.”

It has long been taboo for U.S. officials and corporate media to speak of U.S. foreign policy as “imperialism,” or of the U.S.’s global military occupations and network of hundreds of military bases as an “empire.”  These words are on a long-standing blacklist of “banned topics” that U.S. official statements and mainstream U.S. media reports must never mention.

The streams of Orwellian euphemisms with which U.S. officials and media instead discuss U.S. foreign policy do more to obscure the reality of the U.S. role in the world than to describe or explain it, “hiding imperial interests behind ever more elaborate fig leaves,” as British historian A.J.P. Taylor described European imperialists doing the same a century ago.

As topics like empire, imperialism, and even war and peace, are censored and excised from political debate, U.S. officials, subservient media and the rest of the U.S. political class conjure up an illusion of peace for domestic consumption by simply not mentioning our country’s 291,000 occupation troops in 183 other countries or the 39,000 bombs and missiles dropped on our neighbors in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan since Trump took office.

The 100,000 bombs and missiles dropped on these and other countries by Obama and the 70,000 dropped on them by Bush II have likewise been swept down a kind of real time “memory hole,” leaving America’s collective conscience untroubled by what the public was never told in the first place.

But in reality, it’s been a long time since U.S. leaders of either party resisted the temptation to threaten anyone anywhere, or to follow through on their threats with “fire and fury” bombing campaigns, coups and invasions.  This is how empires maintain a “credible threat” to undergird their power and discourage other countries from challenging them.

But far from establishing the “Pax Americana” promised by policymakers and military strategists in the 1990s, from Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney to Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton, the results have been consistently catastrophic, producing what the new National Defense Strategy calls, “increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing, rules-based international order.”

Of course the drafters of this U.S. strategy document dare not admit that U.S. policy is almost single-handedly responsible for this global chaos, after successive U.S. administrations have worked to marginalize the institutions and rules of international law and to establish illegal U.S. threats and uses of force that international law defines as crimes of aggression as the ultimate arbiter of international affairs.

Nor do they dare acknowledge that the CIA’s politicized intelligence and covert operations, which generate a steady stream of political pretexts for U.S. military intervention, are designed to create and exacerbate international crises, not to solve them.  For U.S. officials to admit such hard truths would shake the very foundations of U.S. imperialism.

Opposition to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action with Iran – the so-called nuclear deal – from Republicans and Democratic hawks alike seems to stem from the fear that it might validate the use of diplomacy over sanctions, coups and war, and set a dangerous precedent for resolving other crises – from Afghanistan and Korea to future crises in Africa and Latin America.  Iran’s success at bringing the U.S. to the negotiating table, instead of falling victim to the endless violence and chaos of U.S.-backed regime change, may already be encouraging North Korea and other targets of U.S. aggression to try to pull off the same trick.

But how will the U.S. justify its global military occupation, illegal threats and uses of force, and trillion-dollar war budget once serious diplomacy is seen to be more effective at resolving international crises than the endless violence and chaos of U.S. sanctions, coups, wars and occupations?

From Bhurtpoor to Baghdad

Major Danny Sjursen

Major Danny Sjursen, who has fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught history at West Point, is a rare voice of sanity from within the U.S. military.  In a poignant article in Truthdig, Major Sjursen eloquently described the horrors he has witnessed and the sadness he expects to live with for the rest of his life.

“The truth is,” he wrote, “I fought for next to nothing, for a country that, in recent conflicts, has made the world a deadlier, more chaotic place.”

Danny Sjursen’s life as a soldier of the U.S. Empire reminds me of another soldier of Empire, my great-great-great grandfather, Samuel Goddard.  Samuel was born in Norfolk in England in 1793, and joined the 14th Regiment of Foot as a teenager. He was a Sergeant at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.  During 14 years in India, his battalion led the assault on the fortress of Bhurtpoor in 1826, which ended the last resistance of the Maratha dynasty to British rule.  He spent 3 years in the Caribbean, 6 years in Canada, and retired as Commandant of Dublin Castle in 1853 after a lifetime of service to Empire.

Danny’s and Samuel’s lives have much in common.  They would probably have a lot to talk about if they could ever meet.  But there are critical differences.  At Bhurtpoor, the two British regiments who led the attack were followed through the breech in the walls by 15 regiments of Indian “Native Infantry.”  After Bhurtpoor, Britain ruled India (including Pakistan and Bangladesh) for 120 years, with only a thousand British officials in the Indian Civil Service and a few thousand British officers in command of up to 2.5 million Indian troops.

The British brutally put down the Indian Mutiny in 1857-8 with massacres in Delhi, Allahabad, Kanpur and Lucknow.  Then, as up to 30 million Indians died in famines in 1876-9 and 1896-1902, the British government of India explicitly prohibited relief efforts or actions that might reduce exports from India to the U.K. or interfere with the operation of the “free market.”

As Mike Davis wrote in his 2001 book, Late Victorian Holocausts, 

“What seemed from a metropolitan perspective the nineteenth century’s final blaze of imperial glory was, from an Asian or African viewpoint, only the hideous light of a giant funeral pyre.”

And yet Britain kept control of India by commanding such loyalty and subservience from millions of Indians that, in every crisis, Indian troops obeyed orders from British officers to massacre their own people.

Danny Sjursen and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other post-Cold War U.S. war zones are having a very different experience.  In Afghanistan, as the Taliban and its allies have taken control of more of the country than at any time since the U.S. invasion, the U.S.-backed Afghan National Army has 25,000 fewer troops under its command than it did five years ago, while ten years of training by U.S. special operations forces has produced only 21,000 trained Afghan Commandos, the elite troops who do 70-80% of the killing and dying for the corrupt U.S.-backed Afghan government.

But the U.S. has not completely failed to win the loyalty of its imperial subjects.  The first U.S. soldier killed in action in Afghanistan in 2018 was Sergeant 1st Class Mihail Golin, originally from Latvia.  Mihail arrived in the U.S. in November 2004, enlisted in the U.S. Army three months later and has now given his life for the U.S. Empire and for whatever his service to it meant to him.  At least 127 other Eastern Europeans have died in occupied Afghanistan, along with 455 British troops, 158 Canadians and 396 soldiers from 17 other countries.  But 2,402 – or 68%, over two-thirds – of the occupation troops who have died in Afghanistan since 2001, were Americans.

In Iraq, an American war that always had even less international support or legitimacy, 93% of the occupation troops who have died were Americans, 4,530 out of a total of 4,852 “coalition” deaths.

When Ben Griffin, who later founded the U.K. branch of Veterans for Peace, told his superiors in the U.K.’s elite SAS (Special Air Service) that he could no longer take part in murderous house raids in Baghdad with U.S. special operations forces, he was surprised to find that his entire chain of command understood and accepted his decision.  The only officer who tried to change his mind was the chaplain.

The Future of Empire

The U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff have explicitly told Congress that war with North Korea would require a ground invasion, and the same would likely be true of a U.S. war on Iran.  South Korea wants to avoid war at all costs, but may be unavoidably drawn into a U.S.-led Second Korean War.

But besides South Korea, the level of support the U.S. could expect from its allies in a Second Korean War or other wars of aggression in the future would probably be more like Iraq than Afghanistan, with significant international opposition, even from traditional U.S. allies. U.S. troops would therefore make up nearly all of the invasion and occupation forces – and take nearly all of the casualties.

Compared to past empires, the cost in blood and treasure of policing the U.S. Empire and the blame for its catastrophic failures fall disproportionately – and rightly – on Americans.  Even Donald Trump recognizes this problem, but his demands for allied countries to spend more on their militaries and buy more U.S. weapons will not change their people’s unwillingness to die in America’s wars.

This reality has created political pressure on U.S. leaders to wage war in ways that cost fewer American lives but inevitably kill many more people in countries being punished for resistance to U.S. imperialism, using air strikes and locally recruited death squads instead of U.S. “boots on the ground” wherever possible.

The U.S. conducts a sophisticated propaganda campaign to pretend that U.S. air-launched weapons are so accurate that they can be used safely without killing large numbers of civilians.  Actual miss rates and blast radii are on the “banned topics” blacklist, along with realistic estimates of civilian deaths.

Hoshyar Zebari

When former Iraqi foreign minister Hoshyar Zebari told Patrick Cockburn of the U.K.’s Independent newspaper that he had seen Iraqi Kurdish intelligence reports which estimated that the U.S.- and Iraqi-led destruction of Mosul had killed 40,000 civilians, the only remotely realistic estimate so far from an official source, no other mainstream Western media followed up on the story.

But America’s wars are killing millions of innocent people: people defending themselves, their families, their communities and countries against U.S. imperialism and aggression; and many more who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time under the onslaught of over 210,000 American bombs and missiles dropped on at least 7 countries since 2001.

According to a growing body of research (for example, see the UN Development Program study, Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping-Point for Recruitment), most people who join armed resistance or “terrorist” groups do so mainly to protect themselves and their families from the dangers of wars that others have inflicted on them.  The UNDP survey found that the final “tipping point” that pushes over 70% of them to take the fateful step of joining an armed group is the killing or detention of a close friend or family member by foreign or local security forces.

So the reliance on airstrikes and locally recruited death squads, the very strategies that make U.S. imperialism palatable to the American public, are in fact the main “drivers” spreading armed resistance and terrorism to country after country, placing the U.S. Empire on a collision course with itself.

The U.S. effort to delegate war in the Middle East to Saudi Arabia is turning it into a target of global condemnation as it tries to mimic the U.S. model of warfare by bombing and starving millions of innocent people in Yemen while blaming the victims for their plight.  The slaughter by poorly trained and undisciplined Saudi and Emirati pilots is even more indiscriminate than U.S. bombing campaigns, and the Saudis lack the full protection of the Western propaganda system to minimize international outrage at tens of thousands of civilian casualties and an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis.

The need to win the loyalty of imperial subjects by some combination of fear and respect is a basic requirement of Empire.  But it appears to be unattainable in the 21st century, certainly by the kind of murderous policies the U.S. has embraced since the end of the Cold War.  As Richard Barnet already observed 45 years ago, at the end of the American War in Vietnam, “At the very moment the number one nation has perfected the science of killing, it has become an impractical instrument of political domination.”

Obama’s sugar-coated charm offensive won U.S. imperialism a reprieve from global public opinion and provided political cover for allied leaders to actively rejoin U.S.-led alliances.  But it was dishonest.  Under cover of Obama’s iconic image, the U.S. spread the violence and chaos of its wars and regime changes and the armed resistance and terrorism they provoke farther and wider, affecting tens of millions more people from Syria and Libya to Nigeria and Ukraine.

Now Trump has taken the mask off and the world is once again confronting the unvarnished, brutal reality of U.S. imperialism and aggression.

China’s approach to the world based on trade and infrastructure development has been more successful than U.S. imperialism.  The U.S. share of the global economy has declined from 40% to 22% since the 1960s, while China is expected to overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy in the next decade or two – by some measures, it already has.

While China has become the manufacturing and trading hub of the global economy, the U.S. economy has been financialized and hollowed out, hardly a solid basis for future growth.  The neoliberal model of politics and economics that the U.S. adopted a generation ago has created even greater wealth for people who already owned disproportionate shares of everything, but it has left working people in the U.S. and across the U.S. Empire worse off than before.

Like the “next to nothing” that Danny Sjursen came to realize he was fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan, the prospects for the U.S. economy seem ephemeral and highly vulnerable to the changing tides of economic history.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers

In his 1987 book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000, historian Paul Kennedy examined the relationship between economic and military power in the histories of the Western empires who colonized the world in the past 500 years.  He described how rising powers enjoy significant competitive advantages over established ones, and how every once-dominant power sooner or later has to adjust to the tides of economic history and find a new place in a world it can no longer dominate.

Kennedy explained that military power is only a secondary form of power that wealthy nations develop to protect and support their expanding economic interests.  An economically dominant power can quickly convert some of its resources into military power, as the U.S. did during the Second World War or as China is doing today.  But once formerly dominant powers have lost ground to new, rising powers, using military power more aggressively has never been a successful way to restore their economic dominance.  On the contrary, it has typically been a way to squander the critical years and scarce resources they could otherwise have used to manage a peaceful transition to a prosperous future.

As the U.K. found in the 1950s, using military force to try to hold on to its empire proved counter-productive, as Kennedy described, and peaceful transitions to independence proved to be a more profitable basis for future relations with its former colonies.  The drawdown of its global military commitments was an essential part of its transition to a viable post-imperial future.

The transition from hegemony to coexistence has never been easy for any great power, and there is nothing exceptional about the temptation to use military force to try to preserve and prolong the old order.  This has often led to catastrophic wars and it has always failed.

It is difficult for any political or military leader to preside over a diminution of his or her country’s power in the world.  Military leaders are rewarded for military strategies that win wars and expand their country’s power, not for dismantling it.  Mid-level staff officers who tell their superiors that their weapons and armies cannot solve their country’s problems do not win promotion to decision-making positions.

As Gabriel Kolko noted in Century of War in 1994, this marginalization of critical voices leads to an “inherent, even unavoidable institutional myopia,” under which, “options and decisions that are intrinsically dangerous and irrational become not merely plausible but the only form of reasoning about war and diplomacy that is possible in official circles.”

After two world wars and the independence of India, the Suez crisis of 1956 was the final nail in the coffin of the British Empire, and the Eisenhower administration burnished its own anti-colonial credentials by refusing to support the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt.  British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was forced to resign, and he was replaced by Harold Macmillan, who had been a close aide to Eisenhower during the Second World War.

Macmillan dismantled the remains of the British Empire behind the backs of his Conservative Party’s supporters, winning reelection in 1959 on the slogan, “You’ve never had it so good,” while the U.S. supported a relatively peaceful transition that preserved Western international business interests and military power.

As the U.S. faces a similar transition from empire to a post-imperial future, its leaders have been seduced by the chimera of the post-Cold War “power dividend” to try to use military force to preserve and expand the U.S. Empire, even as the relative economic position of the U.S. declines.

In 1987, Paul Kennedy ended The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers with a prescient analysis of the U.S. position in the world.  He concluded,

“In all of the discussions about the erosion of American leadership, it needs to be repeated again and again that the decline referred to is relative not absolute, and is therefore perfectly natural; and that the only serious threat to the real interests of the United States can come from a failure to adjust sensibly to the newer world order.”

But after Kennedy wrote that in 1987, instead of accepting the future of peace and disarmament that the whole world hoped for at the end of the Cold War, a generation of American leaders made a fateful bid for “superpower.”  Their delusions were exactly the kind of failure to adjust to a changing world that Kennedy warned against.

The results have been catastrophic for millions of victims of U.S. wars, but they have also been corrosive and debilitating for American society, as the perverted priorities of militarism and Empire squander our country’s resources and leave working Americans poorer, sicker, less educated and more isolated from the rest of the world.

When I began writing Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq in 2008, I hoped that the catastrophes in Afghanistan and Iraq might bring U.S. leaders to their senses, as the Suez crisis did to British leaders in 1956.

Instead, eight more years of carefully disguised savagery under Obama have squandered more precious time and good will and spread the violence and chaos of U.S. war-making even farther and wider.  The new National Defense Strategy’s implicit threats against Russia and China reveal that 20 years of disastrous imperial wars have done nothing to disabuse U.S. leaders of their delusions of “superpower status” or to restore any kind of sanity to U.S. foreign policy.

Trump is not even pretending to respect diplomacy or international law, as he escalates Bush’s and Obama’s wars and threatens new ones of his own.  But maybe Trump’s nakedly aggressive policies will force the world to finally confront the dangers of U.S. imperialism. A coming together of the international community to stop further U.S. aggression may be the only way to prevent an even greater catastrophe than the ones that have already befallen the people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Honduras, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and Yemen.

Or will it actually take a new and even more catastrophic war in Korea, Iran or somewhere else to finally force the United States to “adjust sensibly to the new world order,” as Paul Kennedy put it in 1987?  The world has already paid a terrible price for our leaders’ failure to take his sound advice a generation ago.  But what will be the final cost if they keep ignoring it even now?

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Nicolas J.S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapters on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.

On Tuesday, the World Economic Forum (WEF) opened in the exclusive Swiss Alpine resort of Davos, with some 3,000 corporate executives, government officials and celebrities convening for the ostensible purpose of discussing this year’s theme of “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.”

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.

The well-heeled crowd at Davos, paying $55,000 each to attend, is guarded by a small army of 4,000 Swiss troops and 1,000 police, with a no-fly zone imposed overhead. Protests have been banned in the village—on the pretext that there has been too much snow—but thousands of people demonstrated Tuesday in the Swiss financial capital of Zurich in opposition to the WEF and, in particular, to the attendance this year by US President Donald Trump. Marchers carried placards reading, “Trump – You’re not Welcome,” “You Are a Shit-Hole Person” and “Smash WEF.”

The gathering of global billionaire CEOs, bankers and hedge fund managers embodies the very social “fracturing” that the Davos organizers pretend to be addressing. The summit opened just two days after the aid group Oxfam issued its annual report on social inequality, exposing the fact that of all global wealth growth in 2017, 82 percent went to the top one percent, while the bottom half of the world’s population, some 3.8 billion people, saw nothing at all.

Personifying this crisis will be Trump, the first US president to attend the global summit since 2000. He is set to meet with global CEOs on Thursday night and to present his “America First” agenda to the forum in its final session on Friday.

Trump set the stage for his appearance by imposing tariffs against Chinese and South Korean manufacturers amounting to 50 percent on washing machines and 30 percent on solar panels, invoking a rarely used statute to protect domestic manufacturers from “serious injury.” Administration officials portrayed the action as a fulfillment of campaign promises to protect “American workers,” even as the solar power industry forecast that its net result would be the loss of over 23,000 jobs.

China’s commerce ministry responded with a sharply worded statement expressing Beijing’s “strong dissatisfaction” with the tariffs and warning that that China would “resolutely defend its legitimate interests.” There is growing speculation that Trump may follow up his first tariffs with far more consequential ones on steel and aluminum, igniting a full-scale trade war with unpredictable consequences for the global economy.

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi gave the opening speech to the WEF, warning,

“Forces of protectionism are raising their heads against globalization. It feels like the opposite of globalization is happening.”

While not naming Trump, it was clear that Modi’s remarks were directed principally against the US administration.

“The negative impact of this kind of mindset cannot be considered less dangerous than climate change or terrorism,” he said.

Much has been made of the supposed stark contradiction between Trump’s right-wing economic nationalism and Davos’ supposed globalist ethos, amid predictions of some kind of a showdown between the US president and his European counterparts, particularly German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron.

In reality, both Merkel and Macron will have left Davos before Trump even arrives. Moreover, their governments are also pursuing national interests under conditions in which the entire post-World War II system of trading relations established under the aegis of the then-unchallenged dominance of US imperialism is breaking down.

The source of this breakdown is to be found not in the demagogic rants of Donald Trump, but rather the insoluble contradictions of the capitalist system, which is driving every country into a war of each against all in a ruthless struggle for profits and markets. This is creating the same kind of global tensions and conflicts that paved the way to the Second World War.

Both the Wall Street Journal and CNN Tuesday published interviews with leading corporate and financial CEOs in Davos praising Trump for enacting the recent sweeping tax cuts for US corporations and the rich and carrying out unprecedented deregulation of big business.

Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat told CNN that tax cuts would lead to business expansion. “Maybe this is the catalyst that takes us from optimism to confidence.”

“There is extreme optimism,” Sir Michael Sorrell, chief executive of the ad group WPP PLC, told the Journal. “It is remarkable the psychological difference—whatever you think of Trump—that he has brought… It has improved (executives’) already positive psychology.”

The “optimism” and “positive psychology” of this layer is driven by expectations that the vast growth they have experienced in their personal fortunes since the 2008 crash, fueled by free money from the global central banks and sweeping austerity measures imposed upon the world’s population, will now be further accelerated.

There were, however, less sanguine opinions expressed on the opening day. Axel Weber, the chairman of the Swiss banking giant UBS Group AG and former chairman of Germany’s central bank, warned:

“We’re seeing inflation pressures largely ignored. We’re starting to see output gaps closing, with tighter labor conditions and wage pressure… Inflation could come back as a surprise this year.”

The fear of “wage pressure” is well-founded. What more conscious elements within the capitalist ruling class see on the horizon is an explosive growth of the class struggle, which has already found expression in the first weeks of the new year in the mass upheavals in Iran and Tunisia, as well as the wildcat strike by Ford workers in Romania and industrial actions by workers in Germany.

Meanwhile, a televised discussion between CEOs on the first day of the Davos summit heard similar expressions of disquiet.

“It feels like 2006 again,” said Barclays CEO Jes Staley, who insisted that the next crash will not start with the banks.

David Rubenstein, cofounder of the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based global private equity investment firm, warned against the exuberance over the rising stock market,

“Usually when people are happy and optimistic, that’s when something bad happens.”

He cautioned that “black swans,” unanticipated events, including global geopolitical conflicts, could plunge the world into crisis.

The so-called “black swans” are coming home to roost as the conferences and lavish parties play out in Davos.

In Syria, the Turkish invasion of the northwestern Kurdish enclave of Afrin has raised the specter of an armed confrontation between two NATO allies, with Ankara seeking to crush Syrian Kurdish forces on its border that have served as the main proxy ground force for US imperialism’s intervention in the country.

The New York Times warned Tuesday that the invasion was bringing US and Turkish “interests into direct conflict on the battlefield.” The newspaper quoted a security analyst who stated that Washington would have to chose between “another U.S. betrayal of the few groups that have consistently supported and helped the U.S. in Syria and Iraq—or risk indirect and even direct conflict with Turkey, a fellow NATO member.”

The confrontation in Syria comes in the wake of a series of documents issued from Washington—the National Security Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Defense Strategy—which lay out a strategic shift by US imperialism toward the open preparation for military confrontations, including nuclear war, with both Russia and China.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson issued a statement Tuesday accusing Russia of responsibility for an alleged chemical attack in Syria, signaling Washington’s intention to shift the crisis it is confronting with Turkey to a confrontation with Russia in a country where both Washington and Moscow have military forces.

This is the grim reality overshadowing the supposed “optimism” of the billionaires and multimillionaires gathered in Davos.

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Featured image is from Sky News.

Power disparities between populations are among the chief factors that determine who will have better access to resources and who will suffer from greater exposure to waste and hazardous materials. The State of Israel is a developed nation and a member of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). As such, its resource consumption per capita is high and it generates waste accordingly.

Like other countries, Israel has a system in place for treating the waste generated in its territory. However, as this report reveals, a significant portion of this system is located outside Israel’s sovereign borders, in the West Bank. Abusing its status as an occupying power, Israel has set out less stringent regulations in industrial zones in settlements and even offers financial incentives such as tax breaks and government subsidies. This policy has made it more profitable to build and operate waste treatment facilities in the West Bank than inside Israel.

B’Tselem research has found that there are at least fifteen Israeli waste treatment facilities in the West Bank. Most of the waste they process is produced in Israel. Six of the facilities handle hazardous waste which requires special processes and regulatory supervision due to the dangers it poses.

This report focuses on five waste treatment facilities operating in the West Bank: four plants which process hazardous waste and dangerous substances produced in Israel – including infectious medical waste, used oils and solvents, metals, batteries and electronic industry byproducts – and one which processes sewage sludge. The findings presented in the report are based on the information available on the types of waste these facilities receive and the potential risks the plants’ operations pose.

Israel regards the facilities built in the West Bank as part of its local waste management system, yet it applies less rigorous regulatory standards there than it does inside its own territory. Whereas polluting plants located within Israel are subject to progressive air pollution control legislation, polluting plants in the industrial zones of settlements are subject to virtually no restrictions. Moreover, the facilities in settlements are not required to report on the amount of waste they process, the hazards their operation pose, or the measures they adopt to prevent – or at least reduce – these risks. B’Tselem sent requests for information on these matters to the Ministry of Environmental Protection and the Civil Administration. The requests have gone unanswered.

Israel is effectively having it both ways: seemingly increasing the amount of waste it treats, it actually does so by diverting the risks and pollutants onto Palestinian land and people. When asked, at a conference at Ariel University in June 2017, whether these legislative gaps are ever exploited to transfer waste from Israel to the West Bank, Mr. Shoni Goldberg, Director of the Ministry of Environmental Protection’s Jerusalem District, which covers most of the West Bank, replied:

“Yes. There are certainly wastes, especially hazardous waste and expensive waste, that Israelis transfer to the West Bank to get rid of.”

International standards in this field address the transfer of waste from the territory of one sovereign state to another. However, transferring waste into an occupied territory is a far graver issue, as residents of an occupied territory cannot oppose the decisions of the occupying power, and are entirely at its mercy. The Palestinian residents of the West Bank are a population under military rule. As such, they were never asked – to say nothing of having agreed – to take in hazardous waste. Prior informed consent is not even an option in their case. They have no influence over what types of plants operate in settlements’ industrial zones, or the legislation that determines what environmental rules apply there. They have no access to information about what goes on in these plants, whether any accidents have occurred, or what risks they pose to water sources, air quality and local residents’ health.

Any transfer of waste to the West Bank is a breach of international law which Israel is duty bound to uphold. The provisions of international law stipulate that an occupied territory or its resources may not be used for the benefit of the occupying power’s own needs or economic development. Moreover, the occupying power is responsible for ensuring public health and hygiene in the occupied territory and must provide residents of the occupied territory with an adequate standard of living, including “the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health.

Palestinians are not the only ones at risk from potential pollution. Unlike other Israeli practices in the West Bank that make a distinction between Palestinian residents and Israeli settlers, environmental hazards make no such distinction. That said, there is a difference. The settlers – whose presence in the West Bank is unlawful to begin with – are Israeli citizens. Therefore, they have access to, and influence over, decision-makers. Moreover, they can choose to live anywhere inside Israel, whereas the Palestinian residents have nowhere else to go. The West Bank is their home and they have no other.

Waste treatment in the West Bank is simply one more facet of the exploitative policy Israel has practiced consistently for fifty years now, using Palestinian space and people to further its own interests. As part of this policy, Israel treats the West Bank – and particularly Area C, where it retained full control under the Oslo Accords – as an area meant to serve its needs exclusively, as if it were its sovereign territory.

The international principles governing hazardous waste management are based on values of environmental justice, public consultation and transparency. An expression of basic human decency, they strive to codify the simple notion that military, political or economic power disparities should not be abused by the powerful in order to dump their pollution and waste in their disempowered neighbors’ backyards. When contrasted with these values, the reality Israel imposes on the West Bank in terms of waste management is unimaginably callous. Israel, taking into account its own needs alone, treats its waste in the West Bank and completely ignores its legal and moral obligations toward the Palestinian population there. Israel has turned the West Bank into a sacrifice zone, exploiting and harming the environment at the expense of the Palestinian residents, who are completely excluded from the decision-making process.

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Featured image is from B’Tselem.

The scandalous news that non-EU-member Serbia is already abiding by Brussels’ proposed migrant resettlement quota before the bloc itself even agrees on it is a conveniently timed distraction to divert attention from President Vucic’s volte face on resuming negotiations with Kosovo.

Serbs have been in quite a stir over the past couple of days after their Internal Affairs Minister, Nebojsa Stefanovoc, declared that:

“If the EU decides that the migrants have to be distributed according to EU quotas, Serbia is of course ready to participate in that. We are not just ready to participate in the future — we are participating in it right now. We already have 4,000 migrants on our territory and we are providing them with all the humane treatment which one country can deliver for migrants and refugees.”

This amounts to nothing more than EU-aspirant Serbia agreeing to a proposal that the bloc itself hasn’t even approved, demonstrating a slavish mentality to please Brussels at all costs in order to facilitate the Balkan country’s membership into the organization.

Not only that, but the announcement was widely republished all across the web, including in Afghanistan by the country’s popular government-linked TOLOnews outlet, indicating that certain migrant-originating countries might be hinting to their restless nationals that Serbia could be a “backup Germany” if they feel adventurous enough to leave their homelands and venture elsewhere in search of a “better life”.

After all, it’s already thought that most of the illegal migrants in Serbia aren’t even “Syrians”, let alone “refugees”, with even Al Jazeera recognizing in 2016 that “most, about 70-80 percent of [them] are from Afghanistan”, so it’s perfectly natural that this landlocked war zone would be “advertising” Serbia as the next destination for its civilizationally dissimilar nationals to move to now that Belgrade has apparently relaxed its policies and is bragging about how good it treats migrants.

Seeing as how Serbia might even one day join the EU, the pursuit of which is the reason why the country is selling out on its previously principled border security policies, then the future Afghan “new arrivals” and others from elsewhere across the world that might stream into the country in the coming months could end up entering the bloc as well if that happens, which is yet another incentive for them to travel there and wait a few years for this to occur.

Tying Afghanistan into all of this isn’t the result of rampant speculation and “fear mongering”, since the country is poised to receive approximately 1,5 million “refugees” that are supposed to be repatriated from Pakistan in the coming weeks, and it’s all but impossible for this failed state to accommodate a roughly 4% sudden increase in its population if it can’t even care for its own people inside the country as it is.

This makes it likely that the government will seek to induce these individuals to migrate somewhere else as soon as possible in order to prevent them from turning against the US-backed authorities and joining the Taliban, hence why TOLOnews promoted the Serbian government’s decision to jump the gun and begin implementing an EU migrant policy that hasn’t even been agreed to yet by Brussels itself.

It would ordinarily make no sense why a national leader would want to encourage a migrant influx into his small and relatively impoverished country in the coming months, but the reason that Vucic’s government is doing this is because they’re Europhiles more than they are Serbophiles, and the President has been known to follow the lead of his EU role model Merkel even if it could be contrary to his nation’s interests.

That’s exactly what’s happening in this case, but the timing of his government’s bizarre announcement on this issue also needs to be taken into account because it conveniently serves as a distraction from Vucic’s volte face on resuming negotiations with Serbia’s breakaway and self-declared “independent” Autonomous Province of Kosovo.

Belgrade previously suspended its “normalization” negotiations with Pristina following the terrorist assassination of Kosovo Serb politician Oliver Ivanovic and ruled out the continuation of dialogue until the culprit was brought to justice, but then a day later Vucic agreed with his separatist counterpart to resume the said talks.

This came as a shock to observers who couldn’t believe that the country’s President cared so little about the assassination of a compatriot that he’d reverse his presumably “principled” position without even a patsy being pinpointed for the crime first, though it should be said that many Serbs weren’t surprised because they’ve grown used to their leader’s antics and are familiar with his duplicitous style.

Nevertheless, it’s objectively inflammatory for a head of state to behave this way regardless of how psychologically conditioned his people may be to expecting this from him, hence why it may have been “politically convenient” for his government to announce their newly reformed migrant policy so soon after this scandal and before its citizens even finished mourning Ivanovic, let alone realized that Vucic was lying to them when he promised not to resume negotiations with Kosovo before justice was served.

The significance of this can’t be overstated because the said negotiations could eventually lead to Serbia’s de-facto recognition of Kosovo’s “independence” as a prerequisite for joining the EU, which amounts to selling out the country’s most enduring historical interest and even its identity, similar in a sense to how newly installed Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev is doing the same by agreeing to change his country’s constitutional name.

Instead of focusing on all of that, the people are now distracted by the migrant news that could much more directly affect each and every one of their lives than Ivanovic’s assassination because of the security threat that it might pose to them, especially if some battle-hardened Afghan Taliban from Pakistan’s mountainous frontier infiltrate into their country under the guise of being (child?) “refugees”.

The Roman quip about “bread and circuses” is more relevant for Vucic’s Serbia than anywhere else, as the President has a flair for drama and is known for hyping up three supposed “assassination attempts” against him in as many years, so it’s not too out of the “ordinary” in the country’s recent political context for its leader to attempt to manufacture an Afghan migrant crisis in order to distract from yet another broken promise and possibly even the ultimate betrayal in pursuit of his cherished dream of EU membership.

*

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.

Featured image is from the author.

This is part two in a multi-part series direct and on-scene from the Mid-East. See link below for part one.

Erdogan’s Turkey: When Knives Cut Both Ways

By Brett Redmayne-Titley, January 20, 2018

***

“ We have seen war… too much war. We desire peace. To have peace we must live together as one people. The new government says so. We support our government.” – Taxi driver on the streets of Beirut

Indeed the people of Lebanon have seen too much war. Though their military has not in its history set foot on foreign soil, remaining in the minds of the Lebanese are one bloody civil war and three separate wars of invasion in 1982, 1999, and 2006. Now it would appear that a new war is brewing again on its southern border.

In all these examples war was brought to their land by Israel which, using false premise, attacked the civilian population and infrastructure at will attempting and failing to conquer the capital city, Beirut. Despite this history, all Lebanese- except the Palestinian refuge population- desire peace with Israel, but they too well understand the need for a well prepared army. An army of the people and for the people.

As Mao observed in his book, Guerrilla Warfare, “In order to put down the gun, one must first pick-up the gun.” This, applied to continued Israeli military foreign policy that continues to threaten them, is the sad, reluctant reality that faces this peaceful country at this very moment. However, considering the examples of military force in Turkey, documented in a previous article, this army-their army- is very different indeed.

Arriving from Turkey into Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport just south of Beirut city, the differences become immediately obvious. The airport’s immigration and customs workers and security guards do their job, but they are not aggressive. A Canadian reporter can easily be mistaken for being American, unfortunately in the minds of some a good reason for a lack of politeness, but here you are treated with courtesy, although sometimes somewhat abruptly, by the staff who all wear military uniforms.

The people here are jovial, smiling and willing to help. They exude a carefree spirit regardless of the prior ravages of war being always at hand. Beirut is known for its very late, night life that goes on seven nights a week, often until 4 AM or later. As one Saturday night reveller summed up, beer in hand and a cigarette waving in the other,

“We party like its our last night on earth… because it might be!”

Many speak English due to three languages being required in Lebanese colleges; Arabic, English and an elective language of a student’s choice. Literacy is high and politics is spoken freely. As such, the traveler feels at home, safe…and very welcome. Buying a tall beer at any Beirut bar, a quick introduction to anyone at arm’s length is all that it takes to make new friends. Politics is spoken freely and they desire opinion on what is going on in the west, especially applied to the new American president and his willingness for new war and for providing Israel carte- blanc in its expansionist efforts against the Arab nations. Rightfully, they are concerned about the advent of new war.

Sadly, there are far fewer western and EU travellers bringing much needed tourist money to an increasingly impoverished Lebanon these days. The Syrian war is mere miles away to the east and although standard media reports that it is winding down, two important facts are widely known to the average Lebanese: The Americans and their manufactured minions of war refuse to leave and the Israelis are preparing to invade their country again- for the fifth time- via their southern border. For the moment, most areas here are safe and visitors have very little to fear, but this can again change, as before, at the whim of these two foreign powers.

Driving into Beirut many buildings show the pock marks of hundreds of bullets holes still there from the civil war of 1975- 1990 as they strangely sit immediately next to other renovated high-rise apartments. Others sit dormant, dark brownish black streaks staining their exterior walls  where fire and smoke once billowed from their now glassless windows after the Israeli bombings of the civilian neigborhoods in the four previous wars. The worst of these structures are held together by a patch work of interlocked reddish, two inch steel piping secured together to keep these ruins from suddenly falling apart in total. This scene is exactly repeated across the many mile expanse of the suburbs that is today’s Beirut, a city that has been victimized by invasion too often and that is a daily reminder to the Lebanese of the past.

Yes, all Lebanese want peace. The problem is, that peace is not up to them. As seen in Syria, the western powers care not at all for peace, a nation’s sovereignty, nor human life. These shattered scenes here, in what was once called the “Paris of the Middle East,” provide an ever-present reminder-a warning- of this horrible truth.

“We are not afraid of our military. We welcome them. They make us feel safe. They are here to protect Lebanese…to protect Lebanon. This is good.”– Shopkeeper in downtown Beirut.

The streets of Beirut have a very large military presence. Everywhere. Whether it is the police, private security, or soldiers they all wear the same multi-grey-on grey with black and white camouflage uniforms. This creates a very visual presence. At the lowest level a very few, such as parking attendants, are not armed. For the rest one can tell the difference in affiliation by the standard Kalashnikov automatic rifles they hold and then counting the number of extra banana clip bullet magazines strapped to their bodies. Police have only the one clip; in their rifle. The military have six!

Watching one set of police work the scene of a minor traffic accident involving a car and motor scooter, the senior officer is standing across the street next to his white and black SUV while casually smoking a cigarette.  He is watching his men closely. Suddenly he moves quickly to the rear of his truck. He has noticed that his men are not properly armed. Snatching-up two AK-47’s,  he quickly crosses the street and thrusts the weapons into their grasp, making them well aware of their mistake and his displeasure. He, like the rest of the Lebanese military, are taking no chances, not now… not ever!

The cops and the military, however, are pleasant. They watch their areas carefully, but are friendly and readily smile and chat with passers-by, often in front of the backdrop of the bullet riddled buildings, and treat strange reporters the same way despite the language barrier. They are everywhere in Beirut, but do not harass or intimidate. They smoke, chat and seem relaxed while holding their rifles that do not leave their hands…but they do not sit. Those with patrol cars are never inside them, instead standing on display, similarly ready for action, as the senior officer at the traffic accident had previously demanded of his own men. There is much to fear in Lebanon, but is not the people. And it is not the police.

Wandering the streets safely late one night, yet hopelessly lost amongst the myriad of tall apartment buildings that border each side of the street and provide no point of reference at all, two well armed soldiers- special forces by the looks of their ruby-red caps- notice this stranger approaching them and … that he has somehow managed to be inside their closed perimeter. They turn,  facing the stranger, admonishing him in obvious Arabic that he is definitely in the wrong place. However, they do not draw their weapons, rather they check him out closely, looking with close scrutiny as he gets closer. The stranger’s heart rate is increasing despite what he has observed that day having previously dealt with American cops and military far too often in his travels and fallen victim to their aggressions far too often. Now his thumping heart palpitations throb at his temples as he closes the gap on this dark, silent street… a natural reaction due to past experience.

Now within ten feet, the two special forces officers begin to smile, then laugh politely at the foreigners predicament, although pointing adamantly that he should move immediately outside their gate and their security zone. No English is spoken, but they point the way back to a landmark and home, shaking their heads in amusement as the stranger ambles on, finally in the correct direction. This of course is a far cry from how their American counterparts would likely have handled this very innocent situation.

For the remainder of my time in Beirut I never again had any remaining fear at all of this military. A military that shows itself regularly, as on this night, to be… an Army for the People.

*

Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 150 in-depth articles over the past seven years for news agencies worldwide. Many have been translated. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis that has led to multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, KXL Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk

Republicans in the U.S. House have made available to all members of the House an allegedly scandalous “memo” that allegedly summarizes the FBI’s cooperation with the Democratic Party during the 2016 Presidential election; but, supposedly, no House member is being allowed to make this evidence available to the public, because, supposedly, as Republican House Intelligence Committee member Mike Conaway from Texas said, “That’d be real dangerous,” and yet he provided no evidence to back up that police-state assertion of the Government’s supposed ‘right’ to hide, from the voters, information that’s crucial to voters’ being empowered to vote intelligently.

The veteran opinion-columnist and Reagan Administration Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy, Paul Craig Roberts, has headlined about this, “The NSA Is a Blackmail Agency” and alleges:

The blackmail mechanism was put into gear the minute the news reported that the House Intelligence Committee had assembled proof that the FBI, DOJ, and DNC created Russiagate as a conspiracy to unseat President Trump. Members of Congress with nothing to hide demanded the evidence be released to the public. Of course, it was to be expected that release of the facts would be denounced by Democrats, but Republicans, such as Rep. Mike Conaway (R, Texas), himself a member of the committee, joined in the effort to protect the Democrats and the corrupt FBI and DOJ from exposure. Hiding behind national security concerns, Conaway opposes revealing the classified information. “That’d be real dangerous,” he said.

As informed people know, 95% of the information that is classified is for purposes that have nothing to do with national security [but is for ‘blackmail’].

Rep. Conaway might consider the alleged “memo” to “be real dangerous” to release to the public; but, as the skilled lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald has made clear and documented:

1. Trump can declassify anything he wants. …

2. The House (and Senate) intelligence committees can declassify any material they possess. …

3. The Constitution protects members of Congress from prosecution for “any speech or debate in either House.” …

4. Republicans can leak everything to the news media.

If for some reason Trump and the congressional leadership refuse to use any of the above options to vindicate themselves, a brave member of Congress could turn whistleblower and transmit the classified proof of the GOP’s claims about the memo to the news media. …

The above leave me with three possible explanations for why this information hasn’t yet been made public:

1. Paul Craig Roberts is correct that coercive means from the Deep State are being applied in order to hide from the public the Government’s thoroughgoing corruption — that we live in a police state; or, as he phrases this, “The main function of the National Security Administration is to collect the dirt on members of the house and senate, the staffs, principal contributors, and federal judges. The dirt is used to enforce silence about the crimes of the security agencies.”

or:

2. The Republicans in Congress are just as eager as the Democrats in Congress are to hide this “memo,” and there isn’t anyone in Congress, from either Party, who is willing to reveal the complete “memo” to the public. However, it that’s true, then don’t we already live in a police-state, just like PCR is alleging? 

or:

3. Our Senators and Representatives in Congress are unanimously in support of keeping the evidence away from the public, because all of them want to protect the public from having essential information to be able to make valid voting-decisions.

Or: Can you think of any other options here? And do all of the possible options come down to one? — That the U.S. is a dictatorship.

*

The framework for protest movements needs to be expanded with a view to threatening the Establishment that supersedes political parties.

This “Establishment” is globally-oriented, it erases nation-state sovereignties, and imposes its dark will on all of us, through lies and deceptions.

Protest movements also must be globally oriented, and we must challenge the “forbidden truths”.

The globalized permanent war agenda and the West’s support for terrorism are two foundational “forbidden truths” that protest movements must address.

Recently, Western-supported al Qaeda affiliated terrorists[1] slaughtered innocent civilians in Damascus Syria.  These terrorists have been attacking schools, hospitals, innocent civilians, Syrian infrastructure and all of Syria for almost seven years now.  In Damascus alone they have murdered thousands of civilians[2] since the war started.  And yet the West, including Canada, still supports them, and illegal terror sanctions, as part of their illegal Regime Change[3] war on Syria.

Calling certain terrorists “moderates” is an intelligence agency construct, a psychological operation, that has worked too well for too long to confuse the masses and politicians into supporting Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

To be clear: All of the terrorists in Syria are Western-supported terrorists. “Moderates” never existed, except as an imperial strategy of deception.

These “Forbidden truths” about the war on Syria, about Western-supported terrorism, and the Establishment’s permanent war agenda need to be exposed to the light of day, and repeated, until they displace the “Accepted lies.”

We need to challenge the globalized Establishment and its toxic agenda of war, death, and poverty – all protected behind a matrix of interlocking agencies of deception.

Christine Horani lost her leg in yesterday’s mortar attack on Damascus by terrorists in E. Ghouta! 9 civilians were killed and many more injured. Unfortunately, all of these jihadi terrorists are still considered “moderate” rebels by the West! pic.twitter.com/KzLlNf1GBj

— Fares Shehabi (@ShehabiFares) January 23, 2018

Canada’s progressive veneer needs to be shattered.  Canada is not progressive or civilized or humanitarian. We support terrorism, lie about it, and pretend that we are civilized with our Pride parades, our pink hats, and our oh so cute Prime Minister. The fact that we hide our barbarism beneath these “Establishment-friendly” facades makes us even more disgusting. Human-rights marches must include the human rights of people such as the young lady pictured above, and the children dying unnecessarily in Syrian hospitals, and every person murdered by Western-supported terrorists.

*

Notes

[1] AfraaDagher, “Ghouta ‘Moderates’ Slaughter 9 in Damascus Neighborhood.” Syria News. 23 January, 2018. (http://www.syrianews.cc/ghouta-moderates-slaughter-damascus/) Accessed 23 January, 2018.

[2] Pierre Le Corf, Global Facebook commentary, 22 January, 2018.

[3] Mark Taliano, “Imperial Disaster.” Global Research. 19 January, 2018.(https://www.globalresearch.ca/imperial-disaster/5626548). Accessed 23 January, 2018.

Order Mark Taliano’s Book “Voices from Syria” directly from Global Research.  

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The US-Japanese missile deal is threatening to ruin the Russian-Japanese rapprochement.

The island nation will be purchasing four SM-3 Block IIA anti-missile systems from the US for over $130 million in order to ostensibly defend against North Korea, though Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov openly suspected that the Americans might end up manning these units and potentially exploiting them as a front for deploying offensive weaponry for use against his country. Basically, Russia is implying that the US is expanding its contentious “missile defense shield” from Eastern Europe to Northeast Asia in tightening its strategic noose around Eurasia. Japan denies these accusations and asks Russia to trust it, but the developing disagreement between the two is now threatening to derail their newfound and promising relationship.

Neither side will probably be able to reach a long-awaited World War II peace treaty with one another because their publics will accuse one or the other government of “selling out” depending on the resolution of what Japan calls the “Kuril Islands Issue”, with Moscow being berated for succumbing to “strong arm” tactics if makes any territorial concessions afterwards or Tokyo getting attacked for using the missile deal as a “face-saving” excuse for withdrawing its claims. Nevertheless, Japan will most likely go forward with the missile purchase due to domestic political pressure on Abe to prove that he’s “doing enough” to protect his people from North Korea, exactly as the US foresaw would happen.

This means that the ball will be in Russia’s court over whether it decides to continue with the rapprochement or not despite the ever-diminishing odds that the “Kuril Islands Issue” will be resolved in the near future, and while there are convincing arguments for why Moscow might suspend this process, there are also three interrelated and pragmatic reasons for why both sides could surmount what Washington clearly intends to be the ultimate stumbling block to their rapprochement so far.

Japan has an interest in investing in the nearby Kuril Islands and Russian Far East, just as Russia is eager to see as much foreign capital coming into these far-flung corners of the country as possible. Tokyo is attracted to the idea of establishing a strategic presence along China’s borders there too, just as Moscow wants to diversify its “Pivot to Asia” from its erstwhile sole Northeast and East Asian strategic dependency on China. Finally, Japan desires to use Russia’s mainland and maritime territory for achieving access to Western Europe, which aligns with Russia’s grand strategy in serving as Eurasia’s Silk Road bridge and geopolitical “balancer”.

Altogether, Russia and Japan have a lot to lose if they fall for the US’ trap by allowing its manipulation of the manufactured North Korean missile threat to undermine their rapprochement and provoke one or the other to suspend this process for reasons of “image” and “national prestige”, since the last thing that Washington truly wants is for Moscow and Tokyo to continue working together in spite of this.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Jan 19, 2018:

*

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.

Featured image is from the author.

A must read for any sports fan is Brian Tuohy‘s 2010 book ” The Fix is In”. Tuohy covers most professional sports and how many times certain games are fixed for various reasons.

Sometimes the larceny is done for betting angles. Sometimes the larceny is done by certain teams to help them win games. Sometimes the larceny is done by the leagues, in concert with the media, to assure getting the best viewing ratings. All in all, as my old Sicilian friend once stated: “Things are not what they seem.” This writer, a lifetime football fan, could cite so many recent developments that reveal to the ‘ever watchful eye’ the collusion by most likely the referees and the league they work for (NFL or NCAA) that affect the outcome of certain games. Recently, both the comeback wins by ‘America’s pro team’, the New England Patriots, in last year’s Super Bowl, and ‘America’s college team’ , the Alabama Crimson Tide, in this year’s NCAA championship, smell worse than week old fish. In both cases it was the referees, most likely instructed by the two leagues, to ‘ make or not make’ key calls during the second halves of each game… to cement the fix. More than ever before, astute observers of football are being added to the list of conspiracy believers, most recently Sirius Radio sports talk host Christopher Russo’s 15 year old son.

Actually, the best example of the ‘Fix being in’ were the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. They revealed to anyone with even half a brain the corrupt nature of this empire. Talk about Banana Republic! I mean that after both elections investigative researchers had documented how electronic voting machines were fixed to make sure that Bush Junior was the victor. The ‘hanging chad’ controversy, the schemes to assure long voting lines in Democratic districts, and the use of incorrect felon lists was only the tip of the iceberg… it was those electronic machines (manufactured, by the way, by Republican donors ) that really sealed the deal. So much so, that in ’04, it was little Dickie Morris, once President Clinton’s main polling guru, who by then had deserted to the other side, who let it out while on live TV. Morris was on the election return show for one network to offer his expertise. When he saw how the exit polls were overwhelming for Kerry in the crucial state of Ohio, Morris stated “Well, those polls are for sure… Kerry will win Ohio”. When that state and the election went to Bush Junior, Morris actually stated on air that something was fishy.

Sadly, it seems that in this Military Industrial Empire the ‘Fix’ is paramount. What makes this sadness cry deeper is the fact that our two political parties serve the empire so well. Throughout the government shutdown chaos you never see or hear those two ‘puppet parties’, or the embedded mainstream media lackeys ever mention that half our tax dollars goes for military spending… while our safety nets are full of holes and our cities short of funds. Both parties will stand and salute, along with the whoring journalists, the flag that was stolen from us by the Phony Warriors. The Cold War was a fix, Korea and Vietnam a fix, and all the succeeding foreign interventions a fix. When will the majority of us, the good and decent and truly patriotic folks, be the role models for the others among us who still believe in this fairy tale?

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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 300 of his work posted on sites like Consortium News, Information Clearing House,  Global Research, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected] )

Understanding for intervening

Constructivist and psychoanalytic oriented social research provides evidence that human behaviour is driven by the shared meanings of the subjective social experience (Blumer 1969, Mead 1934, Berger and Luckmann 1966, Moscovici 1961, Matte Blanco 1975, Carli 1993). This perspective can be used to understand the cultural drivers underlying the elite’s political and economic action.

The understanding of these meanings allows to identify possible strategies of intervention to induce change and enhance democracy, social and economic justice, quality of life and civil coexistence.

This knowledge can be gained by the analysis of socially produced discourses on relevant topics such as globalization, intended as the current common horizon of sense that guides social action.

On the basis of these assumptions, I conducted an analysis of the globalization discourse of the World Economic Forum Board members (TNI 2015) by applying the methodological approach of Text Emotional Analysis developed within the Carli and Paniccia’s model of collusion [1].

The image of globalization

The elite’s image of globalization that arises from this work is not univocal and monolithic, but composed of four cultural dimensions corresponding to the clusters of dense words [2], obtained through the statistical analysis of texts under examination.

The first dimension is characterized by the following elements:

• a negative representation of the other, conceived as a featureless anonymous mass of persons acting solely on the basis of emotional factors (e.g. trust), instead of rational ones;
• the proposition of three main symbolic frames for the attribution of meaning to life experiences in the globalization age that are expressed by the words world, time and grow;
• the idea that globalization impacts over people’s life and especially over that of young people;
• a form of thought based on genetic determinism and a pragmatic knowledge oriented to take possession of reality through technology.

The second dimension revolves around the three following aspects:

• the messianic hope in the dimension of bigness, represented by the international financial institutions (e.g. African Development Bank and International Monetary Fund) and by the Big Science approach of projects like the Human Genome Project;
• the social cost of the international financial institution’s intervention represented by the risk of failing in the pursuit of the imposed ideal of ‘growth, strength and power’ based development, expressed by the threat of inflation and the imposition of living conditions to the limits of survival (e.g. Greece situation) that put under stress the European countries;
• the predominance of the economic factor in determining public policies, under the dogma of free market and personal gain.

The third dimension is focused on the following five points:

• the pursuit of strengthening the ability to provide, invest and manage budget and funds;
• a warped view of competition based on the search for conditions of privilege to successfully compete, that is strictly linked to the negative perception towards the taxes, seen as an authoritarian imposition that limits the satisfaction of one’s needs;
• the consequent need of developing a social order based on the idea of freedom, conceived as absence of restraints to one’s continuous expansion;
• the key importance of cognitive tools concerning capacities such as perceiving, recognizing, distinguishing, choosing and establishing, in the pursuit of this ideal of success;
• the increasingly relevant role of women in facilitating the access to the needed reforms to pursue this end.

The fourth dimension embodies the following fundamental elements:

• the role of supranational finance institutions (e.g. InterAmerican Development Bank Group) in producing a new sort of colonialism through the form of development aid based on providing sureness through financings in exchange of the gradual expropriation of local political and economic power;
• the effects of innovative financing schemes, such as impact investment, which despite being aimed at generating social benefit, actually becomes a way for taking possess of the last remaining fields of public intervention such as welfare, health, education and energy;
• the need of integrating development assistance recipient countries into the myth of making money in their regions;
• the tendency to interface solely with the business elite of these countries (lead companies’ CEOs).

Emotions, relations and organizational level of the Davos elite

The central feature of the Davos elite culture of globalization that emerged from this analysis is the lack of democracy in the decision-making processes, both at relational and organizational level.

At relational level, this is expressed by specific patterns of intersubjective emotional and motivational dynamics. The former is characterized by the following elements: the provocation represented by the claim of imposing a specific dogmatic vision of reality, the control of the compliance to the obligations deriving from it, the distrust towards the other (due to its negative connotation and to the risk of non-repayment of the financings received), and the worries and complaints against limits.

These emotional dynamics reveal an approach to social relations oriented to the possession of the other rather than to a productive and creative exchange with it. This can be read as an expression of the fear towards the other and its unpredictable unknowness, grounded in the representation of it as enemy. This leads to the tendency of attempting to transform the unknown other into a well-known friend, a priori given and assimilated to one’s own categories, in the effort of eliminating its unpredictability and the risk of its possible manifestations of enemy-ness. This, however, inevitably implies denying differences and missing the opportunities they offer.

The motivational pattern [3] is characterized by the prevalence of the need for power, as dominant social motivation, that articulates itself into three dimensions: a hierarchical pattern that counterposes elite and people, the big and who hopes in it, CEOs and employees and backers and recipients; a polar dynamic of belonging to/exclusion from the system of power based on the affective dependency to the other (expression of the motivational need for affiliation) induced by the logic of financial support to development programs; and a manipulative dynamics based on the contraposition between appearance and reality, as evidenced by the contrast between the positive image of development assistance policies and the expropriation of local political and economic powers produced by its exclusively financial logic.

As far as concerns the organizational level, the lack of democracy reveals itself in a dogmatic a priori conception of the international financial institutions grounded in a mythical dimension and hence appearing as immutable and little inclined to change and improvement. The functioning of these organizations seems to be based almost exclusively on the social mandate provided by the respect of socially grounded systems of values compliant with their ends and on a substitutive function in the delivery of their services (development aid and sovereign debt crisis management). These institutions are permeated by a technocratic spirit, by virtue of which technicians (the experts) substitute themselves to the users of their services, expropriating them of their decisional power. In this way, these organizations operate without a real commission from their beneficiaries, thus not addressing nor being held accountable for their needs, expectations and objectives and for the efficacy of provided services.

Possible pathways for change and development

On the basis of results of the analysis carried out, several intervention strategies can be proposed to improve the above outlined scenario. The implementation of these strategies, however, requires an active and accountable involvement of all the interlocutors of the global elite.

The main relation-related goal to be pursued regards the participative definition and implementation of new rules of game for social coexistence, that allow to contain the possible manifestations of enemyness within the relationship between belonging systems and the unknown others [4]. This requires to configure the other not anymore as enemy or well-known friend, but as unknown friend to become acquainted with in a relationship of reciprocal exchange, creatively producing together for the common good. This model of social relations allows to unleash one’s creative power (power of doing), avoiding the risk of transforming one’s creative impotence into forms of power over someone or something (intended as a form of possession).

Regarding the motivation to power, the passage from a relational model grounded in the power over the other to the one characterized by the productive exchange with it, allows to by-pass the hierarchical model of relationship with the other, by focusing on goals and products of the relationship with it and on the development of competencies necessary to pursue them effectively. Consequently, also the dynamics of belonging, grounded in the emotions of power and affiliation, can evolve, passing from the model of possession of the other to that of exchange with the other. As a result, by overcoming the possession of the other as the dominant expression of power, the manipulative forms of power can also be contrasted (such as the current forms of development assistance that lead to the expropriation of local power), since the power becomes shifted towards more creative construction of the common good.

At organizational level, the main objective of improvement concerns the passage from a compliance based logic of action to the approach based on the commonly agreed goals and products, regarded as means of verification of the effectiveness of social action. This would consent to move from an organizational modality entirely grounded in social legitimation to one driven by the commission of verifiable products and services by their recipients, on the basis of their needs and goals. As a result, the recipients could increase their active role in the relation with the technical function, which hence could be oriented to integrate their decisional power, facilitating the development of their competences in the autonomous achievement of their own goals.

This requires questioning, in ever more dialectical and argumentative ways, the dogma of the development vision proposed by the elite and to work on the definition and implementation of alternative hypothesis and models, for instance aimed at the re-embeddedness of economy in society and culture, as proposed by Polanyi (1944) and Granovetter (1985).

In order to push the process of change of the Davos elite’s organizational culture, it is necessary, for instance, that the beneficiaries of the international financial institutions change their attitude toward these organizations, acting as commissioning party requesting their services, on the basis of their specific needs, goals and expected products. These latter represent, in fact, the verification means by which to assess the effectiveness of these organizations in fulfilling the proposed aims and to promote change and improvement of their ways of functioning.

The precondition to advance in this direction is the change of the social image of the elite’s interlocutors by overcoming the negative connotation attributed by the elite referring to them as people (referable to the etymological meaning of the term plebs), by recuperating the sense of the Greek word démos, referring to the democratic governing power of citizens. Thus reconfigured, in terms of global citizenship, the elite’s interlocutors can regain decisional and self-ruling autonomy and boost bottom-up democratization of government political systems (in terms of both participative and representative democracy), in a perspective of a collective and shared construction of the common future. This entails recovering the sense of public good, conceived as pertaining to the collectivity, in contrast to the private good, referring to an exclusive possession, that deprives someone of something.

The pursuit of this process of cultural transformation requires the development of specific competences, oriented to the development of an active and aware citizenship: this can become the goal and the product on which to rebuild the sense of the social purpose of public education and of its productive efficacy.

*

Sources

Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books

Blumer, Herbert. Symbolic Interactionism; Perspective and Method. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969. Print.

Carli, R. (1993) (Ed.), L’analisi della domanda in psicologia clinica, Giuffré, Milano

Carli, R., & Paniccia, R. M. (2002). L’Analisi Emozionale del Testo. Milano: FrancoAngeli.

Granovetter, M. (1985). “Economic Action and Social Structure: The Problem of Embeddedness”. American Journal of Sociology. 91(3): 481–510.

Matte Blanco, I. (1975) The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. London: Karmac

McClelland, D.C. (1987). Human motivation. New York: University of Cambridge

Mead, George H. (1934). Mind, Self, and Society. The University of Chicago Press

Moscovici, S. (1961). La psychanalyse, son image et son public. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Polanyi, K. (1944). The Great Transformation. New York: Farrar & Rinehart

Transnational Institute (2015), Who are the Davos class? Online available at http://davosclass.tni.org, last online access on December 2015

Mario D’Andreta is a psychologist. He works as clinical and organizational psychologist and conducts independent research on the psychosocial dimensions of globalization and power. On his own blog, mariodandreta.net, he writes about psychosocial and socio-political issues concerned with social coexistence, local development, power elites, biopsychosocial wellbeing and acoustic ecology, aiming at promoting the development of a culture of pacific and creatively productive social coexistence. He can be contacted at [email protected].

Notes

[1] The model of collusion is a psychoanalytic theory of social bonds grounded in the shared emotional symbolization of reality (Carli & Paniccia 2002)

[2] The dense words are those words that convey emotional meaning by themselves, independently from the narrative sense of the text (Carli & Paniccia 2002), such as, in this case, growth, hope, big, freedom, crisis, limit, fall, advantage, need, threat and lower.

[3] The motivational pattern has been analysed under the McClelland’s human motivations model (McClelland 1987)

[4] Relationship on which coexistence is based according to the Carli and Paniccia’s theory (Carli & Paniccia 2002).

The #BDS Movement is a nonviolent grassroots movement originating in the occupied territory of Palestine. Its overriding principles are consistency and commitment to universal human rights, and it has proven to be effective, as a tactic, not least for changing the conversation on Israel. [See What is BDS].

The fact that the BDS Movement is a rights-based, apolitical approach does not mean that it will not lead to a “solution” to the problem of the Jewish state in Palestine. Once the Palestinian rights under international law it highlights are restored, the Zionist project, by definition, will be dismantled.  [See Former Mossad chief fears for ‘future of the Zionist project’].

It is now up to Palestinians to push for that political “solution”, whether in the form of one state or two. Two is dead and buried. One democratic state means the end of the Jewish state. [Read What is Next in Palestine?]

It does not mean the end of Jewish people in Palestine. [Quite the opposite]. But settler-colonial Jews can be indigenized only AFTER all Palestinian rights are restored and reparations made to them. [Watch Omar Barghouti on “ethical decolonization.”]

The discourse on Palestine may be getting a bit confusing because of the human-rights analogies intersectional discourse now makes. [See Black-Palestinian Solidarity: Towards an Intersectionality of Struggles]

Sure, Palestinians have a great deal of commonality with Black Americans, but Black Americans are not demanding self-determination. Palestinians are.

The point is that the Palestinian struggle is not just about rights within a legitimized Israel; it’s fundamentally about return and self-determination in the homeland.

What Palestinians must overcome, along with Israel’s belligerence, is The Persistent U.S. Opposition To Self-Determination.

*

Rima Najjar is a Palestinian whose father’s side of the family comes from the forcibly depopulated village of Lifta on the western outskirts of Jerusalem. She is an activist, researcher and retired professor of English literature, Al-Quds University, occupied West Bank.

VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

High moral, ethical and legal standards are absent in the Washington swamp.

Both right wings of federal duopoly governance share guilt for a corrupted system too debauched to fix.

A self-serving bipartisan class runs things – responsible for inflicting enormous harm on millions of people at home and abroad.

The only way to change what’s unfixable is by abolishing the system and starting over – rebelling for the common good. No other alternative can work.

Elections maintain continuity – the abysmal status quo, things worsening with each new administration and Congress.

Washington is a bipartisan cesspool, a fantasy democracy, contemptuous of right over wrong, supporting privileged interests, ignoring the general welfare.

Federal government shutdown followed congressional failure to pass a budget for the current fiscal year.

For nearly four months, government operated under continuing resolutions – unacceptable short-term fixes, another signed into law on Monday after a farcical three-day shutdown.

Trump’s signature kicked the can down the road until February 8 when another shutdown looms if budget agreement isn’t reached.

This is no way to run government anywhere. Continuing resolutions are shameful, a game of chicken to see who blinks first.

Inability to agree on a budget is one of numerous examples of dysfunctional governance in Washington.

Shutdown occurred over immigrant rights issues, notably Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), letting undocumented immigrants entering America as minors receive renewable deferred action from deportation, along with work permit eligibility.

Around 850,000 “Dreamers” are affected. Some estimates put their number at 1.7 million human beings deserving equitable treatment – not thrown under the bus for political reasons.

Deporting them would be unconscionable. Most arrived as very young children. They know no other country than America, its language and customs. They deserve respect and citizenship, not banishment to a foreign land.

On Monday, undemocratic Dem Minority Leader Schumer caved to GOP hardliners – abandoning protection for Dreamers.

“Big win for Republicans as Democrats cave on Shutdown,” Trump tweeted.

The Wall Street Journal added:

“Nor did they get a promise that the Senate will approve their desired change, nor did they get any commitment from House Republicans to do anything at all.”

A Journal editorial said Schumer betrayed Dems running for reelection in “Trump states (to) “placate his progressive base, and then he caved on the shutdown and ended up with the approval of neither.”

Progressive Change Campaign Committee co-founder Stephanie Taylor blasted Schumer and other undemocratic Dems, saying:

“These weak Democrats hurt the party brand for everyone and make it harder to elect Democrats everywhere in 2018.”

United We Dream executive director Cristina Jimenez said members of her organization are “outraged.” Dems “are not resisting Trump. They are enablers.”

Progressive activist group CREDO political director Murshed Zaheed called Schumer “the worst negotiator in Washington – even worse than Trump,” adding:

“Any plan to protect Dreamers that relies on the word of serial liars like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, or Donald Trump is doomed to fail.”

Democracy for America executive director Charles Chamberlain said

“(a) promise from known liars Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, or Donald Trump isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, yet despite that fact, most Senate Democrats, including…Schumer, voted to allow Donald Trump to continue to subject an ever growing number of Dreamers to lives threatened by deportation from the only home they’ve ever known. (Dems) stand for nothing.”

They’re all self-serving serial liars on both sides of the isle, undemocratic Dems as bad as Republicans, Zaheed and Chamberlain failed to explain.

Monday shenanigans in Washington reflected another example of how deplorable governance in the nation’s capital works.

Privileged interests alone are served, others exploited, mistreated and otherwise ill-served so they can benefit hugely – including from the spoils of endless wars of aggression.

*

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

Some are calling it the Coup’s endgame, others the “final battle” for Brasil’s next decade.

Former President Lula, who held office from 2003-2011 has twice the support of his nearest rival to succeed Putschist Michel Temer in the October 2018 elections.

However, on the 24th January in the southern city of Porto Alegre, he will face judgement on his appeal against a conviction which could prevent him running for office, a case which numerous critics, at home and abroad, have dismissed as baseless and without actual evidence. If his conviction is upheld he would not only be barred from the Presidency but face arrest and up to a decade in prison.

Former President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva

It is now widely believed, and not only amongst his supporters, that the case against Lula is political-legal persecution, or Lawfare, and there is also ample evidence to suggest that it has the full support of North Atlantic powers and corporate interests, which are represented by lobby organisations and think tanks such as AS/COA and the Atlantic Council, and thus permeates through English-language coverage of Brasil. Newspapers such as the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post, continue to pretend that Lula’s case is being conducted normally and fairly. This mirrors what happened in the run up to Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, “Brazil’s institutions are working”, a briefed corporate media insisted.

Comedian Gregorio Duvivier remarked in his Folha de São Paulo column, that in today’s Brasil, if you are against conviction without proof, you are deemed an extremist.

A conspicuous failure to prosecute anyone from the conservative US-backed PSDB (to whom Lava Jato’s inquisitorial Prosecutor-Judge Sergio Moro is connected), despite far greater and more tangible evidence such as that surrounding their defeated 2014 presidential candidate Aécio Neves, has made a mockery of insistence that the vast (and unprecedentedly well promoted) anti-corruption probe is politically neutral. In addition, the economic effects of Lava Jato, from its mandated freezing of construction and energy sectors, contributed to the economic contraction which many used to justify Dilma Rousseff’s illegal impeachment, a deepening of recession which Atlas Network-connected group MBL, campaigning for her removal, actually celebrated as a means of recruitment to their cause.

Crucial to this story is that the conservative bloc which now occupies Temer’s post-coup cabinet (and has since implemented a brutal neoliberal programme without the will of the people) includes 4 times defeated PSDB and heirs to ARENA Government of the 65-85 Dictatorship, now living on as “Democratas”, who have failed between them to win a Presidential election since 1998. These are, naturally, the political forces most involved, and most most vocal in their support of the case against Lula and the war on his PT (Workers Party) as a whole. The Brazilian right and their international supporters, although trying to rush through unpopular reforms and privatisations before Temer must leave office, know that they cannot realistically expect to win an election in which the still wildly popular Lula is a candidate, despite decades of intensifying media vilification.

There are also enormous concerns about the impartiality of Regional Federal Tribunal 4, or TRF4 which will judge on Lula’s appeal. The tribunal is made up of conservative judges João Pedro Gebran, Victor Laus and the more liberal Leandro Paulsen. Gebran, who is the TRF4’s rapporteur to the Lava Jato task force, is also from Curitiba where it is based, and a personal friend and former university colleague of controversial judge Sergio Moro. There have been some allegations that he is a godparent to Moro’s children or vice versa, which he denies. Lula’s defence team even asked for their respective wedding and children’s birth certificates to corroborate, a request which was refused.

During 2017, overseer of the appeal, TRF4’s President Carlos Eduardo Thompson Flores Lenz, in a brazen breach of conduct, enthused to the media about Moro’s handling of Lula’s case, calling it “impeccable”. The chief of his cabinet also shared various facebook campaigns demanding that Lula be imprisoned.

Lula’s TRF4 hearing jumped ahead of 7 others pending and was assessed and scheduled in record time.

Historian Fernando Horta has grave doubts about the fitness of TRF4 in its current configuration to judge a case such as that of Lula, with its enormous political ramifications – in short it will decide Brasil’s political future; an unelected trio of Judges will decide Brasil’s 2018 election and its definition as a sovereign nation or neoliberal vice royalty.

“There are two things that strike me. One is that none of the 3 TRF4 judges are specialists in criminal law, they are in health, commercial and civil law. The other thing that frightens me is that Gebran, the leader of the Tribunal, is a personal friend of Moro. They went to university together and afterwards both worked in the same court in Western Parana state. And this is unusual in that the first Lava Jato conviction ever occurred in that court. In 2013, there was a motion for clarification filed there which represents the first time a Lava Jato case rose to the district court level. In Brazil, this process is done through lottery and their court was the one which was this case was awarded to. And from that point, all the Lava Jato resources passed through the same court with the same prosecutor/judge.  So, their court was awarded the first Lava Jato case in 2013. In 2014 both of them were transferred. They opened two judge positions in the court, where they knew the Lava Jato case would continue. Gebran, Moro’s personal friend, was transferred into a court where they knew Lava Jato was going to continue. In other words, they chose who would decide on Lava Jato in advance. The court is composed of various groups of three prosecutors. Each one has a president, but the Court (TRF4) itself also has a president who can step in and make a judgement in case of a split decision. If the ruling against Lula is 2 – 1 the court president can step in.  If Lula receives one vote in his favor there is a legal maneuver called an implementation motion in which judgement advances to a decision of the entire court, which if I am not mistaken is made up of 9 prosecutor/judges. But it is the court president (Carlos Eduardo Thompson Flores Lenz) who would coordinate that.”

The day of the judgement will be potentially explosive. Despite an effort to outlaw protests; Trade unions, and Social Movements such as MST, are planning to travel to Porto Alegre in support of Lula on January 24th. The PSDB Mayor of the city, Nelson Marchezan Júnior has in response taken the likely illegal step, of directly requesting that Michel Temer make the Armed Forces available to him against the demonstrators’ constitutionally-protected right of assembly.

*

Featured image is from Comunicação #EmPoaComLula.

Ten days after a campaign was launched demanding that Israeli pilots refuse to fly deported Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers to Rwanda, or any other dangerous African country, a group of El Al pilots stated they would not participate in the pending deportations.

The campaign, initiated by the NGO Zazim Community Action, comes amid growing reports that the government is planning to indefinitely imprison or deport tens of thousands of the 38,000 refugees in April.

According to the NGO’s CEO, Raluca Gena, the online campaign is the first step toward a series of activities against what they, and many other human rights organizations and Jewish communities around the world, are deeming an immoral deportation.

One of the El Al pilots, Ido Elad, wrote on Facebook:

“I have joined many of my best friends by declaring that I will not fly refugees to their deaths. I will not be a partner to this barbarism.”

Noting the similar dangers Jews faced throughout history, pilot Yoel Piterbarg posted a lengthy missive on Facebook detailing why he refuses to fly the refugees back to Africa.

“The State of Israel is populated mainly by Jews who were in their distant and recent past refugees in countries [around] the world,” wrote Piterbarg. “Most of them went through the Holocaust, many were forcibly expelled from their countries, and many emigrated voluntarily to better their situation to better countries that agreed to accept and care for them.”

Piterbarg continued:

“It is precisely us, the Jews, who must be attentive, empathic, moral and public opinion leaders in the world to deal with the immigration of refugees who suffered and suffer in their countries of origin.”

While the pilot conceded the necessity of controlling migration, which the country has succeeded at as of last year, he insisted the asylum-seekers who are now in Israel be treated with compassion.

“The refugees should remain and be treated as human beings – just as the Jews used to be refugees and wanted to be treated like human beings and not thrown out,” he wrote. “Martin Luther King said that the terrible things in history happened not because of the bad people who committed them, but because of the ‘good people’ who were silent when it happened.”

A third El Al pilot, Shaul Betzer, also declared on Facebook that he would not assist the government in the pending deportations.

“There is no way that I, as part of a flight crew, will participate in taking refugees/asylum seekers to a destination where their chances of surviving are minuscule,” he wrote.

Gena said that since the campaign began 10 days ago, over 7,500 concerned Israeli citizens have sent personal appeals to the Israel Aircraft Association, the Israeli Pilots Association and the companies that provide the ground services at Ben-Gurion Airport for international flights.

“I am encouraged to see that the pilots have begun to respond to our call,” she said on Monday, noting she based the campaign on German pilots who recently refused to fly over 200 deported refugees to dangerous countries.

“We believe that they have the power and the ability to refuse to take part in the brutal expulsion.”

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Interior Ministry continue to claim the vast majority of refugees are “infiltrators” and “economic migrants,” not victims of genocide.

As our world spirals deeper into an abyss from which it is becoming increasingly difficult to extricate ourselves, some very prominent activists have lamented the lack of human solidarity in the face of the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya. See ‘The Rohingya tragedy shows human solidarity is a lie’ and ‘Wrongs of rights activism around Rohingyas’.

While I share the genuine concern of the Yemeni Nobel peace laureate Tawakkol Karman and Burmese dissident and scholar Dr Maung Zarni, and have offered my own way forward for responding powerfully to the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya – see ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to Defeat Genocide’ – in my view the lack of solidarity they mention is utterly pervasive and readily evident in our lacklustre official and personal responses to the many ongoing crises in which humanity finds itself.

To mention just the most obvious: Every day governments spend $US2 billion on weapons and warfare while a billion people lack the basic resources to live a decent life (and more than 100,000 of these people starve to death). Every day millions of people live under dictatorship, occupation or suffer the impacts of military invasion.Every day another 28,800 people are forcibly displaced from their home. Every day another 200 species of life are driven to extinction. And every day our biosphere is driven one step closer to making human life (and perhaps all life) on Earth impossible. See ‘Killing the Biosphere to Fast-track Human Extinction’.

It is not as if any of this information is unavailable. Just as many people and major international organizations are well aware of the plight of the Rohingya, it is also the case that many people and these organizations are well aware of the state of our world in other respects. And still virtually nothing meaningful happens (although there are tokenistic responses to some of these crises).

Hence, it is a straightforward observation that human solidarity is notably absent in virtually any attempt to tackle the major issues of our time. And the Rohingya are just one manifestation of this problem.

Given that I have long observed this phenomenon both personally and politically, and it concerns me as well, I would like to explain psychologically why the lack of sharing and solidarity is such a pervasive problem and suggest what we can do about it.

In order to feel concern for those who are suffering, and to want to act in solidarity to alleviate their suffering, it is necessary to experience certain feelings such as sympathy, empathy, compassion, love and (personal) power. Moreover, it is necessary that these feelings are not suppressed or overwhelmed by fear and, equally importantly, not overwhelmed by a feeling of (unconscious) self-hatred. If someone is scared and full of unconscious self-hatred, then they can have little interest in sharing their own resources or acting in solidarity with those who need help. And this applies whether the adversely impacted individual is a close relative or friend, or someone on the other side of the world.

So why is fear in this context so important? Simply because fear grotesquely distorts perception and behaviour. Let me explain why and how.

If an individual is (consciously or unconsciously) frightened that one or more of their vital needs will not be met, they will be unable to share resources or to act in solidarity with others, whatever the circumstances. In virtually all cases where an individual experiences this fear, the needs that the individual fears will not be met are emotional ones (including the needs for listening, understanding and love). However, the fearful individual is never aware of these deep emotional needs and of the functional ways of having these needs met which, admittedly, is not easy to do given that listening, understanding and love are not readily available from others who have themselves been denied these needs.

Moreover, because the emotional needs are ‘hidden’ from the individual, the individual (particularly one who lives in a materialist culture) often projects that the need they want met is, in fact, a material need.

This projection occurs because children who are crying, angry or frightened are often scared into not expressing their feelings and offered material items –such as a toy or food –to distract them instead. The distractive items become addictive drugs. This is why most violence is overtly directed at gaining control of material, rather than emotional, resources. The material resource becomes a dysfunctional and quite inadequate replacement for satisfaction of the emotional need. And, because the material resource cannot ‘work’ to meet an emotional need, the individual is most likely to keep using direct and/or structural violence to gain control of more material resources in an unconscious and utterly futile attempt to meet unidentified emotional needs.

This is the reason why people such as the Rothschild family, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Amancio Ortega, Mark Zuckerberg, Carlos Slim, the Walton family and the Koch brothers as well as the world’s other billionaires and millionaires seek material wealth, and are willing to do so by taking advantage of structures of exploitation held in place by the US military. They are certainly wealthy in the material sense; unfortunately, they are utterly terrified (and full of self-hatred) and each of them justly deserves the appellation ‘poor little rich boy’ (or girl).

If this was not the case, their conscience, their compassion, their empathy, their sympathy and, indeed, their love would compel them to use or disperse their wealth in ways that would alleviate world poverty and nurture restoration of the ancient, just and ecologically sustainable economy: local self-reliance. See ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’.

Of course, it is not just the billionaires and millionaires of the corporate elite who have suffered this fate.

Those intellectuals in universities and think tanks who accept payment to ‘justify’ (or simply participate in without question) the worldwide system of violence and exploitation, those politicians, bureaucrats and ordinary businesspeople who accept payment to manage it, those judges and lawyers who accept payment to act as its legal (but immoral) guardians, those media editors and journalists who accept payment to obscure the truth, as well as the many middle and working class people who accept payment to perform other roles to defend it (such as those in the military, police, prison and education systems), are either emotionally void or just too frightened to resist violence and exploitation, in one or more of its many manifestations.

Source: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout

Moreover, governments that use military violence to gain control of material resources are simply governments composed of many individuals with this dysfunctionality, which is very common in industrialized countries that promote materialism. Thus, cultures that unconsciously allow and encourage this dysfunctional projection (that an emotional need is met by material acquisition) are the most violent both domestically and internationally. This also explains why industrialized (material) countries use military violence to maintain political and economic structures that allow ongoing exploitation of non-industrialized countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America.

But, equally importantly, many ‘ordinary’ people are just too scared to share (more than a token of) what they have and to act in solidarity with those who suffer whether through military or other violence, exploitation, persecution, oppression or occupation. Of course, it takes courage to resist this violent world order. But underlying courage is a sense of responsibility towards one’s fellow beings (human and otherwise) and the future.

As noted above, however, fear is not the only problem. Two primary outcomes of fear are self-hatred and powerlessness. Here is how it happens.

When each of us is a child, if our parents, teachers and/or the other adults around us are frightened by a feeling – such as sadness, anger or fear – that we are expressing, then they will use a variety of techniques to stop us expressing this feeling. They might, for example, comfort us to stop us crying, scare us out of expressing our anger (particularly at them) and reassure us so that we do not feel afraid.

Tragically, however, responses such as these have the outcome of scaring us into unconsciously suppressing our awareness of how we feel when, of course, evolutionary pressures generated emotional responses (some pleasant, some less so) to events in our life in order to help guide us into behaving appropriately at any given moment. And this suppression of how we feel is disastrous if we want children to grow up behaving functionally. This is more fully explained in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So where does self-hatred fit into all of this? Well, if a child is angry in response to some violence to which they are being subjected (usually, of course, in an attempt to control their behavior), then they will attempt to defend themselves against this violence in an effort to persevere with their original intention.

However, if the child is then terrorized into submission by a parent or other adult (by being threatened with or experiencing some form of violence, often given the inaccurate label of ‘punishment’) the child will be compelled to unconsciously suppress their awareness of the original feelings, including anger, that were generating their behavior.

Unfortunately, there is a heavy cost to this suppression because each child is genetically programmed to follow their own self-will  (manifesting through such mental functions as thoughts, feelings and conscience) rather than to obey the will of another (whether it be parent, teacher, religious figure or anyone else).

Hence, if a child is successfully terrorized into not behaving in accordance with their own self-will, they will experience a strong feeling of self-hatred precisely because they have submitted, out of fear, to the will of another.

Conscious self-hatred is an intensely unpleasant feeling to experience, however, and because the child is systematically terrorized out of expressing and acting on most of their feelings (which is why 100% of children go to school wherever school is available and compulsory: children are not given freedom of choice) the feeling of self-hatred is suppressed along with these many other feelings. Having learned to do this, subsequent opportunities for this self-hatred to be felt are progressively more easily suppressed.

An unconscious feeling does not ‘go away’ however; it is unconsciously projected elsewhere. Suppressed self-hatred is always unconsciously projected as hatred of someone else, some other group (usually of another sex, race, religion or class) and/or something else, often in imitation of the violent parent/adult (because imitation will be given ‘permission’ by the violent parent/adult). And this inevitably leads to destructive behaviors towards that individual, group and/or the ‘something else’ (including the Earth’s environment).

But, and this is important to recognize, this destructive behaviour might simply manifest as inaction: doing nothing in response to someone else’s (or the Earth’s) obvious need.

So the unconscious fear and self-hatred are projected as fear of and hatred for living beings as well as the Earth, and manifests as behavior that is destructive, often by inaction, of themselves, others and the planet.

The tragic reality is that it takes very little violence to terrorize a child and this is why a substantial proportion of the human population is consumed by their own fear and self-hatred, and feels powerless as a result. Consider the people immediately around you: many spend most of their time, consciously or unconsciously, abusing themselves, others and/or the environment, and doing nothing in response to the plight of our world.

So what can we do?

Given existing parenting practice, fear and self-hatred are not easily avoided although they are not necessarily all-consuming. But to be free of them completely requires just one thing: the fearlessness to love oneself truly. What does this mean?

To love yourself truly, you must always courageously act out your own self-will, whatever the consequences. This requires you to feel all of your emotional responses – fear, sadness, anger, pain, joy, love … – to events, including impediments, in your life. See ‘Feelings First’. It is only when you do this that you can behave with awareness: a synthesis of all of the feedback that your various mental functions give you and the judgments that arise, in an integrated way, from this feedback. See ‘Human Intelligence or Human Awareness?’

At first glance loving yourself and acting out your own self-will might sound selfish. But it is not. Self-love is true love. The individual who does not truly love themselves cannot love another. Nor will they feel such emotional responses as compassion, empathy and sympathy. Hence, this individual will not seek mutually beneficial outcomes in tackling conflict, will not seek distributive justice in resource allocation, will not value ecological sustainability and will not act in solidarity with those who are suffering. It is this individual, who is terrified, self-hating and powerless, who will act selfishly.

In addition to courageously acting out your own self-will, you might also consider making ‘My Promise to Children’.

And if you love yourself enough to be part of the struggle to end the violence and exploitation of those who are full of fear and self-hatred, you might like to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’ and/or using sound nonviolent strategy for your campaign or liberation struggle. See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy or Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy.

Those who are terrified and self-hating never will.

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Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is [email protected] and his website is here.

“The medical profession is being bought by the pharmaceutical industry, not only in terms of the practice of medicine, but also in terms of teaching and research. The academic institutions of this country are allowing themselves to be the paid agents of the pharmaceutical industry. I think it’s disgraceful.” — Arnold Seymour Relman (1923-2014), Harvard Professor of Medicine and Former Editor-in-Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine

“Big Pharma is engaged in the deliberate seduction of the medical profession, country by country, worldwide. It is spending a fortune on influencing, hiring and purchasing academic judgment to a point where, in a few years’ time, if Big Pharma continues unchecked on its present happy path, unbought medical opinion will be hard to find.” – John LeClarre, author of The Constant Gardener, that focused on the corrupt nature of the pharmaceutical industry.

“The drug companies don’t sell drugs, they sell lies about drugs…Our healthcare system seriously impedes the rational, economical and safe use of drugs. The industry prospers on this and exerts tight information control. The research literature on drugs is systematically distorted through trials with flawed designs and analyses, selective publication of trials and data, suppression of unwelcome results, and ghost-written papers…This scientific misconduct sells drugs.” — Dr Peter Goetzsche, author of “Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime: How Big Pharma has Corrupted Healthcare”

“Throughout the 20th century, the pharmaceutical industry has been constructed by investors, the goal being to replace (and outlaw) effective but non-patentable natural remedies with mostly ineffective but patentable and highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs. The very nature of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money from ongoing diseases. Like other industries, the pharmaceutical industry tries to expand their market to maintain ongoing diseases and to find new diseases for their drugs. Prevention and cure of diseases damages the pharmaceutical business and the eradication of common diseases threatens its very existence.” — Dr. Matthias Rath – Journal of the American Medical Association, April 15, 1998

“Therefore, the pharmaceutical industry fights the eradication of any disease at all costs. The pharmaceutical industry itself is the main obstacle, why today’s most widespread diseases are further expanding including heart attacks, strokes, cancer, high blood pressure, diabetes, osteoporosis, and many others. Pharmaceutical drugs are not intended to cure diseases. According to health insurers, over 24,000 pharmaceutical drugs (as of 1998) are currently marketed and prescribed without any proven therapeutic value. According to medical doctors’ associations (as of 1998) the known dangerous side-effects of pharmaceutical drugs have become the fourth leading cause of death after heart attacks, cancer, and strokes.” — Dr. Matthias Rath

***

In the December 5, 2017 issue of The Lancet (a widely respected British medical journal) a study was published that showed that, after 12 months of weight loss with a strict low carb diet, half of the patients in the treatment arm of the study were cured of their diabetes. Cures occurred in spite of the fact that every member of the treatment arm had their anti-diabetic and anti-hypertensive drugs abruptly discontinued on day one. The matched control group continued to follow the “community standard of care” which involved continuing to take their synthetic hypoglycemic and anti-hypertensive maintenance drugs – which offered no hope of cure.

While half of the previously diagnosed Type 2 diabetic patients in the treatment group achieved complete remission of their diabetes, the patients with the largest weight losses were the ones that did the best. Indeed, about 90% of the treatment group that lost at least 15 kilograms over the year-long trial period achieved complete remission. Interestingly, 4% of the control group achieved “remission” over the 12 months.

In other words, significant numbers of the patients in the “Type 2 diabetes” treatment group had become non-diabetic, They had been cured of a disorder (actually “obesity-related hyperglycemia”) that I and my med school classmates had been taught was incurable.

The myth about the permanence and incurability of Type 2 diabetes has been repeatedly reinforced for me and most American physicians ever since our training. The myth has been reinforced by everything that we read in the medical journals and everything we heard at our continuing medical education (CME) conferences – where all the major presenters, incidentally, were Big Pharma-influenced academic researchers/professors and assorted other “experts” that had been under the economic influence of a variety of cunning medical-related industries.

Similarly, everything that our thoroughly propagandized and very compliant obese and hyperglycemic patients knew about Type 2 diabetes had been “taught” to them by Big Pharma’s TV commercials and also by health and science journalists who seemed to regurgitate what corporate-influenced professors and Big Pharma’s public relations teams had taught them.

Then, in 1997, thanks to Big Pharma’s lobbyists in DC, it got worse. In that year the US Congress granted drug companies the legal right to use direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising (DTCPA) in the media, which resulted in a multitude of lucrative (and therefore self-censoring, self-silencing) advertising contracts with television networks. The DTC deluge soon included commercials in newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, the internet, billboards, brochures, etc).

The DTC phenomenon was a huge financial boon for Big Pharma. It became easier to sell its expensive, toxic and often addictive products to medically-naïve customers. But it was a disaster for the health of those easily-bamboozled consumers who managed to get prescriptions written. To an informed and skeptical observer, however, these drug commercials are laughable. One only has to watch a few hours of primetime television to understand why.

In a 2011 Pharmacy and Therapeutics article entitled “Direct to Consumer Pharmaceutical Advertising: Therapeutic or Toxic?” health writer C. Lee Ventola, stated that:

“The average American TV viewer watches as many as nine drug ads a day, totaling 16 hours per year, which far exceeds the amount of time the average individual spends with a primary care physician.”

As ridiculous as the deceptive claims and small print warnings are in the average DTC television ad, they apparently do sell a lot of drugs, and we physicians are supposed to know about the brand new drugs whose safety profiles are still years away from being determined, which means that we physicians can’t possibly know very much about the new drugs and shouldn’t be asked by Big Pharma to bear the burden of informing our patients about them!

Nevertheless, we physicians all-to-often comply with patient’s requests by writing prescriptions for brand new drugs when asked. Many physician, when asked, admit that Big Pharma’s drug ads in the medical journals are as laughable and deceptive as the ones that are shown to our gullible patients on primetime television.

“The only time the “cure” word is used anymore is by corporate research organizations (and patient advocacy groups) when they solicit funds from the public during their annual charity drives or their “walks for the cure”. Clearly all of the financial incentives are to mount a never-ending, unsuccessful search for the cure without ever actually finding it.” – quote from www.healingmatters.com

The very compelling Type 2 diabetes study at the end of this column proves that – contrary to community standards of care – Type 2 diabetes can actually be cured! In reporting that fact, the study has to be regarded as a serious existential threat to any number of medical and pharmaceutical groups that benefit from never curing or never preventing disorders that are actually potentially curable or – and hear this well – potentially preventable disorders. In my practice I have found any number of over-diagnosed, heavily-medicated, fully vaccinated, and chronically ill patients whose illnesses were eminently curable without drugs at the beginning of their medical histories. Obesity-related hyperglycemia was just one example. But that is another story.

Active, endless drug treatment and active, endless medical “management”, rather than trying for “the cure” was the only approach to Type 2 diabetes that has become the “standard of care” in the last couple of generations. Such non-curative approaches have resulted in successfully transforming millions of potentially curable patients into chronic, permanent patients – which is a huge financial benefit for every for-profit “healthcare” system.

Every MBA (Masters of Business Administration) hospital or clinic CEO knows that curing patients and sending them on their way is not good for the bottom line. And that goes for the drug and vaccine industries as well. Besides, even trying to devise complex cures is too time-consuming for the individual caregiver to even undertake, given that he or she has to see 30 patients a day. In fact, working out cures for patients is virtually impossible in America’s modern medical system that has been built around the very efficient 10-15-minute office visit paradigm, where writing prescriptions is the quickest and easiest therapeutic option.

As I often told my patients: “it only takes 2 minutes to write a prescription; it takes 20 minutes to NOT write a prescription.” What usually happens? Just do the math.

I graduated from med school and started practicing medicine 50 years ago, when office calls cost $6 and complete obstetric care was $250. Over the decades I have witnessed any number of medical break-throughs that threatened the medical establishment’s dogmas and economics or exposed the uselessness or dangers of certain treatments, drugs or vaccines. Usually the establishment, bolstered by Big Pharma, went on the attack to try to discredit the new information while simultaneously trying to defend the status quo. Justice wasn’t always done and speaking the truth to power didn’t always work out. Big Bad Pharma, their lobbyists, lawyers and their massive public relations campaigns usually won the day.

I have seen important truths squashed by profit-driven organizations in both medicine and commerce, and I fear that the important break-through in the Type 2 diabetes study below will be sabotaged in the popular press as well as in the medical literature. This important study should change forever the standard of care of patients with hyperglycemia and obesity. But it will be attacked, to the detriment of millions of vulnerable and unaware patients.

To more efficiently understand why justice isn’t always done when it comes to the practice of medicine, I have assembled below a short list of some of the groups that will be threatened by this study:

1) Every Big Pharma-co-opted academic researcher and educator who teaches medical students that Type 2 diabetes is incurable and therefore must be “managed” for a lifetime with unaffordable and potentially toxic drugs or injections;

2) The multi-billion-dollar Big Pharma corporations that make and market all the often unnecessary, obsolete or dangerous so-called diabetes drugs that are designed to very profitably manage (but not cure) obesity-related hyperglycemia (which the study below has revealed to not actually be Type 2 diabetes);

3) The medical establishment-trained nutritionists who do not teach the common-sense realities that this study teaches;

4) Allopathic, non-holistic medical practitioners in all capitalist countries where Big Pharma has thoroughly co-opted and successfully taken over control of the following institutions:

a) America’s profit-driven healthcare system (AMA, AAFP, APA, AAP, ACOG, etc);

b) The US government’s public health agencies (CDC, FDA, NIH, NIMH, etc);

c) Medical schools and general health education systems (patients and health caregivers);

d) Most health and science journalists;

e) The profit-driven mainstream media that relies on Big Pharma’s advertising dollars;

f) Our politicians who are bribed by campaign “contributions” from Big Pharma’s lobby groups and industry-funded “political action committees”); and

g) The “Too Big to Fail” Big Medicine establishment whose financial well-being is actually reliant on the widespread ingestion of Big Food’s “illness-producing”, malnourishing and always toxic junk food; the standard over-diagnosis, over-treatment and “medicalization” of otherwise transient, resolvable, adverse life experiences; the disease-producing over-vaccination policies that – both acutely and chronically – sicken innumerable and very vulnerable infants and children with the CDC’s unproven-for-safety, simultaneously-injected cocktails of vaccines that contain a variety of neurotoxic vaccine ingredients such as mercury, aluminum, live viruses and a variety of contaminants; and the endless prescribing of unproven-for-safety cocktails of synthetic chemical medications that can easily terminally sicken the drug-taker.

Be aware that new scientific findings that contradict previously deeply held beliefs are often ignored, denied or attacked by indoctrinated “true believers” – even if the new truths are unassailable and reproducible. The psychological discomfort one feels when confronted with new information that contradicts one’s deeply held beliefs is called cognitive dissonance, and we physicians are as susceptible to it as anyone else, especially if our honor or financial security are put at risk. Cognitive dissonance often irrationally leads one to go into denial, refusal to even consider the new information or even the willingness to attack the unwelcome messenger.

Primary care-led weight management for remission of type 2 diabetes (DiRECT): an open-label, cluster-randomised trial

Professor Roy Taylor, et al – Published: 05 December 2017

A PDF File of the study is available here.

Background

Type 2 diabetes is a chronic disorder that requires lifelong treatment. We aimed to assess whether intensive weight management within routine primary care would achieve remission of type 2 diabetes.

Methods

We did this open-label, cluster-randomised trial (DiRECT) at 49 primary care practices in Scotland and the Tyneside region of England. Practices were randomly assigned (1:1), via a computer-generated list, to provide either a weight management programme (intervention) or best-practice care by guidelines (control), with stratification for study site (Tyneside or Scotland) and practice list size (>5700 or ≤5700). Participants, carers, and research assistants who collected outcome data were aware of group allocation; however, allocation was concealed from the study statistician. We recruited individuals aged 20–65 years who had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes within the past 6 years, had a body-mass index of 27–45 kg/m2, and were not receiving insulin.

The intervention comprised withdrawal of antidiabetic and antihypertensive drugs, total diet replacement (825–853 kcal/day formula diet for 3–5 months), stepped food reintroduction (2–8 weeks), and structured support for long-term weight loss maintenance. Co-primary outcomes were weight loss of 15 kg or more, and remission of diabetes, defined as glycated haemoglobin (HbA1c) of less than 6·5%.

Findings

Between July 25, 2014, and Aug 5, 2017, we recruited 306 individuals from 49 intervention (n=23) and control (n=26) general practices; 149 participants per group comprised the intention-to-treat population. At 12 months, we recorded weight loss of 15 kg or more in 36 (24%) participants in the intervention group and no participants in the control group (p<0·0001). Diabetes remission (cure) was achieved in 68 (46%) participants in the intervention group and six (4%) participants in the control group (odds ratio 19·7, 95% CI 7·8–49·8; p<0·0001).

Remission varied with weight loss in the whole study population, with achievement in none of 76 participants who gained weight, six (7%) of 89 participants who maintained 0–5 kg weight loss, 19 (34%) of 56 participants with 5–10 kg loss, 16 (57%) of 28 participants with 10–15 kg loss, and (remission occurred in) 31 (86%) of 36 participants who lost 15 kg or more.

Mean bodyweight fell by 10·0 kg (SD 8·0) in the intervention group and 1·0 kg (3·7) in the control group (adjusted difference −8·8 kg, 95% CI −10·3 to −7·3; p<0·0001).

Quality of life, as measured by the EuroQol 5 Dimensions visual analogue scale, improved by 7·2 points (SD 21·3) in the intervention group, and decreased by 2·9 points (15·5) in the control group (adjusted difference 6·4 points, 95% CI 2·5–10·3; p=0·0012). Nine serious adverse events were reported by seven (4%) of 157 participants in the intervention group and two were reported by two (1%) participants in the control group. Two serious adverse events (biliary colic and abdominal pain), occurring in the same participant, were deemed potentially related to the intervention. No serious adverse events led to withdrawal from the study.

Interpretation

Our findings show that, at 12 months, almost half of participants achieved remission to a non-diabetic state (ie, cure) and off antidiabetic drugs. Remission of type 2 diabetes is a practical target for primary care.

Read the synopsis above, be encouraged, but don’t hold your breath, for profit-driven (as opposed to altruistic) corporations, including those associated with Big Medicine, Big Pharma and Big Media, will likely find a variety of ways to sabotage the study’s findings. The financial stakes are too high for the powers-that-be to do nothing.

Note to readers: As I have frequently warned in the past, you should consult your physician before making use of the information in my columns.

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Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. In the decade prior to his retirement, he practiced what could best be described as “holistic (non-drug) and preventive mental health care”. Since his retirement, he has written a weekly column for the Duluth Reader, an alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns mostly deal with the dangers of American imperialism, friendly fascism, corporatism, militarism, racism, and the dangers of Big Pharma, psychiatric drugging, the over-vaccinating of children and other movements that threaten American democracy, civility, health and longevity and the future of the planet. Many of his columns are archived at

http://duluthreader.com/search?search_term=Duty+to+Warn&p=2;

http://www.globalresearch.ca/author/gary-g-kohls; or at

https://www.transcend.org/tms/search/?q=gary+kohls+articles

In 1854, the Canadian colonies entered a free trade agreement with the United States. In 1866, the Americans cancelled it, believing that the Canadian colonies had become so dependent on the U.S. economically that they would ask, or beg, for entry into the American Union. 

Instead, the Canadians decided to take the bold step of independence. They negotiated a union of the Canadian colonies and began building a Canadian-owned and controlled economy, including the world’s longest railway.

Canada’s next major free trade agreement with the U.S. was in 1988 (FTA), later expanded to include Mexico in 1994 (NAFTA). Under their terms, much of Canada’s economy has been bought up by American owners — everything from Hudson’s Bay Company to Tim Hortons and Stelco. Whole industries have been taken over by U.S. investors,  including both our national railways. U.S. corporations have the right to sue Canada for any law or regulation that causes them loss or damage and which they feel contravenes the spirit of NAFTA. (Canada has been sued three dozen times and paid out more than $200 million in NAFTA penalties.)

However, the U.S. government may again save us from ourselves.

The U.S. is demanding even greater concessions from Canada in a “renegotiation” of NAFTA,  including sweeping rights to buy up what is left of Canada’s economy. It has stated that it is ready to trigger the six-month cancellation clause of NAFTA. In response, the Canadian government has spent millions trying to convince it not to do so.

Under the GATT/WTO, Canada has allies and the U.S. was not able to impose punishing tariffs on our softwood lumber exports or our aircraft industry. It was unable to destroy our wheat marketing system, buy up our railways or shut down our steel industry.

Norway,  much smaller than Canada, declined to enter the European Union although it was under great pressure to do so. It retained control of its oil and gas and other industries through publicly owned corporations. The result for Norway is no debt, no deficit, free child care and university education, virtually non-existent homelessness, free dental care for all under 18, generous old age pensions and a $1-trillion surplus in its sovereign wealth fund.

Canada by contrast, after almost three decades of “free trade” with the U.S., has more than $1.2 trillion in federal and provincial debt, large deficits at every level, no national child or dental care, high university tuition, miserly old age pensions, years of massive budget cuts, and giveaway prices for its exports of oil, gas, timber and minerals.

For 150 years, great Canadian leaders have warned that without an economic border with the Unite States, we would soon no longer have a political border.

We once owned the world’s largest farm machinery maker, Massey Harris, headquartered in Toronto; built the world’s largest and most respected marketer of wheat and barley, the Canadian Wheat Board, based in Winnipeg; created a great transcontinental railway system, beginning in Montreal, which tied our country together; and saw Vancouver’s shipyards produce the beautiful Fast Cat ferry.

Instead of spending hundreds of billions on foreign-made machinery, electronics, automobiles, ships, fighter jets and passenger aircraft (even payroll systems for federal employees!), we can build our own, both for the domestic and export market.

We once designed and built the world’s most advanced jet interceptor, the Avro Arrow, so we know it can be done. With Canada’s resources and ingenuity, it could create a prosperous, domestically controlled economy that would give Canadians multiple benefits, security and pride of ownership. All that is required is some of the will that drove our ancestors to create an alternate power in North America. As George-Étienne Cartier, the great Québécois Father of Confederation, put it, “Now everything depends on our patriotism.”

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David Orchard was twice a contender for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada. He is the author of The Fight For Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism. He can be reached at davidorchard@sasktel.net

Opinion article published in The Ottawa Citizen . Permission to reprint granted by the author.

The Romanian Prime Minister implied that pro-autonomy Hungarians in the “Szeklerland” region should be hung in their town squares.

Premier Mihai Tudose, who just resigned because of an unrelated power struggle, was responding to the news that three ethnic Hungarian minority parties in the territory that they call “Szeklerland” had joined forces to lobby for autonomy in the central Romanian region of Transylvania, harshly promising that

“I have sent message that if the Szekler flag flies over the institutions over there, they will all fly next to the flag. Autonomy for Szeklers is out of the question.”

His undiplomatic remark was met with instant condemnation from Budapest, which has been more active over the past few years in supporting the rights of its ethnic compatriots abroad that it feels were unfairly cut off from their homeland after the 1920 Treaty of Trianon.

Source: the author

Thus far the most newsworthy efforts in this sphere have recently been those related to the Hungarian minority in Ukraine’s western region of Transcarpathia, but the situation in Transylvania might be even more important because it involves developing hostilities between two NATO- and EU-member states in so-called “New Europe’s” “Three Seas” region. The rising sense of national identity that’s accompanied the recent surge of populism across the world has seen the politicized revival of the Hungarian diaspora issue in the heart of Europe, and Orban’s activism on this group’s behalf could easily lead to the EU labeling him as the greatest threat to the bloc.

The organization’s post-Brexit future is in doubt, and the Polish-Hungarian Strategic Partnership is working hard to reform the EU in making it more decentralized and sovereignty-friendly, but the most dramatic change could be the readjustment of some member states’ internal borders in the continental heartland if the Hungarian minority decides to flex their political muscles. The people of “Szeklerland” are separated from Hungary proper by a swath of mostly Romanian-inhabited territory, but their pro-autonomy efforts could encourage the fragmentation of the country along regional-centric lines and precipitate a constitutional crisis in the formally unitary state. It could also provoke a nationalist reaction from Romanians as well, thereby opening up a whole can of worms if it transforms into violence.

Romania and Ukraine aren’t the only areas that could be affected by this process either, since Serbia’s northern Vojvodina region has a small Hungarian minority near the borderland, though this “front” is less likely to see any “action” when compared to what might transpire in Southern Slovakia. For hundreds of years, the territory of so-called “Upper Hungary” was regarded as an inseparable part of Hungarian Civilization, and approximately half a million Hungarians still live in Southern Slovakia and constitute a little less than 10% of the country’s total population. That’s why there’s a high likelihood that any inadvertent crisis in “Szeklerland” will actually lead to a “Slovak Crisis” as well, though the latter could jeopardize the unity of the Visegrad Four and undermine the EuroRealist reform campaign if it’s not preemptively dealt with by all responsible players.

The post presented is the partial transcript of the CONTEXT COUNTDOWN radio program on Sputnik News, aired on Friday Jan 19, 2018:

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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.

Il Nuclear Posture Review 2018, il rapporto del Pentagono sulla strategia nucleare degli Stati uniti, è attualmente in fase di revisione alla Casa Bianca. In attesa che sia pubblicata la versione definitiva approvata dal presidente Trump, è filtrata (più propriamente è stata fatta filtrare dal Pentagono) la bozza del documento di 64 pagine.

Esso descrive un mondo in cui gli Stati uniti hanno di fronte «una gamma senza precedenti di minacce», provenienti da stati e soggetti non-statali. Mentre gli Usa hanno continuato a ridurre le loro forze nucleari – sostiene il Pentagono – Russia e Cina basano le loro strategie su forze nucleari dotate di nuove capacità e assumono «un comportamento sempre più aggressivo anche nello spazio esterno e nel cyberspazio». La Corea del Nord continua illecitamente a dotarsi di armi nucleari. L’Iran, nonostante abbia accettato il piano che gli impedisce di sviluppare un programma nucleare militare, mantiene «la capacità tecnologica di costruire un’arma nucleare nel giro di un anno».

Falsificando una serie di dati, il Pentagono cerca di dimostrare che le forze nucleari degli Stati uniti sono in gran parte obsolete e necessitano di una radicale ristrutturazione. Non dice che gli Usa hanno già avviato, nel 2014 con l’amministrazione Obama, il maggiore programma di riarmo nucleare dalla fine della guerra fredda dal costo di oltre 1000 miliardi di dollari. «Il programma di modernizzazione delle forze nucleari Usa – documenta Hans Kristensen della Federazione degli scienziati americani – ha già permesso di realizzare nuove tecnologie rivoluzionarie che triplicano la capacità distruttiva dei missili balistici Usa».

Scopo della progettata ristrutturazione è, in realtà, quello di acquisire «capacità nucleari flessibili», sviluppando «armi nucleari di bassa potenza» utilizzabili anche in conflitti regionali o per rispondere a un attacco (vero o presunto) di hacker ai sistemi informatici.

La principale arma di questo tipo è la bomba nucleare B61-12 che, conferma il rapporto, «sarà disponibile nel 2020». Le B61-12, che sostituiranno le attuali B-61 schierate dagli Usa in Italia, Germania, Belgio, Olanda e Turchia, rappresentano – nelle parole del Pentagono – «un chiaro segnale di deterrenza a qualsiasi potenziale avversario, che gli Stati uniti posseggono la capacità di rispondere da basi avanzate alla escalation».

Come documenta la Federazione degli scienziati americani, quella che il Pentagono schiererà nelle «basi avanzate» in Italia ed Europa non è solo una versione ammodernata della B61, ma una nuova arma con una testata nucleare a quattro opzioni di potenza selezionabili, un sistema di guida che permette di sganciarla a distanza dall’obiettivo, la capacità di penetrare nel terreno per distruggere i bunker dei centri di comando.

Dal 2021 – specifica il Pentagono – le B61-12 saranno disponibili anche per i caccia degli alleati, tra cui i Tornado italiani PA-200 del 6° Stormo di Ghedi. Ma, per guidarle sull’obiettivo e sfruttarne le capacità anti-bunker, occorrono i caccia F-35A. «I caccia di nuova generazione F-35A – sottolinea il rapporto del Pentagono – manterranno la forza di deterrenza della Nato e la nostra capacità di schierare armi nucleari in posizioni avanzate, se necessario per la sicurezza».

Il Pentagono annuncia quindi il piano di schierare F-35A, armati di B61-12, a ridosso della Russia. Ovviamente per la «sicurezza» dell’Europa. Nel rapporto del Pentagono, che il senatore democratico Edward Markey definisce «roadmap per la guerra nucleare», c’è dunque in prima fila l’Italia. Interessa questo a qualche candidato alle nostre elezioni politiche?

Manlio Dinucci

Serbian community leader in NATO occupied Kosovo, Oliver Ivanović, was gunned down, mafia-style, in front of his party offices in the town of Kosovska Mitrovica on January 16.

As the old Romans used to say, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, of the dead, speak no evil. Mr. Ivanović did nothing that anyone is aware to merit such a ghastly fate. But it would also be a mistake to regard him as the Ghandi or Mandela of Kosovo’s Serbs. He was a career politician, with everything that encompasses, including rumors of shady deals on the side. Curiously, his profile was that of a “moderate” and “cooperative” local politician. For that, he was rewarded by Pristina authorities not with a medal but a war crimes indictment so preposterous (the obligatory bevy of false witnesses included) that even their own Supreme Court was compelled to throw the conviction out.

But what matters here is that Ivanović was a symbolic “high value target”, to use the terminology favored by those who are probably behind his murder. The “lone gunman,” to again borrow an expression from their lexicon, will probably never be apprehended. At most, some patsy will be convicted of the gangland crime, just for form’s sake.

Ivanović’s assassination was a classical Tavistock Institute production and it fits in perfectly with the current drive to achieve the recomposition of the political leadership in the Balkans. We saw that process start last year in Macedonia with the installation of the lackey, Zaev.

In anticipation of the re-opening of the Eastern Front, the Balkans rear must be secured. Recalcitrants must be replaced by the obedient, and the obedient must give way to the even more servile.

The shots which killed Ivanović were a warning to all the Balkans puppets and clowns of what could happen to any of them in broad daylight, if they as much as entertain in passing the thought of diverging from the party line. “All the usual suspects” have been busy indeed, but also meticulous to warn US citizens to stay away from Serbia and Kosovo, citing “safety concerns”. The purely coincidental warning was issued just three days before the successful assassination.

People light candles during a gathering to commemorate Kosovo Serb leader Oliver Ivanovic (Source: The National)

It is interesting that William Walker, of El Salvador death squad fame who later engineered the phony Račak incident which served as the pretext for the bombing of Yugoslavia and eventually the occupation of Kosovo, known as a fervent booster of the sordid entity he helped hatch, a few days ago refused — just like that, refused — to accept a decoration for his past devotion from the hand of Kosovo’s current President Hashim Thaci.

The President that Walker helped put in office would be wise to remember Kissinger’s classical adage. He should pay worried attention to Walker’s discourteous but portentous gesture. Does Walker know something about the fate reserved for the Kosovo Albanian leadership which they themselves are unaware of? Perhaps, time will tell.

As for the background of this murder plot, it would be foolish to suspect the Kosovo Albanians, though they obviously are being set up collectively as the patsies. The cui bono analysis tells us plainly that with official recognition of their secessionist enterprise now within grasp, they had nothing to gain and much to lose from such a destabilizing outrage. The overall purpose of the assassination was not to advance the Kosovo Albanian agenda but to execute a psy-op which sets the stage for renewed managed conflict, should the decision be taken to go that route. And, just as importantly, it is to fire a shot that would be heard throughout the Balkans: lethal for the unfortunate target that was selected, but a robust warning to all the other local chieftains.

The suspension by Serbia of participation in the fabled “Brussels process,” in reality the mandated incremental divestment by Serbia of its cultural heartland, supposedly triggered by the assassination, was no more than political rhetoric and grandstanding. Politicians perform such maneouvers routinely in similar situations, to create the appearance of minding the national interest.

Things will soon return to normal, as the impression left by the murder dissipates and the incident ceases to be front page news. (In fact, they already have. European Commission spokesperson Maja Kocijancic announced triumphantly on Thursday, January 18, while Ivanović’s body must still have been warm, that Serbia’s accommodationist — some would say, quisling — President was ready to resume talks with the KLA gang in Prishtina. The period of mourning lasted barely more than five seconds.) So Serbia’s simulated withdrawal from the talks was not a serious obstacle to the pursuit of its imbecilic political elite’s “cherished dream” to be accepted by the EU, above all because these are not dreams, but orders from above which must be carried out.

That, plus breaking ties with Russia, plus NATO membership, is why their services were hired in the first place and why they were installed in power, in various, progressively worse incarnations, in the year 2000. They must perform as instructed, and to understand their predicament it is sufficient, once again, to recall the pedagogical nature of this assassination, as explained above.

A safe bet can be made that after the killing there will be no stiff requirements for the Kosovo Albanian side to comply with in order to resume the talks; that will simply happen when the public are distracted by something else. Everything will soon return to “normal” in Brussels because those who are conducting this process on the Serbian side have made a Faustian deal and painted themselves into a corner. They have no way out of it but to continue to tread the path of ignominy.

The writing is clearly on the wall. Brussels expects Serbia to disengage from Kosovo and to sign off on it because that is the only way to secure and legalize NATO’s land and base grab in 1999. It is entirely up to Serbia’s leaders to invent the formula according to which the assigned job will be done. All past brave official declarations (including that Kosovo is part of Serbia forever) are subject to revision and change by politicians facing the necessity of ensuring their own survival. Their instructions are to find a creative way to do it and to get the job done!

It will be a vain endeavor to expect of the EU, or any of the Western “partners” beyond the ocean, in the wake of the assassination, to make a show of even-handedness and exert pressure on the Prishtina authorities to negotiate constructively with Belgrade. There is no past history of putting pressure on Kosovo, so the question is essentially what pressure will be put on Serbia.

Condolences will be accompanied by not so subtle threats, such as denial of EU membership prospects unless Serbia rejoins the negotiations. To a normal and responsible leadership, of course, that would not be a threat at all but rather a welcome pretext to drop the EU charade altogether and to geopolitically reorient itself in a rapidly changing world. But, unfortunately, all of Serbia’s geopolitical eggs are in the EU basket. As a result, Serbia is in the absurd position of being blackmailed to abandon its historically most important territory, not to mention loyal citizens of all ethnic groups and religions living there, for the sake of joining a moribund European Union. Of course, even if the EU did amount to something Serbia is being asked to sacrifice its heritage for the privilege of becoming a dumping ground for EU trash and a source of dirt-cheap labor for its corporations. A bad deal, no matter how you look at it.

The frightening thing is that the spiritual assassination of the Serbian people — because without its cultural cradle of Kosovo the nation is truly reduced to a zombified corpse — is being conducted without its input, awareness, or implicit, much less overt, consent. Of course, as in most contemporary “democracies”, the public’s consent for the resumption of the Kosovo talks, or for anything else of consequence for that matter, is entirely unnecessary.

Especially with an undemanding public, such as Serbia’s, which practices the manners of all well-bred children, who were raised to be seen, but not heard.

Kosovo will not be asked to fulfill any conditions beyond conducting a cosmetic investigation of the murder which will yield no tangible results. Pressure, however, will be on Serbia to disregard the outrage as quickly as possible and go back to “business as usual.”

Last May, Warren Buffett announced that cyber attacks are a bigger threat to humanity than nuclear weapons.

“I’m very pessimistic on weapons of mass destruction generally although I don’t think that nuclear probably is quite as likely as either primarily biological and maybe cyber,” Buffett said during Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholders’ meeting.

Interestingly, Buffett has put his money where his mouth is. In 2015, Berkshire made a bet that could profit from increased cyber breaches. Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance launched two insurance policies that cover cyber liability and the costs incurred to respond to a data breach or threat.

Similarly, AIG launched a product earlier this year that covers expenses arising from online bullying and extortion, according to Fortune.

The writing is very clearly on the wall. In 2016, 6.4 billion connected things were in use worldwide in 2016, up 30 percent from 2015, and will massively increase to 20.8 billion by 2020. What follows next is a logical response to that explosive growth.

In 2015 cybercrime cost an estimated $24 million. In 2016 it rose tenfold to $209 million, in 2017 it rose twenty five fold to $5 billion and by 2019 most expert estimates put the cost of cybercrime exploding at a staggering four hundred times to $2 trillion dollars.

For perspective, the top five oil and gas companies in the world collectively have revenues of half that number. Similarly, so is 2017’s record breaking global car sales revenue of the top five manufacturers. Global defence spending combined is three quarters of that number. That number – $2 trillion – is truly staggering. So staggering it matches dollar for dollar the amount of money spent online buying and selling stuff.

The ransomware attack in May 2017 called Wannacry caused $8billion of damage and over 300,000 business computers were infected.

Last year, the financial services industry was worst hit followed by utilities and energy and then technology companies, where between them, they lost $42billion overall before security costs.

By 2019, the nearest estimates from the cyber-security industry is that $1 trillion will have to be spent defending the $2 trillion of expected losses.

You would be forgiven for thinking that humanity is attacking itself and that none of us are ever going to be immune from such a devastating event as identity theft and you’re probably right. And yet, there’s a strange number that has just emerged.

A survey just out, sponsored by Opus and conducted by Ponemon Institute, shows 67% of Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs) and Chief Information Officers (CIOs) believe their companies will likely fall victim to a cyberattack or data breach in 2018. And incredibly, 60% are concerned that a partner or vendor will be to blame.

The most threatening factors named by CISOs, in this order, are:

• The human factor (70% cited “lack of competent in-house staff”)
• Inadequate in-house expertise (cited by 65% of respondents)
• Careless employee falling for a phishing scam (65% chance)
• A malware attack, a data breach or a cyberattack (unspecified percentage)
• Inability to protect sensitive and confidential data from unauthorized access (59%)
• Inability to keep up with the sophistication of the attackers (56%)
• Failure to control third parties’ use of sensitive data (51%.)
• Disruptive technologies – i.e. Internet of Things (IoT) devices (60% of respondents considered these the most challenging to secure)
• Mobile (54%)
• Cloud (50%)

In other words, the first three on this list are one and the same – that is – human error. The fact that another 60 percent of security officers expect malware, hack attacks and the like to cause a serious data breach, is itself an alarming number.

According to the same poll, less than half of the security officers surveyed believe their IT security budgets will increase, yet the threat of losses over the course of just one year is likely to increase many times over.

The rapid escalation of targeted cyber-attacks is no longer surprising news. In 2016 an outfit named ‘shadowbrokers’ breached the spy tools of the elite NSA-linked operation known as the Equation Group and caused havoc as they were made up of malware, viruses, trojans, weaponised ‘zero day’ exploits and remote control systems – all designed by government to spy on or cause disruption to citizens. Let’s not forget what this really means. Nation-state cyber weapons are now in the hands of criminals.

In 2017, the voter records of just about every American registered to vote for the last ten years was hacked and presidential candidates had their servers attacked and incriminating email distributed on every continent in the world.

In the meantime, the online cyber-threats to you personally are changing shape. Socially engineered malware now led by data-encrypting ransomware, provides the No. 1 method of attack. Password ‘phishing’ attacks are next, un-patched software, social media hacks and ‘spear-phishing’ bring up the rear. These are all known as ‘advanced persistent threats’ for good reason.

Sky News has just reported that a “text bomb” has been discovered which can crash iPhones just by being sent to a victim’s device.

Software developer Abraham Masri discovered the bug and said he released it to get Apple’s attention after his reports and warning to the company went unheeded. The “text bomb” code is so toxic for iPhones that devices which were sent a link to the code would also crash – even if they didn’t actually click the link.

Britain’s Chief of General Staff, Sir Nick Carter, has belatedly decided to bring to the attention of the electorate that our defence spending is woefully inadequate and that there are now very many countries including Russia that could wipe us off the map owing to the lamentable negligence of the government in providing for the defence of the nation – which, of course, has to be its unquestioned first priority.

It is well known that expenditure and reliance on the outdated Trident missile, so-called nuclear deterrent is complete nonsense, but the government is too weak to make any proper provision for an alternative defence system.

Meanwhile, tiny countries such as Israel in the Middle East, now has a fleet of state-of-the-art, German-built, nuclear-armed submarines – courtesy of Angela Merkel – that could blow Britain out of the water, in seconds.

Our present government is so incompetent that it has built and commissioned two new aircraft carriers, HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales that have cost the taxpayer nearly £7bn and that are already redundant and that can never defend the United Kingdom for a host of reasons political, technical, practical and strategic. They are the epitome of the proverbial white elephant but probably the most expensive elephants in history.

Meanwhile the clowns at the defence ministry are no doubt drawing up plans to install cast-iron canons on the lawns of Buckingham Palace protected by barrage balloons.

The inevitable conclusion being that the government of Theresa May is incompetent having failed in its primary duty to provide adequate defences for the nation. And that is a hanging offence.

Before I go any further with this let me state that I’m not a Trotskyist, or a Leninist, or a Stalinist or a Maoist (but I might have been all of the above, with exception of Maoist, at one time or another). However, I might be a Zapatista, at least in spirit, but I’m definitely a Socialist Revolutionary (or is that a Revolutionary Socialist?). I’m not sure if I’m a Marxist either, but I’m definitely an admirer of the old man, he was a great artist and thinker, and possibly, along with Charles Darwin, the greatest mind of the 19th century. Whatever you call it, we need a socialist revolution and we need one now, we are running out of time!

War, Crisis, War

Crisis is capitalism’s middle name and, as in the past, crisis leads to war, major wars and indeed lotsa ‘little’ ones too. Thus if crisis is capitalism’s middle name then war is it’s first and possibly last name too! Boom, Bust, Boom takes on a whole new meaning.

I don’t think you need a crystal ball to figure out that capitalism is headed down the major war path, it’s displaying all the same pathological signs as it has done in past decades; economic crisis, economic collapse, repression abroad and repression at home. Increasing intolerance; increasing censorship of any opposition to the maniacs allegedly running things. This is how things were in the 1930s, when my folks cut their political teeth. Then it was the Spanish Civil War that was the trigger, the catalyst, the testing ground and we, that is the left, failed to stop it then and it looks like the ‘left’ or at least what’s left of it, are even less able to offer an alternative today. Where is our equivalent to the International Brigade that fought to defend Republican Spain?

And this time there is no Stalin to boss Communist Parties around (worse, there’s virtually no Communist Parties left to boss around) and tell them what to do in the mistaken notion that it would have defended the Soviet Union against Fascist invasion. Instead, and this is the tragedy of it, the left, or what laughingly calls itself the left, is bossing other countries around instead of dealing with its own failures to challenge capitalism, e.g., Syria, Libya, and other points East and South, obsessed as it is, with the spurious notion of ‘humanitarian intervention’ and attempting to manage other countries political struggles.

War = Capitalism, Capitalism = War

War solves, at least for the capitalist class, several fundamental and intractable contradictions that afflict capitalism:

1. The cyclical crisis of over-production and the related problem of the vast accumulation of surplus capital that needs to be consumed, spent, valorised, one way or the other, in order that yet more capital can be accumulated and set the entire monstrosity lurching off all over again;

2. The crisis of surplus labour, usually called unemployment, aggravated by machines and now computers and the obscenely misnamed ‘Artificial Intelligence’;

3. The crisis of competition between capitalist economies, now that there’s no Red Menace around and the incessant search for new markets (see War above);

4. And finally, the problem of the potential insurrection of working people when they finally see what’s in store for them once again (more on this below).

War, better still, general war solves all of these problems, for the capitalist class that is. War chows vast amounts of surplus capital in the form of weapons and infrastructure destruction and secondly, it deals with the ‘problem’ of all that surplus labour but unlike previous wars, rather than destroy the competing armies and the civilians, it now destroys only the civilians and the infrastructure. The advantages of this approach are obvious. Armies are now numerically small but highly trained and highly mechanised and it’s very expensive and above all, it’s time-consuming to replace all that flesh, brains and computers. Annihilating the civilian populations kills two birds with one stone as it were but leaves the armies (relatively) intact, ready to fight the next war.

Pax Americana! Rule Britannia! It’s the ultimate end-product of industrialising war, just as capitalism has industrialised everything else and trashed the planet in the process.

Of course, unlike previous slaughters, the next one will be the last and Engels prophetic forecast will finally be realised. It really will be the war to end all wars this time, and probably pretty much of what life is left on the planet at the same time. Now whether psychopaths like Trump and his insane ruling class (and let’s not forget their highly paid servants, who make it all possible) actually plan to turn the planet into a radioactive cinder in pursuit of aforesaid profits is a moot point, as if it actually does come to that, all discussion is over, in fact everything is over.

The really important thing is that, believe it or not, we can actually stop them, if we choose to. So what is stopping us from stopping them? Is it because we’re as suicidal and as shortsighted as the ruling class is? Like all honest socialists, I’m an optimist, I like to think that we are different from our rulers, that people are being misled, lied to, hooked on addiction to things by the all-devouring monster that is capitalism.

But it’s not inevitable, any more than revolution is inevitable. Can we break the addiction? It really does depend on us.

Of course it’s extremely dangerous to draw direct analogies with the past[1] but the common thread is capitalism, so you have to draw the obvious conclusion don’t you? Well don’t you? How can you escape the obvious when a man called Donald Trump heads up the most powerful, the most destructive society in all of history. So destructive and insane that it’s driven a goodly percentage of its population insane as well.

But Trump is no Adolf Hitler in spite of the similarities in outlook. Hitler’s raison d’être was Lebensraum (living space) for a Greater Germany. US capitalism’s is an unabashed desire for global domination. The current number of US foreign bases is 1000, streets ahead of anything Hitler’s Germany achieved even at its height! And this doesn’t include the floating bases, the US Navy’s aircraft carriers, 19 in total with 15 more planned that carry a total of between 1235-1330 warcraft and 142,500 personnel. There’s simply no comparison! Yet the economic motivation is in fact the same; economic domination or economic collapse, or Revolution.

The choice is yours and in a really bizarre, nay abhorrent way, perhaps we do have to thank Donald Trump (if it’s not too late to do so), for he has surely and finally revealed to us the true nature of capitalism in all its horrific barbarism. For Trump is no aberration, he is capitalism personified, just as Hitler’s Germany was brute force capitalism. The Emperor really does have no clothes. But note that even though he does embarrass the Guardian, the New York Times and the BBC, they do their utmost to present things as business as usual, which it surely is of course. Think about that over your morning latté while you read the newspaper.

The way forward

So how exactly, do we weld together a fractured working class, what’s left of a coopted trade union movement and bring onboard a compromised and divided middle class, half of whom (or more) get their pay check from the very system that’s destroying the ground we walk on? A divided Labour Party? One that’s stabbed us in the back so many times I’ve lost count?

We can however draw some conclusions from the Corbyns, the Maduros, the Syrizas, the Podemos’es et al, all of whom have failed or are in the process of failing like Corbyn and his traitorous Labour Party to produce a viable alternative to capitalism. Yet millions are currently putting their faith in Corbyn to deliver us from evil, just as millions put their faith in Syriza, only to be betrayed. Will a Corbyn-led Labour government betray us all over again? History says yes. So what do we have to do to avoid another betrayal, another debacle? To avoid another version of some kind of Fascism?

We don’t appear to have a clue as to how to go about it. No programme, no clear analysis, no way forward except our anger and our revulsion driving us in our frustrations but toward what end? My friend in NYC, wrote me this in response to my sending this essay (or something like it) for comments before I published:

Only by developing a revolutionary program.  So what’s our program? What’s our strategy that leads us to being able to implement the program. What are the tactics that build the strategy. It doesn’t get us far enough to say “we are the solution, we can change things.” How is the question demanding an answer. Does it mean supporting Podemos? Or Corbyn? Does it mean breaking with the notion that the “main enemy” is the US? Breaking with the nationalism that puts an ANC, a Maduro, in power? That put a Qaddafi in power? – S. Artesian in NYC.

What I can say is that currently we don’t have anything that even remotely resembles a programme that will stop the suicidal course capitalism is taking us on. What we do have are a thousand fractured visions, individualised struggles about this and about that, but nothing that ties them all together.

In addition, I can say that the way forward does not lie with Parliament, if anything, Parliament is an intrinsic part of the problem blocking the way forward. Yet popular insurrection isn’t the answer either, it will lead only to bloody defeat, just as it has in the past. Yes, part of the answer lies in taking our struggle to the streets but it’s only part of the solution. It is, if you like, a catalyst for change. A shot across the bows of capitalism but no more than that. The biggest march in British history in 2002 to try and stop the illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003, put not a dent in the process, so clearly it’s going to require a multi-pronged approach. But first we need a viable programme upon which to base our alternative to capitalism. And not only an alternative economic model, but the means by which to realise it. This requires us to disabuse ourselves of the capitalist notion of democracy, of voting every five years for essentially the same, professional political class, the so-called two-party system, or whatever it’s called in your country.

Somehow, we need to develop a structure that unites a thousand different struggles and do it if not simultaneously, then in a ‘cascade’ across the world system, well at the very least the seven, major imperialist states that control it.

A big task you say? Well yes of course it is, but what’s the alternative? Armageddon? Definitely barbarism.

*

This article was originally published by Investigating Imperialism.

Note

1. See Eric Walberg’s essay, ‘America 2018: postmodern ‘Germany 1933’, which I think makes the mistake of confusing form with substance but draw your own conclusions. This is not to say that there isn’t a parallel between 1939 and 2018, the question is, what do these parallels consist of and can we usefully draw conclusions from them?

Featured image: Line-workers make trousers and jackets for international brands at a garment factory in Dong Nai province, Vietnam, on November 21, 2017. (Source: Oxfam International)

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.

‘Reward Work, Not Wealth’ reveals how the global economy enables a wealthy elite to accumulate vast fortunes while hundreds of millions of people are struggling to survive on poverty pay.

• Billionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of just 2 percent. The number of billionaires rose at an unprecedented rate of one every two days between March 2016 and March 2017.
• It takes just four days for a CEO from one of the top five global fashion brands to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her lifetime. In the US, it takes slightly over one working day for a CEO to earn what an ordinary worker makes in a year.
• It would cost $2.2 billion a year to increase the wages of all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is about a third of the amount paid out to wealthy shareholders by the top 5 companies in the garment sector in 2016.

Oxfam’s report outlines the key factors driving up rewards for shareholders and corporate bosses at the expense of workers’ pay and conditions. These include the erosion of workers’ rights; the excessive influence of big business over government policy-making; and the relentless corporate drive to minimize costs in order to maximize returns to shareholders.

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of Oxfam International said:

“The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system. The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors.”

Women workers often find themselves off at the bottom of the heap. Across the world, women consistently earn less than men and are usually in the lowest paid and least secure forms of work. By comparison, 9 out of 10 billionaires are men.

“Oxfam has spoken to women across the world whose lives are blighted by inequality. Women in Vietnamese garment factories who work far from home for poverty pay and don’t get to see their children for months at a time. Women working in the US poultry industry who are forced to wear nappies because they are denied toilet breaks,” said Byanyima.

Oxfam is calling for governments to ensure our economies work for everyone and not just the fortunate few:

• Limit returns to shareholders and top executives, and ensure all workers receive a minimum ‘living’ wage that would enable them to have a decent quality of life. For example, in Nigeria, the legal minimum wage would need to be tripled to ensure decent living standards.
• Eliminate the gender pay gap and protect the rights of women workers. At current rates of change, it will take 217 years to close the gap in pay and employment opportunities between women and men.
• Ensure the wealthy pay their fair share of tax through higher taxes and a crackdown on tax avoidance, and increase spending on public services such as healthcare and education. Oxfam estimates a global tax of 1.5 percent on billionaires’ wealth could pay for every child to go to school.

Results of a new global survey commissioned by Oxfam demonstrates a groundswell of support for action on inequality. Of the 70,000 people surveyed in 10 countries, nearly two-thirds of all respondents think the gap between the rich and the poor needs to be urgently addressed.

“It’s hard to find a political or business leader who doesn’t say they are worried about inequality. It’s even harder to find one who is doing something about it.  Many are actively making things worse by slashing taxes and scrapping labor rights,” said Byanyima.

“People are ready for change. They want to see workers paid a living wage; they want corporations and the super-rich to pay more tax; they want women workers to enjoy the same rights as men; they want a limit on the power and the wealth which sits in the hands of so few. They want action.”

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. day, and on a day where people often discuss his dreams, they rarely discuss his nightmares. It was in early 1967 while Dr. King was eating breakfast and reading a magazine when he came across images of children in Vietnam who had been struck by Napalm. He said afterwards that “I came to the conclusion that I could no longer remain silent about an issue that was destroying the soul of our nation.”

It was then that Dr. King decided to come out publicly against the war in Vietnam, delivering an address that is among the greatest speeches ever delivered by anyone in this country’s history. Dr. King’s April 4th, 1967 speech in front of 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City, delivered a scathing rebuke of not only the war in Vietnam, but the militarized United States, which he referred to as “…the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today”. That speech earned Dr. King the anger of nearly everyone, including US liberals and fellow civil rights activists. This highlights a problem that is still all too prevalent today. That is, it is still highly taboo to criticize US foreign policy and the violent war machine that is behind it.

This past weekend in Baltimore, I had the honor of being part of a conference that set out to not only criticize the US war machine, but put an end to the foreign military bases the United States has planted all over the world.

The Coalition Against U.S. Foreign Military Bases hosted a conference that was attended by antiwar groups from all over the world to highlight the ways in which U.S. foreign bases affect the lives of those communities who are forced to live with them and how these bases can be eliminated.

The numbers alone surrounding these bases are pretty staggering. According to David Vine, professor of Anthropology at American University and author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, who was also a keynote speaker at the conference, there are over 800 US military bases in around 80 countries. The cost of these bases are $156 billion or more annually, and that doesn’t even factor in the number of US marines guarding embassies, US aircraft carriers, CIA black sites, and the growing U.S. military presence in space.

The financial costs are staggering, but the human costs are unconscionable. It was fitting that this conference took place in Baltimore, where students this past winter couldn’t even go to school because they were sitting in cold classrooms. We can find hundreds of billions of dollars to destroy the lives of people worldwide but no money to heat our schools and keep our children warm. The human costs of US foreign policy are often ignored, not only domestically, but especially internationally, where those 800 plus military bases fall upon people who the American public never gets to see. There is this myth among the apologists of U.S. militarists that “they want us there”. This ignores the many anti-Base protests and organizations that take place in these countries and the conference sought to highlight these movements by giving them a platform right in the heart of the empire. This blog piece will also attempt to highlight these movements and voices that are often ignored.

On the first day of the conference, there was a peaceful demonstration in front of the Washington Monument in downtown Baltimore, where we gathered with our signs and our chants to demonstrate that the anti-war movement was alive and well. The demonstration was covered internationally, as a newspaper from Okinawa was on the scene taking pictures and interviewing participants. Cars drove by and many offered their support by honking their horns in solidarity. A few of the participants in the demonstration gave quick speeches to keep up the spirits of the crowd. It was a great show of solidarity on that rainy afternoon, and a great start to a conference that is hopefully the start of something bigger.

Okinawan coverage of the demonstration in Baltimore

One of the groups present at the weekend conference was Okinawa Peace Appeal, an Okinawan group dedicated to spreading information about anti-base and peace activities in the NYC area. Okinawa, a prefecture of Japan, is home to one of the most fierce anti-base movements in the entire world. While many know of Okinawa as part of Japan, Okinawan people are actually the indigenous people of those islands, and only came to be part of Japan through annexation. Now, Okinawa is littered with 32 U.S. bases, and is faced with the prospect of more. These bases are not welcomed by the people of Okinawa, with as many as 80% of the people in opposition to the bases. Okinawan Governor Takeshi Onaga ran on an anti-base platform, and continues to resist construction while being completely ignored by the Japanese government. These bases are constructed close to Okinawan communities, where Jet crashes often occur and result in the deaths of people. The most tragic incident was the 1959 crash of a US military jet into an elementary school in Okinawa that killed 18 people, including small children. The people of Okinawa have been sick of these bases. There is even an ongoing protest against the relocation of a base in Futenma that has recently reached 5,000 consecutive days! The Japanese government cracks down hard on protesters, the most prominent figure being Hiroji Yamashiro, a leader in the Okinawa anti-base protests, and someone who is facing a possible sentencing of up to 2 and a half years in prison for allegedly damaging a wire fence outside of the military base of Camp Schwab. If you really think the people of Okinawa want us there, you need to reconsider your position.

U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma. Take a look at how close the base is located to the surrounding communities.

The Korean peninsula is a hotbed of diplomatic tensions, where the North and South are technically still at war. People in South Korea overwhelmingly want peace with the North, but the U.S. insists on continuing the one policy that is keeping North Korea from coming to the table, which is the continued militarization of the Korean peninsula. The most recent military initiative on the Korean peninsula that is causing increased tensions is the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense System (THAAD). This is an initiative that is intensifying military tensions in the Asia-Pacific and large numbers of people in South Korea are protesting its deployment. One of those organizations, the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific, was present at the conference in Baltimore. The installation of this missile defense system is dangerous for two reasons. One, this missile system is seen not only as provocative by North Korea, but also China, which sees the system as part of an effort to encircle China with U.S. military hardware. Two, the installation of the missile system puts a target on the community in which the system is installed if conflict were to ever break out. Moon Jae In, the current president of South Korea, ran on a platform that among other things, expressed many doubts about the THAAD deployment, and has since sought peace talks with North Korea and has on occasion challenged further deployments.

Other organizations present at the conference included Shannonwatch, a group of peace activists in Ireland who monitor flights in and out of Shannon, which contains an airport that for years has served as a transport hub for U.S. soldiers going off to war in Iraq. Since 2002, over 2.5 million U.S. troops have gone through Shannon airport. The airport has also been used by the CIA for rendition flights, connecting the supposedly neutral nation to U.S. war crimes in more ways than one. I doubt the Irish people want to be party to war crimes and the people at Shannonwatch do not think so either. BAYAN USA, an organization that attempts to mobilize Filipinos in the U.S. against imperialism, made their case for ending the U.S. military presence in the Philippines. U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay is the largest U.S. naval base in the Asia-Pacific, and has always faced resistance from the people in the Philippines, even closing down in 1991 due to fierce protest and opposition which forced the government not to renew the agreement. The base is now once again being used, supposedly under new rules that only allow for refueling, but the base has also served as a transport hub for troops and materials used in military exercises in the area. Another important base to discuss is that of Ramstein Air Base in Germany, which faces fierce German opposition for it’s part in contributing to U.S. drone operations, which flies in the face of German law. Norman Solomon calls Ramstein “The Most Important Air Force Base You’ve Never Heard Of” and the U.S. Defense Department calls it “the largest American community outside of the U.S.”. It supports 15 major combat operations, and it allows for the support of U.S. special operations on the African continent.

Speaking of the African continent, there was an entire panel dedicated to the U.S. Africa Command, or AFRICOM. AFRICOM was established in 2007 by the Bush Jr. administration. The idea faced unanimous rejection amongst African nations, so the U.S. had to set up the command station in Stuttgart, Germany. Since its establishment, the U.S. has rapidly increased its presence on the African continent, which has ironically coincided with a significant increase in terrorism. AFRICOM acknowledges the existence of 46 outpostsscattered across 24 countries, a figure that has swelled over the years. The US public recently became aware of one of these major operations, with the ambush and killing of four US soldiers in Niger, including Sgt. LA David Johnson, whose killing sparked controversy after Donald Trump failed to deliver a proper sympathy call to Johnson’s widow. There are 800 U.S. troops stationed in Niger, with Senators Lindsey Graham and Chuck Schumer publicly stating that they were unaware of the level of involvement in the country.

AFRICOM Panel at the No Foreign Bases Conference

No foreign military base is more controversial than that of the detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. January 11th marked the 16th anniversary of the detention facility’s opening, with 41 prisoners still populating the prison. Of those 41 prisoners, 31 have been held for years without facing any charges or trial. While the prison itself is a human rights catastrophe, the land on which it rests is a whole other issue. The U.S. seized Cuba in the aftermath of the Spanish-American war, and granted Cuba independence only if it would sell land to the U.S. on a perpetual lease that could only be broken by a mutual agreement between the two governments. Let’s be clear, the people of Cuba want their land back, and considering the lease for Guantanamo is based on a relic from the 19th century, that time is way past due. The only reason the Cuban government doesn’t take what is rightly theirs by force is because they would not win a war with the U.S. Government, having a perpetual gun to their head telling them to “deal with it”. A delegation of people from Cuba were unable to participate in the conference due to the restrictions placed by the Trump administration on travel and commerce last November.

It would be dishonest to talk about foreign U.S. military bases without discussing the very first foreign bases. As David Vine noted during his keynote speech at the conference, the first U.S. foreign bases were those outside of the original 13 colonies that were used to go to war against the various nations of the Indigenous populations of the Americas. It is unfortunate that there was no representation from any Indigenous People at the conference, and the lack of diversity and inclusion were discussed during the strategy session, so hopefully going forward, the coalition will work to remedy that. A different perspective was provided by Netfa Freeman of Pan African Community Actionwho described the descendants of African people in America as internally colonized people who are under occupation from a domestic military in the form of US policing. Considering the increasing presence of foreign military training that U.S. police undergo, that assertion is looking more and more accurate each day.

To close, it would be impossible within the scope of this tiny blog to state the importance of this conference, as well as express the level of energy and solidarity that took place within it. It was not the intention of this post to summarize in great detail the breadth of information that was learned during the various sessions. Ajamu Baraka spoke at the demonstration on the first day of the conference, and said that over the weekend “we’re going to struggle, we’re going to get information, we’re going to get energized so that we go back to our respective communities, our towns, cities, and rural areas and we build the kind of movement that’s representative of the best of this country” and I believe the conference was all of that and more. There certainly was struggle, as the room didn’t always have unanimity, and there was some healthy head butting that occurred. In the end, the coalition was able to pass three resolutions that enshrined action going forward. One was a global day of actions against Guantanamo, another was a national day of anti-war action, and the last was convening a global conference against U.S. and NATO foreign military bases. I won’t give away any more details, because you always have to be aware of enemies who are watching, but in the end, there is an increasing movement around the world that is calling for peace and an end to US imperialism, and that is a beautiful struggle.

Update: The possible sentencing length of Hiroji Yamashiro, which was originally noted at 4 and a half years, is actually 2 and a half years. The paragraph beginning with a description on the group Okinawa Peace Appeal, which was listed as operating in Okinawa, actually operates in the NYC area.

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Mike Byrne is an anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, anti-Zionist, pro-peace.

All images in this article are from the author.

Ankara is militarizing the Afrin district of Syria with operation code-named “Olive Branch” to establish a “safe zone” along the Turkish-Syrian border. The district is controlled by US-backed People’s Protection Units (YPG) which are allegedly the target of the Turkish forces in the region. 

Will this invasion mount up the existential crisis in the Middle East? 

Read our selection of articles below and share it far and wide, post it on your social media accounts and discuss with your cliques.

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Turkey Invades Syria to Attack US-backed Kurdish Forces

By Halil Celik and Alex Lantier, January 23, 2018

This aggression by Turkey is a reckless escalation that will exacerbate the conflicts raging across the Middle East and intensify the danger of war between the major powers. With Moscow’s tacit support, Turkey is attacking the YPG, the backbone of the main US proxy force in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia. 

Kurdish Frictions: Turkey’s Military Campaign in Syria’s Afrin

By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, January 22, 2018

On Saturday, 72 Turkish jets targeted the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria in an effort, codenamed Olive Branch, to remove, what Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called a terrorist threat across northern Syria.

US and Moscow “Green Light” Turkish Aggression in Northern Syria

By Stephen Lendman, January 22, 2018

Russia is going along with Turkish aggression in northern Syria. Instead of condemning it, its Foreign Ministry urged restraint, an unacceptable response, Ankara taking full advantage.

NATO’s website has nothing about Turkey’s ongoing aggression, supporting it through silence.

Video: Syrian Troops Almost Closed Eastern Idlib Pocket

By South Front, January 21, 2018

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson decided to say that Washington has no plans to create a 30,000-strong border force in northern Syria and claimed that the issue has been “misportrayed”.

Trump’s Plan B for Syria: Occupation and Intimidation

By Mike Whitney, January 21, 2018

On January 17,  Secretary of State Rex Tillerson announced the creation of a de facto autonomous Kurdish state in east Syria that will be supported by the United States and defended by a US-backed “proxy” army of occupation.

US, Turkey React as Syrian Forces Move into Idlib

By Tony Cartalucci, January 20, 2018

The Syrian government with support from its Russian, Iranian, and Lebanese allies has embarked on a major military operation to retake parts of Syria’s northern governorate of Idlib. As it does so, the US and its regional allies are rushing to position themselves to ensure the permanent partition of Syria is achieved.

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The announcements and denials of the Trump administration concerning military developments in the North of Syria reveal a heavy secret. Paradoxically, Turkey has come to the assistance of the United States to correct “the error” of their superior officers.

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The denial expressed on 17 January by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson concerning the declarations of the commander-in-chief of CentCom, General Joseph Votel, on 23 December, and of the spokesman of the anti-Daesh Coalition, Colonel Thomas Veale, on 13 January, has sowed confusion.

The denial did not satisfy Turkey who, after having warned the US Chargé d’Affaires, Philip Kosnett, on  the 10th and 13th of  January, began preparing military operations in Afrine and Manbij, effectively launched them on 20 January.

Contrary to the declarations proffered by various participants, the US programme was not intended to create a sovereign, independent State in the North of Syria — that is the French plan — but a non-recognised State, like the Puntland State of Somalia or the Iraqi Kurdistan. The latter structure is absolutely independent, and despite the Iraqi Constitution, does not respond to orders from Iraq, of which it is nonetheless a part. Iraqi Kurdistan also has its own embassies abroad.

The Syrian Border Security Force is officially to be composed of 30,000 men, half of whom would be ex-Democratic Syrian Forces (SDF), sponsored and supported by the US.  These combatants would receive three weeks of training in interrogation techniques and biometric scanning. 230 cadets have already followed this course.

In practice, the other half would be composed of 15,000 ex-jihadists from ISIS- Daesh who would thus be discretely recycled.

In reality, President Trump’s special representative to the Coalition, Brett McGurk, was the lawyer who participated, alongside John Negroponte and Colonel James Steele, in the creation of the Islamic Emirate in Iraq in 2006. With Colonel James Coffman, he was tasked with giving President George Bush an account of this secret operation, which was intended to combat the Iraqi resistance to the occupation by dividing their forces into Sunnis and Chiites, and artificially creating a civil war.

After a passage at Harvard, Brett McGurk was re-assigned to the State Department under John Kerry. He helped with transforming the Islamic Emirate in Iraq into ISIS-Daesh, and co-organised the preparatory meeting for the jihadist invasion of Iraq, on 27 May 2014 in Amman. He reorganised Iraq, then trained the International Coalition which was tasked with fighting … Daesh.

A good student, McGurk agreed to serve President Trump in order to get rid of the jihadist organisation that he had himself created, and some of whose members he is now attempting to recycle.

On 18 August last, Brett McGurk offered a friendly reception to the leaders of Daesh, although officially, the United States was preparing to crush the jihadist organisation. (Source: the author)

The project of the Syrian Border Security Force has a lot to say about the sincerity of the YPG militia, which professes the gentle anarchy of Murray Boochkin, but which, without hesitation, are ready to form a single unit with the killers of Daesh under US command.

Contrary to appearances, the Turkish attack on Afrine, and probably soon on Mambij, was approved on 8 and 19 January by the Russian military staff, which was alerted by the number 2 of the régime and head of the secret services, the director of the MIT (Milli İstihbarat Teşkilatı), Hakan Fidan, who journeyed specially to Moscow for this reason. The attack was facilitated by the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from the combat zone.

Identically, Turkey informed Syria of the attack in writing, even if Damascus claimed that it had not received the letter.

President al-Assad, who doesnot want to put Syria in direct confrontation with the United States in order to stop the recycling of the jihadists, left Turkey, a member of NATO, to so to speak deal with it, namely to confront US sponsored Kurdish forces.

President Trump had not been informed about the Votel-McGurk plan. The Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, confirmed to US military commanders the instructions of the White House concerning the jihadists. However, Votel and McGurk are still in place.

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Translated by Pete Kimberley

Thierry Meyssan is a political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network). Latest work in French – Sous nos Yeux. Du 11-Septembre à Donald Trump (Right Before our Eyes. From 9/11 to Donald Trump).

All images in this article are from the author.

It seemed so much busier, much more manic and crowded than the one year that had passed.  Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump continues to excite the same headlines and explosions that began even before he made it to the White House.

By the time he got there, there were protests galore at agendas yet to be implemented, decrees yet to form.  There were women’s marches, contradictory in their message (former flower power advocates joining hands with traditional military alliances, greying peaceniks wishing for a stable man, or woman, behind the nuclear option) while the President had yet to implement a single law.  Many of the anti-globalisation protesters had disappeared into the woodwork or re-kitted themselves.  Fine to be an anti-globalist, but Trump?

A year on, and the agenda in terms of making America great again is far from smooth. In certain cases, it is barely extant.  The corporate jackals remain, even if their diet has slightly altered.  (Trump prefers his own version of the capitalist menu, his own idea of the toxic swamp that bathes Washington’s bureaucracy.)

The latter part of the first year started to see some traction.  When Trump had any doubts, he attempted to simply dismantle what his predecessor had done, often failing.  The opening salvos of 2018 have, however, been aggressive, laced with concerns from politicians across the aisle that Trump has forgotten, if, indeed, he ever knew it, the values of free speech, or the inner mysterious force that is the US constitution.  For Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Trump’s attack on the press had more than a generous shade of despotism, inspiring “dictators and authoritarians with his own language.  This is reprehensible.”  

What is fitting here is to note the various viewpoints of those who claim that the US Republic is in some sort of anti-democratic free fall, tripping into an abyss that will see totalitarian impulses catch and grip.

Trump, it is true, is authoritarian, and, like many corporate boardrooms of the world, indifferent to the notion of the demanding demos.  But so are his opponents, free marketers, Davos devotees and freeloaders.  They are the water diviners rather than the democrats. They see chimeras and believe in the magical distribution of goods through the global economy, and care little whether these actually have any influence on populaces.  Naturally, if they do, it must be positive.

This form of reasoning amounts to an obscenity, the sort happily trundled out by Thomas Friedman at the New York Times with apostolic confidence.  As long as the person involved with the Nike production chain in, say, Vietnam, is earning just that little bit more, so be it.  You, purchaser, are doing well and they are doing even better, even if working conditions are unsafe.

Nor does it matter whether that above-poverty-line person’s vote might go to a more equitable distribution policy from a government he or she votes for.  The foes here are clearly demarcated.  Neutralising the power of such a government, unduly interested in the welfare of citizens, too keenly parochial, is an imperative of the global corporate system.

(It should be noted that the factions who wish to see Trump removed can be found across the security-state – apologists and incongruous defenders of the CIA and FBI – the free market wings of both the Democrats and the GOP, and a range of other deeply conflicted individuals who see sex in everything, the grope behind the statute, molestation behind the decree.)

Mechanisms such as Investor-State Dispute Resolution provisions in less than free trade agreements provide the historical context as to why Trump has proved so alarming to the orthodox creed.  He should be one of them, but has embraced populism instead.  

The nature of such provisions is clear, permitting unelected companies to sue states for lost profits.  State policies that cut the share price can lead to arbitral proceedings.  Such points become critical in the mixing of health and value: the pharmaceutical company has to square its product with keeping shareholders happy, wherever they might be. Democracy has nothing to do with it.

Statements on the democratic deficit, the erosion of democratic values in Trump’s America, and such similarly inclined observations, are easy to come by.  Few individuals better qualify for this confusion thanLawrence Summers, who assumes that “internationalism” (note the economic underlining) is democratic, and that a stance against its predations is somehow against the commonweal.  Calm the waters at Davos, urges Summers of Trump.

Summers was an economic architect under the Clinton administration who encouraged those hot house conditions which led to financial apoplexy at the conclusion of George W. Bush’s tenure.  Deregulating markets inherently implies placing the economy beyond the state and its representatives – a suitably anti-democratic rationale.

His distressing contributions to economic fragility were rewarded with a janitorial stint in the Obama administration.  Having messed the stable of economic stability, Summers had to make amends, though this move was far from convincing. There were few fresh brooms in the wake of the subprime mortgage disaster.

Summers exemplifies the animating background to the Trump presidency, with the president promising to neutralise both egg head and boardroom manager.  That Trump is disingenuous about this (capitalism is not bad as long it is managed by cronies) doesn’t weaken that message, which obviously continues to resonate.

The Jekyll and Hyde nature of US politics means that those who claim to be progressive will still happily embrace a president, or presidential candidate, soft on corporatist America (the Clintons), or an enthusiast of extra-judicial killings and legal instruments permitting indefinite detention (Barack Obama).  They are the interlopers who believe that the way to paradise on earth is via Wall Street and adopted aspects of the police state, even if Wall Street needs periodical strafing and castigating.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Today the Republican and Democrats in Congress agreed to end the so-called ‘shutdown’ of the US government over the weekend. Not much really ‘shut down’. Government workers were not at work over the weekend. There were no plans to stop funding the military. Or halt social security checks. Or anything else that was economically meaningful. Using the word, ‘partial’, in relation to shutdown was probably also an overstatement. So what was involved? And what was agreed today?

Republicans wanted to eliminate left over taxes on the rich and business, that they were not able to achieve with their failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) last year. The ACA required $692 billion in taxes on businesses and investors. Republicans and Trump have been chipping away at the ACA ever since their failure to get a full repeal. The shutdown deal marks yet another milestone in the destruction of the health care act. In the agreement Republicans reportedly got to eliminate more of the tax funding base for the ACA, another cut of the $692 billion. (The ACA destruction will result in even more accelerating insurance premiums and even more enrolled dropping from the program).

To make sure they got their business tax cuts, Ryan and McConnell held the SCHIP program hostage. SCHIP is the insurance program for 9 million children whose parents otherwise can’t afford to buy them health coverage. The Democrats got the continuation of SCHIP for another six years. In other words, they ‘got’ what they ‘already had’, while the Republicans got something new–i.e. more tax cuts.

So what about DACA–the 800,000 ‘dreamer’ kids? Wasn’t the Democrats’ refusal to pass the spending bill to fund the government based upon getting the DACA issued resolved? Yes. But the Democratic party leadership dropped that demand in today’s agreement, and instead agreed to refund SCHIP in exchange for three more weeks of government funding, and the further ACA tax cuts. In other words, they got what they had and gave up on DACA. They say DACA is not dead, that they’ll return to it three weeks from now.

But in three weeks from now the Republicans will find another program they will hold hostage, and demand the Democrats fund the government further in exchange for keeping another program going–while the DACA demand will be left hanging once again.

What this all points to is the Democratic Party is continually being outmaneuvered by the Republicans. It’s a sad story that has been the case ever since 2008. Democrat party leaders are proving themselves not only strategically myopic since the 2016 election, but tactically inept as well.

What the recent ‘negotiations’ around the DACA-for-funding the border Wall trade off also reveal is the Republicans keep adding demands to the negotiations, keeping Democrats off balance and unable to hold firm to their initial principled demands.

Also revealing is that Trump was a non-entity in the entire negotiations process. He holds PR press conferences for the TV audience, making it look as if he’s in charge, and will play a positive role in getting the two parties to agree on DACA in exchange for his Wall funding. But he’s not in charge. Whoever gets to him last, he agrees with. Shumer goes down to the White House and thinks he has a deal. But the right wing and corporations walk in the swinging door and Trump changes his position before Shumer can even get back to his office on the hill.

Democrat party second in command in the Senate, Dick Durbin, went on TV to try to pick up the pieces. He asked the DACA kids ‘don’t give up hope’. We’ll deliver next time. But now that the Democrats caved in on their DACA demand, who will believe they’ll prove tougher the next time around three weeks from now? The Republicans will hold out even more confidently, knowing the Democrats will cave again. By giving up on DACA the Democratic party leadership ensures it will be even more difficult next time.

To use a metaphor, it’s like a union declaring its intent to go on strike for a non-negotiable demand, and when the deadline comes telling its union members they’ve changed their mind,they’ve given up the demand, and no one should go on strike…for now. The union leaders then declare publicly they’ll strike ‘next time’ three weeks later. Who among their rank and file are going to believe them? Nor will the Republicans (i.e. the management negotiators per our metaphor). And certainly not the workers (DACA kids). Drawing a line in the sand and then backing up and drawing another accomplishes nothing but demoralization.

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This article was originally published by Jack Rasmus.

In India, there is a push to drive people from the countryside into cities. The mainstream narrative implies that urbanisation is natural in the evolution of societies and constitutes progress. The World Bank wants India to relocate 400 million people to urban centres. Former Chief Finance Minister P. Chidambaram once stated that 85% of the population would eventually live in cities, which would mean displacing many more than 400 million people given that the country’s population is heading towards 1.3 billion and that over 60% reside in rural India.

It is easy for some to conflate urbanisation and progress and to believe this is how to ‘develop’. But societies do not ‘evolve’ in a unilinear way. Policy makers merely look to prosperous countries and see the bulk of their populations living in cities with a small percentage working in (heavily subsidised and an unsustainable system of) agriculture. This is what ‘we’ must do, Indian politicians then say, spurred on by World Bank directives.

The route to capitalism and urbanisation was not ‘natural’ in Europe and involved the unforeseen outcomes of conflicts and struggles between peasants, landowners, the emerging class of industrialists and the state. The outcomes of these struggles resulted in different routes to modernity and levels of urbanisation.

In the book ‘The Invention of Capitalism’, economic historian Michael Perelmen lays bare the iron fist behind the invisible hand which  whipped the English peasantry in a workforce willing to accept factory wage labour. In this article by Yasha Lavene, it is noted that English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of industrial capitalists.

A series of laws and measures were designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support. Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land, not least the destruction of the access to common land by fencing off the commons.

Early capitalists and their cheerleaders complained how peasants were too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited. Indeed, many prominent figures advocated for their impoverishment, so they would leave their land and work for low pay in factories.

In effect, peasants were booted off their land by depriving a largely self-reliant population of its productive means. Although self-reliance persisted among the working class (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc), this too was eventually eradicated via advertising and an education system that ensured conformity and dependence on the goods manufactured by capitalism.

‘Development’: facilitating capital

“We build cyber cities and techno parks and IITs at the cost of the welfare of the downtrodden and the environment. We don’t think how our farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.” – Sukumaran CV 

Today’s affluent sections of urbanised Indians are often far removed from the daily struggles of the farmers for whom they depend on for their food. While inequalities spiral, many city dwellers echo similar sentiments of the cheerleaders of early capitalism described by Perleman when they say loan waivers for farmers are a drain on the economy and any subsidies given to them or the poor in general just encourages unproductivity or fecklessness.

Neoliberal dogmatists are quite content to sign a death warrant for Indian farmers.

Despite nice-sounding, seemingly benign terms like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’- behind the World Bank/corporate-inspired rhetoric, policies and directives is the hard-nosed approach of neoliberal capitalism that is no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was in England for its peasantry.

Like the English peasantry, India’s farmers are also being booted off the land.

Let us take a look at what has happened to India’s farmers. Trade policy and agriculture specialist Devinder Sharma has written much on their plight (access his writing here). GDP growth has been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population, including public sector workers, has widened enormously. Rural India consumes less calories than it did 40 years ago. And corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans because it supposedly spurs job creation (which it has not), while any proposed financial injections (or loan waivers) for agriculture (which would pale into insignificance compared to corporate subsidies/written off loans) are depicted as a drain on the economy.

In short, although farmers continue to produce bumper harvests, the impact of underinvestment, lack of a secure income and effective minimum support prices; the undermining of the public distribution system; exposure to cheap imports courtesy of rigged international trade; the hardship caused by deregulation and profiteering companies which supply seeds and proprietary inputs; the loss of state agricultural support services; and the impacts of the corporate-backed/written Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, have made farming financially non-viable for many.

It is a deliberate strategy: part of the plan to displace the existing system of production with one dominated from seed to food processing to retail to plate by Western corporations. Independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land will be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and those that remain will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.  

Between 300,000 and 400,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and millions more are experiencing economic distress. Over 6,000 are leaving the sector each day. And yet the corporate-controlled type of agriculture being imposed and/or envisaged only leads to degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water and water shortages and poor health.

In addition to displacing people to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, unconstitutional land grabs for special economic zones, nuclear plants and other corporate money-making projects have forced many others from the land.

Various reports have concluded that we need to support more resilient, diverse, sustainable agroecological methods of farming and develop locally-based food economies. Indeed, small farms are more productive than giant industrial (export-oriented) farms and produce most of the world’s food on much less land.

Instead, in India, the trend continues to move in the opposite direction towards industrial-scale agriculture for the benefit of Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer and other transnational players. Is this the future India needs, with a fraction of farmers left on the land, trapped on an environmentally unsustainable chemical-GMO treadmill?

While whipping farmers, tribals and the unorganised sector into submission by depriving them of their livelihoods by one way or another, India’s political elite blindly adhere to the mantra that urbanisation equals progress and look to the West, whose path to ‘development’ was based on colonialism, eradicating self-reliance and beating the peasantry into submission. There was nothing ‘natural’ or ‘progressive’ about any of it. It involved the planned eradication of peasants and rural life by capitalist interests and the sucking of wealth from places like India.

In India, the bidding of capital is these days done through its compliant politicians, the World Bank, the WTO and lop-sided, egregious back-room deals written by corporations.  

Further information about the issues raised can be found in these articles by the author.

In India, there is a push to drive people from the countryside into cities. The mainstream narrative implies that urbanisation is natural in the evolution of societies and constitutes progress. The World Bank wants India to relocate 400 million people to urban centres. Former Chief Finance Minister P. Chidambaram once stated that 85% of the population would eventually live in cities, which would mean displacing many more than 400 million people given that the country’s population is heading towards 1.3 billion and that over 60% reside in rural India.

It is easy for some to conflate urbanisation and progress and to believe this is how to ‘develop’. But societies do not ‘evolve’ in a unilinear way. Policy makers merely look to prosperous countries and see the bulk of their populations living in cities with a small percentage working in (heavily subsidised and an unsustainable system of) agriculture. This is what ‘we’ must do, Indian politicians then say, spurred on by World Bank directives.

The route to capitalism and urbanisation was not ‘natural’ in Europe and involved the unforeseen outcomes of conflicts and struggles between peasants, landowners, the emerging class of industrialists and the state. The outcomes of these struggles resulted in different routes to modernity and levels of urbanisation.

In the book ‘The Invention of Capitalism’, economic historian Michael Perelmen lays bare the iron fist behind the invisible hand which  whipped the English peasantry in a workforce willing to accept factory wage labour. In this article by Yasha Lavene, it is noted that English peasants didn’t want to give up their rural communal lifestyle, leave their land and go work for below-subsistence wages in dangerous factories being set up by a new, rich class of industrial capitalists.

A series of laws and measures were designed to push peasants out of the old and into the new by destroying their traditional means of self-support. Perelman outlines the many different policies through which peasants were forced off the land, not least the destruction of the access to common land by fencing off the commons.

Early capitalists and their cheerleaders complained how peasants were too independent and comfortable to be properly exploited. Indeed, many prominent figures advocated for their impoverishment, so they would leave their land and work for low pay in factories.

In effect, peasants were booted off their land by depriving a largely self-reliant population of its productive means. Although self-reliance persisted among the working class (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc), this too was eventually eradicated via advertising and an education system that ensured conformity and dependence on the goods manufactured by capitalism.

‘Development’: facilitating capital

“We build cyber cities and techno parks and IITs at the cost of the welfare of the downtrodden and the environment. We don’t think how our farmers on whose toil we feed manage to sustain themselves; we fail to see how the millions of the poor survive. We look at the state-of-the-art airports, IITs, highways and bridges, the inevitable necessities for the corporate world to spread its tentacles everywhere and thrive, depriving the ordinary people of even the basic necessities of life and believe it is development.” – Sukumaran CV 

Today’s affluent sections of urbanised Indians are often far removed from the daily struggles of the farmers for whom they depend on for their food. While inequalities spiral, many city dwellers echo similar sentiments of the cheerleaders of early capitalism described by Perleman when they say loan waivers for farmers are a drain on the economy and any subsidies given to them or the poor in general just encourages unproductivity or fecklessness.

Neoliberal dogmatists are quite content to sign a death warrant for Indian farmers.

Despite nice-sounding, seemingly benign terms like ‘foreign direct investment’, ‘ease of doing business’, making India ‘business friendly’ or ‘enabling the business of agriculture’- behind the World Bank/corporate-inspired rhetoric, policies and directives is the hard-nosed approach of neoliberal capitalism that is no less brutal for Indian farmers than early industrial capitalism was in England for its peasantry.

Like the English peasantry, India’s farmers are also being booted off the land.

Let us take a look at what has happened to India’s farmers. Trade policy and agriculture specialist Devinder Sharma has written much on their plight (access his writing here). GDP growth has been fuelled on the back of cheap food and the subsequent impoverishment of farmers. The gap between their income and the rest of the population, including public sector workers, has widened enormously. Rural India consumes less calories than it did 40 years ago. And corporations receive massive handouts and interest-free loans because it supposedly spurs job creation (which it has not), while any proposed financial injections (or loan waivers) for agriculture (which would pale into insignificance compared to corporate subsidies/written off loans) are depicted as a drain on the economy.

In short, although farmers continue to produce bumper harvests, the impact of underinvestment, lack of a secure income and effective minimum support prices; the undermining of the public distribution system; exposure to cheap imports courtesy of rigged international trade; the hardship caused by deregulation and profiteering companies which supply seeds and proprietary inputs; the loss of state agricultural support services; and the impacts of the corporate-backed/written Indo-US Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture, have made farming financially non-viable for many.

It is a deliberate strategy: part of the plan to displace the existing system of production with one dominated from seed to food processing to retail to plate by Western corporations. Independent cultivators are being bankrupted, land will be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation and those that remain will be absorbed into corporate supply chains and squeezed as they work on contracts, the terms of which will be dictated by large agribusiness and chain retailers.  

Between 300,000 and 400,000 farmers have taken their lives since 1997 and millions more are experiencing economic distress. Over 6,000 are leaving the sector each day. And yet the corporate-controlled type of agriculture being imposed and/or envisaged only leads to degraded soil, less diverse and nutrient-deficient diets, polluted water and water shortages and poor health.

In addition to displacing people to facilitate the needs of resource extraction industries, unconstitutional land grabs for special economic zones, nuclear plants and other corporate money-making projects have forced many others from the land.

Various reports have concluded that we need to support more resilient, diverse, sustainable agroecological methods of farming and develop locally-based food economies. Indeed, small farms are more productive than giant industrial (export-oriented) farms and produce most of the world’s food on much less land.

Instead, in India, the trend continues to move in the opposite direction towards industrial-scale agriculture for the benefit of Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer and other transnational players. Is this the future India needs, with a fraction of farmers left on the land, trapped on an environmentally unsustainable chemical-GMO treadmill?

While whipping farmers, tribals and the unorganised sector into submission by depriving them of their livelihoods by one way or another, India’s political elite blindly adhere to the mantra that urbanisation equals progress and look to the West, whose path to ‘development’ was based on colonialism, eradicating self-reliance and beating the peasantry into submission. There was nothing ‘natural’ or ‘progressive’ about any of it. It involved the planned eradication of peasants and rural life by capitalist interests and the sucking of wealth from places like India.

In India, the bidding of capital is these days done through its compliant politicians, the World Bank, the WTO and lop-sided, egregious back-room deals written by corporations.  

Further information about the issues raised can be found in these articles by the author.

We learned in recent days that the FBI and the National Security Agency “inadvertently” deleted electronic messages relating to reported felonies, but one noxious reality persists: No one in the FBI or NSA is likely to be held to account for these “mistakes.”

It is a 70 year-old tradition. Today’s lack of accountability is enabled by (1) corruption at the top of intelligence agencies; (2) the convenient secrecy behind which their leaders hide; (3) bureaucratic indignities and structural flaws in the system; (4) the indulgence/complicity of most of the “mainstream media;” and (5) the eunuchs leading the Congressional “oversight” committees, who — history shows — can be bullied by threats, including blackmail, a la former longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

It is a safe bet, though, that neither the FBI nor NSA have deleted their holdings on key Congressional leaders — including House Democratic minority leader Nancy Pelosi, who used to boast about her very long tenure as head of the House Intelligence Committee, only to complain later that “they [intelligence officials] mislead us all the time.”

In fact, Pelosi was briefed by the NSA and CIA on all manner of crimes, including warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens, in violation of the Fourth Amendment, and torture.

The lack of intelligence accountability has created a kind of perfect storm, enabling felonies and lesser mischief ordered by those sitting atop the intelligence community. While press reports indicate that the Congressional oversight committees now have “explosive” documentary proof — not yet deleted — of such crimes, it remains to be seen whether the committees will have the courage to do their duty under the law.

Even if they try, the odds are against their being able to make much headway, in the face of stiff resistance from the heads of intelligence agencies and a suborned/frightened “mainstream media.”

Rosemary Woods on Steroids

Those of us with a little gray in our hair will remember the infamous, 18.5-minute gap “mistakenly” caused by Rosemary Woods, President Richard Nixon’s longtime secretary, while transcribing a key Oval Office tape of a discussion between President Richard Nixon and his partner-in-crime-cum-chief of staff H.R. Haldeman right after the Watergate break-in. (The tape itself was then destroyed.)

Younger folks may recall reporting on the videotapes of waterboarding at a CIA “black site” in Thailand in 2002, tapes that were deliberately destroyed in 2005 at the order of Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA operations directorate at the time.

Woods testified that she had erased part of the tape by mistake. She suffered no consequences for her “mistake,” and died in 2005 at age 87.

And to no one’s surprise, Rodriguez also landed on his feet.

CIA officials initially claimed that the videotapes were destroyed to protect the identity of the interrogators — read torturers. It was later revealed that then-Executive Director of the CIA, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, wrote in an email that Rodriguez thought “the heat from destroying is nothing compared with what it would be if the tapes ever got into public domain,” adding that they would be “should devastating to us.”

Foggo ended up in prison as a result of an unrelated fraud case. Sadly, no senior intelligence official following the time-(dis)honored Foggo/Rodriguez approach today are likely to end up behind bars, unless this time Congress shows unaccustomed courage.

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Ray McGovern works with the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Savior in inner-city Washington. After retiring from a 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he co-founded Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

The abolition of net neutrality and the use of algorithms by Facebook, Google, YouTube and Twitter to divert readers and viewers from progressive, left-wing and anti-war sites, along with demonizing as foreign agents the journalists who expose the crimes of corporate capitalism and imperialism, have given the corporate state the power to destroy freedom of speech. Any state that accrues this kind of power will use it. And for that reason I traveled last week to Detroit to join David North, the chairperson of the international editorial board of the World Socialist Web Site, in a live-stream event calling for the formation of a broad front to block an escalating censorship while we still have a voice.

“The future of humanity is the struggle between humans that control machines and machines that control humans,” Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, said in a statement issued in support of the event. “Between the democratization of communication and usurpation of communication by artificial intelligence. While the Internet has brought about a revolution in people’s ability to educate themselves and others, the resulting democratic phenomena has shaken existing establishments to their core. Google, Facebook and their Chinese equivalents, who are socially, logistically and financially integrated with existing elites, have moved to re-establish discourse control. This is not simply a corrective action. Undetectable mass social influence powered by artificial intelligence is an existential threat to humanity. While still in its infancy, the trends are clear and of a geometric nature. The phenomena differs in traditional attempts to shape cultural and political phenomena by operating at scale, speed and increasingly at a subtlety that eclipses human capacities.”

In late April and early May the World Socialist Web Site, which identifies itself as a Trotskyite group that focuses on the crimes of capitalism, the plight of the working class and imperialism, began to see a steep decline in readership. The decline persisted into June. Search traffic to the World Socialist Web Site has been reduced by 75 percent overall. And the site is not alone. AlterNet’s search traffic is down 71 percent, Consortium News is down 72 percent, Global Research and Truthdig have seen declines. And the situation appears to be growing worse.

The reductions coincided with the introduction of algorithms imposed by Google to fight “fake news.” Google said the algorithms are designed to elevate “more authoritative content” and marginalize “blatantly misleading, low quality, offensive or downright false information.” It soon became apparent, however, that in the name of combating “fake news,” Google, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are censoring left-wing, progressive and anti-war sites. The 150 most popular search terms that brought readers to the World Socialist Web Site, including “socialism,” “Russian Revolution” and “inequality,” today elicit little or no traffic.

Monika Bickert, head of global policy management at Facebook, told the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in a hearing Wednesday that Facebook employs a security team of 10,000—7,500 of whom “assess potentially violating content”—and that “by the end of 2018 we will more than double” it to over 20,000. Social media companies are intertwined with and often work for U.S. intelligence agencies. This army of censors is our Thought Police.

The group, Bickert said, includes “a dedicated counterterrorism team” of “former intelligence and law-enforcement officials and prosecutors who worked in the area of counterterrorism.” She testified that artificial intelligence automatically flags questionable content. Facebook, she said, does not “wait for these … bad actors to upload content to Facebook before placing it into our detection systems.” The “propaganda” that Facebook blocks, she said, “is content that we identify ourselves before anybody” else can see it. Facebook, she said, along with over a dozen other social media companies has created a blacklist of 50,000 “unique digital fingerprints” that can prevent content from being posted.

“We believe that a key part of combating extremism is preventing recruitment by disrupting the underlying ideologies that drive people to commit acts of violence,” she told the committee. “That’s why we support a variety of counterspeech efforts.”

“Counterspeech” is a word that could have been lifted from the pages of George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984.”

Eric Schmidt, who is stepping down this month as the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has acknowledged that Google is creating algorithms to “de-rank” Russian-based news websites RT and Sputnik from its Google News services, effectively blocking them. The U.S. Department of Justice forced RT America, on which I host a show, “On Contact,” that gives a voice to anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist voices, to register as a “foreign agent.” Google removed RT from its “preferred” channels on YouTube. Twitter has blocked the Russian news service agencies RT and Sputnik from advertising.

This censorship is global. The German government’s Network Enforcement Act fines social media companies for allegedly objectionable content. French President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to remove “fake news” from the internet. Facebook and Instagram erased the accounts of Ramzan Kadyrov, the dictator of the Chechen Republic, because he is on a U.S. sanctions list. Kadyrov is certainly repugnant, but this ban, as the American Civil Liberties Union points out, empowers the U.S. government to effectively censor content. Facebook, working with the Israeli government, has removed over 100 accounts of Palestinian activists. This is an ominous march to an Orwellian world of Thought Police, “Newspeak” and “thought-crime” or, as Facebook likes to call it, “de-ranking” and “counterspeech.”

The censorship, justified in the name of combating terrorism by blocking the content of extremist groups, is also designed to prevent a distressed public from accessing the language and ideas needed to understand corporate oppression, imperialism and socialism.

“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?” Orwell wrote in “1984.” “In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. … Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. …”

Corporate capitalism, and the ideology that justifies it—neoliberalism, the free market, globalization—no longer has any credibility. All of the utopian promises of globalization have been exposed as lies. Allowing banks and corporations to determine how we should order human society and govern ourselves did not spread global wealth, raise the living standards of workers or implant democracy across the globe. The ideology, preached in business schools and by pliant politicians, was a thin cover for the rapacious greed of the elites, elites who now control most of the world’s wealth.

The ruling elites know they are in trouble. The Republican and Democratic parties’ abject subservience to corporate power is transparent. The insurgencies in the two parties that saw Bernie Sanders nearly defeat the seemingly preordained Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and the election of Donald Trump terrify the elites. The elites, by attacking critics and dissidents as foreign agents for Russia, are seeking to deflect attention from the cause of these insurgencies—massive social inequality. Critics of the corporate state and imperialism, already pushed to the margins, are now dangerous because the elites no longer have a viable counterargument. And so these dissidents must be silenced.

“What’s so specifically important about this is that in a period of growing political radicalization among young people, among workers, they start to look for oppositional information, they become interested in socialism, revolution, terms like ‘equality,’ those terms which previously would bring thousands of readers to the World Socialist Web Site, now were bringing no readers to the World Socialist Web Site,” North said. “In other words, they were setting up a quarantine between those who may be interested in our site and the WSWS. From being a bridge, Google was becoming a barrier, a guard preventing access to our site.”

The internet, with its ability to reach across international boundaries, is a potent tool for connecting workers across the earth who are fighting the same enemy—corporate capitalism. And control of the internet, the elites know, is vital to suppress information and consciousness.

“There is no national solution to the problems of American capitalism,” North said. “The effort of the United States is to overcome this through a policy of war. Because what, ultimately, is imperialism? The inability to solve the problems of the nation-state within national borders drives the policy of war and conquest. That is what is emerging. Under conditions of war, the threat of war, conditions of growing and immeasurable inequality, democracy cannot survive. The tendency now is the suppression of democracy. And just as there is no national solution for capitalism, there is no national solution for the working class.”

“War is not an expression of the strength of the system,” North said. “It is an expression of profound and deep crisis. Trotsky said in the Transitional Program: ‘The ruling elites toboggan with eyes closed toward catastrophe.’ In 1939, they went to war, as in 1914, aware of the potentially disastrous consequences. Certainly, in 1939, they knew what the consequences of war were: War brings revolution. But they could not see a way out. The global problems which exist can only be solved in one of two ways: the capitalist, imperialist solution is war and […] fascism. The working-class solution is socialist revolution. This is, I think, the alternative we’re confronted with. So, the question that has come up, in the broadest sense, [is] what is the answer to the problems we face? Building a revolutionary party.”

“There is going to be, and there is already unfolding, massive social struggles,” North said. “The question of social revolution is not utopian. It is a process that emerges objectively out of the contradictions of capitalism. I think the argument can be made—and I think we made this argument—that really, since 2008, we have been witnessing an acceleration of crisis. It has never been solved, and, indeed, the massive levels of social inequality are themselves not the expression of a healthy but [instead] a deeply diseased socioeconomic order. It is fueling, at every level, social opposition. Of course, the great problem, then, is overcoming the legacy of political confusion, produced, as a matter of fact, by the defeats and the betrayals of the 20th century: the betrayal of the Russian Revolution by Stalinism; the betrayals of the working class by social democracy; the subordination of the working class in the United States to the Democratic Party. These are the critical issues and lessons that have to be learned. The education of the working class in these issues, and the development of perspective, is the most critical point … the basic problem is not an absence of courage. It is not an absence of the desire to fight. It is an absence of understanding.”

“Socialist consciousness must be brought into the working class,” North said. “There is a working class. That working class is open now and receptive to revolutionary ideas. Our challenge is to create the conditions. The workers will not learn this in the universities. The Marxist movement, the Trotskyist movement, must provide the working class with the intellectual, cultural tools that it requires, so that it understands what must be done. It will provide the force, it will provide the determination, the emotional and passionate fuel of every revolutionary movement is present. But what it requires is understanding. And we will, and we are seeking to defend internet freedom because we want to make use of this medium, along with others, to create the conditions for this education and revival of revolutionary consciousness to take place.”

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Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, New York Times best selling author, former professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. 

Featured image is from Mr. Fish/Truthdig.

Recent Algerian media reports detailing Saudi propagation of a quietist, apolitical yet supremacist and anti-pluralistic form of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism raises questions about the scope of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s commitment to what he has termed ‘moderate’ Islam. So does Saudi missionary activity in Yemen.

The missionary activities suggest that Saudi Arabia continues to see ultra-conservatism as the primary ideological antidote to Iranian revolutionary zeal. Saudi Arabia has invested an estimated $100 billion over the last four decades in globally promoting ultra-conservatism in a bid to counter the Islamic republic. The campaign has contributed to greater conservatism and intolerance in Muslim communities and countries and in some cases fuelled sectarianism.

Saudi support for ultra-conservatism does not by definition call into question the kingdom’s determination to fight violent radicalism and extremism, and counter non-violent political expressions of Islam.

More recently, the kingdom has been willing to surrender control of major religious institutions that it funds and controls when that proves to be beneficial to improving its image, tarnished by negative perceptions of its support for ultra-conservatism.

The grand mosque and Islamic centre in Brussels, Europe’s largest, is a case in point. Saudi Arabia, responding to Belgian criticism of the mosque’s ultra-conservative Saudi management, last year appointed as its imam, Tamer Abou el Saod, a 57-year polyglot Luxemburg-based, Swedish consultant with a career in the food industry.

The appointment followed complaints in parliament about Saudi and other ultra-conservatives who managed the mosque. Senior Saudi officials have responded positively to a Belgian government initiative to prematurely terminate the kingdom’s 99-year lease of the mosque so that it can take control of it.

Prince Mohammed has created expectations of greater social liberalism by vowing to return Saudi Arabia to an undefined form of “moderate” Islam; 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.

The reforms notwithstanding, Saudi Arabia has yet to indicate whether it has reduced its long-standing funding for ultra-conservative educational and cultural facilities even though Saudi financing vehicles like the World Muslim League have re-positioned themselves as promoters of tolerance and humanitarianism. The league operates the Brussels mosque.

Source: algeriepatriotique

The League’s secretary general, Mohammed bin Abdul Karim Al-Issa, a former Saudi justice minister, has in the last year argued that his organization was “a global umbrella for Islamic people that promotes the principles and values of peace, forgiveness, co-existence, and humanitarian cooperation” that organizes inter-faith conferences.

Algerian media reported however that the kingdom’s assertion that it promotes moderate and more tolerant strands of Islam may not be universal.

“While Saudi Arabia tries to promote the image of a country that is ridding itself of its fanatics, it sends to other countries the most radical of its doctrines,” asserted independent Algerian newspaper El Watan.

El Watan and other media reproduced a letter written by Saudi Sheikh Hadi Ben Ali Al-Madkhali, a scion of Sheikh Rabia Al-Madkhali, the intellectual father of a quietist strand of Salafism that projected the kingdom prior to Prince Mohammed’s reforms as the ideal place for those who seek a pure Islam that has not been compromised by non-Muslim cultural practices and secularism. The letter appoints three prominent Algerian scholars, including Mohamed Ali Ferkous, widely viewed as the spiritual guide of Algerian Madkhalists, as Salafism’s representatives in Algeria.

Similarly, Saudi Arabia has said it would open a Salafi missionary centre in the Yemeni province of Al Mahrah on the border with Oman and the kingdom. Saudi Arabia’s ill-fated military intervention in Yemen was sparked by its conflict with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, a Zaydi Shiite Muslim sect with roots in a region bordering the kingdom, that dates to Saudi employment of Salafism to counter the group in the 1980s.

Question marks about what Prince Mohammed defines as moderate Islam are fuelled by a widespread assumption that the ruling Al Saud family cannot afford a clean break with ultra-conservatism in general and Wahhabism, its specific Saudi strand, in particular, because it derives its legitimacy from the kingdom’s religious establishment.

Prince Mohammed’s grip on power by virtue of his position as heir to the throne, defense minister, and economic czar that was cemented with last year’s purge of prominent family members, businessmen and officials in what amounted to a power and asset grab may, however, persuade him that the family no longer needs religious legitimacy.

Prince Mohammed’s moves have put an end to rule based on consultation within the Al Saud family and more than ever forced the ultra-conservative religious establishment to endorse his moves in a bid to survive and retain some degree of influence rather than out of conviction. In effect, Prince Mohammed has assumed the kind of power associated with one-man-rule, possibly convincing him that his legitimacy is rooted in his power and image as a reformer rather than ultra-conservatism.

Like with many of his reforms, Prince Mohammed is treading on fragile ground as long as his popularity is based on expectations rather than delivery. There has so far been little in his social reforms at home or declarations about Islam that suggests that he intends to go beyond curbing the rough edges of Sunni Muslim ultra-conservatism and creating the building blocks for an autocratic monarchy capable of performing economically and technologically in a 21^st century world.

Prince Mohammed’s social and ideological reforms no doubt seek to fight political violence. The crown prince has yet to demonstrate that this involves in practice rather than words the countering of an ultra-conservative ideology that breeds intolerance, fosters anti-pluralism, and potentially creates breeding grounds for radicalism.

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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 and  Shifting Sands, Essays on Sports and Politics in the Middle East and North Africa.

This article was originally published by The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

First published by Global Research on November 16, 2013

Revelations about the long-term global, intrusive spying by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other allied intelligence apparatuses have provoked widespread protests and indignation and threatened ties between erstwhile imperial allies. 

Allied regimes have uniformly condemned NSA espionage as a violation of trust and sovereignty, a threat to their national and economic security and to their citizens’ privacy.

In contrast, Washington has responded in a contradictory manner: on the one hand, US officials and intelligence chiefs have acknowledged ‘some excesses and mistakes’, on the other hand, they defend the entire surveillance program as necessary for US national security.

Interpretations vary about the US global spy apparatus – how it was built and why it was launched against  hundreds of millions of people. ‘Subjective’ and ‘objective’ explanations abound, evoking psychological, social, economic, strategic and political considerations.

 A multi-factorial explanation is required.

The Integrated Hypothesis of the Global Police State

One of the essential components of a police state is an all-pervasive spy apparatus operating independently of any legal or constitutional constraints.  Spy operations include: 1) massive surveillance over text, video and audio communications and 2) the capacity to secretly record, store and use information secretly collected.  This information strengthens political and economic leaders who, in turn, appoint and direct the spy chiefs.  The political and economic rulers control the spy-lords by setting the goals, means and targets of the surveillance state.  The US global spy apparatus is neither ‘self-starting nor self-perpetuating’.  It did not arise in a vacuum and it has virtually no strategic autonomy.  While there may be intra-bureaucratic conflicts and rivalries, the institutions and groups function within the overall ‘paradigm’ established and directed by the political and economic elite.

 The Global Spy Structure

The growth and expansion of the US spy apparatus has deep roots in its history and is related to the colonial need to control subjugated native and enslaved peoples. However, the global operations emerged after the Second World War when the US replaced Europe as the center of world imperialism.  The US assumed the principal role in preventing the spread of revolutionary and anti-colonial movements from the Soviet Union, China , Korea , Vietnam and Cuba to war and crisis-burdened countries of Europe, North and Southeast Asia and Latin America .  When the collectivist states fell apart in the 1990’s the US became the sole superpower and a unipolar world emerged.

For the United States, ‘unipolarity’ meant (1) an impetus toward total global domination; (2) a world-wide network of military bases; (3) the subordination of capitalist competitors in other industrial countries, (4) the destruction of nationalist adversaries and (6) the unfettered pillage of resources from the former collectivist regimes as they became vassal states.  The last condition meant the complete dismantling of the collectivist state and its public institutions – education, health care and worker rights.

The opportunities for immense profits and supreme control over this vast new empire were boundless while the risks seemed puny, at least during the ‘golden period’, defined by the years immediately after (1) the capitalist takeover of the ex-Soviet bloc, (2) the Chinese transition to capitalism and (3) the conversion of many former African and Asian nationalist regimes, parties and movements to ‘free-market’ capitalism.

Dazzled by their vision of a ‘new world to conquer’ the United States set up an international state apparatus in order to exploit this world-historical opportunity.  Most top political leaders, intelligence strategists, military officials and business elites quickly realized that these easy initial conquests and the complicity of pliable and kleptocratic post-Communist vassal rulers would not last.  The societies would eventually react and the lucrative plunder of resources was not sustainable.  Nationalist adversaries were bound to arise and demand their own spheres of influence.  The White House feared their own capitalist allies would take on the role of imperialist competitors seeking to grab ‘their share’ of the booty, taking over and exploiting resources, public enterprises and cheap labor. 

The new ‘unipolar world’ meant the shredding of the fabric of social and political life.  In the ‘transition’ to free market capitalism, stable employment, access to health care, security, education and civilized living standards disappeared.  In the place of once complex, advanced social systems, local tribal and ethnic wars erupted.  It would be ‘divide and conquer’ in an orgy of pillage for the empire.  But the vast majority of the people of the world suffered from chaos and regression when the multi-polar world of collectivist, nationalist, and imperialist regimes gave way to the unipolar empire. 

For US imperialist strategists and their academic apologists the transition to a unipolar imperial world was exhilarating and they dubbed their unchallenged domination the ‘ New World Order’ (NWO).  The US imperial state then had the right and duty to maintain and police its ‘New World Order’ – by any means. Francis Fukiyama, among other academic apologists celebrated the ‘end of history’ in a paroxysm of imperial fever. Liberal-imperial academics, like Immanuel Wallerstein, sensed the emerging challenges to the US Empire and advanced the view of a Manichean world of ‘unipolarity’ (meaning ‘order’) versus ‘multipolar chaos’– as if the hundreds of millions of lives in scores of countries devastated by the rise of the post-collectivist US empire did not have a stake in liberating themselves from the yoke of a unipolar world.

By the end of its first decade, the unipolar empire exhibited cracks and fissures.  It had to confront adversarial nationalist regimes in resource-rich countries, including Muammar Gaddafi in Libya , Bashar Assad in Syria , Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Khamenei in Iran .  They challenged US supremacy in North Africa and the Middle East .  The Taliban in Afghanistan and nationalist Islamist movements questioned US influence over the vassal rulers of Muslim countries – especially the puppet monarchs in the Persian Gulf .

On the other side of the imperial coin, the domestic economic foundations of the ‘New World Order’ were weakened by a series of speculative crises undermining the support of the US public as well as sectors of the elite.  Meanwhile European and Japanese allies, as well as emerging Chinese capitalists, were beginning to compete for markets.

Within the US an ultra-militarist group of political ideologues, public officials and policy advisers, embracing a doctrine combining a domestic police state with foreign military intervention, took power in Washington .  ‘Conservatives’ in the Bush, Sr. regime, ‘liberals’ in the Clinton administration and ‘neo-conservatives’ in the Bush, Jr. administration all sought and secured the power to launch wars in the Persian Gulf and the Balkans, to expand and consolidate the unipolar empire.

            Maintaining and expanding the unipolar empire became the trigger for the White House’s global police state apparatus.  As new regimes were added to Washington ’s orbit, more and more surveillance was needed to make sure they did not drift into a competitor’s sphere of influence.

The year 2000 was critical for the global police state.  First there was the dot-com crash in the financial sector.  The speculative collapse caused massive but unorganized disaffection among the domestic population.  Arab resistance re-emerged in the Middle East .  The cosmically corrupt Boris Yeltsin vassal state fell and a nationalist, Russian President Vladimir Putin took power.  The willing accomplices to the disintegration of the former USSR had taken their billions and fled to New York , London and Israel . Russia was on the road to recovery as a unified nuclear-armed nation state with regional ambitions.  The period of unchallenged unipolar imperial expansion had ended.

The election of President Bush Jr., opened the executive branch to police state ideologues and civilian warlords, many linked to the state of Israel , who were determined to destroy secular Arab nationalist and Muslim adversaries in the Middle East .  The steady growth of the global police state had been ‘too slow’ for them.  The newly ascendant warlords and the proponents of the global police state wanted to take advantage of their golden opportunity to make US/Israeli supremacy in the Middle East irreversible and unquestioned via the application of overwhelming force (‘shock and awe’).

Their primary political problem in expanding global military power was the lack of a fully dominant domestic police state capable of demobilizing American public opinion largely opposed to any new wars.  ‘Disaster ideologues’ like Phillip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice understood the need for a new ‘ Pearl Harbor ’ to occur and threaten domestic security and thereby terrify the public into war. They lamented the fact that no credible regimes were left in the Middle East to cast as the ‘armed aggressor’ and as a threat to US national security. Such an enemy was vital to the launching of new wars. And new wars were necessary to justify the scale and scope of the new global spy apparatus and emergency police state edicts the warlords and neoconservatives had in mind.  Absent a credible ‘state-based adversary’, the militarists settled for an act of terror (or the appearance of one) to ‘shock and awe’ the US public into accepting its project for imperial wars, the imposition of a domestic police state and the establishment of a vast global spy apparatus.

The September 11, 2001 explosions at the World Trade Center in New York City and the plane crash into a wing (mostly vacant for repairs) of the Pentagon in Washington , DC were the triggers for a vast political and bureaucratic transformation of the US imperial state.  The entire state apparatus became a police state operation.  All constitutional guarantees were suspended.  The neo-conservatives seized power, the civilian warlords ruled.  A huge body of police state legislation suddenly appeared, as if from nowhere, the ‘Patriot Act’.  The Zionists in office set the objectives and influenced military policies to focus on Israel ’s regional interests and the destruction of Israel ’s Arab adversaries who had opposed its annexation of Palestine .  War was declared against Afghanistan without any evidence that the ruling Taliban was involved or aware of the September 11 attack of the US .  Despite massive civilian and even some military dissent, the civilian warlords and Zionist officials blatantly fabricated a series of pretexts to justify an unprovoked war against the secular nationalist regime in Iraq , the most advanced of all Arab countries. Europe was divided over the war. Countries in Asia and Latin America joined Germany and France in refusing to support the invasion.  The United Kingdom , under a ‘Labor’ government, eagerly joined forces with the US hoping to regain some of its former colonial holdings in the Gulf.

At home, hundreds of billions of tax dollars were diverted from social programs to fund a vast army of police state operatives.  The ideologues of war and the legal eagles for torture and the police state shifted into high gear.  Those who opposed the wars were identified, monitored and the details of their lives were ‘filed away’ in a vast database.  Soon millions came to be labeled as ‘persons of interest’ if they were connected in any way to anyone who was ‘suspect’, i.e. opposed to the ‘Global War on Terror’.  Eventually even more tenuous links were made to everyone…family members, classmates and employers.

Over 1.5 million ‘security cleared’ monitors were contracted by the government to spy on hundreds of millions of citizens. The spy state spread domestically and internationally.  For a global empire, based on a unipolar state, the best defense was judged to be a massive global surveillance apparatus operating independently of any other government – including the closest allies.

The slogan, ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWOT) became an open-ended formula for the civilian warlords, militarists and Zionists to expand the scope and duration of overt and covert warfare and espionage.  ‘Homeland Security’ departments, operating at both the Federal and State levels, were consolidated and expanded with massive budgets for incarceration and repression.  Constitutional protections and the Writ of Habeas Corpus were ‘rendered quaint vestiges of history’.  The National Security Agency doubled its personnel and budget with a mandate to distrust and monitor allies and vassal states. The targets piled upon targets, far beyond traditional adversaries, sweeping up the public and private communications of all political, military and economic leaders , institutions, and  citizenry.

The ‘Global War on Terror’ provided the ideological framework for a police state based on the totalitarian conception that ‘everybody and everything is connected to each other’ in a ‘global system’ threatening the state.  This ‘totalistic view’ informs the logic of the expanded NSA, linking enemies, adversaries, competitors and allies.  ‘Enemies’ were defined as anti-imperialist states or regimes with consistently critical independent foreign and domestic policies. ‘Adversaries’ occasionally sided with ‘enemies’, or tolerated policymakers who would not always conform to imperial policies.  ‘Competitors’ supported the empire but had the capacity and opportunity to make lucrative trade deals with adversaries or enemies – Allies were states and leaders who generally supported imperial wars but might provide a forum condemning imperial war crimes (torture and drone attacks).  In addition allies could undermine US imperial market shares and accumulate favorable trade balances.

The logic of the NSA required spying on the allies to root out any links, trade, cultural or scientific relations with adversaries and enemies, which might have spillover consequences. The NSA feared that associations in one sphere might ‘overlap’ with adversaries operating in strategic policy areas and undermine ally loyalty to the empire.

            The spy logic had a multiplier effect – who gets to ‘spy on the spies?’  The NSA might collaborate with overseas allied intelligence agencies and officials – but American spymasters would always question their reliability, their inclination to withhold vital information, the potential for shifting loyalties. ‘Do our allies spy on us?  How do we know our own spies are not colluding with allied spies who might then be colluding with adversarial spies?’  This justified the establishment of a huge national vacuum cleaner to suck up all transactions and communications – justified by the notion that a wide net scooping up everything might catch that big fish!

The NSA regards all ‘threats to the unipolar empire’ as national security threats.  No country or agency within or without the reach of the empire was excluded as a ‘potential threat’.

            The ‘lead imperial state’ requires the most efficient and overarching spy technology with the furthest and deepest reach.  Overseas allies appear relatively inefficient, vulnerable to infiltration, infected with the residua of a long-standing suspect ‘leftist culture’ and unable to confront the threat of new dangerous adversaries.  The imperial logic regards surveillance of ‘allies’ as ‘protecting allied interests’ because the allies lack the will and capacity to deal with enemy infiltration.

There is a circular logic to the surveillance state.  When an allied leader starts to question how imperial espionage protects allied interest, it is time to intensify spying on the ally. Any foreign ally who questions NSA surveillance over its citizens raises deep suspicions.  Washington believes that questioning imperial surveillance undermines political loyalties.

Secret Police Spying as a “Process of Accumulation”

            Like capitalism, which needs to constantly expand and accumulate capital, secret police bureaucracies require more spies to discover new areas, institutions and people to monitor.  Leaders, followers, citizens, immigrants, members of ethnic, religious, civic and political groups and individuals – all are subject to surveillance.  This requires vast armies of data managers and analysts, operatives, programmers, software developers and supervisors – an empire of ‘IT’.  The ever-advancing technology needs an ever-expanding base of operation.

The spy- masters move from local to regional to global operations.  Facing exposure and condemnation of its global chain of spying, the NSA calls for a new ‘defensive ideology’.  To formulate the ideology, a small army of academic hacks is trotted out to announce the phony alternatives of a ‘unipolar police state or terror and chaos’.  The public is presented with a fabricated choice of its perpetual, ‘well-managed and hi-tech’, imperial wars versus the fragmentation and collapse of the entire world into a global war of ‘all against all’.  Academic ideologues studiously avoid mentioning that small wars by small powers end more quickly and have fewer casualties.

The ever-expanding technology of spying strengthens the police state.  The list of targets is endless and bizarre.  Nothing and no one will be missed!

            As under capitalism, the growth of the spy state triggers crisis.  With the inevitable rise of opposition, whistleblowers come forward to denounce the surveillance state.  At its peak, spy-state over-reach leads to exposure, public scandals and threats from allies, competitors and adversaries.  The rise of cyber-imperialism raises the specter of cyber-anti-imperialism.  New conceptions of inter-state relations and global configurations are debated and considered.  World public opinion increasingly rejects the ‘necessity’ of police states.  Popular disgust and reason exposes the evil logic of the spy-state based on empire and promotes a plural world of peaceful rival countries, functioning under co-operative policies – systems without empire, without spymasters and spies.

A former Federal Prosecutor sat down with The Daily Caller to give perhaps the most comprehensive rundown of the Obama Administration’s “brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton” and “frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy.” 

In this highly recommended 30 minute interview with Joe diGenova, the former Special Counsel who went after both the Teamsters and former NY Governor Elliot Spitzer, paints a very clear picture of collusion between the Obama administration, the FBI, the Clinton campaign and opposition research firm Fusion GPS.

From the Daily Caller:

The FBI used to spy on Russians. This time they spied on us. what this story is about – a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton from a clear violation of the law with regard to the way she handled classified information with her classified server. Absolutely a crime, absolutely a felony. It’s about finding out why – as the Inspector General is doing at the department of justice – why Comey and the senior DOJ officials conducted a fake criminal investigation of Hillary Clinton. Followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrant. That’s not an investigation, that’s a Potemkin village. It’s a farce. 

And everybody knew it was a farce. The problem was, she didn’t win. And because she didn’t win, the farce became a very serious opera. It wasn’t a comic opera anymore, it was a tragic opera. And she was going to be the focus.

What this is about, this is about a lavabo, a cleansing of FBI and the upper echelons of the Department of Justice.

We’re going to discover that the Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, her deputy Sally Yates, the head of the national security division John Carlin, Bruce Ohr and other senior DOJ officials, and regrettably, lying attorneys. People who were senior career civil servants violated the law, perhaps committed crimes, and covered up crimes by a presidential candidate – but more than that, they tried to frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy that never existed, and they knew it, and they plotted to ruin him as a candidate and then destroy him as a president. That’s why this is important. That’s why connecting the dots is important.

DiGenova condemned the FBI for working so closely with the controversial Fusion GPS, a political hit squad paid by the DNC and Clinton campaign to create and spread the discredited Steele dossier about President Donald Trump. Without a justifiable law enforcement or national security reason, he says, the FBI “created false facts so that they could get surveillance warrants. Those are all crimes.” He adds, using official FISA-702 “queries” and surveillance was done “to create a false case against a candidate, and then a president.” –Daily Caller

During the interview, DiGenova holds up and references a previously unreported and heavily redacted 99-page FISA court opinion from April, 2017, which “describes systematic and on-going violations of the law [by the FBI and their contractors using unauthorized disclosures of raw intelligence on Americans]. This is stunning stuff.” 

NSA Admiral Mike Rodgers: An American Hero

diGenova also discusses the immense risks taken by retiring NSA director, Mike Rogers – who briefed Trump on Nov. 7, 2016 about the Obama administration’s surveillance of the Trump team. The next day, the Presidental transition team was moved out of Trump tower and into the president-elect’s Bedminster, NJ golf course until they could sweep for bugs.

Uranium One and other matters

Also discussed in the interview are the Uranium One scandal, Mueller’s “tainted” probe, and the consequences of the Democrats regaining control in the November midterms – which would most certainly lead to an effort to impeach Trump.

“It’s important for the House to complete its work now,” says diGenova.

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The 99-page FISA court opinion is below (link)

On Sunday, at 11 AM local time, Turkish tanks and infantry invaded Afrin, a majority-Kurdish multi-ethnic region in northwestern Syria. The Turkish forces are targeting the US-backed Syrian-Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its militia, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), which control Afrin. At the same time, the Free Syrian Army (FSA), Ankara’s proxy force in Syria, attacked Afrin from the south and east, supported by Turkish tanks and Special Forces.

This aggression by Turkey is a reckless escalation that will exacerbate the conflicts raging across the Middle East and intensify the danger of war between the major powers. With Moscow’s tacit support, Turkey is attacking the YPG, the backbone of the main US proxy force in Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) militia. The danger of this triggering a clash between US forces and Russian and Turkish forces in Syria, and all-out war between the United States and Russia, is very real.

The ground invasion, code-named “Olive Branch,” came after hours of Turkish air strikes on Afrin, including strikes on an airfield used by US forces to deliver equipment and arms to the SDF.

It signifies a historic breakdown of the NATO alliance, of which the United States and Turkey are both members. Given that the Turkish invasion apparently has support in Berlin, it reflects deep and mounting conflicts between the major NATO powers.

In the first hours of the operation on Sunday, Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told reporters that its aim was to create a 30-kilometer “safe zone” along the Turkish-Syrian border. He said the operation would proceed in four phases, without giving further details. It seems likely to continue eastwards to Manbij, a region occupied by the SDF since it fought Islamic State (ISIS) forces in August 2016.

That development provoked Operation Euphrates Shield, an invasion by the Turkish army to block the Kurdish offensive in Syria and break up what Ankara called “a terror corridor along the Turkish border.”

Initial press reports of the Turkish attack were contradictory. Turkish officials and media unanimously hailed the operation as a great success. However, the YPG claimed to have repulsed Turkish and FSA forces “after fierce clashes.”

The Kurdish Communities Union (KCK), an umbrella group including the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) of Turkey and Kurdish organizations in Syria and Iran, condemned the operation and declared it would “stand by Afrin with all its strength.” In a written statement, it accused Russia and Syria of “permitting Turkey to attack Afrin.”

The offensive threatens to provoke civil war in Kurdish-majority areas of southern Turkey. Speaking in Bursa, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan vowed to crush all opposition within Turkey to the war, including from the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP).

“Whoever takes to the streets on the call of HDP, KCK and PKK should know that our security forces will keep a tight rein on them and they will pay a heavy price,” he said.

Late yesterday, Turkish media reported three missile attacks in the southeastern Turkish province of Reyhanlı, killing one and wounding 32 civilians.

Within Turkey, Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party is using the invasion to escalate its crackdown on political opposition, with the support of the opposition Republican People’s Party and the fascistic Nationalist Movement Party. Hundreds of people protesting the invasion were arrested in several Turkish cities. The judiciary launched investigations of Democratic Society Party (DTP) Co-Chair Leyla Güven, HDP spokesperson Ayhan Bilgen and HDP Deputy Co-Chair Nadir Yıldırım for criticizing the Afrin invasion.

Turkey was able to launch the operation only due to tacit Russian support. Moscow withdrew its forces stationed in Afrin as part of the Russian intervention against NATO-backed Islamist militias in Syria, and allowed Turkish aircraft to operate in the region’s air space. It also mediated for Turkey in relations with the Syrian and Iranian governments, which criticized the invasion.

Yesterday, Russian officials blamed Washington for the attack, saying it took “provocative steps” by saying it would arm the YPG and use it to control the Syrian-Turkish border.

The Syrian Foreign Ministry said

Syria “strongly condemns the flagrant Turkish aggression on the city of Afrin, which is an integral part of Syrian territory, stressing that this aggression is the most recent in a series of Turkish transgressions against Syrian sovereignty.”

It dismissed claims by Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu that Turkey had informed Syria beforehand, calling them “lies that the Turkish government continues to spout.”

Iran, Syria’s main regional ally, said it hoped that “the operation will immediately come to an end.”

Turkey’s invasion of Syria is the outcome of decades of escalating carnage and imperialist war in the Middle East, led by Washington, since the Persian Gulf War and the Stalinist bureaucracy’s dissolution of the USSR, both of which occurred in 1991. With the removal of the Soviet military threat, Washington was free to launch ever bloodier wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and beyond, with the aid of some or all of its NATO allies. It is increasingly clear, however, that the growing international conflicts provoked by these wars, including Ankara’s outrage over US reliance on Kurdish proxy forces, have reached an entirely new stage.

As Turkey moves to destroy the main US proxy force in Syria, NATO is on the verge of collapse and Washington is increasingly isolated. It faces a powerful coalition of opponents in the Middle East that enjoys support even among Washington’s nominal European allies. It is responding by announcing a military strategy that centers on preparations for total war against nuclear-armed powers such as Russia and China.

Initial US statements on the invasion were unclear and self-contradictory. US State Department sources said that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had spoken to his Russian and Turkish counterparts about “securing stability in the north of the country,” but gave no details. Pentagon officials said they “encourage all parties to avoid escalation and to focus on the most important task of defeating the Islamic State.”

In fact, the Pentagon on Friday unveiled a National Defense Strategy that proclaims the “war on terror” to have been supplanted by the need to prepare for war against rival great powers.

“Great power competition—not terrorism—is now the primary focus of US national security,” Defense Secretary James Mattis said as he unveiled the document, which singles out Russia and China as the preeminent threats to US global dominance.

The US is clearly concerned with the Turkish invasion. The Center for American Progress, a Washington think tank, warned that it “could trigger a new, bloody phase of the long-running Syrian civil war” and “may also be aimed at the United States,” which “has spent three years balancing a troubled relationship with Turkey with the imperatives of the counter-IS campaign in Syria.” The Center for American Progress statement continued, “With the end of that campaign in sight, that balancing act is once again teetering on the brink.”

The contrast to the policy of Germany, the leading European power, could not be more striking. Berlin appears to have green-lighted the invasion. Last Wednesday, as Turkish artillery strikes on YPG positions began and Erdogan’s National Security Council threatened to invade Syria, a delegation of high-level Turkish security officials arrived for two days of friendly talks in Berlin. In these talks, German and Turkish officials discussed measures against the Kurds.

As the German press discussed Berlin’s “new turn back” toward Turkey, German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said Berlin intended to have “better negotiations” with Ankara, “for the benefit of Turkey, Germany and Europe.” Berlin announced a new crackdown on PKK activities in Germany, with the Federal Prosecutor’s Office opening 130 investigations.

Berlin also signaled that Turkey will continue to enjoy German military support even after attacking US proxies in Syria. It did so by moving to fast-track Turkey’s requests for the modernization of its German “Leopard” tanks by Rheinmetall.

“The federal government is showing itself to be flexible in its new turn back towards Turkey,” Der Spiegel wrote. “According to Der Spiegel’s sources, Berlin now wants to give the nod to a multi-million-euro arms deal with Ankara.”

These statements of German support for Turkey even as it bombards US proxy forces in Syria point to the profound tensions tearing apart the NATO military alliance and the escalating danger of direct conflict between the major world powers.

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Featured image is from Middle East Eye.

Yes, the blockchain is truly revolutionary.

Yes, bitcoin is Tulipmania 2.0.

Yes, cryptocurrency is a nail in the coffin of the bankster parasites.

Yes, digital currency is a tool of the totalitarian tyrants.

No, these statements are not contradictory.

But don’t worry if you think they are. You’re just a victim of “The Bitcoin Psyop.”

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Jack Rasmus’ commentary on OXFAM’s annual report pertaining to the relentless growth of wealth inequality globally, benefiting the wealthiest 1% investor class.

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Video:  World’s Richest 1% appropriate 82% of Global Wealth, Prof. Jack Rasmus

Featured image: A pregnant woman checks clothes made for international brands at a garment factory in Dong Nai province, Vietnam, on November 21, 2017. (Source: Sam Tarling/Oxfam International)

Call it the ‘Year of the Billionaire.’

In 2017, a new billionaire was created every two days and while 82 percent of all wealth created went to the top 1 percent of the world’s richest while zero percent—absolutely nothing—went to the poorest half of the global population.

That troubling information is included in Oxfam’s latest report on global inequality—titled Reward Work, Not Wealth (pdf)—released Monday. In addition to the above, the report details how skyrocketing wealth growth among the already rich coupled with stagnant wages and persistent poverty among the lowest economic rungs of society means that just 42 individuals now hold as much wealth as the 3.7 billion poorest people on the planet.

“The billionaire boom is not a sign of a thriving economy but a symptom of a failing economic system,” Winnie Byanyima, Oxfam’s executive director of Oxfam International. “The people who make our clothes, assemble our phones and grow our food are being exploited to ensure a steady supply of cheap goods, and swell the profits of corporations and billionaire investors.”

Among the report’s key findings:

• Billionaire wealth has risen by an annual average of 13 percent since 2010 – six times faster than the wages of ordinary workers, which have risen by a yearly average of just 2 percent. The number of billionaires rose at an unprecedented rate of one every two days between March 2016 and March 2017.
• It takes just four days for a CEO from one of the top five global fashion brands to earn what a Bangladeshi garment worker will earn in her lifetime. In the US, it takes slightly over one working day for a CEO to earn what an ordinary worker makes in a year.
• It would cost $2.2 billion a year to increase the wages of all 2.5 million Vietnamese garment workers to a living wage. This is about a third of the amount paid out to wealthy shareholders by the top 5 companies in the garment sector in 2016.
• Dangerous, poorly paid work for the many is supporting extreme wealth for the few. Women are in the worst work, and almost all the super-rich, nine out of ten, are men.

The report comes just as the world’s economic and political elite are set to open the World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, Switzerland. And why the global elite argue the summit’s focus is addressing the world’s most pressing problems, Oxfam found that the amount of new wealth which went to the world’s top one percent in 2017 was roughly $762 billion—a figure large enough, the group points out, to end extreme global poverty seven times over.

What the report ultimately exposes, Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB chief executive, told the Guardian, is a “system that is failing the millions of hardworking people on poverty wages who make our clothes and grow our food.”

“For work to be a genuine route out of poverty we need to ensure that ordinary workers receive a living wage and can insist on decent conditions, and that women are not discriminated against,” he added. “If that means less for the already wealthy then that is a price that we—and they—should be willing to pay.”

Not just cataloging and lamenting the metrics of inequality, the new report also puts forth a number of policy solutions that should be embraced by people and governments worldwide to reduce levels of inequality and lift billions of people out of extreme poverty. They include:

• Limit returns to shareholders and top executives, and ensure all workers receive a minimum ‘living’ wage that would enable them to have a decent quality of life. For example, in Nigeria, the legal minimum wage would need to be tripled to ensure decent living standards.
• Eliminate the gender pay gap and protect the rights of women workers. At current rates of change, it will take 217 years to close the gap in pay and employment opportunities between women and men.
• Ensure the wealthy pay their fair share of tax through higher taxes and a crackdown on tax avoidance, and increase spending on public services such as healthcare and education. Oxfam estimates a global tax of 1.5 percent on billionaires’ wealth could pay for every child to go to school.

Though Oxfam has been calculating global inequality on an annual basis for more than a decade, the anti-poverty group notes that this year’s report used new data from Credit Suisse and a separate kind of model. Specifically, Oxfam noted, the fact that the world’s 42 richest billionaires have as much wealth as the poorest bottom half “cannot be compared to figures from previous years – including the 2016/17 statistic that eight men owned the same wealth as half the world – because it is based on an updated and expanded data set published by Credit Suisse in November 2017.  When Oxfam recalculated last year’s figures using the latest data we found that 61 people owned the same wealth as half the world in 2016 – and not eight.”

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

There is a reason to say that the majority of conflicts today are a result of policies of colonial rulers. Western European invader-rulers have done much damage to the world. There is little they can argue against this.

Creation of artificial states & amalgamating new states have been a legacy that continues to haunt every country colonial invaders occupied. Which international laws will hold these Western European countries accountable for artificial lines, artificial borders, artificial states dividing people as they wished? Should these countries be allowed to resolve the conflicts they created?

Many of the present day countries by name did not exist – they were all christened by these colonial rulers. Many of their borders were drawn by colonial rulers for their own advantage. The present day African countries by name didn’t exist. The Berlin Conference of 1884-5 partitioned Africa among a handful of European countries using a pen – 44% of Africa’s borders were divided as a straight line splitting over 177 ethnic groups into two countries. The Somalis are split between five different countries. The Somali 5 pointed star in its flag represents these 5 divided groups.

Present day India didn’t exist, colonial British cobbled up independent states and territories and declared it as India. Similarly, countries like Canada, US, Australia came into being having confiscated already occupied lands, killing off these indigenous and claiming it as theirs, while Saudi Arabia, Singapore are also created countries for distinct geo-political and financial purposes.

All of these artificially created borders & countries are having some problem or the other. International laws created immediately after colonial independence were Euro-centric and never dwelt on any of the illegalities committed by their own. This is evident in the Vienna Convention on Succession of States which upholds utipossidetis juris – bilateral agreements are handed down to successor states.

Moreover, Article 50 of Vienna Convention states “If the expression of a State’s consent to be bound by a treaty has been procured through the corruption of its representative directly or indirectly by another negotiating State, the State may invoke such corruption as invalidating its consent to be bound by the treaty.” (doesn’t this question the Indian Government giving Rs.5m monthly to LTTE to agree to signing the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord)

The Durand Line – artificial boundary created in 1893

This arbitrary line is a 1500mile border that divides present day Pakistan (named in 1933) & present Afghanistan (Khorasan). Afghanistan is important for its access to Central Asia & the Indian Ocean. Afghanistan was created to be used as a buffer state by colonial rulers. The Durand Line was established by British India & Kingdom of Afghanistan in 1893. Afghanistan refuses to acknowledge it as a border since creation of Pakistan in 1947.

This line has divided the Pashtun tribes into 2 – who now live in Pakistan & Afghanistan. The line was drawn by British colonial officer Mortimer Duran who disregarded the Pashtun populace. All that Britain wanted was to control the Khyber Pass and make Hindu Kush the northwestern border of British India.

Britain arrived in the Indian sub-continent in the 19th century. Britain annexed parts of Afghanistan in 1879 by an arbitrary treaty in exchange for money – Rs.1,200,000. Britains puppet Shah Shoja emerged after dethroning Afghan king Dost Mohamma in 1839. Britain’s aim was to protect the opium drug line! Taliban is all Pashtuns.

You will be most surprised to know that King Amanullah who ascended the Afghan throne in 1919 engaged in numerous liberalization programs which included reforming the army, abolishing slavery and forced labor, and encouraging the liberation of women, discouraging use of veil, oppression of women giving them more educational opportunities. Instead of Britain feeling happy about these moves they thought it a threat to their reign and supported extremists against the move!

“Britain was seen as the culprit in the affair, manipulating the tribes against Amanullah in an attempt to bring about his downfall.” (Afghan historian Abdul SamadGhaus wrote in 1988)

The British were cunning enough to bind Afghanistan to accepting drawn borders (Article 5 of the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1919).

The Durand Line Agreement divides boundaries between Afghanistan, Balochistan & British India. If so a trilateral agreement was required but Balochistan was excluded by making Afghan monarch believe that Balochistan was part of British India. Britain refused Afghan request to relook at borders before it gave independence to India in 1947.

Colonials speak with forked tongues & is a lesson when the same European countries are out to create more new borders claiming to resolve conflicts without acknowledging that they created them!

Did Afghans understand a word the British spoke. Could they read & write English to agree to sign on a dotted line?
Was this ‘treaty’ ratified by the British Parliament if so where are the records if it was gazetted? Has the Durand line been registered in the UN? Validity aside is this line Legal?

How valid & legal are treaties signed by monarchs of these countries and invader occupiers? Can legal experts please elucidate?

Present day issues between Pakistan & Afghanistan is another issue the crux of the matter is that the root cause of these issues associated with the Durand Line is the British who drew the illegal line!

The Radcliffe Line – the root of Kashmir issue

The culprit this time was again Britain & Sir Cyril Radcliffe the Director General of the Ministry of Information was appointed Chairman of the Boundary Commission. His task was to divide India religious lines. Sir Radcliffe had never been to British India & was clueless about the people or the region but was given just 5 weeks to complete the job. He was tasked with equitably dividing 175,000 sq miles with 88m people. That line has impacted India, Pakistan, East Pakistan & Myanmar)

He was not even a cartographer. Sir Radcliffe did the same mistake – dividing villages, separating people and the line at times ran through houses!

Before independence, nearly 40% of India was covered by princely states that were not British possessions and thus not part of British India. It was the choice of the rulers of these independent states to choose which side they wanted to belong to.

The division caused mayhem at independence with 14m fleeing one side of the border to the other & contributed to 3 wars between India & Pakistan in 1947, 1965 and 1971. For the mayhem Radcliffe was made a Peer and made a Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire.

The Radcliffe Line became another example of how a pen destroyed millions of lives.

Partition of India, including migrations after the partition.

The Radcliffe Line allocated to Pakistan, the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan, East Bengal (became Bangladesh), Western Punjab.

India was given West Bengal, Eastern Punjab, Kashmir is located on the northernmost tip of India & the northeastern part of Pakistan. The British thought the ruler of Kashmir Hari Singh would join Pakistan after the partition as Kashmir population was Muslim. Hari Singh did not join Pakistan and requested British assistance which led to the 1948 agreement that left half of Kashmir under Indian control including the fertile Valley of Kashmir. Pakistan got the impoverished part of the region. To compound matters the area has disputes between India & China too which led to the 1962 Indo-Sino War.

Kashmir

When asked how Britain could help end the conflict over Kashmir during a visit to Pakistan in 2011, Prime Minister David Cameron said,

“I don’t want to try to insert Britain in some leading role where, as with so many of the world’s problems, we are responsible for the issue in the first place.”

McMahon Line – 1914

Is another case of illegal colonial invaders imposing arbitrary borders to serve their advantage. Not only are colonial invaders guilty of drawing arbitrary borders they are also guilty of forcing the indigenous to sign treaties with them. How valid are these? In 1914 there was no India – only British controlled parts of present India. There were 565 princely states that were not part of British India (these states were not under British rule)

The line was drawn by Sir Henry McMahon, the foreign secretary of the British-Indian government who was acting as the chief negotiator in the Shimla conference between Britain, China and Tibet. The line was negotiated without Chinese participation and when China opposed the response was to declare it a bilateral agreement between India & Tibet as the land south of Tibet was declared as British India making Tawang region of Arunachal Pradesh a part of India.

Today countries are disputing over borders & territories demarcated purposely by illegal colonial rulers to inflict conflict at future dates. These lines the colonials drew were purposely done over areas that provided major tributaries like water, resources, hydro-electric potential & mountains that were geo-strategic.

Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916)– Dividing Middle East

Again it was a British Sir Mark Sykes and a French Francois-Edouard Picot who were tasked to divide the Middle East between the two. It was a secret agreement. It became another example of a straight line pen drawn without any concern for the people living, their cultures or their desire to separate.

North of the line – became modern Syria & Lebanon under French mandate.

South of the line – modern Israel/Palestine, Jordon, Iraq went to the Brits. Issue was Mosul which was north of the line and should have been part of Syria but Brits negotiated & placed it under Iraq. Oil was the reason. Lebanon has historically been part of ‘Greater Syria’ (a region that encompasses Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel/Palestine & western part of Iraq)

“The Kurds were divided between 4 states :Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Shiite Arabs were split between Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the eastern provinces of Saudi Arabia. The Alawites, a heterodox Shiite Arab sect, reside today along the northern Lebanese, Syrian, and southwestern Turkish coasts. The Druze were distributed between today’s Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. Lebanon, supposedly a Christian redoubt, included large Sunni and Shiite populations, as well as Alawites and Druze. Sunni Arabs, who formed the dominant population of the Middle East, were divided into numerous states. Pockets of Turkomen, Circassians, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Chaldeans were isolated throughout. At the dawn of the 21st century, minority ethnic groups ruled Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Bahrain, often repressively” (Gabriel Scheinmann – The Map that Ruined the Middle East”)

Saudi Arabia came into existence after Britain had already promised Hussein ibn Ali, the emir of Mecca, an Arab kingdom in exchange for his military support against the Ottoman Turks in World War I.

There are plenty more artificially created states, borders, territories that colonial invader rulers have forced into being internationally accepted as today’s laws are Euro-centric.

If it is illegal for an illegal occupant to enter into any legal agreement that same logic should apply to all of the European colonial countries that went to explore following the 3 concepts of Gold – God –Glory – profit by stealing Asian spices, African slaves, American metals & other resources. Declaring all countries already inhabited as Christian and dispatching missionaries to forcefully convert natives or kill them if they refused to do so. Expand the Western-Christian hegemony across the world and creating an ideology of mercantilism and capitalism where wealth centred around a handful who dictated how the world was to be governed.

The very countries today preaching human rights, good governance, transparency divided the world between them and fleeced countries, subjugating the indigenous and murdering millions of innocent people. None of the present day crimes come anywhere near to the atrocities these Western European countries committed as GOVERNMENT & CHURCH policy upon natives who were peacefully living in their land. We are presented false history by these Western countries who claim to have ‘FOUND’ countries that had people living in them.

We can laugh now at how these countries have even celebrated these ‘Founding Fathers’ but have now come to realize these men were horrid murderers. Many of the philosophies and concepts the West claim to be theirs were spoken and practiced by Eastern civilizations. Buddhas teachings covers most of what the West claim to be ‘theirs’! Such confiscation of intellectual property is wrong and immoral without paying due acknowledgement to its original source. But what more can you expect from countries that have historically fleeced, invaded, occupied & murdered and continue to do the same using the cover of international laws & the UN that they control as a puppet.

In highlight some of the above borders that have been artificially created the crux is to draw attention not to the countries presently involved in the dispute but to convey the message that these disputes stem from illegally drawn borders by illegal occupiers and that is why countries fighting over these borders should get together and point fingers at the countries that drew them without fighting with each other.

The Western European countries that invaded, occupied & ruined countries should not be allowed to have any role in resolving the conflicts they created.

“The American Negro has now reached a point in his progress where he needs to take serious account of where he is and whither he is going. Yet this situation is in sight and it brings not as many assume an end to the so-called Negro problems, but a beginning of even more difficult problems of race and culture. Because what we must now ask ourselves is when we become equal American citizens what will be our aims and ideals and what will we have to do with selecting these aims and ideals. Are we to assume that we will simply adopt the ideals of Americans and become what they are or want to be and that we will have in this process no ideals of our own?…The deficiency in knowledge of Negro history and culture, however, will remain and this danger must be met or else American Negroes will disappear. Their history and culture will be lost. Their connection with the rising African world will be impossible.”

The talented and poetic rap lyricist, hip-hop philosopher and music innovator Kendrick Lamar (image on the right below) seems to be more attuned to the iconic and symbolic power of Africa in the Black popular imagination than Black America’s supposed intellectual elite. His 2016 Grammy performance was as historic as it was uncompromisingly African-centered, situating the name Compton a city that has come to personify the emergence of West Coast gangsta-rap in the late 1980s and early 1990s within a silhouette of the African continent.  His message, undeniable and bold rang out like a trumpet summoning a community from the stupor of self-delusion and historical amnesia.  His Pimp A Butterfly track “The Blacker The Berry” says it quite succinctly, “I’m African American, I am African.”

Yet Lamar’s emphatic pronouncement of African ancestry and identity among African Americans even if representational has eluded the discourse of Black intellectuals in our post 9/11, hyper-patriotic, anti-Black, Islamophobic and anti-immigrant era.  The omission of the Pan-Africanist nationalist and African-centered trajectory within the Black intellectual tradition represents at this historical moment a glaring crisis in the panorama of African American social and political thought.

In the essay Kendrick Lamar’s Grammy Performance points to a Simple Truth #Black Lives Matter When Africa Matters written by Dr. Faraji nearly two years ago he clarifies the meaning and purpose of Black freedom and liberation when he says “the struggle for the dignity of African humanity in the United States transcends the quest for racial equality—and is more precisely a battle for the assertion of African power, sovereignty and the right to be self-determining, self-defining and self-building in the world.”  The positioning of African diaspora communities including Black America and African nation states as socially, politically and economically sovereign societies in full control of their land, resources, human capital and socio-cultural institutions is ultimately the true measuring stick for Black progress.  In its most classical and fundamental sense Pan African nationalism is about the building and developing of African nations and states in both Africa and the diaspora and the failure of Black public intellectuals to articulate this stance and even evade it all together is the primary intellectual crisis of our time.

What is most disturbing about Cornel West’s recent critique of Ta-Nehisi Coates in the The Guardian article, “Ta-Nehisi Coates is the neo-liberal face of the black freedom struggle” is the idea that the African American intellectual landscape can be reduced to what West calls the “neo- liberal face” and so-called “radical wing” of which he claims allegiance and membership to. The Black intellectual tradition is far broader and certainly more complex than the two polarities that West seems to suggest as he takes on the banner of radicalism.  What does he mean by “radical wing” and what are the criteria for such intellectual affiliations in African American social thought?  Does he mean what Reiland Rabaka refers to in his book Africana critical theory : reconstructing the black radical tradition, from W.E.B. Du Bois and C.L.R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral or is he referring to the Gramscian organic intellectualism that led him to adoptappellation radical democratic socialist throughout most of his career?  We would not dispute the radical positionality of either one of these schools of thought and neither would we question the radicalism of Black feminist thought, critical race theory, post-colonialism, intersectional analyses or the transgressive, pan-sexual restructuring of gender categories proposed by the radical strands within LGBTQ perspectives.  Our point is the designation “radical” covers the full gamut of Black intellectual perspectives and therefore it is a gross oversimplification for West to juxtapose his version of the “radical wing” as the intellectual binary of Coates’ neo-liberalism.

The irony is that throughout the 1980s and 1990s leading up to September 11, 2001 West was considered by his Pan-Africanist counterparts such as the luminary John Henrik Clarke as the lukewarm, neo-liberal Black scholar who was more loyal to his brand of Marxism and Christianity than the uncompromising stance of revolutionary Pan Africanism.  This was no small critique coming from Clarke who was an intellectual adviser to Malcolm X, founding chair of Africana and Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College and whose name was bestowed upon the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library at Cornell University.

Is it possible that it is Coates and not West who is the radical simply because the former has dared to broach the topic of reparations for African Americans—a position that has been noticeably absent from West’s intellectual repertoire for over four decades.  Toni Morrison referred to Coates as “the single best writer on the subject of race in the United States” in response to his book, Between the World and Me and definitely his latest work We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy represents a powerful analysis of the present state of racial discord and political backlash in American politics today.  However Cornel West is not entirely wrong in his characterization of Coates as the “neo-liberal face” of the Black freedom struggle.

Although we differ from West in that it is not only Coates’ overestimation of the tragic in Black life and his resignation to a world without hope that is antithetical to Black freedom, but also his paradoxical views on Africa and nationalist consciousness that ultimately give power to a politics of ambivalence.  For Coates “Pan Africa” maybe the subtext of Black life, but it is the ethos of survival that is rooted in realism and claims prominence.  That some African Americans are the descendants of African royalty is simply a mythic celebration that supplants the real fact that Black people are the progeny of slaves. And since he has resolved through an unsophisticated analysis of what he calls “separatist nationalism” as useless and futile Black people basically have no way out beyond integration or the altruism of whites.  For Coates African consciousness is merely about the nostalgia of ancestry and tradition which at the least can help Black folk cope with their despair, but at the end of the day it is not a strategy that can lead to significant progress or advancement.

Ironically it is Coates’ essay The Case for Reparations that potentially points to Africa in a way that acknowledges that African Americans are the descendants of enslaved Africans whose labor, bodies, wealth and resources were plundered by white supremacist exploitation. In fact,hundreds of thousands and possibly millions of the African ancestors of African Americans were illegally smuggled into the country by countless American freebooters who wantonly broke the 1808 United States act that prohibited the importation of sovereign African nationals into the country.

Although Coates familiarity with the 1808 Act is bane, he nevertheless makes the case for reparations clear by citing the story of Belinda Royall a freed African woman from what is now Ghana petitioning the commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1783 for reparations due to having “endured the Middle Passage and 50 years of enslavement” at the hands of her master Isaac Royall.  The Massachusetts legislature awarded her 50 pounds and 12 shillings which was paid out of the estate of Isaac Royall.  Her story maybe exceptional, but it was her memory of her African homeland and the knowledge that she had been deprived of freedom, a livelihood and access to the economic opportunities of her slaveholder’s society that prompted her to pursue both justice and monetary compensation.  Coates’ discussion of reparations need not be fatalistic or pessimistic because it actually situates the quest for reparations for Black America in the context of the global reparations movement in both Caribbean and Africa.  Coates compelling argument for reparations is in alignment with the ten point action plan of  the Caribbean Reparation Commission (CARICOM) and the call for reparations by the Herero people of the southern African nation of Namibia directed at their former colonizer Germany.

Marines train with M16A2 rifles in March 2003 at Camp Lemonnier (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

We argue that a Pan Africanist vision on the issue of reparations would present a greater likelihood of achieving victory.  Likewise a Pan Africanist lens on what Cornell West rightfully highlights as American complicity in capitalist, imperialist and militaristic jingoism around the world is made more concrete and relevant when we consider that the east African country Djibouti is home to Camp Lemonnier a military base that has been described by a Washington Post commentator as the “busiest predator drone base outside the Afghan war zone” and “the only installation of its kind in the Pentagon’s global network of bases.”  Camp Lemonnier functions as the “headquarters” for US counterterrorism and drone assaults in east Africa and the Middle East. It is essentially an intensification of US militarization in Africa via AFRICOM and the Trans-Sahara Counter Terrorism Partnership which according to the official spiel is for the purpose of supporting African militaries in the combat against terrorism.  The Sahelian region of Africa has become the new flashpoint for global terrorism.  A greater motivation however is the objective of securing US oil interests in Chad and Cameroon and protecting French energy security derived from Uranium mines in Niger.  It should be evident that any discussion regarding reparations for Black America or the western tripartite forces of capitalism, imperialism and militarism must include Africa.  Coates does so by innuendo and West is completely silent, so it is very dangerous to view any two individuals or thinkers as the summation of the Black intellectual tradition.

As much as we are steeped in the Pan Africanist intellectual tradition it is not our goal here to serve as uncritical ideologues, but to ensure that the totality of the Black intellectual tradition is engaged, referenced and resourced as we seek to solve and ultimately neutralize the pressing challenges that Black humanity is faced with in both the United States and the global community.  We recognize the contributions of West, Coates and the plethora of other scholars, intellectuals, activists and revolutionaries who embody the heterogeneity of Black thought both past and present.  Yet we must be unyielding in our stance that the inattentiveness and unwillingness of Black intellectuals, scholars and activists to make Africa and the African Diaspora central to our configurations of the Black freedom struggle is not only intellectually irresponsible, but also a betrayal ofone the most influential and impactful streams within African American intellectual heritage and socio-political praxis.

In his attempt to counter Ready for Revolution: The Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), Peniel Joseph in his magisterial historical biography on Stokely Carmichael aka Kwame Ture, Stokely: A Life describes the Trinidadian born Carmichael as the successor of both Martin Luther King and Malcolm X.  Carmichael was an activist-revolutionary who had been a part of SNCC, the Black Panther Party and a founding architect of the All African People’s Revolutionary Party under the tutelage of Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure.  He was grounded in civil rights organizing, Black Power direct action and revolutionary Pan Africanist politics.  For Carmichael Pan Africanism was the logical progression of both the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power and any Black ideology that did not point to Africa was deficient in its understanding of revolution and freedom.  Yet Peniel Joseph disparages and mocks Carmichael’s Pan-Africanist philosophy as well as his decision to take up residence in Guinea under the political mentorship of Sekou Toure and his co-president Kwame Nkrumah.  For Joseph, Carmichael was a community organizer who had become a “revolutionary ideologue.”  By turning to Africa, Carmichael’s once-clear political vision had succumbed to his ‘ideological faith” in Pan Africanism.  According to Joseph, Carmichael’s greatest sin was that he had betrayed the civil rights movement by disowning his “former, more hopeful perspective about American democracy.”  Accordingly Carmichael spent the last 30 years of his life living under a repressive African dictatorship with less political freedom than the country he had first proclaimed the mantra “Black Power.”

Joseph’s domesticized, neo-liberal, Black American reading of Stokely Carmichael is certainly not an accurate depiction of Carmichael’s motivation and neither does it grasp the significance of Nkrumah or Toure’s strategic role in leading anti-colonial, revolutionary movements in Africa.  Even with Toure and Nkrumah’s contradictions and failures the outright dismissal of Carmichael’s Pan Africanist years smacks more of an anti-African disposition among many Black intellectuals than a sincere interrogation of this particular socio-political philosophy.  It is in fact an ideological position that privileges the quest for inclusion into American society as the ultimate goal of Black freedom.  This position, even if correct cannot ignore the role of the Pan Africanist intellectual tradition in advancing Black social, political and economic progress in American society—and neither should it disregard the significance of Africa as home to the world’s critical and strategic resources in the realms of energy, agriculture, mining, minerals, technology, real estate and the extractive sectors of oil and gas.

Kwame Nkrumah

The centrality of Africa has been a major aspect of the Black intellectual tradition for over 200 years.  Notwithstanding the Pan Africanist intellectuals and activists of the 19^th century like Martin Delaney, Edward Blyden, George Washington Williams and the AME Church bishop Henry McNeal Turner. This tradition propelled the international Black freedom struggle throughout the 20^th century.  Booker T. Washington entertained inquiries from Black South African leaders on how to replicate the Tuskegee model for higher education in their own country.  Washington also commissioned a delegation from Tuskegee to explore cotton production in the then German colony of Togo. Marcus Garvey along with his wives Amy Ashwood Garvey and Amy Jacques Garvey forged a Pan Africanist agenda that has left a permanent impact on the collective consciousness of Africans in both Africa and the African Diaspora.  Unsurprisingly African nationalist leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta and Kwame Nkrumah both attributed the success of their anti-colonial independence movements in Kenya and Ghana respectively to the Pan Africanist ideals of Marcus Garvey.

Revolutionary African American thinkers like Anna Julia Cooper and W.E.B. DuBois attended the first Pan African Conference called by the Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester Williams in 1900.  For 63 years DuBois was devoted to the cause of Pan Africanism through his participation in the aforementioned conference and organizing the Pan African congresses between 1919 and 1945—and his leadership in the Council of African Affairs alongside Paul Robeson, Mary McCloud Bethune, Adam Clayton Powell and Ralph Bunche among others during the 1940s and 1950s.  He joined Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana in the early 1960s to launch the Encyclopedia Africana and died a naturalized Ghanaian citizen in 1963. His life is a testament to the vitality of Pan Africanism among African American intellectuals.

Du Bois, c. 1911 (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

DuBois was not the only African American who took an interest in Ghana.  Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Wright, St. Clair Drake, Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou and Julian Mayfield among others either lived as expatriates in Ghana or attended the independence celebration of 1957.Those who were at the 1957 independence celebrations also joined dozens of others who attended the 1958 All African Peoples Conference in Accra, Ghana. Du Bois’ wife Shirley Graham Du Bois was equally committed to the global African freedom struggle as she is buried next to her husband at the W.E.B. Du Bois Memorial Centre for Pan-African Culture located in Accra, Ghana. Furthermore, we must also consider William Leo Hansberry, the historian and pioneer of African studies at Howard University who was knighted by Emperor Haile Selassie on account of his anti-colonial activism against the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1936.  Hansberry also mentored African students at Howard such as Nnamdi Azikiwe who later went on to become the first president of Nigeria.

Malcolm X “Our Black Shining Prince” was the quintessential Pan Africanist forging relationships with African heads of state like Julius Nyerere to pass a resolution in the 1964 OAU meeting in Cairo condemning American racism and discrimination directed at Africa Americans.  Malcolm X also traveled to Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Algeria and Morocco meeting with anti-colonial leaders to present the case of the Black freedom struggle in the United States.  Malcom’s Caribbean born mother, Louise Little, had come from several generations of committed Pan Africanist and was herself a Garveyite along with her husband Earl Little.

As we move forward in the year 2018, we must not forget that the Pan Africanist tradition has long been at the forefront of the African American quest for freedom and justice.  And in an age of globalization and internationalism it is extremely imprudent to disregard and make invisible the African continent, a region that is not only the ancestral home of African Americans and other Blacks in the Caribbean and Latin Diaspora, but also an emerging economic superpower that will be home to significant share of the world’s population by 2050. If this tradition is continually deflated and ignored by Black public intellectuals such as West and Coates, then W.E. B. Du Bois’s 1960 prophecy would have come to pass. African Americans will have missed the rising tide of Africa and forfeited the African continent to the interests of the European Union, China, Japan, India and the American corporate elite who engage Africa without the approval, leadership or involvement of Africa’s descendants in the United States.

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Dr. Salim Faraji was born in Philadelphia, PA. He is the former founding Executive Director of the Master of Arts in International Studies Africa Program at Concordia University Irvine. Dr.  He has served as an external reviewer for the new PhD in Management Science at the Harold Pupkewitz Graduate School of Business at the Namibia University of Science and Technology. He is also a Professor of Africana Studies at California State University, Dominguez Hills and one of a handful of Nubiologists in the United States.  

 Dr. Jahi Issa was born and reared in St. Louis County (Ferguson, MO). He is the former Scholar in Residents at the W.E.B. DuBois Center in Accra, Ghana. He is a Senior Editor at Africology: The Journal of Pan Africanism, and currently serves as a senior expert on Africa for the international media outlet,Press TV. He has graduated and held teaching positions at several HBCUS. He currently teaches history at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. His upcoming completed manuscript Until Africa is Redeemed: The Universal Negro Improvement Association in Louisiana will be published in 2019.

Featured image: Japanese high command enters Nanjing on horseback (Source)

On December 14, 1937, the day after Japanese soldiers entered Nanjing, a crew led by producer Matsuzaki Keiji, under the guidance of the Military Special Affairs Department, entered the city. Its mission: to document the transition to Japanese rule in the Nationalist capital.

The next day they began shooting a documentary film, Nanjing [Nanking] that presents the battle as framed by the Japanese high command. The crew had just completed an earlier documentary, Shanghai, on the battle that paved the way for the advance of Japanese forces toward Nanjing. Dispatched to Nanjing without supplies, the reign of terror began en route with Japanese forces attacking villages en route to secure food and supplies. In Nanjing, shooting of the film continued to January 4, 1938 and the film was rushed to completion for release in Japan on January 20. (Can it also have been distributed for viewing in Chinese cities? Or for international distribution?) Long believed to have been lost, a print was discovered in Beijing in 1995, although with 10 minutes of the original missing. Nippon Eiga Shinsha made it available as a DVD. The present film superimposes primitive English translation . . . whether provided at the time of its release or years later, presumably for international distribution.

Toho film on Nanjing Massacre made 1938; English subtitle

Prepared five years before Frank Capra’s seven part American series “Why We Fight” (1943), and also drawing on Leni Riefenthal’s Triumph of the Will, Nanjing 1937 seeks to portray both the power and benevolence of the Japanese military. It begins with the victory parade of Japanese forces in Nanjing, the high command on horseback with troops marching behind while additional Japanese troops line up along the road to witness the entry. Other shots highlight the destructive power of Japanese weaponry and the benevolence of Japanese forces shown towards Chinese POWs and providing candy to smiling children while yet other Chinese children delightedly set off firecrackers to ring in the New Year. Viewers in Japan were also treated to a long ceremony conducted by General Matsui Iwane honoring the war dead, with Japanese soldiers carrying the ashes of slain comrades even as the Emperor presided over solemn Shinto rites in Tokyo, as zigzag-shaped white streamers (shide) evoking lightening fluttered in the wind.

Gen. Matsui conducting Shinto rites for the dead (Source)

Other scenes include Japanese soldiers rebuilding destroyed parts of the city and the inauguration of the Nanjing Self-Government Committee.

Inaugural ceremony of the Nanjing Self-Government Committee Jan. 1, 1938 (Source)

Needless to say, there is no Nanjing Massacre on display in the Japanese film. Or is there? The film in fact shows the city’s devastation by invading forces as well as the dispirited faces of Chinese refugees. It does not, of course, display captured Chinese soldiers being led off to the river to be shot, still less the rape and killing of civilians.

Viewed against the background of the American Why We Fight series, Nanjing 1937 conveys another powerful impression. The Japanese army, with the power to crush Chinese forces in Shanghai and Nanjing, was an army marching across China on foot, with officers mounted on horseback. In advancing to attack entrenched nationalist forces in Nanjing, the Japanese troops commandeered a small boat and poled across a river, then lifted a rickety 15-meter ladder to send suicide troops to climb it to enter the fortress. In the film, images of a single tank and a handful of trucks underscore the rather limited mechanization of the Japanese military. Fifteen years ago, in a seminar held in the Taihang Mountains of Shanxi, I saw photographs of Japanese troops hauling dismantled cannons to fight in the harsh terrain, each soldier bearing 60 pounds on his back. Similar images such as these in the film help explain why better-informed Japanese commanders were aghast at the Japanese decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, aware of the overwhelming technical superiority of US military forces.

Viewed in conjunction with samples from the American Why We Fight Series or the Nazi’s Triumph of the Will, Nanjing 1937 can stimulate fruitful classroom discussion of the ways in which nations represent their wars, domestically and for global audiences. Students can also draw on the substantial literature on the Nanjing Massacre, the military ‘comfort women’ system, forced labor and other controversies framing the ongoing historical memory debate in Japan, the United States and internationally.

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Mark Selden is a Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University, a Coordinator of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, and Bartle Professor of History and Sociology at Binghamton University.

It’s a cruel saga, and one that promises no immediate end. Turkey, considered one of the more potent of powers within the NATO alliance, has manoeuvred itself into a play that Washington will find hard to avoid.  For Ankara, one thing must not happen as Islamic State forces gradually vanish, or more likely metamorphose into the next force they will, in time, become.  It is that inconvenient matter of the Kurds, ever present, and, in recent few years ever forceful, about carving out territory within Syria and Iraq. 

The United States has seen the Kurds as something of a gem, desperate, keen to fight, and often effective in their encounters with the Islamic State forces and their various incarnations. Ankara has been none too pleased with that fact.  Guns, once acquired, are used; weapons, once used, are hard to put down. 

NATO allies, on this score, do not see eye to eye, and have never done so.  These eyes have parted even further with Washington’s promise that a 30,000 Kurdish-led border force will be established to police Turkish-Iraq borders in an effort to quash any resurgence of Islamic State forces.  The promise has also managed to irk Iran and Russia, who see such a force as directed, not merely at Islamic State, but against their regional influence.

On Saturday, 72 Turkish jets targeted the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria in an effort, codenamed Olive Branch, to remove, what Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan called a terrorist threat across northern Syria.

“Beginning from the west, step by step, we will annihilate the terror corridor up the Iraqi border.”

Within that enclave are some 8 to 10 thousand Kurdish fighters.  But added to that are 800 thousand vulnerable civilians, many displaced by the Syrian Civil War.

No more negotiations, no more chit chat or fanciful discourses about peaceful resolutions and amiable settlements – this was belligerence, pure and simple. 

“No one can say a word,” blustered the Turkish leader.  “Whatever happens, we do not care anymore at all.  Now we only care about what happens on the ground.”

Did it matter that the operation was just another example of Syria’s sovereignty as contingent, best ignored rather than respected by yet another power keen to issue its stamp on the area’s geography?  Bekir Bozdağ, Turkey’s deputy prime minister, made a rather weak effort suggesting that such a military venture was temporary, a necessarily surgical move to target an infection.  Once achieved, Turkish forces would withdraw.

Bozdağ proceeded to name organisations that have all found the convenient rhetorical packaging of terrorism.  There are no distinctions to be had between the Kurdish YPG, or the PKK groups, nor those of the Islamic State.

“The only target of the operation is the terrorist groups and the terrorists as well as their barracks, shelters, positions, weapons and equipment.”

As has been the official line in the conflicts that have mushroomed from Syria to Iraq, civilians are not targeted, even if they might be slaughtered.

“Civilians are never targeted.  Every kind of planning has been done to avoid any damage to civilians.”

Masks, posturing, and a good deal of dissimulation, are essential across the diplomatic engagement here.  The one group that seems to be coming out of this rather poorly are history’s traditional whipping boys, the Kurds, who remain gristle in the broader strategic picture.  Russia, for one, has blamed the United States for feeding the unstable situation while urging restraint on the part of Ankara’s forces.

“Provocative actions by the US, aimed at isolating regions with predominantly Kurdish population, were the main factors that contributed to the development of a crisis in this part of Syria,” went a statement.

Despite adopting a frowning line to the attacks, there is little doubt that discussions would have been had ahead of time with officials in Moscow, given the presence in the Russian capital of Hakan Fidan of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organization and Hulusi Akar, chief of staff of Turkey’s army.

Iran, in turn, has been taking the position that such incursions, rather than dousing the fires of terrorist groups, emboldens them. Careful eyes are noting the fortunes of the respective players in this latest, murderous squabble.

The attacks were far from negligible, comprising some 100 targets.  Another important feature of this muddled equation was the role played by fighters of the Free Syria Army, who also participated in operations against the Kurds.

The great power play here, even in the murky bloodiness, is that no one wants a genuinely viable Kurdistan front, and certainly one that has any claim to international legitimacy.  One neutralised, weakened, and preferably defanged, is a position that seems to have been reached.  Moscow will be assured that future conflict can be averted; Ankara will keep its sword sheathed in future.  Washington will be left somewhere in between, left behind in another play it misread.  Humanitarian catastrophe will be assured.

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Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge.  He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.  Email: [email protected]

Turkey’s Operation Olive Branch against Kurdish YPG/YPJ forces in Syria’s Afrin entered the third day. According to the Turkish newspaper Haberturk, 6,400 service members of the Turkish Armed Forces (TAF) are involved in the operation. The newspaper added that the following 2 days of the operation, the TAF advanced 7.5km and captured 9 villages.

On January 22, pro-Kurdish sources claimed that YPG members destroyed 2 more Turkish battle tanks in Afrin. However, these reports like the previous “3 destroyed battle tanks” were not confirmed by any photos or videos also. Meanwhile, Turkey-led forces captured the villages of Sheikh Hrouz, Sheikh Bassi, Merso and Haftar from YPG/YPJ forces.

في اليوم الثاني لعملية #غصن_الزيتون.. القوات التركية والجيش السوري الحر يسيطران على مواقع عسكرية خاضعة للوحدات الكردية شمال غرب #عفرين pic.twitter.com/yZwzVSkoae

— قناة الجزيرة (@AJArabic) January 22, 2018

In turn, a representative of the Syrian Kurdistan in Moscow, Rodi Osman, claimed that YPG/YPJ forced the TAF and pro-Turkish armed groups to retreat from all the captured territory.

“Turkish forces and related groups tried to cross over to the territory of the Syrian city of Afrin with the support of the Air Force and missile strikes. However, the Syrian Democratic Forces struck at five positions,” the Russian state-run news agency Sputnik quoted Osman. “Those areas to which they crossed, they left, as the Kurds struck and forced them to retreat.”

Osman added that 10 Turkish soldiers and 20 pro-Turkish militants were killed in the clashes. However, pro-Turkish sources have already released enough photos and videos to confirm that statements that the TAF had achieved no gains in Afrin are baseless.

Pro-Turkish militants are in Sheikh Hrouz:

#الجيش_السوري_الحر يسيطر على تلة الشيخ خورز الاستراتيجية في محيط مدينة #عفرين بريف #حلب الشمالي pic.twitter.com/QTbVVNvYn2

— قناة الجسر الفضائية (@jisrtv) January 22, 2018

The Turkish Prime Ministry’s Office of Public Diplomacy also released an official list of the reasons of the ongoing military operation. The Turkish state-run news agency Anadolu provided a translation of the released note dubbed “What Turkey aims to do with Afrin operation”:

• To ensure the Turkey-supported Free Syrian Army (FSA) takes control of a 10,000-square kilometer area.
• Following on from the Euphrates Shield Operation and the operation in Idlib, to completely prevent the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from reaching the Eastern Mediterranean.
• To eliminate the possibility of losing Turkey’s geographical contact with the Arab world.
• To ensure the security of our borders with Syria.
• To prevent the infiltration of the Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the PKK into Turkey through the Amanos Mountains.
• To prevent a terrorist organization from opening to the Mediterranean and to the world from here
• To ensure the security and continuation of the Euphrates Shield Operation area.
• To take control of the Tel Rifaat region and ensure the return of civilians to their homelands.
• To counter U.S. support for a terrorist organization.
• The office also added three articles stating “Why Afrin is important to Turkey,” cited as follows:
• Afrin is critical in maintaining the security of Turkey’s border provinces and ensuring the security of the Euphrates Shield Operation area.
• The presence of terrorist organizations in Afrin means that the whole of the southern Turkish province of Kilis and most of the Hatay province are within range of terrorist organizations.
• Turkey sees the merging of the Kobane area with Afrin as the most important pillar of the “Kurdish corridor” project.

Turkish battle tanks involved in the operation:

Pro-Turkish militants involved in the operation:

*

All images in this article are from South Front.

This article was first published by:

闯 Chuǎng: The image of a horse breaking through a gate. Meaning: To break free; To attack, charge; To break through, force one’s way in or out; To act impetuously. 闯关 (chuǎngguān): to run a blockade. 闯座 (chuǎngzuò): to attend a feast without being invited.

Over the past three decades, China has transformed from an isolated state-planned economy into an integrated hub of capitalist production. Waves of new investment are reshaping and deepening China’s contradictions, creating billionaires like Ma Yun while the millions below — those who farm, cook, clean, and assemble his electronic infrastructure — struggle to escape fates of endless grueling work. But as China’s wealthy feast ever more lavishly, the poor have begun to batter down the gates to the banquet hall. 闯 is the sudden movement when the gate is broken and the possibilities for a new world emerge beyond it.

闯  Chuǎng will publish a journal analyzing the ongoing development of capitalism in China, its historical roots, and the revolts of those crushed beneath it.  Chuǎng is also a blog chronicling these developments in shorter and more immediate form, and will publish translations, reports, and comments on Chinese news of interest to those who want to break beyond the bounds of the slaughterhouse called capitalism.

Chuǎng Editors

***

On November 15, 2017, police stormed into a student reading group at the Guangdong University of Technology (GDUT) and seized six participants, including four current students at the university and two recent graduates from other schools. The former were released the next day, but the latter two were placed under detention as suspects for the crime of “gathering crowds to disrupt social order” – a charge we have seen increasingly leveled against multiple feminists, labour activists, striking workers and bloggers over the past five years. Authorities alleged that the reading group was an “anti-party, anti-society organization” that was discussing “sensitive topics.”

Despite Beijing’s massively staffed policing of the internet and cellular networks, a petition managed to circulate calling for the release of 24-year-old Zhang Yunfan – one of the initial two among what would turn out to be at least four young people detained for weeks as suspects in this case. Apparently the petition mentioned only Zhang, a “Left Maoist,”¹ because the authors were unaware of the others when it was penned. Although it was repeatedly blocked only moments after being reposted, over 400 people soon signed the petition, including many prominent intellectuals who risk repercussions because they are based in China.

On January 15, after 30 days in the Panyu Detention Center, two weeks under house arrest and two weeks of recovery, Zhang published the open letter that we have translated below. The letter mentioned three associates who had also been detained and released on bail awaiting trial, and four others who were still in hiding after having been put on the police wanted list.

The next day Sun Tingting, one of the other three detainees, released her own open letter, also translated below. It provides a more detailed account of the arrests, their context and her nightmarish experience in detention from December 8 to January 14.

Like the petition, both of these letters were of course quickly censored, but new WeChat feeds keep popping up and reposting them, to the point that “Sun Tingting” even briefly trended on Sina Weibo until the term was blocked.

Then on the third day, a third letter appeared by yet another detainee: Zheng Yongming. In the interest of making these translations available as quickly as possible, we are publishing the first two now and will add the third when it is finished in a day or two.

From left to right: Zhang, Sun and Zheng (Source: The Bullet)

My Confession to the People

Zhang Yunfan

Translated by Steamgoth Engine

Special thanks to Qian Liqun, Zhang Qianfan, Li Ling, Chen Bo, Cai Xiaoming, Song Lei and other mentors from Peking University (PKU), and to Huang Jisu, Kuang Xin’nian, Zhu Dongli, Qin Hui, Yu Jianlin, Xu Youyu, Song Yangbiao, Chen Hongtao, Fan Jinggang and over 400 other mentors and friends from all walks of life, who signed the petition for my release. Thanks for courageously speaking out for justice so that I can again see the light of day! I wish I could express my gratitude to every one of you in person.

I was released on bail awaiting trial December 29th, 2017. However, after 30 days of criminal detention and another 14 under house arrest, I find that the challenge has just begun.

I cannot tear off this page of my life. My only option is to confront the challenge.

Some people say I am a PKU alumnus, a scholar, an elite who is less egotistical than most. But the identity I hold dearest is that of a Marxist and a “Left Maoist” – labels to which different people attach different meanings.

I can see that in this world, exploitation and oppression have never disappeared. Many of my family members have been workers in state-owned enterprises. Thus, even when I was a child, I was aware of how the lifelong hard labour and contributions of old workers were expropriated, when the state-owned enterprises underwent reform and privatization. They were discarded and rendered precarious, abandoned to the will of society. Even larger in number, the vulnerable groups, those in coal mines owned by abusive bosses, on scaffolds and in sweatshops – their life trajectory was to first exhaust their youth, then exhaust their whole lives, and finally to exhaust the lives of their sons and daughters.

I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can’t swallow any more
All that I’ve swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.²

Behind the glory of prosperity, a long shadow, an inch of halo, an inch of blood red. The poet has jumped to his death, but his faith rises slowly from the horizon.

This is why I am determined to be loyal to the working class and why I have faith in Marxism.

Some of the rumors online are true. It is true that when I was studying in Peking University, I was a member of the PKU Marxist Student Group. My comrades at the university and I not only studied theory in our reading group, but also placed ourselves among the downtrodden masses. I gradually found that – after spending countless hours with them singing, dancing, discussing news, screening films and giving English lessons, everywhere I went, I was greeted by workers on campus. In the cafeteria they always gave me a little extra food.

After graduation I came to Guangzhou. My life did not change, except that now I had to work for a living. To put it a bit self-righteously, perhaps, I continued to practice my idealism one step at a time at GDUT. Actually, though, all I did was to attend reading groups and do volunteer work.

During the reading session when we were arrested, we were discussing historical change and social problems from the last few decades, including major historical events, workers’ rights and so on. We discussed how young people should solve these problems. I admit that we also talked about the movement 29 years ago that university students were involved in.³

Some readers must be curious whether my views are indeed “extreme.” Of course, they are not like what you read about in the newspapers or textbooks or watch on TV. By their standards acknowledging the existence of various problems in society alone is already “extremist” enough, and it is undoubtedly even more so to discuss “how to solve” the problems. But every country in the world has its own social problems. Is it truly a crime for one to voice one’s opinions on how to solve them? This is our right! The Constitution states, ambitiously: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China have freedom of speech, publication, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.” If an expression can be judged as “extremist,” then “freedom” means nothing!

However, I would feel that I was at least being treated with due respect and seriousness if the excuse for my arrest were actually “discussing social issues.” When I was locked up on November 15, the police noted that I worked in education and accused me of “illegal business activities.” Perhaps because of the obvious stupidity of this charge, when I was officially detained, my alleged transgression changed to the crime of “gathering crowds to disrupt social order.” Was I, a 24-year-old young person, powerful enough to disrupt the “work, production, business, teaching, research and medical services” of a university campus covering hundreds of acres? Isn’t it obvious that this is just a trumped-up charge meant to silence me?

I was asked to confess that there was a conspiracy. Was there really a conspiracy? What kind of plotting does a reading group need? Are people involved in plotting when they dance in plazas? Does the simple division of labour necessary for a reading group count as “plotting”?

I was also asked to admit that I had “extremist ideas,” to pledge not to attend reading groups in the future, and to give them names of more people with the same ideas. The cold floor of the detention center, interrogation for eight hours on end, the absolute loneliness under house arrest, the overwhelming spiritual torture – all these are hard to put into words. When I was told that more people would be arrested and my parents would be dragged into this because of my decisions, I have to say, I could not bear the tremendous mental stress. All I wanted to do was to bring it to an end as soon as possible and let my family and friends return to their normal lives, even if that meant I would go to prison. So I compromised. To my surprise, I was finally released on bail. The days under house arrest – the days of absolute loneliness – made me wordless and flat. After a dozen days of recovery, I finally resumed my former self. What I did not expect was that my compromise would turn out to be utterly useless!

Several young people involved in the reading group – Sun Tingting, Zheng Yongming, Ye Jianke – were released on bail along with me. But the young leftists Xu Zhongliang, Huang Ping, Han Peng and my girlfriend Gu Jiayue are still wanted as criminal suspects. Our charges have not been dropped, and they have been forced to become fugitives!

I cannot imagine how the four of them are now. When I close my eyes, it is as if we were back in the guotongqu [parts of China ruled by the Kuomintang during the Civil War]: the roaring police cars, the shrill wail of sirens, the agents with arrest warrants hunting down progressive young men and women who had nowhere to hide.

And I am supposed to remain silent. According to the police, I should be “cautious,” return to a “normal” life, sit peacefully at a desk, henceforth living as a “refined egoist.” But they also want me to bear the burden of an imaginary crime for life, and to stay away from reading groups and the labouring masses I so love.

What’s more, I am also supposed to watch other young leftists be hunted down and arrested!

They are not from prestigious schools. They will not be as fortunate as myself, released because of public opinion. They cannot even get out of Guangzhou. And they do not have a Yan’an to turn to.⁴ The only thing awaiting them is an indefinite period in prison!

I am out of jail, but my conscience is in handcuffs. I was not tried in court, but I will always face a moral judgment.

Maybe we have always been insignificant. But from now on any young idealist can be arrested, any reading group can be condemned, any nonprofit activity can be controlled, ideas and idealism are taboo, free speech is not worth a penny, and Marx and Mao are mere jokes!

How heartless must one be to simply bow one’s head at this moment?

I have heard many speak of “the golden mean,” saying “take a step back to gain a broader perspective.”

Of course I can understand that they care about me and offer advice in good faith. But how can I leave my comrades and become a “refined egoist”? Moreover, “freedom of speech” is protected by the Constitution, so there is no need for moderation. Mao Zedong Thought takes a clear position, not “the golden mean.” If I “take a step back,” maybe my own situation would improve, but my comrades would fall into an abyss! And if they fall, the dignity of all young idealists would fall with them. It is better to revolt than to live in shame! I can only tell the truth – I will compromise no more. I would rather be in prison than resign myself to this miserable condition.

Good people, I urge you to see: the person you have defended is here. He will not let you down. He will hold his head high and face the coming storm. He is prepared!

I Am Sun Tingting, I Want to Speak Out

Sun Tingting

Translated by Wen

I am the Sun Tingting mentioned in “Zhang Yunfan: My Confession to the People,” and one of the detainees along with Zhang in the GDUT reading group incident. I was detained by police on December 8th 2017 and released on bail January 4th 2018. I originally did not have the courage to speak out, but I saw Lu Qianqian and others reporting on sexual harassment, and saw the courageous Zhang Yunfan fighting for freedom of expression. As someone whose rights and dignity have also been violated, I cannot stand idly by, and I will not remain silent.

I am Sun Tingting and I want to speak out!

For the first 11 months of 2017, my life and work were as usual, organizing charity events for migrant workers by day, and joining campus workers to dance in public squares by night. I never thought that on the night of December 8th a group of police would raid my apartment, turning the last month of 2017 into a nightmare.

I graduated from Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in 2016. At university, I came across progressive youth and participated in activities related to social service and the public interest. Their passion, spirit, sincerity and practicality deeply affected me. In serving the underprivileged, I came to realize that public interest work is the best way to help underprivileged workers and peasants at the bottom of society to live with dignity. Since then, I developed a strong inclination toward a career in public interest work. I first worked at a social work organization in Guangzhou’s Tianhe District, and later I worked at another social work organization at Guangzhou’s university district in Panyu. Before I started working there, the organization was already collaborating with a reading group at GDUT. One of my responsibilities was to recruit volunteers for public interest events, so I naturally kept in contact and worked with student volunteers from this reading group, and I assisted campus workers in organizing cultural events such as dances in public squares.

Never in a million years would I have expected to face imprisonment as a result.

On the night of November 15th 2017, students had gathered in a classroom for the reading group as usual. Suddenly, security guards stormed into the classroom, supposedly because someone had reported to the university’s Security and Safety Department that the group was discussing sensitive topics. Police then seized four students [at the university] and two recent graduates [from PKU] who were involved in the reading group, taking them all to the police station. The next day, the four students were released, but the two other people (Zhang Yunfan and Ye Jianke) were placed under criminal detention in the Panyu Detention Centre. I soon learned from the director of my social work organization that the group had been labelled an “anti-party and anti-society” organization. For some time thereafter, students involved in the reading group were regularly visited and warned by university [authorities] and the police, and one of the students lost their scholarship. The reading group soon dissolved. I felt this was very unfortunate because they were some of the most compassionate and capable volunteers I had met, unlike many other college student volunteers who do it to accumulate volunteer time rather than try to take up some grassroots perspective.

But I never thought this would affect me because I was merely working with them to organize events for workers. I kept working as usual, but without the help of volunteers, it was difficult to sustain the public square dance activities.

It was at that moment that a terrible disaster befell me.

At around 10pm on December 8th 2017, my landlord knocked on my door, and when I opened it, a plainclothes police officer and four police in uniform forced themselves into my apartment and asked me for my ID, and for me to cooperate with them. As a young woman living by myself, I was dumbfounded, and did not know what to do with myself. A brief moment of panic was followed by overwhelming rage. I repeatedly asked them to show me their police ID and search warrant, but they refused. They began to search my room, rifling through all my things, paging through books, notebooks and diaries, heaping them into a pile and making me stand to one side as they took pictures.

Then I was taken to Xiaoguowei police station with my mobile phone and computer. They started to ask me about members of the reading group, and I said I didn’t know. The head of the police station threatened me: “you don’t want to talk? You can go die (and said this repeatedly)! Then we’ll give her a random charge, lock her up first and figure it out later!”

When they said that, I thought I was hearing things. What is “assigning a random charge”? So police can just “assign a random charge” to an innocent citizen without evidence? Can the law be used so casually in their hands? Can the personal freedom of individuals be impinged upon so freely in their eyes? Not only did I not know the situation of the members of the reading group, I at least had the right to remain silent when being questioned. Can I be assigned a random charge to pressure me because I don’t know or remain silent?

At 5pm the next day, the police took me back to my apartment and asked me to sign a search warrant, and they started to take books and notebooks including my private diaries and Kindle reader. I was very angry and I did not understand. Is a search warrant a warrant to raid my home? Can they take away any personal belongings including the most private personal diary to be examined by police with a search warrant? Do police not consider the privacy of citizens and the inconvenience to people when their personal belongings are taken away? To be clear, at this time I was not even a suspect to a crime, let alone a criminal, but merely being summoned for questioning.

Back at the police station, the police pulled out another search warrant dated 12pm December 9th 2017, and made me sign it. This was clearly a trick! If the search was at 5pm, how does it become 12pm? And why was there a second search warrant? Did they go search again at 12pm? When I questioned the police, they did not reply and I refused to sign. Then they produced a summons which was dated for the previous day, December 8th, and asked me to sign. I questioned them why they did not show it to me last night, and they said under special circumstances people can be taken away first and showed the summons later. I was absolutely speechless! What special circumstance did I have? Me, a wisp of a 1.6 meter tall recent college graduate – did they think I was going to make an escape or something? I also refused to sign that document.

Even more absurdity followed.

In the evening, the police told me they were applying for both my administrative and criminal detention, and waiting for their superiors to decide on which form of detention. Because of an issue with the system, they could only apply for one form of detention, and decided “on the spot” to apply for criminal detention. During the entire process, they did not present any evidence to prove that I had violated any law, and they still so casually decided a criminal detention. At that moment, I again felt the casual attitude with which the Panyu police treat the law and the freedom and rights of citizens.

And that’s how I was thrown into the detention centre “on the spot,” but this was only the beginning of my real nightmare.

The room I was locked up in had 25 detainees, including drug traffickers, thieves and other criminals of all kinds. As a young woman working on public interest in service to migrant workers, to be locked up with these people made me feel endless irony and sadness. The room only had 15 concrete beds, so I had to sleep on the cold floor. I could not sleep the whole night on the first night under the bright light. My body could not handle coldness, and I felt intense pain on my insides. I kept waking up in the middle of each night. In our cell block there was a fixed bathroom schedule, and I was always placed last, and each time it was my turn the time was already up.

If there was urgent need to use the bathroom outside of scheduled bathroom time, I would be punished by being forced to stand and not allowed to sleep. As a result, I alternated between half-hour sleeps and half-hour standing up, and ended up with less than 4 hours of sleep each night. Because of lack of sleep and limited bathroom use, my body weakened and I felt ill inside. I urinated blood on two occasions and experienced two serious instances of constipation which caused so much pain that I could not sit, stand or walk. If not for my release on bail on January 4th, I feel I could have died from the pain in my cell. My request for an individual room or medical attention were refused and ridiculed. When I absolutely insisted, the doctor in the detention centre just gave me some bottle with no medicine in it!

Beside this, there was no privacy to speak of. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, even when you are changing your clothes or using the bathroom. Why should I suffer such indignity!

I was detained for 26 days, and released on bail on January 4th, 2018. However, the charges still remain.

Throughout the entire process I felt bewildered, and even now, I do not know what I did or what law I violated. The police demanded that I write a confession, and that I write it according to their instructions. But I refused to distort facts. The police threatened that if I do not write in accordance with their wishes, I will be put under house arrest for 6 months. But how can I confess to a crime I did not commit?

I have far too many questions, and so I want to write down my experience, and hope others can answer my questions.

• I am not a criminal, and there is no evidence that I am a major suspect to a crime. Why should I be criminally detained?
• Can the police detain absolutely anyone, and then search for evidence to prove the guilt of that person, and when no evidence is found, simply release the person, but the police will not face any discipline?
• Can police arbitrarily search the residence of any citizen, and take away their personal belongings for an indefinite amount of time?
• If during the course of questioning someone doesn’t answer to the police satisfaction, can they just “make up a charge and figure it out later?”
• Can the police arbitrarily decide on either administrative or criminal detention “on the spot”?
• Should I be bullied in detention, and seen as “uncooperative”, just because I insist on my rights in the face of the police?
• Should I not be treated when I fall sick in detention?
• Does 4 hour of sleep meet the legal requirement of “ensuring that suspects have sufficient time for sleep”?
• Can I only be released on bail after agreeing to a confession in accordance with police instructions?
• When the police detained an innocent person for more than 20 days and confiscated my books, computer, mobile phone, Kindle and other belongings, are these evidence of my crime? When can they be returned to me? I no longer have the money to buy those things.

Finally, I want the police to recognize that I was detained for more than 20 days for no reason, which caused me to lose my job, broke my body, put my family in debt for legal fees to the tune of tens of thousands of yuan in borrowed money, and imprinted criminality upon my life. In the future, it may be very difficult for me to find a job. This incident has laid yet another heavy economic burden on my already poor family!

Why is this happening? These questions puzzle me. It has made me very cautious and has made me feel very insecure. I do not know if I, or people around me, will suffer these abuses once more in the future. I hope friends who read the experiences I have described above to explain all this to me, and I also hope that people can help the other friends also suffering from this same ordeal. Whether I will be given a heavy sentence or declared innocent, at least I will have a clear understanding of it all and some satisfaction!

*

Notes

1. ‘Left Maoist’ (毛左) is a political category that has risen to prominence since about 2012 in order to distinguish from those Maoists (known as ‘Right Maoists’ by some of their leftist critics but simply as “Maoists”[毛派] by themselves) with more nationalist and/or reformist orientations. (These categories will be discussed in the second issue of our journal, forthcoming later in 2018.)

2. From the poem “I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron” by Xu Lizhi.

3. I.e. the mass movement of 1989 that ended with the June 4th Incident on Tian’anmen Square.

4. Having likened the fugitives to Communist Party members hiding underground during the Civil War, Zhang now notes the difference that at least the latter had a base in Yan’an to which they could flee, whereas today’s communists have no such sanctuary – in China or elsewhere.

This article was first published by:

闯 Chuǎng: The image of a horse breaking through a gate. Meaning: To break free; To attack, charge; To break through, force one’s way in or out; To act impetuously. 闯关 (chuǎngguān): to run a blockade. 闯座 (chuǎngzuò): to attend a feast without being invited.

Over the past three decades, China has transformed from an isolated state-planned economy into an integrated hub of capitalist production. Waves of new investment are reshaping and deepening China’s contradictions, creating billionaires like Ma Yun while the millions below — those who farm, cook, clean, and assemble his electronic infrastructure — struggle to escape fates of endless grueling work. But as China’s wealthy feast ever more lavishly, the poor have begun to batter down the gates to the banquet hall. 闯 is the sudden movement when the gate is broken and the possibilities for a new world emerge beyond it.

闯  Chuǎng will publish a journal analyzing the ongoing development of capitalism in China, its historical roots, and the revolts of those crushed beneath it.  Chuǎng is also a blog chronicling these developments in shorter and more immediate form, and will publish translations, reports, and comments on Chinese news of interest to those who want to break beyond the bounds of the slaughterhouse called capitalism.

Chuǎng Editors

***

On November 15, 2017, police stormed into a student reading group at the Guangdong University of Technology (GDUT) and seized six participants, including four current students at the university and two recent graduates from other schools. The former were released the next day, but the latter two were placed under detention as suspects for the crime of “gathering crowds to disrupt social order” – a charge we have seen increasingly leveled against multiple feminists, labour activists, striking workers and bloggers over the past five years. Authorities alleged that the reading group was an “anti-party, anti-society organization” that was discussing “sensitive topics.”

Despite Beijing’s massively staffed policing of the internet and cellular networks, a petition managed to circulate calling for the release of 24-year-old Zhang Yunfan – one of the initial two among what would turn out to be at least four young people detained for weeks as suspects in this case. Apparently the petition mentioned only Zhang, a “Left Maoist,”¹ because the authors were unaware of the others when it was penned. Although it was repeatedly blocked only moments after being reposted, over 400 people soon signed the petition, including many prominent intellectuals who risk repercussions because they are based in China.

On January 15, after 30 days in the Panyu Detention Center, two weeks under house arrest and two weeks of recovery, Zhang published the open letter that we have translated below. The letter mentioned three associates who had also been detained and released on bail awaiting trial, and four others who were still in hiding after having been put on the police wanted list.

The next day Sun Tingting, one of the other three detainees, released her own open letter, also translated below. It provides a more detailed account of the arrests, their context and her nightmarish experience in detention from December 8 to January 14.

Like the petition, both of these letters were of course quickly censored, but new WeChat feeds keep popping up and reposting them, to the point that “Sun Tingting” even briefly trended on Sina Weibo until the term was blocked.

Then on the third day, a third letter appeared by yet another detainee: Zheng Yongming. In the interest of making these translations available as quickly as possible, we are publishing the first two now and will add the third when it is finished in a day or two.

From left to right: Zhang, Sun and Zheng (Source: The Bullet)

My Confession to the People

Zhang Yunfan

Translated by Steamgoth Engine

Special thanks to Qian Liqun, Zhang Qianfan, Li Ling, Chen Bo, Cai Xiaoming, Song Lei and other mentors from Peking University (PKU), and to Huang Jisu, Kuang Xin’nian, Zhu Dongli, Qin Hui, Yu Jianlin, Xu Youyu, Song Yangbiao, Chen Hongtao, Fan Jinggang and over 400 other mentors and friends from all walks of life, who signed the petition for my release. Thanks for courageously speaking out for justice so that I can again see the light of day! I wish I could express my gratitude to every one of you in person.

I was released on bail awaiting trial December 29th, 2017. However, after 30 days of criminal detention and another 14 under house arrest, I find that the challenge has just begun.

I cannot tear off this page of my life. My only option is to confront the challenge.

Some people say I am a PKU alumnus, a scholar, an elite who is less egotistical than most. But the identity I hold dearest is that of a Marxist and a “Left Maoist” – labels to which different people attach different meanings.

I can see that in this world, exploitation and oppression have never disappeared. Many of my family members have been workers in state-owned enterprises. Thus, even when I was a child, I was aware of how the lifelong hard labour and contributions of old workers were expropriated, when the state-owned enterprises underwent reform and privatization. They were discarded and rendered precarious, abandoned to the will of society. Even larger in number, the vulnerable groups, those in coal mines owned by abusive bosses, on scaffolds and in sweatshops – their life trajectory was to first exhaust their youth, then exhaust their whole lives, and finally to exhaust the lives of their sons and daughters.

I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can’t swallow any more
All that I’ve swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.²

Behind the glory of prosperity, a long shadow, an inch of halo, an inch of blood red. The poet has jumped to his death, but his faith rises slowly from the horizon.

This is why I am determined to be loyal to the working class and why I have faith in Marxism.

Some of the rumors online are true. It is true that when I was studying in Peking University, I was a member of the PKU Marxist Student Group. My comrades at the university and I not only studied theory in our reading group, but also placed ourselves among the downtrodden masses. I gradually found that – after spending countless hours with them singing, dancing, discussing news, screening films and giving English lessons, everywhere I went, I was greeted by workers on campus. In the cafeteria they always gave me a little extra food.

After graduation I came to Guangzhou. My life did not change, except that now I had to work for a living. To put it a bit self-righteously, perhaps, I continued to practice my idealism one step at a time at GDUT. Actually, though, all I did was to attend reading groups and do volunteer work.

During the reading session when we were arrested, we were discussing historical change and social problems from the last few decades, including major historical events, workers’ rights and so on. We discussed how young people should solve these problems. I admit that we also talked about the movement 29 years ago that university students were involved in.³

Some readers must be curious whether my views are indeed “extreme.” Of course, they are not like what you read about in the newspapers or textbooks or watch on TV. By their standards acknowledging the existence of various problems in society alone is already “extremist” enough, and it is undoubtedly even more so to discuss “how to solve” the problems. But every country in the world has its own social problems. Is it truly a crime for one to voice one’s opinions on how to solve them? This is our right! The Constitution states, ambitiously: “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China have freedom of speech, publication, assembly, association, procession and demonstration.” If an expression can be judged as “extremist,” then “freedom” means nothing!

However, I would feel that I was at least being treated with due respect and seriousness if the excuse for my arrest were actually “discussing social issues.” When I was locked up on November 15, the police noted that I worked in education and accused me of “illegal business activities.” Perhaps because of the obvious stupidity of this charge, when I was officially detained, my alleged transgression changed to the crime of “gathering crowds to disrupt social order.” Was I, a 24-year-old young person, powerful enough to disrupt the “work, production, business, teaching, research and medical services” of a university campus covering hundreds of acres? Isn’t it obvious that this is just a trumped-up charge meant to silence me?

I was asked to confess that there was a conspiracy. Was there really a conspiracy? What kind of plotting does a reading group need? Are people involved in plotting when they dance in plazas? Does the simple division of labour necessary for a reading group count as “plotting”?

I was also asked to admit that I had “extremist ideas,” to pledge not to attend reading groups in the future, and to give them names of more people with the same ideas. The cold floor of the detention center, interrogation for eight hours on end, the absolute loneliness under house arrest, the overwhelming spiritual torture – all these are hard to put into words. When I was told that more people would be arrested and my parents would be dragged into this because of my decisions, I have to say, I could not bear the tremendous mental stress. All I wanted to do was to bring it to an end as soon as possible and let my family and friends return to their normal lives, even if that meant I would go to prison. So I compromised. To my surprise, I was finally released on bail. The days under house arrest – the days of absolute loneliness – made me wordless and flat. After a dozen days of recovery, I finally resumed my former self. What I did not expect was that my compromise would turn out to be utterly useless!

Several young people involved in the reading group – Sun Tingting, Zheng Yongming, Ye Jianke – were released on bail along with me. But the young leftists Xu Zhongliang, Huang Ping, Han Peng and my girlfriend Gu Jiayue are still wanted as criminal suspects. Our charges have not been dropped, and they have been forced to become fugitives!

I cannot imagine how the four of them are now. When I close my eyes, it is as if we were back in the guotongqu [parts of China ruled by the Kuomintang during the Civil War]: the roaring police cars, the shrill wail of sirens, the agents with arrest warrants hunting down progressive young men and women who had nowhere to hide.

And I am supposed to remain silent. According to the police, I should be “cautious,” return to a “normal” life, sit peacefully at a desk, henceforth living as a “refined egoist.” But they also want me to bear the burden of an imaginary crime for life, and to stay away from reading groups and the labouring masses I so love.

What’s more, I am also supposed to watch other young leftists be hunted down and arrested!

They are not from prestigious schools. They will not be as fortunate as myself, released because of public opinion. They cannot even get out of Guangzhou. And they do not have a Yan’an to turn to.⁴ The only thing awaiting them is an indefinite period in prison!

I am out of jail, but my conscience is in handcuffs. I was not tried in court, but I will always face a moral judgment.

Maybe we have always been insignificant. But from now on any young idealist can be arrested, any reading group can be condemned, any nonprofit activity can be controlled, ideas and idealism are taboo, free speech is not worth a penny, and Marx and Mao are mere jokes!

How heartless must one be to simply bow one’s head at this moment?

I have heard many speak of “the golden mean,” saying “take a step back to gain a broader perspective.”

Of course I can understand that they care about me and offer advice in good faith. But how can I leave my comrades and become a “refined egoist”? Moreover, “freedom of speech” is protected by the Constitution, so there is no need for moderation. Mao Zedong Thought takes a clear position, not “the golden mean.” If I “take a step back,” maybe my own situation would improve, but my comrades would fall into an abyss! And if they fall, the dignity of all young idealists would fall with them. It is better to revolt than to live in shame! I can only tell the truth – I will compromise no more. I would rather be in prison than resign myself to this miserable condition.

Good people, I urge you to see: the person you have defended is here. He will not let you down. He will hold his head high and face the coming storm. He is prepared!

I Am Sun Tingting, I Want to Speak Out

Sun Tingting

Translated by Wen

I am the Sun Tingting mentioned in “Zhang Yunfan: My Confession to the People,” and one of the detainees along with Zhang in the GDUT reading group incident. I was detained by police on December 8th 2017 and released on bail January 4th 2018. I originally did not have the courage to speak out, but I saw Lu Qianqian and others reporting on sexual harassment, and saw the courageous Zhang Yunfan fighting for freedom of expression. As someone whose rights and dignity have also been violated, I cannot stand idly by, and I will not remain silent.

I am Sun Tingting and I want to speak out!

For the first 11 months of 2017, my life and work were as usual, organizing charity events for migrant workers by day, and joining campus workers to dance in public squares by night. I never thought that on the night of December 8th a group of police would raid my apartment, turning the last month of 2017 into a nightmare.

I graduated from Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in 2016. At university, I came across progressive youth and participated in activities related to social service and the public interest. Their passion, spirit, sincerity and practicality deeply affected me. In serving the underprivileged, I came to realize that public interest work is the best way to help underprivileged workers and peasants at the bottom of society to live with dignity. Since then, I developed a strong inclination toward a career in public interest work. I first worked at a social work organization in Guangzhou’s Tianhe District, and later I worked at another social work organization at Guangzhou’s university district in Panyu. Before I started working there, the organization was already collaborating with a reading group at GDUT. One of my responsibilities was to recruit volunteers for public interest events, so I naturally kept in contact and worked with student volunteers from this reading group, and I assisted campus workers in organizing cultural events such as dances in public squares.

Never in a million years would I have expected to face imprisonment as a result.

On the night of November 15th 2017, students had gathered in a classroom for the reading group as usual. Suddenly, security guards stormed into the classroom, supposedly because someone had reported to the university’s Security and Safety Department that the group was discussing sensitive topics. Police then seized four students [at the university] and two recent graduates [from PKU] who were involved in the reading group, taking them all to the police station. The next day, the four students were released, but the two other people (Zhang Yunfan and Ye Jianke) were placed under criminal detention in the Panyu Detention Centre. I soon learned from the director of my social work organization that the group had been labelled an “anti-party and anti-society” organization. For some time thereafter, students involved in the reading group were regularly visited and warned by university [authorities] and the police, and one of the students lost their scholarship. The reading group soon dissolved. I felt this was very unfortunate because they were some of the most compassionate and capable volunteers I had met, unlike many other college student volunteers who do it to accumulate volunteer time rather than try to take up some grassroots perspective.

But I never thought this would affect me because I was merely working with them to organize events for workers. I kept working as usual, but without the help of volunteers, it was difficult to sustain the public square dance activities.

It was at that moment that a terrible disaster befell me.

At around 10pm on December 8th 2017, my landlord knocked on my door, and when I opened it, a plainclothes police officer and four police in uniform forced themselves into my apartment and asked me for my ID, and for me to cooperate with them. As a young woman living by myself, I was dumbfounded, and did not know what to do with myself. A brief moment of panic was followed by overwhelming rage. I repeatedly asked them to show me their police ID and search warrant, but they refused. They began to search my room, rifling through all my things, paging through books, notebooks and diaries, heaping them into a pile and making me stand to one side as they took pictures.

Then I was taken to Xiaoguowei police station with my mobile phone and computer. They started to ask me about members of the reading group, and I said I didn’t know. The head of the police station threatened me: “you don’t want to talk? You can go die (and said this repeatedly)! Then we’ll give her a random charge, lock her up first and figure it out later!”

When they said that, I thought I was hearing things. What is “assigning a random charge”? So police can just “assign a random charge” to an innocent citizen without evidence? Can the law be used so casually in their hands? Can the personal freedom of individuals be impinged upon so freely in their eyes? Not only did I not know the situation of the members of the reading group, I at least had the right to remain silent when being questioned. Can I be assigned a random charge to pressure me because I don’t know or remain silent?

At 5pm the next day, the police took me back to my apartment and asked me to sign a search warrant, and they started to take books and notebooks including my private diaries and Kindle reader. I was very angry and I did not understand. Is a search warrant a warrant to raid my home? Can they take away any personal belongings including the most private personal diary to be examined by police with a search warrant? Do police not consider the privacy of citizens and the inconvenience to people when their personal belongings are taken away? To be clear, at this time I was not even a suspect to a crime, let alone a criminal, but merely being summoned for questioning.

Back at the police station, the police pulled out another search warrant dated 12pm December 9th 2017, and made me sign it. This was clearly a trick! If the search was at 5pm, how does it become 12pm? And why was there a second search warrant? Did they go search again at 12pm? When I questioned the police, they did not reply and I refused to sign. Then they produced a summons which was dated for the previous day, December 8th, and asked me to sign. I questioned them why they did not show it to me last night, and they said under special circumstances people can be taken away first and showed the summons later. I was absolutely speechless! What special circumstance did I have? Me, a wisp of a 1.6 meter tall recent college graduate – did they think I was going to make an escape or something? I also refused to sign that document.

Even more absurdity followed.

In the evening, the police told me they were applying for both my administrative and criminal detention, and waiting for their superiors to decide on which form of detention. Because of an issue with the system, they could only apply for one form of detention, and decided “on the spot” to apply for criminal detention. During the entire process, they did not present any evidence to prove that I had violated any law, and they still so casually decided a criminal detention. At that moment, I again felt the casual attitude with which the Panyu police treat the law and the freedom and rights of citizens.

And that’s how I was thrown into the detention centre “on the spot,” but this was only the beginning of my real nightmare.

The room I was locked up in had 25 detainees, including drug traffickers, thieves and other criminals of all kinds. As a young woman working on public interest in service to migrant workers, to be locked up with these people made me feel endless irony and sadness. The room only had 15 concrete beds, so I had to sleep on the cold floor. I could not sleep the whole night on the first night under the bright light. My body could not handle coldness, and I felt intense pain on my insides. I kept waking up in the middle of each night. In our cell block there was a fixed bathroom schedule, and I was always placed last, and each time it was my turn the time was already up.

If there was urgent need to use the bathroom outside of scheduled bathroom time, I would be punished by being forced to stand and not allowed to sleep. As a result, I alternated between half-hour sleeps and half-hour standing up, and ended up with less than 4 hours of sleep each night. Because of lack of sleep and limited bathroom use, my body weakened and I felt ill inside. I urinated blood on two occasions and experienced two serious instances of constipation which caused so much pain that I could not sit, stand or walk. If not for my release on bail on January 4th, I feel I could have died from the pain in my cell. My request for an individual room or medical attention were refused and ridiculed. When I absolutely insisted, the doctor in the detention centre just gave me some bottle with no medicine in it!

Beside this, there was no privacy to speak of. There were surveillance cameras everywhere, even when you are changing your clothes or using the bathroom. Why should I suffer such indignity!

I was detained for 26 days, and released on bail on January 4th, 2018. However, the charges still remain.

Throughout the entire process I felt bewildered, and even now, I do not know what I did or what law I violated. The police demanded that I write a confession, and that I write it according to their instructions. But I refused to distort facts. The police threatened that if I do not write in accordance with their wishes, I will be put under house arrest for 6 months. But how can I confess to a crime I did not commit?

I have far too many questions, and so I want to write down my experience, and hope others can answer my questions.

• I am not a criminal, and there is no evidence that I am a major suspect to a crime. Why should I be criminally detained?
• Can the police detain absolutely anyone, and then search for evidence to prove the guilt of that person, and when no evidence is found, simply release the person, but the police will not face any discipline?
• Can police arbitrarily search the residence of any citizen, and take away their personal belongings for an indefinite amount of time?
• If during the course of questioning someone doesn’t answer to the police satisfaction, can they just “make up a charge and figure it out later?”
• Can the police arbitrarily decide on either administrative or criminal detention “on the spot”?
• Should I be bullied in detention, and seen as “uncooperative”, just because I insist on my rights in the face of the police?
• Should I not be treated when I fall sick in detention?
• Does 4 hour of sleep meet the legal requirement of “ensuring that suspects have sufficient time for sleep”?
• Can I only be released on bail after agreeing to a confession in accordance with police instructions?
• When the police detained an innocent person for more than 20 days and confiscated my books, computer, mobile phone, Kindle and other belongings, are these evidence of my crime? When can they be returned to me? I no longer have the money to buy those things.

Finally, I want the police to recognize that I was detained for more than 20 days for no reason, which caused me to lose my job, broke my body, put my family in debt for legal fees to the tune of tens of thousands of yuan in borrowed money, and imprinted criminality upon my life. In the future, it may be very difficult for me to find a job. This incident has laid yet another heavy economic burden on my already poor family!

Why is this happening? These questions puzzle me. It has made me very cautious and has made me feel very insecure. I do not know if I, or people around me, will suffer these abuses once more in the future. I hope friends who read the experiences I have described above to explain all this to me, and I also hope that people can help the other friends also suffering from this same ordeal. Whether I will be given a heavy sentence or declared innocent, at least I will have a clear understanding of it all and some satisfaction!

*

Notes

1. ‘Left Maoist’ (毛左) is a political category that has risen to prominence since about 2012 in order to distinguish from those Maoists (known as ‘Right Maoists’ by some of their leftist critics but simply as “Maoists”[毛派] by themselves) with more nationalist and/or reformist orientations. (These categories will be discussed in the second issue of our journal, forthcoming later in 2018.)

2. From the poem “I Swallowed a Moon Made of Iron” by Xu Lizhi.

3. I.e. the mass movement of 1989 that ended with the June 4th Incident on Tian’anmen Square.

4. Having likened the fugitives to Communist Party members hiding underground during the Civil War, Zhang now notes the difference that at least the latter had a base in Yan’an to which they could flee, whereas today’s communists have no such sanctuary – in China or elsewhere.

The American public has clear-cut opinions on both issues at the center of the current debate on immigration policy. A large majority (74%) favors granting permanent legal status to immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally when they were children, but 60% oppose a proposal to “substantially expand the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico” – a longtime goal of President Donald Trump.

When the two policies are taken together, 54% of Americans both favor granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came to the U.S. illegally as children and oppose greatly expanding the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, according to a new Pew Research Center survey conducted Jan. 10-15.

There are substantial partisan differences in opinions about both policies: About nine-in-ten (92%) Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children should be granted permanent legal status. Republicans and Republican leaners favor this approach as well, though by a much more modest margin: 50% support this, while 40% are opposed.

To Read complete article on Pew Research Center click here

Note: Full topline results and methodology can be found here.

*

Alec Tyson is a senior researcher focusing on U.S. politics and policy at Pew Research Center.

After the Palestinian resistance, it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, which drove this slow but steady tide against the racist state. Lebanese Sunni scholar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Zein, pointed out that it was Iran’s leader Imam Khomeini who ‘moved the focus onto Palestine, not out of hatred of Judaism but to safeguard human dignity, to safeguard justice, and in rejection of aggression, racism and extremism’. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic consistently elevated and championed the cause of Palestinian self-determination.

Despite decades of brutalizing assaults, Palestinian resistance to apartheid Israel has not disappeared. Indeed, in the middle of an apparently desperate situation, there are some rays of hope. One of those is Gaza.

In 2005 the Zionist state dismantled its colonies and withdrew from the Gaza strip. Ariel Sharon, a brutal Zionist leader who had led repeated attacks on Gaza, said the reason for Israeli withdrawal was ‘to grant Israeli citizens the maximum level of security’. The underlying reason was the unceasing resistance by the brave people of Gaza, ever since the late 1940s.

Since 2005 the crowded Palestinian territory has been subject to a prison-like blockade and repeated collective punishment assaults. The apartheid state, in several operations, slaughtered thousands. But the retreat from Gaza marked one boundary to the ethnic cleansing project of a ‘Greater Israel’.

The following year, encouraged by Washington’s imperious project of a ‘New Middle East’, Israel again invaded south Lebanon, attempting to disarm the Shia-Muslim party Hezbollah. That party was created precisely because of earlier Israeli invasions. Although Zionist forces were able to kill many, they also suffered serious losses and were forced to withdraw, failing to meet any of their objectives. So, the defeat of the 2006 invasion was a second ray of hope, imposing another limit on Zionist expansion.

According to the founding father of Zionism Theodore Herzl, “the area of the Jewish State stretches: “From the Brook of Egypt to the Euphrates.” According to Rabbi Fischmann,  “The Promised Land extends from the River of Egypt up to the Euphrates, it includes parts of Syria and Lebanon.”

In the subsequent decade, although some Lebanese territory is still annexed, Tel Aviv has been wary of adventurism on the Lebanese border. Unlike many western supporters of Israel, the Zionist state’s military leaders listen to and, in their own, way, respect the Hezbollah Secretary General, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah. They also know that Hezbollah is now better prepared and better armed than in 2006. Were it not for Hezbollah, south Lebanon would likely have joined the West Bank and the Golan Heights as yet another occupied territory.

We cannot ignore these achievements. Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei pointed out that, since the 1980s, ‘the Zionist regime has not been able to transgress against new lands, it has also begun to retreat’. The Palestinian resistance has played the ‘major and determining role’ in these retreats, Ayatollah Khamenei says.

The role of Iran in leading a regional alliance that provides real support to the Palestinian resistance is a third ray of hope for the future of Palestine. The rise of Iran and the victories in Syria and Iraq against NATO-Saudi-Israeli terrorist proxies has strengthened this alliance.

Israeli leaders fear the defeat of DAESH, al Nusra and the other sectarian groups, at the hands of Syrian-Iraqi-Iranian forces. They know that this will lead to an empowered, Iran-led coalition on the border of occupied Palestine and occupied Syria. They fear, in particular, the liberation of the occupied Golan Heights, an operation for which Syria and its allies would have the full support of international law.

After the Palestinian resistance, it was the Islamic Republic of Iran, which drove this slow but steady tide against the racist state. Lebanese Sunni scholar, Sheikh Ahmed al-Zein, pointed out that it was Iran’s leader Imam Khomeini who ‘moved the focus onto Palestine, not out of hatred of Judaism but to safeguard human dignity, to safeguard justice, and in rejection of aggression, racism and extremism’. Since 1979, the Islamic Republic consistently elevated and championed the cause of Palestinian self-determination.

The large nation has paid money to Palestinian families of fallen resistance fighters, after they had their houses demolished in Israel’s collective punishment rampages. It has supported with training and weapons almost all the Palestinian militia, which resist the apartheid state; even including those groups linked to the anti-Shia Muslim Brotherhood. This is no ‘Shia Crescent’, as Palestinians are mainly Sunni Muslims.

Some Palestinians were recruited into sectarian project encouraged by Washington, Riyadh and Tel Aviv. However, the small group of Palestinian leaders who were misled into taking Qatari and Saudi money to join the war against Syria are now either in disgrace or are turning back to Iran.

The ‘Axis of Resistance’, a West Asian Alliance, brings together the Palestinian Resistance, Iran, Syria and Hezbollah, the main real opposition to the apartheid state. They are what Israel fears. When that alliance is well consolidated, it will be a force capable of forcing Tel Aviv to the negotiating table. Washington and Tel Aviv know this; that is why they persist in attempts to divide and destabilize the region.

There are a substantial number of opportunists who claim to support the Palestinian people, yet oppose their strongest allies. They criticize Israel, seemingly in the name of a nicer, kinder apartheid state. They pretend to support the Palestinians, but only as passive victims. They deny their right to resist; and they ferociously attack Iran, Hezbollah and Syria. Many of us have come to call the western versions of these people ‘left-Zionists’.

These ‘left-Zionists’ spread their own corrosive myths about the Resistance. For example, during the Zionist attacks on Gaza they tried to make a moral equivalence between Israeli crimes and alleged ‘indiscriminate’ Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel. In fact, we know from independent evidence (the UN and Israel itself, against its interest) that, during the 2014 assault on Gaza, more than 75% of the 1,088 Palestinians killed were civilians; while only 6% of the 51 deaths inside Occupied territories were of civilians. There is no moral equivalence, either in character or in ‘collateral damage’ terms, between the Zionist state’s ethnic cleansing and punitive assaults, and the resistance of the Palestinian people. Moral clarity on that issue deserves repetition.

The regional alliance in support of the Palestinian Resistance is one critical factor for the nation’s future; the other is the unity of the Palestinian people. In this respect, the unity talks between the different factions are crucial. It is well known from polls that Palestinians have low levels of confidence in the factions and their leaders, yet continue to express strong support for their national institutions. Divisions fuel that low morale. Iran’s leader Ayatollah Khamenei says that the differences between groups was ‘natural and understandable’, but that ‘increasing cooperation and depth’ was necessary. Greater unity would build popular confidence, assist in focus and organization and allow new steps forward.

The future of Palestine is clouded with divisions, great pain and sacrifice, and fear of formidable enemies. Nevertheless, it is far from hopeless. There have been real gains in recent years. The Resistance has imposed limits on expansion of the colonial project, both in the north and the south. Attempts to smash and divide the ‘Axis of Resistance’ have failed and there are signs of an emerging and strengthened West Asian Alliance. Finally, the unity talks amongst Palestinian factions could breathe fresh resolve into a battered but brave and resilient people.

*

Professor Tim Anderson is a distinguished author and senior lecturer of political economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. Author of the ‘The Dirty War on Syria’, he has been largely published on various issues particularly the Syrian crisis. 

The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance, by Tim Anderson

The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. This book tries to tell its story while rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, ethical principle and the search for independent evidence.

Title: The Dirty War on Syria: Washington, Regime Change and Resistance

Author: Tim Anderson

ISBN Number: 978-0-9737147-8-4

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VISIT MY NEW WEB SITE: 

stephenlendman.org 

(Home – Stephen Lendman). 

Contact at [email protected].

Turkey’s shelling, bombing and invasion of northern Syria has nothing to do with protecting its borders and national security.

Its aggression has everything to do with wanting territorial expansion, along with longstanding hostility toward the Kurds, including its own citizens, an estimated 14 million people, residing mainly in southeastern and eastern Anatolia.

On Sunday, US Defense Secretary James Mattis defended Turkish aggression in Syria, saying

“Turkey is a NATO ally.”

“It’s the only NATO country with an active insurgency inside its borders. And Turkey has legitimate security concerns,” adding:

“Turkish was candid. (It’s) easy to understand” why it’s concerned about conflict in Syria spilling cross-border into its territory.

“They warned us before they launched the aircraft that they were going to do it. We are very alert to it. Our top levels are engaged and we’re working through it.”

Fact: Turkey threatens Syrian territory, not the other way around.

Fact: Throughout seven years of US aggression on Syria, Erdogan supported ISIS and other terrorist groups in the country, allied with Washington’s playbook, wanting Assad toppled and northern Syrian territory annexed.

• No active insurgency exists in Turkey, a nation at war with its own Kurdish people, along with anyone challenging Erdogan’s despotic rule.
• Throughout the war in Syria, no spillover into Turkish territory occurred. No threat of it exists.
• Turkey is a NATO country with the second largest military force in the alliance after America’s.
•  The Trump administration wants Erdogan allied with its imperial agenda against Russia. He’s an opportunist, playing the US and Russian cards at the same time, currently leaning more toward Moscow than Washington, why Mattis and other administration officials are concerned.

Russia is going along with Turkish aggression in northern Syria. Instead of condemning it, its Foreign Ministry urged restraint, an unacceptable response, Ankara taking full advantage.

NATO’s website has nothing about Turkey’s ongoing aggression, supporting it through silence.

Syria is the only nation strongly denouncing Ankara’s invasion and terror-bombing of its territory. It’s operation is expanding. Ankara announced a large-scale Menbeij offensive in the Aleppo governorate.

Heavily armed US-backed Kurdish YPG fighters control the area able to hit back hard against Turkish aggression. US forces are deployed nearby.

Fighting in the area hasn’t begun. Whatever its plans, Turkey’s military won’t attack areas near US positions.

The announced Menbeij offensive may be more bluster than reality. Washington’s acquiescence with Turkish aggression suggests a deal struck between both sides.

The same goes for Russia, failing to condemn what’s ongoing. Military chiefs from both countries met in Moscow before Turkish aggression began.

Without at least tacit approval from Moscow and Washington, Erdogan most likely wouldn’t have launched his latest aggression in northern Syria.

Ankara’s Prime Ministry office of Public Diplomacy issued a statement, saying its military aims to take control of a 10,000 square km area in northern Syria, including Afrin.

Claiming it’s to secure its borders from a terrorist threat is utter rubbish. Erdogan supports terrorists in Syria.

He wants northern Syrian territory annexed, seizing and maintaining control over as much as possible.

He’s pursuing his objective with virtually no opposition from Washington and Moscow – other than meaningless tepid rhetoric.

He heads Turkey’s Justice and Development Party. His main opposition Republican People’s Party, the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), and recently formed IYI (Good) Party all lent support to his northern Syria aggression.

He’s free to do what he pleases, flagrantly violating international law, the world community largely turning a blind eye to what demands condemnation.

*

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